It isn’t just the deconstruction of marriage we are facing, it is the deconstruction of the family, with its constituent authorities and responsibilities, with the state taking its place. Consider this from Canada, Court overturns father’s grounding of 12-year-old:

A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.

The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling. . . .

According to court documents, the girl’s Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.

HT: Don S

Mollie Hemingway gives more details about the return of “Issues, etc.”:

Jeff [Schwarz] and Todd [Wilken] have signed a contract with KSIV-AM 1320 in St. Louis. All of their studio equipment is in and connected. So the team will be furiously testing, testing, testing until they open the mic on June 30.

On weekdays, Monday-Friday, starting June 30, the program will be webcast around the world for two hours, 3:00-5:00 (Central), on the Internet at the Pirate Christian Radio website:
The second hour, 4:00-5:00, will be broadcast in the St. Louis area on AM 1320.

Todd gave an interview about the show and you can listen to it here: www.tabletalkradio.org/audio/scraps-wilken.mp3

Isn’t it telling that a program featuring Lutheran theology was booted off of the Lutheran radio station but picked up by an evangelical radio station? As I keep saying from my own experience, evangelicals are often more open to the insights of Lutheran theology than some Lutherans are.

Anyway, put June 30 on your calendar and make the time-slot part of your routine. All of us who supported “Issues, Etc.” during this controversy will need to rally around the show to make the new launch successful, both in our listening and in our financial contributions. The rest of you can now see what the fuss was all about.

Now that homosexual relationships are winning legal, binding status, some people are calling for similar laws ratifying friendship:

Now, a number of scholars are seeking to shore up friendship in a surprising way: by granting it legal recognition. Some of the rights and privileges restricted to family, they argue, should be given to friends. These could be invoked on a case-by-case basis - eligibility to take time off to care for a sick friend under an equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. Or they could take the form of an official legal arrangement between two friends, designating a bundle of mutual rights and privileges - literally “friends with benefits,” as Laura Rosenbury, a law professor at Washington University, puts it. One scholar even suggests giving friends standing in the tax code, allowing taxpayers to write off certain “friend expenditures.”

Such changes, proponents say, could contribute to a shift in how our society values personal relationships. In part, they say, the point is to acknowledge that society has already changed: as more people are living outside of marriage, friendships have become the primary relationships on which many Americans rely. But a broader aim is to recognize the universal social and psychological benefits of friendship, which rival those of other relationships, notably marriage, that receive active state support. New laws could elevate friendship’s status, recasting it as an essential part of our lives, rather than a luxury often sacrificed to other priorities.

Changes of this kind would “allow you to say, these are people who matter deeply to me,” said Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the thinkers in favor of friendship law. “I want that to count, not only in my own intimate life, but in the eyes of the law.”

That’s all single people need! It’s hard enough to find someone to marry. Think of the agony of rejection when you can’t even find a friend willing to commit to you. Notice also how this ties into the deconstruction of marriage into its component parts that we blogged about recently.

This is also a creepy manifestation of the revived religion of the state, in which some people really do want the government to ratify, control, and regulate EVERYTHING. That is, to become “totalitarian”; from the word “total.”

HT: Motte Brown at Boundless

John McCain is old; Barack Obama is young. McCain looks back; Obama looks forward; McCain represents the past; Obama represents the new. See how Peggy Noonan frames the election in terms of two mindsets already at work in our culture: the Old America vs. the New America:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”

Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.

Mr. McCain is the old world of concepts like “personal honor,” of a manliness that was a style of being, of an attachment to the fact of higher principles.

Mr. Obama is the new world, which is marked in part by doubt as to the excellence of the old. It prizes ambivalence as proof of thoughtfulness, as evidence of a textured seriousness.

She goes on in this vein. . . .What do you think of her categories? Is the New America inevitable?