Category: Waxing Philosophical

. . . without a license.

On Tolerance

So, let’s see.  I mentioned that I wanted to talk about the intolerance of people toward Christians.  This post linking to another post written by a woman who was dismayed (horrified?  discomfited?) to be attending a barbecue with a bunch of Christians (who had the nerve not to serve alcohol) sparked my reaction.  That, and the Joan Rivers “Before Melissa Pulls the Plug” comedy special I paused on while channel-surfing the other night.  (Then again, Joan Rivers says outrageous things about everyone, so how can anyone be offended by that?) 

I understand about being uncomfortable around people who are different than you, so the woman who spent her afternoon at the barbecue feeling out of place gets my sympathy.  After all, I live in one of the states where more people do not attend church than do. 

“The idea that Seattle or this part of the country is a bastion of liberalism and tolerance and open-mindedness is baloney,” Gallant says. “It is just self-absorbed and trendy. These people are, in fact, very intolerant to anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They want people of faith out here to be silent about their beliefs.”

The Rev. Bill Keeton, 48, pastor of the tiny, yellow-frame Chapel of Grace in Olympia, dubs secular Washington “downright anti-religious.”

“Charting the Unchurched in America,” (USA Today) says:

The majority of Americans, 81% according to ARIS, still do claim a religion. They represent a counterargument to the theory that the more developed a country — in education, occupations, science and technology — the more its people move away from religion, says Ronald Inglehart, who heads the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Americans break the mold. Inglehart says, “Even if you look at the easiest measure of religiosity — church attendance — the USA has 30% to 32% per week depending on which poll you look at, but comparably wealthy countries in Northern Europe have 5% to 15%.”

So, eighty-some percent claim a religion (all religions, not just Christianity), but only thirty-some percent go to church.  (Far less than that in my region.)  I’m one of them.

I am accustomed to being mocked on television, on the internet, in print media.  Christians are accused of intolerance (and downright stupidity) by those who refuse to tolerate Christian belief systems.  It’s kind of funny, really, that those who claim to be tolerant of lifestyles and differing beliefs cannot tolerate Christians because of their perceived intolerance.

At least I find it funny.  And offensive on occasion.

However, I try not to take offense at the illogical meanderings of people who don’t realize how intolerant they are.  I assume those people have no idea what they are talking about, since most people are frighteningly ignorant of the overall message of the Bible and what a Christian is really like.  Joan Rivers wouldn’t know a beatitude if it hit her upside the head, after all, so we can overlook her insensitivity to Christians.  (Blessed are the meek.)

I really do believe actions speak louder than words, so I figure I don’t need to defend myself or other Christians.  But every once in awhile, my eyes roll so far back in my head that I have to say something lest my eyeballs get stuck in that position.  That explains this post.  My eyeballs were lodged way up under my eyelids.  This ought to shake them loose.

Some of you mentioned in comments that Christians are also very intolerant of other Christians.  That’s true, I suppose, though I think there’s probably a better word than “intolerance” to describe the differences between various Christian denominations and factions.  Sure, there are vast disagreements between Christian groups, but disagreeing with something doesn’t imply intolerance (“unwillingness to recognize and respect differences in opinions or beliefs”.) 

(Yes, I quibble about semantics quite often.  So?)  

I have been in Christian circles my whole life–my maternal grandfather was a preacher, my uncles are ministers, my mother met my father at Bible college–I attended church three times a week until adulthood . . . and seven times a week in college (mandatory chapel every weekday and mandatory attendance at church on weekends).  So, I have church-cred. 

And I’m telling you that the view from here, from the life of a pastor’s wife–who never, ever mentions that fact to strangers lest they suddenly begin to censor themselves and apologize for their language and start to look for an emergency exit–from here, it sure looks like those who champion tolerance can barely tolerate me.

Which, you have to admit, is irony at its finest.

You can accuse me of a lot things–setting back the feminist movement, for instance, by ironing my husband’s pants–but please don’t accuse me of intolerance or assume that because I’m a Christian I’m a party-pooper.  (I’m a party-pooper because I’m an introvert, which has nothing to do with my religion.) 

