from Susan Lepak
All you moms, enjoy. Everyone else, go hug your mom and tell her Thank You!
My Golden Mama and Her Slow Good-bye
May 11, 2013 By 6 Comments
Let me tell you about my mother.
She is 87 and she gets confused.
She gets confused a lot.
For a couple of years there, every day was a challenge just to keep her alive. We rushed her to the hospital several times so they could drag her back from the edge. Now, her physical health has stabilized, but her mental health is going downhill, a little bit at a time.
She reminds me quite often that I took her car away from her. She’s lost that sense of time that lets the rest of us grieve a loss and then move on, leaving it in our past. When she remembers that she doesn’t have a car, the indignation is as fresh for her as the day it happened. The day I took that car was a sad day for me, too. When she tells me, as she does at least once every day, that I “took” it from her, it re-opens the pain in me, as well.
Other than the car memories, my mother is as sweet as a small child. She accepts whatever I suggest as the best thing and she trusts me the same way my children did when they were little. Like them, she talks almost non-stop, prating along about things that happened, or didn’t happen but that she thinks happened, 60, 70 or even 80 years ago.
For my part, I’ve fallen into the same u-huh, u-huh, answers that I gave my babies when they chattered to me as they “helped” me wash dishes or plant flowers or whatever. I do a lot of the same things with her that I did with them. We sat in the backyard yesterday and counted the blue-jays and the robins to determine which are the most numerous.
The differences are that when I told them something, they remembered it later that day. Mama doesn’t. That, and the fact that my babies were moving forward toward independent life, while Mama is moving inexorably away from independent life and then on to the next life on the other side of this one.
Forgetfulness is a blessing of sorts. At the beginning of this journey, she knew when she forgot and it upset her. Now, she no longer remembers that she doesn’t remember. She’s much happier this way.
I never remind her that she’s asked me that same question several times. I just answer her again. I don’t chide her about calling me 10 times in 15 minutes when I’m at work. I just talk to her each time as if it was the first call; because for her, it is.
I love my mother. I always have. But in some ways, she’s more precious to me now than she ever was before. She is so sweet, and so good. The pretensions we hide our real selves behind are gone from her. Her personality is stripped down to the unself-conscious realness of its bare self. What that is in my mother is a person who is all love, all generosity, trusting and deeply, profoundly innocent.
Caring for her during these years of her slow good-bye has given me the chance to see my mother as she really is without any cover. What I’ve seen is that she is a wonderful person, all the way through.
This is precious time, these years with her. I would not trade them for anything. There are moments, every once in a while, when I miss who she used to be. I would love to just sit down and have a talk with Mama as she was. But that can’t be and I know it, so I run my mental fingers over the weave of the thought and then fold it up, put it away and go back to the reality of the sweet baby Mama I still have.
Old age is not a tragedy. It most certainly is not a waste or a burden to those who aren’t there yet. It is a gift and a treasure; a phase of life like any other. My mother is going through a slow and beautiful passage from this life to the next one. It make take her years yet. Her family is a very long-lived tribe. Or, it may end suddenly, at any time.
Whichever way that happens, I know that she and her ultimate future are in God’s loving hands. I only thank Him for giving me this present time to love and cherish her now. It is, like she is, golden.
Is Government Intelligence a Contradiction in Terms?
May 10, 2013 By 5 Comments
Is that 007 on the right? No! It’s Sister Megan Rice, nemesis of government intelligence.
Is government intelligence a contradiction in terms?
The reason I ask is because an 83-year-old nun and her two not-so-Rambo-esq buddies managed to break into the Y-12 National Security Complex last July and spend two hours putzing around hanging banners and putting up crime scene tape before anybody noticed.
They also sprayed baby bottles filled with human blood on the walls.
Now think about this. An 83-year-old nun breaks into our nation’s top nuclear weapons manufacturing facility and doo-dahs around the missiles for two hours before somebody asks her what she’s doing there.
