Optimal vs Ideal - Marriage is Not Disingenuous Enough for Gays

This is an essay I wrote a while back. The topic was divisive at the time (to say the least) and every time I bring it up, I usually lose a portion of my readers. The times since I wrote this have become far stranger and the terms seem even more archaic than they were five years ago. It is probably about time to alienate some folks. I just didn't want to do it too early and have readers think that this is my subject for the whole website. It is something I am happy to be passionate about, but certainly not the only thing. I wanted to get it said and frankly out of the way at this point, to reduce confusion about how I feel about such things. For those of you that will walk away, I accept your strident emotional and philosophical immaturity...

Let's begin with the concept of "ideal" and how that relates to marriage, something most of us will involve ourselves in for most of our lives, if we have a desire to obtain a greater portion of joy and happiness in our lives.

I think it is a no-brainer that to have both a man and a women enter their marriage with their chastity intact is "ideal". In a union that requires loyalty and devotion, it is so much better to have no skeletons in the closet, no embarrassing old fling to make a visit, no previous commitment or children that this new union really can never truly share. If nothing else, such a marriage has a better than average chance of being successful, just by not being "complicated".

Although I know that it is quite svelt to tear the Ten Commandments out of courthouse yards, I will make an appeal to old custom and the Bible, where you were supposed to leave your parents and cleave to your wife. That sounds like loyalty to me, even beyond your life-long ties to those who gave you birth. God seemed pretty wierd about being a virgin at the marriage altar as well, and even kindly Christ gave the idea extra umph by saying that if you even looked at another woman with ideas in your head, you were being disloyal to your wife. Called it "adultery", even.

Just think of the marriage every young woman wants and how tainted it gets if groom or bride had previously fielded their "wild oats". Even in these incredibly permissive times, everyone knows (and may actually admit) that this marriage is sad compared to what could have been. Obviously, in spite of the best efforts of mass-media and moral relativists, everyone understands when an ideal marriage is not happening, and no amount of white dresses, mounds of flowers, and smiling clergy can repair the obvious damage.

The great part is that ideal marriages are happening all the time! Even today, in the age of "everyone is doing it", there are still young people who "kept themselves" and present themselves unused to their new spouses, ready to give everything they have (and they still have everything to give) to their marriage and their future family together. My wedding involved two such people, as did my parents' and my wife's parents'. Such a thing is still very normal and expected within my culture, though I am sad to say that the rest of society somehow decided otherwise.

As a world, we have seriously deflated what our expectation of marriage should be. These days, many marriages are attended by the children of those getting married, often children with a father or mother who is not standing at the altar. Progressive couples may even invite former spouses or old flames, as if this is some freak-show mega-family being sewed together like body parts on Frankenstein's monster. What a wonderful jumble of mixed emotions on a day that people have supposedly waited for all their lives! The funny part is that everyone is supposed to smile and sigh with wonder just as if this were not the fourth spouse (or practical spouse) for everyone involved, behaving just as if this was an ideal marriage.

Now, I don't want to be accused of not being forgiving. My own parents divorced in my childhood and my father married a very nice lady, who was also a divorcee. Everybody had tons of baggage to bring to the union and there has been plenty of troubles caused by his, hers, and theirs. With patience, they have perservered, hopefully because nobody could expect anyone's full loyalty and devotion. No new family was being formed here, just a lonely man and woman who decided to love and care for each other and devote what they could to each other. Was it ideal? Of course not. But everyone wanted these two people to have another chance, even if there wasn't much of the ideal marriage stuff to bring to the table.

I have often wondered if it would be useful to call subsequent unions something other than marriage. As a person that avoids the whole idea of a "blended" family (I already have a family, albeit broken, thank you very much), I would really welcome some different terms to describe varying sorts of joining. My marriage is very different from my father's second marriage and as such, it is probably deserving of a different name to describe it. Where my wife and I having children was assumed and looked forward to with joy and anticipation by all, my father and his new wife, though still in their thirties when they married, wisely did not have more children. When you already have a family, even a broken one, a good man or woman feels the need to consider the ramifications of their actions in the lives of their children from a former spouse, as well as how their new spouse may feel as a redundant appendage. Any child brought into this tangle of relationships would have likely feel alienated enough by various half-siblings, divided loyalties, and where they "fit in" if they manage to at all. I have never come up with a word or phrase that I thought would adequately describe the frustrating feelings of my father and his second wife; feelings of being wedded yet not being able to feel like everything is really "ours" together. In a phrase, it is significantly less than ideal.