The tolerant among us should have no problem with my assertion that I am right because doesn’t tolerance demand that you tolerate me, even if you disagree with me?  Otherwise, that makes you intolerant, huh? 

I could go in circles forever, pointing out that people who cry “intolerant!” and point an accusing finger are intolerant of the intolerant . . . but it’s boring me.  So it must be boring you. 

The end.

When you have nothing to say, pass the microphone to someone else.

It’s 11 p.m. and the reason I haven’t written anything yet today is that I really have nothing to write about.  No wasps have stung.  I haven’t solved the puzzle of “fling, flang, flung.”  And for that matter, why can’t we say, “The wasp stang me?”  Huh?  Tell me that!

By the way, I wonder what the difference is between a wasp and a yellow jacket?  The television news just reported that a swarm of yellow jackets stung a bunch of high school seniors who were posing for a class picture today.  A student unwittingly stepped on a nest.  Perhaps we have yellow jackets in our yard, not wasps.

Now, if you are looking for something more interesting to read by someone who is way smarter than me and about ten times more adventurous, you ought to go check out Stacy’s blog, Smoov.  She also takes amazing pictures, works full-time, attends school (perpetually), and has a genius pre-teen girl and darling twin boys.  Go and read her blog . . . but don’t forget to come back. 

By then, maybe I’ll actually discuss something of substance, like the intolerance of non-Christians towards Christians I keep noticing or my recent realization that I mistrust most people or the fact that these days, if you are a virgin (or were a virgin when you married) you are considered to be some sort of freak. 

Meanwhile, go visit Stacy and tell her I sent you.  (She’s one of the original women who started blogging with me three years ago.)   Stacy rocks. 

Untitled Just Because

Today the half-day of school was canceled because the power was out at the school.  However, we had power here at home.  So, all my boys had the day off and they spent their free time bickering, arguing and annoying one another and thus, annoying me.

I made the 13-year old twins watch “Schoolhouse Rock” on DVD as their “school” for the day.  And later, they chose to watch a Disney movie, “Robin Hood,” for awhile.  My daughter spent most of her time this morning outside, chasing and running and pretending.  Despite the fifty-something degree temperatures, she refused to wear even a jacket.  This child does not get cold.

I spent my day pondering the absence of the word “flang” in the English language.  If you have “sing, sang, sung,” why don’t you have “fling, flang, flung”?  I cannot let this conundrum go.

I Like

I like my bread dense.  

I like my shoes comfortable.

I like my clothing cotton.

I like my burgers well-done.

I like my spicy food mild.

I like my house chilly.

I like my feet warm.

I like my popcorn salty.

I like my toenails red.

I like my novels well-written.

I like my friends amusing.

I like my humor sarcastic.

I like my walls vibrant.

I like my jewelry simple.

I like my house silent.

I like my music sedate.

I like my mornings late.

I like my nights later.

I like the sky blue.

I like my summers warm.

I like my lounge-chair shady.

I like my acquaintances straight-forward.

I like my children cooperative.

I like my Diet Coke with Lime icy.

I like my cars small.

I like my kitchen big.

I like my reading material eclectic. 

I like my Saturday solitary.   

I like my hair wild.

I like my newspapers thick.

I like my movies long.

I like my flowers fragrant.

Rules Rule

When I was a teenager, a police officer in Seattle stopped my friend, Shelly, and me, and threatened to give us a ticket.  Our crime?  Jaywalking. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we take jaywalking very seriously.  In downtown Seattle, in fact, when you can look both ways and no cars are coming, you still stand on the curb and wait for the light to turn green.  You will, or you will pay.

I like that.  I like to follow rules.  I like other people to follow rules.  The world would be a better place if we all just followed the rules.  (My rules, in case you wondered.)

The other day, as I drove along savoring my freedom, the lights marking a railroad crossing began to flash.  I slowed to a stop, first in line at the crossing.

The crossing did not have a gate, only flashing lights.  I could see clearly down the tracks looking both directions.  Quite a distance to the right, I could see the train coming.

