The Real Misogynists Are Far Left Men

One of my working theories is that many men on the political far Left who proclaim the loudest that they respect womyn and are "male feminists" actually hate women. I think the reason for this is that modern feminism is basically man hating. That sounds kind of Rush Limbaugh-esque but it also happens to be true. Contemporary feminism seems mostly concerned less with women having equal opportunities as men and more with the absolute degrading of men. What this leads to is a weird self-loathing from liberal men who are forced to despise and hide their own maleness to appear properly "woke". What it doesn't do is eliminate their maleness, as much as they might try to make it appear that way. What it simply does is force it below the surface where it boils up from time to time when there is an "acceptable" female target. You saw this a lot with Sarah Palin who so incensed liberals that there were lots of sexually violent insults hurled at her. Playboy Magazine ran an article by Guy Cimbalo, since deleted, listing conservative women that the author would like to rape. Even leftist luminary J.K. Rowling went on a Twitter rampage about the way liberal men attack women that are "safe targets" because of their politics. Here is the money tweet, number 3 of 14:

I’m sick of ‘liberal’ men whose mask slips every time a woman displeases them, who reach immediately for crude and humiliating words 3/14

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 9, 2017

The "mask slipping" is a perfect way to describe it. It is very sad and disturbing but not surprising. These "men" hate women because of what they perceive women have done to them in the name of feminism.

Enter ambulance chaser and pro-rape lawyer Robert Ranco of the Carlson Law Firm in Texas that specializes in "personal injury" (i.e. ambulance chasers), medical malpractice, divorce, etc. In other words a pretty garden variety sleazy law firm. Mr. Ranco is obviously a top-notch lawyer and you can reach him by calling 512-346-5688. Mr. Ranco is a graduate of the prestigious University of Maine School of Law and is an undergraduate music major from Dartmouth. Maine is ranked the 139th best law school by U.S. News and World Report which places it in high class company like the University of Akron, the Universities of both North and South Dakota and the University of the Pacific. In fact since they only gave out numerical rankings from 1-148, Mr. Ranco graduated from a law school ranked in the bottom 7%. It is hard to imagine how he ended up an ambulance chaser instead a Supreme Court Justice with credentials like that. Maybe he just cares too much about people who get rear-ended in Texas to bother with a trifle like the Constitution. What is really funny is how his bio describes him:

If you missed it here is the critical sentence:

The quick witted, Ivy League educated lawyer with an easy going attitude and an appreciate for the arts...

Apparently an Ivy League education (an undergrad music degree from Dartmouth) doesn't mean much as they don't teach grammar these days.

Anyway, Mr. Ranco fired off the following tweet, followed very quickly by making his account private and then deleting it entirely but not quickly enough. You can't undo what you say on the internet, something you would think an "Ivy League educated lawyer" would have known.

Strange how he just protected his account. pic.twitter.com/Mw6WWjninz

— J.R. Salzman (@jrsalzman) September 9, 2017

Quick witted and easy going indeed! Nothing says quick witted like posting a pro-rape tweet about a Cabinet Secretary and nothing says easy going like sort of wishing someone you don't even know would get raped because she holds the primitive and patriarchal notion that college men should have some basic legal protections when accused of a felony. I guess they didn't cover that sort of stuff in the rarefied air of the University of Maine School of Law. They must have been too busy talking about coaching plaintiffs to show maximum discomfort and emotional distress on the stand.

When someone tells you how liberals respect women and how conservatives hate women, just remember that when the "mask slips" you see an awful lot of liberal men demonstrating a misogyny that puts Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump to shame.

I don't advocate rape but I am pretty much OK with it

The Women We Are Really Without

Apparently there is some sort of protest going on today under the hashtag #DayWithoutAWoman. Don't worry, the women who are going to be absent today are sadly not really going away, they are just not going to work or something for a day. Why are they taking the day off? Well I am glad you asked! Here is the scoop from www.womensmarch.com:

On International Women's Day, March 8th, women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women and all gender-oppressed people, through a one-day demonstration of economic solidarity.

In the same spirit of love and liberation that inspired the Women's March (my note: "spirit of love", you mean like Madonna talking about blowing up the White House?), we join together in making March 8th A Day Without a Woman, recognizing the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system--while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity. We recognize that trans and gender nonconforming people face heightened levels of discrimination, social oppression and political targeting. We believe in gender justice.

Wait, so is it a day without women or a day where women stay home or something to support sexually deviant mentally ill people? I guess they are going to wear red, because that doesn't have any historic connotations or anything and not shopping ("with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses" of course) and not doing any work. Don't worry ladies, the dirty dishes will still be there in the sink tomorrow! I am thinking about giving Amish women free rides to Wal-Mart today....

I wonder if any of the organizers of the Day Without Women gave any thought to the women we are really without today?

Since the legal perversion that gave us "the right to abortion", Roe v Wade, the abortion holocaust has claimed over 58,000,000 lives. Assuming that at least half of those were women (I would guess that sex selective abortions disproportionately target female children), that means that America is without over 29,000,000 women. Since "legal" abortions started in 1973, the earliest victims of the abortion holocaust would be in their 40's today. They would be wives and mothers, many would have careers and many others would be caring for their homes. One of those aborted women might have been less morally repulsive than Hillary Clinton and could have perhaps been the first female President. Or maybe they would just be a bunch of normal women trying to make it in this world. We will never know because they never got the chance to even draw their first breath. They were slaughtered in the one place that they should have been the safest in order to appease the goddess Choice.

The greatest injustice against women (and men and minorities and humanity itself) we have seen in the last 40 years will get no airtime from the media, no mention from virtue signaling celebrities and political activists, but we know and we don't forget. The regular people in this country know that our fellow citizens, our fellow image bearers, have been sacrificed on the blood-stained altar of feminism and no amount of marching or wearing red will undo that. We don't buy into the idea that this  "Day Without Women" has anything to do with average women. It is a leftist political stunt to provide cover for income redistribution and the normalization of perversion. It is not pro-woman, it is anti-male, anti-family, anti-children and really anti-women who don't bow to the altar of political correctness.

Don't be fooled. The agenda here is one of death, destruction and deviancy. It is an agenda dedicated to destroying families, destroying any sense of morality, destroying genuine femininity and destroying life. Real women will take care of their families and their homes tomorrow and not demand special recognition for it. They will go to work, they will wash dishes, they will comfort sick kids. They will sacrifice themselves for the sake of others because that is what women do. That is what makes them so indispensable to our society. Let the angry women march and be huffy about injustice. Real women will keep doing the often invisible work that helps to keep this country running and will not ask for nor expect anyone to make a big deal about it. That is just what they do, at least the ones who were lucky enough to escape the abortionist's scalpel.

Feminism: A Corrupt Seed That Yields A Rotten Crop

Picture from AgFax.com

In my prior post, It Is Not About Getting Rid Of Gender, It Is About Getting Rid Of Men, I argued that the "transgender" and "gender fluidity" movements are mostly about ridding our culture of any actual masculine expression. I also made the statement that I think women are, by and large, not terribly happy today in spite of "feminist progress" and by implication that they would be more happy if the men in their lives acted more like men. In fact it often seems to me that things that are supposed to make women happier, like having more women with careers outside of the home and going to college, are actually conspiring to make women less happy and satisfied. As an example of this I quoted the disproportionate female-male ratio at most colleges in an article, Unequal Gender Ratios at Colleges Are Driving Hookup Culture, but the broader issue of that post was that the shrinking male population at university is actually benefitting the men enormously, at least from a standpoint of sexual promiscuity.

