Gung Hay Fat Choy!

'Tis the Year of the Dawg.

Mel Gibson: Something Other Than Catholic

The world famous actor buys his, uh, eccentric father, Hutton, his very own Rad Trad church.

Anna Benson: Duh

The former stripper and wife of Major League Baseball pitcher Kris Benson reveals how being liberal does not equate with being very, well, informed.


Brazen baseball wife Anna Benson blasted the Mets last night for tossing her pitcher hubby a curve via a trade to Baltimore.

The buxom Benson feels she was "misled" by management — which insists she's not why Kris was shipped south.

"If he was traded because of any potential talks with . . . Playboy or anything like this, that's a dirty, nasty, rotten trick — and I think that's really freedom-of-speech infringement," she charged.

Is it a Mortal Sin to Torture Captured Terrorists?

Maybe there's some other provision I missed, but this is the closest thing I could find on the subject from the Catechism:

Paragraph 2297: Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.

I don't know about you, and I'm certainly no theologian, but it just isn't clear to me from this language that the Church regards torture as being intrinsically evil. Indeed, it could even be argued that the Church perceives the commission of torture as being the equivalent of intentionally hurting someone's feelings. It' not nice, but it's hardly a mortal sin. Muddling the picture even more is the fact that this Catechism provision is written within the context of kidnapping, hostage taking, and terrorism, which are all expressly said to be either immoral and gravely unjust. So even if one were to assume that torture is gravely immoral, it appears to only be so in limited circumstances.

Any thoughts?

Update: From Paragraph 80 of Veritatis Splendor:

The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such [intrinsically evil] acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator".

Now, it should be noted that the Second Vatican Council never actually called torture intrinsically evil. I also wonder whether John Paul II correctly used the above quote from Guadiam et Spes given that deportation is among the items listed. Surely, there are circumstances when deporting someone is justified.

Jimmy Carter: American Embrassment

The Great Terrorist Enabler strikes again.

Speaking of the devil, I just started reading Steven Hayward's fairly recent political biographyof America's worst ex-President.

Triumph of Catholicism, but not the Catholic Church, in America

An insightful analysis by Joseph Bottum at The Weekly Standard on the significance of Sam Alito's ascendency to the SCOTUS. (link via Amy Welborn)

This may be the best time in American history to be a Catholic, and it may also be the worst: a moment of triumph after 200 years of outsiderness, and an occasion of mockery and shame. It is an era in which a surprisingly large portion of the nation's serious moral analysis seems to derive from Catholic sources. But it is also a day in which Monsignor Eugene Clark--an influential activist and Fulton J. Sheen's successor as rector of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral--can be named an adulterer in a divorce petition and photographed checking into a hotel with his hot-panted secretary, to the weeks-long titillation of New York's tabloids: "Beauty and the Priest," ran the headline in the Daily News. Catholicism is the most visible public philosophy in America, and the Catholic Church is a national joke.

That's not necessarily a contradiction. Indeed, there might even be a connection between the rising rhetorical influence of Catholicism and the declining political influence of the Church. Since its founding, the United States has always had a source of moral vocabulary and feeling that stands at least a little apart from the marketplace and the polling booth--from both the economics of capitalism and the politics of democracy that otherwise dominate the nation. For much of American history, that source was the moral sense shared by the various Protestant denominations, and it influenced everything from the Revolution to the civil-rights movement.

Somewhere in the last 50 years, however, the mainline Protestant churches went into catastrophic decline. The reasons are complex, but the result is clear. By the 1970s, a hole had opened at the center of American public life, and into that vacuum were pulled two groups that had always before stood on the outside, looking in: Catholics and evangelicals.

Their meeting produced one of the least likely alliances in the nation's history, and it can be parsed in dozens of different ways. "Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft," the New Republic claimed this month as it attempted to explain the Catholic ascendancy on the Supreme Court. That explanation is, as Christianity Today replied, mostly just a condescending update of the Washington Post's old insistence that evangelicals are "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." But the New Republic was at least right that the rhetorical resources of Catholicism--its ability to take a moral impulse born from religion and channel it into a more general public vocabulary and philosophical analysis--have come to dominate conservative discussions of everything from natural-law accounts of abortion to just-war theory.

Waaaaa....!

Kathy Shaidle remembers and reviews the all-time kung-fu classic Enter the Dragon. (I still don't get why there were bunch of Chinese drunks locked up in a cell in the basement).

Weren't Stalin and Mao Atheists?

Atheist Mullah Richard Dawkins issues a fatwa against religion, Christianity in particular.


In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics," he says.

Dawkins, using his visit to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, criticizes conservative U.S. evangelicals and warns his audience of the influence of "Christian fascism" and "an American Taliban."

(..)

In part two, "The Virus of Faith," Dawkins attacks the teaching of religion to children, calling it child abuse.

"Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods," he says. "It's time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. Isn't it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents' religion?"

"Sectarian religious schools," Dawkins asserts, have been "deeply damaging" to generations of children.