The rain puttered along very slowly.  I could have run faster than the crawling train.  Still.  I sat, obeying the flashing lights.

I reasoned that I could go . . . now! 

Or . . . now! 

Or even . . . now! 

But I sat.  I waited.  And waited some more.  I thought, I could have gone twenty times already! 

But I didn’t move.  Finally, the train arrived.  I could see the whites of the eyes of the train engineer.  I think he was smirking. 

I followed the rules, though.  Never cross railroad tracks when lights are flashing. 

I was that child in your classroom who shushed everyone, the girl who longed for the rest of the class to stop asking questions long enough for the teacher to complete the instructions.

I love rules.  (But not these rules.)  Curiously enough, I don’t want anyone to speak for me or tell me what to do.

But the Golden Rule?  The one where we all treat each other like we want to be treated?  (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Luke 6:31)  I try to do that.  I hope you try to do that. 

If that guy tailgating me or that woman parking her shopping cart in the middle of the aisle or my kids leaving their dirty dishes scattered hither and yon would also do that, I would be grateful.  If those drunks driving and those kids drinking and that cat pooping in my yard would also follow the rules, wouldn’t that be nice?

Also, if my daughter would refrain from waking me at 6:00 a.m., I would appreciate it.  The day should never begin before sun is up and shining through the window.  She, however, listens to the dictates of her stomach which apparently rumbled, “GIVE ME A DONUT NOW.”

I hate a predawn talking tummy, even more than I hate a slow train chugging down the tracks, wasting my precious free time.

Making a Happy List versus Keeping Your Vows

Do you remember when I wrote about Lance Armstrong’s divorce?  Way back when he was in the news for winning the Tour de France for the seventh time, I announced my dismay at his inability to keep his marriage together.  (And I was taken to task by some of my more judgmental readers about my judgmentalism.  Ha.  Good times.  I loved the irony.)

And now, his ex-wife speaks out.  Kristin Armstrong has written about what she wishes she’d known about marriage before she tied the knot.  (Go ahead and read that article published in “Glamour” magazine.  I’ll wait.)  

She explains, “Here is the truth as I see it: Marriage has the potential to erode the very fiber of your identity.”

(I wish I could stop rolling my eyes long enough to respond.  Let’s just move on to the next excerpt.)  

She says: 

“If I were to do things over again, I wouldn’t have thrown myself so irrevocably into my new life. I would have guarded the things that made me feel like me —the places, the friends —and above all I would have spoken up about my needs. Instead, I will leave you with a lesson about how a woman can hold on to the bright, hard flame of who she is.

If your husband asks what you think, tell him. If you have a preference, voice it. If you have a question, ask it. If you want to cry, bawl. If you need help, raise your hand and jump up and down. I spent five years juggling kids, travel, cooking, smoothing. I never once said that I couldn’t do it on my own, or that I was just plain tired. I became a prisoner to my own inability to say uncle when life squeezed me too hard. The warden was pride, and I remained in maximum security.”

When she appeared on “Oprah,” Oprah intoned solemnly that this was the exact reason she never married.  She didn’t want to lose any part of herself.  I was shaking my head.   

While I can understand this struggle to maintain the vestiges of a former life and the grief over loss (loss of freedom, loss of identity, loss of car, loss of dog, as Kristin explains), I cannot understand the wholesale disposal of a family in the personal quest to “hold onto the bright, hard flame of who she is.”

When you have a husband, your life is no longer all about you.  And when you have children?  And you describe how you gave up your dog?  And your car?  And about how hard it was to live in France with your superstar husband?  I’m not feeling the sympathy.  I mean, if she sat here in my living room on my old tattered couch, I might nod and murmur sympathetic noises, but I’d be wondering how you just break apart a family like a loaf of bread.  A big piece for me, a little piece for you.   

No one is to blame for Kristin’s five-year agony of losing herself in servanthood, but Kristin.  (Come to think of it, isn’t serving one another a large part of being a follower of Christ?  Aren’t we called to serve our spouses and our families?)  But I have to ask . . . five years?  She gave it a shot for five years?  That’s it?  That’s only a year longer than high school, hardly a drop in the bucket when you consider the scheme of things. 

