A Las Vegas Catholic Priest is facing charges of attempted murder, kidnapping, and battery with the intent to commit sexual assault. 52-year-old George Chaanine allegedly beat a female Church employee. The woman was not sexually assaulted, but police working with the Sex Crimes Unit found that the encounter “had sexual connotations.”
Chaanine was put on “administrative leave.” Another one bites the dust.
As a whole, Catholic Priests are dropping like flies. Pam at Pandagon notes:
BTW, the numbers are staggering, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 2005 there were about 42,000 priests nationwide, which is a 29% decline since 1965. Back at that time there were 549 parishes without a resident priest. Today there are 3,200 with a vacancy. That’s a dying church, and Benedict’s hard-headedness will ensure its rapid decline here in the States.
This new North Dakota legislation is seriously disturbing.
The legislation that was approved, 61-26, seeks to ban abortion except when it is necessary to save a woman’s life. Any other abortion would be a felony crime, punishable by a five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine.
The bill also gives the parents of a pregnant girl younger than 18, and the father of an unborn child, the right to sue to stop an abortion. It now goes to the state Senate for additional review.
The bill only goes into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned, simply because it’s so insanely contradictory to the Supreme Court’s ruling. But I think I may be misunderstanding the media’s portrayal of the bill, because if abortion is illegal in all cases except those in which it is required to save a woman’s life, would suing to stop an abortion basically be condemning a woman to death in order to save a fetus?
65-year-old Nell Hamm fought off a mountain lion with a branch and a ballpoint pen when it attacked and pinned her husband, Jim, towards the end of the couple’s 10-mile hike.
Nell Hamm did all the right things. She approached and screamed at the lion. Then she grabbed a branch and began beating it on its back.
“It wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard I hit it,” she said in an interview at Mad River Community Hospital Thursday, where her husband was in intensive care recovering from surgery.
Jim Hamm, who was trying to tear at the face of the cat, told his wife to grab a pen from his pocket and stab the cat in the eyes. She did, but the pen broke.
“That lion never flinched,” she said. “I just knew it was going to kill him.”
Nell Hamm picked up the branch again and this time slammed it butt-end into the cat’s snout. The lion had ignored her until then. Finally, she had its attention. The cat stepped back, and glared at her with its ears pinned back.
Mrs. Hamm feared that the mountain lion would attack her, but it instead retreated back into the forest. Mr. Hamm is receiving medical care for his injuries.
Wow.
Feministe has a downright frightening post about the girls of puritygirls.com, a fundamentalist Christian website that encourages young women to completely repress their sexuality until marriage - no kisses, no touching, period. Jill quotes multiple forum posts where girls are told to blame themselves when boys lust after them, as they “bear part of the sin” for having dared to look attractive. It’s not difficult to see the harm this indoctrination has had on these kids; one regretful girl tells of the ’scars’ she still has because she ‘messed up.’ Her story:
I agree totally!!!!! God is gonna write my love story!! The thing is, that when you do mess up, it’s hard to forgive yourself! I have never had sex outside of marriage,(Thank goodness!), but when I was younger, 5,6,7, I kissed a guy. Not on the lips, but it still leaves a scar. I knew better than that then too! I didn’t know how it would effect me in the future obviously, and I didn’t totally know all about purity, but I knew not to go around kissing boys! I feel soooo bad now, and it is soo hard sometimes to forgive myself for it! Purity is sooo important, and whether you can see it now or not, even something as small as a kiss can effect you!
STAY STRONG IN PURITY!!!!
Young women also discuss feminism, which is apparently bringing about the family apocalypse. Many of the girls agree that women should not be permitted to teach men, hold any level of leadership (”Exception: If there is no male person available to do the job needed, then a woman could step up to the job needing to be filled, and fill it until a man is available to do the job”), or ‘feminize’ men by having a career that supports the family. Talk about taking a step backwards.
Jill makes a good point: many of these girls are intelligent and thoughtful young women. Hopefully they’ll grow to respect themselves enough to realize that they don’t deserve to be treated as second-class citizens just because they happen to be female.
Check out this letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post:
Regarding the Jan. 13 letter by Jatrice Martel Gaiter, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, about mandatory vaccination for human papillomavirus (HPV):
Perhaps instead of vaccinating young people to prevent a disease transmitted by (promiscuous) sexual relations, or promoting artificial birth control and abortion to alleviate the problem of unwanted pregnancy due to promiscuous sex, Planned Parenthood and the District government should promote abstinence programs, whose main side benefit would be respect for the dignity of young women.
