Jujitsu Lessons Better

I just took my daughter for her first jujitsu lesson today and she loved it. Did pretty good for the first time; as well as a few of the yellow belts.

I've been waiting until she was squared away on her swimming lessons before starting her on some self-defense lessons--part of which gave her motivation to do better at swimming, because she wanted to learn some martial arts.

Since her mother and I are teaching her right from wrong--and are relying on God to make it sink in--we're as confident as any parent can be that she'll do the right thing as she gets older. After all, she's not some highly-evolved animal that can't think, reason and control herself.

And these martial arts lessons will help ensure that she's able to defend herself from any bad guys who have ill intent toward her, giving her father much greater peace of mind as she grows older and will be spending more time on her own out in the world.

Between training her to do the right thing and make the right choices, and getting her trained to prevent the bad guys from forcing their "choices" on her, I just don't think she'll have much need for Governor Rounds' free HPV vaccination...

Stiffing the Taxpayers for What We Should Accomplish On Our Own

There's a lot of discussion going on over at the South Dakota War College (and several of the SD blogs) about Governor Rounds' plan to give free (free at the taxpayers expense) HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) vaccinations to the girls of South Dakota.

For those who may not be familiar with HPV, it's a sexually transmitted disease that already infects about 20 million people, and can cause cervical cancer.

Conservatives don't like the idea of this vaccination because they fear it will promote promiscuity by short-circuiting one of the natural consequences of sex outside of marriage. Liberals (predictably) ballyhoo conservatives as mean and wanting to sexually oppress women.

This debate is similar to the one about AIDS and AIDS research. Why do we need to spend billions on a disease that can be eradicated by simply ACTING MORALLY? If you don't do drugs and don't have sex outside of marriage, AIDS would go away pretty quick. And, gee, moral restraint doesn't cost a dime. But no, I guess it's worth billions of dollars to us to be able to screw whatever we want whenever we want and in whatever way we want, huh?

Besides, it doesn't even protect against all strains of HPV. And it doesn't protect against many other STDs such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, or AIDS. It therefore stands a high likelihood of instilling a false sense of security which may result in greater suffering from those STDs that promiscuous people remain vulnerable to.

One of the comments somewhere on one of the blogs makes, I think, the best point of all. If you want to come up with a vaccine which will do what simple discipline will accomplish for free, then have at it. But should the taxpayers pay for it? I don't think so.

If you do think so, then why not have the state pay for every vaccination--after all, most diseases (mumps, measles, etc.) don't require immoral behavior to get them. So the case for taxpayer funding for these diseases is even greater. Of course, socialists out there would LOVE that idea anyway, because they believe the government should do everything for people, alleviating them from the responsibility of doing anything for themselves or paying for anything themselves, or even thinking for themselves. But I'm not one of them.

If you plan on not teaching your daughter to be sexually responsible and wait until marriage, and if you plan on not instilling the kind of values in her that will prompt her to seek a husband of like values, then go ahead and take the lazy way, ignore responsibility, and just send the taxpayers the bill.

Second Quiz More Accurate

The second quiz posted by South Dakota Politics today was considerably more accurate. That's almost certainly due to the fact that the questions were more straight-forward with a lot less "loaded" meaning in them.

I came down pretty much where I expected to on this one. And unlike liberals, who are almost always afraid to admit what they believe, I'm proud to be a "hard-core conservative."

Political Quizzes May Not Be Accurate

South Dakota Politics posted a link to a political ideology quiz this morning. I've taken one or two of these in the past, so I thought I'd take it for a spin.

First off, I was a bit frustrated by some of the questions, especially on the first page. It had a lot of "well, not really any of these apply." They were the kind of question where the bias/slant of the questioner was pretty clear, and to answer one way placed you in their camp, but to answer the other way was to place you in a camp that you didn't really agree with either. In other words, the questions were loaded with extremely biased suppositions, or at least that had to be assumed, given the politically correct nature of our society these days.

Example: Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races. Well, no, not based on race alone. But Western civilization (which is primarily white) is superior to all others. To answer yes paints you as a racist, plus it's incorrect, because no "race" is superior because of their race. But to say no is to ignore the achievements of Western civilization, and like it or not, typically Western civilization is (rightly or wrongly) tied to the white race.

Another example: No one chooses his or her country of birth, so it's foolish to be proud of it. Being able to choose the country of your birth has nothing to do with whether you should be proud of it. Being proud of your country has to do with the merits of your country. I've often said that if there was something better going out there, I'd leave the U.S. in a New York minute--but there isn't. I wasn't born in South Dakota, but I'm proud to live here and to call myself a South Dakotan. Why? Because, though I wasn't born here, I like it MUCH better than the state in which I was born.

Another example: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Often, but not always. And sometimes only in certain situations and for a short duration. Example: Iraq. We helped Iraq in their war against Iran because we saw Iran as the greater threat (especially since they had taken over our embassy and held our people hostage). But they were never truly our "friends."

Page 2 was better, but...

It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product. It's neither sad nor glad. It's merely the meeting of an economic demand. If there was no demand, do you think companies would waste their time bottling water?

