Yeah, it’s just too obvious, isn’t it? Could anyone say those two words together with a straight face?

David Skinner at The Weekly Standard has a great send-up of a celebrity truth-a-thon. But a warning- it may be better to skip it if you prefer to know as little about celebrities as possible. Sometimes I feel that way too.

The Weekly Sermon, on Genesis 16, The Son of the Bondwoman, is uploaded. Click on the link in the sidebar, or here.

Master and Commander is the story of Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), a sea captain that is sent with his ship to intercept a French privateer in 1805. It’s the middle of the Napoleonic wars, and England is in under threat of invasion. Only their fleet is preventing Napoleon’s complete control of Europe, so the threat is very real. A privateer is a ship that operates outside of the official chain of command, with a charter from a country to attack its enemies. So, it’s basically a pirate ship with the sanction of a particular country.

The French privateer is on its way to the Pacific Ocean, where it will attack British interests. The Surprise (the British Man o’ War) is supposed to intercept the Acheron (the French privateer) off the coast of Brazil. Instead, the Acheron surprises the Surprise and heavily damages it, almost destroying it except for some lucky fog.

The Surprise now realizes that the Acheron is a superior ship- that it’s bigger, faster, more heavily armed and armored, and with more crew. Captain Aubrey’s officers believe that they must turn back, but Aubrey decides that duty and the importance of the mission requires them to continue on, which they do. The movie is the story of the crew’s bravery and resourcefulness in trying to catch the Acheron and to defeat it in battle.

This was a very enjoyable movie. Crowe is great as always, but it’s not a movie driven by star power. There are a great many other fine performances, most notably Paul Bettany as the ship’s doctor. The battle scenes are very tense and engaging, and the editing of the movie is tight. The editing in particular is worth a note- the movie was over two hours long (138 minutes exactly) but did not drag at all. I never wondered to myself, “How long has this been on?”, a sure-fire sign that a movie is longer than it ought to be.

Above all, this is a manly movie, and not manly like we define it today. Not manly like the Man Show; manly like The Sands of Iwo Jima. These are tough men facing tough choices, and are guided by their courage and integrity, not by their emotions or desires. Above all, there is duty. The love of their country and loyalty to each other drives them to do tough things, things they don’t want to do. It’s a welcome change from the typical morality of Hollywood movies, which usually has the carefree rebel in the role as the moral center, and the military man is usually the repressed psychopath.

Another welcome change was its presentation of the Christianity of the men. Hardly a dominant feature of the movie, but we see the captain praying for forgiveness from God at one point, and all the men of the ship praying the Lord’s prayer at another.

It’s bloody, though. Probably not a great movie for little kids, for that reason. Otherwise, I’d heartily recommend it.

4/5 stars.



Rent the DVD free from Netflix!

We don’t have to speculate about the ultimate direction of the current pro-gay judicial rulings. Others have forged ahead, blazed the trail, and we can see where it leads.

Europe is often trumpeted as a haven of tolerance. Well, here’s what’s going on in England, one of the more conservative places in Europe. Some expressed skepticism at my claims earlier that if the pro-gay lobby has their way, I’d be thrown in jail just for writing this blog. Well, here’s a bishop being investigated because he said hurtful things about gays.

Thanks to Alpha and Omega for the link.

Dennis Teti writes for the Weekly Standard on the FMA and its problems, and a solution that he thinks is better. I like his reasoning.

I did some writing on a comments link over at SKBubba’s site, and I see no reason not to repost it here. If I wrote it, my blog should benefit from it, right?

This goes to the argument about why a homosexual couple ought to be treated differently under the law than a straight couple who doesn’t want to have children:

This isn’t about one person’s or one couple’s situation. This is about society and government.

In order to differentiate legally between married people who intend to have children and married people who do not intend to have children, it would be necessary for the state to interview people who are getting married and ask them what their family plans are. You could then deny benefits to people who weren’t going to have children except the problem is, unless they were provably sterile there’s a chance they could have children. Therefore, it’s still in the best interest of the state and society to make sure that all, or as many as possible, heterosexual couples having sex are in fact married, because it greatly increases the odds that any children are born into a stable environment. It’s quite obvious that any gays having sex have exactly zero chance of accidentally procreating. There is therefore no state interest at all in subsidizing their love. Again, we don’t subsidize love. We subsidize childrearing, and we subsidize even situations where childrearing is a possibility, but we don’t subsidize love, at least not until very recently.

Whether or not gays should be allowed to adopt is an entirely different question. Single people can adopt, and gain benefits by doing so. They have to prove stability, though, which is harder for a single person than a married person in many situations, and is also harder for someone living a homosexual lifestyle, as their promiscuity is in most cases much higher than heterosexuals, which leads to instability. But the fact that gays sometimes want to adopt is no reason to redefine a millennia-old institution just to satisfy the whims of a few cultural elites.

For those who point to the disastrous state of marriage and family in America today as some kind of evidence against my argument, it is in fact evidence _for_ my argument. The state of marriage today is a result, among other things, of breaking the link between marriage and childrearing. As I said in the original article that sparked all of this, all of the social indicators have tracked very closely to all of the laws that made it easier for people to get divorced and to have and raise children outside of marriage. Illegitimacy has skyrocketed as those laws have been passed, and the result of illegitimacy is well-documented. Illegitimacy causes poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, criminal behavior, increased promiscuity, child abuse, and a host of other ills. Look up the statistics if you doubt me. Breaking the bond between marriage and childrearing has already been disastrous, and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

I can keep on making this argument, and you can keep on calling me a bigot if it makes you feel better. But I didn’t refer to religion once in the above argument or in the original article, so at the very least don’t say you haven’t seen any reason not to redefine marriage to include homosexuals. You’ve seen an argument, you just disagree with it. That’s different than saying nobody’s made an argument.

Eugene Volokh has two posts, here and here, showing how those who said the ERA and antidiscrimination laws would lead, among other things, to gay marriage, have proved exactly right, since the Massachusetts court used both of those ideas (antidiscrimination on the basis of sexual preference and equal treatment for both sexes in all situations) to support their decision.

And this from someone who supports gay marriage.

DC Sniper gets unusual sentence.

The ruling has just come down- the Massachussetts Supreme Court has ruled that gay marriage is constitutionally protected. That means the fight’s on. The gays will now attempt to force national acceptance through the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the constitution, which rules that each state must honor the contracts of other states. Here’s my post on why this is a bad thing.

So, now it’ll be a fight between two mutually exclusive outcomes. Because the gays won’t settle for anything less than full acceptance, the conservatives will have to press for a constitutional amendment, like the FMA. I don’t know for sure how I feel about that amendment, but I know it’s better than being forced to honor the marriages of homosexuals. The way things are going, I don’t think we’re that far off from me being forced religiously to accept their marriages. If you doubt that, consider that there are places in the world, places that are the model and the goal of the homosexual lobby, like Sweden, where it would be illegal for me to preach that homosexuality is a sin.

The war’s on, folks. Time to choose up sides.

I’ve changed the format for the sermons a little bit. If you want to download them, just click on the link, go to the folder and take the one you want. I’m not going to do individual links to them any more. But I will update you on when the new one’s available.

And, BTW, the new one’s available. But I’m still a little bit of a novice at digital recording on my iPAQ. The software I’m using keeps cutting off the last few minutes of the sermon, for some reason. Sorry about that.