Sheila Jackson-Lee has apparently become an astrophysicist.
A terrorist plot has been thwarted, but expect more to come.
And the Pope finally does the right thing. Better late than never.
Dumbass of the Day
Is This a Surprise?
According to Fox News:
The FBI has arrested an 18-year-old in Idaho after uncovering his “truly horrific” and “violent plot” to attack churches in Coeur d’Alene this past weekend on behalf of ISIS, the Justice Department says.
Alexander Mercurio is now facing a federal charge of attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization after the FBI says he devised a plan to “incapacitate his father, restrain him using handcuffs, and steal his firearms to use for maximum casualties” in an attack he had been planning to carry out in the northern Idaho resort city on Sunday, April 7.
“The defendant allegedly pledged loyalty to ISIS and sought to attack people attending churches in Idaho, a truly horrific plan which was detected and thwarted by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
Is this really a shocking story?
It’s About Time
According to Fox News:
The Vatican has released a document criticizing gender theory, transgender surgery and surrogacy as affronts to human dignity.
Dignitas Infinita, Latin for “Infinite Dignity,” was released on Monday after more than five years in development by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) and focuses on threats to human dignity in the modern world.
“In the light of Revelation, the Church resolutely reiterates and confirms the ontological dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed in Jesus Christ,” the document states in its beginning.
Dignitas Infinita addresses over a dozen individual issues of the modern day through the lens of scripture and church teaching, including abortion, human trafficking, poverty, euthanasia, the death penalty, and more.
Notably, the document formally reaffirms and expands on the Catholic Church’s teaching regarding gender theory – which it holds as an inadmissible ideology – asserting that attempts to alter an individual’s immutable gender are ultimately misguided attempts to play God.
“Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God,” the document states. “This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.”
It’s not a new stance for the church – Pope Francis, forced to confront the rapid rise of gender ideology in recent years, has previously called it one of the world’s “most dangerous ideological colonizations.”
The document continues, “Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.”
Dignitas Infinita has been revised extensively over the past few months and was finally approved for publication by Pope Francis on March 25. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect for the DDF, presented the document at a Monday press conference in Vatican City.
The document reaffirms the Church’s teachings on abortion, and also elaborates on its long-standing ethical criticisms of surrogate pregnancies, which it says are contrary to the pro-life position.
“The Church also takes a stand against the practice of surrogacy, through which the immensely worthy child becomes a mere object,” the document states.
“First and foremost, the practice of surrogacy violates the dignity of the child. Indeed, every child possesses an intangible dignity that is clearly expressed – albeit in a unique and differentiated way – at every stage of his or her life: from the moment of conception, at birth, growing up as a boy or girl, and becoming an adult,” the dicastery wrote in the document. “Because of this unalienable dignity, the child has the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin and to receive the gift of a life that manifests both the dignity of the giver and that of the receiver.”
Surrogacy via in vitro fertilization typically requires the artificial fertilization of multiple human embryos, some of which are often then perpetually frozen or destroyed.