I know I was supposed to publish a post on Sunday, and another one today. Truth is, however, that I’m brain dead right now. I couldn’t force out a post if I wanted to. Yet I have work to do this evening, writing work.

I’ll try to be back on my regular posting schedule next week.

I’ve been away from the blog for a while. Today is the first time I’ve been here in over three weeks, and it’s been longer than that since I’ve posted. I haven’t been idle, however.

July 24-26 was my wife’s high school reunion back in Meade, Kansas. That was a fun weekend. The July 31-Aug 2 was her paternal family reunion in Dodge City, Kansas. I was the reunion planner for that (go figure).  We stayed the full week in the area between the two reunions.

I want to write a couple of blog posts on the family reunion, but need some time to get those together, along with some photos. I’ll be back with those posts.

I also have two or three book reviews to do. Again, I’m not quite ready to write those yet. Hopefully I’ll get one done on Wednesday.

And, of course, I need to do an update on what’s going on with my writing life. I do some of that on my Facebook author page, but will also add some posts here as well. Again, I just need some time to get to them.

So, here I am, finally back at my blog, not able to do much more than tell you what’s coming up. Hopefully I can be regular at blogging for the next month or two, at least twice a week.

I don’t often get into politics on this blog, but will today. Those who come here to read about my writing life, or engineering, or anything but politics, just gloss over this. I just discovered I have never created a blog category for “politics”, which shows how I avoid the discussion. I was going to blog about belt loops today, but will save that for another time.

Right now the raging debate is on religious freedom acts coming from State legislatures. As I write this, Indiana has passed one that the governor has signed. Arkansas has passed one that awaits Governor Hutchinson’s action. These two states thus join 19 others that already have such a law on the books. It’s also said these laws are similar to the Federal law passed in 1993 by bipartisan votes in the Democratic controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton. The laws from the early 1990s were for the purpose of making sure a few Native Americans could smoke their peyote (how fitting based on who supported it), and has no relationship to the current debate.

The debate centers on whether these laws are thinly veiled attempts to legalize discrimination against the homosexual community. Somewhere in the USA a baker refused to make the cake for the wedding of a same-sex couple. That case is winding its way through the court system, and is now, I believe, awaiting SCOTUS action. The homosexual community and others are against these laws, and believe that a person in a public business should not be allowed chose who they will serve and who they won’t.

Others debate that the laws are necessary because a person should be allowed to make a statement about whether they support a cause or not. Partaking in a cause through serving it as a business could be interpreted as supporting it. Hence, they want the right to refuse service as an expression of religious freedom and free speech. Refusing service is not discrimination, or if it is a person’s right to free speech trumps another’s right not to be discriminated against.

Both sides discuss this in relation to racial discrimination, some saying it’s essentially the same, others saying it’s very different. Refusing service to a person of another race is and should be against the law, all say. Some say refusing service to a person based on sexual orientation is the same as it is based on racial reasons; other say no, the two are very different. That’s the arguments, as I understand them. I could be wrong in some of these points, or over-simplifying. I have not researched this or read any of the laws involved. All I know is what I hear on television and read in the news.

My thought about this: I don’t care. Pass the laws or don’t pass the laws. Defend my free speech or take it away from me. Defend my religious liberty or take it away from me. I don’t care. How I live my life will be exactly the same.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for two and a half years, more than 30 years ago. At the time we couldn’t openly practice Christianity. There were no churches. Oh, in the western communities of Aramco there were unofficial churches, which met in Western school auditoriums, and for a while we were able to attend those. The government knew about them. Back in the early 1950s the king called in the oil executives, told them he knew all about their Christian gatherings and the pastors brought into his country as “special teachers”. You may keep them, he said, but if anyone ever tries to convert a Moslem they will be gone on the next airplane.

That had no bearing on our worshiping God, or practicing our Christianity. While we could we went to the “church” nearest us. When that was closed to us who didn’t work for the oil company, we got together with other Christians in our apartments or villas, maybe ten to twenty people, and worshipped how we wanted to. Those were very meaningful times of worship, more meaningful, in fact, because we were breaking the law to do it.

Typical of the debate I see, a Facebook friend (who I don’t really know, but I have an on-line connection to her through a common interest) posted this.

“Christians”, be careful who you condemn. You may find yourself in the next group denied service in a business because you may not be “Christian” enough to suit the owners.

I don’t know if she means this to be a warning, a prediction, or a threat. I don’t care. I find it interesting that she equates refusing to serve someone as condemnation. That is so far from true as to be laughable. Just because we oppose what someone is doing does not mean we condemn them. People in my office accept continuing education credits from vendor presentations. I understand this to be against the continuing education laws in most if not all states, and so I won’t accept those credits and encourage others not to accept them. But I don’t condemn those who accept them. We simply disagree.

