The ten percent solution

I nearly decided to skip comment on the Obama Administration’s approval of mandated contraceptive and sterilization coverage.

What could I say that I, like many other Catholic writers, haven’t said before? That artificial contraception actually encourages poor decision-making, inflating the numbers of unintended pregnancies? Nope; checked that box. That condoms provide little protection against most STDs, which risk-compensation behavior functionally negates? Nope; been there, said that.

Even the news that HHS is rushing the implementation so college students can take advantage of free services during the fall 2011 semester doesn’t increase the outrage. Proof that the Administration tramples on the conscience rights of Catholic colleges? So sorry, already shown in the case of Belmont Abbey College a year and a half ago. You really don’t have to look very hard to find proof that the Obama Administration cares not a whit for rights of conscience where contraception and abortion are concerned.

Catholic pro-life writers have known for some time that contraception feeds the abortion mills. It’s hard not to conclude that the HHS ruling signals a massive investment by the Obama Administration in the Great Western Atrocity … yet what else is new? We’re talking about a president who said he would sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as it landed on his desk (fortunately, as many predicted, it died in committee). Sigh. Yawn.

Past futuristic

In the December 1900 edition of Ladies Home Journal, writer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. wrote what at the time must have been a startling collection of predictions:

These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 — a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.

As far as I know, none of the predictions involved returning the subject and verb to the beginning of the sentence. (I can hear Yoda saying a couple of those lines; picky I am). However, let’s take a lighthearted skip through the rest of their forecasts:

The Yankee invasion of British English

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

—George Bernard Shaw

British journalist Matthew Engel, who lived in the US long enough to learn to love baseball, is nevertheless alarmed by the reverse imperialism of American English. “… I sit over here and listen to people who know nothing of the games talk about ideas coming out of ‘left field’. They speak about ‘three strikes and you’re out’ or ‘stepping up to the plate’ without the foggiest idea what these phrases mean. I think the country has started to lose its own sense of itself.”

Engel isn’t the first Briton to complain about Yankee locutions. According to H. L. Mencken,

The first Englishman to notice an Americanism sneered at it aloofly, thus setting a fashion that many of his countrymen have been following ever since. He was one Francis Moore, a ruffian who came to Georgia in 1735, and the word that upset him was bluff, in the sense of “a cliff or headland with a broad, precipitous face”. He did not deign to argue against it; he simply dismissed it as “barbarous”, and for nearly a century, when it was printed at all in Great Britain, it was set off by sanitary quotation marks.[1]

I’d simply content myself with noting that the imperialism isn’t all one way; more and more US cities are beginning to feature roundabouts in their street construction, and you see more office parks and buildings called Centres … which strikes me as unnecessarily snooty. Then there’s BBC America, and BP stations (which used to be Amoco); my mother has a credit card from — of all places — the Royal Bank of Scotland. And need I mention the ubiquitous Harry Potter?

Feed my pets, change my sheets

My younger brother, Bob, has had type-1 diabetes (adult onset) for over seventeen years.

Since his first diagnosis — actually, he was originally misdiagnosed as type-2 — he has had a kidney replaced, the nerves in his legs have atrophied (diabetic neuropathy), his stomach and intestines have suffered similar damage (gastroparesis), the bones of his left ankle have softened, distorting the joint (Charcot foot), and his skin is becoming ever more fragile. If that weren’t bad enough, he recently suffered a fracture of his right tibia and his right eye has developed an ulcerated cornea.

Since my mother is elderly (I say that with trepidation; she might actually read this blog) and has advanced arthritis in one of her hands, her ability to take care of Bob is becoming more limited. So taking care of my brother is almost literally my new job … one for which I have little to no practical training.

I don’t tell you all this to fish for compliments or admiration. Rather, it’s to set up the context for the rest of the story.

And I’m not the hero of it. More like the comic relief.

Christians: Read the atheist's whole post!

If anything, the responses I got to “The Golden Calf of Scientism” on The Impractical Catholic have provided some good blogging material. One reply, in fact, dovetails nicely with a reply Jennifer Fulweiler got on a recent post.

In “The Golden Calf”, I listed some ways that some scientists misuse or violate the scientific method. One example was, “They cherry-pick statistics and results that support their arguments, while leaving out those that contraindicate.” A respondent jumped on that line:

[I]s this the definition of science or religion. Is this not what most, if not all, [Christians] do today. Scream/preach about the parts that make others sinners and ignore and overlook the parts that make you one. [How original … a tu quoque argument. Yawn.]

Fulweiler, for her part, was telling us that, for some atheists, it’s insufficient merely to reason with them because they’re “trapped in a prison of reason”; that is, they have an answer for everything, so logical arguments become fruitlessly repetitive. To this end, she quoted a couple of paragraphs about the insane from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. And in her combox, what do I find?

“[Prison] of reason”? Some might call that sanity. [Yes, and some North Koreans might find their cultural paranoia very reasonable. But that’s not the point.]

Misusing the scientific method

Last year — March 21, to be precise — I posted a long diatribe on this blog on a study published in Social Psychology Quarterly on the influence of IQ on religious, political and sexual behaviors. Then, two weeks ago, on The Impractical Catholic, I wrote a post trying to remind various people that, for all the benefits it's brought us, the scientific method is still very much a human art, and therefore prone to misuse and abuse.

