Tag Archives: feminism

Pro-Choice is Not The Virtuous Choice

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OK, so let’s get down to fundamentals. If you are pro-choice, your argument is founded on an assumption of higher moral standing. You are fighting for rights, you are taking the high road, you aren’t one of those who want to control women, etc. You are more virtuous, and you signal that fact all you can.

But you are not more virtuous. In fact, your position has no virtue at all.

The prochoice position depends on dehumanizing or otherwise negating the worth of other human beings. Those human beings are the most helpless and innocent there are.

The pro-choice position depends on then advocating for their deaths!

It is all about death. Destruction. Hopelessness. Victimization. Elitism. The advocacy of privilege. The strong imposing their power over the weak. Manipulation. Disenfranchisement. Injustice.

That is my premise, as it ought to be the pro-life movement’s premise. Before you pivot/deflect to: “What about the women’s rights?” please deal with this fundamental question first.

Now please defend your pro-death position.

Dependence is Good: The Church

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I’ve already written on why Submission Is Good. Surprise! I also think dependence is a good thing.

In the Body of Christ, we are absolutely made for dependence. We are simply not designed to be independent. Dependence vs. the entitlement of self-determination.  Can I put self-determination in real words?

You’re not the boss of me. You can’t tell me what to do.

I’m over 18; nobody tells me what to do.

Get off my back.

It’s my body. It’s my life. It’s my business.

I need to find myself.

I want to make a difference.

I’m just not being fed at this church anymore.

As long as I have Jesus and my Bible, I’m good.

We’re looking for a church which has a better youth group/ music which I can worship to/ is more welcoming/ has a better Sunday School/ where I like the pastor/ where I feel comfortable…

…which isn’t full of hypocrites.

I’m leaving this church because I can’t exercise my gifts here. I’m a second-class citizen.

Let me share something in my history. We started homeschooling not long after it became legal in our state, about 25 years ago. During some of those early years, we were immersed in a subculture which defined itself by its home orientation.

There was a strong pull toward the idea of home-centered everything: home education, home church, home birth, home business. Most of this is healthy and creative, though some people took it to more extreme places, raising families on remote farms and eschewing worldly things like store-bought soap and TV. After all, the family home was designed to be the hothouse for growing little people.

Endlessly discussed and promoted on email loops was the thought that we ought to be amongst like-minded others. We were encouraged to find a like-minded church, meaning a church where everybody else homeschooled, home birthed, home businessed, etc. Where everyone was on the same page.

Right there in the supposed pot o’ gold of independent thinking, I found the same old groupthink. Commenters were forever looking down on those who wandered unenlightened into their like-minded circle. I loved the home-centered life but I could see that, for some,  the community had become a fortress.

At this same time, we found a church home where there was only one other homeschooling family, where an overwhelming majority of families had two children, and where most of the women were professionals with substantial careers. Yet there was no question that this was the place for us.

And a surprising thing happened. God was able to speak to me through these people. I learned that like-mindedness isn’t superficial.

We share the one and only thing that matters: Jesus Christ. We are each a member of his Body. Our fellowship is in Him. We already share a foundation of like-mindedness:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Philippians 2)

When God uses the instrument of someone who doesn’t look like me to teach me something He wants me to understand, I am not in a position to invalidate his message. Without the insights of other people God has put in my life, I would be much, much poorer.  Some of these insights were natural, drawn from a well of good sense born of  experience which cost something; some were given to me straight from God through people who were willing, though sometimes unwitting, conduits.

In God’s gentle irony, I who spent most of my adult life avoiding women’s ministry, am now helping to lead a women’s  ministry. I didn’t get the joke the first time: I swore my kids would never participate in youth group, and two years later I was among a group of parent-leaders.

In the process of helping to create a new ministry, I have learned a great deal about being part of a community. I am dependent on other imperfect human beings whose flaws I can plainly see, and I must trust that I can be lead by their wisdom. If I’m honest, the only  flaws I can’t see are mine.

In what my earlier email friends would call a like-minded church, where you feel comfortable, where most everyone is cool like you and is on the same page of the same book from the same library…you are unlikely to be stretched. You are unlikely to hear anything challenging, critical, instructive or helpful. You are likely to have your beliefs and opinions massaged but not questioned. You are unlikely to grow.

You are unlikely to place yourself under authority. You are unlikely to be humbled by becoming obedient, as even Christ was.

We are meant to see our lives in the context of others who share our lives. And God will place us among a diversity which matters: not the superficial diversity we tend to look for, but differences which include just what we need.

When I consider only myself, as our culture expects, I dismiss the complements, the diversity, the wisdom that God knows I need which comes from foreign views to mine. If I dismiss the wisdom from people who I don’t feel I relate to, I dismiss what Almighty God is trying to tell me. Yep, that person you thought was kinda boring and who (in your opinion) doesn’t have a clue fashion-wise and listens to lame music…did she just say something absolutely brilliant which was precisely what you needed to hear? I think God has a good-natured laugh when our pride gets whacked upside the head.

God places us in this family community, and asks us to submit to dependence on others,  so that we learn how to live among others with integrity. That’s easy when we’re babies but gets harder as we grow. By the time we reach some culturally arbitrary measure of adulthood, we are convinced that we don’t need no help from nobody.

We starve ourselves by cutting off the sources of wisdom he has prepared for us, by substituting internet fellowship for face-to-face, life-to-life, iron-to-iron human fellowship. We aren’t accountable to grow and change by anyone we meet by pixel. We become arrogant. It’s the Christian’s version know-it–all-ism.

