Brutally Honest

Why wouldn't this be considered child abuse?

I'm dead serious:

The lesbian parents of an 11-year-old boy who is undergoing the process of becoming a girl last night defended the decision, claiming it was better for a child to have a sex change when young.

Thomas Lobel, who now calls himself Tammy, is undergoing controversial hormone blocking treatment in Berkeley, California to stop him going through puberty as a boy.

But Pauline Moreno and Debra Lobel warn that children with gender identity disorder forced to postpone transitioning could face a higher risk of suicide.

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.

The hormone-suppressant, implanted in his upper left arm, will postpone the 11-year-old developing broad shoulders, deep voice and facial hair. 

The couple faced intense criticism from friends and family as a result, Ms Moreno told MailOnline.

'Everybody was angry with us. "How could you be doing this? You might be ruining his whole life!"

Citing a statistic from the Youth Suicide Prevention Program, Ms Moreno noted over 50 per cent of transgender youth will have had at least one suicide attempt by their 20th birthday.

And ignoring their son's incessant pleas, she said, simply was not worth the risk.

'What is so frightening to me is that you would be willing to say "no" just because you don't like it - even though your child could lose their life?'

Her son's adolescent transition, she hopes, will help him have a less conflicted adulthood.

'The whole idea now is let's stop creating a third (gender) that is neither one thing or the other, so we transitioned her,' said Ms Moreno.

'The protocol now is to transition these children as soon as you can make a diagnosis, because otherwise they end up being not one thing or the other... because they experienced puberty.'

I have nothing more to say.

Nothing.

NASA to rest of world: You lead, we'll participate

This I find to be tragic:

America won't be repeating that historic one small step anytime soon -- not according to NASA chief Charlie Bolden, anyway.

"NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime," Bolden told a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week, according to Jeff Foust of SpacePolitics.com. "And the reason is, we can only do so many things."

...

And private interest in the moon as a resource is heating up. Several companies have announced plans to mine the moon, thought to contain a ransom in precious minerals including titanium, platinum, and helium 3, a rare isotope of helium that many feel could be the future of energy on Earth and in space.

Moon Express, one of the companies targeting the moon and competing in Google's Lunar X Prize to reach our satellite, recently said it plans a mission to begin exploring the moon in 2015.

In his remarks last Thursday, NASA's Bolden acknowledged the widespread interest in the moon from other nations, and said his agency would be willing to help.

"They all have dreams of putting humans on the Moon," he said. "I have told every head of agency of every partner agency that if you assume the lead in a human lunar mission, NASA will be a part of that. NASA wants to be a participant."

You assume the lead... Nasa wants to be a participant.

Not the NASA I grew up with.

"Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality..."

Mark Steyn, in what I found to be a depressing read, is writing about the death of the family:

Gay marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”

That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either (a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what, say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did — that, when it comes to destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is less effective than hollowing them out from within.

On the other hand, there are those who argue it’s a victory for the powerful undertow of bourgeois values over the surface ripples of sexual transgressiveness: Gays will now be as drearily suburban as the rest of us. A couple of years back, I saw a picture in the paper of two chubby old queens tying the knot at City Hall in Vancouver, and the thought occurred that Western liberalism had finally succeeded in boring all the fun out of homosexuality.

Which of these alternative scenarios — the demolition of marriage or the taming of the gay — will come to pass? Most likely, both. In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right. 

Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable. One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital,” which is significantly higher than Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s left of the American family holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while beyond the perimeter the vast mounds of human rubble pile up remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because for millions of families across this land the American marriage is hollow.

If the Right’s case has been disfigured by delusion, the Left’s has been marked by a pitiful parochialism. At the Supreme Court this week, Ted Olson, the former solicitor general, was one of many to invoke comparisons with Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. But such laws were never more than a localized American perversion of marriage. In almost all other common-law jurisdictions, from the British West Indies to Australia, there was no such prohibition. Indeed, under the Raj, it’s estimated that one in three British men in the Indian subcontinent took a local wife. “Miscegenation” is a 19th-century American neologism. When the Supreme Court struck down laws on interracial marriage, it was not embarking on a wild unprecedented experiment but merely restoring the United States to the community of civilized nations within its own legal tradition. Ted Olson is a smart guy, but he sounded like Mary-Kate and Ashley’s third twin in his happy-face banalities last week.

