Plenty to consider

By Tony Staley
Compass Editor

After a week's break for Easter, this is a good time to pick up on some odds and ends:

Worthwhile pro-life effort

• Lawmakers in South Carolina are considering a bill that would make it the first state in the nation to require women to see ultrasound images of their unborn child before an abortion. The bill passed the House 91-23 and was sent to the Senate Committee on Medical Affairs. House passage came after the defeat of two amendments that would have made exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, has praised the bill, which is backed by pro-life groups and is opposed by Planned Parenthood. Wisconsin and Michigan are among six states that allow a woman to have and/or review an ultrasound before an abortion; no states mandate review of an ultrasound before an abortion. It's certainly a worthwhile effort to save lives by showing women what's at stake in an abortion.

End the double-duty for words

• With the tens of thousands of words in the English language, why do some words have to do double-duty with meanings that are antonyms? Consider, for example, citation and sanction. A citation can be either be a great honor or something to be avoided. One meaning is a formal statement listing the achievements of someone receiving an academic honor or in the military, the mention of meritorious performance of duty in a dispatch. Less desirable is the other meaning: an official summons to appear in court. Then there's sanction, which comes from the Latin, sancire, meaning to make holy, and is related to our word sacred. It can mean either official approval or permission. But we often see the negative meaning: a coercive intervention used to enforce a law or an economic or military coercive measure taken normally by several nations acting together to force a nation to follow international law. Please, someone, come up with new words for the negative sense of these two words.

So far, no comments

• Interesting that when former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson announced his candidacy for President on April 4 at Messmer High School in Milwaukee no one objected. In his comments at Messmer, Thompson, who also served as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, championed school choice, as he did while serving as governor. But no one seemed to have asked why Thompson, a Catholic and a supporter of embryonic stem cell research, could speak at a Catholic school. (Messmer was named for the fourth bishop of Green Bay, 1892-1903, who then served 1903-30 as Milwaukee's fourth archbishop.) On March 22, just two weeks before his speech at Messmer, Thompson told northeast Wisconsin business and elected officials that they should capitalize on the stem cell research being done at the University of Wisconsin. James Thomson, a University of Wisconsin professor, was the first scientist to isolate human embryonic stem cells and the university continues to be a leader in stem cell research.

Beware of the gloom and doom forecasts

• Early April's snow again serves as a reminder of how crazy weather forecasts can seem in this area. While snow in April is not an every-year event, it does happen often enough that it's not like snow in Rio de Janeiro (indeed, snow in May in northeast Wisconsin is not unheard of). But to listen to the forecasters, the whole thing seemed like the Second Coming was imminent. Nor did the unseasonable nature of the snow have much to do with the "sky is falling" forecasts. We're also treated to those in the middle of winter for forecasts of anywhere between a chance of an inch and four inches.

Making sense of it

• Speaking of the weather, the forecast for Good Friday night was a 50% chance of snow. It snowed. But given that this forecast meant there was a 50% chance that it wouldn't snow, does this mean the weather folks were half right?