Jury Duty

 Conversation with my younger son yesterday: Me: "So how was your week?" Son: "I spent the whole week on a jury for a double murder."  Yikes. I had read about the trial in the news, but had no idea he was on the jury. Of course one isn't supposed to talk about it while the trial is ongoing.

Not fun, but he was lucky it only lasted a week and that it wasn't sequestered.  I have served on a jury once, luckily it wasn't murder, just a liquor store burglary.  At the time I was eight and a half months pregnant with younger son, so I kidded him that he had been on a jury twice. I was selected for a jury when we lived in Colorado, but they ended up settling out of court.  

My husband has served on a jury for a "possession with intent to sell" case. The person was acquitted.  The defense attorney called it the Grape Nut case, because the amount of drug found was about the size of a piece of Grape Nuts cereal.

I recently got a letter from the county clerk re: jury duty. There was a form giving some reasons to be excused. One of the reasons was being over seventy years of age. I debated a bit, but checked that off and sent it in.  Probably should have volunteered to serve.

From a Catholic to a Sectarian Pro-Life Movement?

 Interesting article in the Atlantic:

This is Really a Different Pro-life Movement

When the Supreme Court issued its landmark abortion-rights decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the most intransigent opponents of the decision were not the legislatures of southern Bible Belt states such as Mississippi and Oklahoma....

The state legislatures that presented the strongest defiance to legalizing abortion were those of the heavily Catholic states of the Northeast. Barely 10 percent of Massachusetts legislators supported legalizing abortion in 1973, according to an archival American Civil Liberties Union document. Instead of permitting the procedure up to the point of viability (about 28 weeks at the time), as the Supreme Court mandated, the Massachusetts state legislature responded to Roe by passing a bill prohibiting abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. Rhode Island’s statehouse presented even stronger opposition: It kept abortion clinics out of the state until 1975, when its anti-abortion law was overturned by a federal court.

This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement’s political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.  

Before the mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia: It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned Democratic.

This fit the pattern across the Western world: Countries with large numbers of devout Catholics restricted abortion, while those that were predominantly Protestant did not. Sweden—where Catholics made up less than 1 percent of the population—legalized some abortions as early as the 1930s; Ireland did not follow suit until 2018.

But in the United States, the anti-abortion movement did not remain predominantly Catholic. Southern evangelical Protestants, who had once hesitated to embrace the anti-abortion movement in the belief that it was a sectarian Catholic campaign, began enlisting in the cause in the late ’70s and ’80s. Motivated by a conviction that Roe v. Wade was a product of liberal social changes they opposed—including secularization, the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and a rights-conscious reading of the Constitution—they made opposition to the ruling a centerpiece of the new Christian right. When they captured control of the Republican Party in the late 20th century, they transformed the GOP from a northern-centered mainline Protestant party that was moderately friendly to abortion rights into a hotbed of southern populism that blended economic libertarianism with Bible Belt moral regulation.

The anti-abortion movement’s political priorities changed as a result. A movement that in the early ’70s had attracted some political progressives who opposed the Vietnam War and capital punishment became associated in the ’80s and ’90s with evangelical-inspired conservative-Christian nationalism. Early activists wanted to create a comprehensive “culture of life,” but many of the evangelicals who joined the movement in the late 20th century wanted to save America from secularism and take back the nation for God.       

Preaching for Mother's Day

This is what my wife Therese preached yesterday, the 4th Sunday of Easter, Cycle C (and also Mother's Day).  The readings for yesterday are here.

Unity in abortion diversity

The United States is not a democracy.  We're a union.  And that has implications for how abortion would be legislated in a post-Roe world.

Parish Gardening Groups?

 As you may remember I do a lot of gardening. Last year I gave a post on the early part of the gardening process each year.

Gardening: Seedlings from Basement to Garage

Like music, gardening has potential for generating a network of small groups in the parish where a dozen or so people could network over some aspect or type of gardening., e.g., vegetable gardening, flower gardening, perennial gardening, etc. 

In this pandemic (post-pandemic, endemic?) age, gardening has the great advantage of being an activity that mostly takes place outdoors and is generally done by people who like to be outdoors. People can also network on-line, providing links to websites, YouTube, and even construct their own blogs.    

After not being in parishes for over two years, we will likely not be returning to regular parish attendance. More likely we will be occasionally coming to Mass between surges, or perhaps attending only during the summers if the virus takes up residence in the winter season. If we cannot come to the parish, why not have a small subsection of the parish come to us.

All the parishes that I frequent have outdoor areas that are very accessible and little used, so there will not be the usual competition for parish meeting space, especially since we don't want to meet indoors. Plus, there is a huge amount of free space in our outdoor parks.

Precedents

We have one local parish that actually has a green house, built by the pastor with his own money. The parish raises and sells its produce after Masses. 

My local parish had a small garden next to the food pantry which was lost when they expanded the food pantry. If our parish had a green house, then parish members could raise food for the food bank. Perhaps even invite food bank recipients to be a part of raising their own food. 

The more distant parish (where our Commonweal group met) had a garden for a number of years by the young people who had been inspired by a trip to an urban garden. As they aged and likely went away to college, the garden folded. 

Finally, the local parish like several parishes in the area has an annual boy scout sale of potted flowers on Mother's day. I also had the impression that they sold trays of vegetable and flower seedlings.

So, there is some local experience of parish gardening. 

Most of all we would like a very grassroots movement that involves parish members but does not require parish resources for its maintenance. 

We hope to be members of one or more groups (e.g. a vegetable group, a flower group, a shrub group) that we could network with mostly over the internet, occasion meeting them in an outdoor space, and inviting them one by one, or two by two, to visit us in our own garden. 

Before the pandemic we regularly gave extra produce to the parish food bank. I wonder how many other people do that? If there are a lot of people, perhaps I might put a sign in the food pantry with my phone and e-mail, offering to network with them.

Any suggestions? What might make this attractive to you even if you were a porch, or patio gardener? What might be some of the problems? 

The Leak

By now you've probably already heard about (and read about, and, if you are on Twitter, have been tweeted at about)  Politico's blockbuster scoop: a Supreme Court draft majority opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, overturning Roe v Wade.  An unknown leaker leaked, not only the vote (at least as it stands at the time of the leak), but the entire draft opinion, which Politico also published.  

Pursuing Easter Joy

I follow Deacon Steven Graydanus on Facebook. He posted this homily which discusses a subject I think is worth discussing, the pursuit of joy.  The whole thing is worth reading, but I will share some excerpts:

 "How do we pursue Christian joy, especially in this Easter season but also throughout the year?"

"Begin with the conviction that your joys as well as your sorrows matter to God, and that joy as well as sorrow is for this world, not just the world to come. When bad things happen, we often tell ourselves and one other that God has a plan, that God works for good in all things. We look for meaning in suffering, but never forget that there is great meaning in joy. Every good gift in this world speaks to us of God’s goodness and love."