Women at disproportionately female schools talk openly about their frustrations. “Everyone’s self-esteem takes a hit,” a young woman at 75%-female Sarah Lawrence College told me. One reason: Sarah Lawrence men have little interest in exclusive relationships. “Why would they? It’s like they have their own free harem,” she grumbled. “One of my friends was dumped by a guy after they’d been hooking up for less than a week. When he broke up with her, the guy actually used the word ‘market’—like the ‘market’ for him was just too good.” 

A male Sarah Lawrence student offered a similar assessment of life there—though he wasn’t bemoaning the school’s hookup culture but celebrating it. The young man told me he had had sex with more than 20 of his female classmates. “There isn’t really a culture of monogamy or even dating here,” he offered. “Sometimes it feels like you can have anyone you want.”

It turns out that men and women still like to be with each other and when men are scarce, women end up having to or at least feeling like they have to, compromise what they want (monogamous, steady relationships) for what men seem to want (casual sex) in order to have any relationship with men at all. Certainly plenty of academic "experts" will tell you that casual sex with no commitment is healthier than old fuddy-duddy notions of monogamy and relationship but I don't believe that to be true for a second. Having once been an unregenerate college guy, albeit one with a steady girlfriend that I got engaged to halfway through my first year of school, I can say with some confidence that being in a culture where you are having sex with so many different girls that you number your partners in the dozens would be fantastic. Marriage traditionally acted as a civilizing influence on young men, especially young men who are outside of the faith, but now most men can get sex on demand with no corresponding commitment. If you want to see an unclothed woman, you don't have to buy a girlie magazine with a brown paper cover over it from the drug store, you can just click a few buttons and see whatever kind of woman you want doing anything you can imagine and quite a few things you can't even begin to imagine.

I have been working over a post literally for years now that I need to finish one of these days that argues we are living in the Golden Era of Male Irresponsibility. Ironically it is feminism that has made this happen. Very powerful and educated men are doing more than fine in our culture. Lazy, ne'er-do-well young men who want to live at home, play video games and watch porn are doing just fine in their pursuit. The vast majority of men who just want to be a good father and husband and productive member of society are the ones who are struggling.

The struggles of most men is mirrored by the struggles of far too many women. Women from affluent homes are also doing great it would seem. But the majority of women in America seem far from doing just fine. They are pulled in a million directions, told that they don't need a man to be happy but at the same time constantly bombarded with marketing tell them that they need this or that to appeal to men. Women have been told that they shouldn't allow men to objectify them but the culture has led to a situation where teen girls are sending nude photos of themselves to boys that often aren't even steady boyfriends. My experience of decades in the professional work environment was that of a lot of women, I would say the majority of them, were equal parts resigned to "having to work" and longing to spend more time with their kids. Having a picture of your six month old daughter on your desk and texting the daycare is no substitute for being there for her. That may sound judgmental and cruel, and maybe it is, but it is also true. Each successive generation of Western women seems less equipped for caring for their own children but in spite of efforts by some feminists to shame the maternal instinct out of women, it is still there but women today are ill-equipped to respond to that instinct.

A perfect example of this came up this week with the cinematic release of the Fifty Shades of Grey bondage-porn sequel Fifty Shades Darker. In the spirit of full disclosure I have not read any of the books or watched the film but I have run across enough in terms of plot summaries to get the gist of the movie. The series is wildly popular. The first book, Fifty Shades of Grey, apparently sold more than 125 million copies. According to Barnes & Noble (I didn't check at Amazon where I almost exclusively shop for books because I don't want to see what else looking at Fifty Shades would cause Amazon to recommend for me), the hard copy retails for $12.95 and the e-book for $7.99 so taking the average price of the two and multiplying that times 125,000,000 copies means roughly $1.3 billion in sales. That is a pretty big number for a book. The first film adaptation made over $166,000,000 at the box office in America and more than half a billion worldwide according to IMDB. It sounds like estimates are that the sequel will earn almost $50 million during the opening weekend alone.

As you would expect just from the general hype, the book buyers are 80% women. What I found interesting when I looked at the buying profile from Bowker was what kind of women were buying it. The cultural narrative is that it is bought by bored and sexually frustrated soccer moms but that is not what Bowker found in 2012:

Compared to the typical adult fiction consumer, buyers of the Fifty Shades books are more likely to be women, live in the Northeast, and have a significantly higher household income.

Interesting indeed! I think a lot of midwestern soccer mom types tend to consume the "Amish romance novel" genre but why would substantially more affluent, presumably more educated and more "enlightened" women in the Northeast (i.e. Boston to New York to Washington, D.C., our power corridor and where you are most likely to find powerful, "successful" career women) buy a book about a disordered and male dominated sexual relationship?

Why in the world would women in our supposedly enlightened world with decades of feminist indoctrination in the schools and our pop culture, want to spend upwards of a billion and a half dollars to read/watch about what ought to be the nightmare of feminists, a wealthy older White man who apparently uses his wealth and power and *GASP* dare I say privilege to seduce a virginal, younger woman and dominate her? Everything about this storyline seems to run precisely counter to what women are supposed to truly crave. Wouldn't a better story line that would appeal to women like this be something like a professional woman, like a high power lawyer, who has a mutually respectful but open relationship with a guy who is an artist of some sort and works at Whole Foods to make ends meet but who mostly depends on his much smarter, more worldly and far more successful female life partner to pay the bills while he keeps their condo clean, feeds the cats and cleans the litter box and makes cruelty free, fair trade vegan meals and rubs her feet when she gets home?

Curiouser and curiouser.

My theory is probably not surprising. Men and women are men and women and you can market and indoctrinate the crap out of them but that doesn't change their basic nature. The Bible is again proven to be accurate in describing the human condition when it comes to gender (ex. Genesis 3:16 ). When these modern, feminism-saturated, independent, strong women get a few minutes to themselves, one hundred million or so of them read about or watched a movie about a man who sexually dominates a woman. Tens of millions more read various romance novels, including the wildly popular Amish romance genre and the Amish idea of gender is about as counter-cultural as you can get. It is almost like women really are actually craving a strong man who will lead in their relationship instead of some flaccid, milquetoast Nancy-boy that has to ask his life partner to open the pickle jar for him.

Feminism is an agenda driven ideology that really has morphed into a matriarchal religion, a religious worldview that has been mostly destructive to women, to men and to children and families. The ideas that it claims to put forth, like equality of opportunity, have long since come to fruition and what we see now are mostly policies and positions that can only be properly described as anti-male, anti-children and anti-family. The future is not female but to ensure a better future for females we must collectively reject the lies of feminism for the sake of our wives, sisters, mothers and daughters.

