My wife and I were married in June 1980, which was a month after I finished my first year in law school. One of the weekly television shows that we watched together during the first year of our marriage was the prime-time soap opera, Dallas. We’ve come a long way since then. Today, there’s no way we would waste our time on that type of show.
During the mid-1980s, I had a good friend — I’ll call him “James” — who I periodically had conversations with about life, politics, family, and religion. I was five years younger than James, and he was a lot smarter than I was. He breezed through elementary school, high school, and college, without any problems. He was quick to grasp new concepts and was a great problem solver.
After I published last week’s article about the 60th anniversary of the Barbie doll, my mom called me on my cell phone. I wasn’t available when she called, so she left a message. In the message, she said that she had read my article and that in addition to her concern about her daughters’ self-images being affected by the Barbie doll, she was also concerned that with the introduction of a teenage, sexualized version of a doll, there would never be a return to the days when young girls were encouraged to play with baby dolls.
Last Wednesday (January 9), Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, announced on Twitter that he and his wife of 25 years were getting a divorce. It turns out that two days before the announcement, a reporter from the National Enquirer notified him that the Enquirer was going to publish a story about an affair he was having with another married woman. The reporter wanted to know if Bezos had any comments for the story. A lawyer who represents Bezos apparently told the Enquirer that it was “widely known” that Bezos and his wife had been “long separated.”
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of willingly choosing to accept less freedom in order to become something greater than what we already are. When we choose to consistently give up certain freedoms, we become much more responsible, and we are eventually able to achieve more than we would have ever thought was possible. This is a critical concept that must be understood and practiced by those of us who are serious about becoming what God intended us to be.
Last week, I wrote about how the Mother of God appeared on six occasions during 1917 to three children in Fatima, Portugal, and asked them to warn the people of the world that they needed to pray and amend their lives. In one of her apparitions, the Blessed Mother told the children, “More souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.”
A lawsuit was recently filed by a Christian-based nonprofit women’s homeless shelter against the City of Anchorage, Alaska, the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission, and the executive director of the commission. According to the lawsuit, the Hope Center, which operates as the Downtown Soup Kitchen, is asking the court to allow it to exclude individuals who were born as biological males, but who now claim to be female. The Hope Center has been in business for more than 30 years.