St. Joseph’s Vanguard And Our Lady’s Train

I don’t know what it is about baby stuff, but I–I hope other young mothers understand–am a sucker for cuteness. Check out some of the things that I’ve found so far:

Baby Dress–have to wait to buy any of these dresses until we actually get a baby and know her age. The baby boy clothes are a little less sweet but still cute:

Christening Gown–I can’t buy one of these until we are actually able to adopt.

Crib Bedding

Okay, apparently I like Battenburg merchandise.

For diapers, I think I’m going to go with BumGenius because they are one-size-fits-all; this is important for us, since we won’t know the age of our infants until the day they arrive at our home. Special thanks to Mrs. Fruit for introducing me to BumGenius.

I have my eye on some furniture but am not ready to buy it quite yet. And, finally, who can resist Montessori baby stuff?

At first, we were under the impression that we would foster a baby for a year. Then, we learned that a year is the longest time possible to foster, and actually, 6 months is usually more common.

Most recently, however, we talked with two foster moms who care for babies and both said that their usual amount of time with a baby is 2 weeks; 4 months was the longest a baby had ever stayed with one of the mothers. Yikes! I’m not sure if I can handle a 2-week stay. That doesn’t seem like quite long enough–no time to establish a routine or catch my breath or normalize a sleep schedule.

There’s so much uncertainty with this process. Devin and I know of two different couples who both were able to foster two babies a piece and adopt all of them. On the other hand, we’ve met one family who fostered babies for a year with the hope of adopting and was unable. I’m not really comfortable with the not-knowing but that may just be what Our Lord wants for me. Dear Hannah and Elizabeth, please pray for me.

What a lovely place. I experienced the perfect moment yesterday evening, sitting on a bench in a grove of oak trees, looking west over the vineyard at the sunset, enjoying the sweet breeze, eating artichoke-parmesan fritters and listening to the plunkings of the guitarist seated nearby.

The wine is great, especially the Verentino. It’s only 30 minutes from South Austin and a lovely drive through Texas hills. Enjoy!

Yesterday, I was reminded that people are good. We had a little break during our 6-hour Behavior and Crisis Management class and were chatting with our fellow participants. I asked the woman next to me the reason for her interest in foster care; she explained that she and her husband have already chosen the profile of a 7-year old boy on the TARE gallery whom they were interested in adopting. “But,” she said, “I’d really like to adopt enough boys for a whole baseball team” Her husband grinned and rolled his eyes. The woman to my left, Jennifer, who is currently adopting a sibling group, 3 and 5 years old, agreed; “I want to adopt, like, 15 children, and sometimes I make my husband nervous.” We met her husband on Thursday at our Psychotropic Meds class, and I don’t think he’s that nervous–he’s clearly smitten with their adoptive children. Many of our other classmates shared their sentiments, and we all laughed.

It was refreshing to see such goodness. We were talking about children as a source of joy, not as burdens or bothers. And, the gusto was contagious, making us all a little breathless as we contemplated opening our homes to many many children. Just as negativity and fear can spread, so does love, igniting nearby hearts and wreathing faces in smiles. Laughter seemed to bubble up inside of us at the audacity of generosity. Absolutely lovely.

From the Family Research Council, more of what most pro-lifers already know about Sen. Obama but worth making clear as he continues to deny that he voted to let babies born alive be tossed aside and left to die–whether in 5 minutes or hours, as it sometimes took.

For all of his stirring speeches, even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) can’t talk himself out of the controversy that’s emerged over his position on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA). The legislation, which protects newborns who survive an abortion from infanticide, became a federal law in 2002. In Illinois, Obama actively opposed an identical piece of legislation as a committee chairman, stating later that he would have endorsed it had the bill contained the same language as the federal version. When it surfaced that he voted against the BAIPA, Obama lied in several interviews, including this one with Chicago Tribune in 2004 in which he told reporters that “had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.” This week, the National Right to Life Committee uncovered new documents proving that the Illinois version of the Act was taken verbatim from the congressional bill, which means that the man running for president has been lying about his position on the issue for six years. The deception continues on his website, where a June 30 “fact check” claims that the Illinois and federal bills “did not contain . . . exactly the same language.” Is it any surprise that a man who referred to babies as a “punishment” would vote for the killing of innocent children who survive abortions? As David Limbaugh writes in yesterday’s column, “Are pro-life Obama supporters so selfishly hooked on a feeling… that they’ll back Obama and his party in the most immoral crusade since slavery? It appears so.”

