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Tom Ridge's goofy color-coded terrorism alert system couldn't possibly scare me as much as the stupidity of the people we entrust to teach our children.  On Wednesday Fox News reported that 7-year-old Brandy McKenith, a second-grader in a suburban Pittsburgh public school, was suspended for profanity after telling a classmate that he would go to hell for saying "I swear to God." Apparently, another student overheard her utter the word "hell" and told her teacher, who then, appealing to the Pittsburgh Public Schools' student code of conduct prohibiting profanity, had the girl suspended. One teacher, acting alone, cannot suspend a student, so this had to be a conspiracy of idiots.

And so a public-school teacher and her administrators can't tell the difference between a declarative sentence using the word "hell' and an emotive expletive using "hell' as profanity? The girl did not say, "Go to hell!"; she said "You will go to hell," and there's a huge difference—as any native speaker of the English language, even someone as young as 7, can tell you. For that matter, even the FCC recognizes the distinction, as recent obscenity rulings show. This really is not something subtle, requiring a linguistics specialist to decypher. Between the curse and the promise is a vast chasm, which Christians hope to bridge through the Gospel message. [See Illustration.]

Honey, I married the dog!  Massachusetts is back in the news with its demand that "marriage" include within it things it really shouldn't. In a December post, I weighed in on why we shouldn't accept at face value any such thing as marriage between two men, or marriage between two women, or any marriage that does not manifest the natural complementarity of the male-female relationship. We may want "persons" to marry, but in fact only humans can do this. We can pretend, as I've said, and can put just about anything into a wedding, but the outcome won't be marriage. It's play-acting, and the happy couple is a pair of imposters.

For example, take yesterday's story about a 75-year-old Nepalese man whose culture encouraged him to "marry" his dog in order to bring luck and ward off evil. Alas, his luck didn't last: he died three days after the wedding. And in India last year 100 people were on hand to witness the marriage between a 9-year-old girl and a mongrel dog—again for luck and to ward off evil. [Sources: Ananova, "Quirkies," February 5, 2004; Sydney Morning Herald, June 19, 2003]

The farther we get from the committed relationship between a man and a woman the more extreme is our bewilderment over why the distant thing might ever be called marriage at all.

Here's an updated count of the international visitors to this blog.  Recent visitors include Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, and Switzerland. They join, in alphabetical order, this growing list: Australia, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, and (predominantly) United States.

With the update, these are now otherwise known as: