Perfect strangers would congratulate me and tell me I was going to have a girl by how I was carrying the baby. One woman even rubbed my belly while predicting the immanent birth of a daughter; I was so flabbergasted that I just gaped at her.

Naturally, I had boys. So much for old wives' tales about pregnancy!

Overall, though, most people were nice to me when I was pregnant. As for being offered a seat on the bus when I was pregnant, it happened a couple of times. I didn't really look pregnant until about 7 months on, so I didn't expect any special treatment.

As for chivalry, in my younger days I pooh-poohed it as a relic; as a strong, modern woman, I could certainly open my own doors and carry my own packages! A college friend made me rethink this. He'd been paralyzed from the waist down in an auto accident and used a wheel chair to get around. One day he got extremely pissed off at me when I held a door open for him. I thought I was just being helpful and didn't understand why he was angry, so I asked him about it.

My friend had been raised to believe that men should hold open doors for women, help them with packages, hold their chairs -- the works. When I held a door open for him, he thought I was saying he was less of a man because of his disability. After that, I always let him open doors and do other small things for me. It didn't seem like much, but it was important to him because it made him feel like a regular guy.

These days I accept chivalrous gestures at face value. Heaven knows they are few and far between. If a man wants to show me how nice and thoughtful he is by holding the door for me or giving me his seat on the bus, I thank him.

... and every single teacher in this school will have to be fired, because there isn't a Catholic alive who hasn't violated some point of church teaching and/or canon law during his or her lifetime. (I don't care how pious and conservative you are.)

Here's what the Man Himself had to say about the subject of sin and judgement. From the New American Bible:

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. "Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?"

They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground.

But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

(John 8 3:7)

God forbid that a Catholic school administrator should try to act like Christ or something.

At this point, I am just assuming that the NSA is data mining every byte it possibly can get its hands on: landline calls, cell calls, ATM/bank records, internet usage, credit card usage, tax returns, the works. And with our society being as wired as it is, there is little chance to avoid its prying eyes.

I don't know if this system would be very useful for actually finding terrorists. The sheer amount of data involved and the number of false positives would make it hard to sift the real terrorists from innocent people who just happened to match some kind of terrorist profile.

However, it would do a bang-up job at identifying and tracking Bush's domestic opponents.

A polygamous relationship freely entered into by consenting adults is a whole different kettle of fish than what's going on in these communities -- where girls are raised in ignorance, ordered into polygamous marriages to men old enough to be their grandfathers, re-assigned to new husbands at the whim of the community's leaders, and threatened with physical harm and confinement in a mental hospital if they complain or try to leave. Consent really doesn't exist in this situation.

It's not the medical advice itself that many women here find objectionable. Taken at face value, it's sensible and inoffensive. What is raising our hackles is the language this advice is couched in. It insinuates that a woman's health is important only because it affects her ability to carry a pregnancy.

When it's coupled with recent Bush administration action against the HPV virus vaccine, plan B contraceptives (and contraception in general), Roe vs. Wade, privacy rights, and other aspects of women's health (e.g., the recent insurance bills that would have limited women's access to cancer screening tests and gynecologists), the CDC directive to consider all women of reproductive age to be "pre-pregnant" regardless of their individual health status is kind of scary.

The root of the English word hysterical is the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus. As our uteri are now considered to be our most important parts, it is ironically appropriate that the usual suspects are invoking this word to denigrate any women who is outraged by the CDC's language.

At this point, just sign me

- Ofjames