Just Visiting: November 2006

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Being Married Rules!

So, I got married on October 8th to the most amazing girl in the world! (That's one reason why I haven't been blogging much lately.) The wedding was wonderful, I had a great time and

everything turned out great. A few things didn't go as planned, but they were only minor things that nobody noticed but us. One bummer was the cold weather, but we didn't let it bother us much. We still put the top down in our convertible car that took us from the church to the reception.

The reception was great. We had a good dinner and a great party with a good band and dancing. It was a lot of fun, but flew by way too fast. We didn't even get to say hi to everybody we wanted to. I really want to thank all our wonderful friends though that helped us make everything happen and supported us through it all. My best man gave a great toast and all the groomsmen were a huge help. The maid of honor also gave a great toast via CD. I also want to thank our parents for supporting us and helping to make everything happen and helping us to survive our lives up to this point. Also, our photographers did an amazing job. Click on these pictures to see their website and our pictures.

Married life is amazing! It is wonderful to be able to live with the person I am most fond of and

not have to say goodbye every night. It is also great just living life together and supporting each other. I love making dinner and breakfast for Kendra and really love the lunches she makes for me. It has also been awesome getting our house all put together and fixed up the way we want it. I'm looking forward to the rest of our lives together!

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Seperation of Church and State

I just learned the other day from this article that the "doctrine" of seperation of church and state doesn't exist anywhere in our nation's founding documents. It's not in the Constitution, it's not in the Bill of Rights or even the Declaration of Independence.

"It's not in the Bill of Rights. It's not anywhere in a foundational document. The only place where the so-called "wall of separation" was mentioned was in a letter written by (Thomas) Jefferson to a friend. That's the only place. It has been picked up and made to be something it was never intended to be.
What it has become is that the government is protected from the church, instead of the other way around, which is that church was designed to be protected from the government."

And when Jefferson made this comment he wasn't using it to protect the government from the influence of the church, but was trying to keep the government out of the church's affairs.

"Jefferson politely declined in his letter to use his office for such influence," Hausknecht said, "explaining that the First Amendment prohibited him from doing so because it had created a 'wall of separation of church and state.' Although it's not completely clear among historians as to the complete scope of Jefferson's meaning,
because of the letter's specific historical context it's accurate to say, as Dr. Dobson did, that Jefferson felt the First Amendment protected the church from government interference -- not the opposite."

I thought this article was very interesting because I never knew where the idea of seperation of church and state actually came from and was the intended meaning.