Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.

Online civil libertarians have warned the freedom of the internet is at stake, but Senator Conroy says that is nonsense.

He says the scheme will better protect children from pornography and violent websites.

“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” he said.

In fact, users will have to opt-out in order to get uncensored internet access.  Now, while I recognize that there is some bad stuff on the internet, I really don’t want my government determining what is and is not harmful for my kids to see online.  And, for that matter, if I discover something that I want access to has been blocked, I really don’t like the idea of having to call up my ISP and tell them I want the censorship taken off my internet connection.  Suppose, for example, that the government were to block an anti-gun-control website…I want access to it.  Now my name is on the list along with all the sickos who have gotten their filtering turned off too.  A little too “big-brother” for me.

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The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of “Godlessness.”

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican “exorcistinchief,” to the online Catholic news service Petrus.

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From the “come on, can’t you at least get things right on Christmas” file,

Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

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Well, we’re drawing near the time that I’ll be heading out of town for a few days, and purposely spending less time around the computer.  Merry Christmas to all my readers, and I hope you have some great family time.

Before I go, I’m linking to a great video file.  This is the first episode of Dragnet, back in 1953, and it’s the Christmas episode.  The baby Jesus is stolen from the Mission Plaza Church on Christmas eve…Joe Friday has to find it by the vigil Mass.  Really great about this episode is the amazing cinematography work done in the church.  Great episode all around.  Enjoy!  

From the Daily Mail, a case of PC gone mad and the atheist parents are upset about it.  The parents wanted their child excluded from religious education classes, so logically the school administration assumed that they’d also want him excluded from a Christmas party, seeing as Christmas is religious in nature.  One would assume your average postmodern atheist parents would be thrilled.  Not so:

Headmaster Ian Davidson said that because the youngster had no interest in religion he could not celebrate the birth of Christ.

Furious mother Dawn Riddell, 38, said yesterday: “I’ve helped out at the Christmas party before and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. Douglas was heartbroken he couldn’t go. It was cruel.”

The boy and his brother Callum, 11, attend Cluny Primary, a council-run school in Buckie, Banffshire.

As the family have no religious beliefs, Miss Riddell had asked for them to be exempt from RE lessons.

But she was stunned when the head called with the news about the party.

She contacted Moray Council to find out its policy on school parties and was told these were non-religious.

After the council spoke to the school, the decision to exclude Douglas was put down to a “misunderstanding”.

Callum was allowed to attend his party a few days later and Douglas received a present Santa had left behind.

Okay, so it’s not a relgious-themed party, but it was clearly the administration seeking a bit of CYA that actually created a bigger problem.

More (and the comments are priceless…one side, thinks that the parents want to have their cake and eat it too, the other side talks about how Christmas is a “celebration of life and goodwill” regardless of religious connotations or some tripe like that.) 

B16 has assigned a commission to study information on Pius XII

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Benedict XVI has established a commission to study new archival material about the papacy of Pope Pius XII and to examine how his possible beatification would impact Catholic-Jewish relations, an Italian newspaper reported. The commission “must analyze every possible repercussion, including diplomatic ones, of the beatification,” reported Andrea Tornielli in the Dec. 18 edition of Il Giornale. Tornielli, a reporter for the paper, also is the author of the 2007 book, “Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli: A Man on the Throne of Peter.” Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, the official charged with shepherding Pope Pius’ sainthood cause through its Vatican process, told Catholic News Service Dec. 19 that the commission’s work “has nothing to do with the merits of the cause; it is a diplomatic matter.”

For 6 Christmases, I have listened to Glenn Beck playing a great parody created by his production team of Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas.”  Finally, someone has made an animated music video of it!

We’ve got a new blog here on the StBlogs.com network!  Tim is a college freshman I know who’s discerning a calling to the priesthood…and I finally convinced him to start his own blog!  Check out Thoughts From Discernment.

Here’s one I am confident we’ll be hearing about on the talk shows soon. A high school teacher in Ohio decided to have her students take on Latino roles (this is a Spanish language class by the way - white students learning to speak Spanish.)

Try it legally, Erica Vieyra told her 40 senior Spanish students at Olentangy Liberty High School. Fill out the correct documents, follow the proper steps. And then, after they spent days completing the actual paperwork from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she took out her red ink pad and stamped a big, fat DENIED across every request.

Because we know that’s what happens to every single one. That’s why no one has legally entered the USA in 3 decades. /sarcasm .

Now, she told the students, come illegally. Forge your documents, find a way across the border. Then, research real ads and find a place to live in Columbus. Figure out what it would cost, how to get food. Plan how to survive.

The students had to go to real businesses and ask for Spanish-language job applications. They had to visit a bank and ask for new-account documents written in Spanish.

Brilliant. Convince them that the only way to go is to enter illegally. Most asinine of all on the part of a student and on the part of a reporter. You see, young Yana was adopted from a Russian orphanage in 1994:

“This project was about me,” Yana said. “I realized that, for a grade, I was about to re-create what my parents had to endure to give me the opportunity to live the American dream. That scared me.”

Ahh yes, I can see myriad similarities between a person illegally entering this country and attempting to survive on their own, and a set of US citizens who are wanting to adopt and raise a 5-year-old. /sarcasm.

And of course, no article would be complete without an obvious lie:

This is the fifth year that Vieyra has assigned this project to students in her Spanish V class. Each year someone, a teacher perhaps, maybe just a friend, cringes: “They say, ‘That’s such a hot topic. Are you sure you want to go there?’ “
She always answers yes. But she cautions that the point isn’t to sway the students, only to teach them a little empathy.

Teaching a little empathy by convincing them that entering illegally is the only way to enter? I think not. Lord help me if I am that naive.

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*standard disclaimer: I am not in favor of imprisoning or deporting all illegal immigrants; I am not opposed to immigration; I am not in favor of treating illegals as less than human; I am strongly in favor of reforming our immigration system, of building a wall to keep illegals out, and of treating illegals who break further laws being instantly booted out of the country.

This is interesting. It’s leftover from last year, but I just found out about it today.  Mark Shea has an impressive explanation of how, in fact, Christians were celebrating the birth of Christ on 12/25 each year for decades before there was an official pagan holiday that was celebrated at the winter solstice.  This goes completely against he “common knowledge” that Christians decided to celebrate Christmas on 12/25 in order to co-opt the holiday from the pagans.  Read it here!

H/T to the Curt Jester