Dawkins, who makes no effort to disguise his atheism and contempt for religion, focuses on the Bible, too.

"The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist," he says. Dawkins then criticizes Abraham, compares Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and calls the New Testament "St Paul's nasty, sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin."

Not on University Time You're Not

Cohabiting professors at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota are shocked over being told they work for an institution that believes there is such a thing as sin and therefore must get separate rooms when traveling with university students.

Ellen Kennedy and Leigh Lawton never thought their sleeping arrangement was an issue, but the university insists it goes against Catholic values.

Kennedy has been living with fellow professor, Leigh Lawton for twelve years. They are not married and both teach at the University of Saint Thomas which is a Catholic school.

"I'm not Catholic," says Kennedy, "Leigh is not Catholic and there has never been anything that's been forthcoming, that says these are the tenets of the Catholic Church."

Because Kennedy and Lawton aren't married, school officials say, they must book separate hotel rooms when on the road. But Kennedy says the real issue stems from a newspaper article in the November 11 edition of the campus newspaper about a former choir director at the school, who is gay. She canceled plans to travel with students to France after being told that having her partner travel with the choir presented a moral dilemma for students.

I Need to be an Anti-American Jew Hater

So that I can get a nice and cushy teaching job at a public university and/or college.


A U.S.-based Saudi professor and former U.N. fellow says he agrees with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust is a "myth" and says America eventually will collapse like the Soviet Union.

Abdullah Mohammad Sindi, who has taught at four American schools, told Iran's Mehr News Agency Dec. 26, "I agree wholeheartedly with President Ahmadinejad."

"There was no such a thing as the 'Holocaust,'" Sindi said, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute. "The so-called 'Holocaust' is nothing but Jewish-Zionist propaganda. There is no proof whatsoever that any living Jew was ever gassed or burned in Nazi Germany or in any of the territories that Nazi Germany occupied during World War II."

Sindi, who maintains a website, has taught at the University of California at Irvine, California State University at Pomona, Cerritos College and Fullerton College – all in the Los Angeles area. He also taught political science at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.

Eh, Well. Maybe Next Year

USC lost. *sigh* On a totally unrelated note, I'm almost done reading Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment. Pretty insightful and informative, and it has really changed my mind on the justification for interning and evacuating people of Japanese descent from the U.S. West Coast during WWII. Like most people who have been fed half-truths on this matter, I used to think it was unjustified, but not anymore.

Even the Mighty Fail

This is a few weeks old, but I just ran across this item about the former dean of Stanford Law School, Kathleen Sullivan, not passing the California Bar Exam. Also noted in this report is the fact that it took former California Governor Pete Wilson four times to pass the Bar, and current mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaragosa, never did pass.

Happy New Year!

And go 'SC! Beat the Cows!

Hey There

Been kind of ill the past couple of weeks, and well, I just haven't been much inspired to blog about anything. Hopefully, things will change after the new year.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November

While surfing around The Matrix website, I discovered that the Wachowski brothers are coming out with a new movie next year called V for Vendetta.

At first, when I saw some information about who Guy Fawkes was, I thought this movie was about the Gunpowder Plot. Turns out, it's a fictional story about a masked freedom fighter, played by Hugo Weaver (aka Agent Smith in The Matrix movies) who resists the forces of totalitarianism in futuristic Britain. The mask this freedom fighter wears is apparently the face of Guy Fawkes.

V for Vendetta looks like an entertaining movie, but I'd personally be more intrigued if it was about the failed plan to free persecuted Catholics in Protestant Britain.

From the Heart of Mormonism to the Heart of Hedonism

The new Archbishop of San Francisco is George Niederauer. I hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling he's a Cardinal Mahoney clone.

Father Niederauer’s first priestly assignment was as assistant pastor at Our Lady of the Assumption Parish, Claremont. In 1966, he completed a Doctor of Philosophy degree in English Literature from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

From 1972-1994, he served as spiritual director at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. During those years he was also an instructor in Spiritual Theology. From 1987-1992, he served as rector of the seminary. From 1992-1994, he co-directed the Cardinal Manning House of Prayer for priests in Los Angeles.

Not Just for "Old" Guys

After a few years of "thinking about it," I finally got around to joining the Knights of Columbus. Since it seems as though I'm the only attorney in my local Council, I'm sort of curious to know whether there are very many lawyers who are Knights.

Initial Impression: Not Good

Ahnuld taps Carol Corrigan, an apparent RINO and CINO, to replace Janice Rogers Brown on the California Supreme Court.

Corrigan has long been active in the Roman Catholic Church and in Catholic charities. In response to questions, she said the church's views on such issues as abortion and homosexuality may not necessarily reflect her beliefs, nor would she ever permit her religion to influence her legal decisions.

"I was raised to believe that everybody has an obligation to inform their own conscience, and that is my understanding of the Catholic tradition as well," she said.

"Judges," she added, "should not impose their privately held views on the body politic."

If Only They Were Allowed to Marry

Another school teacher is criminally charged for sexually molesting students.

Totus Tuus

Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Did you remember to go to Mass?