A martyr for Moloch

George Tiller was aborted this morning.

Some stupid son-of-a-bitch shot him while he was sitting in church. In church!

Now, I don't especially mourn Tiller. I know, a better Christian than I am would, but I think he deserved exactly as much legal protection as his victims. Make of that what you will.

But the fact is, he did enjoy greater legal protection, and it plays right into the hands of the pro-aborts who paint all pro-lifers as frothing lunatics. Heck, Homeland Security already declared us domestic terrorists. Never mind that actual pro-life violence is far, far rarer than the violence perpetrated against us. The perception still stands.

And now they have an excuse to come after us. Shut down our March for Life. Prohibit the crisis pregnancy centers. Force every health care provider in the country to take Tiller's place.

No, if he was going to die, it should have been by God's hand, not ours. There was a good chance of his going to jail, which would have served to save many more babies than killing him did.

Murder was his stock in trade; it shouldn't have been allowed to make a martyr of him. This idiot has put all our necks on the block.

Nice going, jackass.

(Thinking about it, I wonder if this was a set-up by a pro-abort? I rather fear it wasn't, though. We have enough homegrown Oswald wannabes that we don't need an agent provocateur.

You want ID?

Here's my [fornicating] ID, [oedipally-inclined person]!

Akubra tip to Wicked Thoughts.

Memorial Day Weekend

The ribs are on the grill, most of the family is here, and I have the weekend off. I posted this two Memorial Days ago, but things haven't changed. I don't think I could say it any better today..
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See that earnest-looking kid on the right? Calvin Samuel Martin III, his name was. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but he was a first-class smart-ass, with an easy charm that made people like him as soon as they met him. That was my dad, in his high-school yearbook, before he went to war.

Unfortunately, I don't know a whole lot about his experiences in the war, because he never talked about it afterward. And I mean never. Even in the 80s, when it became stylish to dredge up buried memories of Vietnam, he had nothing more to say than just that he was proud that he'd gone.

Not that he had much choice. It was 1966, and he had just flunked out of UW, and the government offered him a full scholarship to the University of Pleiku, without a lot of room to decline. This was before Kent State, before Jane Fonda straddled an enemy gun like she was posing for a girlie magazine, before it became really fashionable to cry "peace, peace" where there was no peace. My mom says that he had some misgivings about the war itself. But it didn't matter; he went.

I don't know anything about what-all happened there, either, except little snippets. My mom says he got to be pretty friendly with the Montagnards, and got his heart broken by what happened to them. (I had to look them up; I'd never heard of them.) He ran supply convoys, "delivering socks," as he told his younger brother later. I don't think he ever shot anybody, but he certainly got shot at enough.

Whatever he saw over there, it damaged him pretty badly. He came back with a self-destructive streak that he watered liberally with ethanol. My mom says that he was like a completely different person. I wouldn't know; I was born on the army base just as he was getting out.

The problems he came back with exacted a price on both him and his family, and he eventually left. I spent a lot of my childhood without him, except as an occasional visitor. I started getting close to him again when I was in my teens, but by then it was kind of awkward. I didn't know it when I was little, but the war had taken my daddy away.

When I was 26, it took him away for good. Now, my dad wasn't what you would call an abstemious man. He drank like a fish, he chain-smoked for twenty years (then just up and quit), he ate anything he wanted, and he was entirely too fond of the fairer sex. (And I do mean "entirely"; if I didn't know he'd had a vasectomy I'd be on the lookout for people who looked a lot like me.) But just as he had settled into a career he loved (working in the Orient designing mass transit systems), and a marriage that looked like it was going to last, he started having some health problems. He came back to the States for some tests, and three months later he was dead of a brain tumor.

For all his vices, the one really virtuous thing he had done in his life had exposed him to Agent Orange. My dad died from the war, just as surely as if he had been shot by a sniper.

Even with him gone, the war still casts a shadow. He was cremated, and buried in his home town of Goldendale. He has two headstones: one in the veterans' section, and another in a family plot. The family couldn't agree on whether to be proud or ashamed that he'd gone to war.

Well, I paid as much of a price as any of them, and I'm proud. Proud as hell. Yes, I know it's fashionable to regard Vietnam as a huge blunder forty years later. Yes, I know the aging hippies are getting their kicks pretending that Iraq is Vietnam and their sign-waving actually matters a rat's ass. I know these things. But I also know what happened to the Montagnards after we left, and I know that the army today is all that stands between us and this. And I know what my dad would say about the people who insist the only way to "support the troops" is to cut them off at the knees.

I loved my dad. I miss him. He only lived to see one grandchild, but I think he'd have made a helluva grandpa. And on Memorial Day, I think I'll crack a beer, barbecue some dead cow, and be grateful to him and every other fresh-faced kid who stopped a bullet or breathed poison so I could do it.

Thanks, Dad.