The problem comes in that the entire concept of marriage and family gets damaged as lesser forms use and enjoy the same term. All of a sudden, a fifth marriage looking back on twelve kids from eight broken union attempts is just as good as a bright young couple looking forward to total family unity, all because their descriptor is the same. I use a word for the way this seems to me: disingenuous. If the young couple are entering a marriage, with all the exciting expectations the circumstance implies, how can the fifth-time-around couple, with barely any expectations that a pre-nuptial agreement hasn't already codified, enter into the same sort of "marriage"? The only thing I can think is that to call the fifth attempt a marriage is to be (wait for it) disingenuous. The whole ideal of marriage is blackened by those who enter one missing most of the expected attributes and expectations. It is like calling a pile of rusted metal with two flat tires on top a "car" and expecting get in and drive it somewhere.

Now, some interesting people are proposing that we expand the ideal of marriage even further. With shouts of "fairness", practitioners of sexual perversions, sometimes euphemistically calling themselves "homosexuals", now demand to have ceremonies with flowers and clergy, and, with their sex-mates, enjoy the full benefits of "marriage". If anybody thought a fifth marriage was a bit of a farce compared with the ideal, this idea takes the cake!

In the one preceding paragraph, I have offended the "gay" heart multiple times. Let me expand on a few statements and offend these people further.

First off, it is impossible to be "homosexual" as a state of being, so I suggest that people stop using the term. "Sexual pervert" is more historically correct and far more accurate. First, one cannot be "homosexual" from birth, as many have conceded, unless someone ends up going to jail for a very long time for having sex with infants. Also, "homosexuality" is put forth as a sexual preference, which means you would have needed to have several instances of sex with several different lifeforms of several different persuasions to have developed such a preference for one over another. Given the term itself and how it is attained, there cannot be any honestly "homosexual" people. At best, you could have decided, at some point, to settle on a certain flavor after a time of sexual hedonism.

And please, don't bother to bring up the term "heterosexual". That would be a classic case of justifying a concept by defining its (perhaps) more acceptable opposite. As the trap is defined, if you are not "homosexual", you must be "heterosexual", and in identifying one way, you give credence and respectability to the other. I can honestly say that I am neither a "homosexual" or a "heterosexual" and there is no evidence to label me as either. I have only had sex with one person: my wife. I have not compared the sex I have with my wife with the sex I had with other women (because I have not had sex with other women). I did not engage in exploratory sex with other genders/phylum/genus, so I cannot really say what preference I would have among them. Therefore, I cannot honestly be called "heterosexual" much less any other "orientation" label. In fact, there really isn't a term for my sexual preference, beside perhaps "loyal".

Now that I have deflated any sense of respectability that sexual perverts have tried to build up over the past few years, I feel like everyone is ready to take a good look at the sickening effort [now success] being made to shoehorn the act of plank-mates "pleasuring" themselves on each other into the ideal of marriage. Hopefully, when I discussed the two concepts in the same sentence a moment ago, you had that twist in your stomach that says that these two things don't belong together. Hang on to that feeling because I am going to intensify it. A lot.

Everyone understands that sex is an important component of marriage. It can strengthen the bond forged at the time of the wedding. It can bring children into the family that the wedding created. Well, it could if we were actually talking about a union between a man and a woman who are striving to become one. These things aren't going to happen in a perverse same-sex coupling, no matter how hard genetic science or government funding want to make things "fair".

We need to talk about the word "optimal". It sounds like "ideal" but it isn't. Optimal is "the best you can do", given circumstances. In marriage or anything else, not everyone can have the ideal, but everyone can have the optimal. For instance, my father couldn't be a "virgin" for his second wife, which would have been ideal. My father could be absolutely devoted to his second wife after their marriage, which is optimal for him, given his circumstances. In my case, the optimal circumstance I brought to the altar was sexual purity, which was "better" or "higher" than the optimal circumstance my father could bring to altar #2 and certainly closer to the "ideal". This is meant as no disrespect to Dad, as he brought everything he could offer to his second marriage, which is all he had and is worthy of honor. Because of my circumstances, my "everything" that I brought to my marriage included more "ideal marriage" things than his did (and could have). Keep the terms "ideal" and "optimal" deeply set in your mind as we explore how the "optimal" proposed gay "marriage" stacks up to the ideal marriage between a man and a woman.

