One of my early mentors — I’ll call him James — was a well-known trial lawyer in Peoria. I met James in January 1983, the same month that I opened my law practice. He started out by giving me research and writing projects. Before long, I was covering his court hearings and helping him prepare cases for trial.
Earlier this month, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina. In the letter, the DOJ threatened Governor McCrory and gave him a deadline to confirm that North Carolina will not enforce a recent law that was passed by the North Carolina Legislature. The letter accused North Carolina and the governor of “engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination against transgender state employees.”
For the past several weeks, I’ve written about the sin of contraception and how it has led to the proliferation of premarital sex, divorce, abortion, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births, the breakdown of the family, assisted suicide, and surrogate mothers. I’ve also written about how contraception has caused a shortage of Catholic priests and how it has allowed couples to easily overrule God’s plan concerning the number of children God planned for them.
Last month, the Chinese government announced that it was changing its one-child policy to a two-child policy. For more than 35 years, the Chinese government has mandated that its citizens refrain from having more than one child. Couples knew that if they violated the one-child policy, they would be punished with fines, job losses, and forced abortions.
A few weeks ago, my daughter Anna had a birthday party at her home. Anna has five children. They range in age from one-year-old to nine years old. After the party was over, I walked into Anna’s kitchen to say goodbye to her. When I entered the kitchen, I heard her two-year-old son Peter ask, “Mom, can I wear my vestment?” Anna replied, “Yes, I’ll get it for you in a few minutes.”
I recently heard about a conversation that took place between some members of my extended family. The question they were apparently attempting to answer was, Why does Harry take the time to write a religious article every week? They came to the conclusion that I probably have some deep-seated guilt about my past that compels me to write. Writing a weekly article is apparently the only way I can atone for my guilt.
Every so often, my wife tells me that I’m living in the wrong times. Because of my old-fashioned beliefs, she claims that I would have been better off living during the 1800s. Whenever she comments about this, I remind her that I spent the better part of my early years at my grandfather’s (Tom Williams’s) house, and since he was born in 1898, that’s probably where I picked up a lot of my beliefs.