In my last post, I discussed the way Peter Jackson’s films have misunderstood J.R.R. Tolkien’s works by including more roles for women in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I pointed out that Tolkien had already included significant role models for women, and that Tolkien’s work had to be understood in the context of a man’s story representing gender in a masculine way. To complement Tolkien would require a story from a woman’s perspective, not the creation of roles for women, placing them haphazardly into the scene, not exactly fitting right with the narrative. I would like to continue this conversation by examining one of the central themes found in all of Tolkien’s stories and how they represent Tolkien and his own life experiences. This theme is romantic love – but not just romantic love, but heroic love, the struggle that a man might have to go through for his beloved. Women have their own version of this, which one can find in other works of literature, and their version needs to be read and studied on their own, as a way to complement Tolkien’s insight. But Tolkien’s work is a masculine voice and what it can offer about masculine romantic, heroic love is compromised by Jackson.

J.R.R. Tolkien had, for himself, a great, romantic affair, filled with the struggles one associates with heroic love, and it served as the foundation for the great love story found within Middle Earth (the tale of Beren and Lúthien). After Tolkien’s mother had died, the priest and family friend, Fr. Francis Morgan, was given custody over Tolkien and his brother, Hilary. When a young Tolkien met Edith Bratt, they quickly fell in love. Tolkien’s love for Edith was seen to get the best of him, and Fr. Morgan forbade Tolkien from seeing or contacting Edith until Tolkien turned 21. Fr. Morgan wanted Tolkien to focus on his studies; he was also concerned because Edith was an Anglican. Tolkien reluctantly obeyed.

As soon as Tolkien turned 21, Tolkien wrote Edith, only to get a letter telling him that she was engaged and had thought Tolkien had forgotten her. A week later, Tolkien went to visit her, and convinced her to reject the man she was engaged to and to marry him instead (with the requirement that she became Catholic, which she did). It is clear, when one reads what happened over the following years, that their love remained through various struggles, some which hurt both them and their family (one struggle seems to have been a religious one, which later worked itself out). These hardships reminded Tolkien that even with true love, the struggle for that love would always be there, to test it and purify it until the end. The fun they had before being forbidden to see each other, as well as the wait and struggle Tolkien had to go through in order to be married, and the heartaches they felt after, can be seen throughout Tolkien’s works, but none better than in the tale of Beren and Lúthien (an identification Tolkien made early on, calling Edith his Lúthien, even on her tombstone).

The story of Beren and Lúthien is one of the greatest stories of Tolkien. It was one of the first he started to write, working on it throughout his whole life. It’s a wonderful, detailed story but a short synopsis must suffice here. It was a story of the First Age of Middle Earth. The hero, Beren, saw and fell in love with the Elven princess, Lúthien. He was the last survivor of a group of men who had withstood the onslaught of Morgoth, the Dark Lord (who, as Sauron’s master, was far more deadly and evil). Lúthien was the fairest of the elves, and loved by her father, King Thingol. When Thingol heard of Beren and Lúthien’s love, he was set against it. He said he would only give his daughter to Beren if Beren did an impossible task: bring one of the three Great Silmarils which Morgoth had stolen from the Elves and give it to Thingol. Beren said he would do just that, and that the next time Thingol saw him, he would have a Silmaril in hand.

The tale is one filled with great heroic deeds, of great love and great woe. Beren would prove one of the greatest men in history but he would die soon after completing his task. Lúthien, in sorrow, died from her grief. Being an Elf, and Beren a human, she feared their destinies would keep them apart, but because of her great story and the depth of love and grief in her heart, Mandos, the keeper of the Elven dead, gave to her the desire of her heart: both Beren and Lúthien were given another life together, both as mortals, to enjoy the glory of their love.

Beren and Lúthien became the great tale of love, told by the Elves themselves. The story of Aragorn and Arwen, as told in Appendix A of the The Lord of the Rings, is a secondary version of Beren and Lúthien. Aragorn was a great man, and Arwen, the daughter of Elrond, was like Lúthien reborn. She was the Evenstar, the most beautiful of her generation. They first met when Aragorn was twenty, when Aragorn fell in love with her, similar to how Beren fell in love with Lúthien. Elrond, her father, had taken Aragorn in and loved him, but when Elrond saw what was in Aragorn’s heart, Elrond warned him that Arwen was of a nobler lineage with a destiny among the Elves. Elrond foresaw dark times and counseled Aragorn not to be concerned with things which he could not have, including a wife. Aragorn struggled with this advice, but kept himself from Arwen.

It would be thirty years before Arwen and Aragom meet again and Arwen finds her love for Aragorn. Then, they would pledge themselves for each other. Elrond, when he heard of this, said though he loved Aragorn as a son, he would not allow the marriage and the doom it brought unless Aragorn proved himself by becoming King. This task represented, like in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the difficulty and sacrifice one must go through for love. As with Lúthien, Arwen would have to face mortal existence and suffer the fate of men, for her love. Jackson’s version of Aragorn and Arwen lost this grandeur, the sacrifice and the nobility of the love itself, when he compromised Tolkien’s concept in order to create a bigger role for Arwen.

In these tales, Tolkien tells the story of how men struggle for love, and how that struggle is shared by their beloved (as well as with many others). Tolkien wrote a happy ending to the two great tales – though, both touched with bitterness – showing the great beatitude of love and how it gives men a sense of value through their struggles for love’s sake. This is how a man can understand love, for it is a man’s way of understanding through his own accomplishments, even accomplishments for love. In the end, if love wins, it is an eschatological joy, which must be earned and not just given for it to be of value. This is also how one can understand another love story in Tolkien’s works, the love of the Ents with the Entwives. The two have become separated; Tolkien himself is not sure if any Entwives still exist in the world. The Ents, in their desire for their Wives, represent their hope for their reunion, a kind of eschatological hope in and of itself:

Ent:

When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!

Entwife:

When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past;
I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

Both:

Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.

Together the two will find rest – the rest found in love, the rest Tolkien represents can only be had at the end of a vast struggle for love. Without it, without such testing, the love is weak and incomplete and lacks value to the masculine sensibility. Love’s labor – it is not lost; the hope for love, in the middle of the struggle, is an eschatological hope which keeps the lovers united even when apart.

Tolkien himself would feel the full blunt of this when his love, Edith, died. He would have to wait, like the Ents, for the reuniting with his love. And yet, it is clear, his hope was that the two of them would be together, in heavenly union, for all eternity, bonded by love. Buried with a tombstone naming them Beren and Lúthien, they now lie together, awaiting the final resurrection, where they too can be in the land where their hearts may find eternal rest

In honor of the football game today, I am reprinting a humor piece I wrote when I realized that I actually had to learn something about this game – a “game” which I’ve yet to see the radical feminists insist be opened, like the battlefield, to women!

