This Workshop is going to be the coolest. Jason Horton teaches us new stuff very quickly every time he comes down, and has been instrumental in helping us reach our A-Game.  I heartily recommend his workshop for anyone who wants to free up their creativity, scrape off their fears, and pump up their energy.  Read on:


CLICK THE POSTCARD BELOW TO REGISTER NOW!

Long Form Improv: Back to Basics with Jason Horton

......Sews and Shows Community Theatre Workshop
......7860 Golden Ave.
......Lemon Grove, CA 91945



......Just 10 minutes east of Downtown San Diego, right off the 94 in Lemon Grove

Cost:    $25   GET TICKETS: 

Age:    14 & over

Are you an actor looking to work on your improvisational skills for commercial auditions? A writer looking to generate ideas for a sketch or screenplay? Improv can benefit careers in all fields by giving you the same confidence professional performers need to get on stage every day.

In 'Back to the Basics', improvisers of all levels will learn to put aside the complexities we all encounter, and concentrate on the fundamentals of long form improvisational comedy: Finding truth and honesty in scenework, the ability to "yes and" without over-thinking, and to “follow your fear”, and take chances.

About Your Instructor:

JASON HORTON is a Los Angeles actor/writer/comedian/improviser that has been improvising since 2004. He has performed with San Diego TheatreSports, and is one of the founding members and A frequent guest performer of The Hinges. He has trained and currently performs improv and sketch comedy at both the Improv Olympic West and Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres in Hollywood. He also writes and produces original content for the Upright Citizens Brigade website, UCBComedy.com. Jason has performed at the 2007 & 2008 Del Close Marathon in New York City, and the 2007 & 2008 Los Angeles Improv Comedy Festival.

And see Jason LIVE! with The Hinges in Escondido later that night!

Come See The Hinges! at THEATRX!

I had some fun with this, so even though it's a blatant tool to sell copies of this book, I thought I'd post the results here.  I laughed at the title it gave me.

As you know, I'm a massive list maker, and my "Adventures to Live!" list is over 9 pages long. It includes items such as a list of countries I will visit, languages I will learn, and projects I will do around my home. I'm also very curious as to lists that others write, and how well they are accomplishing them.

Oh, as an aside:  I was reading an article of a person my age who is quitting facebook after a year of being lost in endless chatter and white noise [full text here], and the best lines in it were:

"I was hurt when he rebuffed my attempt to friend him, but it turns out real life doesn't have that feature."  And he closed with my favorite line ever:  "If you want to friend me, buy me a beer."

Enjoy.

Every time I feel stress, I come up to see Morgan in Palm Springs.  He always has a fabulous home, and swing music playing in the background. It's like he has a Rat Pack soundtrack to his life.  It's always fun and a relaxing change of pace.  Now Morgan is moving (again) to Palm Desert, to an even more fabulous home, with lower rent. I can't believe how giant this new house is.  He is a good son and has reserved the master bath for his mom Joan, who he's looking after.  It's really primo living.  They went to see Sylvia Brown at Spotlight 29 casino, and she had some good news for the economy, which was very encouraging.  Apparently, we're going to start coming back by Spring, with another surge in December.  So, we are in fact going to have a great 2009, as I've been feeling so far.

I am coming up again on Val Day because Lezlie Anders and the Great Buddy Greco will be doing a "Fever" show at the Annenberg Theater up here in Palm Springs.  If you like Peggy Lee, you must come up to see this. There are a bunch of shows all weekend.   Check it out here:

Fever.

The hardest part of the holidays is being alone again.  While I have no regrets over the decision to end my marriage, the holidays bring up the sense of loss more acutely.  When I got married, I wanted to have a person to share my life with.  And when I divorced, I had to relinquish my right once and for all to have a family around me, to see grandchildren open presents, to cuddle together under a warm blanket. 

I don't have any illusions... the odds of finding a life companion at my stage are getting pretty close to zero, so my challenge is to find all the happiness and joy by myself.  I still feel the joy, but when I take a picture, there is no one to show it to.  I have a box full of photos, but I don't put them in albums. There are no people to tell stories of my exciting life adventures to.

