Friday Night Date and a Derby Party on Saturday

We tried the "new" Old Bag of Nails (pub food, noisy bar) in Upper Arlington last night with 2 other couples. The Arlington Bag had moved from the Tremont Center near our former home on Abington Rd. to that messy scramble of partially built buildings at Kingsdale on Tremond Rd. Because of the congestion and parking, we'd avoided it up until now, but we all managed.  We found a handicap spot as we were drivers for someone who needed that. There was a lively crowd, lots of middle age and some families. Since it is in a retirement building (Covenant) squished next to the new community center we weren't sure what to expect. The menu was much as we remembered from 25 years ago, and we got the Cobb Salad. The others ordered breaded fish (one order can easily serve 2 and hand helds. 

We asked the waitress to guess the combined years of marriage, but she failed the test. 185. 56 + 64 + 65. We tipped her anyway. She was very sweet and very young--but then, everyone looks young to me! It was an evening with a lot if reminiscing--the days of black and white TV, the old wringer washers, Bill and Joyce met because he was in the Army in the town where she lived, and the rest of us avoided the military because we were pregnant or had a baby, first jobs, first apartments, and most of that was over home-made apple pie with ice cream at Jerry and Joan's home after our restaurant meal. We all get together fairly often, so I don't know why we had so much story telling. Age I suppose. No one else to talk to who remembers this stuff--plus our kids are tired of our stories!  We all have or had summer homes and Bill and Joyce will be leaving in a week or so for Put in Bay on Lake Erie. Jerry and Joan go to Boyne City on Lake Charlevoix in Northern Michigan.  We sold our place in Lakeside on Lake Erie in 2022 after 34 years.

We're going to a Derby party tonight May 4, and I've been wearing the same fuchsia hat for about 5 years. Today I found a new white floppy hat for $3 (still with store tags) at Volunteers of America and wrapped it in blue flowers from the old hat to go with my blue shirt and multicolor floor length skirt I got at the Discovery Shop (cancer) for $6. 

And while I was looking for a hat at the VOA, I just happened to see a Laurel Burch tote for $3. I have one of her umbrellas from 30 years ago. https://colorfulcritters.com/laurel-burch-handbags-totes/ I don't know if it's an old one or new one (she died in 2007) licensed with her name. It looked unused. I love her whimsical designs.

While I was at the VOA I asked the clerk for a tape measure so I could determine if a cute pair of light weight summer pants would fit. She didn't speak English, which has never happened to me in that store. She gestured to the store manager, who also spoke very little English, but figured out what I needed. They were fine. $3.

Now I need to look up the horses who are running, and who are the jockeys.   We each place a $2 bet.

Kentucky Derby 2024: Meet the jockeys in Saturday’s classic (horseracingnation.com)

The 2024 Kentucky Derby lineup features a competitive field of colts and jockeys. Here’s a look at the full lineup:

1. Dornoch (20-1) - Trainer: Danny Gargan, Jockey: Luis Saez
2. Sierra Leone (3-1) - Trainer: Chad Brown, Jockey: Tyler Gaffalione
3. Mystik Dan (20-1) - Trainer: Kenneth McPeek, Jockey: Brian Hernandez Jr.
4. Catching Freedom (8-1) - Trainer: Brad Cox, Jockey: Flavien Prat
5. Catalytic (30-1) - Trainer: Saffie Joseph Jr., Jockey: Jose Ortiz
6. Just Steel (20-1) - Trainer: D. Wayne Lukas, Jockey: Keith Asmussen
7. Honor Marie (20-1) - Trainer: D. Whitworth Beckman, Jockey: Ben Curtis
8. Just A Touch (10-1) - Trainer: Brad Cox, Jockey: Florent Geroux
9. (Encino, scratched)
10. T O Password (30-1) - Trainer: Daisuke Takayanagi, Jockey: Kazushi Kimura
11. Forever Young (10-1) - Trainer: Yoshito Yahagi, Jockey: Ryusei Sakai
12. Track Phantom (20-1) - Trainer: Steve Asmussen, Jockey: Joel Rosario
13. West Saratoga (50-1) - Trainer: Larry Demeritte, Jockey: Jesus Castanon
14. Endlessly (30-1) - Trainer: Michael McCarthy, Jockey: Umberto Rispoli
15. Domestic Product (30-1) - Trainer: Chad Brown, Jockey: Irad Ortiz Jr.
16. Grand Mo the First (50-1) - Trainer: Victor Barboza Jr., Jockey: Emisael Jaramillo
17. Fierceness (5-2) - Trainer: Todd Pletcher, Jockey: John Velazquez
18. Stronghold (20-1) - Trainer: Philip D’Amato, Jockey: Antonio Fresu
19. Resilience (20-1) - Trainer: Bill Mott, Jockey: Junior Alvarado
20. Society Man (50-1) - Trainer: Danny Gargan, Jockey: Frankie Dettori
21. Epic Ride (50-1) - Trainer: John Ennis, Jockey: Adam Beschizza

