The Girl in the Door ...and a Half-century of Joy

                                 The Girl in the Door … and a Half-century of Joy

                                                                    Published in Marietta Daily Journal Aug. 16, 2015

            Fifty years ago today – August 16, 1965 – I and several other guys strode across the grounds of a northern Wisconsin youth camp to meet the girl counselors.  The week of camp was a culmination of a summer full of Vacation Bible Schools around the state.  The youth from all the churches we college kids had served in were arriving and unpacking.

            As we approached the girls’ dorm, I saw her standing in the doorway.  My heart raced.   I lingered behind my fellow male counselors as three words bombarded my brain: “There she is!”

            I had been praying for her to cross my path since I was 15.  In many ways I was old when I was young, overly serious about everything.  So serious that even dating – or the dating scene – seemed frivolous.  Actually I didn’t want to date and dated little.  I wanted and expected God to parachute a beautiful Christian girl into my life so that we could get on with life.

            It was now happening!  Parachuted down into the beautiful woodlands of Wisconsin, there she stood in the doorway of her dorm room amidst several middle school girls.  Why did I sense that she was a country girl?  How, even before speaking, could I now know for certain that my yearning for the girl of my dreams was over?  And look at how she’s greeting the guys even as she attends to a couple of her young campers.  Look at her composure and her quiet confidence.

            Though a shy fellow, I wasn’t worried about introducing myself.  All that mattered now was that there she stood and my heart was at rest.

            I don’t recall our introductory words.  I do remember that after long days of classes, hikes and recreation with campers, we counselors would gather and talk long into the night.  That’s how I learned that Nancy Milligan was a Tennessee milkmaid.  Raised on a farm near Murfreesboro, she was a country girl extraordinaire.  She was no stranger to work or to excellence.  Milking cows and picking peas were simply a way of life.  During college years, being a delegate to the National 4-H Congress was a fitting conclusion to her farm upbringing.

            At the end of the week I was one sad 21-year-old guy.  Far from the Deep South, I was homesick.  But I didn’t want to leave the camp or Green Bay where I had spent most of the summer.  The girl in the door was the main reason, but there were others.

            The small church I attended sat right beside Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers.  Packers coach Vince Lombardi ruled the world and his raging fullback, Jim Taylor, attended the same church I attended.   One Sunday we sat beside each other.  My head would not have spun more had I been sitting beside the Pope (or the president of the Southern Baptist Convention).  The thought of leaving Green Bay and the Packers intensified the sadness.

            Another pull on my emotions was the beauty of Wisconsin.  If there was a single piece of litter in America’s Dairyland, it escaped my eye.  (My beloved Southland wasn’t and still isn’t so litter-free.)  Clean towns, barns and immaculate fields punctuated the landscape. 

            On the last day of camp, I asked Nancy for her Tennessee address.  Countless times on the Greyhound headed home I unfolded and stared at the tiny piece of crumpled paper that bore her name and address.  So my wife wouldn’t be one of those beautiful Mississippi girls after all.  And I would meet her “up North!”

            Living in two different states made courting difficult.  But I don’t like dating, remember.  I just want to get married.  We did, two years later almost to the day.  Our wedding was only our 10^th time to see each other, having courted primarily via U.S. Mail and long distance Southern Bell telephone lines.

            My Nancy got a degree in English from Middle Tennessee and taught school for 2 and a half years before stopping to raise our children.  She could run the world but chose to run a household.  Several years later she resumed teaching and spoke often of two of her exceptionally delightful students, the Kendrick brothers, whose newest movie, “War Room,” is being released this month.

Nancy’s strength is drawn from her Christian faith and sturdy God-fearing parents.  She is so … Tennessee and Wisconsin both, but believes in blooming where she’s planted.  So now she loves Georgia too, and babies, cooking, reading, sewing, entertaining guests, and life.

            I’m not encouraging “love at first sight.”  But believe me, it does happen.

