Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Is it brave to quote the Bible to atheists who want to silence you?

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C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you
C.S. Lewis has some words to live by for you

I was asked by a commenter whether my advice in a previous post was mistaken. I advised people not to make comments on issues under their real names, where the opposition is irrational and dangerous. I said that you should use an alias so that you can write frequently and effectively about controversial issues, without being subject to threats, intimidation, vandalism, violence, loss of employment etc. – common tactics of the unthinking mobs on the secular left.

So here is what I replied to him in a comment:

I didn’t advise people to be silent at all. Obviously, I have been blogging on this issue for the last 7 years – before it ever entered the radar of most Christians. So I haven’t been silent. I have blogged debate summaries, secular arguments against same-sex marriage, horror stories about gay adoption and child abuse, peer-reviewed papers about the impact of no-mom or no-dad parenting, CDC health data about HIV and STIs, the impact of donor-conception on children, specific laws related to the gay agenda, and every specific case where Christian business owners were punished – in America and across the world.

My alias has given me protection from the bad guys so that I could be FAR more productive and effective than the Bible-quoters who jump up in front of machine guns and call that feelings-driven irresponsibility “piety”. When did being INEFFECTIVE become a Christian virtue? Seems to me that people who address the issues of the day by repeating Bible verses to people who don’t accept the Bible aren’t being effective. My goal is to reach more people with arguments they will actually change their minds. My blog post on a secular case against same sex marriage was linked by the Secular Outpost, a major atheist blog – THOSE are the people we need to be reaching. And so what if they were offended? Because of my alias, they couldn’t get me.

Christianity is about making a difference. It is not about being feeling holier-than-thou. It’s about defending Christ’s honor effectively and efficiently. It’s about getting the job done.

Here is what doesn’t work: e-mailing Bible verses to the Human Rights Campaign along with the name of your employer and your home address. That will get you out of the game really fast. What does work is doing what Ryan T. Anderson is doing – getting a PhD and debating the issue with professors on college campuses. Or you could get a law degree and fight out the issue at the supreme court. But trying to spout Bible verses to people who don’t believe the Bible who can then get you fired is not the answer – that doesn’t work.

Suppose we are playing baseball. Your team is down by 1 run and there is a runner on third and no outs. Suppose you go up to the plate and swing for the fences at the first three pitches that the pitcher throws – all of which were obvious unhittable. You get out and you hurt your team. I guess you could brag later about “I would never do anything other than try to hit a home run every time” and then claim that those who didn’t were cowards. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you would be out and you would have let your team down.

Similarly, when you are on your own 20 yard line, down by 6 with 5 minutes left in the 4th quarter, you don’t get out on the field and throw four hail mary passes and then turn the ball over on downs. Expecting Jesus to bail you out when you act recklessly doesn’t work in any area of life.

The best thing is to be intelligent. What should I study to help Jesus that will work? What job should I get to help Jesus that will work? How can I have an influence to help Jesus that will work? Doing what feels good and expecting a bailout is reckless and doesn’t do anything to help Jesus. When you hand the other side your employer and your place of business and your home address, you are handing them things that they can use to hurt you. Why would you let them have something they can use to stop you from having an influence, when you can withhold that information and strike at them with impunity? These are not difficult things for a rational person to understand.

Frankly, I am at the point now where I view the spouting of Bible verses to dangerous, destructive people as a mental disorder, as much as I would view it as a mental disorder if someone decided to travel to North Korea and do street evangelism. I would urge all the Bible-quoting martyr wannabes to prove their bravery to me by doing that, if they think that the point of Christianity is to be feelings-led and reckless about the consequences of actions. Or maybe they can travel to Saudi Arabia and evangelize the people there. On the bible-quoting rule, to not do this is “cowardice”. I think we are reaching the point where the sexual revolutionaries are just as dangerous as militant atheists in North Korea, or radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia.

Studying all of these issues the way I do and then writing about them costs me about 3-4 hours a night – and that’s every day that I’ve been writing this blog. I have had 6.2 million hits in 7 years of writing. My goal is to influence people to make better decisions. And I think I’ve been able to be more effective at doing that when I don’t hand my enemies personal information that they can use to neutralize my influence. Why would I make it easy for them to stop me from having an influence? No Christian should deny Christ when asked directly. But that doesn’t mean that you should make it easy for them to destroy you.

