Charles Krauthammer, from an entirely secular perspective, dismantles President Obama’s stem cell executive order:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.
On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

For the record: unlike Krauthammer, I do believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. Nevertheless, read the whole thing.

Elissa Reinsma became the first female to compete in the Minnesota state high school wrestling tournament. To which you should say: How bizarre. What on earth is a girl doing in a wrestling match with a guy? How can I guy competitively wrestle a girl and not (a) wrestle with a handicap, for fear of touching her in certain places; or conversely (b) fascinate about dominating her physically if not sexually; or (c) provide entertainment to young men who will fascinate along the lines of (b). John Piper offers a razor-sharp reflection:

Get real, dads. You know exactly what almost every healthy boy is thinking. If a jock from Northern Minnesota encircles her around the breasts and twists his leg around her thighs, trust me, he will dream about that tonight. Only in his dream she won’t have clothes on. And if he doesn’t dream it, half the boys in the crowd will. Wake up dads. You know this.
Manly gentleness is not an epidemic in our culture. Rap videos, brutal movies, fatherless homes, and military madness have already made thousands of women the victim of man’s abuse. Now we would make the high school version of feministic nature-denial a partner in this undermining of masculine gentleness.

Common grace is such that most high school young men (unless they’ve totally hardened their conscience) instinctively feel the responsibility to fight for a woman–in her defense, not against her. Every ounce of their being feels manly when they exert effort, take a risk, or make a sacrifice for a woman. They simply need fatherly affirmation to stand against the pervasive, irrational gender-neutrality of our day and be willing to lose the state wrestling championship rather than sacrifice their manhood.

I wrote a guest-post on The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood blog about Megan Basham’s review of the new movie He’s Just Not That Into You.

In the latest issue of World magazine, Megan Basham reviews romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You (rated PG-13 for sexual content and some strong language). I’ve not seen it, but I am not surprised to learn that the film is nothing other than the latest variation on the same, worn theme of aggressive, independent women chasing men into their late 20s and early 30s, hoping against hope that they will somehow earn the unwavering love, commitment and respect for which they so deeply (and painfully) long. They are mainly unsuccessful, as the film’s title suggests, as these men are “just not that into them.”

Read the whole thing.