Prayers for Gulf Coast Residents

Just after the 3rd anniversary of Katrina's devastation, it looks like another major hurricane has the Gulf Coast in its destructive path. May it be God's will that this latest storm cause less damage and many, many fewer deaths and injuries. I pray that the levees of New Orleans will be able to withstand the storm surge so that the people who've fled Gustav will have homes to return to after the hurricane passes.

Please join me in praying for the residents of New Orleans and surrounding areas!

Off on Vacation!

I'm leaving in a couple of hours to travel to Colorado for my cousin's wedding on Friday and then next week I'll be heading to New England to visit family. I'm not taking my laptop so I probably won't be posting much until I get back on the 23rd.

The "Nanny State" as the Price of Moral Relativism?

There's a very interesting argument in the recently released book Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!) by Carol Platt Liebau that the moral relativism so in vogue over the past four decades is a direct cause of the rise of the "nanny" state. She writes (emphasis mine):

"A society that denies the validity of any morality because of an ethic of moral relativism ultimately loses the capacity to compel decent public behavior....When cultural forces combine to encourage the indulgence of a people's appetites while eroding any competing constraints on them, it becomes increasingly likely that people will eventually become ruled by their passions.

That, without more, is deeply inimical to the flourishing of a truly free society- for when people cannot control themselves, ever more government intrusion into the private sphere becomes necessary to avoid a descent into disorder or even chaos.

Indeed, without sexual self-restraint, the private realm cannot remain truly private. With indiscriminate sexual activity comes a host of ills that ultimately require the government to intrude into the most intimate realms of its citizens' lives- from the agencies devoted to extracting child support from unmarried, deadbeat fathers to the armies of social workers employed to check on the well-being of children born to unmarried teen mothers who, too often, are completely unable to provide them with the loving, stable homes they deserve.

It's ironic that sexual liberation- and all the cultural forces that support it -actually end up making a society less free. But as the Founding Fathers recognized, liberty and self-government are impossible without a nation of citizens willing both to cultivate personal self-discipline and to establish informal social institutions that reinforce behaviors that help a society flourish with minimal governmental control.

As John Adams wrote in 1789: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion....Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.'"

Powerful food for thought, don't you agree?

Like Josef Stalin or Kennedy...

At the beginning of every month, I pick up a copy of Bay Area Parent magazine from my local library to check out the upcoming family-friendly events in our area. In addition to event listings, the magazine features articles on various parenting topics.

One of the articles in the August issue is entitled "Early Returns: How to Get Tomorrow's Voters Interested in Politics Today". Most of the article is perfectly fine. However, it devotes about half a page to profiling two different families supporting Sen. Obama and only about a fifth of a page to one family supporting Sen. McCain. As if that wasn't bad enough, the magazine's cover photo shows twins with shirts bearing the campaign logos of the two candidates. The girl wearing Obama's logo is front and center while her sister wearing McCain's logo is nearly out of the picture. Inside another photo of the twins is shown; again Obama's logo is on prominent display and McCain's is almost completely hidden.

I am getting so completely disgusted with the way that the mainstream media is absolutely fawning over Sen. Obama. He seems like a decent guy personally and he's certainly a very charismatic speaker. But the way the media treats him you'd think he was the Messiah or something. It reminds me of that old Living Colour song "The Cult of Personality":

I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your t.v.
I'm the cult of personality
I exploit you still you love me

The question is whether the American public will be foolish enough to buy the media hype like the children following the Pied Piper's song...