As part of their sexual explorations, "gay" people have collected a group (sometimes a large group) of "partners", which are basically failed spouses if there will be "gay marriages". This train of old exploits is an expected part of discovering one's "gay-ness" and considered "healthy" and "good" by most sexual perverts and their supporters. Therefore, the "optimal" circumstance in relation to sexual purity for nearly all committed "gays" entering a relationship is "devoted to you from now on". Some people, because of the strong hormonal pull of sexual feelings, get seduced into their first sexual encounter without intending to ruin their virginity, which is sad and unfortunate, but is also quite forgivable and, especially if it doesn't result in children, need not destroy the possibility of a positive marriage because it was an isolated mistake. "Gays" cannot claim this, for their sexual exploits become a journey rather than a mistake. For "gays", sex does not follow and enhance marriage, as it is supposed to do in the ideal; sex typically precedes any real commitment, cheapening any future relationship, and is often used as a litmus test before anything more than a "one-night stand" is considered. Although some marriages (that need another and lower term to describe them) follow a "try before you buy" "shack-up", everyone acknowledges that this is very sub-optimal and statistics show that this often leads to distrust, heartache, depression, and divorce. This circumstance is however the "optimal" one for almost all "gay" relationships, meaning that the best "gays" can do is roughly compatible to among the worst that traditional marriages can do.

I must say here that some "gays" justify the concept of "gay marriage" by comparing them to extremely sub-optimal marriages. "At least we love each other, which is more than I can say for those married people!" In subjective aspects such as love, this may very well be true, but each individual case will be different. Let us continue with more objective criteria for our comparison.

In an ideal marriage, a family is created. Through sex, children are created by this marriage, which is very ennobling for everyone concerned. Parents "grow up" and become more responsible and children are born into a stable and nuturing environment leading to the next generation of responsible adults. Of course, this is the ideal again and many families fall short of this. However, most nations and governments acknowledge that marriage-led families, on average, produce more and better adults than any other institution, such as orphanages, adoptive homes, and foster homes. In comparison, though, committed "gay" couplings cannot form such families and begin the relationship, again at the most "optimal", with a marked disadvantage of artificiality.

Now, "gays" can simulate a family, which I think is part of their push for "gay marriage". Children can be adopted or fostered, or brought from other relationships where one partner or another "slipped" from a committed "gay" lifestyle and had sex with someone of the opposite gender, among other possible perverse maneuvers. Before I introduced "gay-ness" to this essay, I described these sorts of "his, hers, and ours" circumstances and how inferior they can be when compared with the bright, young, "virgin" couple that is the ideal. Again, this is another case where the "optimal" thing a "gay" person can bring to the table in the way of family is comparable to among the lowest definition of marriage.

My wife told me a story the other day, as I was talking about this essay with her. She had heard a report of a "gay" coupling (men in this case) that wanted children. Knowing that nature only allowed one spermatozoa to combine with one egg, they arranged for an interesting solution made possible by recent science and tremendous infusions of money. With the sperm taken from each man, two donated eggs would be fertilized. A willing surrogate was procured and both eggs were implanted and carried to term. "Twins" were born and the "gay" partners took home "their" children, but not really.

The seemingly warm and cuddly human interest story ended there, but I started thinking forward. As those children grow, it will become likely obvious which child belongs to which father. If they are honest, the "gay" dads will explain the circumstances of conception and birth with the kids, revealing that the there is no biological tie between the siblings and that they are only really the true child of one of their "fathers". The natural inclination of almost all children is to 1) affiliate more with their natural dad when inevitable conflicts arise, and 2) to seek out their biological mother and try to connect with her. These two realities, which come up with almost perfect clockwork in those tween years, can cause terrible havoc in any situation. Ideal marriages handle these needs easily - natural father and mother are right there, already bound together and united both with each other and with their biological child in a unified family. The "gay" conglomeration has so many points against it, even in this particularly "enhanced" situation, that these needs of the child can often causes a serious rift, as it is easier to sever the manufactured "gay" coupling than it is to interfere with the very real bond between a biological father and his child. Where a proper marriage will tend to pull together because of their common bond in the face of most challenges, the simulated yet increasingly conflicted "gay" "family" will tend to come apart in favor of more authentic and natural ties. It may be painful for "gay" advocates to admit, but blood really is thicker than water.

I could go on, but I see no need to provide further examples of how a "gay marriage", even at its absolute best, is so tragically and purposefully inferior to the ideal marriage. In an age where many people feel that "gays" are more in touch with their feelings and far more sensitive and caring than others, given their downtrodden status, I strongly charge the sexual perversion community with heartless cruelty to themselves and to everyone touched by their perversion. What "kindly" person would militantly demand that intelligent adults enter into purposefully sub-optimal commitments and then possibly drag in innocent children for the sole purpose of playing a childish game of "house" that only honors political opportunists? We already know the answer to this question: perverts (and not just the sexual variety).

