Happy Shrove Tuesday!

One of my favorite customs is having pancakes for supper on Shrove Tuesday, which is today. Pancakes were traditionally eaten because the rich ingredients--eggs, fat, and milk--were forbidden during Lent, which begins tomorrow with Ash Wednesday. Many churches and families preserve this tradition, providing a connection to the Christian past and a pleasant way to be reminded of Christian precepts.

Captain Yips, an Anglican blogger, has a nice piece on Lent and the weather (doesn't it come at just the right time of year to strike a penitential note?) and what we might derive from the penitential season that is fast upon us:

"As we consider Lent, let’s begin with the assumption that our imaginations are poor things, too stuffed with mashed potatoes to know all that God wants for us. We’re more like children who can only see the repressive and unwanted parental discipline but not the independence, the emotional and intellectual maturity that is the goal. We’re always down among the pigs, and every day begins with the realization that we can trust the Father. We’re a long way from home down a dry and dusty road, but the greeting at the end is beyond our imagination. In Lent, we fast a little, give up a little, for the sake of making room in our imaginations for something greater."

Wishing you all a happy Lent, too!

Science and Christianity: Bnet Members Speak!

Loose Canon correctly anticipated that Beliefnet members could go to town discussing two pro-Christianity quotes (you may read them here) from Rodney Stark’s new book, “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.”

Even Swami, often so manifestly unhappy, rose magnificently to the occasion. In a post headlined “Loose Canon’s Challenge: Name One great thing Jesus didn’t do,” Swam writes:

“Gotta feel really bad for LC, who writes:
Do I sometimes detect a soupcon of hostility toward the singular achievements of Western civilization among those who post comments on Loose Canon?

“I assume she means on her message boards, where a random reading does reveal considerable hostility. Most of it seems directed at LC herself.”

Well, I laughed out loud—Swam is right, I do have my—um—detractors among those who express themselves in the comments. A goodly number of the 40 posts were interesting and thoughtful. A few highlights are in order. Basileus writes:

“One final note, LC: if you detect a soupcon of hostility towards the singular achievements of Western civilization, I don't think it's due to those achievements themselves. Indeed, the achievements are profound. It's how you come across with it: like it's the only civilization ever to produce anything and it is just innately superior, just because...it's the West!”The West would not have gotten where it was today if it didn't piggyback on civs before it and sometimes even outright borrow or steal.”

I quite agree—of course, Western civilization has appropriated the achievements of other civilizations. The stream contains elements from desert tribes and highbrows who philosophized on the Acropolis. The point in the Stark book (I think) is that it is only in the much-maligned Western society that science arose. One reason for this is that the Christian West believed in a rational god who created the world. Here is another smidgen from Stark to get your engines running:

“As Alfred North Whitehead put it during one of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1925, science arose in Europe because of the widespread ‘faith in the possibility of science…derivative from medieval theology.’ Whitehead’s pronouncement shocked not only his distinguished audience but Western intellectuals in general once his lectures had been published. How could this great philosopher and mathematician, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark "Principia Mathmatica" (1910-13), make such an outlandish claim? Did he not know that religion is the mortal enemy of scientific inquiry?

“Whitehead knew better. He had grasped that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science in the West, just as surely as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific quest everywhere else.”

Christianity postulated a rational deity and a universe about which mankind could learn. “As conceived by Chinese philosophers, the universe simply is and always was,” writes Stark, adding that therefore Chinese intellectuals pursued “enlightenment” rather than explanations.

Beliefnet member mercmisfire wrote:

“I stated that it [is?] the opposition of Christianity to science [that is?] is at least as valid a historical fact as the importance of Christianity to science, and that at this point the former has more practical usefulness (that is, that at this point, dwelling on the past successes of christianity is useless -- it has served its purpose and glorifying its past is less helpful than realizing the danger it poses to science NOW because the present it just a more useful focus in this situation). I must admit I don't really know that I need to defend this ... is it not obvious at this point ? Look to the bunk of intelligent design or creationism, to the opposition to stem cell research, cloning, materialism/naturalism, etc. and you will see all the proof I need.”

I, of course, believe that the purpose of Christianity is eternal. But I must admit that merc was hot on the trail of one of the reasons I had chosen these two quotes from Stark—I thought that if Beliefnet members could see that Christianity is not anti-science, they might be willing to entertain some of the cautions Christians throw out about the uses to which modern science is put—cloning, for example. I guess I was barking up the wrong tree.

Beliefnet member Cheryl writes:

”Christianity has fought tooth and nail against the advances that our gossip columnist now right pundit LC would have us believe were innovations of the faith.” However, the big-picture issue here is Ms Hayes [sic] and her supreme insistance that white is right. I'm glad that Bnet pulled her ‘the Crusades got a bum rap’ post, but she has posted things in the past that have gotten through, like a similar post to this awhile back, and the shameful post that no one should mourn the loss of the Mayan civilization because they didn't add anything to the world anyway (posted right after a devastating hurricane killed hundreds of Mayan descendants).”

