waltondammerung

Summertime!

In honor of the beginning of summer here in southern California (what else would you call three days straight of almost 100-degree weather?) check out my new favorite steak recipe. I didn't try the potato cakes that accompany it, but the steak and the toppings were wonderful. The soy sauce blends nicely with the balsamic vinegar. I actually used raspberry balsamic vinegar when I made it, and the sweetness of it added a nice undertone.

If you're alone & life is makin' you lonely, you can always go...

... to the Prairie Home Companion list of jokes from this year's joke show. They're always good for a laugh. My favorite:

Q. How do you get a Unitarian family to leave town?
A. You burn a question mark on their front lawn.

Gay marriage III

Law and morality--What is not the role of the U.S. government

The same-sex marriage debate has sparked a lot of discussion among Christians about the nature of marriage: what it ought to look like, whom it ought to protect, and its general purpose. (See a recent World blog discussion on the subject.) In this series of postings, I am addressing a specific group of people: those who both consider themselves Christians and think homosexuality is immoral.

Scripture paints a pretty clear picture of what a godly marriage should be. But if you take a look at our present culture, even heterosexual marriage, as acknowledged by the government, often bears very little resemblance to what one might consider a Christian marriage.

Many Christians argue that those of us who have a moral objection to homosexual unions should not be forced to recognize them by a law that has decreed them to be legal unions. If that is a legitimate objection to allowing gay marriage, what do these same people do with marriages that are legal but are far from what someone following a strict moral code would consider virtuous, or what marriage “ought” to be. Following this line of thought, I am currently “forced” to recognize the marriage of a man who has divorced 4 wives previously and does not care for or support his children from any of those marriages. In what way is this type of marriage something that has been instituted for the sake of children or to ensure the unity of the couple during hard times? Is homosexuality really more morally repugnant than that? In other words, legalizing gay marriage would no more infringe upon our rights to recognize legitimate marriage than the current laws do. The battle for a a unilateral equation of legal marriage with moral marriage was lost long ago when the divorce laws were made much less stringent.

Such an argument seems to arise from the misguided expectation that our government be the moral arbiter of its people. It’s not. We’re supposedly “one nation under God”, but we’ve never been a theocracy. There are two problems with this expectation. The first is the erroneous assumption that our society is such that it is accurately represented by an elected government that writes law based on stringent biblical principles. We’re far from being a Christian society that happens to have a secular government, which is how some people seem to think of us. Call me cynical, but I do live in southern California and daily witness evidence of how little our culture resembles a Christian society. There has been a happy coincidence of public opinion and Christian morals for many years, but the two are diverging more and more. In a blurb in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” a few weeks ago, Henrik Hertzberg wrote about a massive generation gap concerning the issue: “To talk to younger people is to realize that for most of them, including many young conservatives, such notions as the idea that homosexuality is shameful, that it is a voluntary and/or contagious ‘life-style choice,’ or that it is some sort of threat to something or other… are simply bizarre curios from the past, like the belief that masturbation causes blindness.” He added that 61 per cent of Americans under thirty would approve allowing homosexuals to marry.

The second problem is that Christians seem to depend on the government to reinforce Christian principles of morality in lieu of the church, some even to the point of thinking that government defines the sacrament of marriage. Marriage is not defined by the state; it is recognized by it to protect the safety and financial interests of those who are married. (I will get into this more in my next post.) If the law changes, does that change the sacrament of marriage? Certainly, in many churches it already has. Some churches have even anticipated a slackening in the legal definition of marriage. But where there is legitimate desire to follow biblical principles, this question of the definition of marriage should not even arise. If Christian principles cannot withstand the opposition of the law, what good are they?

A constitutional amendment, even if it passed through all the various and tedious stages necessary for approval, would only delay the inevitable. At this point, it seems like a wiser use of energy and resources to back more concerted efforts to save individual souls than to attempt to give mass numbers of non-Christians the appearance of piety by forcing them to conform to moral strictures in which they do not believe. (Shouldn’t the former always be our primary concern?) I will not attempt to address the question of whether homosexuals have a right to be married here. I do question whether we have the right, or even ought to have an interest in forcing them to adhere to beliefs alien to their own and, increasingly, to the culture in general.

SoCal diversity

I think the guys behind me in line when I bought my lox on a bagel today were skinheads. Creepy.

Gay marriage II

HaHA! Fooled you. I hope to continue that post tomorrow, when there is no yoga class to attend, nor homework to do, nor a husband to cuddle. Well, except the last part. I think he'll still be around to distract me. :)

I just wanted to share a photo of me in the salwar kameez (sp?) that my friend Sandeep brought back for me from her last trip home to India. It's not the greatest picture of me, but the outfit is gorgeous! I don't know how she picked one that would fit from thousands of miles away.

