Daddy's Girl: Courtship and a Father's Rights

I've been Daddy's girl from Day One. My first word was "Dada." I've always wanted to do what Daddy was doing, go where Daddy was going, read what Daddy was reading, say what Daddy was saying. We have the same sense of humor, preferences, pet peeves, strengths and weak-nesses--even the same allergies. Little wonder people call me "Daddy's Little Clone." I mean, take a look at the picture heading this column! No wonder that, for fairness' sake, in family votes, our two are counted as one.

But does this exhaust the ways in which I might be reckoned "Daddy's girl"? Beyond being an X-chromosome donor, may we think of the "-'s" in "Daddy's" in the possessive sense, and affirm with legitimacy that Daddy is my owner? That "my heart belongs to Daddy" is certainly true. But do daughters, per se, belong to their Daddies?


The answer to this question will bring us the answer to the propriety of courtship as a model for a daughter's pre-marriage relationship with a prospective suitor. For the crux of the courtship question is not empirical, but principal. I define courtship as the discovery of a life-partner for a daughter under the direct oversight of the father. Any man seeking to beg, borrow or steal a daughter's hand without her father's endorsement is seeking to gain, in unlawful ways, "property" not his own. Daughters are Daddy's girls in the objective sense, and this particular daughter rejoices in that truth. I am owned by my father. If someone is interested in me, he should see him.

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Yes, it is grating to our ears. However, let's not dismiss the idea without examining its merits. The Christian worldview, informed by Scripture, functions as our spectacles. Through the Bible, we see the world as it is; and no part of life is exempt from God's governance. We want to live in accord with his law even if it means living in (uncomfortable) opposition to popular culture. Everyone committed to advancing God's kingdom must be prepared to live against the norms of unbelief. Culture and custom which begin with God's word will inescapably conflict with culture which begins with the word of man.

And the word of God teaches that progenitors have certain rights. Let's use that as our major premise and construct a syllogism. Major premise: The creator of something is sovereign over that which he created. Minor premise: God created all things. Conclusion: God is sovereign over all things. This agrees with Scripture: "The earth is the Lord's, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it, for [i.e., because] He has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers" (Psalm 24:1). God created it; therefore, he has full authority over it.

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Simply put: No. As strange as it may sound, in the peculiar relationship of the father and daughter, God, as it were, takes a back seat. God has created a hierarchy such that the daughter is directly answerable to her father, and her father then answers to God. This doubles the father's responsibilities, because he must account to God for the way he raises his daughter.

The father's ownership, of course, is an in order to thing. God has given the daughter to the father so he can raise her in the fear and admonition of the Lord, protect her from harm and want, protect her from other men, and sometimes, protect her from herself, even from foolish decisions she might make on her own.

“We don’t see him as a vulnerable member,” said Caryn Alagno of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “He’s been in office a long time, and he’s got a solid record in his district.”

Future Social Security retirement benefits for disabled workers is a matter for negotiations with Congress as it drafts solvency legislation, the Bush administration said Thursday, declining to say whether they should be raised, lowered or left unchanged.

"Any plan that maintains current disability benefits will need to address the transition to retirement, and those details will be worked out through the legislative process," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Under Social Security, disabled workers qualify for a benefit until they reach retirement age. At that point, in a bookkeeping move, Social Security switches them to a retirement benefit of the same amount.

President Bush has long said he wants to maintain the existing disability benefit structure.

At the same time, he has spoken favorably of a solvency plan that would curtail the growth of retirement benefits for middle-income and higher-income workers of the future.

That leaves open the issue of future retirement benefits for disabled workers.

Duffy said the administration is not proposing to adjust future retirement benefits for the disabled in the same way as it wants them changed for the non-disabled. "Those two populations will be treated differently," he said.

At the same time, he declined to say there would be no change.

Brides gotta run, planes gotta stray, and cable news networks gotta find a way to fill a lot of programming hours as cheaply as possible. (CNBC gets to talk about the booming April retail sales numbers, and the NRA's television network will replay the Secretary of State on Larry King over and over.)

We say with all the genuine apolitical and non-partisan human concern that we can muster that the death and carnage in Iraq is truly staggering.

And/but we are sort of resigned to the Notion that it simply isn't going to break through to American news organizations, or, for the most part, Americans.

Democrats are so thoroughly spooked by John Kerry's loss —- and Republicans so inspired by their stay-the-course Commander in Chief —- that what is hands down the biggest story every day in the world will get almost no coverage. No conflict at home=no coverage.

Instead, think of the Bolton confirmation hearing, the Ways and Means Social Security kickoff hearing, and the evening tribute dinner for Tom DeLay (and the conservative movement) as classic Beltway set pieces, complete with (semi-)compelling casts of characters, dramatic arcs, conflicts galore, and pure unadulterated entertainment.

"Entertainment," that is, if you think, say, that debating "Resolved: Elizabeth Dole is having a better recruiting cycle to date than Chuck Schumer" is compelling.