Commentary

Why are social conservatives unable to exert political pressure?

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Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign
Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign

Right now, social liberals are having great success pushing through their agenda. Social conservatives seemed to be getting coerced and/or punished so effectively that many are wondering whether the tide can be turned at all.

Ben Shapiro, who writes at the Daily Wire, explains what’s been happening lately:

Leftists, the most tolerant people in America, are now demonstrating their tolerance by boycotting entire states that do not govern in accordance with leftist social policy. On Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would bar non-essential state-funded travel to Mississippi after the state passed a bill re-enshrining First Amendment protections for freedom of religion and association. Cuomo, who termed the law “sad, hateful,” isn’t the only big government leftist to utilize the power of taxpayer-funded nastiness: the mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, did the same.

Lee and Cuomo also announced travel bans to North Carolina, where the governor recently signed a bill that mandates that local governments may not allow people to use single-sex bathrooms based on subjective gender identity rather than biological sex; that bill also makes state anti-discrimination law supreme and exclusive over local anti-discrimination laws that would compel businesses to hire people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

It’s not just government, either. Icons like the wildly overrated Bruce Springsteen are cancelling concerts in North Carolina; businesses like PayPal, which do business in countries like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, which actually prosecute homosexuality. States like Virginia and Georgia have vetoed similar legislation out of fear of corporate and governmental blowback from companies ranging from Apple to Disney.

The left has ratcheted up their pressure on states to crack down on Americans who don’t want their daughters peeing next to grown men, to prosecute businessowners who don’t want to cater same-sex weddings. They’ve utilized their economic power to punish private actors who may or may not even agree with the left in an attempt to coax those actors into putting indirect pressure on their representatives.

Maggie Gallagher, a pro-marriage activists who has written some great books on marriage that I really liked, has some practical advice for social conservatives in National Review.

She has five points – here are four and five:

4) Social conservatives aren’t doing politics.

Before I explain what I mean, let me ask you to answer a simple question: What is the national organization that fights for religious-liberty protections by spending money in federal elections? Currently, there is none. There are many good nonprofits who issue voter guides or get pastors together. There are public-interest law firms galore. These are all good things to have — but there is a hole in the center of our movement.

How big is the hole? For my own amusement, I tried to figure out how much money social conservatives (excluding pro-life groups) spent in national elections in 2014 compared to what they spend on 501(c)3 and other nonprofit strategies. I looked for every organization I could find that has marriage or religious liberty in its mission statement and then compared it with election expenditures by either c(4)s or political-action committees (PACs). Then I asked around to major social-conservative donors I know to see if I had overlooked any major organization.

How big is the hole in the center of our movement?

In 2014 pro-family social conservatives invested $251,633,730 in tax-deductible 501(c)3 efforts (excluding pro-life efforts).

How much was spent on direct political engagement, counting both state and federal organizations? $2,484,359.

That 100-to-one ratio of doing politics by indirect versus direct means explains a lot about the relative powerlessness of social conservatism.

Social conservatives can’t get much out of politics because we aren’t in politics. We just talk like we are on television, when the Left allows us to get on television. Meanwhile, we don’t build political institutions that matter.

Social conservatives need to think like a minority and organize politically to protect our interests. Which leads me to Maggie’s fifth Big Truth of social-conservative politics:

5) The most important thing social conservatives could do in the 2016 cycle is to demonstrate to Democrats that extremism in pushing unisex showers on public schools or oppressing gay-marriage dissenters will cost them the White House.

In theory, this shouldn’t be hard to do: A July 2015 Associated Press–GFK poll showed that 59 percent of independents and 32 percent of Democrats agree that when gay rights and religious liberty conflict, religious liberty should have priority. Social conservatives should use the issue on offense — not just to gin up “the base,” but to persuade soft Democrats to abandon the party of anti-religious aggression. If intensive messaging to Democratic voters in a key swing state could move just 10 percent of them to switch their votes, the whole political dynamic of this issue would change.

But proving that would require raising a significant amount of money — say at least $2 million — and demonstrating in a key swing state, such as Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida, that the Democrats’ anti-religion intolerance against gay-marriage dissenters could cost them something they care about: The White House. Power.

