Goodbye, Target.

Well, I bit the bullet. I canceled my Target card.

I had been waffling over this decision for days. I am angry enough at Target -- for putting empty political sentiment over public safety -- that I knew I wouldn't shop there. The issue wasn't whether Target was going to get any more of my money; they weren't. So the question of the card itself remained: would Target reverse itself, thereby making it a hassle to reestablish the card? Would it hurt my credit to close it, especially if I turned around and opened it again? If I stopped spending money at Target but kept the card open, would Target even notice?

But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got at Target: for making this decision in the first place; for making me feel like a crazy person because no one else seems to see that for the vast majority of the boycotters, this isn't about bigotry but about safety, and the refusal to participate in a political agenda that is empirically bananas; for making me devote so much mental real estate to this.

I came to the conclusion that Target made their very public stand, and there's no way they will have the intestinal fortitude to reverse themselves. The LGBTQ+-whatever lobby is too loud and vindictive, and Target has a long history of pandering to it. Unless scores of little girls are sexually assaulted inside Target store bathrooms, they will stand by their bad move, even in the face of falling share value and millions of lost customers.

So I was 75% of the way to the decision to close it when something else occurred to me: elsewhere in the world, even today, Christians martyrs are being beheaded for their refusal to back down from their faith. And here I am, worrying about the inconvenience of closing this credit card.

Decision made.

While I was making dinner for my family last night, I called customer service and got a supervisor on the phone. I told her I wanted to close my account. This conversation (more or less verbatim), ensued:

CSR: I see you've been a cardholder for over three years. Can I ask you why you're closing your account now?
Me: I think your bathroom policy stinks. [SO ELOQUENT, Colleen. 🙄]
CSR: Okay. Just a second while I make a note of your concerns.

She sounded like a) she'd been hearing that a lot recently -- although possibly most people put it better? -- and b) she'd secretly like to agree.

So it's done. I am no longer a Target customer.

Goodbye, Dollar Spot. I think I'll miss you the most.

You guys, what are we going to do?

I live in Virginia, where it is now been determined by a federal court that rules requiring schoolchildren to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological sex are discriminatory. This is bound to go nationwide, and fast.

Also this week, Target has released a statement that customers can now use whichever bathroom they please, as well. Because, as the statement says, "Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."

... Except for me, Target, and the millions of people like me. We get to feel uncomfortable in the bathroom because there's a dude in there. And he doesn't have to look like a lady, he just has to tell security, should anyone have the cojones to alert security, that he feels like a lady. Because as we also know, no pervert would ever take advantage of the culture of fear surrounding this issue and follow a little girl into a public restroom. Perverts have the utmost respect for the transgendered and would never appropriate their gender dysphoria for their own nefarious purposes. That's a thing that we know... Right?

I do whatever is humanly possible to avoid public restrooms already, but this is enough to make me hibernate in my own home. I don't even have a high school-aged girl (yet), but the idea that high school-aged boys would be able to use her bathroom and locker room is horrifying to me. If my plan weren't already to home-school, it would have to be now.

I have quite a bit of sympathy for the mentally ill -- and make no mistake, the "transgendered" are absolutely mentally ill -- but this is not the way to help them. When schools provide single-occupant restrooms for the use of the mentally ill, gender non-conforming student, the student inevitably throws around words like "stigmatizing" and "otherizing." (Never mind that if I had been offered a single-occupancy restroom option in high school, I'd have been thrilled.) The most helpful thing we can do for these people is to tell them that they are not above the rules that everyone has lived by since the dawn of public restrooms.

Strike that: the most helpful thing we could do is to get these people some real psychological care. A refusal to treat mental illness as something to be celebrated is a close second.

We are enabling a vanishingly small and deeply confused super-minority to dictate the safety of every little girl in this country. And I'm not sorry about my feeling that I would rather see every single transgendered individual in this country get his feelings hurt than see even one little girl get raped by a pervert who takes advantage of this madness and follows her into a restroom in full view of people who would stop him but are scared to be called a bigot.

#NeverTrump #NeverHillary #NeverGettingOutOfThisOne

I never want to live through a presidential primary like this one ever again.

I've written before about Trump and the horror he instills in me. I think he's a moral black hole and one of the worst things ever to come out of American politics. I will never, ever vote for him. And that makes me different than many other conservatives (and Catholics) who, while opposed to Trump, will still vote for the man over Hillary.

I. Just. Can't.

Three peas in a pod, and Melania.

Let's start with some comparisons:

• Hillary Clinton is a brazen, habitual liar. Donald Trump is also a brazen, habitual liar. {Do I need to post links for these things? 'Cause I could, but I don't really think these assertions are in question.}

• Hillary Clinton surrounds herself with thugs and bullies. Donald Trump also surrounds himself with thugs and bullies.

