Outgoing Mail

Outgoing mail this morning:

Thank you note to good ol' Roberta, age 93. We love that sprightly gal.

BD Note to friend. Home-made, took less than 30 mins.

Third: another apology note ( ! ), this one related to AmZyg's moral inventory theme. Hearkens back to a gathering in our church parking lot to welcome home a daughter after her two weeks away on a church missions trip.  The first one off the bus was a paid staff member whose t-shirt sported a loud and large ABERCROMBIE & FITCH across the upper chest.  My mouth spang into action, as it is sorely wont to do. Pulled my jaw up off the pavement and (prob'ly) waved my finger, "You wore THAT all the way home, representing our church?"

My dear daughter, ashamed and embarrassed, scolded me. I've never been off the hook, really.  Now and then, I'd stew over [recognize the theme?] feeling misunderstood, and ponder how I might educate my kids and this pastor re: the horrific reality of who these AF people are. {uh, isn't your son one now? cosmic jokes abound...} Was I out of  bounds to expect everyone to just KNOW how orgy-istic Abercrombie is?  To expect staff on a baptist payroll to just KNOW that FocusOnTheFam staged protests in 2003 over catalogs that went from vaguely pornicious to vulgarly pornicious?

No. You were just out of bounds for wanting to shame someone in public.

Obtaining that 2003 catalog has been on my mind ever since. Seemed like an obvious means by which to defend myself, but I only got around to doing the Amazon search this February.  Had a brilliant idea to just print out one offending page, since the whole obscene thing runs $15, so I did, & then left the ugly thing out on my kitchen desk. It got just the disgusted reaction I expected: various kids and hubby kept flipping it upside down so they wouldn't have to look at it. {OS, the AF sell-out, prob'ly wasn't one of them.} I grilled them, "Instead of hiding the image, why don't you become outraged and vow to alert AF that you oppose this?" No response.

I guess they oppose my outrageous outrage more than they oppose porn, and I suppose I have myself to blame for that.  It's not about porn, it's about my demeanor. My anger management issues  have spawned a litter of porn permissive offspring. Great.

Nevertheless.

I finally ran across Mr. AF t-shirt wearer one day last week, and what'ya know, the print-out was actually in a file I was carrying.  I begged him for a minute of time, showed him the despicable scene, explained that I'd taken a lot of heat for my alarm that day, and asked him to indulge me in my desire BE UNDERSTOOD. He was nonplussed; like he was used to seeing that kind of junk all day everyday. He shrugged and described how he DID actually walk out of AmericanApparel recently after seeing their in-store posters.  Ah! He maybe gets it. SOMEONE gets it. I wanted to tell him  about my anti-American Apparel billboard "campaign" last summer, but he'd already had enough of me. And I didn't want to learn his protest was just a one-time thing, that he probably just orders their stuff on the web now...  Accommodation to 'undress' is just the way of the world, and as the world goes, so goes my church, my friends, my kids... ug.

(This IS the man, btw, whose single greatest contribution to OS's life was to persuade him that guys should walk around the house in only speedo underwear. Seriously. He comes home from a weekend retreat strutting his stuff in brand-new Hanes, scoffs at my exasperation, and, well, another battle ensued that day... Least he didn't wear the G-Unit cap from the same pastor, as he strutted.)

Nevertheless, a written apology was called for.  It was insensitive to give him no warning that I was about to flash a page of porn in his face, and it was insensitive to force his attention when he was in a hurry to get somewhere.  And it's definitely childish to feel defensive over the matter five years after the fact.  But AmZyg admits, that's just who she is. A happy four year old who's grudge holder setting is stuck on Overlydramatic Overdrive.

With the clock ticking on my nine month count down, I still have a few more amends to complete:

-There's the college room-mate to whom I owe a twenty seven year old apology for picking a fight over how to squeeze the toothpaste tube. We refused to speak to each other after that. She lives where? Irvine?
-There's that university professor I lied to about finishing my senior project, so technically, I did not really earn my B.A.
-And then there's the YMCA summer camp director who I finally chatted with last month, but who, when I asked to meet, hung up on me!

Oh, I hate my life.  Ya know that previous post about "getting prayer back"? Lie.

Mostly.

Stand True Ministries: No one says it better

An answer to people who are asking me why we want to completely defund Planned Parenthood when they do so many other good things.

