Storing up skills

A few weeks ago, my daughter's Webelos troop set up to do Christmas caroling at a nearby nursing home. Now it's one thing to say that you're going to do caroling and another to actually do it. As it happens - I am not trying to boast or brag here, everyone there will agree with me - I was the only voice in a group of about twenty to thirty people who was strong, on key (no instruments), and could hold the melody well enough for the others to latch on. A week afterwards, there was another Christmas caroling event, this one with several good singers. One participant brought a violin, another brought a cello, and one had a few recorders with him and was using his alto. I asked permission to use his soprano, sat down to share music with the cellist, and started adding to the accompaniment.

I enjoy reading classics in literature from the time periods before we had computers, television, or even radio. The upper-class people, both men and women, in those times were practically required to learn a few skills that would make social gatherings more enjoyable and entertain their families in the evening. They memorized poems (or learned to read them dramatically from books), learned to play the piano, and practiced singing. The goal was to be able to make yourself pleasant in any gathering, expected and unexpected.

Many people think about skills in the New Year. January is, according to some calendars that gather names for every day of the year, "Hobby Month". Resolutions often take the forms of new skills to learn. If you ask them why they're learning these skills, they'll usually have a reason for it. They want to eat more healthy. They want to knit hats for babies and socks for people in third world countries. They want to know how to build a shed to save the cost of always paying someone else to bring their ideas to life. In many cases, people learn skills more readily and more easily when the stakes are higher. People who worry about the collapse of civilization, for instance, will learn gardening, first aid, mechanical work, and other skills that are less useful for the average person in this society than in the one they are preparing for.

In fact, that makes for an interesting mental exercise. Suppose civilization as you knew it collapsed, and you made your shaken way from the rubble of your neighborhood to a small settlement made up of survivors trying to rebuild. You entered, and the settlement leader asked you, "What can you do to make yourself useful?" Now you might be a highly-paid administrator of some sort, having come from a city where you made more than enough money to eat out every night and see every Broadway show. What useful skills are you going to bring into this new life of yours? If you were paying attention during the shows and have some theatrical skill, you could organize a troop to practice twice a week in the evenings and lighten the heart of your fellow settlers. Maybe you regularly fixed up your own beater of a bicycle thirty years ago in childhood, and you can make some repairs if you have the tools. Maybe you learned how to use a drop spindle at a county fair once and you think you still remember how to do it. Maybe all you can do is to say, "Well, I have good legs and a strong back, and I'm willing to pitch in and learn."

The Bible has an interesting bit in it, in 1 Corinthians 3. The Apostle Paul writes about building a work on a foundation that is tested by fire. If what you built lasts, he says, you will have a reward. If it is all consumed, you will still be saved, but as one who is escaping the fire. The Bible talks about rewards in Heaven and the New Earth in other areas as well, and I've heard some very odd conjectures about what those rewards will be. Some Sunday School classes in my youth presented the notion that you will receive a jewel in your crown for each person you lead to Christ, and you want many jewels in your crown, don't you? I reject that interpretation. We are responsible for living Christ and preaching Christ; we are not the ones who "save" people, and we cannot control their decision. So what is it talking about? I have a conjecture that I believe is supported by Scripture.

Think back to the question of what you would bring to a post-apocalyptic settlement. If you were as sure as some people that civilization was going to collapse, you would spend your time now learning how to plant and garden, how to forage for wild harvests, how to sew without a machine, how to cook without a stove. Well, if you are a Christian, you can be sure that you are going to die, that the old Heaven and Earth will perish, and that you will be given a new body and a new Earth without sin. Through prophesies about "the lion and the lamb" and "grass" as well as others, we can guess that the new Earth is not going to be totally alien to us. So maybe in this new year, you might ask yourself this: What kind of skills can you learn now, that will be of use to you in this new place?

"How To Get A Big Promotion And Drive A Lexus By Stomping On The Little People" will likely do you no good at all. How to play a video game will mean nothing in a world with no video games. Planting and reaping may be of use, though gardening is likely to be much easier in a world without weeds and thorns, which are clearly stated to be part of the curse of sin. How about "The practiced and ready desire to help others without looking for a reward"? How would that skill do in a world where the reward is going to happen? (It's never a sure thing in this world.) Perhaps "Being humbly willing to learn from people who have figured out a new skill before you have"? How about "Developing the discipline and willpower to finish what you start even when your brain and body are working as hard as they can against you"? Like exercising against tension, that skill is going to explode into brilliance once your brain and body are cooperating properly.

In this new year, I'd like to encourage you to think about what skills and works you might develop for the life that we know will last. Since I can sing in this world, I can bring entertainment to groups of people without television, cell phones, or radio. Since I can sew in this world, I have been able to customize garments to myself and other people - as part of my ministry, I once charged materials-only to make special skirts for a wheelchair-bound woman. In times past, being an "accomplished person" was part of being in proper society. How can you be an "accomplished person" when we start to roam the New Earth together?

Conservatism and Slippery Slopes

It took some doing to figure out what to title this thought. After a while of thinking it through, though, I realized that a repeating theme through this post is going to be the "slippery slope". I am going to say some things, and people are probably going to initially react in horror. That's because of "slippery slopes" that are etched in our own brain. You use certain words - liberals like to call them 'code words' - and people who don't understand you are going to slide right into a set of well-worn tracks and assume your meaning based on the continued motion of well-trodden path. I'd like my readers to take a moment to shake themselves loose of the well-trodden paths, and not assume the meaning of my statements until I explain them.

First statement: The more I deal with liberals and children, the more I understand why not everybody is going to Heaven.

Yeah, I started out with the inflammatory-looking one on purpose, just to wake everybody up. I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I am not talking about sin. I am not making any particular person out to be evil. I could already hear the cries of "I work a job and I am nice to people and how dare you say I don't deserve" or whatnot. Yeah, cut that out, ok? I don't deserve Heaven. It isn't because I'm some sort of rotten and mean person who is worse than you. It's because I could be better than you and still not deserve it. This has nothing to do with whether you are a nice person, or even a good person. It has to do with heart and will.

Here's a second statement to add to the first one. Both Christianity and American Conservatism require by their very nature enough hearts and minds willing to follow it from their own free will.

The reason for this is that you can't force someone to follow a philosophy except by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. This is something liberals do understand all too well; it is why virtually every implementation of socialism thus far has been authoritarian. I'm about to hear the "Social Democrats" fuss at me over certain European countries that do not meet some sort of mystical requirement for being full-out Communist. Knock it off. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must know that "Social Democrat" is a form of socialism that is only halfway implemented, and that the areas in which it is implemented do indeed easily meet the definition of "Communist". I'm going to get back to that thought in a moment.

Now I mentioned Christianity and American Conservatism for a reason. Both of them spring from the same root. To be more clear, Conservatism sprang from a period of reformation of Christianity, and Christianity sprang from the root of the One God, previously known by the world as the Hebrew God, and now known to be open to all takers. This is important, because this is the source of my point: To truly grasp and follow either, you have to be willing to do so.