Roger Hines

8/16/15

How Supreme Is the Supreme Court?

                                               How Supreme Is the Supreme Court?

                                                                              Published in Marietta Daily Journal Aug. 23, 2015

            In the recent GOP presidential debate, candidate John Kasich declared that since a Supreme Court ruling is the law of the land, we should accept its ruling on same-sex marriage (Obergefel v. Hodges) and move on.  The Ohio governor went on to say, with some pride, that he had recently attended the same-sex wedding ceremony of a friend.

            One’s first response to Kasich might be “Is he serious?”  Does Kasich not know that Supreme Court decisions can be overturned?  Would he take the same stance on the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 that ruled a slave is property and is to be excluded from U.S. citizenship?  Does he not know the Dred Scott decision was overturned by the 13^th and 14^th amendments of the Constitution?

            How about Plessey v. Ferguson of 1896 in which the court upheld state segregation laws, giving rise to the false doctrine of “separate but equal” schools?   Does Kasich not know that in 1954 the court reversed Plessey in Brown v. the Board of Education, thereby satisfying the moral consciences of many Americans?  It appears that “settled law” is like “settled science.”  It’s not always settled.

            All of which raises a few questions.  How supreme is the Supreme Court?  How equal are our three co-equal branches of government?  How democratic is our democracy?  

A seasoned lawmaker, Kasich surely knows about the aforementioned legal cases.   In stating that we should acquiesce to same-sex marriage, he was most likely declaring that to him the issue was not a hill on which to die.  But to many Americans it is.  Yell “bigot” if they must, the gay lobby doesn’t understand that to evangelical Christians sexuality is inextricably tied to morality.

Consider also Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion.  One thing is certain: Roe v. Wade’s aftermath continues to this day.  Just as many Americans were morally outraged by the Dred Scott decision, so today are there still millions who cannot just “move on” from a Supreme Court ruling that legalizes killing unborn babies.

            In 1974 when the Supreme Court ruled on abortion, radical feminism’s voice was at its loudest.  “I am woman; hear me roar” was the feminist movement’s mantra.  Gloria Steinem chimed in with “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  The seventies were the Golden Age of feminism and court rulings demonstrated just how easily judges can be influenced by loud political activism rather than the people’s deeply held convictions.

            One might ask why the Supreme Court in 1954 ruled as it did in Brown v. the Board of Education, thereby overturning Plessey v. Ferguson.  Was the Warren Court’s 9-0 decision a demonstration of moral conscience?  To be sure it paved the way for integration and added more than a spark to the civil rights movement.  What if believers in social justice had accepted Dred Scott and Plessey v. Ferguson and just “moved on”?  The nation should rejoice that there was no Kasich-like shrug toward these rulings.

            Thanks to the atrocious videos showing Planned Parenthood negotiating the sale of aborted baby body parts, Roe v. Wade will continue to be a hill on which to die for many Americans.  Just as moral conscience drove the opponents of two other Supreme Court rulings, Dred Scott and Plessey, so will Roe v. Wade continue to pierce the hearts of Christians as long as it is the law.

            In the same way does Obergefel v. Hodges (same-sex marriage) affect many Americans who view same-sex marriage as rebellion against nature.  It violates their sense of the question, “What is first in nature?”  What was first was not two people of the same sex marrying each other, but a man and a woman and usually children.  A little unit of government, if you will, that formed a foundation for all other societal institutions.

            So is the Supreme Court supreme?  Only if our three co-equal branches are not equal.  Only if Jefferson was wrong when he wrote, “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”  Only if the Apostle Peter was wrong when he said, “We must obey God rather than men.”

            In a democratic society the people are supreme.  People of conscience and right reasoning changed the Dred Scott decision as well as Plessey v. Ferguson.  Whether they change Roe v. Wade and Obergefel v. Hodges remains to be seen.  I’m saying they eventually will, thus exercising the will of the people and showing that 9 unelected people cannot be the final arbiters of what is right and just. 