If that isn’t enough to make you question the intelligence of our intelligence people, consider this. The laff-alot boys put her on trial. And the equally glum jury found her guilty.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll sleep a lot better knowing that Sister Megan Rice of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus is behind bars. Of course, the fact that she managed to do this at our nation’s top nuclear weapons manufacturing facility may still have me tossing and turning a bit.
After all, if an 83-year-old nun can do it, there’s a slight possibility that someone who wants to do more than hang banners and splash blood on the missiles might get in there. We’ve already seen what mass murderers with initiative can do with fertilizer and ball bearings. Do we really want a demonstration of what they can do with nukes?
Putting this elderly nun in jail does not make us safer. In fact, it probably makes us less safe. I regard the whole trial as the brain flab of a bunch of government bureaucrats who got their pants pulled down in public and are angry about it. People like this act like embarrassed cats when their stupidity gets paraded around. That, and not national security, or some slavish devotion to “the law” is the reason for the trial.
If they gave two flips about keeping this country safe, Sister Rice and her elderly cohorts would never have been able to pull this off. Let’s face it. We aren’t safe. And Sister Rice proved it to us.
Instead of sending her to jail, they should pin a medal on her for making the rest of us aware of the scandalous lack of security at this facility — a lack of security that endangers every man, woman and child in this nation. I do think it would be a good idea to delay the medal-pinning ceremony until after they sit the Sister down and ask her how she did it. That might be nice to know.
As for sending people to jail, maybe we should look at whoever is in charge of security at this plant. It sounds like they are guilty of gross negligence and dereliction of duty. Of course, that is the real reason Sister Rice will be snoozing in the big house. These cats are covering their litter with a stupid trial and conviction.
I just hope the security is better at the prison than it is at our nuclear weapons facilities. It’s terrifying to think what might happen if Sister Megan busts out.
From CNA:
.- Sister Megan Rice of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus was convicted May 8 for breaking into and causing damage at a Tennessee nuclear weapons manufacturing facility.
The 83-year-old nun was accompanied in the July break-in by Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, all of whom are members of Transform Now Plowshares. The three were convicted after two-and-a-half hours of jury deliberation.
On May 4, Sr. Mary Ann Buckley, head of the American Province of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, said the order “would like to express our deep concern” over the trial.
“It should be noted that Sr. Megan was arrested as she and two others engaged in a peaceful protest, offering prayer for the thousands who have lost their lives as a result of nuclear weapons,” Sr. Buckley, representing the Society, said.
On July 28, the three protestors cut through security fences to enter the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, which enriches and stores uranium for nuclear weapons.
They hung banners and crime-scene tape, and hammered small chunks off a wall, spending about two hours in the complex before being approached by a guard. (Read more here.)
Sex Change Surgery is the New Prefrontal Lobotomy and a Trendy Form of Child Mutilation
May 10, 2013 By 40 Comments
What do prefrontal lobotomy and sex change surgery have in common from a scientific viewpoint?
Everything.
How are prefrontal lobotomy and sex change surgery different?
Prefrontal lobotomy was never marketed as a “right” for mentally ill people.
Prefrontal lobotomy is one of the grand dragons from the stone knives and bear skin beds era of mental health care. Back in the bad old days, doctors had the habit of “treating” people with mental health problems (or sometimes, just behavioral problems) by sticking what was essentially an ice pick through the top of their eye socket and into their brains and swishing it around.
The result? “Difficult” patients were ever so much nicer now that a big part of the prefrontal lobes of their brains had been disconnected. So … bingo! … doctors had a “cure.”
Today’s prefrontal lobotomy is to “treat” physically normal, healthy people who suffer from a compulsion to mutilate themselves by cutting off their sex organs with surgery that acts out their compulsive illness and actually does remove their sex organs. The follow-up is to put a cosmetic surgery placebo version of the sex organs of their opposite sex on the wound. This plays into their mental illness rather than treats it. It also subjects them to life-long, massive doses of hormones and permanent mutilation.
