Killing a human is murder. Period.

A woman's body is HER body. Period. UNTILL she is carrying an unborn child. It is inconceivable TO ME that our country that now guarantees civil rights to all regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation applaudes and supports this woman's actions and that we think that a womans right to choose involves the murder of unborn babies. I truly do NO understand that rationale that says a baby still in utero is NOT a human being but a fetus. I do not understand... I am an adopted child who grew up to have two adopted children. THERE are always other choices that do not involve murdering unborn children. Yes every child born should be wanted and every child born should have a good quality of life but not being able to provide the "perfect" scenario for that unborn child should not be outweighed by society's selfish and self absorbed reality. It makes my heart weep to know that society casually accepts this as a womans right to choose and ignores the unborn baby's rights in the process. We have failed women and children alike with this attitude.

The law that Wendy Davis and her fellow “pro-science” acolytes so bravely stood against would have rendered it illegal to kill the child after 20 weeks gestation. And when I say kill, I mean kill. I mean break bones, rip apart limbs, crush skulls, drain fluids, still a beating heart, annihilate a brain that is capable of dreaming, and crush a nervous system. I mean: Kill. As David Freddoso put it yesterday, “Wendy Davis can now say, When the moment came to stand up for smashing the life out of a baby 6 mos into pregnancy, I was up to the task.” This is not an accomplishment of which she should be proud.

By the time that a baby has been in utero for one month, blood is pumping around the body. In the second month, facial features develop, including the growth of ears, eyes, arms, legs, toes, and fingers. At six weeks, the baby’s brain, spinal cord, and central nervous system are all pretty well formed — in outline at least. By the two-month mark, sensory organs begin to develop and bone replaces cartilage.

Three months in, arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed, and the baby can grab with its fists as well as open and close its mouth. Teeth are on their way, as are reproductive organs. In month four, the baby is fully formed, and eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, and hair develop. At this point, a baby can suck his thumb, yawn, hiccup, stretch, and make faces. At 18 weeks, the baby can move around, and experience REM sleep, including dreams. At 20 weeks, some studies show, it can recognize its mother’s voice.
This is what the pro choice or in my opnion pro abortion reality destroys. Killing a human is murder. PERIOD.

Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...

One of the first vivid memories of my father is at age four, rising when he would, slipping out of my room and waiting on the stairs of our Hibiscus pink townhouse on base at Fort Shafter in Honolulu, Oahu Hawaii. This was a morning ritual. It was always early, just before daybreak and I would sit on the fourth step from the bottom and watch the moonlight wink bright and gleaming gold through the windows across the room and the shadows of the palm trees outside the window would dance their own unique Hula on the wall above me. The soft breeze from those open windows would tickle my cheeks and the air would swirl with the scent of Hawaiian Ginger and tuberose. In my minds eye I could always see island fairies dancing on the air.

My  bare feet pressed down on the cool Koa wood step and I hugged my arms around the coffee colored pajamas with tiny ballerinas melted like Degas dancers into the soft cotton fabric. The Pledge of Allegiance was my morning mantra while waiting on him to come. Daddy would start down the stairs and every morning he would pretend to be surprised to find me there. His voice a loud whisper so as not to wake Mama or my younger sister, Kathy.

“Who is that little tow headed monkey sitting on my steps?”

 I would giggle and slip against the wall so he could sit next to me and lace on his black boots and tuck his crisp starched khaki’s into those boots. His morning smell was always fresh from the shower Dial soap and Barbersol Shaving cream, with a hint of Crest mint toothpaste.

Every morning was the same. He would ask me to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I would smile, begin with a rush and tumble and occasional skip of a word, he would nod, softly correct me when I stumbled. At the end of my recitation, he would pat me on the head, we would stand, me waiting until he got the to door.  He would give a sharp salute, I would mimic his as best I could, the door would close and I would ease back upstairs to my bed and wait until the bugle blowing Reveille sounded loud and brassy clear on the parade grounds visible from our bedroom window. That was the signal for my day to begin.

This was, and still is, a deeply cherished memory that in retrospect represents an idealized moment in time with him. Much of who I am this day I owe to this hardworking, loyal and deeply committed man. His word was ALWAYS his bond. He lived his life in a fashion that has me asking myself on occasion what would Daddy do?  This Father's Day will be Seventeen years since he died but I miss him still. His was the GREATEST GENERATION and the world is a better place today because of men like him. That is his greatest legacy.

Why I"m no longer a Southern Baptist...

The United States Constitution makes clear that citizens of this country can believe anything they wish, whether others find those beliefs laudable or offensive. When, however, the EXPRESSION of those beliefs denies other individuals or groups their human and civil rights, a critical line has been crossed and they have entered into the realm of oppression. When they exert power and control in their attempts to define “the other,”they are then working to deprive others of their own rights to believe as they wish.

