How to evangelize.

Start with vulnerable people, malleable individuals or a captive audience.

For the past several years, two U.S. Army posts in Virginia, Fort Eustis and Fort Lee, have been putting on a series of what are called Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concerts. [...]

On May 13, 2010, about eighty soldiers, stationed at Fort Eustis while attending a training course, were punished for opting out of attending one of these Christian concerts. The headliner at this concert was a Christian rock band called BarlowGirl, a band that describes itself as taking "an aggressive, almost warrior-like stance when it comes to spreading the gospel and serving God."

Gosh, doesn't that sound like a Faytene Kryskow kind of proselytizing. Amazons for Armageddon? Jezebels for Jay-Zeus?

The Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concert Series was the brainchild of Maj. Gen. James E. Chambers, who, according to an article on the Army.mil website, "was reborn as a Christian" at the age of sixteen. According to the article, Chambers held the first concert at Fort Lee within a month of becoming the commanding general of the Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee in June 2008. [...]

In the Army.mil article, Maj. Gen. Chambers was quoted as saying, "The idea is not to be a proponent for any one religion. It's to have a mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds." But there has been no "mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds" at these concerts. Every one of them has had evangelical Christian performers, who typically not only perform their music but give their Christian testimony and read from the Bible in between songs.

Well. Isn't that special?

Fortunately, the US Military Religious Freedom Foundation is supporting the soldiers' complaints.

But, but, but ... the feminists are oppressing ME - Shrieeek!!!

Blob Blogging Wingnut turns HER defense of Catholic patriarchs' refusal to respond humanely to criticism about Church tolerance and protection of pedophile priests, into a cause banale. As usual, it's all about HERSELF and how SHE is being persecuted.

SHE finds it hilarious.

"Oh woe is me. I'm so happy and fulfilled being Catholic. How can I be so blind to my own oppression? Fundamentalist men made me do it! They FORCED me to be Catholic by saying nice stuff about me. The nerve! Pushing me into the Catholic faith against my own will. Hilarious."

It's indeed hilarious. Here is someone who spends a MASSIVE amount of time disseminating religious propaganda and claiming that Abortion Is Murder©™ and that family is sacred.

Yet, as the Vatican Taliban feels the heat of criticism, it unleashes whatever odious weapons it can to preserve its most valued and cherished assets: power and wealth.

Not its Catholic families, betrayed by centuries of prevarication. The sexual exploitation of a child by a priest - someone said to be the official representative of God - is a physical assault that will damage that individual's mental, emotional, social and spiritual self for years to come. But the harm is not limited to the thousands of girls and boys who experienced sexual abuse at the hands of pedophile Catholic priests. Families have also been affected by recurring problems such as substance abuse, suicide attempts and other mental conditions caused by the trauma.

Sexually defiled children became adults who perpetuated the cycle of violence: priests, parents, educators, coaches, doctors who abused the children in their care. Research done into this phenomenon has investigated the profound and multidimensional impact of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse and the betrayal of trust by religious leaders on individuals, families and communities by their refusal to accept responsibility and deal with the pedophile priests.

Catholic Church fathers determined centuries ago that its clergy would be above the authority of “man-made” laws. This question divided Henry II and Thomas Beckett: "The clergy have Christ alone as King and under the King of Heaven; they should be ruled by their own law." It is now 2010 and the Vatican Taliban perseveres in following medieval principles and maintaining that its ecclesiastical rules are the only ones that are God-given and irrevocable.

As a result of this MASSIVE sense of entitlement produced by centuries of intellectual inbreeding, Pope Maledict and his Vatican Taliban could be taken down by the collective grief and anger of families.

For more about the Catholic Church ongoing stonewall, check out Canadian Cynic's Arrogance from yesterday and today, ... and then I hit my daily word limit, gosh darn it. which demonstrates how the Family Values©™ branding is really an empty rightwing religious zealot political tactic.

Selling the sizzle cuz the steak is putrid.

Yesterday's blogpost was written about heterosexual pedophile Catholic priests.

