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...Elian Gonzalez saga is a one-of-a-kind international showdown, but it's also part of a rising American debate over parents' rights. In Chicago birth parents are pitted against foster parents, and some blacks are charging the courts with racial insensitivity. In the U.S. Supreme Court this week, grandparents are squaring off against parents over the right to visit their grandchildren. Across the U.S., courts are being flooded with cases involving custody and visitation for homosexuals who have been estranged from the children they parented. At the heart of all these disputes is a wrenching legal and emotional...
Baby T, who will be four next month, was born with cocaine in his blood. His birth mother, Tina Olison, is a single mother with a 20-year history of drug abuse. Eight days after his birth, he was placed in foster care with Edward Burke, a powerful Democratic alderman, and his wife Anne, an Illinois appeals-court judge. Over the next three years, the Burkes bonded with Baby T, while Olison stopped using drugs...
Then the fighting began. Olison campaigned to get her son back, appealing to the courts' tradition of favoring birth parents in custody cases. But her more explosive claim was that the Burkes, who had baptized Baby T as a Roman Catholic, were not suitable parents for an African-American child. Olison accused the Department of Children and Family Services of discriminating against black families. A black South Side minister called on the Burkes to adopt a white child instead. The Olison camp's argument was much like Miami Cuban Americans' claim about Elian: a whole community should have...
Secular scholarship places Christ's real birth at about 3 or 4 B.C. The Christian church has never been very quick to acknowledge poor scholarship--it took the church nearly four centuries to get the heliocentric model of the universe right. Nonetheless, four years ago the church could have made up for some lost ground in the past if it had recognized the 2,000th birthday of Christ in 1997 or 1998 (adjusting for calendar irregularities). We are fortunate that no terrorists managed to set any bombs off this millennium, but how much time, money and effort could have been...
...better to take the money out of the hands of the fanatical and put them in the hands of airlines, hotels and restaurants, but a lot of needless worry and government expenditure could have been diverted if the church had just recognized the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of its Savior on time...