I am glad you brought this up—I do not believe white is right. Forget race and color—this about creed, Cheryl. The point made in the Stark book is that Christianity—the thought processes it introduced, not the people who happened to embrace it—is responsible for the rise of science.

And I am glad that you brought up my ill-fated Crusades post—it was a technologically inept Loose Canon, not her editors at Beliefnet, who removed the post—accidentally. I might have said that the Mayan civilization ranked below, say, fifth-century Athens, but I never said that the deaths of Mayan descendants in a hurricane should not be mourned.

LC enjoyed the comments and regrets that she cannot mention all.

Conscientious Objectors in White Coats

The fight about pharmacists, conscience, and Plan B, the morning-after pill, is heating up. It looks as if it is going to be a state-by-state fight, with different states coming to different conclusions.

An interesting piece in the Washington Post this morning noted a variety of ways in which state legislatures seek to have the pill dispensed:

"Many of the state bills intended to expand access give specially trained pharmacists in states including Maryland, New York, Kentucky and Illinois the right to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription. Other bills require pharmacies to stock and distribute the drug, and to ensure that the pill is made available to women who come into emergency rooms after a sexual assault.

"But some bills would make it more difficult for many women to get emergency contraception, which is effective for only 72 hours after a woman experiences a contraceptive failure or unprotected sex. Legislation in New Hampshire, for instance, would require parental notification before the drug is dispensed, and more than 20 other states will consider bills that give pharmacies the right not to stock the drug and pharmacists the right not to dispense it, even to women with valid prescriptions.

"'Basically, every state now has an effort going to either make Plan B more easily available or to slow it down or make sure that pharmacists don't have to dispense if they oppose it,' said Edward R. Martin, a lawyer and lobbyist with Americans United for Life, who has helped put together some of the proposed 'conscience' clauses."

Most of us would say that we are a society that does not force you to act against your own conscience. The idea that someone might have moral qualms about dispensing this pill and insist upon acting on their consciences, however, is another matter, especially to the "enlightened" among us, people who would ordinarily hail those (conscientious objectors, for example) who act upon their consciences. But the morning-after pill brings out the illogical in its staunch supporters.

Nowhere was this more obvious in Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick's piece yesterday in the Washington Post. She started this way:

"No one disputes that there are circumstances in which people have a fundamental right to assert a moral or religious objection to performing duties -- such as military service -- and thus cannot be pressed by law into performing them. The problem lies in sorting out who can opt out and when.

"Consider, through that lens, the parallels between California physicians who refused last week to participate in the execution of a convicted killer and the growing numbers of pharmacists around the country who refuse to dispense morning-after pills."

You read this and think: How is she going to uphold the right of the California physicians and still deny the right to the pharmacists? You know it will take some fancy footwork, and fancy footwork is what you get. (By the way, Loose Canon, a supporter of capital punishment, not only believes the California doctors had the right to refuse--she believes they did the correct thing: the court has decreed a death, but using doctors to carry out the sentence blurs the distinction between medicine and execution. )

But back to Ms. Lithwick's dance of illogic. She is certainly to be commended for arriving at the "right" position:

"Physicians and pharmacists who refuse to participate in what they deem to be killing have more in common than many of us might like to admit. But the most important distinction between them has to do with their differing relationship with patients. The law recognizes that doctors' special relationship with their patients warrants a legal privilege: Their discussions are kept secret. You may like and trust your pharmacist. You may even trust him with intimate details about your yeast infection. But your pharmacist has neither the tools nor the right to probe details about rape and abuse, incest and health risks. Which is why pharmacists who interpose between decisions made by a doctor and her patient are overstepping not just moral but legal boundaries--and undermining another professional relationship that is fundamentally different from their own."

And this gem:

"The right of conscience is a subjective one. And no one disputes that a pharmacist's moral objection to dispensing certain drugs is as heartfelt or urgent as a physician's refusal to inject lethal doses of sodium thiopental. But as a legal or legislative matter, the inquiry should begin, not end, with that moral objection. Legal regimes that balance an individual's right to opt out against safeguards for patients (like making it the pharmacy's responsibility to provide timely alternatives) are good compromises. Similarly, if physicians cannot supervise executions consonant with their professional obligations, we may need to devise some new form of capital punishment that does not require a doctor's intervention to ensure against violent, painful death.

"There should and will always be space in this country for conscientious objectors. But it cannot and should not follow that murder is murder is murder."

I have no idea what the last sentence means. But I love, "the right of conscience is a subjective one." Such an overtly Orwellian sentence is rare. In this piece, the pharmacist has no right to exercise her conscience because the doctor and patient have exercised theirs. By that reasoning, the California physicians should just be told that the courts have decided: they have no right to exercise their own consciences. In Ms. Lithwick's word, there is "space" for conscientious objectors in matters of war but not for pharmacists who may in some states soon be required to do things they regard as morally repugnant.

I want to thank those who responded to my two quotes about Western civ in Friday's post. Thanks to the marvels of modern air travel, I arrived home this morning instead of last night (don't ask!) from a trip. I plan to read the comments in the morning after I have rested from my night of the living dead in a motel I'd better not name for fear of slandering it.