Yet, beyond the Court, liberal appeals to “fairness” are always the easiest to make. Because, for too much of its history, this country was disfigured by halfwit rules about who can sit where on public transportation and at lunch counters, the default position of most Americans today is that everyone should have the right to sit anywhere: If a man self-identifies as a woman and wants to sit on the ladies’ toilet, where’s the harm? If a woman wants to be a soldier and sit in a foxhole in the Hindu Kush, sure, let her. If a mediocre high-school student wants to sit in a college class, that’s only fair. American “rights” have taken on the same vapid character as grade-school sports: Everyone must be allowed to participate, and everyone is entitled to the same participation ribbon.

Underneath all this apparent “fairness” is a lot of unfairness. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of adolescent daughters abused by Mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Millions of children are now raised in transient households that make not just economic opportunity but even elementary character-formation all but impossible. In the absence of an agreed moral language to address this brave new world, Americans retreat to comforting euphemisms like “blended families,” notwithstanding that the familial Cuisinart seems to atomize at least as often as it blends.

He's got more.

Society is paying a price for the ever escalating war against traditional Christian morality.  A price we're paying arguably because too many of us have abandoned the fight.

Tragic for our kids... and their kids.

High profile Muslim convert to Catholicism changes mind

Magdi Allam, claiming Catholicism was "too weak on Islam" and who had been baptized by Pope Benedict XVI, has decided to renounce his conversion:

Allam, writing on his Web site, said the “euphoria over Pope Francis” and the rapid way Pope Benedict was set aside was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and convinced him to abandon his conversion to Christianity.

Benedict baptized Allam in 2008 during an Easter vigil service at the Vatican, saying he wanted to inspire other former Muslims to practice Christianity openly. At the time, some of the Vatican’s Muslim dialogue partners said the high profile given to the conversion was a deliberate provocation.

Allam said that what drove him away from the church most of all was “religious relativism, in particular the legitimization of Islam as a true religion, of Allah as the true God, of Mohammed as a true prophet, of the Koran as a sacred text and of mosques as places of worship.”

He said it was “true folly” that Benedict had prayed in a mosque in Istanbul, and that Pope Francis, in one of his first speeches, said that Muslims “worship the one, living and merciful God.”

Allam said he considers Islam an “intrinsically violent ideology.”

Though I can understand the disappointment the man might've had with the Catholic kid glove treatment of Islam, I must say that it would seem to be a disappointment driven by ignorance of the Catholic faith.

Brandon Vogt, in the comments, speaks for me on this:

This story confirms a suspicion I've held for a long while: theological objections are often personal objections in disguise.

When wrestling with whether to leave Catholicism, Allam decided through secondary questions like, "how does the Catholic Church engage Islam?" and "do Catholics honor the Pope Emeritus enough?"

Those are of course *important* questions but they have no relevance to whether Christianity (or Catholicism) is true. Here are three questions he should have asked instead:

- Is Jesus God?
- Did Jesus establish the Catholic Church?
- Is Catholicism true or is Islam true? (Or is neither true?)

Answers to those questions would have one move toward embracing, not rejecting, the Catholic church.

Sad stuff but in this age of the low information voter and the decisions so many in that... demograhic... make, it's not surprising.

People need to understand what they're rejecting, and what then, as a result, they're accepting, more fully before acting.

Think people, really think before taking next steps, particularly when they're this important.

I hope Mr. Allam has a change of heart.  I really do.

H/T to the good Deacon.

"Blood money and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death suffices as punishment."