After thrusting a sword into the hearts of "gays" and twisting their irresponsible yet cherished beliefs a bit, let me offer some hope. Not just a tiny sunbeam of hope, but "bright sunshine on a clear day" kind of hope. Wherever you are and whatever you have done in the past, you, like everyone else that wants happiness and to give more happiness to someone you love, can have a more "optimal" relationship, bound together by age-old custom and better approaching the ideal of marriage.

If you have considered yourself "gay", you can simply put that aside and move on to a much brighter set of possibilities! Every ideally married couple will tell you that, although sex is an essential part of their relationship, it does not define them or their marriage. How you have chosen to have sex in the past does not demand how you must have it in the future. You can have sex that is more natural and infinitely more productive and you can still marry someone of that "other" gender to enjoy such sex as part of a much more fine and more rich relationship than you may have ever known before. Just as you chose your current "partner" from the field of available "same-gendered" people around you, you can chose to look for the person you can marry among the "differently-gendered". You can have far, far more than the selfish and self-serving "gay" community offers you and, if your supposedly enlightened "gay" friends are any friends at all, they should cheer your striving for the "optimal" -- the best you can possibly do and be!

So, instead of fighting political and judicial battles to legitimize a bad facsimile of the marriage ideal, why not simply abandon the un-useful labels that defined you in the past and "go for the gold"? You, your future spouse, and possibly your future natural children will be very glad you did!

Husband above Father

• "Cleave to your wife and no other." There is no better thing a man can do for his children than to devote himself to the love and care for their mother.
• Becoming a father is pathetically easy - irresponsible boys become such through mindless copulation.
• Being a good husband is a much heavier commitment - you have to get some girl to actually agree to this, over and over again, for the long term.
• It is easy to get the "love" of your dependent children - they have little choice in the matter. Does the young child easily turn their back on the hand that provides bed and bread?
• Mothering alone tend toward over-protection and smothering. Fathers alone tend toward distance and premature independence. The best results comes from a combination of both, applied as mother begins and father finishes.
• Being a good father requires devotion first to a sustaining love of your wife and then dedication to the preparation of your children for their future roles as husbands and wives, then fathers and mothers. It is the ever-expanding growth of human development and progression.

Children Thrive Best Under a Loving, Stable, and Devoted Marriage between their Natural Parents

The lack of natural marriage, childbearing, and family-building is a root cause of a majority of societal ills. Our prisons are bursting with the products of broken homes who never accomplished proper human development. One cause of such problems is the practice of putting the caring for one's children ahead of devotion for one's spouse. This misplaced centrality leads to selfish divorces, un-launched and mal-developed adult children, and divided loyalties that retard everyone's needed progression. Societies cannot survive with so many under-developed and broken people as "respected" members.

The relationship between a husband and wife is the supreme, enduring relationship as sanctioned and dictated by God himself. It is meant to last a lifetime and beyond. The marriage covenant is designed to complete men and women, drawing upon the innate talents and abilities of each to meet the common needs of both and the children they bear - the natural family. The acquisition and nurture of a mutually beneficial and loving natural marriage should be the over-arching goal and primary labor of every adult human life. No other pursuit is more fulfilling; no other relationship is more honorable. Natural marriage provides its ultimate benefit in incubating the next generation of verdant individuals that healthy societies and nations require and that God demands.

Parental obligations to children should focus on their development and their rise to the station of dutiful and devoted wives and husbands with families of their own. Doting on children beyond this is a major predictor of lifelong dysfunction:

• an inability to put another ahead of self;
• a lack of desire and resolve sufficient to marry or sustain a marriage;
• the immature act of having children out-of-wedlock; and
• a lack of sufficient time and resources to meet the swollen demands of intrinsically misshapened "sub-families".

Governments and leaders of every stripe should show greater concern for the health of their societies by strongly encouraging natural, devoted marriage and building of families based upon such marriages. All adults should show greater respect for the efforts and sacrifices of parents, grandparents, and further ancestors in bringing each man and woman into this world and raising them up, largely within natural families. The voluntary formation and acceptance of "sub-families", such as intentional single-parent groupings, same-sex couplings (adoptive or not), co-habitation households, orphanages, "child development centers" and other sub-optimal child-raising situations should be strongly de-emphasized and categorically discouraged, both through societal and statutory means. No society can hope to prosper where a large and growing proportion of children are subjected to systemically inferior developmental environments outside of their natural families. There will always be a small proportion of children who will lose one parent or both to death and require alternatives and added assistance, but such circumstances are somewhat rare. We do children no favors by socially and legislatively "blessing" the aberrant home-lives of miscreant parent-figures when family life under natural married parents was purposefully rejected.