How the West Won

Do I sometimes detect a soupcon of hostility toward the singular achievements of Western civilization among those who post comments on Loose Canon? I would love for you to respond to these two quotes from a wonderful new book, "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success":

"Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism. According to any edition of Webster's, 'scholastic' means 'pedantic and dogmatic,' denoting the sterility of medieval church scholarship. John Locke, the eighteenth-century British philosopher, dismissed the Scholastics as 'the great mintmasters' of useless terms meant 'to cover their ignorance.' Not so! The scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe's great universities and launched the rise of Western science. As for theology, it has little in common with most religious thinking, being a sophisticated, highly rational discipline that is fully developed only in Christianity."

And:

"The so-called Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century has been misinterpreted by those wishing to assert an inherent conflict between religion and science. Some wonderful things were achieved in this era, but they were not produced by an eruption of secular thinking. Rather, these achievements were the culmination of many centuries of systematic progress by medieval Scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian twelfth-century invention, the university. Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars."

I'll be interested in what you have to say, especially Swami, who has put forward the unverifiable claim that he actually thinks about his posts before writing them, and who has several days to cogitate on this.

Food for Thought

Loose Canon was thrilled to note that Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party) was #46 this morning on Amazon. Anything below 10,000 is considered good. Rod is a former colleague and a fine fellow, who did terrific work ferreting out clerical sexual abuse. It's great to see him doing so well. And if his thesis is right, it's great to see trad vals thriving, too.

A convert to Catholicism, Rod describes "crunchy conservatives" as people who have mostly old-fashioned, including most notably Christian, values but do a lot of things usually identified with lefties (free-range farming, etc.) A review in Publishers Weekly describes crunchy cons as people who "voted for Bush but shop at Whole Foods." (The review, not overly perceptive in my view, is quoted on Amazon.)

The National Review (where Rod once worked, before going to the Dallas Morning News) has devoted an entire blog to the book. Rod himself weighs in frequently, including a post on how we care for the elderly--see below, some people euthanize them.) Amy Welborn, Beliefnet contributor Fredericka Matthewes-Greene (here and here), and others debate Rod's ideas--and offer confessions. (I won't tell you who got her navel pierced!)

If Rod is right about all this, one pleasant observation: Christian conservatives are quite likely to outbreed secular liberals.

I am heading to Natchez, Mississippi, later today--but don't worry, I've left behind a thought-provoking item for you to discuss among yourseves on Friday.

Caregivers: Get Out of My Way

A human life is valuable, whether it is in its early moments or in its last earthly moments. An old or frail person in the last hour of life may love, repent, or hope.

A chilling report by LifeSiteNews indicates that the old and frail in a New Orleans hospital may have had their leave taking of life cut short for the convenience of their "caregivers."

This recent LifeSitesNews report bolsters several earlier ones about DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) patients allegedly being killed as Hurricane Katrina approached. LifeSites says:

"National Public Radio now reports on its access to court documents in the case. In a February 16 report, NPR says it has reviewed secret court documents related to the investigation and not yet released to the public. The documents, says NPR, 'reveal chilling details about events at Memorial hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses. The witnesses also heard staff discussing the agonizing decision to end patients' lives.'

"The allegations revolve around a group of patients left on the seventh floor at Memorial Medical Center. This floor was leased to a different entity, LifeCare Hospitals. According to NPR, the patients on the seventh floor were all DNR patients--they had 'do not resuscitate' orders.
The report describes the deplorable conditions in the hospital which was left without power, without sewage removal facilities, and in soaring temperatures with looters attempting to enter the hospital.

"Not Dead Yet, a national disability-rights organization that leads the disability community's opposition to legalized assisted suicide, euthanasia, and other forms of medical killing, points to a section of the NPR report suggesting the staff wanted to eliminate the patients so they could themselves escape."

Sure, they might want to advance bogus arguments about preventing suffering. But don't believe them. Like Terri Schiavo, these patients were in somebody's way. Somebody wanted to move on. Being in somebody else's way while sick is becoming increasingly dangerous in our society.

Mocking Mary

I'm not crazy about this, but I have decided not to riot.

What's That Thing in the Petri Dish?

There are two great threats to our society, one without (resurgent Islamic fundamentalism), and one within--the disregard for the dignity of every human life. We are in denial about both threats.

Many of the best-educated among us are leading the charge for making unethical use of scientific advances. Michael S. Gazzaniga, a Dartmouth professor and member of President Bush's bioethics council, wrote an op-ed about cloning ("All Clones Are Not the Same") that purports to demolish President Bush's stand against human cloning "in all its forms." Here is part of what he writes:

"Yet all modern research reveals that DNA must undergo thousands if not millions of interactions at both the molecular and experiential level to grow and develop a brain and become a person. It is the journey that makes a human, not the car. Unfortunately, the president rejected the advice of his own counselors and has kept his ban on federal financing of stem cell research for all but a handful of strains of existing lines. ...