Talking About Morality In The Most Immoral Of Acts

As someone who has listened cautiously to the news on NPR since my college days, I have to admit that it is becoming increasingly difficult to filter out the nonsense. It is a rare NPR story that doesn't focus on abortion, "climate change" or homosexuality. Today I heard a blurb leading to a story on Fresh Air interviewing Gloria Steinem. She is 81 years old and apparently has a new book coming out, a book is dedicated to the abortionist who murdered her child way back before the blood-letting under Roe v. Wade became so commonplace. So at 81 years old one of the most important people in her life, someone worthy of a book dedication, was the man who killed her child. What a sad, tragic commentary on her life. There was no way I was going to listen to that entire interview, I would rather wade in a septic tank, but I did read the transcript and saw this little gem:

On the morality of abortion

It seems to me that every child has the right to be born loved and wanted, and every person has the right to control — male and female — to control their own bodies from the skin in. I think we need a legal principle called something like "bodily integrity" which recognizes that though the state may jail us, they can't insist on injections or tests or pressuring us for organ transplants. Our skin needs to be the line of defense between our own dignity and will and any outside force. ...

The definition of patriarchy is to be able to control reproduction, and that means you have to control women's bodies.

So only children that will be adequately "loved" and "wanted" have a right to be born and women control anything "from the skin in", so even though a unique human being is dwelling in her womb, she has absolute control over that life until it is outside of her skin, where ironically the same people calling for abortion on demand are mistrustful of those same parents raising their own children. If she really wants to talk about bodily integrity she could maybe talk to young women about sleeping around and getting pregnant is they don't want to get pregnant at this particular juncture in their lives. Since the overwhelming majority of abortions are, like Ms. Steinem's, electively done after a voluntary sexual act it would seem to me that the time to talk about "bodily integrity" is before a woman has sex without taking the commonplace and cheap methods provided by modern "progress" to prevent pregnancy. Even still those methods have a failure rate so it might just be wise to abstain from having sex during the window of fertility if you absolutely don't want to get pregnant. It would be swell to see a feminist give women a little credit and assume that they can exhibit some self-control for a few days a month. That one can even speak of "the morality of abortion" as if there is a moral position to be found in the extinguishing of a human life should be baffling but unfortunately I have lived long enough to hear this sort of sub-human nonsense for much of my life.

The last line killed me. I have never heard patriarchy defined that way but I guess when getting an abortion is the most important day in your life it sort of makes sense. Again the idea of "controlling women's bodies" assumes that women are uncontrollable sex machines who can't abstain for sex or take readily available measures that they have been taught to use in our public school system to avoid pregnancy. I guess I have a higher view of women and think that women can be trusted to control their bodies before they hop in the sack with someone who is not capable of being a father. 

One more item jumped out at me. Apparently women can't even be trusted to be in the same house with a man (emphasis mine)...

If you add up all the forms of violence, whether it's domestic violence in this country, which is at an enormously high rate — I mean, the most dangerous place for a woman in this country is her own home, and she's most likely to be beaten or killed by a man she knows...

Let me state unequivocally that there is no place in the world that my wife is less likely to be struck by a man than in our house. That is true for every other family I know. But for Ms. Steinem all men are just potential rapists, woman beaters and deadbeat dads. With that sort of attitude toward men it is a wonder any women get impregnated and need an abortion in the first place. 

This poisonous mindset is being force-fed to women throughout the "educational" system. It is little wonder that the relationship between men and women has never been worse in our society in spite of all of the wonderful "progress" we keep hearing about. It is a worldview like the one Ms. Steinem is selling that the church needs to respond to with God honoring Kingdom families. The world needs to know that there has to be a better way than  the bleak and blood soaked worldview that the Gloria Steinem's of the world live in.

Unnatural Born Killers

There is plenty of news out there that turns the stomach but this story, intended to be innocuous, from NPR was just awful: Can Female Marines Carry The Load And Kill The Enemy?. The title was bad enough, the content was even worse.

More than a dozen Marines from Alpha Company fan out across California's Mojave Desert, far into the distance. Machine-gun fire gives them cover. The small forms dash ahead. Some drop to one knee, others fall on their stomachs, firing at pop-up targets.
Only one woman is part of this group. Until last fall, Sgt. Kelly Brown was fueling helicopters and trucks. Now she's running with an assault rifle.

"Sgt. Brown. She's a good Marine, she's adapted well," says Capt. Ray Kaster, Alpha Company commander, as he walks up a gravel road toward the training range at a Marine base in Twentynine Palms, Calif.

"She's a natural leader. She's been very good for us. Very good to have a positive influence amongst the females," he says.

But the number of women is dwindling. Kaster estimates he's lost about half of them, though Marine officials later say about one-third of the nearly 30 women dropped out.

Kaster says the majority of those dropouts were due to hip and leg fractures, injuries that come from the heavy load an infantry Marine must carry: weapons, ammunition, a pack that can weigh from 50 pounds to more than 100 pounds.

First the simple facts. Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the women have had to drop the program. Not a knock on their toughness or character, just a simple matter of biology. Women are just not meant to carry packs weighing over 100 pounds where the weight has to ride on their hips. One female Marine interview weighs 130 lbs. One stands 5'1", petite by any standards. So basically they are women, in spite of our cultural attempt to feminize men and make women masculine. They are being asked to perform a physical task that is difficult for a young, fit man and so difficult for women that it is literally crushing their skeletal structure, all to make some sort of political statement.

Second, the ethical issue. I know this question is largely settled in the culture but not for me. Do we really, with a military larger and vastly more potent than any other in the world, need a 5'1" woman, who needs to shop for petite sized dresses, being sent around the world to "kill the enemy" on our behalf? I don't want anyone killing anyone else on my behalf but I especially don't want a woman doing so. It is awful to think of a woman being asked to point a rifle at someone and pull the trigger so that my "way of life" can be preserved. It is even worse to think of that young woman lying in the sand somewhere with her life draining out from a gut wound, dying in agony or falling into the hands of the enemy who undoubtedly has a far less "enlightened" view of women than we allegedly do. I mean, is it really more demeaning to ask a woman to wear a burqa than it is to ask her to kill someone else instead of a man doing it?

You can teach a woman to "want" to be a cage fighter or go off to shoot the bad guys or any other activity that historically has been a male dominated one. You can't change their nature or their physique. Nor can you make it palatable and acceptable for any actual man to be comfortable with a woman serving as a blood-spilling proxy so he can continue to eat, drink and entertain himself into an early grave. The general state of American masculinity is disgusting and the enlisting of women to kill to satisfy the perverse motives of a radical few is second only to legalized infanticide under the guise of "choice" as the most egregious examples of how far we have fallen.

Men in this country are already sent off to kill, die and be maimed in foolish, unconstitutional and likely illegal war after war. Please stop compounding this by beguiling women with the false glory of blood-letting.

A Tempest In A Tight Pants Teapot

I apparently missed the initial outrage but a prominent blogger who happens to also be a woman and a Christian, Veronica Partridge, made the grievous error of posting a very short, very non-judgmental post about why she had made the personal, non-binding on anyone else, decision to stop wearing leggings and yoga pants outside of the house: Why I chose to no longer wear leggings. It drew over 800 comments on her blog and went viral (her prior posts drew single-digit comments). As you can imagine if you pay attention to the culture this post has caused a great deal of outrage.

If you take the time to actually read past the title you will see a prominent disclaimer where she specifically says that she is not intending to tell anyone else what they can or can't wear. On her facebook page she reiterates this and writes:

Whether you agree with me or not, that's okay. Like I said, this is just my personal journey I thought I'd share.

