“The politics of purism make people stupid. And nasty.” - Dowd

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/spare-me-the-purity-racket/ar-AAEWOe0

"diverse" = no white men

That mission statement is straight out of a Monty Python movie.

""diverse" = no white men"

Like the Huffington Post, which has no men at all on their editorial board.

For Amy - is this free download of your book on the up and up?

Always curious about marketing strategies!

Good Manners free download site

Food for thought, for the handful of Christians on this forum:

The One Thing Christians Dare Not Abandon

Always a good decision:

Lifting Weights Helps You Lose the Harmful Fat Around Your Heart

ORANGE MAN BAD!!!

Trump is right about Baltimore — and the Democrats know it

One lady's story:

Why I choose to use a Fertility Awareness Method, even though I have a serious reason to avoid pregnancy

"Trump is right about Baltimore — and the Democrats know it"

And he would be right about dozens of other American cities brought down by panderers to white guilt.

"Trenton, Camden, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Flint, St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee. At one time in all of these one could live, walk at will, send one’s children to the schools. Now, no. Violence, crime, racial attacks and illiteracy drive the civilized to remote suburbs. This is not my culture and I see no reason to apologize for it." - Fred Reed

Most Christians already know that Mpetrie98.

There is an inherent desire as part of the human condition to separate rights and responsibility, to get stuff without working for it. To some extent this is a good thing. I don't haul my water in a bucket from a well. Instead I have running water. But this impulse easily goes toxic as people buy the advertising on all the good stuff without dealing with the reality. Communism is based on this false advertising and has been horrific. Even with that record people want to keep trying. In the Christian church this same impulse plays out as 'God is Love'.

The gospel of John gets abused over and over again as people take his words out of context to justify all kinds of actions. Yes god love you. But in the immortal words of Rabbi Shmuley, "So what?". Just because he loves you doesn't mean you do whatever you want without consequences. Yes there is forgiveness. But not even forgiveness wipes away the consequences of bad behavior. Especially repeated bad behavior after multiple forgiveness.

On the more practical side, priests love the 'God is Love' line. It is easy. No one complains. It is lazy religion. And just like brands that try to cut costs and make their manufacturing easier while also cutting quality churches that cut the responsibilities, the hard parts, out of their teachings see their customer base shrinking and their church dying.

But just like communism there is always another priest thinking, 'I can do it right' and willing to run that experiment one more time.

"God is love, but get it in writing."

-Gypsy Rose Lee

mpetrie (and Ben), there's nothing new or surprising about women having reasons to worry about hormonal birth control. Plenty of women can't use those methods, often for congenital reasons. Also, plenty of women have serious health reasons not to get pregnant at any point in their lifetimes, but that's hardly a good reason for, say, two people who don't WANT children to avoid getting married.

Besides, just GETTING the right contraceptive can involve quite a bit of work, money, and yes, responsibility. (Example: If you're serious about avoiding pregnancy, don't rely on the Pill alone. The Alan Guttmacher Institute says the real-life failure rate is 5%.)

IMO, the question should be "why don't we have more SAFE contraceptive options by now?"

From the 1987 edition of "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," by Ruth Bell, page 173:

"...It might seem strange to you that a country as technologically advanced as ours can't produce a safe and perfectly reliable method of birth control. There's really no excuse for this, but one of the reasons it has happened is that sex is such a controversial subject, there's not much money given out to find ways to separate sex from pregnancy. Many people aren't willing to say that it's OK to enjoy sex without wanting to get pregnant, so they don't support programs to find better birth control methods. The money that is available for birth control research often goes toward finding ways to keep the world population down, especially in underdeveloped nations. That means developing easy-to-use methods, such as the pill or the IUD. The problem is that those methods have by far the greatest health hazards. They work to prevent pregnancy, but many women get seriously hurt in the process."

(And while that was 32 years ago, it was only 7 years ago that the anti-contraception Rick Santorum was a close contender. If ANY of his voters didn't exactly like that part of his platform, they clearly didn't care very much either.)

Oh, and just to clarify - maybe some women actually prefer natural family planning to the artificial contraceptive that their doctors might have recommended as safe. Personally, though, I'd be a nervous wreck for weeks, every month. That would explain why, IIRC, sterilization is the #2 choice for those who use artificial birth control.

From H.L. Mencken:
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."

Speaking of medical failures that patients shouldn't have to put up with in the 21st century, I just found this:

https://www.northcentralpa.com/life/health/ineffective-birth-control-pills-recalled/article_b95baced-b00b-5288-89df-2ad0deb2c1eb.html

That is, of course the efficacy of pills can't last forever. But there has to be a better system for keeping possibly expired pills off the market!

Anyway, here's a thread about it:

http://www.refugees.bratfree.com/read.php?2,431399