• Hillary Clinton is a rabid pro-abortion advocate. Trump claims to be pro-life, awfully recently and with nothing but lip service; but he still praises Planned Parenthood, says he'd appoint his radically pro-abortion sister to the Supreme Court, and did irreparable damage to the pro-life image just last week by advocating for the punishment of women who have abortions (he's since equally-ineptly walked it back, but I'm pretty sure we've all gotten a peek behind the curtain and seen that, once again, the Trump has no well-thought-out positions).

So we've covered the areas where I think they're essentially the same. When it comes down to morality, they're both... Simply without any. That is a horrible turn of events for this nation. The idea that we can't put up a candidate with a stronger moral compass than Hillary Clinton (and when we started with the strongest Republican field in my lifetime) is enough to make me want to sit in the corner and cry indefinitely, but that's where we seem to be.

But what about things like international relations?

I was less-than-impressed with Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. She laundered bribes from unfriendly countries through the Clinton Foundation, she abandoned our people in Benghazi when they were under attack and then lied to the families about what happened and why. She set up a sketchy home-brew email server in her bathroom which was vulnerable to hacking and ought to have been federally indicted long ago. She was basically a disaster.

Here's the thing, though: I'm still pretty sure that Donald Trump, Most Powerful Man in the World, has the potential to be significantly worse.

Leave aside for the moment that he insisted from the debate stage that we intended to order the military to commit war crimes by targeting the innocent family members of terrorists. Leave aside his thinnest-ever skin. He's also dangerously susceptible to flattery, as proven by his little mutual-admiration society with Vladimir Putin. He says whatever flits through his head, with a special emphasis on being insulting and gauche. Diplomacy is not likely to be his strong suit, by which I mean: I give his hypothetical presidency three months before we're teetering on the brink of WWIII.

"Nuclear armageddon" is worse than "disaster."

He continually claims that he'll make up for the areas where he is weak -- insofar as he admits that he's less than outstanding at anything -- by "hiring the best people." Have we seen any evidence that he knows what "the best people" look like? His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been recently arrested for assault on a reporter. His campaign in Colorado was so disorganized that they failed to win a single delegate and are reduced -- "reduced" -- to trying to make hay out of voter suppression, when in fact there was none.

Let's stop trying to place the blame for Trump's ascension on the "establishment," or on the media, or anywhere else it doesn't belong. Trump voters are grown adults with agency, and moral culpability. Voting for a deeply flawed candidate (which is the kindest description I can muster) as a stand-in for waving a middle finger in the face of the GOP, writ large, is childish, morally bankrupt and dangerous.

There's nothing I can do about this but pray. If your state has already voted, there's nothing you can do about this but pray. If your state hasn't yet voted, please don't sit home and hope someone else will get us out of this. I'm not sure if a vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary (although I strongly suspect as much), but either way it is a vote for depravity.

Donald Trump: Front-Runner

I started to write a whole post about screen time and how we handle it, but then I realized that a) it was boring, b) we don't do anything revolutionary (basically we're too loose about it until we realize everyone's miserable, and then we clamp down), and c) what I really needed to get off my chest was Trump.

Actually I'd like to get his giant, lying, wannabe-dictatorial, buffoon butt off American's chest.

In case you need that translated for you: I'm not a fan.

In fact, his entire candidacy is one of those phenomena where I get to wondering if there are a bunch of mentally ill people running around. That sounds overly harsh, I know, but do you know what I mean? Sometimes you look at a set of facts, and come to what seems to you to be an unassailable conclusion; and then you talk to someone who's looked at the exact same set of facts and come to the opposite conclusion, and you can't even understand them. This isn't a common turn of events for me; I usually can see both sides of an argument, even if I think the people on the other side are wrong. There are issues on which intelligent people can disagree, obviously.

Take, for instance, abortion. I am unequivocally 100% against it. Nonetheless, I understand that there exist such justifications that people can support abortion rights and still think they're doing God's work -- people who can't bring themselves to "condemn" some poor girl to a life of parenting before she's ready, and adoption is so hard, or maybe the baby has a profound disability and so abortion is sometimes the least-bad option. They're wrong, of course. This is false compassion which leads to tragic outcomes. But I understand how someone could come to that wrong conclusion.

But I genuinely cannot see how anyone who calls himself a conservative can look at Donald Trump and think, "He's the one!"

He's a lifelong Democrat (which wouldn't be disqualifying, necessarily, if he had a plausible conversion story -- he doesn't beyond "donating tons of money to Democrats was good for business"), a serial adulterer, a misogynist, a thin-skinned bully. He brags that he would sleep with his daughter if she weren't his daughter, which is by any measure gross. He has stated that he would appoint his radically pro-abortion sister to the Supreme Court.

The main thing I can see to commend him to the electorate is his claim that he's a brilliant businessman. But he inherited his money from his father (again, not disqualifying, but it flies in the face of his implication that he's a self-made man), and went on to bankrupt his businesses over and over again through shady and irresponsible borrowing practices. You know the old adage about gambling, "The house always wins"? Well, not if the house is run by Donald Trump. He is lying for no good reason about self-funding his campaign, which he is not.

He waffled on distancing himself from David Duke and the KKK. He makes fun of the disabled.

