Apologia

Ramesh Ponnuru has an article entitled “Marriage and Adoption” in the latest National Review. Last time I looked, however, you had to pay to read it. But the whole thing can be found at the AEI website.

In it he takes note of a “novel thesis” put forth by Esquire’s Tom Junod, who argued in that magazine’s pages that “opposition to same-sex marriage has become a ‘war on adoption,’ which he takes personally as an adoptive father (married to a woman).”

The opponents, he accurately notes, routinely hold up the biological family — a mother and father raising the children they conceived together — as an ideal. In doing so they insult and even threaten his own family. Ross Douthat, of all people, is cited as one of the anti-adoption warriors, specifically called out for writing that “the share of children living in married households with both their biological parents” is a “meaningful indicator of family solidity.” A view like that one, writes Junod, “dooms our marriage and our family to second-class status.”

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…can be found on the Newman page, entitled “A Woman Made High.” It is from a biography containing an excerpt of Newman’s open letter to Dr. Pusey, in which he passionately defends the honor paid to Our Lady by the Catholic Church.

Whenever the Gosnell trial is brought up on the news, I keep hearing either the reporter him or herself, or the ‘expert’ commentator they’ve hauled into to commentate, bellow that this case is “not about abortion, but about infanticide,” or “about killing living babies.” I presume this is done to draw a bright line between the constitutionally protected, and perfectly respectable, practice of abortion – the version of it that civilized men and women should all agree must be protected – and the barbarically degraded version of it in which Gosnell was engaged.

They should consider redrawing that line, and I want to help. They won’t like my help, but I can’t help that. Here’s the line: an abortion of any kind kills a living baby. It can be done outside the womb, or in the womb; before viability, after viability; by chemical poisoning, scissors to the skull, or a vacuum fitted out with miniature veg-o-matic blades; it can be performed in gleeful cruelty (that is, with utter disregard for the reverence owed to these temples of the Holy Ghost), or with a somber sense of regretful but professional determination accompanied by an upside down smiley face. However it is done, a living baby is killed. Why is this so hard?

but there is a new Witness excerpt called “All That Life Has to Give,” from my favorite part of the book. Call me a sucker for love.

…while being desecrated by some pro-abort, pro-homosexualist, feminist demoniacs. He’s a better man than I.

The so-called girls stripped naked from the waist up and “doused the archbishop with water from bottles formed in the image of the Virgin Mary” to punctuate their verbal assault. This happened at the “ULB University in Brussels where the archbishop was participating in a debate on blasphemy laws.” Huh. I didn’t know Belgium had blasphemy laws. Against blaspheming whom?

Anyway, this bishop has been persecuted before: “…in 2007, as Bishop of Namur, Archbishop Leonard was accused of an offence against the Belgian anti-racism act for calling homosexual acts ‘abnormal’. In 2008 he was cleared of homophobia charges after appearing in court.”

I did a google on the story. For the first six pages I couldn’t find a major news outlet covering it, unless you count The Huffington Post as major.

I haven’t written about this because I think reticence the best course when the only response one has to offer is anger of the merely bloodthirsty sort. I turned on the TV a few days ago mere moments after the bombs went off. I’m pretty sure I saw the earliest camera shots of people tearing down the barricades to get at the wounded. The first thing I noticed was the presence of so many dazed and bloodied women, and that was pretty much the end of my ability to reason. I wonder whatever happened to this lady:

or this one:

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There is a Sunday Thought on the Newman page.