The Tyranny of Autonomy

Father Barron explains how a tyrannical mindset results from the pro-choice ideology.

"Al Franken's Dick Move"...

...according to Anne Althouse.

But it makes sense.  Franken's a leftist.  Leftists have defined Lieberman as "the enemy."  Leftists define the enemy as not worthy of respect and you get this...

Another crack in the wall

Russians confirm that Global Warming is based on "cherry-picked" data.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.


The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The Legality of Stigmatizing a Minority Group

Wintery Knight posts on the arguments in front of the Ninth Circuit on San Francisco's resolution condeming Catholic teaching on homosexuality as being "foreign meddling."

Here's the primary article:

A panel of eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in San Francisco will hear oral arguments tomorrow, December 16, concerning the constitutionality of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor's resolution attacking the Catholic Church for its teachings against homosexual adoptions.


The en banc panel, consisting of all the judges of the court, will review the earlier opinion of a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit that upheld the resolution.

The anti-Catholic resolution, adopted March 21, 2006, was challenged by the Thomas More Law Center, a national Christian legal advocacy group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on behalf of the Catholic League and two Catholic residents of San Francisco. The challenge was made on the grounds that the resolution expresses government hostility toward the Catholic Church and its moral teachings in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

The city Board's resolution was issued in response to a directive from Cardinal William Levada, in which he instructed Catholic Charities of San Francisco to follow Church teaching and not begin adopting children to homosexuals.

The resolution refers to the Vatican as a "foreign country" meddling in the affairs of the city and proclaims the Church's moral teaching and beliefs on homosexuality as "insulting to all San Franciscans," "hateful," "insulting and callous," "defamatory," "absolutely unacceptable," and says that Church teaching shows "insensitivity and ignorance."

The Board's resolution makes reference to the Inquisition and it urges the Archbishop of San Francisco and Catholic Charities of San Francisco to defy Church directives.

A lower federal court's dismissal of the case based on the pleadings was later affirmed by the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit.

However, on November 5, 2009, a majority of the Ninth Circuit judges voted to grant the Law Center's petition for an en banc (full bench) rehearing.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel for the Law Center, remarked, "It seems the only bigotry and prejudice these so-called liberal politicians tolerate is anti-Catholicism. To them the only good Catholics are the bad Catholics who ignore the teachings of their Church."

"Our constitution plainly forbids government interference in, and hostility toward, religion, including the Catholic faith. And we are fully committed to fighting homosexual activists who seek to promote their personal political agenda at the expense of our constitutional freedoms."

According to Catholic doctrine, allowing children to be adopted by homosexuals would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment not conducive to their full human development.

"Such policies are gravely immoral and Catholic organizations must not place children for adoption in homosexual households," the Law Center argued.

According to the Law Center, the "anti-Catholic resolution sends a clear message to Plaintiffs and others who are faithful adherents to the Catholic faith that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message that those who oppose Catholic religious beliefs, particularly with regard to homosexual unions and adoptions by homosexual partners, are insiders, and favored members of the political community."

 In Romer v. Colorado, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Coloradans could not pass a local ordinance denying protected status to homosexuals because the very act of passing a law saying that gays would not be given special treatment stigmatized gays.  This San Francisco resolution has the same vice of stigmatization.

Of course, Romer involved gays and these are merely Catholics, so.....

The Twelfth Best Christmas Film....

...is "One Magic Christmas", according to John Nolte.

I'm a sucker for this film.  There's not a Christmas that goes by without my watching it, along with those other classics of the season, "Ernest Saves Christmas" and "The Muppet Christmas Carol."

I'm a fan, but I'm surprised to see so high a rating, given the plot holes, cloying sentimentality and the depiction of Ronald Reagan's America in the grip of the Great Depression.

Nolte writes:

Help arrives in the form of Gideon (Harry Dean Stanton), the unlikeliest of angels, who’s been tasked with the impossible: reminding this despairing mother of two of her blessings so that the Christmas spirit ripped from her by the hard realities of life can return. How far Gideon’s willing to go in order to accomplish this makes for some of the darkest moments you’ll ever come across in a holiday film, especially one from Disney.

This quiet, understated and sometimes grim spin on It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol is not for the wee ones. But at 88-minutes there’s a ton of story and you have to be grateful that when the end credits roll no one On High has paid the bills or found Ginny and her family new housing. The film understands that God is not our own personal deus ex machina and that the angels can only help the willing to refocus their perspective on to that which really matters. Miracles are short-term solutions, it’s wisdom that helps you go the distance.


Obviously shot in not-America (Canada), the foggy, wet locations work to the film’s advantage in giving the story’s tone a feel of generic sameness and desperation. The two kids, one played by Sarah Polley, are terrific, and the always welcome Elias Koteas makes the best of a supporting role.

Catching this unprepared as to what you’re in for is best. Just be prepared enough to know this ain’t Miracle On 34th Street, and I doubt it could get produced in today’s era of hyper-high concept studio offerings and sterile, flourescent, 133 minute, indie Oscar bait. But don’t let that scare you away. When all is said and done, One Magic Christmas is a gritty life-affirming story set in a world where God exists and cares for us enough to practice some mighty tough-love.

OK, so maybe that's why I watch it every year.

