Right Minded Online

On Father’s Day 2009, I’m pointing out something in which I actually agree with Barack Obama: the utmost need for responsible fathers.

Barack Obama got a basketball, his first name and ambition from his father. Little else.

The son gave back more than he received: a lifetime of ruminations about the man who abandoned the family, a memoir named “Dreams from My Father,” and endless reflections on his own successes and shortcomings as a parent of Sasha, 8, and Malia, 10.

As a candidate and now president, he’s been telling men what sort of father they should be. It’s become his Father’s Day ritual.

He’s asking American men to be better fathers than his own.

The president showcased fatherhood in a series of events and a magazine article in advance of Father’s Day this Sunday. He said he came to understand the importance of fatherhood from its absence in his childhood homes — just as an estimated 24 million Americans today are growing up without a dad.

Obama asks men to be better fathers than their own – Yahoo! News.

Reb Bradley has a book out describing how to train up a child to be a good, wholesome, responsible conservative.

“I noticed that all of the societal ills Rush talked about were really manifestations of people who really never grew up – never matured,” he explains. “Ultimately, that is what the worldview of liberalism is all about. And we wont escape its dire ill effects until we learn how to parent.”

Bradley contends that liberalism is the natural condition of the human heart and for people to be capable of self-government, they must be trained against their own nature.

“In this age of technology, one might say that liberalism is our default operating condition,” he writes.

“Throughout our childhoods, our parents must work hard and change our settings to keep us from operating in our default mode. If parents are successful, we enter adulthood with our new settings fully locked in. Left untrained, all children would grow up liberal in their outlook.”

Born Liberal author on C-SPAN.

Columnist Kathleen Parker discusses how liberal feminists celebrate Valentine’s Day.

But Valentine’s Day does matter because, no longer a holiday of hearts and flowers, it has become a feminist political vehicle in the gender wars. Think armada.

Usurped in 1998 by Eve Ensler and her vagina warriors — conscripts to Ensler’s blockbuster play “The Vagina Monologues” — Feb. 14 is now called “V-Day.” That stands for violence, victory and vaginas — not exactly a compelling prompt to uncork the Veuve Clicquot.

And so I am left wondering if there is anything at all in the world of liberal feminism which allows them to experience joy.

Along these lines, Bookworm over at The American Thinker, has a long, insightful essay on marriage, “Modern Love, American Style.”

While women of a certain generation were assured that they could “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, ever let you forget you’re a man,” the sad fact is that this glowing 1970s adulation for the new feminist woman falls apart in the face of a working mother’s fatigue and resentment. It turns out that, in the real world, it doesn’t work very well for most families if the husband continues to play Ward Cleaver, and brings home a paycheck, but the wife is expected to be both Ward and June, right down to the pearls and fresh-baked cookies. So many modern couples, therefore, fall back on traditional roles, a tradition that starts with marriage.

Sharon Cobb and I kinda sorta agree on something, which is noteworthy, because our areas of agreement so far are limited to four things: our support of Israel, rock-and-roll, sports, and photography. On everything else, we’re about 180^o out of phase.

Ms. Cobb left a comment to a blog post I made on Saturday about John Edwards’ new digs, which I used to make the point that rich liberals really don’t care about the poor. They just use the poor for political leverage.

At any rate, Sharon disagrees with that assertion, but does note that “What Edwards is saying is a lot of people don’t get the chance to obtain what he did.” Perhaps that is what he believes. The idealist in me hopes so.

Ms. Cobb further opines that “When we are all on equal footing for the basics, then we all have a chance of the American dream. But if you’re too sick to go to school and have no health insurance and your mother is beating you because she never wanted you to begin with, then that child is facing a lot more obstacles. I know I am getting redundant about this, but every child in America must have an equal chance to have love and happiness and education and health care. Invest in these things while they are young, and the vast majority of these kids will more than pay their fair share of taxes which we need to pay for initially.”