I could go on (and on and on and on). These are literally only the objections that presented themselves to me off the top of my head. I'm sure if I thought for ten minutes more, I could write the longest blog post in the world about all the reasons that Donald Trump is unfit to be the dogcatcher in a small town, let alone the President of the United States of America.

A lot of people seem to dislike Ted Cruz for reasons I can't quite fathom. He doesn't seem like the type of guy you'd necessarily like to go drinking with, but is that what we need in a president? A lot of other people object to Marco Rubio as "too establishment" -- whatever that means -- and unreliable on immigration. But the truth is I would crawl over broken glass to vote for either man over The Donald, to say nothing of Hillary or Bernie.

If Trump gets the nomination, I will sit this one out. I have never skipped an election before, even when I wasn't happy about my options, but there is no lever I could pull on that day that wouldn't leave me feeling filthy. I won't do it.

At this point, it's looking unlikely that anyone can beat him. All we can do is pray. Please, please pray for the faithful of America, those who haven't yet had a chance to vote, to stand up and do what's right. (I did see something hopeful on that score -- "Regular, weekly church attendance...predicted a statistically significant and substantive opposition to Trump" -- but it's clearly not enough yet.)

Pray on your knees.

Daleiden vs. Planned Parenthood: Who's the criminal?

I'm over on Catholic Mommy Blogs today, talking about Lenten fasting. Check it out!

This news is over a week old, but David Daleiden -- the activist behind the Center for Medical Progress videos exposing Planned Parenthood's grisly practices of selling aborted baby parts -- has been indicted by Harris County, TX on multiple charges, including a felony charge of tampering with governmental records, and a misdemeanor charge of buying human tissue.

{Note: according to this indictment, it's possible to criminally buy human tissue, while the seller on the other end of the transaction is judged to have done nothing wrong. Seems legit.}

It's long been known that some counties, even in Texas, would indict a ham sandwich, so long as said ham sandwich happened to be conservative (see: Travis County's politically-motivated indictment of Rick Perry over a veto threat). In this instance, one of the prosecutors is a Planned Parenthood board member.

Nothing about this passes the most cursory of sniff tests.

Here's the thing: David Daleiden may have done something criminal in the course of his investigation. I'm not sure one way or the other. If he did, I would bet he did so in the full knowledge that he may have to pay a price in the service of getting this information into the public consciousness.

We are not the ones occupying the "end justifies the means" side of this cultural divide, and as such I think that if there have been laws broken, then Daleiden should get his day in court. But let's be serious: it's not possible that Daleiden broke the law by buying the fetal issue if Planned Parenthood simultaneously did nothing wrong -- legally wrong, that is, because there's really no question whether Planned Parenthood's every action and instinct is morally wrong.

So! To that end, please consider signing this petition, which has over 108,000 signatures already, asking Harris County to reconsider their nakedly political witch hunt, and instead focus their investigative and prosecutorial efforts where they belong: on the ghouls of Planned Parenthood.

And in despair, I bowed my head.

Facebook is positively revolting right now. 

Two mass shootings within the span of a week has inspired every over-emotive millennial I know (so, like, all of them) to decide that they're going to "get real" and "not worry about offending anyone" and say "what [they] really think" about guns.

And -- sorry, dudes -- what they have to say is mostly uninformed and irrelevant. And insulting.

No one talks about the breakdown of the family, or Islamist terror tactics, or actual, honest-to-God, demonic evil. There's some lip-service paid to mental illness, but strictly in the sense that We Need More Government (which we do not). 

Mostly there's dishonest and/or stupid conflation of semiautomatic and automatic weapons -- news flash, basically no one thinks you should be able to buy a machine gun for home defense -- and what I can only assume is a willful refusal to admit that the overwhelming majority of legally-owned firearms in this country will never be used to shoot anything but paper targets.

So everywhere I scroll on Facebook, I'm being told that I'm "part of the problem" because I think guns are not inherently evil. I'm "part of the problem" because I think dismembering babies in the womb and selling their parts to the highest bidder is abhorrent and I'm not afraid to say so. I'm "part of the problem" because I don't think that we should enact laws that prohibit American citizens from buying guns when they have not been so much as accused of a crime. I'm being told that as a gun owner -- as someone who has exercised my Constitutional rights -- that I bear responsibility for every misuse of a gun that happens in this country.

Nope.

I reject that, outright. I am not immoral because I have purchased a firearm and learned how to use it so that in the event that I ever have to protect my children from mortal danger, I can (angels and ministers of grace, defend us!). I am not culpable for the actions of others. 

Moreover, while Planned Parenthood is easily one of the most evil corporate entities in the world, I still don't think anyone has the right to go there and commit violence against the people who work there. The ends do not justify the means. In fact, I don't even think the ends are worthwhile: violence committed against abortion clinics tends to make the general population more sympathetic and even perversely sentimental about abortion and its practitioners.

All of this brought to mind one of the latter verses of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," one of the lesser-appreciated Christmas songs, but one which I love.

