I’m Pro-Marriage Equality but Appose Gay Marriage

Yep you read the title correctly. As an American I fully believe and support all those who are out there in favor of equal rights. America was created on the idea that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and I don’t know of anyone, with regards to the gay marriage issue, who would disagree with that or try to prevent one set of individuals from having the same rights as any other set of individuals… But that’s the thing isn’t it, we are individuals and are guaranteed individual rights under the Constitution.

So how can I claim to be “pro-marriage equality”? well just as all human beings deserve equal rights for being created equal, I firmly believe that all marriages that are equal should be treated equally… but there in which lies the question.

Is a gay marriage equal to a traditional marriage from the stand point of the entity which is granting rights, in this case the United States government?

Well in both cases 2 people are publicly declaring their undying love for each other, that’s equal right? Yes, but that is irrelevant to the question. The government has no reason to care if you love each other. The government is there to look out for the best interests of the country to serves. What it should be concerned about is whether or not a marriage has the potential to serve the best interests of the country.

On numerous accounts healthy, traditional marriages have been shown to provide a wide variety of benefits to society and the people involved in the marriage. It is for these reasons that a government should have an interest in promoting traditional marriages and historically it has through DOMA and by providing grants for relationship education.

On the other hand, while some less than credible studies have shown that homosexual unions are just as good for children as heterosexual marriages the New Family Structures Study by Mark Regnerus says otherwise. To be clear, this study does not show a causation correlation between homosexual parents and dysfunctional children, but rather that, by and large, homosexual couples often have other issues which negatively affect a child’s development. In other words, gay couples don’t cause children to be dysfunctional simply because they are gay, but children raised in gay homes often are dysfunctional because gay parents are often engaging in negative activities like drug use or criminal actions, for example.
Note: I am not trying to imply that all gay people are criminals or druggies but the study has shown that there is a high number of homosexual parents with criminal records.

To recap, the issue at hand is not one of an individual’s equal rights, it is about the equality of unions and the distribution of benefits to them. Furthermore, homo and heterosexual unions have not been shown to be equal to one another regarding the issues of concern to the government and so until such a time that they can be deemed equal in terms of how the participants and society are benefited by the union, I see no reason for the government to give the 2 equal status.

Final note: While the one example I went into was that regarding the raising of children I want to be sure to add that this is not the only way  in which homo and heterosexual couples have not been shown to be equal but is the one with the most timely study.

Newlyweds with Low Progesterone

I believe the greatest joy a couple can experience is sharing a love so pure and true that after 9 months you can hold it in your hands and give it a name. I also believe that one of the most devastating things that a woman can experience is not being able to carry that love to term…

As Curt and I started our charting several months before getting married, our NFP teacher noticed a few “abnormalities” in my cycle. From those charts, along with the symptoms I was experiencing, our teacher warned that I may have low progesterone and would be at a high risk for miscarriage during the first trimester. Progesterone is important in conception and imperative in continuing a pregnancy. I was crushed. To be a woman and potentially not be able to bring a new life into this world made me feel…defective.

Our teacher suggested that I speak to my doctor (luckily I have a great NFP only doctor who is trained in NaPro technology) regarding the charts and to bring them with me to my next appointment. On an unusually bright and warm February day (it was also Ash Wednesday), I went in for that appointment. The doctor confirmed that it was very likely I had some level of low progesterone. I was told that I had a higher chance of miscarriage with the low progesterone and depending on how low it was maybe even a difficulty conceiving. It was so difficult to hear again but this time there was a brighter side and she sounded confident that this is something fixable. She told me that we had a few options:
1) have blood work done before marriage so we knew what was going on
2) wait until we were married, but before we starting trying to conceive to do blood work
3) take our chances on our own to see if we can conceive but call the office the moment we had a positive pregnancy test because I would need levels done immediately. No matter what I would have to get stabbed…several times and I am terrified of needles!

We thought we chose option 2. However, after the wedding we started playing a little too loosely with our fertile times. Two months in a row we had intercourse during our fertile time and didn’t conceive. While I know people don’t always get pregnant even if they time things just right, it was still eating at me that maybe I was the reason we didn’t get pregnant either of those times. So as a couple, we decided that I would go through 5 terrible days of needle pokes after ovulation to determine the progesterone levels and then once we had the results we could consider a plan for trying to start our family.

As God would have it, once all those needle pokes and labs were done, during the week when I should have started menstruating, I only had some light spotting. After, 3 negative pregnancy tests, we finally realized we actually had participated in option 3- we had a positive test! I called the doctor immediately and was ordered to get to get more labs done to determine my pregnancy levels of progesterone. I was never so happy to get stabbed some more!

What followed were the most exciting and nerve racking 2 days of my life. We were pregnant but had no idea if we would continue to be. After the second set of labs came back, which showed that my levels had actually dropped from the first set, I was started on oral progesterone and told to follow up again in a few days with, you guessed it, more labs.

After 2 months of supplementing progesterone and a total of 4 rounds of blood draws (each round requiring some draws) the tests showed my placenta was now making enough progesterone and I no longer needed to supplement.

I know that there are still problems that could arise in this pregnancy, but I am grateful that we have been given the opportunity to experience the excitement and we pray that come this April we will be able to hold the product of our love!

~Joan

What’s Your Relationship Status with God?

Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? this is a fairly common question and I think it’s something that needs to be pondered a little deeper. My answer is, “YES I have a personal relationship with Jesus but I think the question you should be asking is what kind of personal relationship is it?!”