            Jefferson’s spirit of rebellion is in the air, no thanks to Kasich, and well it should be.

           

           

Roger Hines

8/16/15

Is a Jeffersonian 'Little Rebellion' at Hand?

                                       Is a Jeffersonian “Little Rebellion” at Hand?

                                                                           Published in Marietta Daily Journal Aug. 30, 2015

The barbarians are at the gates.  The peasants are headed toward the palace with their pitchforks. 

            Not really.  What has actually happened is ordinary people have found a megaphone, a new national leader.  Many of them, not all, are Tea Partiers.  This doesn’t mean that every Tea Party group supports that national leader.  It only means the sentiments that birthed the Tea Party are strikingly similar to those held by the supporters of Donald Trump.

            True, the first modern Tea Partiers in 2009 focused on taxes and the nation’s profligate spending, while this new leader has made illegal immigration his chief issue.  Even so, many Tea Partiers and those who have joined their ranks appear determined to dump some more tea and stir things up.

            The barbarians and peasants are actually normal middle class folks.  But to political party echelons, high paid consultants, big donors, special interests and lobbyists, they are still riffraff.

            Sooner or later every pot needs to be stirred.  Sometimes you have to fire people.  Sometimes Jefferson’s notion of “a little rebellion” needs to take place.  New wine cannot stay in old wineskins. 

Neither can freedom remain for too long on any one vehicle, because freedom likes to flow.  Political parties, contrary to George Washington’s fears, have served for over 200 years as America’s mechanism for choosing leaders.  But today one of those parties is being tested like never before.  Its leadership has been tone deaf. The riffraff are unwilling to take it anymore.

“It” is government intrusion, government regulation, government expansion, IRS excesses and an elitist media/political complex.  “It” is the timidity of political leaders whose fathers successfully defeated the evil ideologies of Nazism and Communism but who are skittish about even acknowledging the evil ideology of Islamic terrorism.

  How far we have come from President Clinton’s famous words just after his midterm shellacking in 1994. “The era of big government is over,” Clinton declared in his state of the union address.  The riffraff thought it might finally be so. But a few years after that platitude came No Child Left Behind, Dodd-Frank, TARP, executive orders and Obamacare, not to mention Benghazi, ISIS, loss of a nation we helped stabilize, loss of national prestige and flattened wages. 

            Elites are not only squirming, they are showing fear on their faces and in their words.  Network and cable news anchors appear nervous every time they interview the supposedly “buffoonish” Trump.   George Will, ordinarily one of the nation’s best thinkers and communicators, says there is reason to “voice robust disgust” with the riffraff’s new leader.  An intellectual if there ever was one, Will has served the cause of conservatism well, yet when it comes to the present turmoil, he still prefers old wineskins.

            Bill Kristol, son of the father of neo-conservatism, Irvin Kristol, says he’s finished with the riffraff’s new leader.  He, too, prefers old wineskins.  Karl Rove has cast aspersions and gloom on the riffraff.  Tethered to old line alliances and unmindful of who the riffraff really are, Rove continues to tout the establishment.

            This upending of the Republican Party (and eventually the Democratic Party that must deal gingerly with its own avowed socialist candidate) is concurrent with two other social upheavals.  One is the cracking of religious denominations as evidenced by countless unaffiliated churches – most of them with cutesy names – sprinkled across the nation.  The other is the fading of the old media or television networks that have fallen to cable and the internet.  What’s changing is delivery systems and what the riffraff are angry about is the current system’s failure to deliver.

            The current system has failed to deliver candidates who are not beholden to donors.  The candidates it has produced have, instead of representing voters, become members of a buddy club who should be fighting each other on behalf of their constituents instead of chumming it up.

            The riffraff have found in their new leader a candidate who acknowledges their love of flags and fetuses, who rightly rejects the notion that the 14^th amendment grants citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. (It really doesn’t.  Read it.) In 1866 illegal immigration was not an issue.  The amendment was intended for former slaves.

