Safe Haven

It's really very simple: If the living product of a sexual union is a person, you can't make an exception for when it's OK to kill them. Even in horrible situations like rape, we need to remember that this person did not choose how to come into being. None of us did. Shall we take life away, because of the evil of someone else? It seems astonishing to me that we spend so much time talking about 'reproductive rights' and not about that most fundamental right we all have: the right to life itself. What are we? Are we defined by what we are able to accomplish, or by an inherent dignity that no others can deny or destroy, and that misfortune and accident can only obscure, but never eliminate? Tell me why a political party who presumably exists to promote economic fairness among those weakest among us: the racially marginalized, the disabled, the forgotten, has forgotten its first duty-- to defend the weakest among us. Who needs more help than a child? Some people ...

That guy was a jerk-face. All I did was say that Todd Akin is a good man who made a mistake. Unfortunately, it might mean that Senator McCaskill will win re-election. I said I would pray she picked up an economics textbook (among other things) should she be fortunate enough to win. Well, this guy didn't like that at all. I may have speculated that she would switch parties if she did that. Whereupon this guy pointed out that Akin voted against raising the debt ceiling, as if that was the equivalent of putting puppies in blenders. I said maybe we need a default to wake up our whole political class. At which point, he consigned me to whatever mental holding-tank he has for storing his subhuman political opponents. He said, " I don't think you have any idea what a sovereign default would entail, so I can see why you feel right at home with the Republican party, where knowledge is weakness." I added the period for the aid of my readers and for him, since he was so full of ...

I need to talk about a couple of things. First, the Gospel for the 20th. The rich young man. Meets Jesus. Asks Jesus what he needs to do still. Also says he's kept all the commandments. Jesus says to be perfect, sell your stuff and follow him. But he's rich, and he went away sad. Now, when I was Reformed, we said 2 things about this and related texts: First, there's no way he actually kept the commandments; that's impossible. We need grace, and we are wretched sinners with no good of our own, but that God loves us. Second, this man wasn't saved. If you meet Jesus, and he asks you to give up some small thing like stuff to follow him, we can only hope we understand what's being offered. But he didn't. Ergo, unsaved. Catholic theology reads this text very differently. Jesus said, "if you want to be perfect..." not saved. And we take him at his word that he kept the commandments, in some real fashion. We distinguish between venial and mortal sins (...