You may have noticed - I certainly have - that a great many political topics have seemed to become needlessly complicated. So many of the minutiae being argued about nowadays seems blindly simple to the uninvolved. So many easy solutions lie by the wayside. This is because liberals are trying to rules-lawyer their way to forcing us to acknowledge that they have some sort of right to what they want. This in turn forces people to go on the defensive and enact laws meant to prevent authoritarianism, but ironically increase it themselves, pushing the government into places where it shouldn't have had to go. The only way you can force someone to follow a philosophy is by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.

I've mentioned in a previous post that I believe there to have been two Civil Rights movements. In the first, Democrat governments tried to get the government involved in "race" by Jim Crow laws in the South. In the second, Democrat politicians tried to gain power and get the government involved in "race" by Reverse Discrimination laws on the Federal level. Though you will never hear me disparage the overthrow of a single Jim Crow law, I must say that the true winners of the entire era were the Democrats. Considering disparate levels of fatherlessness, joblessness, jail population, poverty etc. we can hardly say that the true winners were actually the blacks. Like I said, liberals understand that the only way to force a philosophy on someone is by authoritarian dictatorship; their goal was to get the government involved in race, which is why the leadership was able to so quickly switch their allegiances from one race to another.

I believe that this is a very important point to make because there are elements in the Republican Party who have taken on that liberal point, muddying the actual definition of Conservatism. Their ardent support of President Trump, whom I do not oppose - this is not anti-Trump sentiment being expressed here - has confused people, especially since he ran as a Conservative. That is at the heart of why I, in a "safely" blue state, voted Johnson. (Before anybody jumps on me for this, the election results bore out what I had suspected; all of Johnson's votes in my state would not have defeated Hillary had they been Trump's votes instead. Sad to say, that's the way it was.) I'd also like to specifically call out Dominionism, which is at times conflated with Conservatism. Dominionism - trust me, I know what I am talking about here - is not a Conservative philosophy. It harkens back to pre-Reformation Christianity, in which unwise people violated the spirit of God's Laws and the message of Salvation by falling back upon that bastion of liberalism: oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. (Granted, even so, they were gentler than most... the more Biblical you get, the more you are protected against it, hence the rise of the Reformation in the first place.)

Back to my core point, to make sure it is understood. At the core of Conservatism is an understanding that we should hold to principles of guarded liberty, personal responsibility, and a very real sense of our government as something that must be under our control: not only for the people, but also of the people and by the people in a very real sense. We must be active individuals in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities as well as in our government (as voters, for most of us), careful, and self-disciplined, because a government of an undisciplined people will never fail to establish its own discipline over them, and that is how the authoritarian dictatorship starts.

I do believe that the "silent majority", found in every corner of the country from the much-discussed 'heartland' to the simple New England farmer types from which I partly descended to the grateful Cuban refugees to the black families who still remember the pre-Reverse Discrimination mandate to be articulate, clean, and responsible, are willing and able to return to a time when our salvation depended more on our personal lives than our Federal laws.

Now I said I was going to get back to a point about the Social Democrats, and I'd like to close with it. I've been linking Conservatism and Christianity throughout this post. I do not want to make the same mistake as the Dominionists. I do not believe Conservatism to be especially blessed by God in the same way as God blessed the Nation of Israel or anointed King Saul, whom later-King David refused to cut down even when Saul was corrupt and oppressive in his later years. I do not believe Conservatism to be the only Christian-derived form of government, nor do I believe it to be necessary in any way to be a Christian, though I confess I suspect that Christians will find themselves living it in their personal lives no matter what their political affiliations. Conservatism is a derivation, a lesser production, a philosophy meant to address the here-and-now, and it is not especially favored by God aside from the natural benefits of working alongside the laws of nature rather than against.

I could picture some sort of unusually eloquent and gentle-thinking Social Democrat asking me, "Perhaps you might think the same thing of this philosophy as well? You do want to make it clear that Conservatism can be derived from Christianity without leading to an oppressive authoritarian theocracy. Think of Social Democracy in the same way; it is derived from socialism, but it is not going to lead to full-on Communism." To that, I would like to return to the concept of the slippery slope. You start at a point and fall into well-worn tracks that take you off the very edge of the precipice. In Conservatism, particularly American Constitutional Conservatism, there are a set of Human Rights very clearly enumerated. These are stops, barriers between us and an authoritarian theocracy. How firm are they? Whether any given Conservative personally believes in God or not, those who set up the barriers understood them to have been fixed by a Supreme Authority, quite out of their hands and well beyond their 'pay grade', and so the philosophy demands that they be treated that way whether you are a Christian or not. This, then, is the question to ask the Social Democrats: Where are your stops? What are your stops? Who laid them down, who keeps them steady, and under what circumstances could you violate them? In the area of health care, as we have seen with cases like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, the part of the country that follows Communism does so to the point where that particular country's government has the power of life and death over innocent citizens. So what *can't* Social Democrats allow the government to do, and why?

Or are the stops nothing more and nothing less than the current will of the people in charge, to be kept, discarded, violated, or worshiped at their desire?

The Other Path to a Living Wage

Living Wage.

This seems to be the new socialist bugaboo. I do call it socialist, even though its implementation may be more fascist in appearance. I have said this before: Fascism and Communism are two fingers on the same hand of Socialism, though one may be purer than the other. In the former, the government controls the people through the companies, while in the latter, the government forbids the companies and controls the people directly. There is very little difference; in Fascism, the government forbears the existence of the companies for the time being, while in a free market economy, the government is limited in the ways that it is allowed to control them.

Economics lesson aside, let's break into the actual thought. The usual suspects are now calling for a government-enforced "living wage", the ability of any job to support a spouse and family. They like to claim that this was quite possible and expected back "before all this deregulation", as if the 1950's may as well have been lived under the hammer and sickle or something. Frankly, I'm pretty sure they don't know what they're talking about. But let's take a moment and ask the question: Why are so many jobs no longer offering "a living wage"? There are a few reasons that we can note before stepping into this one. In the 1950's, a "living wage" supported a smaller home with fewer amenities, fewer electronic devices with monthly plans, fewer restaurant meals, and smaller wardrobes. If you were to study the time period and attempt to live only with the amount of stuff and amenities that they had, eating what they ate and owning the clothing that they owned, you might find that a minimum wage job would in fact provide your needs. But let's set that, also, aside for a moment and ask this question:

Are corporations not offering a "living wage" because they are already subsidizing it via government fiat?

A worker costs an employer a great deal. Government-required taxes and benefits alone may increase the cost of an employee a minimum of 25% and maximum (more common in larger businesses, which have additional mandates that small businesses do not) of 40% above the employee's base salary. Many of these 'benefits', like 'health insurance' (itself becoming increasingly expensive and useless), would have been paid by the worker back in the days of the Living Wage.

On the other side, we have corporate and personal income taxes. Why did I say "corporate and personal"? Many companies nowadays are taking advantage of the S-Corp filing status, and filing as if they are persons. That lowers the bewildering complexity of the process and may lower the tax rate. On the other hand, someone who makes $35K/year may be paying taxes on his company's $120K/year profits instead. When we talk about government income from employers, we need to include them. All in all, the top 1% of income earners pay nearly half of personal income taxes, the top 20% pay 85% (the bottom 60% pay 2%), and many, perhaps even most, of those are S-Corps rather than individuals like Elon Musk or Bill Gates. The average S-Corp tax rate is 31%, with a range of 19-35%. (Note: That information is pre-Trump and so is at least slightly out-of-date. But hopefully it gets some thoughts stirring.)

