Last week friends from Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School sent me an article in the Yale Daily News that covered the Reproductive Rights Action League at Yale (RALY) and the Yale Medical Students for Choice commemoration of Roe v. Wade. While other students were participating in the March for Life, these Ivy Leaguers were performing mock abortions–and generating a huge crowd of 15 people. Here’s what one of the organizers–a medical student at Yale–was reported as saying:

“It’s not as scary as it seems. It’s just blood and mucus,” Khoury said, referring to the fetus remains in the device. She added, “You’ll be able to see arms and stuff, but still just miniscule.” …

“Often times, women are crying and cursing and saying they’re going to hell,” Khoury said. “It may be a quick and easy medical procedure, but it definitely is a very involved social-medical procedure.”

The presenters also urged the crowd to become involved in the abortion-rights movement by joining Reproductive Health Externships, a campaign in which volunteers are taught how to conduct abortions. “It’s fun because you meet people from all over the country who do them,” Khoury said. “It’s pretty inspiring.”

I wanted to share Khoury’s inspiration with FT readers, but I couldn’t link to the story last week because Yale Daily News took it down from their website. Later in the week, a different, sanitized, article went up in its place–writen by Khoury!

LifeSiteNews has the story here.

In Reply to A. Dulles, S.J.

There once was a poet named Keats
Whom the would-be lampoonist defeats.
Even Cardinal Dulles,
Despite his keen skull, is
Confusing Keats’ iamb for cleats.

Last week, Amanda wrote about Elizabeth Marquardt’s fascinating studies on the inner lives of children of divorce. On Sunday, Marquardt had an equally fascinating essay in the Washington Post about the living–and dying–of the adults of divorce.

Here’s a bit from the beginning:

My friend isn’t alone in her uncertainty. Because of profound changes in how Americans organize and sustain — and often break up — our families, our nation will soon confront a never-before-seen shift in how we die and whom we’ll have around us when we do. And the likelihood is that on every level, we will be dying much more alone.

Reduced birth rates, widespread divorce, single-parent childbearing, remarriage and what we might call “re-divorce” are poised to usher in an era of uncertain obligation and complicated grief for the many adults confronting the aging and dying of their divorced parents, stepparents and ex-stepparents. And compared with the generations before them, these dying parents and parent figures will be far less likely to find comfort and help in the nearby presence of grown daughters and sons.

She closes with this:

The situation with stepparents is even more complex. In his study, Temple University’s Davey found that aging stepparents were only half as likely as biological parents to receive care from grown children. “Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for stepchildren’s responsibility,” he observed.

You can say that again. All stepchildren and stepparents forge a relationship in their own way. Some become deeply attached, some are virtually strangers, many fall somewhere in between. Even when stepchildren and stepparents are close, the deep ambiguity of the relationship can make losing a stepparent to death or divorce a profoundly lonely experience for the child. A friend told me about a colleague who had recently nursed her beloved stepmother, a woman she had grown up with, during a long illness. Even as she mourned her stepmother’s death, the woman was mystified and hurt by the lack of support she had received from many friends and co-workers, who’d wondered why she would go out of her way to provide long-term, hands-on care to someone who was “only” a stepmother.

Her story was all too familiar to me. When I was 13, my beloved stepfather took his own life. He and my mother had been divorced for several years, but from the time I was 3 years old until they separated when I was 9, he had been my in-the-home father, a man I’d fallen in love with not long after my mother had. His death was devastating for all of us, but my immense grief, which stretched through my teenage years and into my 20s, was made all the more lonely and isolating because almost no one around me — friends, teachers, many members of my extended family — recognized that I’d lost anyone of importance at all.

As the generation that ushered in widespread divorce ages, an epidemic of such lonely grief may well sweep in behind it. Much of the expert literature on death and dying implicitly assumes an intact family experience. It assumes that people grow up with their mothers and fathers, who are married to each other when one of them dies. Some scholars are beginning to investigate aging and dying in families already visited by divorce. But most scholars and the public still give scant attention to the loss of other parent figures or to the deeply complicating, long-lasting effects of family fragmentation.

Nearly 40 percent of today’s adults have experienced their parents’ divorce. Increasing numbers of younger adults were born to parents who never married each other at all. I am certain, because I’m one of those living it, that the painful contours of the new American way of death will be discovered and defined by my own generation for years to come.

In the New York Times today, David Kuo and John J. DiIulio have an op/ed on faith-based initiatives: “The Faith to Outlast Politics.” Kuo and DiIulio are the former deputy director and director (respectively) of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Jim Nuechterlein reviewed DiIulio’s new book, Godly Republic, in the February issue of First Things; I did a review of the book back in November for National Review.

The op/ed reiterates many of the arguments from the book (along with arguments from Kuo’s book Tempting Faith) and applies them, in light of last night’s State of the Union address, to the current campaigns:

President Bush has promised much. It will be left to the next president to deliver on those promises. The good news is that every major presidential candidate seems open to doing just that.

