St. Thomas and Planned Parenthood

Thomas Mengler, the dean of St. Thomas Law School, has rightly decided not to extend volunteer credit to a student for working at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"I view myself as responsible for promoting and protecting our institutional identity, including but not limited to our Catholic identity," Mengler said Thursday. "Our law school clearly has a faith mission."

Two aspects of this story, which the author brushes past, seem worth remarking upon. First, note that St. Thomas requires its students to perform volunteer service. The Star-Tribune attempts to bury this telling fact. Service is as prominent a component of the school's Catholic mission as its defense of innocent human life. However, it is a component for which liberal MSM outlets like the Trib are not prepared to give credit.

Second, Mengler's decision is unlikely to earn him friends in the legal academy. Most legal scholars disparage defense of the unborn, as they disparage defense of traditional institutions such as conjugal marriage, as theocratic, dogmatic, and irrational. Kudos to Mengler, who unlike a certain wimpy element within Christendom (against which I often inveigh), cares much more about unborn humans than he does about receiving an invitation to the cocktail party.

Add St. Thomas to my ealier list of law schools for aspiring conservative lawyers to consider. (And while we're at it, throw in BYU in the Mountain West.)

CNN shows its bias

Kudos to the group Americans for Prosperity for catching CNN on this one:

Another canard against Israel debunked

For years misguided liberals and fascists asserted that Palestinians were led by violent, despondent, blood-thirsty men only because of Israeli occupation. Then Israel voluntarily withdrew from Gaza and violent Palestinian men continued to send their children, social outcasts, and even grandmothers to homicidal deaths.

Israel has taken heat for its security wall around Gaza. The wall is supposed to demonstrate how intolerant Israelis are of their Muslim neighbors. But Israel isn't the only country with a realistic understanding of Palestinian aggression. Last night the security wall separating Gaza and Egypt came down, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans have flooded across the border into Egypt.

Yes, Egypt erected a wall against its Muslim, Palestinian neighbors. Yes, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians today demonstrated that Egypt, for all its faults, is an immensely more desirable place to live than the hell hole their oppressors in Hamas and Fatah have built for them in Gaza.

Now, perhaps I missed something, but I don't recall ever having read in the mainstream media about Egyptian intolerance of Palestinian Muslims. Nor have I heard of the overwhelming desire of Palestinians to go any place, even Egypt, that is not Gaza. Why, I wonder?

UPDATE: It appears that most, though not all, of the Gazans have returned to Gaza after buying food and other necessities. Of course, the media attributes the scarcity in Palestine to Israeli policy. However, history teaches that embargoes starve people only when they coincide with tyrannical leadership.