Blast from the Past Movie Review: Dirty Dancing (1987)

Although Dirty Dancing is not the usual type of movie I watch, the good folks at Myopia: Defend Your Childhood chose it for their weekly examination of whether beloved childhood movies hold up. I figured I'd give it a spin, and I was not disappointed. Here's the link to the podcast. And now for my review.

The Plot

In the early 1960s, before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, young Frances "Baby" Houseman (Jennifer Grey), the daughter of wealthy doctor Jake (Jerry Orbach), is vacationing with her family at a resort in the Catskill Mountains. Although Neil (Lonny Price) the grandson of resort owner Max Kellerman (Jack Weston) seeks her attentions, she instead falls for the working-class dance teacher Jack Castle (Patrick Swayze). Complications ensue. Will young love triumph? We'll just have to see...

The Good

*Jennifer Grey does a really good job playing "Baby." Her facial expressions, in particular her eyes, are extremely expressive and she uses them quite well. For example, when the sheltered doctor's daughter stumbles onto the raunchy dance party the resort staff are holding, her expression speaks volumes. She's seriously Adorkable and does a great job in the part.

*The other actors do a good job. Patrick Swayze's Castle is cool, Orbach is appropriately paternal (and, as a doctor, outraged at the "butcher" who presides over a botched abortion), and Weston conveys Kellerman's snobbery (but surprising kindness toward his longtime band leader). Cynthia Rhodes, who plays Johnny's dance partner Penny, does a lot with a part that could have had more depth. Price and Max Cantor, who plays slimy waiter Robbie Gould, do a good job playing the sort of upper-class lowlifes who give fraternities a bad name. Seriously, I referred to both of them as "young Donald Trump" for their attitudes toward women and the resort staff.

*And on the matter of women and the resort staff, the movie deals with some very important social issues without being annoying and preachy. The upper-class waiters (who are doing this as a summer job while at schools like Yale and Harvard) are clearly disdainful of the working-class dance instructors and other resort staff, something the elder Kellerman encourages by telling the waiters they're there to "show the daughters a good time" but threatening to fire any staffer who get involved with a guest. Baby's older sister Lisa (Jane Brucker) clearly fits in with the shallow world of 1960s wealthy people who have few aspirations beyond socializing and marrying well, but it's clear Baby doesn't want that and doesn't really fit in. The class issue ties in with a plot involving an illegal abortion in which Gould tells Baby that some people count and some people don't, complete with showing her a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead for good measure.

And although the abortion plot is something that could potentially derail the film into an issues movie (and aggravate viewers on either side of the issue), it's handled compassionately and respectfully. We see exactly why the character in question goes through with it, how badly it could have gone in the days when abortion was illegal (both the danger of death and, should the woman survive, sterility), and we see Dr. Houseman's outrage toward both the back-alley abortionist (whom he calls a "butcher") and the young man he initially thinks is responsible. The whole situation is just sad.

*The soundtrack's good. It mixes both music from the 1960s when the movie takes place with songs from the 1980s when the movie was made. One of the songs, "She's Like The Wind," was even sung by Swayze himself, who's a good singer.

The Bad

*The movie drags a little bit in parts. I spent a good bit of time on my phone. To be fair, that's because this is not the sort of movie I ordinarily enjoy watching. Someone else--and considering how beloved this film is, that'd probably be most people--wouldn't have that problem.

*The movie has an actual Training Montage when Baby learns to dance. I remarked that this was like seeing a cliche come to life, but the movie is also nearly 30 years old. Back then training montages might not have been so cliched, although Nick tells me that training montages occur in some of the earliest movies.

*Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention, but as I said earlier, the characters Robbie Gould and Neil Kellerman are so similar in look and action that I actually thought they were both the same character. Neil claims that he's planning on joining the Freedom Riders (and the TVTropes page for the film claims that actually shows he has hidden depths), but it came off to me that he was taken aback that Baby in interested in studying economics and joining the Peace Corps rather than studying English (aka an "MRS Degree," given the time and her social class) and was scrambling for some way to impress her. Both of them came off to me as "young Donald Trump," with Neil as snotty and pushy toward "the help" and Robbie as a vile cad.

