Thursday, December 12, 2013

Bring me the head of Charles I

Because, as Mr. Dick often said, the trouble from his head has gotten into mine.  Why, you might ask, does it take me nearly two hours to write a single paragraph?  Could it be, perhaps, because I stop and ACTIVELY LOOK for distractions and diversions after every single sentence I manage to choke out of myself? My work habits suck, and my attitude is no better.

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Would you have been a Cavalier, or a Roundhead? Neither would have appealed to me, and I don't guess that abstaining was an option.

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Which Cromwell would you invite to dinner, Thomas or Oliver?
I'm Catholic, so I assume that neither of them would come.  Just as well.  They were terrible dinner guests.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Nothing to see here...

If you ask the Washington Post or NBC News, then this didn't happen.

Interesting.

Is it not news because it happened in a foreign country?  Because I'm guessing, just guessing, that if the pro-life demonstrators had sexually assaulted the pro-choicers, in public, then it would have been worldwide headline news no matter where it occurred.

I'm sure, though, that Gloria Steinem, and Cecile Richards, and Terry O'Neill, and Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are all going to issue statements condemning this hideously violent attack against religious and free-speech rights, and asserting that their cause is not helped by such behavior.  Maybe they already have!  Yes, I'm sure that's it.

Or not.

Even Planned Parenthood GLOBAL (because maybe Planned Parenthood US feels that it's just none of their business, right?) has absolutely nothing to say about this.  So if they're not morally outraged, it doesn't occur to them to think that perhaps public, violent, obscene attacks on pro-lifers will not win converts; that if someone is on the fence on abortion (as I once was), then the sight of abortion supporters attacking peaceful pro-life protesters might just lead these fence-sitters to decide that they'd rather not be on the side of the people who publicly sexually assault their opponents? And spare me any suggestion that a woman rubbing her bare breasts in a strange man's face, or spray-painting his genitals, is not sexually assaulting him.  If the spray paint can belonged to a man and the crotch belonged to a woman, we'd all be clear on the definition of sexual assault.

I used to believe that abortion should be legal, although I never referred to myself as pro-choice because I have never felt that it was a legitimate choice (and among the women I personally know who have had abortions, most of them say that they didn't feel that they had any choice). I have many friends on both sides of this issue.  And I KNOW that pro-lifers have behaved very badly indeed in some cases.  How do I know this?  Not from personal eyewitness, nor from word of mouth, but because when a pro-life protester assaults a pro-choicer, it's NEWS, and rightly so.

I'm going to wait and see.  The national media took a long damn time to say anything at all about Dr. Gosnell, but they finally did, because they finally had to.  I'm the most obscure blogger in the world right now, but fortunately, I'm not the only one writing about this.  Maybe some actual paid professional journalists will eventually decide that this is news after all.