Or perhaps it was just a crappy movie that people didn't want to pay to see?

Particularly when the buried punch-line was that Christian believers should pay their hard-earned money to be insulted about their deeply-held religious beliefs.

Actor blames Catholic Church for lack of Golden Compass sequels.

Actor Sam Elliot has blamed the Catholic Church for stopping sequels from being made to the Golden Compass movie based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s atheistic trilogy His Dark Materials. The film, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Eva Green, grossed more than $380 million worldwide after its Christmas 2007 release, but took in only $85 million in the U.S. According to the Internet Movie Database, the film had a budget of $180 million.


The 65-year-old Elliot, who played a Texan “aeronaut” in the film, charged that a Catholic-led campaign against the movie stopped its sequels from being made.

“The Catholic Church happened to The Golden Compass, as far as I'm concerned,” Elliot remarked to the Evening Standard.

He said the movie did “incredible” at the box office but the Catholic Church “lambasted” the filmmakers and “scared off” New Line Cinema executives.

The movie itself is about a young heroine named Lyra who fights against an evil organization called the Magisterium, which many people see as a reference to the Catholic Church's body of teachings of the same name. The anti-religious message was reportedly toned down compared to the book.

Sorry to see that the actor was Sam Elliott, whose characterization of taciturn westerners I've always liked, but this is a real dive into crackpottery, since everyone knows that if the Catholic Church had opposed the movie that would have been "box office gold."

In fact, the real scandal was that "[t]he U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Film & Broadcasting had initially published a positive review of the movie, which was later pulled."

The atheist, anti-Catholic author Phillip Pullman chimes in:

"Pullman, the author of the book on which the Golden Compass was based, said that the likelihood of the film trilogy being completed is decreasing.


He said that Catholics’ efforts against the film “must have played a part” in the trilogy being shelved, the Telegraph reports.

Pullman has denied his series is anti-Catholic, claiming it is a warning about what religion can do “when it gets its hands on the levers of power.”

All uses of terms like "magisterium" and "pope" and the deployment of Catholic imagery in the book and film being pure coincidence.
The Vatican...is there nothing it can't do?

Global Warming: A Historical Perspective

Or why I won't start worrying until they can grow wheat in Greenland.

The reason for the reason for the season

John Mark Reynolds has a nice post about how the Blessed Virgin Mary was blessed for more than the fact that she had a womb:

Mary was the mother of God and the temptation is to stop there. It doesn’t get much greater than that does it?


It does and Jesus says so in Luke 11:

27As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” 28But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”

Any temptation to reduce the role of Mary or women in general to walking wombs is rejected by Jesus. Mary, the Lord’s mother, is not happy (”blessed”) merely because she served as the house for the Lord, but because she heard the word of God and kept it.

It is no accident that the same gospel that records this story, Luke, also tells us the most about Mary, the mother of Jesus (especially in Luke chapters one and two).

Mary is told that she will bear the Son of God and she agrees. She is pregnant without sex, has a baby in a stable, shepherds come and worship, her baby is blessed in by two prophets. He grows to be an amazing boy who can teach the greatest teachers and she keeps all these mysteries and ponders them in her heart.

Mary is great, because Mary obeyed and never stopped obeying.

The Blessed Virgin heard the Word of God, said “yes,” and gave her flesh to the Word of God. Her obedience was virtuous and her holiness remarkable, how she did it (as a woman) was in one way incidental.

Ecological Disaster

According to this article, the filling of the Mediterranean Sea basin could have occurred in two years.

A cataclysmic flood could have filled the Mediterranean Sea — which millions of years ago was a dry basin — like a bathtub in the space of less than two years. A new model suggests that at the flood’s peak water poured from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin at a rate one thousand times the flow of the Amazon River, according to calculations published in the Dec. 10 Nature.

It makes you wonder what ecosystems and unique animal and plant species were destroyed without human intervention.

Liberal Fascism

A documentary film-maker asks a global warming scientists some "inconvenient questions" and hilarity ensues in the form of an attempt at censorship and retaliation for the exercise of free speech.

I wonder what the legal basis for the security guard instruction of the cameraman to turn of the camera or he would "take it away" was.



With the advent of recording technology and the internet, liberal fascism is getting a lot more exposure.

"Oh, grow up", he explained.

Joseph Bottums at First Things takes R.C. Sproul to task for his "pharisaism":

Prominent Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul refused to sign the Manhattan Declaration on the grounds, he now explains, that it assumes that the Catholic Church preaches the gospel.


Indeed, he explains, it was born of the same impulse that produced the various statements of Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

The first point that needs to be made is that the Manhattan Declaration had nothing to do with Evangelicals and Catholics Together: If nothing else, the declaration was produced and guided to completion entirely outside First Things‘ offices, while such projects as Evangelicals and Catholics Together remain at the center of the work the magazine exists to do.

And the second point that needs to made is that R.C. Sproul’s kind of refusal of any interaction with Catholics—his pharisaical keeping of his skirts oh-so clean—is proof of why Evangelicals and Catholics Together exists: Even when we disagree, it’s vital to make clear to one another why we disagree. But that is something R.C. Sproul, in his lonely purity, will never bother to find out.

Twilight would have been so much better....

...if Buffy had been allowed to kick Edward's butt.