I just had a (loud) discussion with a pro-life friend who told me what his church is telling people about this amendment. Now, this guy is intelligent and literate, but has fully bought into the Bible-as-inerrant-literal-truth philosophy. Maybe you've read Erich's Missouri Amendment 2 entry from April. Maybe not. Here…
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 …
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…
All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives. We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control: Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal…
I don’t usually go around discussing poop.
That might have changed forever, though, once I stumbled upon smellypoop.com, a site dedicated to disseminating information about . . . well, poop. Smellypoop.com is a refreshingly frank site presenting “solid” information on a subject that simultaneously compels and repels.
For example, smellypoop.com addresses each of the following topics (as well as others):
But there’s more. Smellypoop.com provides comprehensive research on the topic of farts. You can order fake poop and poop-themed greeting cards at the site (click on “Order Fake Poop and Other Great Gifts”). There is a poop forum and a poop photo gallery. You’ll find poop poems, poop riddles, and poop sayings, including “Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day” (attributed to Harry S Truman).
What especially interests me, though, is the comprehensive list of poop synonyms at smellypoop.com. There are hundreds of them. Though I was already aware of dozens of poop terms (including the classic four-letter reference and oldie-but-goodie “number two”), I was woefully unaware of the vast number of poop synonyms. Thanks to stinkypoop.com, my repertoire now includes terms like “blind eels,” “bootycakes,” “colon cobras,” “dookie-doop-droop” “mooky-stinks,” and the quaint but useful “pooplets.”
Why so many synonyms for a basic bodily function, I wondered? Then it hit me: …