Readers can be so thoughtful.
In 2005, after I mocked acting New Jersey Gov. Dick Codey for using state funds to subsidize Rutgers students' Jell-O shots at a bowl game, he sent me a six-pack of Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale with a note that said: "No taxpayer money was spent on this beer."
Years later, after writing regularly about urban violence and lax gun laws in Pennsylvania, an anonymous nonadmirer bought me "the gift of freedom," also known as membership in the NRA.
I can't prove that the Second Amendment superfan paid $1,000 to make me a patriot for life, but it has been ages, and American Rifleman magazine still arrives every month.
This week's random act of ideological kindness caught me off guard: A libertarian academic in California donated in my name to the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society.
The center promotes "the natural family," in which no member can be gay, pro-choice, a free spirit, or non-Christian. Work has value, but day care kills, so if you want to keep it "natural," Mom must stay home having many, many babies.
If the Howard Center sounds familiar, that's because it's associated with the Family in America, the faith-based, public-policy journal edited by a highly paid Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare aide who loathes everything government does for the less fortunate.
The above paragraph should be in past tense, since on Tuesday, Robert W. Patterson left his six-figure, taxpayer-funded job amid outcry over prose arguing that birth control robs women of the mood-lifting chemicals in semen. My colleagues Amy Worden and Angela Couloumbis broke the story about Patterson's moonlighting, so really, they're to blame for the gross jokes.
I wrote two blog items about the bloviating bureaucrat. For that, I've been bequeathed a gift subscription to the journal and a copy of The Natural Family: A Manifesto - which promotes "self-sufficiency through home gardens" while seeking to end "the war of the sexual hedonists on marriage," "childlessness," and "aggressive state promotion of androgyny."
Why me?, I wonder, reading the Manifesto. I garden! I make my own pesto, for God's sake.
My husband can confirm our marriage is hardly hedonistic. We're too tired raising two kids - living, breathing, whining examples of our commitment to repopulation.