Every child deserves an optimal developmental setting and it is the duty of each father and mother to join together to provide such for their natural children. Putting devotion to a spouse ahead of love for son or daughter best prepares the children to accept adult roles and responsibilities, the highest of which is to create further natural marriages and optimal families.

Doing Things "Right"

I am doing some adjunct teaching this year and I find myself with mixed feelings about it. I find myself falling into the trap of being an English teacher, as all of the work is written. I wrote this to the students today and I thought it might be interesting to others as well.

As you are now working on your term papers, I feel the need to say a few things about research, source material, and doing things "right".

Some of you seem to be opening up Google, typing in the title of your "research" and basically restating the "click-bait" pablum that passes for technology "journalism". These should not be passed off as business-grade research in anything to which you attach your name. I hope you have a little more regard for your productive output and how you look professionally.

Internet "Best of...", "Ten Ways..", or "Twelve Tips..." articles, if read at all, should be the absolute beginning of your research effort. Please do us all the effort of "drilling down" for the real research behind the surface "noise" of the search engine top results. This means looking up that article's "sources", that source's sources, and so on, until you actually find the original material on which several layers of "Hey! look at this and my obvious conclusion" writing was ultimately based.

You may find the reading of that original research difficult, but your self-respect, the money you earn to provide for your family, and the reputations of those around you deserve real insights beyond the shallow products we see too often in the technical popular press. Also, although the mere mention of sources is technically correct and appropriately scored, your future bosses (and I) would really like to see actual *quotes* to back up your assertions from authoritative sources. I have a masters degree in this subject and I am *NOT* considered a particularly authoritative source in a term paper - Everyone feels better if they see "Ph.D." in a good number of your sources and that the title of the sources look scholarly. I am not saying that ALL your sources must look that way, but you should have more regard for your work and how it will be viewed by others. Poor, shallow research is obvious and I see it too often. Good research looks a certain way and I hope you want to be known for your use of it!

Your grade will reflect criteria met and you can put forth a pathetic effort ("I figured out the system!") and still make excellent scores and get your degree with minimal fuss. That is the story of much of my graduate work. You can do this on your term paper as well, I will give you the points you earned, and I expect some of you may do this for your own reasons, legitimate or not. If nothing else, I understand the realities of higher education and the fact that it can be easily "gamed".

Some day, I hope all of us will be capable of displaying that we actually can do things in an excellent way and show that we are fully educated people. You can do this through your term paper in this class, or somewhere else where it matters more to you and your family, but my greatest wish for all of you is that you actually *do it* someday!

Breaking the Cultural Suicide Pact of the West

Culturally, most Americans have a problem with the indolent - those who choose to live off the money made by others. These people are economically un-productive. I suppose these folks could say that they were born lazy and that they cannot be asked to behave differently, but I think the bulk of people in a vibrant culture rightly reject this. As societies, we expect people to strive to economically support themselves and contribute to the support of those who authentically cannot do so. Naturally, we think poorly of those who can do this but choose not to do so.

We have not been replacing ourselves in most of the "Western" or "developed" world for a few decades now. North America continues to gain population through immigration, both legal and illegal. The tide of immigrants to Europe as refugees is the only way they keep their vaunted social programs viable, though you won't catch many politicians saying so. If it were up to native-born Westerners to keep our present culture at even a stable state into the future, it could not be done due to an inability or more likely a refusal to have and raise a necessary number of children to do so. It is a statistical reality for North America, Europe, and much of the far East that, without heavy infusions of "third world" breeding stock that eschew the so-called "value" of childlessness, presently strong nations will continue a steady population decline toward cultural irrelevance. To put it into a term, we are in the midst of cultural suicide.

Many Americans refuse to do what is required to avoid cultural suicide and such suicidal tendencies have become an accepted and even heralded addition to our culture. For example, people increasingly choose now fashionable "gay" and other deviant lifestyles that provide an easy rationalization against bearing and raising children in a culturally sustainable way. Although there are many lifestyle choices that encourage childlessness and cultural suicide, we are currently in the hypnotic embrace of deviant sexuality and its absolute desire for acceptance. However, this fact remains: if there are too many deviant people, there won't be enough kids.

