[Religion News Service, September 5, 1995]
An on‑line friend regularly sends me E‑mail titled “Hathos!” These are items that prompt a mix of hatred and pathos (and embarrassment, loathing, and other emotions). Something that showed up the other day certainly fills that bill: the liberal advocacy group People For the American Way is accusing America's parents of censorship.
[Religion News Service, February 4, 1997]
This year Jan. 22, the date of the March for Life, dawned chilly and gray in the nation's capital. There was no snow, but ugly rumors troubled the crowd.
It was said that there had been an explosion at an abortion clinic in town earlier that morning. A couple of days before there had been a firebombing at a clinic in Tulsa, Okla. Before that, a pair of bombs exploded at an Atlanta building that housed an abortion clinic along with other businesses.
[Religion News Service, June 27, 1995]
Baby Katherine has it lucky. She’s dying.
When she was born three months ago, problems suspected during pregnancy were confirmed. Katherine has Trisomy 18, a tripling of the eighteenth chromosome. Down Syndrome, in comparison, triples the twenty‑first. But, unlike Down Syndrome children, few Trisomy 18 babies grow up; those that make it to birth live about two more months. Katherine is racing to double that allotment.
[Religion News Service, August 8, 1995]
A few years ago a small item appeared in the newspaper of the American Medical Association: some clinics in New York were secretly testing women for HIV, and refusing to give abortions to the ones they found positive. The motive: self-protection. One doctor said they were “unhappy about the risk. We're being splashed with amniotic fluid and blood, and it scares us.” Another said he was afraid the staff would contract HIV through exposure to the patients' tears.
[Religion News Service, September 3, 1996]
A recent television awards ceremony sought to honor so‑called “family” shows; advertising for the program proclaimed that it would celebrate “shows the whole family can watch together.” The tone was both defensive and opportunistic.
The show's producers read their demographics correctly: There are a lot of parents out there who are just plain peeved.
[Religion News Service, July 25, 1995]
It's as adorable as a kitten sitting on a teddy bear holding a balloon, licking a lollipop shaped like a rainbow that smells like violets and plays “Send in the Clowns.” Make that a pink kitten.
Superlatives fail me. The latest porcelain doll catalog just arrived from the Ashton‑Drake Galleries, and just thumbing through it is enough to make my teeth hurt.
[Religion News Service, December 9, 1996]
The story has become familiar: Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson were high school sweethearts in a New York City suburb usually described as “affluent.” They went off to separate colleges as freshmen this fall, but met in mid‑November at a motel outside Newark, Del. There she delivered their firstborn son, and Peterson swaddled him in bloody motel linens and laid him in a gray garbage bag. The corpse was later recovered from the motel trash bin.
[Religion News Service, January 7, 1997]
In a north Florida city, just off the interstate, stands a gas station that at first appears routine. But as I came around last week to pump a tankful for my holiday trip home, I noticed a sign posted next to the credit‑card slot.
The wording was oddly formal. ”We hope your fueling experience will be enhanced by Jacksonville's first FAST PAY television gas pumps."
[Religion News Service, September 19, 1995]
The heat wave has broken hundred‑year records, and now the wave is broken with rain pounding the asphalt and whipping the trees around. This morning I tried to pick my way toward church around the yawning puddles, with an umbrella held down tight enough to function as an awkward hat. At last I sacrificed dignity to common sense and ran barefoot through the parking lot with my sandals in my hand.
[Religion News Service, March 24, 1997]
”Madness,“ writes the Rev. Luke Veronis, in one of his daily e‑mail messages from his beseiged apartment in Tirana, Albania. ”It is as if the entire country has gone crazy. I want to think that things are slowly getting back to normal, but I am fooling myself."
