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| Has anyone else noticed that the Olympics are sponsored by really unhealthy things. Coke. McDonalds. Budweiser. I'm pretty sure that most of the athletes have never seen a Big Mac up close. | | |
| So I've done it. I became so engrossed in Facebook that I abandoned xanga. Well, I'm back. My commitment has been renewed! Well, renewed at least until school starts and I get crazy busy again. This school year our enrollment is down. In order to keep my full time status I will be teaching two sections of Spanish 1 and supervising ISS to round out my teaching load. The good news is that I will have far less to do outside of school since all of my grading can be completed during my conference blocks. I'm going to start on my master's since I'll have all of that boring time in ISS to read. The dilemma is that I'm not very intimidating. I can't scare the class-skipping, non-ID-wearing, cell-phone-using offenders into sitting still and doing their work by my mere physical presence. I'm working on ways to be scarier. I've considered hanging a black belt across the front of my desk. I'm going to try to spread a rumor that I killed my first husband and have lots of "friends" who covered it up for me. Ben suggested that I put a chalk outline on the floor every morning and be on the floor trying to clean it up as the kids walk in. While these are all very good ideas I don't have a black belt, I don't want anyone to start an actual investigation into any previous marriages I may or may not have had and I'm not sure I want to re-create a chalk outline every morning. What I need from you, xanga audience, is a few more suggestions for making me seem scary. | | |
| So I was reading Newsweek today. An editorialist wrote about a short documentary on YouTube in which a cameraman questioned protesters at an abortion clinic. If abortion was actually made illegal, what should the penalty be for a woman who has one anyway? There has been a lot of talk about penalties for the doctor who performs the abortion, but the woman did make a "choice" (as we have heard...a lot).
I can say confidently that I believe that a fetus is just as human as I am. Because of that, I believe that doing something to stop that fetus from living is murder. I have a hard time seeing it as an issue of a woman having control over her own body. Justice Ginsberg (and the Newsweek writer) would be very disappointed in me as a woman. I am a young married woman who does not feel ready (financially or by way of maturity) to have a baby. If I were surprised, I like to think that I'd find the resources to find a way to either raise the child or find a better home for him or her.
On the other hand, I often think that I must be missing something. As a teacher of some students living in poverty, I see that some people just don't have those resources. Who am I to make (or encourage the making of) laws telling a woman who is not in a good place to have children that she can't kill the fetus before it continues the cycle of poverty. Then again, I wonder how many women who seek abortions are frightened high schoolers and how many are logical women in their 20's who are responsible enough to raise a child.
I suppose I had always thought that if laws were made against abortion, people would just stop having them. I hadn't even considered the fact that people break the law all the time. So what do you do with the woman who commits murder against her unborn child? Wouldn't a woman plead insanity appealing to her desperate state of mind? If all abortions made illegal could a woman plead self-defense? The unborn child was threatening her physical safety or her mental health because of how the baby was conceived.
This was a really long post, but the question bothered me today because I thought I had considered all the facets of the issue. What do you think? If abortion was made completely illegal, should the woman be penalized for having an abortion performed or just the doctor who commits the act? If she is culpable, what should the punishment be?
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| OK. I can take a hint. I left if for a month. I'll go ahead and put off my bid for congress until...I find better friends. :) We heard good news from one of the seminaries Ben applied to. We're still waiting on news from other schools. We're still not sure where we'll end up next year. I'd been feeling really strange about the whole idea of leaving. I've been unsettled about it, but I couldn't quite identify exactly what the feeling was. Today I discovered it. It's fear. I'm afraid. After all of my fancy ideas about going on a big adventure. Here's the chance and I'm trembling in my boots. I discovered my fear while I was going through some old files on my computer today. I'm cleaning out some of the really old stuff. I came across my speech from my high school baccalaureate. I had almost completely forgotten about it. I had written 2 speeches. I opened the files expecting a trip down memory lane. I anticipated something trite and as sentimental as a high schooler's final goodbye to her senior class of 80 students could sound. Instead I found the exact words I needed most to hear. God used my words to my fellow seniors in 2002 to calm my fears six years later. I talked about how we could trust God because he knows our futures. I wasn't worried at all about what was to come. At 17 I was so much braver than I am now. I could justify my fear to myself by saying that I had fewer responsibilities when I was 17. Does that mean that God has gotten less powerful as my responsibilities have increased? By no means! (to quote Paul) What a great example of God's timing paying off twice. What comfort to know that six years ago He already knew what I would need to hear on April 19, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.! Wow. If He will take care of a detail that specific just to make me feel better when I wasn't even trusting Him in the first place, how much more will He take care of the big issues. Just because He loves me. | | |
| We went to the capitol building last week with the theatre students for Fine Arts Advocacy Day. It made me miss all of that political stuff that I was so crazy about a few years ago. I really liked it there. It led me to some questions about the distant future. So... If I ran for congress (someday in the distant future) would YOU vote for me? | | |
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