Anti-Christmas bias isn't new

 In 1993, I was still 6 years away from voting for a Democrat for president, but I could certainly sniff out bias. Came across this letter of Dec. 1993 I had written to the American Library Association which had designed cards for libraries to send to other libraries and their staff.

Dear Colleagues,

Our Library received the very clever and attractive "Season's Readings" card from our sibling library, John A. Prior Health Sciences Library.

We are in complete agreement with your goal of supporting a campaign to promote libraries, reading and literacy through the sale of these cards. However, we are somewhat puzzled and curious that in your effort to include everyone else's language and holiday, you left out English speaking Christians. We Christians (a faith claimed by 1,783,660,000) also have a December holiday. In our language (spoken by 750 million others) it is called CHRISTMAS, and the traditional greeting is, "Merry Christmas."

Perhaps next year we could be included in the festivities.

Signed by me and the library supervisor, Daniel Martin

Hillarycare and ELCA

I used to be a Democrat, and voted for Bill Clinton.  I left the reservation in 2000, and some of my ire was at Hillary for her universal health care plan, when she was FLOTUS, and some was at her philandering husband.  I retired that year from OSU and no longer had to worry about being a Democrat with conservative values. But a 1993 letter shows the worm was turning much earlier.

While cleaning yesterday I came across a  November1993 letter I'd written to The Lutheran, organ of ELCA, the largest Lutheran synod in the U.S.  At the time I didn't know ELCA's position on abortion (anytime for any reason), or I may have left our church.  The magazine had carried a "Special Report: Health Care," and it seems to be written by Lawrence O'Connell S.T.D.  The initials aren't for sexually transmitted diseases, but doctorate in sacred theology. That said, it's HillaryCare. I don't know who gave him that degree, but I give him an F for ethics, after going on-line and checking out various boards, committee, and positions he's held.

The heart of my letter (ELCA didn't respond nor did O'Connell) : "Instead of placing personal responsibility for good health as first, the task force put it number 13.  We would not have a need for such a document or billions spent on health care if it were not for abuse of alcohol, cigarettes, food and sexual behavior.  Once those health problems, all of which are personally manageable, are set aside, we can afford the rest with pocket change."

I go on to ask how is it ethical for O'Connell to decide I should pay the social and economic costs of someone else's abortion, drunk driving, obesity, STDs or even failure to floss?  where is the justice in "redistributing" our resources? Hasn't socialism, which is what "redistribution" and "communal sharing of risks" means, shown itself to be a complete failure in Eastern Europe and the USSR?"

The golf game wedding snafu in Hawaii

I think the biggest non-story this week is Obama's golf game forcing a military couple to change their wedding plans. I don't think much of Obama as a president, but are we really to believe he personally arranges his golf games? This is a matter of security, and lately his security has been very lax. And so was that of the golf course, which made the decision. Someone should be fired for not noticing the mix up before it became a news story. He should send them a nice gift—a phone call doesn’t do it.

With so many scandals to choose from, I hate to see conservatives wallowing in stuff like this that he had no control over. We had something similar happen at our daughter's wedding in 1993. The senior pastor decided he needed the kitchen of the church to feed Billy Graham volunteers for one of his crusades in town that week. We'd had the fellowship hall for the reception reserved for 9 months--paid up front. Fortunately we had a great Christian caterer, who managed to work the kitchen by preparing the food elsewhere and bringing it in. I was one unhappy Mother of the Bride and had a real melt down. I think Joanie Poynter, our niece and the maid of honor, was the peace maker, and it wasn't even her church. Always helps to have a cool head. And that wouldn't be me. Ever.

Bernadine Dohrn, co-host of Obama’s career-launching fundraiser

From attacking "pigs" to attacking an innocent baby in the womb and the mutilation of Sharon Tate. And in 1993 she, the happy little homemaker, child-care expert, was still amazed that people thought so little of her!

"Much like Vladimir Lenin’s ever-widening category of people considered “harmful insects,” destined for death or the gulag, Bernardine’s category of “pigs” was rapidly expanding. In the very recent past, the pigs had been America’s police and boys in Vietnam. Now, Bernardine was about to enrich the brethren at the War Council with her thoughts on the vicious Tate-LaBianca murders executed by the satanic Charles Manson “family.” The victims would get no sympathy from the future childcare advocate, who, here in Flint, was hell-bent on herding their mutilated bodies into her widening “pigs” category.

