Month: December 2008

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FOCA – Engaging the Battle

Written by a friend who insists on anonymity:

If you believe the Bible to be the inerrant inspired Word of God, then you and I agree.

However, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, the Democratic National Committee, many of the policy makers in the new Congress and the new Administration and a list of folks posting here do not!  Telling them about the Bible is like quoting poetry to a pig: “It wastes your time and irritates the pig.”  Worse, that “other side” doesn’t respond positively to the Bible and arguments based on this Truth are not (immediately) effective.  Human persistence will only do so much toward defeating that resistance and will often cause people to leave the debate unchanged.

So I suggest each of you to politely and substantively state a moral case for your opposition to some part or other of FOCA and its related measures proposed here.  That will work; I promise.  It is some effort but not really.  God’s Truth is reflected in all the smaller truths of biology, relationships, justice and freedom.  If you read a claim that women will be hurt financially tell them about the real science that proves that the most effective way out of poverty – especially for a minority single mom – is marriage.  If they argue against parental notification laws because of cases of incestuous abuse, ask them if they’ve read the law and quote back to them the case law that proves how rarely that occurs.  Then ask them if the thousands of proven incest and statutory rape cases presented to Planned Parenthood somehow don’t apply.  Polite and reality based facts (not just science & figures but experience & human reality) will win this fight.

Do not censor yourself.  If you have a faith experience that’s relevant tell it.  If you know a person hurt by abortion or longing to adopt say so.  Say that your faith tells you to be compassionate.  Write that God’s word speaks truth about your experience.

Of most importance before all of this is do not surrender prayer; it will certainly do much more for this fight than our small words.  We all know this but I repeat it for my benefit and perhaps yours.  PRAYER is our first tool and web logging and dialog are only a supporting role.  Already you and I are lifting up these issues and these decision makers in prayer.  If you’re reading this and writing on the blog but haven’t spent at least 15 uninterrupted minutes (or 30 or 60 or 90!) in prayer in the last 24 hours then you are wasting your time!  Worse you’re wasting your best weapon in this fight.  You’re not preparing for this work.

Finally, do not threaten anyone with anything.   A person who sins so greatly that he will surely go to hell won’t change his ways because we tell him so.  He will change when he responds to God’s gift of Grace.  Each of us has lived that and has changed for the better.  However a threat or other words written in anger serve to make us look foolish and confirm their hardness of heart.  Worse the occasional unstable person will read it and think ‘those sinners deserve to die’ and will act on that thought.  I hold that an act of violence is a PRO-CHOICE act.  We cannot go there and must discourage others from going there.  God – who may have a plan to change their hearts – will give them what they deserve; we cannot.

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Fighting FOCA

The Freedom of Choice Act, which President-elect Obama has promised to enact as his first item of business as President, is a piece of legislation that begs the passionate opposition of every American citizen – even those among us who are pro-choice. The Senate version of the bill, introduced by Barbara Boxer (why does this come as no surprise?) is located here. Read it carefully. Note the “Findings,” which for all practical purposes set the groundwork for understanding the motivations and ambitions of the advocates and sponsors of the bill. Notice the language, word choices, definitions – the absence of definitions. Pretend it is a college text for which you are about to face an exam.

In the next few days, you’ll be seeing more here about this issue. Please pray for me, and for a friend, and for a project he is developing and I am supporting.

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Why all the hullabaloo?

Pastor Rick Warren, chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to pray at his inauguration, said in a video message to his church that he doesn’t equate homosexual relationships with incest or pedophilia, but opposes redefining marriage just as any conservative Christian would…

“I have in no way ever taught that homosexuality is the same thing as a forced relationship between an adult and a child, or between siblings,” Warren said. “I was trying to point out I’m not opposed to gays having their partnership. I’m opposed to gays using the term marriage for their relationship.” – according to an article in OneNewsNow.

Well, that’s just hunky-dory, but it seems to me that Pastor Warren is missing a couple of points, here. First of all, he’s trying to be nice to the gay community by implying that he’s always believed that homosexuality isn’t really such a serious offense against Christian sexual rules. Then he’s just translating it as if it were a sort of adultery – sad, but not really serious.

However, homosexuality is one of the behaviors that dominates pagan culture. Those Greek myths we read in school – you remember, Zeus becoming an animal in order to seduce beautiful women (swans and bulls, for starters) – weren’t just bizarre symbolic stories. They reflected a culture where all manner of licentiousness was the norm.

Moreover, the ancient Greeks had a culture that glorified homosexuality. “The love of a man is better than the love of a woman,” is a commonly-known hallmark of that culture. And when Plato discusses beauty, in his Republic, he doesn’t use women’s beauty as the standard, but boys’.

Also, when God hands down the complex Law to Moses, with all the varied restrictions and prohbitions on sexual behaviors – which actually elevate heterosexual monogamous marriage to a point of dignity and meaning unprecedented in the otherwise pagan world! – homosexuality is the one sin that is identified as an abomination.

That is one mighty strong word – and the only time it appears is in conjunction with homosexuality.

So Pastor Warren is missing the deep theological layers that informed Christians – and especially Christian leaders! – need to have in mind, if they’re going to adequately teach their congregations.