That is what blogging is for most of us that are not making a living from blogging, an outlet for us to write about what we are thinking about and thinking through. To some apparently her personal thoughts on a topic are tantamount to a condemnation of their own behavior. I suspect that a lot of the backlash has to do with a sense of guilt hidden by many that comes to the surface when anyone brings up the topic, which might explain why no one brings it up because who wants that sort of grief? Here is what she wrote that got everyone in a tizzy:

Was it possible my wearing leggings could cause a man, other than my husband, to think lustfully about my body? I asked my husband his thoughts on the matter when he got home. I appreciated his honesty when he told me, “yeah, when I walk into a place and there are women wearing yoga pants everywhere, it’s hard to not look. I try not to, but it’s not easy.”

I instantly felt conviction come over me even stronger. Not that I wasn’t feeling it earlier, or else I wouldn’t have thought twice about the conversation, but after talking to Dale, it hit me a lot harder. If it is difficult for my husband who loves, honors, and respects me to keep his eyes focused ahead, then how much more difficult could it be for a man that may not have the same self-control? Sure, if a man wants to look, they are going to look, but why entice them? Is it possible that the thin, form-fitting yoga pants or leggings could make a married (or single) man look at a woman in a way he should only look at his wife?

That this is even slightly controversial says a lot more about the state of our culture than it does about Victoria Partridge.

I have some thoughts on this topic. Go figure. I am sure that my thoughts will draw the ire of some so I will save you the trouble of shouting the following at me:

SEXIST PIG!

MISOGYNIST!

PATRIARCHIALIST!

There, having that out of the way we can continue. It is odd that we can talk openly and frankly, even to the point of being awkward and creepy, about sex except if we suggest any sort of limitation or self-control. When someone suggests to college women that getting drunk to the point of being severely impaired in your ability to make rational decisions on actions you might regret later or even drinking to the point of passing out might just put you in serious risk, gets you labeled with all of he terms above and an apologist for the "rape culture". As others have pointed out this is like saying that the suggestion that you shouldn't leave your new car running with the doors open in a bad neighborhood is being an apologist for car theft. Saying "you should take reasonable and rational precautions to protect yourself" is not even close to saying "if you get drunk and get raped you had it coming" but you would think it was in our culture.

Back to the pants issue. The trend of wearing leggings and yoga pants has been a goldmine for many dudes like nothing men have seen since the advent of the bikini and the mini-skirt. Being uncharacteristically blunt, leggings leave pretty much nothing to the imagination and that is precisely what they are designed for. Every contour of her skin is on display under an awfully thin layer of fabric. Again, by design. I appreciate Victoria's  use of the word "entice" because I think it is an excellent word to label the impact leggings are designed to have.

I work in a place where the public comes and goes and a huge percentage of women are wearing leggings. I can watch my fellow men and you can see the heads swivel almost involuntarily. It is a cultural trend and it seems that a lot of Christian women are swept along by this tide just as so many Christians are by other cultural waves. Unfortunately we have come to a point where these sorts of conversations either don't happen at all because of a conservative setting where a sister wearing yoga pants in public is unthinkable or in the rest of the church where even the suggestion of common sense self-limitation is met with frothing at the mouth anger.

Before I get to the main issue, here are a couple of the most common responses....

You shouldn't be looking anyway, it is your problem!

Do you know why billboards along the highway have been an effective marketing tool for a long time? Because they work. Even if you aren't meaning to your eyes are drawn to a billboard because they are designed to attract attention. The same is true for neon signs. Also true for flashy jewelry. The same is true for any attention grabbing device. You get my point. Baggy sweat pants would be just as comfortable as leggings but they don't draw much attention. While some women clearly have not looked in the mirror before leaving the house in leggings you can't tell me that most don't check themselves out and wear leggings specifically because it shows off their hind end. Back in the 80's girls used to wear high-waisted (so their butt crack wasn't showing whenever they bent over) jeans that were so tight it had to be a major struggle just to get them on. Were they comfortable? I doubt it. Did they draw attention to their butt? You betcha.  It is absolutely true that I shouldn't be looking at other women. I think that most men struggle with this, that is why it gets special mention in the Bible. Turns out men and women are different and have different struggles and the Bible addresses those issues differently (but they are usually interconnected). It is almost like God is omniscient or something. I also have an obligation to not encourage my brother or sister to stumble. If they sin it is on them but I bear a different responsibility if I encourage it. I don't go to AA meetings and offer people there a beer. I don't leave a flash drive loaded with porn for someone I know is struggling with that issue. I don't leave stacks of money around someone who has a problem with stealing. You get my point. Life is hard enough to navigate in the old flesh with a new heart without intentionally and willfully making it harder for others in the name of "liberty". Paul had a lot to say about this and it is as true today as it was back then.

Well they are just comfortable!

Maybe, but so are lots of other outfits. To be blunt it might be comfy in the summer to wear nothing but my boxers but I don't do that, not around the house and certainly not in public. It might be comfy and convenient to wear your robe in the house after you shower but you don't go out like that (hopefully). It is about a sense of propriety. What you wear in public ought to be different from what you wear around the house and what you wear to bed. I am not advocating for a uniform or a burqa, nor am I a fan of forced formality in clothing, just some common sense and common courtesy.

Get ready, I am about to use the "M" word, the dirtiest word you can use in the church today. Leggings aren't really the issue. The ultimate issue here is about modesty and modesty is much more than not wearing revealing clothing. Or let me rephrase that. Modesty is more than not wearing revealing clothes but it is also not less than that. Paul wrote about modesty in a way that I think is profitable for the church today.

I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. (1 Tim 2:8-10)

Paul isn't really talking about jewelry or braided hair here, nor is he setting a minimalist standard. My wife and I don't wear our wedding rings anymore partly because of this verse but it is about so much more than that. Why do women wear costly attire and jewelry and spend a ton of time on their hair? Why do men buy sports cars or wear gear from their favorite sports team? In short to draw attention to themselves.  That is what this is really about. Leggings and yoga pants are just the latest fad to draw attention to women by enticing men to look at them lustfully. Whether it is leggings or costly jewelry for women or a new luxury car for men, we like to be noticed even if we don't like the way we are noticed. We ought to expect this from the world but as the church we ought to try something different. We ought to be marked by humility, by our good works in response to the Gospel, for our self-control and sobriety and most of all for our love of one another and of all men, even our enemies. There is a reason that virtually all of the qualities to be demonstrated by an elder are based in our public witness rather than on charisma or public speaking talents. People should notice us for how different we are and how consistent we are, not thrown about by every wind of the culture but standing firm on the ancient teachings of God's revelation.

I don't know much about her other than this one post but thanks to Victoria Partridge for sharing what was on her heart and for standing firm in the face of the slings and arrows of detractors. I wish more brothers and sisters in  the church had the courage of conviction to stand against the cultural tide rather than seeking to accommodate in every sense of the word. 

The Institutional Mindset and Gender Roles

There are some conversations that keep coming around and around so I blog about them again and again. Reformed theology used to be one of those but I haven't bothered in a while because it has been hashed over so many times that it just wore me out and the Arminian answers are just so awful. So now I write about things like non-violence which also gets a visceral reaction and of course gender. Today was one of those gender days and as usual the discussion has gone around in circles, circles based on whether we should examine what Scripture says to inform our decisions on application or whether we should look to see what Scripture doesn't say to override what it does. I know that is a loaded and smarmy statement. 

One of the common arguments against the historical and I would say glaringly clear teaching on gender in the Bible is the notion that Paul is addressing an issue in the culture of the day, making concessions or teaching for pragmatic reasons or dealing with some specific problem. The accuracy of this is pretty easy to ascertain by simply reading what Paul wrote. What is Paul's reasoning for his teaching on gender (emphasis mine)?