Including all Federal spending, over half goes to social welfare programs, and state spending further adds to the bundle. A cursory look 'round state budget pie charts shows that welfare spending seems to run about the 20-40% range in general. Where am I going with this?

The average low-paying job is indeed already paying a Living Wage.

How can this be? Well, in the 1950's, he would do it by giving you a paycheck with which you could purchase all that you need. Nowadays, he does it the same way the government does for nonworking families. He pays for your health insurance, pays for a fair bit of your tax burden (did you know he pays half your Social Security tax? Try to work for yourself and you'll quickly find that out!), and pays the government to give you food stamps, heating assistance, rent assistance, free school lunches for your children, possibly free medical care for your children as well (CHIP/SCHIP), and, as your salary, a small cash allowance with which to obtain that which he and the government through his taxes have not provided.

Indeed, we see that this provision is sufficient, as there are workers in California under an increased minimum wage who have asked for fewer hours in order to preserve the same Living Wage.

Now's the part where everyone starts accusing me of saying that the poor have it easy, that they are freeloaders, that I don't care if babies starve, yadda yadda. Let's see who can continue to keep an open mind and listen to what I have to say about that. This is not by any means an ideal situation, and the poor do struggle. The reason they struggle, however, is not due to lack of funding. It is because the method of that funding is almost the least efficient and least effective manner possible. I say "almost" only because full-on Communism exists in the world, and it is by far the least useful way to handle wealth.

Raising children has helped me to remember and think about what it was like to be a child. People look back to that time period fondly, thinking of it as being idyllic, because "the world was less complicated and more safe". Indeed, when an adult controls your life, you have less responsibility and you don't have to worry as much about the dangers that still surround you. You still have a chance of being hungry, of being homeless, but in that event the adult will tell you what to do. What people forget is the loss of freedom. Sure, there's a measure of it if you live in a suburban area and own a bicycle. Other than that, though... You still have to ask if you can go to a friend's house. You have to ask if you want to visit a museum. You have to accept the food they give you; your parents determine your diet. You are severely restricted in how you can earn income and how much money you will have. And, of course, your school takes up much more of your life than you would have ever remembered; your precious memories of freedom and fun were most likely snipped out of a plethora of weekends and holidays (the parts that don't involve mandatory visits and customs) and stitched together out of a pair of decades.

Well, the current method of providing a Living Wage is much like being a child. Someone else controls how often/much your house receives to heat, how much you spend on food, which doctors you see, and what your child eats for lunch every school day. This is great, if you live the exact lifestyle that these social programs were optimized for. The problem is that it does narrow you down into a specific form of lifestyle; a purely cash form of a Living Wage allows you to spend more on your housing and less on your cell phone, or more on your clothing and less on your groceries. It can be very, very frustrating to need money for one budget category and be blocked by the Government from simply doing what the middle class takes for granted and transferring it from another category.

What is the answer?

The obvious answer to me is to reduce and reform the welfare system, and with it the tax system. Every reduction in welfare spending must be paired with an equal reduction in employer taxes. I was hesitant to suggest this before, because there must be a time period, I thought, in which wages were still low and people would be hurting. However, the quick responses of businesses in handing out bonuses as they began to raise wages after Trump's tax cut surprised and emboldened me in saying this: As they spend less on the employees through the government, they will spend more on the employees through regular wages.

On top of that, market competition will come into play, this time with a strong emphasis on employee demands rather than employer offers. When you can get a job as a cashier at Walmart and have the government spend tens of thousands of dollars on welfare to make up your Living Wage, you will not have to insist that your employer pays you that wage or you will fight for one of the jobs that pays it. The employment market is indeed a market with customers and 'sellers', and companies that do not offer that wage will have difficult finding people qualified to do the work.

If we do this, I think we will find that the effect of "wages not rising with national wealth", an argument that Liberals tend to use to try to justify actions that depress wages further, will correct itself, and workers will receive their Living Wage as cash instead of an unholy mixture of cash, government-mandated employer spending, and government-mandated welfare spending.

Grow Up Before Supporting Sanders

I'm addressing this one to Sanders supporters, and I'm about to make a lot of you very angry with me.

You like to tell me that Sanders isn't in favor of "socialism", he's just a "social Democrat", which is completely different. You point to a bunch of European countries (which are currently moving away from socialism - oh, sorry, 'social democracy' - because it doesn't work), and tell me how much better life is in those places. The tip of the top always seems to be the same claim... "They're happier in these countries." The people are more content. You seem to believe that the reason that these people are more content is because they are getting exactly what you expect Sanders to provide to you: Government-streamlined resources, quick, easy, and 'free', with a stream of gold emanating from the rich and being distributed 'fairly' to you. (But remember, that isn't socialism! It's Social Democracy!)

You are young. I am not just trying to insult you by saying that. Statistics show a lot of younger people in favor of Sanders. You haven't learned history and culture in the way the older folk did. You haven't had much chance to get out and about in it for yourself. When you look at Europe, you don't understand what it is, what its people are, what its people have been for thousands of years before the word "Social Democrat" existed. You've been doubly encouraged, in the school system, to not learn about the European-descent men who created this country. How could you possibly know what Europe is like, what Europeans are, and what makes them content?

I'll give you a hint. It isn't Sanders' stance on the issues.

Europeans are slow. This isn't an insult either. They are slow, calm, and patient. They plod through each day. They don't mind that it takes a while to travel somewhere. They don't mind that the lines are long. They will stop and 'shoot the breeze' while you're waiting behind them in line, freaking out over your own tight schedule. This may be slightly less true in some cities, in some countries, but it is markedly true in the rural areas. An old European farmer won't mind that it takes him four hours to plow his field the old way. He doesn't see much reason to buy the newfangled equipment, because the old one works fine for him.

Europeans do for themselves. They will bicycle distances that you find obscenely long, in a daily commute. Increasingly, as hospitals have longer wait times and less equipment, Europeans will take care of the 'smaller' things themselves. An American will head to the emergency room with a cut that needs stitches; the European will get a friend or family member to stitch it up themselves. Here's the kicker, the part that you guys do not and possibly cannot understand: They are content to do so. They don't expect much from others. They don't expect much from their government. They don't expect much from life. And yet they carve out little lives for themselves and they are content.

Their housing units are much smaller. Their conveniences are fewer. Their possessions are less. And yet they are content.

This is why these countries are full of happier people than in the U.S. It isn't because of 'Social Democracy' or 'Democratic Socialism' or whatever you hope to call it. It's in spite of the government, in spite of the policies that leave them with less and take them much longer to get what little they can receive. Their inner contentedness helps them weather the delays, the bureaucracy, the stupid crazy hoops they have to jump through for everything. They are willing to lose an entire day to one single government program, to business that we expect to be able to complete in less than an hour.

Now I'm not insulting Europeans, and I'm not praising them either. We are young, quick, impatient, and creative. This is a good thing! This is the reason why so many improvements, so many inventions come out of this country. We see the farmer plowing for four hours and say, "If you did this, you could have it done in two." We demand instant food, instant medical care, instant government response, instant withdrawals, instant gratification... we don't want to wait. This is true of Americans in general, but it is even more true of the demographic that tends to make up Sanders supporters.

