LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP
By
Betty Freauf
October 24, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
Someone has said that the reason a Christian ought not to marry a non-Christian is that if you marry in the family of the Devil, you are going to have trouble with your father-in-law. In generations past young folks married within their own ethnicity and religious faiths. Because of our sinful nature, there may have been cases of incest and spousal abuse and occasionally there may have been a divorce but as a general rule, once married they stayed married giving the children a sense of stability and financial security.
I had a cousin who worked ten years putting the family history together on my German dad’s side of the family. She did an excellent job tracing their roots from Germany to Russia in the early 1800s and eventually to the U.S. I shared the book with a German lady who married a military man and ended up in the U.S. She opened the book to the places of birth and immediately said she was born in the same area as my grandparents. We laughed and said maybe we were related. An Englishman standing nearby commented, “Ya, you probably are. There was a lot of inbreeding going on in those little communities.”
Unlike the illegal invasion we are experiencing in the U.S. today, my ancestors legally emigrated through Ellis Island. Instead of heading for the welfare office for a handout and free health care, they chose to assimilate. They brought with them a trade so they could support themselves and if they had any diseases, they were sent back to the country of origin and they learned the English language.
Two centuries ago the federal government owned all the land west of the Mississippi River but all that land did not put a nickel into the federal treasury and so the government started giving away the land under the Homestead Act signed by President Lincoln in 1862 that offered 100 acres of land for families who had the courage to settle the frontier and farm the wilderness, build railroads and stake out mining claims – all sorts of programs to transfer public land to private title. Today, after our ancestors cleared the land of sagebrush, now the government pays some “socialist” farmers not to farm the land and instead plant sagebrush. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. When the productive farmer, who is not willing to participate in government handouts, dies, his land will be taken from the family for estate taxes. I recently saw the movie “Secretariat.” When this daughter’s dad died, the family owed $6 million in estate taxes and some financial advisers, including her husband, said she should sell Secretariat. It was a good family movie. I recommend it.
The citizen owners would clear the land and farm it thereby generating wealth and then pay taxes to the government. This worked well for decades. There is the old saying that “birds of a feather flock together” and that was especially true of these immigrants from Europe who ended up staying together in their little communities no matter where they settled. If we drive through the country-side today the little churches that the community built may no longer be there but we’ll see family cemeteries in the middle of fields.
The community built one-room schoolhouses serving eight grades that were easily accessible by horse or foot from all the families in the area and Bible was part of the curriculum As recent as October 2002 an AP article appeared in our local newspaper about a public boarding school in Crane, Oregon, which draws students from a vast area in Eastern Oregon. Most students attend kindergarten through 8th grade in one-room schools throughout the Crane Union High School District, a territory roughly the size of Massachusetts. The district, which serves 97 High School students, spans 7,700 square miles in Harney and Malheur counties down to the Nevada border. Some small towns in northern Nevada have agreements to send their teenagers to Crane. But be not deceived, no school district has escaped federal curriculum since Democrat President Jimmy Carter helped create the Department of Education which Republican President Ronald Reagan said he was going to eliminate.
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I have a test in my possession from an 1894 Schoolbook: Facts I ought to know about the government of my country by William H. Bartlett. Today’s 8th grade students could not pass the test nor could the Ph.Ds of the college system. There is a new book called, “Pursuing Liberty: America Through the Eyes of the Newly Free,” By Cory Emberson and Rick Lindstrom. The authors believe Americans have taken their freedoms for granted and the book suggests we are losing our uniqueness. People who have come to America from oppressive regimes are so much more appreciative of this country than native born who just take our freedoms for granted.
Marriage can sometimes be difficult even when a couple has the same ethnic and religious background. It causes even more problems when politics is involved. Will the spouse be supportive and a helpmate or more of a check mate? If a couple is not of the same faith, how will they raise their children? Will they agree before they get married? Will a man raised in the Catholic faith agree to raise the children in his wife’s evangelical faith? What if the wife gets cancer and dies while the children are still young? Or perhaps the opposite situation could occur. And what about a couple on second marriages and stepchildren?
And then there are the cases of the live-in couples that have babies and the child is given a hyphenated name of both the mother and father. This causes mass confusion on birth records, social security cards, and other legal documents and the child never quite knows what name they should use. And what about the subject of abortion? Jon Christian Ryter in his article The Global Currency War writes how aborting millions of babies for the last 37 years has caused industrialized nations economically to pay for nearly four decades of abortion rights – loss of our national identities and our national sense of well-being. He says for every “action” there is a reaction.
