Boy, am I out of the loop. I don't work in an office, have no kids in school, don't watch TV or pay to have ads delivered to my house in a daily paper. I didn't know it was Columbus Day until I noticed that my outgoing mail failed to…
Many years ago, a fellow employee and I got into political and philosophic discourse weekly, sometimes daily. One of our basic disagreements had to do with abortion. She was Irish Catholic, and a very bright woman. Her position was consistent with her church. But she was not so dogmatic as to be incapable of engaging the debate without getting so defensive as to shut off her brain.
One day we both heard a news report about a statutory rape case in England. The girl–14–was pregnant. The judge ordered her to have an abortion. The circumstances were bizarre and extreme. Naturally, though, the debate at work that day was about abortion.
“I suppose,” she said to me, “you agree with the judge’s order.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. She blinked, dismayed, and asked why. “Because it’s supposed to be a matter of choice, for Pete’s sake. Choice. Why is it so hard for you to get that? It’s not the court’s decision, it’s her decision, whether to keep it or get rid of it.”
She had a hard time with that–with both aspects. The idea of abortion and my support of a woman’s right to keep her fetus.
An earlier post elicited some responses dealing with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, one of which asserted that there is no explicit statement in the Constitution separating church and state. As far as it goes, no, there isn’t, but the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment lays a logical basis for first …
If the past few weeks have proven anything at all they have proven to us that no news is not good news. In the absence of a steady stream of vigorous reporting to convince us that things are actually going well, we should never assume that things are okay.
We now have evidence that Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were advised of an imminent Al Qaeda attack in July, 2001, but that they did nothing to protect us.
We now have evidence that an alleged stalwart protector of children, Mark Foley, is actually a brash and despicable Internet predator. We know also that several high-ranking Republicans covered up the conduct of Mark Foley for months instead of protecting the teenage boys on the receiving end of Foley’s horny advances.
We now know from the recent NIE report directed to the President that the war in Iraq is inflaming the Middle East and that producing a new generation of Islamic radicals. This contradicts the constant and ludicrous assertions by the President that attacking Iraq would make Americans safer from acts of terrorism. In other words, the President’s claim that he was protecting us by attacking Iraq was utterly false and it should have been vigorously questioned by the press for years.
All of this recently revealed information makes me ask “what else don’t we know?”
The Walt Disney Studios, and its divisions and subsidiaries, have always upheld a very loose relationship between well-established historical fact, and their productions. One case in point would be The Prince of Egypt, a delightful tale of Moses growing up. It clearly shows Moses playing around the slaves building the…
Here's the definition of "reaction formation" from Wikipedia: In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. This mechanism is often characteristic of obsessional neuroses. Here's the example given on Wikipedia: A man who is overly aroused by…