Today, it's all about the Vatican Taliban cranking up its propaganda machine.

First, go watch "Catholics Come Home" advert at Feminist christian socialist and read what Luna has to say. She nailguns the propagandists to the wall.

Then, consider Pope Maledict's dilemma regarding the Legion of Christ:

As sex abuse scandals rock the Vatican, the results of an investigation into a rich, ultra-conservative and secretive Roman Catholic order founded by a priest accused of pedophilia and incest are due to be filed in Rome on Monday.The sordid story of the Legion of Christ, whose late founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, was a close ally of Pope John Paul II before being forcibly retired by the Vatican in 2006, is a microcosm of the crisis currently enveloping the church.

Rich and ultra-conservative. Key words. Do you think a poor and progressive faith movement within the Catholic Church would have been allowed to thrive? Would its leader have been praised and anointed by the previous pope?

"Maciel was a sexual criminal of epic proportions who gained the trust of John Paul II and created a movement that is as close to a cult as anything we've seen in the church," said author Jason Berry, one of two reporters who broke the Maciel story in 1997 [...]

Interviews with former members of the Legion and Regnum Christi paint a chilling picture of Maciel as a sociopathic master salesman who knew how to charm the upper echelon at the Vatican as well as enlist the wealthy and elite to his fast-growing order, all while using cult-like techniques. Two of the most visible priests in America are Father Thomas Williams, a movie-star-handsome CBS News analyst, and Father Jonathan Morris, who is sometimes referred to as "Father Knows Best" on the Fox News Channel. They belong to the Legion of Christ but rarely identify themselves as such on camera.

"Dan Brown got the wrong group," said Genevieve Kineke, an orthodox Catholic who was a member of Regnum Christi, the legion's lay movement, from 1992 to 2000 and writes a blog about her experiences. "The Legion of Christ is the scary cult embedded in the bosom of the mother church. Not Opus Dei." [...]

That misuse of sex and power was an undercurrent that helped fuel the growth of the order, according to several former members of the Legion and Regnum Christi. "Maciel always told me to recruit the most handsome boys from the best families," said Vaca. "They were trained to approach rich women. I'm not saying they had sexual relationships with these women but they did know how to charm them." Kineke and others also said Legion priests are notoriously successful in winning over women to the church.

"They are spiritual seducers," said another former Regnum Christi member. "They are the only priests I've seen who have swept people off their feet. These men woo women because they want access to our children and our husbands' wallets."

That is very strong language from someone who will be monitoring how the Vatican Taliban deals with the findings of the investigation into the Legion. More here about that, and also here.

What kind of reception did Maciel receive in heaven when he died? Surely someone who masterminded such a MASSIVE grift in the name of Jesus deserves to be seated to the right of Lucifer? Oh ... wait.

All shrieeekkk!!! - no substance.

"Dr" Melissa Clouthier - neither medical doctor nor physician but someone with a chiropractic degree from a US institution - leads with her blogpost headline:

Pregnancy Center Burned: Domestic Abortion-Rights Terrorists Suspected?

When you read the mostly cut'n'paste text, nothing in the reported facts supports Clouthier's claim.

From the original story at Lifeshite:

[...]whoever started the fire vandalized televisions, VCRs and other equipment before setting the blaze in the back of the building[...]

That suggests someone with a specific gripe against that particular CPC. Or perhaps the arson is a cover for some crooked insurance claim - since The Fetus©™ fetishists opened the door to wild, unfounded accusations.

It's not as though operators of US-based CPCs are known for rigorously upholding ethical standards. Their flim-flam techniques have been well-documented.

Update: Go read what JJ's investigative skills dug up: How anti-choice propaganda works.

Blame Mandos.

Our friend Mandos - fellow blogger and Ottawan, though now residing elsewhere - appears to be quite excited about a recent development in Eggbert Umbert's narrative.

"BREAKING!!!! UMBERT REFERS TO SEX FOR FIRST TIME!!"

Yawn. Wake us up when Umbert's parental-units-in-waiting are doing the horizontal mambo, doggy-style, and the cartoon embryo is bouncing around the uterus like a pinball. Though that's unlikely to happen.