Additional Resources
David Limbaugh: The ‘Making Abortion Rare’ Hoax
Jill Stanek: New documents show Obama cover-up on born-alive survivors bill

There’s those little bits of sunshine that brighten your life, and one of them for me and Katie is an elderly man who we pass by in our car while driving to our parish.

The parish is in a neighborhood, and about once or twice a month, when we drive through the neighborhood he is walking, oftentimes with one of his grandchildren; he has a coffee mug in his hand, and his favorite shirt has in big letters on the front: “GRANDPA”.

How wonderful that this extended family is so close that the grandchildren take walks with their grandfather every week!  All seems right with the world when we see him, and he knows our car well enough now to wave at us when we pass by.

I hope one day I will have a shirt like that and grandchildren who will want to take walks with me.

I’ve spent less time at our computer the past few weeks, and the time I have been on it, I have been using to work on completing the Tower Defense game, hence the sporadic posting.

This fall I am facilitating a men’s book study group called Men at Work at my parish, and by God’s grace, a great group of guys have joined it, so I am looking forward to that.  Also, I am going to be coaching a boy’s soccer team with my Dad starting in about two weeks, which I am looking forward to but also will consume a lot of free time.

Finally, and most important of all, we are taking the foster-adoption classes; next week we have three during the week lasting for 2 - 3 hours and then a 7 - 8 hour one on Saturday; meanwhile we are filling out the reams (literally) of paper work for the application process.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way, but we have had a full schedule–how much fuller will it be if God blesses us with a baby or two?! 

And a last thought: I’ve gotten a bit burned out about the presidential election–it’s something that can really bother me as a person with a melancholic temperament, so I have to step away from it for a while and leave it on the back burner.

The big news this week about John Edwards’ infidelity is sad; I feel the worst for his children who have had to see their father’s shameful behavior trumpeted on the headlines; may God bless his wife and children and lead him and the other woman to repentance, forgiveness, and deep conversion of heart.  How vital is the virtue of chastity!  And how much is every man tempted to lust and infidelity, which knows no political parties?

Oh yeah, happy memorial of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)!

A great success!

Katie and I plan to work with Arrow Child and Family Ministries, a Christian, non-profit organization founded by a man who grew up with an abusive family and then in the foster-care system. They seem like a really dedicated, loving group of persons.

We learned a lot more about the foster/adoption process, and also learned how organizations like Arrow help prospective foster-adopt parents like us: Basically, the State is primarily concerned with reuniting the children with the birth parents, if possible, while these organizations are advocates for the children and for us, who hope to adopt them.

The State relies heavily on these organizations to help them; Arrow alone is currently helping over 100 children in foster care and has 75 families who are fostering or foster-adopting or adopting. The State caseworkers apparently have really tough jobs with overwhelming numbers of cases, so these groups are the ones who meet regularly with the foster parents and children to assess how things are going; they also do the home screenings of prospective families, teach these mandatory pre-service classes, etc.

Arrow is unabashedly Christian, which is also really refreshing. This month we have a fairly intense regimen of classes to take, including an 8-hour one on a Saturday, but Katie and I both continue to feel that God is leading us in this direction, so we are very excited about the prospect of adopting children!

Just been thinking about all of the poor children who have no parents nor family to love them:

And you ask me what I want this year
and I try to make this good and clear
just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

cause I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings
and designer love and empty things,
just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days

Better days…waiting to be adopted by a family who will promise to love them forever.

Katie and I learned during our adoption information meeting that the way in which babies (0 - 1 year old) are usually adopted is through foster-adopt.

Babies are taken from their birth family when they have been abandoned, neglected, or abused; oftentimes the family, very sadly, has a history of harmful behavior toward their children, and so the State takes the babies away.

The parents have one year to change their behavior and show that they can be good parents; during this time, the baby is placed with a foster family. It is so important that the baby learn to bond (or “attach”) to a family at this age; even if the baby is later removed from the foster family to be reunited with her birth one, much good has been done because if the baby learned to bond, they can learn to bond again.

