All posts by Wintery Knight

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Barbara Kay writes the best essay against feminism ever written

Let me introduce the ideology of feminism with a quote from a founder of the feminist movement.

“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

Here is the greatest essay ever written against feminism – written by Barbara Kay.

Introduction:

The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years.

This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal “system”, but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.

Her first point:

As a result of feminists’ promotion of career equity with men and unrestrained sexual experimentation over early and faithful commitment, women are having fewer children later, and many are having none. Consequently, birthrates are down in all western countries, in many below the replacement levels. Canada’s current fertility rate is 1.54 per woman, behind one-child China’s 1.7.

Sadly, many women realize they want to have children, but too late. They were not warned by their Women’s Studies teachers or by feminist commentators that fertility peaks by age 25, or that late pregnancies carry elevated risks, or that induced abortions pose a risk of pre-term delivery in future pregnancies.

Abortion is now such a commonplace here that it is used as a backup form of birth control. Abortions in Quebec have doubled in the last 10 years: in 1998 16 percent of pregnancies resulted in abortion. Today 30 percent do. You don’t have to be a religious Christian to find that statistic disturbing.

All of these realities are directly traceable to feminist doctrine. Feminists’ original goal may not have been the intention to preside over the actual demographic decline of western civilization. Their goal was to empower women. But as the old saying goes, when you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.

Her second point:

Misandry, which is the female equivalent of misogyny (misanthropy is a hatred of humankind), is now entrenched in our public discourse, our education system and social services. Misandry flies beneath most people’s radar, because we have become compliant in the acceptance of theories that have nothing to do with reality, and compliant in the speech codes that accompany that tendency.

Denigration of men in ways both casual and formal are a commonplace in society.

[…]For overt misandry, one has only to survey the industry around domestic violence. You could be forgiven for thinking that domestic violence is a one-way street, for that is certainly the impression one has from the fact that there are innumerable tax-funded shelters for abused women, none for abused men, unlimited funds for campaigns to raise consciousness around abused women, none for abused men. There is not a single social services agency or charity in Canada advertising “family services” that offers counseling, shelter or legal services for men who have been physically abused by women.

Her third point:

I want to talk about the implosion of the traditional family, which can be directly traced to feminism’s repudiation of normative marriage and the role of fathers as vital to a child’s psychological well-being. In June 2006 I wrote about the imbalance, in women’s favour, in the family law system: 90 per cent of contested custody suits end in sole custody awarded to the mother. Such a skewed percentage is unthinkable in any other branch of law.

The family law system is now systemically colonized by radical feminists. Their goal is the incremental legal eclipse of men’s influence over women’s spheres of “identity” interests, which includes children. To that end the custody issue has become a front line in the gender wars, supported by all feminist academics and institutional elites, by supine cabinet ministers and by feminist judges.

Either the majority of women will come to accept her views on feminism… or marriage, and consequently Western civilization, will end.

Interview with one of my favorite Christian scholars, Paul Copan

I found the interview here, thanks to Brian Auten’s weekly Apologetics 315 round-up, which is a must-read every week.

Excerpt:

Dayton: Outside of my apologetic endeavors, I work with middle school and high school students. As a rule, I keep copies of your book “True For You But Not For Me” on hand to give away to either students interested in learning more about apologetics or to unbelievers looking to explore Christianity. What other books have written that you could recommend be used in this manner?

Paul Copan: I appreciate your keeping copies of “True for You” handy!  I’ve written several books at a more popular level that either deal with a wide range of common criticisms or slogans leveled against Christianity, and I try to make more accessible topics like Christian philosophy of religion or dealing with Old Testament ethical problems.  So here are the other books to check out:

“That’s Just Your Interpretation” (Baker)
“How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong?” (Baker)
“When God Goes to Starbucks: An Introduction to Everyday Apologetics” (Baker)
“Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion” (Chalice Press)
“Is God a Moral Monster? Understanding the Old Testament God” (Baker, January 2011)

Dayton: Speaking of books you have written, is there anything new in the works? Do you have any forthcoming books you could tell us about?