The major difference between the two “treatments” is that sex change surgery is being promoted as a “human right” by people in the LGBT community and has been taken up as a cause by the brain-dead politically correct media. I am talking about the mutilation of physically healthy and normal people. I am not talking about treatments for people who are born with mixed genitalia. Whenever I write about this topic, I get a smattering of comments calling me a few names for having the temerity to say what is obvious to anyone with a shred of intellectual and moral honesty: This is medical malpractice.
People who suffer from this compulsion are not the beneficiaries of this new trendy. They are its victims. They need real treatment that is based on something approaching science, not politically-motivated mutilation.
I used this analogy in another post: If I went to a doctor and asked him/her to cut off my healthy legs and replace them with prosthesis, they would call for a psych evaluation.
Why then do we behave as if a compulsion to cut off one’s genitals is somehow a healthy impulse?
This tawdry business of faux science enabling the mutilation of healthy people has moved into a sinister new arena. As usual, the brain dead trendies in the politically correct press are hyping it as an advance for human rights.
The new politically correct is to mutilate children with sex change surgeries and massive doses of hormones. A shameful article in the Boston Globe, titled Led by the child who simply knew promoted this horrific form of child abuse for all it was worth. For instance, here’s the summary sell-line that tops the article:
The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Wyatt was a girl to the core, and now lives as one, with the help of a brave, loving family and a path-breaking doctor’s care.
There’s a photo of these twins below the sell line and the caption for the photo reads: “Nicole Maines, 14, her twin brother, Jonas, and their parents have traveled a long, trying road.”
The article itself adds:
… now a groundbreaking clinic at Children’s Hospital in Boston – one of the few of its kind in the world – helps families deal with the issues, both emotional and medical, that arise from having a transgender child – one who doesn’t identify with the gender he or she was born into.
The Children’s Hospital Gender Management Services Clinic can, using hormone therapies, halt puberty in transgender children, blocking the development of secondary sexual characteristics – a beard, say, or breasts – that can make the eventual transition to the other gender more difficult, painful, and costly.
Founded in 2007 by endocrinologist Norman Spack and urologist David Diamond, the clinic – known as GeMS and modeled on a Dutch program – is the first pediatric academic program in the Western Hemisphere that evaluates and treats pubescent transgenders. A handful of other pediatric centers in the United States are developing similar programs, some started by former staffers at GeMS.
It was in that clinic, under Spack’s care, that Nicole and her family finally began to have hope for her future. (Read the rest here.)
This fine piece of objective journalism won the GLAD Award for Outstanding Newspaper Article for 2012. The GLAD award “honors outstanding media images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community that inspire change.”
We have another article from the Mail Online describing how the lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy are putting him through sex change mutilation. This poor little boy, who has started calling himself Tammy instead of Thomas, is undergoing hormone block treatment by means of a hormone suppressant that is implanted in his upper arm. The purpose of this “treatment” is “to stop him from going through puberty as a boy.”
Psychiatrists “diagnosed” this little boy with gender identity disorder when he was seven, after he had threatened gender mutilation on himself. I guess no one thought that this might be a mental health problem and that it might, possibly, be caused by his lesbian mothers. Nope. No child abuse here. This is obviously “gender identity disorder,” and the “treatment” is to mutilate this little boy’s body, as well as his psyche.
From the MailOnline:
The mothers say that one of the first things Thomas told them when he learned sign language aged three – because of a speech impediment – was, ‘I am a girl’.
At age seven, after threatening genital mutilation on himself, psychiatrists diagnosed Thomas with gender identity disorder. By the age of eight, he began transitioning.
This summer, he started taking hormone-blocking drugs, which will stop him from experiencing puberty.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043345/The-California-boy-11-undergoing-hormone-blocking-treatment.html#ixzz2StkXJila
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
The two mothers, who were “married” by a rabbi in 1990, insist that their sexuality has nothing to do with this. Which, I would guess, in today’s trendy, politically correct world, settles it.