It is bad enough that people choose lifestyles that preclude propagation, but now our leaders offer political "perks" to such groups and hand over our most vulnerable children to them for adoption and indoctrination into attitudes of sanctioned and vaunted dis-productivity. Every person, no matter what their personal excuse, who chooses to not birth and raise at least three children under sustainable circumstances is perpetrating cultural suicide. How can Western civilization hope to survive on its present course?

It is easy to blame others for the decline and so expect others to effect the needed turn-around. Better yet, we can look at ourselves and evaluate our own contribution to our cultural continuance. Are we marrying in ways that bring children into our culture? Are we teaching our own children the habits and expectations that will help our culture thrive? Are we being decisive in the direction that our culture should take toward sustainability? Does our personal conduct reflect such habits and expectations? Any change from our present course toward cultural suicide begins with each one of us. Like the indolent, we have little space for people who claim some exemption and could be birthing and properly raising the next generation.

In the end, we must either choose to abandon practices and attitudes that lead to cultural suicide or watch our nations and peoples fade into irrelevancy. The areas of western Europe and north America will continue on and be populated, but other, less suicidal cultures and peoples will occupy them.

MediMania: The CPAP Prostitution

I wrote a few posts a few years back regarding the whole concept of hypochondriac profiteering (aka preventative medical care). It is a compelling subject simply because everyone has a story to tell about their own shellacking by the health industry. Allow me to offer up a personal example.

Ever since we got married (nearly twenty fours years ago these days), my endurant wife has lived with the fear of my imminent death. Apparently, when I go to sleep, I stop breathing. I go for upwards of two minutes where my tongue seems to fall back into my air passage, closing it off, and it seems to take something of an act of Congress for mind and body to jar me awake enough to clear the blockage and get some oxygen back in the lungs. Come to find out that this is an incredibly common problem and the official name for it is "sleep apnea". My wife tells me that she got scared of my dying on our wedding night and has remained scared ever since, until she finally convinced me to "see my doctor", as every drug and health advertisement urges one to do.

I was then introduced to the biggest "medical" cash cow I have yet encountered: the CPAP prostitution.
My quasi-doctor (I use a nurse practitioner because I don't care to deal with physicians), upon hearing the situation from my wife, prescribed a curious instrument somewhere between an oxygen mask and a brain scanner. It seemed to get used quite a lot because they had several and I had to wait a few days before one became available and a specially trained nurse could instruct me on its proper use. You have to understand that I live in an underpopulated place and this clinic probably serves a population of 2000 at best, so these little "sleep apnea" detectors were getting quite a workout. In deference to my wife, I strapped this contraption to my head which confirmed what my wife had been saying for years: I didn't breathe very often at night. This highlights Rule #1 of the medical/insurance cabal: Use very expensive tests to establish the incredibly obvious. This would not be the first time that rule would be employed.

After the obvious results finally came in, I was scheduled for the mandatory "sleep test" which was scheduled at a pleasant little building some hundred miles from where I lived. Even with my pathetic insurance that charges me a lot and pays out very little, I would be getting to sleep in a nice enough bed while hooked up to dozens of sensors and an air pump that kept me inflated like a hot air balloon. Of course, my insurance only paid for part of this, as I am sure many scammers do these tests just for fun to watch me lose the better part of a night's sleep, so I ponied up my co-pay and after the might ended, I was basically told exactly what my wife had been saying for years and for free: I didn't breathe much at night.

I guess I need to say something positive about my health insurance, as they must have thrown piles of money at these "sleep centers", which seem to spring up everywhere. The guy who ran me through the process was very talkative and ultimately revealed that he had gotten into the business after his own "sleep test", perhaps seeing a lucrative career as I seem to recall that he was a truck driver previous to becoming a "sleep tech". Although he seemed small potatoes in the field, he did well enough to afford a nice little building with two suites that stay full every night he chooses and he even gets a lot of repeat business, as the insurance companies likely demand a recheck of your lifelong condition to prevent aforementioned scamming, as if anyone just magically starts breathing better at night.

So, my quasi-doctor and my certified ex-truck-driver sleep tech were satisfied, so my insurance company released the monetary floodgates and I was rented a CPAP machine by a chain smoker who had a certificate as a respiratory therapist. It seems like a lot of victims of various breathing ailments decide to jockey their troubles into a career, as it seems the "sleep" industry doesn't require much more than a background in bail-jumping to begin training. I was dutifully read a paper, as my therapist seemed to be new and hadn't properly memorized things yet in order to look "professional". It seems that everyone involved with this procedure were suffering from my "apnea" in one form or another, just like apparently 98% of the population. I was introduced to my new nighttime buddy, a "quiet" CPAP machine, and instructed in its rather simple use.