Think about it. We have ALL kinds of personal relationships: friends, family, co-worker. And among these there are even more levels of intimacy at which a relationship can be.

I have a fairly personal relationship with my supervisor at work. We talk about our personal lives and on occasion participate in some of the same activities and clubs outside of work as well; we spend much of our day together and do our best to help each other out. Is it okay for me to have a work relationship with Jesus?

On the other hand, my relationship with my wife went through many different levels of intimacy as we worked our way towards marriage. Now that we are married our relationship is very intimate. Should my relationship with God be as intimate as my relationship with my wife?

My goal is to dive into these levels so that we can come to a deeper spiritual relationship by analyzing the needs and nuances of loving relationships. You want an intimate relationship with Jesus, right? Well what level of intimacy is appropriate? When is it appropriate in your faith journey? And how do I deepen what I already have? The answer to these and more I will share in subsequent posts in the Relationship Status category.

(If you are not mature enough to understand and appreciate this kind of analogy, please avoid these posts. Subsequent posts in this “series” will be under the category: Relationship Status)

Pregnancy Aversions?

The first few weeks of knowing I was pregnant were great, I just ate, a lot. Mostly I ate to keep from feeling nauseous as it definitely got worse when I was hungry. After that phase quickly passed a new one showed up, one in which certain foods I usually enjoy no longer sounded appealing and ones that I thought were appealing brought me close to throwing up at the dinner table. (poor Curt)

The foods that I currently detest are: chicken, steak, hamburger, ham on my pizza and shrimp. So basically for meat I can eat sausage (weird, I know), bacon, and ground pork, oh and oddly enough I can tolerate hot dogs (gross). So basically I’m currently a vegetarian that eats bacon.

The only “craving” I have had after 12 weeks if you can call it a craving is peanut butter with honey. For those of you wondering, I HATE peanut butter (I like peanuts) but that night I think my poor body really wanted protein as I did something I have never done in my life… I ate peanut butter by the spoonfuls yes more than one spoonful. I ate about 4 spoonfuls then I got the normal ew I hate this reaction.

Replacement Refs are like the Pill

Just like the birth control pill the NFL’s replacement refs looked like a legitimate, good idea. With refs ready to go to work on the field the football season was able to start back on track and allow those Americans fed up with the political season a pleasant break by watching some good old American football…or so we thought.

While the now infamous replacement refs did allow football to resume, the beginning of the season was plagued with bad call after bad call as their true ineffectiveness came to light.

No this is not a perfect analogy, but none are

As it was with the replacement refs, it still is with The Pill. Just like the replacement refs birth control goes about it’s business mostly unnoticed until there’s a flag on the play and a woman starts to experience one of the numerous negative side effects: headache, bleeding irregularities, weight gain, mental depression, yeast infection, excessive hair growth in unusual places, or acne to name a few of the less severe ones. While the interruption of normal play is annoying you tell your self it’s a necessary part of the game of life and you try to ignore it. Then one day, like refs who are supposed to ensure the fairness and integrity of the game but instead of giving you a touch-back they give your opponents a touchdown, one morning you find your self getting positive test after test even though all the doctors and sex experts said you’d never end up pregnant as long as you were on birth control.

How does this happen? well, just because you call someone an official doesn’t mean they’re going to know what on earth they’re doing on the football field and just because you take a pill that’s call birth control doesn’t mean that it will actually control your body’s ability to give birth. The reality is that most birth control pills work with a 3 fold failure system so that if the first effect fails the second should prevent a pregnancy. If the second also fails, there is a chance fertilization will take place thus creating a new life which will be unknowingly aborted if the 3rd effect succeeds in making the lining of the uterus an unsustainable habitat. And of course if the 3rd effect also fails, the baby implants and will continue to grow like a normal pregnancy.

To give a little perspective, when a perfectly healthy couple comes together on the optimal day in the woman’s cycle, there is generally a 65% chance they will NOT get pregnant.

So, how often does the pill fail on all 3 accounts resulting in a known pregnancy? Studies vary widely depending on the the age, length of use, and income level of the woman on the pill. For example, one large study showed that poor teenage girls who lived with their boyfriends had a 48 percent chance of getting pregnant during their first year on the Pill, whereas a wealthy married woman over the age of thirty had a 3 percent chance of pregnancy. (Haishan Fu, et al., 61.) Generally, birth control is given a real world effectiveness rating around 90% meaning that about a 10th of the time it will fail completely and result in a known pregnancy.

The rate at which birth control results in a pregnancy but succeeds at preventing that baby to implant in the mother’s womb is unknown, but would logically be even higher.

I don’t want ineffective replacement refs messing with my family’s life. For that reason and SO many more, my wife and I chose to learn about our fertility, and monitor it. Though the use of Natural Family Planning we don’t have to worry about obviously blown calls. We are empowered to make educated decisions when planning our family and are able to do so through a method that is 96% effective at preventing pregnancy and is also one of the best methods to help achieve pregnancy when desired!

Getting started

My wife and I have been married for a little over 4 months and have been learning/using the Creighton Model of NFP for about a year. We hope to share our experiences, advice, and reasons for why we love being sexual rebels in a culture that claims intercourse is the greatest thing in the world and yet treats it as if it’s as plain as playing tennis with someone.

If you’re brave enough to step outside your comfort zone then follow us on our journey, otherwise you can just take the “blue pill” and go back to sleep.