Author Archives: jtjim

Both Sides Now

July 23, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

In spite of my mother’s best efforts to introduce me to God, I decided early in life that he was irrelevant to my well-being.

Fond memories of Baptist preachers, Presbyterian youth groups, and candlelit Christmas Eves were pushed aside by pragmatics. College life didn’t require God. Classes in psychology, English, and education were independent of faith, and I certainly had better things to do with my Sundays.

In the ensuing years, my distractions grew in variety and intensity. I married, taught school, raised children, opened a part-time business, and remodeled a house. Gradually, my views about God began a subtle shift.

Where I had originally dismissed God as irrelevant, I slowly began to consider him an irritation. People who went to church were entitled to their delusion, but they had better keep “their myth” to themselves. I was the one with a college degree and a rational mind.

Never bold enough to reject God outright…just in case…I was content to see God confined in a box over in the corner where he could not interfere with the real world. I associated only with non-believers, the academic elite “patted me on the back,” and I became adept at pointing out how God had inspired death and destruction beginning with the Crusades.

Separation of church and state for me back then was all about separation. I wanted the wall high enough and thick enough that God – and his deluded followers – would never be able to disturb me…ever.

Alas, my secular paradise came to an abrupt end in the flash of a millisecond. God appeared. And every minute of my life since then has cast a new understanding on my years of faith in the non-existence of the Almighty.

I’ve lived on both sides now, and it is a unique vantage point from which to view the battle between the faiths “in support” of God and those “opposed” to God. Because the truth about this battle is that “separation” is really a pretty mask used to hide the distress of non-believers when they are confronted with their own “faith.”

This is a battle that won’t end with the Supreme Court. Faith is foundational to human existence, whether that faith is in a Supreme Being or in the Supreme Human Being. In our innermost being, we desire above all an integrity that unifies our life and our faith with the world around us. We strive to be “at one” with ourselves and others.

When I didn’t believe in God, I needed to find ways to dismiss believers in order to sustain my own faith of disbelief. Their ever-present existence began to wear on me as a “challenge” to my rational reasoning and to my authority over my own life. My god was the human mind, and I wanted a world consistent with my god.

I didn’t want to co-exist with people of faith. I wanted them to “separate”. I wanted them to live according to my faith of non-belief, under my laws, and pounded into submission with “my” Supreme Court. I wanted a world based on fluid truth, changing with the whims of human beings in control of public policy. And today, my dreams are in danger of becoming a reality.

One by one, the court cases are moving up the ladder to the Supreme Court. America is demanding a decision about God. But the cases at hand are not about separating God, they are about removing God. They are about creating a new national faith that affirms the belief of those who “know” God doesn’t exist.

The courts are slowly encoding this “faith” into public institutions and our government. Lawyers do battle to preserve one essential faith as supreme over all the others: the faith that god, if he were to exist, is subordinate or irrelevant to human beings. It is a battle to declare the supremacy of the Supreme Human Being.

In a truly multi-faith nation, we would find peace and harmony in a government that allows special tax and zoning considerations for institutions of faith – all faiths. We would support use of educational scholarships to pursue consideration of spiritual matters – in all faiths…even if they contradicted our faith in the non-existence of God. We would welcome believers…of all faiths…to positions of authority and respect…most especially in the Supreme Court.

Which side of God will the Supreme Court come down on? The pro-God side or the con-God side? Hopefully, neither.

If America is to remain the land of the free and the brave, we must come to terms with the greatest of all fears, the fear of God. An America that cannot reconcile its existence with the existence of God is neither brave nor free.

Doomed to Fail

July 16, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Daddy was a product of his generation, growing up on a large Kansas ranch in the 1930s.  Behind the barn, he smoked his first cigarette at eleven years of age, the initiation of a life-long habit that eventually killed him.

Marlboro Man…Lucky Strike…the sign of “cool”, a cigarette perched on the lips of cowboys and movie stars…kids were naturally born on a path to become smokers, and in 1955, the cigarette could claim 57% per cent of the male population as “users.”

Undaunted by the social acceptance and prevalence of smoking, in the 50s, health workers launched a campaign to begin an education of the public to the dangers of tobacco.  In 7th grade science, I watched movies of smoking machines depositing tar into glass tubes.  And in spite of denials from the tobacco industry, news reports began to link smoking with heart disease and cancer.