I have no idea what really happened in the Armstrong marriage.  But I still find it disappointing that two intelligent, accomplished, attractive, people who are old enough to know better couldn’t manage to keep their marriage intact.  Their kids will forever pay the price for that failure, as all children of divorce pay for their parents’ mistakes in one way or another.

I hear the protests now:  “That’s not fair!  My sister/ aunt/ friend/ acquaintance divorced and her kids are doing grrrreat!”  Or, “I’m so glad my parents divorced!  Life was horrible while they argued!”  And, “My ex-husband and I are better parents now that we’re no longer married.”  And all that may well be true.

So, you throw a child from the roof and the child survives with only a scratch.  Another child ends up paralyzed.  Many break their bones.  Occasionally, one dies.  Most develop a fear of heights and refuse to even climb a set of stairs.

Divorce isn’t much different.  Sure, some kids survive unscathed.  Most only have scars.  Some bear life-long injury and paralysis.  A lot develop fears, fear of abandonment, fear of commitment, fear of love itself.  Why take a chance? 

Clearly, I have a bias, one shaped by my own parents’ divorce, by my Christian worldview.  I am unapologetic for that.  Some would say that I’m not “over” my parents’ divorce.  That’s the point, isn’t it?  Divorce is the “gift” that keeps on giving long after the pain has faded.  I’m high-functioning, successful, happy, and yet, I was damaged by divorce.  

I believe marriages are not meant to be crumpled up and tossed away so you can start over, especially when you’ve brought children into the world.  (Sometimes, certainly, divorce is the only reasonable choice, but fifty percent of the time?)

Marriage has the potential to shape you into the person you were meant to be, if you stop complaining long enough about injustice of your life and let it.  But servanthood, truly putting other people before ourselves, is more outdated then my twenty-year old stone-washed denim “skinny” jeans.  It’s completely unfashionable to choose to be last, to be least, to serve.

More than once, I’ve heard women exclaim, “I wash the laundry and I fold it.  He can put it away!  I will not!” as if their servanthood has legal limitations and conditions.  No one wants to serve.  No one wants to be last.  No one wants to lose themselves.  We all think we deserve fifteen minutes of fame and a winning Lotto ticket and a flattering hairstyle, besides.  We all want to be Happy all the time.

I think being faithful matters a lot more.   

So, Kristin can rattle off her list of “Things That Make Me Happy.”  That’s got to be some consolation to her children who are now growing up in a broken home.  (Can you not figure out what makes you happy even while you are married?  That’s all I’m saying.  Well, that and five years?)

Life is Too Short

A couple of weeks ago, my mother brought my grandmother to my house for Easter lunch. When they left, Grandma paced inch-by-inch down the sidewalk, clutching her walker, while my mom leaned on her cane and limped to the car. I walked them out and as Grandma was attempting to fold herself into the front seat while my mother stood with one hand attempting to quell the pain in her back, I quipped, “Hey! I see my future right here,” and I swept my hand at the scene and said, “and I’m scared!”

They both laughed at my feeble joke, but the truth is, I wasn’t joking. I bent down and lifted my grandmother’s swollen foot up into the car and she winced and groaned at the pain. The hip joint has deteriorated and even that tiny movement shot searing pain up her leg and to her hip. She even said, “Oh, that hurts,” which is as dramatic as she gets.

I never liked being young. I was eager to get through my teen years as quickly as possible. I didn’t savor my high school years or wish that time would slow down. I could hardly stand the excruciatingly slow pace of adolescence and the walled off borders of teenage-dom. I wanted out and I wanted out yesterday.

My college years raced by, though, in a blur of longing and confusion and fretfulness. And before I knew it, I was married. My twenty-sixth birthday depressed me, but only because we had been trying to start a family and ended up caught in a maze of infertility and adoption attempts and all I wanted was to be a mother. I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to sleep in, more than I wanted to have a career, more than I wanted chocolate chip cookies. So, when I turned twenty-six, I moped around.