I sort of agree with that summation. The problem is that we Americans are never going to be on equal footing for the basics. But I would argue that we’re closer to such equality than any other nation on earth.

I wish more than anything that every child had the benefit of love, happiness, education, and health care. While one can make the argument that the taxpayers are already providing the latter two, the government can never supply love and happiness. The only guarantee is the right to pursue happiness, not happiness itself. I wish Congress could pass a bill today that would effect love and happiness upon everyone, but that, of course, is an impossibility. The best thing government can do is clear the pathway of obstacles that otherwise bar our pursuits.

I once wrote in an op/ed that you can trace just about every social ill we face as Americans back to the failure of men to be fathers to their children, and husbands to the mothers of those children.

And in one of my favorite op/ed pieces, “It’s time to end the war on poverty,” that I published on October 3, 2005, I noted that:

According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the U.S. in 1959 (the first year for which data are available) was 22.4%. By 1965, the year President Johnson declared war on poverty, the poverty rate had already fallen to 17.3%. The next year, it was 14.7%. In 2004, it was 12.7%. Since 1965, the poverty rate has never risen above 15.2%, or fallen below 11.1%. Clearly, the War on Poverty hasn’t worked. It’s time to end it.

A lack of wealth is not the problem. Going back to the Census Bureau, per capita income in 1967 (again, the first year for which such data are available) was $2,464, or $11,500 in 2003 dollars. In 2003, that figure was $23,276, having more than doubled during the intervening 36 years. So if our wealth production continues to increase, then why hasn’t the poverty rate been appreciably lowered?

The answer lies in the breakdown of the two-parent family. Using 2004 data, the poverty rate for people in married-couple families was 6.4%. The poverty rate for people in families with no wife present was 13.8%. And the poverty rate for people in families with no husband present was 30.5%.

In other words, a person living in a home headed by a single woman is nearly five times as likely to be impoverished than in a home headed by a married couple. And, of course, the percentage of families headed by married couples has fallen considerably since 1965. In that year, 87% of all families were married-couple families. By 2004, that number had fallen to 75%.

Thus, as per capita wealth has increased in the U.S., the number of individuals living in single-parent homes has increased so that our wealth-building has been offset by the breakdown of the nuclear family such that the poverty rate during the past four decades has remained largely unchanged. Throwing money at poverty has only treated its symptom — not the disease itself — and has instead produced unintended side effects, namely single parenthood.

We therefore do not need more government. We need more married-couple families. It’s so simple a concept that it’s often dismissed.

This finally brings me to the topic of this post — namely that education matters more than just about anything else if one is to even come close to realizing his God-given potential. (And everyone has God-given potential to do something useful.) Of course, the government guarantees a public education to every child in American, but not every child is guaranteed to receive a good education. You can drag a child to school, but you can’t make him learn. That’s where parents come in, and without a stable home headed, preferably, by a married man and woman who are committed to each other and their children, then, yes, those children will most likely face obstacles that really shouldn’t be there.

Why does education matter? A story that ran in the Tennessean last Thursday gives a perfect example. It has to do with businesses that offer high-fee or high-interest payday and tax refund loans, usually to low-income people. I’m a free market guy, and realize that such businesses wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a demand for their services, but payday loan businesses are insidious for the same reason that the lottery business is insidious; they prey primarily on low-income people who aren’t good at math, and they take advantage of the ignorance and gullibility of others. Here are a few key points from the article:

She gets her W-2, takes it to H&R Block and then applies for the fastest refund method available, a refund anticipation check that helped Brooks take care of bills and other little emergencies last year.

“I don’t really think about it,” Brooks said, waiting to catch a bus at a downtown Nashville bus stop. “I think about my refund, the things I need. And even if I wanted to, I don’t know how to do my own taxes. Where would I start?”

…

Count Germaine Williams, a taxpayer in southern New Jersey, in that number. Williams said she paid $304 to have her taxes professionally prepared this year. That included a fee to create a temporary bank account into which the Internal Revenue Service will electronically deposit more than $3,000.