Progress was slow.  By 1965, 52% of males were still smokers.  Ten years of advertising for change, and still over half of American men 18 years of age and older continued to smoke.  One might have considered the campaign doomed to failure.

Daddy was evidence of this failure.  In spite of his analytical nature and the mounting evidence against cigarettes, he remained entrenched as a smoker.  His sister died of emphysema…my Dad continued to light up.  My uncle underwent surgery for lip cancer…my Dad continued to smoke…two packs a day.

My sister and I went off to college, non-smokers both of us.  Eventually, my mother gained a concession from Dad.  He would at least move his smoking out-of-doors, onto the back patio.  But elevators, restaurants and offices…those were a different matter.

One night at the dinner table, he recounted the insult of being asked by someone not to smoke in the elevator.  “Can you believe that?” he asked.  “This is a free country.  They don’t have any right to tell me what to do!  If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke.”

The Marlboro Man eventually died of smoking.  So did my dad.  Joe Camel Cool was sent to prison.  The tobacco industry finally caved in to the evidence.  Warnings from the Surgeon General are legislated on every pack of cigarettes.  And Turner Classics have been edited to remove cigarettes from the lips of Bogey and Bacall.

But wouldn’t you know it.  The campaign to rid our country from smoking is doomed to fail.  In 2004, one fifth of the total population, male and female, continued to smoke.  In the prior year, 48% of young adults 18-25 had smoked, and during their lifetime, 69% of them tried this deadly habit.  Failed. We are doomed.

We might as well admit that smoking is a temptation that will entice young people.  We may as well face failure straight in the face and give up.  Let’s not hurt their self-esteem.  We certainly don’t want to make them hide a secret habit.  Since kids are going to smoke anyway, let’s teach them to choose their cigarettes wisely.  Smart smoking…if they are going to ignore our warnings and light up, let’s at least teach them “safe smoking.”

Ridiculous?  Then consider the consistent doom and gloom of “sexperts” who chastise health educators who want the best for our youth and have set their expectations on creating change.

Abstinence education?  Doomed!  Kids are going to have sex anyway.  Give up.  Let’s teach them to enjoy sex.  We don’t want them to hide their sexual encounters.  We don’t want the facts to scare them…let’s let them believe the myth of “safe sex.”

Doom and gloom?  This is the foundation of the push to legitimize sex for teens as an acceptable and “safe” behavior.  They’re going to do “it” anyway.

But are they?  Data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that the fear of increasing rates of teenage sexual behavior may be unfounded. For example, teenagers seem to be waiting longer to have intercourse. The percentage of 12th-grade U.S. students who reported having had intercourse declined from 66.7% in 1991 to 60.5% in 2001.

This six percent decrease is all the more incredible when you consider that these teens live in a sex-saturated culture that refuses to deglamorize casual random sex.  It is miraculous when you consider the prevalence of “sexperts” who continue to promise “saferrrrrrrrrr sex” as the follow up to “safe sex” which has been thoroughly discredited by science.

Doomed to fail?  If history is any teacher, the surest way to lead our youth to failure is to teach them they have no other alternative.

Doomed to fail?  If teachers believe teens are doomed to fail and build an educational program founded on failure as an expectation, what choice will our teens have?

Failure as an expectation?  Then we are indeed doomed.

Teaching Denial and Ignorance

July 9, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

America is caught in a battle for the health of our youth.

When left to the common sense of parents, informed and supported by medical facts, clearly the health of our youth depends on their ability to maintain sexual abstinence until marriage.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirms this sexual abstinence message…although…to avoid public castigation by liberals bent on social re-engineering, the CDC couches their approval in careful linguistics:  The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.

The average person attests to the wisdom and truth of this message, citing their own life experiences…both the bad…and the good.  Sex is a wonderful gift, if treated with respect.  Boundaries for behavior are protective.  But wait.

If liberals could have their way, young people would be taught that all sex is created equal (uninhibited), and that you can do anything (absolutely anything) you feel you are ready to do with another person (or persons) who feel they are ready to do it, too (consensual sex), hiding behind a bit of latex (protection), without fear of consequences (free and natural).

If liberals could have their way, this message would begin early…in kindergarten…and be legally mandated and federally funded.

But wait.  The only way to proceed with the liberal message of free sex is to live in denial and ignorance about the costs of free sex.  And, yes, if liberals could have their way, they would have our children do just that.