When I was first elected for the very first time, back in the dark ages of 1980, a seasoned legislator remarked to me, “There are two groups of people that you will find you can do anything to in this place and no one will stop you: Prisoners and children.”
Thanks to court interventions, that is no longer as true of prisoners. However, in the case of children it has grown much, much worse. We kill children with impunity right up to the moment of their birth, and sometimes afterwards, as well. We have degraded the public schools into propaganda mills for sexually disturbed people to teach their view of life to the young. We push dangerous contraceptives on young girls. We destroy our children’s homes with divorce. We commodify their lives with designer babies and then harvest the bodies of young women for eggs to keep that cycle going.
And now, we are pushing the idea that we can submit young children to dangerous, mutilating “sex changes” because, hey, it’s politically correct and you’ll be called a few names if you object to it.
Ok. Let the name-calling start here.
Sex change surgery on healthy people is not treatment. It’s medical malpractice.
Sex change on children is child abuse and child mutilation. Doctors who do it should lose their license to practice medicine and be sent to prison. Parents who push for it should lose custody of their children, and if they go forward with it, they also should be sent to prison.
No child should be mutilated for politically correctness.
Call me all the names you want. I don’t care.
For further reading, check out Sex Reassignment Surgery for Children? Two Words … CHILD ABUSE
Students Stand Up to Christian Bashing in Public Schools
May 10, 2013 By 3 Comments
This video was produced by Reach America, an education organization based in Coeur d”Alene, Idaho.
Gary Brown, founder of the organization, said that one of the factors that inspired him to create this video, which is named The Thaw, happened last year when a public school teacher asked students to write an essay title, “I Believe,” without using the names God or Jesus in their papers.
Pope Francis and Egypt’s Coptic Pope Tawadros Meet, Pray Together
May 10, 2013 By 3 Comments
There is one Jesus.
Every difference between Christians is a difference that human beings have created. Because there is one Jesus and He is the same Jesus for all of us.
We live in an era with rising violent persecution of Christians in much of the world. That is coupled with a militant secularism that appears to be setting up the framework for legal discrimination and marginalization of Christians in most of the rest of the world.
Christians must stand together against these threats.
It gladdened my heart when I saw the photos of Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros, laughing, talking and praying together.
According to a CNA article, Pope Tawadros had this to say:
“We must prepare our people for this very real and needed unity that we know and live, we must work quickly and seriously,” said Pope Tawadros II in May 10 remarks provided to CNA by his office.
His visit to the Vatican is significant because he leades Egypt’s largest Christian Church with ten million members, as well as historic, since the May 9-13 trip is the first to Rome in 40 years.
“The rising of Islamic parties in countries like Egypt and Syria means Christians are now feeling they are second or third class citizens,” said Father Rafic Greiche, director of the press office for the Catholic Church in Egypt.
“We Egyptian Christians want our brothers of all world churches to help us, to pray for us and to be real brothers in our Lord Jesus Christ,” he told CNA on May 10 in Rome. (Read the rest here.)
I agree with this sentiment. Christians must help Christians.
Here, from Vatican Radio is Pope Francis’ statement:
Your Holiness,
Dear Brothers in Christ,
For me it is a great joy and a truly graced moment to be able to receive all of you here, at the tomb of Saint Peter, as we recall that historic meeting forty years ago between our predecessors, Pope Paul VI and the late Pope Shenouda III, in an embrace of peace and fraternity, after centuries of mutual distrust. So it is with deep affection that I welcome Your Holiness and the distinguished members of your delegation, and I thank you for your words. Through you, I extend my cordial greetings in the Lord to the bishops, the clergy, the monks and the whole Coptic Orthodox Church.