You aren't interested in giving up your car when you live eight miles away from your workplace and ten miles from the grocery store. You want a 2,500sqft house for your family. You want a four-year education for your kids. You want free healthcare. Did you know that your contented European counterpart has a bicycle, a 1200sqft domicile (probably an apartment or what we would call a 'condo', but with smaller yards and no amenities), and even the poorest among them have to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket before they can access healthcare through the system? You want your son to get a bachelor's in English Literature. If he's in Holland, however, and he doesn't score highly enough in his 10th grade (by U.S. standards) exams, the government will not give him more than a two-year (highschool diploma) or possibly four-year (associate's degree) education.

Oh yeah, and your counterpart has no bathtub, and his kitchen looks like it hasn't been renovated since the 1970's.

Would you be content with that?

Alright, so maybe you've read all of this and say, "I still am a Sanders supporter! I still think that I can be content with all of this!" Alright, then, prove it. I'm being honest here. No matter who gets into office, this will benefit you. Take command of your own healthcare. Do not expect anybody else to do it for you. Forget the gym membership. You can't afford it. Bicycle to work. Eat foods that are not pre-prepared. Learn how to cook rice, lentils, beans, 'boiled dinner', and other such meals. Take an apple as a snack instead of a candy bar. Slow down. Take tea every afternoon. Formal tea, or, at least, as formal as you can bear it. You cannot be looking at any of your electronic devices while you're doing it. Be content with 10-year-old televisions. When you buy online, never, ever pay more for second-day or same-day shipping.

Downsize your life. Downsize your expectations. Take longer. Care less. Don't think you'll be the one who gets famous, the one who gets rich, the one who even gets what he wishes out of life.

Learn to be content without government aid.

Then you'll be ready to live happy under a Social Democrat.

Of course, even then, you'll be happier to live under a conservative government; you won't get less, but you'll pay less for it.

But that's up to you.

Search for the Cure

I heard yesterday that the Federal Government has now spent over $3.5 million on an ongoing HHS study on "why lesbians are fat". More specifically, they are trying to find out why nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese, while obesity risk doubles in gay men compared to heterosexual men.

The person who advanced the news item had a typical conservative viewpoint on it. How ridiculous, that we should be wasting taxpayer dollars, the money that is paid to the government even by people who struggle to make their own mortgages and food budgets, on fat homosexuals! It is doubly silly from the viewpoint of a conservative Christian, who will naturally believe that the simplest way to solve the problem is to not openly encourage and laud open homosexual behavior, due to the various harms that it already causes on its own, regardless of what it may do to your figure.

I'd like to look at it differently for a moment. The people who should be most up-in-arms about this study are actually the homosexuals themselves, especially the activists. Why? Consider the ramifications of this: What if they found something?

No, really. Think about this for a moment. What if scientists, backed by Federal Government money, found a link? What if they found a chemical imbalance, or even a faulty genetic expression, that increased the chances of both homosexual desire and obesity? What if we could "cure gay" and "cure obesity" at the same time, with a single supplement?

What if they succeeded?

Wouldn't the gay activists all be thrilled? For all these years, they have been painting themselves as the eternal victim. These poor young folk, you see, none of them want to be gay. None of them hope they are gay. They are only now embracing this desire because it's the only way they can feel good about themselves! They are what they are, and there's nothing they can do about it! If they could "not be gay", they'd do it in a heartbeat! They've tried so, so hard, the poor dears!

No doubt there are many of the rank-and-file who would jump at the chance. But would people who have built a livelihood on their victim status, people like Ellen Degeneres or George Takei, would they jump at the chance to take a simple supplement that would make them attracted to the opposite sex?

What if Science proved, for a fact, that homosexual desire was the result of a chemical imbalance?

How would the gay activist groups respond if parents started asking for their children to receive the supplement? What if pediatricians recommended it? What if it was the best possible way to prevent child and adult obesity? Would the government consider this a good thing or a bad thing?

What if the Federal Government issued a mandate through the Department of Health and Human Services - which both funds this study and has unprecedented control over our healthcare system thanks to the "Affordable" Care Act - requiring all Americans to have their sexual desire chemicals balanced in the name of preventing another "Obesity Epidemic"?

Suppose it was confirmed, in a way they could not ignore, that homosexual behavior was the result of something going wrong?

Remember the brouhaha about waterboarding Muslim terrorist suspects at Gitmo? What if the chemical imbalance can be shifted the other way? What if it gets out that American doctors can turn captured Islamists gay? What are the moral implications of that?

Frankly, it should be the gay activist groups who riot against the Federal Government spending money on a study that has a possibility of "curing gay". And in the grand scheme of things, with Obamacare costing nearly three trillion dollars in ten years, Obama's new environmental regulations costing Americans over 400 billion dollars, and nearly 800 million dollars paid in 'wages' to Federal employees who are on paid leave while awaiting verdicts in disciplinary actions, this particular little study is peanuts. There is so much more that a conservative Christian can work on before we even worry about a government study linking obesity with homosexual identity.

Can the gay activists say the same?

Flags and Issues

On March 19, 1777, Capt. Moses Dunbar was hanged for being a Loyalist. He had not only joined the King's army, but he was caught trying to recruit others to the cause. He was the only man in Connecticut ever hanged for treason. It is said that his own father gave them the rope that made the noose.

His (second) wife gave birth to their youngest son, also named Moses Dunbar, almost exactly nine months later. I am directly descended from that youngest son.

Am I proud of ol' Moses Dunbar? Well, no and yes. I don't support the ideals that he appeared to the patriots to endorse by joining the soldiers who were fighting them. I definitely don't advocate taxation without representation, or other methods by which the monarchy  refused proper governance to its territory in the New World. But honestly, I admire his willingness to stand up for what he believed, and he wrote a fascinating letter which he read at his execution, in which he forgave all involved and asked forgiveness for his own sins from anyone affected by them. He went to his death expressing confidence in God, and that is something to be proud of.

I wonder what the reaction would be if Connecticut insisted upon flying the British Flag from the State Capital in order to proudly declare their deep and abiding appreciation for the old British Colonial Empire. I wonder, furthermore, what we might think if the people who supported this action used the British Flag as a symbol to explain their distate for post-Christian government-forced social issues such as abortion and gay 'marriage'. What should such people say to those who question the wisdom of flying a flag of colonialism while claiming to be the only group in America who are truly interested in freedom?

This is a problem that we are facing now, with the Confederate Flag being flown by people who insist that it is all about "states' rights" and that anybody who is squeamish about Confederate history must be a big-government liberal. I can't help but wonder if, when the Southern States pushed through the Slave Fugitive Act, if they told abolitionists that it didn't have to affect them because "if you don't want to own slaves, just don't buy any slaves - nobody is forcing you to be part of it", while making anything but the whole-hearted pursuing and capturing of fleeing ex-slaves punishable by government action. In short, my point is this: Yes, it is possible to be in favor of deregulation and lowering taxes without flying the "Stars and Bars", and the Southerners would do well to remember that.