After all, this comic strip is a cash cow for its creator, Gary Cangemi. It appears in the National Catholic Register and it's syndicated to a large number of associated catholic organizations' newsletters.

Umbert©™ states that he's "the product of 100% natural family planning." The implication is that sexual relations between the two hopeful-to-be-parental-units was achieved for the purpose of procreation. Now that Umbert©™ is in residence, there's no justification for his human-rights-deprived vessel to engage in carnality, is there? As for the male parental-unit-in-waiting, in spite of catholic religious dogma currently in vogue, he's probably furtively getting his rocks off elsewhere.

Demons, poker and vessels, oh my!

Discretely mentioned, amid a flurry of headlines that range from a bishop's quote that "the spirit of Vatican II is a demon that must be exorcised" to the fundraising feats of a poker-playing and winning vicar, is a link to Umbert, The Fetus©™ Without Wit.

Yes folks, the National Catholic Register lumbers forward into the 21st century with all the latest technical accoutrement festooning its website, and the same-old same-old ideology fundamentally in place. Though it may be a clunky clam competing in a horse-race (to para-phrase the brilliant and prescient feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman) the Catholic Church perseveres in proclaiming the supremacy and imperativeness of its dogma.

And how perfectly Umbert the Unborn fits into that scheme. In the latest instalment, The Fetus©™ Without Wit floats in outer space, attached to the distant 'mother-ship' by his umbilical cord. The trite monologue "My mother is the vessel and I'm the prize" reinforces the Church Fathers' message that women are merely and toujours a mere vessel, a disposable container for the fertilized ova, zygote, embryo or fetus that that impregnate them.

NCR is also the acronym for National Cash Register, a profitable corporation now owned by AT&T.

Hype vs "Propoganda" (sic)

Over at SUZY ALL-CAPS’ House of Glossy Fetal Remains and Periodic Whining and Shrieking, where SHE quotes from this blogger - ‘Why I just can't believe the hype’.  Here’s the money quote: "As with global warming, the more we realize that the "experts" don't even agree amongst themselves and that the supposed "consensus" on the question is just a myth meant to delegitimize and silence opponents, the less the population will swallow everything it's told without question." 

Will Blob Blogging Wingnut include her constant screeching of factoids about The Fetus©™ and "propoganda" (sic) about choice, in this broad-brush invalidation of phenomenons such as those claimed to be myths; say, climate change and antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria?  Oh wait, SHE probably considers HERSELF exempt from the observations that SHE interprets as a condemnation of all the things that SHE does not believe.

Just as Sarah Palin thinks that electric cars can't work in Alaska because sockets to plug them in are hundreds of miles apart, SHE grasps at the strawmen arguments that seemingly bolster HER sense of persecution yet 'specialness'.

Religious zealotry disorder.  Because the ungawdly are not like HER.

Update: Go read Bene Diction Blogs On, regarding yet another tool produced by the lesser dull knives in the drawer.

Blob Blogging Wingnut calls for the canonization of Jim Pouillon.

Jim Pouillon was collateral damage, in the terms of rightwing military jargon. He was the second shooting victim of alleged killer Harlan Drake. As jj points out, there is no evidence so far that Pouillon was a target because of his anti-abortion activities.

But why should mere facts stop rabid The Fetus©™ fetishists and religious zealot SUZIE ALL-CAPS from calling for his canonization by the Catholic Church?

... did Jim Pouillon live a life of heroic virtue, i.e. is he worthy of canonization? On the surface of it, it looks like he might have. ... I think it would be very inspiring if he were to be canonized. I like the idea of a genuine pro-life activist saint-- not necessarily one of the elites of the pro-life movement (although I can sense that some of them may be worthy of canonization, too) but he was an average schlub, by the looks of things, except for his disability. Of course, I don't actually know him, but it might be profitable to investigate the possibility.