            Finally, the riffraff have a candidate who doesn’t bore them to death and who has the ability to ignite Jefferson’s call for occasional, legitimate rebellion.  That spirit of rebellion is much deeper than our political leadership and media stars realize.  They best beware and the rest of us best prepare for surprising political re-alignments of all stripes in the next decade.

            Politically, the planets are shifting.  All because regular folks and a city boy billionaire found each other.  I, for one, will stay tuned.

Roger Hines

8/26/15

Tennyson is Dead and Frost is Dying: A Case for Poetry

                          Tennyson is Dead and Robert Frost is Dying: A Case for Poetry

                                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 6, 2015

            Is there anything offensive about the following poetic lines?  Do they merit a place in the classroom?  Could it possibly be productive for America’s youth to read, discuss and (dare I say) memorize them?  They were written by Maltbie Davenport Babcock and appear to be words of both challenge and encouragement.

            “Be strong / We are not here to play, to dream, to drift / We have hard work to do and loads to lift/ Shun not the struggle, face it / ‘Tis God’s gift.”

            Of course the word God is probably illegal, but based on the overall content of these 5 lines, my own take on them is that they are sorely needed, mainly because we simply aren’t as tough as our grandparents were.  Seems to me everybody needs to be challenged and encouraged from time to time.  Certainly youth do.

            Try these words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  “Let us, then, be up and doing / With a heart for any fate / Still achieving, still pursuing / Learn to labor and to wait.”  If the national mood was ever in need of Longfellow’s poetic trumpet, it is now.  Yet, poetry is not in vogue in any degree to speak of.  Because of all the emphasis on testing, job readiness and “practical learning,” schools are giving the humanities (literature, history, music, etc.) short shrift.

            Besides, literature – especially poetry – contributes nothing (many think) to the acquisition of trades and professions.  Literature is an “extra,” intended for the bookish.  Strange, then, that throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century when industrialization was expanding and American laborers and farmers were building a nation and moving America toward post-World War II dominance, literature was a mainstay of education and a source of inspiration in the poorest of homes.  Many a city urchin and many a country boy like myself was encouraged to “shun not the struggle” and to be “up and doing.”  That encouragement came largely at school from literature.

            What happened?  Where’s the hunger of our youth to be “still achieving, still pursuing?”  Not all youth lack the hunger.  If you think all do, go judge an oratorical contest for the American Legion.  You will be inspired, but by a small minority.

            Much of today’s youthful malaise is caused by parents who give their children cars as soon as they reach driving age.  Much of it can also be ascribed to what we de- emphasize in education, namely the humanities which don’t lend themselves to testing as well as math does.  In fairness to educators, public schools are social institutions that must respond to the public.  He who pays the fiddler calls the tunes and today’s tune is “Prepare my kid for a job.”

            Jobs are a reasonable concern.  But what about values which the public also expects schools to teach?  As essential as math and science are, these subjects don’t and can’t teach values.

            But literature can.  The question is what is the need of the hour?  The answer is both “practical learning” and the humanities.  We should welcome the emphasis on educating the hand as well as the head and should kick ourselves for doing away with “shop” in the first place.  But in addition to hand and head, man has a heart.  Man is a doer and a thinker, but he is also a feeler, a possessor of a moral sense that must also be attended to, educated and fed.

            Math is an exact science.  We are fools to argue about math but derelicts to discount literature, history, music and the values they import.  Perhaps there will always be tension between the humanities and studying for things practical, but to ignore or downplay studies that inherently teach values is to court social disaster.  Isn’t any laborer’s life richer if, in addition to plying his trade and feeding his family, he can also tell his children about David and Goliath, Paul Revere and Pinocchio?

            Mr. England himself, Alfred Tennyson, bids us “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  Who among us doesn’t need that poetic line?  Robert Frost, with the help of an 11^th grade teacher, finally convinced me poetry wasn’t just for girls.  Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

            Teens love that line and teens are not automatically predisposed to hate poetry.  More than ever they need poetry. 