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!" 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Peace on earth, good-will to men.

The solution to violence is not an abdication of your goodwill toward men. Throwing invective at people in your Facebook timeline because they disagree with you about gun control is not displaying good will. Refusing to acknowledge that law-abiding gun-owners are not the problem is not the way. Let's all recognize that evil exists. When someone shoots up a Planned Parenthood or a community center (for one of the most vulnerable populations in our society, by the way), let's acknowledge that their motivation was not "for fun" or "because of the Second Amendment" or "motivated by Christianity" or "ginned up by irresponsible anti-abortion rhetoric," but instead their motivation is the commission of evil in service of the Evil One.

And let's realize that two things can be true: I can be saddened and sickened by the loss of life in these mass shootings and still, in good faith, not support your gun control agenda. 

I pray for our country. I pray that we turn from our collectively pretty horrible ways and be the city on the hill again. I can only work on my little corner, and so can you. 

God is not dead, nor doth He sleep.

"What punishments of God are not gifts?"

So I've been thinking about Stephen Colbert. He's often held up by Catholics as "our guy" in the world of political comedy because he's open -- and talks frequently -- about his Catholicism.

But I've always felt rather disappointed by him, personally. His tenure on The Colbert Report featured him, in character as an over-the-top right-wing blowhard; as a genuinely right-wing person myself, I found it annoying that I could nod along with his take on a situation until he took it a step too far. And he always took it at least one step too far.

In fact, that was the point: to discuss conservatism in a faux-approving way, but to reach the most obnoxious possible conclusion; to make conservatives into a caricature of a bigoted, selfish Scrooge McDuck. This formula was guaranteed to make the Comedy Central audience, still on a high from Jon Stewart's conservative bashing in the previous slot, sneer.

{I'm not sure it would be quite so harmful if an alarming proportion of my generation didn't get their news exclusively from Comedy Central. Get a grip, fellow millennials.}

Furthermore, he was known to espouse some pretty un-Catholic positions (ugh, I feel dirty even linking to The Huffington Post!). I just can't really get on board with Colbert as a Catholic we should be holding up as an example.

But then every once in a while he says something beautiful that makes me understand why Catholics do it. Consider this excerpt from an interview with GQ recently, talking about the loss of his father and brothers in a plane crash when he was young:

He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.

“It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened.”

Gorgeous. Gorgeous. This is an absolutely breathtaking reflection on the nature of suffering. I could never have articulated that; I can appreciate it, I recognize the Truth of it, but it's beyond my ability to verbalize. He's clearly smarter and more articulate than I am.

And that, I think, is where my problem really lies:

He's smarter than I am. He's more articulate than I am. He certainly has a larger field of influence than I can ever expect to have. And he's using it to do more harm to the Church than he's doing her service. More people will have seen him bashing the Supreme Court judges who opposed the gay "marriage" ruling than will likely see him waxing poetic about God's gift of suffering in our lives. More people will remember him as a faux conservative bigot than as a Catholic.

I understand that not everyone has the courage to be counter-cultural. As a Comedy Central news-comedian, Stephen Colbert was expected to carry water for progressivism. It would have been an act of sheer foolhardiness to come out in opposition to the legalization of gay "marriage" if he wanted to keep his job at Comedy Central and his upcoming gig at CBS. And maybe it's not moral cowardice at all: maybe he genuinely thinks that the Church is wrong in her steadfast opposition to gay "marriage."

She is not, and that is why I find him to be disappointing and an unworthy role model overall. Even if his reflection on suffering and gratitude brought me to tears.

Can open, worms everywhere.

I have a daughter and a son (so far).

I was already 100% sure that my daughter would never be a Girl Scout. That is because of the Girl Scouts' extremely troubling involvement with Planned Parenthood, and also their founding membership in WAGGGS (the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), which has been known to send girls to petition the UN for sexual and reproductive rights. This from an organization intended for girls under 18.

Just today I saw the news that the Boy Scouts of America have decided to end the ban on gay scout leaders. There is a tiny silver lining in that there is an exemption in place for scout troupes that are sponsored by churches. (For now.)

I'll say it straight out: this is depraved.

This is obviously a touchy subject. The BSA has been fighting making this change for years in the face of enormous pressure and has evidently finally buckled under the strain. And let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that all gay men are pedophile predators, or that there's no reason other than sexual interest that a gay man might be interested in being a scout leader. But the reality of the situation is that some scouts are 18, or nearly so. Furthermore, unlike other jobs that men can hold which brings them into regular proximity to potential objects of desire (for instance, high school teachers), the boy scouts go camping. Overnight. And it's not as if high school teachers have a stellar track record of keeping themselves from temptation under circumstances that afford them far less privacy with the teens by whom they find themselves tempted.

I was recently discussing this with a priest friend. His pastor has put him in charge of deciding these issues in his parish and he's feeling paralyzed with indecision. On one hand, the church-sponsored troupes of both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are faith-centered in a way the national charters can apparently no longer sustain. On the other hand, he's worried about the trend, and how long the church-sponsored troupes will be allowed to maintain their independence in these matters.

