Our bodies, our choices

Seven thoughts about abortion:

• All prolifers I’ve ever discussed abortion with, live in countries where women have access to safe legal abortion.
• No prolifer who’s ever given me their views on abortion has had any informed views on what would happen if women in their country no longer had access to safe legal abortion.
• The best person to judge if an abortion is necessary is almost invariably the woman who is pregnant.
• In the rare exceptions to point three, the better judges of whether an abortion is necessary have medical training and are medically responsible for the health and wellbeing of the pregnant woman as their patient.
• No woman who knew she needed an abortion ever refused to have what she needed.
• No man who cared for a woman ever wanted her to be hurt or die doing without what she needed.
• Prolife arguments for making abortion illegal are never about preventing abortions: only about making abortions more difficult, expensive, and dangerous.

Abortion was decriminalised in England, Scotland, and Wales in 1967. No one much younger than sixty can have direct personal memories of what it was like to live in a country where the law said that unless a girl or a woman was going to die when she was forced to have the baby.

Gay bishops & closet cases

Today I pass over the Pastoral Staff to my successor and enter a very active “retirement.”God is good, all the time!

— Bishop Gene Robinson (@BishopGRobinson) January 5, 2013

“Death threats, and the now-worldwide controversy surrounding your election of me as bishop, have been a constant strain, not just on me, but on my beloved husband, Mark, who has faithfully stood with me every minute of the last seven years, and in some ways, you.

“While I believe that these attitudes, mostly outside the diocese, have not distracted me from my service to you, I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that they have certainly added a burden and certain anxiety to my episcopate.” – Gene Robinson, November 2010

Pope Leo IX of the Roman Catholic church imposed a ban on married clergy in 1039 which was only slightly relaxed in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. The Eastern Orthodox Church does not allow a marriage after ordination, but a married man may be ordained as a priest – though to be consecrated as a bishop, a priest must be unmarried or a widower. But in the Anglican Communion, created by Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer, there is no ban on marriage for priest, bishop, or archbishop – which was the reason for Pope Benedict’s 2009 relaxation, to let married Anglican priests who wanted to leave the Church of England for the Catholic Church.

This is a story Fred Clark at Slacktivist likes:

In the 1950s, an old hillbilly preacher invited Jordan to come and speak at his church in rural South Carolina. Jordan arrived to find, to his surprise, a large, thriving and racially integrated congregation — a remarkable thing in that time and place. (Sadly, it’s actually a remarkable thing in any time or place.) So Clarence asked the man how this came about.

General Election, Corporal Reality

If you’re a Conservative/LibDem supporter, this must be like watching Titanic, except that Nick Clegg and David Cameron and Ed Miliband aren’t even as appealling as DiCaprio, Winslet, and Zane. The iceberg has hit, the ship is peeling apart and sinking, and yet you know the end of the movie is ages away and already seems to have been going on for far too long.

For the rest of us, though, things as much worse than simply enduring a long, long movie in the cinema as being on the Titanic was worse than taking part in the movie.

Paul Goodman, executive editor of ConservativeHome, offers four reasons why he does not believe the Tories can win a majority in 2015.

There is really just one reason, but it’s a shattering iceberg:

Austerity: The proclaimed conviction that if only enough people are unemployed or in work but struggling on a low income, plus essential services cut to the bone and cut again, then the economy will improve.

The belief that the economy must be destroyed in order to save it is essential to Tory thinking and was adopted by the LibDems with hardly a gulp. Labour can only lose if they adopt it too.

Making invisible the victims of child abuse

In June 2012, Cardinal Brady – who in 1975 had let a child abuser loose to prey on further victims – publicly if not very personally apologised:

Cardinal Sean Brady has said it is “a matter of deep shame” that the Catholic Church did not always respond properly to victims of child abuse.

The Catholic primate of all Ireland was delivering a homily at the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.

He said he wanted to ask for the forgiveness of abuse victims.

He said the church had “first betrayed their trust and then failed to respond adequately to their pain”.

The Christmas Message

This year the Archbishop of Westminster, the leader of the Catholics in England and Wales, took the opportunity of his bully pulpit on Christmas Eve to tell his congregation that God hates LGBT people and does not want us to have equal civil rights. Peace and goodwill to all is so outdated: modern Christians are expected to hate as directed.

Vincent Nichols

told worshippers that the Government has no mandate for the change and had not followed the proper rules of British democracy.

“There was no announcement in any party manifesto, no Green Paper, no statement in the Queen’s Speech. And yet here we are on the verge of primary legislation,” he said.

In an apparent reference to the totalitarian state described in the novel 1984, he added:

“From a democratic point-of-view, it’s a shambles. George Orwell would be proud of that manoeuvre, I think the process is shambolic.”

Nichols told lots of lies about the lack of public support for equal marriage, but his key objection is – he claims – that in England & Wales, this was not done properly.