This said:

I can't say I like the push to remove the Confederate Flag from Civil War memorials in the South, or ending re-enactments, or basically pushing it 'under the rug' the way that Germany has done with the swastika. I also think that any choice to remove it from a state building should be the decision of the state itself, not the Federal Government, though I also see nothing wrong with The People pushing to make it happen through popular opinion. Granted, I don't think personally that the Confederate Flag belongs with the "Flags of the Present" on government buildings meant to administer the Present - tax collection, license renewal, etc. - but I would be about as 'shocked' at seeing a Confederate Flag at a Southern Civil War memorial as I would be to find a cross in the chapel of a college. (I would, however, encourage all who want to fly the flag personally to read the Reasons for Secession historical documents. You may find the modern perception of the Civil War, as being primarily about "states' rights" or "economics" rather than slavery, challenged... strongly.

And now that I'm on the outs with both sides, let me say what I want most to say about the issue.

This is not as important as keeping the government from imposing further gun control laws upon us. It is not as important as keeping the government from redefining the sexually-dimorphic pair-bond to exclude sexual dimorphism and pair-bonding. Every single Confederate flag in the nation is not worth the life of one baby destined for abortion. And killing Obamacare dead will save many more lives than are affected by that particular piece of cloth.

So debate it all you like, work it out all you like, choose sides... but don't let this issue make Southerner Republicans hate Northerner Republicans. The Democrats are weak. This is our country to win or lose, and breaking out into virulent hatred over this particular issue could leave us with Four More Years... of Clinton, or even worse, Sanders the Full-Out Avowed Socialist.

Ask yourself this: What means more to you? What do you think will do more damage to this country?

The Stars and Bars?

Or the Hammer and the Sickle?

Better the Stars and Bars in South Carolina than the Hammer and Sickle over all of us. That's my stance on the issue, as a Northerner Conservative Republican who has no love for the Confederate Flag.

Yesterday, I took my copy of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame to my grandmother's house. She hasn't kept up with Disney movies since Pocahontas, and I wanted to assure her that they were still turning out quality stuff. I went alone, because the kids are too young to see it, and we sat and visited afterwards.

This post has nothing to do with the Hunchback whatsoever.

We got to talking about Obamacare and its implications for the aging. It wasn't until I was driving home, however, that a really odd thought hit me.

Our parents take care of us when we are infants, when we're young children, patiently changing our diapers and mashing our food and talking to us when we can't talk in return. I've always thought that one good deed deserves another, and so this culture teaches us that we pay our gratitude forward in caring for our own children. Increasingly, we are teaching and therefore learning that the way of things is that the children are our future and of utmost importance, while the job of the elderly is to pass on and allow the younger ones to take the field.

I am now thinking that this is wrong.

Instead, this is what happens. When you are a child, your parents care for you. As you mature, however, they slowly begin to revert. As a person gets older, he finds his memory beginning to slip. His words become muddled. He may no longer be able to reliably clean up after himself. He may lose his teeth. He is 'regressing' in behavior and abilities to a more childlike state. That is when you pay, not forward, but back.

That is when the right thing to do is to care for your childlike elderly parent as that parent has cared for you. That is when you return all the gentility and dignity with which they have endowed you.

Of course you should care for your own children, but not out of a debt to your parents. You care for them because you love them and give of yourself, literally, for their creation and subsistence. You do not repay a debt to your parents by raising your children and abandoning the elderly to their fate. You repay a debt to your parents by caring for your parents.

 My grandmother is still in full possession of her faculties. She and my grandfather still live independently. I hope I will always find time to spend with them while they can still intelligently answer my questions and share their thoughts and discoveries. As they age and become more childlike, I hope I will be able to give them the same care, kindness, and basic human decency as they gave me when I was 'knee-high to a grasshopper'.

New Year’s Resolution: 1920x1080

Each year I re-resolve several things, but this year I’m going to repeat my little ritual and re-resolve them once again.

Why do I do this to myself?

Well, though I fail to hit my target each year, I do come closer to reaching it. My house is cleaner today than it was last year on this date. My weight is closer to normal. I have made the greatest leaps and strides in my writing. So here I go again, with the same New Year’s Resolutions as ever before, and one of them, of course, concerns this blog and me posting in it more often.

Resolution 1: Writing more
I made leaps and strides here, when I decided to join in the NaNoWriMo challenge (lovingly nicknamed “Cain’t Write No Mo’” about halfway through) and finish the first draft of a book I had outlined some time ago. I discovered that I was capable of putting 2,000 words on a story each day, no matter how I was feeling or how inspired I was. My challenge was to see if I was a writer, not only in good times, but also in bad. I succeeded.
I put aside the draft for the entire month of December, but in January I want to turn out my first-edited form for family and friends to read, with an eventual goal of publication. For 2011, I also want to turn this blog into something people will actually come back to read and, you know, find new stuff *to* read. I’d like to post in it at least weekly, at most daily.

Resolution 2: Clean my house
My house-decorating philosophy is actually quite simple. I am a fan of all that is useful and beautiful. If it is beautiful but not useful, or if it is useful and not beautiful, I am more likely to want it gone. Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, I am also OCD and a bit of a packrat. I have so many things I want gone that I have never been able to rid myself of.
I have a genuinely nice house that would have all the room I needed if we would only get rid of the things we don’t use/like/need.

Resolution 3: Stick to my proper weight
I’m really not that bad off. I picked up an extra 10-15lbs during my second pregnancy, and they just haven’t come off yet. Actually, I began this year 15lbs up and ended it 10lbs up, so I am honestly getting myself back into shape. This goal I’m not too worried about, not just because I think I can do it, but also because it isn’t really all that important to me.

Will this be “my year”?
To be honest, I will be happy even if I make a small gain in each goal. Best case scenario will find me, on December 31st, 2011, reporting that my house is clutter-free and my first novel has been published, and that my BMI has gone from 25 to 22.5.

A better way than this

A cartoonist posted this in his blog a few days ago:

You know what this is? It's a sculpture by Blake Fall-Conroy, the Minimum Wage Machine.
From the site:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage (and Ohio state minimum wage, too--)). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money.

I generally hate 'abstract sculptures', but this one seemed to reverberate in my very soul. I spent a few years of my life at that crank (granted, not working minimum wage), trying to wring out the pennies we needed to keep the household going. Now my husband is the one who turns the crank.

Granted, not all jobs are quite this bleak. Many people are able to make their living doing something they enjoy, or, at least, something that is not consistently monotonous. My husband works as a computer programmer, a "code monkey", as he puts it. Still, most workplace jobs involve a certain level of cranking. That goes doubly for the kind of jobs in which working women often find themselves.

This is one reason why the feminist anti-homemaker viewpoint baffles me. They wish to replace a system in which the man returns home from the crank to find beauty, warmth, and stimulating conversation. They wish to end a system in which the woman spends all of her creativity, intellect, and strength in fulfilling tasks that make life for her husband so much more than 'the crank'. They want to take her from her home and children.

Their idea of utopia is the man and the women both out at their own separate cranks, grinding away while the government takes half of what trickles out and raises their children for them. The feminist dream ends each workday when whichever parent finishes at the crank first having to stop and pick up his (or her) children from daycare, then to arrive at a cold, empty house in hopes of making things a little brighter for the sake of his (or her) mate.

(Of course, this changes the house life even on weekends and holidays. I see more and more women choosing to put their children in daycare on vacation days so that they can "get a break" and have time to do the chores. I hear them complain about vacations from school, grateful when their own children return to someone else's care. You have to live with a child to know how to 'deal with' that child. You have to spend most of your hours in a child's company to get into that child's groove, so to speak, to understand which sounds of frustration denote hunger and which sounds denote sleepiness. But I am getting off the subject.)

