Smooth as silk! New mixer, new recorder, better mics, no utter disasters… all in all, a pretty good episode, I think. We go a bit long, but are actually fairly on point for a change. The Items of Interest are salvaged from last week’s aborted attempt at a show, and I’m in the process of cutting up the rest of it to share on YouTube.
News Items:
The firestorm over the position paper “After Birth Abortion”
Whoever brought this paper to the attention of the fundamentalist Christians was demonstrating, in Brian’s words, ‘graduate level trolling.’
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
A blog post from the editor of the publication in defense of the paper: http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2012/02/28/liberals-are-disgusting-in-defence-of-the-publication-of-after-birth-abortion/
Oh?! No Oxnard parents show up to protest teacher’s alleged porn past
“Parents were invited to a school board meeting Wednesday evening to express their concerns after an Oxnard middle school teacher was placed on paid leave for allegedly dabbling in hardcore pornography.
However, not one parent with a student at Haydock Intermediate School attended, according to CBS2’s Suraya Fadel.”
Awesome!
Some follow up – she was eventually outed by name: http://www.nationalconfidential.com/20120307/stacie-halas-middle-school-teacher-allegedly-worked-as-pornstar-tiffany-six/
ID Promoter sues JPL for Discrimination
Trial begins this week in a lawsuit over whether NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) unlawfully discriminated against an employee for discussing the scientific theory of intelligent design (ID) at work, according to the Discovery Institute.
Defendant’s trial brief: http://ncse.com/webfm_send/1746
Plaintiff’s trial brief: http://ncse.com/webfm_send/1685
Iconic Church Sold to Church, Church Relocates
The Crystal Cathedral, where modest services at a drive-in movie theater morphed into the Hour of Power at a fabulous glass-paned home to a global televangelical empire, will relocate and the Orange County megachurch will get a new name, the Associated Press reports today. The financially-struggling church sold its iconic glass-paned home to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange last month to emerge from federal bankruptcy protection. Continue reading →
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