Many Americans think of Sunday at the day for church, but The New York Times encourages its subscribers to see Sunday in a much more sybaritic way. This seemed really obvious on August 4.
Sunday Business had a big cover story titled "Can Millennials Save Playboy?" The Hefner family is no longer involved, and "gender editor" Jessica Bennett wrote "This is a newer, woke-er, more inclusive Playboy — if you believe what company executives tell you, and if you are inclined to give an aging brand yet another chance at reinvention."
A new underwater cover photo is said to be represent the new regime:
“The water is meant to represent gender and sexual fluidity,” [editor Shane] Singh said, seated beneath a 1988 Herb Ritts portrait of Cindy Crawford. The women who would pose in that water — their limbs wrapped around one another in a balletlike pose — were not simply models but activists. One uses performance art and digital media to share stories about the H.I.V. epidemic. Another is an underwater dancer who promotes ocean conservation. The third, a Belgian artist, recently filmed herself walking naked through a Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn during a sacred holiday. (An angry mob chased her out.)
Sunday Styles promised a story inside: "The perks and problems of polyamory." Writer Alice Hines sounded like their willing publicist:
Now a cottage industry of coaches and educators has cropped up to help polyamorous partners strive for compersion, the happy-for-you alternative to jealousy. Effy Blue, a relationship coach in Brooklyn, works with all of the following: triads, or three people in a committed relationship together; individuals seeking to transparently date multiple lovers simultaneously; partners who each have intimate friends, all of whom are close; and clients cultivating long-term relationships with someone who already has a primary partner.
“There is no single model that suits everyone,” Ms. Blue said. She also wrote a book on play-party etiquette. “Consent is the cornerstone of any well-produced, healthy and fun sex party,” she said. “This makes it safer and more fun than an average nightclub on any given day.”
Sunday Review offered a big cover story on "The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings: American nuns are beginning to confront their ties to slavery, but it's still a long road to repentance." Times reporter Rachel Swarns, a black Catholic, explored how most American convents relied on slavery in one way or another in America's early days. That is certainly an area for repentance.
But there was no repentance in the same section for Times columnist Farhad Manjoo championing the new frontier of chemical abortion. The front-page tease was "Inexpensive, safe, and picket-line-free: Are pills from the Internet the future of abortion?" The hopeful headline was "Abortion Pills Should Be Everywhere." That's quite the opposite of the Catholic position.
Manjoo chronicled how he's ordered and paid for abortion pills several times (not to use, but to be tested by a lab).
The drugs, which have been used by tens of millions of women around the world, are also some of the safest known to modern medicine — mifepristone has accumulated a record of adverse complications lower than that of Tylenol, Flonase, Xanax and Viagra. In 2017, Canadian regulators lifted most restrictions on the drug, allowing it to be prescribed by any doctor, without requiring an ultrasound, and dispensed in any pharmacy.
Pro-life activists aren't so thrilled with the "safety," especially for babies. See Lila Rose in National Review.