We laugh at books and magazines written in the '50's that encourage housewives to fetch drinks for their husbands. There is even an Internet meme full of advice such as making yourself pretty when he returns home from work and not bothering him with trivialities until he has had a chance to relax. We read it and scoff about what doormats those women were back then. The next time you hear that advice, though, and the next time you are ready to laugh, I want you to go back to that picture and I want you to look at that crank.

That cartoonist's blog post continues:

Picture that. Picture standing there for four hours, six hours, eight hours a day, turning that crank to squeeze out one penny at a time till you have enough to pay the rent, put gas in the car, keep the water, electric, wash the clothes, feed the kid, pay your taxes.... Your day revolves around being there to turn that crank. Your life revolves around turning that crank. Your precious limited time on this dear sweet earth is eaten away by that crank.

Ladies, your husband has spent his entire day at that crank. If you are a full-time homemaker, or even if you are a part-time worker, he has spent his day at that crank for you and for your children. He will spend tomorrow at that crank. He will work that crank until he is elderly, and he's doing it for his family. If he is like my husband, he may complain about his work, but he never complains about the fact that he will be winding away at that or another similar crank for most of his life. That 50's meme that so many women find ridiculous, the easy chair and the glass of his favorite beverage, the effort you take to look pretty and provide him with a hot supper... that is the least we can do in return.

Wealth

It's that time of year again. I watched the enormous truck back into the driveway. My son watched in fascination as a man with a thick, greying beard connected the pipe. Within minutes, our oil tank downstairs displayed its little floater at the top of the gauge, and I was writing out a check. We fill our oil tank twice a year, once around November and once around March. Of course, living in the northern hemisphere in a cold-winter area, we use significantly more oil in the winter months. But that's hardly my point today.

I always get a thrill from filling the oil tank. It's the same thrill I get after a good grocery shopping session, in which there have been a lot of good sales and I have filled my cart. It's the thrill I get when the church giveaway room has several outfits out for the taking, all the right sizes for my children. I simply love having Plenty.

This isn't just an odd quirk of mine, mind you. It's a pretty common human condition. In Western Society, we have the curious desire for sparser homes and thinner women. Throughout history, the cultures have trended in the exact opposite direction, probably because wealth was not nearly as common as it is in the present day. Consider the example of the needy taking pictures of soup kitchens on their cell phones. We hardly understand what poverty really is anymore. I can't claim to truly understand it either. Even when we haven't known if we could fill that oil tank again, we've still had a weathertight house and the expectation that nobody is likely to destroy it in war or for spite anytime soon.

I like to focus on and enjoy the simplest and truest types of wealth. Recently, my family and I sang for a Salvation Army coffeehouse. One of the workers there found out that I have a baby girl and offered me some free diapers. I hesitated, automatically saying what I usually say in similar situations. We'd love the help, and I'll definitely use anything we're given, but I'm sure there are others in more need than us and they should probably be aided first. My mother told me on the drive home that we are in fact 'salt of the earth humble' and probably not much less in need than the other families in that area.

This surprised me, to be sure. In my reckoning, we're doing pretty well. Sure, you can look at us as a family who can't yet afford to replace the carpet as it wears thin, we're basically one major car repair away from disaster, and it would be nice to have enough money in the bank to replace a major appliance should it suddenly die. However, I tend to look at the plenty. I look at the pantry piled high with consumables, the lovely big yard, the clothing so plentiful that we can afford to toss pilly t-shirts and holed socks...

...and the filled oil tank, ready to give us heat and hot water all winter long.

Last year, it was only the sudden dip in oil prices that allowed us to fill that tank at all. We're in better shape this year, thanks to the mortgage refinancing done before Obama's plans made the process nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't missed a payment. My baby's hospital bills are all paid off, and we're starting to put money back into savings.

Still, I'm never going to take a filled oil tank for granted again.

Hope and Change!

Alright, it's been a couple of months and we've got a fuller and richer idea of what Obama means by 'hope' and 'change'. Let's take a look at what's being said, what's been said, and what is being planned for the future.

President Obama, being eternally optimistic and having run on a platform that claimed sunshine and bluebirds every day should he be elected, has been speaking doom and gloom on the economy so often that even Bill Clinton has reprimanded him on the topic. The stock market has dropped further since his election than it did in all the time W. Bush was in office, and every time he makes a speech, it takes a fall of a couple hundred points. His message is simple; the only way for this country to survive is to give him every power, and to oppose any of his decisions is to want this country to fail. As well, to want lower taxes and greater freedom is now unpatriotic.

Our 'stimulus package' was put together under the watchful eye of Nancy Pelosi, who encourages government funding of contraception and abortion services under the unapologetic (her words!) claim that we can cut government spending on education and healthcare for children by reducing the number of children. I would never have thought of that solution. My natural preference is to reduce or eliminate government spending by cutting taxpayer programs for children of rich families, but the expansion to SCHIP either has been or will be passed soon.

The changes in the package made to medical spending were put into place by Tom Daschle, who has praised Europeans above Americans for being willing to accept a 'hopeless diagnosis' for a treatable condition on the grounds that it would cost the government too much money to help you.

Robert Reich, another lawmaker who worked on the package, caused a minor stir when he pronounced that guidelines should be created for the infrastructure upgrades to ensure that construction jobs created by the work do not go to skilled construction workers or white men. We must ensure that "women and minorities" who are not construction workers or skilled professionals are the ones who ensure that our bridges are safe to cross.

But don't despair! You'll be getting tax relief, if you don't make what the government deems to be too much money, which is about $75K/year. Yeah, I know Obama said his threshhold was $250K, but then Biden, I think it was, said $150K, and someone else said $120K, so are you really surprised? Anyways, if you are not rich, i.e. making $75K/year, you'll be getting about $25/month back in your paycheck starting in April. Don't you feel lucky? It's a tax credit, not a cut, but it's evenly distributed so that it looks like a cut. Oh yes, and you will get this money even if you don't pay any taxes at all, so it isn't really a 'tax' adjustment so much as a welfare check. Basically, the government is using the IRS to send welfare checks to people who are already working, whether they want it or not, and anyone making over $75K/year, in other words, the rich, will be paying for it.

This is the Democrat definition of hope, you see. The government will be handling the redistribution of wealth. If they decide that you make 'too much' money, you will be forced to pay for the lifestyles of all the people who don't. However, even if this level of financial burden bankrupts you, it will still not be enough. Therefore, all the 'little people' who don't make 'too much' money have to learn to be content with what the government provides. Instead of negotiating your own prices with an HMO in order to obtain the medical care that you need, you must expect that if you are too expensive for the government, you will not be allowed to obtain care. You must learn to accept that which has been rationed out to you instead of seeking your own fortune.

The government will care for all your needs, and if your needs are too many, the government will see to it that the population of the needy is reduced through abortion and lack of care for the ill and elderly until the finances work. In other words, prevent hunger by killing the hungry and prevent poverty by killing the poor. The survivors will revere you for saving them from want.

