As a parent who has made her share of mistakes, I’m loath to criticize other parents and yet … one has to question parents who deliberately put their child’s life in danger by refusing medical treatment in the name of God. (Just as one has to question parents who let their children become obese, lose themselves in World of Warcraft, or provide them with recreational drugs.)

Then again, having watched a very small child endure all sorts of traditional cancer-fighting treatments – and die anyway – I wonder if Colleen Hauser is doing what any parent instinctively wants to do: protect his or her child from undue pain.

Hauser has taken her son, Daniel, who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and fled their home in southern Minnestoa in violation of a court order to have Daniel treated with chemotherapy. Apparently the 13-year-old (who reportedly has a learning disability and cannot read), has endured one round of traditional medicine and his tumor has returned. Hauser and her husband, Anthony – who is not on the run, but who told his local newspaper (remember local newspapers?) correctly that chemotherapy is not always the cure – are Roman Catholics.

However, they also believe in the “do no harm” philosophy of the Nemenhah Band, a Missouri-based religious group that believes in natural healing methods advocated by some American Indians. Colleen Hauser testified earlier that she had been treating Daniel’s cancer with herbal supplements, vitamins, ionized water and other natural alternatives. This isn’t Christian Science, where believers tell followers with sick children that a lack of faith or presence of sin is what causes the illness. It is more like integrative medicine, practiced and preached locally in Tucson at the University of Arizona. Mind-body connection, that sort of thing.

But framed as a religion, it makes the Hausers look crazy. The judge says they are medically neglecting their son. Are they? They are surely violating a court order to appear before the judge. (Anthony Hauser said he was disappointed his wife didn’t show up because he apparently thought the plan was to tell the judge about the alternative treatment plan and, if denied, appeal.) But they are seeking treatment, not just allopathic treatment. Is this a religious choice or a parental choice? Discuss among yourselves.

Pajamas Media has two items of note today – one being a video by the founder of the site on how being in the same room as Iran’s President Ahmadinejad moved him from agnostic to believer. At nine minutes it is a little long, but it turns upside down a point atheists often use in disproving a higher power: to wit, if God truly is good and loving, why is evil in the world? Roger L. Simon has an experience with Mr. There Are No Homosexuals in Iran/There Was No Holocaust that makes him (Simon, not Ahmadinejad) “sense” pure evil. That experience leads to him sensing something else: If there is pure evil, there must be the opposite as well, e.g. Pure Good. Hmmm.

The other item was a post by Ron Rosenbaum about anonymous commenters. Anyone who works in media nowadays knows the bane of banality offered via folks unwilling to pen their name to story or blog comments. Currently, two people near and dear to my heart are struggling under great odds to take what was once an online news site and turn it into an all-opinion blog site with some news aggregation. They have a tiny budget, a smaller staff, and a corporate owner who, IMHO, appears to wish them ill. And while the commenters on their posts at TucsonCitizen.com mostly gave these journalists-cum-bloggers a pass on Monday, they’ve got their fangs out today with snotty, snarky comments. And they do it, methinks, because they don’t have to sign their names.

Like Rosenbaum, I believe allowing unsigned comments has led to a swill of snipe in “new media” that grows, much like algae bloom, exponentially under the protection of darkness. Words, as anyone who uses them to make a living knows, have power. That’s why journalists attempt to use them with care. It’s why a feature writer will walk around the office building for 20 minutes trying to decide if “gawky” or “clumsy” is the correct word for a particular sentence or (speaking as a former columnist) why most opinion writers labor long and hard before deciding if snark is necessary to make a point.

We think about our words because we have our names attached to them. If you’re not willing to sign your name to your words, you’re nothing short of a liver-belly chicken. (Not sure if liver-belly chickens actually exist, but you get my point.) So, like Rosenbaum, I offer a challenge: If your arguments are so fantastic and your aim so true, then fess up, and add your John Hancock to your posts on any story or blog anywhere, all the time. Otherwise, do the English language and civil culture a favor and just shut up.

When we first heard the Tucson Citizen was for sale and would be closed, it was a terrific shock to everyone in the newsroom. Then, when we got a reprieve and were told we STILL might be closing, but not for awhile, it was another shock, but then, for some of us, a relief: We still had stories we wanted to cover, things we wanted to look into, people we wanted to interview. We had work to do.

As the reprieve passed one, then two, then three weeks, many of us (those who just can’t seem to let go of journalism, to heck with the gloomy forecasts about the news biz) actually started feeling better. For us it was, “Hey, I still get to do the best job in the world! HOW COOL IS THAT?!”

But May 9 is Saturday, and that means Tucson Citizen employees should hear something tomorrow about a closure or a sale. Which meant that today, I spent my afternoon pulling three stories together: One with a lede that said we were sold… one with a lede that said we’d be closing Saturday … and another with a lede that no one can know about until or unless Door Number Three is opened.

And the thing I noticed writing the stories was that the pain in my upper back that appeared when the likely layoffs were announced returned the minute I started writing. It had been gone the past month or so, dissipated by the “my job is so cool” factor, but as stress filled the newsroom in anticipation of Friday’s news, it just swept over me. It was odd that it could return on such short notice.