BATES MOTEL --SO FAR-- Compelling mysteries!

Is anyone watching the BATES MOTEL series?
The movie of a young man's descent into insanity doesn't appeal to me --or so I thought, but they showed all 4 episodes thus far on Sat. night and I thought --"well, I'll just watch a little," and Jon and I were drawn in by compelling characters, actors, directing. It's quite a compelling drama! Fifth episode is tonight. I'm hoping this has a different ending than the later Hitchcock movies. I want artistic license to be redemptive! with triumph of good over evil! I like happy endings! Never was one for soap operas!

It appears that there are not any GOOD persons in the show except Norman's 2 girlfriends and Norman himself. Even his brother who has come home for lack of other options --and taken a turn for the better toward Norman and is befriending/protecting him (at last)-- told him to "go be a normal teen --go get laid at 17 with a pretty teen girl!" And the worldly audience probably found themselves agreeing that that's just what Norman needed! as he went off to visit the girlfriend --who invited him at night --a girl whose beloved father was mysteriously murdered by fire in his warehouse. Next we'll have a teen love triangle with the other girl who has cystic fibrosis --who also has a crush on him. Then maybe there'll be a pregnancy or an abortion--and goodness knows what from such lousy brotherly advice.

The story is contemporized --with teens texting on their phones and a sex-trafficking mystery involving Asian girls and a journal of drawings about their plight found by Norman under the carpets --after they removed the carpets for blood --because his likable mother murdered her rapist, a gross fellow who formerly owned the property and lost it in foreclosure. Norman caught him in the act, bonked him on the head, they handcuffed him to a table leg --and his mother went into a rage and stabbed the guy to death. We suspect mother caused an accidental death to her husband, too, Norman's father, for insurance money. That's another mystery. The estranged son, Norman's brother --was born to the mother when she was 17 to a man who left her --and that son never respected her (calls her Norma) --so she favored Norman. Her facial expressions are terrific --with a mix of kindly motherly affection for Norman and vulnerability to the disrespectful son. She seems neither crazy nor particularly inappropriate with her sons --so far.

The older brother gets a job, starts helping out at home. His job is guarding a big secret marijuana field --near which there is a cabin in the woods --featured in the Asian girl's drawings in her journal.

The police suspected Norma in the disappearance of her rapist -- she and Norman dumped him in the lake --and carpet fibers found on his recovered hand from his body matched the motel's carpet which they removed because of blood residue as the police arrived. They had stored him in a bathtub of one of the motel rooms --after murdering him in the kitchen. She chose not to report his rape of her and her understandable rage leading to his murder --it wasn't self-defense since they had him handcuffed and helpless. He had once claimed the police were his fishing buddies when she threatened to call the police on him for his threatening ways --so she figured the police would discount the rape, and she figured no one would want to visit a motel where there had been a murder. She already found out that a freeway was being put in on the other side of town which would hurt her business.

Another twist --the sheriffy's deputy has become Norman's mother's lover --as he found the dead man's belt under Norman's bed and promised to keep it and not tell on them. Norman had kept the belt as a memento of the event --and wonders why and what's wrong with him for doing so. Norman's mother apparently told him to get the belt back --so he goes to the deputy's house --and he finds, not the belt, but an Asian girl in the basement --apparently a sex slave. He tells his mother --and she looks in the basement when she is with the deputy at his place and he falls asleep --and there doesn't appear to be a girl there anymore.

So what's going on? Norman had a trance and black-out in the classroom thinking about the drawings in the journal. There is a scene in which the mother tells him to reclaim the dead man's belt from the deputy's house because he could use it as blackmail to get whatever he wanted from her --to make HER his sex slave. Yet, the deputy claims to love the mother --took Norman fishing --says he will protect them.

Everyone knows the dead man was a brute and had it in for his mother. Nevertheless, when they find the dead-man's fish-severed hand with watch and carpet fibers in the lake, they arrest Norman's mother. That's where the story takes up tonight.

Mystery: Norman's mother says she did NOT tell him to get that belt from the deputy's house, tells him he has been having delusions like this all his life, tells him there IS no Asian girl in the deputy's basement because she went down and looked. But the deputy could have moved her --because when deputy got home he found his vicious dog locked up in his bedroom --(by norman) and basement window was left open, too, from which Norman fled. So the deputy may have known someone had been in the house --and thus moved the girl. Or is Norman imagining the girl from the journal drawings? There is something fishy going on here --his CF girlfriend found Chinese writing under a bathroom sink in the motel --the figures spelled "Beautiful." But why would you write that word under a sink? Perhaps it is her name! And she was leaving evidence of her presence in that room.

