Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
As one who was taught by Benedictine nuns in a Catholic elementary school, I grew up with some strange and possibly severe restrictions on what the nuns called “mixing” the boys and girls. More recently, when my adult children were in school, the Diocese of Rockford forbade Altar boys being on the altar at the same time as Altar girls! With that background, I thought I had seen it all. However, the State of Tennessee has just beaten that sorry record of over restrictive rules for school children. It seems that Tennessee state senators, in their infinite wisdom have updated their already suspect abstinence based sex education law by suggesting that holding hands is a gateway to sex.
“Last week, the Senate passed SB 3310, a bill to update the state’s abstinence-based sex education curriculum to define holding hands and kissing as “gateway sexual activities.” Just one senator voted against the legislation; 28 voted in favor. Since the bill specifically bans teachers from “demonstrating gateway sexual activity”, educators would be prohibited from even demonstrating what hand-holding is.” Truth Progress
I understand the concept of abstinence only programs. The nuns were in favor of that idea, and it worked as badly in the 1960′s as it does now. “In a new family life instructions bill, holding hands and kissing could be considered gateways to sex. Planned Parenthood said that allowing state government to define local sex education curriculum could backfire. According to a 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Study, 61 percent of Memphis City high school students and 27 percent of middle school students have had sex. That’s higher than the national average. Planned Parenthood said these numbers are why a new sex education bill promoting abstinence is not realistic.” WMC-TV
As I understand it, the State Senate of Tennessee has an ongoing problem with high school and middle school students having sex. Their educated response to this problem is to claim that holding hands is a dirty and dangerous act that could lead to dire sexual health consequences. Under this proposed legislation, a teacher could be subject to a direct lawsuit from parents if the instructor goes beyond this draconian curriculum. Do these State Senators have any idea what is happening in the real world? The numbers quoted by the Memphis TV station above suggest that the State Senate should be happy if all the students are doing is hand holding. Could the respective religious beliefs of these State Senators be guiding their legislative hands?
Just how successful are these abstinence only programs? One George Mason University article in December 2006 discussed claims that any reduction in teen pregnancy rates is far and away due to contraception and not abstinence. “A new study has shown that contraception, not abstinence, is behind declines in teen pregnancy. Researchers from Columbia University and the Guttmacher Institute took a nation-wide look at why it is that teen pregnancy rates are down. In 1995, there were just under 100 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage women age 15-19, according to the Guttmacher Institute (the figures vary slightly among the three major sources for teen pregnancy rates – the Guttmacher Institute, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion). By 2002, this had gone down to just over 75 per 1,000. According to the new study, 86 percent of the decline is attributable to the use of contraception, while only 14 percent is attributable to abstinence. Abstinence has only contributed to a small percentage of the overall decline, and none for teens aged 18-19. For those ages 15-17, abstinence was responsible for about 23 percent of the decline, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.” stats.org
When the Tennessee House representatives take up the Senate bill, I hope that they look beyond religion and realize that the teen pregnancy problem won’t be solved by burying their heads in the sand. A sex education program designed by educational experts and not Bishops, can have a positive impact on teen pregnancy. Outlawing teachers from actually talking about the real issues could defeat what the legislators are trying to accomplish. However, since Tennessee just passed a law allowing creationism to be taught alongside evolution, I am not holding my breath that the legislature in Tennessee will do the right thing.
Do you think religion is getting in the way of proper education principles and methods? Are the state representatives pandering to a particular segment of their citizens rather than suggesting and promoting valid, scientific methods to address the problem at hand? What do you think?
Raff,
Lol…… You have to be kidding, right?
I wonder if there are exceptions for home schooled children….. Family better be exempt….. This is Tennessee after all.. The birth place of incest….. (only kidding, it really Arkansas)….
What about Sunday school…. This has to be a misprint…..
I don’t know if this was mentioned in their legislation, but is there an age defined. I’m thinking about all the little kids holding hands with their “partners” as they line up to go on a field trip. What about the cultural divide that we all made fun of George Bush for when he was meeting with the Saudi King?
This stupidity is giving me a head ache.
Blouise, I feel a story coming on.
