Religion and Private Life

On behalf of my students in the Mixing and Remixing Information Spring 2007 class, I’d like to invite you to our Open House. Bring your friends along!

At the Open House, students will be presenting their semester-long projects, which all reuse or recombine information to create something new. We will be setting up the room for poster-style presentations. Please feel free to drop by anytime during the hour to see some demos and talk to the students. I think that you’ll be impressed by the imagination and hard work of the projects.

For more information, please contact feel contact me (Raymond Yee — rdhyee@ischool.berkeley.edu)

Ten projects will be presented. See http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s07/projects/ for an updated listing.

I hope to see you on Monday, May 7. I’d appreciate your letting me know if you plan to come — but feel free to drop by in all cases.

California Adult Education Map
Katrina Lindholm

Adults who are hoping to continue their education will often seek out local colleges and universities offering classes, diploma programs, certifications and degree programs. In general, these individuals tend to look for schools that are close to their work or home. In addition, they will often look for schools that offer a program in a certain field such as accounting or medical assisting. To help facilitate this process, I have created a mash-up between Google Maps and an XML file of school information. For the purpose of this class, I have limited the scope to the state of California. Users can enter an address and see only those schools that are within a specified radius from the address. In addition, users can specify the subject material that they are interested in and the map will show only those schools that offer programs in that field.

HotDealMap
Ethan deYoung

There are several very large online communities that each share information on upcoming sales, specials and discount coupons for all kinds of electronic goods. The wealth of information that these communities provide is immense, but they also tend to overlap and visiting each site in search of a great deal tends to take a long time.

The HotDealMap project is designed to solve the problems with the most popular ‘hot deals’ websites. HotDealMap will provide a centralized source of information for finding special sales and will also provide a location based representation of ‘hot deals’ within a user-defined proximity to a location. This new approach eliminates the problem of having to visit multiple websites and scrolling through several pages of posts only to discover there is nothing ‘hot’ near your city.

Pingus
Ivan Tam

Pingus is a system that enables users to compare prices between brick-and-mortar book retailers and Amazon.com through a simple mobile-phone interface. While current systems only allow access though desktop browsers or through browsers found only on higher-end phones, Pingus enables a broader range of mobiles devices to access price
information.

PlaneBored — where relationships take off
Matt Schutte and Nate Anthony

PlaneBored is a mashup website that pairs social networking profiles with location information. It was initially designed to allow people to find and meet others that share their interests during layovers at airports. The site allows users to quickly generate a PlaneBored profile by entering links to their existing social networking profiles–such as MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn–and other sites that convey information about personality such as Flickr profiles and blogs. We combine this information with user location information to allow searching and browsing of user profiles within a limited geographical space–typically a single terminal within an airport. However, as work on the site has progressed, the site has evolved to support usability outside of the airport context, and to allow searching of profiles by location more generally.

SkillShop
Lindsay Tabas

Calendaring and scheduling are very important parts of running a business. SkillShop is a website that helps restaurants and catering businesses manage their schedule and employees while also looking for temporary workers to help their businesses in the face of fluctuating customer demand and high staff turnover. For this project, managers schedule shifts and events through the SkillShop interface and share those events through shared Google Calendars. In addition, employees and temporary workers search jobs through the Google Calendar interface.

Slideshow Synchr
Owen Otto

With the rise in popularity of digital cameras and web-based photo sharing over the last decade, it’s now common at events like weddings or parties for many attendees to take photos and share them online afterwards. This project aims to open new and fun ways for friends to experience these images. The prototype allows Flickr users to view four simultaneous slideshows from friends’ photos with the same tag. In order to help users re-experience the event from multiple perspectives and reveal interesting synchronicities, the photos are mapped to a timeline and the slideshows switch images at a rate that’s based on the time of capture.

A Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration Service Oriented Application: Mashing Google Maps and Vehicle Data Services
Christian Manasseh

This project provides a tool to track vehicles and monitor the status of several in-vehicle sensors remotely on a Google Map.