There's the money comment "... it might be profitable to investigate the possibility." Because pro-lies organizations need MASSIVE infusions of cash to sustain their propaganda efforts, from an ever-dwindling number of supporters, many of whom have stopped sending in their hard-earned money to anti-abortion fanatics whose associations with Scott Roeder and other US domestic terrorists are under investigation.

An attempt to canonize Jim Pouillon would surely be cause for frenzied fund-raising. How tactically astute of Blob Blogging Wingnut to suggest such an initiative.

Yet again, BLOB BLOGGING WINGNUT shows a lack of understanding.

As LuLu noted at Canadian Cynic: Was it something we said?  the propensity Blob Blogging Wingnut has for spinning every "Gotcha! you hypocrites!" into an attack on their absolute, zealot right to their unfettered speech is a MASSIVE exercise in panty-bunchification.   

The Fetus©™ fetishist normal.  According to their beliefs, they have the right to prevaricate, obfuscate, and baldly lie to advance the goals of whatever their crusade du jour happens to be.

And to disallow or moderate comments?  That is a built-in feature in most blogging software.

Here’s the point that SHE missed.  As fern hill said, there is a cognitive dissonance and often an abyss, between the principles they pretend to espouse and the manner in which they conduct their business.  And business it is – though foot soldiers like Blob Blogging Wingnut and Scott Roeder are penniless schmucks who believe in the greater glory of their just cause, the respective beneficiaries of their support: the Catholic Taliban or Operation Rescue (or whatever organization surreptitiously encouraged Roeder) will reap the rich financial harvests. 

It is just too, too delicious to point out the inconsistencies and the patent propagandizing that occur at ALL-CAPS as normal operating procedure.  The dogma SHE embraces ran rampant in the Middle Ages and resulted in the Grand Inquisitions.  Yet SHE claims all the entitlements of the 21^st century has to offer, in defense of this religious malevolence. 

Medieval Catholicism.  Not just for the 12^th century. 

Cue the shrieeekkking in 3 ... 2 ... 1.

Expect the following news item to become a MASSIVE headline on pro-lies websites over the next days and possibly weeks.

Frantic to reverse the downward spin that their implicit support for and explicit incitation to carry out the public execution of Dr George Tiller last month has precipated, abortion-criminalizing and zygote zealot organizations will be frothing and shrieeeking about the incident.

Road rage is never an acceptable response to a perceived provocation, even when the target is a propaganda-toting rightwingnutter.

It remains for the Chico, California police to determine whether charges should be laid against the driver of the SUV who allegedly attempted to hit a protester outside a Planned Parenthood clinic with his vehicle.

Already Lifeshite has branded the driver an "abortion advocate" in its coverage of the incident. Now what? Are fetus fetishists going to start claiming that any imagined threat, such as those that had Jill Stank's knickers in knots, is an attempt to produce a "retroactive abortion"?

Idjits.


Added by fern hill: Here you go, dBO, SHE is on it.

Saturday Comix

SHE fibs. Go read pretty shaved ape at Canadian Cynic. The finest example of a smack down this side of Pharyngula.

Meanwhile, over at unrepentant old hippie, the laughs never stop as we take a crack at completing the Blob Blogging Wingnut-coined expression: Extremist Canadian Feminist Pro-Abort Runs …

what? what? How about:

Extremist Canadian Feminist Pro-Abort Runs … with the deer, the bunny rabbits and the chipmunks. Yup. You got it.

We were once Snow White but sadly, we drifted.

This is how a smackdown is done.

There's a slew of comments in response to Dr Dawg's posting of a video "Pro-life" savagery, produced with footage from the Forced Pregnancy Parade.

In our humble opinion however, this one from sleazebear - who should be blogging, not just leaving comments - is superb.

jimmy durante writes: "At what point do non-sentient embryos become sentient and thus, per your definition, human?"

Sentience is necessary, but not sufficient, to be considered human. Not that I'm a philosopher or anything. But that's what I'd say. As for when it happens, from what I understand (see below), medical experts say sentience isn't achieved until late in the second trimester.