In about mid-1990s a colleague and I received information about a case in which a colonel in the army, stationed at Fort Benning, GA (head of the marksmanship unit) had been charged by the CID with molesting three out of his four children. But his CO refused to allow the court martial to go forward because the CO has the last word in prosecutions. As a result, the kids had to go visit Colonel Dad on the base and the older two (twins) were violently opposed to it because (a) they had told on him; and (b) they didn’t want another dose. We got in touch with the general in the Pentagon in charge of social services within the army; my friend was an employee of the Division of Army Psychiatry at that time so I was the one who carried the laboring oar. I got to the Pentagon to meet with the Colonel in charge of the investigation and he spent several hours with me going over the documents and discussing things. I also told him about cases we had seen OUTSIDE the army. We were really involved in serious negotiations and he was trying to convince me that we shouldn’t divulge any of the information, although he had no real power to stop me. I had met with his boss, the general, who had shaken my hand in such a violent manner that it hurt for two weeks. My bones were crunched together; he did that on purpose right before asking me where I got the documents. I answered, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.” Anyway, the Colonel parted ways with me that day saying to me, “I understand what you have told me. I understand this case. I understand what is going on here. I am getting a headache.” I made an appointment to see him again after two weeks. I brought him a whole bottle of aspirin. I put down the aspirin right next to the tape recorder he put down to tape the interview. I said, “This is for our meetings, because we will have many of them.”
It seems to me that a sui generis phrase like “holding hands” is pretty descriptive of the forbidden sexual activity…..and if the statute forbids discussion of that condemned activity how can the teacher even say the magic words? I have recent recollections here in California of elementary school kids crossing streets in cross walks holding each others hands looking like so many goslings following their Mother Goose. Tennessee just cant be serious can it? Are the people in Tennessee going to regularly host gatherings modeled after the Scopes Monkey Trial? God save us….
Holding hands being the gateway to sex to be horrible must therefore mean God who made sex must also be horrible. Catholics say they represent that being? Really now, had God be horrible the life on this planet would be horrible being a representation of the Hoooorable God that made it terrorizing humans that dared walk out of their man made shelters. The Catholics must worship a tyrant of a God that made sex bad. Could it be the Catholics unwittingly worship Satan under the guise of worshiping God who is loving not bad at all being Jesus?
Abstinence is bad for the RCC membership drive!
“Do you think religion is getting in the way of proper education principles and methods?”
Does the Pope wear a funny hat?
Jonathan Hughes,
In fairness to the RCC, my question asking if religion had anything to do with the legislators actions was not suggesting it was only a Catholic issue. My past personal experiences were in a Catholic setting.
Mespo,
You are right that the numbers of Catholics might decrease if abstinence gets out of hand!
By the same token, raff, if they adopt the slogan “Join the RCC and get laid!” they may be overwhelmed by new membership. Too much growth too quick can be as bad as a declining membership.
“Tennessee just cant be serious can it? Are the people in Tennessee going to regularly host gatherings modeled after the Scopes Monkey Trial? God save us….” Yes, they are serious and No, God is not going to save us because there is no such thing!
Gene,
Those are the Devil’s words!
This kind of thing has very little to do with actual religion and has everything to do with controlling people. Every longstanding human institution devotes a certain amount of its energies towards perpetuating the institution. When the proportion of those energies gets to great, it becomes a corrupting force in that institution. In religion and nationalism this usually takes the shape of condemning certain normal healthy human behaviors and then defining anyone that continues those behaviors or questions their prohibition as “the enemy”. Those who loudly condemn the unbelievers/traitors are held up as pillars of the institution, even when they are actually just adding to the corrupting force.
I worked as a substitute teacher for awhile. In one class, the students were learning, not just basic human biology, but how hormones affected them and how to deal with them. Among other things, they discussed means of determining when things were getting “too hot” and how to cool things off. The idea being that they had a responsibility to themselves and each other. This was a co-ed class. There may have been some snickers here and there but, overall, the students were respectful and participating. They were being empowered.
Has alzheimers set in? These old fogey legislators don’t seem to remember what it was like when they were young. Or maybe they just think that by keeping the kids ignorant that they will do as they are told. What fools!
re: home schoolers. The ones I know about are home schooling b/c they don’t want their kids exposed to the temptations and evils of public schools. This includes getting a religous exemption for sex education.
