But have you had Arugula with lickspittle and red wine vinegar?  

#57 Jean Arras.  Thank you for the life and the lives.  Thank you for the testimony.   

Where is this planet filled with responsible people who always follow the instructions on the birth control package?    

I think the best shot, but hardly a sure thing (what is?), is for the couple to get married. 

And I think when it was expected that you got married with a baby coming, it made it easier to adjust your personal expectations.    

Of course, when the ceremony is conducted in the courtyard of the state pen, the optimism you feel for the newlyweds can be somewhat tempered. 

See what we're up against: one of the films shown over the past weekend at the Maryland Film Festival, near where I live (link function doesn't seem to be working, but I've pasted the URL):  http://md-filmfest.com/festival/film-guide/6 

It's a documentary portrait of four late-term abortionists, two men, two women, calledAfter Tiller(you know, the martyred abortionist).  I didn't attend either show.  Here's the last paragraph of the webpage's blurb:

These doctors didn’t go into medicine with any thought of putting their lives and the lives of their families at risk, but they live daily with death threats, violence and other harassment.  They are gentle, brave, caring people who are committed to helping women, and sometimes couples, through a difficult part of their lives that they will never forget.

*

Anyone threatening any of these monsters hurts the cause of putting them out of business. 

...who was handsomely rewarded for his killings -- considering the amount of traffic through his abbatoir, and the larger fees charged for murdering babies that look like babies (that move and cry like babies), Gosnell is surely a rich man.  He wasted no money on upkeep at the "facility."

Gosnell's career as a hired killer seems to have been tangled up with a perverse fascination with doing evil for its own sake.  It seems Satanic.  

Others I think are true believers who exercise a willful blindness that enables them to wave away the cruelty of what they're doing; that they'd be surrounded by people who consider them heroes, for slaughtering the innocents, might make abortionist seem a rakishly attractive pursuit.  

And  there are some who will do anything for money.  Abortion is a very, very lucrative business.      

Does a baby who is delivered alive and killed by cutting his spine in two suffer more than a baby that's killed by a partial-birth abortion?  Or a baby whom abortion dismembers in the womb? 

Some people who are crazy look crazy.  Not all do. 

Markm Crinkle (a very small settlement in Ireland).  

Yes.  All of us Dime.  

Remember the second chapter of Mark when they broke the roof in to get the palsied man to Jesus?  My confessor (everybody should be so lucky as to have a guy like him to represent God's forgiveness) once preached that Gospel event as a parable on intercessory prayer: we're all of us depending on our friends to carry us into the Lord's company.  

Some of my own best friends are on the other side of death.  My own dear mother and father and brother and sister-in-law...  And then there are them I don't know; in the Communion of Saints you can count on the kindness of strangers.  

To state the obvious: sex is different.  Analogizing your job to prostitution is inherently hyperbolic -- a bitter joke.  As argument weightless.

Selling sex debases seller and buyer.  To recognize that reality is important for society; important enough to its essential, intimate structures -- among them the self and its nest, the family -- to do so with the force of law, by banning the practice. 

The law is a teacher, whether or not we like it.  Law should support society's moral life.  If that isn't supported it will be supplanted, by its immoral and amoral life, at first imperceptibly and then overwhelmingly.   

Agreeing with Katievs on the nature of the issue, I find it hard not to feel pessimistic.  The no-fault divorce stick that's used to beat opponents of SSM is not irrelevant -- a large and ruinous experiment on children that came on a wave of self-righteous sentiment.  I'd wager that arguments that supported it -- oh, of fundamental fairness -- would be easy to find being advanced today to support another impending disaster.  

I'm just not sure that arguments are what will carry the day.  I think in these terms: pro-life is winning because of the in utero baby picture on the fridge.  SSM is winning because it's Will and Grace (everyone has a gay friend whose feelings he'd rather spare).   

Katievs is right.  Her use of the word "evil" is in accord both with its dictionary definitions and, as she was at some pains to explain, its philosophical use.  No other word in its place would be as precise.  That she violates a pet rhetorical flourish of other Ricochetti is sad I suppose, but I can't see why they're entitled to redefine the word to suit.  

What is NAP? 

And the mob is a political tool; wielding its threat is the work of "community organizers." 

I'm pretty confident same-sex marriage will solve the entire problem.