Pell draws lines

The great tradition of religious tolerance in Catholic parochial schools in New South Wales is under fire. Many thousands of children of all faiths have been educated in a system often chosen by parents due to a complex perception of superior education outcomes rather than as a response to the promulgation of faith within the schools, and many non-Catholics and non-Christians remember their time at a Catholic school very fondly. But from now on such experiences may be fewer and further between than in previous generations.

Cardinal George Pell and NSW Bishops have sent out a pastoral letter which bemoans the trend for more non-Catholics to attend Catholic schools and for more Catholics to send their children to public schools, and announces methods which the hierarchy wishes to implement to reverse these trends – a four way selection process giving preference first to children from the school’s local parish, then to Catholics from other parishes, then to other Christians and finally children from other religions. They also plan to move into preschool education in order to “foster the spiritual development” of younger children, which would at least be a welcome addition to the chronically short supply of pre-school places. The Cardinal and Bishops also want recruitment of staff to favour more practising Catholics and to actively encourage the school population to participate in Catholic events outside the school.

Here’s the doozy – acknowledgement that they actually considered barring non-Catholics altogether:

The Church will not ban non-Catholic students from enrolment – it says it considered, but rejected, plans for a formal “downsizing to accommodate only those who are committed to the faith”.

Filed under: culture wars, education, religion

Hey, we can say it

An attack has been made on the Australian media from the front page of Life Decisions International (LDI), whose domain name is the far more accurate fightpp.org (PP being the USA’s Planned Parenthood, the family planning organisation that offers comprehensive sex education and pregnancy services including abortion for those who choose it). The LDI are upset that somebody noticed an association between them and serial ministerial bungler Kevin Andrews.

Australian Media Shows No Regard For The Truth

It is not unusual for pro-abortion activists to use their allies in the media to attack pro-life leaders and lawmakers. But some in the Australian media are taking the practice to a whole new level. LDI has issued a response to an attack on an Australian lawmaker.

When we go to the response, the target of our media’s attack is made more explicit (the weird hyphenation of some words is in the original):

Australia Media Shows No Regard For Truth In Attack On Pro-Life Minister
8.6.2007

WASHINGTON, D.C.–It’s nothing new. Pro-abortion activ-ists work with their allies in the media to attack pro-life leaders and lawmakers. The most recent vociferous attack is against the Honorable Kevin Andrews, a Member of the Australian Parliament and Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.

“It is obvious that some pro-abortion zealot was in the United States or was searching the Internet in an effort to find something that could be used to attack Mr. Andrews,” said Douglas R. Scott, president of Life Decisions Interna-tional (LDI). “They eventually discovered that Mr. Andrews and his wife, Margaret, are members of our Board of Advi-sors. To pro-abortion activists, one may as well be a mem-ber of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Filed under: Politics, culture wars, ethics, religion, sexuality

Soundbites on YouTube

Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference.

Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads (which I already loathed anyway) to convey the Vatican’s doctrine on Natural Family Planning vs Contraception.

They’ve got three videos up now, with more planned.

Now I disagree with the practicality of Natural Family Planning, although I applaud much of the sentiment: avoiding excessive chemical intervention with bodily functions, increased communication and intimacy between partners about avoiding unplanned pregnancies etc. Increased communication about sex before it actually happens can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, NFP requires abstention during ovulation, which is the woman’s peak time of sexual desire, thus NFP involves a lifetime of women acquiescing to sex outside their peak period of desire and being forbidden from other forms of attaining orgasm during the peak period of sexual desire. Sounds like a recipe for frustration and resentment for me.