 If we kill off our poets, we starve our souls, all for … bread, I suppose.  And we all know the line about trying to live by bread alone.

Roger Hines

9/2/15

Selective Justice: A Double Standard for Kentucky

                      Selective Justice: A Double Standard for Kentucky

                                                                          Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 13, 2015

The jailing of county clerk Kim Davis of Rowan County, Kentucky is a clear example of selective justice.  Although freed this past week, Ms. Davis took a stand that has shed light on how inconsistent law enforcement can be.

            Jailed for refusing to grant marriage licenses to homosexual couples, Davis has forced the issue of double standard to the forefront.   Consider the many examples of failure to enforce the law.  The prime example is sanctuary cities.

            Today over 200 cities in America are sanctuary cities, that is, havens for illegal aliens.  Whether or not they have declared themselves as such, these cities have chosen to ignore federal law.  Some have forbidden their police or municipal employees to inquire about an individual’s immigration status.  Others have instructed their law enforcement officers not to inform the federal government of the presence of illegal aliens living in their communities.  And what has the Justice Department had to say about this?  Guess.

  Sanctuary cities are violating the Illegal Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that requires local governments to cooperate with the feds in enforcing the law.  Their defense?  They are protecting “immigrant rights.” Never mind that illegal aliens are not immigrants.

               Why haven’t mayors and city council members of the sanctuary cities been arrested?  Why aren’t they in jail? 

            Ms. Davis is the first American citizen to be jailed as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling on homosexual marriage.  President Obama, the Supreme Court and public officials of every level may soon learn there are not enough jails to hold the Christians who are willing to be jailed for what they believe.

            Slavery, segregation, abortion, and now the re-definition of marriage.  Slavery and segregation are settled issues.  Abortion and re-defined marriage certainly are not.  Ms. Davis, who argues that her Christian convictions prevent her from granting homosexual marriage licenses, has become the face of resistance to America’s new definition of marriage.

            When U.S. District Judge David Bunning jailed Ms. Davis for contempt, he remarked, “Jailing is necessary in this case.  It sets a dangerous precedent to allow people to assume they can pick and choose which court orders they will follow.”  What a laugh, particularly in light of President Obama’s total disregard for our highest law, the U.S. Constitution.  One might ask what happens when a President or the Supreme Court acts unconstitutionally.

            Ms. Davis’ incarceration highlights the tension between individual religious beliefs and laws that violate those beliefs.  Happy we should be that Abraham Lincoln did not acquiesce and accept the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision as “the law of the land.”   And who would argue that Martin Luther King should not have taken his bold stand against segregation laws, which he did at great sacrifice?

Would Judge Bunning have anything to say about President Obama’s failure to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act?  What does the judge think about Attorney General Eric Holder’s brash public announcement that he would not enforce that law?  And where was the concern for rule of law when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of California state law?  Or when Newsome set San Francisco on the path to be a sanctuary city, thus violating federal law?

Holder and Newsom were as guilty as Ms. Davis, yet they were never called into account.  Instead they were celebrated by the homosexual lobby, some of whom traveled far to Rowan County to paint Ms. Davis as a Christian radical.  Yes, she is a government official, but so were Holder and Newsome.

 Ms. Davis actually is a radical, if a radical is one who challenges the existing order.  The existing order (our Supreme Court and contemporary culture) has demolished a 2000-year definition and tradition of marriage.  It appears not to know that life is sexually transmitted, that mutilating oneself cannot change one’s gender, and that, as dissenting Chief Justice John Roberts put it, “For the good of children and society, sexual relations that lead to procreation should occur only between a man and a woman committed to a lasting bond.”

Ms. Davis’ opponents hold that marriage has nothing to do with procreation, and they will continue to stigmatize people like her.  If we are to ever turn back the assault on marriage, it is essential to elect a pro-marriage president in 2016 and to support others like Ms. Davis who have the courage to stand up for their convictions.