Children who fail to learn to attach can develop reactive attachment disorder, a frightening disorder that negatively affects the child her entire life.

The “risk” taken by such a foster family is that, after many months or even the year has passed, the baby could be given back to the birth parents if their behavior has improved sufficiently. It must be very difficult then for the foster family who had hoped to adopt the baby.

Nonetheless, Katie and I are seriously considering first being open to foster-adopting a baby. The caseworkers we have spoken with told us that there are many babies in the 0 - 1 age range who come up for fostering, and thus there is great need for foster parents for these babies.

How soon could it be before we were given a baby to foster-adopt? Amazingly, it could be in as little as three months! When we learned this, it took me aback. I could be a father in three months? Wow.

To finish this post, I want to give you just a few of the sobering statistics that we were given about child abuse here in Texas and last year alone:

• Child Protective Services (CPS) received 240,688 reports of child abuse or neglect
• Of these, 71,344 Texas children were known to be confirmed victims of abuse and neglect.

That was only in 2007 in Texas. It is hard to imagine the horror that so many children suffer.

They also apprised us of what they call “disproportionality”, which for Texas means that African-American children are represented at a higher rate in the system than in the general population:

• !2% of the Texas’ children population is African-American, but 29% of the children in state conservatorship are African-American
• African-American children spend more time in the system, wait longer for adoption than other children, and age out of foster care without an adoptive family at a high percentage.

How vital is the family for the upbringing of children! And children deserve a true family, a good family, a family who will foster a civilization of love where all members are treated with respect and given the care they need to grow and fulfill their God-given vocations.

So that is what Katie and I are thinking about currently. We are prayerfully considering which foster/adoption foundation to work with (who in turn works directly with the State but who also provides many services and much wisdom), and the next step will probably be to take our PRIDE classes, which will teach us more about what it means to foster or adopt these children.

Please say a prayer for us if you think about us.

Our associate pastor, Father Juan Carlos, left our parish this past week to take a new assignment as pastor of a parish in Cameron, Texas.

Near the end of his farewell talk at the end of Mass, after he had thanked our Lord and also us for our love and kindness to himself, he said something to the effect of: “If I have failed to be a good Christian witness to you in any way, I ask for your forgiveness.”

Katie and I were both touched by this act of humility; it is so totally in line with our Christian faith of course–you ask for forgiveness from others–but it is not something you see done publicly very often, and coming from a priest who has only shown us great love and service (e.g. daily Confession), it is that much more moving.

May Christ bless Father Juan Carlos!

We have been asking this question since attending the adoption information meeting put on by the State of Texas’ Child Protective Services (CPS).

We have friends who adopted 5 girls, all sisters, through CPS some years ago, and I believe they ranged in age from 1 or 2 years old to maybe 10 years old; we hope to meet with them sometime soon to learn about their experience adopting their 5 daughters.

Another friend of ours who is well-versed in Montessori wisdom said that she thought that “old” is 4 years old!  That took us aback, since we had been thinking that maybe 12 years old is “old”.

I guess our concern, as you can imagine, is that the older the child is, the more harm has been done to them and therefore their wounds are deeper, their personality, including faults and learned bad behavior, is more ingrained and therefore harder to change for the better.

Yet another friend, however, encouraged me that these children need love, and if they are ever to have a good chance at becoming the persons God created them to be, they are much better off being adopted and loved rather than bounced around from one foster family to another until they finally turn 18 and are on their own, without a family to come home to.

Katie and I are very grateful to all our friends and family who have given us advice or shared their experiences with us about adoption; we are actively discerning whether our Lord desires us to adopt or not, and if so, what age of children, and the wisdom of our loved ones is an important factor in this discernment.

Meanwhile, we did a search recently on the CPS site and found this sibling group had been newly added:

“and its someplace simple where we could live
and something only you can give
and that’s faith and trust and peace while we’re alive

and the one poor child who saved this world
and there’s 10 million more who probably could
if we all just stopped and said a prayer for them

so take these words
and sing out loud
cause everyone is forgiven now
cause tonight’s the night the world begins again”

– The Goo Goo Dolls, “Better Days”

From our recent visit to Katie’s extended family in New Mexico:

With our niece, Ava (or perhaps Addi):

With nephew Adam:

…unscrupulous persons will commit evil actions.

