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Texas Supreme Court allows ex-wife to take gender-confused son to California

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Every time I see a story of a woman initiating divorce to a man because he doesn’t support her desire for their child to transition, I blog about it here. I’ve blogged about a case from Canada. I’ve blogged about a case from California. And now there is one from Texas (see below). Who is to blame? And what message does this send to men who are considering marriage?

Here’s the story from The Post Millennial:

Jeffrey Younger has lost his court case to prevent his ex-wife from taking their son to California, where he could be medically transitioned.

[…]He wanted the courts to stop his ex-wife from taking the children to California and to protect his boys from medical mutilation at the hands of their mother, who is a pediatrician. The courts prevented him from forcing the mother to bring the boys back from California. Younger has accused her of using the children to help advertise her “inclusive,” “gender affirming” practice.

[…]The custody case was before the Supreme Court of Texas, which ruled against Younger. Younger had issued a petition on December 16 to try to retain his parental rights after his ex-wife, Dr. Anne Georgulas, took the boys to California.

He lost his parental rights. Why? What crime did he commit? He didn’t commit any crime.

More:

California has a law in place, starting on Sunday, that children in that state will not be returned to their home state in the event that the home state would prevent the children from being medically transitioned to present as the opposite sex. Younger wanted the boys brought home.

And a little more about the ex-wife:

Younger was married to pediatrician [Anne] Georgulas. Georgulas and Younger ended up in court fighting over the children when she believed that James, Younger’s 7-year-old, wanted to live as a girl called Luna.

She petitioned the court to prevent Younger from “from signing Luna up as James for any activities or taking her as James or calling her James or using male pronouns related to Luna at any activities outside the home…”

She further asked the court to prevent Younger from “allowing the children to remain in the presence of anyone who is not calling Luna by her chosen name, ‘Luna,’ not using female pronouns to refer to her and otherwise not affirming Luna.”

Who is to blame? I think that since Younger made the choice, and he’s the one who is disappointed, he is to blame. She was dangerous before he married her. He should have left her alone. Men shouldn’t marry alligators. And they aren’t forced to marry them. It’s the man’s job to ask the woman questions about her beliefs and actions before proposing to her. And vice versa.

But look at this:

In a video posted to the dad’s website, James is asked, “You’re a boy right?” Heavy reported.

“No, I’m a girl.”

“Who told you you’re a girl?”

“Mommy.”

The child said Anne also put James in dresses. “She buys me headbands. She gets me hair clips…she paints my nails.”

[…]Witnesses who knew the boys and could attest that James did not identify as a girl when left to his own devices, were prevented from testifying in the case. One mother of the boys’ friends said, in testimony she wasn’t allowed to give in 2019, that:

“Over the past year, I have observed that James is blissfully happy as a boy. He loves to march around outside and yell, ‘we are the only boy scout troop’ or ‘I’m the Leader of the wolf pack!’ He is always the ring leader, even though he isn’t the oldest of the group. He loves dressing as a super hero and sword fighting. One day we all walked to a playground near my house and on the way home James slipped in some mud and got his clothes dirty. He asked if he could borrow some of my kids clothes and I could wash his.

“Of course I said, ‘no problem’ and grabbed him a pair of shorts from the chest of drawers and tossed them to him. I said, ‘hang on while I grab a shirt from the closet’. He immediately said, ‘Mrs. Sarah, I don’t need a shirt! It’s hot! And boys don’t have to wear shirts if they don’t want to! Isn’t that awesome!’ He was so cute. I said, ‘yes that is awesome!’ As he ran off to play. I did eventually get him to put on a shirt. It was gray with lizards on it and he loved it! He also likes having his hair cut a certain way but told my son Grayson that his mom wouldn’t let him get it too short even though he wanted it to be spikey.”

So why blog about this?

Well, most pro-marriage conservatives, male and female, especially beta-male pastors think that a man’s job is to affirm his wife at all times, even if she descends into feminism, secularism and socialism. Her friends are always leading her the right way, and husbands are just supposed to submit to her intuitions and desires. Most pro-marriage conservatives think that men have no leadership role with women. That would be patriarchy, and patriarchy is bad. Even if the woman is behaving badly, men have to submit to her leadership of the home. Even if the woman is hurting her own children. Men have to make the evil “work out”. That’s the “chivalrous” thing to do.

But there’s a problem with this. The problem is that young men are watching what is happening to this man (who chose poorly, and is responsible for it). And what they are learning from this case is that it is stupid for a man to get married. Men don’t have to get married in order to be successful. A single man can go to university, start a career, pay off his house and save a million dollars by age 46, then retire at age 50, and live off his dividends. Then he will have time for his own priorities: apologetics, theology, charitable giving, mentoring others. Becoming a slave to a secular leftist wife, in a system dominated by misandrists, is not necessarily the best way to make a difference for God. Men who want marriage have certain plans for their marriages, and certain things they are looking for in a wife. If they can’t get those things, then why push it, and get into a situation like this?

Neither Jesus nor Paul was married in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 7 urges single Christians not to get married so they can  focus on Kingdom work. The case for marriage has to be overwhelmingly attractive for a man to pursue marriage. These news stories are discouraging men from marrying. No amount of shaming and blaming by pro-marriage conservatives is going to remove the risks of divorce, loss of custody, loss of parental rights, alimony, child support and forced transing of kids. Good men can do good in other ways. They don’t have to get married, especially not in a time where society is producing radical feminists as wife candidates, and stacking the schools, courts and hospitals with more misandrists. Why should men expose themselves to being ruled by secular leftists?

