I’ve been watching a bunch of episodes of the @whatever podcast, and really enjoying the fact that the Christians are allowed to say what they think about dating and relationships, and that the non-Christians are explaining in their own words what their view of relationships is. And it’s very interesting to see how modern women have a disconnect between “in the moment” and “some day”.

So, I have a couple of clips from a show to show you what I mean. In this clip, the men on the left of the room – Brian Atlas, the host, and Chase, the evangelical Christian – challenge the two non-Christian women on the right side of the room. They ask whether a boyfriend can expect his girlfriend to stop going to bars and night clubs. These are places where alcohol is served, women wear sexy clothes, and men flirt with drunk women and try to take them home for sex. All the non-Christian women on the panel call this demand that they not go to bars and clubs “controlling”. They don’t see why being in a relationship should cause them to have to give up any aspect of their pursuit of pleasure. If they want validation from hot guys, and maybe some extra sex, then they should be able to look for it in bars and night clubs.

Remember, this video has a lot of bad language. It’s not for kids.

So, watch this clip from 1:05:21 to 1:28:45: (23 min and 24 seconds)

So, these young women want to focus on having fun in their early 20s, because that’s what they want to do. And then later on, when they get much older, then they might be ready for a man to marry them and give them children.

A marriage-minded man is looking for a woman who is willing to control her behavior so that she becomes safe to marry. So that she can focus on her husband. So that she can spend time nurturing and raising her children. She can’t spend money on frivolous things. She can’t spend money on vacations and entertainment and alcohol. She can’t smoke while she’s pregnant. She can’t buy expensive hand bags and get cosmetic surgery. But these young women aren’t willing to give up any of these things. They want to have fun. And marriage is seen as “boring”, until they decide in their late 30s that they finally want it. Men who want to focus on marriage early are “controlling”. Men who want women to focus on preparing to build a home and a family are “controlling” men.

The problem with this, as one of the men points out, is that those bar and night club experiences do not make the woman attractive or stable for marriage. Marriage is an enormous financial and legal risk for men. They can be thrown into jail for inability to pay alimony and child support. They can lose custody of their kids in family courts. They can have their parental rights nullified by feminist judges. Women are actually more likely to commit non-reciprocal domestic violence than men, according to this recent study:

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.

Men have to be extremely careful about marriage. And when young women are taught to be self-centered from 18-35, this is not good preparation for being a wife and mother. “Hoe phases” and “party stages” doesn’t look good on a resume. I would not hire a college grad to write software, if their entire resume was playing video games and memorizing movie scripts. If you want the job, you have to be able to show that you can do the job. Jobs are not meant to entertain you. There is work to do, and results are expected. The same thing is true of marriage. Men are making the hiring decisions, there, and we do look at women’s resumes.

Men are the keepers of commitment. If a woman wants commitment, she has to apply for commitment, and prove she is worth being committed to. Men are looking for marriage-related behaviors and capabilities. Chastity. Sobriety. Conservative political views. Accurate theology. Apologetics. Experience building others up to be useful for God. Spending restraint. Saving and investing. STEM degrees. Cooking ability. The ability to be content at home. Willingness to learn what husbands like, and to play with husbands. Fitness. Nutrition. Respect for male leadership. Etc.

Consider this clip from 2:32:54 to 2:43:24: (10 min, 30 seconds)

Here the Christian co-host Chase explains to the women that if they pick a Christian man, he will be able to lead them to focus on the most important things in life early on. The single mother is excited that some men would want to help to avoid mistakes with bad boys. But again, the two blondes who insisted on hedonism rebel against the leadership of good men. They want to be free to pursue pleasure, and not listen to the leadership of Christian men. They don’t want to focus on marriage. They don’t want to prepare their character for marriage. They don’t want to control their desires, so they can get a long-term result. They want to SAY that they want marriage and children “some day”, but they want to choose what feels good “in the moment”. And they definitely prefer hot bad boys who are permissive. They don’t want good men who want to lead them to get into shape for marriage.

I think the older generation of Christian women has NO IDEA that this is what younger women are like. 70 years ago, women would jump into the arms of men who wanted to step in and lead on moral and spiritual issues. They were not interested in “tingles” caused by physical attraction. They were interested in men who could step in and make marriage and parenting easy for them. Men who were serious about earning. Men who were serious about fighting evil. Men who were involved in the home, and effective at leading the children to have accurate beliefs and good moral character. But those days are long gone.

Today, young women are choosing men based on the feelings they get from being validated by those men. They like men who “don’t judge”. They like men with attractive appearances who are having a lot of sex with other women. They like men who spend their money on displayed wealth, rather than save for a downpayment on a home. Good men are ignored until these women realize that their plan isn’t working, and suddenly they want to “settle down”. But good men know that a woman who makes a good man her “last resort” in her late 30s will never respect him as a leader in the home.