In Guatemala, which has thankfully begun investigations to overhaul their adoption system, people have been abducting babies to put them up for adoption.

Why?  From the article:

Before the reform, foreign couples, mostly from the U.S., paid up to $30,000 to adopt children.

The previous system was so quick and hassle-free it became the second-largest source of foreign babies to U.S. couples after China.

$30,000 for a baby, while 4,000 are aborted everyday here in our country, and it leads to kidnapping in poor countries like Guatemala.  I don’t have a magic solution, but surely we can see that something is wrong with this situation.

Sen. McCain has put up a video of Sen. Obama’s multiple contradictory statements about the war in Iraq.

I don’t plan to debate details but rather just want to point out that, whether or not beginning the war was just, we now have a responsibility to help them establish a good government and peaceful nation, which we have had significant success in doing in the past year or two.

The course that we should take should be reasoned through and wisely decided; Sen. Obama, as you can watch in the video, clearly contradicts himself flatly multiple times on the Iraq war; it seems clear that he has been changing his positions for political expedience and doesn’t have firm reasons that would support a steady position.

A brief example is the first section of the video where multiple clips are shown of him saying that the surge would not work, then later, after it worked, saying that he knew it would work all the time and had always said so.  It’s okay to change your position and admit that you have come to believe that you were incorrect and explain why you changed but acting like you never made a mistake and reversed your position is something that seems all too common in our American politics, both Republican and Democrat.

We as Christians believe that people can change, even radically, and turn from evil to good.

How?  By turning to the God who loves them and finally accepting His love and forgiveness.  What a great story this is to bring that truth home.

Katie and I have been considering adoption, as she posted about recently–thank you for your kind words of encouragement with it–and I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had with regard to adopting children from foster care.

Sometimes, when I think about adopting,  I think of how heroic an act of love it would be and how much these children need parents to love them and how we can adopt them and love them, giving them a family in which to be healed of their past wounds.

At these times, adopting seems not just possible, but almost inevitable: “Why wouldn’t we adopt?!”

Then when I am feeling particularly tired, or a bit selfish, or lazy, which is some good portion of the time, I consider adopting and think about the instant change that would be wrought in our home, in our daily life, in my comfortable routine and abundant time for myself. I also think about the possible “problems” our children might have that would cause us grief.

At these times, adopting seems scary and the feeling of impossibility that I am able to be a good father and a husband is very strong. Then I think, “Why would I ever want to adopt?”

Then I see parents with adopted children and how beautiful their families are, as well as parents with birth children and how beautiful they are, too.  They all have difficulties and challenges and headaches and frustrations, and some parents with birth-children with “problems” that are as severe as the most challenging children from foster care.

There are no guarantees, so I must believe that God chooses each child for each parent and vice-versa; He knows that this particular child, with all of his gifts, virtues, and faults, is perfect for this family–not to make their life “easier” but to make their life holier, to give them the opportunities every single day, to become more like Christ.

Katie found a page on the Texas foster care site detailing success stories from many adoptive families and their adopted children; these really inspire me. Almost every one of them talks about God and faith and how they have been blessed by our Lord by “letting love in” when they adopted their children.

These families have given me hope for our country, in knowing that there are Americans willing to sacrifice out of love for another, and have also given me hope that Katie and I could adopt and be blessed, too.

We’ll see what our Lord has in store.

I’m wanting sugar. Pie. Cake. Muffins. Ice cream. A big fizzy cold Coke. But, I can’t have any, well, much of it. It’s this darned insulin resistance I’ve got, which is tied to our fertility issues, so we’re working on keeping my blood sugar levels down in the hopes of helping our fertility.

My dear husband has helped me create a list of our most common foods and their corresponding Glycemic Index numbers. We were encouraged by this exercise because, due to my organic foodness, it turns out that we already have very few sugars in our diet. So, really, not much is changing, but I like to gripe about it. The drama helps me feel better, you see.

