Scrolling around...June 6, 2013

Jury awards $170,000 to lesbian Catholic school teacher sacked after artificial insemination
Dias is not Catholic. She is, however, a lesbian and it seems obvious that she underwent artificial insemination so that she could have a child without entering into a traditional marriage.

WHO expert team, including Canadian, in Saudi investigating MERS outbreak
The mission is an attempt to find answers to some of the many questions that persist about the puzzling new MERS virus.

More than a year after the first known infections occurred, the world still has no idea where the virus lives in nature, how people are contracting it, how often and under what conditions person-to-person spread occur and whether the genetic sequences of the viruses suggest they are evolving to infect people more easily.  U.S. Says Deadly MERS Virus Could Affect Nat’l Security

Boy Scouts: Sending up the White Flag
...You were also the last public institution whose mission was specifically directed to the moral, educational, and social health of boys. It is no surprise that when boys and girls are taught at home, the boys prove to be quite teachable; they do not fail, as they do in our schools. That is not because homeschooling is particularly beneficial to boys, but because our schools have become pernicious to them...

Transgender bill in Canadian Senate will open door to normalizing pedophilia, women’s org warns
“This devious manipulation, using the smokescreen of the transgendered bill to expand legal protection for other problematic sexual activities, is unacceptable as it is contrary to all democratic principles and to the health and safety of Canadian citizens.”

How the Supreme Court Gave Us Gosnell
...Thus, forty years after Gosnell opened his clinic, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to approve health and safety regulations governing first- or second-trimester abortions, leaving many women exposed to unnecessary risks. First Things

Dolan: Cuomo Bill May Decriminalize Forced Abortions

Embryonic stem cells: Where are the cures?
Thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of lives killed under microscopes.
Not one cure.
Not one apology.

JI Packer: The Gentle Temeraire
...His latest book, Weakness is the Way, is a case in point. It is a fine volume; but I wonder how may of us will really take seriously its message.  This brief volume offers some reflections on 2 Corinthians, Paul's letter of weakness.  As a man in his late eighties, Packer is physically weak and becoming weaker by the day.  It makes him perfectly positioned to write such a book.   A younger man, even a man on the cusp of middle age, will probably not have the sensitivity to his own decline that comes naturally to one in his eighties. Dr. Packer clearly feels the gently encroaching presence of his own mortality, as is made clear in the moving video which Crossway have made to promote the book.

This work speaks eloquently of how God uses weakness; and, indeed, of how Christians are to make themselves weak in order for God to be shown to be truly strong.   Herein lies the difference between the much-trumpeted theology of the cross and a theologian of the cross.  A theology of the cross can simply be a way of thinking, an intellectual technique; as such it can ironically be found on the lips of a theologian of glory if it is simply his sales pitch, his means of drawing attention to himself, of honing a hip patois.   Recent days have indeed seen the theology of the cross used by some as a kind of triumphalism; yet for Packer, as for Paul and for Luther, it is a means of seeing through present pain and affliction and the existentially painful contradictions of life to the glories of the resurrection - glories which are real despite their utter invisibility to human experience here and now.  A theologian of the cross combines a cross-shaped way of thinking with a cross-shaped way of living, not escaping from pain and weakness but looking through such and that only by God-given faith....

Dept. of Homeland Security: Laptops, Phones Can Be Searched Based on Hunches
...Since his election, President Barack Obama has taken an expansive view of legal authorities in the name of national security, asserting that he can order the deaths of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism without involvement by courts, investigate reporters as criminals and — in this case — read and copy the contents of computers carried by U.S. travelers without a good reason to suspect wrongdoing...

NSA's Verizon Spying Order Specifically Targeted Americans, Not Foreigners
The National Security Agency has long justified its spying powers by arguing that its charter allows surveillance on those outside of the United States, while avoiding intrusions into the private communications of American citizens. But the latest revelation of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance shows that it has focused specifically on Americans, to the degree that its data collection has in at least one major spying incident explicitly excluded those outside the United States...

Obamacare law's unpopularity reaches new highs
...For individuals, the current poll also finds 38 percent of respondents saying that they (and their families) will be worse off under the health care law. That’s the highest percentage of respondents to express a negative outlook toward “Obamacare” since 2010, when the president signed this signature piece of legislation into law following an extended, bruising battle in Congress...