Listen, My Children...

Adoptions

There's hubbub about same-sex couples adopting. My thoughts are: if they can legally keep their own kids (from previous relationships, sperm donors, whatever), they should be legally permitted to adopt. Same goes for anyone else. Conversely, if you're not fit to adopt, you're not fit to keep your own children. If there's really strong enough reasons to keep same-sex couples from adopting, wouldn't those reasons also be strong enough to have CPS remove their natural children?

Every adoption agency or individual giving up her baby, if there is competition for adoption, will (or at least should) try to pick the best people for adoptive parents. If they wish to reject same-sex couples, or wish to give preference to them, or only want to give to single parents, that's their call, I'd say. But don't make laws about it.

Now back to thesis.

My Scientology

Apparently, the drug-abuse class we had at my school in London must have been run by Scientologists.  I don't remember the name of the program, but it did include such things -- undisputed by the largely drug-using students -- as saying that pot can give you the munchies, that you can get acid flashbacks years after the fact, that huge amounts of caffeine can kill you (especially in things like taking a handful of caffeine pills, or if you have a weak heart), etc.  But now I find out all those things are wrong and just the product of warped Scientology minds!  Who'd'a thought?

(Somewhat more seriously, I strongly dispute San Francisco's claim that "Authorizing ex-addicts to teach drug prevention in schools may tacitly reinforce student perceptions that drug use really isn't risky" -- at least when you're talking to me, you'll have more luck in getting me not to do something if you can tell me how it destroyed your life and killed off half your friends, than if you tell me you have no experience of it yourself but you hear it's pretty nasty.  Maybe Californian kids are different, and will hear "it destroyed my life and killed off half my friends" as "it's really not risky," but I somehow doubt it.)

(off topic: I generally pick Today over GMA (or whatever it is CBS has), but I agree that Diane Sawyer is more human and realistic and calming and like the middle-aged women I hang out with.  She's also aging like a normal person, while Katie Couric's starting to look a little crazed.  So what?  I still watch Today.)

Pope Lando

Lest it be said that Star Wars isn't Catholic: Pope Lando!

(And call me dense, but I just now realized that Grover and Yoda have the same voice. Yay Frank Oz!)

Jungle Fever

I've reviewed "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" before, and even wondered about a remake:

This movie was made at a time when the ideal (at least in the moviemakers' mind) was a mixed-race couple who loved each other as people, not as racial types (content of character, not color of skin). Looking beyond race to the people within, determinedly, and stubbornly getting beyond whatever opposition there may be from outside. As Sidney Poitier says to his father, "You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man."  [Now, it seems, you're supposed to think of yourself as a colored man -- or, rather, a person of color -- rather than as a man.]

I wonder what it would be like made today. Perhaps they would get married as a statement -- what many people seem to think (and are pleased) that I'm making. You can't fall for someone, it is thought by many today, without making your choice of person based largely on their skin color (but you gotta be the right assortment of two people, or your skin color choice will be racist -- don't go for asians if you're not one). And rather than being called down for getting above his station, the black guy would be called down for letting down his race, for betraying it by giving into whitey (well, maybe only if it's written by Boondocks -- unless that's an opinion held by more people than just a cartoon, as much of what I've read leads me to think is true). Being colorblind would not be the ideal...

I'm glad the movie was made then and not now.

And now there's a remake; a comedy, though, so it didn't work out the same way as my predictions for a didactic/ social commentary remake.  And the NYT has a short review:

The latest "Guess Who" is about a white man in love with a black woman, and that's a comfortable old archetype from days when slave owners inflicted themselves on slave women.

Right.  I see.  White guy with black girl, longing for slavery and domination.  Kristof doesn't say it directly, but it goes the other way too: white girl with black guy, it's jungle fever.  Interesting that he holds up Othello as the goal -- or, if not the ultimate goal, at least something to which level Hollywood has yet to come -- considering the thirty-odd film versions of Othello there are, including a trendy Julia Stiles one (who was also in another jungle-fever movie, save the last dance) and a Kenneth Branagh-Laurence Fishburne one.  (And considering Othello's supposed to be vaguely Arabic -- Moorish, coastal north African -- not black.)

