Stoning is, like, sooo 2000 years ago.

I suppose to some, it would seem more consistent if we "right wing religious conservatives" publicly destroyed Sarah Palin and her daughter over the issue of teen pregnancy.

In rushing to Sarah Palin's defense, the leaders of the Christian right have made it abundantly clear how they define a Christian. We don't care if you sin. ...It all comes down to your stand on guns and fetuses. Vote the right way, and you have our blessing. If any proof were needed that James Dobson is a political operative rather than a spiritual leader, his jumping on the Palin bandwagon offers it.

I suppose it can be difficult to understand if one does not actually know what forgiveness means. It does not mean accepting the sin. It means accepting genuine repentance. It means loving the sinner, and being ready to take her back when she is sorry for what she has done.

Now, I do not pretend to know the condition of Miss Palin's heart. I do not know if she regrets the act that got her pregnant in the first place. However, the fact that she is doing the right thing with respect to her pregnancy is laudable, as is the support her family is giving her. That is what Dr. Dobson and others including myself find commendable. If God could forgive a repentant prostitute, he can certainly forgive a teenager.

We're just putting our faith into practice, people.

Pregnancy Help Center destroyed by Arson

Read it here:

http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2008/09/20/news/local/3aaa01_pregnancycenter.txt

The arsonist, whoever s/he is and regardless of motive, is now responsible for making it more difficult for women in need to choose life for their unborn children. I hope s/he is caught quickly.

Visit the website for the Pregnancy Alternatives Center of Lebanon, OR.

Click here for a directory of pregnancy centers in Oregon.

Tip of the ruler to: Christina Dunigan, who correctly points out that there would not be such a minimal response from the mainstream media if this had been an abortion mill. The only MSM article I found was this one from the Local News section MSNBC, which, like the Democrat Herald article linked above, speculates that the motive may have REALLY been to attack an abortion clinic. How much you want to bet this will move to the national section if that turns out to be the case?

Not a Bushism. It's a real word!

Google's Word of the Day:

misprize: to despise; also, to undervalue.

Anne Rice: The Importance of Not Being Howard

I posted before on my reactions to Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, which I believe could only be written by a person immersed in Catholicism throughout her life (even if at the time she found herself at odds with her faith).

Now closer to the Church, Rice discusses her memoirs Called out of Darkness and the influence her faith has had on her life and writings:



Rice's experience of beauty is a great illustration of the need for beautiful artwork in our places of worship. She was affected by it even before she could read! A good picture (or a statue, for that matter) really can be worth a thousand or more words. Art is a form of catechesis that is accessible to everyone.

Through this she picked up on the richness of Catholicism, which she would come to apprecciate more fully later in life.

Beauty and pain are strangely (and perhaps wonderfully) united in Catholic art and Catholic theology. There is perhaps no better example of this than in the cross itself, an image which Rice mentions in this interview.




Sacrifice is beautiful, though it may include suffering. The incarnation is beautiful. The Resurrection is beautiful, but the beauty of the Resurrection would be incomplete without the torturous sacrifice that came before it.


J.R.R Tolkien put it quite well:

The Gospels...contain many marvels--peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: "mythical" in their perfect, self-contained significance, and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered history and the primary world... The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. .... There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. for the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary art, that is, of Creation. ...

Though human artistry could never perfectly depict divine beauty, skilled artisans can still come close enough to leave a profound impression.

Tip of the Ruler to: Alan

We'd better watch our cat this Halloween.

Here he is:



He has quite an appetite. Cat food. People food. If there's a bug in the house, he'll find it. I just found out he likes to eat pumpkin too.


We wouldn't want this to happen to our jack-o-lanterns:

Where to begin:

Sandra Bernhard's racist and anti-feminist attacks on Sarah Palin. She owes women and the African American community an apology.



Professor Meyers is at it again. This time, the man who publicly desecrated the Eucharist is going after a pro-life pharmacist. Pray for him. Hopefully, it will do him good.




Barack Obama's less than classy response to abortion survivor Gianna Jessen:

Her Ad:



His:




Yup. 'Nuff said.

Tip of the Ruler to: Jeff Miller

Pro-Life Prayers and Pushy Pro-Abort Protesters

In Argentina.

Warning: My spanish is a bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure there's profanity here.



The contrast between the young people praying the rosary before the steps of the cathedral and the angry mob speaks for itself, I think.

Tip of the ruler to: Alan

Yahoos on Yahoo...

So much for secure webmail:

Sarah Palin's Yahoo Account Hacked

If this had been done to Obama or Biden, I bet congress would already be investigating.


At least the FBI is taking this seriously.


I'm waiting for the legal head-rolling.

...

One more reason to drill more in the West...

Ike is threatening Oil facilities in Texas, hitting the pump before it even hits land.

Did we mention that Sarah Palin favors drilling in Alaska?

Surreal.

It was near the end of summer vacation.  Like many college students, I was back home at my parents' house taking advantage of every possible opportunity for extra sleep before heading back to school.

Ahh, the joys of sleeping in.

Through the hazy fog of half-slumber one morning I heard my parents outside my door in my dream.  

"...bombed the World Trade Center..."

"Should we tell her?"

...

"Nah," I thought. "No way." And I turned over to go back to sleep, expecting to wake up to the world as it usually was.

When I did the sleepy college student shuffle out to the living room, I saw the smoke on the television. I saw a replay of a plane flying into a tower.

Later on there was another.

It wasn't a bad dream.