The first play my son had to make in football was to get all the waivers of liability signed without being spotted by the Motherback. He did this. He worked with a man who I usually refer to as “my husband” but, in this case, I will call him “the Co-conspirator.” My son and the Co-conspirator devised a series of maneuvers that ran wide of me throughout July and August. My 14-year-old freshman was crossing the goal line with a football before I knew that there was a football team at his new Catholic high school. I, the Motherback, failed in my defensive position and one of my children, my baby to be precise, is playing football.

Now, I am learning about this form of combat which my son and the Co-conspirator hysterically call a “game.” First, I have learned that there are several backs (beside my back which everyone went behind). There are ¼ backs, ½ backs and running backs. There are some tight backs, too, I think – at least, mine usually is. There are no ¾ backs and no whole backs, but a full back seems close to the latter. There is a defense and an offense but the ¼ backs never play on the defense which is all about blocking and tackling and brutally hitting the person with the ball so that the pigskin flies out of his grip and into the air. That becomes a free pigskin and every single person on the field then must jump upon it and make a pile of bodies. The referees then unpile the persons, slowly, one at a time like pick up sticks, until they find a hopefully breathing human being who has the ball stuffed under his shirt moaning “it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.”

A pigskin is the ball my son uses but they don’t call it a ball as in other sports. You use the ball in basketball, for example, to make baskets and you hit the ball in baseball to get to base. In football, the “foots” are most certainly used to run the ball down the yard line and across the goal, but the ball is not called a runningball, yardball or goalball, it’s called a pigskin. I have found this confusing.

There are a lot of calls in football I don’t understand but some of them have to do with interference. There is interference in a pass which seems to be called when a referee is very disappointed that a player did not catch a pigskin thrown really far down the field. I’ve never seen interference on little, dinky passes. There is also interference in a face mask. This seems to be called only when one player grabs the mask portion of another player’s helmet and swings him around until his feet leave the ground or when one player takes his fingers and jabs them through the mask into the other player’s eyes who then screams out loud. The face mask on a helmet and the nose guard on the defense are not related in any way to my knowledge.

I have also learned that five minutes of football is actually 45 minutes of time in the lives of real people. It is critical to learn this early in the season so you have proper supplies. If you say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” most Co-conspirators reply, “but there’s just five minutes remaining so you better wait.” Either you learn to ignore this bald-faced distortion of reality and go ahead to the bathroom or you must wear an adult diaper to all football games. It’s up to you.

Finally, I have learned to bring a prayer book to my son’s football games. The first game, I did not do so and found myself staring obsessively at the ambulance which was waiting for injuries near the visitor’s bench. We were the visitors. I thought it was incredibly unkind of the host team to put the ambulance and two excited paramedics next to my son’s team and I found myself thinking uncharitable thoughts and words. Then one of my son’s teammates got hammered and fell down totally still in the middle of the field. The activated paramedics dashed onto the field to pronounce the player dead, while all of the players kneeled on one knee to pray for his departed soul. I began to sob and realized that I did not have a prayer book with me. But the player miraculously came back to life and everyone clapped.

So far, none of the many injuries I have witnessed have been fatal. In fact, most of them have not required any treatment except ice and applause. I am still puzzling over what is actually an injury and what is not. The large deep blue and purple streaked bruises all over my baby’s arms and shoulders are not, I am told, “injuries” – they are merely caused by the pads which he wears to protect himself from injuries. However, when one of the ½ backs or tight wads gets tired and fakes a leg cramp to limp off the field, the football trainer runs out with a gigantic bag of ice and all of us stand up and clap because he is injured.

Personally, I do not believe that football is consistent with any teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The only overlap between football and the Roman Catholic Church is the Holy Rosary which, along with my prayer book, is as necessary equipment as my son’s helmet and his big number 58 jersey.

Contributed by Fay Voshell

It is said that General Robert E. Lee, as he surveyed the carnage of the battle of Telegraph Hill, spoke the words, “It is well that war is so terrible — we would grow too fond of it.”

War is terrible.

Perhaps that is one reason why during relatively peaceful interludes, but sometimes even in wartime, palliative fantasies are concocted to make armed conflict seem less horrible and the stresses of war more equitably distributed. Civilians, often the most ravaged by war, long to see their hopes and dreams of a perfect society, along with their ways of conducting affairs and mediating conflict, inform the armies of nations. Then peace will reign.

But most often, attempts to make armies resemble the mores and behavior of contemporary civil society amount to chimerical impracticalities and downright denial of reality. It seems the present administration of the U.S.is gripped by a fantasy of “equality” designed to distribute the rigors of combat more equitably between men and women by allowing women to enter combat zones as infantry. Women are to be both as endangered and as heroic as men traditionally have been in wartime.

The West has seen similar fantastical pipe dreams before.

Before and during World War I, the French military was gripped by an illusory vision of heroism. French soldiers were taught to think of themselves as unconquerable because they possessed elan vital. A concept developed by philosopher Henri Bergson, elan vital was a supposed life force imparting a heroic invincibility that would enable French soldiers to conquer the less nobly endowed, retrogressive Huns comprising the German armies.

Buoyed by their fantasy of natural supremacy, the French nobly went forth, garbed in their brilliant red and blue uniforms and wielding their flashing sabers. They met the cold, hard and merciless reality of German machine gunners who methodically picked off rank after rank of inspired Frenchmen who, despite elan vital, fell dead. Illusion eventually bowed before reality. The French changed uniforms and tactics. But not before the fiction the nation’s soldiers were taught to believe in had resulted in countless casualties.

The American military has now been asked to embrace a fantasy equal to or worse than the concept of elan vital.

Today’s adherents of heroic fantasy have decreed the battlefield can be a gender-neutral zone reflective of the Left’s domestic agenda for gender “equality.” The daydream is that women and men can act as interchangeable units on the battlefield. The eradication of the differences between the sexes the Left is seeking to achieve in civilian society is to be applied to the U.S. military, which is now expected to embrace a sort of psychological Lamarckianism that insists men and women can by sheer positive thinking — “I can be anything I want to be”–overcome the natural limitations of the female sex by an act of will.