Men don’t HAVE to get married and have kids in order to be happy. We can just work hard, stack our cash high, retire early, and work on our ministry goals. Working for God on evangelism and apologetics is enormously fulfilling for a man. Just ask Paul.

I have a close friend who lives in North Carolina, and she thinks that it’s a great state, and that it’s about to get a lot more conservative because they now have Republican supermajorities that can override the governor’s veto. I have noticed a lot of good stories in the news about North Carolina, and I thought that I might collect a few stories about what they are up to.

First, this one from yesterday, reported by Life News:

Pro-Life legislators in North Carolina have introduced a bill to ban abortions on unborn babies starting at 12 weeks. While pro-life advocates were hoping for legislation to protect babies starting at conception or at least a heartbeat bill protecting them beginning at 6 weeks, the political reality of the situation prevented that.

North Carolina Republicans face an uphill battle in getting legislation approved because pro-abortion Democrat Governor Roy Cooper is certain to veto any pro-life legislation and stronger pro-life protections for babies would have a more difficult time securing the supermajority necessary to override his veto.

North Carolina Republican legislative leaders said on Tuesday there’s agreement for a 12 week bill and House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger both said they would push the pro=life legislation in their respective chambers.

Now for a couple stories about cleaning up their elections, so that Democrats can’t steal them by voter fraud.

This one from Life Site News:

With its new conservative majority, the North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday reversed prior decisions against state voting rules and a Republican-redrawn districting map, a boon to the GOP’s prospects going into the 2024 elections.

The Carolina Journal reports that the state’s highest court, on which two Democrat justices were replaced with Republicans last year, voted 5-2 to reinstate North Carolina’s 2018 law requiring photo identification in order to vote and districting maps favorable to Republicans in congressional and state legislative races, and to forbid felons from voting in state elections until they have completed their sentences.

All three rulings were issued “with prejudice,” meaning that opponents cannot challenge them again.

Nice. And how about this one from The Federalist:

After scoring significant victories in the legislature in the 2022 midterms, North Carolina Republicans are introducing legislation that would bar state and local election officials from accepting or using private money to conduct elections.

SB 89 stipulates that state and local election boards, as well as county boards of commissioners, are prohibited from accepting “private monetary donations, directly or indirectly, for conducting elections or employing individuals on a temporary basis.”

Concerns surrounding the use of private money to conduct elections became prominent following the 2020 election cycle, during which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gifted nonprofits such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) hundreds of millions of dollars. These “Zuckbucks” were then siphoned into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsecure election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes.

To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

That’s how Biden was able to win the election in states where he wasn’t even competitive in the polls.

And this one, from Daily Wire:

The University of North Carolina (UNC) made a move against woke culture on Thursday, banning controversial so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements from the school’s hiring and promotion process.

The university’s Board of Governors reportedly voted Thursday to secure the ban, following pressure from Color Us United, a non-profit committed to speaking out “against those who want to divide America.”

UNC “shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement,” the resolution said, adding that an employee or applicant can’t “be solicited or required to describe his or her actions in support of, or in opposition to, such beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles.”

A lot of this is going to hinge on who wins the governor post in 2024, and this guy (reported in The Federalist) is the guy who Republicans are running:

Mark Robinson believes Republicans and conservatives should never concede the cultural narrative, and that the party’s greatest need is to put forward those who can speak with force, conviction, and eloquence about the party’s shared values with everyday Americans. The lack of articulateness in such matters is, of course, a perennial complaint about GOP political discourse. However, if anybody is in a position to do something about it, it is the man who will be, barring incident, the first black lieutenant governor of North Carolina.

I’ve witnessed a great many politicians give a great many speeches, but I’ve seldom come across one with the natural ease and ability to combine passion and reason the way Robinson does when he gets warmed up on his favorite issues. His is a national-level talent that the GOP would ignore or sideline at its peril.

I saw a display of Robinson’s appeal last summer when he addressed a Back the Blue rally in downtown Raleigh. He electrified the audience and with a speech basically shut down the Antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors cat-calling and drumming on the periphery, striking them, at least momentarily, silent and dumbfounded.

I hope a lot of conservatives move there from blue states, and tilt the balance more. No point living in a blue state if you can get out. Don’t pay taxes to people who hate you, and your values. Just move. I like to make spreadsheets comparing all the interesting rankings of states, like fiscal solvency, state legislatures, pro-life and self-defense. According to my spreadsheets, across all measures that I care about, the two best states in the union are Florida and Tennessee.