God wants us in accountable relationships, all of us; honoring authority and submitting to teaching, exhortation and correction. He wants us supported by our real spiritual siblings, and he wants us to support in turn. How will we bear one another’s burdens if we never make it to church? How will we lay down our lives for one another if we’re off on our own island? How will we share our lives with people we only occasionally visit? God calls us to be part of community. We are never expected to be lone wolves or individuals.

God makes us part of the true Church universal, the Body of Christ, the second we choose relationship with him. That’s the big picture. But he also calls us to commit to a specific, local group of real people in continuous relationship. It’s almost impossible to live out the commands for growing within His Body without committing to that church experience.

Study all the one anothers in the New Testament. The picture you discover is one of an intimate, inter-dependent, loving family of (true) like-minded, fallible, needy people. The gates of hell will never prevail against this.

In the church, we are made for dependence.

 

 

Brainless, Faithless, Heartless, Mindless

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Romans 1:31 describes a particular group of committed ungodly  people this way.  I’ll give three translations of the same passage:

 …without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful…

…they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless…

…void of understanding, faithless, without natural affection, unmerciful…

Our cultural arbiters’ latest lesson on the state of women’s rights:

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Hardly clothed beefy Beyonce dancing/contorting along with a cohort of other hardly-dressed women at some awards show, and, reportedly making it impossble to avoid the visual assault of gyrating behinds right in your face. The song ending with Beyonce silhouetted before a gigantic lighted word: FEMINISM.

(Notable that she was a tiny little woman dwarfed by that word?)

In other words, girls, this is feminism.  What you just watched is the essence of feminism.

The essence of feminism is…the objectification of women…by women? You’re a thing. Happy now?

So being a true feminist means empowering yourself by means of being as sexually provocative, as sexually explicit, and as sexually active as possible, as early as possible. Without consequence, in fairy feminist land. And that’s all.

Explain to me again why anyone wants to be called a feminist?

Forgive me, but there is no term more amorphous today than “feminism.” No two feminists seem to share the same definition. I have seen no–not one–discussion on the blogosphere or other social media wherein at least one woman is not compelled to explain what feminism ISN’T, really.  You thought it was Gloria Steinem and her fish/bicycle, or lesbianism, or being pro-abortion.  Silly, it’s not any of those things.

It’s what I want to believe it is.  It’s just fairness and equal pay for equal work. That’s all.

Those other things like:  the absolute right to abort your child, the absolute right to free-for-me-but-taxpayer-funded contraceptives, contention between the sexes, bisexuality, lesbianism, male-hating, goddess worship, gender vs. sex, “rape culture”, eternal conflict over the “division of domestic labor”, patriarchy, victimhood…don’t have anything to do with feminism.  Because I don’t want them to.

Yet I hear mainstream women, Christian women, declare proudly that they are feminists. You know, what they mean by feminism.

Isn’t it time to acknowledge that the thing you want feminism to be isn’t what it really is? Maybe you should split off and found another movement which is about fairness and harmony. Cause that sure ain’t feminism.

And the essence of feminism sure isn’t about letting women be women, and letting little girls be little girls.

Bad Decision

It’s sad.  Because among other things, I think feminism has robbed feminist women of sexual satisfaction.

It’s convinced them that it is merely a mechanical act, a pressure valve.

Or a power play, wherein your partner is a thing to be used and exalted over. Sound familiar?

Feminism has made the object of sexual satisfaction the self, robbing women  of emotional connection with a partner. Like it or not, the point of sex is for two people to complement each other by being united into one. Real sexual intimacy is an act of the will involving the whole person, body, soul, emotion.

And they have separated sex from its intrinsic component—fruitfulness. Sexual intimacy is designed to potentially result in reproduction.  Modern women are persuaded that their greatest fear is a child. That their greatest enemy is a baby. It is the worst possible thing, and an abject failure. It has made us fear our fruitfulness instead of glorying in our design.

The kind of empowering sex they promote makes it all about me, not about him or about us.

 

Brainless, faithless, heartless, and mindless sounds like a fitting description of feminism. Hello–Feminism is Marxism, plain and simple. Intentional violent struggle between opposed groups for the purpose of bringing about change in the power structure.

Where’s the violence?  Do 50 million count? Ladies, when oppression falls, it’s not the women who are the victims.

On Being a Parasite

“[Housewives] are mindless and thing-hungry…not people. [Housework] is peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. [It] arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity with an inevitably weak core of self…. [Housewives] are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps. [The] conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife.” – Betty Friedan

(Someone must have cleaned her house. Can you feel the elitism?)

“[Housewives] are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.” ~ Gloria Steinem, “What It Would Be Like If Women Win,” Time, August 31, 1970.

“A parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism…the [housewife’s] labor does not even tend toward the creation of anything durable…. [W]oman’s work within the home [is] not directly useful to society, produces nothing. [The housewife] is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. It is for their common welfare that the situation must be altered by prohibiting marriage as a ‘career’ for woman.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.

Who is the parasite?

Whose hoped-for world view requires a paradigm shift in the order of the whole world until now?  Whose requires, before it can be operational, that almost every single member of society be indoctrinated into a mindset which is contrary to that which has been built by the consensus of all societies everywhere?

Who is the parasite?  Which woman is living upon the structure of the work of the other woman?  Without women everywhere occupying their natural or Biblical or traditional roles, keeping society running and thriving, the feminist would not be able to survive.  She stands on the shoulders of a societal structure created by God, manifested by the lives and work of multitudes of women before her, and disdains them.

The activist feminist is a spoiler, a crank. She is an elitist, a nasty parasite, a spoiled child.  She is very much a first-world creation; no one in the 2nd world on down would have time for such gratuitous fluff.

And don’t get me started on the utter privileged elitism of the anti-child wing of the movement. That’s another blog or hundred.

So again, why do we want to be feminists?