Horsley's admissions regarding Elsie the Mule are actually part of a larger redemption narrative; what a wretch was I until I was saved. Furthermore, Horsley implies that a person who is not as he now is, a fundamentalist Christian, is really just a hedonistic animal, as he, by his own account, once was. Either you believe in absolutes -- his absolutes -- or you believe in nothing. Not only do you believe in nothing, but you aren't even in a sense fully human. You copulate with animals. That seems to be how he interprets his own history, and how he interprets the way that people in general face the problems of life.

This narrative of depravity and rebirth is so common on the right that it's almost a badge of honor. Think of George W. Bush's alcoholic past, or of Gannon/Guckert's prostitution. What many on the left see as hypocrisy, many on the right see as redemption stories. I was depraved; then I was saved. Just put your misdeeds into that narrative, and boom, all is forgiven.

Now, spiritual rebirths do happen. But the way that Horsley thinks of his own is part of that larger rebirth narrative that's prevalent on the right. Furthermore, underlying that narrative is a stark idea, and one that is key to understanding the modern right. The idea is that there are really only two alternatives: Absolute Truth or Absolute Chaos. When people on the far right look at other people, they see lost souls, descending into moral iniquity and dragging the world down with them. The fact that other people might believe strongly, morally, and sincerely in different things is not part of the narrative. The idea that someone might even have a moral or spiritual perspective that is true but different is not even considered possible.

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You see, the reason that they want to impose their set of narrow values on us is that they really do think that the nation is lost without them. Only their values, they believe, can save us from our own depravity. Without their set of values, they fear, we'll all be lovin' mules. But with them, we, like they, may yet be redeemed. All our misdeeds can be washed away if we just do what they do and think as they think. Otherwise, they believe, hellbound we go at top speed.

Just think of the kind of thing that Bill O'Reilly and others have been saying about equal marriage. Today, gay people; tomorrow, we'll be marrying goats. The modern right believes that if something is allowed, then everything is allowed, and that if everything is allowed to happen, then everything will happen. Change one thing, and society will fall apart like a house of cards.

According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."

Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did any reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis--she remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and relocated to southern Georgia--on her husband's record, even though she contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.

Real wages in the US are falling at their fastest rate in 14 years, according to data surveyed by the Financial Times.


Inflation rose 3.1 per cent in the year to March but salaries climbed just 2.4 per cent, according to the Employment Cost Index. In the final three months of 2004, real wages fell by 0.9 per cent.

The last time salaries fell this steeply was at the start of 1991, when real wages declined by 1.1 per cent.

Stingy pay rises mean many Americans will have to work longer hours to keep up with the cost of living, and they could ultimately undermine consumer spending and economic growth.

Many economists believe that in spite of the unexpectedly large rise in job creation of 274,000 in April, the uneven revival in the labour market since the 2001 recession has made it hard for workers to negotiate real improvements in living standards.

Even after last month's bumper gain in employment, there are 22,000 fewer private sector jobs than when the recession began in March 2001, a 0.02 per cent fall. At the same point in the recovery from the recession of the early 1990s, private sector employment was up 4.7 per cent.

How would you like a 54-percent pay raise? That's how much pay jumped last year for the chief executives of the 500 largest U.S. companies, according to Forbes magazine.

Worker pay is shrinking, the economy is stalling, the trade deficit is growing, and the stock market is below 1999 levels -- but CEO pay is still on steroids. The highest-paid CEO in 2004 was Yahoo's Terry Semel, who hauled in $230.6 million. That's more than $4 million a week.

Yahoo is on the Lou Dobbs Tonight list of companies "sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers." It would take the pay of 7,075 average American workers to match the pay of Yahoo's CEO.

William McGuire, of UnitedHealth Group, the nation's leading insurer, was the third-highest-paid CEO on the Forbes list. His pay of $124.8 million could cover the average health-insurance premiums of nearly 34,000 people.

"While executives are richly compensated, patients are tightening their belts," Dr. Isaac Wornom, chairman of the Richmond (Va.) Academy of Medicine, wrote last year. "Premiums, deductibles and co-pays are up, while benefits continue to shrink. One million Virginians -- that's one out of seven -- have no health insurance at all, and this number is increasing. . . . Half of the uninsured work full time for small businesses that simply can't afford the inflated rates."

CEOs can win big even when the company loses. Merck, for example, had to pull its Vioxx pain medication off the market, because it increases stroke and heart-attack risk, and Merck stock was down 28 percent last year -- but CEO Ray Gilmartin got a supposedly performance-based bonus. His total 2004 compensation was $37.8 million, and he received a new grant of 250,000 stock options.

CEO pay of Fortune 500 public companies averaged $10.2 million in 2004, counting salary, bonus, and other compensation, such as exercised stock options and vested stock grants. Full-time-worker pay averaged just $32,594. That's 11 percent less than 1973's average worker pay, of $36,629, adjusted for inflation, although worker productivity rose 78 percent between 1973 and 2004.

In 1973, CEOs made 45 times as much as workers, according to pay expert Graef Crystal. In 1991 -- when Crystal said that the imperial CEO "is paid so much more than ordinary workers that he hasn't got the slightest clue as to how the rest of the country lives" -- CEOs made 140 times as much as workers. Last year CEOs made more than 300 times as much.