It's no wonder so many of us write blogs, speaking to "the world," sharing shockingly intimate details of our lives.  I've been lectured about concealing my identity from thieves and stalkers.  Sadly, not even they are bothering with me.

So, I feel somewhat connected to people on the Internet, and that helps me feel like I'm not completely alone on the planet.

It's Friday night, and I don't drink.  I blog.  Sorry if I'm a downer.

In San Diego, we just celebrated "December Nights" in Balboa Park. It used to be called "Christmas on the Prado," but our local atheist political lobbyists filed a lawsuit to terminate the event because it was publicly funded and of a religious nature. The government caved and changed the name, but all the decorations and musical acts are still about Christmas. Even with the ongoing political struggle about it, probably the biggest crowd I have ever been a part of played in Balboa Park for 2 days, visiting free museums, eating foods prepared by the International Houses from many countries from all over the world, and celebrating the holidays together, peacefully. Strollers, dogs, kids, teenagers, seniors, of every single color and ethnicity, out in the park together, packed as tightly as sardines. It was the first time I felt exhilarated, really joyful, this year, and it has restored my faith in humanity. It was a truly spiritual experience to participate in an event that put aside all that strife and divisiveness we have seen through this political season, and have everyone just come out and BE together, in person. It was my own Christmas miracle.

Now, I'm lucky to be starting out in a city that is infamous for its positive people, who are so generous that the relief agencies had to tell us to STOP making donations after our last big fires because we had given them a massive surplus. This while over 500,000 people were evacuated. So, San Diegans are a pretty warm and welcoming bunch to begin with. It was just so extra sweet to see so many people at this event, having a great time. When does that ever happen any more?

My wish for you, and for everyone who reads this, is to try to find a way to BE with each other without all the "holy wars" and to work together and build our society and our culture back up, stronger, better, capable of love and peace, and remembering the intense kind of hope we can bring the world when we are being the best part of ourselves. Regardless of what we believe religiously, we are still sharing this planet together, and we are capable of great things when we work together and look after one another.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, and happy holidays, to you. I hope you find something to be joyful about. Look for the positive miracles around you, and I promise you will find them.

At lunch today I watched Boston Legal on the DVR. I gotta say, I love that show. It really dives into the issues and chews on them from both liberal and conservative viewpoints. This week's topic was abortion. Talk about diving into the fray!

The story line was this: a 15-year-old Chinese girl who was born in China came to Alan Shore to get a judicial bypass because her mother, played by Ming Na, had refused her permission to obtain the abortion.

The mother came across as very reasonable, and was worried that her daughter would have a hard time living with the fact that she had ended the life of her unborn baby. The daughter sounded very reasonable and intelligent, and argued that she was poor, and her baby would be raised in a home with inadequate health care, nutrition, and a mother who would be unlikely to be able to finish her education and provide a decent life for her. The idea of adoption was floated, but the girl didn't want to be put through a whole pregnancy and the changes that her body would have to undergo for that. Not to mention the medical care she didn't have and couldn't afford.

Denny Crane piped in the religious point of view, that the girl would go to Hell for murdering her unborn infant.

Shirley reluctantly second-chaired the case, but still put in her 2 cents that she had from personal experience regretted that decision her entire life. Furthermore, an issue complicating that case was the fact that the girl had been born in China, and that she knew her unborn baby was a girl. She resisted telling everyone why she wanted to abort, but Shirley realized that the girl was aborting the baby primarily because it was a girl. She cited some interesting statistics about India, whose abortion rate of girls was dramatically high, and in China, the one-child law had caused many people to selectively abort female fetuses because males are so much more prized.

Shirley likened it to a genocide of females in those cultures, and called it gender selection.

Alan Shore came away from the day with a very hollow victory: knowing the girl was going to abort the baby for a "wrong" reason, the judge still granted the parental bypass. Alan railed at the chipping away of Roe v. Wade, and Denny Crane said something very interesting: he said something to the effect of: you liberals need Roe v. Wade to justify your moral sense when arguing in favor of allowing a woman free access to abortion. Without that law in place, the idea of killing a fetus is much harder to argue for. Roe v. Wade is there to protect the mother and her health. Its effect is to remove any consideration of the life of the fetus in that equation.

