Notes: Tuesday, October 11-Tuesday, October 18, 2011 (part 2 of 2)

8. "Patriarch Kirill lauds Putin for ‘enhancing Russia’s international authority’"

http://www.angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39294

(See also the first comment after the thread-starter for information about recent developments in the Russian Orthodox Church.)

Labels: Cyril of Moscow, R.O.C., Russia, Vladimir Putin

9. "Princess wants stunning before slaughter"

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/princess-wants-stunning-before-slaughter-20111017-1lt1g.html?skin=text-only

I was surprised to learn, from Australia's Agriculture Department's acting deputy secretary for the live animal export taskforce, quoted in that article, that in Australia,

For cattle we do allow for ritual slaughter purposes, for stunning to occur after the cut has been done, so it's a post-cut stunning.

Labels: Islam, Jews

10. "Last Wednesday [two Lesbians] organised a forum for gay and lesbian parents with school-age children to address what they see as a stereotypical and heterosexual representation of family at their schools"

[...] The forum included representatives from the Board of Education and the Board of Studies, as well as 70 gay, lesbian and heterosexual parents.

[...] A group calling themselves Rainbow Schoolies have set up a work party to produce a program for principals and teachers on how they should include a child from a gay family in the school environment.

Although the program will initially be aimed at [one] primary school, the group hopes to extend the program to other schools in in Australia, and is planning a national conference next year.

[...] [One panellist at that forum, who is "an associate professor in the school of education at the University of Western Sydney" and "specialises in issues of gender and sexuality within education"] said the changes to the curriculum next year would be a chance to address issues of diversity and inclusion within the school environment, with a platform for members of the public to voice their concerns.
[http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/happy-fathers-day-mum--gender-restriction-a-challenge-for-gay-families-20111016-1lrfi.html?skin=text-only]

See also item 3 of this edition of Notes.

Labels: education, families, G.L.B.T., N.S.W., Rainbow Schoolies

11. "Growth [in the world's population] has been so rapid that the US Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 5 per cent of all the people who have ever lived are living now"

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/coming-soon-7-billion-reasons-to-rethink-how-we-use-the-planet-20111016-1lrdu.html?skin=text-only

Labels: demography

12. "Toowoomba GP and pro-family activist David van Gend found himself in conciliation before the Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland over a complaint that an article he wrote for Brisbane's The Courier-Mail, as part of a debate about same-sex marriage, vilified the homosexual community"

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/discrimination-police-indulging-in-gay-abandon/story-e6frg6zo-1226167016741

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/10/17/truth-the-telling-is-now-hate-speech/

Labels: David van Gend, discrimination, families, G.L.B.T., marriage

13. A blast from Australia's 'sectarian' past

I was intrigued when I read a very short biography of one "Sister Liguori", of whom I didn't recall previously hearing, on the Sydney Daily Telegraph's history page yesterday, and planned to see if I could find out, on the Internet, more about her and the episode of Australian 'sectarian' history in which she featured so prominently. I've found that the Australian Dictionary of Biography's article "Partridge, Bridget (1890–1966)" is available here.

Labels: Bridget Partridge

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist, Martyr, A.D. 2011

More on the sinister relationship between abortionists and Parliament

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/comments/farce_with_tragic_overtones/

Two excellent letters have appeared in The Australian exposing what the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance (A.R.H.A.) really stands for. Here they are, reproduced in full:

I WAS present at the tragicomical Senate committee hearing last week into Medicare funding of late abortion, when we learned that senator Clare Moore’s submission on behalf of the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development was identical to the submission from the lobby group Australian Reproductive Health Alliance.

Angela Shanahan rightly described this duplication under two different letterheads as open to allegations of collusion (Opinion 1/11).

But it is the content that is disturbing. No fair-minded person can read the ARHA/Moore submission without understanding it as an argument for late-term abortion of handicapped babies to save society the cost of caring for them.

Exposing this collusion was great comedy, but the chilling reality is that Senator Moore’s discreetly eugenic tract was tabled, in the name of 41 MPs and senators, in the same week as a German doctor was denied Australian residency because of the costs to society of caring for his boy with Down syndrome.

For tragic historical reasons, if such a document were ever tabled in the German parliament, there would be no hint of comedy.
Dr David van Gend

Mackenzie House Medical Centre

Toowoomba, Qld

HEATHER Macdonald’s attempt (Letters, 4/11) to defend the propriety of the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance’s influence on the Parliamentary Group on Population and Development is weak in the extreme.

If, as she claims, the provision of the secretariat to this Parliamentary Group is a “professional relationship”, why doesn’t the ARHA representative leave her agendas at the door when operating as its secretary? Why have members of the group suddenly found that a submission that was supposed to represent their views is word for word the same as the submission of the ARHA?

It is also a rather lame claim to say that the ARHA doesn’t promote abortion. It has on its website as its only two current domestic issues supporting organisations and activists in the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Victoria and its involvement in the RU486 campaign. It touts as its “partners” some of the biggest abortion providers in the country.