  

These are not race horses, but may be the first original art I purchased. Artist is Alison Adams, and I purchased it at Manchester College.  1958. She may have been on the faculty.

Words, words, words.

Words have always been political. No language has more words than English/American. But with today's deconstruction and destabilization of the 19th century Marxist thinkers, you particularly have to be careful about words. Take no words home to meet your parents until you know what they mean to your grandchildren (my proverb I just made up).

"Gender affirming care" is actually legalized child abuse which includes toxic hormones for children, and amputation of body parts. Pay no attention to those "medical" associations that approve it. There are virtually zero/zip clinical or long term studies, only hunches and hopes, what these zombized lab specimens will be when they are 80.

"Respect for marriage act" is exactly the opposite. It intends to enshrine same sex or any sex or any number of genders or any species into formal, cultural recognition of a relationship which will criminalize you if you don't agree. The most primitive of societies in the most far reaching regions and religions always had a way to formalize a marriage between men and women. They weren't confused. They knew concubines, mistresses, male temple prostitutes and adolescent boys who were sex toys of older men were not marriage partners. They were sex objects. Marriage was for the creation of a family, for procreation, even if that culture had no knowledge of Christ, Moses or Mohammed or a named Hindu God or gods. There are some things pre-history people knew that we're trying to legislate away today in order to destabilize society.

"Inflation Reduction Act" is exactly the opposite. Only governments create inflation, and only governments increase inflation by expanding the supply of money. Both the Trump and Biden administrations threw unreasonable amounts of money at the pandemic on the advice of people who claimed to know how to stop a virus. They then burdened the people who make the money and give it to the government in taxes with lockdowns. Even churches took money to stay closed--the very people we trusted with our souls and our first amendment.

"Climate change" is one of those, of course it does, phrases. But the political meaning is very different than the words. It actually means there is a huge cloud of power hungry bureaucrats who have enlisted science, entertainment, information giants and massive corporations to convince you the tax payer to believe puny, insignificant people, can control the universe. These are the same people who can't define a woman or properly fund the police or can use an attack on Paul Pelosi while police were in house to accuse Trump supporters.

So that's my word story for today. Now a few words from a career librarian: to the victor belong the archives. If you have to go to the victor (Biden administration, Bush, Obama, Clinton, JFK, LBJ, FDR, etc.) to get your information (data, knowledge, news reports, archives), you better have your eye on a deeper understanding of TRUTH before you start your journey.

-------------comment

"Gender affirming care" is probably the biggest lie, biggest inversion of language I can imagine. It's as fake as the penis that is inverted to create a vulva and then call the male victim an actual girl. You don't need a class or lecture in medical ethics to know that the doctors, nurses, and "counselors" are creating, not treating, Frankensteins. To call this abuse "bottom surgery" is absurd. If they actually told the truth of what they are doing, eyes would pop. And if you say "follow the money" and it enriches a huge chain of medical and support staff and leads back to the pharmaceutical companies who will then have a patient--or thousands of patients--for life with bad bones, bad kidneys, bad hearts from hormone blockers--the perps will pull out all those obfuscating terms for compassion and kindness and accuse you of being hateful, of being "transphobic." Would a ethical doctor amputate a leg if a patient demanded it? Why are they amputating breasts of young, under age girls?

And btw, why do lesbians and homosexuals want these goons and abusers in their camp? Haven't they spent decades claiming they are not pedophiles, and now they take the T and the Q into their acronym?

Why did Ezra tell the Jews to send away their foreign wives and children?