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (1 Tim 2:12-14)

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

(Eph 5:22-24)

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Cor 11:3)

For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. (1 Cor 11:7-9)

So we have the creation order. We have the relationship between Christ and the church. We have man as the glory of God but women as the glory of man. An image of male headship that is not incidental or cultural but intentional. God could have created Adam and Eve simultaneously but He did not. He made Adam, declared him incomplete and in need of a helper and created Eve out of Adam. There is a very explicit pattern here that is repeated in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 and it deals with the order and method of creation.

So what we have to work with is sufficient to inform our interpretation and application but what we don't have is almost as important. No hint of the culture of that day. No suggestion of pragmatic reasoning. Nothing that implies that this is something only for this time and place, having no universal application. I have said this all before but many who find the Biblical teaching on gender odious and embarrassing in our enlightened era simply refuse to accept it.

Here is what is so troubling about this to me. Because we can't get past our institutional religious setting we think that "If you ain't a pastor, you ain't nothing". The only service and leadership in the church that matters is "preaching". Ironically "preaching" as we understand it doesn't even appear in Scripture so we have elevated an extra-biblical practice to a position of overwhelming prominence and in doing so have diminished every other calling in the church and especially diminished the calling of wives and mothers. This is true even among those who, on the surface, reject institutional religion but still can't let go of that need for ecclesiastical recognition.

Being a mother and raising children. Caring for the home. Submitting to a husband who is often an idiot but needs your support anyway. Those are infinitely more important and difficult than preparing and delivering a 45 minute sermon once a week that no one will remember next month anyway. The church should be doing everything in our power to support and encourage our sisters in this noble endeavor. Instead we subtly look down on them and say they are not good enough. You need a career! You must be allowed to "preach"! You must be granted a religious title! Being a mother and wife is hard enough without piling on extra expectations. The simple fact of human beings is that we cannot do it all. We are not made to do it all. There are 24 hours in a day and about a third of them we need to sleep. There are only a limited number of years to bear children. We exist in time and space so if you are in location A doing activity Y you cannot also be in location B doing activity Z. We should encourage wives in what they already have on their plates instead of piling on more. 

Being a mom and wife is stressful enough without making our sisters feel like they are not doing enough. If you care about women, care enough to affirm and support their calling as women and quit trying to make them into something that God never intended regardless of what the culture around us might say.

Why Complementarianism?

John Piper, Tim Keller and Don Carson talk about why The Gospel Coalition is complementarian and why this is an important issue. The video is 17 minutes so it is not a quick watch and it covers some deep issues but I think it is worth your time. If you are not going to watch and interact with the video, please don't comment.

Why Is TGC Complementarian? from The Gospel Coalition on Vimeo.

 

I think Piper is at his best here and his best point is this one:

"We live in a culture where for the last 30 or 40 years, the collapse of the meaning of biblical masculinity has not produced a beautiful egalitarian society," Piper observes. "It has produced a brutal masculine society."

That is exactly true. I have been toying with a post about this but egalitarianism in the church and more broadly feminism in the culture has not made life better or happier or more fulfilling for women and it certainly has not been beneficial to families and especially not children. The only people it has benefited are those in the swelling population of child-men, men who reap the benefits of an egalitarian society but don't do much to contribute. It is the cruel irony of feminism that the primary beneficiary of feminism has been the most irresponsible of men.

This is an interesting video. Piper is right on the mark most of the time, again where he speaks of how we handle 1 Tim 2:13 or Ephesians 5 (at around the ten minute mark) and what that implies about how we handle Gospel texts as well as a powerful statement about how our unwillingness to stand against the culture on this issue speaks to whether we will stand for other issues.

I think they stretch the point a bit in places but I obviously believe this is an important issue Some suggest that these questions are divisive and distract us from the more important stuff. I reject the idea that we should ignore issues like this and just concentrate on the "big stuff". If God deigned to reveal and preserve something, He did so with a reason. As Carson points out, the relationship between husbands and wives is so deeply interwoven with so many other issues (esp. Christ and the church) that if we start to miss this issue we will start to miss other issues and pretty soon the church devolves into an anything goes religious club that does good work but misses the big truths that the church is founded on (for evidence of this see pretty much every "mainstream" and egalitarian denomination).

This is an unpopular  topic but one that demands more than platitudes and "I thinks". How we handle these passages speaks volumes about how consistent we are about other passages.

Sorry mom, what you do is meaningless

Yikes, I ran into an ugly morass of a feminist rant against women who let down the team by actually staying home and, the horror!, being a mother. Get a barf bag and click if you dare Elizabeth Wurtzel's screed in the Atlantic 1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible. Under the headline we read Being a mother isn't a real job -- and the men who run the world know it. You pretty much know what you are going to get after that....

What follows is a litany of ugly and often crude self-loathing silliness from a woman who apparently thinks that all stay at home moms are the bimbo trophy wives of domineering rich guys who spend their days shopping and going to yoga while hubby is at work. Here is a sampling...

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time -- by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits -- is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it? The whole point to begin with was that women were losing their minds pushing mops and strollers all day without a room or a salary of their own. 

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 And there really is only one kind of equality -- it precedes all the emotional hullabaloo -- and it's economic. If you can't pay your own rent, you are not an adult. You are a dependent.

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I have to admit that when I meet a woman who I know is a graduate of, say, Princeton -- one who has read The Second Sex and therefore ought to know better -- but is still a full-time wife, I feel betrayed. I'm not much of a moralist -- I have absolutely no right to be -- but in the interest of doing what's right both for me personally and for women generally, I have been strict with myself about earning my keep.  

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Because here's what happens when women go shopping at Chanel and get facials at Tracy Martyn when they should be wage-earning mensches: the war on women happens. 

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Most mothers have jobs because they need or want the money and fulfillment; only in rare cases are they driven by glory. To be a stay-at-home mom is a privilege, and most of the housewives I have ever met -- none of whom do anything around the house -- live in New York City and Los Angeles, far from Peoria. Only in these major metropolises are there the kinds of jobs in finance and entertainment that allow for a family to live luxe on a single income. In any case, having forgotten everything but the lotus position, these women are the reason their husbands think all women are dumb, and I don't blame them.

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Hilary Rosen would not have been so quick to be so super sorry for saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life if we weren't all made more than a wee bit nervous by our own biases, which is that being a mother isn't really work. Yes, of course, it's something -- actually, it's something almost every woman at some time does, some brilliantly and some brutishly and most in the boring middle of making okay meals and decent kid conversation. But let's face it: It is not a selective position. A job that anyone can have is not a job, it's a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation). Even moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers, so it is apparently taking up the time of about 14 percent of a paid position. And all the cultish glorification of home and hearth still leaves us in a world where most of the people paid to chef and chauffeur in the commercial world are men. Which is to say, something becomes a job when you are paid for it -- and until then, it's just a part of life. 

Yikes. Shockingly a woman who is a lawyer in New York City doesn't seem to get what life is like in the rest of the country where being a mother rather than an employee is hardly a glamorous life of pedicures and Chanel. Wouldn't have expected that. I found it especially odd that she seems to think that a leaving home mom somehow spends almost as much time with their kids as an "unemployed mother" (and the notion of that phrase being used to describe women who raise children is worth an entire post of it's own). Maybe if you count the time sleeping as "spending time" with your kids that makes some sense. Since kids leave for school and return from school at generally different times than mom, many children are not in school yet because they are under 5 and adding in the 1/4 of the year or more that kids are not in school, that idea is ridiculous on its face. Thus we have a reminder of the old saying that statistics never lie but liars use statistics.

