It's only Murder when it's not done by the mother?

Clearly I need to spend more time reading blogs. Because somehow I missed this last week.

A Virginia court has decided that it's okay for a woman to murder her baby during labor. That's right. Third trimester, when it's typically illegal to kill an unborn baby. Unless you're its mother, apparently. There was no antiseptic doctor's office, there was no "medical procedure" euphemism... there was only a bullet fired into her abdomen as labor commenced. A child was murdered in a parking lot by its "mother" and the state has seen fit to call this an "abortion." And despite the fact that third trimester abortions are supposed to be illegal there, this one is okay. That's right. It's okay to "abort" your baby in the third trimester, in Virginia, if the means implemented are a pistol in a parking lot.

This hideous woman, this wretched excuse for a human being, is raising two other children. My first thought is for them, not their poor murdered sibling. Because what does it say to you, to know that your mother killed your sib? I wonder, were they looking forward to the new baby? Did she have a nursery set up, had she let any of them feel the baby move? What did it mean to them when Mommy left, not to go to the hospital, but to kill one of their number?

If there is any justice in this world, the state will remove both of them from her care, and some kind family will raise them as their own. Because these children have no mother. No mother would do this awful thing. As her baby moved inside her, preparing to be born into this world, she shot it dead.

She is evil. She is unholy and rotten to her core, and should have spent the remainder of her life in a prison cell. What she did should be unacceptable to any thinking, feeling human being. That we even have to discuss whether what she did was a crime, is a sign of how far our society has fallen into the Culture of Death and Murder.

How can she walk the streets of her town, when people know what she has done? Does anyone speak to her? Look at her? Or do they cross the street to avoid contact with someone so horribly inhumane?

Because I would. I would have to avoid her, if only to avoid the temptation to spit upon her.

May she never ever cross my path. Because I lack the compassion of my faith; I cannot find it in my heart to pray for her, only for her babies.

Teh Left must hate teh Babies...

The Anchoress knocked it out of the park again, as usual.

Micheal J. Fox is prostituting himself and his condition to lie to the public. I'm not going to be PC and say, "oh, what a shame, poor Micheal." He's pissing me off. He is LYING to us, and we're all supposed to just let it slide because he's sick. Well, I'm not letting it slide.

Let's go over this one more time, shall we? Thus far, the only successful stem cell treatments have involved Adult Stem Cells. Early reports to the contrary have been subsequently shown to involve patient death and worsening conditions, or to be outright frauds. All questions as to the morality of ESC treatment aside, it's not a success, folks, when it leaves the patient with worse symptoms than before treatment began. It's definitely not a success when it kills the patient.

No one in their right mind opposes adult stem cell research. Fox's deceptive tactics conflate one type of research with the other, confusing a public too apathetic or lazy to do their own damn research. This is not accidental, this is intentional, and it's immoral and intellectually dishonest.

Incidentally, Fox's Parkinson's case is intriguing for an altogether different reason. I had to google to find it, but I did recall watching a program that discussed potential environmental factors in his condition. That program may have been "The Parkinson's Enigma," a Canadian documentary about Parkinson's clusters. (Fox and several other coworkers on a late seventies Canadian sitcom all contracted Parkinson's early, in a strange statistical anomaly.) If it turns out to be a preventable condition, whether disease or brain injury, then research into this area could put a stop to all of the squabbling over what stem cells are acceptable to use in treatment.

But the left will probably still want to chop up baby bits for research, you know that, don't you? I don't even pretend to understand why. There must be something threatening about any form of research that doesn't involve getting government funding to slice'n'dice baby bits for your lab...

This made me weep...

In an act of ultimate Christian charity, Amish leaders have set aside a portion of the funds donated by a sympathetic public, to help provide for the family of the man who murdered their little girls. Apparently, the hand of friendship has been extended to the nutjob's widow, and forgiveness extended to the nutjob himself.

I am awed, I am humbled. I can only admire what I do not possess. I don't think I would have it in me to forgive someone that way. There is too much anger, too much vindictiveness, in me. I harbor grudges. I am filled with the sin of pride, and the thirst for vengeance when I am wronged. I engage in schadenfreude from time to time, when the opportunity presents itself. I am not a very good Christian. I want to be, but I sin and fall short, time and again.

Every time one of these psychos goes and kills a bunch of people- going all the way back to the Standard Gravure thing when I was a child- I entertain notions of packing up, and moving out to the country. I think about how much safer I'd feel, and how much more simple and peaceful things would be, with fewer neighbours and a more rural setting. I allow myself the fantasy of raising my boys in more traditional, more nurturing, surroundings.

