We’re all going to have to start doing things like this. it’s not a question of forcing someone else to follow our Lord Jesus. It’s whether or not we will allow others to stop us from following Him. The story began when the American Civil Liberties Union managed to find time in their heavy schedule of advocating for abortion, polygamy, gay marriage and euthanasia to send threatening letters to every school district in South Carolina, warning them of possible lawsuits... Read more
Judge Twyla Gray sat opposite me twirling her fork in the salad on her plate. She had just told me that she was going to have a prophylactic double mastectomy. Twyla, who was a cancer survivor, had learned that she carried the brca gene. This gene predisposed her to breast cancer. It had been decades since Twyla went through a lumpectomy, chemo and then radiation to treat a small cancer doctors found in one of her breasts. At the time... Read more
When does life begin? Back when I was pro choice, I used to field that question in debates all the time. I knew that the people asking the question meant human life. When does human life begin? The answer is no use to us in the besetting questions of our age. Life, human life, doesn’t begin. We pass it from one to another like a baton in a relay race. The reason for this largely useless answer is that the... Read more
I think Pope Francis is channeling my grandmother. “Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry,” he said yesterday. “Clean your plate,” my grandmother told me, “think of those that do without.” I am not, as some people do, blaming these injunctions to eat what I put on my plate for my weight problem. I know what causes that, and cleaning my plate has nothing to do with it. However, I... Read more
I remember the swimming safety rules. One of the first was do not jump in the water to try to save someone who is drowning. The reason? In their panic, they will latch onto you and drag you down with them. The instructors went through dramatizations. One would pretend to drown, the other would jump in to “save” them and be promptly pulled under by the flailing arms of the “drowning” one. After this graphic presentation, the instructors would show... Read more
Is DNA protected from illegal search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment? If you are arrested for, say, drunk driving, do the police have the right to take a swab of your DNA and put it into police databanks? The Supreme Court says “yes,” and that answer has set off a predictable firestorm on both sides of the civil liberties aisle. We’ve been debating this issue most acrimoniously for several years in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Proponents of taking... Read more
Remember Michael, aka Mikey, Weinstein? It’s not a name that falls trippingly off the tongue, but I’m beginning to think it is worth remembering. Michael Weinstein recently penned a diatribe against Christians that hails back to the hate-speeches of every genocidal maniac spawned in the 20th Century. He is a self-proclaimed “guardian” of Constitutional freedoms in the military. His backers include the usual list of suspects, such as branches of the ACLU, the former Oklahoma Director of Americans United for... Read more
Bank robbers and drug dealers aren’t the only ones who turn their backs on God until they get in trouble. We’re all prone to do this. Jail house conversions are the stuff of bad jokes and legend. Once in a while, one of these literal “come to Jesus” events holds up throughout the rest of a person’s life. More often, the repentant sinner reverts to their old selves as soon as the bad times pass. The difference between the convicted... Read more
The document below is a copy of a Department of Justice brochure advising managers to be gay friendly. Socially conservative commenters have been roasting this brochure while social liberal commenters and most of the media has ignored it. After reading quite a few comments about the brochure, I decided to look it up and read it myself. I may be just getting blasé about these things, but this brochure didn’t make me angry the way it has some people. I... Read more
Oklahoma City spun with activity all weekend. Everywhere you went, the sound of chain saws filled the air as people cut fallen trees into kindling. A house not far from mine lost a big part of its roof. I don’t mean that the storm took off the shingles. It lifted the roof off the house like it was a child’s miniature playhouse, and then dumped about 8 inches of rainwater into the interior. It also tore up a tree... Read more
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