Ah, let me take a moment and address the jobs situation. The rise in unemployment is actually less of an all-over set of layoffs and more targeted to a couple of specific industries, primarily construction. But don't despair, you who are losing your construction jobs! The benevolent Obama has foreseen your needs! He and the Democrats in Congress are setting up a large spending spree on upgrading roads, bridges, and highways.

Unfortunately, Reich and others advocate restrictions on this spending to ensure that the money does not go to actual construction workers and/or 'skilled professionals', especially if they are white men. That's right, despite the fact that 'whites' make up about two-thirds of this nation's population, we must make sure that they are not getting any government funding, even if that means that we cannot hire the people who actually lost their jobs in this recent rise in unemployment. Don't despair, however. Plenty of money in the stimulus package will go towards hiring biologists to study field mice and climatologists to study 'global warming', even though there is no indication of a high unemployment level among biologists or climatologists.

How will Obama pay for all these non-white non-construction workers, biologists, and climatologists? Well, next up on the agenda is supposedly a 25% cut in defense spending. That's right, since the housing market collapse has caused many lost jobs among various construction workers and associated professionals, we must pay for non-professionals and people who are not construction workers by taking money away from the people who employ carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, and welders. With the government refusing to buy military equipment built by blue-collar workers and then refusing to hire those same blue-collar workers with the money they've taken away, I'm afraid we're in for a lot more government-subsidized people lining up for their rationed food and rationed healthcare.

Is this hope? Well, it certainly is change.

Focusing on the wrong end

I keep hearing it from the Republican so-called leadership who are hijacking the party into moderate materialism... "We need to focus on the financial conservatism and jettison the social conservatives... so that we can reach more people." They have their tactic completely and totally backwards. If anything, we need to do completely the opposite. I'd go so far as to say that if I had to choose between social or financial conservatism, I would choose social.

Did anybody reading this also read George Orwell's Animal Farm? I recommend it. Right now I am thinking of a specific character in the story, a pig named Snowflake. In the story, the farmer is chased from the farm and the pigs set up a socialist government that turns brutally totalitarian by the end. Snowflake, chased off and killed eventually by the power-seizing Napoleon, is a 'gentler dictator' and genuinely works towards the good of the other animals. He may be an economic liberal, but he acts as a social conservative, and does not seem to govern his own life by the mantra that you do what you can to secure your own power and satisfy your own pleasure. He is not a moral relativist.

I will never truly believe that socialism is the best way for a country to operate, but I would rather have a good dictator than a society left adrift and manipulated by evil men. Even government-mandated programs for the poor is better than a set of undisciplined rich men who sneer at and oppress those beneath their income levels. Indeed, in a morally-corrupt culture, a firmer hand is needed. Liberty is for adults, not children.

If we truly work for the good of our society, we must focus on morality, even above freedom. If our sons and daughters are not raised in such a way as to be willing to give up power voluntarily, what will it matter when we send them into public office with their heads full of capitalism? We will end up with tyranny of a different sort.

Those who prize economic conservatism above social conservatism will create a land so undisciplined and brutal that socialism will be needed eventually just to hold man's passions in check. Those who prize social conservatism will create a land in which government power holds no fear for the citizens and can be lowered over time by those who have not grown to love power.

We are headed for a time of increases socialism under Obama, but we can still train ourselves and teach our children to be people of moral standing, who not only understand, but feel that lying, cheating, and stealing is plainly wrong. That is the only way we will continue to be worthy of the economic conservatism we so badly want back!

Reconfiguration

I am going to take a few days for contemplation, and then I am probably going to change the title of my blog. I am probably not going to change it's current purpose.

The current title is The Determined Homemaker, which very deeply fit my purpose when I wrote it. At the time, I had just quit my full-time job, which I had taken on very reluctantly when my husband was laid off. With hidden tears and stress levels high, I left my one-year-old son and set out to keep food on the table as a software engineer at a local defense contractor. Depending on the way I look at it, this was either a complete failure or a success.

I managed to hold out for three years while my husband fast-tracked full-time to his bachelor's degree, giving him the standing needed to make the needed salary for me to return home. On the other hand, I got very sick with several neural and intestinal problems, and it took me a good year or so to really regain my health again, and on top of that I kept getting poor performance reviews. When I'm working as a programmer, I'm a very good coder. I am not a data-entry whiz (numbers dyslexia). I'm not a manager. I can teach and tutor readily, but I have to be given a class and subject. I can't just go walking about and Know.. or Find Out.. what people need to know. In short, I was, as I often am, a square peg in a world full of round holes. If they'd expected me to build an application, they might've thought I was a genius. They wanted me to psuedo-manage data entry personnel, and I was a complete flop.

I'm still dealing with the self-esteem fallout from that fiasco.

I suppose I've spent the last year trying to prove that I'm a good enough homemaker to justify being a pretty bad Extrovert Psuedo-Manager Career Woman. The time for that is over. I don't know how I'm going to move past it, but I know I need to. Of course I'm going to keep being a full-time homemaker. But I need to stop stressing over my societal/financial worth. I've been trying to pare down my hobbies to nothing that is not highly-potentially financially profitable, so that I end up doing nothing but either homemaking or doing something that will or might land me a check, however small. That can't be my life anymore.

All these books and essays and such about finding your purpose in life seem to assume that you are supposed to pick and focus in on one single thing only that lights up your eyes, that you are drawn to naturally. What if there's more than one thing? Is it truly a waste to do something you enjoy but will never be good at? I've got some questions to answer in the coming days. It may be that my year, rather than being what I've got when I answer them, will simply be about finding the answers.

Meanwhile, I anticipate that I will continue to write religious and political essays in this blog, peppered with things I've discovered or done as a homemaker/homeschooling mom. And in time, we'll see how this blog changes as I do.

Thanks for reading!

Anti-anti-feminism? Or not quite?

Since McCain has made his unexpected VP pick, forums and blogs everywhere have been alight. Especially in the media areas where I watch, suddenly everyone wants to talk about this not-unknown-for-long woman, governor of a state most people don't even think about on a semi-regular basis.

I, being a bit of an 'anti-feminist', track sites with similar beliefs, of course, and I've been surprised to see an ultra-conservative backlash against this VP pick. I've been even more surprised to find that I, usually pretty nearly solid in my agreement with them, find myself a bit at odds. There are two main areas in dispute, and I plan to lay out my own thoughts on each one separately.

1. Sarah Palin, being a mother of young children, especially one with Down Syndrome, should be at home taking care of them.

I'm not sure where people who worry over this think the Palin children and husband actually are. I recommend http://www.mccainblogette.com/postings/083008_0928.shtml for an answer. In case you don't feel like wading through the pictures, I can tell you myself... her family is with her. For hours and sometimes days between campaign trips, she will have plenty of time to spend with husband and children, feeding her baby and snuggling with him. She may well have more time to spend with her family than any mother who is not homeschooling. Even during events, her family are no further away from backstage, and, increasingly, out in the front alongside her.

Palin is headed for a position that allows her to work in the same building that she and her family will live. The other working women afforded her level of flexibility, mostly schoolteachers, small business owners, or telecommuters, are often in the ranks of the anti-feminist groups and accepted by them. What is the difference here? It may have something to do with the second issue: Authority.

2. What's a woman doing taking authority over men? Indeed, placing herself in the line of succession for the most powerful job in the country?