But before I knew it, I was a mother (to twins!) and then, in a flash, I turned thirty. And the thirtysomething years marched on and then, what? My fortieth birthday arrived. By then, I had four children and I was trying to remember just exactly why I had been so desperate to be a mother. Okay, not really. Okay, well, not most days, only occasionally because, hello? I never get to sleep in anymore.

My dad died when he was forty-seven. So, on one hand, I am so thankful for every day of living and so aware of the alternative to aging. On the other hand, I see my mother’s eyelids sagging lower and lower as if are too tired to stand up any longer. And I look at my grandmother, lingering a century on this earth, and I dread the day when my eyesight fails and darkness falls, even on a sunshiny day.

How is it fair that just as you become comfortable in your own skin, your skin gets speckled with age spots and bunches in wrinkles around your knuckles? Just when you figure out what to do with your hair, a new stripe of gray appears with a wiry texture. And even your knees betray your age with tiny purple spider veins appearing over the winter under cover of your pant legs. Aging is like receiving a package in the mail that you did not order and you cannot return.

But, oh, the alternative is to never breathe in another lilac spring day and to never watch the tulips grow taller day by day.

Life is too short. Even when you live to be a hundred, like my grandmother, life is too short to focus on the flaws, on the missing pieces, on the crooked places you wish were straight. Life is too short to not take chances, to not speak up, to not stand tall. Life is too short.

Old age will come, ready or not. In the meantime, I will sear into my memory the vision of my daughter dancing a high-step in the back yard and the faces of my boys as they carry homemade bows and arrows made of bamboo in improvised sheaths on their backs. I will appreciate my body sweating on my exercise bike and I will be mindful of the fuel I give my body. I will smile at my face in the mirror and be grateful that I can clip my own toenails. I will snip an armful of lilacs to carry into the house, even though they’ll fade and die in the vase in a week and they’re such a pain to clean up.

Because today, I welcome the fleeting beauty of lilacs into my home. Life is too short and soon, the lilacs will be gone. My boys will abandon the backyard for the wider world. My daughter will find better things to do than to harass the ants on a fine spring day. The neighborhood boys won’t trample mud into my carpet. I’ll have an uninterrupted telephone conversation and I’ll think, oh, I remember when–

Act fast. Get yours now. Life is too short. Already, the tulip petals have fallen. But you can get in on the lilacs if you hurry.

Integrating the Sacred and the Secular

When I was a child, my mother ordered us to turn the channel when Donnie Osmond sang “And I’m a little bit rock’n’roll!” For rock and roll music was sin. So was dancing, even square-dancing, drinking alcohol, swearing, smoking, mini-skirts, hip-huggers and shopping on Sundays.

As I grew up and attended Bible College, life seemed to be neatly divided into two categories: Sacred and Secular. Christian music? Good. Secular music? Bad. Christian books? Good. Secular books? Bad. Dancing in the Spirit? Good. Dancing at a bar? Bad.

My four years at Bible College (where women were required to wear dresses to class, even on snowy days) brought out the cynic in me. I heard enough rambling sermons to last me a lifetime and I saw enough hypocrisy to turn my heart to stone. I’m lucky I escaped with my faith intact, because I definitely needed it later when I traveled the rocky paths of infertility, cancer, death, loss, heartbreak–in other words, Real Life.

The idea that life should be lined up in separate categories crumbled, bit by bit, until finally, I came to understand that I would live my life without a division between the sacred and the secular. Good music is good music, whether or not it includes the lyrics “Jesus died on the cross,” or not. Fantastic art is simply fantastic art. A walk through a still forest, glimpsing trilliums in bloom is as sacred as a moment in a stained-glass church.

Just tonight, I came across a book by Steve Turner called Imagine: A Vision For Christians in the Arts, which discusses this very idea. I can’t wait to read it, if the sample first page on Amazon and the comments are good indications of the quality of the rest of the book.

So, when I see a particular well-known blogger announcing that she is partitioning her blog into two separate blogs, one for Christians and one for non-Christians, I just shake my head. Maybe that’s because I don’t write for Christians. I don’t even write for non-Christians. I just write for people. I’m not a Christian blogger and this isn’t a Christian blog. I’m a blogger who is a Christian. I don’t divide my life–or my blog–into partitions. (I even avoided associating myself with Christian bloggers when I began this blog for fear that I would be boxed in by other people’s expectations. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to write a Pastor’s Wife’s Blog.)

