Weekend Links — 11.27.10

A free Southern Sudan will be bad news for Darfur , according to Foreign Policy .

Someday  Israel will have to say “no” to the United States and make an alliance with India, according to an Israeli academic and lawyer.

Iraqi Christians are still fleeing the country , as Islamic violence against them, some of it unreported, continues to rise. A group of Arab Christians argues that those murdered should be canonized .

“We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings,” says linguist K. David Harrison , interviewed in The Economist . “We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.”

“[T]he law of changing sexual mores goes as follows,” writes philosopher R. J. Snell, adapting the famous Neuhaus’s Law: “Whenever the illicit becomes optional, the illicit will sooner or later oblige support .” And, he continues, “the most serious problem of the sexual inversion would appear to be justifying such rights claims,” because trying to do so “places their conclusions in jeopardy of incoherence.”

Sexual orientation is not immutable , as both sides of the sexual culture war believe, writes a former lesbian. “Sexual orientation cannot be reduced either to biology or to psychology, because sexual attraction cannot be so reduced.”

In England, there is “a growing trend for for local authorities to prohibit photography and filming at key events [by parents], with many citing data protection or child protection laws.” The National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations wants schools “to ban cameras and video equipment from school events unless all families have given prior consent for their children to be filmed.”

About half of new mothers sent text messages or updated their Facebook profiles while in labor.

Here are five things you don’ t know about supermarkets .

And here is a description of how two Catholic thinkers view the Tea Party Movement .

Thanks to Mary Ellen Kelly and the New Oxford Review for links.