There's seriously, seriously something wrong with a culture that allows this sort of thing to take place:

A ‘celebrity’ Saudi preacher accused of raping, torturing and killing his five-year-old daughter has reportedly been released from custody after agreeing to pay ‘blood money’.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi had been accused of killing his daughter Lama, who suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken back, broken ribs, a broken left arm and extensive bruising and burns. Social workers say she had also been repeatedly raped and burnt.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi admitted using a cane and cables to inflict the injuries after doubting his five-year-old daughter’s virginity and taking her to a doctor, according to the campaign group Women to Drive.

Rather than getting the death penalty or receiving a long prison sentence for the crime, Fayhan al-Ghamdi served only a few months in jail before a judge ruled the prosecution could only seek ‘blood money’.

Albawaba News reported the judge as saying: "Blood money and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death suffices as punishment."

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, who regularly appears on television in Saudi Arabia, is said to have agreed to pay £31,000 to Lama’s mother.

The money is considered compensation under Islamic law, although it is only half the amount that would have been paid had Lama been a boy.

Despite Saudi Arabia’s famously strict legal system, Women to Drive say fathers cannot be executed for murdering their children in the country. Equally, husbands cannot be executed for murdering their wives.

Formal objections to the ruling have been raised by three Saudi activists, and the twitter hashtag #AnaLama (which translates as I Am Lama) has been set up.

It's disgustingly sick.

A riveting account of Columbia's last moments 10 years ago

PJMedia has a moment by moment accounting in a piece that is the prologue to a soon to be released book, titled “Safe Is Not An Option: How Our Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive Is Killing Our Future In Space”:

... the first hint of trouble appeared a few minutes after Entry Interface, defined as 400,000 feet
altitude.

The vehicle was still moving at about Mach 24 — twenty-four times the speed of sound. The yaw moment had changed almost imperceptibly, with a gentle tug to the left — there was a slight asymmetry in the aircraft’s aerodynamics, but no one on the ground or in the cabin noticed it at the time.

Twelve seconds later, a temperature sensor indicated that a hydraulic brake line in the left wing was warmer than it should have been, and was slightly out of specification in that regard. As the vehicle was gradually slowing down, perceived gravity slowly growing to an indiscernible hundredth of a gee, fiery hot plasma was infiltrating through the hole in the leading edge, insinuating itself into the interior of the wing and starting to damage it, but none realized it yet.

A minute or so later, as they approached the California coast from three hundred miles out, an off-nominal rolling moment appeared, more evidence of subtle changes to the vehicle’s outer shape. A few seconds later, Mission Control received a signal that several sensors were starting to indicate problems, but no one on board or in the control room was yet aware.

Half a minute later, still going Mach 23 after crossing the coast line, observers on the ground in California saw an eight-pound piece of the left wing separate from the vehicle, creating a luminescent trail in the plasma, though they didn’t know at the time what they were seeing. No one in Houston or in the cabin was aware of this. About the same time, the side-slip angle exceeded any previous entry experience, as the vehicle was no longer moving in a pure forward motion. A little over half a minute later, the left elevon started to trim to compensate for the off-nominal forces, but no one noticed at the time.

A few seconds later, as the craft crossed the border into Nevada, someone in Mission Control finally noted the temperature-sensor anomalies from a couple minutes earlier.

A few more seconds after that, as the crew was doing a pressure check on their suits in preparation for landing, the brightest piece of debris was shed, but the sensors indicated nothing, and no one on board saw it.

The crew started to really sense the deceleration — about a third of a gravity — a minute or so later, as the dynamic pressure increased to forty pounds per square foot. This was a value that allowed the aero surfaces to take over from the small rockets that had been controlling the vehicle’s attitude. Thirty seconds later, they commenced the first roll reversal to bleed off excess energy, from right-wing low to left-wing low, starting the standard series of S-turns as they approached their eventual landing site. For the veterans on board, the entry seemed to be going normally.

