Texas and Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave right about now. He wouldn’t believe, as I hardly can, that the Texas board of education has removed him from their textbooks. There was this part in the books that asked students to explain how Thomas Jefferson and others influenced later revolutions with their Enlightenment thinking. But because Jefferson advocated a separation of church and state, the board decided it would be better to include John Calvin in his place. They took this man, who authored the Declaration of Independence, and removed him from their history book because they didn’t like that he wanted church and state to be separate. What. A. Bunch. Of. Morons.

What of this quote from Jefferson regarding the separation of church and state?

“The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg . . . . Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

I don’t get the rational behind this textbook decision. You don’t have to get rid of Jefferson to prove you are religious – I am very religious, and I’ve always had a profound respect for the man. Thanks to the separation of church and state, my church was founded and allowed to thrive. At that time, there was no state run church that threatened to squash dissenters who held different beliefs. Ironically, but luckily for Texas, people can believe what they want and put whatever they want into textbooks. Maybe they should thank Jefferson that their brand of Christianity doesn’t offend some all powerful religious state, prompting a little holy war.

It really is a shame that we still fall victim to viewing history without considering how circumstances have changed. That some arrogant school board members can presume that their ideas of what is Christian excludes the possibility of appreciating Jefferson’s ideas is just pathetic. All I know now is that I will look very carefully at what my child’s school teaches before I let him step foot inside. I won’t have people like this teaching my kids. I will be responsible fore teaching him religion and values, and I’ll expect his school to teach him what this nation was founded upon. If that includes Enlightenment theory, separation of church and state, science, etc, then all the better. Better that my child accepts or questions Thomas Jefferson’s ideas with his own little reason than there be no mention of Jefferson at all.

Adoption

Never in my life had I thought I would end up adopting a child. I knew one family who had adopted a few, but I never looked at them and thought that my family might look like that someday. I always believed that life would take its typical course, few variations if any. So I guess you could say that that the adoption process that I now find myself in the middle of constitutes one of life’s good curveballs.

I can’t even remember when the talk started, but I’m certain it came from April. I’ve benefited from a wife who was raised by an adopted father. Adoption must have been talked about as normal in their family. Because it was never spoken of in my family, my resistance to adoption at first could be expected. I always thought of fatherhood as biological.

Slowly, my resistance began to wear down. It’s not that I was ever flat out anti-adoption, but I needed some convincing. My wife started to think about Ethiopia early on, gathering bits of information over time. She started watching adoption videos to see how other families experienced it. A while after that started, my sister adopted a baby from Tennessee. Not so suddenly, it became acceptable and even desirable to me. It was no longer about giving up and settling for an adoption. It started to be about giving a disadvantaged child a chance. Then it became more a question of children’s equality in God’s eyes, and our responsibility to start a family no matter the method. It’s really a mix of both those things. Now when I think of adoption versus other methods we could have tried with a fertilization specialist, all I know is that there is 100% certainty that we could bring a child out of a poverty-stricken nation and give him a better life here.

I’ve been at this point for a while now. We won’t be a family who couldn’t have “our own”. We will have our own. Like I wrote above, parenthood isn’t about DNA – it’s much more than that. I hope people get that. My sister who adopted last year has told us of people who don’t. They stand in grocery lines, seeing the attention that the little black girl gets, and feel they have to make snarky remarks about how Brangelina has made adoption trendy now. I’m sure we’ll get a few of those, but you can bet I’ll speak up if I need to. It’s just one of those things not everybody understands fully, but that’s ok.

My wife and I will be posting updates throughout the process at TheRealBlairFamily.com.

Work it out

It’s funny how things just work out.

You can anticipate what you think will happen, maybe justify why you want it to happen, and then it happens in an entirely different way.  You can tell yourself that certain things shouldn’t have happened, but then you see that they actually happened for your good.  You can puzzle and puzz, till your puzzler is sore, only to one day realize that the pieces fit together like you never had imagined.

All these “you cans” are pictures of my experiences, of course.  All too many times I’ve found myself wondering why something had to happen the way it did.  Why was I supposed to learn that the hard way?  Did I learn anything at all?

I’m beginning to change the questions I ask because I want an answer that is forward looking.  Those other questions dwelt too much on the past, too much on the why’s.  I am beginning to acknowledge that things happened the way they did because…well, just because.  The fact that I know something more about myself now, because of what happened, is enough for me to move forward.  So what do I know?