Today’s version of elan vital, monotonously repeated for at least two generations, is reminiscent of the fatuous Emile Coue’s theories of self-improvement based on optimistic mantra, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Ideas similar to Coue’s theories of the transformative abilities of positive thinking were to trickle down to children’s literature in the form of The Little Engine That Could (1930) — “I think I can; I think I can.” In turn, the “I think I can,” motif has now become the ubiquitous mantra repeated continually to little boys and girls: “You can be anything you want to be.”

Including a female GI Joe locked in hand-to-hand combat with hardened male soldiers.

No. Sometimes, you can’t be anything you want to be. Sometimes, you shouldn’t even try.

It is impossible to eliminate the natural differences and natural attraction between the sexes. It is hallucinatory to believe there are not core differences between the way men and women think and act. It is also madness to deny the heightened testosterone levels characterizing men on the battlefield.

For instance, does anyone suppose women will not be assaulted and raped when put side by side with men in a battle zone?

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs has found sexual assaults within our armed services are far more common in war zones. Think of it: women face assault and rape within their own units. Even if the assaults sometimes don’t amount to physical rape, the temptation to trade sexual favors for protection and/or advancement is great. How many women in the military can testify that they are propositioned regularly by men who are their superiors in rank? How many have not been merely propositioned, but have been forced into sexual encounters they don’t want?

There is another reality that contradicts the fantasy: Special tortures await women when in the hands of enemies who regard women as unclean and as infidels who are lower than dogs. Such enemies are highly unlikely to be handing out birth control pills to the women they rape and use as sex slaves — if they allow captured women to remain alive. Women face impregnation and forced abortion or the killing of infants conceived during rape when captured behind enemy lines. Men may face torture and even death, but they do not face what women will inevitably face if captured by implacable misogynists who care nothing about the niceties of the Geneva Conventions.

The experience of the Israelis, a democratic nation that has deployed women to combat zones, is instructive. Phyllis Chesler reported in a symposium on Islamic Terror and Sexual Mutilation:

“Soon after the establishment of the IDF, the removal of all women from front-line positions was decreed. Decisive for this decision was the very real possibility of falling into enemy hands as prisoners of war. It was fair and equitable, it was argued, to demand from women equal sacrifice and risk; but the risk for women prisoners of rape and sexual molestation was infinitely greater than the same risk for men.”

During the same symposium, Dr. David Gutman said:

“During the Israeli War of Independence Jewish fighters, including female soldiers captured by Arab irregulars, were routinely tortured and mutilated in the most obscene ways (by contrast, water-boarding would have furnished a pleasant interlude), and IDF officers warned their troops against being taken alive.”

John Luddy of the Heritage Foundation cites the demoralizing effects on unit cohesion, another vital consideration. Male soldiers who saw their fellow women soldiers mutilated in obscene ways were devastated.
Luddy writes:

“For example, it is a common misperception that Israel allows women in combat units. In fact women have been barred from combat in Israel since 1950, when a review of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War showed how harmful their presence could be. The study revealed that men tried to protect and assist women rather than continue their attack. As a result, they not only put their own lives in greater danger, but also jeopardized the survival of the entire unit. The study further revealed that unit morale was damaged when men saw women killed and maimed on the battlefield.”

But just as importantly, when given combat units are facing each other, one of which has women and the other which has men, the most likely outcome is that the male-only forces will win. After all, war is about winning. Imagine the sheer joy of the SS if they had faced an American battalion made up of men and women — or only women? The ludicrousness of the situation would have been exceeded only by the slaughter. Weakness would have ensured victory by the enemy.

Is weakening our armed forces what is actually desired? We conservatives should never forget the military has long been a target of the Left, who wish to weaken it so it does not present a threat to their goals of a European-style America. It is a badly kept secret that our president dislikes the Armed Forces and would even allow “sequestration” — gutting our military — in order to promote his domestic agenda. What better tactic to complete the emasculation of the finest military in the world than to insist on enforced “equality” between the sexes on the battlefield?

Speaking of emasculation, what happens to the manhood of soldiers who are expected to fight alongside women? What man is going to choose being a soldier if he has to share a foxhole with a female and give up belonging to a band of brothers?

Radical feminists who want their fantasy of so-called “equality” to extend to the battlefield must ask themselves if they are prepared to have universal Selective Service, along with all it implies for all women, not just those who meet the standards and who would choose to be fighters alongside men. What transpires when choice is taken out of the hands of all women? Who, for instance, will take care of all the children if Mom and Dad both head for the battlefields?

None of the above is meant to imply American women have not shown they are capable of much when they serve in the armed services. The core issues concerning women in combat do not indicate women are not as intelligent, as brave and as true as men. Individual women can even sometimes outperform men. They can be just as ferocious when protecting what is precious to them and their country.

No, the core issues concern the innate limitations of and the unique dangers facing soldiers of the female sex as pertains to mixed gender battle units, the battlefield, and capture by the enemy. Even when women have met all the physical standards applying to male soldiers, they remain women and therefore automatically more vulnerable than men. That is why no armies, ancient or modern, ever incorporated women soldiers into their infantry ranks. In fact, the appearance of women on the battlefield would not only be welcomed by our enemies, it would be a fantastical exercise in political correctness that would not only to be uniquely dangerous to women, but might well prove fatal to the readiness and effectiveness of our military and our country.

Those who would conduct wars according to fantasies will lose. The French were on the verge of losing WWI no matter how firmly they believed a mystical endowment of heroism was bestowed on their soldiers by the elixir of “elan vital.” It was when France faced reality and changed her politically-correct assumptions that she began to break her losing streak, with the help of American soldiers — all of whom were men.

It is time to put the axe to the root of the fantasy of “equality” before it irrevocably damages the finest military in the world.

Fay Voshell, selected as one of the Delaware GOP’s “Winning Women” of 2008, is a contributor to American Thinker and National Review Online.  This article is reprinted with permission and originally appeared at American Thinker.

The big opposition banner below reads “Fetuses are Not Babies, Women are Not Incubators.”  Some of the small opposition crowd was chanting the same.  This was an interesting shift away from “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and “My body, my choice” chants from prior years.

"Fetuses are Not Babies, Women are Not Incubators"

Oppostion to life: We won't go back.

SF Police have made this march possible over the years. Duty is more relaxed now. In the early years, the police had to remove bodily protesters trying to block our path.

When I first got pregnant, I was amazed at how pro-life the world suddenly seemed. I remember Googling “five week old baby” and realizing shortly after hitting “enter” that I would probably have to change my entry to “five week old fetal development.” And yet, the search engine produced exactly what I was looking for: “See what your baby looks like in the womb at five weeks!” And it wasn’t just one website. All the headlines were like this. And the images—they weren’t of newborns, but of tiny little creatures curled up inside tiny little bubbles—fetuses.