The battle over sex education, from the liberal perspective, is really a battle to deny truth and to live in ignorance.  Truth about sex is being reaffirmed by research.  Only a person who insists on living in denial can escape the reality of the cost to our youth of promoting “free sex.”

  • Condoms do not adequately protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).  Incurable virus and infectious bacterium live on areas of the body not covered by condoms and not visible to the human eye.
  • Even when treated and cured, STDs can exact a permanent cost.  Infertility is a painful lifelong consequence of several STDs that wreak havoc on the reproductive system.
  • Incurable genital herpes, a virus that condoms cannot claim to prevent, now infects at least one in six over the age of 12.  This is one facet of an epidemic of STDs that infect over 70 million Americans today and leads to 19 million new cases each year.
  • Victims of STDs are not created equal.  Women, with their internal reproductive system, are more susceptible to STDs and their serious consequences.  Teen girls are at an even greater risk, with their still-developing tissues and organs especially vulnerable to STDs.
  • Emotional consequences of sex are rooted in the chemical makeup of human beings.  Oxytocin, a chemical released during sexual activity, creates emotional bonds and vulnerability for women which may explain the higher rates of depression in sexually active female teens.
  • In spite of all the HIV/AIDs awareness campaigns over 20 years, HIV infection continues to occur, with approximately 40,000 new infections annually.  Seventy percent of new infections are in men, and half of all new infections are in people age 25 or under.  Condoms are not recommended by manufacturers as “safe sex” for anal intercourse.
  • The CDC reports that “[i]n the United States, HIV infection and AIDS have had a tremendous effect on men who have sex with men (MSM). MSM accounted for 71% of all HIV infections among male adults and adolescents in 2005 (based on data from 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting), even though only about 5% to 7% of male adults and adolescents in the United States identify themselves as MSM.”

The list could go on…and on…and on.  Yet, safe in their world of denial, liberals in partnership with the media chide medical experts and educators for speaking the truth about the costs of sex.  Preferring denial to truth, liberals dismiss these facts with epithets such as “fear-based”, “shame-filled” and “morality-driven.”

Further still, not content to live in denial themselves, liberals insist on teaching denial to our children.  The consequence of their educational plan is to send our children into the world totally ignorant of the truths that could motivate and help young people make the healthiest choice to abstain from sex until marriage.

No wonder that college students Dr. Miriam Grossman (Unprotected) counsels at UCLA are surprised when they realize their emotional and physical pains are linked to current and past sexual activity.  Reared in a liberal culture that spent years cultivating ignorance, these students were denied the information they needed to make the best possible choices for health and happiness.

America is caught in a battle for the health of our youth.  If you want to know where you stand in this battle, consider the cost.  Who is the winner when we teach denial and ignorance?

Planned Parenthood Opposes Choice!

July 2, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

I know it’s hard to believe.  Planned Parenthood opposing choice?  Never!

Ever since Roe v. Wade, over thirty years ago, Planned Parenthood has rallied its forces around the banner of CHOICE.  The ultimate insult, by extension, has been anti-choice.  If you are an enemy of Planned Parenthood, the banner is hoisted high in the sky and voices rise in shrill chants, “Anti-choice, anti-choice, anti-choice!”

Thus, it is a momentous occasion when Planned Parenthood has adopted the tactics of the enemy.  Planned Parenthood is ANTI-CHOICE!  Yes, it is.  Really!

If choice mattered, politicians funded by Planned Parenthood would listen to parents.  And parents have clearly set out what they want for their children.  A 2007 Zogby poll of parents of children age 10-16 showed the following:

  • 9 out of 10 parents agree that being sexually abstinent is best for their child’s health and future, with 8 in 10 strongly agreeing.
  • 8 out of 10 parents think it’s important for their child to wait until they’re married to have sex, with 6 in 10 strongly agreeing.
  • 8 out of 10 parents think sex education in public schools should place more emphasis on promoting abstinence vs. contraceptive use.
  • 2 out of 3 parents believe that promoting alternatives to intercourse (such as showering together and mutual masturbation, which are presented in some comprehensive programs) encourages sexual activity.
  • 6 out of 10 parents think more government funding should be given to abstinence education vs. comprehensive sex education.  Only 2 out of 10 want more funding for comprehensive education.

