Three Beautiful Boys

"Bad things don't happen to our family. I've always lived that way. I didn't think anything bad could happen to me."


That what Gina Hubert of Torrence, California, thought, before learning that her son Zachary was autistic. As this piece in the Torrence Daily Breeze reports, she and her husband, Jack, thought they could help Zachary deal with his illness. Meanwhile, their other son, Taylor seemed perfectly normal.


"Tyler was different," Gina said. "He'd play with Zach. He'd stop and look at the camera and smile. He was Mr. Animated. We were sure he was going to be fine. There was no doubt. If there was something wrong with Zachary, at least Tyler's OK. I knew God would only give me what I could handle, so this was going to be OK."


Soon, they discovered that Taylor, and their third son, Tate, also had autism. In a two part series, Daily Breeze writer Josh Grossberg reports on how the Huberts learned dealt with the heartache and disappointment that came with knowing that the dreams they had for their children would never come true.

Here's how part 2--titled "Recasting a Shattered Dream" starts.


Their first child was diagnosed with autism at an early age. So was their second. And then their third.

Each time was more devastating than the last, each time a new dream shattered. Greg and Gina Hubert's three little boys -- Zachary, Tyler and Tate, now 12, 10 and 6, respectively -- were never going to have the lives the Torrance couple had imagined for them.

So they abandoned what they imagined and started from scratch.


This is a beautiful story. No pulled punches, cliches, or glossing over the difficulties--which almost wrecked their marriage. But through it all the Huberts are sustained by faith and hope and grace.


"People think these kids are a mistake, but this is the way God planned them for our family," Gina said. "We view them as the perfect kids."

One Last Deal Hudson Post

A couple quick thoughts on Deal Hudson, and why the story seems to have died before it ever became national news. One is related to a
NY Times editorial today, calling for the head of General William Boykin and the fall of Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan.

All three are scandal stories--two sex related (Ryan and Hudson)--and one's about alleged religious bigotry.

Here's what the Times wrote about Boykin:

General Boykin has to be removed from his current job. He has become a national embarrassment, not to mention a walking contradiction of President Bush's own policy statement that the fight against terror is bias-free and not a crusade against Islam. (General Boykin preached of a 1993 fight against a Muslim warlord in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.")


The Times is headhunting--there's a scandal, and the editorial board wants someone's head to roll. They want someone fired, or driven to resign. That's the way these kinds of stories resolve. Since Ryan took some time to resign and Boykin wasn't fired, all the followup news was about whether they should resign or be fired. The stories gained legs and didn't stop in Ryan's case, and won't stop in Boykin's case until there's a resolution.

The Hudson piece died for a simple reason. He resigned. And so there's no story there, at least in the way scandal stories work. That's a flaw in our current 24/ 7 news cycle that the Bush campaign (and Kerry as well) and PR professionals are exploiting. A quick decision and a trophy--a high level personality losing their job--will kill a scandal. It's old news. And all the important questions, like how did Hudson gain such influence in the way the Bush campaign dealt with Catholic votes, get lost in the tsunami of the 24/7 news cycle.

One aside--the Times editorial raises some interesting questions. Is an Evangelical Christian, a Catholic, an Orthodox Jew, a Muslim--anyone who holds a faith which makes exclusive claims about truth and salvation--that their God is bigger than someone else's and their faith is truer than someone else's, unfit for command duty in the US military?

The Deal Hudson Affair--Part

Jeff Sharlett and Kathryn Joyce of The Revealer posted some comments on my post about Deal Hudson the Crisis magazine editor who resigned as an advisor to the Bush campaign. They both made good points, and I should try and clarify my post.

The National Catholic Reporter article on Hudson included some graphic detail about Hudson's behavior. Not only did he allegedly have oral sex with a drunken 18 year old student, he reportedly was french-kissing two other students and slurping body shots off one of them.

I don't doubt that Hudson abused his position and took advantage of Poppas. I do wonder about all the bar details--since it took place in public, is there anyone around who can corroborate the accusations? That would make this a more damning story.

My post included this commnent:

this kind of sexual misconduct ranks pretty low on the outrage scale. If Hudson was a priest that had sex with preteen or teenaged boys, he'd be seen as a pervert and an abuser. A male college professor who has sex with a college student is seen as getting lucky. The young women involved was 18 at the time, and the alleged activities, while sordid, were not illegal or would not be considered unethical at some colleges.


I made the comment in disgust--one that there are colleges where professors having sex with students is acceptable behavior, and two, that many people would see an older man having sex with a younger woman as "getting lucky." It could be read that I was condoning Hudson in some way. Nothing could be farther from he truth. If he had acted this way towards my daughter, he'd have lost certain vital bits of his anatomy.