Henry Louis Gates, Jr., arrested

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested last week for breaking into his own home.  I’ve watched several of Gates’ documentaries, and they’re very good, although he comes off as a jerky American when dealing with people from other countries.

While I’m happy to see any liberal professor, regardless of race, going to prison justly, what happened to Gates last week deserves some consideration.

Gates was returning from a trip out of the country, and found his front door stuck.  So he tried to force the door open, while his companion went around the back.  He lives on campus at Harvard.

A neighbor saw “two black men with backpacks” trying to force their way into the home and called the cops.

When the police arrived, Gates was on the phone with the property manager.  He showed them various forms of ID and had the property manager on the phone to vouch for him.  But the police arrested him, anyway, for being “disorderly”!

Doesn’t a person have a right to be disorderly in his own home when it is being invaded by the Gestapo?

Anyone concerned about civil liberties, our growing Police State or human dignity should be concerned about this. 

Yes, race was a major factor, but so was the fact that most police are a) stupid, barely educated louts and b) bullies.  That’s the main reason people become cops: so they can bully.

When Gianna was a baby, Mary got accosted by our crazy neighbor on her way home from morning Mass.  He stood in front of our house, jumping up and down, screaming at her and threatening her.  We called the cops.  The officer who arrived said it wasn’t a crime to block entrance to our home or to verbally threaten her.

Then he jumped and started going for his gun!

“I just saw something move upstairs!  You said you were the only people in this house!”
“That’s the dog,” I sighed.

Then there were the cops who pulled me over in TN last Christmas for turning around in an empty parking lot at midnight because I was lost in the fog.  Even when I *asked* them for help because I was lost, they said, “We’ve had a lot of robberies here, and we have to be safe.”  They searched me, searched my van, scrutinized my belongings, and held me without cause for 40 minutes while they checked my name in their computers.

Having given the anti-police side of the story, here is the police report (cop doesn’t know the meaning of the word “behalf”, but that’s another matter).

As I said above, Gates comes off as quite a jerk in his videos, shouting over people, calling native Africans “brother” and getting looks in reaction like, “What a weirdo!”, being rude to Muslims and Christians who didn’t want him filming inside their holy sites, etc.

So, there is another side to this story: the one where Gates is shouting over the officer, demanding his name, then shouting over him while he gave his name.  He says Gates immediately started shouting “racist” as soon as he showed up.

I can appreciate Gates’ anger, but he definitely took it over the top–if the police report is accurate.

What I don’t get is: didn’t the neighbor recognize him?

Commonweal Respects Jimmy Carter more than Pope Benedict XVI

That’s the real story in this piece about how former mediocre president Jimmy Carter has severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention (apparently for the second time) over complaints about the SBC’s “treatement” of women and gays, and the liberal commentors on Commonweal’s blog agree with each other that the Catholic Church is also guilty of such sins against “equality.”

The question is: who sets the standard? 

As I’ve noted before, C. S. Lewis said the challenge of the modern Christian was dealing with subjectivism.  The traditional approach of Christian missionaries was to appeal to the sense of guilt people already had, and the sense of the supernatural they already had, and to show that a) Jesus was the reality, and b) Jesus offers forgiveness.

Lewis said we need a new approach to evangelization to deal with those who don’t believe in the supernatural and don’t believe they need to be saved from their sins.

Now, postmodernism offers a whole other problem: an inverted natural law.  The situatoin is more like Chesterton’s dictum that tolerance is the virtue of the man with no convictions.  The New Natural Law inverts secondary principles of the old Natural Law to the judgement of the greater ones: so Equality, and Tolerance, and “Dignity” (but a fales dignity) are the standards by which even religions are to be judged.

But where do those standards come from?

Liberals like Carter and the Commonweal staff and readership take these principles for granted: but how do they justify those principles?

How swine flu is being used to push communion in the hand

Catholic Cartoon Blog reports that some countries are requiring Communion in the hand as a way of allegedly preventing infection by swine flu.

This is how the destroyers of the Faith work. They seize on any opportunity to make it work towards their ends.

First, communion in the hand was introduced. Then, after the horses were out of the barn, it was approved.

Then, when Tradition begins to push back, they mandate standing as the “norm” to receive communion. Was there really some need to mandate standing? Other than spite?

Will communion in the hand be mandated soon, based on some backdoor “need”? Naturally, they’d say “Well, we understand those who like to receive on the tongue, but due to (insert excuse here), we need to have everyone receive in the hand.

Disclosing a disability to a potential employer

Here’s an interesting piece pondering when disabled people should disclose their disabilities to potential or new employers.

Here’s what I know from experience: when I’ve gone to interviews on foot, I haven’t gotten the job.  Every job I’ve gotten, I’ve gone to the interview in a wheelchair.  Interviewers have even said, “That explains the holes in your resume.”  When they look at my resume and think, “Able bodied, ” they see “holes.”  When they look at my resume and think, “Disabled,” they see, “Look what he’s achieved!”

That said, it’s quite interesting to see that it’s illegal for employers to ask if you need any accomodations on the job application, as I have filled out applications that asked that very question.

Catholic Key Blog asks: “Why welcome a child doomed soon to die?”

Now, the author’s point in this fantastic post is how his mind was changed by seeing a couple welcome such a child.

And I give the fellow credit for saying that his concern would be having to watch his wife endure pregnancy and childbirth only to see the child die.  That’s better than, “I can’t bear to watch the child suffer.”

But the basic question I always ask of this mentality is:
Aren’t all children destined to die?
How do you know your child won’t be born with the umbilical cord tied around his or her neck?
How do you know your child won’t get a disease and die in the first months of life, or die in a tragic accident?

We are all born into this world to die.  It’s as simple as that.  Whether it’s sooner or later, every child born in the womb is born to die.