*Where are Baby's parents? Castle is teaching Baby how to dance and the film implies this takes most of the summer, with the climax taking place at the end of the season. Certain events in the film early on strongly prejudice Dr. Houseman against Castle and I imagine he wouldn't want Baby involved with him AT ALL or, if he did allow her to take lessons, he'd keep a close eye on them. There's a deleted scene suggesting Mrs. Houseman knows a lot more about what's going on, but a deleted scene doesn't help much.

*It would have been nice if Baby's actual name is revealed earlier. It's not even in the credits!

*How much older is Castle than Baby? If the resort staff are all in their 20s and 30s and "the daughters" are all teens, Mr. Kellerman would have reasons beyond class snobbery to want to limit guest-staff romances to the wait staff, who are all college students and are consequently more appropriate age-wise. Patrick Swayze was in his 30s when the movie was made, for example, while Frances' character would have still been in high school if not just graduated and college-bound.

*It's my understanding that going to the Catskills for extended summer vacations was a primarily Jewish thing (hence the "Borscht Belt"), but religion or culture is never touched on. This article in Tablet Magazine suggests Dirty Dancing is "the most Jewish film ever," but if you're not already familiar with the cultural milieu, you wouldn't get it. Some indication that the characters are Jewish would have been nice, plus if Castle is a Christian (or at least simply isn't Jewish), that's another reason for Dad to be bothered.

The Verdict

It's not my type of movie, but it's very well-done. 8.5 out of 10.

LITTLE PEOPLE, BIG GUNS, My Third Original Novel, Is Done

This is a little late, but here's some good news. My third original novel Little People, Big Guns is now finished.

It's actually been finished for a couple weeks now, but I wanted to run the last three chapters through the writing group, go through a backlog of older critiques I'd set aside due to real-life obligations, review the comments from a friend who'd read the whole thing in a couple days (it's around 28,000 words, which technically makes it a novella), and then finally give the whole thing a once-over before I sent it out. I've got a contact at a small bizarro press whom I'd pitched an earlier version of the story to at the World Horror Conference 2015, so I sent it his way and hoped for the best.

Okay, maybe I should actually describe the plot. A few years ago I read a news story claiming TV chef Gordon Ramsay's dwarf porn star double was found dead in a badger den. It turns out the story might not actually be true, but at that point the earliest version of the story, entitled "Badgers vs. Midgets," was born. Basically a little person (a whole lot people with the condition actually consider "midget" a slur) is killed by a predatory badger, the local law enforcement declines to investigate, and so the local little persons take matters into their own hands.

Unfortunately, as I learned from the gentleman at the pitch session, that would only work as the first act. What happens next? Fortunately I was quick-thinking and spun out a plot involving militant animal-rights activists and a bear-sized super-badger. As my writing-group cohort Katherine Mankiller would put it, "peak silliness" has been achieved. I spent the last year and a half banging it out and now it's in someone else's hands.

And although the story seems tasteless and exploitative, it's actually much more thoughtful. LPBG touches on issues like the abortion of fetuses with dwarfism, mobility issues little people face, people rubbing little persons' heads for good luck (Tyrion Lannister has something to say about that), etc.

And that might make it an awkward fit. It's too farcical for a book seriously exploring the issues people with this condition face, but it might be too thoughtful for straight-up exploitation. I might well have to independently publish it like I did with a bunch of my short stories. There aren't very many publishers of bizarro fiction (which is the literary equivalent of a cult movie--think Bigfoot Crank Stomp or Shatnerquest), so I might exhaust those fairly quickly. I'm going to pitch it Thursday through #Pitmad, but that hasn't gotten me a lot of luck with more mainstream fare.