As Robert VerBruggen writes in his rebuttal, Elizabeth Wurtzel Should Get Out More, even a half-hearted attempt to gather some facts rather than relying on anecdotal evidence gathered in an atypical city like New York would reveal stats like...

65 percent of married women who stay home with children under 18 years old live in households that earn less than $75,000 a year, according to the most recent data from the United States Census Bureau.

Turns out that being a stay at home mom is not the sole privilege of the wealthy but is actually a conscious choice made by many middle-class families that make up 2/3 of the stay at home mom population. Kind of deflates the whole premise of her article but hey that is OK because most of the people reading her article have the same myopic vision of American family life. Anything that affirms their worldview is fine and dandy.

While Ms. Wurtzel gets essentially nothing right in her entire essay, an impressive feat, there is one truth that is inadvertently written.  Being a mother isn't a job. It is a calling and a far more important one than being a lawyer, one that doesn't come with a pension or vacation time or a time clock. There is indeed a war on women and it has been going on for decades, a war against mothers that has led to generations of single mothers, millions of aborted children and an entire population of children who have raised themselves. Instead of berating women who choose to raise their children in a vain attempt to validate her own life, perhaps Ms. Wurtzel could try to encourage those who are striving to raise children in a culture that demeans and diminishes the value of home and family.

A War On Women? No. A War On Mothers? Oh Yes.

The news media is beating the America public over the head with their invented notion of a "War on Women", a war of course perpetrated by evil conservatives as opposed to the war on unborn women waged by liberals. I digress. What the past 24 hours or so has shown us is that there is indeed a war going on in the culture but the target is not women in general but mothers. The internet is all a twitter (pun intended) over the intemperate and ugly remarks made by one Hilary Rosen at CNN.

“Guess what, (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Hilary Rosen said Wednesday evening on CNN.

These foolish comments, made by a lesbian and homosexual advocate who adopted two children with her now ex-girlfriend, making her an expert on motherhood, suggest that Ann Romney, a stay at home mother of five children, doesn't know the first thing about working. Since Ms. Rosen has had an illustrious and prestigious career, it can be assumed that her children have spent much of their life in the care of professional care-givers while she went to work to do Super Important Stuff like defending huge music corporations from illlegal file sharing. What is raising kids compared to that? Given that reality I can step in and assure her that stay-at-home moms work far harder with fewer breaks than any high powered executive or lawyer or whatever else. As Mrs. Romney has also battled multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, she should be commended for her diligence as a mother, not chastised by someone like Ms. Rosen. Ms. Rosen has finally come out and apologized for her foolish comments but not before she penned an angry screed for CNN.

Spare me the faux anger from the right who view the issue of women's rights and advancement as a way to score political points. When it comes to supporting policies that would actually help women, their silence has been deafening. I don't need lectures from the Republican National Committee on supporting women and fighting to increase opportunities for women; I've been doing it my whole career.

The irnoy of those comments is obvious to anyone. Who made things like government mandated birth control and funding for abortion providers part of the political battlefield? Here is a hint, it was not "the right". For a woman who can with a straight face call abortions on demand and subsidized by tax payers a "women's health issue", reality is not really relevant. I am not sure how aborting tens of millions of tiny women is "increasing opportunities". I guess those women who have their lives snuffed out in the womb won't compete for jobs with other women.

These comments are ignorant but they expose an important worldview. While liberals across the board have been tripping over themselves to repudiate what she said, the underlying view of motherhood and women was exposed for all the world to see. Certainly Mrs. Romney, the wife of a very wealthy and influential man, did not have some of the same concerns that the wife of a bus driver would have but all of the money in the world cannot change the very difficult and often thankless job of being a mother. There is an ugly, unstated but assumed view that women who "just stay home" are somehow "letting down the team" and settling for being "just a mom". Even the cultural assumptions are biased against mothers. We call women who stay home and raise their kids "stay at home moms" but we don't refer to mothers who leave their kids in the care of someone when they go to work as "leave home moms". To stay home and raise your children rather than subcontracting that task out to someone else requires a woman who has the strength, humility and conviction to do something sneered at by a small minority of vocal and influential women, standing against the overwhelming weight of our culture to do what women for thousands of years have done without complaint, namely being the primary caregiver and molder of the next generation.

Millions of women stay home with their children but it has become harder and less common over the last few decades. Many social observers have noted that being a stay at home mom is rapidly becoming a status symbol reserved for precisely the sort of women, like Ann Romney, that Ms. Rosen takes shots at. We cannot have a society where choosing to be a mom rather than an employee is a luxury reserved only for the wealthiest families. If feminists and their allies on the left truly cared about women in general and working mothers in particular they would work to enact policies that make it easier for women to choose to stay home. After all, isn't "choice" the demigod of the left?

The cult of child hatred

James Taranto, a secular editor for the Wall Street Journal, posted an interesting item last week as part of his popular "best of the web today" column, The War on Fertility. James was looking at an essay by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility. Apparently Ms. Miller takes umbrage that some Republican presidential candidates have large families and have the arrogance to not hide them away during the campaign. If you missed this column, you need to read it because it is equal parts fascinating look into the anti-child mindview and important lesson for believers. Here is the intro...

Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.”


There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Especially worrisome is the inevitable corollary to that belief: Women should put their natural fertility first — before their brains, before their ability to earn a living, before their independence — because that’s what God wants.

Gasp, there is nothing worse than a believer that...believes! It cracks me up that she has assigned a blanket, unspoken motivation that covers all of the past and present republican candidates even though that group contains a libertarian Christian man in his 70's, a much younger evangelical woman, a Roman Catholic and a mormon. She seems more put out by large, intact families than by Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery.

Needless to say, when she writes "There's nothing wrong with big families, of course", it is inevitable that she does think there is something very wrong with having a large family, namely that having a large family and daring to show them in public is somehow striking a blow against "women's reproductive freedom". How else to explain the "smug fecundity" of these...these....parents!

Of particular and unpleasant interest are the comments that follow her essay. If you thought she was a bit over the top, you ain't seen nothing yet! It is always instructive as well as ironic to read the vitriolic rants of people spewing hatred, stereotypes and intolerance toward those they accuse of....hatred, stereotypes and intolerance.

I have never, not once, heard anyone among the "Christian right" tout any of the candidates for their large family size. That doesn't mean that nobody has made that case but I haven't seen it and I certainly spend more than my fair share of time reading places where that should come up. This isn't really an issue among the "Christian right" at all as much as it is a visceral reaction among the secular Left to large families, at least large in the eyes of people in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles what qualifies as a large family. Where we live a family with five kids is not all that unusual but I can assure you that even in the Midwest large families garner a gasp and head shake response, perhaps more polite than in larger population centers but a shocked and disbelieving reaction regardless.

Although many people would classify me as intolerant because, for example, I think murdering unborn children is wrong, I don't presume to tell anyone else how many children to have. Of course I also don't presume to tell anyone how many children are enough. I think that decision is something left to each family to decide for themselves. For Christians it becomes more complex because we do have some explicit teaching from the Bible that describes children as a blessing from God which we ought to embrace rather than avoid, something that is formative rather than something to put off until the last moment. That doesn't mean that the Quiverfull folks are correct but I certainly am more sympathetic to their view than those who view children in a manner little different from the world.