I told him about how my pastor denied the Girl Scouts meeting space in our parish a couple of years ago. It made national news. Obviously some of that coverage was extremely unfriendly. But it blew over, and fast. In my opinion, I told my priest friend, it's smarter to cut ties now and face the angry parents -- and there will be angry parents -- than to wait until he's looking at a lawsuit for refusing to allow a gay scout leader in his troupe. I don't know what he's going to do, but this decision makes the need to decide more acute.

My decision is made: my son will not be a Boy Scout, any more than my daughter will be a Girl Scout.

Such a shame.

Rioting in Baltimore

There are a couple fellow bloggers/blog readers who stop by here on occasion who live in Baltimore and its environs; if you are that person, know that I'm praying for your safety.

I don't know if it's national news (I'm local enough that it's been dominating my news), but there are riots happening right now in Baltimore following the death in custody of a 25-year-old named Freddie Gray. Gray was arrested for carrying a switchblade; at some point during his transportation to incarceration, he suffered a serious spinal injury. He doesn't seem to have been given timely medical attention, and as a consequence, he passed away.

And now Baltimore is ablaze, literally.

It's not clear quite what happened to Freddie Gray. It seems to be undisputed that he wasn't buckled into the transport van, but I don't see how that can cause, as his family alleges, his spine to be 80% severed at the neck. It's certainly possible that Freddie's cause of death was some form of police brutality, but we don't know what happened to him.

Meanwhile, since I live in the Northeast corridor, Facebook is rife with opinions. They range from the simple and poignant: "Prayers for Baltimore," to the vitriolic: either "The rioters are animals," or "Anyone who would call the rioters 'animals' is an animal."

As always, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly there is something to be said for making an effort to understand. I don't know what it's like to be a young black man in a majority-black, economically declining city like Baltimore. I also don't know what it's like to be a police officer in Baltimore, on the other end of the kind of interactions that cause mistrust on both sides, and charged with keeping the peace.

However.

There is never any excuse for the kind of rioting happening in Baltimore right now. Rioters looted and torched a CVS drugstore, and then punctured the firehose so that the blaze couldn't be put out. Explain to me how CVS is responsible for what happened to Freddie Gray. A store run by Chinese immigrants was completely wiped out. Innocent people are losing property and they're being made unsafe because all the police in the city are otherwise occupied.

After the death of Michael Brown in August 2014 in Missouri, Ferguson experienced weeks upon weeks of this kind of unrest. It is widely accepted that it only died down because the weather got to be too inhospitable. Unfortunately for Baltimore, protest weather is just ramping up.

I have to withhold judgment on what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But I do not have to withhold judgment of indiscriminate destruction. 

"Rape Culture" or a culture of denial?

A reasonably good friend of mine, with whom I disagree almost always when it comes to politics, shared this on Facebook this morning.

And when the mother of a friend of ours from high school commented:

"I agree BUT, when a girl or woman is wearing shorts so short that everyone can see her butt cheeks and shirts so low you can almost see her nipples, I think she should expect to be objectified."

My friend replied, simply, "No." (Which... Dude. Rude!)

Now, I never wade into these debates on Facebook. I have a million things to say and anyone who knows me knows that I have very little fear about saying them, but just I don't do that stuff on Facebook. People get ugly, immediately, and presume the worst about each other, and I'm not on Facebook to get flamed by strangers who happen to know someone I know.

I'm tempted to break my rules and get into it this time. This is a departure from reality, and like all departures from reality just really bothers me.

Of course a fifteen year old girl, dressed provocatively, is going to be sexualized by the men and boys who see her. That's why she dresses provocatively. What other reason is there? Seriously: name one reason to wear short-shorts that dig into your crotch if not so that people will look at your legs?

This message from a teenager who doesn't understand her own power, her own worth, and the danger she's potentially putting herself in is almost understandable. She's fifteen. She may not have been raised by parents who taught her self-respect. She has a lot of growing up to do. She has a lot more to see of the world and the ugliness that's out there before she can hope to realize that covering herself modestly is best for everyone. She's been steeped in a radical feminist worldview that talks constantly about "rape culture" and yet ignores that the atmosphere of cheap, supposedly consequence-free sex is a major contributor to the fact of rape.

Ever-younger girls are parading around dressed like the Pussycat Dolls. Have you tried to shop for a modest bathing suit for a nine year-old recently? Best of luck to you, because clothing manufacturers seem to think that pre-pubescent girls need padded bra tops and string bikinis. Such things are available for toddlers.

{via}

Why is that even being manufactured in a size 3T? Is it really necessary for my daughter to be running around the beach in a bikini with her diaper sticking out? (Yes, my one-and-a-half year old is wearing size 3T bathing suits. She's a tall, solid, healthy kid.)