News

Another eternal cosmology model shot down by the BGV Theorem

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I saw this article on Evolution News, and thought it might a good time for me to review the BGV Theorem that Dr. William Lane Craig brings up in all his recent debates.

First, let’s review the BGV Theorem.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem shows that every universe that is on balance expanding must have a space-time boundary in the past (a beginning). Even cyclical models of the universe count as expanding “on balance” if their later expansions go further than the previous ones.

Here’s the article from Evolution News:

A key argument in Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis centers on the universe having a beginning. He argues that the beginning points to the cosmos resulting from the mind of a creator. Meyer’s case for the God Hypothesis includes discrediting the claim that cyclical cosmological models could avoid a beginning by his appealing to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem. His reasoning was recently reaffirmed by University of Buffalo physicists Will Kinney and Nina Stein in their analysis of Ijjas and Steinhardt’s (IS) cosmological model. They published their results in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

By the way, the Kindle edition of the Meyer book is on sale for $2.99 right now. Get it while it’s cheap!

More:

Correspondent Charlotte Hsu summarizes the research at Phys.org:

“People proposed bouncing universes to make the universe infinite into the past, but what we show is that one of the newest types of these models doesn’t work,” says Kinney, Ph.D., professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “In this new type of model, which addresses problems with entropy, even if the universe has cycles, it still has to have a beginning.”

Kinney and Stein applied the BGV theorem to the IS model, which I have previously critiqued. Anna Ijjas and Paul Steinhardt propose that the universe expanded, then contracted, and then bounced back into an expansion stage in a never-ending cycle. Each iteration grows vastly larger than the previous one, so the universe is on average always expanding. Kinney and Stein rigorously demonstrate that the BGV theorem mandates the IS model being “geodesically pastincomplete,” meaning that spacetime had an absolute beginning:

In this paper, we use the BGV theorem to demonstrate that growth in the scale factor inevitably means that the spacetime is geodesically pastincomplete. … This result is completely general: any bouncing spacetime which obeys the condition for entropy dissipation and the Null Energy Condition outside the bounce must be geodesically incomplete. This is consistent with the BGV theorem, which shows that any spacetime for which the average Hubble parameter is positive must be similarly geodesically incomplete. The IS cosmology satisfies this condition and therefore cannot be past eternal, independent of the details of the dynamics.

In other words, this new cyclical / oscillating model of the universe does not avoid the need for a beginning… and a cause of the creation event.

So, when you hear Dr. Craig talking about the BGV Theorem in debates, now you’ll know what it’s for. It’s real, and it works.

News

Atheist Jerry Coyne explains why morality is impossible for atheists

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Let’s review what you need in your worldview in order to have a rationally grounded system of morality.

You need 5 things:

1) Objective moral values

There needs to be a way to distinguish what is good from what is bad. For example, the moral standard might specify that being kind to children is good, but torturing them for fun is bad. If the standard is purely subjective, then people could believe anything and each person would be justified in doing right in their own eyes. Even a “social contract” is just based on people’s opinions. So we need a standard that applies regardless of what people’s individual and collective opinions are.

2) Objective moral duties

Moral duties (moral obligations) refer to the actions that are obligatory based on the moral values defined in 1). Suppose we spot you 1) as an atheist. Why are you obligated to do the good thing, rather than the bad thing? To whom is this obligation owed? Why is rational for you to limit your actions based upon this obligation when it is against your self-interest? Why let other people’s expectations decide what is good for you, especially if you can avoid the consequences of their disapproval?

3) Moral accountability

Suppose we spot you 1) and 2) as an atheist. What difference does it make to you if you just go ahead and disregard your moral obligations to whomever? Is there any reward or punishment for your choice to do right or do wrong? What’s in it for you?

4) Free will

In order for agents to make free moral choices, they must be able to act or abstain from acting by exercising their free will. If there is no free will, then moral choices are impossible. If there are no moral choices, then no one can be held responsible for anything they do. If there is no moral responsibility, then there can be no praise and blame. But then it becomes impossible to praise any action as good or evil.

5) Ultimate significance

Finally, beyond the concept of reward and punishment in 3), we can also ask the question “what does it matter?”. Suppose you do live a good life and you get a reward: 1000 chocolate sundaes. And when you’ve finished eating them, you die for real and that’s the end. In other words, the reward is satisfying, but not really meaningful, ultimately. It’s hard to see how moral actions can be meaningful, ultimately, unless their consequences last on into the future.

Theism rationally grounds all 5 of these. Atheism cannot ground any of them.

Let’s take a look at #4: free will and see how atheism deals with that.

Atheism and free will?

Here’s prominent atheist Jerry Coyne’s editorial in USA Today to explain why atheists can’t ground free will.

Excerpt:

And that’s what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. (These studies use crude imaging techniques based on blood flow, and I suspect that future understanding of the brain will allow us to predict many of our decisions far earlier than seven seconds in advance.) “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.

If you don’t have free will, then you can’t make moral choices, and you can’t be held morally responsible. No free will means no morality.

Here are some more atheists to explain how atheists view morality.

William Provine says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.

Richard Dawkins says atheists have no objective moral standards:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

When village atheists talk about how they can be moral without God, it’s important to ask them to justify the minimum requirements for rational morality. Atheists may act inconsistently with their worldview, believing in free will, expecting praise and blame for complying with the arbitrary standards of their peer group, etc. But there is nothing more to morality on atheism that imitating the herd – at least when the herd is around to watch them. And when the herd loses its Judeo-Christian foundation – watch out. That’s when the real atheism comes out – the atheism that we’ve seen before in countries that turned their backs on God, and the moral law. When God disappears from a society, anything is permissible.