Hillary Clinton has declared that there is no contradiction between “support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles.” John McCain has supported the idea especially as it relates to improving educational programs for disadvantaged children. Barack Obama describes faith-based programs as a “uniquely powerful way of solving problems” especially where former prisoners and substance abusers are concerned. When he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney created his own faith-based office.

Politicians from both parties have come to realize that faith-based programs are indispensable even if they are not miraculous. America’s churches, synagogues, mosques and other congregations supply dozens of major social services — like day care, homeless shelters and anti-violence programs — worth billions of dollars each year, as Ram Cnaan, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, has proved in several studies. Dr. Cnaan is not even counting the work done by inner-city religious schools and other local faith-based programs. From coast to coast, the primary beneficiaries of these services are low-income children and families who are not otherwise affiliated with the religious nonprofit organizations that serve them.

The Constitution is no longer a potential obstacle to a successful faith-based initiative in the White House. In several cases decided since 2001, the Supreme Court has clarified that even “pervasively sectarian” religious nonprofit organizations remain tax-exempt and can receive government social service grants on the same basis as secular nonprofit organizations. Their eligibility is constitutionally secure so long as they do not proselytize or engage in sectarian instruction; serve all persons without regard to religion; follow applicable federal anti-discrimination laws; and use public monies only to serve grant-specified secular purposes.

“Follow applicable federal anti-discrimination laws.” That clause may cause a dust storm in the coming days, but first, it seems, at the state level. Consider the case of Colorado. Here’s how Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, summarized the moves of the Colorado House Majority Leader, Alice Madden (D):

Last year the Colorado legislature enacted a state version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which forces businesses to forfeit their religious convictions in matters of firing, hiring, and promotion regardless of a person’s faith, age, gender, or sexual orientation. In a classic move to abate opposition from the religious community, they exempted religious organizations like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army that provide social services. Madden, who supported the exemption last year, has now introduced H.B. 1080, a bill that would put religious charities under these onerous requirements and clearly violate the religious tenets of many of them.

Archbishop Charles Chaput, has promised to close down Catholic Charities in Denver if this bill passes:

In its effect, HB 1080 would attack the religious identity of religious nonprofits serving the wider community. And since Catholic nonprofits play a major role in serving the needy through organizations like Catholic Charities — in fact, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Denver is the largest non-government human services provider in the Rocky Mountain West — Catholics will bear a disproportionate part of the damage.

House Bill 1080 would greatly hinder any Catholic entity which receives state money from hiring or firing employees based on the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church. Many non-Catholics already work at Catholic Charities. But the key leadership positions in Catholic Charities obviously do require a practicing and faithful Catholic, and for very good reasons. Catholic Charities is exactly what the name implies: a service to the public offered by the Catholic community as part of the religious mission of the Catholic Church.

Catholic Charities has a long track record of helping people in need from any religious background or none at all. Catholic Charities does not proselytize its clients. That isn’t its purpose. But Catholic Charities has no interest at all in generic do-goodism; on the contrary, it’s an arm of Catholic social ministry. When it can no longer have the freedom it needs to be “Catholic,” it will end its services. This is not idle talk. I am very serious.

And he concludes with this:

Finally and quite candidly, one of the Catholic community’s deepest concerns in regard to HB 1080 is the bill’s source. I’ve heard from quite a few Catholics over the past week; Catholics who find HB 1080 offensive, implicitly bigoted, and designed to bully religious groups out of the public square. But the Colorado Catholic Conference has also heard — repeatedly — that the Anti-Defamation League has been a primary force behind this bad bill. I hope that isn’t true. It would be a very serious disappointment. I invite and encourage the Anti-Defamation League to disassociate itself from this ill-conceived piece of legislation. And I strongly urge Catholics to contact their state representatives, urging them to vote against this bill.

This is saddening, but not surprising. Religious liberty and non-discrimination clauses, especially, as Maggie Gallagher has persuasively argued, when applied to same-sex issues, will be very important in coming years. Archbishop Chaput has provided a good example on how to respond. Read the entire column.

Anthony, the Office Linebacker is all fine and good–I don’t drink coffee anyway–but what this office really needs is the Evangelism Linebacker: “As a fish was created to swim in water, as a bird was created to fly, I was created to knock people out who don’t evangelize.”

A junior fellow who shall remain nameless (Nathaniel Peters, graduate of Swarthmore College, photo and other identifying marks to follow) forwarded this YouTube video to me with extreme prejudice.

I don’t get it . . . the gentleman in the red jersey obviously enjoys an intense work ethic and dedication to obtaining the group’s goals in a timely fashion.

Now get back to work, Nathaniel, or, as the sign on my office door says, “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”