Information such as geographic location and speed of vehicle, condition of vehicle (moving, breaking, airbag deployed,…), in-vehicle data (wipers on/off, tires skidding,…) among other data elements have to be made available for a certain road section to make traffic operation decisions and solve congestion problems. Among commercial uses for such data are: personalized maintenance schedules based on driver behavior, improved engine designs based on engine burn-out rates, adjustable insurance premiums based on driving habits, etc.

By using in-vehicle web services, we are able to read the data out of the vehicle sensors (GPS and Speed in this project) and serve it up for the consumer. We also provide a web application that mashes the data from the vehicle web services with the Google Maps API providing an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface that can be accessed through the browser.

VideoTag
Rick Jaffe

Imagine the ability to select a moment or a scene within a video file, comment on some aspect of that frame, and mark it so that other interested parties can find that moment – and those notes – with ease. In the context of a course, students viewing a webcast could flag crucial sections of the lecture and add notes that would help them use it to review for an exam. In the larger, social context, shared annotation could turn a video into a “container” for a rich body of knowledge and insight.

The VideoTag project takes a first step towards this ideal. Its Javascript-based application lets users mark a point within a Quicktime video or audio file, creates a URL that will quickly recall the file at that point, and posts the URL to del.icio.us, a web-based social-bookmarking site.

Virtual World Geotagging
Stephanie Collett and Ross Housewright

Location is a useful concept for establishing context and shared meaning in the real world. Flickr geotagging is a demonstration of online tools that allow users to share this meaning in an adhoc manner. The Virtual World Geotagging project uses locational descriptors as a vehicle for sharing meaning between users of online virtual worlds. Our goal is to enable the narrative of a single place through the experience of multiple users over time. The project demo captures locational data associated with screenshots taken in the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. The project is also interested scaling the concepts across multiple game/virtual worlds.

Volunteer Map
Jerry Yu

Volunteer Map is a mashup of volunteer opportunity listings with a web-based map and calendar, which is intended to make finding opportunities more browsing-oriented by location or time. Currently, many volunteer sites provide text-based searching and browsing of listings, but only show maps and calendars in the listing details. Volunteer Map would hopefully be helpful for those who are interested in community service but cannot make regular commitments, making it easier to look for more convenient one-time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/arts/television/30morm.html

New York Times
April 30, 2007
TV Review | ‘The Mormons’
Modern-Day Look at History of the Latter-Day Saints
By NEIL GENZLINGER

A proposition: If your beliefs are any good, you needn’t be afraid to bring them out into the light. The proof: “The Mormons,” a thoughtful two-part series tonight and tomorrow on PBS. The tenets of the Mormon church may not be to everyone’s tastes, but the church members and leaders who speak in this program are admirably forthright about their religion’s history, strengths and challenges. It’s great to hear people who believe in something and can articulate it without sounding crazy or defensive.

“The Mormons” is the first joint production of “American Experience,” the history series, and “Frontline,” the public-affairs program. The history side, which dominates tonight, is the strongest.

The installment would be interesting enough if it merely related the fascinating story of the founding and evolution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion more commonly known as Mormonism. But it also manages to mix in, through some well-chosen talking heads, an intriguing discussion of what faith is, what religion is and what the Mormon story has in common with Judaism, Islam and early Christianity.

The religion began with revelations to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, N.Y., in the 1820s, most notably the Book of Mormon, which he said was delivered to him on golden tablets. The resulting church, the program notes, is distinctive in that it was created in the United States and it is relatively young; its founding events are not shrouded in centuries of historical mist. That has made it an easy target for skepticism and scientific inquiry, but this program is not really interested in knocking down the church’s pillars. “All religion depends on revelation,” Harold Bloom is heard to say. “All revelation is supernatural.”

The persecutions endured by the early Mormons as they were driven west into Utah are starkly chronicled — the parallels to Judaism and other religions are unmistakable — and so is the gruesome flip side: the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, in which 120 people in a wagon train traveling through Utah were murdered by Mormons. Part I ends with the church in transition as the 19th century winds down, trying to fit into modern America.

Part II opens with a promise to explore how the church went from being denounced by American presidents in the 1880s to having its famed singers, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, perform at presidential inaugurations a century later. But the promise isn’t really fulfilled. The installment ends up being a disjointed collage of personal stories from believers and critics. Two leading Mormon politicians, Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the Republican presidential candidate, merit brief mentions early on, but are never seen again.