As we are tightening up on lobbyists, the Government might do well to include training for organisations like this on what a professional relationship is, before they provide secretariats to parliamentary groups we all think are giving their own considered opinion.

Angela Shanahan is spot on—thanks for the revelation.
Dr Jane Taylor

Canberra, ACT

Furthermore, there is a comment at the on-line edition from a pro-abortion person who reveals more of the horror of the pro-abortion movement:

Iris Ashton Thu 06 Nov 08 (08:46am)

The abortion is not to save the cost of their care, but to save the anguish and heartache of the parents when after many hard years of caring for a deformed or disabled child they find they can no longer give the adult child their care and have to depend on a nursing home or the child’s siblings. It is also to save the child itself the anguish of a life of pain utterly dependent on others. Also to save the siblings of that child the efforts to help the disabled child and to save them from having to care for said child in later life.

Everyone is entitled to have a normal healthy life and if any family can be save the anguish of a life time of caring for a disabled child, who in many cases will not even know them, then that is what this law will provide.
(my emphasis)

Note the aversion to ‘dependence’, which is quite telling. We Christians know that we are completely dependent on God, Who not only created us but keeps us in existence from moment to moment. But the secularist philosophy is one of radical detachment, autonomy and independence, so naturally any reliance on others is viewed with varying degrees of horror. Hence, also, the secularist support for euthanasia as a way of ‘freeing’ the infirm from being a ‘burden on society’. But of course, as this letter also reveals, it is not primarily for the relief of the dependent party from their ‘burden’, but for the release of society from the burden—hence the commenter speaks firstly of the ‘suffering’ of the parents, with the suffering of the child an “also”, a secondary consideration. Msgr. Anthony Fisher summarised the pro-death position quite well when he said ‘it’s not about putting Granny out of her misery, but about putting Granny out of our misery’. Comments like the one from Ms Ashton are useful for reminding us of what we are up against.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
6.XI.2008 A.D.

How to write an article on a matter of justice without examining too closely whether justice has been served

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/judge-rules-youths-be-taken-out-of-adult-jail/2008/09/19/1221331207054.html

Ms Adele Horin shows us the way. In an article in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herod she reported the following:

IN A victory for prisoner rehabilitation, a Supreme Court judge has ordered three young offenders be removed from adult jails and returned to juvenile detention centres by Monday to complete their sentences.

Now here’s a quick concordance for you: the word rehabilitation appears seven times in the article, while the word justice appears six times, but only ever as part of a name, such as the Department of Juvenile Justice or when referring to Mr. Justice Johnson, the judge in question. The word punishment appears only once, and also only as part of a name (‘punishment cell’). So Ms Horin’s focus is exclusively on rehabilitation, which is distinct from and subordinate to strict legal justice. No doubt she adheres to the notion of ‘restorative justice’, which usually ends up being no kind of justice at all, and would have been foreign to not only the Catholic authors but also the great figures of pagan antiquity and the more clear-thinking luminaries of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, such as Kant. And yet this mangled conception of justice has infested the judiciary in Australia and presumably much of the West.

Ms Horin also uses at least one dodgy journalistic technique. Early in the piece she says that the youngsters in question (all of whom were eighteen or over)

were transferred to adult jails in April despite court orders they serve their sentences in a juvenile facility until age 21 because of special circumstances that can include developmental delay, mental health issues, and rehabilitation prospects.
(my emphasis)

Presumably she lists them in this order so as to elicit our sympathy. Yet Ms Horin leaves the reader to infer from the following point:

[Mr. Justice Johnson] said consideration had not been given to the circumstances of the three, in particular, "the powerful body" of evidence that pointed to their progress in rehabilitation, and education and training, in the detention centre.

that in fact rehabilitation prospects were just about the only circumstances considered and that there was no question of psychological problems (which is surprising, given how liberally ‘psychological problems’ are invoked these days, especially with regard to the grounds for abortion). This is especially likely given that presumably Ms Horin would have specified any such circumstances if there had been any, in order to heighten the reader’s sympathy.

(And, predictably, Ms Horin managed to smuggle a purported ‘human rights breach’ into the article, when she quotes a psychoanalyst saying that

it appeared young offenders' rights had been compromised due to management putting pressure on psychologists to change their reports.

Someone who is not afraid to ask the hard questions of justice, however, is Dr. David van Gend in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly.

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=3&subclassID=44&articleID=4929&class=Features&subclass=Feature%20articles

In connection with the imminent Victorian abortion free-for-all, he wonders

[b]y what wild superstition do legislators believe that a 24-week baby is a citizen deserving of all protection when wrapped in hospital blankets, but mere human waste when wrapped in the womb? I have held a baby born at 24 weeks, and if somebody attempted to assault her I would defend her. By what principle of justice do legislators conclude that there should be no restraint on adults who would assault the same baby when trapped in the womb?

I wonder whether the abortionist who was trying one minute to kill Miss Gianna Jessen and then signing her birth certificate the next (http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/09/09/on-burning-babies-alive/) asked himself these questions?

Reginaldvs Cantvar