Remeber those films you were shown in junior high school that attempted to pass as information about what was happening to your body as you matured?
Here's the film the girls got to see.
My favorite lines:
"See how it sticks to my panties?"
"blood is coming out from inside your body through an opening between your legs" (you'll hear this one over and over and over and....)
"Mom! I put on a pad!"
Nothing like repitition to drive a point home!
Link to The Calm Dreariness via MeFi
Very interesting op-ed piece over on OpinionJournal by Rev. Donald Sensing, the pastor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, Tennessee.
Opponents of legalized same-sex marriage say they're trying to protect a beleaguered institution, but they're a little late. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion.Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.
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Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.
Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.
The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.
When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.
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If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.
Thanks to Discount Blogger for the link!
Link to The Advocate commentary via BillAndKent.com.
It's bad enough that we, as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered men and women have felt the psychological pain of being told we are second-class citizens, that we are "abominations," that we will burn in hell, and that we are "mistakes of nature", but President Bush's message inherent in his endorsement of the Federal Marriage Ammendment has been heard loud and clear.
John D. Moore's commentary says:
Children will listen. Bush’s message in supporting a discriminatory antigay constitutional amendment was clear: Gay people are not part of the American family. So now it’s open season on gays and lesbians—particularly on gay and lesbian youth, who are the most vulnerable. Violence and death will surely follow.When President George W. Bush decided to publicly embrace a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, cloaking his remarks in the guise of religion, he psychologically violated millions upon millions of gay and lesbian youth around the nation as well as the many millions more who are their parents and relatives. In short, Mr. Bush has made it fashionable to declare “open season” on a segment of our society. Make no mistake—his intolerant message was quite clear: “You and your family are not part of the American family.”
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Consider what one 20-year-old student wrote in an essay about this topic in a class I instruct on gender psychology: “I have beaten up faggots before, and I used to feel guilty—not anymore! Bush says fags don’t count, so I guess it’s cool to do it.” To be sure, the president did not say “Faggots don’t count,” but some may see Bush’s comments as the proverbial green light to act out hatefully.
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Yahoo is reporting that Aliso Viejo, CA officials were
so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.Then they learned, to their chagrin, that dihydrogen monoxide — H2O for short — is the scientific term for water.
"It's embarrassing," said City Manager David J. Norman. "We had a paralegal who did bad research."
The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as "an odorless, tasteless chemical" that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.
As a result, the City Council of this Orange County suburb had been scheduled to vote next week on a proposed law that would have banned the use of foam containers at city-sponsored events. Among the reasons given for the ban were that they were made with a substance that could "threaten human health and safety."
The measure has been pulled from the agenda, although Norman said the city may still eventually ban foam cups.
"If you get Styrofoam into the water and it breaks apart, it's virtually impossible to clean up," Norman said.
I've never been a Howard Stern fan. I think my exact description of his show has usually been "a waste of bandwidth." I generally regard him as shock-jock taken way too far.
No, I'm not going to reverse my opinion of his show (neither radio or TV), but, it is interesting that he's pretty much inline with my feelings of the Republicans currently in power in this country.
From Salon.com:
[...]Stern had strongly backed Bush's war on Iraq, but in the past two weeks, he has derided the president as a "Jesus freak," a "maniac" and "an arrogant bastard," while ranting against "the Christian right minority that has taken over the White House." Specifically, Stern has assailed Bush's use of 9/11 images in his campaign ads, questioned his National Guard service, condemned his decision to curb stem cell research and labeled him an enemy of civil liberties, abortion rights and gay rights.
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Link to Salon via Boing Boing