"One World"

Last night, I was having coffee with my friend Philip when the talk turned to race. Although the polls had only just closed, it was already pretty clear that Deval Patrick was about become the first black governor of Massachusetts and only the second black governor in American history. Although I was excited for Patrick's landslide victory, I found the slow pace of change – nearly 150 years after Emancipation – more than a little disheartening.

Philip, who is Jamaican, commented that America, for all of its talk of racial equality, actually lags behind the much of the rest of the world in terms of racial progress. "Jamaica," he said, "is much more of a true melting pot than America will ever be. Here, you talk equality, but everyone keeps very much to himself."

Jamaica, he argued, with it's national slogan "One World," was really much more of a true melting pot, as just about everyone there is, to varying degrees, of mixed raced. Philip is part Caucasian, Chinese, African, and about a half a dozen other things. "The Jamaican ideal is to look like me: All the races blended into one." Philip is not modest.

"The funny thing," he said, "is that sometimes the races are imperfectly blended." Apparently, last year there was a new story about a pair of twin girls born to a mixed-race couple, where one sister was black and the other white. The sisters were fraternal twins, of course, and one sister had inherited a gene for dark skin and the other sister had inherited a gene for pale skin.

Although intrigued, I was convinced this had to be some sort photo hoax that had become a well-traveled urban legend. But in fact, Philip was quite right.

Meet twin sisters Kian (left) and Remee (right) Horder:



According to the Daily Mail, the twins were born to a British couple of mixed ancestry: Both parents had white mothers and black fathers. In order for two babies to be born with such dramatically different skin color, a sperm containing all black genes must fuse with an egg containing all black genes, and a sperm with all white genes must fuse with a similar egg. The odds of this occurring, caculates the Daily Mail, are about 100,000,000 to one.

I'm no statistician, but I do know that every year there are more than 1 million live births in the world. So that means …

Yes, there was another set of black-and-white twins born in 2006. Twin sisters Alicia (left) and Jasmin (right) Singerl were born in May to an Australian couple. According to News.com, their mother Natasha Knight, 35, has Jamaican-English heritage, and their father, Michael Singerl, 34, is Caucasian.

Although I tend to agree with Philip that we would become "One World" much faster if we were all a little bit brown, I think having a twin sibling of a different race would be much, much cooler. Variety, they say, is the spice of life.

Remember, remember …

OK, so I may have missed Guy Fawkes Day, November 5th, by a day or two now. Nonetheless, I wanted to take this opportunity to remember the luckless traitor and celebrate the 401st anniversary of his attempt to blow up British Parliament in the infamous "Gunpowder Plot."

You've got to love the British. They celebrate their villains and overlook their heroes (there's still no "Churchill Day"). Where else in the world could you find a national holiday in which the man of honor is paraded through the streets and burned in effigy? I mean, can you imagine Americans parading down Main Street every April 19th with likenesses of Oklahoma city bomber Timothy McVey?

Sadly, Fawkes popularity seems to be waning. In Tower Hamlets, an East London borough, the town council voted to abandon the historic Bonfire Night celebration this year, (a.k.a. "Guy Fawkes Night") in favor of hosting a production of the traditional Bengali tale "The Emperor and the Tiger." It turns out that Tower Hamlets is home to about 20,000 Bengali immigrants, and Bengalis make up a majority on the town council.

But the British take their eccentric traditions seriously, and many townsfolk were angered by the council's move, which they viewed as forcing the community to buckle under the pressure of multiculturalism and political correctness.

John Midgley, spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness, told The Daily Mail, "[P]olitically correct actions like these undermine our historic occasions and harm community relations." To which members of the council responded: "We did Guy Fawkes last year."

Midgely warned that the council's decision would "explode in their faces." Take that, political correctness! Huzzah!

I was reminded of this colorful figure and the very off-color debacle he has inspired when I walked through Harvard Square yesterday and saw this rather erudite graffiti on the side of the new American Apparel store:



My first impression was that it was a "shout out" to Natalie Portman, Harvard hottie and star of last year's Guy Fawkes revival "V for Vendetta," an excellent film, which I highly recommend for anyone caught up in the civic-minded spirit of Election Day today.

But then, I started to grow concerned. Is it possible that the Ivy League has finally become that snakes nest of leftist revolutionaries the Conservative Right has been warning us about for decades? Are the Harvard kids plotting to overthrow the government and bomb Congress?

Then I looked a little closer:


I doubt these freedom fighters could pull off a violent coup if they can't even remember how to spell "remember." It's good to know the value of a $44,000-a-year education.

Dept. of Blame the Victim

In response to the outing of prominent minister Ted Haggard last week as a closet homosexual and drug addict, the evangelical community was left reeling, "Where did he go wrong?" Well, folks, it might not have been all his own fault.

Here's an explanation for Haggard's shenanigans from the blog of Mark Driscoll, pastor of the Mars Hill mega-church in Seattle:

"Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations
and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely
despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one
for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who
really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their
husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives
them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually
available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank
about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be
helping him either."

Pastor Driscoll, 33, counts himself as lucky, "I have married a beautiful woman," he wrote on his blog last Friday. And indeed, Driscoll's wife Grace, his highschool sweetheart, remains lovely even after 10 years of marriage. It also seems that Gracey has done her "wifely duty": She's given Mark four children.


Driscoll's wife, Grace, is a "beautiful woman."

But temptation is always knocking at the door, Driscoll confesses, even for a man with a beautiful wife. In his most recent post, he recounts how on a number of occasions, wonton young women -- members of his own congregation -- have attempted to seduce him, even dropping offers of dinner and sex into his shirt pocket while he was serving communion! "On another occasion," he writes, "a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body." "Thankfully, that email was intercepted by an assistant and never got to me." Thank the Lord!

To protect oneself against these femme fatales, Driscoll lists 11 precautions that every preacher should take, including:

1) Work late at home, not at the office. "Some years ago when I did not, I found that lonely people, some of them hurting single moms wanting a strong man to speak into their life, would show up to hang out and catch time with me."

2) If these women continue to pursue you at home, don't feel bad about turning them away: "This means that if someone keeps dropping by unannounced and is unwelcome, or a flirtatious woman shows up to a Bible study at the pastor’s home, the pastor and his family have the right to request that they never return."

Other precautions include giving your wife oversight of your e-mail account and taking a companion (your wife, older child, or assistant) on the road with you if you must be away from the marital bed over night. "Pastors must not travel alone," he writes. "If this cannot be afforded then travel should not be undertaken."

Finally, Driscoll suggests that churches consider returning to the tradition of hiring heterosexual male assistants instead of nubile female secretaries. "Too often," he writes, "the pastor’s assistant is a woman who, if not sexually involved, becomes too emotionally involved with the pastor as a sort of emotional and practical second wife."

Indeed, if Haggard had only taken Driscoll's advice and hired a male assistant, his could have avoided this fall from grace.

You can read the full post, and Driscoll's other thoughts on pastoral seduction, male assistants, and wifely duties at:
www.TheResurgence.com.