ISABELLE BUCHANAN
Kensington
Maybe nobody told Isabelle, but sperm doesn’t stop to question whether or not you’re ‘promiscuous’ as it’s making its way to the egg. As for HPV, 20 million Americans are infected and the virus doesn’t give a shit whether it’s being passed on through casual sex, intimacy in a long-term relationship, or marital relations.
It’s a moot point anyway, because Planned Parenthood does promote absintence as a 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy and the transmission of STDs. However, the organization recognizes that the big disadvantage to Abstinence-Only education is that most people will someday have sex - and without the proper education and willpower, they may be unprepared to protect themselves from STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Outside of Isabelle’s world, there’s no dignity in abstaining early on only to become a human incubator against your will later.
I am for options.
I am for voluntary abstinence, contraception variety and availability, and sex education.
I am for safe abortion, adoption options, and motherhood.
I am for those women who choose to be mothers, those who will choose to be mothers, and those who choose to not be mothers.
I am for freedom, self-determination, and choice.
Feministe has a great article on the Post-Abortion pseudosyndrome with references from The New York Times’ cover story, “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?” The story focuses on Rhonda Arias, an “abortion recovery counselor” with a past of substance abuse, rape, and multiple abortions. Unlike most other women who’ve undergone abortion procedures, Arias believes that many of her personal problems stem from her abortions - and that legalized abortion is the conspiring puppetmaster of national social ills.
Because of this knowledge, she is now equally certain, she slipped into years of depression, drinking and freebasing cocaine. One night when she was in her early 30s, she got as high as she could, lay down in the dark in a bathtub filled with water and slit her wrists. In her mind, all of her troubles — the drugs, the suicide attempt, the third and fourth abortions she went on to have, the wrestling match of a marriage she eventually entered — are the aftermath of her own original sin, the 1973 abortion. It’s a pattern she sees reflected everywhere: “In America we have a big drug problem, and we don’t realize it’s because of abortion.”
Of course, there’s no credible research to suggest that abortion causes substance abuse, just like there’s no credible research to back the idea that abortion is characteristically harmful - studies have shown (and experts have agreed) that the psychological risks posed by abortion are no greater than the risks associated with childbirth following an unwanted pregnancy. In fact, a firm majority of women feel relieved - not guilty - after their abortions.
However, the anti-choice movement has a lot to gain from falsely assuming that all women are traumatized by their abortions. By claiming that abortion hurts women, they can go on to suggest that a ban on abortion would protect women from their own freedoms. And while this may seem like an effective platform for the misinformed, it never has been (and never will be) the real focus of anti-abortion leaders.
“For every woman who has suffered trauma as a result of an abortion, I bet you could find half a dozen who would say it was the best decision they ever made,” he told me. “And in any case, suffering isn’t the same as immorality.” Beckwith speaks at churches and colleges, and he says that most anti-abortion leaders don’t want the woman-protective argument to supersede the traditional fetus-centered focus, “because that’s where the real moral force is.”
These tensions surfaced in the campaign to retain South Dakota’s abortion ban. The state leader for the anti-abortion side, Leslee Unruh, who had an abortion in her 20s, called on post-abortive women to campaign and started a state tour for them called Fleet for Little Feet. Unruh says, “My strategy was to put the women on TV and have them tell their stories.” But the national pro-life groups refused to send her money to run those TV ads early in the election cycle, she says. “They won’t acknowledge women as the first victim. We’re always second to the baby.”
Wait… pro-life groups put women second to unborn fetuses? This is news.
As Jill at Feministe notes, the end of the article is an insightful and well-informed evaluation of the historical and current manipulation of women through avenues such as the so-called Post-Abortion syndrome.
At the prison the day before, I watched the inmates drink in Arias’s preaching, too. Abortion-rights leaders would accuse her of manipulation, of instilling guilt in women to serve the anti-abortion movement’s political ends. But Rhonda Arias ministers from the heart; the lack of scientific support for her ideas merely underscores that she is a true believer.
Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave of unfounded reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too — by preventing them from having the same choices.
And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven.
In Tipton County, Tennessee, sex education has been outsourced to a pro-life, privately-funded Christian counseling center. The name of the new abstinence-only program is “Why kNOw,” which pretty much sums up its intentions to not teach anything about sex but how great it is not to have it. Forget that the vast majority of these kids will have sex at some point in their lives; they don’t need to be taught trivial information like how to protect themselves from STDs or unwanted pregnancy - everyone knows that nothing bad like that ever comes from sex when you’re married, and the 95% of Americans who’ve had premarital sex are just dirty whores who deserve what they get.