The command by Ezra to divorce the foreign wives certainly sounds cruel and not inclusive by our modern values.  We're reading Ezra today in our Women's Bible Study at the Lakeside Women's Club.  I'm not sure I ever read it, but it was very interesting.  I even did some deep diving into Bible commentaries on the internet.  Would you believe there are some Christian authors who treat Ezra-Nehemiah as leadership guides or building programs for churches!  Whoa. But to our modern values, separating families sounds very harsh. Read what this commentator on the Hebrew Bible has to say:  https://elwynshebrewbiblepage.weebly.com/the-inter-marriage-crisis-in-ezra-and-nehemiah.html

"Ezra 9 blames the intermingling of the races as the cause for his people’s woe, and why it should be forbidden[2]. This “intermarriage crisis”, as Ezit is commonly referred to, is therefore very important. For Ezra, the problem with foreigners and other non-returnees is that they were associated with “abominations and uncleanliness”, and intermarrying with them threatened Israel’s stability and its prosperity, as represented by land ownership, since God required the people to be clean and free of abominations in order to possess it.

A code in Ezra specifies who could marry who. A Jew could only marry another Jew who had experienced the Exile. Those who had remained in the land during the Exile were unacceptable. Ezra provided a genealogy distinguishing between those who were considered acceptable and those who were not, but it is suspect. Those who had married “other” women were commanded to divorce them. This was motivated by a fear of pollution of the Holy Seed and uncleanliness.

A Holiness code is also described in Ezra Ch 17, holiness being the antithesis of impurity. Ezra’s command was not to mix the Holy Seed. This was a means of consolidating a new identity. On the other hand, Nehemiah offered other, potentially more concrete, reasons for the denunciation of mixed marriages: such marriages produced children who could not speak the Judean language (Neh.13:24), and Solomon’s experience showed that foreign wives can cause a man to sin (Neh. 13:26). Solomon tolerated the worship of gods other than Yahweh, and did so because his foreign wives gave him the opportunity to do so (1 Kings 11).

Related factors include concern about the influence women have on their families. Children would likely learn the language of a foreign mother, and within the household a woman’s religious practices could influence the beliefs and practices of her children and her husband. The culture and religion of the father and the family’s feelings of connection and deference to them could conceivably then be threatened. Marriage also affected property ownership and inheritance, geared as they were in order to protect land tenure. If the wife or the children had strong connections to a community other than that of the husband/father, the land could effectively leave the community’s sphere of influence. In certain circumstances, Jewish women could possess and inherit land[3] and this may also have been the case in Judah. During the post-Exilic period, there was an attempt to reconstitute a new tradition: that the land has been polluted by the intermarriage of those who stayed behind during the exile, so the returnees had to distance ourselves from that.

The consequence was that the local residents - Samaritans who thought of themselves as the direct descendants of the original Northern Kingdom - were without any right to the land, and those who had been deported and gone into Exile, or rather their descendants, those of pure blood, came back with the message that the land belongs to us and we are going to seize it and settle there[4]."

We are all paying for transgender surgery through Medicaid

Medicaid represents $1 out of every $6 spent on health care in the US and is the major source of financing for states to provide coverage to meet the health and long-term needs of their low-income residents. The Medicaid program is jointly funded by states and the federal government. Now that states are succumbing to pressure from leftist ideology groups to obscure the truth known from the beginning of time by pagan tribes, rampaging warlords, Greek philosophers, Roman Caesars and thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian traditions with sacred texts (including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), trans-intervention (called GAHT and GAS) will be covered by Medicaid.

“Gender-affirming surgeries are safe, effective, and medically necessary,” says the ACLU, but in fact they aren't any of those. Certainly not safe or effective when one considers the long term (untested) results of a life time of mental confusion and hormones foisted on people already with high suicide rates. But they want us to pay for their crimes in the medical, legal, non-profit (obviously very well funded) and entertainment fields. They want the government to pay for amputating non-diseased penises, testicles and breasts, and then they want all of us to not only pay for it, but to agree it's right, change our language and submit to being vilified if we speak the definition of a real woman.

Patrick W. Lappert, MD: "Self-identified transgender persons are a small but apparently growing population of persons who experience a severe dissonance between their sex (male or female) and their interior sense of themselves as men or women. It is a condition that is associated with a high rate of self-harming behavior, including alcohol abuse, drug abuse, sexual abuse, prostitution, and suicide. It is a condition that demands merciful care in every regard.