Well, women in Ancient Israel might have taken issue with this question. As I said before, I agree with anti-feminist groups largely for the most part. In this area, though, I have some concern that they are taking an extremist position against an extremist position rather than looking to restore a proper balance. From wives frequently ruling their husbands, they push for a time when women are more or less ruled by men. I take a different tack, and one that I believe to be Biblically supported.

As I just mentioned, women in Ancient Israel might take issue with this view. During the Golden Ages of Israel, women had a great many rights not allowed to those in 1700's America, which even then was not the time of terrible oppression feminists claim it to be. In Ancient Israel, not only could women own and inherit property, but they had equal access to the courts and equal access with non-Levites to the Temple.

The Bible, when it speaks of submission to men, is clearly laying out the proper roles within a family. The husband is the CO, and the wife is the XO. However, these positions hold only within the family. As an example, when I conduct family business outside the home, I am not subordinate to any man with whom I may deal. My position as XO of the family trumps his position as outside the family, and he will not induce me to do anything against my family's betterment simply for the sake of being male. This position was supported even in America of the 1800's. If the husband died, the widow owned his property and cast votes in the family name.

A lot of people have been quoting the Old Testament case of Deborah as 'proof' that having a woman take a position of power over men outside of the family is a shameful thing. However, there are numerous instances of Old Testament women judging in the gates, owning and profiting from their own land and businesses (even married women), founding cities, and building bridges. In the New Testament, women commonly founded and led early churches, and Paul had plenty of them to greet and bless in each of his letters. There are two sets of verses usually used against this, but I believe one of them actually supports women's authority and the other is taken out of context.

The first involves women praying with their head covered (or with long hair). People claim that these verses establish all women as subserviant to all men as a matter of nature. "For God is the head of man, but man is the head of woman, and man was not created for woman, but woman for man." What they seem to be missing is the import of the last verse: "For this reason and for the angels, women should pray with a symbol of authority on their heads." This line of reasoning does not end with "women serving men is a matter of nature." It follows on to say, "Because nature suggests that women do not have the authority of men, women should pray with a symbol of authority on their heads." We are different than men, and we take different roles in marriage, but we are not lesser in God's eyes.

The second is a little trickier. After several occasions of Paul talking about how we are all equal in Christ, man and woman, free and slave, after all the times he's cheered on the women leaders in the church, suddenly he declares that "the women shouldn't teach" because "Adam was formed first, and Eve was the one who sinned first." What's he talking about? Many people have taken it to mean that no woman should teach any man, but if you look at the context, you see a slightly different story.

Paul wrote his famous statement to Timothy, in Ephesus. Ephesus was home to the Diana cult. (Diana is also known as Artemis.) In Acts, we got to read about this cult causing a riot and nearly getting the early Christians in a lot of trouble. It turns out that their troublemaking had not ended there. The cult was very feminist-minded, and members who joined churches began distorting Scripture to suit themselves. "Eve was created first, before Adam," they'd teach loudly. "Eve did not sin, so women are not under the same curse as men."

Now his statement makes much more sense when taken with his previous affirmation of female leaders, doesn't it? "Timothy, your women need to stop preaching. Adam was created first, not Eve, and Eve did sin... she's not excluded from the sin curse."

On the matter of women in authority, by the way, my mother had a very interesting take on it. A housewife and mother for about as long as I've been alive, she pointed out that political leadership involves administrating the will of the people and has since the peasants forced the King of England to sign the Magna Carta. "Women make excellent administrators," she pointed out.

To conclude, I'd like to point out that the loudest people speaking against Palin's position due to her sex are not the conservative Christians. They are the liberals, particularly the liberal feminists. Why are they on this tack? Why do they care? They don't, to be honest. But they'll do anything they can, including trying to use our own arguments on us, to prevent her from winning this election. I hope to predict that they will fail because they do believe the bad light they cast us in, the distorted view that we believe woman is inherently inferior to man, that holding values mean we must crucify anyone who doesn't live up to our standard, and that "it's important for mothers to raise their children" means "mothers had better not move from the kitchen... ever!"

The simplest things

I took an Internet test this morning on being a '1930's wife'. I thought I'd score as low as other people I'd seen taking it for sure. I was amazed to find that I scored very highly. I was more amazed to see the kind of things the test required of a good 1930's wife, considering how many people scored poorly.

So what kind of things did I check? I dress before breakfast. I am cheerful in the mornings. I greet my husband with a smile when he comes home from work. Supper is generally on time. I know how to sew a button on a shirt. I try to learn a bit about what he's doing at work. I'm pretty frugal with the money. (Those outside of my uber-frugal New Englander family would say I'm exceptionally frugal with the money.) I'm pleasant even with unexpected guests. I speak with my husband before making large decisions/purchases. I checked that I wear red nail polish, but I don't know if that counted for or against me.

What kind of things did I not check? I don't gossip. I don't correct my husband's speech in front of guests. I don't go to bed angry at him.

Is it so difficult, ladies? I've heard so many women complain bitterly about "what was expected" of that 1930's wife. I've heard them scoff. Doesn't she take any time for herself? Isn't she more than just a doormat? Of course she is! Don't sound so stupid! Does it really take that much from a woman to smile when her husband comes home? To listen to him? To care about what he's been doing, his needs and his struggles, his successes? What'd you even get married for?

I worked full-time outside the home for three years while my husband finished an advance college degree that would allow us to live on a single income so that I could homeschool our son. It was so difficult! I got a taste of what my husband deals with, and on top of that I had to deal with a lot of the household stuff. You know what, though? I learned from it what made a day better and what made it worse. It's a tough world out there, especially in the "cubicle farms," underappreciated and struggling for position.

Do you know how much nicer it is to live that life if you come home to a smile? If you wake up to a pleasant demeanor? To have someone supporting you and not tearing you down? Women act like it's such an unreasonable demand on their time and energy, but it's so little, it's so little and it means so much.

Now you don't really have to know how to sew on a button if you've got the money to buy a new dress every spring and fall. You don't have to know how to cook a masterpiece if you can put something together that's healthy and pretty nearly on time. You don't have to do curlers in your hair and makeup every evening just to look nice when your guy comes home. You have a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher, a washing machine and dryer, a microwave, and a car. Some people talk as if everyone should go back to the 30's, but that's not necessary. Where we've made progress, let's keep it.

But I would love to keep that 30's attitude, the cheerful, loving, giving wife who doesn't think it's a burden on her time to smile at her husband when he comes home. Someone who cares about taking care of him, who is interested in him. Someone who does the homemaking, not growly and begrudgingly, but with pride and a bit of finesse.

Watch your priorities!

My sink is a mess of dishes that I should have done yesterday before going to bed. But they can wait until after the morning service.

My son and I are going to start walking early to the service. Taking off, hand-in-hand down the road, with my husband picking us up probably about a half hour later in the car. The church is a good three miles away, after all.

He'll be exercising his little legs (my son), out in the sun and fresh air, gathering memories. The 'model homemaker' might have decided to do the dishes instead and make sure the kitchen was fresh and clean in case we had anyone come to lunch. (For shame! Yesterday's dishes!)

But homemaking is a means to an end, and it is better to focus on the end while performing the means. Because every now and then, the end is not found in a sink full of dishes, but in a long country road and a little boy.