One unintended consequence of my conversion story is that I have stopped watching television. Instead I read. I read a lot. I just started a new book and frankly it's fucking great. I KNOW some of you have read this because I just saw a line from it quoted on RfM not long ago. I have forgotten who posted it, but here is the line:

"No offense, Sally, but most of the right-to-lifers I know--and I know a lot of them because they call at our house pretty regularly to say how much they hate my dad--get all wrapped up with the life in the womb, and life after death, for that matter, but they don't give a rip about life after birth. All you have to do is look around to see we've got big trouble in that area. People are starving to death all over the world. Their lives are spent trying to get something into their bellies, which they never get, and they die.

And to tell you the truth, the people who seem willing to fight to the death, or who are at least willing to carry a poster in front of the Deaconess clinic, are politically against giving them anything. The second they're born, they're on their own."

"I've spent a little time locked in my room with a Bible, and I think you're more full of shit than Moby does. Certainly I'm for birth control before abortion, but I'll tell you one thing, Brittain, if God kept as close an eye on us as you say he does, and if he felt the need to intervene in daily human problems, he'd put on his steel-toed holy boots and come down here and kick your butt for making him look like a mean-spirited, unforgiving ayatollah."

--Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. Highly recommended book by MiB.

I work with urban kids and I've seen far too many of them go without adequate food, shelter, clothing and medical care. I'd love to see the right-to-lifers put their money where there mouths are. Help out a real live kid whose mom did exactly what they wanted her to do.