One pastor’s daughter now has 2 children, no husband. Her parents did everything they could to keep her out of the two public school systems she tried to get into before and after she left home.
Another family now have a grandchild whose parents are their son and daughter. Actually, I only know that the daughter was pregnant. They are also against abortion so I assume they now have a grandchild.
Really, raff?
I thought they were my words. I’m going to have to start charging the Devil for using my IP. Hopefully my contracting skills are better than Faust.
“Do these State Senators have any idea what is happening in the real world?”
Negatory Rubber Ducky.
I knew that Sesame Street was EVIL!..
Hilarous Woosty!! Thanks!
Gene,
you may have been under the Devil’s influence when he used your words!
He is a crafty bastard, raff. I’ll have to give him that.
When I was in high school an Irish priest came and taught religion once in awhile instead of the nuns. He said that if you kissed for longer than 10 seconds you committed a mortal sin.
The catholic school kids around here are the wild ones and the fundamentalist crowd is abstinence only but not really. Some girls wear chastity rings.
Dredd,
Ones reality in the real world is grounded in their own reality…… One may or may not know what is socially acceptable……
Swarthmore,
I guess I committed many mortal sins!
Raff,
You went to law school right….. You have no other options…..
It is not only a Catholic issue. The Religions as a whole teach the same thing about hell being a place when hell is Gods light being like fire to those that like darkness, and the perverting of servant to mean slave, and using the words perverted, and abomination, defiled, and deviant to mean what they have them mean, but all of them come from the mouth describing the blaspheming devil in the soul of a human. The devil hiding in the churches tried to make the things God made out to be bad. That is why war in government is made out to be good, and the oppression of humans in the legal system good. It is all connected.
God loves life. The more humans born loving like Jesus loves the happier Jesus will be. Look beyond this life.
And people are concerned about Sharia law being imposed here? Too many of these rules and laws are seem to mirro those of Iran, Iraq, etc.
You are right AY.
Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn joust. legal system doers that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn jesus. legal system doers that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
Flesh, and blood did not reveal that to you. You are right on. The Legal system, and the religions are connected. Separation of church in state in an illusion. In spirit they are the same. The religions did their best to condemn jesus. legal system does that to humans today. Sharia law does the same thing. All of them are evil. They kill the soul that uses them calling them good.
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It seems that Tennessee state senators, in their infinite wisdom have updated their already suspect abstinence based sex education law by suggesting that holding hands is a gateway to sex.
===========================================================
raff
when i was 17 a girl talked me into going to church with her. when the preacher said almost those exact words about holding hands, i got up and left.
i’m now 52 and except for weddings and funerals i haven’t been in a church since.
apparently i haven’t missed much
By admitting you are a sinner is the beginning to being saved. Jesus came to save the soul. The body sins because this body can’t survive being in Gods glory. This body kills life to live a very shot time.
Love like Jesus loves, and talk like Jesus talks ,and be saved. It is by his grace that we are saved.
You are4 not rejecting him. Sex, and nudity will not lose you your soul.
Dogs dont hold paws. We dont pray in groups. The pack decides who is a bad dog. We poop in the church yard.
From 1984>, by George Orwell, Part II, Chapter III:
“… With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual Puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was :
‘When you make love you’re using up energy ; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot ?’
“That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.”
The Republican Party — Sex Gone Sour
From Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House:
“Then why the [anti-sex] laws?”
“They’re bad laws,” said Billy. “If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth – those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.
“Why this is, I do not know. That is one of the many questions I wish somebody would ask the machines. I do know this: The triumph of that sort of disgust and terror is now complete. Almost every man and woman looks and feels like something the cat dragged in. The only sexual beauty that an ordinary human being can see today is in the woman who will kill him. Sex is death. There’s a short and nasty equation for you: ‘Sex is death. Q. E. D.’”
The current proliferation of more bad anti-sex laws by the Republican Party in so many states throughout America testifies to the bankruptcy of their political and economic prescriptions for the country. Nevertheless, the unqualified success that they’ve had for decades nurturing and flogging these unresolvable cultural non-issues testifies equally to a confident belief in their continued utility. And who, if anyone, will prove that confidence unfounded?
“I hope that they look beyond religion and realize that the teen pregnancy problem won’t be solved by burying their heads in the sand.”
