In right to life news, “Texas OKs Life-Without-Parole Jury Option” reports that Texas is considering giving juries an option to sentence people to life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty. If this passes, only New Mexico would have a death penalty without offering this morally acceptable alternative. Pray that the Texas House passes this bill and the Texas Governor signs it.

“Appeals Court Rules Against Wiccan in Va.” shows an appellate court getting things right for a change! A Virginia county barred a Wiccan priestess from giving the opening invocation because Wiccans are not consistent with the Judeo-Christian understanding of God. The Appeals court upheld this, saying that as the county has a wide range of faiths represented, they are meeting the Constitutional requirement. If this reaches the Supreme Court, it will, no doubt, be overturned, as their decisions tend to go towards an anti-Christian understanding of that Amendment. Still, it is nice to see that one court, at least, understands things.

I remember that there was once this thing called a legal separation, where you were still married, but not living together. It was tried before divorces, and it better reflected the reality of marriage, at least from my Catholic perspective. Divorce is merely a legal separation, you are not then unmarried, you are not then able to marry again. You do not hear about legal separation any more, just divorce. Why is that? The reason I ask is that in Oregon, have passed a bill to allow for divorce when the woman is pregnant. Apparently this was needed to protect women in abusive relationships. One would think that there would be other ways short of divorce to do that, no? Details are here.

So the whale-dolphin mix over in Hawaii made Yahoo news today. I’ve known about it for some time, and have used it as an example of how messed up our science is today. You realize there aren’t any research papers on this beast? And it has given birth! A cross bread like this should be sterile, if the parents were in fact different species. Now the Yahoo News story says they are in the same family, I remember reading that you had to go up another level before they were grouped together, but still, these are not the same genus much less same species. Or at least so we have thought. I wounder, which will give, the definition of species, the classification of each, or will it continue to be ignored?

This is huge news because there is a scientific definition of species, and it does not allow for this event. Two things must be in the same species if when they mate they produce fertile offspring. Further, this article says something I had not heard before: there are rumors that this happens in the wild also. This is not just a freak of close confinement. But even if it were, do you think its all that common that a big dog, say a great dane, as I am not all that familiar with dogs, and a small one, say a toy poodle, would mate? Yet we don’t worry about them being lumped in the same species. We understand that you simply cannot separate them, as they are clearly in the same species with dogs that are clearly in the same species…you get the idea. You simply cannot split them. This does the same thing for that family, it challenges the idea that that family has more than one species in it. If this sort of thing were to happen to other families, you’d see a sharp reduction in the species counts. On one hand this would in fact make Darwin’s claims easier; but not meaningfully so. The big challenge to Darwin is its ability to create life, and its ability to grow it to multi-cellular organisms at all. The biochemical is the unanswerable challenge. On the other hand, this reduces the complexity of Noah’s task as well. And that is a welcome development. ☺

UPDATE 20050415-1023: I realized I did not include the link, here it is.