But if this is a prediction or a threat, and service refusals to Christians are coming, I don’t care. Let them come. It won’t affect my worship practices one bit. I will continue to serve the living God in the way I see right. I will see being refused service because I am a practicing Christian to be a badge of honor, remembering that they did much worse to Jesus than to me.

Recently a homosexual hairdresser refused to any longer do the hair of New Mexico’s female governor because she came out in opposition to same-sex marriage. It actually doesn’t matter that he’s homosexual. He could be heterosexual and take the same position, refusing service for political reasons. I wonder what would happen to his right to refuse her service if these laws pass, or don’t pass. Of course, his reasons were political, I guess, not religious. Do we need a Political Freedom Restoration Act to protect his right to refuse to do business with a person who takes a political stand with which he disagrees? I assume he is not condemning her. he just doesn’t want to do business with her because of her political stance.

And that’s the crux of the matter so far as I’m concerned. Disagreement does not equal condemnation. At least it doesn’t in my mind, though it seems to in this friend’s mind. She condemns “Christians” for supporting these laws, even as she accuses “Christians” of condemning homosexuals simply because of a disagreement on same-sex marriage.

The debate gets coarser and harsher. Must disagreement be interpreted and labeled as condemnation? The sides are bucking up, not simply disagreeing and going on with their friendships and lives. All of which makes me less than optimistic about the future of the USA.

I drove to church this morning alone, my wife being down in the back after driving home yesterday.  Snow flurries were forecast, and sure enough they started to fall as I was walking across the parking lot and into the church. When the worship surface was over an hour and 30 minutes later, the flurries were coming down pretty good. An hour later when I left Life Group, same thing.

This is the first snow I’ve seen this season. I was gone last Sunday-Monday when it snowed 2 to 3 inches. It was still on the ground when I returned Thursday, but nicely off the road. It was good to see it on the ground, but would have been better had I been able to be out in it.

As I type this, I’m looking out the windows of The Dungeon, our walk-out basement. I see the flakes falling, the snow on the ground down in the hollow behind the house, and on the un-raked leaves in the back yard. It’s a pretty picture.

Well, I didn’t have much to say. I enjoyed the cold have the hot church and classroom. I enjoyed the snow. Now have to head over to the other monitor and do some work.

Our house is piled high with photographs. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but sometimes it seems that way. In the basement, in an antique dresser in the downstairs bedroom, are boxes and envelopes stuffed with photos, along with many loose photos. Photos Lynda and I took. Photos my parents took. Photos their parents took. Photos with negatives. Photos without negatives. Negatives without photos.

Then in the basement storeroom are boxes of photos. Photos from our China trip, and other trips. Photo albums of ours from 1976 to 1986. Boxes of developed Photos Lynda’s parents took. Photos her grandparents took. Photos from even earlier generation.

And I’m not even close to the end. In the secretary in our bedroom, one drawer is all but stuffed with photos we look in later years. The number of these have waned over the years, especially when we had a digital camera. This drawer contains hundreds of photos. Together by the roll of film they came out of. But otherwise un-annotated.

And, one more batch. On our dining room table, and in boxes around it, are hundreds of photos that belong to Lynda’s mom, Esther. Over a year ago, before Esther moved to her current, small apartment, Lynda’s brother began the process of putting these in photo albums. He didn’t get very far. Lynda picked it up, and made good progress. However, not one album is put together; the photos are spread out on the table; others are in boxes next to the table; and the end is not yet.

Since the rise of digital photography, the era of printed photos has mostly come to an end. Today a shutterbug fills a card with bytes, rather than a box with prints. How those cards eventually get to easily viewable media is a question. And, how many of those become prints is another question. But for sure, future generations won’t be filling up antique dressers, storeroom shelves, and dining room tables with thousands of prints.

We have a monumental job to go through these photos. The oldest one I know of is from August 1877. We have lots that are from England that are unmarked. I know these are of either Hepburns or Todds, but beyond that I have no clue who they are. And no way of knowing.

I wanted to illustrate this blog with pictures of the piles of photos. Alas, I have no camera right now, except for the kind that require film. Our digital camera bit the dust almost a year ago. Lynda’s iPad-mini takes photos, but we haven’t figured out how to do it very well. And neither of us have a cell phone with a serviceable camera. So, irony upon irony, I can’t take a picture of the photo problem.

I suppose we’ll get through this. Since we are in good health and neither of us expects to assume room temperature any time soon, we have years to get the job done. If we can complete Esther’s photo albums in a month or two, clear away the boxes, and return excess photos to those who sent them, I’ll feel good about it. After that, I’ll check back in here and let you know where we stand. Or maybe I’ll wait a year or two, till I have something new to say about it.