orichalcum

My college, as well as many others, had a policy of not reporting or allowing the newspapers to extensively cover student suicides. In part, of course, this was meant to save its reputation; no one wants to send their kids to a place where undergrads are regularly killing themselves. But there was another, and more legitimate reason. Many very depressed, lonely, insecure people who are contemplating suicide very much want attention and affirmation. If a suicide victim is made into a tragic martyr, other vulnerable people may see their act as a success rather than a failure - they got publicity and group mourning and lots of attention.

I'm not criticizing Bristol Palin or her fiance's decision to keep and raise their child. That's their business. But in defense of her mother's candidacy, it appears that the Republican National Convention delegates are cheering her on and celebrating her and her choices. The boy in question will appear with the Palin family on stage tonight, having been flown out by the campaign. She's being held up as a role model for keeping her baby.

Frankly, this worries me - just as the coverage of Jamie Lynn Spears did and to some extent the movie "Juno" - because we should not in any way be glorifying teen pregnancy in this country. Yes, these girls - and I do mean girls - are making difficult choices now that they have been faced with a very hard situation. But it's not a good thing that they're pregnant in the first place! If these girls had been more responsible (one way or another) in the first place, they wouldn't be having to deal with the consequences of abortion, adoption, or becoming a mother while still a teenager themselves.

Figuring out how to treat teen mothers is difficult. I don't like the other traditional extreme of kicking them out on the streets or shutting them up in nunneries, obviously. I don't want public shaming, just a lack of positive coverage. I really worry about the lonely 15-year-old girl with a boyfriend who refuses to wear condoms, who reads about the Palins in People Magazine next week and thinks, "wow, see, everyone loves and supports her for having a kid! And her really cute hockey star boyfriend is going to marry her now, and they'll live happily ever after! Maybe my life would be better if I got pregnant too!"

Because, for most girls, it simply won't. And the RNC delegates and the media are acting extremely irreponsibily and unthoughtfully if they make her into a teen heroine.

So, one of the newest and latest Palin controversies is that she attended a sermon at her church two weeks ago given by the founder of Jews for Jesus.

That's not the weird part, from my perspective.
Abraham Foxman, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, is on record in the article defending her and Jews for Jesus on the grounds that, "Protestant evangelizing to Jews was entirely different from Catholics praying for Jewish conversion, which the ADL has sharply criticized. They did not have the Inquisition. They did not go on a Crusade. They did not kill Jews for 2,000 years,” Foxman said. “They have a belief; they’re entitled to their belief.”

Now, I don't like denouncing my own denomination, but I'm a historian. Protestants couldn't have killed Jews for 2000 years, or gone on a Crusade, because _they've only been around for 500 years._" (And what does the Crusade have to do with anti-Semitism, in any case?)

And during those 500 years, well, a lot of Protestants attacked and killed a lot of Jewish people, just as Catholics and Russian Orthodox worshipers and all sorts of other people. Various Protestant churches have publicly repented for this, rightly so, but so has the Catholic Church. If you're going to get upset at people evangelizing your congregants because of their religion's past history, making an exemption for Protestants seems pretty darn hypocritical.

On a lighter note...

Goods: Mac has been starting to use words to describe the past or present, rather than just demand future goods (still 90% of his words). Sometimes, this is slightly embarassing. The other day, he demanded the phone when I was chatting with stone_and_star: "Give me phone! Give me hi!" Eventually, I gave him the phone.

"Hi, stone_and_star! I poop in my diaper!"

Sometimes, his speech is more illuminating. Yesterday, I asked him, "What did you do at school today? Did you play with J.?"
"I kiss a girl!" he answered.
I have not been able to get any more of the story from him, and forgot to ask his teacher, sadly.

Bads:
So that's the fun part. On the down side, Mac gave me a few more white hairs yesterday and a lot of terror. The first was retroactive paranoia; I went to put him in his car seat, and discovered that it wasn't attached to anything...he can't unbuckle himself from the seat, but he has successfully unbuckled the seat from the car seatbelt.

So I moved him to a side seat, rebuckled it in carefully, and set back from school. We got stuck in horrible rush hour traffic, and about halfway, Mac started wailing and crying "I want Daddy." Of course, I needed to focus on driving, so couldn't do anything. He decided to take matters into his own hands, and unlocked and opened the right rear door of the car slightly. In extremely slow traffic, when I was in the left lane. Yes, I thought I had the child locks on; this is a new car and either I didn't do it correctly or it can be manually bypassed.

After way too long of not being able to move, I was able to make a very slow, gentle left turn and pull over to the side of the road. Mac, of course, started screaming and wailing as soon as I closed the door on him.

I may still be recovering from the adrenalin crash afterwards. This is the first time where Mac's ingenuity has not just been slightly worrisome, but actively dangerous. It was pretty scary.

Eowyn, meanwhile, continues to be her eager hyper-excited self; she was very happy about getting much petting from amethyst73 and her husband over the weekend.