"In his State of the Union speech, President Bush went on to observe that 'human life is a gift from our creator—and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.' Putting aside the belief in a 'creator,' the vast majority of the world's population takes a similar stance on valuing human life. What is at issue, rather, is how we are to define 'human life.' Look around you. Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else?

"Most humans practice a kind of dualism, seeing a distinction between mind and body. We all automatically confer a higher order to a developed biological entity like a human brain. We do not see cells, simple or complex—we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. It doesn't yet have the memories and loves and hopes that accumulate over the years. Until this is understood by our politicians, the gallant efforts of so many biomedical scientists, as good as they are, will remain only stopgap measures."

This is a sickening definition of a human being. If you don't "yet" have memories and loves and hopes, are you somehow less than human? If you fall sick and forget some of your memories, are you somehow less human? Defining us this way is utilitarian, and ultimately, the use to which a clone may be put is more important than anything else.

In a piece titled "That Thing in the Petri Dish," on National Review Online, Gilbert Meilaender and Robert P. George show why this Gazzaniga's analysis is so shallow:

"It will not do to opine that a living human embryo of the sort all of us once were (which Gazzaniga prefers to characterize as 'that thing in a petri dish') cannot be a member of our community, entitled to the same protections as the rest of us, unless and until it has acquired 'the memories and loves and hopes that accumulate over the years' without offering any serious discussion of what this means for newborns, for those afflicted by retardation, and for those suffering from dementia.

"It will not do to opine that the distinction between body and brain is decisive for determining whose life should be protected without even considering whether the living and developing human body ought not elicit from us a kind of reverence and respect that would keep us from simply using it in the service of our goals, even praiseworthy goals.

"Gazzaniga is, of course, not alone in failing to engage in the kind of serious reflection we need right now (though as an informed scholar he does bear some special responsibilities that others may not). Others also want to rid our nation's debates about embryonic-stem-cell research of any so-called "political" interference with the research agendas of scientists. But this effort badly misrepresents the nature of both science and politics."

Support the Danes!

While I am not a button-wearer (except I do like to wear my Bush-Cheney button on the 42 bus that goes through one of the most left-wing 'hoods in America: mine), I have wanted to get a Danish flag or do some other little thing to show my support in the face of the cartoon riots.

Writing on Tech Central Station, Lee Harris, author of "Civilization and Its Enemies," shares my concern:

"In the wake of the Cartoon Jihad, as Daniel Pipes has called it, Danish embassies have been attacked and burned, while Moslems are calling for a boycott of Danish products. Meanwhile, those of us who feel sympathy for Denmark are at a loss to know how we can stand up for this tiny and beleaguered nation. There are those who had urged us to buy Danish. But how many Danish plum hams and delectable Danish butter cookies can you eat before endangering your waistline, and possibly even your health? Certainly, there must be a low-calorie alternative."

Harris puts forward an original alternative--go to the music store and buy a CD of a symphony by Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), the great Danish composer. There is also a Buy Danish website with ideas of how you might support the Danes. And Canada's Western Standard asks, "T-Shirt Anyone?"

Of course, the real way to support the Danes is to realize what we're up against: bullies (and that's a nice way of putting it). The tendency is always to appease. That is what happened in the 1930s, and that is the temptation (especially to an elite media more obsessed with Dick Cheney's hunting accident than the peril of our civilization) now. In a piece headlined "Appeasement 101, Dealing with Bullies," the historian Victor Davis Hanson shows how difficult it is to recognize our predicament. He writes:

"It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Hitler, given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed. But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto, but also trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that now in hindsight seems inexplicable. Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for a variety of reasons. All of them are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish--or about fighting radical Islamism in general."

I can't resist quoting one more chilling bit from Hanson's piece:

"[T]he moral high ground today supposedly was to refer both the Iraqi and Iranian problems to the UN. But considering the oil-for-food scandals and Saddam Hussein's constant violations of UN resolutions, it is unlikely that the Iranian theocracy has much fear that the UN Security Council will thwart its uranium enrichment. As fascism spread, France worked on fortifying its German border with the Maginot Line, Oxford undergraduates voted to refuse 'in any circumstances to fight for king and country,' and British newspapers decried the Treaty of Versailles for unduly punishing Germany. This was all long before the 'no blood for oil' slogan and Al Gore in Saudi Arabia apologizing for the supposed American maltreatment of Arabs. But deja vu pertains not just to us but our enemies as well. Like the Nazi romance of an exalted ancient Volk, the Islamists harken back to a mythical purity, free of decadence brought on by Western liberalism."

Can I Minor in Prostitution, Daddy?

Why do I bet that the new minor in Queer Studies offered at DePaul University, a Catholic university in the Midwest, won't give the mean old Church's teaching on the subject a fair shake? A news item on LifeSiteNews, a conservative site, reports:

"De Paul University, one of the most important Catholic colleges in the US, has instituted a minor undergraduate programme in 'lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer (LGBTQ) studies.' The new minor programme offers students an overview of the 'history of the queer movement' in legislation as well as the place of homosexuality in the US as a social movement.

