I don't understand why we aren't talking about Stewart's district. If I understand correctly, he lives in Red Bank, NJ. Red Bank voted 2:1 for Barack Obama both times. His state senator is a second-term liberal Republican (pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-gun) who could (it would appear) be easily defeated by…

Good point. Under Wisconsin Law (948.02, for anyone who wants to check out their legislature's very nice statutes website), both the mashing and the filming are felonies — regardless of the age of the felons, or their mutual consent!

According to the contemporary LifeNews reports, Rep. Ryan was kicked out of Democrats For Life not for sponsoring birth control bills (which DFLA takes no position on), but for insisting that significant federal funding go to Planned Parenthood as part of those initiatives. Your basic pro-lifer sees funding for PP as…

Galactica was a Mormon parable.

The story is being somewhat mis-reported in the United States. She was jailed for murder, not miscarriage. She *claimed* it was only a miscarriage, but, at trial, her claim was rejected and it was concluded that the termination of pregnancy was deliberate. English-language outlets, by contrast, appear to be…

Catholic papist here. Here's the relevant bit of the Catechism:

Catholic papist here. Here's the relevant bit of the Catechism:

Why would Santorum care about urban and upper-income votes to begin with? There's not a chance in hell he could win the East Coast (or Jezebel readers) to begin with, so he'd be much better off targeting lower- and middle-income rust belters with a message of conservative-flavored economic populism. Those are the…

I think Netflix genuinely cares about our well-being; it's only our own guilt that makes us want to read shade into their inquiries. I cry judicial activism on your ruling!

Very good apology. Kudos.

The Malleus Maleficarum — as even a quick glance at friggin' Wikipedia will tell you — was written by a priest who had already been expelled from a diocese for illegal witch-hunting. It was immediately condemned by local theology faculty, and, within a few years, by the Inquisition itself. If the Roman Catholic…

If Jezebel cares to pay me for a column, I'll spend the three hours necessary to hunt down and cite those sources.

In some sense, isn't everything a process? Nothing happens instantaneously! It seems there's always a moment, sometimes a tiny one, where something is in transition. Certainly that's true in the fertilization process.

Life is not only not "too vague" define scientifically, but a great many scientific and medical dictionaries and textbooks publish definitions of it — because biological life is a scientific concept, not a spiritual one. Yes, there are certainly edge cases, like viruses, but there's no controversy in the scientific…

Which of your sources explained the Catholic Church's stance on all this? Because there's some really major points that this article gets seriously wrong, from the contours of the "ensoulment" debate to the Church's teaching on the sinfulness of first-trimester abortifacients to both the origins of Church teaching of…

No, "beginning of life" is a very simple scientific concept. It's straight out of your ninth-grade life sciences textbook, chapter one: when a cell or collection of cells achieves independent metabolism, organization, growth, and homeostasis, it's a new life. Whether that new life is a new cat, a new virus, a new…

IUDs (copper IUDs in particular) *likely* cause the (choose one: death/destruction) of embryos after fertilization (the beginning of life) but before implantation (the beginning of pregnancy). Although this is not the primary mechanism by which IUDs operate, it is very probably a secondary mechanism.

It's a statewide election. Gerrymandering ain't the blues' problem. Popularity is.

Sorry, I should have said "elected" Democrats. There are a substantial minority of Democratic voters who are at least nominally pro-life. For whatever reason, they still choose to vote for the party whose official platform states, "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's…

Amending the federal Constitution would require 2/3rds of the members of both houses of Congress to approve of overturning Roe/Casey. That means you need 67 pro-life senators, in an era when either party getting past 55 is a miracle (and only happens with help from some sort of "blue-dog"). THEN you would have to…