The episode ended with Alan Shore contemplating the two abortions he had been a party to in the past. He quoted a statistic from Freakonomics that said the crime rate in the 90's may well have been lower in part due to the legalized abortions that started in the 70's. The thinking is that babies born to unwed, impoverished teen mothers are often much more likely to commit crimes as they get older, and since they were aborted, they simply didn't exist to commit those crimes. Denny Crane asked if that consoled Alan about his two aborted children, and he answered no.

All underscored by a modern version of "The Times, They Are A-Changing."

It caused me to wonder if this is an indication of the next frontier on the battle front of abortion: to redefine the unborn infant as a person with rights, who deserves a chance to live?

Then we have to come up with a balance to protect the rights of the mother. What about that poverty problem? The lack of proper nutrition, medical care, hospitalization for the birth? How about helping the girl choose adoption so she won't have to drop out of high school and be forever locked into poverty by being unable to acquire decent, well-paying employment? And complicating matters, what about the rights of the father? Can it be easier for the father to either choose to raise the child if the mother doesn't want it, or to abdicate his rights so it can be easily adopted? Can it be safer to adopt a baby so that adoptive parents don't have to worry that the children will change their minds willy-nilly when they turn 18 and suddenly want to parent their infant, who is now a 2 or 3 year old stranger who has already bonded with his/her adoptive parents?

I think it's wrong to force a teenager to be a parent simply because she and her boyfriend were too eager to wait till he had a condom one night. I don't think that the children and their baby should be forced into a completely punishing life of poverty, welfare, homelessness, and possibly crime just because they followed their biological urges. I know religious folks want to judge and punish the kids for "sinning," but I don't think a lifetime of poverty and punishment is fair.

I think we need to look at other options to make it safe for girls to bring the babies to term without dooming them to a totally ruined life, a ruined future, and ruining the baby's chances to have a safe and happy existence. If their families aren't ready or willing to look after the baby and help the teen mother complete her education, why make the teen feel like abortion is the only way out of all these ruined lives?

I think we need to glorify adoption, adoptive families, and building families from love, if not from our own loins. I think that part of the "universal health care" idea should include a way to help these impoverished pregnant girls get proper prenatal care and delivery.

I still think that if a girl still needs to have an abortion, she should at least be able to have access to a medically safe one.

But I surely would like to see more support offered to girls who are pregnant by those people who want to end abortions. Because if you cut off abortions without providing those other solutions, you'll just be sending desperate girls back to the coat hangers and back alleys.

I thought it might be helpful to discuss my point of view on the issue of Gay Marriage. In this incredibly heated political season, this topic seems to cause religious conservatives to explode in fits of rage and hatred, condemning me to eternal damnation, accusing me of being against the natural laws created by God Himself. They bring up Sodom and Gomorrah, blaming the homosexuals and those tolerant of them for their destruction by the Lord. And they claim that by allowing society to create a legitimate place for homosexuals, we are bringing down the Lord's destruction on ourselves. Those are heavy charges.

It may be helpful to know that I have been a Christian for many years. It may also be helpful to know that I have personally read the Bible myself, without limiting my reading to pamphlets and missives handed out in the various churches I've attended over the years. I have listened to pastors and priests from a number of denominations over the years expounding on politics, religion, homosexuality, family, etc. I read a research piece called "What the Bible Says, and Doesn't Say, About Homosexuality" published online by Rev. Dr. Mel Write (see SoulForce.Org). And after all that, I have come to the conclusion that we are facing a special time in our lives that is much like the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's.

On the right side of the room, the religious conservatives are convinced that homosexuality is merely a sexual perversion. A heart full of sin and temptation by Satan, a cross to be born and resisted throughout one's life. The same as any other sexual perversion like bestiality, pedophilia, fetishism, sadism, or masochism. All to be reviled and repented from, and the prayerful pervert could be saved by the love of Jesus Christ and a good wife or husband. That choosing a life of heterosexuality, building a family, denying one's sexual inclinations, is a virtuous path for life. That there is no such thing as a "Homosexual" as a distinct class of people deserving any kind of special acknowledgment or rights. After all, there is a homogeneity to other protected classes: skin color, gender.

