Day: July 1, 2002

Abortion=Suicide Bombers

Star Parker has a column in USA Today in which she compares women who have abortions to suicide bombers.

Parker opens up her column by claiming that,

After Sept. 11, some evangelical ministers suggested the moral state of our country might have helped provoke the attacks — and they were condemned for saying so. But their basic point — that a moral accounting should be part of our national assessment of what went wrong and what needs fixing — is correct. That so many Americans don’t see this as relevant is an indication of the problem.

Count this writer as one of those who did not see the point in watching Americans investigating their alleged sinfulness. Frankly, I’ll take American-style decadence over the sort of morality that religious extremists of various faiths would prefer.

To recap, what went wrong on Sept. 11 was that a bunch of Muslim extremists used box cutters to hijack several jets and crash them into buildings. It had nothing to do with abortion, pornography, divorce, school prayer, gambling, or other alleged social ills.

Parker goes on to compare women who have abortions to Palestinian suicide bombers,

The claim that “I own myself,” that I am the ultimate arbiter of life and death, defines the common ground of the suicide bomber and the abortionist.

This is not a matter of defining at what point a fetus is a human being. This is a question of the attitude of the mother-to-be who says what is most important is that I choose, and not what the choice is.

It saddens me that Palestinians kill themselves and innocent civilians because they don’t like the choices they have. The Palestinian people have been given many choices, from the considerable territory given them in 1948 to the major territorial concessions made at Camp David. They choose death instead.

The same politicization of human life that produces suicide bombers has crept into our own society. More than 1.3 million fetuses are aborted each year.

This is the worst sort of argument by analogy — and terribly unconvincing to boot.

Source:

Countries in glass houses shouldn’t … Star Parker, USA Today, June 27, 2002.

Update on Child Killer

My wife just called me to say that Connie Chung interviewed the prosecutor who is handling the case against the Southfield, Michigan, woman who left her 3 year old and 10 month old in a locked car with the windows rolled up (except for one which apparently had a small gap) while she had her hair styled. The case just gets more disgusting and unbelievable:

1. The prosecutor said the woman will have a hard time protraying herself as not understanding that her actions would likely lead to the death of the children since she was studying physics at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The whole “I didn’t understand how dangerous a hot car was” defense ain’t going to fly.

2. These cases always have gruesome/sad details like this — they found the fingerprints of the three year old on the window that was slightly open. Based on the way the bodies were placed and the woman’s statements, police believe the three year old got the infant out of the car seat and tried to find a way out of the vehicle.

3. The idiot mother is pregnant with yet a third child. No matter what else happens with this case, she should never be allowed to have custody of children ever again.

I’ve never been able to find exact statistics on how many children are killed in this manner, but in 2001 GM funded research that found at least 120 children died in the United States from 1996-2000 after being left in hot cars.

On a hot day, a small child left in a car can be killed in about 30 minutes. GM’s research found that on a 95 degree Fahrenheit day, a car with its windows closed can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit in only 20 minutes. Heat stroke, of course, only requires temperatures above 105 degress Fahrenheit.

Never leave children in hot cars, even for a very short period of time.

Child Killing Season Again Open

It is that time of year again for parents to lock infants in cars, roll up all the windows and go get a trendy hair cut.

In this case a woman left her 3 year old and 10 month old in a locked car with the windows rolled up for three hours last Friday, which was a very hot day here in Michigan.

The one good thing here is that the prosecutor in this case is at least talking the talk. Usually in cases like this the prosecutor will charge the parents with manslaughter at best, but here they’re charging the woman with two counts of first degree murder and two counts of felony child abuse. Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Deborah Carley told the Associated Press,

Those children really suffered. The mere image of her sitting in that salon, getting her hair done, reading a magazine while they were suffering makes me sick.

Also appropriate were the police chief’s comments,

We treat animals better than that. It’s our full intention to put her behind bars for the rest of her natural life.

Absolutely. Prosecutors need to use cases like this to send a message that if people don’t want to take care of children in a responsible manner, then they shouldn’t be having them.

Great Books Debate at K5

Kuro5hin has a little “great books” thread taking off on a question posted to Mortimer Adler about which books he would take with him to a deserted island.

Of course the scary thing about online versions of this is the geeks who will chime in with lists of graphic novels and scifi novels they would take. Which is not just to pick on geeks. At least one person there claims that he’s never read anything written before the 20th century, which is just pathetic but an apt commentary on the dumbing down of our educational system.

Now the obvious answer to the books on a deserted island question is that you would want only one book — a copy of “How to Escape From a Deserted Island.”

Barring that, though, I would side with Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Shakespeare come’s close to Dante’s genius, and a complete works of Shakespeare would be a decent consolation prize.

Two authors showed up in the Kuro5hin debate whom some of my friends would agree with but whom I have no use at all for — Jean-Paul Sartre and Umberto Eco. I suppose if you ran out of toilet paper Foucalt’s Pendulum might be useful since it is such a long novel. And Sartre might come in handy rationalizing away your situation as Sartre rationalized away some of the ugliest of human behavior.

Graduation Day

My, Lisa, went through her commencement proceedings this weekend (she doesn’t actually get her degree until August, but here we have a combined Spring/Summer commencement ceremony). She’s finishing up the final touches on her thesis for her Masters in Medieval Studies.

Her sister and brother-in-law from Tennessee surprised her (and me) by driving up for the ceremony after stringing her along making her think they wouldn’t be able to make it. Since they’re the two sanest people in either of our families, that was fun.

The only low point was when the idiot they hired to do a prayer during the commencent had the temerity to compare the WorldCom and Enron fiascos with Sept. 11. Apparently if you don’t pray for Arthur Andersen, then the terrorists have won.

When I received my degree I never bothered with going through a graduation ceremony and was reminded why sitting there on Saturday — there is nothing more boring than watching thousands of people you don’t know get a degree. My daughter was thrilled when the Dean of Arts and Sciences talked about my wife in a mini-speech highlighting students who had made a lot of impact on the university (thrilled because the dean mentioned my daughter). But by the time they got around to awarding the undergraduate degrees, she was bouncing all over the place out of sheer boredom (and I was about to join her).

New Scientist’s Nonsense on Vouchers and Creationism

New Scientist has a bizarre take on the recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the Constitutionality of a Cleveland voucher program. Almost all of the vouchers were used to send students to private Roman Catholic schools, and the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that this did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

But to New Scientist, this decisions is all about teaching creationism,

But the decision will mean that even fewer US children will be taught evolution. Repeated attempts since the 1920s by Christian fundamentalists in the US to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, or at least mandate teaching the biblical account of creation as well, have been defeated in court on the grounds that teaching religion in a state-funded school violates the separation of church and state.

Private schools are under no such restriction. So creationists have turned their efforts towards expanding private schooling. The voucher scheme is widely supported by Christian right wing organizations. One Cleveland voucher school states that “the one cardinal objective of education to which all others point is to develop devotion to God as our Creator”.

But if Cleveland parents were obssessed with having their children taught creationism, why would 95 percent of those using the voucher system send them to Catholic schools? Or is New Scientist writer Debora MacKenzie simply so clueless that she doesn’t realize that private Catholic schools have been teaching evolution for decades?

After all, as far back as 1950 Pope Pius XII made it clear there was no doctrinal conflict between evolution and Catholicism.

It’s interesting that the Catholic Church was able to look at scientific changes and incorporate them doctrinally, but New Scientist doesn’t seem to be able to get over its bigoted assumption that creationist and Christian are synonyms.