Look, there's nothing healthy about deciding to pretend that wearing sexy clothes to school should be a right for teenagers. My friend who shared the picture has two sons, and he and his wife have taken steps to ensure no more babies (which just makes me sad), and thus he will never know what it's like to parent a daughter. He's never been a woman. He's never experienced being leered at while wearing a maxi dress with no exposed cleavage, let alone while wearing a bikini, and he never will.

It's easy for male "feminists" to share these sentiments and even to think they mean them. But parents of daughters know better. Grown women know better.

It's not rape culture, it's reality.

Role models for Catholic children.

So this is making the rounds on my Facebook page: Catholic School Apologizes For Picture of "Poor Role Model" Ellen DeGeneres On Dance Invitation. It's been shared by several of my "friends," probably because Newtown, PA, is where I went to high school (I lived one town over). 

Some background: The school sent out invitations to the eighth grade dance with the tag like "Live from the Red Carpet" and a picture of Ellen holding an Oscar statue. When some parents complained, the principal apologized ("I was obviously NOT thinking.") and requested (or, according to BuzzFeed -- ugh -- "demanded") that the invitations be returned so that they could be destroyed, and new invitations sent out. The principal, without referring to Ellen's sexual orientation, said that Ellen is not a good role model because she doesn't live her life in alignment with the principles of the Catholic Church. 

Follow me so far? Good. Because the apology and the rescinding of the offending invitations are exactly right. It would have been better if the incident hadn't happened at all, but as that ship has sailed an apology was in order.

Now. If people I know were just posting this story, I wouldn't have much to say about it. But, naturally, they're posting with some of the most bigoted commentary I can imagine: 

"These bougie, over-privileged, low-life white moms and dads of Newtown don't have anything better to do than call the principal of their kid's Catholic school and say they don't like Ellen because she's gay?"

"Priest's [sic] are raping Children [sic] whom [sic] attend the Church." [The young lady who wrote this comment might have benefitted from some Catholic schooling, by the way, as her grammar is atrocious.]

... And more, but let's just deal with these two, shall we?

First: Those "bougie, over-privileged, low-life white moms and dads" -- because their race is relevant here, according to the over-privileged white guy I know who posted said comment -- are paying a premium for a Catholic education. Newtown, PA, is in one of the top school districts in the state of Pennsylvania. Unlike some places, a Catholic education is not the only alternative to failing schools, but a sacrifice that parents make so that their children can receive a Catholic education. A Catholic school has an obligation to present good role models to the children under their care. Ellen DeGeneres is an outspoken lesbian with a wife. She is not the person you put on your eighth grade dance invitation. I bet that some of the moms who complain watch and enjoy Ellen's talk show, but that doesn't make Ellen an appropriate role model for eighth graders. If I enjoy watching Modern Family, but I complain that my child's Catholic school showed it to my child, I am not hypocrite. I am a parent who recognizes that children and adults are not the same thing. I am unlikely to be influenced by the depiction of a gay couple in a way a prepubescent child might. We spend most of our time as parents deciding what is age appropriate for our children. 

I guess that makes me a bougie (ugh, that word appears here three times and it just makes me cringe!), over-privileged, low-life white mom. Because I would have called to complain.

Secondly: Can we cool it already "priests are raping children" meme? No priests were even mentioned in this story. I did a little Googling -- because for a hot second I entertained the notion of wading into the fray, only to decide not to argue with idiots, especially as it got uglier -- and in two seconds discovered that Catholic priests commit sexual abuse at a rate that is less than 100 times that of public school teachers. Furthermore, the Catholic Church did more to report and combat the abuse than did the school districts in question. The same 2004 Department of Education -- you know, that right-wing think tank -- report that is linked to above tells of 225 admitted cases of educator abuse in one year in New York. How many were reported to police? All of zero. ZERO. More facts about priest sexual abuse here.

To sum up: good for the parents who complained. Good for the principal for apologizing. And I should maybe think about pruning my Facebook friends list.

Must-Read Monday, Week of 28 April 2014

Throughout the course of the week, I'll curate a list of links for y'all to read (if you want! No pressure!), because I wander all over the internets and I may have found something you haven't seen.

Please, please share your must-reads in the comments!

• I thought this was interesting: dueling posts, hours apart, about the compatibility of the terms "pro-life" and "feminist." First came this one, "Christian women: feminism is not your friend," by Matt Walsh, which argues that "pro-life" and "feminist" are mutually exclusive; and then this one (not in reply to Walsh, just by coincidence), "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About NWF," from New Wave Feminists, which purports to explain that one can be both. [For the record, I come down on Matt Walsh's side. I believe that feminism has outlived its very limited usefulness. We have the vote, the wage-gap is the stuff of myth, and mostly what feminism has wrought is abortion-on-demand at any gestational age and for any reason (including, perversely, sex-selection abortion, which almost exclusively targets baby girls).]

• And! Several days later, a response from the New Wave Feminists to Matt Walsh! [It's not going to convince him he's wrong, as it doesn't convince me. Walsh was not claiming that all is right in the world for women, but that the label "feminist" has been irrevocably poisoned.]