A few things are changing, however. First, I’m trying to cook with all the buckwheat flour I can, since buckwheat has a low GI number, as well as producing a lovely compound in the body called D-chiro inositol when digested. I’ve made some muffins that turned out well, but I need to use strong flavors to mask the buckwheat flavor, so I’m perplexed regarding how to make things like pancakes. In addition, where before I might have more easily bent my organic rules and eaten ice cream (after all, it’s Haagen Dazs, which is, after all, all natural), now I’m being really strict about sugars; I’m only allowing myself to eat sweets on Sundays…and, maybe sometimes, when I really feel the need, I’ll buy a tube of cookie dough and eat it in hiding, so that Devin can’t scold me.

Democracy in America, published in 1840:

“America is still the country in the world where the Christian religion has retained the greatest real power over people’s souls and nothing better shows how useful and natural religion is to man, since the country where it exerts the greatest sway is also the most enlightened and free. [Americans] believe religion necessary for the maintenance of republican institutions…they so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds, and this is not one of those sterile ideas bequeathed by the past to the present nor one which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live. I have seen Americans coming together to dispatch priests to the new states in the West in order to found schools and churches. Their fear is that religion might disappear in the depths of the forest and that the people growing up there might be less fitted for freedom than the society they had left.”

This conviction regarding the necessary link between Christianity and freedom makes sense. Christianity is the only religion which teaches equality between every person and promotes respect for individual conscience. Freedom is safe when citizens follow the teachings of a God who tells them that they cannot treat other citizens in certain ways because those other citizens are made in God’s image; in Christianity, certain rights are completely protected–the right to life, the right to seek Truth, the right to educate one’s family without coercion, and so forth–and citizens are free, therefore, from the tyranny of government upon their persons. But, when the ideas of a nation and its government are not influenced by Christian principles, no one is safe. The government decides which rights belong to persons and families and can take them away if it wishes.

I’m not sure what factor is responsible for the change in our country from the notion that Christianity is necessary for freedom to the notion that Christianity threatens freedom and must be silenced from the public square. But, I don’t like it.

“Congress was assembled in Independence Hall, at Philadelphia, when the Declaration was adopted…on the morning of the day of its adoption, the venerable bell man ascended to the steeple, and a little boy was placed at the door of the Hall to give him notice when the vote should be concluded. The old man waited long at his post, say ‘They will never do it, they will never do it.’ Suddenly, a loud shout came up from below, and there stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his hands and shouting, ‘Ring! Ring!!’ Grasping the iron tongue of the bell, backward and forward he hurled it a hundred times, proclaiming, ‘Liberty to the land and to the inhabitants thereof.”

(The Lives of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, BJ Lossing, 1848)

Maybe. As God wills. Devin and I took a very big first step and filled out an adoption interest form online recently. We are open to adoption (okay, actually, I would love to adopt), but we need to continue taking prudent steps with our fertility and will have to wait until Our Lord makes our path very clear.

We are most interested in adopting through the Texas foster care system and have already enjoyed looking at the photos of the many children waiting for “forever families.” We are excited and hopeful that Our Lord will bring us children soon in whatever way is best.

These two sibling groups especially caught our hearts:

Christ says: “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”

I’ve been thinking about this truth recently, having once lived in slavery to my own disordered passions and desires.

Also, I recently posted about the head of the Ugandan AIDS committee begging the Western liberal powers to stop exporting their messages of promiscuity and condoms to Uganda, where those messages of “freedom” to have sex when you want with whom you want have stopped the positive progress made against HIV infections and begun increasing them again.

Here is the tragic irony: Planned Parenthood and their cohorts have the mistaken notion that sexual “freedom” means promiscuity: Have sex with whomever you desire and “protect” yourself from the twin diseases of STDs and pregnancy with condoms and birth control or when that fails, abortion.

But this is not freedom; rather, it is slavery, for when you tell someone that they cannot control themselves, cannot control their sexual desires, and they take that message to heart, you are telling them that their disordered desires control them, and thus, they are slaves to those desires rather than being the master of them.

True freedom is the ability to control your desires and passions, correcting through intellect and will the disordered temptations that will always come, and growing in the opposite virtues of chastity, fortitude, and love.

Christ words to us:

So Jesus said (to them), “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.” Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.

Jesus then said to those Jews who believed in him, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if a son frees you, then you will truly be free.

in Dallas, thanks be to God; this one did late-term abortions:

Members of the Catholic Pro-Life Committee, the Respect Life Ministry of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas, maintained a constant presence of peaceful prayer and sidewalk counseling in front of Aaron’s for over a decade.