Hey, I’m no apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor or teacher, but I do know this: Taking care of my kids is my spiritual worship. Writing well is my spiritual worship. Singing “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in church is my spiritual worship. So is washing the laundry and walking on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Whatever I do, if I do it well and with acknowledgement of the Creator, that is worship.

My integration of the sacred and secular is incomplete, because I am in progress, learning as I go. Each believer certainly has to find his or her own way, embracing some things and rejecting others. But building walls around our lives, pulling up the drawbridges and digging moats can’t be what Jesus intended for us to do. He came to bring us life, not fear and judgment. (And furthermore, when anyone assumes I’m not bright enough to be able to distinguish the differences between sects, cults and even different denominations, that annoys me. I wonder if it annoys Jesus, too?)

Well, while I’m at it, writing this atypical post which has nothing to do with grocery shopping (I purchased twenty bags full of groceries at 10:45 p.m. tonight!) or laundry (currently backed up), I will also comment on this post at Internet Monk. He talks about another blogger, this guy who announced he would no longer call himself a “Christian, an idea he bandied about here.

I just have one word for that guy: SEMANTICS! Quit fussing about how the label “Christian” might taint your testimony or make you look and go feed the hungry, visit a prisoner, share with the poor, listen to a lonely widow, serve someone who doesn’t deserve it and then get back to me. I’m guessing that by then you might be too tired and too peaceful to worry about what someone might think if you accept the descriptive label “Christian.”

(If I continue to roll my eyes that far back in my head, they might stay that way, so if you see a 41-year old woman at Albertsons with only the bloodshot whites of her eyes showing, say hello. That would be me.)

Sanctity of Human Life Sunday

[Disclaimer: This is one of my rare politically charged posts. Please skip this is my anti-abortion stance will cause your brain to explode and/or make you want to slap me for being insensitive. I have a point of view and sometimes, I throw caution to the wind and express it. You are free to express your opposing point of view, too, of course, but please, be gentle.]

I clipped this newspaper article by George Will last April. Mr. Will cites the case of a fetus in Britain who was aborted at 28 weeks gestation because it was prenatally diagnosed with a cleft lip and palate. Apparently, this fit the British law that abortion is permitted only when “there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.”

I wonder what Bobby Martin, a boy who was born without arms or legs, but who ended up playing high school football (and appearing on Oprah) would think about that? What is his parents took a look at an ultrasound picture and gasped, “Oh no! We don’t want a boy without limbs.”

No one would blame them. Right? Why bring a child into the world only to suffer?

The case I saw on television the other night would certainly fit the criteria for abortion in Britain. The doctors can’t even diagnose this child, a now-twelve year old girl who hasn’t grown beyond the physical size and mental capacity of a six-month old baby. What purpose does such a life serve? Wouldn’t she (and her long-suffering family) be better off if she hadn’t been born?

Then I turned the channel and saw the amazing story of these children and young adults who communicate almost entirely through music. Though their cognitive and communicative skills are impaired, they all display an amazing aptitude and passion for music, specifically the piano. These children with different abilities face difficulties in their lives most of us cannot even imagine. Would we choose to let them live, if the choice were ours to make?

Not all women take advantage of prenatal testing. What happens when a devastatingly imperfect baby is born? Well, in the Netherlands (land of my ancestry, I might point out) “the Groningen Protocol, as the hospital’s guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.”

Child euthanasia remains illegal everywhere else. Unless, of course, the child is still a fetus, in which case, in the United States, abortion laws which essentially allow abortion at any time. Did you know that “U.S. abortion law, in terms of how late an abortion may take place, is far more permissive than that of other nations such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example.”?

The Associated Press article by Linda A. Johnson published on March 10, 2005, concludes, “Experts said the Dutch report [of newborn “mercy killings”] will generate discussion but won’t change American opinion or practices.”