I see no signs yet that any such thing is happening among social conservatives.

But it could.

We should fill the hole in the center of the social-conservative movement by getting into politics for the first time in 50 years. It could happen.

I noticed that Maggie’s web site “The Pulse” is very pro-Cruz. They do not like John Kasich at all on social issues, and they were not fans of Marco Rubio’s tepid response to the gay marriage ruling.

Commentary

Woman invents hunky man character for her book, then leaves her husband for him

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Child grabs for his mom, who is leaving for work
Child grabs for his mom, who is leaving for work

My good friend Dina sent me this article about a very crazy, irrational woman who does not value marriage at all.

Excerpt:

Her steamy, bestselling novels and strong male characters have seduced hundreds of thousands of female readers worldwide.

But Jodi Ellen Malpas has revealed she has split from her own Mr Right – because he no longer lives up to the fantasy she created.

The 34-year-old, whose This Man trilogy has sold more than 500,000 copies, has left her husband of ten years after ‘falling in love’ with one of her characters.

Ms Malpas, from Northampton, says: ‘All my fictional men are strong, successful, sophisticated and enigmatic. I guess it’s hard for any living, breathing man to live up to such a fantasy.

‘In This Man I created Jesse Ward, whose forceful personality was appealing to me. There is no denying I fell in love with him.

‘After all, I created him and I made him the way he is for a reason. Every woman needs some fantasy lover to spice up the dull reality of her real life. I wanted to create my perfect love story.

‘But the success of my books and the popularity of my male character led to the breakdown of my marriage. Sadly it was not solid enough to withstand the changes success has brought to my life.’

The mother of two, whom many believe is the new E. L. James, the housewife who wrote the Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy, became a self-publishing sensation last year, swiftly rising to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List.

The This Man trilogy explores the love affair between young interior designer Ava O’Shea and playboy Jesse Ward. The second part of her new trilogy, One Night, has just been published by Orion.

‘I was 23 when Aaron and I got married, so we were both very young,’ she says. ‘I didn’t really know who I was. I got on with being a wife and mother.

‘But over time I started to feel that something was missing – my normal everyday life had become a routine. I was bored. I guess that is what couples mean when they say they’ve grown apart. Aaron couldn’t understand why I wanted to write my fiction and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t understand.’

The couple have two children, Alfie, 14, and Patrick, ten. But although they divorced in August last year, Ms Malpas says their relationship remains amicable. She is currently single and insists that she has no time to get involved in a relationship.

‘My children and my writing are enough for the moment,’ she adds. ‘In any case, I suspect some men might be a little intimidated by my independence and my success.’

And she insists she has no regrets. ‘It’s been crazy, but I’m loving the stronger more liberated me,’ she says.

They are “her” children. Not her husband’s and hers. And they don’t need a father – because children don’t have needs distinct from her own needs. Her husband doesn’t have needs distinct from her own needs. In her own mind, men are “intimidated” by her success. But that’s not true – they are intimidated because she is insane and irrational and self-centered. She is not capable of relationships, and that’s the main thing that a man wants from a woman. They avoid her because she divorced her husband of 10 years (with children) for a fictional character!!!!! 

Good Lord. What have women come to under the influence of feminism? The feministy ones seem to place no value on what a married couple can do together. They place no value on the needs of children. Everything is about getting their own fulfillment through worldy “success” and experiences; traveling, feeling good and taking pointless risks. When I think of the men that these feministy women seem to really want (at least when they are in their teens, 20s and 30s) it really scares me. I used to think that most young, unmarried women were sensible and thought that being a wife and mother was a good way to make a difference. Now so many of them are influenced by feminism and they seem to be avoiding it in favor of making lots of money. As if that were an end in itself.

What is so boring about marriage that women no longer find it fulfilling? I go to work every day and damned if I think that is more fulfilling that loving a wife and fathering children. I don’t think any man would think that. We work because that’s how we relate to our wives and children, by providing for them and leading them. And work is not meant to be fun or fulfilling. It’s WORK. Nowadays, I am seeing a lot of men who are interested in the idea of marriage and becoming a father. But I also see more and more women more interested in careers and travel than they are in marriage and becoming a mother. Men avoid women like that – we don’t want to be accessories to a self-centered career woman, we want a partnership and a home and children raised by a mother.