Things You Hear on NPR: Catholicism One Possible Direction for the Catholic Church?

NPR struggles to make sense of the fact that the Catholic Church and its understanding of human nature have remained essentially unchanged for several times longer than the United States has existed:

Well, first of all, let’s keep in mind that all the cardinals who are voting cardinals have been appointed either by Pope Benedict XVI or by his predecessor, John Paul II. So they all pretty much are — more or less follow the same kind of line of a conservative dogma, very traditional.

As if the Catholic Church might have gone in some totally different direction if only a different person had happened to be making the appointments this time around?

Murderer Says He Got It from College

Via Mark Steyn, Gateway Pundit, Wintery Knight, and the Daily Caller, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the man who shot three white women in midtown Atlanta in 2011 (killing one and permanently paralyzing another) says he was just responding to what he had learned in college:

During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.

Things You Hear on NPR: Laymen ‘Civilians’

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday:  The host, NPR’s Neal Conan, interviewed Father Jeff Kirby, a Catholic priest, about the scandals that broke ten years ago.  Conan:

Is it simply the question of how could their fellow priests or their future fellow priests do such a thing, how could the church protect them, but also—how they might come to be regarded, uh, by, uh—(pause)—I guess you’ll excuse the expression, civilians?

Nineteenth-century Americans Knew the Fetus Was a Person

National Review Online has an interesting piece about the legal history of abortion in America.  Apparently there’s a certain liberal narrative that “the true purpose of 19th-century abortion laws was to protect women, not unborn children,” and that there was a “right” to abortion in Anglo-American common law “from 1607 to 1830.”

Apparently this narrative is far from historically accurate, and the liberal lawyers who crafted it were sometimes surprisingly explicit (among themselves) about what they were doing:

News Media Still Liberal — Consume Some Conservative Media!

The “mainstream” news media are all liberal.

The news media do occasionally conspire—such as at a Romney press conference about the Benghazi killings, when they coordinated to make sure the narrative would be all about criticizing Romney’s response (Right Scoop with the audio; see also News Busters, Hot Air, Breitbart.com, National Review Online), or in 2008 when liberal journalists used the e-mail list “Journolist” to conspire to keep the Reverend Wright story from hurting Obama’s chances in the election (Daily Caller, News Busters, Politico)—but I’m willing to assume that the rest of the time, there is no conspiracy.

There doesn’t have to be.

New York Times Liberal

In case you ever have occasion to wonder:  Yes, the New York Times is definitely part of the liberal news media.  Just take it from their own 2003-2005 “public editor” (“The public editor serves as the readers’ representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own”), Daniel Okrent:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

. . . the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others[—]if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

Washington Post Liberal

In case you ever have occasion to wonder, yes, the Washington Post is definitely part of the liberal news media.  Just take it from their own ombudsman (2005-2008), the late Deborah Howell:

I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

(Emphasis added.)  She also noted that after Barack Obama became the nominee in 2008, he received three times as much front-page coverage (in terms of number of articles) as John McCain.  In her parting column, she observed, “Too many Post staff members think alike; more diversity of opinion should be welcomed,” and advised, “Make a serious effort to cover political and social conservatives and their issues; the paper tends to shy away from those stories . . . .”

Separation of School and State

During my last semester of law school, we read an interesting case for Corporations class, A. P. Smith Mfg. Co. vs. Barlow, 13 N.J. 145, 98 A.2d 581.  In this 1953 decision by the New Jersey supreme court, the question (basically) was whether the corporation was allowed to donate money to charity, or whether donating would be an illegal waste of the shareholders’ money.  I won’t bore you with the legal details (the court found that the corporation was allowed to make such donations), but listen to some of the testimony in the case: 

On Liberals, Conservatives, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Knowledge

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?  It’s an interesting question, if you like, and you can find interesting studies and speculations on whether and why, but intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom.  A person gifted with higher than average cognitive ability can still be a fool.

Some liberals certainly think that liberals are both much smarter and much wiser than conservatives.  Arguably that belief is an intrinsic part of the ideology of the American Progressive movement.  A commenter on this blog has said, “. . . the American people are by and large an idiotic bunch. . . . And these are the people that are voting!”