Yet the portrait of the modern-day church, which the program says has 12 million members worldwide, is compelling nonetheless. Some of its teachings — that marriage is eternal, that family is primary — have an undeniable beauty, and if the church isn’t shy about using excommunication to discourage deviance, even those who have been driven out speak of it with a certain affection.

There is a split personality at work here: Mormonism has clearly evolved — denouncing the polygamy it once sanctioned, for instance — but today seems determined to stand fast on issues like homosexuality. Marlin K. Jensen, a historian of the church, provides one of the program’s most compelling moments when he speaks to that subject head-on.

“If you’re going to live your life within the framework of the gospel and within the framework of our doctrine,” he says, “then you’ve got to choose to marry someone of the opposite sex, and if you can’t do that honestly, then your choice has to be to live a celibate life. And that is a very difficult choice.” Of those who have to make it, he says, “My heart goes out to them.” And you believe him.

THE MORMONS

Tonight on most PBS stations (check local listings).

Produced and directed by Helen Whitney; Jane Barnes and Ms. Whitney, writers; Ted Winterburn, editor; David Fanning, Frontline executive producer; Sharon Grimberg, American Experience series producer; Mark Samels, American Experience executive producer; Michael Sullivan, Frontline executive producer for special projects. Produced by Frontline and American Experience (WGBH/Boston) and Helen Whitney Productions.

Wiccan War Widows Win Their Sacred Burial Markers

By Maya Dollarhide - WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)–Even before she learned the good news earlier this week, the Rev. Selena Fox was upbeat.

“We’ll win,” Fox told Women’s eNews in an interview last month. “We have two goddesses on our side; we have Lady Liberty and Lady Justice.”

Fox is the leader of Veteran Pentacle Quest, a campaign based in Barneveld, Wis., that has been working since 1997 to persuade the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow the pentacle, an encircled five-point star that symbolizes the Wiccan religion, to join the list of 38 emblems allowed on markers in veteran memorial cemeteries.

This week the VA agreed to comply with that request.

“People are ecstatic and joyous,” Fox said. “There is such a sense of relief and celebration for all those involved, and I’m happy because this is a major victory. Not just for Wiccans, but all people who practice nature-based religions. We received so much support on this issue from people across all religious denominations and across every political line.”

Approximately 1,900 active-duty soldiers are Wiccan, according to the Department of Defense, although some Wiccans believe that number is much higher.

Women make up the majority of the Wiccan population, although there are male witches, say Fox and others. Exact numbers of male and female practitioners are not known.

The VA normally takes a few months to approve a petition to add a religious symbol to the list that can be included on veteran grave markers. But in the case of the pentacle, the decision took a decade and came after the April 23 settlement of a lawsuit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Washington, on behalf of Circle Sanctuary and others.

Case of Religious Freedom

The settlement agreement ends a lawsuit filed in November that charged that denying the pentacle grave marker was unconstitutional on grounds of religious freedom. A separate but similar case, filed by the New York-based American Civil Liberties Union, was also resolved by the settlement.

“This settlement has forced the Bush administration into acknowledging that there are no second-class religions in America, including among our nation’s veterans,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It is a proud day for religious freedom in the United States.”

Five women associated with Circle Sanctuary, a prominent Wiccan church headquartered in Barneveld, Wis., were part of this lawsuit. They include Roberta Stewart, whose husband, Sgt. Patrick Stewart, was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2005; Karen DePolito, the widow of Jerome Birnbaum, a veteran of the Korean War who died in 2005; Fox, representing Circle Sanctuary; and Jill Medicine Heart Combs, whose husband is severely ill. Fox said a female Wiccan priestess, the fifth in the group, attended the settlement case on behalf of the Isis Invicta Military Mission in Geyserville, Calif.