 
Care for transgender persons is presently being compromised by a distortion in our understanding of the human person. Whereas in times past the patient was seen as an intrinsic unity of body and spirit, today we are seeing large segments of the medical community tacitly accepting an understanding of the human person as a kind of spirit creature that may or may not be inhabiting the correct body." Are Man and Woman Interchangeable? – St. Paul Center (stpaulcenter.com)

I only mention Clinton and Obama because Bill admired women and knew the difference, and Obama was a great family man and even in his campaign said marriage was between a man and women until the swamp issued directives about rest rooms during his term, so we can date this official, tax paid insanity to about 2012, a little recent in the history of mankind's approval.

Georgia' Medicaid will Pay for Sex Change Operations for Trans Women (breitbart.com)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33422448/

Money can't fix everything

We sold our home of 34 years in 2001 and the new owners installed a professional kitchen, spending ca. $50,000 ($80,000 in today's dollars), and then got a divorce. The three signs of a marriage in trouble are 1) a new sports car for the husband, 2) an expensive get-away vacation, and/or 3) a ridiculous remodeling project for the wife. Or, maybe money just doesn't fix what's wrong.

Divorce statistics from divorce lawyers

 I was looking for an update on some 2005 divorce statistics from my blog and came across a website for divorce lawyers and these interesting tidbits.  These three professions have the highest rate of divorce, dancers (43), bartenders (38.4) and massage therapists (38.2). These three professions have the lowest rate, clergy (5.61), optometrists (4.01) and agricultural engineers (1.78).

The groups with the most divorces are downscale adults (adults making less than $20,000 (annually)  (39 percent), Baby Boomers (38 percent), those aligned with a non-Christian faith (38 percent), African-Americans (36 percent), and people who consider themselves to be liberal on social and political matters (37 percent).

Among the population segments with the lowest likelihood of having been divorced subsequent to marriage are Catholics (28 percent), evangelicals (26 percent), upscale adults (adults making more than $75000 annually) (22 percent), Asians (20 percent) and those who deem themselves to be conservative on social and political matters (28%).

A lot of other statistics that might surprise you--or not.  https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/

What has happened to marriage--and families, and churches, and jobs, and morals, and home building and education

 In 1949, 78.8% of all U.S. households had married couples. By last year, 47.3% had married couples. And guess what, marriage rates by race tracks with poverty among children.  The highest rate of marriage is among Asians; next whites, then Hispanic, and then blacks. 

  

If I find more recent links, I'll add.  It has fallen off the radar on topics people want to research.  Most meaty articles are about five years old.

The strength and power of the Catholic Bishops

The Catholic Bishops apparently don't have the power or desire to stop Uncle Joe from embarrassing the Church or receiving communion--they aren't as powerful as the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook who had no trouble shutting down a sitting U.S. President while spreading lies about him.

 
Out of the $1.9 trillion stimulus (which we don't need) Uncle Joe is sending $467.8 billion off to help kill the unborn. And he is propped up by the party that denies Church teaching on marriage, religious freedom, sexuality and gender ideology. That's a lot more serious than mean tweets, don't you think?

 Even if you're pro-choice, you must see the duplicity of a guy who left his pro-life values behind so he could be Obama's vice president in 2009. Then in 2020 he ran as a moderate with strong Catholic values (or so his campaign ads said on Catholic radio) and is now lurching left of Bernie Sanders who never kept his motives or ideology a secret from the voters. And what an insult to Mary, the mother of God, when he flashed the rosary beads of his deceased son during a virtual visit with Mexico's president. It's embarrassing for our nation--not to have a Catholic president--but to have such a big phony. And the media who raged that President Trump dared to carry a Bible while investigating a fire in a DC church, just shrug at his hypocrisy.

The old Democrat line again

At a Townhall yesterday, Biden said, "No one should work 40 hours a week and live in poverty." According to government statistics, no one does. Even during the Clinton administration decades ago, it was shown that to avoid poverty 3 things are required.

1) Finish high school,

2) be over 21 and married before having children, and

3) have a full time job.

Just those three can lift most children from poverty and break the cycle. If both parents are working 40 hours a week even at minimum wage (the old one) the family won't qualify for poverty programs because their income would be too high. It's not that there aren't exceptions like mental illness or intellectual deficiencies, alcoholism, drug abuse and illness which might prevent full time work, but overall, Joe is lying to us.

This speech was the old Democrat chant and whine for more money to redistribute among their faithful, and that ours is not a land of opportunity. You can never make America great again under Joe because legislation will prevent it.

Democrats continue to make these 3 simple rules, articulated in the 1990s by Ron Haskins in a Brookings report, difficult for the low income.