Wow! Lot's of mystery --and no one to trust!

"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible

Open Letter to Bob Ferguson, Wash. State AG --on Persecution of Florist

Dear Mr. Ferguson: (Attorney General of Washington state)

We are told that people of religious conscience on the gay marriage issue have nothing to fear from the government if gay marriage is legalized. Thanks for proving this untrue before the Supreme Court rules on the issue. I hope they take note.

There is a lot of research that shows that the children who lack a father fill our jails, do poorly in school, and follow the footsteps of their parents, unable to remain married and sustain happy homes. Three researchers found that children raised by homosexuals are 35% more likely to fail a grade.

Functional homes with both mother and father intact produce the most children able to marry and parent normally --civilizing and educating the next generation --providing an economic safety net and a mental health center and good school for life for their children and grand-children. The homes which lack fathers tend to need a lot of gov't aid --and tend to produce similar, fatherless, poverty-status homes.

What your office has done is shameful --to tell private business people that homosexuals are the same as minority races --and thus those who fail to provide services for their weddings --or housing for their unions --are in violation of the civil rights of homosexuals.

There have always been limits on our sexual proclivities: illegal prostitution; illegal obscenity as porn; age restrictions; consent restrictions (no legal rape) ; restrictions on bigamy and polygamy; and restrictions on bestiality and incest --and re: GENDER!

Everyone has the same right --to marry --and marriage is the union of a man and wife --according to historical definition and nature, our physical design as procreative people. The age and fertility status (inability to procreate) does not prevent an adult couple from being role models of the natural order. Married heterosexual people do role- model the natural order as male with female. All else is problematic for our young people influenced by adults as role models; they are impressionable and not ready to make mature decisions about intimacy and procreation. Youth who start to sex-plore their gender roles, end up vulnerable to STD's, depression, and all the downsides of serial broken relationships. Older gays tend to be lonely due to the emphasis on youth and beauty in their community. They do commit 1/3 of the molestations between adults and youth --which is way more than their percentage of the population.

Our national encouragement should be to wait for marriage before having sex. Some people still do that, you know, believe it or not. And all people have a right to heterosexual marriage --there is no discrimination against people --just against immoral sexual inclinations, lust, and choices. We need to protect our children from the lie that is "homosexual happiness." Gays aren't typically gay. They are angry because they want their anal and oral sex to be respected. They tend to hate those who disagree with them --rather than receiving hatred from the religious. The argument now is to say that straights do it, too. I haven't found in my medical practice that ANY women are succumbing to anal sex --or that oral sex is an oft-practiced event for heterosexual couples. There are some real health concerns with sodomy. According to recent study of obituaries in gay-friendly San Francisco, only 20+% of homosexuals attain old age --compared to over 70% of heterosexuals.

If the Christians are right - if Jesus Christ did rise from the dead, we should consider His definition of marriage --man leaves parents and cleaves to his wife. St. Paul called homosexuality "exchanging the truth about God for a lie, " and "worship of creature more than Creator."

Don't ask this florist to violate her conscience, be it religious or moral concerns or both --by participating in gay weddings. Which is better, to serve God or man or money? Don't make this small business pay for refusing to help solemnize sodomy.

Sincerely,
Jonathan E. Rohrs, MD
Family Medicine

"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible

NOM on Barronelle Stutzman's Persecution by Wash. State' AG

SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2013
Dear Jonathan,
...the news this week [is]t hat Washington's Attorney General Bob Ferguson is using taxpayer funding to bring a lawsuit against a small Washington state florist named Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene's Flowers and Gifts. Stutzman's crime? Refusing to sell flowers for a gay wedding.

For this 'thought crime' against gay marriage, her whole livelihood is now put at the stake.

It was only a few months ago, before the November elections, when gay marriage advocates were sanctimoniously getting on television and reassuring voters that our claims of the religious persecution that comes hand in hand with redefining marriage were unfounded. Made up. Untrue. They knew at the time they were not telling the truth. Because now, just a few months later, the ACLU and a State Attorney General are the ones at the forefront of making sure that Christians who disagree with gay marriage pay a price for acting on their convictions.