They were the second group in the nation to undertake the 40 Days for Life campaign in 2004 that saw nearly 1,000 people from dozens of different churches participate.

“We are overjoyed to hear that this notorious place of death is finally closing,” Karen Garnett, executive director of the Catholic Pro-Life Committee, told LifeNews.com.

8 abortuaries down, 5 to go. Via Family Research Council.

Howdy friends,

I’ve been in NM for the past four days or so and away from the cpu.

Katie’s family here is doing great, and we have had a good time together; yesterday I set up a new blog for Katie’s mother!

Also, I used the very fun gift from Gerardo and Roxanna, The Dangerous Book for Boys, to make paper airplanes with my nephew Nathan, who is about 5 years old.  They were a big hit, and I ended up making about 7 of them for his little brother Adam and my twin nieces, Ava and Addi, who, though they didn’t really like to throw the planes much, still wanted one to hold.

Katie and I went to the Flying Star cafe, a hip eatery that is kind of like Jason’s Deli but with some more authentic local cuisine and style.  I ordered the New Mexico burger which came topped with green chiles.

Katie found out about a sustainable farm in Oregon run by an ex-software developer and his wife, via The Beginning Farmer.  There’s a video of their farm on the Beginning Farmer’s site; he talks about getting tired of working in a cubicle for 25 years (tell me about it ).

I return to Austin tomorrow and just have one week before my wife returns!

…and, I’m so happy. It’s wonderful to be together after two weeks of phone conversations, and I just want to be near him, to touch him and feel the gift of his physicality.

We had a great day. We drove up into the Jemez Mts. north of Albuquerque, with the intent of looking at property. We’re not looking to buy yet, more just dreaming of the day when we’ll actually make an offer on a farm. The drive was beautiful, through red rock formations and along a winding stream. We decided that the village of Jemez Springs was too far from city life but did enjoy the pleasure of stopping in at the convent of the Handmaids of the Precious Blood in Jemez Springs; we had not planned our visit at the convent, having had no prior knowledge of their existence, but passed their mother house on the road and stopped to ring the doorbell. We were greeted by Mother John Paul, who chatted with us briefly before inviting us to pay a visit in their Perpetual Adoration chapel. We promised her that we’d pray for vocations for their community, and she promised to pray for a child for us. The village of San Ysidro was more near to the city, only 17 miles from the suburb of Rio Rancho and had some pretty and green bottom land along the river, and we stopped to look at one property for sale–8 acres and a house for $185 thousand. Not bad, but we’re not ready to make an offer yet.

We spent the afternoon watching a few HGTV shows (love ‘em) and visiting my sister, Courtney, with her children Nathan, Adam, and baby Sophia Rose (totally named in honor of the Rose family). Devin beat Nathan in a splashing war in the backyard pool, particularly when he pulled the trump card with the water hose. I held little Sophia, who slept and slept and slept some more.

Tonight, we watched our nieces Ava and Addi, my brother Jordan’s daughters, at swimming lessons. They’re two and are learning to put their faces in the water and float on their backs. So precious. They were a little shy with Devin at first but decided he was okay and spent the rest of the evening climbing on him.

Tomorrow, we’ll picnic in the Sandia Mts. with Courtney, her children, and Tammy (Jordan’s wife) and the twins. Then, Saturday morning, Nathan’s last soccer game of the season (he’s five, so you can imagine the game’s intensity) and picking raspberries with all the kids at Heidi’s Raspberry Farm in the afternoon. We’ll do our best to take photos during the weekend.

My dear wife has been out of state for over a week now, and in the past few days I have been realizing how lonely and boring it can be to live alone!

It made me think about the elderly friends of ours from church who have lost their spouses and now for the first time in 50 years are by themselves–how important it is to have friends and family to love and to be loved by.

Katie, I miss you!

I have been delighted during the past week to know that Devin is being fed hot home-cooked meals by different friends of ours. Thank you, Gracias and Brumleys and Coopers and everyone else who is taking in this poor bachelor who would otherwise be living on burgers and nachos.