For $304, I think I could learn how to do my own taxes. Indeed, the quote that bothers me most is “I don’t know how to do my own taxes. Where would I start?” Folks, I’m not a CPA, but I can read and do arithmetic. And I am a product of public schools. I’ve always done my own taxes, even though it continually gets more complicated.

For years, even after I got married, I used the 1040EZ. Then after my wife and I bought our first home and started itemizing, we switched to the 1040 and Schedule A. Then came along the tax deduction known as “our son,” and I started having to do the worksheet that tells us whether or not we can claim him as a tax credit. Then, as our income increased, I started having to figure the alternative minimum tax (which, fortunately, hasn’t hit us yet). Then came the sales tax deduction, for which I am grateful, but it requires even more calculations. Now that my wife is self-employed, we have two more forms to do for the insidious self-employment tax. It’s cumbersome, but it isn’t brain surgery, either.

There are several things I’ve learned along the way, the most significant of which is that if you get back a huge refund every March, then you’re having too much money taken out of your paycheck and are, in effect, giving the IRS an interest-free loan every year. So, a few years ago, I jacked up our deductions to have less money taken out with the goal of having the bottom line on our tax form add up to as close to $0 as possible.

Simple things like doing your own tax forms are the result of having the invaluable abilities to read and write. When I did my first tax form back in 1988, I, too, didn’t know where to start. So I asked someone who did know. I can now keep my $304 and do the forms myself.

This leads me to a comment that Sharon left to a separate post regarding the lottery.

Yes, it is mainly poor people who buy the tickets. However, that is indicative of a much bigger problem where poor people are feeling hopeless and don’t think they can obtain the American dream. Now I won’t blame it all on that. (Almost) everyone is looking for a way to get rich quickly. That comes down to pretty poor values in our country.

Oprah Winfrey recently said it better than I ever could. When asked why she spent 40 million on education in Africa instead of America, she said, “In Africa when I ask young people what they want they tell me they want to go to school and becomes doctors and build up their communities. When I talk to young people in America, they tell me they want a new IPOD or new name brand sneakers.”

First of all, if these kids have iPods and $100 sneakers, how poor can they be? Indeed, I, too, believe our values are misplaced. Again, I look back to the breakdown of the family.

I also agree that almost everyone is looking for a way to get rich quickly, rather than build wealth slowly over the course of one’s lifetime. As Dave Ramsey says, “live like no one else now so that later on you can live like no one else.” What he means is that “normal is broke,” but that even those who live on relatively modest incomes can, if they start saving at an early age and stay out of debt, retire as millionaires after 30 or 40 years.

The fact that the lottery preys primarily on the poor is less the result of hopelessness, and more the result of ignorance. Again, education matters.

I did the math for my op/ed back on December 15, 2005, “Lottery is regressive.” Here’s an excerpt that illustrates my point:

If more people understood the math behind lotteries, there would be far fewer tickets sold. Some do know the math, and choose to play anyway. But some don’t know the math, and play because they honestly believe they are going to win a huge jackpot that will change their lives. The latter is perhaps the lottery’s saddest story.

Minority Wealth Magazine did a survey earlier this year, and discovered the following:

“A larger percentage of men questioned noted they felt playing their state lottery was the best way to build wealth, as compared to women. …[Forty-eight] percent of minority men preferred playing the lottery in lieu of savings as a financial design, compared to 41 percent of minority women surveyed.”

It looks like someone got some bad financial advice. According to the Tennessee Lottery, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1-in-146,107,962. The odds of winning even the $200,000 prize are 1-in-3,563,609, while the odds of winning $10,000 are 1-in-584,432.

Let’s say a person puts $50 a month into Powerball tickets. He does this for 30 years. He will have “invested” $18,000 in the lottery. Since each ticket produces a 1-in-146,107,962 chance of winning, the odds of his winning the Powerball jackpot at any one time during that 30 years are still 1-in-8,117. Even his odds of winning $10,000 are 1-in-32. And that’s after buying 18,000 lottery tickets. But investing $50 per month for 30 years at 5% interest would give that person a 1-in-1 chance of ending up with $41,612.93.