"The university’s dean of the Liberal Arts and Sciences did not return LifeSiteNews.com’s request for comment, but the programme was featured in a news spot earlier this week on National Public Radio. The website Queertheory.com that lists college resources for homosexual studies, notes also that 'DePaul also has a large lesbian/gay faculty and staff caucus.' ”

NPR comments that DePaul "could face the wrath of the Vatican" for Queer Studies. How about ridicule? Isn't that more fun (and more effective)?

Of course, the Vatican does have an obligation to make sure that Catholic institutions are Catholic. And parents might want to avoid footing tuition bills for DePaul, unless, of course, they think that their offspring will have a bright future after majoring in QS. But the rest of us should just laugh our heads off at this absurdity.

The "New" Abu Ghraib Pictures

There are “new” pictures of Abu Ghraib out, not new in the sense of being new but new in the sense of being old photos that were not published during the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal (see here, here, and here). Pathetic, cowardly news operations that did not dare print pictures of the Danish cartoons (and would not level with the public about why: fear) will gleefully publish these pictures.

The pictures are shocking, but I would argue that, though they are old, those news organs that have chosen to print them are not out of bounds. It is too bad they couldn’t muster the same courage to print the more genuinely newsworthy cartoons of Muhammad.

While I support the right to carry these pictures, I do suspect the motives: most likely many editors view these pictures as a golden opportunity to show U.S. personnel in Iraq as sadists more than liberators and thereby undermine the whole effort to bring a new way of life to the Middle East. I am sorry that some of my countrymen have resorted to this kind of inhumane treatment of prisoners. It is both morally repugnant and counterproductive. But this in no way affects our noble goal in Iraq, and the majority of our military do not engage in sadism. By the way, I think you could make an argument for not publishing these pictures: They do harm America, and they are not representative of the way we behave. I can see why the administration did not want them to be made public, but the decision to publish or not to publish is made by editors.

Nevertheless I'd say fie on our media for refusing to publish the Muhammad cartoons and then publishing this flagrantly anti-American stuff designed, like Newsweek’s woefully underreported Koran in the toilet story, to inflame murderous the thugs. Our mainstream media are part of a degenerate elite that lacks a moral compass (oh, and courage--they lack that, too).

The best thing I’ve seen on these buffoons in the press and their decisions about what matters is a hilarious piece by Tony Blankley. Here is a tidbit:

“In the absence of any pressing news these days--other than Iran's nuclear weapons development crisis, the election of Hamas terrorists in Palestine, ongoing worldwide Muslim riots and killing in reaction to a cartoon, Al Gore's near sedition while speaking in Saudi Arabia, the turning over of our East Coast ports to be managed by a United Arab Emirates firm, the criminal leaking of vital NSA secrets to the New York Times, Mexican military incursions across our southern border, the Iraqi crisis, Congress's refusal to deal with the developing financial collapse of Social Security and Medicare, inter alia--the White House press corps has exploded in righteous fury over the question of the vice president's little shooting party last weekend.

“As I understand the profound concern of the ever-alert White House reporters, they smell a constitutional crisis because the shooting party failed to alert the media of the accidental shooting down in Corpus Christi, Texas. Well, actually, they did alert the Corpus Christi media--but that didn't count. Unless the exalted ones have been formally informed by an official government press secretary, no public communication has technically occurred.

“I checked the bylaws of the White House press corps, and they are right. It seems that the bylaws refer to Article XXIII of the U.S. Constitution, which expressly designates that White House reporters with a minimum annual income of $375,000 (plus minimum stock options equal to not less than two-thirds their yearly salary, plus use of driver and long sedan during business hours, of which hours must include post-deadline dinner engagements of a semi-social nature) are the exclusive recipients of all government information.

“If information isn't hand-delivered in gilt-edged paper to them while they are reclined on their chaise lounges, it hasn't been released to the public. And if they don't report a fact, it hasn't happened. This provision is vital to a vigorous and independent free press. [I should note, my copy of the Constitution must be outdated, because it doesn't have an Article XXIII.]”

LC Answers the Question

A Beliefnet member was not satisfied by my post refuting Swami's allegation that I believe that contraception is murder (I don't believe that):

"I read and re-read Ms. Hays' response of righteous indignation to Swami, but nowhere do I see whether she supports a pharmacist's right to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. (Perhaps this was in an earlier blog posting, now not on the page). A clarification would be helpful. For the record, I do think a pharmacist who would deny a woman a birth-control prescription to be a hate crime against that woman. Aw c'mon, answer the question."

This is a difficult question. I guess, off the top of my head, I'd say a pharmacist ought to be able to refuse to fill a prescription for anything he regards as morally repugnant. I don't think this would have much impact on getting prescriptions for contraception filled. Even I would fill a contraception prescription if I were a pharmacist, if I was certain it was a contraceptive and not an abortafecient.

Because I accept Catholic church teaching on contraception, I regard it as a grave moral evil and ultimately harmful to those who use it. But precisely because I don't regard it as murder, I would fill the prescription.

I happen to believe in drug legalization on the theory that it's your right to make a mess of your life (and because the war on drugs can't be won). But, while I believe you have the right to ruin your own life, I do not believe anyone has the right to take innocent life. I would not acquiesce in doing that.

