SCHOLA: The Reason for the Season?

Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Reason for the Season?

Thinking Parents want to know how the recent votes to ban gay marriage fit with our holiday traditions and ideas of family.

Quite simply, they don't. The end-of-the-year holidays are a time to celebrate thankfulness and love. For friends, for family, for the blessings we have, for those who make sacrifices on our behalf. Hate just doesn't fit in there. Penalizing someone for their choice of a loved one and actively setting out to deny them the same rights as any other is mean-spirited, uncharitable, hypocritical, certainly not in keeping with the message of Christianity's eponymous Reason for the Season.

John 13:34
John 13:35
John 15:12
John 15:17

Love one another. Everyone. Not just the ones in your churches. Not just the ones you like. Not just the ones whose behavior you approve of.

Matthew 5:44
Luke 6:27
Luke 6:35

Love your enemies.

Our dining room table easily seats ten. There are only five of us. We've always got room for more.

This week the Australian Parliament made changes to nearly 100 Commonwealth laws to remove discrimination against same-sex couples. The changes cover areas like retirement benefits, health, employment entitlements, and aged care. The Marriage Act of 1961, redefined in 2004 to explicitly define marriage as being between a man and a woman, still holds, however, de facto couples, couples living together without being married, have the same legal rights as married couples. All states and territories now recognize cohabitating same-sex couples as having all the rights of opposite-sex de factos. It's a nice little work-around. And something else to be thankful for.

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SCHOLA 101

schol' a: 1) An intermission of work, leisure for learning, learned conversation, debate, disputation, lecture, dissertation. 2) A meeting place for teachers and pupils, place for instruction, place of learning, school. 3) The disciples of a teacher, body of followers, school, sect. 4) An acronym for my tortuous blog title "Secular Classical Homeschoolers' Odyssean Learning Adventure." 5) How my Boston cousins pronounce "scholar." 6) Someone who studies at 10 o'clock for a dilla or a dolla.

These are the blatherings of an introverted, autodidactic, champion of The Enlightenment raising three daughters. At one time or another we have homeschooled, public-schooled, Catholic-schooled, cyber-schooled, unschooled, and even threatened boarding school. We have been inspired variously by The Well-Trained Mind, A Thomas Jefferson Education, and Climbing Parnassus, tempered by the writings and wisdom of Charlotte Mason, John Holt, Benjamin Franklin and Michel de Montaigne.

I try not to get wrapped up in labels, but we are secular and we are classical-ish.

We travel. A lot. Sometimes to the other side of the state and sometimes to the other side of the planet. Join us on our journey as we search for our home, navigate the waters of self-education, lounge with the lotus-eaters, and bash a Cyclops or two.