The basics: why pro-choice is the only moral option

Pro-choice is often referred to as if it were synonymous with pro-abortion. It isn’t. Being pro-choice says nothing whatsoever about your own personal views on your own abortion, your best friend’s abortion, or a complete stranger’s abortion; being pro-choice means you believe that the pregnant woman ought to be the one to decide whether, and when, to terminate her pregnancy.

That’s because it’s thoroughly immoral to force a woman to use her body – at potential risk to her life, and likely risk to her health – to make a baby out of a fertilised egg, when she has decided she does not want to make use of her body in this way, and/or she does not want the baby.

If you want the complicated details, read on.

Tuesday Recipe Blogging: bread for breakfast

I make my own bread. This wins me almost entirely undeserved admiration from many, especially when I admit (or confess) that I do not have a breadmaker. When you have limited kitchen space you learn to do without inessential gadgets, and a breadmaker (if you have a freezer) is very definitely inessential.

The key ingredients of making bread are flour, water, and yeast. Oil and salt aren’t key but the bread will taste much better.

This is very Friday

Hamster Ball

How is this not a good thing?

Some people are tying themselves up in knots trying to “prove” that Barack Obama is not an American citizen/not entitled to run for President, because his birth certificate is forged.

Obviously, these people are doing it because they are fanatically anti-Democrat or fanatically racist.

But they’re focussing all their time and energy on a point that’s never going to move: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4 1961. Hawaii became a U.S. Territory in 1896, and the 50th state of the union on August 21, 1959. These are all basic, simple, incontrovertible facts.

There could be no more harmless way for these fanatics to waste their time than by poring over Obama’s birth certificate trying to find a flaw. The success of the Bush administration in claiming that the Killian memos were faked seems to have given these mad bloggers the idea that they can prove any document of sufficient age to be a “fake”, if only they look at it closely enough.

Clueless Het Guy Is Clueless

Tonight, I decided to walk home from my parents’ house, where I had dinner: it’s over four miles, but I hadn’t been to the gym today.

There was this route and that route I could have taken, but I opted for the way that took me past the 24-hour supermarket where I could buy a pint of milk for my coffee tomorrow. From the supermarket, I cross a main road, take a sharp left through a warehouse car park to a path through trees by a housing estate that briefly crosses a park and then to another main road: from that second road, I’m 15 minutes from home. It’s a darkish and lonely route, but it’s quick (less than ten minutes, from one main road to the other), familiar to me, and any other route would have taken twice as long.

I had my earphones in and was listening to Jethro Tull sing “Then I’m down straining at the lead — Holding on a windward course” as the path turned a corner and a tree blocked off the nearest source of light and I was just aware that there was someone on the path close behind me when he tapped on my shoulder.

I turned: the man was dark and faceless in the shadows.

Call at Lambeth for black bishop to resign post

If the first black bishop in the Anglican Communion were being treated like Gene Robinson:

Hostilities over the Rt Rev Daniel Deng resumed yesterday in Canterbury, as a white primate urged the black Archbishop of Sudan to resign and save the Anglican Communion.

The Rt Rev Simon Legree, Archbishop of Bob Jones, and white colleagues, accused the African Episcopal church of exposing Anglicans to ridicule, and issued a rejection of black bishops. “This has not only caused deep divisions within the communion, but it has seriously harmed the church’s witness, opening the church to ridicule and damaging its credibility in a multi-religious environment.”

The statement is endorsed by more than 150 bishops attending the 10-yearly Lambeth gathering, who between them represent 17 of the 38 provinces in the communion. At a press conference, Legree said: “He [Deng] should resign for the sake of the church. The people who consecrated him should confess to the conference because they created an outcry in the whole Anglican world.”

Around 230 bishops are boycotting the conference because of Deng’s election and the people who consecrated him, said Legree. “Can he not resign to allow the 300 bishops to come back to the house? The norms of the communion have been violated. We’re asking them as Christians to keep the Anglican world intact.”

Though the subject of discussion, Deng himself is not a participant in the gathering, having not been invited by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. This decision angered the Episcopal church, which until 48 hours ago was lobbying to have him brought back into the fold; white African bishops in a closed meeting expressed anger and hurt over his exclusion. However, the leadership declined to take up the issue, and a growing number of bishops are said to wish to avoid conflict with conference organisers.

Written in reaction to the news that a black archbishop believes the proper reaction to bigotry is to give the bigots what they want: remove the person who offends them. Call at Lambeth for gay bishop to resign post, Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent, The Guardian, Wednesday July 23, 2008

Tuesday Recipe Blogging: the Porridge Testimony

“Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek good Scottish oats and make porridge; to follow after rolled oats and abhor the steel-cut; seeking the good breakfast and doing that which tends to the porridge of all. We know that wars and fightings proceed from being denied breakfast, and so porridge avoids the occasion of war. The occasion of war, and war itself (wherein envious people who ate not porridge lust, kill, and desire to have men’s lives or breakfasts) ariseth from frustrated hunger. All bloody principles and practices, as to our own particulars, we utterly deny; with all outward wars and strife, and fightings with pans and recipes, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever; this is our testimony to the whole world.

What I like about Christianity

I was brought up a Christian. (It didn’t take.)

Here’s the things I like about Christianity. (Some of them also apply to Islam and Judaism, but I know less about those religions.)

Tuesday Recipe Blogging: Banana-Tofu Curry

I found the basic recipe for this curry in Recipe Cottage. If you’re not vegetarian and/or don’t like tofu, you can omit the tofu, or substitute it with some non-vegetarian tofu substitute, what’s the word …meat! Oh yes. That stuff.

You should read the real recipe, but basically, this is how I do it:

Heinz Meanz Bigotz

To the Daily Telegraph, in response to their distinctly biased presentation of the recent Heinz Meanz Bigotz kerfuffle:

Recently, the firm was threatened with a boycott by gay rights campaigners after it withdrew an advert that showed two men kissing.

The advertising regulator received about 200 complaints that the Heinz Deli Mayo advert was “offensive” and “inappropriate”.

I noted on the comments page attached to the article (which is moderated, and I expect mine won’t get through) that they “forgot to mention” that the reason Heinz withdrew the Mayo ad from British TV was because of a mass online campaign that shut down their website – by the American Family Association in the United States. They also “forgot” that the ASA announced that they saw nothing offensive in the Heinz Mayo ad. It appears the 200+ complaints were just a British version of the AFA campaign.

Oh, and (other stuff was happening) but I got an apology e-mail from Heinz. Apologising for running the ad. I get that it’s just an ad, not important in the scale of things: but I’m not buying another Heinz product again….