Monthly Archives: March 2010

When ideology trumps education, then the time has come to take children out of public education and either send them to private schools or to home school one’s children.  Alas, it increasingly seems just such a time has presented itself.  … Continue reading →

I am not now, nor shall I ever be, a member of the Catholic Church. But this much is clear to me: Until Benedict XVI is no longer Pope, I would find another way to express my commitment to God. For just as I would and could not be friends with a pedophile and a Holocaust denier, I would not and could not accept as a spiritual leader someone who has found a way to look pass such horrendous moral wrongs.
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Pierre Durieux in his essay “Lettre ouverte à un prêtre pédophile” writes as follows: “I am out to get you. I am to get you because you have wounded children, their personality, their capacity for affection, their sexuality, and their identity. I am out to get you because you have betrayed your tripartite vocation of man, Christian, and priest” Alas, I do not who Duriex had in mind. However, Pope Benedict XVI readily leaps to my mind.
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I cannot imagine Ms. Cynthia Davis arguing against women giving birth. But does she not know that as a matter of fact a woman puts her life at risk in doing so. To be sure, the risk is not so great that a woman is generally expected to die. Still, the probability of a woman dying goes up somewhat during child birth. So if minimizing the risk death is what life is all about, then Ms. Davis must be opposed to child birth. I think that this is the point at which I say: “You go, girl!” As to where she needs to go, I shall leave that up to you. Continue reading →

I am not challenging the nobleness of giving up sex for religious devotion. Let me concede the spiritual majesty of that calling. Rather, my point is that a lot of people who think that they can answer that calling are apt to have deep psychological problems with regard to sex as a result of which they down play the tremendous significance of the affirmation afforded by sex. Continue reading →

If the idea of teachers having a sense of duty were richly and majestically affirmed by the community, what would simply not be having is a proliferation teachers having sex with their students. For that public affirmation in the community would be an ever present reminder of the appropriateness of such behavior with students and such public affirmation would stay the hand of most teachers in times of weakness. The evidence of this comes from a most unexpected source, namely the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church with young people. Continue reading →

Famously, Aristotle observed that we become just by doing just deeds as part of our upbringing. One very crucial step in that line of thought is that a child’s parents serve as the most substantive guide in the child’s life. The child learns how to engage in this or that behavior through experiencing the behavior of his parents. There is also verbal instruction, but as we shall see this is typically irrelevant with regard to the matter of sexual abuse. Continue reading →