The Editors Eye

We feature in this issue a couple of insightful pieces on the modern practice called "dating" and how it fits - or doesn't - with biblical teaching. One piece features a young man, Joshua Harris, who has single-handedly raised it as a public issue in the minds of young people through a youth magazine he publishes. Harris has now written a book on the subject. The lead piece is by well-known Christian ethicist and activist (a combination unfortunately hard to find), Randy Alcorn. Alcorn's last visit to our pages was a bombshell on abortifacient birth control which has lit fires under Christian ministries across the country and is forcing them to confront this issue.
Don't jump to conclusions, and put on your thinking caps!
Besides dating, this issue has what appears to be a second theme. It was not planned this way, but as things have fallen out, so it is that much of what is in these pages relates to freedom of speech.
The NOW v. Scheidler lawsuit is certainly a picture of the great danger that this important freedom faces. The verdict against Joe Scheidler and pro-life activists everywhere (it was a class-action suit) threatens to overturn one of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases upholding free speech - NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware.
Nat Hentoff tells us what is happening on the college campuses and some of the News Notes will send chills down your spine.
Next to Freedom of Religion, speech is supremely important. How can one preach the truth of the Gospel of salvation - or the truth of so many other biblical precepts -without this freedom. If truth cannot be tolerated by the Tolerance-mongers, then the lies of abortion, euthanasia, and cannibalism will have no competition.
Speaking of Tolerance - the supreme virtue of our decadent age - the National Abortion Federation held their annual convention in Vancouver, British Columbia in mid-May. While they allowed hundreds of actual killers and killing promoters across their borders for the convention, they refused to allow your Editor into Canada because they thought my words (in their computer file courtesy of our own FBI) sounded threatening. It seems our neighbors to the North - or at least their Immigration Department - has an irony deficiency. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Even stranger, though, abortionist Bruce Steir, out on bail and facing California murder charges for killing one of his abortion customers, was not only let through the border, but given the platform to speak. What tough bail restrictions, huh?
Neal Horsley analyzes the apparent epidemic of schoolyard killings in the light of the society-wide acceptance of principles which could not help but produce a generation of snakes. His piece came Providentially about a week before the recent schoolyard tragedy here in Oregon and I was relieved of having to write my own assessment while seeing it "up close."
Not that I, of all people, have nothing to say on the matter (a virtual impossibility). It is just that I prefer to allow someone other than me to comment because of my proximity to the most recent shooting. Proximity breeds myopia - which is why I objected when I heard Time magazine was about to list the 100 most influential people of the not-quite-over 20th Century. It is immoral to compile a list until at least 20 years have passed after the Century's demise.
Abandoning babies seems to be all the rage. One can hardly go a single week without reading about some pittiable child left in a hospital waiting room (whew!) or in a dumpster. One of this issue's tales recounts a jogger and her dogs finding a newborn child burried head down in a park - and who survived despite the dirt in his lungs. George Grant reminds me that the basis for many pagan myths is child abandonment a la Romulus and Remus.
Evidently a person or persons unknown has acquired a supply of buteryic acid as ten Florida abortuaries were closed within a single week's time (pass the Kleenex, please), three in one night, five on another and two on a third, by the foul-smelling stuff. It was reportedly introduced through holes drilled in the windows. The industry is in mourning and most of the pro-life movement appears to have joined in the miserere. All this began shortly after the NOW v. Scheidler verdict. Could JFK (see Grapevine) have been right?

For God and for Life,

Editor-in-Chief