That really isn't my point here. It is hardly news that "traditional" families seem to agitate people of a certain political viewpoint, especially if they are large families. Of greater concern to me, and what is sure to get some people wound up, is the way that feminism is being integrated into the church. From Taranto's post:

...why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it's none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

James Taranto, an admitted unbeliever, seems to understand something that a lot of Christians are missing. Feminism is not a force for the "liberation" of women, it is a method for ideological transformation. A lot of Christian are buying into a form of feminism dressed up in Christian sounding language and in doing so are unwittingly buying into a worldview that has a goal far beyond women pastors. It is a worldview that diminishes the importance of family, replaces mothers with institutionalized childcare and ultimately denies the image-bearer understanding of humanity as unique in the world. It is lived out in the disbelieving looks large families get and the subtle insults (don't you know what causes that?) even in the church and in the burgeoning literature of neo-feminist Christians who consistently misinterpret and misrepresent Galatians 3:28.

I make no apology for sounding the warning against the influence of feminism in the church. To me it is no different than any other worldly influence, whether patriotism or materialism or environmentalism, that seeks to pervert and diminish the worldview that should be the focus of Christians. Just as patriotism conflates national identity with the church and militarism flips the peacemaking life of the disciple on its head, feminism seeks to replace the complementary and interdependent structure of the family with the radical but false independent life that reduces women to occasional baby-makers before sending them back into the work force as a unit of production. Let me be clear, women are not "liberated" by going to work outside of the home. We are living in a culture that rapidly is becoming one where staying at home, once the norm, is becoming something only the very well to do can afford (see this excellent comment on this very topic by the same columnist, James Taranto: The Unchained Woman). When staying at home with your children becomes a sort of luxury good and status symbol, who is really benefiting from feminism? Not the women who scramble all week to get their kids up, ready for school and daycare, rush to drop them off before trudging off to work only to do the same scramble in reverse at the end of the day. Certainly not the children who are raised by and large by strangers because the harried schedule of their parents and economic pressure of a two-income society reserves full-time parenting to the country club elites.

As the church we are called to look at life and the world differently, to not be carried along by every wind and whim of the culture but to hold fast to the timeless and counter-cultural teaching of Scrpture. This is true for the family more than almost any other facet of life and not surprisingly the family is often ground zero for attacks from the Enemy. Not every Christians is called or able to have a large family and having a large family is not a sure sign of theological maturity but we must be wary of worldviews that teach beliefs that run contrary to the Bible. Even if those beliefs are not overtly anti-Christian we must examine the underlying worldview of those who teach worldviews contrary to Scripture, whether in the family, in education, in the church or anywhere else. Although some honest opponents of the faith will be open about their opposition, many others utilize a more subtle influence that often is dressed in religious language and aimed at tickling our ears. We must constantly be wary and hold up every belief to the Word and the influence of the Spirit working in conjunction. Otherwise we invariably will be led astray by those who deny the Son of God. The more we look and think like the world, the less we look and think like Jesus.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)

The neo-Reformed shock jock versus the neo-feminist egalitarian

In one corner we have the bad boy of the "young, restless, reformed" crowd, Mark Driscoll.

In the other corner we have the popular egalitarian blogger/author/speaker Rachel Held Evans.

The main event? A post by Mark Driscoll on Facebook that was supposed to be funny but came across as anything but:

So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you’ve ever personally witnessed?

Needless to say this didn't sit well.

This is going to be a long post, so I am going to throw a break in. If you are interested readig in the rest, follow the link below...

A great story from the sports world

There was a high school sports report that I really liked. It had to do with a female high school wrestler in Iowa winning in the state tourney for the first time ever.

I didn’t like it because I think it is swell that a girl is wrestling in the state tourney. I find that highly inappropriate. I liked it because of the reason she won. The young woman, Cassy Herkelman, won when her opponent Joel Northrup, the fifth seed at 103 pounds who came in third in the state tourney as a freshman last year elected to forfeit the match. Here is why:

Northrup, a sophomore at Linn-Mar (Iowa) High, cited his personal faith as the motivating force for his forfeit. The withdrawal ensures he can finish no higher than third at the tournament, which follows his third-place finish in the 103-pound classification as a freshman.

"I have a tremendous amount of respect for Cassy and Megan [Black] and their accomplishments," Northrup said in a statement given to the media following his official forfeit. "However, wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times.

"As a matter of conscience and faith, I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

That is praiseworthy indeed. In a world where personal accomplishment trumps many values, this is a wonderful stand by this young man. I wrestled in high school and getting to the state tourney is a dream and lifelong goal for many of these young men. To willingly forfeit against an opponent as a matter of conscience takes an incredible display of conviction. Wrestling is a violent and close contact sport and Joel is precisely right that it is highly inappropriate for boys and girls to be wrestling against one another. I hope he wins out in the tournament and gets to compete for third place. As a sophomore he will have two more years to pursue a state championship but at least for this year his convictions triumphed over his ambition and for that I applaud him and his family.

Sarah Palin on Neanderthals who dare question feminist dogma

This seems to be an odd position for someone who touts herself as a social conservative and defender of traditional values. From WorldNetDaily comes this telling snippet from an interview with Sarah Palin on Fox news….

"It kind of seems, Geraldine, that some things haven't changed," Palin said. "There are still the Neanderthals out there who pick on the petty, little, superficial, meaningless things – like looks, like whether you can or can't work outside of the home if you have small children – all those type of things where I would so hope that at some point those Neanderthals will evolve into something a bit more with it, a bit more modern, and a bit more understanding that, yeah, women can accomplish much."

Petty? You can make arguments on either end of the political spectrum or even try to use some Biblical support for it but the topic of whether or not women should work outside of the home when they have small children is anything but “petty”. I would go so far as to make the link between absentee parenting and much of the social ills we experience in America. I think having a parent at home is far more important than whether we allow/mandate prayer in schools or have textbooks that talk about the religious beliefs of the Founders or whether we allow Ten Commandments monuments on public ground.

I think women or at least one parent should stay home with their children. I don't apologize for that view and neither should anyone else. I believe it is unhealthy for kids to be raised by strangers or even worse to be hanging around at home alone. It may be unkind to bring this up but I wonder if Ms. Palin would be a grandmother already if she were at home instead of chasing fame and personal glory?

Furthermore, the prevalence of two-income families where the second income is superfluous has been, in my humble opinion, disastrous for our economic well-being and our families. In the not too distant past, most families survived quite nicely on a single income where the father worked and the mother stayed home to care for the home and the children. As we have increased the number of women working outside of the home in an misguided attempt to ”empower” women, we have seen a change in our economy. Today many, if not most, families are two wager-earner families. More people are putting off marriage and consequently putting off children while men and women alike establish their careers. By the time they get married and eventually start having kids, they are used to the things in life that two people working full-time can afford to buy. It is perceived to be much harder to make ends meet on one salary today but we used to do so quite commonly. What happened?

If you needed further proof that Sarah Palin is more useful as a spokesperson and someone to rally the troops than as a serious leader, this is it. There are a lot of people who think that women ought to have home and children as their first priority. Many of them are exactly the kind of people who Palin would depend on to win the GOP nomination. Referring to us as “Neanderthals” is probably not going to win her many votes. There is a new strain of “conservative” women who seem to think that “traditional” values boil down to opposing gay marriage and abortion while embracing a neo-feminist view of the family.