Executive pay now takes more than double the bite out of company earnings that it did a decade ago, according to a recent study by Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard professor of law, economics, and finance, and Yaniv Grinstein, of Cornell University's School of Management. Looking at data for thousands of publicly traded companies, Bebchuk and Grinstein found that pay for the top-five company executives rose from 4.8 percent of aggregate net company income during 1993-95 to 10.3 percent of aggregate net income during 2001-03.

Former first lady Barbara Bush introduced the former presidents, acknowledging that her husband and his political rival are an odd coupling. She admitted she's since decided to allow Clinton to refer to her as 'Mom.'

''We have been hearing a lot about them recently,'' Barbara Bush said. Forget about Tom Cruise and whoever he is dating now. Forget about the desperate housewives. Everyone is talking about the odd couple, George and Bill - or as I now call him, 'Son.'

Clinton turned red, reaching out and touching George Bush's arm as he laughed.

''Every family has one, the wayward son who drifts off the political reservation,''

People around the world have talked about the life and death of Terri Schiavo, but Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin will get the last word.

For the past month, he has been working on her autopsy. She has taken over his office and consumed his working hours. He appeared for an interview in blue scrubs, looking every bit the wiry medical examiner with his bald head and tiny wire-rimmed glasses.

"That's her and that's her," he says, pointing to piles of documents and boxes of slides stacked all over his office.

And so you must stand in the doorway of his office to look at the old skulls and microscopes and fading picture of his dapper grandfather in knickers and the lifesize pencil drawing of Mr. Spock and Capt. Kirk.

Thogmartin, 41, knows Schiavo's autopsy will probably be the most publicized of his career. He won't talk about it until he is done and estimates it will be two or three more weeks.

He has received hundreds of letters and e-mails about the brain-damaged woman who died March 31, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Many ask him to look for signs she wasn't brain-dead or signs of abuse, among the allegations made during the protracted battle between her parents and her husband over whether to keep her alive.

"They are of no consequence to me," says Thogmartin of the letters.

The lively Texan, publicity shy and fiercely protective of his wife's and child's privacy, is known for doing everything by the book. He denied requests from Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, to allow their own pathologists to observe the autopsy.

"It is routine in cases of criminal importance to not allow any biased pathology advocates in the morgue," he said. "I'm the independent pathologist."

The way this subject has been addressed in recent news stories could leave a person bewildered, but the facts are actually straightforward. Brain death should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state or a coma. In brain death, the entire brain irreversibly ceases to function. Everything shuts down: the cerebral cortex, which controls higher functions, as well as the brainstem, which regulates automatic actions like heartbeat and breathing. In a persistent vegetative state, the cerebral cortex has been destroyed, leaving the person incapable of thought or memory, but the brainstem remains intact and functional. A person in a persistent vegetative state can live for years without a mechanical ventilator or other technological support. That was Terry Schiavo's situation. There was no question that she was alive. Her heart and lungs received signals from her brainstem - they didn't need machines to sustain their activity.

US Senator John F. Kerry said yesterday that he believes it's a mistake for the Massachusetts Democratic Party to include a plank in its official platform in support of same-sex marriage, saying that such a statement does not conform with the broad views of party members.

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Kerry, who opposes same-sex marriage but supports civil unions, said in an interview with the Globe that he would prefer that the party not mention gay marriage in its platform, because Democrats continue to disagree on how to handle the issue.

''I'm opposed to it being in a platform. I think it's a mistake," Kerry said shortly after hosting a forum on his universal children's healthcare bill in Baton Rouge. ''I think it's the wrong thing, and I'm not sure it reflects the broad view of the Democratic Party in our state."

Some analysts believe that the same-sex marriage issue contributed to Kerry's loss to President Bush in last year's presidential campaign. Kerry's position puts him at odds with the state Democratic Party chairman and his fellow Bay State senator, Edward M. Kennedy, who is scheduled to address the party convention next weekend.

Kerry said he does not plan to attend this year's state Democratic convention or to lobby against the same-sex marriage plank. He said he has not been closely monitoring debate over the state party platform.

A nursing dog foraging for food retrieved an abandoned baby girl in a forest in Kenya and carried the infant to its litter of puppies, witnesses said Monday.

The stray dog carried the infant across a busy road and a barbed wire fence in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital, Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper.

The dog apparently found the baby Friday in the plastic bag in which the infant had been abandoned, said Aggrey Mwalimu, owner of the compound where the animal is now living. It was unclear how the baby survived in the bag without suffocating.

Doctors said the baby had been abandoned about two days before the dog discovered her. Medical workers later found maggots in the infant's umbilical cord, a product of days of neglect, Hannah Gakuo, the spokeswoman of the Kenyatta National Hospital, where the girl was taken for treatment, said Monday. No one has yet claimed the baby, she said.

But the 3.3 kilogram (7.28 pounds) infant "is doing well, responding to treatment, she is stable ... she is on antibiotics," Gakuo told The Associated Press. Workers at the hospital are calling the child Angel, she said.

Who says dogs don't have souls?

THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.
Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.

Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man.