It turns out that's playing pee wee football comes with some risk of concussions. Until recently, many people assumed that those little bodies couldn't muster blows hard enough to cause concussions. New research data is now in.
I was surprised to see the cover of the most recent Time Magazine: an attractive young woman breast-feeding her 3-year old boy, who is standing on a chair to reach her breast, wearing army fatigues. I'm not shocked or disturbed in the least by the breastfeeding. There is nothing wrong with public breast-feeding. The subject of the main article, Attachment Parenting, does intrigue me, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim. Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle. We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back. Ever since Gay Pride. Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin. So….okay. How? If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors? I’ll tell you what destablilizes families. And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit. Families are destabilized over money. [More . . . ]
How often do you cross paths with a parent who is attempting to make his or her children in the parent's image and likeness? I see it on a regular basis. The prototypical case is the parent who didn't make it to the Broadway stage who tries to turn his/her child into a Broadway performer. You often see parents who demand athletic excellence from their kids, often (it seems) in an effort to compensate for the parent's failed strivings to make it big in sports. This style of parenting reaches every high-earning or high-prestige profession. Or maybe it's not to make up for the parents own failings as much as it is an attempt to create a trophy child so that, at cocktail parties, the parent can nonchalantly drop a few hints about his or her child's (sometimes admittedly spectacular) accomplishments. This afternoon, a friend sent me a perfect antidote for this mindset. It's a poem by Kahlil Gibran, titled "On Children." Upon reading it, I was reminded of the following quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.”
Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion). Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity. He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood. The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise. In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling.