It is no secret that God Blogging has little to no respect for Planned Parenthood, so it won’t be a surprise to readers that I’m passing on a video of an undercover taping at a PP clinic done by LiveAction, an anti-abortion movement led by young people. (Note: I label LiveAction anti-abortion instead of pro-life because I can’t determine from their web site if they are also against the death penalty and unjust war or for massive social services and extensive educational funding for those born into poverty — all pro-life values. Note #2: I point out that LiveAction is spearheaded by the young because, for most of its existence, the anti-abortion movement was led by older folk who wouldn’t know YouTube if it smacked ‘em up side the head. This youth-led movement is a serious change.)

For people who wonder – and surely some do – my distaste for PP comes from their shift from supporting access to birth control (their aim in the early days) to an almost total focus (and financial dependence) on abortion. The final straw was when a nurse I met in Dallas showed me a memo encouraging her and her PP clinic co-workers to “push” more abortion services so the clinic could makes its monthly revenue budget. The report a few years ago in Consumer Reports showing that two of the most ineffective condoms to use were sold by PP, which was followed by a report that showed those were the two most popular condoms sold at PP at the time, lent fuel to the fire. (Fair and accurate reporting note: CR also noted that there was one condom sold at PP that received CR’s higher rating.)

Now, there are the LiveAction videos, the latest of which you can find over at Fallible Blogma here, where the doctors and nurses speak for themselves. And before anyone jumps on me in the comment section saying I’m an ignorant prude or a religious nut trying to push my agenda, please read my post on birth-control here, and keep in mind that some of us view unwed pregnancy as an economic and societal issue, not a religious one. Additionally, not all of us who are against abortion came to that conclusion through Divine inspiration but rather, like my agnostic and atheist friends, through reason: As one such friend told me, wrong is wrong, even if there is no God.

Image courtesy of scienceblogs.com

Health care reform needs to include food industry reform. The well-off often wonder why the poor are obese. I can tell you simply: fattening “food” is cheap. I call it “food” because anything with more than four ingredients on its label can hardly be called real food – it is little more than processed poison, a poison laden, usually with high fructose corn syrup, the bane of anyone trying to stay healthy. It is put in food for one reason and one reason only- to appeal to our sweet tooth, to get us addicted to junk. I mean, really, does a fast-food burger need sugar? No, but they have them. And, as anyone knows, fast food is cheap – check out the $1 menus sometime.

This has been on my mind ever since the battle over health care reform heated up. We have an epidemic of obesity and we’re going to be paying for it either personally or through our taxes if we get universal health care. Ergo, we should care that people’s waist to hip ratio is right, we should care that the food stamp program in some areas is so backward it forbids the purchase of yogurt but allows people to buy soda, we should care that the food industry is stuffing our cows with corn instead of grass and beefing up our chickens with hormones to the point they can’t stand on their own…. and that all that poison goes into bodies that are biologically designed to eat food in its natural state and revolts (gains weight disproportionately) when we eat what our too busy (or too poor) lifestyles seem to demand: fast, cheap, processed food. (And don’t even get me started on the “leftovers” grocery stores and restaurants send to soup kitchens.)

I don’t have time to explain all this today, but luckily, the NYTimes is having a discussion about it today here, and there are links to various blogs discussing the politics of food, who gets what in our nation, and why the real health care issue is reform of the food industry here, here, here, here, here, and this video about “portion distortion” with links to more discussions on those blogs. Read them and engage your brain. Then take a walk, make your own lunch and read labels: If it’s got more than four or five ingredients, don’t eat it.

Yesterday, I heard an outstanding sermon. Coming from me, that says something.

As some people are coffee snobs or music snobs or clothing snobs, I am a sermon snob. I’m one of those people who feel that, although I go to Mass to participate in communal worship, I also go to be spiritually fed, and half of that feeding comes from the preaching. Add to that attitude the critical listening that comes from being a professional writer and more than 15 years as an active member of the Catholic press and you’ve got someone programed to “edit” from the pew. Additionally, I’ve been blessed through my work to have heard some of the best preachers in the country and everyone knows that once you’ve tasted the best of something, its really hard to accept less than that without noticing that, well, it’s less.

The problem with most preaching – and this is as true of Protestant ministers as it is of Catholic priests – is that most preachers are so love with the sound of their own voices and so convicted that their words needed no editing, that they go on long after the sermon’s natural ending point. People squirm in the pews, look at their watches, glance at the door, check the football scores on their cell phones — anything to escape the horrific feeling of being a pew prisoner during a too-long (or too-rambling) sermon. Still, the preachers go on. And on. And, all too frequently, on.

This practice ignores fundamental facts about attention span (between 7 and 10 minutes for listening, depending on the age and education of the listener and apparently shrinking every second due to linking, linking, linking) and the ability of remembering a point when it is surrounded by too much exposition.

Yesterday, however, the priest knew the end and stopped when it came, which, coincidentally, was less than seven minutes after he started. Then he did something brilliant: He sat down and stayed silent for about two minutes, letting people process what they just heard. The sermon was on the need for silence in a world of noise and “connection,” especially during Advent, the four-week liturgical season preceding the Christmas season (which, by Christian standards, is not the month after Thanksgiving but the weeks between Christmas Eve and Epiphany.) The priest used a recitation of a Liffey River full of words to demonstrate the noise blocking out the one Word that matters. His point was made without him ever having to say: You guys need to spend more time in silence so you can hear the still, small voice of God. (Best line about societal blabbering was something to this effect: I update my FaceBook status via Twitter using my Blackberry smart phone.)

So, if you’re the believing sort, you might consider the priest’s advice. If you need a jump start, here’s Beliefnet’s annual Advent cool stuff page – with their (yuck) new page design, you have to scroll halfway down to get to the calendar, but its a good tool if you want to enrich your celebration of the season. And on this page, also if you scroll down, is info on all the other December religious holidays of other faiths.

And a postscript about the power of words: This from the NYTimes about the newspaper winning their seven-year battle to get documents about the clergy sex abuse scandal released from the never-accommodating Cardinal Edward Egan, once the bishop of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., where the abuse occurred. Note Egan’s words of (still!) denial and shape-shifting compared to those of Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, when addressing the crime in his archdiocese. It is easy, IMHO, to see the one Word in Martin’s words … and the shameful absence of same in Egan’s.