Today there are an estimated 135,000 Wiccans in the United States and practitioners describe it as a religion that is concerned with the inter-connectedness of life and the natural realm founded on the concept of magic. Wiccans trace their religious roots to folklore and mythology from pre-Christian Europe, including Celtic and Teutonic cultures, and the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

A Sensitive Term

Practitioners sometimes call themselves “witches,” a term used in the past and present to refer to folk healers, midwives, and pagan priestesses and priests. Some avoid the term because of the negative connotations it can give a religion struggling for mainstream acceptance.

In 1999, for instance, President George W. Bush said that he personally did not think that Wicca was not an actual religion. And in 1985, Senator Jesse Helms tried to keep Wiccan and Pagan churches from receiving tax-exempt status; an endeavor that failed to pass in Congress.

“Often when we look at Wicca in popular culture, what we see is very superficial,” said Dr. Wendy Griffin, a retired professor of women’s studies at California State University, Long Beach, and a specialist in Wicca. “The word ‘witch’ or ‘witchcraft’ gets a lot of publicity and play on television and in the media, and I think that the military and this administration have a narrow understanding of what constitutes religion.”

Rev. Ann Keeler Evans, a post-Christian feminist theologian and author in Lewisburg, Pa., says Wicca attracts women because the religion celebrates the feminine as divine.

“Within Wicca, traditions are constructed to celebrate and support women’s lives,” says Evans. “I think that women come to these traditions looking for a spirituality which reflects themselves, and a connection with other women.”

Graves Went Unmarked

Fox had long noted that the graves of deceased Wiccan veterans in public and private cemeteries had remained unmarked. She called the VA’s refusal to accept the pentacle discriminatory and said the grieving process of families and friends of veterans from Wiccan families had been complicated and prolonged as a result.

“One woman, Rosemary Kooiman, died last March. She never saw her last wish fulfilled,” says Fox. “She was involved in the Pentacle Quest because she wanted it added to the grave marker in Arlington National Cemetery where her husband Abe had been buried in 2003. Her daughter Kathleen carried on her mother’s work.”

Some Wiccan families had refused to bury their dead, choosing to hold onto ashes, until the VA relented, according to Fox. Many, she said, would not order a marker from the VA until the pentacle was an option and one family has held on to a loved one’s ashes for 10 years.

At the press conference announcing the settlement Stewart, one of the widows in the case, expressed relief. “Finally, after 10 years of struggle, the Wiccan faith has their religious emblem and can have it inscribed on government-issued headstones and markers. It has been a long hard fight, fought by many, and today is a day of celebration.”

Celebrations of the settlement are taking place around the nation, and more are being planned, including a national day of remembrance and victory celebrations on Beltane, an ancient Gaelic holiday celebrated around May 1. Beltane will also be celebrated on Memorial Day and the summer solstice in June.

Maya Dollarhide is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, N.Y. - This series is supported by The Sister Fund.

Women’s eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org .

For more information:

Circle Santuary: - http://www.circlesanctuary.org/

“Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Women Reach for Better Jobs”: - http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3095/

“Female Episcopal Priests Balance on Schism’s Edge”: - http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3078/

Note: Women’s eNews is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites and the contents of Web pages we link to may change without notice. -

Cat and I crossed the bridge last month for BattleCry, the traveling evangelical youth stadium show. The event drew out plenty of kids (from as far away as Texas, we found), plus plenty of cameras and some counter-protesters. We wanted to ask young Christians what they thought about it all. We also wanted to know what religion stories they thought the media were missing. Here’s what we found.

New York Times,December 3, 2005
Push to Loosen Abortion Laws in Latin America By JUAN FORERO

PAMPLONA, Colombia - In this tradition-bound Roman Catholic town one day in April, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room - then promptly arrested.

Insisting that abortion was rare, Pamplona’s conservative leaders thought the case was over. Instead, the episode reverberated throughout Colombia and helped to galvanize a national movement to roll back laws that make abortion illegal, even to save a mother’s life.

Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the developing world’s highest rate of abortions - a rate that is far higher even than in Western Europe, where abortion is widely and legally available.

Increasingly, however, women’s rights groups are mounting challenges in courts and on the streets to liberalize laws that in some countries ban abortion under any circumstances. At least one major case with implications for the entire region could be decided in December.