But let's leave that aside. What I've always wondered, but have been too lazy to check out, is how many "late term" abortions actually happen in Canada. So, I decided to check out the statistics on this. According to my limited research (just about 10 minutes on the web), no pregnancies are viable before 20 weeks, and almost all are viable after 27 weeks.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2003, 0.7% of abortion procedures for which detailed records were available were performed after 20 weeks of gestation. (89.4% were in the first trimester when it's generally considered by medical experts that fetuses do not have a sufficiently developed to be considered sentient -- and once again, it's arguable as to whether sentience is sufficient to declare a fetus "human".) If we do a little calculation, we can make a rough estimate that probably 725 abortions that year were performed after the 20 week mark before which hardly any fetuses are viable.

So each year, only 725 abortions past 20 weeks in Canada out of more than 100,000. 0.7%. Also of interest: there are very few providers of late term abortions in Canada. They are not easy to get. According to statistics I found on a pro-life site -- a pro-life site -- there were only 49 abortions in Canada performed past the 24-week "sentience" point. That's roughly 0.04%.

Please note that the Canadian Medical Association does not endorse "elective" abortions past the 20 week mark. That means that those 725 abortions are undoubtedly almost all due to serious fetal illness or serious threats to the health of the mother. (Many severe fetal defects that result in miscarriage or death soon after birth are undetectable before 24 weeks.)

From the information that I could find, abortions past 20 weeks aren't even particularly easy to find in Canada. No doctor in Quebec performs them, for example, even in the case of fetal illness or threats to the mother.) So I'm left to wonder how many of these mythical 8-month abortions happen in Canada? From what I can tell in my admittedly quick bit of Google research, the number is probably zero. And based on the policy of the CMA, I'd be surprised to find a doctor Canada that would perform an abortion on a viable, healthy, late-term fetus when there's no threat to the health of the mother. In other words, it really is about controlling women's bodies.

Indeed. It is ALL about controlling women, and their bodies too.

Religion never at fault; women's deaths are collateral damage.

Two young women were crushed to death in a crowded frenzy to enter Coqueiros Stadium in Luanda where the Pope was about to have a meeting with Angolan youths as Benedict XVI pontificated about the evils of systemic corruption, witchcraft and discrimination against women.

There's something about that in the Gospels, is there not?

... And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ... Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye, Matthew 7:1-5.

Absent a sense of irony, it seems the Pope floats in a bubble of sublime abstractions and religious ideology, isolated and protected from the harsh realities that Catholic Church followers confront every day.

... at a meeting with female Catholic groups ... He further emphasised “think about those lands where poverty abounds, zones devastated by war, in many tragic situations resulting or not from forced immigration, almost always women keep human dignity intact, they defend the family and uphold the cultural and religious values”.

Thus the top Catholic Church patriarch can patronize and deign to recognize women's contribution ... but upholds the ecclesiastical opinion that only male power reigns supreme in the clergy.

This imperious personal and Catholic Church position has deadly consequences for women in Africa.

The United Nations magazine, Africa Renewal, quotes an expert who participated in a UN survey of AIDS' impact on young African women. She described the conditions under which most young African women contract AIDS as follows:

"[They] are not in a position to abstain. They are not in a position to demand faithfulness of their partners. In many cases they are in fact faithful, but are being infected by unfaithful partners...A woman who is a victim of violence or the fear of violence is not going to negotiate anything, let alone fidelity or condom use ... Her main objective is to get through the day without being beaten up."

The Pope is correct in saying that AIDS cannot be eradicated by condom use alone. Clearly, when young women are raped or otherwise forced into sex against their will, the men abusing them will not commit to use condoms. But instead of offering these women useless verbiage, the Pope could have offered the vast resources of the Church to distribute anti-viral foam to young married women in AIDS-infested areas. Foam is the only form of AIDS prevention that young wives completely control and can use without their husbands' permission.

From here.

The photo-montage is from this blog.

Pet-Pee

This was predictable. The convergence of the arrogantly sexist authoritarian marketing campaign with soft-pedaling, dissembling authoritarian believers.