At first, this was all payed for by my insurance, so I played along. My wife reported that, when I did sleep, which was difficult in a full face mask that rarely made a usable seal onto my head, I indeed didn't stop breathing. Of course, I doubt is was necessary to breathe as I was swollen up like a bloated porpoise with all the air being pumped into my gastro-intestinal tract and every other empty internal cavity!

Well, I was dutiful about using the CPAP but was also planning what to do about my hiking and backpacking activities and how such a machine would fit into this. There were some incredibly expensive battery-operated units that a person could get, but I am cheap guy and a began looking for alternatives. Most of these were either worthless (variations on jaw-jutting mouthpieces) or practically illegal in the USA, but obtainable over the internet. I tried a few cheap "solutions" that didn't work and I was discouraged. I was also doing my typical job of ignoring the fact that all of these "sleep aids" were absolutely not recommended for sleep apnea sufferers and was told that I was taking a horrible risk with my life by trying such things.

Then, the reality hit as I received my first bill for this "therapy" that my insurance was supposed to pay for. I would pay $50 a month for the rental of my CPAP machine from here on out. Needless-to-say, I was "disappointed" and promptly took all the stuff back before I could be charged again. Of course, I was warned constantly that this action was dangerous, as if I were going to die within hours of the discontinuance of CPAP use. I am accustomed to being lied to by TV hucksters but it is interesting to see the same tactics used by "licensed" "health-care" "professionals". In fact, to this day, I get some harassment from providers over ending my "therapy".

I finally settled up on the wonderful AVEO TSD device, which sucks onto your tongue and keeps it pulled a bit out of the mouth while I sleep, opening the air passage and letting me breathe at night. I got mine off of eBay for around $80 that another person used and didn't like. Normally, you must have a doctor's or dentist's prescription to even touch one of these, but you know how much I love feeding the medical/insurance industry!

In all of this, I had one criteria for dealing with this problem: does it let me breathe at night? That actually was the only original problem and in spite of likely thousands of dollars spent to poke at things, I ultimately solved the problem myself for about $80. I could have skipped the whole sorted process described above by doing one simple thing: Stay away from doctors.

Now, I certainly don't recommend avoiding medicine if there is something causing you extended pain - that is what the system is there for. Sadly, we hypochondriacs are encouraged to see the doctor about every little thing and often see them when we have no problems at all, just in case. My advice is to avoid the "if you had just come in earlier" syndrome, promulgated by a media that loves to tell horror stories about people who are dying that may not have if they would have spent their lives running between waiting rooms. It is a trick: if we had perfect and real-time knowledge, we would also likely never have troubles, but you can't live like that. I choose living a life, perhaps even an allegedly shorter one, than giving myself over to the "life managers" of the medical industry.

Putting Husband Before Father

Children Thrive Best Under a Loving, Stable, and Devoted Marriage between their Natural Parents

The lack of natural marriage, childbearing, and family-building is a root cause of a majority of societal ills. Our prisons are bursting with the products of broken homes who never accomplished proper human development. One cause of such problems is the practice of putting the caring for one's children ahead of devotion for one's spouse. This misplaced centrality leads to selfish divorces, un-launched and mal-developed adult children, and divided loyalties that retard everyone's needed progression. Societies cannot survive with so many under-developed and broken people as "respected" members.

The relationship between a husband and wife is the supreme, enduring relationship as sanctioned and dictated by God himself. It is meant to last a lifetime and beyond. The marriage covenant is designed to complete men and women, drawing upon the innate talents and abilities of each to meet the common needs of both and the children they bear - the natural family. The acquisition and nurture of a mutually beneficial and loving natural marriage should be the over-arching goal and primary labor of every adult human life. No other pursuit is more fulfilling; no other relationship is more honorable. Natural marriage provides its ultimate benefit in incubating the next generation of verdant individuals that healthy societies and nations require and that God demands.

Parental obligations to children should focus on their development and their rise to the station of dutiful and devoted wives and husbands with families of their own. Doting on children beyond this is a major predictor of lifelong dysfunction:

• an inability to put another ahead of self;
• a lack of desire and resolve sufficient to marry or sustain a marriage;
• the immature act of having children out-of-wedlock; and
• a lack of sufficient time and resources to meet the swollen demands of intrinsically misshapened "sub-families".