See what happens when you question The One™?

Notre Dame isn't a Christian university anymore. It's now dedicated to the worship of the real messiah. Thus saith Barack.

And old gleeps like this who insist on having gods before Obama are just begging to be hauled away in chains.

IOU

Happy Mother's Day to my own mom and to the woman I'm proud to have for the mother of my children. (And to Wharf Rat, who's having her first one as an actual mother.) I love you all!

Just because

Because I'm a defiant Jesus Freak, and because it's Friday, and because, as much as we bellyache about persecution, us American Christians have nothing on the Poles.

I saw Steve Taylor do this song in concert back in 1985, just a couple of years after the events he's referring to. The lyrics are here. There's not a single banal line, not a wasted syllable. The man was a frimpin' lyrical genius.

You don't have to be a Christian believer to find yourself waving a fist in the air along with the Polish Catholics.



(I seem to remember that Brian posted these lyrics at one point, but I don't have the post handy to link to and I'm too lazy to search it out.)

Go granny go!

Maggie is an ancestress again! Wahoo!

Vengeance is mine...

... sayeth the guy whose dinner hour has been repeatedly interrupted by phone solicitors. (Language alert!)

Snatch the pebble from my hand...

The last couple of days my young co-worker Kaci and I have been taking turns training each other in the esoterica of our respective jobs. She kept looking perplexed when I made mention of things like grasshoppers and pebbles, and it dawned on me this morning that she's actually never heard of Kwai Chang Caine. A whole generation of boys grew up kicking each other and whacking each other with sticks because we all wanted to be Caine, and now he's relegated to history.(Do they even show reruns anymore? I'd love to find them and relive my boyhood.)

I don't know when this intro ceased to be universally familiar, but now she'll see what I was talking about.

A song to lie dreaming by

Not everybody will get this, but I don't care.


Akubra tip to Mark Shea.

Gone to that great buffet table in the sky

Dom DeLuise travels in elephants. Heck, he's probably impersonating one with great success.

He was a comic genius. That's not a phrase I use lightly, but Dom DeLuise was a man who could make anything funny. He just had a presence that inspired laughter.

Eat well at God's table, buddy.

Stay classy, Specter!

Arlen Specter uses the memory of Jack Kemp as a cheap re-election sound bite.

Let's review...

Jack Kemp: Fulfilled minor roles with major distinction and conducted a vice-presidential campaign like a gentleman, on a doomed ticket. Served his country with honor.

Arlen Specter: Bolted his party to make re-election easier, abandoning America to one-party rule that we may never emerge from. Betrayed both country and honor.

Senator Specter, please never, never take Jack Kemp's name into your mouth again. You foul it by speaking it. Jack Kemp was worth a dozen of you.

Everybody make fun of the old guy!

Actually, Pastor Paul is younger then me (though not by much). But it seems to me that ordination ought to confer at least a five-year penalty on a man. Otherwise, I'd be faced with clergymen who were my juniors, and that just can't be right.

So everybody stop over to his place and mock his gray hairs.

Happy birthday, Paul! Geezerhood is powerful!

OMG!

This is, like, so totally low-balled!

A totally grateful H/T to the thoroughly gnarly Miss Cellania.

(Hey, I was a teenager once, too!)

Priceless!

Lifted from Fausta's Blog:

Appreciate me!

It seems Mairin has nominated me for a Cannonball Award as the Best Underappreciated Blog over at The Crescat. Vote early, vote often!

(If I win, does that make me no longer underappreciated? My brain hurts.)

Ignorant Jesus freaks to be re-educated

Oh, goody. Our moral superiors are going to teach us the True Way™.

Before an Albany crowd of about 2,000 gay and lesbian advocates of marriage-equality laws, the governor and other supporters lashed out at opponents of expanding marital laws as they stepped up efforts to have New York join several other states where gays can legally marry...

“Where were these leaders of faith when college students of gay and lesbian orientation were beaten and often brutalized for expressing their feelings to each other?” Paterson said... He then vowed to help in an effort to change the mind-set of New Yorkers on the marriage-equality issue.

“We’re not only going to change the laws of New York, but we’re going to change the culture of how people treat each other,” Paterson told the crowd. [Emphasis mine]

Okay, let's get a few things straight (you should pardon the expression) once and for all.

1. I don't know of anyone who has ever "beaten or brutalized" a gay person as a function of their religion. There is the occasional story in the news about yahoos getting a snootful and beating up on a gay bystander, but that's hardly a result of their faith.

What the governor is trying to pin on us is a very flimsy causation: Person A believes that homosexual practice is wrong. Person B assaults a practicing homosexual. Therefore, Person A must have caused Person B's behavior. Doesn't hold water.