The recent ads now proclaim that permitting homosexual people to marry and the specter of gay marriage being a permissible subject of discussion in the schools, somehow will be infringing on their right to freedom of religion. By allowing someone to have a lifestyle that is not officially sanctioned by their particular churches, they claim that official practices will now interfere with their right to practice their religion. They don't say HOW. So, I'm not sure why they believe that.

Further, the right claims that civil partnership, while still an abomination to them, is good enough, and equal enough. That marriage should be preserved for a sanctified union between people, to protect the family and ensure family relationships are strong and in place to care for children. And since gay people cannot procreate, they do not deserve the special status that marriage provides the family unit.

On the left side of the room, the social liberals are convinced that homosexuality is a natural condition of humanity. As argument in favor of this position, there is evidence of the existence and behavior of homosexuals for time immemorial, predating the compilation of the Bible, predating the histories of much older societies. The nature of relationships between homosexual people is that these are two consenting adults, sharing a mutual attraction, and forming a close personal bond that includes a sexual component. Unlike the other "perversions" listed by the right, these relationships are not characterized by a person victimizing a weaker party (human or animal), willing or unwilling. And for the hundreds of gay and lesbian people I know, they tend to want the same things from their partners as I wanted from my heterosexual partners: intimacy, love, compassion, understanding, partnership, mutual care and respect, devotion, commitment, honesty. They have also discovered among themselves a kind of continuum of sexuality, where some find themselves attracted to members of the opposite sex to different degrees, some even identifying themselves as bisexual.

They look exactly like me. Except they are sexually attracted to a person of the same gender.

It's much harder to classify them as a homogeneous class because we're looking at their skin for clues. Or their outward behavior. Or their gender. It's not that easy, because the homosexual population seems to be a pretty consistent subset of all these other protected classes. Racially diverse. Gender diverse, beyond even the simple male/female divide, the Gay and Lesbian community has been embraced to include transgender people as well. This spectrum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender people are often referred to as GLBT these days.

The GLBT community has gathered and identified itself for us. They have declared that they exist, and that this is the natural state of being for them.

The religious right's argument is that they don't even exist. That it's all a sinful fantasy and that allowing them to exist will serve to destroy the rest of us.

These seem to be intractable positions. On the one hand, there are people who have had the courage to band together and demand to be treated on an equal footing with other human beings. To enjoy the right of assembly, the pursuit of happiness, privacy, and equal protection under the law.

On the right, their very existence is vehemently denied. This reminds me of the fact that black people were officially described as only 3/5 human, and were not allowed to vote. The churches argued that miscegenation violated God's natural laws. Upon meeting my Chinese best friend in college in 1980, my own grandmother objected to the possibility of marrying him, arguing that if God hand intended for us to mix the races, he would not have distributed us so distinctly by race in all the different places on the planet, separate from one another by natural barriers like the Himalayas and the oceans. In a sense, ships and modern methods of transportation have allowed us to intermingle, and were an abomination in their own time for that. And it was illegal for black people to marry white people in many states until 1964. In effect, that's only 44 years ago. Only for our last 2 generations has our entire nation been free to marry the person we chose.

The biblical argument is extremely well defined in the research piece I mentioned above. Homosexuality is barely mentioned in the Bible itself, and when you look back on the language used in the original texts, there is some dispute about whether the text was referring to homosexual relationships as we know them today, or if it is referring to an ancient practice of subduing a warrior's conquered people by actually violating them. (I'm sure we can all agree that there is no way one could construe that to be a mutually consenting relationship in that scenario.) So, if you take the amount of time and passion that the religious community extends toward preventing the GLBT community from enjoying the equal rights under the Constitutional laws of our land compared to the amount of time they invest in preventing all the problems mentioned many thousands of times that could contribute to preserving marriage among heterosexual families, their attention is completely out of proportion with the emphasis that God himself has placed upon those two issues.

