My wife brought to my attention a story making the rounds on the boards at Mothering.com.  A lady and 8 of her kids were at Applebee’s in Lexington, KY, June 14.  She had her 7-month-old with her, and he needed a snack.  Being a breastfeeder, she began nursing, and her waitress told her that her manager had indicated she needed to cover up (she had requested a corner booth so she would be in a quieter and less public part of the restaurant.)  Because it was June, she had nothing to cover up with, so the manager came over and continued the harassment.  She presented him a copy of Kentucky breastfeeding laws, showing that legally she was under no obligation to cover up, and what she was doing was completely protected by law.  He eventually intimidated her into going out to her van to nurse her child.

She got a lawyer to draw up a letter to that Applebee’s location, which was ignored.  A month later, she had another sent to that company that manages that Applebee’s location.  The management company responded: “we regret that Ms. Ryan left without being served and would like the opportunity to personally invite her to return” …. “we are also considering keeping blankets in the restaurants for use by breast-feeding mothers that may not have them readily available as a result of this incident.”  Talk about not getting it.  We’re sorry we discriminated against you, now please come back to our store so we can discriminate against you again.

Anyway, she is gaining increasing media attention and is having a nurse-out at that location (and throughout the country, additional protests are being planned at other Applebee’s locations.)  The management company spokesperson apparently commented that she must have a hidden agenda since she carries a copy of breastfeeding law with her.  Applebee’s corporate responded to her that the manager acted in a “lawful” manner.  The company is apparently not interested in even finding out what the law on the subject is in the localities they serve.

Read more about it here! 

Media attention here  (be sure to read the comments, most are supportive of the baby’s right to nourisment but some of from idiots)

In a move sure to delude this author into thinking he has some relevance in the Catholic blogging world, a blog troll has hit RomanCatholicbyChoice.com and commented on three of my posts yesterday.  The troll is called “Katherine.”  “Katherine” claims to be a “progressive” Catholic and attacks my views on socialized medicine, womynpriest wannabes (i.e., the Chittister types, the sour-faced nuns who don’t wear habits anymore) and my posting of some of the 1963 Communist Party goals.  You can check out the nuttiness below.   Trolls, please comment.  Let me know you’re there.  One of the sure ways I can get respect and credibility in the blogging community is by having trolls commenting on my blog.  Maybe I’ll get a trackback from Gerald at the Cafeteria or The Curt Jester, or maybe even Jimmy Akin.  Ooh…I’m hyperventilating just thinking about it.

Sample 1
Sample 2
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As a student of education (and let me say a student of education but not an educator, thanks to the screwed up government school system) I found this interesting, from A Father’s Academy.

I’d encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education. Moreover, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One’s social circle should never include one’s equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult. 

Read the rest. 

Since I am from Nashville, TN, originally, and now live in the Atlanta diocese, I figured this story from the Georgia Bulletin was appropo.  The Serra International convention was held in Atlanta recently, and there was representation from the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, aka the Nashville Dominicans, who teach school all over the place (including here in my hometown of Rome some years ago.)

Dominican Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins flashed a quick smile and told the group of Serrans something they hadn’t heard a lot of during a weekend focused on the drop in vocations.

“I bring a message of hope,” said Sister Catherine Marie. “God has not stopped calling.”

In a twist, she said a way to encourage men and women to embrace a celibate life is for wives and husbands to live lovingly.

The commitment of parents in marriage strengthens vocations, she said. “When the family is healthy, the church is healthy. It is the first school of love.”

She is a member of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia. The congregation was founded in 1860 in Nashville, Tenn., “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” as she put it.

Sister Catherine Marie was one of the featured speakers at the Serra International Convention in Atlanta, Aug. 9-12. The group’s mission is to support those in religious vocations and to pray for future vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

The Nashville congregation is seeing an upswing of vocations that reverses a trend in many other congregations of sisters. Sister Catherine Marie, who was the vocations director from 1990 to 2005 and serves on the congregation’s General Council, said the increase is fueled by young people influenced by Pope John Paul II and people “rediscovering Catholic culture.”

The Nashville Dominicans are seeing new candidates by the dozens, in contrast to the dramatic decrease in the sisterhood nationwide.

So, take that all you womynpriest wannabes and sour-faced progressives.  In the solid, conservative Catholic orders, there’s growth.

Crossposted at the Society and Politics blog:

Here’s a brilliant video clip of Elvira Arellano, erstwhile sactuary-seeker, illegal immigrant, and felon, explaining why it’s the United States’ fault, that the USA “broke the law first” by “letting people” enter the country without documents.  That, my friends, is called blaming the victim.  Typically it’s not allowed in a world where everyone is a victim.  Enjoy.

Click here to watch the video.

After all, if the left wins in November 08, we’ll all become wards of the state in terms of health care.  Fueling this, in addition to the desire of the left and some on the right to grow government, is the international community talking about how great it is to have government healthcare.  Now, if you talk to the citizenry of Canada, European nations, etc., you can hear about how bad it is.  Gerald at the Cafeteria once mentioned how he was kept in hospital for several days for a simple injury, over a holiday no less, because the hospital needed to fill that bed.  It seems in most places, people who don’t live under government health care talk about how great it is, while people who actually have to live with it talk about how terrible it is.