I don't know if Denyse O'Leary of Mercator.net was reading either my mind or my blog, or I was reading her mind, or if it was just fantastic timing. But lo and behold, she brought forth a couple of splendid examples of how the scientific method can be misused to promote an agenda.

On two posts, which you can access here and here, O'Leary looks at a couple of studies which claimed to show a negative correlation between religion and IQ, and fisks them for methodological problems. Although the link to one of the studies is broken at this time, I commend them to your attention; suffice it to say that neither of the researchers in question seems to have heard of a false-cause fallacy.

Pro-life hatred and feminist groupthink

“Just a few days ago, our highly effective pro-life site, AbolishAbortion.com, was hacked by a gang of pro-abortion activists,” says Kristan Hawkins, the executive director for Students for Life. “As a result, we lost critical data, petition sign-ups, graphics, and social network communications. This breach of security was intentional — and it was very malicious.”

So begins the story in LifeNews.com posted today by Steve Ertelt (H/T to Lisa Graas). This episode doesn’t stand alone, either; Ertelt has also posted stories of vandalism against a crisis pregnancy center in Fredericton, New Brunswick, tire-slashing of a car owned by Operation Rescue interns in New Mexico, and other acts of hate-fueled wanton destruction.

As I read it, I was reminded of a story reported in May 2010 of various insults a group of priests in Rockford, Ill., have had to endure while maintaining a prayer vigil outside a local abortion mill. Now, mind you, these priests aren’t sidewalk counselors or carrying protest signs … all they do is pray. At one point, one priest’s minivan was egged; another found a sign taped to his car which said “I RAPE CHILDREN”.

I don't own the rights.

The other day, when Stacy Trasancos and I were debating with a pro-choice person on Facebook, one thing that puzzled me is when she explained her rudeness by saying that she was angry about “misogynists” who were attempting to take her freedom away and reduce women back to second-class status. As I read it, I thought, You’re putting me on! You can’t seriously believe that SDS retread bushwah!?

Why Eucharistic adoration builds parishes

Is perpetual adoration “THE solution”?

You keep reading Catholic blogs long enough, and you start amassing a load of anecdotal evidence for any number of antidotes to the illnesses besetting the stateside Church: getting rid of the EMHCs, restricting the post of altar server to boys only, reverting to chant and sacred polyphony, even getting rid of the Novus Ordo Mass altogether and going back wholesale to the 1962 Missal. Certainly it seems that the closer a parish gets to Catholic orthodoxy and traditional emphases, the more likely it is to start flourishing again.

Now, I have an ingrained, constitutional suspicion about magic cure-all elixirs, especially when it consists of drastic policy changes sprung on unprepared, unsuspecting congregations. Again, working from anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that most such things work best when the pastor works enthusiastically to get the parish movers and shakers on board and introduces the changes gradually.

Of the long-term approaches, one I favor is switching parish schools to a classical curriculum as has been done by a few already, such as The Atonement Academy at Our Lady of the Atonement parish in San Antonio, St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, MD, and St. Pius X Classical Academy in Nashville. The other is the re-introduction of perpetual adoration.

Father Corapi and authentic Christian witness

In about the year 52 BC, the great Roman demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher was accused of profaning a religious ritual. In this escapade, Pompeia, the wife of Julius Caesar, was also accused as his accomplice. At Clodius’ trial, Caesar refused to give evidence: he wasn’t present, since it was a women’s festival. However, he also divorced Pompeia. When asked why, he stated, “Because my wife shouldn’t even be a suspect.” (Another tradition phrases it: “Caesar’s wife, like all Caesar’s family, must be above suspicion.”)

Another story: The chief rabbi of the yeshiva approached young Moskowitz, and said, “My heart is heavy, and my words are like lead: for I have heard a rumor about you—” Young Moskowitz interrupted, “It’s all lies! I know the rumor you’re speaking of, Rabbi, and there’s not a shred of truth in it!” Upon which the rabbi reared up and thundered, “True it should be yet? Isn’t it bad enough that there’s a rumor?”

It was said that the great Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner “would not allow himself to fall into a position in the privacy of his bedchamber that he would not assume in the chamber of the Senate.” Just so; the secret to maintaining the appearance of a moral person is to maintain the appearance even when no one’s watching and there’s no way you could get caught being immoral.

What's in a name? (A Sunday ramble)

Recently, my cousin Steve and his wife Laura Kristi welcomed into the bigger world their first child, whom they named Kaiya (pronounced “kah-yah”). Yesterday, some of my nieces and nephews and I were talking with him about her, trying to get the pronunciation right, and he grinned self-consciously: “I know. Sounds pretty hippie, doesn’t it?”

Men don’t get to pick the baby’s names. At least, not often. Sometimes it’s not a good idea, especially if you consider Dweezil, Moon Unit and Motorhead Zappa. Steve’s smile suggested to me that, for love of his wife, he had embraced Kaiya’s name as much as he embraced Kaiya herself. It was a beautiful thing.

And I don’t intend to denigrate it, either, or to chide Laura for it. “Moon Unit” would be far, far worse.

But it does make me wonder why and how people choose the baby names they do. How many women actually think about the child that has to carry the name they give, and what s/he may have to suffer if given something too outré.