So far, no country has dropped its ban. But the effort, spurred by the high mortality rate among Latin American women who undergo clandestine abortions, has begun to loosen once ironclad restrictions and opened the door to more change.

Although it may seem small by United States standards, it is a seismic shift for a region where abortion is readily available only in Cuba and a few other Caribbean nations. “There is a real trend for change, particularly in South America,” said Marianne Mollman, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, which supports efforts to decriminalize abortion in Latin America. “I think it’s the end of the realization that the criminalization of abortion doesn’t lead to less abortion, but that it leads to a lot of preventable problems.”

In Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, women’s groups successfully pushed for new regulations this year that permit a rape victim to get an abortion without providing a police report to doctors, as was required. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also formed a commission this year that called for legalizing abortion up to the third month of pregnancy. Congress is debating the plan.

In Uruguay, the Senate came three votes shy last year from legalizing abortion, setting the stage for future efforts by abortion rights advocates, while Argentina’s Congress is debating about a half dozen bills to legalize abortion in some instances.

Women’s rights groups from New York to Buenos Aires are also closely watching the outcome of a lawsuit filed by a Colombian lawyer, Mónica Roa, with the nation’s highest court. It seeks to legalize abortion when a mother’s life is in danger, when the fetus is expected to die of abnormalities or when the pregnancy resulted from rape.

The central argument in the case - one that could set precedent - is that Colombia’s anti-abortion laws violate its international treaty obligations, which require the nation to ensure a woman’s right to life and health.

The abortion rights movement in Latin American has come as women throughout the region are having fewer children and benefiting from once improbable opportunities in the workplace and politics. Social mores are also changing. Largely gone, for example, is the social stigma unwed mothers once faced, as well as laws that offered few legal protections for women. Also, divorce is now legal across Latin America.

Emboldened, women’s groups that advocate the legalization of abortion have taken to the streets of Buenos Aires; Santiago, Chile; and the Colombian capital, Bogotá, with some marchers publicly admitting they had had abortions.

Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.

In an interview, a doctor in Medellín, Colombia, said that while he offered safe, if secret, abortions, many abortionists did not.

“In this profession, we see all kinds of things, like people using witchcraft, to whatever pills they can get their hands on,” said the doctor, who charges about $45 to carry out abortions in women’s homes. He spoke on condition that his name not be used, because performing an abortion in Colombia can lead to a prison term of more than four years.

“They open themselves up to incredible risks, from losing their reproductive systems or, through complications, their lives,” the doctor said.

Such arguments have done little to sway an anti-abortion movement that is largely led by influential leaders of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Colombia, José Galat, the Catholic rector of the Gran Colombia University, has collected two million signatures against efforts to legalize abortion and has paid for full-page newspaper advertisements criticizing abortion rights advocates.

“If there is life, then it has all the rights and a mother cannot apply the death penalty,” he said.

Public opinion polls and studies show that Latin Americans do not support the full legalization of abortion. But detailed surveys conducted in 2003 in Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia showed that a majority of Catholic respondents believed abortion should be permitted to save a mother’s life, when doctors believe the fetus will not survive or when the pregnancy is the result of a rape.

Abortion rights advocates point to a Nov. 17 decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which ruled that Peru had failed to comply with its obligations under an international rights treaty and violated the rights of a young woman by denying her access to an abortion in 2001. The decision may have wide repercussions in future cases.

The young woman had sought an abortion when she was 17 after doctors determined that her fetus was severely malformed. But a hospital in Lima, the capital, denied her request, though abortion is legal under such circumstances in Peru. The woman was forced to have the baby, who died four days later.

“I hope that this does not happen to another young person,” the woman, Karen, now 21, said in a telephone interview. “I feel very satisfied because this was a long fight.”

Like much of Latin America, the people here in Pamplona have, until recently, talked little of the abortions that have taken place behind the town’s tranquil, buttoned-down facade. Yet, 68 students, most of them from the University of Pamplona, sought emergency treatment at the local public hospital last year after having abortions, hospital records showed.

Several students said that they had a liberal attitude toward sex. Condoms are readily available, and the so-called morning-after pill is sold over the counter in pharmacies.