And then I started looking at ultrasound pictures and videos. And I was amazed at what the parents said about their fetuses. First of all, they never called them that. They were “my baby,” “our little one,” even when only a tiny yolk sac was distinguishable on the machine (at which point, the fetus isn’t even considered a fetus yet—but an embryo.) But more than just being called “baby,” they were treated as such. The mothers and fathers—they talked to their fetuses. They interacted with them—the mother might laugh and the baby might move which would make the mother laugh again and the baby move even more. And then these ultrasound images would be taken home, maybe even framed (especially with the new 3d ultrasound technology in which you can really see the baby’s facial features—many parents frame a picture from the 3d ultrasound side-by-side with a picture of the newborn, amazed at how they can often look like the same exact picture.)

But perhaps most striking of all is how women, at their most casual, speak about their fetus. Again, they never call it that. They rarely even call it an “it.” Even before the sex is known, many will say “he/she” or switch out he and she or stick to one until they know. You hear things like “I felt the baby move,” or “I don’t think Baby would like that,” or “is it okay if I eat this cheese? Will it harm my baby?” There are countless tips on how to “bond with your unborn baby”—tips on talking to the fetus, touching the belly, playing music for it—and all of these people, they act as if they truly believe the fetus is more than a clump of tissue. They act as if they truly believe that the fetus is a child. And yet, I am sure that a good amount of them, in the political arena, would argue that it is not.

And perhaps this means nothing. Perhaps women are doing with their fetuses what anyone does with anything they desire. Wishfully thinking. Obviously, one might say, obviously they call it a baby. They want it to be a baby. It’s more emotionally satisfying to think of it as a baby. A woman who wants a baby is going to call her fetus a baby. But if you talk to a woman who doesn’t want a baby, you’re going to hear very different terminology. And this may very well be true. The inclination to treat a “clump of tissue” like a human being may be no different from the inclination to treat an imaginary friend as a real one, or an online girlfriend as more than that.

And yet, I have a feeling that it’s not the same as an imaginary friend or an exaggerated girlfriend. After all, those who tend to have these tend to have serious insecurities or wounds that incentivize such delusion. Most people don’t have imaginary friends or exaggerated girlfriends. And yet I have never met a pregnant woman who plans at the bare minimum to not abort her baby to refer to her baby as anything less than a baby. If the inclination to treat a fetus as more than a clump of tissue is a delusion, then all pregnant women who are not seeking an abortion are delusional. All have serious insecurities or wounds to incentivize such delusion. As do the family members and friends and acquaintances and nurses who deal with the pregnant woman. And this just seems so incredibly unlikely that it demands we take such an inclination seriously. That is, we must take it seriously that it is actually the norm to treat a fetus as a baby. Yes, our country may be split down the middle politically on the abortion issue. But the mother is not split. She may change her mind because she has been raped or because she conceived at an inconvenient time or because she is single, young, or for whatever reason reasonably afraid of the responsibilities of parenthood, and she may change her mind because someone close to her has fallen into or is in one of these categories. But if you take a woman at her barest, purest, unbiased self—unaffected by these ulterior motives, she will believe her fetus to be a baby. As will all those connected with and to her. And perhaps we are all delusional. But if we consider the nature of delusion, who is actually more likely to be delusional? The overwhelming majority of mothers and families and friends in their natural, stable state? Or the few, the pressured, the scared, the lonely, the very young in their anything but natural and stable state? It seems to be more likely that those in the latter group are the only ones who have any reason to be delusional. And so perhaps then, this overwhelming instinct to treat a fetus as a baby (unless that baby is no longer desired) means something and ought to be taken seriously. And if we are the delusional ones, then we had better start changing our ways—because delusion is not a healthy thing to live by. Changing our ways would mean changing every instance of “unborn baby” to “fetus,” or “embryo.” It would mean never saying “my baby” no matter how big your stomach gets—no matter how soon your due date may be—no matter the little foot you saw make an imprint against your belly button. It would even mean telling the poor families who have suffered a miscarriage that they ought not treat the loss as if it really was the loss of a child. After all, delusion would not be a healthy thing. And yet, which one of us is ready to do this? Which one of us doesn’t find such a thing to be cruel and inhumane, and quite simply, incorrect? And perhaps it is because it is incorrect. And if it is incorrect for the mother who wants her child, it is likewise for the one who does not. Our instinct matters. If our instinct is wrong, let’s resist it, in all ways, shapes, and forms. But until we are ready to resist it, we had better listen up.

Contributed by Russell Nieli

Last month’s massacre of twenty young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, prompted much public debate and soul-searching. The results were predictable. The left-liberal position went something like this:

There are too many guns in America, too many crazy people who should not have guns, and too few restrictions on the kinds of firearms that civilians may own. It’s ridiculous to allow civilians to possess military-style assault rifles with large capacity magazines that can kill dozens of innocent human beings in minutes. We need to end our national love affair with firearms and firearm violence and should learn from the Europeans and Japanese, who severely restrict gun ownership for anyone not in the military or government police forces. We also need laws mandating that privately-owned firearms be stored securely so that criminals or unlicensed users can’t get them.

Our mental health system also needs a thorough overhaul. Troubled, at-risk youth are too often left to fend for themselves because their families cannot pay for or access the professional care they need. We need to provide them this care through more outreach programs in schools and community centers that identify children and teens at high risk for self-destructive or socially destructive behavior.

While many found this view compelling, the conservative take on the Newtown horror couldn’t have differed more. It went like this:

Guns will always fall into hands that they shouldn’t, no matter how extensive our gun control laws are. These laws don’t prevent criminals from getting guns, but they disarm law-abiding citizens and render them helpless against deadly criminal attacks. Look at what happened in Norway. A country with very strict gun laws still saw one of the worst gun massacres of all time when the deranged Nordic supremacist Anders Breivik systematically shot and killed over five dozen helpless adolescents on an offshore island where only he possessed a firearm. Only a heavily armed Norwegian SWAT team stopped his attack. The bad guys prey on helpless victims who they know will never shoot back. Only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns. To protect our school children we need more armed guards—policemen and suitably trained civilians—who know how to use firearms responsibly and how to defend the helpless and defenseless against homicidal crazies.

We also need to stop the poisonous influence of violent video games and Hollywood movies on developing young minds. Teenage youth can become desensitized to violence through an addiction to games like Grand Theft Auto, Thrill Kill, Postal, and Mortal Kombat. These games reduce people’s sense of empathy and increase their appetite for sadism and aggression. If we really want to tackle the problem of youth violence in America, we should critically examine the perverse messages that our media-saturated culture often sends to young people.

