What has no wings yet flies swiftly and cannot be imprisoned?

It was a weekend to remember, the second in a row for me. A weekend whose chief feature was that what I expected was almost never what actually happened.

The plan was to visit my brother in Iowa, because my niece and nephew-in-law, missionaries in China, are home on a short leave. The original plan was for me to ride down with another family member who was coming from further north.

But he had car trouble, and had to cancel. So I loaded up Mrs. Hermanson and turned her nose south.

In northern Iowa, near Mason City, she lost power (though the engine continued running). I pulled her over to the shoulder, and phoned AAA. Continue reading My further adventures →

I don’t usually tell you what I do offline. I’m sure enough connections have been made for an investigator to find me, so maybe I’m just kidding myself about how much distance really have between here and, well, where I am. But I want to point out some articles I’ve written this week on the men’s conference I have been working.

CBMC held a great men’s conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last week with several solid speakers and a moving prayer and communion meeting on the snowy battlefield. Read the overview here. There are other short articles and videos, which you can reach from the Good News front page.

I won’t be posting the rest of this week, as I’m going out of town today on a family matter. See you next week.

You’ve probably seen it on the web today. Secretly filmed footage of a New Jersey Planned Parenthood manager, repeating recent history by explaining (to a man and woman claiming to be a pimp and a prostitute) ways to get STD testing, contraception and abortions for girls as young as fourteen. According to the description given, these fictional girls are obviously sex slaves illegally smuggled into the U.S. from other countries. The manager seems to have no qualms about telling them she doesn’t want to know various things, and giving advice on how to fool the physician’s assistant on site. “We all hate her.”

I won’t disagree with most of the conclusions drawn by various commentators. Certainly this is further evidence that Planned Parenthood, which should never have gotten government funding in the first place, ought to be cut off.

But I think I detect a deeper problem.

I don’t think Planned Parenthood’s organizational management is actively supportive of child sexual slavery. Whether this manager’s attitude is typical, I have no way of knowing.

But I think her behavior ought to be no surprise, given the nature of the enterprise.

Why would a modern, educated woman—certainly a feminist, since that’s part of Planned Parenthood’s brief—collude so easily in the degradation of little girls?

My guess is that she came to this gradually. It’s the result of a desensitization process. One every one of us experiences, to some extent or another, in our time.

The first time she saw the results of an actual abortion (I would imagine) she was shocked. Probably had a few bad nights.

But she told herself, “I mustn’t judge. It’s not for me to judge.”

The first time she encountered a fourteen year-old girl impregnated by her fifteen-year-old boyfriend, she probably frowned. Then she told herself, “It’s not for me to judge.”

When a fourteen-year-old girl who’d been impregnated by her 26-year-old boyfriend came in, she was tempted to call the police.

But hey, how could she judge in this situation, either? She didn’t know these people. And anyway, somebody might ask embarrassing questions about the last fourteen-year-old girl she’d treated off the record.

And so it goes. At each stage, past compromises lead to new compromises.

Eventually, she can see no moral lines at all. “There ain’t no right, there ain’t no wrong. There’s just things people do. It’s not for me to judge.”

In our age, the greatest sin is judging sexual behavior. You can judge the wearing of fur, and smoking, and using “offensive” words, but hands off sex. Any kind of sex. The kinkier, the more sacrosanct.

This is the disease of our age, and it will kill us if we don’t address it and change our thinking.

Looking for literary journal for the relatively new year? Here is a list of Bestselling Literary Journals from Amazon.com. Shameless marketing, you say? Why, thank you, I say.

To listen live to my interview tomorrow (see post below), go to this site and click on “Listen Live.”

I think that’ll do it.

Just a reminder. If you live in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, you can catch me live, in studio, being interviewed by the crack team of Mitch Berg (of Shot In the Dark) and Ed Morrissey (of Hot Air) tomorrow (Saturday) at 2:30 p.m. Central, on AM 1280, “The Patriot,” WWTC.

If you can’t catch me live, you can access the podcast here, once it’s posted. (I think you can listen live, too, but I’m not sure how that works.) My interview will be in the second hour.

Andrew Klavan does a video feature called “Klavan On the Culture” periodically, on his blog. I think this is my favorite so far. It’s about Good Intentions.

A comic strip I follow online used the word “fortnight” today.

It’s an odd word, “fortnight,” at least for an American. It means “two weeks,” of course. But we rarely use it over here because—let’s face it—it doesn’t take any less time or effort to say than “two weeks.”

Pragmatic people, we Yanks.

I can see the use of the word in situations where one is paid every two weeks, as so many of us are, though. It would be kind of cool to say, “I get paid fortnightly.” That saves a couple syllables off “I get paid every two weeks.”

But that can’t be the original reason the English use it. The word itself is very old, going back to times before anybody got a regular salary. Perhaps serfs in Olde England got their ration of lard fortnightly, or something.

Still, the word brings back one personal memory. The sort of thing that means nothing to anybody else in the world, but to me alone.

In the misty past, when I was but a callow lad, giveaway calendars were far more common than they are today. Nobody ever thought of having a store in the mall (malls did exist, even then) around Christmas to sell calendars, because everybody got all the calendars they needed from the grocery store, and the hardware store, and the drug store, and there was often a pile in church (Free! Take One!) supplied by the local mortuary. (I have a mortuary calendar for 2011, which I picked up in church this year. A blast from the past. Hadn’t seen that in years.)

Anyway, I remember one calendar my folks got somewhere one year around 1960. I think it may have come from a drugstore, but I’m probably wrong. It was a “Fortnight Calendar.” I’d never seen one of those before, and I’ve never seen one since. You turned the page every two weeks. We hung it in the “sun porch,” an enclosed porch with a lot of windows, where Dad kept his desk.

The fact that the calendar was laid out in a fortnight format wasn’t the only unusual thing about it. It also contained information. Every square had a notation of some historical event that had happened on that day. There were also little notes in the empty squares, containing obscure, random information.

I loved that calendar.

It was not replaced the following year. If my folks got a calendar from the same business, it was some different kind. People probably complained that they’d rather have something with a pretty picture.

Me, I never found anything to read that was as interesting to me as that calendar, until I finally got on the internet.

Now I think about it, though, I’m not entirely sure the fortnight calendar and the random information calendar were the same calendar at all. I may be conflating two memories.

“Conflating.” Also a word I’m fond of.

“I never was, am always to be,

No one ever saw me, nor ever will

And yet I am the confidence of all

To live and breathe on this terrestrial ball.”

I like this one. I got it right the first time I read it, but a week later I was off. What do you think?

Now, for C. N. Nevets’ sake, here’s an cheating riddle. Who succeeded the first Prime Minister of Australia?

In other news, I will be out most of this week, and though I will be online for part of it, I doubt I will be able to write for the blog. I hear that sigh.