Still, sex education focuses more on anatomy than behavior, and church and university officials preach abstinence. Shamed by the thought of having children without being married, many young women try to induce abortions by taking a drug called Cytotec, which is made for ulcers but also dilates the cervix.

Pharmacies in Pamplona are barred from selling the drug, but students can purchase it in cities nearby. It was Cytotec that the two young women took in April that left them bleeding and, ultimately, under arrest. But there have been others, court records showed.

Under questioning from prosecutors, all admitted their guilt and received suspended sentences.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said one young woman, who had an abortion in February, explaining her confusion to a local prosecutor. “I’m sorry. I ask God for forgiveness and to give me another chance. I’ll never do it again.”

Mónica Trujillo contributed reporting from Bogotá for this article.

From La Opinion, LA’s Spanish-language daily… Crece debate por aborto en México
A loose translation of the lead:
“The denouncements between the Catholic Church and the DF Legislative Assembly became accusations with first and last names when deputy Cirigo accused archdiocesan spokesman Valdemar of being the intellectual author of death threats for supporting depenalization.
“If something happens to us (the legislators), it’s the cleric’s fault,” said Cirigo, one of the sponsors of the legislative order that will be voted on tomorrow Tuesday and would permit women to abort in the first 12 weeks of gestation, if approved, and require doctors at public hospitals in DF to offer the service.”

Legisladores del Distrito Federal votarán mañana para decidir si se despenaliza o no
Gardenia Mendoza Aguilar
Corresponsal de La Opinión
23 de abril de 2007

MÉXICO, D.F.— Los descalificativos entre la Iglesia Católica y legisladores de la Asamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal (ALDF) pasaron a ser acusaciones con nombre y apellido cuando el diputado Víctor Hugo Círigo, acusó al vocero de la Arquidiócesis de México, Hugo Valdemar, de ser el autor intelectual de amenazas de muerte en su contra por apoyar la despenalización del legrado.

“Si algo nos pasa [a los legisladores], culpo al clero”, sentenció Círigo, uno de los impulsores del dictamen que será votado mañana martes y que permitirá a las mujeres abortar en las primeras 12 semanas de gestación, si así lo decide, y obliga a los médicos de los hospitales públicos de la Ciudad de México a dar el servicio.

La propuesta de ley —que cuenta con la aprobación de la mayoría en la ALDF— sustituye las anteriores causales del aborto que sólo lo autorizaban en caso de violación o malformación genética. Además, coloca al DF como punta de lanza para que el aborto sea despenalizado en otros estados.

El cardenal Norberto Rivera pidió durante una misa dominical a todos los sacerdotes y obispos defender a la familia ante lo que consideró un “crimen abominable”. Y de ese modo dio luz verde a todos los “defensores de la vida” a manifestar el rechazo por diversas vías.

Rivera fue respaldado la semana pasada por el papa Benedicto XVI, quien llamó a luchar por el derecho del niño por nacer.

Rivera se alió con su otrora enemigo David Romo, arzobispo de la iglesia de la Santa Muerte, para establecer un frente común de propaganda “en defensa de la vida”. Ambos dejaron para el futuro “arreglar sus diferencias ideológicas”.

Por su parte, el comediante Roberto Gómez Bolaños (”Chespirito”) entró a la polémica y aparece, desde hace dos semanas, en el Canal 2 de la televisora Televisa, con un mensaje en contra de la despenalización del aborto.

“Hola, soy su amigo ‘Chespirito’, cuando estaba yo en el vientre de mi madre, ella sufrió un accidente que la puso al borde de la muerte, el médico le dijo: ‘Tendrás que abortar’, y ella respondió: ‘¿Abortar yo? ¡Jamás!’. Es decir, defendió la vida, ¡mi vida!, y gracias a ello estoy aquí”, expresa el actor mexicano.

Al final del spot hay un mensaje: “Abortemos la ley, no la vida”: www.denmechance.org es la página de internet de una organización que supuestamente es patrocinada por algunos empresarios de la Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana (Coparmex), el Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) y la Iglesia Católica.

