I have no particular confidence in the ability of counseling to change most homosexuals' orientation, but for heaven's sake, so long as someone voluntarily chooses to undergo such therapy, why shouldn't it be allowed?

"Is it really that difficult to see that every innocent life deserves to be protected?" Not at all. The problem is what happens when those 800,000 babies a year become a wailing, crying, hungry reality. The answer is that extramarital sex has to stop. Over 80% of all abortions are procured by unmarried women. What also has to stop are fertility treatments & donor/surrogacy pregnancies, which add an extra 100,000+ U.S. births per year. Look, if you can't have kids naturally, adopt. And keep your legs closed and quit popping out illegitimate kids! It's for the good of the nation! Since it looks like we're legalizing gay marriage, let's re-criminalize extramarital sex to cut down on disease & welfare brats. Make sex a married privilege again!

I'm against abortion in general, but banning sex-selective abortions is a little ridiculous when a woman can elect to have an abortion with as little justification as she thinks she'd be a lousy mother (which, if she goes through with the abortion, will turn out to have been absolutely true in that child's case).

I thought the reason the PP employee was fired was because of Medicaid fraud, not the sex-selective abortion aspect.

Amen to that.

I still don't get the "religious freedom" aspect. Catholic institutions are not being forced to pay for medically unnecessary birth control because it is up to the insured individual whether to obtain that birth control. So if none of the insured opt for the birth control, there's no sin involved. So it is not the Catholic institution that is the active agent, but the insured person. I see this no different from a Catholic choosing to shop at Walgreens. Walgreens has birth control in the aisles -- does that mean Catholics can't shop there, because the money they use might go toward keeping birth control stocked and ready for purchase? (And what about the Jehovah's Witnesses? Can they object to policies that pay for blood transfusions?)

Exactly. Everyone is serious about abortion, but no one is serious about the out-of-wedlock sex that causes over 80% of abortions. For anti-abortion measures to work and last, we not only need a culture of life but a culture of no-sex-until-marriage, in addition to a culture of adoption vs. fertility treatments and pregnancies involving third parties (e.g., donors, surrogates).

The Bible dealt with this nonsense a long time ago: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God." (Deut 22:5) There might well be a difference between what a person actually is and what he/she thinks she is. What actually is should win, because what actually is is the part that the rest of us have to interface with. It isn't worth saving the feelings of the individual to disrupt the feelings of the community.

Why is anyone shocked over this? Of course liberals don't want our war dead to be called "heroes." That precludes the left from using body counts as anti-war leverage!

I don't think "growing up with war" is going to be a big deal to kids unless they actually have loved ones off somewhere fighting the war. I barely remember we're at war most days. What I get mixed emotions about are when people display "Rebel Pride" and honor the dead in their family who fought for the Confederacy. I mean, honoring your dead should always be okay, but I don't believe the cause they fought for ought to be honored if it's not an honorable cause, and given that the Confederacy's cause was keeping blacks enslaved, I think "Rebel Pride" needs to go the way of the dinosaur. I swear, I'm actually embarrassed I watched "Dukes of Hazzard" now. My Southern history teacher taught us that the Civil War was about money, not slavery.