My mental safety net is shattered. If the Amish ain't safe, ain't nobody safe.

I can only marvel in wonder at the amazing goodness being displayed by these folks. They are living the example of Christian love, living their faith in a very visible and moving way. I wish I was more like them.

The Good, the Bad... and the Pervy

So Mark Foley is a perv. We're all pretty much in agreement on that, right? So let's start from there. The man made inappropriate overtures to minors via email and instant message. And by 'inappropriate' I mean lewd and repulsive, the sort of overtures one typically makes to paid strangers in the dead of night, for 3.99 a minute or something.

But let us examine things more closely. Hastert claims republican leaders were only made aware of the one email, the first message 'leaked' to the media. This would be the "how ya doing after the hurricane, can I get a recent picture?" email. Which is ... weird, but not vulgar. And apparently Foley was told this sort of chumminess with the pages just didn't look well, and would he please not do it again? Gingrich points out that anything beyond that might have been taken for homophobia, for an attack on Foley as a gay man. So congressional leaders treaded softly for fear of being un-pc. How lovely. How very enlightened and thoughtful. Not.

So where did the five years or so of lewd IMs come from? Who held onto them for this long? Why did they not come forward? Surely they weren't holding them for an October Surprise! Why that would be... unthinkable. Immoral. And hey, possibly illegal.

So now Foley is claiming the liquor made him do it. That or the priests. Would this guy go away already? It's past time he fell on his sword. Or ate the end of a pistol.

Now let's think for a moment about the boys he conversed with. The ones who talked about their girlfriends, and measured their parts for him. Do you ever wonder what they must have thought amongst themselves? Did they think the guy was a great big joke? A skeezy, dirty old man? Did they avoid him, did they fear him, did they think that by flirting with him a little, they could get ahead in Washington? So now is there a new twist on being "gay for pay?"

I don't think Mark Foley is a pedophile. He clearly is interested in postpubescent, adolescent males. This, by definition, makes him gay. Just a really skeezy, grotesque sort of gay. The sort of gay the homosexual lobby don't want the rest of us to think about. Which is sad. Because you can't judge all gay people by one dirty old man. That'd be like judging all heterosexuals by the actions of one William Jefferson Clinton. Shudder.

And I think focussing on "pedophilia" actually does us a disservice here. The issue isn't Kiddy-touching, it's abuse of power and the subsequent cover up- by whomever did the covering. If it was members of my own, beloved, Republican party- I want heads to roll. If it was people hoping to damage us in the coming elections? I still want heads to roll. And either way, if we can prove someone knew about this and did not come forward? There ought to be charges involved. This perv was permitted to carry on in this manner for YEARS... a crime could have been prevented, and was not, most likely for political gain. Somebody needs to go to prison for that.

Conversion Stories

I always enjoy reading conversion stories on other people's blogs. In 2001 I was asked to give a speech during mass, detailing my experience with RCIA. I wrote the piece below at Deacon Charles' request, and I delivered it with shaking hands and an uneven voice. But afterward I had numerous people come up to me and tell me how moved they were. One lady even asked for a copy of it, to show her son, who had fallen away from the Church. Anyway... I have been toying with the idea of writing up my conversion story for this site, for some time. Today I realised, I already have that story- all I need do is post the speech. It says everything I want it to say.


"Looking For God In All the Wrong Places,"- speech by the Ornithophobe, August, 2001.

Hello. My name is (deleted for privacy) and Deacon Wayne has asked that I speak to you today about my experience of the RCIA program here at Our Lady. I consider it both an honor, and a privilege, to do so.

I am still in my neophyte year- I was baptized and confirmed this past Easter. It was the culmination, I thought, of a lifelong dream, the dream of belonging to God, of feeling at one with Him and with His Church. I now realize it was merely the first step of many, in a never-ending commitment to follow Christ, and his teachings.

I was a Catechumen; an unbaptised querant into the rituals, and doctrine of our catholic faith. My family background was a hodgepodge of Christian traditions, punctuated by infrequent attendence in churches of one denomination and another. I grew up saying grace and bedtime prayers, and learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” We had rosaries in the house but no one prayed them.

I was never baptized. Despite the efforts of well-meaning neighbors, shepherding me to and from Vacation Bible School, and Sunday School, it never happened. I never quite made that long, arduous trek down the aisle to Get Saved and Get Dunked. And no, Jesus himself never reached down from heaven and gave me that shove- Besides, it was so awfully PUBLIC. To Go stand up, before all of those people, and do something so intensely personal? I am just not that bold.

