Ed FirmageHumanity
Horray for my friends Mary Kay and Jon Huntsman, Jr., and Asha. A great family, from top to bottom. Including my old friends up the food chain, Karen and Jon, Loving lovely people. A new child at Christmas. That’s what I call family planning. Asha is from India, a land I love as my own, since it is. Blessed child. Blessed parents and grandparents. And congratulations to Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney and Mrs. Cheney, and to Heather Poe, Mary’s partner of fifteen years, on Mary’s announced pregnancy.
What a great time of year for expansions of family. Defining “family” is great fun and a great challenge. See,” Fiddler on the Roof.” Defining ever outward, not inward, is the whole story of Chiristmas. And human rights. And the American Constitution and the International Law of Human Rights. And the gospel core of every great world religion, without exception. Defining family allows a great many lessons of love. Good time for that, about now, in the life of this tortured world. Defining “family” is great fun. And boy, is it a challenge to all our treasured mishaprehensions. Whether parents and grandparents teach a single thing children don’t possess at and before birth, with Socrates, I most seriously doubt. Mostly, it seems to me, from family to the public schools, parents and teachers, we seem primarily to remove from chldren, or at least force the burial, of the sacred, way way down deep, tragically, to be rediscovered later in life, at great cost. Like, for example, seeing spirits and ghosts. Some of us childen see this stuff all the time. See, Utah B Section, Salt Lake Tribune, p.l; ;and A section, p. A ll, Thursday, December 7, 2006.