He is also missing out on the fact that the make-up of the gay orientation and identity are complex and multi-layered. There are serious disorders that attend the simpler, more obvious one of Same-Sex Attraction acted out.

So – if they’re really smart, the gay lobby would sit down and shut up, because Pastor Warren is, in fact, paving the way, through his fairly sentimental approach to the issue, for greater acceptance – unquestioning acceptance – of homosexuality among the evangelical community.

I say, it’s a darn shame.

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A little bit miffed…

I wish someone would tell me what is going on. My rational thinking assures me it’s a computer glitch, something depersonalized and unbiased. But it feels personal, when I read the pro-abort insanity at Obama’s website change.gov, with a few rabid and ill-informed posters making a stampede of posts, and I’m having trouble getting any of mine to go through.

I got one in last night – One! out of four! Cannot locate my original post from the 22d. The friend who sent me there said he was having trouble getting posts in, too, although he does have several fairly good ones.

One last night, one earlier this afternoon…. but where is last night’s? Don’t tell me it’s gone! No, it’s not even in my profile…

I hate it when I make brilliant points about the obvious and they get lost in the internet netherworld!

This person “judyb” is vulgar, crude, and just plain wrong, and she has a horde of posts?half of them marked “deleted by moderator!”

Go over, register (you can register by posting, or you can go to the parent site of the comment program and register through them) – TRY to post, but at least give thumbs-up to lucid posts defending life, and thumbs down on the ignorant and hostile posts of the pro-aborts.

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The death of one of my heroes –

Please pray for the respose of the soul of James “Al” Bowman, my former brother-in-law. He’d been a nursing home for a while – Alzhimer’s – but the obituary said he died at our local hospital. It’s too late to call the family for other details, but the Pilot says the funeral will be on Saturday.

Al was born nearly 80 years ago, when his mother was in her early teens, up in the mountains of Surry County (near Mt Airy), delivered by a granny midwife who served that entire region. A bad car wreck when he was a young boy kept him out of school for a couple of years, and then he became a very young school drop-out, going to work to help support the family. When the local community college began to offer GED classes, Al was among the first to sign up; he was featured in a local newspaper article about the program, and for the rest of his life he was proud of that diploma.

He worked a variety of jobs from boyhood, finally becoming an electrician and working a number of years until he retired from Burlington Industries, and I often heard the others of the family tell how Al would bring home a paycheck, hand it to his mother, and say, “Here, Mama – take this, be sure  Mike and Rusty have shoes or whatever they need for school.” Without Al’s help against their father’s deficiencies (Mr. Bowman drank, gambled, and alternately abused and neglected his family), there is no telling what would have happened to the family.  He was particularly concerned for the wellbeing of the younger boys, who were born when he was near 20 (he was 21, in fact, when Rusty, the 8th of the family, was born).  It was Al who bought the house the family was living in when Mrs. Bowman died, and he continued living there until Alzhimer’s made it necessary for him to go to a nursing home, several months ago.

When I was dating Rusty, Al took quite a shine to me. “Better be good to Laura. Better marry that girl,” he used to tell Rusty. “Laura’s a good woman, a damn good woman – good woman’s hard to find!” He never quit saying it. When he had his cancer surgery in 2001, I came home from Louisiana for a couple of weeks at his request to stay at his house and help him out. He was awfully good to me: kind, wholly unsophisticated but gallant in that unschooled but great-hearted way of his (my cousins reading this, who knew him, will immediately know what I mean) – he tried so hard to help Rusty to be a better man.

He wasn’t a particularly religious man, although he possessed that country Baptist faith that is common here in the Bible Belt, and particularly among the mountain folks he came from. It was a simple, even simplistic faith, but Al was a simple man.

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Events from Rome on EWTN

If you don’t have cable and EWTN, you can stream online from http://www.ewtn.com – go to the Television heading at the top of the page – pretty self-explanatory (I can do it, so can you!)

SOLEMN MASS OF CHRISTMAS AT MIDNIGHT WITH POPE BENEDICT XVI FROM ROME (LIVE) 2 hrs
Solemnity of the Birth of Our Lord: Midnight Mass with the Holy Father from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
Wed 12/24/08 6:00 PM ET & 3 PM PT
Thu 12/25/08 8:00 AM ET & 5 AM PT
Thu 12/25/08 4:00 PM ET &1 PM PT

URBI ET ORBI FROM ROME: POPE BENEDICT’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO THE WORLD (LIVE) 1 hr
From St. Peter’s Square. Join the Holy Father for his inspiring Christmas Day message to the world on the celebration of Christ’s birth.
Thu 12/25/08 6:00 AM ET & 3 AM PT
Thu 12/25/08 10:00 PM ET & 7 PM PT
Fri 12/26/08 3:00 AM ET & 12 AM PT
Fri 12/26/08 5:00 PM ET & 2 PM PT

VESPERS OF THANKSGIVING 2008 (LIVE) 90 mins
The Holy Father will preside at the first vespers of thanksgiving at the year’s end in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Wed 12/31/08 12:00 PM ET & 9 AM PT
Wed 12/31/08 5:00 PM ET & 2 PM PT