I got all caught up in politics and movies and missed some important authors’ birthdays. February 25th was Cynthia Voight’s birthday–one of my favorite Young Adult authors, I really like Homecoming and Dicey’s Song and the other books about the Tillerman family. Voight has especially good characters, Here’s a website for teaching materials for her novels, but I always think it’s more fun just to read books, never did like filling out worksheets. ( I must admit that I sometimes make my kids do the study questions and the worksheets, but not nearly as often as they would have to in a classroom.)

February 26th was Victor Hugo‘s birthday. From some books I remember characters; from others I remember quotations–or at least try to remember quotations. From Les Miserables, I mostly remember scenes. Of course, there’s Jean Valjean being chased by Inspector Javert through the sewers of Paris and Jean Valjean the convict caught red-handed with the Bishop’s candlesticks and Monsieur the Mayor lifting the cart off the injured peasant and Thenardier looting the bodies of the dead soldiers after some battle (Waterloo?). The scene I usually remember first, though, is that of Thenardier’s children huddled inside Napoleon’s elephant statue.

The bourgeois in their Sunday clothes, who passed by the elephant of the Bastille, often said, eyeing it scornfully with their bulging eyes, “What’s the use of that?” It’s use was to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, the rain, to protect from the wintry wind, to spare from sleeping in the mud, which breeds fever and from sleeping in the snow, which breeds death, a little being with no father or mother, with no bread, no clothing, no sanctuary. Its use was to receive the innocent whom society repelled….This idea of Napoleon’s, disdained by men, had been taken up by God. What had been merely illustrious had become august…The emperor had a dream of genius; in this titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, brandishing his trunk, bearing his tower and making the joyous and vivifying waters gush out on all sides around him, he wanted to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he sheltered a child. (p. 957)

I also remember staying up until 2:00 AM when I was in college reading Les Miserables for the first time. I had an 8:00 AM class that morning, but it didn’t matter. It was worth the “hangover” to find out what would become of Cosette and Gavroche and Marius and Jean Valjean. Even though the Accuser pursues us to the ends of the earth, may we. too, be saved by His amazing grace.

I went to the NPR website and listened to the report I heard (on the way to dance practice) the other day. After listening carefully, I must admit that the NPR does use the terms related to therapeutic cloning correctly. The report talks about human embryos being produced and then stem cells being extracted from those embryos. The reporter and the reproductive cloning advocate who is quoted in the report both sound to me as if they are trying to make the dubious point that a human embryo cannot be a human baby because of its location–not implanted in the womb of a human mother. However, the reporter does quote a pro-life spokesman who is quite articulate in his opposition to any kind of cloning. Again, there is only one kind of cloning–the kind that creates a human embryo. Then, you decide whether to destroy the embryo or take care of it and allow it to grow up.
Oh, the reporter for NPR on this story, Joe Palca, does have a science education–well, sort of. He has a degree in psychology, and he spent a year studying “human clinical trials.” Maybe I’m the one who needs a degree in biology before I’m allowed to listen to this stuff.

Even most scientists do not understand that “therapeutic cloning does not create tissues or cells. It creates a cloned human embryo. That’s the science and it is biologically indisputable. Once the embryo comes into being, there are no further acts of cloning. All that remains is deciding what to do with the nascent human organism that cloning has created.” In other words, a human embryo is a human embryo no matter how it originates–as a clone or as a sexually fertilized egg. If you don’t believe in conceiving embryos in order to kill them and harvest their cells, then you shouldn’t believe in “therapeutic cloning.”

So my question is: how did we get to the point where most of the general public, even scientists who are supposed to know better, believe that therapeutic cloning produces a “cell” that can be destroyed or used for research or whatever whereas sexual fertilization produces an embryo that should not be wantonly destroyed or used simply for the purposes of research? I heard a report on NPR just a couple of weeks ago that indicated that the reporter believed in this exact false distinction.

So my next question is: should we require journalists to get an education in some discipline, say, math or biology or ethics or something so that they know something before they start telling the rest of us about whatever it is they’re writing about? Teachers are supposed to know history or science or some subject before they teach it, at the secondary level and beyond anyway. (I know, it doesn’t always work that way, but that’s a subject for another day.)