If I may say so, it does not appear that those who nurture and perpetuate these “problems” have any interest in solving them. In fact, precisely the contrary seems the case.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: “Controversy equalizes wise men and fools alike — and the fools know it.” So the rabid right continually shouts: “Teach the Controversy!”
James Carroll wrote, in Crusade: chronicles of an unjust war: “Only a fool would define a problem in such a way that he cannot solve it.”
Not just fools, though, but those who understand fools and how to divide and distract them into fighting among themselves instead of uniting against the upper class that relentlessly robs and bullies them. As Shelley wrote in The Mask of Anarchy:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
You are many, they are few
“The object of all this breast-beating underdoggery is not to unvictimize the average American for whom conservatism claims to speak. … the backlash is something very different: a crusade in which one’s material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are all-important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged.” Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?
So, yes, we can quite clearly see “the state representatives pandering to a particular segment of their citizens rather than suggesting and promoting valid, scientific methods to address the problem at hand.” Not to notice and repudiate this relentless “Teach the Controversy” fascism not only seems innocent beyond explanation but politically and economically fatal, as well.
You could be right pete.
Michael Murry,
The best way to keep the base in line is to always have a boogeyman man waiting in the wings.
“In its recent practice, the radical side of U. S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for governments by literal biblical interpretation. … [Unfortunately, critical] bluntness is frequently muted by a pseudo-tolerance, the polite reluctance to criticize another’s religion. However given the wider thrust of religion’s claim on public life, this hesitance falls somewhere between unfortunate and dangerous” — Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: the perils and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century
Those who would intrude their religious nationalism into the secular life of the nation will always interpret “polite reluctance to criticize” as weakness inviting further, and ever-more-ruthless assaults. The time to bluntly and honestly criticize the political exploitation of religion arrived some time ago and may have passed beyond recall. Whether a tardy and tepid acknowlegment of the danger will do much good, or whether only a full-on counter-assault by the secular will suffice, remains the unanswered but vital question. In any event, we should try to repudiate the coordinated assault on the separation of chuch and state as best we can. As Thomas Jefferson warned us:
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
Failure to break up this mutual-protection-and-abetting alliance will only perpetuate the abuses to which priests and despots will only too willingiy subject us.
rafflaw,
Yes to the utility of the bogeyman, but I prefer Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein as the quintessential one.
When scrutinize church with its many anti Christ oppressive laws having no bearing on saving the soul not seeking to love all as one, and the legal laws of man doing the same being connected to the state we have not a separation of church, and state . There is a combination of the two being the same in spirit. deception is the devils tool.
When a human scrutinizes church with its many anti Christ oppressive laws having no bearing on saving the soul not seeking to love all as one, and the legal laws of man doing the same being connected to the state we have not a separation of church, and state . There is a combination of the two being the same in spirit. deception is the devils tool.
MM,
You are talking about the American Taliban.
Yes to the Taliban reference, rafflaw, but I like to think of it as “Taliban envy.” The Taliban, after all, actually once defeated an imperial power invading their land — and will do so again. The erstwhile American edition, however, never fought any foreign invaders and had to have five fellow ideologues on the Supreme Court appoint them to positions of power in America. As one of their insider apostates famously confessed:
From “Without a Doubt,” by Ron Suskind, The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004
“Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. “Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: “This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them [emphasis added].
No doubt about the fundamentalist, mono-theocratic resemblances, but if I had to bet on which one of them wins back real power first: the American or Afghan variety, I’d bet on the Taliban. Anything that tries and fails to kill you only makes you stronger.
Again, as I see it, defense of the democratic Republic — what remains of it — requires incessantly pointing out that the culture-problem creators and the corporate job cremators who bankroll them have no intention of solving any of the nation’s real problems — or allowing anyone else to solve them — but only in lighting the bonfire and fanning the flames of phony controversy so as to mask their real objectives and methods.
“The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace. Cultural wars might seem an indication of strong political involvements. Actually they are a substitute. The notoriety they receive from the media and from politicians eager to take firm stands on nonsubstantive issues serves to distract attention and contribute to a cant politics of the inconsequential” [emphasis added] — Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Inc: managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism
I particularly love that phrase “cant politics of the inconsequential.” First-rate analysis and writing by Professor Wolin.