Thomas Jefferson understood judicial tyranny and warned us of it:  “It is very dangerous to consider judges as the ultimate arbiter of all constitutional questions.  To do so is to place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

Roger Hines

9/9/15

A Decision Revisited and a Victory for Exceptionalism

             A Decision Revisited  and a Victory for Exceptionalism

                                                                           Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 20, 2015

            When Georgia’s state school superintendent Richard Woods was running for office in 2014, one of his oft repeated remarks was “We won’t farm out U.S. history.”  Mr. Woods was referring in part to Advanced Placement U.S. History, the accelerated high school program run by the College Board.

            College Board is the private, nonprofit corporation that publishes the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and controls all of the Advanced Placement courses and exams.  Advanced Placement is used by many high schools throughout the country because it offers participating students a chance to engage in college level learning in various subjects.

            The program works as follows.  If a high school student takes, for example, AP English and the AP English exam at the end of the course, then with a certain score he or she can exempt college freshman English, receive both high school and college credit, and advance on to other courses.

             One benefit of AP is that students are exposed to more rigor and depth.  Another is that Mom and Dad have to pay for one less college course for each AP exam their student performs well on.

            Alas, as the poet put it, “The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry,” and that’s why Mr. Woods took a stand.  In 2014 the College Board came up with new guidelines for its U.S. history course and exam.  To put it mildly, the guidelines were not complimentary of capitalism or of America’s origins.  They failed to mention that Washington, Franklin, Madison and other founders were ever even born.  They also cast American Indians as helpless victims of European colonization.

            Further, the guidelines painted Europeans as disease-carrying pale faces out to acquire gold.  Doesn’t sound like the gentle Puritan leader William Bradford, does it?  If the guidelines writers had ever read any of the poetry of colonial poetess Anne Bradstreet, they would have known that colonial women were not doormats, but stalwart women of strength and intelligence.  Yet, gender was one of the obsessions found in the guidelines.

            One of the 2014 guidelines reads as follows: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.”

            “Formation of gender”?  Oh yes.  From studying U.S. history, students must learn how we “became” male and female.

            Fortunately the above standard has been deleted, but only because Superintendent Woods and others made their voices heard.  Woods even paid a visit to David Coleman, the president of College Board, to plead his case. Coleman was the chief architect of Common Core which Woods has also opposed.  Had Woods and others not spoken up, the College Board, in light of the Bruce Jenner caper, would likely have added, “Formation of gender: how we became male and female and how we can know whether we are male or female.”  I’m not being facetious.  “Gender education” has already edged its way into several states’ curricula.  Such social indoctrination is maddening; its placement in U.S. history is puzzling.

            Thanks to Superintendent Woods, this summer the College Board re-wrote the guidelines.  Good old Ben Franklin was included because “the effort for American independence was energized by colonial leaders such as Franklin.”  Faint praise, but more than it was.

            Capitalism is given only faint praise as well, but at least the new guidelines say capitalism “provided new access to a variety of goods and services.”  That’s a small bone for an “extremist super patriot” like myself, but there’s still reason to celebrate.  While the 2014 guidelines were a Bernie Sanders dream, the corrected ones are not.  The new guidelines point out that America was and is an exception to all of the tyranny and autocracy that has characterized so much of human history and that still rears its ugly head wherever free people are not vigilant.  Superintendent Woods was vigilant.

            The trendy word is “exceptionalism,” but unlike most prissy neologisms, it is a useful and  fit expression for what took place in 1776 and for what has made America special ever since.

            I have no doubt that College Board changed the guidelines out of fear that some states would cease using their products such as the AP program and the SAT.  SAT’s competitor, the ACT (American College Test), has given College Board a run for its money for several years.

            At any rate, in this particular educational battle, political correctness and revisionist history lost.  Serious students of history won.  U.S. history is no longer being farmed out to those who tried to rewrite it.