To put this into even better perspective, you could buy 50 Powerball tickets a week and win the jackpot once every 56,000 years.

If you bought a ticket for every mile you drive, you’d have to make the equivalent of 300 round-trips to the moon before winning.

If you buy one Powerball ticket, you’re 27 times more likely to be killed by a wasp, hornet, or bee sting in the next year than you are to win the jackpot.

And now we come full circle.

Who was it that pushed the lottery here in Tennessee in the first place? It was former State Senator Steve Cohen, who was perhaps the most liberal member of the Tennessee Senate before being elected to Congress last November.

Who is standing in the way of reducing the food tax here in Tennessee? Governor Bredesen and the Democrats in the Tennessee General Assembly — the very same people who also argue that the food tax is too regressive and hurts the poor the most.

Who gave us the War on Poverty, which hasn’t changed the poverty rate but has contributed to a soaring illegitimacy rate, and fights tooth and nail to keep its social programs in place? Democrats.

Who stands in the way of school vouchers, which would allow parents of children who attend failing public schools to spend that money at private schools? Democrats.

Indeed, liberals may care about the poor. But when given the choice of siding with the poor or the government, they will side with the government every single time.

Sadly, the ones who tend to be the most adversely affected by the policies of liberals are the very ones who help keep them in power.

Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family penned a commentary in the December 18 issue of Time under the irrefutable title “Why Two Mommies is One Too Many,” and some academics and homosexual activists aren’t exactly displaying that tolerence the left demands of others.

The first attack came in claims from two researchers whose work Dr. Dobson cited in his piece that he had “twisted” their science. They only spoke up, it is worth noting, after being contacted by a gay activist with a long history of personally vilifying pro-family leaders; in fact, he once called Dr. Dobson “a Scripture-spitting, simple-minded, superstitious savage.” No matter why the researchers weighed in, though, their objections are off-base, according to Dr. Bill Maier, Focus on the Family’s psychologist in residence.

“These are well-respected scientists who probably feel they have no choice but to cry ‘foul’ because they work in a field that is so dominated by liberal groupthink,” Maier explained. “But the fact they aren’t happy their data was used to reach a conclusion they disagree with doesn’t mean the data was not properly applied. Dr. Dobson never claimed these researchers share his view on this issue — they clearly do not. But there is no denying that the data they compiled can be appropriately cited to show the unique contributions mothers and fathers make in the lives of their children.

Aside from the “data,” common sense already tells us that a child does best in a home that’s headed by a married man and woman. There is simply no other arrangement that’s equal.

Sharon Cobb wrote a post a few days ago that’s been burning inside my pea-sized brain ever since I first read it, and I’ve got to get it into words.

Sharon writes: “I would like to point out to people who aren’t as familiar with [Marilyn Monroe] as my generation is that she was a size 14 AND drop dead gorgeous. I just think it’s so sad girls as young as 8 or 9 are on diets and that by today’s standards, Marilyn Monroe would be considered fat.”

I’m treading into dangerous water for a man, but, hey, I’ve been married for 12 years (to a woman, since you have to clarify such things these days), so I’m willing to take a risk. The topic is a woman’s weight.

I agree 100% (200% if it were mathematically possible) with Sharon that there is far too great an emphasis on women being thin. There’s quite a difference between being healthy and being thin. You don’t have to be as thin as a quarter in order to be healthy. In fact, some of the means women use to “achieve” thinness, I would argue, are quite unhealthy, especially among girls who are still growing.

At some point, we went from a society (or, I should say, popular culture) that cherished size 14 women to a popular culture that places supreme value on being rail-thin.