We raised $1000 for the Walk for Life! The Walk took place on Saturday, June 7, and Devin generously walked in my stead, now that I am in NM; though, I did walk in Deming, to do justice to your generosity. Each of your generous donations will be used to help women who are pregnant and need good options, either through legislative efforts or through pregnancy care assistance at pregnancy care centers.

Thanks to each of you who helped make to fulfill my goal!

And is hitting Britain and Canada hard.

In Britain, Catholic Charities adoption service has to close down after 120 years of good work because they refuse to place children with homosexual people.

In Canada, people are being fined, threatened, and have had their right to free speech taken away by Canadian bureaucrats simply by saying that sexual acts with people of the same sex are morally wrong. (More here also).

These attacks on marriage and the family are coming to our shores, too, unless we stop them. Senator Obama, if elected, will advance them further at every opportunity. Senator McCain and the Republican party will fight against them.

Remember, anything that has to do with a person’s sexuality and how they act in regards to it is a moral behavior. Moral behaviors are not intrinsic traits like whether a person is black or white, Honduran or Italian, or even male or female, but rather are behaviors that can be controlled by the person.

I’m not one of them.

Neither is Archbishop Chaput of Denver, Colorado. But the newly minted group who named themselves “Roman Catholic for Obama” saw fit to selectively quote him in their promotional literature.

He responded in a charitable and clear way:

In the years after the [President Jimmy] Carter loss, I began to notice that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be “personally opposed” to abortion really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand-wringing and a convenient excuse—exactly as it is today. In fact, I can’t name any pro-choice Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life—not one. Some talk about it, and some may mean well, but there’s very little action. In the United States in 2008, abortion is an acceptable form of homicide. And it will remain that way until Catholics force their political parties and elected officials to act differently.

Emphasis mine.

Archbishop Chaput quotes from their website:

[Catholics for Obama:] “After faithful thought and prayer, we have arrived at the conclusion that Senator Obama is the candidate whose views are most compatible with the Catholic outlook, and we will vote for him because of that—and because of his other outstanding qualities—despite our disagreements with him in specific areas. “

[Chaput again:] I’m familiar with this reasoning. It sounds a lot like me thirty years ago. And thirty years later, we still have about a million abortions a year. Maybe Roman Catholics for Obama will do a better job at influencing their candidate….

Changing the views of “pro-choice” candidates takes a lot more than verbal gymnastics, good alibis, and pious talk about “personal opposition” to killing unborn children. I’m sure Roman Catholics for Obama know that, and I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.

This past Easter, during my self-imposed moratorium on (constructively) critical posts, Senator Obama made the comment that he didn’t want his daughters to be punished with a baby if they had sex and got pregnant.

Horrible isn’t it? But I once looked at children in the exact same way and feared few things more than fathering a child and that child “ruining my life”. That is exactly how I thought about it: It would “ruin” my life.

Why? Because I had plans, big ones, to make a great impact on the human race, solving scientific challenges and propelling our species across the solar system and the galaxy. I was going to do this and that and become a great man, and having a child would mess all that up because I would have to pay for the child’s care and upbringing and “it” would take up all my time and ruin my plans.

I wouldn’t mind having a few children, one day, when I was ready to do so and had everything all lined up. So I can understand how Senator Obama thinks about children and the possibility of his daughters having one someday, out of wedlock and unwanted.

Children are a punishment because they ruin your life if you get pregnant (or get your girlfriend pregnant) when you don’t want one.

What is the common thread through all these statements: They are all me-focused. It’s all about me and what I want and what I am going to do. But when another person, a little baby, defenseless, comes into being through my actions, suddenly it’s not all about me because this baby is a person who has the right to live and to live long enough to decide for themselves what they want to do.

But with legal abortion, I can decide that that child, that other person, dies, and do so with legal impunity, though the emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical scars that it leaves are deep and ugly.

Faithful Catholics believe that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit to teach all truth, that she cannot err in matters of faith and morals. I assented to this belief with all my heart when I entered the Catholic Church as a convert 7 years ago as all converts do.

The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, teaches that abortion is always morally wrong, a grave evil. Senator Obama supports every form of abortion through all stages of the baby’s life in the womb, and even outside the womb if the baby manages to survive.

His belief directly contradicts the teaching of the Church and therefore of Christ.

Archbishop Chaput finishing the out-of-context quote that this group took from him:

But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.