I know there’s something to be said for playing to my strengths.  I have been given certain talents and abilities.  Others I was most emphatically not given.  Why, I don’t know, but I really no longer care because my strengths are enough to take me precisely where I want to go.  So maybe I still feel this occasional need to prove to myself that I can do something whose gift to do so was so generously bestowed upon everyone except me, but that doesn’t mean I have to pursue it.

I know that others know better than me.  Most of the time, April.  All those ideas, certainties, and pieces of ‘undebatable’ knowledge tend to jumble around so much in one’s head that the dust clouds one’s vision.  Sometimes you need  someone to rain on your dust cloud (in a good way of course), and identify what should have been obvious.  There is untold value in an intelligent second or third party in one’s life.

Finally, I know that things will work out as designed.  Thankfully, I know that they have been designed by a Master Architect, and now I just need to follow the drawings as best I can.  None of this “what might happen if I go that way instead of this way”.  Just more of “this seems to be the best way, now I’ll make the best of it”.  Wow, it sounds so easy.  What might have happened if I had always thought that way.

Wrongo.

I was about to fall into that trap again,see.  What matters now is that I knows what I didn’t knows, and that’s good enough for me.  So here’s to the knowledge that things will work out, that they have worked out, and that I can make them work out if I stay true to myself and the Designer.

Word.

Mex-Am Drug Problem

It’s sad to me to see all the nasty stuff that is going on down in ol’ Mexico. Those who know me know why I have a soft spot for that country – I lived there for a couple years as a missionary for my church. Living in another country while engaged in a work of that nature gives you a different perspective on its people. Especially so since that country is Mexico and many people in the states seem to have an opinion on what they think that country is.

That’s an aside from my reason for writing this post,though.  I just read what Hillary Clinton said about the drug violence in Juarez and all along the border – that the U.S. shares the blame for what is happening because of our demand for drugs.  I agree with her.  I think her point is very logical, but when I read down through the comments, I could hardly believe some of the things I saw.

Let me say first that this article came from a website called “One News Now“, a site that I have been receiving regular email updates from for a while now.  I gradually got the impression that this site was a so called “Christian site” because many of the views were extreme right and often referenced clergy from various Christian churches.  I read the articles as I would read any other, knowing the source from where they came.  I rarely read the comments to these articles.  I think today was the second time I have ever done so.

It was pretty incredible reading comments that immediatly discounted what Clinton had to say because of her character, family, or political affiliation.  A lot of these commenters made the argument that this liberal, anti-American, witch Hillary Clinton was selling out her country and blaming other country’s problems on our people.  Many interpreted her comments as though she said we deserve all the blame for Mexico’s drug woes.  That we should not hold the people of Mexico responsible; it’s all our fault.  Then they proceeded to insist that were the borders completely sealed off, we would be isolated from the drug problem.  Build a wall, it seems, and our drug problems would be over.

I am no big fan of Hillary Clinton, but what she said was right on.  Can we deny that there is HUGE demand for drugs in the U.S.?  Absolutely not.  Where there is huge demand, will supply not find its way to meet it, one way or another?  Absolutely.  How then can these people say that we are not at least partially to blame for this crisis?  This is not an issue to be politicized.  It is simply confronting a problem that is responsible for the deaths of I don’t know how many people in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere, and having the courage to admit that we helped create that problem.

By admitting this, nobody is saying that we are blaming the American people for Mexico’s problems.  That’s just political crap that acts as a distraction.  The truth is that we must start fixing it by cleaning up the demand end.  Yes, we should do other things like securing the border to stop drugs from coming in.  We should continue to cut away at the branches, but we have to attack the root with much more force.  That’s the long term solution.  It’s a hard fight against a lot of druggies, but it’s the lasting solution.  Mexican drug lords will continue to satisfy our insatiable demand, and when their government gets in their way, they won’t roll over.  Too much drug money is at stake for them.

One commenter said that it is very un-Christian to say that we should wash our hands of Mexico’s problems.  I agree with her.  Work needs to be done on both sides.  Let’s not let the fact that the statement was made by a liberal like Hillary Clinton get in our way of seeing it for what it is.  That is, if you are one of those naturally inclined to disagree with her, like many of us are.

Tags:Mexico, Hillary Clinton, One News Now, Mexican drug violence