And if it does get published, either from a small press or as an Amazon original, it'll probably be under a pseudonym. I want the "Matthew W. Quinn brand" associated with more highbrow content like The Thing in the Woods (a teen horror novel that ultimately becomes a tale of interstellar war--think Down The Bright Way with monsters), Bloody Talons (an oral history of an alien invasion a la World War Z), and Battle for the Wastelands (post-apocalyptic steampunk Western--think Dark Tower meets Game of Thrones). A lowbrow exploitation farce, even one with a heart, doesn't really fit.

(A lot of writers have different pseudonyms for different brands. Delilah S. Dawson's fantasy-western Shadow novels Wake of Vultures and Conspiracy of Ravens go out under Lila Bowen, while James R. Tuck's Lovecraftian Red Right Hand is published under Levi Black and Bryan Cohen's Cinderella Dreams of Fire is published under Casey Lane.)

And the planned sequel, should this one take off, gets even more farcical. It involves a hidden community of little people called the Shire under threat from a master criminal code-named Santa Claus who kidnaps members of the community to force them to work in a mine. And his muscle is a blue-eyed white-furred Bigfoot. Nope, not classy at all.

I'll keep you all posted once I get more information.

Joint Projects for Pro-Life and Pro-Choice People

I strongly suspect this thread is going to get a lot of people going, but on the other hand, that means more blog traffic, so here I go...

One of the most contentious moral-political debates in this country is the issue of abortion. For starters, it's one of the few issues that have provoked outright violence (bombings of abortion clinics and shootings of abortion doctors) and it certainly generates the most bellicose language. Furthermore, I've observed, based on reading the comments pages of both pro-life and pro-choice sites, that people on both sides of the issue simply do not understand why their opposite numbers hold the beliefs they do.

(Belligerent pro-choice people do not appear to believe pro-life people actually have humanitarian motives and instead attribute their beliefs to some sick desire to control women, while belligerent pro-life people accuse the pro-choice people of being callous baby-killers when no less than former President Bill Clinton said abortion should be safe, legal, and rare and, anecdotally, I've heard of women who've had abortions leaving clinics crying.)

One theory I've heard is that Roe vs. Wade united both Catholics and Protestants together in the pro-life movement and the increased contacts between the two groups led to a decline in sectarian prejudice that had previously been much stronger. After all, if you get to know people in a different group, you realize a lot of the negative ideas you've had about them are wrong.


By that logic, getting pro-life and pro-choice people to work on projects of mutual interest might help defuse some of the general nastiness characterizing the debate.

So here are two suggestions:

While doing research on pregnancies resulting from rape for my Wastelands projects (Catalina Merrill was captured by the villain Grendel, made a concubine, and bore a son whose legal name is Havarth Grendelsson but whom she privately calls Hayes Merrill), I found a pro-choice website (I can tell it's that because it calls pro-life people "anti-choice") describing how in 31 states, no law specifically forbids a rapist from attempting to assert parental rights. Given how there may well be thousands of children born every year as a result of rape, that's a big problem. The site posted a link to proposed legislation in South Carolina sponsored by pro-life people that would fix this situation and suggested forming a political alliance with them.

(I can't find the original link because the Akin and Mourdock controversies have filled up Google, but Shauna Prewitt's work on the subject has provided much of the same information. And I'd rather not run lots of Google searches for "rape.")

I suspect the law is based on the assumption no rapist would seek parental rights on the grounds this would open them up to legal consequences. That would apply to hooligans lurking in dark alleys, but most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, in circumstances ambiguous enough that proving a criminal case would be rather difficult and thus the perpetrator would not be deterred from making himself obnoxious.

Oftentimes this leads to rapists trying to get pregnant victims to drop charges in exchange for them renouncing their parental rights, which leaves them free to rape again. Furthermore, the more obsessive varieties of rapist might use the parental-rights excuse to continue to harass the victim for years to come.

(I can hardly imagine some sleazy stereotype of a frat boy who goes around plying women with alcohol and roofies in order to take advantage of them from caring enough to harass one victim for years when he can continue on his merry way preying on naive freshmen, but the article I just cited does reference that occurring.)