But, like impossible advances in science and medicine that have allowed us to preserve life, fly around the entire earth in less than 24 hours, or visit the moon... maybe it IS God's Will that we have the ability to see and identify such a diverse group of people as a single class, deserving equal protection of the law. It's complicated... in the early 20th Century, we learned how to harness nuclear energy: it can be the instrument of mass destruction if it is used as a weapon, or it can provide electrical energy to millions of people. Even with that very positive outcome, it still creates a filthy, toxic mess that destroys the part of the earth in which it is disposed. How can we, as a society, reconcile this very useful, yet dangerous, application of science? In a sense, we have to use some faith that we will solve the problems in the future, some how, some way, while allowing everyone to reap the benefits of using the power now.

In the same way, as a society that prizes equal protection under the law, it is time for us to make a bold leap of faith and say that this is our next frontier. It's time for us to declare that the GLBT community is a real group of people who deserve the equal protection of the laws. That they deserve freedom of association. They deserve freedom of religion, meaning that the stated rules of the Christian majority religion should not be used to prevent them from practicing what is for them to be a very natural and normal lifestyle. That they deserve to have the exact same rights, benefits and responsibilities to marry the person they choose in life, and be able to support each other in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, as long as they both shall live. So help them God.

I also believe that civil partnership is NOT equality. Like the old "separate but equal" claim of the segregationist's schools, civil partnership does not afford equal rights to the partners. Here's why:

1. Married people need only a single-page marriage certificate to prove their bonding and fusion. Civil partners need a multi-page document, along with a pile of ancillary documents regarding health care power of attorney, HIPAA permission, Wills, and various powers of attorney to act on behave of their loved one in order to be able to fuse their lives financially and publicly, or even visit one another in the hospital and discuss their loved one's case with the medical professionals.

2. Married people don't have to produce paperwork to hospitals, employers, etc. to prove they are married. Civil partners, however, must submit the paperwork to prove it.

3. Civil partners are not entitled to their partners' life insurance, retirement and death benefits on the same equal and automatic standing as a married person's spouse. They must be listed as beneficiaries, and if they are not explicitly listed, they can be excluded by blood relatives, even if those relatives have been hostile and distant from the GLBT relative. A married person would not need any special paperwork beyond the one-page marriage license to inherit all those rights. (The wealthier the married people get, the more complex it can become... but we're talking about regular, basic rights here.)

4. Heterosexual people with no plans or ability to procreate are allowed to marry, even though they will not be using the marriage unit to create a safe haven for children. On the other hand, homosexual couples are permitted to adopt children in California, but they are not able to "upgrade" their civil union to a full marriage. So, their legally adopted children are prohibited by society from enjoying the same level of legal protections as other children.

My final statement is a more emotional one for me.

The religious community talks endlessly about "protecting traditional marriage" as if allowing the entire population the right to have access to the same civil rights and protections is in some way taking something away from them. Try as I might, I can't understand how that can be. The way I see it, allowing gay people to marry will add another level of commitment possibility to the gay community.

The reputation of multiple shallow relationships that was earned from the wild and woolly coming out of the 80's and the painful AIDS epidemic that swept the world after the unprotected sexcapades of those years have caused a lot of bitterness in the religious community, who often claim that AIDS is a modern-day plague visited upon them for their sinful behavior.

What they fail to see is that as the years have advanced and the GLBT community has matured in its identity, people have sought out more meaningful connections and relationships. They have moved beyond the gleeful early discovery of freely expressing themselves through the lens of their sexuality, and have begun to carve out lives for themselves. They build homes and cocoon right alongside the hetero community. They love and care for children, raising them to be loving, responsible people in their own right. They are brave and courageous for being willing to live a life that is different from the way their parents have chosen to live. And they now want to be able to crystallize and formalize their devoted relationships in the same way that their parents were able to.

What the religious community fails to see is that by ratifying the GLBT community's right to bond and commit on the highest, most intense level, they are ratifying the institution of marriage itself by declaring it a pinnacle commitment, beyond just some civil papers. That means something.

In a world where Britney Spears can marry some guy and divorce him a couple of months later, a husband can marry a wife to get at her money and connections, a wife can get pregnant to force a husband to marry her and dump all his other girlfriends... in a world where marriage itself is seen as a temporary condition that can be solved by a quickie divorce... wouldn't it be nice if we could move forward to an era where marriage is restored to its pinnacle status?