Other claims and arguments were made to bolster both positions. The Supreme Court, for instance, came under attack from both sides—from the right for prohibiting prayer in public schools, from the left for interpreting the Second Amendment to include a right of private gun ownership. The two contrasting views were fleshed out in countless op-ed pieces and news broadcasts with the usual low quality we expect of such media treatment.

The Elephant in the Living Room

Though both sides in this dispute have something sensible to say, they’ve missed an elephant in the room either because of willful blindness to anything politically incorrect or because of a lack of real-world experience. I speak of the problems associated with divorce, family breakup, father absence, and the enormous burdens placed on a single mom who must rear a troubled male child alone.

Adam Lanza was not normal. He suffered from morbid shyness and an inability to connect with his student peers and anyone else—a cold, withdrawn, hollow shell of a person to his classmates, an Asperger’s patient to professional psychologists. Even under the best of circumstances—with a loving, caring, two-parent family consisting of a husband and wife who complemented each other’s strengths and worked together as a team—raising someone like Adam Lanza would be a real challenge.

One can’t say how he might have turned out under different circumstances, but statistics show that having divorced parents, as Lanza did, plus a father who moves out of the household, remarries, and has little contact with his son for long stretches of time, is not the ideal formula for successful childrearing. Yet what sociologists call “family structure issues” were rarely discussed in the media, not even on conservative talk radio where one might have expected them to have a preeminent place. Most Americans, it seems, have so many divorced or single-parent neighbors, friends, and relatives (if they are not themselves divorced or living as single parents) that discussing family structure is simply too painful and too sensitive to be taken up in any honest or candid manner.

While we may never be able to explain fully what caused Lanza’s murderous rampage, the best speculation to date involves, besides mental health problems and gun availability, the challenges faced by a single mom trying to raise a deeply troubled youth. A Fox News reporter gathered from the Lanzas’ neighbors and others who knew the family situation that Lanza likely killed his mother because he thought that she loved the students and teachers of Sandy Hook School more than she loved him. Lanza knew that his mother planned to have him committed to conservatorship, and perceived her court petition as an effort to send him away. This enraged him to the extent that he killed first-graders who may have worked with his mother in the past year, and the school’s principal and psychologist, who were his mother’s good friends.

It’s hard to read such an account without feeling great sadness for someone like Nancy Lanza—a single mother with a deeply disturbed male adolescent on her hands and no man in the house to turn to for help or advice. Those who knew her said that she was at her wit’s end and thought she could no longer care for her son by herself. In a saner age, when people understood the palpable harms of “broken homes” and “fatherless boys” (the terms themselves have become quaint if not archaic), the “family structure issue” would have guided reflection on the Lanza killings. But now, since any such discussion of divorce’s harms, especially the harm of not having a father present in the home, would step on too many toes, we focus instead on the safer territory of gun control and our mental health system.

A preview of the current non-discussion was provided almost fifty years ago when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. As Moynihan learned, however important the “family structure issue” may be to an understanding of an acute social problem, for many it strikes a raw nerve, the pain of which shuts down all serious discussion. A preoccupation with “racism” and “de-industrialization” were the equivalents in Moynihan’s day of guns and the mental health system today, as topics to raise to avoid the salient but hypersensitive issue of family breakdown.

In his book Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn writes that “across societies, married fatherhood is the single most reliable, and relied upon, prescription for socializing males. As marriage weakens, more and more men become isolated and estranged from their children and from the mother of their children. One result, in turn, is the spread of male violence.” Though we can’t ignore the other contributing factors to the Lanza massacre, this simple truth must be acknowledged in any honest assessment of the Newtown tragedy.

Russell Nieli is a lecturer in politics at Princeton University. This article originally appeared in Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ on January 2, 2013.  It is reprinted here with permission.

Contributed by Kathleen Sloan

Myriad Genetics, producer of the world’s biggest-selling gene test for breast and ovarian cancers, has become synonymous with corporate greed. In an egregious breach of bioethics, the company refuses to share groundbreaking knowledge that could benefit cancer patients.  Myriad Genetics is deliberately withholding data that could help other scientists to understand cancer genetics on the grounds that the information is “commercially sensitive.”

The healthcare company manufactures the test for determining whether women carry potentially lethal mutations of the two genes linked with inherited forms of breast and ovarian cancer.  It has a monopoly on the tests in theUnited Statesand is beginning to engage in aggressive marketing inEurope.

Professor Martina Cornel, chair of the European Society of Human Genetics policy committee, stated: “We are very concerned that such important data is being withheld from those who need it.  It is vital that progress towards personalized medicine, which holds out so much promise, is not hindered by companies maintaining private genomic databases.”

Adding insult to injury, while Myriad refuses to share its potentially life-saving data, it simultaneously benefits from free access to public databases compiled by other scientists and researchers.  It also gives Myriad a competitive advantage over academic institutions.

Myriad uses its test data to compile a database of other mutations beyond the cancer-causing mutations on the two BRCA genes.  Known as “variants of unknown significance” or VUS, this information is important because it helps physicians correctly interpret the results of a breast cancer test.  This information withholding goes a long way to explaining why Myriad finds only 3% of its tests fall into the VUS unknown category while other testing services report a 20% VUS rate.

What this means in practical terms is summed up by Professor Cornel: “Interpreting the variants of unknown significance that may be found in analyzing the patient’s genome plays an essential part in being able to provide proper counseling and if necessary, preventative or therapeutic guidance.”

Myriad Genetics has been at the center of controversy over gene patenting and the ethical divide between genomic science for public benefit versus private profit.  Myriad founder Mark Skolnick ofUtahUniversityidentified and sequenced the gene involved in inherited forms of breast cancer, currently between 5 and 10% of all cases.  Myriad then applied for patents and control of royalties on any gene tests resulting from the discovery.

Many scientists point out that Myriad/Skolnick could not have made the discovery without the work of others whose results are public.  In the second quarter of 2012 alone, Myriad generated sales of over $105 million from its BRCA analysis test.

The situation is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. On November 30, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on the patentability of human genes.  The case began in May 2009 when the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit charging that patents on the genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, are unconstitutional and invalid.  The suit correctly charges that the patents stifle diagnostic testing and research that could lead to cures and that they limit women’s options regarding their medical care.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, women patients, cancer survivors, breast cancer and women’s health groups, and scientific associations representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists and laboratory professionals.  In addition to the U.S. Patent Office, the suit was filed against Myriad Genetics and theUniversityofUtah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the genes.