This leads me to what I guess is the root cause for the emphasis on thinness, and that would be supply-and-demand, or at least the perceived supply-and-demand. I know there are men who want women who, as Sharon Cobb says, are nothing more than “silicon-on-a-stick.” As for me? No thanks. And there are, believe it or not, a lot of men who believe the way I do. On the other hand, are a lot of girls and (mainly) young women trying to “achieve” thinness because of a perceived, widespread demand for them to be that way? Are they trying to compete with other women? I ask, because I honestly don’t know.

I associate primarily with other people around my age who are married with children, either at work, or at church, or at my son’s school. By all appearances (and I don’t always know what goes on behind closed doors), the men with whom I associate do not demand thinness of their wives. Most of us love our wives as they are, cherish our children, realize the toll that a pregnancy takes on a woman’s body, and couldn’t care less whether she was able to shed that last 15 pounds or not. (Heck, most of us guys would do well to shed 15 pounds.) But I know that some men aren’t quite so forgiving.

My point is, all of us grow old, and I plan on being one of those men who, assuming I live long enough, celebrates a 50^th wedding anniversary. As such, the aging process diminishes a person’s physical attributes. Most of us do put on a few pounds over the years, lose eyesight, hearing, hair, get wrinkles, arthritis, and all the other glories that happen with the addition of years. Physical attraction doesn’t sustain a marriage for that long. Emotional attraction does, and if you’re emotionally attached to your mate, it doesn’t matter what the scale says. So, my unsolicited man-to-man advice for the day is to love your woman with your whole heart, regardless of her size.

Nathan Moore posted a couple of days ago on the state of the family, or, more specifically, the spread of societal ills when the nuclear family breaks down.

Today the illegitimacy rate among blacks in the United States sits at an astounding 70%. The source of the poverty problem is not a lack of rights, as every American no matter what their melanin content now enjoys more rights today than ever before (to include abortion, which from a liberal point of view ought to itself address higher illegitimacy rates, but has not), but instead stems from the lack of a stable child rearing environment, largely brought on by policies advocated by those who cry the loudest about the problem. Economist Gary Becker best encapsulated this in a study in the late 1970s, published in 1981 and re-released in 2005, as A Treatise on the Family, which showed that the welfare state actually preempted the need for fathers, reducing demand and creating less of them. The facts largely bear this out – in the mid 1970s the black illegitimacy rate was in the mid 50s. The plain truth is that since the Great Society a decade earlier, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births has only gotten worse. No one can rationally argue that this is because of an erosion of rights – civil rights have only strengthened over that time. In fact, it is the family structure more than any other factor that accounts for one’s likelihood of success in life.

This is a point I made in my op/ed back on October 3, 2005, “It’s time to end the war on poverty,” where I use statistics to show that:

Thus, as per capita wealth has increased in the U.S., the number of individuals living in single-parent homes has increased so that our wealth-building has been offset by the breakdown of the nuclear family such that the poverty rate during the past four decades has remained largely unchanged. Throwing money at poverty has only treated its symptom — not the disease itself — and has instead produced unintended side effects, namely single parenthood.”

This is a post I’ve been mulling over for some time, and it has to do with liberal feminists and the way they view men, and vice versa. By “liberal feminists,” I refer to the NOW gang, the kind of women who declare that all men are scum and rail against our “patriarchal society,” and admirers of Gloria Steinem, who once declared that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Phyllis Schlafly, the matriarch of Christian conservatism, has studied feminists longer than I’ve been alive, and has written reams on the topic since she single-handedly took on and defeated the Equal Rights Amendment back in the 1970’s. One of her most recent column on feminism, “Feminist Whines Lead Down a Dead-End Road,” summarizes the movement this way:

Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but the national media have climbed on this gender controversy to help market the latest feminist assault against homemakers, Judith Warner’s “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.” She calls “the general culture of motherhood in America oppressive” and asserts that women are locked into a “cult” that worships the goddess of perfect motherhood.

Forty years ago, Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” appealed to the pampered suburban housewife by claiming she suffered from “the problem that has no name.” Judith Warner tries to initiate a similar movement by labeling women’s plight the “mommy mystique” or, inelegantly, “this mess.”

