Culture War: August 2005 Archives

From the "Kyrie eleison" file:

CANTON, Ohio -- There are 490 female students at Timken High School, and 65 are pregnant, according to a recent report in the Canton Repository....

According to the Canton Health Department, statistics through July show that 104 of the 586 babies born to Canton residents in Aultman Hospital and Mercy Medical Center had mothers between 11 and 19.

Let that sink in: nevermind that the overwhelming majority of them are unmarried, there was at least one 11-year-old girl who had a baby in the last year -- and that fact wasn't even remarkable to the reporter.

Kyrie eleison.

At Catholic Light, we have occasionally been accused of being shills of President Bushitler and his merry band of oil-stealing fascists in league with the neocon Zionist intergalactic conspiracy. Point well taken, although if we are shills, we demand a raise, or at least a vacation home in the Gaza Strip.

So it is with great regret that I must disagree with my Republican puppetmasters, who are objecting to the creation of an .xxx top-level domain for the Internet. Cities used to have red-light districts, and the authorities looked the other way as long as the smut stayed within strict limits. If the pimps or pornographers oozed out of their little box, the cops would make sure they were smacked back in.

When I lived in San Diego for a summer, I noticed that the "gentlemen's clubs" and filth peddlers were located in normal-looking business and residential neighborhoods. Even in my local area, there is at least one "adult" movie store on a well-traveled highway, though it is reasonably discreet. Personally, I like the red-light districts better. You know where to avoid if you aren't looking to indulge your perversions, and if you are, you have to make a conscious decision to enter.

I would say the same about the .xxx domain. It would be fantastic to simply block those sites at my firewall/router and make sure my kids don't stumble across them. This wouldn't "legitimize" pornography any more than allowing second-level domains that contain the f-word.

This is entirely in keeping with Church teaching, which holds that it is sometimes prudent for a lawful authority to permit an evil if suppressing it would unleash greater evil. There will always be pornography, because of the effects of original sin and the devil's hatred of sex, which causes him to seek its corruption. The question, then, is how to minimize porn's prevalence and effect, and making it easier for parents to protect their children, and creating a virtual red-light district for adults to decide whether they want to enter, would be a step in the right direction.

Like some other bloggers, I received a review copy of Bill Kassel's This Side of Jordan, which I just finished reading. FOr the most part I concure with Curt Jester's review, although I did find it a tad sermonizing in parts (even though I agreed with the content of the sermons). Nevertheless, I must agree that I found Kassel a much smoother novelist than Bud MacFarlane.

Some of the parts I found most humorous in this novel are his observations about modern nuns. Kathy Shaidle would probably concur with Kassel's description of how modern nuns dress and groom -- that is, despite getting rid of the veil and habit, you can still tell a nun in an airport by the way she dresses.

The other enjoyable part is an exchange between an old conservative priest and a boomer modernist priest, where the latter claims homophobia is the greatest threat facing the church. The old priest responds something like "No, I think the greatest threat is homophobephobia -- or the fear of being called a homophobe."

From my little computer in Canada's capital, I wholeheartedly concur. In fact, just blogging this thought is technically a felony in our country, if I am not mistaken. One punishable by up to two years in prison.