On top of this, fat load Michael Moore’s released a movie called Sicko.  In it, he talks about how great Cuba is, and spends time on their medical care system, and how much better it is that the USA’s.  John Stossel takes this on in a new editorial:

First let’s acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

That’s just a taste.  Read the whole thing.

I posted this over at Society and Politics, but it merits a spot here too, because it involves anti-Catholic bigotry.

Bobby Jindal is a Catholic Indian (as in from India) running for governor of Louisiana.  Now, the Democrat party isn’t too popular lately, as their fierce corruption was exposed by the Katrina mess.  Apparently, in spite of what the MSM told the rest of us, folks from New Orleans recognize the fact that the biggest cause of the problem was “Chocolate City” Nagin and Governor Blanco.  So, in polls, Jindal has 75% or more of the vote.  Dems can’t have this, so they published this video on YouTube. Gerald did some digging into these allegations.  Also, the Catholic League has made a statement.

All who are surprised, please rise.

As we all know, if you offend the peaceful religion of Islam, then you invite violence against yourself.  (I’m sorry, but does that really make any sense to anyone?)   Hence, political cartoons depicting Mohamed with a bomb in his turban are terrible and can get you killed.

Well, the BBC doesn’t want to incite any peaceful Islamists to violence, so their new hospital show, Casualty,  won’t be depicting victims of a bomb attach by Islamist terrorists.

The BBC has dropped plans to show a fictional terror attack in an episode of Casualty to avoid offending Muslims.

The first show of the hospital drama’s new series was to have featured a storyline about an explosion caused by Islamic extremists.

Okay, get ready to laugh!!

Now the bomb will be set off by animal rights campaigners instead.

My friends, all 20 of you who check this blog every day, real life is funnier than fiction!  See, because it’s generally a liberal cause to not want to offend Muslims.  But animal rights whackos see theirs as a liberal cause as well – so now they’ll be offended that they were chosen to replace Islamists in a bomb plot.  They might have protests and stuff.  Some nutty misguided ones might even threaten the BBC.  Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake?  Trade one terrorist group for another (completely fictional, in both cases, though.)

Wouldn’t made a lot more sense if it was an abortion clinic bombing – then they could scream the full hour about radical Christians, and we’d just keep our mouths shut.  Sure, Bill Donohue would write a letter of protest, but we’d hunker down and not worry about it.  It’s win-win for the BBC – offend Christians and promote the pro-abortion message!  Tell you what, BBC.  Revise it again, and I won’t even charge you for this idea.  I’m telling you, though, it may not be a good idea to offend the animal rights establishment!

More – be sure to read the comments 

The fun continues, as BBC now has done a documentary on Bishop Tiny Muskens (great name for a bishop, eh?) and his call for Christians to make peace with Muslims by calling God “Allah.”  Curt Jester has a rundown of all the pertinent information.  Here’s a sample:

But debating the merits of Muskens’ suggestion misses the larger point here. Muskens makes it sound as if the problems in Muslim–Catholic relations were merely silly arguments about semantics that distract from the truly important things on which we all agree. In fact, there is a serious, substantive problem dominating Christian–Muslim relations at the moment, the same problem that dominates Muslim–Jewish, Muslim–Buddhist, Muslim–Hindu, and Muslim–Orthodox relations, and that problem is that Muslim fanatics keep murdering innocents of all faiths, including their own, in terror attacks.

Brilliant, eh?  Does anyone really think that radical Islamists won’t want to fly planes into buildings if we just refer to God by His Arabic name?  Silly.

Ever read that list of Communist Party goals that was read into the Congressional record in 1963? Here are some of the items on that list:

Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions, by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism, and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in text books.

Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography, and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.

Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as “normal, natural, and healthy.”

Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the grounds that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”

Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

With all that in mind, the California legislature is working on laws:

to prohibit any “instruction, school activities, or instructional material” that “reflects or promotes a discriminatory bias against” homosexual, transgender, or bisexual persons. 

Sounds okay, except:

“For seven years, lesbian state senator Sheila Kuehl has been trying to pass a homosexual curriculum teaching affirmatively about gay, lesbian, and transgender issues from K-12,” Randy Thomasson of Campaign for Children and Families, told California Catholic Daily.

“This bill requires textbooks, instructional materials, and school-sponsored activities to positively portray cross-dressing, sex-change operations, homosexual ‘marriages,’ and all aspects of homosexuality and bisexuality.”

Moreover, said Thomasson, “silence on these sexual lifestyles will simply not be permitted. Schools or school boards who fail to cooperate with the program would be sued by the attorneys at the California Department of Education.” 

In other words, Thomasson is at worst a willing accomplice, or at best what Marx referred to as a “useful idiot.”

More from California Catholic Daily

H/T Closed Cafeteria