A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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At Mercatornet, Michael Cook points out that risk of suicide is often inter-generational and asks if assisted suicide could become contagious.
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Pat Maloney of the Run with Life blog lays out the latest details on Justin Trudeau’s ongoing crusade against crisis pregnancy centres and pro-life groups.
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Some of you will be familiar with the ongoing discussion around purity culture, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and Josh Harris’s ultimate apostasy and rejection of the movement he helped to found. It is now generally agreed upon that many mistakes were made in the church’s attempts to fight back against the sexual revolution—but Samuel D. James has a fantastic essay titled “We Can’t Talk About Purity Culture without Talking About the 1990s” that provides some necessary context.
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This essay by Andrew Sullivan, “When All the Media Narratives Collapse,” is an absolute must-read. Sullivan is a liberal and a gay activist, and his analysis of the media is straight savage:
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
More:
We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.
Exactly. The media is not combatting the crisis of authority and crisis of trust in our society. They did much to help create it, and they are actively fueling it. In a social media age where information is everywhere, the media has to hold itself to the highest standards—or be constantly exposed as propagandistic hacks. Which, as it turns out, they have.
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In First Things, Francis X. Maeir has an essay ambitiously titled “All You Need To Know About Sex.” It might not quit live up to that, but it is a very good read nonetheless.
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While large swathes of Australia morph into a COVID police state, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is attempting to pass a religious freedom bill that is, predictably, being labeled by opponents as an attempt to roll back LGBT rights simply for protecting conscience.