Failure to tell the truth—call it a lie—arises from the fundamental lie: same-sex unions are not marriages because they cannot ever, under any circumstances, do the fundamental, key, and irreplaceable work that marriages do: bringing together under one home, in one family, the two great halves of humanity, male and female—to create homes in which children are known and loved by their own mother and father.
Not every marriage succeeds in creating the full range of goods that marriage aims at. But when marriages succeed in doing so, it's because they combine elements and circumstances that no same-sex couple can.

Suppressing the truth is what same-sex marriage advocates have to do to "win" the debate (temporarily, anyway).

How Truth is Suppressed

That's why, when a distinguished social scientist does an ordinary act like publishing his research in a major peer-reviewed journal—all pandemonium must break loose to discredit him. Not just disagree with him. Not just contextualize or re-contextualize his data—that would be normal scientific debate. But to smear him as a non-scientist and to ignore his work.

That's the crucible University of Texas Prof. Mark Regnerus has been going through and still is going through.

C-FAM's Austin Ruse recently pointed this out in his piece on Regnerus:
"Science Study Still Spooking Gay Advocates."

Ruse points to Dr. Susan Yoshihara, research director of C-FAM, who used the Regnerus study before the legislature in Rhode Island. So-called "fact-checkers" claimed her testimony was false:

Politifact, a self-styled watchdog of political truth, branded Yoshihara's claim as false. Yoshihara, however, says the Politifact piece itself backed up her claim when they quoted a "prudent scholar" who said the issue is not settled in the scientific literature, which was Yoshihara's claim in the first place.

Ruse also cites the recent claim by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who said that "The study was pretty well demolished by peers."

But for me the worst was a claim in the LA Times that the Supreme Court was just silly to entertain the idea children do best with a mom and dad. Justice Scalia had made the assertion that "there's considerable disagreement" about whether "raising a child in a single-sex family is harmful or not," an assertion no doubt based in part on Regnerus's research.

"Those comments startled child development experts as well as advocates of gay marriage, because there is considerable research showing children of gay parents do not have more problems than others," the LA Times went on to report with a straight face…. '"There is a fundamental, scholarly consensus that children raised by same-sex couples do just fine,' said Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld."

Yet I know of—and I'm no sociologist—at least 5 studies published in peer-reviewed journals whose results contest the "no difference claim": Mark Regnerus (2012), Loren Marks (2102), Douglas Allen (2012), Daniel Potter (2012), and Theresa Sirota (2009).

Listen, social science is not a "hard science," and I don't need to know from merely scientific evidence what I know in my heart from my own experience and the experience of so many children raised in fragmented families: children long for and need their mother and their father. But simply as a statement about the scientific literature, the claim there is now a "consensus" is untrue. The claim can be made only by ignoring the reputable scientists whose works disagree with that claim.

Truth matters to us, but it's not clear it matters to gay marriage advocates.
If you doubt me, listen to the voice of the extraordinary British writer Brendan O'Neill—a one-time Marxist, a man of the Left, who has spoken out repeatedly against the use of elite power to shut down the debate over same-sex marriage across the pond:

I have been doing or writing about political stuff for 20 years, since I was 18 years old, during which time I have got behind some pretty unpopular campaigns and kicked against some stifling consensuses. But I have never encountered an issue like gay marriage, an issue in which the space for dissent has shrunk so rapidly, and in which the consensus is not only stifling but choking. This is the only issue for which he has been not only booed but threatened with death.

"Is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rights side won?" O'Neill asks. And then he answers his own question:
I don't think so. I don't think we can even call this a 'consensus', since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It's better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage. Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, 'phobic', or otherwise beyond the pale.

"Gay marriage," he writes, "brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them."

Narrative is the relevant word here. Not hard truths uncovered, but stories created to whose allegiance people are held by threats, by bribes, and by conformist pressures.

The editor of First Things, Rusty Reno, has a similar set of concerns for what all this means for our democratic society. "If government can reshape marriage, it can reshape everything," his article explains:
Tyranny isn't just a situation in which the government is telling you what to do at every moment. It's also a society in which government says that, if necessary, it can. In this respect gay marriage reflects a dramatic enlargement of government. If legislatures and courts can redefine marriage, what can't it intervene to reshape and re-purpose?

The tyranny of the conformists, backed by government's coercive power, were on display in Washington State when the ACLU decided independently to sue the same florist the Attorney General is pursuing.

