Catholic League Body-Slams Ventura

CATHOLIC LEAGUE, Sept. 30—Minn. Gov. Jesse Ventura is quoted in the November issue of Playboy as calling organized religion “a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers,” a statement issued by the Catholic League reported.

Said Catholic League president William Donohue, “The Minnesota Governor has now proven himself to be Jesse ‘The Bigot’ Ventura. Liberty shorn of its religious underpinnings is the real sham, as the Founders and most students of freedom have long understood. But according to the erudite Mr. Ventura, they all got it wrong.

“What Ventura is saying is that organized religion has an intrusive, and therefore deleterious effect on American society. To that end, it is only logical that he might seek to check its influence. This bears watching, as that is the position of an anti-religious bigot,” Donohue added.

Persecution of Catholics in China

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Oct. 1—The Sept. 26-Oct. 3 Register reported that Chinese authorities had destroyed 13 Catholic Churches for failing to register with the government. After seeing video footage of the destruction, veteran The New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal had this to say in his weekly column for The New York Times.

“I got and saw the film on Wednesday, while hundreds of top American and European business executives were attending a Shanghai “economic forum” sponsored by Fortune and its owner, Time Warner, with the blessing and manipulation of the Politburo, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mao's victory, and the decades of despotism by massacre that followed.

“Everything pertinent to trade was on the agenda, except the rights of Chinese. The C.E.O.s and company presidents, and Fortune and Time Warner, either judged these rights to have no value on any balance sheet, were foot-kissing the Politburo, or both,” Rosenthal said.

“I am asked why I write often about religious persecution of Christians, since I am a Jew, and not even religiously educated. One simple reason is sufficient: sufferings of the religious are as painful as of the secular. But there is another — neither religious nor secular freedoms will flourish where one is denied. Only if religious and secular Americans grasp that will a human rights movement exist in America that can protect them all,” Rosenthal wrote.

Marriage: The Tender Trap?

TIME, Sept. 26—Marriage is tough. This is the conclusion of a 10-year study published recently in the Journal of Developmental Psychology entitled “The Nature and Predictors of the Trajectory of Change in Marital Quality for Husbands and Wives over the First 10 Years of Marriage.” Commenting on the study was Time Magazine columnist Amy Dickinson.

“According to the research, married couples’ assessments of the quality of their marriages starts to sink rapidly just after the ‘I do’ and continues downward through the first four years. The quality of marriage plateaus after that first drop and then declines again during years eight, nine and 10.”