“Uniting Healthcare with Holiness to Relieve Suffering”
Los Angeles has a terrible District Attorney. In most jurisdictions, the District Attorney is the chief prosecutor, or law enforcement officer, who leads a group of other prosecutors in bringing persons accused of committing crimes to trial and prosecuting them so that they will be punished for their alleged crime.
Recently, I saw a news story regarding the Actress, Anna Kendrick, and her relationship struggles. She provided the following quote to People magazine, “I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband.
The other night, I was watching “Bob’s Burgers” on one of the cable channels (I forget which one), when a remarkable commercial came on. “Bob’s Burgers” is an adult-oriented cartoon about a struggling proprietor of a hamburger restaurant and his eccentric family. It is quite clever, actually, and entertaining, without being too offensive. So, as I was watching this cartoon (around 8 PM, Central) a pharmaceutical commercial came on for a drug named “Apretude”. Even in the bizarre world of pharmaceutical-to-consumer advertising, this commercial reached a new and disturbing low.
While we try to avoid a lot of political discussions in this venue, sometimes it can’t be helped. In a bizarre illustration of the circus that is the US Congress, last week Republicans in the US House of Representatives passed the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act”.
One of the criticisms often levied against me, and others of my philosophical bent, is that we excessively use analogies between medical ethical issues and Nazi Germany. Conventional wisdom is that the holocaust should be The Holocaust, an event unique in human history…If only it were true.
Most people want to be seen as fair, rational and tolerant of others’ beliefs and perspectives. There is also a desire to be diplomatic and avoid offending those who differ in opinion from us.
This week, we find ourselves thinking about another group of very vulnerable human lives, those that are less than 6 days old, or so. Like newly hatched sea turtles returning to the ocean from the beach, the journey of the youngest children, from the fallopian tube to the uterus is fraught with hazard
People and societies are funny things. We are subject to fads. Mass hysteria of a sort, wherein something catches the public’s attention and, without good reason, takes hold of the culture and dominates the media, purchasing and personality. Most of us remember the beanie babies
Last week, we discussed the, likely, millions of children who have been conceived through the evil of invitro fertilization (IVF) and now are frozen in a secular limbo, awaiting adoption (unlikely), death (more likely) or donation to “research” (repulsive). These children, created in the image and likeness of God, are the innocent victims
Netflix is a repository for some truly heinous programming. If television is often some kind of junk food for the intellect, then Netflix is, perhaps, the equivalent of vending machine burritos, or gas station sushi; not really good for you. Nevertheless, we all occasionally stroll in the gutter
In the echo chamber of the pro-abortion popular media (which is almost redundant, after all, is any of the popular media pro-life?) common phrases used to disparage the pro-life position are, “forced birth”, “misogynistic ruling class” and “patriarchy”, or “GOP patriarchy” when political parties are included. In a perverse twist of logic,
Ethics are non-political. An action is either right or wrong and its ethics, or lack thereof, are independent of political parties. In some sense, one may say that politics are the opposite of ethics. Ethics simply are.
In the popular media, particularly following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we are inundated with the assertion that “abortions save lives” the implication being, if women are unable to get an abortion on demand, there will literally be bodies in the streets.
Defending the indefensible is hard. In fact, it is impossible, hence the term, “indefensible”. Because the concept of “abortion on demand, for any reason”, is indefensible, the pro-abortion lobby buries itself in euphemisms and distractions to obfuscate the fact that the vast majority of abortions are the elective termination of a human life for no compelling reason whatsoever.
One of the most common positions taken by those trying to equivocate on abortion is the, “I am personally pro-life/choice, but the decision is private and best left between a woman and her doctor” (or “physician”, if one is trying to add dramatic gravitas to the proposition). This is frequently taken by politicians attempting to gain favor from all sides of the issue.
Whether one calls it a child, fetus, embryo or clump of cells, at conception, the fertilized ovum is undoubtedly a human life. It is clearly alive and clearly human, albeit at a very early and unrecognizable stage. That early stage, however, does not make it any less human.