I notice that these videos simply don’t mention at all that NFP works (as far as it does work) only for people who are in monogamous committed relationships, which of course to the Church means marriage. So they’re simply not addressing the rather large population of adults who are not yet married but who are interested in sexual intercourse anyway. The unsaid only option for unmarried adults is abstinence. I’m not surprised that they’re not addressing that.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting exercise in propogating a set of policy soundbites. I await the replies that will surely multiply in the next few weeks with great interest. I also wonder when various lobbying groups on various social issues are going to fully embrace the viral aspect of YouTube etc for getting their soundbites more effectively out into the social consciousness. Let’s face it – I’m blogging about the videos above because they were put together with a modicum of wit about a controversial issue. Other people will do the same. If other groups do similiar things, those videos will be viraled and generate discussion. Get your issues out there, folks.

crossposted at LP

Filed under: Media, activism/charity, culture wars, netgeek, performance, religion, reproductive freedoms, technology

Applying Bill of Ockham’s sharp thing

Carey Roberts, a withered geriatrarch of the he-man-she-haters club, is once again complaining that women are meanyheads: in Misandry in the least likely of places Roberts clutches his pearls over the lyrics of a Country song about a revenge scenario on an untrusted lover.

But it’s the title — Before He Cheats — that turns this song into a bitter gender tirade. Just imagine a male star reaching platinum for crooning, Before She Aborts.

Country songs about Cheatin’, oh my, Carey Roberts! Such razor-sharp insight! Who’s ever heard of such a thing! Why, it’s not as if it’s such a trope in country music that there’s actually songs about cheating songs or anything.

Cause she just started liking cheatin’ songs
And what’s bothering me
I don’t know if its the cheatin’ she likes
Or just the melody

As various commentors over at Sadly, No!’s excellent fisking of Roberts have observed, it’s hard to see how just the title makes this particular country song an outstandingly bitter gender tirade in comparison to such shining lights of relationship modelling as “Momma’s in the Graveyard (Poppa’s in the Pen)” or “He hit me (and it felt like a kiss)”.

You’d think drawing such a long bow would have tuckered Carey out, but no – he’s only warming up for the Hyperbole Steeplechase:

Filed under: moral panics, religion, reproductive freedoms

“God didn’t make any junk”

So said Tammy Faye Messner (once Tammy Faye Bakker) once when asked her opinion on homosexuals and whether they could be part of the Christian family. She died yesterday of cancer aged 65.

I’m not a fan of televangelists as a breed. That’s not just because I’m an atheist. The judgemental authoritarianism seems to be generally too close to the surface, and too many of them have been proven fleecers of their flock for person gain, persuasive hypocrites and liars motivated by greed and hunger for fame.

The general impression of Tammy Faye seems to be that she was a truly warmhearted and generous woman, who although she enjoyed fame wasn’t actively involved in the fraudulent fleecing of the PTL Ministries flock, but who still must have been deliberately closing her eyes to the shadiness of Jim Bakker’s dealings rather than being truly totally ignorant.

That’s a pretty huge flaw, let’s say it. But at least she never bought in to the party line of bigotry towards same sex attraction that so many other evangelical Christians, whether they’ve got a TV station broadcasting it or not, spout every day. Good for you, Tammy Faye.

Filed under: Life, ethics, religion

Thursday Godless quote

This comes from a long and contentious thread at Pharyngula, and is unrepresentative of most of the thread actually, but it’s one of those regular arguments for which I always wished a pithy response. Thanks, Tulse.

In all things, I have peace, because I know God loves me, and I know He has a plan, a purpose, and a destiny for my life.

Slaveowners had a plan, purpose, and destiny for their “property”, and cattlemen have a plan, purpose, and destiny for their livestock. Somehow in neither case are the objects of this attention comforted by this. Explain to me again why one should follow the alleged plan of an alleged creator? And do you always do exactly what your mother tells you to do?

If someone showed me incontrovertible evidence that a Creator existed I would be impressed and apprehensive of a being with that much power. I don’t see why I should be expected to love that Being just because of its power. Trust seems out of the question when the world could surely have been designed without cruelty and yet we know cruelty exists. If there is a larger purpose to the cruelty existing on this planet then it wouldn’t be a purpose to benefit the inhabitants of this planet, so again, where is the impetus to trust the Creator and be comforted by being a part of the Creator’s plan?

