Oregon Offers Terminal Patients Doctor-Assisted Suicide Instead of Medical Care

FoxNews. It’s really quite a reasonable thing when you start making suicide a legal option. And we all know that the state has our best interests at heart…(sarcasm alert)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Some terminally ill patients in Oregon who turned to their state for health care were denied treatment and offered doctor-assisted suicide instead, a proposal some experts have called a “chilling” corruption of medical ethics.
Since the spread of his prostate cancer, 53-year-old Randy Stroup of Dexter, Ore., has been in a fight for his life. Uninsured and unable to pay for expensive chemotherapy, he applied to Oregon’s state-run health plan for help.
Lane Individual Practice Association (LIPA), which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, responded to Stroup’s request with a letter saying the state would not cover Stroup’s pricey treatment, but would pay for the cost of physician-assisted suicide.
“It dropped my chin to the floor,” Stroup told FOX News. “[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?”
(more)

Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good

Mandatory reading. Go and read it. Learn it, understand it and spread the word to your church, your school board. No need to bash your gay neighbor, but it is time to stop the indoctrination of our children, the splitting of our churches, and the destruction of our culture.
From the Princeton Principles:
In recent years, marriage has weakened, with serious negative consequences for society as a whole. Four developments are especially troubling: divorce, illegitimacy, cohabitation, and same-sex marriage…
Marriage protects children, men and women, and the common good. The health of marriage is particularly important in a free society, which depends upon citizens to govern their private lives and rear their children responsibly, so as to limit the scope, size, and power of the state. The nation’s retreat from marriage has been particularly consequential for our society’s most vulnerable communities: minorities and the poor pay a disproportionately heavy price when marriage declines in their communities. Marriage also offers men and women as spouses a good they can have in no other way: a mutual and complete giving of the self. Thus, marriage understood as the enduring union of husband and wife is both a good in itself and also advances the public interest. ..
We affirm the following ten principles that summarize the value of marriage- a choice that most people want to make, and that society should endorse and support.

Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good

1. Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.
2. Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
3. Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.
4. Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.
5. Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.
6. Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.
7. When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.
8. A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.
9. The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.
10. “Civil marriage” and “religious marriage” cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.

Kuwaiti Daily Reveals: Iran Building Secret Nuclear Reactor

From Memri, hat tip to The Spine:
On July 29, 2008, the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa reported that, according to “highly reliable sources,” Iranian authorities had begun construction of a secret nuclear reactor in the Al-Zarqan region close to the city of Ahwaz in southwest Iran, on the Iran-Iraq border.
The paper said that according to sources, Iran was working to distance its nuclear installations from international oversight. The English version of the report, published in the Kuwaiti Arab Times, said, “Disclosing [that] Tehran directed international A-bomb inspectors to other places, sources warned [that] the project poses a very serious threat to international security.”
Also according to the sources, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not know about this site at all, since it was not included in negotiations with Iran in Geneva held in early July.
According to the report, the sources said that during 2000-2003, Iran expropriated the lands and homes of thousands of Arab citizens from the Al-Zarqan region, destroying homes of thousands of Arab citizens from the Al-Zarqan region..(more)

Stealing from Supernaturalism

From InsideCatholic
…Atheism — and particularly the New Atheism — is an acid that inevitably corrodes the natural apprehension of the human person as a supernatural being. A New Atheist bravely steals and desecrates the Eucharist and then declares in his Manifesto justifying the deed:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity’s knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Nothing Must Be Held Sacred — except the three-pound piece of meat behind the eye of the New Atheist; reason; intellectual liberty; science; their loved ones; human dignity (for humans they happen to like); and countless other things they don’t think about while penning these unthinking dogmas and engaging in these strange sacramental rites of desecration. In short, passionate love of the sacred is what fills the rhetoric of the New Atheists with such fire.

Meanwhile, really truly atheist philosophers like Richard Rorty have the number of the New Atheists and their moral posturing. He writes that there is no universally valid answer to moral questions such as, “Why not be cruel?”

Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question . . . is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (more)

Canadian woman gives birth to 18th child

No doubt you’ve heard the story :
ABBOTSFORD, British Columbia – A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province’s most prolific mother in 20 years.
Proud dad Alexandru Ionce said Saturday that his 44-year-old wife, Livia, gave birth on July 22. Their daughter Abigail weighed in at 7 pounds, 12 ounces (3.5 kilograms).
“We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that’s the reason we did not stop the life,” Alexandru Ionce said.

“Marital love just allowing and producing life“ as they said over at Touchstone..

A Week with No US Troop Deaths In Iraq

From Heavy Handed Politics blog and Jeremiah Films:

NewsBusters.org:
On July 16, Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times’s Top of the Ticket Blog wrote the following:When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, (Barack) Obama said: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse,” a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he acknowledged progress, but maintained his position that political progress was lacking.The LAT Blog notes earlier in its entry that “The parts (of Obama’s web site) that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared.”

Boycott McDonald’s

From the Boycott website:
What the boycott of McDonald’s IS NOT about
This boycott is not about hiring homosexuals.
It is not about homosexuals eating at McDonald’s.
It is not about how homosexual employees are treated.
What the boycott of McDonald’s IS about
It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars. McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage. (more)

Poll: Support for Homosexual "Marriage" Grows in US

July 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A US poll suggests that support for homosexual unions, including homosexual “marriage,” is on the increase. Angus Reid found in a survey of 1,783 US voters that 32 percent said they would vote to allow homosexual partners to contract legal marriages. Only 29 percent said they would grant homosexual partnerings no legal recognition. (more)
We are losing the argument because we are not involved in the discussion. We are not doing are part to teach people. We are allowing our children to be indoctrinated in our public schools. We are letting this be framed as a civil rights issue (it’s not). Or allowing the claim that science has declared it a fact (science has not made such a statement) and we have failed to explain that marriage (not redefined) forms a strong foundation for society and is important for the health and vigor of the culture itself.

Editorial: Cooling Earth is inconvenient fact

From the Examiner:
WASHINGTON (Map, News) – It’s been unusually chilly in Anchorage this summer. In fact, temperatures in the Alaskan city have reached 70 degrees only twice this year, compared with 49 times in 2004. A National Weather Service meteorologist predicted that 2008 will likely go down “as the summer with the least number of 65-degree days” on record.
But just last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came to the “unequivocal” conclusion that the Earth is on a dangerous warming trend that, in Al Gore’s words, puts “the survival of the United States of America as we know it … at risk.” Looks like somebody forgot to send Mother Nature the memo.
Last week, the scientist who wrote the computer model that monitors Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol cast serious doubts on whether the Earth is getting warmer at all. David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, so he’s no ordinary global warming “denier.” But Evans now says the scientific evidence compiled since 1999 has convinced him that he — and what he calls other global warming “alarmists” — were wrong. (more)

Iran main entry route for militants: Afghan paper

KABUL (Reuters) - Iran has become the main transit route for militants trying to join insurgents in Afghanistan, an Afghan government daily said on Sunday.
Some Western nations with troops in Afghanistan have said that Iranian weapons destined for the Taliban have been seized in Afghanistan, although they are unsure whether Tehran knew about the shipments...(more)