Ms. Palin, I am not really interested in “evolving” into something “more modern” if that means that we consign an ever larger number of our children to the tender mercies of day care workers and public school officials or worse yet left to fend for themselves day after day after school. I am quite convinced that “women can accomplish much” but I also think that they can do so with the children God has placed under their care instead of seeking personal glory in the workplace. What is the greater testimony of a strong woman, children who are raised well by their mother or a list of accolades from work and a high balance in your 401(k)? If a woman chooses to work outside of the home, that is between her and her husband but please let’s not resort to petty and ignorant name-calling of those who think that decision is not in the best interest of children. That is the sort of behavior I expect from political liberals who can’t argue their positions on merit, not from someone who many people think is a champion of conservative values.

Can women work outside of the home? Sure. Are there circumstances where this is actually necessary as opposed to a matter of preference? Absolutely. Is it generally better wherever possible for women to stay at home and care for their children? You betcha!

Feminism equals unhappy women

Read this essay from Albert Mohler. I think the truth is inescapable here, women were sold a mess of pottage in "feminism" which has led to a generation of "liberated" and miserable women and we all, men, women and especially children, are paying the bill for the lie sold to women. Feminism hasn't improved the lives of women, it has made them unhappier and more stressed out. 30 years of feminism has left America unhappier, more unstable and more confused than ever.

Thanks Gloria Steinem!

Admitting when you are right

In the political world beyond the health care debate, there is a minor kerfuffle in the Virginia governors race. The Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell, is being attacked based on a thesis he wrote 20 years ago when a law student at Regent University, known for its connection to founder Pat Robertson. This thesis is just chock full of juicy tidbit being used by the Democrat candidate governor, Creigh Deeds, to paint McDonnell as a frothing at the mouth right winger who wants men to club their wives and drag them back to the cave.

What are these horrific positions that Bob McDonnell holds?

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

Horror! Traditional families are good! Less government intrusion is good! How backwards, what a Neanderthal!

Actually, I read that and said: right on!

I wish Bob McDonnell would come out and say what he should say: that many of those positions were right when he wrote them and they are right now. The tax system which incentives women to abandon their kids into day care has been a negative for America, culturally and economically. Divorce is too easy in America and maybe it would be good if couples were encouraged to stay together. Not much of what Bob McDonnell wrote is offensive to me and was the majority report in America until recently. Instead of standing up and defending what he clearly believed, he is running as fast as he can. I am no sure which is more troubling, that he refuses to stand up for what he believes or that he is willing to say what he thinks he needed to in college and willing to say something different to advance his own political agenda.

Ever since the Robert Bork hearings, the real political legacy of Ted Kennedy, politicians of all stripes are hiding from taking real stands. I wish we could have a real conversation about this stuff. We live in a world where no one is allowed to have a strongly held opinion and we are left with soundbytes and gotcha politics. Political discourse has suffered for it and as a country we are worse off fot not having real conversations about real issues.

Abortion empowers men, not women

I read a very interesting article in First Things magazine at my parents house (apparently they still publish magazines in hard copy, not just online. Who knew?) The article, Her Choice, Her Problem, argues that by making "reproductive choice" a hallmark of feminism, that in effect women bear more of the responsibility of child rearing and sexual restraint, not less. Abortion actually makes women less empowered and makes men more empowered by making them less responsible for the consequences of sex. Very interesting argument, yet another nail in the coffin that houses the lie that abortion is a liberator of women.

The feminist betrayal of women

The ugly secret of feminism is that it has not made women better off or happier. In fact just the opposite is true.

The Wall Street Journal asks: Why aren't women happier? and it is a fascinating question. It comes in response to a new report on the general happiness of women in America that just came out and shockingly it turns out that women are less happy now than they were 35 years ago. What?! How can that be? Allow me to express some thoughts….

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not a woman)

Some of the theories behind this from the secular media have to do with women not acclimating to their new opportunities quickly enough, that these great opportunities make women feel depressed because they haven’t gained the whole world all at once. In other words, expectations rose faster than social change and women felt left behind. So the problem is not the enormous shift in women’s roles and expectations, but rather because things haven’t changed in reality fast enough.

May I pose a different theory? Women are not as happy because feminism has sold them a mess of pottage. A small handful of women convinced vast swaths of the rest of the women in this country that what they thought they really wanted was not only not what they wanted but that in fact desiring to be a wife and a mom was something to be ashamed of. Even now women who choose to stay at home with their children are accused of “letting down the team”, which assume that the “cause” of feminism takes priority over the raising of children.

Thirty five years ago, in 1974, the percentage of women in the work force was much lower than it is today. With the advent of mass contraception, it was far easier for women to control, delay or even prevent having children. This helped drive women into the workforce in greater and greater numbers. According to the Department of Labor, in 2008 59.5% of women were in the workforce (defined as working or actively looking for work). In 2002, 55% of women with infant children were in the workforce versus 31% in 1976. This has led to the creation of more than 687,000 daycare centers.Women are already 46.5% of the workforce and with layoffs hitting male dominated professions, it is quite possible that we will see even this year women becoming the majority of the workforce. That is a big deal culturally to have our workforce become majority female. Women are working more and in a wider variety of industries and professions than ever before. Yet they are less happy.

Meanwhile, as women enter the workforce a couple of things happen simultaneously. The number of workers goes up and that supply has a negative impact on labor demand and wages. As society shifts to a two income family labor and wage norm, it becomes progressively harder to make it on one income. The cause and effect are the inverse of what we are told; it is harder to survive on one income precisely because so many families have elected the two income model. Take away the accessibility of revolving credit, leading to enormous amounts of unsecured debt driven consumption, and I think you would find that the buying power of a single income family 35 years ago is pretty similar to the buying power of a two income family today.

While mothers and fathers are working, houses sit empty during the day and children are warehoused somewhere else. Generation after generation of kids are abandoned into the system of daycare, preschool and public school by their parents. As I cited above, according to the U.S. Census Bureau there are more than 687,000 daycare centers in America. 69,000 of the largest centers employ three quarters of a million employees (primarily women I assume) to watch kids so that other women can go to work. Ultimately this leads to two million preschoolers in day care out of around 10 million preschool children. One out of five preschoolers is being raised by someone other than their parents for the majority of their waking hours. We are reaping the harvest of generations of latchkey kids who got nice vacations and a TV in their room but essentially raised themselves under the influence of their peers, the television and the internet and under the supervision of disinterested strangers instead of by their mothers. Little wonder we find nation in the state it is in today.

Maybe what a lot of women want is to be a mom and what a lot of moms want is to be...a mom? Not a super mom who juggles a career and a couple of kids, but just a mom. Can a few extra bucks make up for dropping off your eight week old infant at daycare where they will spend 45 hours a week being watched by someone else until they are old enough for school? Is that really making women feel fulfilled? Maybe a group of angry, bitter women in the media and academia don’t really understand what drives the majority of women. Is it that hard to believe that women and men have different goals and motivations?

The truth is that the feminist movement has not "liberated" women or made their lives better, but has instead made their lives worse. Women are more stressed and less happy now in spite of the utopian promises that women's liberation promised. Women were sold a bill of goods by feminism and now society as a whole is paying.