I’m reading two books right now–alternating according to mood. The first is called Caledonia, Legend of the Celtic Stone: An Epic Saga of Scotland and her People by Michael Phillips. It’s historical fiction, and I’m wondering, as usual, how historical the material in the book is. I’ll have to look it all up eventually. The story is set during various times in Scotland history, and then it has “flash-forwards” to an imaginary present day Britain. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to like it or not, but it’s interesting enough to keep reading.
My other book is Mayada: Daughter of Iraq (One Woman’s Survival under Saddam Hussein) by Jean Sasson. The title is self -explanatory. I am learning a lot more about Iraqi history than I knew before. It seems that the British were everywhere in the Middle East before and after WWI. And the British “created” the modern-day country of Iraq out of a portion of the old Ottoman Empire, combining Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and other groups into one fairly ungovernable country. Mayada, from the little I have read seems to led a privileged life in some ways, but the suffering under Saddam was equal opportunity. Several times in the first few pages of the book the author emphasizes that no one living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein knew when he or she might be accused of a crime and hauled off to the nearest torture chamber or prison. We have much to be thankful for and much responsibility to pray for those still living under cruel and tyrannical governments.

John Holzmann has an interesting post concerning the “gay marriage” controversy; he says he’s clueless as to what all the fuss is about. I think he’s just anti-HSLDA and Mike Farris, and since he received an alarmist letter (or email) from HSLDA alerting him to the danger that “gay marriage” poses to the homeschooling community, Mr. Holzmann is taking the opportunity to express his disdain for such fundraising tactics. However, he raises some valid points. If marriage and family have already been devalued by the prevalence of heterosexuals living together without benefit of marriage ceremony, why should we care if the government gives a couple of men or women a piece of paper so that they can wave it around and pretend to be married? Actully, I think it matters a lot, but maybe we should be able to articulate the reasons that it matters a little more clearly. Some thoughts:
1) Maybe civil marriage and Christian marriage should be two separate entities. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention could vote and say as a group that these are guidelines for performing a marriage for two people and then further proclaim that only under these circumstances will our churches perform marriage ceremonies. Then, if the United States of America or the State of Texas wants to recognize marriage between a man and his cow, they could do so, but it wouldn’t be a Christian marriage. Maybe this is what the churches should have done in regard to divorces long ago (similar to what the Catholic church does).

2) I still think that recognizing homosexual unions is NOT good public policy because two men living together in sin or two women living together in sin (let’s call a spade a spade) are not best suited to raise children and transfer vaues to the next generation. (It’s not the two women or the two men that are really the problem. Maiden aunts or or other same sex couples have raised children in the past and have done a good job. The problem is that the Bible says that the sexual relationship of homosexual couples is sinful, and if God says so, be sure there’s a reason for the prohibition.) Similarly, the state should encourage (but not require) traditional marriage relationships and family structures because these arrangements create a more stable society. Polygamy should be against the law because it exploits women and is not good for children. Homosexualygamy (it’s NOT marriage) should be against the law because homosexual relationships are notoriously unstable and are not good for children.

3)I agree with John Holzmann that all this has very little to do with homeschooling freedoms. Except that, as homeschoolers, we say generally that parents should have the right to direct the education of their own children. If we as a society are all mixed up as to who are the parents of any given child, we start to have problems. We already have custody battles between divorced parents arguing about how the children should be educated. Let’s add homosexuality iinto the mix and see how complicated it can get.

4) What is the state doing when it bestows a marriage certificate upon a couple? Is it not certifying that a marriage has already taken place? How can the state certify that a marriage, a union of one man and one woman, has taken place when no marriage has taken place? Isn’t this the idea behind some states’ recognition of common-law marriage? Obviously, a marriage has taken place between a man and a woman who live together, have children, and present themselves publicly as a married couple–whether a ceremony has been performed or not. What I’m getting at is that the State doesn’t marry people. Two people are married when they come together, Biblically, as “one flesh.” Since same sex couples cannot become “one flesh” in the Biblical sense, they are not married no matter what the mayor of San Faancisco thinks about it. So if that mayor or any other government official or entity wants to issue a certificate to say that Mr. X and Mr. Y have decided to live together in one house and play at being “married.” maybe we should let them do it. It’s stupid, but it’s a free country.

“Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
Author: George Macaulay Trevelyan, British historian and professor born on this day in 1876.

Is this true, or is it just one of those things that sounds witty when you first read it, but turns out to be not really? Obviously, a lot more people know how to read now than in the middle ages or in ancient times. Is the world better off with so many more educated people? In some ways, it is. People are still sinful. “All we like sheep have gone astray . . . ” Education brings with it more possibilities, more “scope for the imagination” as Anne of Green Gobles would say. Of course some of those imaginings and possibilities can be evil or simply not worthwhile, but many books are beautiful and enriching and intimations of the glory of God and His Word. Let’s not bemoan the fact that a vast (but ignorant) population is able to read but rather teach ourselves and our children and whoever else comes into our sphere of influence how to discern that which is pure and lovely and noble and of good report. So teaching them to read is good but incomplete; we must also teach them what to read.