The Southern Baptist Convention has a life long history of oppression. The denomination was founded on the premise of supporting slavery. The issue of slavery became a lightening rod in the 1840s among members of the Baptist General Convention, and in May 1845, 310 delegates from the Southern states convened in Augusta, Georgia to organize a separate Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) on a pro-slavery plank. They asserted that to be a “good Christian,” one had to support the institution of slavery, and could not join the ranks of the abolitionists.

Then there is the belief in the submission of wives and women. Of course, Southern Baptists believe their amendment concerning the necessity of wifely “submission” and the wife’s duty to “respect, serve and help” her husband, is what the Holy Scriptures demand. But Southern Baptist slaveowners once believed the same thing regarding the “submission” of slaves and the slave’s duty to “respect, serve and help” their masters. In 1844, the national Baptist General Convention for Foreign Missions refused to license slave-owning missionaries. One year later, that refusal led to the split between the northern and southern Baptists. The southern Baptists were absolutely convinced that the Bible taught that God had divinely sanctioned slavery.

      More than 90 years ago, Southern Baptist leaders in the U.S. opposed the attempt by women to gain the right to vote.  Stalworth W. L. Hargis, a Southern Baptist minister of that era quoted various Bible texts and concluded, "Does this sound like God intended that man and woman should be on a parity in everything, civil, religious, social and everything else?" ("Woman Suffrage," The Baptist Record, XXIV, August 10, 1922, p.6)

      Why is it that a large group of humans who know the Bible and claim to believe it, have missed the whisper of the Holy Spirit on all of the great American social issues of the last two centuries?  Southern Baptists, more so than most any other American denomination, are a cultural tribe with such deeply ingrained cultural biases and prejudices that it is difficult for them to even recognize they have them.

This denomination is once again at the forefront of prejudice, bias, discrimination and oppression, all in the name of Jesus. The points I make about the Southern Baptist Convention speaks to issues of power and control; one they have struggled to maintain over the lifetime of the denomination. These attitudes within the denomination are more about this control and less about the love and grace of Jesus Christ. Each generation of this denomination has had particular groups subject to oppression and each generation of religious leaders has used Scripture to force their own particular prejudices and discrimination on the church members who often blindly follow their teachings without serious prayer and study as individuals.
I have family members and close personal friends who are gay, lesbian and transgendered. Science has proven that this is a biological determination made before birth and is not a choice these folks willingly make and it is clear to me that these family and friends were BORN this way the same as I was born clearly heterosexual. As a practicing Christian I believe that we ARE ALL made in Gods image, each of us and that our differences are here to teach us to LOVE as God loves us, not to condemn and persecute some based on their race, gender or sexual orientation. I think the Southern Baptist Denomination represents the Pharisees of this modern world, caught up in the legalism of the law rather than the mercy and grace that loves each of us. 

As a twice divorced woman I was first the victim of domestic abuse and serial adultery and who was told by my minister that I was not submissive enough and the problems in my marriage were MY Fault.  I was then the victim of lying, adultery and deceit by a Southern Baptist minister who was and still is a “secret” homosexual. It is I who have paid the price of ostracism and lack of validation and worth as a woman within this denomination. Both of my ‘husbands’ retain public roles within the church that has granted them “forgiveness” but shunned me.

      Southern Baptists, a denomination that split with its Baptist cousins to the north over the right of ministers to own slaves (and presently the nation's largest Protestant Christian denomination) "apologized" in June 1995 for their pro-slavery, pro-racist, pro-segregationist past. Measured from the date Southern Baptists began waving their Christian banner for slavery (1845) to the date they apologized (1995), it took them longer to apologize than it took the white South African government to apologize for their segregation policy known as "apartheid;" it took them longer to apologize than it took the Japanese Emperor to apologize to the Asian nations who suffered at the hands of Japan during World War II; it took them longer to apologize than it took the U.S. government to apologize to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans sent to prison camps during World War II; it took them longer to apologize than it took the U.S. government to apologize to the native Hawaiians whose government was forcibly overthrown in 1893; it took them longer to apologize than it took an Israeli president to shake hands with the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Besides which, the Berlin Wall rose and fell and so did communism in Russia, before Southern Baptists finally apologized--an apology uttered one hundred and fifty years, six hundred thousand corpses, and countless lynchings, whippings and beatings, too late.

      I wonder then if in a 150 years or so if the denomination is still viable that the Southern Baptist Convention will apologize to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, to Jewish people, to women, and to all the other individuals and groups they have offended?
With religious rights come responsibilities, and with actions come reactions. Whenever clergy pronounce and preach their conservative dogma on sexuality and gender expression, on women, on Jews, and on others, they must take responsibility for the bullying, harassment, violence against and suicides of these individuals and groups.