Roger Hines

9/16/15

Teen Parenthool --- Still a Bad Idea

                                 Teenage Parenthood: Still a Bad Idea

                                                                       Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 27, 2015

            Some years they trickled in.  Other years they arrived in what seemed like droves.  Teenage mothers, I mean.

            On normal school days they weren’t allowed to bring their babies, but on teacher work days, on registration days for the next semester, and often after school they brought them, excited to show off their progeny.

             Sometimes I wondered if they had not purposely gotten pregnant.  Of course babies should cause joy in every human heart, but for the girls I’ve observed, joy came not only from their adorable offspring but from something else as well.  It was as though their babies gave them needed purpose; as though love, acceptance or something was what they actually sought in the first place.

            One particular day, the last day before Christmas holidays, students were registering for the second semester.  There were no classes.  This was one of the days they came in droves.  Practically all of them were attended by their moms who held their babies while the young mothers registered for classes.

            Just before registration began in the library, I was on my way to lock my classroom door.  From the other end of the hall came a beautiful 11^th grade girl with a diaper bag strapped on her shoulder and a baby on her hip.  My instant inclination was to get on inside my room and close the door behind me.

            Why?  Because unmarried teenage mothers always made me uncomfortable as well as sad.  In class there was no problem.  I truly sought to help them any way I could.  But when it came to showing off their babies, my uncomfortable index soared.

            At any rate, I was too slow.  Just as my hand touched the door knob, Amy yelled, “Mr. Hines, have you seen my baby?”

            Of course I had.  Amy had already returned several times after school to show her baby to faculty members, but frankly I had avoided her.  What was I supposed to do?  Hug the child and congratulate its unmarried 16-year-old mother? 

            Amy was a top-notch student.  Whatever her home life was like, she dressed well and didn’t appear to be needy, either materially or emotionally.  Nor did her parents whom I had met before Amy became pregnant.

            And, oh yeah, the child’s father.  Teachers overhear everything.  If only parents knew how much and how often.  Just days before Amy left to have her child, she entered my classroom talking to two of her friends.  The following words fell from her lips: “I think Brian is the father, but he’d make a terrible husband, so I just don’t care.”  Her words angered and saddened me.  As I noted above, Amy and her parents appeared to be materially comfortable, but Amy surely took a casual attitude toward some things about which no one should be casual.  Therein lay her need and perhaps her parents’ neglect.

            Unmarried teenage girls who bring their babies to school create an awkward position for teachers.  Teachers are rightly expected to be as helpful as possible, but how can they do so without feeling they have become enablers?  In the case of my avoiding Amy, I was torn between doing the right thing and overdoing the positive stroking.

            Beside all of these personal conflicts teachers must face, there is a societal aspect to consider.  For instance, unlike Amy who placed her baby in her well-off mother’s arms, far too many other girls place their babies in the laps of taxpayers, essentially dumping their financial obligations on taxpayers.

            Children having children is still a bad idea.  But before we shame the 14, 15, and 16 year-old Amy’s of the world, let’s shame adults.  Adults who view sex casually themselves, either unmindful or uncaring of how complex, intricate and sacred sex really is.  Let’s shame adults for an entertainment industry hell-bent on destroying traditional morality, and clothing its disdain for morality in comedy.  Let’s shame schools that foster teen entertainment culture at every turn, thereby giving teens what they already have and already wallow in.

            Let’s also shame schools for accommodating and enabling our Amy’s with baby nurseries down the hall and congratulatory notes on the bulletin boards.  Let’s shame preachers who used to keep bad, harmful things at bay by naming them.

            Finally let’s shame adults in government who cannot see that indiscriminate aid destroys people, who think marriage can have multiple definitions, and who deny that a nanny state can undermine homes.   

            The more I think about it, the more I want to apologize to Amy.  She was just a kid surrounded by adults who were either pointing her in the wrong direction or leaving her to her own devices.  And that’s sad.

Roger Hines

9/23/15