Whereas Friedan’s book initiated a drive to move mothers out of the home, Warner’s book hopes to start a drive for the taxpayers to help women “living Mommy Track lives” to “get a life of their own.” Both books are a tiresome litany of complaints about life’s daily challenges in the lifestyles that women have freely chosen.

Sylvia Hewlett’s book “Creating a Life,” which received unprecedented free publicity several years ago, recorded the complaints of successful professional and business women who were unhappy because they were childless. Judith Warner’s book “Madness” is filled with the whines of educated upper middle-class women who did become mothers but surprise, surprise, discovered that babies require a lot of care.

It’s all society’s fault, according to the authors. If only the government were caring enough to provide taxpayer-paid high-quality daycare and preschool, employer-paid maternity and parental leave, and taxpayer/employer-paid health care for all full- and part-time workers, mothers could get out of the “mess” or at least shift the cleanup burden onto the backs of society.

All men are not scum. Some men are. Some women are. It is my own observation as a man that liberal feminists tend to be selfish and petulant, and so the type of men they attract are often going to be selfish and petulant. The man who is family-oriented, committed to the sacrifices that are required to raise a good family, and not ashamed of being testosterone-driven generally isn’t going to go for a woman who rails against men the way liberal feminists do. Thus, the men who make the best husbands and fathers usually aren’t going populate the same sphere as liberal feminists for same reason that people who enjoy a warm climate don’t flock to the Arctic Circle.

In a recent issue of Forbes, Michael Noer warns his male readers not to marry career women.

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Meanwhile, economist Walter Williams shows us the good wife’s guide, 100% guaranteed to enrage liberal feminists.

WorldNetDaily has yet another piece that fits the case for the traditional family that I’ve been trying to make these last few days.

Fifty years ago, “Father knows best” was a hit TV show, in which insurance agent Jim Anderson (actor Robert Young) would come home from work each evening, trade his sport jacket for a nice, comfortable sweater, and then deal with the everyday growing-up problems of his family. He could always be counted on to resolve that week’s crisis with a combination of kindness, fatherly strength and common sense.

Today, television virtually always portrays husbands as bumbling losers or contemptible, self-absorbed egomaniacs. Whether in dramas, comedies or commercials, the patriarchy is dead, at least on TV where men are fools — unless of course they’re gay. On “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the “fab five” are supremely knowledgeable on all things hip, their life’s highest purpose being to help those less fortunate than themselves — that is, straight men — to become cool.

In baseball, we call that a grand slam home run.

Thomas Sowell’s column on May 30 fits in very well with all the writing I’ve been doing these last few days about the American family. It’s tempting to quote Sowell’s entire piece, but I’m going to refrain and just point out the best of the best.

While liberals may think of the 1960s as the beginning of many “progressive” trends in American society, cold hard facts tell a very different story. The 1960s marked the end of many beneficial trends that had been going on for years — and a complete reversal of those trends as programs, policies, and ideologies of the liberals took hold.

Teenage pregnancy had been going down for years. So had venereal disease. Rates of infection for syphilis in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1950. There were similar trends in crime. The total number of murders in the United States in 1960 was lower than in 1950, 1940, or 1930 — even though the population was growing and two new states had been added. The murder rate, in proportion to population, in 1960 was half of what it had been in 1934.

Every one of these beneficial trends sharply reversed after liberal notions gained ascendancy during in the 1960s. By 1974, the murder rate had doubled. Even liberal icon Sargent Shriver, head of the agency directing the “war on poverty,” admitted that “venereal disease has skyrocketed” even though “we have had more clinics, more pills, and more sex education than ever in history.”

…

As for black economic advances, the most dramatic reduction in poverty among blacks occurred between 1940 and 1960, when the black poverty rate was cut almost in half, without any major government programs of the Great Society kind that began in the 1960s.