Those with the ability to pay should have the right to higher standards of medical care . They shouldn't have the "right" to it. But there's nothing wrong with them having access to a higher standard of medical care. A "right" is a politically charged word, because though a "right" originally meant something that was inherent to all human beings and unaffected by external forces, it now means that if you determine someone has a "right" to something, then all of society must bend to ensure that every individual has access to this manufactured "right."

Results:

I don't consider this to be completely accurate (perhaps due to it's impossible-to-answer-accurately answers) because I came down significantly to the Left of Margaret Thatcher (actually coming in somewhere around Jacques Chirac), which I doubt since she's one of my most admired leaders (right up there with Reagan) and Chirac I mildly loath.

Why We Left the Episcopal Church

I read an interesting piece at Virtue Online yesterday (an Anglican publication). It was written by Rev. John Yates and Os Guinness, two men who belong to a church in Virginia (one of several churches) that left the Episcopal denomination over the leadership's devotion to liberalism over the Bible.

They get right to the heart of why many churches are leaving the Episcopal denomination, and while some may be surprised, the ordination of a homosexual bishop isn't really at the heart of it:

It is not a "leftward" drift in the church. It is not even primarily ethical -- though the ordination of a practicing homosexual as bishop was the flash point that showed how far the repudiation of Christian orthodoxy had gone. The core issue for us is theological: the intellectual integrity of faith in the modern world. It is thus a matter of faithfulness to the lordship of Jesus, whom we worship and follow.

This really gets to the heart of the issue: a failure to remain true to their faith. If they had, then they would have never embraced a position that says homosexuality is normal, natural and health...and that God approves of it. The Bible is as clear as it can be that this is a practice God finds abhorrent--it radically violates His design for human sexuality.

The authors of this piece have an interesting term to describe the plague infecting many denominations, churches, and Christian individuals today:

Episcopal revisionism negates the authority of faith. The "sola scriptura" ("by the scriptures alone") doctrine of the Reformation church has been abandoned for the "sola cultura" (by the culture alone) way of the modern church. No longer under authority, the Episcopal Church today is either its own authority or finds its authority in the shifting winds of intellectual and social fashion -- which is to say it has no authority.

Sola Cultura. A very apt term for what is going on. Christians who should look to the Scriptures as the determiner of what is right and wrong, instead looking to culture for the answers.

How upside down can these mixed-up people be??? The church is supposed to guide and enlighten culture, not the other way around. Remember the term about the blind leading the blind? That's what you have now, and these morally bankrupt people who call themselves Christians have no idea that they're being led around by the nose by the very people they should be helping to find the truth.

When denominations, churches or individuals turn away from the Bible and look to anything else for truth--especially the fickle, shallow culture--they're going to end up with the sad state of moral anarchy that is looming over our culture today. A state of anarchy that will certainly destroy everything that makes Western civilization the stable, successful thing it has been.

All Sex Outside of Marriage is "Unprotected"

Mona Charen had an informative column on TownHall.com a couple of days ago dealing with "the sexual free-for-all that prevails on American campuses and throughout American life." The column quotes from the work of Dr. Miriam Grossman in her new book "Unprotected."

She describes a 19-year-old, "Heather," who is depressed. She has a "friend with benefits," but only with the help of psychotherapy is she able to acknowledge that the relationship is causing her pain. She'd like to do things with him, like see movies or go out for dinner, but he is interested only in sex.

Here is another example:

Another student, "Olivia," is devastated after her first serious boyfriend breaks up with her. Her grades suffer, she weeps constantly and suffers a relapse of an eating disorder, making herself vomit up to six times a day. "'Why, doctor,' she asked, why do they tell you how to protect your body -- from herpes and pregnancy -- but they don't tell you what it does to your heart?'"

And another:

"Stacey" is paying a heavy price. An athlete and vegetarian who avoided preservatives, sodas and nicotine, and prided herself on discipline and a low body mass index, Stacey showed up at the health service after repeatedly cutting
her forearms.

And of course the dangers of promiscuity (or even limited sex outside of marriage) carry the risk of STDs:

Stacey, it seems, had been diagnosed with HPV, a sexually transmitted disease. And while college health brochures and women's magazines suggest that the virus is no big deal, that's rubbish. In some cases it can lead to cancer. In every case it requires time-consuming and emotionally draining tests. And 43 percent of college women get it. Stacey's strain can lead to cancer, so she must be tested every six months for the rest of her life. Chlamydia, which is difficult to detect and cure, can cause infertility. Each year, 3 million women are treated for it. An unknown number never get treatment.

This kind of sexual behavior takes a toll not only on women, but men, too. Although admittedly it hits women harder because despite the assertions of feminists to the contrary, women are far more "hard wired" by their Creator to seek emotional attachment through sex.

The "free love" that began to be touted in the 60's, and still lauded by sexual anarchists, isn't "free" at all. It may look like it's coming at no cost, with no strings attached, but sooner or later, the physical, emotional and spiritual cost becomes evident. And it's a pretty high price.

Parents and society should be sending the message of sexual responsibility (i.e. waiting until marriage and keeping it within marriage) instead of parents who are too "enlightened" to teach values to their children, or a society that can't even have a 5-minute run of commercials without allusions to sex.