Not that I didn’t WANT to do it. I wanted it desperately. I wanted to feel His presence, in His house. I just never could.

I began services here in 1997. On Easter Sunday. I went for three weeks. Then, in 1998, I did it again. Easter Sunday, and for a couple of weeks after. Some people make new year’s resolutions; Apparently mine coincide with Easter.

Last year my son started Prekindergarten here, and I came to the realization that if I didn’t make a place for our family here at church, then my boys could both grow up with that same emptiness that I had. The idea seemed divinely inspired- I thought that if I went through RCIA, then my kids could be “cradle catholics” in the truest sense, living and breathing their faith throughout their whole lives. They’d never have that feeling that they didn’t belong in Church, And Maybe- Just maybe, they’d never question the presence of God there either. And I thought that perhaps, if they never questioned it, then He’d be there, for them. At the beginning in RCIA, I was doing it for them. As for me- I’d rather given up on feeling God’s presence on Sunday morning. Id stopped thinking it was the churches, and started thinking maybe it was really me- I started too late, I couldn’t feel comfortable in church, Whatever- I just knew that I was spiritually Colorblind- Everyone else obviously felt fine, So the problem lay with Me.

I began the classes here on Wednesday nights, not too long after he started School. Every
day, he’d go off with his backpack, and every Wedneday, I’d go off with my Binder. I wanted everybody to like me, so I bought them off with Food. If I brought Cake, everyone would think that I was nice and nobody’d suspect I couldn’t find God in church. I took meticulous notes in class, read a lot of supplemental material, and even answered all those little discussion questions on the handouts. I tried to spend a lot of time in prayer, and in meditation. Was I doing the right thing? I honestly didn’t know, half the time.

I asked lots of questions, and hoped I was arriving at the right answers.

I went dutifully to mass, too. Although I always felt very strange when everyone would go up to receive holy communion on Sundays. A little ashamed,too, hiding in my seat, wishing no one would notice me or that I wouldn’t have to get up and draw attention to myself to let my neighbor out of the pew. But, humiliation or no, I went, most every week. I threw myself into my studies, determined to get the most I could get out of the process.

Christmas Eve I went to midnight mass. I was exhausted, having been up almost 24 hours straight dealing with gifts and festivities and family visits. The holiday season is always a mess for me,as I’m sure it is for many of you, with Baking and Christmas Cards and about a blue million relatives. But I made time to come listen to the beautiful music, and to pray. And as I prayed, I felt renewed, and calm. I didn’t get to sleep until very late Christmas morning, after Santa came at our house- But I didn’t feel tired.

As the Lenten Season Began, I was really looking forward to being taken into full communion with the Church. Not just so my kids could have a Catholic Home, but for my own sake. I was suddenly very excited about it, full of energy and joy. I had this sense that something mystical and wonderful was about to happen to me. I was in a good mood no one could shoot down. I think my Cynical-side was on vacation through most of April. I became Relentlessly “Chipper”. I decided to throw myself a Baptismal Party. So what if I’m a grownup? All the kids in my family who got christened had parties- I made myself a gorgeous cake to celebrate, and I went out and I bought a hat. I invited my whole family. I made my Husband promise to attend- and he’s not seen the inside of a church since our Wedding Day. My poor, aged Mamau, who is on Oxygen and Never Leaves the house, came. Despite her Baptist upbringing and thinking Im a hellbound Papist. My mother came, though I had a hard time convincing her that it was okay to wear slacks, and that no one would pin a napkin to her head if she didn’t wear a hat. She not only came, but she cried happy tears for me. My Uncle Came, my kids came- and they made me “Happy Baptism” cards. Mrs. Layman, My sponsor, Stood right up here next to me as God took me in and made me his own. It was one of the most beautiful, most profound moments of my entire life.

I finally feel like I belong here on Sunday mornings. When I take holy communion I am part of something larger than just this building, just this congregation- I am genuinely part of the body of Christ. I am united through His Body and His Blood with Christians across the globe, and with all of those throughout history who have shared our traditions and our faith. I know most of you have been able to feel part of that closeness for a long while- but for me, the newness hasn’t worn off yet- I’m still bowled over by it every Sunday, by that perfect moment when we are all one.

In summation I could enumerate the things I learned in RCIA; I could pray rote prayers, discuss church history, Church Doctrine, Biblical Symbolism, and our lovely stained glass windows! But you can learn all that yourself by coming to the classes this fall. But RCIA is about Formation as much as it is Information. It is the art of making brand-new Catholics. I’ve just shared with you how God, and the church, made me.