WARNING: Political post--proceed at your own risk

One of my son's homework assignments for the weekend was to come up with a controversial solution to an important social issue of the day. The assignment sprung out of recent reading of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.

I was surprised to learn that High School students are still reading this piece, and I don't understand why it is discussed as being shocking in this day and age. We are content to allow thousands of babies to be chopped into pieces and incinerated each day here in the US. In parts of Eastern Europe, young women are paid to get pregnant and abort at a certain, optimal number of weeks, when the fetus reaches the perfect stage for use in facial beauty products and treatments. In other parts of Europe it is legal to kill imperfect infants after they are born.

So if all of this is perfectly OK, why should the thought of eating them be so bad? Wouldn't it be less of a waste if all these millions of blobs of flesh were consumed?

I'm shocked that A Modest Proposal remains in the junior-year corpus in this day and age.

Shouldn't we keep English classes out of our bedrooms? Err, kitchens?

Isn't this sort of thing an infringement on a woman's right to menu plan?

Choice

I'd always thought that "choice" was a rather cowardly way to refer to something as seismic as abortion, but recently realized that it's actually a very appropriate term. All of life's nobility and destruction hinge on choice.

Despite God's direction, we chose to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and continue to choose it today. The choice between self donation or self preservation is ever before us.

We are all called to choose, and the choices are very, very hard.