Filed under: religion

Fundiewatch: a Catholic prenatal diagnosis “counselling service”

Two of our local Catholic hospital networks have collaborated to offer a new so-called “counselling service, dubbed “Mamreh”. These two hospitals combined have a lot of community credibility already, as they provide the vast majority of private-hospital maternity services in this State. Baby-catching (or baby-cutting-out, for over half the births in these hospitals) is big business around here.

Mamreh has been taking out full-page ads in the local medical rags pushing their “counselling service” to doctors. The advertisements make no disclosure of the Catholic-medicine rider that the service operates under – which means no condoning, recommending, or counselling on termination of pregnancy, except in cases where the mother’s life is at substantial risk.

This service’s stated purpose? Counselling on prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis. Stating the bleeding obvious, the ad I’m looking at says, “Prenatal genetic screening and diagnostic test information can have profound medical, psychological, and social implications”. No kidding. It goes on, “To add to this there is often only a limited time in which to make critical decisions about a pregnancy.”

This window of defencelessness is crucial. Fundies want to ensure that women are rapidly bustled by their trusted doctors or midwives into a “counselling service” whose primary goal is to hide information from them. The ultimate goal of this type of counselling is to obfuscate information on options and to coerce women into continuing a pregnancy whether they wish to or not – or at least, to delay them just long enough so that the window for a readily accessible termination of pregnancy closes.

Fundies have been pulling this crap in Australia for years, first with tacit government approval and now with open government funding and encouragement, thanks to our papist Health Minister. Attempts to get fraudulent “unplanned pregnancy counselling services” to declare their “faith-based” bias up front have thus far failed.

And now these malignant woman-hating godbags are expanding their vile game to even more vulnerable women – those who are in the initial throes of learning that their fetus has a severe medical problem.

The Mamreh ad veers from there into outright sleight of hand:

“Mamreh Counselling Service explores self, motivations, beliefs and faith in the context of a patient’s own personal, cultural and social situation.”

Would you read this as saying that if your belief system allows termination of pregnancy in the event of severe congenital defect, the service would offer unprejudiced counselling on, and referral for, termination of pregnancy? Well, stop right there. This is not the case. Not remotely.

Do NOT go to this service, or any service like it, unless your goal is to be railroaded into continuing your pregnancy come what may. If a friend or relative has been referred to this service, make sure they know what they’re in for BEFORE they cross the threshold and the forced-birther brainwashing and guilt trips begin. A woman in this awful situation needs absolutely unqualified, unconditional support throughout her decision-making process.

Lying lies and the lying liars who tell them. We hatesss them, we does.

Filed under: ethics, fundies, medicine, obstreperation, reproductive freedoms

Lame jokes

I’m looking at you, Pavlov…

Once there was a boy who had no arms, legs, or torso. In other words – he was a head. He used to roll to school, and roll home again. He was teased unmercifully, and the girl he had a crush on wouldn’t give him a second look.

When a fairy godmother appeared and offered the boy one wish, he asked to be turned into an orange in the girl’s lunch box. (Obviously a rather dim bulb, this one.)

So, long story short, girl forgets to eat her orange, goes off on school holidays, and at the end of the school holidays the girl discovers the mushy mouldy orange in her lunchbox, and throws it against the wall, splat!

The moral is: Quit while you’re a head.

In the US, conservative culture itself is the lame joke. As Lauren at Unsprung explains: “A janitor who watches too much 20/20 was chagrined when he learned that the bag of human fetuses he found in the girls’ locker room was actually a sack of rotted oranges. …pro-life group protesting outside sadly put down signs and went home“.

Amanda Marcotte:

Imagine you’re a junior high school janitor and inside a girl’s locker you discover a Ziploc bag full of goo and rot around some unidentifiable object. What do you assume right off the bat it must be? A discarded and rotten lunch? At worst, a bag of puke? A prank of some sort?

Try a human fetus. (H/T.)