1) They denigrate and ridicule the value of marriage/children in all the cultural areas they control,

2) they weaken the necessary moral principals to sustain the education system by focusing on intersectional, racial and social issues leaving millions of children uneducated in the basics for employment, and

3) they make it difficult for young people to get good employment through programs that punish the employers, like raising the minimum to job killing levels.

Which cities have the highest rate of unmarried families?

Smartest Dollar this week features cities with the most single parent families--also the poorest in society (as a group--not all single parent families are poor). Ohio doesn't score well--Cleveland (73.3%) and Columbus (49.4%), #1 and #8. For smaller cities, Dayton (70.1%) was #1. https://smartestdollar.com/research/cities-with-the-most-single-parents-2020?

The solution for government workers (deep state and elected) is to throw more money at it. But when you look at the stats, either in print or in a graph, it primarily took off after the War on Poverty and affected more blacks than whites. In the worst days of Jim Crow, Blacks had a higher marriage rate and lower unemployment than whites. Driving dad out of the home with promises of government assistance in his place has been very harmful for the black family. But whites have followed the trend with marriage being considered a non-essential until other needs are fulfilled.

Also, not mentioned in this article is the effect of the pill and abortion in convincing women that they could go it alone.

Then when you see which ethnic group has done the best in solving this, it isn't whites, it's Asians, who have the highest marriage rate, the lowest unemployment and the highest education rate of any group in our society. It doesn't even mention that in the article, but you can check it in other sources.

Marriage, not government programs, is the solution to child poverty. What does BLM want to destroy? The nuclear family--i.e. marriage--because of its link to personal property and religion. Which group as the highest rate of child poverty because of unmarried parents--blacks. This is a statistic BLM will tell you is racist, because marriage is racist.

Beautiful hymn of praise in the book of Tobit

This morning I've been reading the story of Tobit, Anna, Tobiah and Sarah. Such an interesting cast of characters including a demon named Asmodeus and an angel named Raphael. Such beautiful hymns of praise and promise. It's a shame we Protestants don't use it. You don't need to read it as either fact or fiction, just enjoy it for God's amazing works and the praise offered to him.

I really identified with the husband/wife conversation between Tobit and his wife Anna, that is still being repeated to this day.

Backstory: Tobit was a wealthy, successful man who became blind and lost his wealth. His wife had to support the family so Tobit sent son Tobias off to recover money he had in another land. Anna is not happy! It goes sort of like this as they are awaiting his return.

Tobit chapter 10. Now his father Tobit was counting each day, and when the days for the journey had expired and they did not arrive . . .

Tobit: “Is it possible that he has been detained? Or is it possible that Gab′ael [kinsman] has died and there is no one to give him the money?” And he was greatly distressed.

Anna: “The lad has perished; his long delay proves it.” Then she began to mourn for him, and said, “Am I not distressed, my child, that I let you go, you who are the light of my eyes?” She begins to weep and wail.

Tobit: “Be still and stop worrying; he is well, my love, he is safe. They probably had unexpected business, the man traveling with him is trustworthy and is one of our own kinsmen. Do not worry.” [Women just love to be told not to worry and awfulize.]

Anna: “Oh stop it! Be still and stop deceiving me; my child has perished.” And she went out every day to the road by which they had left; she ate nothing in the daytime, and throughout the nights she never stopped mourning for her son Tobi′as, getting no sleep at all."

Now, doesn't that sound familiar?

P.S. It all turns out and God is praised--see Chapter 13 for Tobit's song of praise. Raphael the angel when he reveals his true identity tells Tobit, "A king's secret is prudent to keep, but the works of God are to be made known with due honor."

A couples retreat

Believe it or not—I found this at a blog on a dairy site. I was reading an article on Oreo-Cowkies—Dutch Belted cattle—and noticed at the bottom there was a blog. https://www.progressivedairy.com/blogs/guest-blog/my-husband-and-i-held-our-own-couple-s-retreat-and-lived-to-tell-about-it   She bases her information and comments on the book “The One Thing.”

“When was the last time you sat down with your spouse without the TV on, without notifications on the phone buzzing nearby, with the kids in bed (or not home at all) and talked about any of the following:”

• What steps do we want to take to improve our spiritual life?
• How can we improve our eating habits?
• Do each of us get enough “me time” to decompress and destress?
• Is our marriage headed in the right direction?
• Do we support one another in front of our children?
• Do we need to think about helping aging parents?
• Are there any specific people we would like to get to know better this year?
• How often should we set money aside, and where should we put it?
• Have we reviewed our household budget?
• What causes are we passionate about?
• Do we feel useful in our work?
• What are the ultimate goals for the business?
• What are the key habits we want to develop this year as a family and as individuals?