But a picture taken from an infrared camera in New Mexico showed some bulges in the flow field on the left wing that couldn’t be explained by the vehicle attitude. No one saw it until later. The trim on the elevon was now departing sharply from a standard entry, as it fought to maintain the nominal attitude in the face of increasing asymmetric aerodynamic loads.

A little over half a minute later, alarms went off in the cabin as sensors indicated problems with pressure in the left main tire. A few seconds later, there was a false signal that the gear itself on that side was deployed and locked. After a minute or so, the crew received a call from mission control about the tire-pressure issue. Within a few seconds, the left elevon had lost control authority to maintain the proper pitch and roll rate. At that point, the yaw jets, which usually operated in pulse mode, started to fire continuously in a vain attempt to prevent the vehicle from turning to the left. The crew could have seen the indicator lights for this, and a rapid decrease in the propellant on the gauge, but we’ll never know if they did, because the signal was lost at about that time and mission control had received their last transmission. But the flight control system started annunciating its own master alarm, as actuators started to fail, which wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Within a few seconds, the hydraulics themselves failed, and the vehicle was out of control. It started to transition from a controlled glide to a ballistic trajectory, like a misshapen cannonball. What had been a forward-moving aircraft started to corkscrew, something that the commander and pilot couldn’t have failed to observe, both from the unexpectedly changing acceleration and shifting horizon in the windshield. 

There's more.  And it's well worth your time.

May their deaths and the deaths of all who have died in the quest for exploration, become a catalyst for pushing the boundaries once again.

I would suggest that it might be the only thing that would unite Americans.

 

Perhaps they should rename the hospital St. Judas

Via Gawker:

A major Catholic health provider has successfully dismantled a wrongful death lawsuit brought against
it by arguing — in defiance of its own long-held doctrine — that a dead fetus is not the same as a dead person.

The case involves the 2006 death of 31-year-old Lori Stodghill, a woman seven months pregnant with twin boys, who was brought in to the emergency room at St. Thomas More Hospital in Cañon City, Colorado, on New Year's Day.

According to her husband Jeremy, Lori was vomiting and had shortness of breath — symptoms that would later be attributed to the clogged artery that caused her untimely demise.

After he parked the car, Jeremy returned to the ER to find Lori unconscious. Less than an hour later she would be dead of a massive heart attack, and her twins would die with her.

But Jeremy maintains that it didn't have to end this way.

Despite being paged by the hospital, Dr. Pelham Staples, the on-call obstetrician (who also happened to be Lori's personal obstetrician), never arrived. Instead, he spoke with Jeremy by phone.

"He said, 'Well, what do you want to do? Take the babies? Take the babies?" Jeremy recalled to Westword. "I kept responding, 'I'm not a doctor!'"

ER staff, meanwhile, were unable to detect any fetal heartbeats, and the decision to perform aperimortem Cesarean section fell to doctors at the scene, who decided against it.

A short while later Jeremy, who believes the Cesarean section might have saved his twins, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the faith-based nonprofit which operates St. Thomas More.

Catholic Health Initiatives is the second-largest faith-based health system in America, and boasts 78 hospitals in 17 different states.

CHI claims to follow the tenets of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care [PDF], which clearly state that "The Church's defense of life encompasses the unborn."

But when push came to shove, CHI abandoned their beliefs in order to win a malpractice lawsuit.

A Catholic Institution abandoning their beliefs for money.  Obama will see this and learn that he can overcome the angst over the HHS Mandate by dangling some green.  You know he'll do it.

Sad stuff.

If this doesn't break your heart, you haven't a heart to break

From The Telegraph, Dads make the top ten most wanted things for Christmas:

When it comes to Christmas, it might be safe to assume children will ask Santa for an extensive list of toys, games and treats.

But a survey of their typical lists for Father Christmas has shown many have more serious concerns, requesting "a dad" instead.

A study of 2,000 British parents found most children will put a new baby brother or sister at the top of their Christmas list, closely followed by a request for a real-life reindeer.

A "pet horse" was the third most popular choice, with a "car" making a bizarre entry at number four.