Planned Parenthood would have you believe otherwise.  They have spent years trying to convince parents otherwise.  They have confounded, confused, manipulated, exaggerated, engineered, maneuvered, exploited…but all to no avail.

Once the truth is revealed, once parents understand the core content and message of abstinence education, by a 3 to 1 margin parents want government funding of sexual abstinence education that promotes abstinence until marriage as the best for their child’s health and future.

Planned Parenthood has reached the end of the road.  The truth cannot be denied.  Thus it must be faced head-on.  Planned Parenthood is finally ANTI-CHOICE.

Planned Parenthood and its allies have clamped down on Congressional members.  They don’t care about the choice of parents who choose abstinence education.  Choice?  They’re against it!

In the greatest ANTI-CHOICE campaign of the year, Planned Parenthood has mustered its full force to deny parents and their children the choice to have abstinence education programs.  And Congressional members who receive campaign donations from Planned Parenthood are all too willing to be a part of this campaign.

Until June 30, federal funding under Title V paid for the choice that parents want…abstinence education.  Even with this funding, the educational choice of parents received only one-tenth of the money given to condom-promotion education…much of that condom pushing money going to Planned Parenthood programs.

But nine-tenths of the money tree isn’t enough for Planned Parenthood.  No.  They want it all.  Choice?  Hang Choice.  Forget Choice.  Kill Choice.

July 1, is a watershed date.  It is the line in the sand.  It is the time when parents must finally take things into their own hands and demand that their choice be heard.  They must gather their voices and rattle the phones of the Congressional representatives who are supposed to represent them.

If not, Planned Parenthood will have ten-tenths.  And our children will have nothing.  This is clearly the goal of Planned Parenthood in its fierce campaign…ANTI-CHOICE!

Big Fathers

June 25, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

He is an engaging boy, close to ten years of age.  A ball cap turned back on his head, he looks straight into the camera.  The poster on the wall brags on the young man.  He could be the child of any proud father or mother:

James is well on his way to become a statistic.  One we can be proud of.

 

  • 70% less likely to use drugs,
  • 27% less likely to start drinking,
  • 52% less likely to skip class,
  • 64% achieve higher grades,
  • Celebrating 100 years, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Donate – Volunteer.

One hundred years of matching children with Big Brothers and Big Sisters, a lot has changed since the day they made the first match.  Fifty years ago, when Little Rickie ruled the house on television, and when I jumped rope with kids on the street, I knew few children growing up in single parent homes.  In most cases, they were children impacted by death of a parent or, in rare cases, children of divorce.

Today, children raised by single parents are the norm.  And for every child without a dad, Big Brothers, Big Sisters works hard recruiting men to fill in the gap.

This is a Herculean task, recruiting enough Big Brothers and Big Sisters to take care of the needing children in America.  It sets my mind on fire with questions.

Where are the men who have fathered these children?  And if they didn’t stay around to be a Big Father, can we expect them to be a Big Brother?

And for the fathers who have stepped up to the plate to be the fathers they should be, how many more children can they adopt under their wings before they are unable to fly for the weight of the burdens we have placed on them?

The biggest question of all?

Educators around the country are working to instill in young people the notion that the sex that produces children should be saved for the time in their lives when they will be able and willing to marry.  Children born into families built on the healthy marriages of Big Fathers and Big Mothers is the most secure way of providing what Big Brothers and Big Sisters are attempting to give.

In one case, Big Brothers, Big Sisters is applauded for their generosity and their efforts to help young boys and girls succeed.  They boldly place posters and billboards and recruit donations and volunteers.

In the other case, promoting the benefits of marriage which, if successful, results in Big Fathers and Big Mothers, draws down the wrath of people who denounce this effort to “force your values on me.”  Why?

Why are we afraid to recruit Big Fathers through education programs that connect sex, marriage and families as a positive goal?  And why do we reject this education at the same time that we laud Big Brothers for recruiting men to fill the void created by the breakdown in social norms for marriage?

Consider the benefits for James of living with his married parents:

  • less likely to use drugs,
  • less likely to start drinking,
  • less likely to skip class, and
  • will achieve higher grades.

Celebrate this…thousands of years, families founded on fathers married to mothers.  Volunteer your support.  James needs you.  All children need you.

Big Brothers, Big Sisters.  Yes.  Better still…

Big Fathers, Big Mothers.  Yes!