Damn. I keep messing up with the HTML tags. I meant to emphasize (in the first sentence of the second paragraph) “The point about such [controversial] topics … is that they are not framed to be resolved.”
Additionally, as F. C. S. Schiller pointed out in Logic for Use: “the word ‘sacred’ generally means a fear that the things so denominated cannot bear investigation.”
sa·cred
adj \ˈsā-krəd\
Definition of SACRED
1 a: dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity b: devoted exclusively to one service or use (as of a person or purpose)
2 a: worthy of religious veneration : holy b: entitled to reverence and respect
3 : of or relating to religion : not secular or profane
4 archaic: accursed
5 a: unassailable, inviolable b: highly valued and important
— sa·cred·lyadverb
— sa·cred·nessnoun
This is why I hate religion.Jagoffs….
Anonymously Yours 1, April 15, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Dredd,
Ones reality in the real world is grounded in their own reality…… One may or may not know what is socially acceptable……
=======================================
Tru dat.
They seem to think like someone who just left a convent or monastery and misjudged that s/he had been dropped off into downtown Sodom or Gomorrah.
Never mind the destruction of the planetary life, or the millions of starving and sick kids, the millions killed in wars, just DON’T HOLD HANDS!
I think Mike S could tell us some stories about withdrawal, and I don’t mean from Afghanistan.
The 1% need to withdraw from Bullshitistan.
Dredd,
Maybe they’ve had a total immersion…… And they suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome……
Jonathan Hughes 1, April 15, 2012 at 8:55 pm
… Sex, and nudity will not lose you your soul.
===================================
Good I was born naked in a vagina and it has had a powerful impact on my life.
I think the state of Tennessee may be on to something:
You could be right Catullus.
Nobody mentioned the nuns’ dating rule of passing the popcorn to your date by holding the popcorn bucket at the top of the container as your date chastely receives it by grabbing politely the bottom of the popcorn ( You might have been aroused if flesh touched flesh , you see. ) A much more realistic approach was a thoughtful priest taking Catholic students to see the movie Alfie in the late 1960′s and discussed it afterwards. Severe repression only creates empty churches .
lol@Dredd
Ya reckon?
The devil does not want truth to be sought after – investigated so truth will remain a mystery. Then the priest feeds whoever what he sees, as truth not allowing humans to think for themselves to determine if the priest has truth or not, and when speaks truth the priest does not agree with is called a heretic, and all kinds of negative words.
Jesus is outside of religion persecuted by religion.
Jonathan Hughes,
the world’s many religions want truth to be a mystery. The devil has nothing to do with it, even if you believe in the devil.
Brother Jonathan Hughes:
“The devil does not want truth to be sought after – investigated so truth will remain a mystery.”
***********************
10 When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11 He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that,
“‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’
~Mark 4 (New International Version (NIV))
So it seems, does the carpenter from Nazaerth.
Southern Baptists. Watch out for the Southern Baptists.
In junior high school, my mother made me attend the local Southern Baptists church. A Lutheran herself, she had better things to do on Sunday, her one day of the week off work. But she didn’t have a car and so could not drive me to any church further away from the nearest one, to which I could walk by myself.
I didn’t last long, as both mom and I loved music and dancing, which the Southern Baptists considered the equivalent of fornicating with farm animals. “I can do the same thing in the back seat of a car,” the reverend’s son smugly told me once. To which I replied, incredulously: “You can?” (I had in mind ballroom dances like the Samba, Tango, and New Yorker Swing.)
The final straw came in church one Sunday when the minister launched into a fire-and-brimstone harangue against a widowed woman of the congregation sitting a few pews in front of me. “Her husband has only been dead five years and already she is out in public, dating another man!” The humiliated woman just sat weeping silently under the public tongue lashing. After the sermon, I left and never went back.
Several years later, just before I enlisted in the Navy, a girlfriend of mine invited me to attend The Friends (Quaker) Church with her. I had other designs on her person, none of them religious, but thought I’d go along just to preserve future possibilities. What a shock to discover this group of pacifists sitting around on a Sunday morning discussing how best to organize relief supplies to impoverished Eskimos in Alaska. Not one fiery condemnation of a single soul, anywhere.