Despite their material requests, the tenth most popular Christmas wish on the list was a "Dad".

If that's not a leading indicator for a society in need, I don't know that there are any.

I'm of the belief that our earthly Father foreshadows, however imperfectly for some and much better for others, our need for our heavenly Father.

This one I found truly heartbreaking.

Horror! (UPDATE)

I'm on a lunch break and am just now hearing about this:

Twenty-seven people, including 18 children, have been killed in a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to the Associated Press.

The report cites an official with knowledge of the situation.

Sources told The Courant that there are at least 20 shooting victims. Many of the shootings took place in a kindergarten classroom, sources said.

One entire classroom is unaccounted for, sources said.

A person believed to be a shooter is dead. Earlier reports of a second shooter are unconfirmed.

Three people were brought to Danbury Hospital, but their condition is unknown. The emergency room is on lockdown. 

Police were still searching the school at 11 a.m., and police dogs had been brought in. Around noon, the triage area was broken down, stretchers were taken away and the SWAT team left the building.

Shortly after 9:40 a.m., police reported that a shooter was in the main office of the school. A person in one room had “numerous gunshot wounds,” police said.

Groups of students — some crying, some holding hands — were being escorted away from the school by their teachers. Some students were still in the school at 10:30 a.m., parents said.

School and local emergency officials are accounting for the children, who will be released to their parents to get them home. A staging area has been set up at the Sandy Hook fire department, directly in front of the school. 

Frustrated parents are trying to get information from officials, who are still actively searching the school.

Parent  Richard Wilford said his Sandy Hook second-grader, Richie, heard what he described as “pans falling” when gunshots rang out. He said that his son told him that the teacher went to go check, came back in and locked the door and told the students to stand in the corner.

“What does a parent think about coming to a school where there’s a shooting” It’s the most terrifying moment of a parent’s life … you have no idea,” said Wilford.

Eight-year-old Alexis Wasik, a third-grader at the school, said police were checking everybody inside the school before they were escorted to the firehouse.

"We had to walk with a partner," she said.

One child leaving the school said that there was shattered glass everywhere. A police officer ran into the classroom and told them to run outside and keep going until the reach the firehouse.

I cannot imagine the horror and the pain those with loved ones involved are going through right now.

Mother Mary, pray for them.  St. Michael, pray for them.

Lord Christ, send your Holy Spirit to minister to them.

UPDATE: Horrible things are happening to children today.  This in China:

A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country.

The man attacked the children at the gate of a school in Chenpeng village in Henan province, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Police arrested a 36-year-old man, identified as villager Min Yingjun, Xinhua said. It did not give further details of the extent of the injuries.

Horrific.

God have mercy.

“Male students earn points for documented engagement in sexual activities with female students”

The fruits of progressive thinking on human sexuality and the commoditization of women that results:

Some Piedmont High School students have been involved in a “Fantasy Slut League” in which male athletes “draft” female students and earn points for sexual encounters with them, school officials have told parents.

The league has been in existence for 5 or 6 years but only came to school officials’ attention several weeks ago, according to a letter Piedmont High School Principal Rich Kitchens sent out to families Friday.

In discussions following a date-rape awareness assembly on Oct. 3, students brought the league to the attention of officials, who then followed up with an investigation.

“It has been reported that students on some of our Varsity Teams have set up a ‘Fantasy Slut League’ in which our female students (unbeknownst to most of them) are drafted as part of the league,” Kitchens wrote in the letter. “Male students earn points for documented engagement in sexual activities with female students.”

The school is not planning to discipline the students involved, said Randall Booker, an assistant superintendent of educational services, nor would he discuss how many students might have been involved.

“Our focus really isn’t pinpointing the who or the details,” he said. “Our focus is really about having this continued conversations with kids, getting them to feel comfortable, getting them to learn why this is disrespectful, inappropriate.”

I'm thinking they're feeling pretty comfortable there Mr. Kitchens.

Pretty damned comfortable indeed.

Sandra Fluke could not be reached for comment.