The lawsuit correctly charges that patents on human genes violate the First Amendment and patent law because genes are “products of nature” and therefore cannot be patented. Anyone with a sense of ethics and morality understands this basic fact of life inherently.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents on human genes; in fact, about 20% of our genes are patented.  A gene patent holder has the right to prevent anyone from studying, testing, or even looking at a gene.  As a result, scientific research and genetic testing has been delayed, limited, or even shut down due to concerns about gene patents.

What manner of society are we creating when we decide that private profit is more important than potential medical breakthroughs, scientific knowledge, and people’s health?  As all living things—from plants and animals to human beings and their component parts—are turned into commodities to generate money for the benefit of private business, we descend into a rapacious society bereft of dignity, morality and common decency.

 
Kathleen Sloan is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and the former Program Director of the Council for Responsible Genetics.  This article is reprinted with permission from CBC, 

C.S. Lewis, observing how Hollywood adapted novels for film, noted that books without a significant female presence often ended up having one created for the movie.  Lewis believed that the scriptwriter, in doing so, did a disservice to the story being adapted onto film.  The woman often ended up being a romantic interest to the hero, with little to no real connection to the story itself.  So why was she added?  As an appeal to women? ~the thinking being that without such a plot device, the movie would not be to the liking of females.  

While there might be some merit to the idea of adding a feminine character to an otherwise masculine film, what we get from Hollywood is rarely complimentary to women.  The woman has little to no real place in the story, and so is placed in situations which do not matter.  The woman, therefore, is unimportant to the movie and her role is denigrated as a secondary, accidental feature.  Why should such a character be introduced?  Won’t her insignificance in the story reinforce old stereotypes about women in general?   While some might applaud the idea of appealing to women,Hollywood too often appeals, not to the best qualities of women or their complementary nature with men, but rather, to qualities which make her irrelevant in the world scene. 

I find Peter Jackson’s attempt to “include women” in movies based upon Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to be not only ironic, but utterly wrong.  Tolkien’s work The Lord of the Rings certainly has prominent women.  For example, Eowyn plays a pivotal and significant role, and, through her, Tolkien provides an important statement of the value and place of women like St Joan of Arc in the world.  Tolkien shows us that there are things which men just cannot accomplish, and women, with their strengths, can.  Eowyn was able to dispatch the Witch King, the Lord of the Nazgul, the most powerful of the kings of men.  No man could do so, but her strengths, her integrity, her assurance of herself and her mission in the world allowed her to do what no man could, to overcome the supposed might of men and show it to be utterly powerless. 

Galadriel, Tolkien’s Marian figure, also held an important place in Tolkien’s world. She was able to bridge racial biases, as can be seen by the way Gimli the Dwarf ended up giving her the highest form of veneration and respect.  Dwarves and Elves were rivals and yet Gimli, in seeing Galadriel, felt a deep, pure love for her.  And it is good that he should.  Galadriel is shown to be one of the few who could and did transcend the temptation of Sauron’s Ring.  Frodo offered it to her, and she could have taken it, to become a powerful Queen over all creation – but she said no.  Deep within her and her femininity she was able to find that no, the need to reject a masculine call for dominance. 

Galadriel and Eowyn together show the integrity of women and their transcendent, complementary authority to men.  It is not that men have no value, of course, but rather, men and women need each other, and what is seen as a weakness in one is a strength in the other.   Yet, Peter Jackson, Hollywood’s Tolkien scriptwriter, felt Tolkien did not do enough to represent women.  He used Arwen, Aragorn’s beloved, as a third representation of women, having her accomplish feats in his films which were not in Tolkien’s work.  Like Hollywood writers before him, Jackson felt the need to appeal to women and provide them a platform beyond the role Tolkien gave women.  Jackson thought Arwen would provide this in his adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  But in doing so,Jackson shows that he does not appreciate the value and strength shown in Eowyn and Galadriel.  Jackson does not see that the portrayal of strong women that he wanted had already been done by Tolkien’s female characters.  By creating a woman to act like a man (Arwen),Jackson denigrated the strength and character of women.

The Hobbit, now split into three films, once again gives us Peter Jackson’s desire to appeal to women by making up a character not in Tolkien’s works: Tauriel.  She has a brief role in the first Hobbit film, but when the Dwarves find their way into Mirkwood, she will be given a significant role.  She is a Wood Elf and the head of their guard.  Now, why is she needed? What exactly is the point of her character?  ~to say women are undervalued by Tolkien?  But by suggesting such, the women of Tolkien’s stories find their value and their purpose diminished.  By creating such a superficial role for a woman,Jackson only makes women superficial.  This is exactly the problem with the creation of feminine roles in movies and stories which do not need them.  Not every story has a place for women, just as not every story has a place for men.  It is good to desire the proper respect for both genders, but forcing a story to do so, as is seen in the world at large, often denigrates one or the other. 

Tolkien, whose works are masculine and from a masculine perspective, ascribes great value to women.  Women have their own stories and interests, which complement men and their stories. Just as it is best not to try to force men in women’s stories where they do not belong, so women should not be forced into men’s stories where they do not belong.  It is not to say men do not belong in women’s stories: clearly they do, but often in a secondary fashion, just as women might not hold a prominent place in a man’s story.  These stories must be seen as reflexive of the gender and what their values in the world, and what is needed is not the imposition of one gender in the stories of another, but the combination of stories, of men’s stories and women’s stories, allowing each to show and provide something of the human condition, showing aspects of both genders which such an imposition which deny. 

Tolkien, I think, understood this point.  He expressed it a few ways.  One way could be found in the division between the tree-herders, the Ents, with their Ent-Wives, where the two were divided from each other, looking for each other, and will only find each other in the eschaton (that is, the end of the world, if the Ent-Wives still exist).  Another can be found in his Dwarves.  We know there are Dwarven women.  We know they exist.  They have to exist, because the Dwarves, as a race, continue to propagate throughout Middle Earth.  Yet, they are mysterious and hidden.  We are given only secondary glimpses of them.  We are not given their perspective of the events in Tolkien’s world. But we are given the fact that Dwarven women are rare, and when encountered, they can be mistaken for Dwarven men, as Tolkien related in the first Appendix to The Lord of the Rings: 

Dis was the daughter of Thrain II.  She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories.  It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people.  They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart.  This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves ‘grow out of stone.’ (The Return of the King, Appendix A). 