• A large group of gay-marriage advocates published an open letter, "Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both," over at RealClearPolitics to call for civility in the debate. While I obviously dissent against gay marriage (fundamentally, it is at best as a contradiction in terms), I appreciate the intellectual honesty of the letter; its authors acknowledge that they cannot "wish away the objections of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions, or browbeat them into submission," and further remind their more bloody-minded allies that if uniformity of thought could be imposed on a society, they would have gotten nowhere themselves.

• If the phrase, "Lord, please don't let me become a spiritual fruitchucker" doesn't motivate you to read this article on Catholic Answers, nothing will: Everyone's A Critic.

• What To Expect If Your Baby Has Down Syndrome: Annie of The House That Jade Built writes a beautiful ode to her Down syndrome daughter, Ollie, and her impact on her entire family. 

• Can irony actually cause a head to explode? This article on the Daily Caller, "Good grief: Now, it's pea personhood!" discusses the fact that Switzerland has laws pertaining to the "dignity" of plants. Nowhere does its author point out that Switzerland is the home of euthanasia tourism, but I think it's fair to say that we live in the world gone mad when it is legal to assist someone with their suicide, and illegal to "decapitate" a wildflower.

• Amy Otto writes in the Federalist: "How I Made My Peace With Princess Culture." She agrees with my assessment of Barbies (which boils down to: silly body, still just a doll) and argues that trying to shelter little girls from the Disney Princesses could conceivably result in more Lena Dunhams, the star of HBO's Girls, which is a truly insufferable mess and in which Dunham is unattractively naked. A lot.

Tax Day 2014

Well, ladies and gents, here it is again: tax day.

We have already filed and received our refund -- you're welcome for the interest-free loan, Uncle Sam, you wastrel -- but I still have to make note of today.

As usual, the estimable Matt Walsh has said it better than I ever could: Three things that all you serfs and peasants shouldn't say on Tax Day. I wish he'd used the word "vassals," just because I like it, and because it works.

So I'm going to use this post to point out some of the absolutely ridiculous and insulting ways the government spends our money. I suggest you drape your laptop to minimize the damage when blood shoots out of your eyes. (My source is primarily the 2013 Wastebook put out by Sen. Tom Coburn, which you can read in full here, conveniently in PDF form.)

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has doled out nearly $1 million (actually $914,000 since 2010) to The Popular Romance Project to "study" fictional romance: novels, fan fiction, self-help books, the Internet (where real romance goes to die), comics and songs. Taxpayer money to study Twilight. Oh, there goes the first splash of blood on my laptop screen.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has spent $500 million to help millionaires build mansions on the beach. In 2013, more than 100 individuals or families received loan guarantees for $500,000 or more from the USDA to buy property in Hawaii. And if these buyers default on their loans, the federal government will pay the banks 90% of the loans. Blood didn't shoot out my eyes that time because it all boiled away.

• Tax breaks for legal brothels! $17.5 million worth! 

• Now that we're not quite as built up in the Middle East, there's a lot of equipment there that we're not using. So rather than sell it (which I'm not sure would be the best idea; who's going to buy it that we want to have it?), or better, ship it home, the military has decided to simply destroy SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS worth of war materials. 

• Need I even mention healthcare.gov, the most expensive website ever to not be successfully built? More than $379 million has been flushed on that one.

• Facebook paid no taxes in 2013, and instead got a refund of $295 million. I imagine that it's a reward for recording (and probably reporting) every word we type, even if we choose not to ultimately post it. 

• $1 million for a single bus stop in Arlington, VA. You do not get a gold bracelet for waiting there.

• Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent $1,236,500 building apartments in Tempe, AZ for deaf senior citizens, with blinking lights to indicate the doorbell ringing or to warn residents that the garbage disposal is running. That seems nice. Oh, wait. HUD threatened to pull the funding unless 75% of these apartments are given to NON-DEAF tenants.

• HUD, a real gem, gave $65 million in relief for Hurricane Sandy. Hey, wait, you say: you live on the east coast! Shouldn't you understand the toll that Sandy took? I do. Even though our lights never so much as flickered during Sandy, a lot of people lost everything they owned and insurance companies were too backlogged to help right away. Except! This HUD money was spent not on relief to the affected, but instead on TV advertising campaigns. "New York is Open for Business!" "New Jersey: Stronger Than the Storm." Meanwhile, residents of Staten Island (for instance) didn't have power for months as we headed into winter.

• And here's my absolute favorite: According to a study that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded for $325,525, during arguments, "wives should calm down." THE GOVERNMENT SPENT A THIRD OF A MILLION OF OUR DOLLARS TO SAY SOMETHING THAT EVERY HUSBAND IN THE WORLD KNOWS NEVER TO SAY.

That brings me through page 47 of a 132 page report (not counting an additional 40-odd pages of citations). I didn't cite every example in those 47 pages. I'm dying of blood loss, and so should you be. 

Happy Tax Day, fellow vassals!

"Facebook God" gives the kind of advice you'd expect, I guess.