Today’s visit strengthens the bonds of friendship and brotherhood that already exist between the See of Peter and the See of Mark, heir to an inestimable heritage of martyrs, theologians, holy monks and faithful disciples of Christ, who have borne witness to the Gospel from generation to generation, often in situations of great adversity.Forty years ago the Common Declaration of our predecessors represented a milestone on the ecumenical journey, and from it emerged a Commission for Theological Dialogue between our Churches, which has yielded good results and has prepared the ground for a broader dialogue between the Catholic Church and the entire family of Oriental Orthodox Churches, a dialogue that continues to bear fruit to this day. In that solemn Declaration, our Churches acknowledged that, in line with the apostolic traditions, they profess “one faith in the One Triune God” and “the divinity of the Only-begotten Son of God … perfect God with respect to his divinity, perfect man with respect to his humanity”. They acknowledged that divine life is given to us and nourished through the seven sacraments and they recognized a mutual bond in their common devotion to the Mother of God.
We are glad to be able to confirm today what our illustrious predecessors solemnly declared, we are glad to recognize that we are united by one Baptism, of which our common prayer is a special expression, and we long for the day when, in fulfilment of the Lord’s desire, we will be able to communicate from the one chalice.
Of course we are well aware that the path ahead may still prove to be long, but we do not want to forget the considerable distance already travelled, which has taken tangible form in radiant moments of communion, among which I am pleased to recall the meeting in February 2000 in Cairo between Pope Shenouda III and Blessed John Paul II, who went as a pilgrim, during the Great Jubilee, to the places of origin of our faith. I am convinced that – under the guidance of the Holy Spirit – our persevering prayer, our dialogue and the will to build communion day by day in mutual love will allow us to take important further steps towards full unity.
Your Holiness, I am aware of the many marks of attention and fraternal charity that you have shown, since the early days of your ministry, to the Catholic Coptic Church, to its Pastor, Patriarch Ibrahim Isaac Sidrak and to his predecessor, Cardinal Antonios Naguib. The institution of a “National Council of Christian Churches”, which you strongly desired, represents an important sign of the will of all believers in Christ to develop relations in daily life that are increasingly fraternal and to put themselves at the service of the whole of Egyptian society, of which they form an integral part. Let me assure you that your efforts to build communion among believers in Christ, and your lively interest in the future of your country and the role of the Christian communities within Egyptian society find a deep echo in the heart of the Successor of Peter and of the entire Catholic community.
“If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together” (1 Cor 12:26). This is a law of the Christian life, and in this sense we can say that there is also an ecumenism of suffering: just as the blood of the martyrs was a seed of strength and fertility for the Church, so too the sharing of daily sufferings can become an effective instrument of unity. And this also applies, in a certain sense, to the broader context of society and relations between Christians and non-Christians: from shared suffering can blossom forth forgiveness and reconciliation, with God’s help.
Your Holiness, in assuring you of my prayers that the whole flock entrusted to your pastoral care may be ever faithful to the Lord’s call, I invoke the protection of both Saint Peter and Saint Mark: may they who during their lifetime worked together in practical ways for the spread of the Gospel, intercede for us and accompany the journey of our Churches.
Text from page http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/10/pope_francis_welcomes_egypts_coptic_orthodox_pope_tawadros/en1-690886
of the Vatican Radio website
Back to Babel: Did Europeans and Asians Once Speak a Common Language?
May 10, 2013 By 9 Comments
The idea of a universal human language goes back to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.
Now a group of researchers have developed a theory that people living in Europe and Asia 15,000 years ago may have spoken a common language. Of course, other researchers disagree. Which, I guess, will set off years of debate.
An article describing the common language theory was published May 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It claims that the researchers in question have traced “echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age.”
The idea of a common source to language is an interesting one for linguists to explore. Right now, their estimates of when this common language emerged are too indefinite to be meaningful.
I find the discussion intriguing. However, I’ve been around animals enough to believe that language in a rudimentary form is almost ubiquitous among the more intelligent mammals. I realize that’s a somewhat radical statement. But I am using a definition of language that is a bit broader than words and more focused on the ability to communicate.