Support for reproductive choice by women who are grandmothers, mothers, adolescent girls, women from all ethnic and religious backgrounds becomes this:

Women are told by old-school feminists and, too often, their own family members, that killing their unborn child is a valid “choice.”

Now there's text-book spin, aka disinformation, written with the intent to distort facts and reality to suit an ideological imperative. The PWPL crew is rabidly anti-abortion. No one is forcing any of them to have an abortion. Yet they would deprive all other women of the choice to carry or not carry a pregnancy to term.

But you know what? In spite of their high-and-mighty judgmental position with regard to other women's life choices, DAMMIT JANET! generously offers them a graphic for their t-shirts, in the same spirit of sisterhood that PWPL demonstrates.

Religious zealotry as a mental disorder ... why the hell not?

Via Slap Upside The Head, we learn that Kari Simpson has filed a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal, alleging that the Ministry of Education (and other parties named) discriminates against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students by depriving them of the support and services that would "cure them of their dysfunctionality".

Not shy about using the legal and court system to draw public attention to her cause, Simpson claims:

"... sexual re-orientation therapies have helped thousands of individuals to recover from such dysfunctional orientations. School counsellors are being denied the tools to be effective advocates for students in need of sexual re-orientation help and they should have access to resources and training that will equip them to properly counsel students."

Should the only reasonable, legal, systemic counterweight to such pernicious and unmitigated bigotry be an initiative to have the following definition included in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as a sub-category of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

Zealot fundamentalist fixation is a mental illness most commonly characterized by intrusive, repetitive thoughts resulting in compulsive behaviors and mental acts that the person feels driven to perform, according to religious dogma and beliefs that must be applied rigidly, aimed at reducing anxiety by preventing some dreaded event or by denying other people's reality. In extreme manifestations of this illness, those who suffer from ZFF may utter verbal abuse and are capable of acts of physical violence toward individuals and organizations that embody the dreaded event that is feared and must be destroyed at all costs. See fetus fetishists.

Of course, that could mean acting against the fundamentalist religious zealots with the same authoritarian force that they resolutely and implacably try to use against us.

This is how the Pope's declarations harm women and children.

This needs to be said: the Pope's declarations harm women and children. An African mother who is a practicing Catholic faces the following dilemna: If she requests that her husband use a condom when having conjugal relations, she is going against the Pope's edict, even if she is trying to protect herself and any potential child that she might carry to term from HIV infection. If her husband is a devout Catholic, he may refuse to use a condom.

If this woman decides to not allow sexual intercourse, her husband may beat her, sexually assault her or abandon her and their children. Her priest, if he obeys the Pope's edict, will consider that she sinned.

But if she becomes infected with HIV because she submitted to sex without protection, who will care and take responsibility for her children when she dies of AIDS? The Catholic Church?

Some countries were quick to take action, in response to the Pope's medieval ideology.

Spain said Wednesday it will send one million condoms to Africa to fight the spread of AIDS, one day after Pope Benedict XVI's controversial remarks that they aggravated efforts to battle the disease. "The objective is to advance the prevention of this epidemic, which affects 33 million people all over the world, two-thirds of them in Africa," the health ministry said in a statement. "Condoms have been demonstrated to be a necessary element in prevention policies and an efficient barrier against the virus, according to laboratory studies," it added.

Good for Spain, I hope that other Catholic countries follow its lead in demonstrating compassion for Africans as well as support for medical science.

Anonymous Comment from a Federal Civil Servant

Anonymous comments can now be submitted at DAMMIT JANET! though they are also moderated. This setting was modified in order to allow those who don't have Google accounts to leave comments.