Similarly, in his column on May 23, Mike S. Adams reviews Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest book, “The Party of Death.” Adams has this quote from Ponnuru, summarizing the abortion views held by what he calls the Boxer Democrats:

Abortion should be legal throughout pregnancy. Teenage girls should not have to inform their parents about it, much less get their consent. Nobody who would let the voters deviate from these positions should be allowed on the court. The Senate shouldn’t even be allowed to hold a vote on such people. The law should not treat the murders of pregnant women as double homicides because it might lead people to look more negatively at abortion.

And taxpayers should pay for abortions, just in case there are some going undone. But federal funds should not be allotted to ensure the health of the unborn. Each of these positions is extreme by the standards of public opinion – but not by the standards of what the Democratic party has become.

Here’s Katherine:

I’m not a big fan of demonising anything in popular culture. When I was a kid it was Rock Music (boo-hiss). When my mom was a kid it was the internal combustion engine. Or playing cards–one or the other. I do understand the reasons behind decrying these types of things. It’s not always the things themselves but the company they lead to or the corrupting influence they may have. And as Christians we do need to take that VERY seriously. But why start teaching that the thing is wrong, instead of explaining that why the situations or ideas behind the thing are the wrong/bad?

Where did I ever say it’s not necessary to explain the how and the why? Some rock music is fine, some isn’t. We play cards in my home, but we don’t gamble on it. There are some fine movies out there, but there are also some that will never find their way into our home. It’s called d-i-s-c-e-r-n-m-e-n-t, and that’s a parent’s job. But here’s the funny part:

I used to have a close relationship with some children who were brought up from cradle to voting age with this singular rearing tactic. Beer is evil, rock is evil, cards and PG-13 movies are evil. When these boys got out into the world and drank their first beer without going straight to hell they naturally began to doubt everything about the faith. Wouldn’t you?

Ah, no. A child that’s been properly reared knows good from bad, and knows WHY there’s a difference. For example, I’ve never smoked crack. I was brought up knowing that drugs can destroy your life, and have never had the desire to try drugs. I listened to rock music as a child, and still do, but there is some demonically-influenced rock music I stayed away from then (Led Zeppelin, for example), and still do. The idea that children are going to automatically reject the values they were brought up with the moment they leave home crumbles under Proverbs 22:6, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”

I believe my parents adopted that philosophy, and it worked. Imagine that.

Next, Katherine Coble writes:

Funnily enough, both Mark and Dan admit to not having read Harry Potter. Which is their right as well as their loss. Even more funnily, Mark admits to reading the Chronicles of Narnia and Dan admits to reading The Wizard of Oz. So clearly the problem isn’t with fantastical use of magic and wizardry in fiction.

Somewhat correct. Chronicles was written by a Christian, and is heavily symbolic of the Christian faith. Christ himself used parables to teach, and performed miracles (which weren’t, of course, fiction). Since I haven’t read or watched any Potter, I’m going to post an excerpt from Focus on the Family’s review of The Sorcerer’s Stone:

Also very troubling is the overarching idea that Harry is “rescued” from a miserable life by a bunch of wizards and witches. Of course, there are two ways to see this. Viewers who bring to the movie a background in Christian fantasy may see it as somewhat similar to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia-a magical world far more exciting and “fitting” for the human spirit than the plain physical world. On the other hand, there’s the likely interpretation that Harry is being “saved” by witchcraft, a disturbing idea to say the least. The immediate emotional impact of film makes the concept even more dangerous, because passive thrill-seekers won’t necessarily ponder and process it as they might while reading a book.

That’s a striking difference from Chronicles. Anything that portrays witchcraft other than being demonically-influenced does not pass muster with me. (That’s why Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which I have seen, is not in our home, either.)

And by the way, Michael (see comments), is it fair that some who’ve never read the Bible make criticisms and judgements of it? Absolutely. It’s a free country. I try to be tolerant even of those who are hostile to something that I hold as dear as the Bible.