Paul Copan: For a fuller picture of what I’m working on, people can check out my website: www.paulcopan.com.  I’m on Twitter (I tweet weekly); so people can keep up with my writings and speaking engagements that way.  I’m very excited about my book, Is God a Moral Monster? (forthcoming with Baker in January 2011).  The noted Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham (University of Gloucestershire) has given this endorsement:  “Lucid, lively, and very well informed, this book is the best defence of Old Testament ethics that I have read.  A must-read for all preachers and Bible study leaders.”  Christopher J.H. Wright, a noted Old Testament scholar (specializing in Old Testament ethics) and author of Old Testament Ethics for the People of God and The God I Don’t Understand, has this blurb: “This is the book I wish I had written myself. It is simply the best book I have read that tackles the many difficulties that the Old Testament presents to thinking and sensitive Christians and that give such ammunition to the opponents of all religious faith…. I strongly recommend this book. We have wanted and needed it for a long time.”

I am coediting another book with William Lane Craig: Come Let Us Reason.  This is the third apologetics book we’ve edited for B&H Academic (the other two are Passionate Conviction and Contending with Christianity’s Critics); it is filled with cutting-edge essays on important topics such as issues surrounding the Qur’an’s authority, Jesus’ resurrection as a pagan myth, postmodernism, problems with naturalism, and so on.

I’m coauthoring a book on the moral argument with Mark Linville (Continuum), and another book on biblical ethics with Robertson McQuilkin called Living Wisdom (InterVarsity Press).  I’m also contributing several chapters to various books: on the Protestant view on human dignity (Routledge); on why ethics needs God (Oxford University Press); on theism’s contribution to bioethics (Routledge); two on the problem of the Canaanites (B&H Academic and another to be determined); on the moral argument (a short article) in The Dictionary of Christian Theology (Cambridge).  I’ve also contributed a series of articles on Old Testament ethics to Enrichment Journal.

I recently contributed a chapter “A Time for Truth” in The Complete Christian Guidebook to Understanding Homosexuality, edited by Joe Dallas and Nancy Heche (Harvest House) and a chapter on the moral argument to Mike Licona’s and Bill Dembski’s The Evidence for God (Baker).

Paul Copan is not only one the nicest guys, but he is also quite tough and combative about his faith. A real fire-breathing evangelical who writes about things that are relevant to rank and file. Whenever I send out beginner apologetics packages, I always include lots of Paul Copan books because his books are the most practical. For evangelicals who like to defend their faith to their co-workers and friends, Paul Copan is a must-read.

The other guys who write good books for beginners are Lee Strobel and Sean McDowell. All practical evangelicals used to fielding questions.

Ontario government gives IKEA $685,000 per year in solar power subsidies

Political Map of Canada

Story from the National Post. (H/T Small Dead Animals via ECM)

Excerpt:

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.
The government’s regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, has prepared secret forecasts of how much Ontario consumers are going to have to pay for electricity over the next five years. The government won’t allow the report to be released. The next best estimate comes from Aegent Energy Advisors Inc., in a study it did for the Canadian Manufactures and Exporters group. Residential rates are expected to jump by 60% between 2010 and 2015. Industrial customers will be looking at a 55% increase.

Going back to 2003, based on numbers dug up by consultant Tom Adams, the price of residential electricity in Ontario hovered around 8.5¢ a kWh in 2003 — the first year of the McGuinty Liberal regime. By 2015, Aegent Energy estimates the price will be up to 21¢, an increase of 135%. Doubling the price of electricity in a decade is no way to spur growth and investment. In this age of global economic competition IKEA may end up with fewer sales of its Billy bookshelves in Toronto because its customers will be bogged down with soaring power bills and a sliding economy.

I wonder how the taxpayers of Ontario, who have just been whacked with the HST, feel about this government waste. By the way, the Ontario Liberal Party is basically analogous the Democrat Party. So this is is going to happen to us, too, if they get their way.