This isn't exactly incentive for women in this position to keep their babies, now is it? Furthermore, eliminating the ability of a perpetrator to use the parental-rights issue as a bargaining chip would help deal with the rather low arrest/prosecution/conviction rate of rapists.

Obviously the laws would need to be written in such a way that a man can't be denied access to his child or children on accusation alone, but that can be hammered out once the effort actually starts. The MJ article references one attempt to change the law using the "preponderance of evidence" standard used in civil cases, since child-custody is a civil matter. That seems like a sound standard.

Furthermore, here's an idea I had awhile ago that I've only posted on my alternate-history site, where it received little attention. The suggestion was that pro-life and pro-choice people should invest the efforts spent calling one another names into supporting research into artificial wombs and fetal transplantation, as well as in-utero surgery and genetic engineering.

Implemented together, these would render abortion obsolete. A healthy unwanted zygote/fetus/whatever could be transplanted to an artificial womb or a surrogate and then put up for adoption when born, while an unhealthy zygote/fetus/whatever could be more easily fixed. Genetic engineering to fix anomalies would actually be easier, since we already have had cases of gene therapy for diseases as well as genetic doping for athletes.

Fixing a situation this extreme could prove rather difficult to say the least, but many situations aren't as bad. In Britain, for example, abortions have been undertaken for clubfoot and cleft palate, both of which can be fixed after birth. If those could be fixed before birth, that wouldn't have happened.

I'll end my post with a quote from the late President John F. Kennedy. He said the United States would go to the Moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Both the scientific research I suggested and getting two groups opposed to each other to the degree the pro-life and pro-choice movement are will not be easy, but the dividends in civil peace, increased convictions of perverted criminals, and scientific advancement will be well worth the effort.

What do you think?

Why I'm Not Voting for Romney or Obama

As those who have known for while awhile know, I've been self-identifying as a Libertarian since a road-to-Damascus moment about how there is no moral difference between nonviolent ownership of "assault weapons" and nonviolent marijuana smoking when I was in high school. Although I was too young to vote in the 2000 presidential election, I voted for the Libertarian Badnarik in 2004.

In 2008, I voted rather reluctantly for John McCain. I can't remember why--either something the Libertarian candidate that year did got on my nerves or perhaps there was something about Obama I really didn't like and I didn't want to risk helping Obama win Georgia. Although I'm drifting away from Libertarianism (more because I support government spending on education, science, and infrastructure), my views are sufficiently different from the two major parties that I'm not inclined to vote for either of them and I'm not going to vote for hard-leftists like the Greens.

However, although I haven't voted yet, I'm probably going to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Although I have spoken out in favor of Republicans Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul, here's why I'm not interested in supporting either candidate.

Obama

One thing I didn't like about Obama back in 2008 was the whole cult-of-personality thing that coalesced around him, with him being "the one" who would bring "change." I'll give Obama credit that he tried to make a joke out of it rather than use it for some more sinister purpose, but that did rub me the wrong way.

One of the big reasons I didn't like him in 2008 was the born-alive controversy in Illinois. This isn't a matter of abortion in the first trimester or so of pregnancy when the fetus doesn't really have much in the way of a brain. If there's the possibility the fetus can survive outside the womb, it must be fairly far along. See this. This isn't even abortion anymore.

Although I shed no tears for Gadhafi and have flat-out recommended Obama claim credit for Gadhafi's death to look tough on foreign policy, Obama has claimed the U.S. contribution to the overthrow of Gadhafi did not require congressional approval. I do not believe that to be the case.

Obama does not oppose indefinite-detention provisions that violate the Fifth and may infringe on the First amendments.

And then there's Gunwalker.


Romney

For starters, Mitt Romney flip-flops when it's politically convenient. I have no beef with changing one's opinions based on new evidence--after all, that's what science is all about--but the timing of Romney's changing views on issues like gun control and abortion smell.

It's not like Romney opposes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens either. If someone is killed in battle and is a U.S. citizen that's one thing, but if they're arrested, that's something else. The U.S. Constitution specifically says people can be charged with treason for making war on the U.S. and that's how to handle American members of AQ who are taken alive.