One more Scripture verse. “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Just because “the world” (popular culture, if you like) says we’re supposed to be into Potter doesn’t mean we have do. I’m not out to please anyone, so I don’t feel it’s my duty to bring Potter into my home. Katherine isn’t big fan of demonising anything in popular culture. I’m not a big fan of demonising just to be demonising, but when popular culture produces something that runs counter to Scripture, then I have to reject it. And believe me, popular culture produces a lot of things that run counter to Scripture. You can think my rejection of Harry Potter is my loss, but I consider it my gain.

Dan the Baptist made the comment yesterday on his blog that “Today as I was driving home I jokingly asked my daughters if either of them got any Harry Potter valentines today. My oldest daughter said ‘NO Daddy and I know I know Harry Potter is the devil’ Man I was so proud.”

As a result, the liberals over at Nashville Is Talking are completely blown away, as they have fallen for the “fundy family” stereotype trap they have laid for themselves.

(Disclosure: I have never read any of the Harry Potter books, nor seen any of the movies, so let me defuse the inevitable questions before I go any further. “But Mark,” you ask. “How can you comment on Harry Potter if you’ve never read a book or seen a movie?” Answer: Because this is my blog, and I can.)

I absolutely love these quotes in both the NIT blog post and the comments that follow:

Maybe this is a big joke I don’t get, but it seems that Dan (author of Conservative Corner) is seriously proud his daughter “knows Harry Potter is the devil.” Is this still an issue in churches and scools [sic] after all the books and films that have been released?

I guess Dan is proud that his daughter is responding to her father’s spiritual mentoring. It may not be such an issue in churches and schools, but it apparently is in Dan’s house (and mine). Believe it or not, but some parents take such great care in raising their children that they HAVE more influence than the schools, and have the churches at their back.

That’s another thing about the fundy family – no imagination – and no understanding of how the imagination works, or of how children actually grow up.

Ah, fallen for the old fundamentalist caricature, I see. This is about as old as the arguments against the Harry Potter books themselves — that if parents deprive their children of the experience of Harry Potter, then their imaginations are forever stunted. Of course, Harry Potter has been around for what, 7 or 8 years? Well, children somehow had imaginations long before Harry Potter came along, but now, apparently, the only way a child can have an imagination in 2006 is to read Harry Potter.

And by the way, I’ll put the Chronicles of Narnia up against Harry Potter any day.

As Dan says, “I know that it is make believe and if you like it then fine but I do not want my kids to see it.” And that, folks, is a parent’s job: to filter out things he doesn’t want his children to see or hear. Dan’s made his call. I’m sure his little girl isn’t any worse off as a result, and that her child-like imagination is just as vivid and robust as if she were reading Harry Potter.

Funny how fundamentalist families, some of which are quite large, have great experience at raising children, but somehow have no understanding how the imagination works or how children actually grow up. Well, I don’t quite have the imagination to process such a contradiction. I’ll leave it for the more cerebral Harry Potter readers.

Returning to our theme, perhaps it is clear now why I believe pornography is the most harrowing threat to your kids, and especially your boys. A single exposure to it by some 13- to 15-year-olds is all that is required to create an addiction that will hold them in bondage for a lifetime. It is more addictive than cocaine or heroin. Those of us in the field of child development know that the focal point of sexual interest is not very well established among young adolescents. It can be redirected by an early sexual experience (wanted or unwanted) or by exposure to pornography. A boy who would normally be stimulated by a “cheerleader” image of the opposite sex can learn through obscenity to find excitement in humiliating or hurting someone, or in sex with animals, or in homosexual violence, or in having sex with younger children. Many men who have succumbed to these perverse sexual appetites trace them back to the dawn of their adolescence.

Parents! Protect your children from this curse. You can do it. But you will not succeed if all your time and energy is devoted to a job or other outside activities. And while you’re at it, teach your kids that God’s view of human sexuality is not obsolete or old-fashioned. It is designed to protect us and to keep us clean and healthy. Don’t let anyone, neither the sex-ed teacher at school nor the makers of perverted entertainment in Hollywood or at MTV, undermine traditional biblical teaching. It is valid. It is true. And it bears the imprint of the Creator Himself.