The other undercurrent that the governor is trying to slip past us is the assumption that any negative attitude about homosexuality is tantamount to assault. Which is equivalent to my claiming to be "brutalized" every time someone speaks ill of Christianity. Anyone whose skin is that thin needs to wrap himself in Kevlar and hide under the bed.

2. Beliefs about the nature of marriage are not a personal value judgment. Look, I don't believe that the relationship between a man and his Buick can be a marriage, either. Doesn't mean I hate either Buicks or those who love them. In fact, it has nothing whatever to do with my attitude toward either one. It just means that the word "marriage" means something specific, regardless of who's involved.

3. My opinions are not the result of ignorance, hatred or bigotry. I can't claim to have a lot of gay friends, simply because of where I live and the social circles I usually move in. Nevertheless, those that I've known, I've usually liked. Just like anyone else.

Governor Patterson apparently genuinely believes that if I were as smart as he is, I would naturally see the light and share his beliefs. What's more, if I continue to refuse to see the light, he has every intention of forcing me to see things his way. Which says nothing about my actual opinions, but does mark him as an arrogant buffoon. Dictators and tyrants throughout the ages have broken their teeth trying to force believers to abandon their faiths. Christians have outlasted other brownshirts and bullies; we'll outlast this one too.

This is fair

It looks like there's some common sense in Connecticut after all.

Here's the deal: My church doesn't control the government. Frankly, I wouldn't want it to. There was a time when it had a heavy influence in politics, and we got no end of grief from it.

But at the same time, the government not only shouldn't control my church, but it's expressly forbidden to in the Constitution. My church has always had a definition of marriage that is different from the state's. Up till now it hasn't been an issue, for reasons I got into here. (I'd like to go on record again as believing that if the state recognizes same-sex marriages, it has no reasonable basis for prohibiting polygamous ones. Marriage equality isn't just for social liberals.)

But what happens when a gay couple decides to sign up for a Church-sponsored Marriage Encounter, for instance? Or when they demand the use of Church facilities for a blasphemous ceremony?

Yeah, yeah... it'll never happen, right? Let's be realistic. How long do you think it will take before some activist couple decides to make a test case out of the Church's marriage stance? Long enough for the ink to dry on their state marriage license, if we're lucky.

(Side note: Other churches will probably have to deal with this problem to a lesser extent, but the Catholic Church is apt to be the biggest target, simply by being (a) the biggest church out there and (b) one where people still consider themselves members even when their beliefs no longer fit the Church's teachings. So there are plenty of actively gay people in the Catholic Church where there are probably very few in, say, an Assembly of God congregation.)

The Connecticut clauses eliminate that danger, making it possible for the state to have a definition of marriage that churches (and individuals whose consciences forbid it) are not required to adhere to. I am free to believe that a gay couple is simply a very committed unmarried couple, while they still have all the recognition of the law as married. Win-win.

I hope so, anyway. Here's where the rubber meets the road. Will proponents of same-sex marriage accept a compromise in which everybody wins, or is it essential that the Christians lose? In other words, is the goal equality, or dominance? I'm up for equality if they are. We'll see what happens in Connecticut.

Happy birthday, mom!

How many birthdays does this make? That's a very good question.

Let's just say that she would clearly recall most of the things listed here:

(Go ahead and click the image, then start the video.)

'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky

Ninety-three years ago today, a group of patriots (or terrorists, depending on your side) rebelled in Dublin against the most powerful empire in the world. That the Easter Rising actually failed, and due largely to the comedy of errors that passed for a plan among the conspirators, is actually sort of a reflection on Ireland itself. Whatever is chaotic and untamed in the American spirit is perhaps a reflection of the Irish influence on our own culture. We broke free of England's yoke after less than a century of high taxes and lousy government; they took seven centuries of vicious abuse before they finally managed to kick the Saxons out. All the while fighting among themselves as only the Irish can do.

This is also an excuse to post a video of the opening of one of my favorite movies. When she died I waxed on about Deborah Kerr's performance in this film, and now I have a chance to give a glimpse of what she was like. Not the matron of The King and I, not the over-sentimental but underplayed Terry McKay of An Affair to Remember, but a young, vibrant, adorable Irish girleen Bridie Quilty, whom I fell in love with by the end of this little clip. You will too.

Double points to the writers for using the word "unbesmirched." It's a fun word to pronounce, isn't it? Go ahead and say it out loud: "Unbesmirched." The father, W. O'Gorman, doesn't seem to have any other credits at IMDb, but he's the most quintessentially Irish actor I've ever seen. So is the singing of "The Boy from Killane," which marks the hour clearly as closing time at the pub. (See if you can make out a single word of their singing.)

Behind all the humor is the incredible bravery of the rebels, many of whom were executed with the most summary of trials. Ireland may have its troubles today, but the fact that it's a nation to have troubles at all is due to "those fearless men but few." Every nation needs bumbling, passionate rebels, so there will always be a free country for girls like Bridie to love and defend.