Mitt Romney also opposes online gambling, using downright nanny-state arguments in favor of keeping the ban. I don't gamble for money, but I don't care if anyone else does. If someone causes their family to suffer because they can't control their gambling, that's unfortunate, but it's not justification for the government to ban everyone from doing it.

Romney vowed to fight marijuana legalization "tooth and nail." Considering how Colorado has greatly benefited from "medical marijuana" and several states are voting on legalizing marijuana this fall, we might well have a major state-federal clash. Considering how the GOP claims to support state and local control, the federal government being aggressive on this issue is rather hypocritical.

I'll get to why I support Gary Johnson later, since I generally believe in providing positive solutions rather than just complaining.

Another Note On "Martin's Middle Earth"--Female Warriors

I've given some more thought to "Lord of the Rings if done by George R.R. Martin" scenario I posted here and I've come up with some more ideas.  Here there be spoilers, so watch out...

Despite the faux medieval setting, Martin has included several notable "warrior women" like Brienne of Tarth (who's as big and strong as most men), Asha Greyjoy, Maege and Dacey Mormont and the other women of Bear Island, and the pint-sized death machine Arya Stark.  Although the Norse had "shieldmaidens," women being active combatants in medieval times was fairly rare due to cultural norms and physical size issues.

It's been a long time since I've read Lord of the Rings or seen the movies, but the only female combatant I recall depicted in action is Eowyn.  Galadriel is described as having thrown down both during the War of the Ring and in the era depicted by The Silmarillon, but that could have been in a command role as easily as physically grappling with an enemy.  The movies depict Arwen as a better rider than Aragorn who evades the Nazgul to bring Frodo to Rivendell and even draws steel on them, but I don't think the rather old-fashioned Tolkien would have gone for that.

So, basically Martin's version of Lord of the Rings would have a far more active and violent female cast.  I'm drawing comparisons now to the Elves, who are different from the other peoples of the West due to being immortal and the oldest race, and the Dornish of A Song of Ice and Fire who practiced equal inheritance regardless of gender, allow their women much more sexual freedom, and were never conquered by the Targaryens.  The Elves could be a more gender-equitable society due to their smaller numbers and how long-lived the Elves are.

(Even if Elves have the same physical strength differentials than humans have, due to the Elves being so long-lived, Elven women would have more time to learn ways around that--think martial arts.  Even if they'd still be at a disadvantage against Elven men who would still be stronger and have the same thousands-of-years-of-free-time thing going, they'd be a very dangerous opponent for a man, a dwarf, or an Orc.)

Thus Martin's LOTR, if it included the flight to Rivendell from the Nazgul, would resemble the movie more than the book.  I'm thinking we might see Galadriel throwing down with the Forces of Darkness at the Battle Under The Trees and the destruction of Dol Guldur as well.  I'm thinking you'd see female Elf warriors as well, probably more in the vein of Asha Greyjoy (who is fairly normal in looks and size and seems to rely on non-grappling weapons like throwing-axes) than Brienne of Tarth (who is physically man-like to the point some fans have guessed she had a glandular problem).

As far as humans are concerned, Eowyn would still be there.  Making her, the one who slew the Witch-King of Angmar, into some Sansa Stark analogue who gets abused and forced into marriage for dynastic reasons, comes off as dubious and almost insulting even if there are some similar circumstances (a man who desires her, regardless of her opinions, and the dynastic thing) and the brutality is par for the course in Martin's work. 

However, if she's the one who kills Wormtongue, makes the decision about what to do with his rape baby (be it abortion or telling her infanticidal brother that she isn't going to allow a child to be killed because the father is a pervy traitor) if Martin's LOTR includes that plot element, and engages in hard-core warrior stuff like in canon, that might make up for it.