Oh my gracious, this is SO SAD:

(Sorry about the picture quality. I took a screenshot from my phone. Click to enlarge.)

Everything about this just breaks my heart to pieces. I'm heartbroken that this girl was pressured into an abortion she didn't want. I'm heartbroken that her parents treated her so badly, instead of with love and forgiveness. I'm heartbroken that she had no one better in her life to turn to than Facebook God, who bears absolutely no resemblance to the God I know. I'm heartbroken that someone masquerading as our God and Father gave this girl such bad advice as, "Abortion is legal, therefore it can't be murder." And I'm heartbroken that over 4,600 people have "liked" this post on Facebook (at the time of this writing), and have posted many comments that if "this God" had a church, they'd be there.

So, so sad.

Sunday night politics.

We live in a contraceptive culture. As I write, there is a case under consideration by the Supreme Court (Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) dealing with the question of whether an employer can be required to provide contraceptive and/or abortifacient devices and medications against his/her conscience. Proponents of the contraceptive mandate -- contained within the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare -- argue that contraception is a "women’s health issue"; that an employer’s refusal to provide a health insurance plan that includes free birth control is tantamount to said employer banning his employees from using birth control; that most women use contraception so everyone should just get over it.

Without going into why all of that is a load of steaming horse manure (for now), let me just say: I find it all to be somewhat of a personal insult.

I suffer from infertility. I have one child, miraculously conceived after almost five years of (never-contracepting) marriage, countless rounds of fertility medications and finally surgery to remediate endometriosis. Our daughter is delightful and we want her to have siblings. Despite the well-meaning assurances from everyone we know that after getting pregnant the first time we wouldn’t have trouble repeating the feat, my doctor has officially declared that the name of the game here is secondary infertility, and thus multiple rounds of Clomid are in my future.

I read a lot of blogs written by endlessly, effortlessly fertile Catholic women. They good-naturedly complain about the burden of a large number of children (and their laundry!), the open disbelief people display at the sight of their families, and the difficulty of enduring the abstinent periods of an NFP-charted menstrual cycle.

Meanwhile, I struggle to keep my heart and soul free of the crushing burden of bitter envy.

And let me tell you: the world does not understand a family that freely accepts children as a gift from God. I’m one of seven children myself; I heard the rude remarks that people made to my mother. But the world also does not understand the grief that comes with having a heart open to children who do not arrive.

Most of the time I’m fine, and happy, and delighted with my child and my husband and our life together. Sometimes I’m sad and fending off depression – mostly when a round of fertility medication has failed and I’m staring down the barrel of another month of hot flashes, irritability, nausea (just a delightful reminder that if I get pregnant, I'll be off food for nine months), and meticulous charting. Occasionally I’m relieved that I’m unlikely to ever find myself accidentally pregnant four months after having given birth to my sixth child.

And I often get SO MAD about the casualness with which so many contracept and abort in order to preserve their status quo. I get personally insulted when people see pregnancy as a disease to be prevented with the Pill or “cured” by abortion, and who see children as nothing more than a burden.

Some of us are filled with longing to be so burdened.

Current Events

I'm going to blurt out some quick thoughts about some things happening in the news right now. They're in order that I became aware of them over the last several days, not in order of importance.

1. The crowdsourcing campaign for the Gosnell Movie: Give to it. Kermit Gosnell has to be the worst mass murderer in United States history, and his trial was largely ignored by the media. Too many people have no idea of the scope and horror of this story, and that needs to change. Give whatever you can; no amount is too small. Even a $1 donation will be helpful and appreciated by the filmmakers.

2. Shooting at Fort Hood, TX: Yes, another one. Three people were killed and sixteen more wounded yesterday, on an Army base where soldiers are not allowed to carry guns. If anyone can explain to me why on Earth anyone thinks it's necessary or smart to disarm trained soldiers at their base of operations, I'm happy to hear it. (And then I shall refer you to psychiatric help, because that is insane.) If the SOLDIERS on the ARMY BASE had not had to call the LOCAL POLICE for help -- yes, I'm shouting in all-caps -- then the death/wounded toll would surely be lower. It's just suicidal. Furthermore, while the poor, frightened, disarmed citizens of the base at Fort Hood were still sheltering in place, there was a large outcry from opportunists calling for more gun control. They would actually disarm the military because of their personal fear of firearms. Think about that for a minute.

3. Brendan Eich ousted at Mozilla: The CEO of Mozilla, the software company who provides Firefox, a truly abysmal web browser, has been removed from his position. This move comes after the news was made public that Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 in California in 2008. So six years ago, a private citizen made a constitutionally-protected donation to support a cause, and now he has lost his job. He has been fired for supporting traditional marriage, which is surely his right. I don't care which side of the issue you come down on, this should outrage you. If you don't have the right to your opinions, if your boss can fire you because you think something different than he does, then no speech is safe. Basically, Mozilla is a real-life version of the novel 1984, and Eich has been fired for a thoughtcrime. Shame on you, Mozilla.