By now you’ve probably heard about the nine year old Brazilian girl who was sexually abused and raped by her step-father.  She became pregnant with twins. Her mother arranged an abortion to save her life.  Doctors were found to do the procedure and the little girl’s life was saved.

The danger to a little nine year old girl’s life under those circumstances isn’t something you’d think a rational person would even question, let alone condemn the adults who took the measures they had to in order to save her life. 

You’d think.

Vatican backs abortion row bishop

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.

The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live" and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.

…

The girl, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, was allegedly sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather, possibly since she was six.

The fact that she was four months pregnant with twins was only discovered after she was taken to hospital in Pernambuco complaining of stomach pains.

…

Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.

Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would apply to the child’s mother and the doctors, but not to the girl because of her age.

Guess who else the excommunication doesn’t apply to…

Upon learning of the abortion, the regional archbishop excommunicated the doctors, as well as the girl’s mother. He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.

Emphasis mine.  As Andrew Sullivan said today, "I guess the Vatican is used to finding ways to see the lesser evil of raping and molesting children." 

Sullivan also notes today that Rod Dreher is shocked, shocked to learn that there are bisexual teenagers in East Texas.  Here’s the Dallas News story that fairly curdled poor Dreher’s blood…

Demons in the house: E. Texas man details escape from attack

Terry Caffey awoke to gunshots and his wife’s guttural screams.Instinctively, he threw his right arm over her body – taking three bullets in the forearm and three in the shoulder – before a seventh round caught him in the right cheek and exploded through his ear.

That one blew him out of bed, face down.

Moments later, someone shot Caffey three more times in the back.

"He came up and kicked my foot to make sure I was dead," he said. "There was heavy breathing, and I could hear them reloading. I was basically just waiting for them to shoot me in the back of the head. But it got very quiet, and he walked off."

Caffey passed out.

When he regained consciousness, furniture crashed, glass shattered and footsteps marched upstairs toward his children’s bedroom.

His right arm hung limp because a bullet had severed a nerve. He scrambled to his knees.

Then he heard his 13-year-old son Bubba cry out – "No, Charlie! No! Why? Why are you doing this?"

Caffey collapsed again…

No, No…wait just a moment…  That’s not the part of the story that shocked Rod Dreher.  This is:

Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.

The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.

"I guess you’d call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it’s like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin’s little girlfriend. And I was like, ‘That ain’t happenin’.’ "

But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin. 

Emphasis mine.  No, really, Dreher wrote an entire post off of this news story about a man surviving the home invasion massacre that killed his entire family, about how shocked he was to discover "a bisexual culture" in East Texas.  If you think I’m exaggerating that, let Rod tell you all about it himself…

…the killings aren’t what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town — and there’s a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe?

And now of course, he’s getting all pissy because people are questioning his sanity in the post’s comments…

UPDATE: To clarify: I’m not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven’s sake. Obviously murder — and murder of one’s own family — is about the worst thing imaginable.. I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.

UPDATE.2: Reading the comments, what on earth is wrong with some of you? I’m not saying bisexuals killed that family.Good grief. It’s obvious that the murderers include the daughter and her boyfriend. The bisexuality thing was a mere aside that I found more startling than the murders, given the small-town culture where this crime took place. I freely admit that I am out of touch with teenage culture today. If you’re bound and determined to conclude that I think bisexuality is worse than murder, you’re completely wrong, and you’re willfully misreading my post for whatever reason. At least understand what you’re doing, and the bad faith in which you’re doing it.

A pastor was shot dead in his pulpit today in Illinois. That appalls me. It doesn’t shock me. This kind of thing happens these days. Sad but true. You don’t hear every day about a tiny Texas town whose teenagers are engaged in a culture of bisexuality. At least I don’t.

UPDATE.3 Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.

Well that sure clears things up doesn’t it.  Rod…you’re done.  Whatever humanity you may have once had within you…it’s gone now.  Don’t even bother trying to figure out why your readers are appalled.  You will never know.

You can wonder whether the culture war has utterly corrupted what might have otherwise been decent human beings, or whether they never actually took that belly flop into the gutter because they were there to begin with.  But if nothing else the culture war has made it pretty plain that there is a difference between spirituality and religious dogma, and the two are not compatible.  Dogma destroys the human spirit as surely as rust, because it demands we give it our conscience, our integrity, and eventually everything we are, and everything we might have become.  Dogma fashions out of our living bodies and empty shell for it and it alone to fill, and we stop being the person we are, and we become dogma. 

Jacob Bronowski put it perfectly in his series, The Ascent of Man…

There are two parts to the human dilemma.  One is the belief that the end justifies the means.  That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine.  The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false.  Look for yourself.  This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.  This is where people were turned into numbers.  Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people.  And that was not done by gas.  It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma.  it was done by ignorance.  When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge.  We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped.  Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.  Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.  In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".

…We have to cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.  We have to touch people.

But this is precisely what dogma demands we do not do. We cannot touch people, lest the scarecrow that dogma insists to us they must be, comes undone, and we see a human being not that much different from ourselves.

The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.

Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and we are.  Integrity.  Dogma will not share power with it.  And that is the lesson people are learning…

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.

• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.

• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.

…

The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked the survey’s basic question: "What is your religious identity?"

The USA Today article goes on to postulate a number of causes, from increased mobility to sex abuse scandals in the clergy.  But it doesn’t take on the most obvious one: culture war weariness.  People are sick of it.  They are sick of being told over and over again to hate their neighbor.  Sick all the more, for being told to hate their neighbor in the name of love.   And sick still more, for having that message of hate preached to them by the likes of this…

He did not excommunicate the step-father, saying the crime he is alleged to have committed, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending a fetus’s life.

I’m simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. 

Religion isn’t on the decline in America.  People are just getting sick of being lectured by moral degenerates.  Life is good.  This good earth is a wonderful place to be living it.  Our families and friends give it sweetness.  Love and sex bring it joy and contentment.  To ask questions, to search for knowledge is not only a good thing, it is a great adventure.  Life is good.  The gutter is no place to be living it.