A year's service for a philosophical question?

Bink stayed the night.  He found he rather liked the castle and its denizens; even the manticora was affable now that the Magician had given the word.  "I would not really have eaten you, though I admit to being tempted for a moment or three when you booted me in the ... tail," it told Bink.  "It is my job to scare off those who are not serious.  See, I am not confined."  It pushed against the bars, and the inner gate swung open.  "My year is almost up; I'll almost be sorry to have it end."

"What question did you bring?" Bink inquired somewhat nervously, trying not to brace himself too obviously for flight.  In an open space, he was no possible match for the manticora.

"I asked whether I have a soul," the monster said seriously.

Again Bink had to control his reaction.  A year's service for a philosophical question?  "What did he tell you?"

Atheists "celebrate" reason with sophomoric mockery of religion

On Sunday, 8,000-10,000 atheists showed up in Washington, DC at what was billed as "The Reason Rally" — a display of unity and strength meant to "Celebrate Living without God"!  And how did this remarkable collection of supremely bright, intellectually superior people trumpet the unquestionable, impregnable reason of atheism?

By obscenity-laced mockery of religion, of course.

From comedian(?) Eddie Izzard's jeering because "God never comes down [when He's called]" (and what was He supposed to do ... play banjo? juggle? make a few cutting remarks about idiots who don't believe in Him?)  to Tim Minchin's extremely creative musical refrain, "F*** the motherf***ing pope", to Richard Dawkins' trademark exaggerated incredulousness and calls to relentlessly mock religious people (atheism, my dear Dr. Dawkins, also makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiatiated), the whole thing apparently degenerated into a massive display of juvenile name-calling.

If you're gonna claim to be more rational, it would lend credibility if you acted more rational.

More gender silliness in Miami, Ohio

Wow ... two weeks without a word here! I apologize for the prolonged silence.

As soon as I saw the headline for the Creative Minority Report entry, I had to check it out: Transgender Student Files Complaint After [Being] Banned From All-Male Dorm!

Ms./Mr. Kaeden Kass

Kaeden Kass is genotypically and phenotypically female.  But in the alternate-universe thinking of "queer theory", that doesn't matter — she says she identifies as a male, and therefore must be treated as a male.  Confident that the world must bow to her self-identification, she applied to be a resident assistant at a male dorm at Miami (Ohio) University.

MU, oddly enough, paid no attention to her self-identification and rejected her application, offering her instead an RA berth at a female dorm.  “The problem is, I’m a male-identified person,” Kass told CBS Cleveland, who posted her story (and used masculine pronouns whenever the story referred to her). “As soon as I’m in a space that is all female, my identity gets erased.”  And so she has filed a complaint against MU ... with whom, the story doesn't mention (I presume some university board empowered to make changes in the name of diversity and inclusiveness).

Memento mori

Today would have been Bob's 44th birthday.

All told, it's been about six months since Bob passed, and the grief is mostly settled.  Mostly settled ... I had a memory of Bob at our niece's wedding, when we managed to turn David Lee Roth's cover of "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" into a reference to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein; a memory that brought a grin only slightly touched by melancholy.

As I've said before, grief keeps its own schedule, and will be neither denied nor rushed.

Calling BS on Sandra Fluke's testimony

Perhaps her pants are on fire?

Okay, I'm going to copy some things that I said over on The Other Blog.   It's not that my creative well is running dry — um, at least it's not all that — but rather that, in that other piece, I was headed in a different direction, so the first couple of paragraphs were merely a set-up.  Now, I want to stare directly at the sun.

Right now, there’s a lot of guffawing and name-calling over Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke’s testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on Monday.  Among other things, Fluke estimated that “Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.”