The girl from the Midwest flew off the hinges, waxing lustfully over the demonic spectacle of the criminally insane mutilation of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her friends by the swastika-tattooed Manson brood. The crime done by the Manson clan is too mortifying to describe here, particularly the ripping open of Tate’s belly, but it wasn’t to Bernardine Dohrn. The future professor of child education at Northwestern saw a kind of deliciousness in these true Manson “revolutionaries.” She imbibed at the image of the cabal’s dehumanization of Tate, gleefully sharing her feelings with the assembled. Dohrn thrilled:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!

It was two days after Christmas, when America was still celebrating the image of the birth of the Christ child. Bernardine, however, was celebrating the image of the slaughter of the Tate child

Guest Post: Tracing the Origins of the Days of Rage Protest « RickMick

Friday Family Photo

Tonight we're going out with our daughter and son-in-law to celebrate their 14th wedding anniversary. I've never seen a prettier bride, nor had more fun at a party! For the first and only time I had all my own family here in Columbus; we had a fabulous reception and wonderful wedding breakfast the next day. It was just lots of fun.



Saying their vows

My brother, niece, two sisters, great-nephew, me and Mom

Aside: Wedding dresses with some coverage are much prettier and more graceful than strapless or slinky-slip styles with body parts falling out.

Friday Family Photo--The generations

In the black and white photo taken probably in August or September 1935, we see my uncle John and his wife Opal holding baby Evelyn, John's parents (my grandparents) Joe and Bessie, and Bessie's parents (my great grandparents) Bill and Leanor. Evelyn was the first grandchild and first great grandchild, so this is what I'd call a Four generations photograph. By the time I came along, there were so many grandchildren it was no big deal, but I did live on the same block as my great grandparents, so there is a photo of me at age 5 with her.


Fast forward 58 years. Now here is a real generations photo! In the color photo taken in July 1993 in Mt. Morris, IL, we see the descendants and spouses of Joe and Bessie, who both died in 1983. At their 60th wedding anniversary in 1972, they had 23 grandchildren and 31 great granchildren, but I'm not sure what the count was 21 years later. Aunt Opal is the only one from the b & w photo still alive at the 1993 reunion. She is the white haired woman in the dark shirt with sun glasses in what might be called row 3 a little to the right, sitting next to me in the pink dress. Evelyn died in 1978. I think one of Evelyn's sons is in front of Aunt Opal. My husband is behind me, my daughter behind him with her hands on his shoulders, and her fiance, now husband, behind her. My parents are next to me with my sister Carol next to Dad and my brother in front of him. My other sister was at the reunion but isn't in the photo.

Monday Memories

Did I ever tell you my favorite story about Serendipity?
In 1993 I was heavy into research on the private library of an Illinois farm family. I knew what was in the library from an estate list because the owners were my grandparents who had died in the 1960s, and they had inherited some of the books of their parents who settled in Illinois from Pennsylvania in the 1850s--with books. However, it required a lot of background material about publishers, what people read and why, the role of religion, what the schools were like, etc.

I was the librarian for the veterinary medicine college at Ohio State University, some distance from the main campus. One day I was in the Main Library for a meeting and made a quick trip into the stacks. I don't know how many books were in the collection in 1993 in that one building (12 floors), but there were 4,000,000 total in the various 20+ locations to serve 50,000 students. Anyway, I went into the stacks to browse shelves--my favorite unorganized way to do research. Although I taught classes on how to do library research (there was no Web in those days and very little was digitized), I never actually used those methods myself.

I saw a book that looked interesting but was out of order and pulled it off the shelf. When I flipped through it, I saw it contained some studies on what farmers read and what books they owned during the 1920's so I took it down stairs to the circulation desk. When the clerk attempted to charge it, the computer refused, and so she looked at the record. It was already charged out--to me! It had been charged out to me since 1991 and I had never seen the book. I had probably noticed the title in a bibliography, found it in the on-line catalog, and charged it out from my office without ever seeing it.

At Ohio State, faculty and staff could charge books out from any library on campus remotely and have them mailed to our office address. Apparently this one went astray and never made it to my office and never had the charge removed. Because I was doing so much research at that time, I probably had 20-30 items on my record. We had a computer command that would renew anything we had that was overdue, so each time I did a batch renewal, I was renewing this book that I’d never seen. I don’t know what the system allows now, but in 1993 you could literally keep a book forever if no one else requested it.

What do you suppose the chances are for picking a mishelved book in a collection of four million volumes and having it already charged out to you--two years ago?

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