It's been a tough year for the secularist crowd. There was Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the moral values election, the Christian hostage subduing her kidnapper by reading from "The Purpose-Driven Life," and the Christian effort to save Terri Schiavo. Not only that, but earlier this year Dr. James Dobson insulted the Democrats' mascot, SpongeBob SquarePants, with impunity.
And now, for all the hullabaloo in the media, you'd think the pope had died.
The liberal take on Catholicism is that it's a controversial religion because of its positions on abortion, sodomy and various other crucial planks of the Democratic platform (curiously, positions that are shared by all three of the world's major religions).
In defense of the Catholic Church's most "controversial" position (meaning "contrary to the clearly stated opinion of CNN"), I wanted to return to a story from a few weeks ago that passed from the headlines far too quickly. The "controversial" Catholic position is the ban on girl priests.
I'll leave it to the Catholics to explain the theological details, but we have a beautiful pair of bookmarks to the exact same incident illustrating women's special skills and deficits. The escape and capture of Brian Nichols shows women playing roles they should not (escorting dangerous criminals) and women playing roles they do best (making men better people).
Nichols' murderous rampage began when he took the gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother who was his sole guard at the Fulton County Courthouse. It ended when an otherwise unremarkable 26-year-old woman appealed to the Christian conscience of this same violent killer holding her hostage.
At 2 a.m. one Saturday night, Ashley Smith went out for cigarettes while unpacking her new apartment, yet another victory for tobacco pleasure. Returning from the store, Smith was grabbed by a man at her front door, who put a gun in her side and told her not to scream. He asked if she knew who he was. When he removed his baseball cap, she saw it was Nichols, the dangerous fugitive all over television who had escaped custody during his rape trial and had killed four people in the previous 48 hours. (Although he also looked a lot like of one the guys on "American Idol.")
In Smith's apartment, Nichols bound Smith's feet and hands and put her in the bathtub. Later, at Smith's request, Nichols allowed her to hop from the bathroom into the bedroom, where she began talking to him.
In short order, Smith was reading aloud to Nichols from the Christian book "The Purpose-Driven Life" ? in direct violation of his constitutional right to never hear any reference to God, in public or private, for any purpose, ever, ever, ever! For more on this right, go to the "People for the American Way" website.
After reading the first paragraph of Chapter 33 aloud, about serving God by serving others, Nichols ? the man pundits were calling an "animal" ? asked her to read it again.
Continued... |