Look at Me

When children want attention — and they want it — often and presumably need it too — since they want it so earnestly much — one notes that they do not fiddle-faddle around.  Important needs require urgent responses.  Look at me!  And, the effectiveness of childish claims can be demonstrated about how strong children are able to get their wish.  Look at me!  And we look, even if sometimes we only frown-out our adult disapproval.

Happily though, not all glances are frowns and — in any case children are often adept — at changing one’s frown into whimsy and in transporting us to moods of wise joy.  Children can often cheer a sour adult mood, which is one reason I enjoy their companionship. 

Children have so much to learn.  And they learn rapidly.  They also love learning with all the whole depths of their strong young minds — and they will persist in enjoying new ideas even when schools put innumerable obstacles and objections in their path.  Children naturally turn all important learning into play — and with their games, they run headlong toward experience in sharp contrast to schools which prize regimentation and stigmatize change. 

A bright inquisitive child seeing a barrier simply goes around it, under it, over it, through it — or pretends not to see it or hear it (“I can’t see you!”  “I can’t hear you!”).  Irrepressible childish love for the new cannot be stopped anymore than Niagara Falls can be dammed.  And, really, what kind of stern parent wants to stop children from their play?  Even a very rule-bound parent will eventually bend and yield to the childish infatuation with life.

One must accept childish glee.  Children are relentless.  They are born with urgency inside them.  That’s why — having just come from Nature’s lap — they live life so vigorously now — in the present tense.  And they are Nature’s cheerleaders in their prattling constant chorus of “now,” “look,” and “come and see.”

Whatever stern heartedness sometimes stops our seeing, one needs this urgent reminder to rejoin the game, to play, to learn, and to delight in the present, where life is lived inside a strange, complex, marvelous, continual now.

Obama: the Religion

Obama supporters … can you explain this?

Some of the Illinois Senator’s fans seem to be plunging off the deep end.  Now, me, I greatly admire John McCain — but I’m a long, long way from worshipping him.

McCain’s a good man.  But he’s definitely not God.  So, sports fans,  I’ve got no McCain songs to sing for you.

Obama “Sex-ed ad” unfair? Think again.

Is the McCain ad that accuses Obama of supporting a “comprehensive sex ed” bill during his tenure in the Illinois Senate misleading?  Well, not if you can read.  (If you can read the bill, thank your teacher of course.)

Byron York of the National Review examines the criticism of McCain’s ad and concludes that the legislation was as the McCain camp characterized it as being: a “comprehensive” program that included kindergarteners into a program formerly offered only in grades 6-12.  The word “comprehensive” is used in the bill itself to describe what it purports to be: “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.”  The emphasis was not on “inappropriate touching” as asserted by Obama, but upon preventing HIV.  Other provisions of the bill were pointedly of even greater concern to conservative parents than the aspects highlighted in the pro-McCain ad. 

That Obama is backing away from the bill now is characteristic, given that he has similarly distanced himself from other unsavory aspects of his Illinois political career: his association with Bill Ayers, his participation in the church pastored by Reverend Jeremial Wright, and the precise context of his “community organization” efforts on behalf of the not widely esteemed group ACORN. 

In regard to the sex ed bill, Obama’s leftwing hypocrisy is particularly evident.  The bill provides an “out” for parents who find it objectionable, specifically York notes: “The bill gave parents and guardians the right to take their children out of sex-ed classes by presenting written objections.”  Once upon a time, conservatives who wanted a place for prayer in the schools sought to have prayer opportunities that would allow non-believers (of any type) the option of not participating.  Rightly, the critics of an institutionalized school prayer pointed out the stigma that attaches to a child who singles himself out of a group enjoined event. 

Well, if nonparticipation in a moment of silence was too emotionally charged to be foisted upon unwilling students, what are we to think of something so emotionally charged as sex ed?  What hope for happiness can we reasonably expect for the child whose parents object to the sex ed program and keep their child from participating?  Anybody out there in leftie land remember what peer pressure was?  (Oops, I forget, it’s a life-long albatross for the would be hip crowd.)

How sincere is the option out clause for conservative parents?  About as trustworthy as a deed for the Brooklyn Bridge.

If the shoe fits, wear it.  McCain’s “sex ed” ad tells it like it is.  And the country needs to know. 

If you read this blog, thank your teacher.  Knowledge is power, after all.

Why does Obama keep running away from who he is?

Photo Credit Click.

Why the “Culture Wars” are Really War

An article at MSNBC wears the title “More Gay Men now ‘married with children’” and some of us now feel vindicated for having felt miserable the first time we heard about surrogate motherhood.  Sometimes I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle.  When did gay “rights” become the left wing’s agenda, which is to say, when did it become equated with hipness and the cool people and gain easy ready access to the media?  Why is there no balance in journalism?  Where is a commentator arguing the dangers of gay parenthood?  And what is going to happen to children and to childhood in this brave new world?  MSNBC’s “news” isn’t news.  It’s a Hallmark card.

I’m thinking even as I write this that my husband and I better start rewriting the will this very moment to make certain that, God forbid the worst happens, our kids can never be adopted by gays.  I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know what adoption law is today.  Evidently, though gays can adopt in some states.  Or perhaps throughout the United States.  But I’m guessing that adoption still poses challenges: why else would gays turn to surrogacy? 

Here’s a good dividing line to demark the difference between “nature” and “culture.”  In nature homosexuality doesn’t impact children (except, of course, when they are victims of it).  Obviously homosexuality cannot produce children.  So gays can pursue “marriage,” can pretend to be married, can even find some entity to endorse their “marriage,” but they cannot reproduce, and so they could never impose their “marriage” on a succeeding generation.  Until now.

So it says something about motherhood, too.  What kind of woman lets herself become pregnant deliberately with a child she has no intention of protecting?  And then what happens to the abandoned child who is then turned over to strangers?  Ironically, this dilemma comes about as a direct consequence of abortion.

Abortion is the modern institution that led the way by defining the unborn child as not human.  And abortion was the “right” that divided a woman from her own child, that planted the idea into every mind that we have lives but not souls. “And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” Mother Theresa had asked.  But while some children are killed by abortion, others are brought into existence for the express purpose of being abandoned by their mothers and placed into alien circumstances unknowable in nature.

While some gays are trying to paint themselves in golden tones of sentimental harmony for the Hallmark card,  their publicists in Hollywood portray them in a rather different light.  If gay lifestyle were the harmless thing it’s represented as being, wouldn’t gays themselves be the first to decry the Gay Pride Parades, the bath houses, and episodes of Will and Grace and the transgendered movement? 

“I think we still have something to prove, to show America we can do a great job with these kids,” says one of the men in the MSNBC article.  Is the proof just a ruse to justify the gay relationship?  Maybe the children are pawns.  The men in the picture hold three young children in their arms, each near in age.  They can raise their children like an elementary school classroom since nothing prevents the children being spread out in ages as would occur in marriage and normal birth.  So their “family” is an experiment in every way.  An experiment made possible by the elimination of the mother.

Ironically, we have reached the state where changes are not even debated any more.  Change is an end in itself.  The credo of the generation is “change.”  We have a presidential candidate who has made it his centerpiece.  Just “change.”  No messy details.  Not surprisingly he is the greatest political champion of “gay rights” yet. 

Homosexuality is about change, but not any change that evolves.  Homosexuality eludes evolution.  It used to be said that homosexuality went “against nature.”  It turns out that was the truest charge of all.  We have left nature behind.  And God help us now with that inheritance.