She could still kill the Witch-King of Angmar per canon or perhaps Saruman, especially since in the latter case there'd be a revenge element.  Even with the One Ring Sauron's physical body could be destroyed, so Eowyn could relieve Saruman of the hand with the Ring on it and then relieve him of his head.  If she manages to avoid thrown fireballs or other magical attacks or telekinetic wizard-staff-kung-fu like in the movie, it'd be a fight worthy of her canonical battle with the Witch-King.

(Of course, apparently one reason Bilbo could carry the Ring for so long without ill effect is because of his good heart and how he pitied Gollum and spared him when he could have killed him while invisible.  An embittered, angry Eowyn might be in serious danger of being corrupted by the Ring.  Unless of course she's wise enough to have it gotten away from her immediately, and she seems like she's got a brain based on what I remember from the books.)

Great...now I'm tempted to write a fan-fic depicting the battle between Eowyn and Saruman, with the latter's taunts and mind-games expositing the whole sick back-story.

Not sure who else there'd be.  If we want an analogue to Bear Island, where the women became warriors because the Ironborn and wildings would attack them while the men were fishing, maybe the Gondorian provinces closest to Umbar and its corsairs or the Easterling borders have a military tradition among the women as well?

About female warriors and the Dwarves, that might be trickier due to the fact that I think Tolkien said only a third of Dwarves are female and many Dwarven men never marry and instead devote themselves to their work.  Such a culture would have even more surplus males to expend in war and would have even more reason to be protective of women, even though I can imagine female dwarves being very physically formidable.

Covenant Care Adoption Services Has Reached Its Goal

In an earlier entry, I called on my readers to donate money to assist Covenant Care Adoption Services, a Christian non-profit whose function is to facilitate adoption of unwanted children.

Well, my friend Michael (who clued me on this) and his wife Angelyn both posted this on Facebook today.  Apparently Covenant Care has not only reached, but exceeded, its goal and soon a worker for Augusta will be hired.

Good job to all of you who helped out.  And to anyone who might not have seen my earlier link or not been able to donate, I imagine they'll still need money for other purposes, so one can still donate.

A Brief Retraction Re: My Birth-Control Article

I posted the NYT link and the link to my blog in the Chat forum of my alternate-history site, in order to drum up discussion and hits for the blog.

The user whose handle is Blairwitch749 works in the health-care industry--and has gotten in some mighty battles with the pro-national health care contigent, which is mostly European--and he didn't think making hormonal birth control over-the-counter was such a good idea.

He went into a great deal of detail about how doctors do extensive blood-testing, calibration for the recipient's weight, etc. to ensure they've got it right when they prescribe hormonal birth control.  If a doctor's involvement is required to that degree, keeping it a prescription drug might be prudent, or at least the matter should be discussed more thoroughly first.

Due to the fact I am not 100% sure BW is correct on the matter (I have not independently verified the process) and the fact that a large thrust of my earlier comments were a defense of secularism in government from a Christian perspective, I will leave the older article up.

The Case for Making Birth Control Pills Over-the-Counter

I was reading the New York Times today and I came across the following opinion column:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22blanchard.html

I think it's time for my regularly-scheduled controversial opinion, so here goes...

I think it would be a good idea to make birth-control pills over-the-counter instead of requiring a doctor's prescription. 

In my opinion, drugs should be prescription-only if they're dangerous enough to need a doctor's guidance in their uses or if misuse would cause large-scale problems--think all these diseases we've thought we'd conquered becoming antibiotic-resistant because people don't finish their antibiotic prescriptions or badger doctors into prescribing them unnecessarily.

According to the article, which was written by someone who knows what they're talking about, the first situation is not an issue.  I've googled progestin, the one the author believes should be made over-the-counter first, and I can't really find anything about dangers from it.

Since there aren't any negative effects to the wider society I can think of, I do not think whether or not one can buy birth control pills over-the-counter or not is really any of the government's business.

Now I'll discuss something that will inevitably come up if someone proposes this--religion and its associated morality.  I'll stick with Christianity, since it's my own religion and the most influential religion in the United States.

