Q&A Monday 17 August 2015: Gay Marriage - Brendan O'Neil, Katy Faust, Kelly O'Dwyer, Richard di Natale and Sam Dastyari

Link to Q&A Monday 17 August 2015. Guests: Brendan O'Neil, Katy Faust, Kelly O'Dwyer, Richard di Natale and Sam Dastyari.

http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/qanda/FA1407H029S00

Ryan Anderson - What is Marriage?

Ryan Anderson gives a thoughtful and well-reasoned talk on the marriage debate from a public policy point-of-view.




Link to video of Q&A segment.

A Third Way Between Gays and Bigots

A new documentary presents a strong case for the Catholic stand on homosexuality. Read more at MercatorNet


The Third Way from Blackstone Films on Vimeo.

The Questionable Ethics of Surrogacy

With the latest controversy regarding surrogacy in Australia, it's worth looking again at the submission made to the "The Investigation into the Altruistic Surrogacy Committee", Queensland, by the Queensland Bioethics Centre.

Whenever the term the "best interests of the child" is used by people supporting this legislation [to allow surrogacy] it really means the best interests of the child after the interests of the adults have been served.

The Justifiable Outrage of a Donor Conceived Person

From AnonymousUs.org

Below, a person conceived through the use of donor sperm shoots holes through the spin and propaganda of fertility clinics, especially the fallacy that sperm donation is praiseworthy.


I don't want to meet him, sorry.

This may be strange to hear but I don't want to meet my donor, I've traveled the interwebs looking for other donor offspring who are oppose to this practice, and are demanding justice and change. My search has led me here.

I have my reasons for never wanting to know my father. Anyone who willingly degrades women to sexual objectification in pornography, willingly disowns the children he doesn't personally want, willingly impregnates multiple strangers, has these people raise his biological children, and never once in his life checks in to see if his kids are healthy, happy, alive, is not worth my time looking for. This person is the most atrocious and loathing human male on the planet, and the issue is that he thinks he has just done a service to humanity. We have enough men who abandon and disown their children, it's called 'deadbeat fatherhood'. Just because you were paid doesn't mean you're a hero. You're still a monster.

I'm not here to depreciate any donor offspring personal search for the dummy who abandon them. Origins are important to many people, and I completely understand that. This entry is just about me.

If I stand alone here, so be it, but I want it abolished. There is absolutely nothing to gain from reproductive technologies, besides 'happy customers'. But sometimes not even happiness to the customers is guaranteed, social parents can and have demanded refunds from the companies that manufactured their children because their children did not turn out how they paid for them to. The gamete banks depict posters of smiling children but more importantly they caption these words at the bottom of their posters: "have the family of your dreams!". So what are these companies doing? They're advertising children to couples. How on earth is this ethical? A donor can have well over two hundred offspring being raised by strangers around his area. He could easily date and have sex with his own daughter. More importantly these offspring could end up having sex with one another, without knowledge. This makes sperm donning a public health issue. Not only this, but as other victims of this unregulated practice have already expressed, our fathers and mothers are treated like breeding studs, their gametes are treated like 'raw material', our conception is manufactured in a laboratory, and our life was ultimately paid for with cash money. We are chattel, and the companies know this so they try their hardest to sugar code the truth, and promote their lies in media, so that people will not get concern. If you're getting paid, you're not donning, you're selling. If you're being selected from a catalogue, you're not 'helping a couple', you're advertising your DNA, like a breeding animal. And children should never be 'wanted'. We should only want material objects. The love of a parent should never be measured on how much that parent spent buying the children themselves. That is completely disgusting and disturbing.

The donor sibling registry is not anyone's saving grace. It's a terrible attempt to normalize this dehumanizing business. Why is it ok for you to purposely separate your children from their biological parents, then play the hero who 'found' the long lost siblings online, when you had partook in separating them from one another in the first place? Why is it ok to put your kids through the psychological torture of searching desperately for their missing families, of who they may never completely find because there could be many more siblings that aren't on the sibling registry, just so you can get the family you want? Do you realize that there are many kids who couldn't find their family on this website who are still I the search?

I am more disgusted on how I was 'made' than never knowing the idiot who partook in this human trafficking. I never wish to know him, I don't thank him for giving me life, I don't appreciate how he help delude my social parents into thinking they both created me, so they can feel better about their infertility. I don't appreciate him lying to them and telling them he gave them treatment for their infertility, when all he did was use them for the spread his descendants, while never having to take care of those descendants.

If you think I should be praising these reproductive technologies for giving me life, you're not in your right mind. With that understanding, I should be down at the feet of my mother's rapist, if my mother had been raped by my father, praising him for raping my mother, thus giving me life. It simply doesn't work the way people think.

Signed, a donor kid, not on the search

Date submitted: April 04, 2014 [from Donor Conceived]

***

Amen to that. I couldn't have said it better!

Bishop Anthony Fisher OP: Ten Myths about the Catholic Church

This was recorded on the 3 March 2014 at The Commercial Hotel, Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.
From xt3.com via CathNews (Audio only).

 Index. Click on topic below. 
1. Rolling Stone's Pope Francis Vs the Real Pope Francis
2. Women. Do women have souls?
3.Treating Gays badly.
4. HIV/AIDS. How the Church killed millions of people.
5. Vatican Wealth.
6. Child Sex Abuse.
7. Past Misdeeds of the Church - Crusades etc.
8. The Church opposed to Science.
9. Sin and Catholic Guilt.
10. Evangelisation and the Responsibility of the Laity.
Questions and Answers.

The Truth Behind the Myth of Tuam's Septic Tank Babies

Thanks to Paul Barry at ABC's Media Watch.

"The Fault in our Stars" - A Commentary by Fr. Robert Barron

The Young Turks Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur Spread some Anti-Catholic Lies.