This is simply my answer to the questions, and there may be better Christians out there who have another reply.

Not Heroic, But They're Telling the Truth

Loose Canon commends the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly, for being just about the only media outlet in these United States with a shred of decency. Here is part of what the paper wrote in defending its decision not to run the notorious Danish cartoons:

“There are three reasons not to publish the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed with his turban styled as a bomb (to view the cartoons, click here) and the other images that have sparked violent protests and deaths throughout Europe, the Middle East, West Asia, and Indonesia:

“One: Out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.”

I wish my local daily had been as honest. Not only did the paper's ombudsman try to explain away the failure to carry the cartoons with some craven blather about editorial decisions, but today the paper's "Style" section had a piece trying to explain why art and stories blaspheming Christianity are routinely published, while these cartoons can't be. I was eager to see how the article would swing the justification. But disappointed in the utterly unoriginal, politically correct rationale for what is really cowardice:

" 'Of the 57 nations that belong to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 54 have been colonized by Europe,' [Yvonne Haddad, professor of the history of Islam and of Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University] says. 'That history is well known in Islamic countries, you've got the current war in Iraq....Those things form the context of this sort of response [riots]. Devout Muslims are offended by the cartoons, but this is not just a religious affront.'"

Let us hope that if we end up living under Islamic rule, which is not beyond the realm of the possible, they will be so solicitous of our feelings.

The Good Side of 'Brokeback Mountain'

In a Beliefnet vote for the most spiritual movie of last year, "Brokeback Mountain," a propaganda film on gay cowboys, is beating "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the beautiful adaptation of one of C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales. When I last checked, the score was: Brokeback, 42; Wardrobe 37. (Swami, did you vote more than once?)

What was spiritual about "Brokeback"? Sex between two guys who rarely make emotional contact with each other? (Some wag said this might be because the actors were straight!)

But there is good news on the Brokeback front: The movie is not playing in the heartland, according to blogger Mickey Kaus, who has kept an eye on the movie. In posts on "the Brokeback heartland meme," Kaus not only shows that the movie's popularity in red states is a myth--he shows why it is being propagated and who it actually hurts (that's the good news):

"More specifically, if you believe "Brokeback Mountain" is sweeping the heartland, you won't hesitate before presenting gay marriage as the obvious next step in the evolution of civil rights--a step that's already been taken, really, according to Frank Rich. After all, they swooned over Ennis and Jack in Plano, Texas! If you don't buy the Heartland Breakout spin, you'll press the gay marriage issue much more cautiously (and will especially avoid the moralistic, guilt-tripping attitude that allows Republicans to pull off the Democrats-are-the-real-elitists act that Tom Frank writes about in "What's the Matter with Kansas.")

"Misjudging the depth of cultural antipathy to homosexuality can be costly for political groups aside from Democrats. ..."

Kaus reports that the same market strategy that is being used for "Brokeback" was used for "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Democrat biggies embraced, only to find themselves backing away as the election entered the final stretch.

Just for Fun...

It's not a burning issue, but here is a delightful report from the Guardian about a DNA test on remains that may belong to Joan of Arc:

"History contends that the ashes of Saint Joan of Arc were gathered from the pyre on which she was burned alive and tossed into the river Seine. Anxious to avoid creating a martyr, the English, who had ordered her death in 1431, wanted nothing left of the 19-year-old French heroine. According to legend, however, a devoted follower managed to find and conceal some of her remains, including fragments of charred rib and material from clothing, that today are one of the Roman Catholic church's most precious relics."

"Now DNA tests are to be carried out on the Pucelle d'Orléans (the Maid of Orleans), who was killed 575 years ago for being a heretic and a witch after she claimed voices from God had told her to drive the English from France.

"Philippe Charlier, a genetic specialist at the Raymond-Pointcaré hospital at Garches, west of Paris, said the tests would solve the mystery over the relic.

"'The remains include fragments of ribs, material, wood, and traces of human body tissues on pieces of bone and wood from the pyre,' he said.

"Joan of Arc, was burned at the stake, but because her heart remained intact--seen in the 15th century as a miracle--her remains were cremated on two more occasions before being thrown in the river."

Invincible Ignorance, part 1,207

Swami has done it again--he has seriously misstated my views one more time. In a somewhat emotional post on pharmacists and conscience, Swami writes that Plan B is "nothing but a super-sized dose of birth control." He then goes on:

"For that matter, does LC understand this? If she does, does she support a pharmacist's right to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions? My bet: She'd vote with the 'conscientious' pharmacists who will have nothing to do with birth-control in any form--because from where she sits, isn't birth control murder? Naturally, she doesn't say this. Why? Because you'd think she's some kind of hard-core wingnut woman-hater, and you'd never pay attention to her again."