This morning, at 9:24 AM, someone posted from this location - Government of Canada 11 Laurier Street Hull QC - this anonymous comment:

"As biased as this article may be,it's only to be expected from left-wing leaning supporters, who feel the need to use the same propoganda that they condemn others for. You may disagree with a view, and ultimately not support it - but the reality is that many "non-right wing" and "non-Christian" causes are supported by taxpayer funded initatives, yet I don't see you bashing them? It's this intolerance that is furthering the great social divide in Canada, one that is further taking away from Canada's identity as a nation that embraces and supports diversity of thought, culture and belief syste,." (sic)

It was a response to fern hill's blog post: Public Funding for Fetus Fetishists? It would seem that this civil servant, posting from her or his work station, does not agree with the view of separating Church from State. That's an opinion he or she has a right to think, but to post it from a federal government computer? One also wonders how that civil servant, working in the province of Québec, feels about the hateful anti-Québec propaganda Harper supporters spread as well as the western separatism feelings their December campaign fed?

Isn't that an ethical no-no that rightwing RepubliCons keep harping and shrieeekkking about? Oh wait. Only when it's not their own rightwing RepubliCon supporters who do it.

Benny Ratzo Pontificates Again

From the folks who brought you the Inquisition, more illuminating fundamentalist religious dogma served up as concern for the environment and of course, male breeding capacity.

In December, the Vatican opposed the use of the soon-to-be-available in Italy RU486 pill aka the morning-after contraception.

Faithful to its tradition of selective equivocation and/or denial of scientific data, the Vatican is claiming via its mouthpiece:

Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations said in a report in the Vatican newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, that not only do“[they] have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” but that the pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature” via female urine.

The Vatican's claim has been challenged by experts.

Here in Canada, scientists have demonstrated after decades of research on the Great Lakes, regarding the effect of contamination by PCBs:

... like many other chlorinated chemicals, PCBs are soluble in fat, so they tend to accumulate in living things and to enter the food webs, where they concentrate. The higher you are on a food chain, the greater the concentration of PCBs. Large fish and creatures that eat large fish, tend to accumulate in their flesh thousands, even millions of times the background levels of PCBs. Furthermore, by a cruel twist of fate, large birds and marine mammals (seals, sea lions, whales, and some dolphins) lack enzyme systems to efficiently detoxify PCBs. As a result, PCBs build up in the bodies of these predators and are passed to their offspring through eggs (in the case of fish and birds) and milk (in the case of mammals). PCBs mimic hormones and are a powerful disrupter of the endocrine system that governs reproduction. Marine mammals are already having trouble reproducing. It is entirely possible that, as more PCBs reach the oceans, all large mammals will disappear.

The Vatican is once again, attempting to spin stories to suit its ideological agenda.

Update: Antonia Z blogs about it here - Mellow Yellow. And more merriment, via Creekside's wise-beyond-her-days Emma Embryo.

Two by two, to procreate as intended …

Thank the goddess that BigCityLib is keeping an eye on the Lifeshite fetus fetishists. We learn from his blogpost that the abortion criminalizers have compiled a list of the candidates that they consider to be in their camp.

That, along with April Reign’s reflections upon Stevie’s little parable about Noah and his ark, made Birth Pangs think that this approach, where sex = breeding has become a most unsavoury meme in this election campaign. Especially since since Lifeshite clearly labels its procreation political stance as one for “Serious Christians”, aka zealots.

Meanwhile in the US, Repulsican rightwing rhetoric cranked up the fearmongering to such a degree that even some ideologues are starting to panic over the ’stormfront’ that may have been unleashed. Good luck with that.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

Support from the post-dead

It all makes sense, in some religious fundamentalist parallel universe where no-choicers can lay claim to represent the interests of the pre-born and the post-dead. First, some folks claimed to channel the will of deceased holders of the Order of Canada by returning the snowflake medal in their name.

Now, JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie blogs about the petition that Lifeshite has set up to gather comments and signatures from the world at large. And just look at the famous supporter they have attracted:

“As the man who created Decree 770 in Romania, I would like to add my name to your wonderful petition. We can learn from my country’s history how beneficial it is to completely control women’s fertility and reproduction. I hope your country is preparing uterine forensic examiners for all miscarriages, as well as fertility police to force women to have a urinalysis each month to monitor for blessed pregnancy.” - Nicolae Ceaucescu

Now there’s the spirit! Who knew that Hell facilitated and upheld all Internet traditions?

First posted at Birth Pangs.