August 2004

My mother-in-law studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, she gave birth to 10 children in 14 years. Her husband, engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family well.

Food preservation, hygiene, cooking, sewing, and home budgeting were part of the home ec curriculum and, along with the liberal arts training which came with every bachelor's degree at the time, these young women graduated with specialized training for their profession of choice--motherhood. Other women took similarly helpful majors in Elementary Education, Bible, Christian Education (my own mother's major), and Nursing.

Then came the frontal assault on housewifery and motherhood carried out largely by a new and powerful aristocracy, the "Information Class." (Footnote 1) During the late '60s and early '70s this assault reached fever pitch and the academy was ground zero. College and university students were assigned propagandistic tracts such as Ibsen's, A Doll's House, and joined the ranks of those determined to liberate the "Noras" of the world. (Footnote 2) Oxford historian Paul Johnson provides interesting historical details on A Doll's House, noting that both Karl Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, and George Bernard Shaw took part in its first private reading in London, Eleanor playing the title role of Nora. Johnson writes, the "clear message" of A Doll's House was that "marriage is not sacrosanct, the husband's authority is open to challenge, [and] self-discovery matters more than anything else." Johnson concludes, "[Ibsen] really started the women's movement." (Footnote 3)

The discipline of home economics (also known as "household arts") was an early casualty. Traditionally, home ec had enjoyed a comfortably apolitical niche in the world of higher education, and the guardians of this discipline had every reason to trust their academic peers would continue to be favorably disposed toward a curriculum so integrally tied to domestic tranquility. It was taken for granted that a dignified and competent wife and mother, devoted to her home and family, was a highly desirable constant in American culture.

To the feminists, home ec was anything but apolitical, so they attacked...

Last night during a campaign appearance with his wife, Lynne, in Davenport, Iowa, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly acknowledged his opposition to President Bush's support for a constitutional amendment outlawing sodomite marriage. The Washington Post reports that the Vice President said:

"Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with. My general view is freedom means freedom for everyone... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." The question of whether that relationship should be given the status of marriage, Mr. Cheney, said, is "a matter for the states to decide."

Is there a single person outside the Beltway who would be surprised to find out that the lead line of the Post's editorial on the matter was, "Good for Vice President Cheney"?

This whole episode is sad because it can't help but further confirm the mass perception that morality is relative, particularly sexual morality, and that even the most principled men sacrifice their principles when those principles would cause pain for their family members.

In the years to come, most of us will face a similar moment and the way we respond to our own family's sins will be the evidence by which the world judges whether we serve the True God or an idol.

Setting aside Vice President Cheney's conniving at the public policy side of this sin by talking of states rights, how sad to see such a manly father choosing not to love his daughter by calling her to repentance, but instead accepting that daughter's sin as an unalterable reality and making his peace with it. Has he no fear of God, either for himself or for his daughter? Has he never heard or read these words from Scripture:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1Corinthians 6:9-11)

Make no mistake: it is no more possible to love our sons and daughters and wink at their sodomy than it is to love them and wink at their adultery, fornication, or pedophilia. Like every other sexual sin that used to be illegal across our country, sodomy destroys lives. And souls.

Over the years I've heard many Christians confidently declare that, though Scripture is clear on the role of women in the Church and home, it's silent concerning their role in secular society. But those making such statements mean by "silent" only that there's no silver bullet text forbidding a woman to serve as a queen, president, CEO, general, or judge.

Many doctrines central to our Faith are not laid out in Scripture explicitly, but implicitly, and both methods are a legitimate path for God's Truth to come to us. There are times when God is pleased to reveal His Truth with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: "And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger" (Luke 2:12).

Other times it pleases God to speak in parables. In fact, on more than one occasion the People of God were rebuked for approaching God's Word with a wooden literalism when the truth being communicated was meant to be understood on a different level. Consider this exchange between Jesus and His disciples:

And the disciples came to the other side of the sea, but they had forgotten to bring any bread. And Jesus said to them, "Watch out and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees."

They began to discuss this among themselves, saying, "He said that because we did not bring any bread."

But Jesus, aware of this, said, "You men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves that you have no bread? Do you not yet understand or remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets full you picked up? Or the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many large baskets full you picked up? How is it that you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning bread? But beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees."

Then they understood that He did not say to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (Matthew 16:5-12)

Yes, as Protestants we hold to the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, and therefore oppose the notion that a believer must have a college or graduate degree in order to understand God's Word. Rather we confess that:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. (Westminster Confession of Faith I:7)

Yet again, this is not to say that the meaning of Scripture must always be what occurs to us at first blush (or most immediately). Many of the doctrines of our Faith are inferences and deductions from the study of God's Word; they're the product of coming to understand types and anti-types, of "getting" the point of the story. In fact, it may even be said that much of Scripture is intentionally hidden so that some people won't "get it." How else are we to understand the answer Jesus gave to this question posed by His disciples:

In connection with my daughter, Heather's, blog entry titled, Are You a DINKWAD?, check out these excerpts from a The New Yorker piece on the changes caused within the practice of veterinary medicine by women replacing men as vets. When I read the piece, I filed it for future use, but having had it sit dormant for a year, now, it seems time to let others find a use for it.

There are so many lessons here, including lessons on the nature of womanhood and the foolishness of a decadent society that places greater value on animals than unborn and newborn children. By the way, it was the same at the time of the Early Church when, in the midst of the decadence of the Roman Empire, church fathers exhorted believers to give more attention and money to the care of little children exposed on the slopes behind their homes than they gave to their lapdogs.

In 1962, when the (Animal Medical Clinic of New York City) moved to the Upper East Side, veterinarians were still a utilitarian breed and more than ninety percent of them were men.... Then, gradually, women began to enter vet schools. By 1975, they represented half of all students; by 2000, nearly three-quarters--and most of them wanted to treat pets.... And, as the birth rate dropped, pets came to take the place of children in some families.

Between 1980 and 2001 alone, the number of dogs and cats in the United States grew from ninety-eight million to a hundred and thirty million. Two generations ago, fathers still gave their sons sacks of kittens to drown in the river. Today, according to a recent survey by the American Animal Hospital Association, sixty-three per cent of pet owners say "I love you" to their pets every day. Eighty-three per cent refer to themselves as their pet's mom or dad.

The current director of the A.M.C., Guy Pidgeon, has lived through both halves of this history. He was born on a farm in Western Nebraska... and went to the Colorado State University veterinary school, intent on becoming a country vet.

"Then, at some point, I began to see an incredible dichotomy between agricultural and veterinary medicine," he told me. "One was driven by economics, the other by emotion."

* * *

Before I visited the A.M.C., ...I thought of the German countess Carlotta Liebenstein, who in 1991 bequeathed her eighty-million-dollar estate to her dog Gunther. Of J. Paul Getty, who refused to return from Europe when his twelve-year-old son died of a brain tumor but had a vet flown in when his dog developed cancer. When the disease proved fatal, he spent three days weeping in the dog's room.

-Burkhard Bilger, "Annals of Veterinary Medicine: The Last Meow (Organ transplants, chemotherapy, root canal-how far would you go for a pet?)," The New Yorker, September 8, 2003, pp. 47,48.

If you want to hear what I consider to be the best musical testimony against the culture of death that pervades the medical community in our country today, get your hands on the song "Baby Doe," written and performed by that wonderful prophet, Steve Taylor, on his Meltdown CD.