For the record: You are free to call me a hard-core wingnut, if that is your wonted way of speaking, but I most certainly do not regard birth control as murder. The philosophical and theological (and I daresay biological) underpinnings of the Catholic Church's ban on abortion and artificial birth control are very different. Abortion is a right-to-life issue; contraception is not. The stricture rests on the idea that it is wrong (at least for a practicing Catholic) because it is sterile, or selfish, sex that is not open to procreation. For a fuller treatment of this subject see Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on artificial contraception.

I will not belabor the point, Swami, not only because it might be too subtle for you but because I am still trying to explain papal infallibility to you. (I had questioned whether Plan B could be called contreption because it is used after sexual intercourse, and I was mystified at the idea of prevention after, to mix metaphors, the horse is out of the barn. But I have never said or even entertained the idea that contraception is murder, though it can lead to the death of love. You may realize this if you actually read Paul VI's prophetic encyclical.)

Something Like Hatred

Loose Canon had planned to quote from Jeremy Lott's fine piece in Doublethink magazine on spiritual writer Ann Lamott's fiendish hatred of George Bush even before Ms. Lamott recounted her own hysterical outburst when she participated in a panel and the subject of abortion came up:

"But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor—but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove. I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo-ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls 'snowflake babies,' and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans."

Yikes! Ms. Lamott may be the left's poster girl for spirituality, but this is unbalanced. Here's just a bit from "Bush as Antichrist," Lott's piece:

"'Plan B' has unusually strident anti-Bush credentials. [Lamott] admits to having written, before this, an anti-Bush baby book. A search of her 1994 best-seller 'Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's Year bears out this claim. ...'Plan B' is more of a Bush-haunted book. Bush is mentioned as the author contemplates the ashes of her dead mother, whom she also dislikes, these two villains proviking the same 'bewilderment that this person could ever be in charge, and dismay, and something like hatred.' ....Lamott sees the president as the head of a vast movement that she admits brings out the worst in her, twitch fears."

Sounds like she should have tea with Mr. and Mrs. Uptown.

Although Lott's piece isn't online, the group that publishes Doublethink, America's Future Foundation, is--and it's a nice organization for younger conservatives. (Disclaimer: I was on a panel there recently, where I picked up a copy of their excellent magazine.)

A Falling Camel?

The Washington Post ombudsman's pathetic explanations of why her paper won't print the undoubtedly newsworthy Muhammad cartoons is hilariously convoluted, and a little bit pitiful. It's hard to sound principled when the truth is that you're just too scared to publish the 'toons.

And ombudsperson Deborah Howell's attempt to swagger falls flat:

"The Post has written thousands of stories about abortion, forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church, and has printed countless recipes using pork, forbidden to Orthodox Jews and Muslims. And the Post publishes stories about drinking alcohol, forbidden by Islam and other faiths.

"That also doesn't mean that The Post doesn't occasionally offend readers' sensibilities, religious or otherwise. A recent story on over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs in New York offended several Jewish readers. But you're not going to see a cartoon lampooning the Virgin Mary or the Jewish high holy days in The Post. So you wouldn't expect to see a cartoon making fun of Muhammad."

I never thought the mighty Washington Post would be reduced to this. (I am unable to tell if the Post carried a picture of the Virgin Mary made partly from elephant dung, a work of "art" shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. The Virgin Mary piece was reproduced only last week in a New York Times piece on the cartoon riots which, interestingly, refrained from carrying the offending Danish cartoons. Anybody out there know?)

Ms. Howell makes a sad little attempt at bravado in her finale:

"Being a First Amendment freak, I support those newspapers' right to publish the cartoons. [Executive Editor Len] Downie made a different and equally valid decision not to publish."

Some "First Amendment freak." Note: Ms. Howell supports the newspaper's right to publish the cartoons--she doesn't seem to support actually publishing them. It would be so much better if newspapers would tell the truth--it's dangerous to publish these pictures. We're scared out of our gourds. The fake bravado is unbecoming. But so is cowardice.

The cartoon wars are just the beginning, as columnist Mark Steyn notes:

"From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag.'

"Not literally 'blasted' in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that 'blowup males' are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy 'insults the Prophet Muhammad--who also has the title al-Mustapha.'

"In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the Prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the Prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the Prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, 'We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed.'"

Whatever you think about adult shops (I find them abhorent but don't advocate additional laws against pornography--we should just shun known users), the West is all too willing to capitulate to non-Western values. Here's Steyn on the surrender of the West:

"The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a 'media code' to encourage 'prudence' in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, 'The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.'

"'Prudence'? 'Self-regulate our free expression'? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.

"But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, 'Prayers for the Assassin,' set in an Islamic Republic of America, 'A falling camel attracts many knives.' In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him."

Here's the question: Can the West, which believes nothing much beyond a few mealy-mouthed platitudes of multiculturalism, withsand an onslaught from a society that believes with red-hot intensity?

Don't Apologize

Newspapers are supposed to traffic in the truth. That's why I'd like to see something like this in an editorial in an American newspaper: "We fully recognize that the Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad are nothing if not newsworthy at this point. But we aren't going to print them. We're scared to death. We remember what happened to Theo Van Gogh and we don't want this to happen to us. We must think about the lives of our staff."

