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1. The New York Times Magazine looks at the contraception wars
First the good news: The cover story of this weekend's The New York Times Magazine picks up on the growing Protestant discomfort with artificial contraception. It's an important developing story that few major mainstream media sources have picked up on.

The bad news is that Russell Shorto's 8,000-word article is horribly underreported, contains glaring errors, and essentially paints critics of artificial contraception as anti-sex.

Shorto is right that religious conservative Protestants have been increasingly critical about the 1965 contraception case Griswold v. Connecticut, and that recent technologies (especially the emergency contraceptive pill) have forced them to reconsider facile support of earlier technologies (like the non-emergency pill). And he's right in his implication that Catholic-Protestant alliances in the abortion wars (and the reasoning in Pope John Paul II's writings) have also had a dramatic effect.

But for those who have actually been watching this happen, it's like reading a U.S. history text that talks about the American Revolution without also talking about colonialism, Reconstruction without the Civil War, and World War II without World War I. Or like trying to read a subway map that only names four stops. His connect-the-dots puzzle only has the numbers 3, 8, 24, and 31, and the only crayon in his box is labeled "anti-sex."

"The issue is partly — but only partly — one of definition," Shorto says. Well, perhaps partly, but if the thesis of your story is that those who only opposed abortion now oppose contraception, it's an important part of your story to define which is which. Pro-lifers who have said "protect life at the point of conception" have always meant fertilization. That's because pretty much everyone equated fertilization and conception. It has only been very recently—and largely due to groups supporting emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, and embryonic research—that some have wanted to redefine conception to mean uterine implantation.

Indeed, this article could have as easily been written as "How the Left Has Divorced Sex and Pregnancy." At the least, it should have been "How the Right Is Reuniting Sex and Pregnancy" instead of "The Latest Salvo in the Right's War on Sex."

In Shorto's view of "The War on Conception," there's only one side (an "outer fringe" that's "moving in the opposite direction from much of the rest of the world") at war. He sees a liberated, science-minded, politically innocent mainstream under attack, shocked, as his closing quote says, that "here in the U.S., people are still arguing about whether it's okay to have sex."

You can color the story with that crayon, but it's both acrimonious and wrong. The debate over contraception isn't about "whether it's okay to have sex" but rather about what sex is. That Shorto dismisses natural family planning in one phrase and says it is "otherwise known as the rhythm method" (the rhythm method is to NFP what a bubble mower is to landscaping) demonstrates that he was less interested in reporting or in understanding an actual newsworthy development than he was in scaring his readers with another malicious article to support the theocracy thesis.

2. Sudan government, Darfur rebels sign peace plan
It's "major progress in an internationally backed effort to end the death and destruction in western Sudan," says the Associated Press, adding, "Optimism over the deal was muted by their absence and a history of failure to live up to agreements struck over two years of negotiations in the Nigerian capital." One must always balance hope and realism when talking about such a resolution to genocide. Only one rebel group signed the accord: two other groups refused. But even peace comes soon to Darfur (miracles happen), The New Republic's Eric Reeves reminds us that the tragedy of Darfur is far from over:

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May (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50