La campaña de “denmechance” pasó inmediatamente de comerciales en televisión a las calles. En diversos puntos de la Ciudad de México se montaron estructuras metálicas de aproximadamente cinco metros de largo por dos metros y medio de ancho con frases como “A un hijo se le defiende con la vida”, “Sé un héroe para tu hijo, sálvale la vida” y “No matarás significa no abortarás”.

Para contrarrestar la campaña de “Chespirito” y “denmechance”, diputados de Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Alternativa, Partido del Trabajo y Convergencia prepararon también un anuncio televisivo en el que aparece Paulina, una muchacha que explica que fue violada en 1999, a los 13 años, y el gobierno la obligó a tener el bebé.

“Soy Paulina. Mi caso se conoció en todo México. Cuando tenía 13 años quedé embarazada. Mi vida se cortó, fui una niña madre”, reclama en el anuncio.

En ese contexto, el pasado 10 de abril acudió iracundo a la ALDF, el líder de la Asociación Provida, Jorge Serrano Limón, acompañado de una mujer embarazada de 10 semanas y dos médicos para hacer una ecografía ante legisladores y demostrar de esa forma que el feto ya está totalmente formado. “No es una bola de carne, como se hace creer”.

En la entrada del recinto, Serrano y su comitiva fueron recibidos con improperios y una lluvia de tangas que se agitaban a su paso. Eran los reclamos de mujeres Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (CDD) y de la Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (CMDPDH), que aseguran haber recibido amenazas de muerte a través del correo electrónico por apoyar el aborto.

María Consuelo Mejía, directora de CDD, considera que estas amenazas “son resultado de la campaña de odio de la jerarquía conservadora” y agrega que, del total de las mujeres que aborta en México, 88% son católicas.

En la capital están desprotegidas cerca de 77 mujeres que diariamente acuden desangradas a los hospitales del Gobierno del Distrito Federal a concluir abortos mal practicados, según la Secretaría de Salud local y otras tantas que lo hacen en la clandestinidad.

Cifras de organismos civiles, como el Instituto Alan Guttmancher, señalan que en el país hay anualmente 533 mil abortos provocados.

El PAN ha propuesto como una alternativa para no legalizar el legrado la habilitación de depósitos de bebés para que las madres que no deseen a sus hijos los abandonen ahí, en lugar de la calle, como ahora sucede. Pero los defensores del aborto consideran que eso incrementaría la irresponsabilidad.

“Esto no es de Dios, es un asunto de salud pública”, resumió el ombudsman capitalino, Emilio Álvarez Icaza.

El día de ayer, marchas en contra y a favor del aborto tuvieron lugar en la capital mexicana

Alrededor de 500 personas, según la Secretaría de Seguridad Pública del Distrito Federal, protagonizaron una marcha en contra del aborto que recorrió varias calles céntricas, como el emblemático paseo de la Reforma, y se concentraron en el Zócalo de la ciudad frente a la Catedral Metropolitana.

Esta marcha partió del Monumento a la Madre y fue convocada, entre otros, por la Iglesia católica, la Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia y la organización no gubernamental Provida.

En un punto de su recorrido, los manifestantes se desviaron para evitar encontrarse con un grupo contrario de unas 300 personas que se expresaban a favor del polémico proyecto de ley que pretende despenalizar el aborto en la ciudad.

Are you kidding me? This is a total profile waiting to happen and no it’s not because it’s Guate!

Antichrist‘ to preach in Guatemala
2007/4

By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA, Associated Press Writer Fri Apr 20, 4:10 PM ET

GUATEMALA CITY - He calls himself the Antichrist, wears the number 666 tattooed on his arm and claims a following of 2 million people.

The Central American country has banned the leader of the Florida-based Growing in Grace church, arguing he is a security risk because he provokes conflict with Roman Catholics and evangelicals.

“It has been predestined and angels will make it happen. He is, after all, God himself,” said Axel Poessy, Miranda‘s media director.

He often takes aim at the Catholic Church — the most powerful faith in Latin America — calling all priests child molesters and saying chastity vows go against the Bible‘s teachings. Members of his church have torn up images of saints and other religious symbols in El Salvador , and marched in Guatemala and Honduras.

From BoingBoing.net: