"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down."
--G. K. Chesterton (The Innocence of Father Brown)

Professor J Budziszewski offers his own version of this quote (even citing the quote itself) in his books about the natural law philosophy. The good professor notes that just as no man can keep at a level of evil, neither can any society. We begin with our favorite sin--usually something specific like fornication or theft which is based upon something abstract such as lust or envy--and our refusal to repent of said sin. Yet, if we can't go through a normal and healthy repentance, we will be dragged through an abnormal, unhealthy form of repentance. Failing to confess the sin--and our guilt in it--we tell all of the sordid details about the sin, in gory detail. A simple sin seems to become an obsession--perhaps even a possessive one; but even having confessed every detail, even crying out "Peace, peace," we find that there is not peace to be had.

The Texas Alliance for Life—along with the Diocese of Austin—commemorated the infamous Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton decisions on Saturday. It was a day filled with Masses and marches, rosaries and rhetoric, statistics (over 50 million dead in the American abortion holocaust alone) and speeches—of prayer and politics. The problem in America—indeed, in what was and may someday again be Christendom—is one not merely of politics, but also of culture. The late (and perhaps great) president Ronald Reagan once referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire; it was true, but the late and certainly great Pope John Paul II offered a more profound critique of culture when he called ours “the culture of death.”

Chesterton once remarked that a heretic is unable to truly have an original thought. His point was that the heretic was too busy tearing down to ever really build up, and it's certainly a good point to consider. In my own experience, however, the heretic's problem is not that he never has an original thought, but rather that once he has that singular thought he can think of nothing else.

I have long been thinking about the problem of unwanted pregnancy. The solution proposed by most of the more old-fashioned Protestant Christians is just to abstain from sexual activity until marriage; and the oft-unspoken advice is to contracept in marriage to limit the number and timely arrival of children. Catholics, with all their fuss against contraception, have an abstain-until-you-are-married-and-want-children approach to this problem. Neither of these approaches deals fairly with the single biggest problem faced by people who don’t want children: unplanned sexual activity.

Before I begin, a word about my notation in this reflection. I did not take any notes, and thus have to rely on memory alone about what was said. Thus, I cannot use any direct quotes, only paraphrases; I thus will use italics and single quotations (‘ ’) to denote anything which I am taking as a paraphrased quote, and regular double quotations marks (“ ”) to mean things which are quoted directly, e.g. from other sources.

Two days and two columns from the Daily Sexan--err, I mean, Texan--about the subject of sex. I am, of course, not counting the weekly "Hump-Day" column in which Ms Mary Lingwall writes about how to have better (and often, more depraved) and sometimes "safer" sex; the explicit purpose of this column is to subvert traditional attitudes regarding sex, but I digress. Yesterday, we had Ms Anna Russo's "Who can be promiscuous;" today, we have Ms Ashley Shew's "Texas' failed sex education."

There was an article in the university paper today about a job fair in which criminals are given a "fresh start" (so says the article's title). Normally, i ignore these things, but then I saw this little gem:

"Planned Parenthood representative Cynthia Brown, who was at the event, said people with criminal records are encouraged to apply for a job at the organization" (emphasis mine).

Mark Shea has a great little post on "asking questions." His post is, of course, closely related to the Church's teaching about the supremacy of conscience in making moral decisions. Namely, the conscience is the ultimate thing which we must obey, but that conscience must be informed--indeed, it must go through formation in general. That does, of course, involve asking questions, but all to often the questions are not exactly innocent:

The National Catholic Register has a short blog entry about Dan Merchant's new documentary, Lord, Save Us From Your Followers. According to NCR, the documentary purports to take "a look at the often divisive and angry rhetoric that’s come to characterize religious media coverage."

My own thoughts on this--in brief--are that there is a tendency of thinking that if an idea can be expressed on a bumper sticker then the entire dialogue concerning that idea should be reduced to bumper-sticker slogans. There are, of course, at least two problems with this.

School's back, and so is the Swine Flu. And now, a school district tries an otherwise unthinkable solution to limit the spread of this disease. From CBS News:

"As students across America prepare to head back to school, officials and parents are bracing for a spike in swine flu cases. With the possibility that nearly 2 million people will be hospitalized, and 90,000 people across the country could die, one Long Island school district is taking no chances and has set into place a new "hands-off" approach to fighting the swine flu.