Month: October 2014
Sunday, 10/12/14
Oh! How we love the poor children of backward lands!
I couldn’t help myself. I heard about the Nobel Peace Prize recipients, but couldn’t stop thinking about something else.
The Nobel laureates were chosen for their work to assure the right of children (and of girls in particular in one case) to an education. And we Oooh! and Aaah! and Coo and inveigh against those barbarians who put children to work, or marry them off to old goats at age eleven, and how enlightened we are to celebrate their liberators with one of the world’s topmost honors.
Meanwhile, closer to home, children increasingly become commodities to be
- gestated in rented wombs, where they may be
- inseminated by designer sperm donors,
- purchased to adorn our empty and sterile lives, and
- aborted by contractual stipulation if they’re “defective” goods.
Then we tart up our little girls starting around age ten or so, and get them (and now, their boyfriends, too!) their Gardasil shots. But no old goats for our daughters (at least until they’re 16). And our notion of “education” for our designer babies is “college or career readiness,” not a humane and rounded life.
So we’re civilized and they’re barbarians because we prostitute our daughters to males closer to their age and start our wage slavery ten or fifteen years later?
If anyone made an effective case that this is barbarianism, too, and that children have rights to be born free, to be raised by biological parents wherever possible, to know the heritage of those biological parents, and to have actual childhoods instead of vicarious re-enactments of how we dream our adolescence could have been, he or she would surely be branded a bigot – if not shot in the head.
So kudos to the heroes and heroines of the International Children’s Rights Institute (and a tip-o-the-hat to Matthew Dugandzic). May they irritate, and indict, and expose hypocrisy, and rip the curtain back to expose child and surrogate quasi-slavery, until there’s no mistake that some of the world’s barbarians have advanced degrees, with homes on Beacon Street or in Santa Barbara, or condos in Manhattan or Michigan Avenue, and firm control of the levers of Official, Sanctioned public opinion.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Friday, 10/10/14
Wednesday, 10/8/14
Sunday, 10/5/14
Pulpit Provocation Sunday
Today is “Pulpit Provocation Freedom Sunday,” which vies powerfully for “most annoying idea ADF ever came up with.”
Here’s the deal. ADF, a public interest law firm with which I have been affiliated and still support sporadically (if you think that’s hypocritical, ask a conscientious liberal if he’s even had to suppress a gag reflex to support the ACLU) is inciting pastors to preen and preach about politicians today.
“Pastors should decide what they preach from the pulpit, not the IRS,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley, who heads the Pulpit Freedom Sunday event. “Churches should be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to talk about ….”
To the list of people who shouldn’t decide what pastors preach, I would add public interest law firms trolling for a test case on the odious Johnson Amendment.
I’m with ADF on the Johnson Amendment, but concertedly preaching politics on a particular day sends a powerful message that the Church is something infinitely inferior to what the Church really is.
My concern is only heightened by the realization, acquired over the last 17 years or so, that pastors really shouldn’t be deciding in a vacuum, or according to what “God laid on muh heart” (a cue that a hobby horse is about to be mounted again), what to preach. They should feel powerfully constrained to preach the whole counsel of God by following traditional lectionaries. The alternative is a theoretical superiority of the Scriptures over all human opinion coupled with a very real shrinkage of the canon to a few of Pastor Billy Bob’s favorites (Daniel chapter 7, Revelation 21 and a few others, for instance).
But I’ll give ADF credit for one thing. It’s working against an extremely lawless, arrogant administration, with a cribbed view of religious liberty and paranoia against the Bill of Rights, that just might take the bait.
If it does, I know who I’ll be rooting for: the schismatic religiopreneurs who never thought their show of bravado would actually land them in hot water.
UPDATE/BACKDATE: When sharing this through Hootlet, I was auto-reminded of similar posts in the past. It gratifyingly appears that my response to this irritant has been fairly consistent over the past 16 months.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 