Over a three-year period, that’s about $83 a month and change.  A quick browse through the Internet got me a range of prices on generic estrogen-progestogen pills going from $49.52 for a 3-month supply (≈ $16.51/month)[*] to $25.99 for a 1-month supply of Levora or Lutera.[†]  Craig Bannister figured it out at $1 a condom … largely for laughs.  [According to Prof. Janet Smith, "These are the costs given on the Planned Parenthood website: Depoprovera costs $35-75$ and last 3 months, the pill at about $15-20 a month; Norplant costs $400-$800 but lasts up to 3 years."  And CVS lists a box of 12 Trojan Extended Pleasure condoms at $12.99.] Yet unless the braniacs attending Georgetown Law still don’t know how to go generic, or the Safeway Pharmacy on Wisconsin Avenue is deliberately ripping the rich kids off, there’s still quite a gap between $25.99 and $83.33 a month — Ms. Fluke’s numbers refuse to add up.

But besides the two explanations I've given above — that either Hoyas are spendthrifts or the local drugstores are taking advantage of them — there are a couple other explanations that don't have GU Law students spending more time in their bedrooms than in their classrooms.  One is that Fluke is great at public speaking but lousy at math.

An equally simple and more likely explanation is that Sandra Fluke deliberately exaggerated the costs of contraception. 

Washington Archdiocese throws priest under the bus for enforcing Canon 915

Barbara Johnson (© 2012 Marvin Joseph/Washington Post)

So the story goes that Barbara Johnson was at her mother's funeral Mass at St. John Neumann in Gaithersburg, Md., when the celebrant, Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, refused to give her Communion.  The way WUSA-9 presents the story, Fr. Guarnizo "somehow found out" that Johnson was living in a lesbian relationship, and his denial of Communion put her in a state of shock.

That, however, is only one side of the story.  According to one of Deacon Greg Kandra's readers, Johnson introduced her partner to Fr. Guarnizo in the vestry as her lover.  Guarnizo said at that time that she should not present herself for Communion.  When she walked away, according to another account, he attempted to follow her to speak with her further, but was blocked at the vestry entryway by the girlfriend.

Seven Quick Takes Friday! (Vol. 15)

ONE:

On the one hand, I appreciate the opportunity to work and make money again.  On the other, I miss having all day available to write.

TWO:

Jehovah's Witnesses to the left of me!  Jehovah's Witnesses to the right of me!  It's chaos!  How did they all end up working for the same *@#&$ company!?

THREE:

This company is expanding so rapidly that they're still installing security and offices with windows in the building they just leased before I interviewed.  Right now my job consists of re-reading the training materials while waiting for my computer to arrive so I can actually earn my paycheck.

Angel Coulby and Adetomiwa Edun from Merlin

FOUR:

Okay, I understand that English television is the epitome of British secular rationality.  This explains why Angel Coulby and Adetomiwa Edun were cast in a television show set in England  sometime between the fifth and eleventh centuries, when you were as likely to see a person of African descent as you were to see an armadillo walking across the Roman road.

 FIVE:

Ate lunch at Razoo's today ... fortunately, there are plenty of places near my office I can have fish or seafood for lunch on Fridays.  The hurricane shrimp lunch special was reasonably priced, and was exquisitely spicy.  Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that Razoo's is bidding to become a Cajun Outback Steakhouse.  Meaning that you pay a little extra for decor and atmosphere that tries a little too hard to convince you it authentically represents the culture.

SIX:

I've been trying to do some writing at a library about a mile and a half from my office.  On Wednesday, I finished my Ash Wednesday post for The Other Blog at 11:45 am, and drove like a madman through North Dallas traffic, making one wrong turn, to get to the only church within reasonable distance — Prince of Peace Catholic Community [say what?] in Plano.  Got there at the stroke of noon ... and there wasn't a place to park within half a mile of the joint.  While the Catholic blogger and apologist part of me was pleased to see such a turnout, the rest of me swore furiously — I blew through a friggin' red arrow to get there, dammit!  Ah, well ... it wasn't a holy day of obligation, at least.

SEVEN:

Belated recognition to my friend Lisa Graas, for whom Ash Wednesday marked the twenty-first year since she was received into Mother Church!

*     *     *

Have a great weekend!

What if we just stop fighting Vatican II?

Bl. Pius IX

On February 7, Johannes Faber at Golden Straw huffed, "All this talk about Obama's health bill is rather shocking. I think that the way American Catholics are rebutting it is extremely unwise. I am referring to the constant appeal to religious freedom."