But watch out for those Southern Baptists. I understand that they form the storm-trooper base of the religious Republican Party. This does not surprise me.
Dropped the taxes of at the Post Office. On the way home I stopped at a yogurt shop and saw an Ursuline female student holding hands with a Jesuit boy. ha!ha!
Holding hands . . . the gateway to yogurt.
Swarthmore,
Did you report them to homeland security? Or to the closest Bishop?
Reminds me of an early Beatles hit “I Want to Hold Your Gland” …
Dredd,
Isn’t that why the pope has that pointy thing on his head…..
Fornicating is a sin against the body. .How in the blue blazes can sex with another species be sinning against your body or even sinning against a human out side your body?> War will sin against the body. That can have shrapnel in it, and bullet holes,and severed limbs, and minds tormented with war. Devils hate happiness, singing, and dancing . .Devils in humans frown on that.
Religions teaching eternal hellfire are giving the devils sermons. That is why that woman was given guilt. Marry, and have sex. Have it wherever you want. Demonic religions will get enraged. The religions are of the devil. Jesus does not give tears at all. Hell is Gods light that Moses could not see from the face of God. Humans waring are fornicating against their body. Sex has been demonized, and war sanctified.
“How in the blue blazes can sex with another species be sinning against your body or even sinning against a human out side your body?”
Let me get this straight, Jonathan.
Are you endorsing bestiality not be a crime or not be considered a mental illness or not be considered a sin or all of the above?
Gene,
I don’t have a clue how to read Jonathan Hughes’ post.
raff & Gene,
Is Jonathan speaking in tongues? That was about what I could make out of it. The only thing I recognized were the words were all English, but the content was not in any known language.
Maybe that is the answer OS. Maybe Jonathan is really a Tennessee State Senator and he is trying to defend their legislation. Then again, maybe not.
raff, probably not a TN State Senator. The words appear to be spelled correctly and they were not in crayon.
Hah! You got me there OS!
Tennessee aspires to be like its neighbors to the west:
http://boingboing.net/2012/04/16/u-s-teen-pregnancy-drops-shar.html
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/bishop-obama-following-path-hitler-and-stalin/485096 Bishop of Peoria says Obama is following the same path as Hitler and Stalin.
SwM,
Has the good bishop registered with the State Department as a member of the Vatican City State’s diplomatic staff.
Let us not forget that the Vatican City State is governed as an absolute monarchy. The Head of State is the Pope who holds full legislative, executive and judicial powers. In telling us that our government must be run in accordance with a foreign ruler’s views the Bishop is acting as a diplomat representing his monarch, the Pope.
Blouise,
That Bishop needs to be chased out of town on a rail.
I saw that video clip, thanks, S-Mom.
Single parenting for mothers is already a serious legal disability in lots of states, while single parenting by fathers (meaning the father got sole custody or just kicked the mom out) is a sub-category of sainthood. A single father who was a disbarred attorney and admitted drug addict (he said the reason he accidentally took his clients’ money out of trust funds was that he was an addict) in Illinois and who had never supported his daughter, who was in her mother’s sole custody for 12 years and coudln’t get her father to look at her or buy her a birthday present, then approached the Illinois Bar to ask for reinstatement because NOW he was recovered and wanted to be “there for his daughter.” He sued for the right to be a part of his daughter’s life by paying child support, but then failed to pay the amount he agreed to pay (not one payment on record!) and got custody instead. Go figure. Now he is “Saint Father.” AND his complaints about the mother included that she did not do enough educationally for her daughter because she moved her from school to school. Of course, she HAD moved her daughter from school to school because she is an actress and she had to move from city to city (theater to theater) to find work that would pay enough for her to totally support herself and her child without help from the pre-sainted father. I could go on and on. But the bottom line is that the Republicans and Democrats are really alike on this one: Mothers are raising children alone because they are bad and blameworthy (and lazy and greedy and unfit and neglectful and abusive and alienating and promiscuous and…) and fathers are raising children alone because the mothers of those children were bad and blameworhy (and lazy and greedy and…)
If she works, it’s because she prefers the glamour of her job to her responsibilities to her kids (McCreery versus McCreery, Virginia) or because she is depriving her kid of Stability (Nameless father versus Nameless Actress Mother, California) and if she doesn’t, well, we need to do something about THAT.