1| Gerald Ford’s wisdom |National Post
***As someone born a couple months after Nixon resigned and Ford took his place, I found this piece of President Ford history interesting.
Now consider another thing Ford said that I doubt a politician could get away with today: “It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation.” Even in the early 1970s, it was a protest against the rising tide of weirdness, rather than the cliché it might have been 20 years earlier. But it reflected a profound down-home wisdom that diversity and experimentation must rest on solid foundations, or you really do get cultural and social anarchy rather than dynamism.
If praising squareness wasn’t bad enough, how about Ford’s 1976 claim, “There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things”? It would definitely get you booed off the stage today by governments that increasingly resist “mother,” or especially “father,” on forms as heteronormative. And we increasingly expect governments to take the place of parents, running daycare centres for infants, teaching “values” in public schools, acting as breadwinners through child tax credits and universal child care benefits and reshaping our understanding of “family” away from squaresville norms to who knows what.
2| The pastor at the center of this story is a friend of mine: Church sues Iowa to stop application of transgender rules |AP
The Fort Des Moines Church of Christ filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court in Des Moines against the Iowa Civil Rights Commission and the city. The church asks for an order that keeps the state and the city from enforcing the rules that would allow biological males who identify as women from using women’s bathrooms, showers or changing rooms and the same for females identifying as men.
The church says it teaches that “maleness or femaleness is designed by God and is tied to biology, chromosomes, physiology, and anatomy.”
The church says the commission has published a brochure that says the state law sometimes applies to churches when they operate a child care facility or when church services are open to the public.
Here’s the PDF of the brochure mentioned in the article.
3| Noah’s Ark of Biblical Proportions Ready to Open in Kentucky |AP
A 510-foot-long, $100 million Noah’s ark attraction built by Christians who say the biblical story really happened is ready to open in Kentucky this week.
Since its announcement in 2010, the ark project has rankled opponents who say the attraction will be detrimental to science education and shouldn’t have won state tax incentives.
“I believe this is going to be one of the greatest Christian outreaches of this era in history,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, the ministry that built the ark.
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