Governments and leaders of every stripe should show greater concern for the health of their societies by strongly encouraging natural, devoted marriage and building of families based upon such marriages. All adults should show greater respect for the efforts and sacrifices of parents, grandparents, and further ancestors in bringing each man and woman into this world and raising them up, typically within natural families. The voluntary formation and acceptance of "sub-families", such as intentional single-parent groupings, same-sex couplings (adoptive or not), co-habitation households, orphanages, "child development centers" and other sub-optimal child-raising situations should be strongly de-emphasized and categorically discouraged, both through societal and statutory means. No society can hope to prosper where a large and growing proportion of children are subjected to systemically inferior developmental environments outside of their natural families. There will always be a small proportion of children who will lose one parent or both to death and require alternatives and added assistance, but such circumstances are somewhat rare. We do children no favors by socially and legislatively "blessing" the aberrant home-lives of miscreant parent-figures when family life under natural married parents was purposefully rejected.

Every child deserves an optimal developmental setting and it is the duty of each father and mother to join together to provide such for their natural children. Putting devotion to a spouse ahead of love for son or daughter best prepares the children to accept adult roles and responsibilities, the highest of which is to create further natural marriages and optimal families.

The Great "Squaring Up" of Heaven and Hell

As I promised in other blog posts about the ultimate Telestial, Terrestrial, or Celestial rewards that are available after Judgement, I am now going to provide my perspective on the time that we will spend between death and the judgement. As always, these are my thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, where I spend my Sundays. Mormons call this time the "Spirit World", which is kinda strange since it describes more of a condition than a place. Christians have several names for it: "Heaven", "Hell", "Paradise", "Prison", "Limbo", "Purgatory". There are likely other names as well and scholars of the Judeo-Christian Bible use them all copiously to try to describe what is going to happen after we die.

There is indeed a time between death and Judgement. How long this time lasts is quite dependent on the way you lived your life. I have come to call it the "Squaring Up", where each of us and God fulfill promises and covenants made previously.

It is useful at this point to explain that you existed before you were born on Earth. You not only just existed, you made a very important choice: you decided to take sides with Jehovah, the man you may know better as Jesus Christ. God's reward for your choice was to send you to Earth with a body and to promise that you would get to have that body again in a perfected form after you die. If you recall, Jesus was "resurrected" after he died and God promised that same resurrection to those of us who followed Christ before birth. Essentially, you are alive today because you made the right choice previously and you will be resurrected for the same reason. God will "square up" his pre-Earth-life promise of immortality with you just before you attend Judgement. You will absolutely live again - God is good on his word.

There are other things to square-up as well. As part of accepting and promising to follow Jehovah (Jesus) before you were born, you were expected to keep commandments during your life on Earth. Also, while on Earth, you may have made further "covenants" with God that involve other activities and rewards. All of these must be accounted for before the Judgement.  If you kept the promises you made, there will be very little to "square up" and your time might be short and blissful, a definition of "heaven". If you didn't do a very good job with your promises, you will have more "squaring up" to do, which seems to be unpleasant and is often referred to as "Hell".  Remember those stories about Hell in the Bible? How long you spend "squaring up" is really dependent on how much you strayed from your promises.

If you have a background in business, this "squaring up" sure sounds like business accounting. God feels like an auditor and you want to have your bookkeeping in good order before the audit (Judgement) comes. That's what this "spirit world" time is for:  make sure all the figures add up and everything on the ledger balances. If you have been a good business manager, you should be ready for your audit without much work.  If you "cooked" the books or kept your records poorly, things could get nasty. Making everything honest and balanced is going to be a painful and expensive.  Sound like "Hell" yet?

There are some things to keep in mind when attempting to make the "squaring up" time as short as possible for yourself:

• Repentance - Everyone messes up on their promises (well, except for Christ). The principle of repentance is that you can avoid the pain of "squaring up" as you make up for your mistakes in the way Jesus has prescribed.  Not sure how to make it work? We are here to help you.
• There is no Excuse for Ignorance - As part of the squaring up there will be full disclosure. No one will be left ignorant before Judgement. I suppose you can try to say you really didn't know about Jehovah's commandments (there are ten and many US courthouses put them out on the front lawn. They also feature in that Bible.) I suppose you can plead ignorance if you like, but you really do determine how long this "squaring up" takes.
• You want Mercy, Not "Fairness" - There are two things to expect from God:  justice and mercy. The smart bet is to go for mercy every time. If you start arguing with God (pretty stupid idea) that he isn't being "fair" about the squaring up process, it will just create more things to settle.

God really has set up a wonderful system - it really is up to you if you choose to take advantage of it. For my money, it's absolutely the best deal that will ever come around! So, keep those commandments! Repent when you need to do so! Don't make the "squaring up" any harder. There is a fantastic reward just waiting for you to claim!