As you imagine, the bag of goo turned out not to be the discards from some sort of young teenage sex cult, but was in fact a rotten orange, though they had to verify this through the Dallas County Medical Examiner. (Well, the medical examiner probably had quite the laugh over this, so all is not lost.) And in retrospect, it might have seemed a little unwise to assume straight off the bat that junior high students are collecting fetuses in bags, but that they might be doing what kids do and being a bit sloppy in cleaning up trash left in their lockers. But let’s cut everyone involved in this a break. We all know that females are born naturally duplicitous, craven and immoral, and that they get a rise out of having all sorts of sex so they can lie about it and avoid the consequences of forced childbirth….

…Anyway, Bush-appointed members of the FDA believe that there’s a likelihood of emergency contraception-based teenage sex cults, so why would it be such a leap to imagine that junior high girls are running around having sex with the boys and escaping the due punishment by with Sapphic abortion parties in the girls locker room? It’s not like the Bush administration would have members that had a poor grasp on reality, right? The way the war is going certainly demonstrates that. Why I bet these teenage girls today with their girl power and their Title IX are able to self-abort by playing Britney Spears records backwards. That’s how far this country has fallen, due to the feminist infiltrators.

Lends a new meaning to the word loinfruit, doesn’t it.

(Boom-tish.)

 
 
 
Guest post by Helen

Filed under: conservatism, fundies, moral panics, reproductive freedoms

Read ‘Ems: more on the NT plan, barefaced hypocrisy, and a couple of amusing tidbits

What I’m reading today:

1. The AMA call has come. Yesterday’s email brought a plea from the AMA to volunteer 2-4 weeks in a central Australian community to perform governmental health checks on children. The email opens with a big fat BLAME:

The Federal Government is currently implementing a reform package to modify behavioural patterns in Aboriginal communities that have over many years had a serious adverse impact on their health.

Given that the AMA Indigenous Health Report Cards have focussed over and over again on the role of colonialism in the indigenous health situation, why the stilted behaviourist blamefest? Is this a subtle back-handed stab at the government’s approach to black-blaming, or is the AMA swallowing this hook, line and sinker?

The email goes on:

In a matter of weeks, the Government is planning to deploy the ‘first wave’ of health teams to conduct health checks for children in the communities. The teams will comprise doctors, nurses, Aboriginal health workers, and social workers. The doctors who lead these teams will be made aware of the cultural and social sensitivities involved in this operation. If you have had previous experience with Indigenous communities, this would clearly be an asset.

I am writing to Australian doctors seeking expressions of interest from suitably skilled and committed doctors to lead these teams on this important mission.

No specific skills are requested, and the email recipients have clearly not been targeted in any way. The commitment requested is two weeks, with the possibility of extension to four weeks, so there will obviously be no opportunity for any comprehensive training or mentoring.

Lots more after the cut – reactions from the RACGP, an Aboriginal women’s group in Katherine, the ACT HREOC, Rex Wild, government hypocrisy in discontinuing funding for the CDEP employment plan in WA, and some fun with antifeminist conspiracy theory and a baby dwarf hamster.

Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, fun, fundies, moral panics, racism

Konkokted Kreationist Krap

This would be side-splittingly hilarious if it wasn’t so evil. A digg-er spotted this scan of a restaurant children’s menu:

Front

Back

Alongside the cheeseburgers and corndogs is a list of “DiNoSaUr FuN fAcTs”! These include:

“The most up to date scientific information shows that dinosaurs did not live millions of years ago, they lived with man. There are still some around today.”

“There have been recent expeditions into the Congo swamp where some apatosaurs still live!”

“Scientists have determined that the Loch Ness Monster is probably a dinosaur.”

and my favourite:

“Scientists have theorised that the T-rex could probably breathe fire!”

The “facts” have been attributed to the site drdino.com, but they sound more like a stoned-out mishmash of “Believe It Or Not” and “Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real”.

Here’s hoping the kids are too smart to fall for it.

Filed under: Science, creationists/ID, obstreperation, religion