While we know they exist, their direct voice is more or less absent.  Tolkien, in a way, cannot tell their story, because their story lies outside of the events of his histories.  Yet their story is integral to those same events.  The lack of a homeland for the Dwarves makes their plight greater; they need to be protected and kept safe, so that the Dwarven race can continue to thrive: 

It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings.  For Dwarves only take one wife or husband each in their lives, and are jealous, as in all matters of their rights.  The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third.  For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.  (The Return of the King, Appendix A). 

For the other races of Middle Earth, the Dwarven women are a riddle.  Their absence in the story is not because of their insignificance, but rather, their outright importance to the Dwarves and their society.  The Dwarven women have a place and a destiny, that we know is occurring – but it is a story which is not to be told to us.  Their mysterious nature, their hiddenness from ordinary view, shows their absolute value and significance. Trying to place them in the story would undervalue them.  They have a story of their own, a story which cannot be told to us, to outsiders.  That is their point.  When we don’t see Dwarven women, when we don’t encounter them on screen (or in Tolkien’s stories), it is natural to wonder , “What about the Dwarven women?”  Is their place being ignored?  The answer is “no” – their absence reflects their value, not their lack of value. And in a way, this is what we should expect. Tolkien’s story represents, for the most part, the stories of the men of Middle Earth (and the few, extraordinary women who have a significant role in that story).  Trying to put them into the story would undermine them. Silence about them represents the mystery of women to men. (This absence is not to be seen as their denigration but their exaltation.) 

The role of women in the world often differs significantly from the role of men.  Women have their own history, their own stories, which would only be denigrated if placed as some minor feature in the story of men.  To complement each other, men and women need universal stories together, but also need stories of their own.  Ignoring this, the genders, and their values, are lost. When we don’t see Dwarven women, we should resist the modern tendency to equate their absence with unimportance.   By being mysterious, even to the rest of Middle Earth, Tolkien points to the complementary nature of men and women, where one cannot even begin to tell the story of the other except by leaving space for them to tell their own tale.

When I was little and went to the grocery store with my mom, I liked to occupy myself by looking at greeting cards. There were funny cards, cheesy cards, stupid cards, pretty cards, sentimental cards — and I found it all very interesting.  But perhaps most interesting of all were the cards for those people turning forty or fifty.  They actually disturbed me a little bit.  There was so much color on all the other ones but when you got to these, it was like they were the death cards.  And if you didn’t know how to read you might as well have assumed that that’s exactly what they were.  Cards for the dead people . They were almost always black and they might even have a reference to a grave stone or something else rather morbid.  You’d open the card and there would be some sort of half-hearted, well, at least you can celebrate.

To little me, this was very confusing.  Birthdays were supposed to be a great thing! When and why do they become so terrible?  And if they are so terrible, why even celebrate them?  Why buy a card?  Why not pretend they aren’t even happening? Unfortunately, as I grew older, I began to realize that this indeed is the coping mechanism of choice for many people — pretend they’re not even happening or get drunk enough to forget they’re happening.

And what’s even sadder is that that age — 40 to 50 has lowered dramatically. Ironically, as our life expectancy increases it seems that we become more and more afraid of getting older.  Now it’s not the dreaded 40.  It’s the dreaded 30.  Because the end of your twenties is like the end of your life.  But it seems to trickle down even further.  I can count on one hand the number of peers I have who are actually excited about turning anything above twenty-one.  Indeed, you hear some version of this all day or all week long on your twenty-first birthday:

Enjoy it! It’s the last birthday worth celebrating anyway.

To make matters worse, it’s not even the first twenty years that are considered the prime.  It’s roughly the years between sixteen and twenty-one.  So while the adults are all wishing they could go back, with each year our culture is shoving the ten-year-olds further and further into a desperate climb towards the day they can get their license or the day they can drive off finally to the freedom of college.  We literally act as if life is only great for six or so years.  And we counsel those living them to live them well as they pass quickly and they’re gone before you know it.

Maybe I’m too idealistic, but this just doesn’t seem to cut it.  To live a life in which you believe that six out of your eighty or so years are going to be anything worth your time doesn’t sound like a life very much worth living.  There has got to be something more. There’s got to be a better answer.  Especially for women.  For women are probably the most plagued by this syndrome.  We all know how increasingly mature little girls are starting to dress.  And we all know how much older women are increasingly desperately pouring themselves and their money into “miracles” of botox and tucks and suctions and add-ons and push-ups and cover-ups.  Women are told a lie that with each year gets stronger and stronger.  And this lie is that their sexual prime is what defines them.  And that the time before and after it will never measure up.  If we were animals, I could maybe understand this lie, and it might not be such a lie.  But we’re not animals.  And I’m pretty sure life has more to offer.  And I’m pretty sure that most of us would agree it does.  But even if we won’t outright say it, why do we continue to perpetuate the lie?

I believe we do because we are part animal.  And we have instincts.  And when we start down the road of instincts, when we start to let instincts take over, we begin to forget about everything else.  We all know how increasingly sexualized our culture is becoming.  But why at such a fast rate?  And why is it so overwhelming?  Because instinct is strong.  And when let to run wild, it runs wild and it knocks over everything in its path.  We have, as a culture, let the sexual instinct rule.  Just listen to the beats and the grunted words coming from so many of the songs on the radio.  Sometimes they don’t even sound human.  And I would argue, that at some point, they aren’t human anymore.  We have resigned ourselves to the part of us that is enslaved to the instinct. And once we are enslaved to the instinct it is very, very difficult to turn back.  Even if we have many wonderful things in our life at thirty we can’t help but gaze backwards at the women younger than us, increasingly anxious as we see ourselves looking older and getting further and further away from that prime.  The more sexually focused our culture becomes, inevitably the more sexually focused we become.  The more instinct driven the advertisements and people and movies and music around us become, inevitably the more instinct driven we are pressured to become.  Because our culture is our pack. And in the wild, the pack defines your survival.

But the good news is, we are not all animal.  We are human.  And our humanity raises us above the silliness of the pack.  Our humanity allows sexuality to be merely a facet of who we are, and even still, our humanity makes sexuality so much more beautiful than it ever was when ruled by instinct.  Humanity has so, so, so much more to offer. Humanity is not the time between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one.  Humanity is eternal.  But we cannot know and fully understand and fully reap the benefits of being human until we learn to stop looking backwards (or forwards) in anxiety.  We have to accept where we are and until we do that we will never know what that point in eternity has to offer us. Sadly, too many ten-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being ten.  Sadly, too many forty-year-olds will never have known the beauty of being forty.  And sadly, too many people will have lived and died without ever having known the beauty of being human.  All they will remember is the crazy party days of satisfied instinct.  That will be the summit and high point of their lives and how sad that is.  So I challenge us to resist being slaves to the instinct.  There’s no need to be.  (Besides, it’s a losing game anyway!  There’s no rush and there’s no ticking clock.  And to live like there is, is to miss life itself.)  So celebrate your birthday this year.  Tell everybody how old you are and how proud you are of it because it’s a beautiful and amazing thing.  And the more you choose to act like it, the more you’ll believe it and see how true it really is.  In turn, you will then give others the courage to be human too.