Life, life, life

A few years ago, when I was on holiday in Belgium, I spent hours in churches. (The friend I travelled with, who hadn’t voluntarily been in a church in decades, and who knew I am an atheist, was worried I would catch Christianity.) What I wanted to see was the paintings. The invention of oil paint meant Lowlands painters could create pictures so finely detailed it is possible to see the weave in the carpet and the stitches in the embroidered clothing: pictures from five or six hundred years ago that glow from the canvas.

And over and over again, pictures of Mary. Mary as a baby, with Anna her mother: Anna and Joachim, Mary’s father, together: Mary saying “Fiat” to the angel: Mary as a young woman, as a mother with a preposterously large infant on her knee, Mary being carried into heaven by a troop of angels on her death. Mary is supposed to have been conceived on 8th December, and on that date in 2009, The US Senate rejected by a narrow margin an amendment proposed by Senators Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that was intended to modify “Obamacare” so that any private insurance company that got federal funding for Obamacare insurance, couldn’t offer health insurance plans that included abortion.

Gandalf for the Firth

This is a bit of a story, so have patience.

Kreetch is a fan of The Hobbit: as am I. Due to her shift-patterns, it was impossible for us to go any earlier that Sunday 23rd December, so I booked two seats in the Dominion Cinema, Gold 1 (because she’s worth it) for the 3.20pm showing.

The Dominion is described as “Edinburgh’s most unique and luxurious cinema”. Gold 1 isn’t quite as snazzy as Gold 4, but you get utterly comfy seats in a gorgeous building in Newbattle Terrace that’ll remind you of what cinemas used to be like before they went multiscreen and boxy. (Facebook has some photos.)

Matron of honour, Cristina Odone

Cristina Odone’s week: how many ways can you be smugly disapproving about religion, marriage, and gays being religious and wanting to be married if you try with both hands?

Cristina Odone on Monday, how appalling it would be if gay people thought they could be married just like us!:

I resent the way Cameron is ready to bulldoze over Tory and religious objections on this issue. It’s clear from his arrogant stance that the PM believes soon, even this bunch of hypocrites will embrace the Gospel according to Dave. They – Tories who live out in the sticks and not in fashionable metropolitan areas; people of faith who hold onto their traditional religious values – will experience a Damascene conversion to the PM’s way.

That’s Monday, with a side-order of I love my gay friends but they shouldn’t want to be my equals. (Why do homophobic bigots always claim to have gay “friends”?)

Cristina Odone on Tuesday, Christianity is great! not liberal at all!:

But I can’t help think – we’re not doing so badly after all. That, after a decade of Dawkinism, paedophile scandals and metropolitan secularism, the majority (59 per cent) of Britons should still cling to their faith strikes me as nothing short of miraculous. And that’s before the backlash to the atheists – it’s bound to happen – properly gets off the ground. If, after all the vicious kicks they’ve suffered from the liberal establishment, and their none-too-inspiring leadership, the Christian Churches in this country are still in existence, we who care about faith should celebrate.

Cristina Odone is a Christian. Christians aren’t liberal. Christians get kicked by liberals, and Christian leadership is none-too-inspiring. Muslims are all right, though. That’s Tuesday.

Pink+Blue Marriage

Once again, the Christian right is trying to kick up a fuss over nothing. Reverend Andrew Fothergil (Church of Scotland, Strichen and Tyrie Parish Church, Aberdeenshire) said:

“My personal position is that I think naturally, we have as celebrants, some concerns about the assurances that have been given by the Scottish Government about the safeguards it intends to put in place to protect celebrants who would hold a different position from what the future government legislation might become. I think many of us are a bit nervous about what protection it can actually offer.”

Reverend Fothergil has evidently not read the Church of Scotland’s admirably clear guide to people who want to have their marriage ceremony performed by a Church of Scotland Minister. That’s a shame, because it would calm him down from being “a bit nervous”.

Of the Frequently Asked Questions, the first one is: Q. Can anyone be married in a Church of Scotland church? The answer is:

The Church of Scotland is ‘national’, in that every district has its parish church. The parish minister is willing to discuss conducting marriage for any member of the parish. If you are not a church member, the minister will want to discuss with you whether a religious ceremony is what you are looking for, whether it will have meaning for you, and whether he or she agrees it is appropriate in your situation.

Donald Trump

It’s actually really hard to believe sometimes that Donald Trump is for real. I don’t follow @realDonaldTrump on Twitter, because who wants that kind of thing in your timeline? But he’s always good for a laugh when you want one. So the question is: Does he do it on purpose? This is a multi-billionaire who appears to regard running for President as a useful means of self-publicity. Is his Donald Trump persona – arrogant beyond belief, childishly certain that people admire him, blusteringly furious at people who get in his way – just assumed, a performance?

If so, is the double-combover part of it? You’d have to be the kind of person who surrounds himself with sycophants and who ignores any personal criticism whatsoever to think that growing what’s left of your hair long and folding it to cover your bald scalp looks anything but completely stupid. (Mind you, it’s impressive that whatever product his hairdresser uses, the double-combover holds – not for Trump the occasional long flowing locks and glimpse of scalp in a high breeze.)