From there, you can pretty much figure it out, even if you don't follow the link: Cite Syllabus of Errors and St. Thomas Aquinas, then cast Dignitatis Humanae into non-infallibility as if such will make it irrelevant.  The only extra difference is that Faber brings up the Vatican's efforts to bring the Society of St. Pius X back to full communion: 

I propose, pace the US Consistution, American Catholics find other ways of arguing this issue. Otherwise we may find ourselves either a) cutting off the branch we're sitting on, or b) with egg on our faces when this issue is resolved in the Church in the future. I do think that Dr Pink's paper on the matter goes a long way in resolving this issue in the Church, but until we have a clear consensus [there is a clear consensus among the successors of the apostles, which is the only consensus needed; this is just weasel-speak for "until the unreasonable folks in the Vatican finally give the SSPX some concessions"] , it would wise for us to rely on other arguments (that are generally better anyway).
I think we need to be clear: HHS is not wrong because it is anti-Catholic. It is wrong because it is mandating something that is intrinsically evil, and contrary to the natural law. Religious liberty has nothing to do with it, the evil of contraception is not a revealed truth [non sequitur]. Conscience is only relevant in so far as we make clear that we will not comply.  But this is not about building a fortress where can carry on our pleasant prophylactic-free lives [and nobody said it was, either] — the endgame is to have no contraception anywhere, not just to have Catholic hospitals exempt. We should not be using secular, atheistic [?] arguments like religious liberty to justify this, because of the consequences down the road. Our arguments must be rooted in philosophy (not theology) and the natural law. We have had enough of the world's greatest philosophers in the one true fold of the Redeemer to be able to construct a better, richer and more convincing argument from than religious liberty.

WaPo Fact Checker calls BS on "98 percent" meme

On Saturday, Feb. 11, I wrote "Lies, damned lies and the Guttmacher 98%", which was in essence a repeat of Lydia McGrew's post on What's Wrong with the World, "How to lie with statistics".  (I had mentioned in a post on The Other Blog that there was a discrepancy between the "98%" figure and another figure — "nearly 70 percent" — in the Reuters report of the Guttmacher Institute study.)

Well, Mollie at GetReligion.org, in a post with a title that shows we're all pretty unimaginative in our literary references, also called "bulls***" on the  number, citing Lydia's excellent takedown.  I just want to make her (and my) debt to Lydia clear, because Mollie in turn has been cited by none other than the unimpeachable Fact Checker of WaPo, Glenn Kessler:

But while the study says that 98 percent of “sexually experienced Catholic women” have “ever used a contraceptive method other than natural planning,” the data shown in the report does not actually back up that claim.  In fact, a supplementary table in the report, on page 8, even appears to undermine that statistic, since it shows that 11 percent of Catholic women currently using no method at all.  That has led to criticism of the statistic [link leads to Mollie].

The Guttmacher Institute, citing “confusion” over the statistic, on Wednesday posted the actual data behind it [which should tell you how badly the MSM got it wrong if even Guttmacher wanted to set the record straight].  It turns out it was based on a question that asked self-identified Catholic women who have had sex if they have ever used one of 12 methods of birth control.  [Rachel K.] Jones [co-author of the study], in an interview, said the women were asked to answer “yes” or “no” whether they had used each of the different forms; only two percent had said they had used only natural family planning.

In other words, a woman may have sex only once, or she may have had a partner who only used a condom once, and then she would be placed in the 98 percent category.  Jones said the correct way to describe the results of the research is this:

 “Data shows that 98 percent of sexually experienced women of child-bearing age and who identify themselves as Catholic have used a method of contraception other than natural family planning at some point in their lives.”

Sunday Snippets—A Catholic Carnival (2/19/12)

Welcome back to Sunday Snippets!  Sunday Snippets is a circle of traded posts hosted by RAnn at This That and the Other Thing.  For some fine Catholic reading, please follow this link!

Well, this week wasn't very productive, as it was my first week back in the regular workforce.  The next week is going to be even stranger, since I'll be working split shifts at my paying job and trying to write at the local library during the four-hour segments between (writing at my desk using company software would be not only questionable work ethics but also sticky in terms of copyright law — they would have a legal claim to it, even if they never exercised it.)