Not every family is in the financial or physical situation to be able to provide the care that an elderly relative can often come to need. Ideally of course, you would take care of your family yourself, live in close proximity, or as health deteriorates, have a parent or grandparent move in. Still, I recognize, have seen in my own family, that sometimes the assistance of assisted living or a nursing facility becomes necessary. If you are not able to lift them for example…. Still, the nursing home is in and of itself less than ideal. Further, it is not used as a last resort by far too big a percentage of the family. Even worse, many elderly people are more or less abandoned in such facilities, visited rarely if at all, nearly forgotten except the occasional phone call, sometimes even living far from any family. To make matters worse, Toyota seems to think it would be a good idea to delegate the care of these people to a robotic staff.[1] Now they are to be denied even the minimal comfort of contact with unknown, harried, and busy staff. Perhaps worse, they want to delegate the raising of children to robots, when intuition, common sense, instinct, and research all highlight the absolute critical nature of human interaction in a child’s development. This is a tragic development.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8644628

In other interesting news, a Kentucky judge has held up the Kentucky Amendment banning homosexual “marriages.”[1] I wonder how long until this one is appealed to the federal courts and overturned.

[1] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-27-2005/e43400073b26d217.html

Lots and lots of non-news in my scan today. I am starting to think that I have once again exhausted my ability to be significantly interested in national or world events. Still, a few things did catch my eye. Why is it that people get this idea that you must prioritize the world’s problems and ignore anything that is not at the top of that stack? Just because China and North Korea are worse than we are, is that reason to ignore evidence of persecution of faith and Christianity here? Some attacking Mr. David Limbaugh’s book Persecution seem to think so.[1] In the afore-referenced interview, Mr. Limbaugh presents an interesting idea that I have no ability to evaluate: that the systematic persecution of the Faith and of the Jewish people in Germany, and in other societies, was presaged by the types of miss-characterization that Christians suffer now. Certainly Germany started slow, but is this a fair charge to make? I do not know.

Still, it is worth noting that we are slowly but surely eroding our understanding of “Freedom of Religion.” From the suppression of displays of faith in public, we now move to sheltering our children from religions that a judge deems not “mainstream.”[2] This is a ruling that I cannot but find sympathy for. The rise of Wiccans and others calling themselves witches is disturbing. It makes me wonder how much of the talk of the “Black Church” in Mr. Neil Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” is historical, something I was and am not otherwise inclined to give him much credence in. Still, as in the case of the New Mexico church that wanted to use the hallucinogenic tea in their services, I cannot but find this sort of suppression unacceptable. No government official should have the right to define what is and is not a religion, what does and does not deserve First Amendment protection. I am not sure how cults should be treated, such bodies that mimic religion present a thorny question for law. I know, instinctively, however, that this sort of action can only spell ill for the Church.

[1] http://www.stanguthrie.com/
[2] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/05-27-2005/9bfe0012b94196c6.html