European Christian Stock Index Launched - Jesus Annoyed

Well, this is pretty interesting...

The STOXX Europe Christian Index, which comprises 533 European companies dovetailing Christian values, was launched Monday, echoing surging demand for ethical stocks, the Financial Times reported Monday.

Available in price and net return versions, and calculated in euros and US dollars, the STOXX Europe Christian Index is a new benchmark among all stocks in the STOXX Europe 600 Index set up by STOXX, a global index provider.

"With the launch of the STOXX Europe Christian Index, STOXX acknowledges the growing number of Christian market participants who wish to invest in accordance with their religious beliefs," said Hartmut Graf, chief executive officer of STOXX Ltd, while expressing the motive behind the move.

Evidently, companies are excluded if they profit from porn, weapons, tobacco, birth control or gambling. The companies who are allowed to participate are screened by a committee that includes Vatican reps.

I guess it just seems weird to me that businesses are banding together because of their common belief in Christianity - needles and camels and all that.

In fact, wouldn't the Christian thing to do be to convince those business owners to give their wealth to the poor and disenfranchised? I'd like to know when Christians decided that Jesus may have walked among the lepers in his lifetime, but were he alive today he would certainly afford himself a big house, nice cars, an ipod, etc. etc. etc.

Though I am assuming quite a bit - if I'm wrong and all of the approved companies are run the way Jesus would run them, I'd love to know.

Teen Birth Rates Highest In More Religious States

Not at all surprising, a new study has shown that teen birth rates are highest in states which are considered heavily religious.

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.

The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.

In a culture which uses sexuality to sell products to people starting at ages as low as ten (Thanks, Disney) it's not at all shocking that abstinence programs fail. The mixed signals kids get from the media regarding the power and allure of sex and their parents who tell them sex is something you should wait to do is not a healthy sexual environment for anyone involved. Pair this with the typical fundamentalist religious reaction to sex - that it's evil and sinful - turns sex itself into a taboo which most teenagers find fascinating. Just say no doesn't work and abstaining for god obviously isn't working either. The one thing that religion does seem to effectively keep kids from doing is having sex intelligently - by using contraception:

However, the results don't say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: "We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

Ahh, but I can hear the religious nuts now claiming that this study is skewed because kids on less religious states could be getting pregnant just as much if not MORE than religious states, they're just running around having abortion parties to dump their irresponsibly begotten babies so they can go out and have more heathenish orgies. Well, no. Thankfully, the study accounted for abortions and while abortions were higher in less religious states, accounting for those did nothing to change the outcome of the study.

For instance, the results showed more abortions among teenagers in the less religious states, which would skew the findings since fewer teens in these states would have births. But even after accounting for the abortions, the study team still found a state's level of religiosity could predict their teen birth rate. The higher the religiosity, the higher was the teen birth rate on average.

John Santelli of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University calls the study "well-done," adding that the results are not surprising.

"The index of religiosity is tapping into more fundamentalist religious belief," Santelli said. "I'm sure there are parts of New England that have very low teen birth rates, which have pretty high religious participation, but they're probably less conservative, less fundamentalist type of congregations."

And that right there says it all, doesn't it? I would wager that moderate or liberal religious groups are far less likely to do such a good job of denouncing contraception while doing such a terrible job at denouncingsexual activity. It makes perfect sense that this would be a fundamentalist issue - they have to keep their numbers up somehow.

Healthcare Debate Turns To Abortion

James Oliphant writes in a recent Los Angeles Times article regarding the latest(?) healthcare reform issue - abortion:

Reporting from Washington -- With House leaders struggling to reach agreement on healthcare legislation, aiming toward a possible vote this week, a new hurdle has emerged: abortion.

Some conservative Democrats are threatening to pull their support from the massive healthcare bill unless their concerns over potential federal funding of abortion procedures are met. They fear that the Obama administration will take advantage of an expanded government role in healthcare to increase the availability of abortions nationwide.
Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to use the divisive issue to build opposition to the bill.

The abortion issue has taken a back seat to a protracted dispute between Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats who worry about the bill's price tag and lack of cost controls. That conflict has delayed House Democrats from arriving at a final version of the bill and made it increasingly unlikely that the chamber will vote on the package this week.

On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) signaled an openness to postponing the voting.

"I have said that I wanted a bill to pass before we left for the August recess," she said. "But I've also said that our members need the time . . . not only to get the bill written but to have plenty of time to review it. . . . So, we're on schedule either to do it now or to do it whenever."

The Senate last week pushed off floor action on a healthcare measure until September to give the finance committee more time to draft its version of the bill.

If the House leadership's dispute with the Blue Dogs is resolved, abortion looms as the next sticking point. Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and other Democrats opposed to abortion rights want to ensure that the bill includes language restricting taxpayer funds for the procedure.

The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, explicitly prevents the federal government from using tax dollars to fund abortion through Medicaid. But the reach of that law grows murkier if the government establishes its own competitive health insurance plan, or if it assists in creating a new market in which the public could sort through various private insurance plans. Both ideas could be included in the healthcare bill under consideration in Congress.

The Obama administration has tried to stay neutral on the matter.

"I think that it's appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings and not get distracted by the abortion debate," President Obama said in an interview with CBS News;photovideo last week.

When asked about abortion prohibitions in the bill, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said last week that "a benefit package is better left to experts in the medical field to determine how best and what procedures to cover."

That is precisely what worries antiabortion advocates.

"By being silent on this issue, [Obama is] actually making an affirmative statement in favor of taxpayer abortions," Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) said.

As it stands, the House bill would create a Health Benefits Advisory Committee to prescribe which "essential benefits" should be offered in any government-supported insurance plan.

Opponents of abortion rights believe that unless there is specific wording to the contrary, abortion services will be included. "Unless you can specifically exclude abortion, it will be part of any federalized healthcare system," said Charmaine Yoest, executive director of Americans United for Life.

Efforts in other House committees to insert such prohibitions have failed. Stupak has vowed to push Waxman to include them in the version being written by the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Stupak was one of 19 Democrats to write to Pelosi last month to say that they "cannot support any healthcare proposal unless it excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan."

Abortion rights advocates say the bill simply would maintain the status quo, in which companies that offer health insurance are free to choose whether to cover abortion services. And they argue that any government restriction would mean that women who seek abortion coverage could be forced to choose a more expensive private health plan instead of a lower-cost, government-supported one. They also fear that insurers who wished to take advantage of government incentives would be forced to discontinue covering abortion procedures.

Stupak's proposal has drawn strong opposition from abortion rights advocates such as Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who leads the rules committee.

"The starting point for Rep. Slaughter on the healthcare debate was protecting abortion rights," said Slaughter's spokesman, Vincent Morris.

"Opponents of women's health and healthcare reform are exploiting healthcare reform as a way to push for unprecedented prohibitions on abortion coverage in the private marketplace," Planned Parenthood said in a recent statement.

As it stands, if a woman without medical insurance or with inadequate medical coverage becomes pregnant in my home state, she can apply for medical through welfare and either receive an abortion or have her medical costs completely paid for through pregnancy and birth. This is her choice to make, and both options are offered to her without any pressure for the woman to pick one or the other.

Planned Parenthood offers UA pregnancy tests free of charge and in the event of a pregnancy, provides the woman with a complete packet of information including contact numbers for counselors and other supportive services regardless of the choice the woman makes. If the woman is not pregnant, the clinic will at the very least give the woman information regarding free birth control programs and, if she is interested, will help to enroll the woman in the free brith control programs.

My point is, I feel like this is how it should be. It is the choice of the people personally involved with the pregnancy - the mother and father - who should be making decisions regarding whether to abort or to take the pregnancy to term. I hate this fear that some people seem to have of allowing people to make their own choices regarding pregnancy.

The focus of these debates shouldn't be abortion, the focus of these talks should be how to effectively educate about unwanted pregnancy prevention.

Bush Administrations Abstinence Programs Produce Unsavory Results

It would seem that abstinence doesn't work. I know, I know, of course abstinence works if it is honestly adhered to, but according to the latest Centers for Disease Control numbers, the falling rates of teen pregnancies and STD's either stalled or increased, in some cases sharply, by 2005 - Bush's 6th year in office.

According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but rose sharply in more than half of American states after 2005. The number of teenage girls with syphilis had risen by nearly half after a big decrease, while a 20-year fall in the gonorrhea infection rate was being reversed. AIDS cases in adolescent boys had nearly doubled.

What do abstinence groups say in response to these telling numbers? What is their answer? Why, more abstinence of course! Now, the fact is that even though abstinence is in fact a certain way of not getting pregnant or spreading STD's, it's not a viable solution to teenage pregnancy or STDs. Why? Because teenagers are horny and they are going to get down, whether you give them a condom or tell them to think about Jesus and take a cold shower.

The emphisis should be on a healthy approach to sexuality, not an approach which leans toward shame and ridicule when a person or two people feel compelled to react on completely natural urges. No one should feel strange about having sex or not having sex because it's a personal choice - one that you might make at 15 or 35 - and while as a mom I would hate to think of my beautiful baby boy knocking boots at 15 I would also rather he have every oppertunity to engage in that kind of activity safely and with the utmost amount of education on the subject rather than trying to pull out or perpetuating other ridiculous myths in regard to sex.

Sorry kids, if the chick is on top, she can in fact still get pregnant.

It's no secret that abstinence programs and religious institutions more often than not are interweaved with one another which leads me to ask this question - what needs to happen before these organizations face the fact that less education will never result in positive trends? When will these groups be held accountable for the fact that ignoring the teen pregancy problem by only offering an outdated and unrealistic solution is the same thing as willingly allowing teen pregnancy to become a much much worse issue?