If only it had been.

Another use for scrap fabric:

Cat toys!

My kitten has these chew toys by Petstages:

And I thought to myself today that it might be fun sometime to get up to my craft studio and put together something similar using some of my old scraps and a little catnip.

Who will take care of Sarah Palin's Baby?

Why, Daddy, of course.

So says the Washington Post, calling him "the GOP's favorite stay-at-home-dad".

While the left is busy criticizing Sarah Palin for having five kids and a career at the same time, and asking who will look after little Trig and his special needs, they seem to be ignoring her husband, not to mention her older children. Those of my readers who come from large families know that very often the oldest children help with the care of the youngest ones.

Not too surprising, I suppose. So many people on the left are so appalled at the sheer size of her family's carbon footprint, they haven't stopped to think of the benefits of having a family that size. And, as to their tendency to overlook her husband, well, we often hear from the Left that fathers are overrated anyway.

You would think the feminists would be praising the Palins for defying traditional gender roles, but instead they are excoriating her, and ignoring him. Strange. 

 

Editorial Cartoonist Dana Summers at the Orlando Sentinel captures this well:

This blogger considers at-home parenthood to be the ideal. While it is expected that women will take on this role, the most important thing is that somebody do it, if at all possible. If having dad at home works better, that's great.

Kudos to Todd Palin for providing his family with what it needs, including time for his wife to take on corruption and foolishness on both sides of the aisle.

Search: PP in Los Angeles

Someone googled "sedation for abortion in los angeles california Planned parenthood".

For the sake of her own safety, this person might be interested in the stories of some of the LA area Planned Parenthood's other patients:
Erica Goode
Holly Patterson
Diana Lopez

She may also be interested in some of the lawsuits against PP that have been filed around the country, including one from a teenage incest victim in Ohio, alleging that PP failed to report her abuser to the authorities as required by law.

She may also be interested in knowing that the Ohio case is not the only instance of a child abuse coverup scandal at PP.

This blog encourages women seeking abortions to learn the truth about fetal development and consider the other choices avaiable to them though local pregnancy help centers and telephone hotlines. Pregnancy Centers and Shelters


For legal help for women harmed by abortion, click here for a list of resources.

Policy, experience, conduct in office:

Here is a chart comparing Governor Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.

Tip of the ruler to: Annie Banno

Commentary on the Media feeding frenzy:

Mark Shea's commentary on the MSM's treatment of the presidential race is worth a look:

Here's a small slice:

The visceral, palpable fear and hatred of her was (mark this) instantaneous and took place *before* the Left that is desperately trying to trash her and her family actually knew anything about her. It's a pre-rational thing. Indeed, what drives the search for dirt is the pre-rational decision that she must be destroyed, no matter what the cost. And so we get the astounding spectacle of feminists demanding she abandon career for family and forget shattering the glass ceiling, of the Party of Compassion ritually slaughtering a 17 year old, of the Party of the Little Guy laughing at Jefferson Smith and his hicks up on the woods. Most of all, we see the deep, deep hatred of children that fills up the empty core where the heart of the Democrat party used to be. When the chips are down, Herod behaves as he always has when his shot at power is threatened. And so we get the appalling suggestion that "truly responsible" people would have just had Trig Palin killed for failing to measure up to Master Race specs and Bristol Palin delivered to the tender mercies of an abortuary.

To his great credit, Obama himself has told his rabid self-appointed neo-Puritan Inquisitors, "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" He's a smart enough pol to know that ritually sacrificing a girl to him is not right and will not win votes for him. But the latter-day Jephthahs are about as smart as the original Jephthah. In their worship of Obama, they are prepared to offer him human sacrifices that he himself never commanded. And in so doing, they show forth the ugliest and most inhuman face of the Left (a face rather like that of Dick Cheney in his willingness, nay, eagerness to "go to the dark side").

Read the rest of his post "Duelling Religious Systems" here.

A thank you to my grandparents...

who loved my parents and welcomed me into the world, even if the circumstances were not what anybody wanted, or entirely in keeping with the way they raised their children.

They were not the first to do such a thing, nor will they be the last, but they are no less special because of that.

At least they didn't have to do so under the predatory eyes of the mass media.

Practically tripping over themselves...

...in a rush to paint Governor Palin as a bad mother.

They can't even get their stories straight. On the one hand, she gave a speech after her water broke, against the advice of her doctor. On the other hand, she was never actually pregnant, her daughter was.

The second theory is the most absurd, and is based on pictures of her daughter. Apparently, the only reason for a young girl to have anything but perfectly flat washboard abs must be pregnancy.

I hate to think what this can do to Palin's daughter. In spite of maintaining a healthy weight, I have had a similarly shaped stomach my entire teenaged and adult life. I remember being pretty self-conscious of this as a teenager. Fortunately, nobody cared about my stomach enough to inspect it closely, much less analyze it publicly. As an n adult I have discovered that I have more important things to worry about, in spite of the cultural pressure on women to get that perfect body. I hate to think what emotional effect national scrutiny of her abdomen might have on a teenage girl.


I think Amy's assessment as well as Amanda Carpenter of Townhall.com pretty much say everything that needs to be said.

-------------------------------------------------------

Update: The AP reports that Trig could not possibly be Sarah Palin's grandchild, as her daughter is already pregnant with a baby of her own.

This blog commends Bristol Palin for not compounding a mistake by turning it into a tragedy, and the Palin family for supporting their daughter through her pregnancy.