If birth control were more widely available and people knew how to use it, there would be fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions.  If abortion is morally equivalent to killing (aka unjustified in most circumstances), it is imperative that abortions be reduced.  This will help accomplish that.  Fewer unplanned pregnancies means a smaller burden on both public and private charitable assistance, making more resources available for people in that unfortunate situation.  This in turn will make abortion--something few women contemplate with relish, based on the reports I've heard about women coming out of these clinics crying--less attractive.

Now, onto sex.  It is true that Christianity teaches sex outside of marriage is immoral and it is true that, if oral contraceptives were more widely available, I would imagine more sex outside of marriage would occur, since it would reduce the danger of unplanned pregnancy.

That being said, I don't think the number of people deterred from having sex outside of marriage by merely having to get a prescription for birth control pills is all that large.  It strikes me as more probable that people simply take the risk, which circles back to my point about abortion.  Basically, they're for the most part going to sin anyway and cause more problems for both themselves and others without oral contraceptives than without.  It's a lesser-evil argument; although an individual may choose to reject both the lesser evil and the greater evil and bear the consequences, this is not practical for governance.

Furthermore, it's not just people having sex outside of marriage who use oral contraceptives, but also married people who, for various reasons, wish to delay having children.  The Bible condemns sex outside of marriage; beyond 1 Corinthians 7:5 (in which spouses are told not to deny one another sex, lest the other partner be tempted to commit adultery), I do not recall any New Testament commandments pertaining to sex within marriage.

(There is the Old Testament case of Onan, who "spilled his seed upon the ground" and got zapped from on high, but he didn't want to father children in his brother's name AT ALL, not just at a more convenient time.  Claiming that story is a commandment against all birth control is reading too much into it.)

On a wider note, it is imprudent to have the government serve as an enforcer for our particular theology or moral code.  After all, someday we might lose our cultural and political dominance (some of the long-term trends don't look good) and we don't want the precedent we set to be used against us. 

The Founding Fathers created a secular government for this reason; they saw the wars of religion in Europe and the mutual persecution depending on which sect was in power (England, in which the Catholic Henry VIII persecuted Protestants until he became one himself and then began persecuting Catholics, comes to mind).  Unless it is a public matter--and for the reasons I've outlined above, oral contraception is not--the law should not be involved.

Let us remember that the secularly-governed United States is the most religious developed country, while the European countries that had state churches of one flavor or another have become extremely secularized.  It was our ancestors' tendency to use government to enforce the predominance of their sect that contributed to the decline of Christianity in Europe--let us remember that Deism emerged in the aftermath of the religious wars.

Furthermore, nowhere does the New Testament suggest that Christians should seek to take control of the government and use it to serve "Christian" ends.  In fact, in 1 Timothy 2:2 in which Paul exhorts his associate Timothy to pray for "kings and all those in authority," it is not so that they may become Paul and Timothy's enforcers, but so that they might leave the early Christians alone.

In Support of Abortion Alternatives...

In the town of Milner near where I work, Rock Springs Church has established Melba's Manor, a home for unwed mothers.

http://www.melbasmanor.com/

My co-worker did the first story on Melba's Manor:

Rock Springs Church to open maternity home

However, I reported on when Mike Huckabee, one of the more successful 2008 Republican presidential candidates, came to speak at a fund-raiser for the manor:

Huckabee delivers pro-life message

In his speech, Huckabee revealed that Pastor Bennie Tate was the son of an unwed mother who chose not to abort him.  As Huckabee pointed out, it is one thing to oppose abortion but another thing to provide an alternative.  Most women who have abortions would rather not have had them and through Melba's Manor, Rock Springs Church has provided an alternative, at least for the few women it is able to serve with its current resources.

I call on all of you my readers to support Melba's Manor or organizations like it.  This is something that both pro-life and pro-choice people can do. 

The pro-lifers should support it because abortion isn't going away anytime soon and providing options for unwed mothers is a good way to prevent it; the pro-choicers should support it because (I think) the majority of them don't like abortion even if they think outlawing it would be the greater evil.  Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said abortion should "safe, legal, and rare," after all.