Eh, but I haven't got time to write about this.  Suffice it to say: Kristof's silly, I'm tired of hearing things like this, and he's really not doing much towards his expressed goal of lots of colorblind relationships by saying a white guy with a black girl is like a master-slave relationship.

UPDATE: NRO's talking about this too, mentioning Star Trek and with a slightly different idea of complaints about white-woman-black-man relationships.

A Woman's Place

Interesting article on Catholic women's place, from new blogroll entry Potomac Gadfly.

Homeward Bound

Still no job, just a neverending stream of rejections. However, in the absence of an income, I'll be homeward bound after graduation, and will once again be the Houston Blogger I've been filed as.

Incidentally...

This is a great counter (on the website under the words "Our Site is Very Popular").

Married Priests

On another topic: getting lost in the married-priests discussion is that the Catholic church has married priests, and has had them for decades: they were just married Anglican priests before. Perhaps that's one way to change, in fact -- once there's a critical mass of married former-Anglican Catholic priests, it won't really have all the baggage of an official change of position if they stop requiring the intermediate step of Anglicanism. Let's hear it for the slippery slope!

A Question of Eternity

One of the priests on Meet the Press right now, the Opus Dei* fellow, is doing an excellent job explaining Catholic positions.  (Especially compared to the others -- they read part of an E. J. Dionne column in which he said, I kid you not, that he was "petrified" of someone whose ideal Catholic Church is one that "uphold the truths the Church teaches"!)  He reiterated one thing that has been a Catholic teaching off and on forever, that there is some element of truth in other belief-systems; that, insofar as they stray from the revealed truth that is Catholicism, they are wrong (which seems logical), but that there is always the possibility for someone to do the best they can with the knowledge they have and still gain salvation.  With that in mind, however, revealed truths shouldn't be denied for the sake of popularity; Jesus started off pretty popular but people ended up really not liking what he had to say, and he ended up with a small group of followers, and even some of them didn't agree with what he said at the time. 

I want that position, the position that there is absolute truth that can't be abandoned for temporal popularity, to be the position the Catholic church takes, because I want it to be the position they take towards me.  If you, Catholic, Muslim, JW, anything, think I'm probably going to suffer eternal torment for my beliefs, PLEASE show me the basic consideration that you would show someone you see about to jump off the diving board into a drained swimming pool, and WARN ME!  What is the merit of not warning the would-be diver because you don't want to bother him or make him not like you and stop hanging out with you?  It'll make things nicer before he dies, but then you have his death on your shoulders because you could have warned him and chose not to.

I'll argue with you, sure; I'll respond that there's water in the pool and I'm not in any danger; but I'd really appreciate the consideration.  If I'm in danger of eternal damnation (or whatever negative after-death things you go for), please tell me, don't choose not to tell me because it's nicer / more tolerant / more expedient / whatnot.

*On Opus Dei: I have no idea what to think. I've heard so many totally contradictory things about them, both from trustworthy and orthodox Catholic sources (who don't have an issue with conservative Catholics), that there really must be more to the story than I have heard.  They may be a satanic cult, they may be the One True Faith, they may be something in between, I don't know.  But this priest seemed normal.

Quote of the Day

From my grandmother, January 1943, but what I felt for a good part of four years:

Oh, how I wish it wasn’t so damn cold in this old “yankee land.”

Additionally, I've been thinking: as I've posted before, the average people in the US in WWII, while they had a vague idea that it wasn't all that swell to be Jewish in Europe at that time, didn't see that as one of the reasons for the War.  (I can't really tell what they did think were the reasons, but that wasn't one of them.)  To some extent, that's because the full measure of what was going on wasn't known; there were newspaper clippings about mass murder of Jewish villagers, but there were also films of happy semites in Teresienstadt, "the city the Führer gave the Jews," and (from what I gather) general unfamiliarity with Jewish people outside of New York to balance that out.  (For example, my grandmother saw Paul Muni on Broadway and was fascinated to find out he was Jewish and got his start on the Yiddish stage.)  But today one of the main post facto reasons for WWII was that it eventually managed to keep all the Jewish people from being killed. 

May the current conflicts, whatever their actual immediate reasons, have that as their outcome: may they be known as something that, however dreadful, ended a greater evil.