And what about interracial marriage? Our current President Barack Obama is a typical case of being confused. The media says he’s the first black president but his mother was white. Barack has an ethnic identity problem. How does he fill out his census questionnaire? And what about his children?
Marrying outside one’s race got the Israelites in trouble with God so it is not unusual to find cities that have little clans and while not always perfect, for generations everyone had been tolerant without any “political correctness” laws or forced “multicultural curriculum.” The German chancellor has just proclaimed that “multiculturalism” has been a failure. The first time I recognized that our country was in trouble when I found laws were being passed about forced “civility”. Suddenly some social planner decided we no longer were respecting the differences of each other and we needed Big Brother to help us. Now we have “hate” crimes that causes more divisions.
Decades ago parents were beginning to sense the public schools were lacking in the basics three R’s which people may recall were: Reading, Riting and Rithmetic. They wanted to skip all the social programs and return to basics but education continued to disintegrate. What will happen in a marriage when a mother wants to home school and a father not realizing how the public schools had deteriorated since he attended might say, “No, the schools were good enough for me so they are good enough for our child.”
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Cal Thomas in his 9/16/1993 commentary said, “Students need emphasis on phonics” and he quoted in his commentary that Robert Sweet, president of the Right to Read Foundation (and former head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention), said, “Government doesn’t look for simple answers, only problems for which it can appropriate billions more in tax dollars. And common sense tells us a child who is functionally illiterate is more apt to get into trouble and end up in prison. On that same 9/16/1993 date an Oregon college professor wrote that he and his colleagues had to perform remedial roles because young people were coming to college totally unprepared. He saw the end product of high school education in Oregon and for too many students that education was frighteningly bad and our education system rotten.
Educators were busy purposely neglecting the basics and instead concentrated on the values clarification process destroying the concept of moral absolutes. The students’ values were being changed via sensitivity training to accept “common values” – reinforcement mechanisms like Pavlov’s dogs therefore driving a wedge between parents and children and why many children are now committing suicide.
We should choose our spouses with caution. Can you imagine the stress involved with the decision about Terri Schindler Shiavo? Like the euthanasia laws passed first in Oregon and a couple years ago in the State of Washington, values didn’t die a natural death. Voters approved euthanasia legislation in these two states. How will couples handle one terminal spouse who chooses to die but the other doesn’t agree?
Being unequally yoked at election time can decide whether a candidate will win or lose. Couples must be able to pull together politically and in the raising of the children if we are going to survive as a God-given sovereign nation. Can the American dream be restored? Many of us feel as though our economic system and our civilization in general are nearing the end.
In the 1930s, we still had firmly established values of right and wrong. Although there were those who occasionally messed up morally, it was generally kept a family secret but today it is simply “in your face.” This is MY life and I’ll live it the way I want thanks to self-esteem courses being taught in the public schools. The education system has done great damage as they tried to desensitize students and separate them from core values.
Did this began in 1981 when Missouri launched an experimental parenting program called New Parents as First Teachers (P.A.T) with a “home visitation” component where social workers that “knew best” (and probably many were childless) that actually undermined parental confidence? It started as a voluntary program in four school districts at a cost of “only” $30,000 each. State legislators believe it would help disadvantaged children by screening them for “developmental delays.” In 1985 the Missouri legislators mandated P.A.T. for all schools and all children. The cost rose to over $9 million and involved 53,000 families and this soon spread to other states. What would happen when one parent didn’t want the “social worker” in the home?
Radio hostess Laura Ingraham was discussing how three free “nutritious” meals are offered daily in D.C. school districts and are spreading to other school districts. With tongue in cheek, one caller said maybe the children could take sleeping bags to school and spend the night. Another caller mentioned parents could be given “visitation rights” Welcome to the United Nations “Rights of the Child” agenda.
And then there is the military. What problems can result if the child of pacifist parents participate at peace rallies happens to marry the son of parents who have served in the military. We’ve heard stories on T.V. about American women who have married Muslims and end up losing their children to another country never to be heard from again. I’m sure readers can think of other examples.
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I’m not saying being “unequally” yoked in the beginning can’t be made to smooth out as the years go by but life would be much simpler if we made the right choices the first time around. The best thing for those considering marrying should be “Look Before You Leap” and the same advice could be given for the November 2nd election.
Is there a small pulse left in our nation? Will the Tea Party folks help resuscitate our Republic or will generational theft continue unabated and the middle class be wiped out? We are at a tipping point in the history of our country.
� 2010 Betty Freauf - All Rights Reserved
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