But first they sent this poor woman a letter:
Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed's lawyers, working with the legal powerhouse at the ACLU of Washington, sent a letter today to Arlene's Flowers owner Baronelle Stutzman saying she has two options: (1) She can vow to never again discriminate in her services for gay people, write an apology letter to be published in the Tri-City Herald, and contribute $5,000 to a local LGBT youth center, or (2) she can get sued for violating the Washington State Civil Rights Act.
Conform to our falsehood. Pretend you believe things you do not. Or face the consequences. George Orwell, call your office.

But here's the good news in all this: It's going to get bad, we already know this. But in the end truth has a power that no narrative, no story can compete with.
Our job is to remain firmly fixed on the truth about marriage, to speak up for it with love in in our heart, and with the courage to never bow before the false gods, the untruths, the made-up stories offered to us in place of reality.

I am so honored to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with you for God's truth about marriage. Thank you for making this enormous megaphone possible.
I treasure your friendship, your prayers, your words of encouragements, your sacrifices of time and treasure on behalf of this great cause.
Bless you!

Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage

"God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible

With Sympathy for Rick Warren's Family

Our prayers are with Rick Warren's family.  I googled and found there are those on the left who are unsympathetic --because of Rick Warren's evangelical stand against homosexual marriage. They erroneously believe that the Christian stand against homosexual relations is a primary cause of suicide among homosexuals --and they muse that Rick's son was probably gay.  

 In fact, the activities in the gay life are such that self-loathing and depression can result --without any doctrinal causes.    Nevertheless, in this case, the LEFT is proving itself to be like the misguided Westboro Church showing up at military funerals to say that America's homosexuality is causing our military deaths.  That church's view lacks any Biblical support concerning individual soldiers who die in war.  And likewise,  it is just as  cruel a  point of view to speculate that Matthew Warren's suicide is for any other reason than depression.  

I was just ONCE what you would call "clinically depressed;"  and this was 8 years or so after a wonderfully affirming spiritual experience --so I didn't lack assurance of salvation per se.  I was almost Matthew Warren's age at 26.   I was pregnant for the first time and the chemicals of the condition knocked me for a loop for several months  so that I just never felt good.  Like  post-partum depression, it has no rational cause.  You can't explain why the world looks grey, cold, impersonal and bleak and you feel overcome with dark thoughts--I had no complaint.  I just was overwhelmed with despair --and it wasn't because I didn't want my baby --or that I felt unloved --or anything I could put my finger on.  Chronic tiredness and nausea was part of it and is part of pregnancy sometimes. (I'm still easily "so tired.")   I would force myself to go to my aunt's or an acquaintance's house --to just not be alone in that mental state. (When Jon was at school.)  

I am so glad that my condition didn't seem to affect my wonderful first baby.  And I never had the condition to that extent again.   I heard that my grandfather and an uncle had bouts of such depression when in THEIR 20's. 

Depression is often alleviated today with medicines affecting our brain chemistry. 

I know some people recommend strongly that young adults live on their own to  experience rent and bills, etc.    In Matthew's case, being single,  perhaps he should've lived with his parents.   Did he have a career?  It would be hard to be the son of such a successful man --in today's economic market --when careers are hard to establish --and jobs hard to find --and you are going nowhere financially and don't have a girlfriend.  None was mentioned.

Our single son lives at home --and he stays busy and cheerful --and is an immense help to us and his grandmothers --and his church. He is an extension of his father in the care of his home, wife, mother, property --so that his father doesn't have to worry about those things.  With 2 college degrees, he works for his father at something he says will never be a career for him.  I don't appreciate those who advise that living alone would be a panacea to mature a person and jump start him into relationships, marriage, and career direction for need of money.  I do think a girlfriend/ wife  can help to focus the future --but living alone after college and without a career is an expensive option fraught with many time-wasting, ungodly temptations these days.  And no panacea against depression either.   I think Matt Warren went home to an empty house/apartment.

 But I also want to believe He went home to a merciful Heavenly Father with His sins covered by the atoning blood of Christ --who would have great compassion for the desperation of the depressed son of his servants, Pastor & Mrs. Rick Warren. Depression leading to suicide  is not usually the sin of arrogance and rebellion --but of despair.  I believe Christ was there to pick him up as he descended into the abyss that is death.  I imagine he asked God's forgiveness as he went --and received it.


."God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and have eternal life."--the Bible