When I made my marriage vows to my (now ex-) husband, I meant every word I said. I had only known him 2 weeks, but I knew myself and my willingness to dedicate my life to building a powerful, positive partnership with this man who had promised to stand by my side and grow old with me as we traveled the earth together and built a life together. Imagine my devastation that my husband would just consider our marriage to be a piece of paper, a contract that we could tear up whenever he found something better. And I'm not the first heterosexual person this has happened to. It happens to half of heterosexual marriages in this country.

I look back and wonder, would it have been any different if we had dated for a year first? What if we had been partners and living together for 3 years? 10 years? There seems to be no guarantee, because no matter when people marry, it doesn't stop one of the partners from changing his values (or lying about them in the beginning) and breaking some or all of his promises.

Blocking my close gay friends from marrying can in no way have solved the problems that broke up MY marriage. Keeping gay people from making the pinnacle commitment does not fix the fact that my husband made his commitment casually, all while continuing his online dating relationships. Preventing my gay friends from devoting themselves emotionally AND financially to their mutual care and benefit in no ways fixes the fact that my ex-husband refused to contribute a penny to our relationship financially, leaving me to pay all the bills and save for our future retirement by myself.

In fact, the best equal protection under the law can do is subject my gay friends to the same problems and weaknesses that married heterosexual people face in our society: infidelity, money problems, impulsivity, incompatibility, domestic violence... the list goes on. I predict that GLBT marriages will be subject to exactly the same human condition that heterosexual marriages will face. So, for better or worse, I say, let's all be able to work on our human frailties and conditions together, equally.

One Republican blogger writes:

"Tonight millions of kids will hit the streets going Trick Or Treating for Candy, some will work many hours filling up their Bags with candy while some kids will only work a little and some will not go Trick or Treating at all.

"Should the Kids that Work Hard all night long going House to House for Hours, practice the Obama Plan of "Re-Distributing the Wealth" and Re-Distribute their Candy to those who did not put in the same amount of work?

"Is Obama Teaching our kids to not work hard because everyone will get the same anyway?

"Is Obama Teaching our Children that you should not put forth the effort to get ahead because the lazy Trick or Treater will get just as much Candy as you do?

A Hard Night of Work only to be told they have to Re-Distribute their Candy Now? "


The problem with Republicans trying to make simplistic examples is that you end up comparing candy apples to pumpkin pie. Your numbers are faulty.

If your kid enlisted the help of 25 other kids to bring him 750,000 pieces of candy, letting each of them keep 20,000, your kid would be left with 250,000 pieces of candy, and the ones who did all the hard work would have only 20,000 each. Of that, he'd have to give 36% to his parents, who provide roof, shelter, protection, medical care, food, etc. to him. That's 90,000 to his folks, leaving him with 160,000 pieces of candy, or EIGHT times as many as the people who did the work for him. He's still plenty wealthy, under the current parental tax plan.

With Obama as President, there would be no change. Still 36%.

But let's say the kids work extra hard and each brought him 2,000 extra pieces of candy, so after paying off his pals at the same 20,000 pieces each, your kid ends up with 300,000.

Under Obama's plan, he might have to pay his parents 39% on that last 50,000 extra pieces. So, instead of 108,000 pieces, he'd have to pay 90,000 + 19,500 of that last extra bit, making him pay 109,500. That leaves him with 190,500 pieces of candy, or 9.5 times as much candy as his pals, who were the ones who did all the work.

Now, with that extra 1,500 pieces of candy, his parents can afford to pay the x-ray costs at the hospital to make sure the candy for all the kids doesn't have any needles or razor blades in it, without losing anything. And your precious kid is even wealthier than ever.

A better distribution of wealth would be if your kid would pay his pals a higher amount for their work, or offer them health care for their sick tummies. But since he won't do that because he wants to be richer than ever before, he's leaving that health care to be someone else's responsibility.

And still, with higher taxes, he comes out even further ahead than he would have been, because his pals are still healthy and available to do his bidding on the next Halloween or school band uniform collection project.

Everybody wins.

My other uncle has a penchant for sending me newsletters from a sect of Catholics that adhere to our lady of Guadalupe's revelations, which to me appears to be a more intense, fire and brimstone brand of belief system than if you focus your efforts on reading the Bible yourself.

Today's missive contained a priest's assertion that the REAL terrorism issue in our country is the terrorism of 3,000 babies a day through abortion. I almost deleted it out of hand as yet another religious extremist rant, and then I thought... if I were as committed as he seemed to be to the cause of ending legal, medically-safe abortion, how would I go about it? I mean, if pro-choice, pro-life people like me are to be swayed, what would it take?

This is my meditation for today:

I think this person has a fundamental misunderstanding of terrorism. It means: "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion."

No one is being threatened or coerced by fear or terror when they choose abortion. (Well, maybe their parents are terrorizing them so they fear their parents' violent response to their pregnancy and childbirth more than they fear the fate of their soul for choosing to abort...In that case, their parents' threats of violence are the terrorism, and abortion is merely the reaction to that.)

I think he should use the word "genocide" instead, which I believe is more accurate.

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group"

All one would need to do is to define "Unwanted/unintended human embryos" as a political or cultural group, and he'd be able to make a much more convincing argument. (Feel free to pass this along to the original author if you feel it would add something productive to the discussion.)

Just campaigning to stop this currently legal "genocide" is not enough. Creating a new generation of starving, abused, neglected infants is not enough. The Roe v. Wade fighters need to do more. You see, abortion solves a very big problem for some people. The problem of abject poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage, lack of food. Girls in abusive homes are viciously beaten if their parents learn of the pregnancies, and they have no safe place to go. Rape victims. Unfaithful spouses. If there is no baby, there is no problem. If there is a baby, she could be viciously beaten and kicked to the street. Recently, a woman whose baby was conceived outside her marriage actually put that baby in the microwave to avoid the punishment of her husband. (Thank GOD that wackadoo is in jail for life now.) These people do not have loving extended families like ours. They have barriers we can't even imagine from our relatively cushy lives. (I mean, I would gladly have adopted that unwanted baby...) So, how do we help them solve their problems so they don't feel trapped into choosing to abort their fetus or murder their newborns? They need more options available that they can live with.

However, I'm still waiting for the religious leaders to mobilize an army of adoptive families and medical groups that would provide for 3,000 new teen mothers/day for whom "just say no" didn't work as a viable method of birth control. The honest thing to do is to make it safe for them to bring those babies into the world, and for those unwanted babies to live in safe homes upon their arrival. They will have housing, nutrition, medical costs, and the costs of adoption to contend with.

The tougher one: if you make rape and incest victims bear the fruit of their violent assault, they should not have to be further victimized financially and emotionally for life. And the innocent infant should not be victimized by forcing a horrified, resentful mother to raise him if she can't bring herself around to forgive the assailant enough to avoid resenting and punishing the child himself.

I also believe we need factual sex ed in the schools so teens know exactly how pregnancy happens, and exactly how STDs and AIDS pass from people during sexual contact, and that they know that abstinence is the only way to prevent those horrors. Nowadays, kids are making it up as they go along. They are passing oral gonorrhea around because they "heard" that oral sex doesn't count as sex because it isn't genital intercourse. And, when they make the CHOICE not to abstain (like Palin's daughter did), they should be armed with information about how to best protect themselves from becoming pregnant before they are ready to be parents, and minimize the spread of disease. And they should have a healthy fear of the failure rates of those choices.

I recently coached a young girl who was having unprotected sex, saying "it just happened," and trying to pretend that nice girls don't "plan" for sex by using condoms or the Pill. I busted her for being 100% responsible for everything that happens to her, no matter what, and that sex doesn't just "happen." By NOT choosing to do anything about the sex before taking her clothes off, she was indeed making a CHOICE to be pregnant or get a disease. She said all her friends had the same pretense because they didn't want to be called a "whore." But they do need to know about contraceptive usage in detail, because the admonishment to be a "good girl" alone leads them to make stupid, irresponsible mistakes. It's one thing to "rebel" against your parents' strict rules and be naughty. It's entirely another thing to take your life, health and future into your hands. People need information to really take responsibility for their actions. To keep them ignorant is basically to declare that any sexual activity before marriage should be punishable by forced parenthood and/or death by AIDS. That doesn't sound very pro-life to me.

