A smart response from Ryan Anderson at First Things.  The question remains though, is illegalizing abortion the best way to eliminate it?  And there’s still the very thorny issue of birth control.

It is at this point that Penalver’s question becomes most relevant: What if punishing abortionists isn’t effective? What if the record showed that criminal sanctions do not reduce the number of abortions? To answer this, a parallel might help: What if during the early days of abolition people claimed that the results of outlawing the slave trade wouldn’t reduce the number of slaves but would only have deleterious effects on those slaves who now would be transported on the black market? I doubt that any of us would consider this a reason not to start down the road of criminalizing slavery and emancipating slaves. Our response, rather, would be to urge the state to work harder to enforce its laws and protect its people. That a law proves ineffective at first is no reason to give up on the law or its purpose. Slavery would still be a horrific evil, a direct affront to basic human rights and human dignity. And our preceding considerations about the purpose of governments in protecting their citizens from these types of evil wouldn’t be affected at all. The same is true of abortion. And in a society such as ours, there is good reason to think that laws regulating the actions of abortionists would have teeth. This is especially the case when one considers the historical record. For two hundred years, abortion laws in this country were effective. It was only after Roe v. Wade that our abortion numbers ballooned to well over a million a year. And as Dr. Bernard Nathanson notes in his “Confession of an Ex-Abortionist,” the number of women dying from illegal abortions back when he founded NARAL was fewer than 250 a year; the number he kept telling the media was 10,000. One wonders if the WHO–Guttmacher study doesn’t suffer from similar deficiencies.

It’s true.  Ya need sleep boyo.

Come on buddy.  You can think of a better excuse than that.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a top official at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy which oversees priests around the world, was heard on Italian television telling a young man he was “hot” and that homosexual sex was not sinful.

Stenico, who did not know he was being filmed and whose face and voice were distorted in the broadcast, says in his defence that he was only pretending to be gay to learn about people trying to “harm” the Church with homosexual behaviour.

The Status of “Urban Lit” (I taught high school in Brooklyn–I know all about it):

 On October 3, McMillan e-mailed a scathing letter to a black writer, the former New York Daily News journalist Karen Hunter, and to Louise Burke and Carol Reidy. Hunter has co-authored several popular titles that might be described as “ghetto lit,” including Confessions of a Video Vixen; Reidy is CEO of Simon & Schuster and Burke is publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books imprint. McMillan’s e-mail accuses all three of harming black consumers by publishing “exploitative, destructive, racist, egregious, sexist, base, tacky, poorly-written, unedited, degrading books.” And that was for openers.

Why is this so hard for people?

Saying that the quest to eliminate hunger is “one of the most serious challenge of our time,” the Pope notes with regret that existing programs “do not seem to have significantly diminished the number of hungry people in the world.”

Pope Benedict notes that many people find themselves starving after poverty or warfare forces them to leave their homes, and they cannot find food in their new locations. Every society should provide migrants and refugees with access to food, he writes, saying that the failure to do so is “an evident violation of human dignity.”

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.

The latest econ. nobel:

Their work addresses situations in which markets work imperfectly, such as when competition is not completely free, consumers are not fully informed or people hold back private information.

It also addresses cases where transactions do not take place openly in public markets, but within companies, in private bargaining between individuals or between interest groups.

The prize winners’ groundbreaking work has been pivotal in assessing how institutions perform under such conditions, and in designing the best mechanism to make sure that goals, such as social welfare or private profit, are reached, the academy said. The winners’ work has helped determine whether government regulation may sometimes be necessary.

Mechanism design theory today plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science, the academy said.

“The theory allows us to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not,” the academy said in a statement. “It has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes and voting procedures.”

From the LA Times: 

 Christianity’s image in the United States is declining, especially among young people, according to a new study.

A decade ago, an overwhelming majority of non-Christians, including people between the ages 16 and 29, were “favorably” disposed toward Christianity’s role in society. But today, just 16% of non-Christians in that age group had a “good impression” of the religion, according to research by the Barna Group, a Ventura firm that has tracked trends related to values, beliefs and attitudes since 1984.

Evangelicals come under the severest attack, with just 3% of the 16- to 29-year-old non-Christians indicating favorable views toward this subgroup of believers. The study also found that many Christians were aware of their religion’s image problem.

More than one in 10 evangelicals believe that “Americans are becoming more hostile and negative toward Christianity.”

Among the most common perceptions held by young non-Christians about American Christianity were that it is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%) and too involved in politics (75%).

From First Things.  A response to Paul Elie’s article in the Atlantic…

Even Niebuhr’s strongest advocates concede his inadequacies as a theologian. His Christology is weak, his ecclesiology is nonexistent, and in a dozen other areas, he is mediocre or derivative, much the inferior of his brother Richard. His theology can be rendered surprisingly undemanding. There is a reason the informal organization “Atheists for Niebuhr” has never lacked for members and a reason Stanley Hauerwas has asserted that Niebuhr may not even be a Christian. Even in his areas of seeming strength, Niebuhr can be little help in the making of practical moral decisions. How, for example, do his doctrines help us to think more deeply and carefully about the relative justice of different circumstances of warfare or other specific exercises of governments’ coercive power, such as appropriate interrogation techniques to be used against terrorists?

In the end, the value of Niebuhr’s thinking in these matters is, for all his legendary complexity, very simple. He asserted three things: First, we are not innocent, either as individuals or as nations, and are incapable of disinterested action. Second, we must act in the world and do our best to promote what we believe to be right, for we cannot preserve our innocence by refusing to act. And third, we must know that the exercise of power always exposes us to the corruptions of power—for we will almost certainly sin in whatever actions we take, a realization that should chasten us in whatever we do.

For what it is worth, I think that a fourth factor also has to be present for the Niebuhrian perspective to be fully understood: The moral tensions on which Niebuhr insists are unbearable in the absence of faith in the redemptive power of Christ. A lot of what passes for “Niebuhrian” completely elides that fact and thereby underplays the rigor of Niebuhr’s gloominess and the necessity of his Christianity.

Sad:

Despite the anguish of India’s government leaders over the declining proportion of female babies, a new study has found that the lopsided sex ratio is becoming still more pronounced. The National Family Health Survey report released on October 11 showed that the sex there are only 918 girls for every 1,000 boys among Indian children below the age of 6. The 2001 census showed 927 girls for 1,000 boys in that category.

The skewed gender ratio, which was originally most evident in India’s cities, has now emerged in rural areas as well. In rural regions the latest statistics showed 921 girls for every 1,000 boys, as compared with 934 in 2001.

The census data from the countryside confirm suspicions that have been roused by the discovery of the remains of unborn girls in dumps in small towns and villages. India’s federal government now acknowledges that more than 10 million girls are “missing” because of the illegal but still widespread practice of sex-selection abortion.