When you’ve been married 60 years and your son has terminal brain cancer, somehow, none of the questions seem worth answering.  We’re eating poorly, our goals are to get to the end of the day, and there is no way to destress, even the tried and true like exercise (we both go to the fitness center).   And I have the feeling I’m going to continue to meet a lot of people I didn’t know before October 1.  However, my spiritual life is definitely improving—I spend more time in the Bible and reading theologians than I ever did.

Preventing child abuse and death

In 2017, an estimated 1,720 children died from abuse, and 72% of them were younger than three years old.  April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month.  https://www.ojjdp.gov/enews/blogs/042419-ojjdp-child-abuse-prevention.html

There is a media campaign with free images and messages you can download called "We Can."https://cantasd.acf.hhs.gov/we-can/   However, as I looked through them I saw only 2 that showed a Mom and Dad together, both active military, which is odd. Why couldn't there be a message about marriage, or the assumption of married parents? What are they afraid of? Married parents are the strongest guarantee against poverty, and fathers active in their children's lives help with self esteem and positive social behavior.

The War on Black Marriage

"Black demographics" (web site) is very pro-Obama, but has some good information. "In 2012 The U.S Census Bureau released a report that studied the history of marriage in the United States. They discovered some startling statistics when calculating marriage by race. They found that African Americans age 35 and older were more likely to be married than White Americans from 1890 until sometime around the 1960s. Not only did they swap places during the 60s but in 1980 the number of NEVER married African Americans began a staggering climb from about 10% to more than 25% by 2010 while the percentage for White women remained under 10% and just over 10% for White men."

So, what happened in the early 1960s? It seems the instability in the black family doesn't trace to slavery days, but to the so-called "War on Poverty" when Uncle Sam became a step-father to thousands. Now if you look the comparative wealth of whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, you see that Asian Americans have the greatest household wealth, highest rate of education, and the lowest child poverty. And--the highest marriage rates. Who knew? Apparently we did--until the government stepped in to help.

I have not been able to locate the Census report of 2012 cited in the article. https://blackdemographics.com/households/marriage-in-black-america/  But I’ve heard Jason Riley site the same statistics in False Black Power. https://www.hoover.org/research/jason-riley-false-black-power

58 1/2 years

What has happened to church weddings?

A Catholic priest called the Dennis Prager (who is Jewish) Show today to respond to a question about “marriage is a sacrament” in the Catholic church.  He said he’d been at his parish of about 400 families for 20 years, and weddings in the church had gone down by two thirds! Some people are not getting married, and some are choosing other venues.  Prager expressed his shock, but the priest continued, that the young people he counseled over 20 years had changed.  Whereas, 20 years ago they were “cultural Catholics,” and now they were “choice Catholics.”  And he mentioned 3 couples in his parish—one he married a few weeks ago, one right after Thanksgiving, and one whose wedding was coming up.  He said all three couples were in mass this past Sunday.  Prager agreed with the concept.  He said formerly there were cultural Jews, and now they are Jews by choice if they attend services.

Politics and religion going public

“Were I to launch into a sermon on the upcoming presidential election, my email box would short-circuit from the deluge of opinions many would need to communicate. However, because this sermon is on the life of Meister Eckhart, chances are good that when it comes to email I'll receive nary a byte. Face it, theology fails to generate the same temperature of heated discourse as politics, despite the admonition against bringing up either politics or religion on a first date.

On the other hand, were these the Middle Ages, the ceaseless subject matter of CNN or Fox News would be the moods and moves of God rather than the latest exploits of kings and princes. In medieval Europe, where earthly life was precarious and death the daily dread, the life to come was the only life that warranted debate.”

You can read the rest of this interesting sermon on Eckhart,  but I really chose this part because of its truth on speaking out and the dangers of writing about politics and religion.  So few people are passionate these days about religion that if you have a belief or opinion about the nativity, baptism, end times, or communion few will challenge you because they may believe all ways lead to God, or all truth is what I say it is.  Politics, however, especially if made public can get you fired, lose friends, destroy relationships, or even get your home attacked by Antifa, as Tucker Carlson found out (and he’s not even a Trump supporter but has spoken out about the D.C.  “elites” in his latest book, “Ship of Fools.”)

