I am not quite sure were to start or subdivide my posts right now, I have 3 articles, 2 from the New York Times, and one from the BBC, all dealing in one way or another with morality. “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/nyregion/13penn.html?ex=”>DNA Tells Students They Aren’t Who They Thought/a" is a rather silly article on the fact that the races are not all that clearly cut today. Based on cheek swab DNA tests, one class learned that their racial identity, genetically speaking, is far less clear than they thought. This really does not come as a huge surprise at all, and is in fact a good thing. This really just follows from common sense, you have been seeing interracial children since Europeans and Africans for centuries now, you see it even in Shakespeare (“Othello”), and it surely must have been a reality of Roman times as well, there is nothing new under the sun. More recently, how can you tell the stories of slave owners that our history books glory in, depicting them at their worst, and not realize that our “African Americans” are not all that purely “African” any more? But however silly the article, it is good that such ideas are starting to permeate even the liberal consciousness, as it can only serve to blur the lines between the races, and racial equality will only come with racial blindness. Why is it that color is more than a descriptive? Only because we make it so, only because we are not one culture, one people./p

Next comes “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/international/worldspecial2/14youth.html?ei=”>Young Catholics Seek to Restore Old Values on Sex/a,“ the other New York Times article. This one finds that many young people are more theologically conservative than their parents were. It quickly backtracks, saying that not all young Catholics agree with our late Pope, and that there is a similar swing towards social conservatism in young people of other denominations, but this does not negate the truth it first asserts. This almost brings me some home, that having explored the limits, and the despair, of tolerance, we are perhaps again learning that some things cannot and must not be tolerated. It also notes in passing a key point, the parishes of the more conservative priests are the ones that are growing most notably, not the ones of the liberal priests the New York Times loves to quote and hold up.

Last but hardly least, comes “Prisoners ‘aware’ in executions/a,” which, I suspect, will begin the process by which yet another execution method will be declared “cruel and unusual”. Part of me is happy to see this; the part of me that would justify the means by the ends is happy to see another advance towards the end of the death penalty. Part of me is dismayed, how could we overlook such an obvious concern as making sure that the person was anesthetized? Part of me hopes that it will simply be modified, not ruled unconstitutional: we have gone too far in declaring things “cruel and unusual.” The death penalty is neither cruel nor unusual, it is merely unnecessary and thus unjust. We are not called to the usual path, but to the hard one. To approach the death penalty in terms of “cruel and unusual” is to ignore the argument that it is simply inherently unjust no matter how it is done. It is to ignore the right of the state to act to protect its citizens. It is to ignore the convict’s value as a human life, intrinsic value, and argue alone on the quality of death. We are not, in so arguing, objecting to the death, but to the method of execution. But the method itself is not what we truly quarrel with. Indeed, there is something to be said for the firing squad, it gave God a chance to act and preserve the life of the convict from the hands of the state. There is something to be said for suffering, our Lord suffered, and we are admonished by the example of the saints to join our suffering to His, for the greater glory of God. If the man must die, let us not quibble about how, so long as it is not a truly horrific death, but if, as the Church argues, it is not necessary he must die, let us again, not quibble about how he does die, but work to end all unjust death. For as long as the death penalty is an option, man will invent new ways by which to kill each other to get around successive “cruel and unusual” findings./p