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In other cases they give you a tax credit, e.g. your taxable income is reduced, and there are weird rules and games you can play.

In this case you simply wouldn't be charged tax for this purpose. You'd be eligible for whatever tax credit you might otherwise, the point is not to change the tax code, the point is to meet a need, if possible outside the government's budgeting powers, and having done so, allow reaping of the reward for it.

So would you have to prove that you gave in order to be eligible for the tax rebate? I guess you are saying no, that the tax rate would simple be lowered as the "need" was met by whoever felt like it.

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What I don't get is why people are so vocally against federal social programmes in this country,

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BTW, what is it that makes Christians (all three descendants of ancient judaism, actually) so obsessed with sex?

Wanted to get back to this, but as I'm no Talmudic scholar, I wanted to check with the source, which meant catching up wth my co-ex-wife. She reinforced my impression that for the time (and yet, for the Middle East) Jewish law was remarkably liberal regarding women and sex. At least women HAD some rights, as opposed to being regarded as chattel...! A new Fact of the Day: It is in Jewish law that a man has a moral duty to sexually satisfy his wife...what a concept.

And Christ was a pretty tolerant guy, as demonstrated by the story of the woman taken in adultery; I know zip about the Koran's stance. But as in the other cases, I suspect, the further one gets away from the original ideology, the more corrupted the principles become in codification and practice.

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And Christ was a pretty tolerant guy, as demonstrated by the story of the woman taken in adultery

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FWIW, most churches I've attended view sex as a good thing: the most intimate of acts, reserved for the union of marriage. Sex is not sin, or even close to it; using it for the wrong purposes is. [...] I realize that there are some Christians who've regarded sex as necessary only for the bearing of children, but this is VERY hard to support from the perspective of the bible. What I (and most Christians I know) come away with is that God intended sex to build/show intimacy between marital partners in a unique and special way.

Hm, then I must have been too exposed to those some Christian (but then, I am here surrounded by Catholics... )

This almost makes sense: if we take the formal marriage as the only way of expresing commitment between partners, and given that sex was until recently more or less inevitably leading to pregnancy, limiting sex to married couples is not entirely unreasonable.

But then, I don't think that commitment equals marriage, in either direction, so for me one of two premises does not hold. Contraception removes the other.

You are right, it is prevention of "sex for wrong purposes" or in "wrong circumstances", so we get everything from Ashcroft covering sculpture of Justice and that stupid uproar over equaly stupid Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" stunt, to fundamentalist Jews in Jerusalem calling their American guests "Nazis" for women and men praying together at the Wailing Wall, to burqhas and Talibans stoning women for infractions they were not even aware of.

I wanted to go on about women being threated as father's (or brother's) then husband's propetry, non-virgins being 'damaged goods' (even if being raped and even now) etc, but somehow I have trouble puting it clearly. Some other time.

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I am 31. In view of the quote variously attributed here I am heartless *and* brainless.

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This almost makes sense: if we take the formal marriage as the only way of expresing commitment between partners, and given that sex was until recently more or less inevitably leading to pregnancy, limiting sex to married couples is not entirely unreasonable.


Dragi, that is insightful. I had never considered it from that perspective before.

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Of course, it's still wise to remember that no method of birth control, save abstinance or complete removal of body parts, is 100% effective (says the guy that beat the <1% failure rate of an IUD).

Reminds me of a couple of friends of mine: They had two kids. Happy family. She went on the pill. They had their third kid. She had her tubes tied. They had their fourth kid. She had a hysterectomy. No more kids. Still a happy, if larger, family.

-jk