• Are you pro-life?  That used to be a religious issue, but is now such a hotly debated topic on heartbeats, selling baby parts and tax support, good friends best not discuss it.
• Marriage?  That also used to be a religious issue, but divorce and infidelity were the morality topics.  Not now.  It’s about baking cakes and fixing floral arrangements, and whether you can lose your business for being on the wrong side of Democrat party politics.
• Gender? God created man and woman used to be a debate about long day, short day, and whether this Biblical story was myth or fact, and now it’s about transphobia and your first amendment right to not only have a religion belief, but freedom of speech.
• Pronouns for God? Feminists used to rail about the masculine pronouns used in the Trinitarian Godhead,  or in traditional hymns, now we can not even use the pronouns he, she, him, her in ordinary discourse or writing!

So yes, it’s far safer to blog or Facebook about religion—it’s just that liberal politics have been co-opting religion so picking a topic is dancing in a mine field. 

Democrats are ridiculing “family values” of Republicans

They’re certainly right that sanctity of marriage is a Republican value, since Democrats have been in the business of destroying marriage and family since 1964, and Republicans do eventually absorb the cultural values imposed by liberals.

And they’re right that sanctity of life is a Republican value (for some Republicans); abortion doesn't appear in the RNC mission statement as it has in the DNC for 3 decades.

And they’re right that the federal government more often disregards the rights of the states when Democrats are in charge.

But they’re  wrong that the current dust up is about children from Mexico; the unaccompanied minors who are being trafficked for sex or labor come mostly from Central America 'with parents" and have passed through Mexico who doesn't want them, or won't take them as refugees.

And they’re right the protests against abortion are about liberty--the right of a child to live, the most basic form of all liberty.

I'm a little puzzled about the FBI probe, though--they confused me on that one. The left is OK with the bias shown at the highest levels? Is that OK in the Ferguson or Baltimore investigations?

That so-called white privilege

Millions of Americans are designated white by the U.S. Census Bureau that perhaps you, especially on the academic left, have not recognized, such as Asian Indians, Lebanese, Syrians, Armenians, Jordanians, Iraqi, Kurds, Turkish, Egyptians, not just Irish and German ethnicity. Remember this the next time a college instructor hoping to get attention and tenure maligns or tries to "gaslight" white Americans of west or north European ancestry.

And interestingly, many of these "also white" ethnicities have higher incomes than European Americans. The highest is Indian Americans, like our current UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and daughter of immigrants--their household income is over $107,000, (real U.S. median household income was $59,039 in 2016) whereas my poor Irish Americans are #48 at $64,525. Most of the Indian Americans are very entrepreneurial and focused on education, and most households are married couples. Work, education and marriage--it's a formula that can't be beat. Even Nigerian Americans are above Irish Americans, with a household income of $76,172 and 72.2% of the households are married couples. Census.gov
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

 Married couples with children under 18 years of age, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (Table HINC-04), made an average household income of $107,054 in 2013 and a median household income of $85,087. Married couples with NO children under 18 had an average household income of $91,870 in 2013 and a median household income of $70,995. Unmarried couples with children under 18 had an average household income of $65,337 and a median of $50,031. Call me crazy, but I think marriage and children have a positive effect on income and well being. Why do married couples with children do better financially than all others? "Perhaps it is because they are not primarily driven by greed but something quite the opposite: a willingness to make sacrifices so their children may live better lives."

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/income-inequality-married-couples-kids-make-average-107054
 

God’s plan for marriage N.T. Wright

“I believe, the ­biblical picture of man and woman together in marriage is not something about which we can say, “Oh well, they had some funny ideas back then. We know better now.” The biblical view of marriage is part of the larger whole of new creation, and it symbolizes and points to that divine plan. Every time I, as a priest, celebrate the marriage of a couple, I remind myself, and I frequently remind the couple, that what we are doing is setting up a signpost. We live in a world of many storms and many winds; those signposts can easily get battered and broken. But they are pointing somewhere – and the reality to which they are pointing is the fulfillment of God’s good purposes for creation.

Marriage is a sign of all things in heaven and on earth coming together in Christ. That’s why it is a tough calling. But that is why, also, it is central and non-negotiable. That, for me, is what it’s all about. “ NT Wright, Plough, Sept. 2015.  http://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/marriage/what-is-marriage-for