The Invisible library

Paging Dr. Jesus

From Scopes.com:

President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter has lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration is tasked with filling all eleven positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional approval.

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Dr. Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as “pro-life” and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager is the author of “As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now.” The book blends biblical accounts of Christ healing women with case studies from Hager’s practice. In the book Dr. Hager wrote with his wife, entitled “Stress and the Woman’s Body,” he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying. As an editor and contributing author of “The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality, Reproductive Technologies and the Family,” Dr. Hager appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate assertion that the common birth control pill is an abortifacient.

For some women, such as those with certain types of diabetes and those undergoing treatment for cancer, pregnancy can be a life-threatening condition. We are concerned that Dr. Hager’s strong religious beliefs may color his assessment of technologies that are necessary to protect women’s lives or to preserve and promote women’s health. Hager’s track record of using religious beliefs to guide his medical decision-making makes him a dangerous and inappropriate candidate to serve as chair of this committee. Critical drug public policy and research must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics. Members of this important panel should be appointed on the basis of science and medicine, rather than politics and religion. American women deserve no less.

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WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. SEND THIS TO EVERY PERSON WHO IS CONCERNED ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS.
2. OPPOSE THE PLACEMENT OF THIS MAN BY CONTACTING THE WHITE HOUSE AND TELL THEM HE IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE ON ANY LEVEL.

Please email President Bush at president@whitehouse.gov or call the White House at (202) 456-1111 or (202) 456-1414 and say “I oppose the appointment of Dr. Hager to the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Mixing religion and medicine is unacceptable. Using the FDA to promote a political agenda is inappropriate and seriously threatens all women’s health.”

Story Time 6:
Morning Glory

That morning, Emmett Frog awoke early, showered, shaved, had a good breakfast, brushed his teeth, loaded his gun and walked out of his apartment onto a crowded street and pulled the trigger six times. His first few shots hit nothing. The last two winged a nun and ruined the shoulder of a used car salesman. Methodically, Emmett emptied the shells from his revolver and reloaded one bullet at a time. He proceeded to fire randomly into the screaming and rapidly scattering crowd. He did this two more times before the police arrived. It took thirteen bullets, fired by five officers to finally stop Emmett Frog. Before they did, he managed to kill five people and injure nine others. Among the dead was a bartender at a local restaurant named John Calamari.

When the coroner examined the body of Emmett frog, he found lodged in his brain pain, a seed, which had recently sprouted into a orchid. The coroner could not explain how the seed had become lodged in Emmett Frog�s brain, or how it had managed to grow into a full sized flower, petals and all with no sunlight. Sure, the brain provided ample nutrients, being mostly water and protein but could enough sunlight enter the skull through a man�s eyes to provide a seed enough warmth and encouragement to sprout? And how had a orchid managed to grow so large within the confines of one man�s cramped and humid skull?

With so little known about the hows and whys of this peculiar flower, the coroner could only speculate:

Like a green house, Emmett Frog�s skull had nurtured this plant to the point where it strangled that part of his brain responsible for higher reasoning, logic and appreciation of the arts. Also, a long fingerlike root was found surrounding the part of the brain that governs sexual response, which would account for Mr. Frog�s enormous erection and sloppy grin.

However it got there, the flower was listed as an accomplice in the murder of five individuals and a root cause of the violent act, if not the mastermind of the whole sordid event.

Because of a peculiar and old fangled law, the orchid could in that county be charged as an accessory to murder. The District Attorney was at first reluctant to file charges against a plant but the victim�s families demanded justice be served, one way or another.

So the orchid was tried, convicted on five counts of accessory to first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole (Haxan County does not consider any living creature with an IQ bellow sixty to be of sufficient sentience to have full knowledge of its actions and so the orchid was ineligible for the Death Penalty. Had the crime occurred in Texas, however, the flower would have been sent to the electric chair, post haste).

The orchid was well cared for by its cellmate, Danny Goodboy, who was serving two years for taking a �76 Pinto for a joyride without having benefit of being the vehicle�s owner. Upon his release, Danny found gainful employment as a gardener at a nursery just outside of town where he showed an uncanny aptitude for rehabilitating members of the family Orchis.

The orchid drowned six months later when its new cellmate tried to smoke one of its leaves and set off the sprinklers on that cellblock.