If you want to win this war, you can't just force a bunch of teenagers to drop out of school and work 3 part time jobs at minimum wage to support a baby they don't want in the first place, and most likely will neglect or abuse. These are not young women who are ready to be parents. They are children themselves, most of whom do not have the same kind of loving and supporting family that we do. You can't take away all their choices once they are committed to NOT becoming parents, or they will just sneak out to a dangerous back alley abortion, like they did before 1972 (yep, I'm old enough to remember). If you take away medically safe abortion, you have to give them the choice of a safe pregnancy and adoption.

What are your church and its members doing about support for destitute/abused/drug addicted pregnant children who want to choose life? Is there a drive to sign up the parishioners for foster care and adoption?

(I'm in process to register for foster care... I intend to be part of the prevention/solution campaign myself.)

THIS PART was not in my response to my uncle... I just thought about it now:

To me, integrity means taking actions to stand by your beliefs, not just sitting back and running your mouth and forwarding emails. If you want to take an action that is going to impact other people's lives and NOT yours, then stand by it and be responsible for the fallout of your actions. If you are not willing to LIVE with the change you demand, then stand down and stop demanding it. If it's not something you would personally be responsible for, then you should not be advocating it, or judging people whose lives and choices diverge from your own.

Uh oh. My uncle called me an atheist and a socialist for wanting to vote for a Muslim and a draft dodger. How could he do that on Ramadan? (Which happens to fall on my birthday this year?)

I saw "Traitor" this weekend, which really opens your eyes to the difficult distinctions inside the Muslim faith between those who observe the Koran and those who take it an extra step and believe that they must follow the orders of their leaders and conduct a jihad against American innocents. It was an interesting look inside.

I find it tragic that so many American conservatives believe that all Muslims are atheists, and that all Christians who understand that there are more than one kind of Muslim are also atheists.

When did it become divine to slap labels on the "other" and then justify all manner of evils to rid ourselves of them? I know the economy is bad right now, but does that justify treating all immigrants as welfare-sucking and job-sucking felons that deserve to be jailed and deported for life? Did someone pry that sign off the statue of Liberty and revoke the original welcome to all immigrants forever? As the granddaughter of immigrants, it would be hypocritical of me to advocate the absolute closure of our borders to all but the wealthiest, best-educated, and most attractive immigrants. My grandparents would never have gotten in. A poor brass foundry worker with $50 in his pocket and a maid? No way.

A lot of religious people deal in black and white and absolutes. It's very uneducated and very immature in my way of thinking. They say you can't believe in gay rights and believe in God. Sorry, it's one or the other. You can't believe in allowing some girls to have an abortion in a medically safe way and believe in God. You have to be willing to put girls and doctors in jail or you don't believe in God. Pro-life only means anti-abortion. It can't also mean anti-death penalty or anti-war.

And someone who has lived as a Christian but whose father was a Muslim can't be a Christian, no matter how many years he has gone to church. And if his pastor in a fit of anger over America's bully international politics that he believed made the world hate America, said "God damn America!" that must mean that anyone who has ever listened to him in any sermon in his life must now be a traitor to this country.

My uncle sent me this glowing fan mail about the little Barbie Oakley from Alaska, who has apparently 90 percent of her people who are happy with her work as governor for the last year, and that is supposed to substitute for substantive experience, and is supposed to trump Obama's experience. That 90% amounts to about 500,000 people if you can extrapolate the results of a sampling survey to the entire population. Even so, there are over 300,000,000 people who have never heard of her because she has never worked at the national level.

Is it really the work of people who don't believe in God to point out such inconvenient truths? Why are the religious people so willing to follow orders of the Rovian rumor mill that they lose their minds and their souls whenever we casually point out the facts about her background that are public record and proven? Why do they ardently hold onto Rovian rumor mills as if they are gospel truths, without one bit of verifiable evidence to back up those assertions?

I think it's time to admit that you religious people don't really know the mind of God. Just admit that you are just as afraid as everyone else about your home going into foreclosure, your kids going off to war, your daughter having a hard time finding a job since she had to drop out of college to have and raise that baby, your job being shifted overseas because programmers abroad will work for 10 cents on the dollar. There are more issues than abortion and oil drilling in Alaska. Admit it!