This morning I read an interesting article in the Washington Post entitled “When the Rules Run Up Against Faith.”  Essentially, the article was about an excellent female high school cross country and track runner, who was a practicing Muslim and was thus forbidden from showing skin except for her hands and face.  Thus, at track meets, she was wearing a unitard that covered her arms and legs, and was equipped with hood to cover everything but her face, which she wore under her team’s uniform.

Everything was fine for the past three years, in which she raced in that uniform at many track meets.  However, at a recent meet, and one that was very important to her, a meet director told her that her uniform was unacceptable and she was disqualified.   Essentially, his argument was that technically, her uniform violated the rules (his argument is wishy-washy to begin with), so she has to be disqualified.

Assuming that the meet director was entirely correct when he said that her uniform violated the rules, he is still wrong in disqualifying her, because he is ignoring the entire purpose behind the rules.  As far as I can see, there are three purposes behind the rules: (1) to prevent an unfair advantage; (2) to make team uniforms the same to differentiate one team from another; and (3) to prevent athletes from wearing something obscene.

If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, you’ll have noticed that Insight Magazine (owned by Washington Times) attempted to smear Barack Obama by claiming he spent time in an Islamic Madrassa school as a child, and thus was taught extremist Islam thought.  This story was debunked recently, but before it was, Fox News repeated all of the allegations and claimed them as truth, without doing any fact checking.

Barack Obama’s office responded by sending out a memo, which can be found over at “The Horse’s Mouth.”  A quote from that excerpt follows:

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.

I think it’s completely ridiculous that any major news source would publish a front-page story without fact checking.  That’s wrong, and it shouldn’t be done.  However, why can’t we have an Muslim president?  Why does Obama have to emphasize that he is not and was not a Muslim?  I understand that many terrorists happen to be Muslim, but most Muslims are not terrorists.  Why does Obama have to say that he is “a committed Christian?”  I understand that Obama is trying to set the facts straight, but I kind of feel that what he did is a slight insult to Islam in general.

Anti-gay marriage amendments have been quite successful in various states.  I’ve never understood why… that is, until now.  The Top 10 Reasons Gay Marriage Should be Illegal explains it all.  My favorite reason was:

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of marriages like Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

In all seriousness, I’m still waiting for someone to send a guest article to gimme-five justifying an anti-gay marriage stance.  Please send something to george AT gimme-five DOT COM so we can have some debate about the issue.  Anyone?

Recently, there have been complaints of medical professionals practicing based upon their religious or moral views. According to an article in the Washington Post, entitled “A Medical Crisis of Conscience“:

In Chicago, an ambulance driver refused to transport a patient for an abortion. In California, fertility specialists rebuffed a gay woman seeking artificial insemination. In Texas, a pharmacist turned away a rape victim seeking the morning-after pill.

The question is: are these medical professionals wrong? Should we force doctors to ignore their moral views or force patients to accept a doctor’s “freedom of conscience?”

In terms of new, controversial medicines or practices, I believe doctors should have a choice as to whether they prescribe these medicines or not. If a doctor vehemently opposes the morning after pill, for example, they should be more than welcome to post on their office: I do not prescribe morning after pills. But they should also be willing to divulge this information on their resume when applying for a job. As for being hired or not, this is where the situation gets fuzzy because a hospital could get sued for discrimination if they refuse to hire someone because they’re not prescribing a lot of medicines, right?

I thought everyone should see this video in that it represents how someone completely insane can write a book (although after watching the interview, she’s so slow that it seems like she didn’t even write her own book).  I think it’s ironic that she says that she’s pro-life, but is actually making a case for pro-choice… in that abortion might have prevented her from ever being born.  Zing.  (sorry that was a real low blow… I deserve to be slapped).