Also, I live in a bilingual neighborhood. I’ve seen first hand that a pet who has lived in a Spanish-speaking household will stare at you blankly when you speak English. Then, if you switch to Spanish, they respond, and they do it appropriately. That’s completely unscientific, but it has convinced me personally that these pets understand more of our languages than we admit.
This article from LiveScience.com describes the research in a common language among early humans:
The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.
Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as “mother,” “to pull” and “man,” which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.
“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
Tower of Babel
The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. [Image Gallery: Ancient Middle-Eastern Texts]
But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even so, researchers recently said they had traced the roots of a common mother tongue to many Eurasian languages back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey.) (Read the rest here.)
ACLU Joins Lawsuit to Force Medicare to Pay for Sex Change Surgery
May 10, 2013 By 41 Comments
I’m going to get roasted and toasted for this post. It would be hard to say anything more politically incorrect that what my typing fingers are about to type here on this blog.
Let me begin with a vignette from my daily life. A few days ago, I was in a committee meeting in which we were discussing amendments to Oklahoma’s advanced directive laws. Several doctors testified about this legislation. During questions and answers, one of them remarked, “A patient can’t come to a medical practitioner and ask him or her to cut off their healthy legs and have them do it.”
No one on the committee reacted to this statement because it is so obviously true. If I went to a plastic surgeon and asked them to cut off my nose, they would call for a psych evaluation. If I went to a orthopedist and asked him to cut off my hands, he or she would do exactly the same thing.
Why?
Because a persistent compulsion to mutilate myself would be an indication of mental illness.
However, if I went to a doctor and asked him or her to cut off my genital organs and then re-shape the stubby leftovers into the appearance of the genital organs of a man, and if I further demanded that I be given massive doses of hormones to force my body to mimic secondary male characteristics such as a deeper voice and a beard, the doctor and everyone else in our society would be forced under threat of being called a bigot to pretend that this was not a mental health problem, but “normal” behavior on my part.
I could change my name to Regis, dress in a pinstripe suit, use the men’s bathroom and probably go on to demand the right to farm other women’s bodies for eggs in order to create a designer baby for me to raise, if I wanted.
Of course, what I wouldn’t be is an actual man. I would be a surgically and chemically mutilated woman with a serious mental health problem that was going untreated, but whose delusions were being played into socially and medically due to political correctness.
I have all the sympathy in the world for people who suffer from this problem, which is called “severe gender dyphoria.” It must be hell for them. I have witnessed it up close in the person of a member of the clergy at a church I once attended who “came out” as someone who had the body of one sex but felt a compulsion to live as the opposite sex and went through all these grisly procedures to achieve this.
I also am adamantly opposed to any violence or unjust discrimination against transexual people. I don’t want to harm them, but I don’t think that subjecting people to mutilating surgeries and hormone overdoses is treatment. I think it is yielding to social and political pressure to collude with them in the delusions which are a symptom of their real — mental — illness.
I don’t want to muddy the waters here with the small number of people who, through what I regard as birth defects, possess mixed chromosomes that are both male and female and who often also have mixed genitalia. That is something entirely different from what I’m talking about.
What I am referring to are those who are born with normal bodies of one sex, and for whatever reason, develop the belief that they are really the opposite sex and who also feel a compulsion to be surgically and hormonally mutilated to live their lives in accordance with this delusion.
I am also not going to weigh in on whether or not doctors should “treat” them by honoring their delusions and performing surgeries and administering the concomitant hormonal overdoses necessary for the person to look like the sex they are not. I will leave that to the physician and patient, as well as the hospital and insurance company.
What I want to address specifically on this blog is how far society and government should be compelled to go in this politically-correct assumption that this mental illness, is, in fact normal. The question for this particular post is, should medicare pay for sex change operations?
The ACLU has joined a lawsuit demanding that Medicare pay for sex change operations. I don’t know how much these surgeries cost, but I do know that there is talk of Medicare going broke. It seems evil to me that we have public officials, such as the former governor of Colorado, talking about how elderly people have a “duty to die” because they take up too many resources and put too much strain on our health care system and at the same time are being forced to consider funding what is an entirely elective and mutilating surgery to mistreat a mental illness.
The cost of these unnecessary surgeries and treatments would be enormous. Claims that these procedures are “safe and effective” are nonsense. No surgery is “safe.” Every surgery is a risk. This surgery is elective and it is massive. I do not doubt that there are many serious potential complications and that these would be magnified when the surgery is performed on elderly people. I also cannot imagine what years of hormone overdoses would do to a person’s health, but “safe” is not a word that comes to mind.
Claims based on what various associations of medical practitioners have voted to say about things like gender dysphoria have become meaningless, at least to me. I do not think these positions are based on science. I think they are based on politics and are a response to pressure from interest groups. I don’t think they mean much more than if the members of my book club had voted to take these positions.
I don’t know how the ACLU manages to shoe-horn this concern under the Bill of Rights. But from what I’ve seen, they can twist any trendy social experiment they are pushing to fit if they want to. At least, they can do it to their own satisfaction.
The ACLU press release regarding the lawsuit they’ve joined says in part:
LGBT Groups Challenge
Medicare’s Refusal to Provide
Healthcare to Transgender
Patients
April 1, 2013FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON – Several national LGBT groups filed an administrative challenge last week to Medicare’s ban on medically necessary healthcare for transgender patients. Medicare currently prohibits all forms of gender reassignment surgeries regardless of the individual patient’s diagnosis or serious medical needs.
The National Center for Lesbian Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and civil rights attorney Mary Lou Boelcke initiated the challenge on behalf of Denee Mallon, a transgender woman whose doctors have recommended surgery to alleviate her severe gender dysphoria.
“Medicare’s categorical exclusion of this care lacks any scientific basis,” said Shannon Minter, legal director at NCLR. “Study after study has shown that these surgeries are the only effective treatment for many patients suffering from severe gender dysphoria.”
Mallon joined the United States Army when she was 17 years old and worked as a forensics investigator for a city police department after she was honorably discharged from the Army. She was later diagnosed with gender identity disorder, a serious medical condition that is characterized by intense and persistent discomfort with one’s birth sex.
“The American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Psychological Association all support these treatments for transgender patients,” said Joshua Block, a staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project. “These procedures have been performed for decades and are proven to be safe and effective.”
Medicare adopted the ban more than 30 years ago. Decades of extensive scientific and clinical research since that time have established that these surgeries are safe and effective. (Read the rest here.)
Undercover: Late-Term Abortion
May 9, 2013 By 13 Comments
I wrote a post a few days ago explaining why a late-term abortion is never necessary. I also wrote another post discussing how many late-term abortions are being performed.
As soon as I have the time to put it together, I’m going to write another post showing how late-term abortions work in ordinary hospitals and the ways that doctors coerce women into having them.
For now, I want to make it clear that this Live Action video just touches the surface of the problem. It takes aim — and does it very well — at abortion providers who perform late-term abortion as part of a medical practice which specializes in doing late-term abortions.
I believe that this just the smallest part of the actual number of completely unnecessary late-term abortions that are performed in this country, most of them after the doctor has badgered the mother into consenting to it. This really is the monster that pro choice has built.
More on that later.
For now, this Live Action video provides a look into late-term abortions as they are practiced in clinics which are dedicated to performing them.
Name that Video: What Does this Exemplify in YOUR Life?
May 9, 2013 By 4 Comments
Deacon Greg Kandra found this and I like it so much I’m putting it here.
It’s exemplifies my feelings about much of the legislation that the Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed this year.
What does it exemplify in your life?
Representative Rebecca Hamilton, 17-year member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives talks about life as a Public Catholic. Read her Bio 
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