A Commentary on another Young Turks Mental Meltdown

Fourteen Lies in Four Minutes.

 

A Summary: Regardless of what the Young Turks'Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur would lead you to believe, Catholic nuns in Ireland didn't stuff the bodies of 800 dead children into a septic tank.

The lies:
1. (0:12). No Ana, the home wasn't shut down because of, as you falsely claim, a significant number of children would die in the home. From page 7 of the Catholic League report, Bill Donohue states that:

"In 1961, the building was falling apart and needed to be renovated. But no funds were available, so it closed. The nuns handed over all the records to the authorities, which today is called the Health Service Executive in Galway. In the early 1970s, the building was demolished to make way for a new housing complex."

 2. (0:20). Really Ana? Who? Who often wondered about the bodies?

3. (0:27). No Ana, Catherine Corless never said she found any bodies of dead babies let alone 800 of them in a septic tank.

4. Again Ana, you're wrong. There is no evidence that dead babies were disposed of in a septic tank. Back in the 1970s a couple of young boys found some skeleton remains (15-20) in what has been variously described as an old concrete water tank, or a crypt.

* (0:44).  Seriously Ana, you're quoting a story for the notoriously anti-Catholic Washington Post on a matter regarding the Catholic Church! That's a bit like asking the Westboro Baptist Church about homosexuality.

5. (1:09). No Cenk, there is no evidence that a lot of these children died as a result of malnutrition. This time quoting from a retraction given by the Associated Press (AP):

"Contrary to the allegation of widespread starvation highlighted in some reports, only 18 children were recorded as suffering from severe malnutrition."

6. (1:19). Cenk, I'm guessing that because you are a person who believes that killing human life within a mother's womb is an acceptable practice, you then have a need to demonize those with a contrary view. But according to historical accounts the nuns provided love and care to these women and children. See pages 9 and 10 of the Catholic League report.

7. (1:23). Again Ana and Cenk, 800 baby bodies have not been found, and even if they are found at some time in the future, so what? That doesn't prove anything other than the fact that 800 dead babies, who died over a 36 year period were buried in a plot on the site where they lived. So what, how is that even a story?

8. (1:29). Oh come on Cenk! Haunted by it? On a positive note, at least you're now bringing in some light relief.

9. (1:41). Really Ana? Have you ever spoken to the parents of these girls who were sent to these homes? How on earth would you know these parents thought their daughters were promiscuous? I'm guessing you got this intimate knowledge from the same people who told you the lie that some Irish nuns dumped the bodies of 800 dead babies into a septic tank!

10. (1:45). Again Ana, how the hell would you even know the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy of these women? You just seem to be making this up as you go!

11. (2:00). Actually Ana, the reports of the day seem to indicate that considering the circumstances at the time, the children were actually well looked after. Again, see pages 9 and 10 of the Catholic League report.

12. (2:12). Again Ana, there is no hypocrisy. The Catholic nuns were pro-life and they dedicated their lives to helping some of the most disadvantaged people in their society at the time -- abandoned single mothers and their children, and all for no material gain to themselves. If, as you say Ana, "these nuns had disdain and hatred for these children born out of wedlock", why did these same nuns dedicate their lives to helping them. You should be praising these nuns, not tearing them down. But then, anti-Catholicism is always hateful and irrational isn't Ana.

13. (2:23). Hang on Cenk. Your original claim was that 800 babies died over a 36 year period from 1925 to 1961. Now, given that Atheists like to continually tell the rest of the world how intelligent they are, how is it you didn't pick up the obvious mathematical error? If two babies died every week for 36 years than that would equal 3744 dead babies. So it's not just the whole theme of your anti-Catholic rant that doesn't compute, neither does your basic math.

* (2:33). Cenk, you can't crap all over anti-abortionists and than suddenly turn round and say you're not. By the way, do you ever say anything critical of those who support the killing of human life in the womb? Ever.

* (2:57). Yes Cenk, those Catholic nuns helping those abandoned women and children probably were with God. If there is a God don't you think God would have wanted people to help those women and children? Of course if there is no God, then there is not moral demands on anyone to care for another human being. Hence your belief that killing a human being through abortion is okay.

* (3:00). Cenk, I'm not sure what crazy interpretations of scripture you're talking about, or what crazy dogma you're talking about, but whatever it was that caused those Catholic nuns to dedicate their lives to help the less fortunate of people, and to do so for no material gain, I think that would be the opposite of crazy.
Now regarding the issue of shaming, yes it can be cruel, but it is also a normal part of societal norms used to discourage unacceptable behavior. And it can be easily argued that historically, having sex outside of marriage was bad for society. Again Bill Donohue addresses this issue well on pages 11 and 12 of the Catholic League report.

14. (3:26). Cenk, It is beyond belief that a rational person could describe a home that provided food and shelter to abandoned women and children as being a trash bin. The reality is that the alternative to these Catholic run homes was indeed living among the real trash bins in the street. And these homes didn't ruin the lives of these women and children, they instead provided a lifeline and support to these women and children who otherwise would have been left homeless and broke with no food or shelter.


* (3:52). Cenk, I'm sure even you can't miss the irony of your last comment. Nearly everything both you and Ana have said over the last four minutes were based on things that simply weren't true.
Don't they have words for that kind of speech! I think it's called BIGOTRY and HATE SPEECH -- The two core components of any anti-Catholic rant.

Additional commentary form other sources:

Australia's left wing public broadcaster, the ABC Media Watch program.
Atheist writer and commentator Brendan O'Neill, from Spiked online.
The Catholic League Report - Ireland's Mass Grave Hysteria.
Extract of Associated Press (AP) retraction regarding report on Tuam home for abandoned mothers.

Fr. Robert Barron on Bill Maher and Biblical Interpretation