With changes of two new people on the Supreme Court, we have had a ton of conversation about what that will mean to us as citizens. One area that is being looked at is the potential of rulings on abortion. I was thinking of asking the other day if you thought that abortion was going to be made illegal by the Supreme Court. But I decided against it. Then I noticed the main page of MSN asked that very question.

I want to focus instead our attention on one issue. I have noticed a trend in recent years for each state to begin to make laws limiting abortion. The most recent law was made in South Dakota. The law is that abortion will be made illegal except in cases where the woman’s life is at stake.

There is some buzz that this may be brought all the way to the Supreme Court. I don’t think we will see abortion made illegal across the country. I think instead we will see various states with different laws on abortion. So some states will have abortion legal in most cases but other states will ban abortion except when the woman’s life is at risk.

The question I have today is related to whether there should be a national standard or should it be left up to the individual states. Some areas like capital punishment are decided state by state so the standards are different.

Civil rights was an issue that ended up being decided at the national level because the states were inconsistent in their application of civil rights.

Should the abortion issue be decided at the national level or should it be decided by each individual state?

You can still vote on the post below on what we call the xanga mascot.

I want to talk about the Winter Olympics. They have been so boring. I had high hopes going into the Olympics this year. I wanted to see Michelle Kwan finally win a gold. She dropped out and so the main attraction was gone. As I sat down and watched the Olympics, I realized that the winter Olympics is full of sports I have never heard of before. I watched this one where they pushed this object and then tried to smooth out the ice so the object could move quickly. I thought to myself, “This is a sport?”

Overall, I thought it was a disappointment. I wish Tayna Harding would have showed up and hit someone with a stick. We need controversy to drive the ratings.

One more thing, if I hear one more sad story about an Olympian who had a mother with cancer and yet was able to make it, I am going to shoot myself.

On a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being awesome), how would you rate this year’s Olympic games?

We have narrowed the names down that people suggested for naming the new xanga mascot. 

We are down to eight names.  Please vote for only one entry.  If you vote for more than one, I will just take the name of the first one you mention.

# 1 Fred

# 2 Rufus

# 3 Duncan

# 4 Xangaball

# 5 Audrey

# 6 The Canabalistic emo pizza boxes

# 7 Flanga

# 8 The Flaming Tomato

What do you want to call the new mascot?

I was reading the answers to my last post and it caused me to start thinking.

Do women have higher expectations out of men than men have out of women?

Every once in a while a friend from xanga wants me to throw out a question to everyone so we can discuss the issues that concern each one of us.  I had a friend who wanted to know the answer to two pressing questions that has been on the heart of many women before her.

Why are men so stupid?  And why don’t they ever call?

Before I start today’s post, I want to point out an article that I read today on a friend’s site.  She wrote an entry about feeling caught in your life.  I think many of you would relate to it.  So go over and see what she has to say.  Her site is ilsurvive.

Here we go:

I have noticed my tendency to not tell people how much I appreciate them.  It is only when they are gone that I think to myself that I should have told them how I felt.  I have a friend who is leaving xanga today.  She has served as an inspiration to me personally.

So many times we have gotten the news that someone we have known is dead.  I am one of those people that regrets that I didn’t tell the person how I felt.  Recently, I told my dad that I loved him and how much I care about him.  He is far from perfect.  I don’t know why I waited so long to express my thoughts to my dad.  He has always tried to be encouraging to me.  I guess we get to a point in our lives where we think the people around us know we love them and care about them.

But I have learned from experience that those people are someday suddenly gone.  Without any warning they pass from this earth.  And we are left without that last goodbye.

Who in your life should you have said “I love you” to more than you have?

I was reading about the bombing of Iraqi Shiite shrines today in the news. A response to those bombings was given by attacks on Sunni mosques. In other words, the people are bombing the religious sites of each other in order to attack each other.

It caused me to think about religious tolerance in our country. I have not read of a Catholic bombing a Methodist anytime recently. I am sure you could point to isolated cases of religious intolerance in our country. You may have those who burn churches in the South. That may be a result of racial intolerance. I began to think that maybe ultimately in Iraq the difference is a racial or ethnic difference rather than religious.

I wonder to what degree we are religiously intolerant here. Maybe if we were in the middle of civil war, we would break out in fights between religious groups.

But I believe that as a whole, we are religiously tolerant people. We tend to raise it as a goal to be religiously tolerant. I don’t think that means we don’t have people that would argue different positions. I just think by in large we value religious tolerance.

Are we religiously tolerant as Americans?

I was commenting on someone’s site today where a woman was talking about getting her kids off to school. It got me thinking about how strict I am with my own kids about their school attendance. When I was a kid, I would miss school like crazy. I have mentioned in a post that I had missed 30-40 days a year for several straight years. I just got in the habit of staying home.

Now I am at the age where I have children of my own and I don’t let them miss school for nothing. I don’t buy into any fake illnesses. I try to take special effort to make sure they attend school faithfully.

I think that when we are parents we are more sensitive to the issue of not letting our kids get away with the same things we got away with when we were kids.

Name an area that you got away with murder that you intend to stop your children from getting away with murder.

Whenever you move into a new culture it is necessary for you to learn the language of the people.

What is emo? And am I emo?

A few people indicated in their comments on the last post that they thought that a person cannot be a priest and be homosexual.  Others looked at those comments and indicated that they were bigots or closed minded.

Is a person who believes that homosexual activity is immoral a bigot?