It seems many people don’t understand the full scope of what Planned Parenthood is; the name itself is so deceiving that is causes confusion.  Planned Parenthood has done a good job of painting themselves as an organization that is there to help women and keep them safe; nothing can be further from the truth. Lets start with the something that should automatically discount everything they do: abortion.  I hate using the word abortion because it is an attempt to sanitize the act of killing a human child. Planned Parenthood also uses terminology like “terminate a pregnancy” in their attempt to dehumanize the child in the womb. Planned Parenthood not only specializes in abortion, but they are the nation’s largest provider of abortion. In 2009 Planned Parenthood killed over 25% of the babies who were killed by abortion in the US.  They are so focused on abortion that they mandated earlier this year that all of their affiliates must provide abortion. The fact is that even if they just killed one child per year, we should have nothing to do with them, let alone the 332,278 abortions Planned Parenthood claims to have done in 2009.  If we were talking about an organization that killed three-year-olds as part of their business, no mater how minute a part, this topic would not even be open for discussion. Planned Parenthood also claims that the taxpayer money does not actually pay for abortions.  This is an insane argument, as the money still goes to the organization and the organization is killing babies.  If that taxpayer money helped pay for the rent on the building where the abortions take place, the electricity that powered the suction machine used to do the abortion and the salary of the “doctor” who performs the abortion, then taxpayer money is paying for abortions. How about birth control? Doesn’t Planned Parenthood offer free or cheap birth control to women who cannot afford it?  This is another question that many people have asked me lately. There are several problems with this argument to keeping Planned Parenthood funded.  First of all, it really makes no sense to me why I should have to fund other peoples sex lives.  Planned Parenthood would argue that the government needs to stay out of people’s bedrooms, and that they have no business knowing what goes on or regulating sexual activity.  If that is the case, then how can they argue that the government should use our tax dollars to fund what goes on in the bedroom? The other issue with this argument is that fact the much of this birth control can be abortifacient in nature, meaning it can cause early abortions. Every form of chemical birth control has a mechanism that makes the uterine wall hostile to embryos, which causes early abortions when break-through ovulation occurs.  For more detailed information on this topic go to: http://www.epm.org/resources/2010/Feb/17/short-condensation-does-birth-control-pill-cause-a/ Yes, Planned Parenthood also does provide some other services such as STD testing, although they have now renamed it STI testing.  In their pursuit to lesson the stigma of promiscuity and youth sexual activity, they now changed the term to Sexually Transmitted Infection.  The word infection, like abortion, is a sanitized and minimized term meant to lesson any stigma. Let’s not forget the beloved founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.  Sanger is still honored by Planned Parenthood every year with the Margaret Sanger Award.  This alone should be enough to make everyone’s hair stand on end, as Sanger was an ardent eugenicist and hate-filled racist. The racism was also documented in some of the first undercover stings preformed by Live Action.  Phone calls to Planned Parenthood asking to donate money to kill black babies were received happily.  Over the past several years, videos were released by Live Action showing Planned Parenthood covering up child rape, sex trafficking and pimps seeking services for 13-year-old prostitutes. Margaret Sanger’s Racist Comments here: http://wp.me/pKipa-7W See Live Actions Video Stings here: http://www.liveaction.org/traffick I will offer another simple analogy. Imagine if you were donating money to your neighbor who was handing out free food for poor people in your neighborhood.  This might be one of the only sources of affordable healthy food for many people in your neighborhood.  Then one day you find out this neighbor also was giving food to several child molesters so they can keep the children they are molesting alive.  He is also killing some of the toddler children of parents who no longer want to take care of those kids. Would you still donate to him because you wanted to make sure the good work he was doing could continue?  Would you be against law enforcement shutting him down because then those poor people could not get food? Think about this: Planned Parenthood murders young children — over 300,000 of them in 2009.  Planned Parenthood has been caught red-handed offering help to pimps and sex traffickers and should be shut down and investigated for criminal charges. So my answer is yes; even though there are things they do that could be perceived as beneficial or good, I want Planned Parenthood defunded and shut down. They remind me of a dentist standing out on the street corner after school handing out “free” candy every day, knowing that when the kids have tooth decay, he will recoup all of his candy expenses on their fillings. For Christ I stand, Bryan Kemper