I want a gun for Christmas.

My New Year’s Resolution will be to learn how to carry and use my new gun safely.   I will carry my new gun wherever I am legally allowed to carry it and I will abide by all laws.  I will use my new gun if I have to, to try to protect any child, young adult or innocent person threatened with being killed.  I may prove not to be a good shot – but if I can distract a lunatic trying to kill children and make him come after me, I will be satisfied.

I’ve had enough.  This Christmas is unlike any other I’ve known in my 56 years.  I can’t forget the profound pain of Newtown Connecticut.  I can’t sweep away my shock and dismay so that I can have a jolly holiday.   These are parents, just like me,  who were supposed to joyfully watch their innocent 6 and 7 year old children setting out cookies for Santa, who were supposed  to grumble and tease when their little ones shook them awake too early on December 25, trembling with excitement in this or their own holiday celebration.  Instead, the children are literally gone – and the parents are trembling because they cannot imagine life as good ever again, cannot abide the pain.

I’ve had enough of the slaughter of innocents.   We are not “healing” today because an angry young man with untreated mental illness barged into a nursing home and gunned down elderly.  No one is puzzling over the cold blooded murder of police officers and fire persons as they relax over steaming cups of coffees at the station.  Our legislators sit safely behind multiple layers of security in statehouses and the nation’s capital with armed, trained personnel a gasp away should some weapon-bearing young male out of his mind actually get through the protections we have funded for these politicians.  No, Newtown’s victims, this year’s victims, like all victim’s of these massacres, are young unsuspecting lives, lives of joy, hope and laughter who knew no cause to be wary or prepared to defend themselves from attack. 

It’s been a year of unbridled assault on innocents, harmlessly – obliviously – going about their daily business in schools, on campuses, in churches and temples and at shopping malls.   These are the places deranged, angry males favor, armed as if single-handedly braving terrorists in Afghanistan.  These males seek out seemingly safe environments, populated by innocent, unarmed people:  like only-recently babies sitting at desks for the first time in their lives, trying to stifle giggles (Newtown, MA); like young adults trudging between classrooms, tackling adult schedules and ideas for the first times, trying to focus and get it right (Oakland, CA); like excited movie fans, finally getting tickets to the opening night of a Batman movie (Aurora, CA); like peace-seeking Sikhs worshiping at their temple (Oak Creek, WI); and like holiday shoppers at a mall (Happy Valley, OR).    All this, in one year.   

Headlines proclaim that survivors, family, friends and everyone as a nation need to “heal” again from the slaughter of innocents.   This is starting to seem like some new, twisted exercise of modern life – as if we’ve entered a period of grief and recovery following the sacrifice of virgins to raging gods who humans dare not defy.  We are not supposed to be angry.  We are cautioned not to be judgmental or make decisions without a full, factual report.  We are told that this is a failure of gun regulation and we ought not to arm ourselves in anticipation of more attacks.   We are assured laws are coming soon which will prevent the next assault.  We are supposed to heal, forgive and move on.

But we all know with chilling certainty that, even as we talk, the next slaughter of innocents is in the planning.  We all know that innocence itself is under assault.   Mine is not a post to blame people, their ideas or their weapons for the death of 20 small, sparkly eyed children.   I support Senator Lieberman’s call for a professional panel to analyze the massacres and recommend measures that can actually begin to get ready to start to give a modicum of protection to the innocents.  But, meanwhile, how can we blithely, wistfully ignore that these are murders of the most innocent amongst us – as calculated to affront life itself as Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Centers was designed to cause terror?  Gun regulation may well be overdue and may help reduce casualties during future assaults on innocents.  But even the most avid gun opponents know that guns are the weapon of choice, not the subject of the attack.

For me, time for individual action has arrived.  I believe any woman with a child for whom she would lay down her life is reasonable to arm herself, the same way women on the western frontier had guns to protect their young from predators, the same way Jeanne Assam armed herself to protect her congregation.  On the morning of December 11, 2007, Ms. Assam shot 24 year old Matthew Murray who entered New Life Church in Colorado Springs “carrying an assault rifle, two pistols and a backpack holding more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.”  Ms. Assam was on voluntary security detail for the congregation and carrying a pistol.  When Murray arrived at the church and opened fire, there were over 7,000 people in and around the church.   He killed two teenagers and injured 3 adults before moving toward the building where Ms. Assam was already alert to the sound of gunshot.  Ms. Assam crept up upon him as he entered the building and shot him.   According to authorities, that shot saved “untold lives.”

I do not know whether I could handle a gun as well as Ms. Assam did.  I do not know whether I could stop a Matthew Murray and limit his carnage.  What I do know is that I could try, that I’d have the determination and capacity to distract him and slow him down.  I do know that I would be completely prepared to exchange my life for 20 small, bubbly 6 and 7 year olds who might actually get to celebrate Christmas. 

I am told that I should not ask for a gun for Christmas.  I am told that all schools, churches, temples and colleges should not permit weapons or arm even designated trained administrators, teachers or staff.  I have heard year after year, slaughter after slaughter, that we (that is … all of us unprotected persons without armed security details) must “wait for the police to come.”  The unarmed teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary school took all this advice.  They had no guns.  Adam Lanza pursued his murderous plan while the teachers and administrators, with no means to protect the 700 children in their care against the death rampage of this 20 year old male, waited for the police.  They waited 20 minutes for their protection to arrive.  By the time their “first” responders arrived, the massacre was over.  The police did not fire a single shot.  “Waiting for the police” no longer makes an ounce of sense in today’s conditions.  In today’s world, “wait for the police” is now code for “unchecked slaughter” until the police get there.

I want a gun for Christmas.  I will learn how to carry and use my new gun safely and legally.   I will use my new gun if I have to; to try to defend the innocents we have somehow left as an unprotected target for males bent on destruction of life.  I may not be a good shot – but if I can distract a lunatic trying to kill children and make him come after me, I will be satisfied.   I have never thought of asking for a gun for Christmas before, but I never thought we as a country would face Christmas mourning 6 and 7 year children gunned down without a shot fired in their defense.  It’s a different Christmas this year – for everyone.