I’m sure that’s true. After all, almost ninety-two percent of American abortions aren’t done because a baby is imperfect. They are done for the following reasons:

25.5% Want to postpone childbearing
21.3% Cannot afford a baby
14.1% Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy
12.2% Too young; parent(s) or other(s) object to pregnancy
10.8% Having a child will disrupt education or job
7.9% Want no (more) children

Not because the fetus has no arms and legs. Not because the fetus is missing a chromosome or has an extra one. Not because the fetus is doomed to die of a birth defect at birth anyway. Not even because the mother’s life is in danger.

No. Most abortions are done because of convenience, not the “health” and “life” of the mother, but for her convenience. While our laws bend over backwards to give women the right to abort a baby which might endanger her life–you know the rhetoric, the heart-tugging stories–almost a million conceived human beings are aborted per year. Dramatic stories (like the boy with no arms and legs and his triumph in life) are matched by dramatic stories of women in terrible, disturbing, horrific circumstances. And I’ll agree that there are ethically challenging cases where difficult choices must be made.

But most unborn human beings are simply obliterated for other reasons. Ninety-two percent of aborted fetuses, gone. Over thirty-three million human beings since abortion was legalized.

And if you are a black fetus in America, you have an even higher chance of being aborted before birth. “In the 41 areas for which race was adequately reported, approximately 55% of women who obtained legal induced abortions were known to be white, 35% were black, and 7% were of other races; for 3% of the women, race was unknown. The abortion ratio for black women (503 per 1,000 live births) was 3.0 times the ratio for white women (167 per 1,000 live births). Additionally, the abortion ratio for women of other races (329 per 1,000 live births) was 2.0 times the ratio for white women. The abortion rate for black women (30 per 1,000 women) was 3.1 times the rate for white women (10 per 1,000 women), whereas the abortion rate for women of other races (22 per 1,000 women) was 2.2 times the rate for white women.”

Only 12.9% of our population is black, yet 35% of the women who obtained abortions in 2000 were black.

Why isn’t Ray Nagin outraged by that? Where is Kanye West’s outcry?

Thirty-three years ago, abortion became legal in the United States. Happy anniversary. Aren’t we all so much happier now?

[Check out Barbara Curtis’ post on this topic over at Mommylife. She’s the mother of 12, including childen with Down Syndrome, and a former abortion-rights crusader.

[Edited to remove reference to Ann Coulter from the post, but you can check out her radical viewpoint here.] I hate for the point of my post to be lost in the distaste many have for Ann Coulter.]

Doling Out Mustard Wisely

As some of you know, I did not fall to the floor in sticky mirth while watching the bonafide hit movie The 40-Year Old Virgin. Aside from the fact that I don’t find the idea of a 40-year old virgin particularly hilarious or mock-worthy, I was offended by the overuse of the f-word. I read that that word was used 68 times during the course of the movie. I think that’s excessive.

I realize that I am in a teeny-tiny minority on this matter.

A particular blogging friend (who shall remain nameless, at least until she consents to being quoted) sent an email with this remark: “I was telling [my 16-year old son] about Mel not liking the word ‘f*ck’ and he said, ‘Oh, she’s one of thoooose’ (hehehehe) then he went on to say, ‘”F*ck” is an enhancer, it’s like adding mustard to a hot dog.’ Well, there ya go.”

And that sort of sums up my point. Would you put mustard on everything? Say you’re at a fancy dinner party eating lobster and asparagus quiche . . . do you douse it with mustard? Say you’re eating cookies with your three-year-old. Do you frost them with mustard?

Mustard on spaghetti?
Mustard on eggs?
Mustard on pudding?
Mustard in orange juice?
Mustard on shrimp-fried rice?

No. You do not.

I like mustard as much as the next girl. Occasionally, that is. I also use a thesaurus full of other condiments. (When my twins were toddlers, once they had ketchup for lunch. Just ketchup. I thought you’d like to know.) Why limit yourself to mustard when there is a whole wide world of sauces, condiments and flavorings?

Please, people, use your condiments wisely. Otherwise, the whole wide world will reek like a hot dog stand and we don’t need that now, do we?