It's the most comfortable thing I've ever worn. You'd think that over the millenia, Western fashion trends would have stumbled across something as comfortable and universally flattering at some point. Sweat-suits and spandex just don't quite make the cut, especially not in the "universally flattering" category.

Grammarian

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

Am I a grammar god, or did I just steal the link from Peter & Becky's blog? The answer, tonight at 10.

To find out whether you are a grammar god, go to the grammar quiz.

Gay marriage

Everyone else in the blogosphere has been writing about this topic, so why not me? Even what I've written so far is too long for one entry, so I'm going to break it up into installments. They will not be available for comment, yet, mainly because I know some people may be tempted to jump right into the debate before they've had a chance to read everything I have to say. Yes, Mom, I'm thinking of you. :) Maybe it's not fair debating practice, but it's my blog, so take it or leave it.

I will begin with this oft-quoted passage on divorce from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis:
“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one; the other is the quite different question -- how far Christians, if they are voters or members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not."

And yet one more labor-saving device

The belief-o-matic. Step right up and get your beliefs here. My brother linked to the belief-o-matic quiz on his website, so I took it. I'm not surprised that my highest match was mainline to conservative Christian/Protestant. I am surprised that Jainism was 14th on the list. Take that as you will.

Another surprising labor-saving device

Who'd have thought that a laptop could double as a heating pad? Nothing more comforting for an upset tummy than a warm computer atop it playing the A&E version of Pride & Prejudice. Indeed.

The true test of a good rum...

...is whether a half-full bottle of it is an adequate subsitute for a rolling pin.

High Security

The management company at our apartment complex has responded to the recent thefts by posting the following new signs on the two front entrance gates:

"Private property. No Trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted." (always effective)
and
"Warning: This community is being monitored by a surveillance camera."

Note the singular noun -- "a surveillance camera". As far as I can tell, there really is only one. It's right in front of the management office, to make those of us in the 125 apartments not monitored by the security camera feel oh-so-safe. I'm willing to bet it's not even real. We sell dummy security cameras at work, and one of them looks just like the one atop our management office. Granted, that's the point of a dummy camera--to look just like the really thing. It still makes me wonder, though...

Knock, knock

Our apartment complex made the local news today. Apparently someone broke into an old woman's apartment in broad daylight yesterday afternoon, tied her up, and stole all of her stuff. Call me paranoid, but I wonder if they might have gotten the idea from the monthly newsletter posted on all of our doors that publicized to all the world how bad the security at our apartment complex is. If I saw a flyer at an apartment complex that berated its residents for not coming to the most recent neighborhood watch meeting and explained away recent car thefts by saying that the security patrol can "only be one place at one time", I might target it for my next robbery, too.

What a great place to live. Hey, at least if our vehicles are stolen and our valuables robbed, we still have $5 pizza night on Thursdays.

hiked up

I went on a short hike yesterday in the Santa Monica mountains. The weather was a perfect 60 degrees and partly cloudy, the flowers were blooming, and the views were lovely, if a bit hazy. Can't complain too much about the haze, though. The last time I hiked this trail, I could hardly see more than ten feet in front of me.

For the price of a bottle of coke from a machine...

...or not much more, I have finally purchased a bottle of Charles Shaw Chardonnay, also lovingly known as "Two-buck chuck". I bought it to use in a recipe, since it was cheaper than any cooking wine I could find. There was some left, so I am sipping it in the hope that it will enhance my creativity. I know I'm behind the times on this, but I've been curious to try it out because of all the buzz and the supposed "blind taste tests" in which good ole Two Buck beat out more expensive table wines.

My verdict: It's okay. It's actually better than some more expensive (and very nasty) wines I've tried. (Most notably, much better than some local wine we paid $30 for at a restaurant in Monterey on our anniversary. If I had been the one tasting it when the waiter brought it to our table, it would have gone straight back to the kitchen. Josh is too nice to do that, though, so we each had a few sips and left the rest for the chef's cats. Pleh.)

It doesn't have the nasty tannic flavor that most cheap whites have. It's not remarkable; there's nothing to distinguish it, to make you jump up and say, "Now THAT'S some Charles Shaw!" That might have something to do with the fact that it's a concoction of all of the leftover chardonnay grapes in the state in 1999. That's not necessarily a bad thing. While it might be considered a disadvantage that nothing distinguishes it as being particularly good, there are no odd notes to the flavor that make it stand out as being very bad, either. It's hard to ask for more from a $2 bottle of wine. I'll be happy when they start selling surplus Two Buck Chuck at the 99 cent store.

blogging lapse

My excuse for hardly posting anything at all over last week is, um... that it's strawberry season. Yeah. And I am so busy eating lots of strawberries that I am afraid to blog lest I stain my beautiful white keyboard with red juice.