Quickies: I Did Not Know This...

     ...but I’m not really that surprised:

     Imagine a woman who favours murdering babies, but then has the sheer brass-necked nerve to say that baptising babies “violates their human rights”!

     Difficult? Well, that’s the case with former Irish president Mary McAleese. In a contrast that many Christians regard as being close (at least) to Satanic, she criticised infant baptism and the Catholic Church this week, while supporting the deadly abuse of children in the womb through abortion.

     Speaking to the Irish Times, McAleese claimed infant baptism imposes “obligations on people who are only two weeks old.”

     The Irish once had an ignorant idiot as their president? A rabid anti-Catholic, at that? How did this happen in the most Catholic country on Earth?

     Baptism imposes no obligations whatsoever on a child! He remains free to reject the Church when he’s grown old enough to do so. One would have to be appallingly ignorant...or perhaps, evilly motivated...to say otherwise.

     But the conclusion of the article is where we find the gut punch:

     Now, the fear is Ireland’s abortion law will mirror Britain’s, where one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion each year. In Britain, abortion is permitted until 24 weeks of pregnancy.

     Pro-abortionists are, however, agitating to extend it to full-term, with more vocal ones now moving to demand the right to end an inconvenient child’s life “up until the age of self-awareness” – around the age of three. The word ‘Satanic’ is not used lightly in dealing with these supporters of child sacrifice.

     “Ethicist” Peter Singer has been trumpeting the above idea for quite a while:

     Singer holds that the right to life is essentially tied to a being's capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is essentially tied to a being's capacity to feel pain and pleasure.

     In Practical Ethics, Singer argues in favour of abortion on the grounds that fetuses are neither rational nor self-aware, and can therefore hold no preferences. As a result, he argues that the preference of a mother to have an abortion automatically takes precedence. In sum, Singer argues that a fetus lacks personhood.

     Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."

     I was unaware that anyone else had taken it up. Given the horrific news coming out of Holland, and what we’ve heard about the Groningen Protocol, I should have known better.