Such an admission would be--like the recent electoral victory of Hamas--a clarifying moment.

European Muslims have tried to pretend a moral equivalence by creating a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler--but in a column on the self-censorship of western newspapers, Michael Kinsley points out:

"[W]hatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now called '5 Questions for a Jewish Mother.' It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary, and would say, 'Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead.' Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play 'fiercely funny, honest and moving' and did not demand that the author be executed or even admonished.

"By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was 'a reasonable choice' because they would offend many people and 'are so easy to describe in words.' As I write I am looking at a front-page photo in today's Times of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think."

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of those liberals conservatives often praise--they sense in his convoluted reasoning a lack of hostility to conservative ideas. But in the end, he always comes out with the accepted liberal wisdom. In today's column, he compares the riots in the Muslim world to our own civil-rights movement and look for "hope beyond Muslim rage":

"Maybe the Muslim world will someday be able to laugh off slurs against the prophet Muhammad, but not now. The wounds are too raw; the sense of victimization is too immediate. I travel often to Muslim countries, and I am sometimes astonished at how hundreds of years of history can seem condensed into the present, so that every current injustice is magnified by the weight of every past one. I don't understand it, but then, I have to remind myself, I'm not a Muslim. I haven't lived it."

What wounds? What victimization? Not victimization by the West, for sure, though many of their own leaders have been tyrants. Ibn Warraq, bestselling writer and Muslim dissident, argues that if the West doesn't stand in solidarity with Denmark, then "the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest":

"Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

"This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples."

Historian Victor Davis Hanson also urges that we "stand up for our values":

"We are seeing an escalating clash of civilizations—against a tense backdrop of the Iranian government's call for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, the election of Hamas terrorists in the Palestinian territories, and Western efforts to protect the new democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq from jihadist bombers.

"There is a great asymmetry in all this. Western notions of cultural tolerance and liberality are the benchmarks Muslims employ to condemn insensitive European journalism. Meanwhile, the Islamic Middle East is given a pass, as anti-Semitic state-run papers there daily portray Jews grotesquely."

Like Ibn Warraq, Victor Davis Hanson recognizes the danger of apologizing:

"Indeed, a number of sadly misguided Westerners—most prominently Bill Clinton—have condemned the published cartoons, missing the issue entirely and so sending exactly the wrong message: A private Western newspaper can crassly editorialize and lampoon as it likes. If it couldn't, or if it censored itself from doing so out of fear, then there would simply no longer be a West as we know it. That's why papers across Europe, from Spain to Poland, have republished the cartoons and faced the consequences."

God Goes to Bloomsbury

Is God working in mysterious ways? Julie Burchill, one of those iconoclastic and fun-to-read journalists who could only emerge on the sceptered isle, is taking a year off to study theology (but don't worry--she'll still finish her lesbian teen novel):

"She had five controversial years at the Guardian before moving to the Times, where her first column two years ago talked about her conversion to Christianity. 'One moment I was sitting there on my Bloomsbury sofa, flicking through Time Out, idly wondering whose life to ruin next, and the next moment it was as if a mighty hand had broken--painlessly, patiently, purposefully--a huge jar of ointment over my head,' she wrote."

Many thanks to Relapsed Catholic for spotting this.

What Comes After the Cartoon Riots?

Are the Muslim cartoon riots more dangerous than we think? Are they an early volley in a global clash of civilizations (with the West trying to deny it until it's too late)? Globe-trotting correspondent (and my esteemed former boss) Arnaud de Borchgrave proposes this chilling scenario:

"The cartoon war could be seen as a limbering exercise for a global intifada. It would be a miracle if the Wahhabi and Salafi and Deobandi and Shiite clergy leaders didn't see it the same way. Iran's Ahmadinejad, surveying the global cartoon thunderclaps, must have concluded that the return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi, is drawing nearer, which means world chaos, death, and destruction, before a new era of world peace under Islamic rule."

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy also sees the cartoon riots as prelude to something bigger, created for the larger purpose:

"So what made this demented scene, this planetary upheaval, possible? However you might look at the problem, it is hard not to see that insidious forces have brought these drawings to the attention of the Muslim masses. And it is hard not to link this provocation, the deliberate circulation of these cartoons, the quasi-home-delivery of a Danish paper that no one could have guessed had so many readers in the Muslim world, it is hard not to link this self-inflicted blasphemy, this calculated offense (calculated, mind you, by the organizers of the distribution of the cartoons), it is hard not to link this blasphemy to a new planetary configuration, itself determined by three recent and major events."

The three events: diversionary tactics of Syria, eager to reassert itself as regional agitator; the hardening of Iran; and the electoral victory in Palestine of Hamas. "These three events," Lévy continues, "are linked as a triangle. There is between these three poles a veritable triangle of death, which is in the process of locking into place thanks to the cartoons affair--and which, if it is successfully welded together, will produce not just symbolic heat, but, with an Iranian bomb, a fissile heat unlike anything we saw in the good old axis of evil."

Lévy suggests that we reach out to "enlightened moderate Muslims"--an excellent idea, along with waking up to the danger we face.