Tag Archives: Boy

News

If you favor abortions, then you favor sex-selection abortions

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Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions
Unborn baby scheming about banning sex-selection abortions

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses the unintended consequencs of sex-selection abortions. (H/T Joy McCann)

Excerpt:

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world. Moral horror aside, this is likely to be of very large consequence.

In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Originally meant to test for fetal abnormalities, by the 1980s it was known as the “sex test” in India and other places where parents put a premium on sons. When amnio was replaced by the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, it meant that most couples who wanted a baby boy could know ahead of time if they were going to have one and, if they were not, do something about it. “Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later,” reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.

[…]Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” she writes. “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

[…]There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have “surplus men”—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.

I think that it is a good idea, when talking to someone who is female and pro-abortion, to them about sex-selection abortions. It seems to me that it is impossible for someone who is pro-abortion to make a principled argument against aborting unborn children just because they are women. If abortion is morally permissible, then sex-selection abortions are morally permissible. After all, it’s the born woman’s body – it’s her choice. Right? Well, maybe not right. Maybe we need to think about this some more.

Note that the Republicans have been trying to ban sex-selection abortions in some states – but the Democrats are opposing them. Democrats favor sex-selection abortions – and in very liberal countries, they are openly permitted.

Learn about the pro-life case

News

The post-abortion trauma of famous musician Steven Tyler

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Here’s an article in National Review. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Long before he won accolades as an American Idol judge, Steven Tyler was a bona-fide rock star, with all that that implied. In 1975, when he was in his late 20s and the lead singer for the band Aerosmith, Tyler persuaded the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Julia Holcomb, to make him her legal guardian so that they could live together in Boston.

When Miss Holcomb and Tyler conceived a child, his longtime friend Ray Tabano convinced Tyler that abortion was the only solution. In the Aerosmith “autobiography,” Walk This Way (in which recollections by all the band members, and their friends and lovers, were assembled by the author Stephen Davis), Tabano says: “So they had the abortion, and it really messed Steven up because it was a boy. He . . . saw the whole thing and it [messed] him up big time.”

Tyler also reflects on his abortion experience in the autobiography. “It was a big crisis. It’s a major thing when you’re growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives. . . . You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done?”

[…]After the abortion, Tyler began a torrid affair with Playboy model Bebe Buell while still seeing Julia, the mother of his aborted son. If you were wondering what happened to Julia (who is referred to as Diana Hall in the book) after this purportedly psychologically safe procedure, Bebe tells us: “There were many suicidal calls from poor Diana as they were breaking up. It was actually a pretty sad time.”

And how was Steven coping?

He went on a European concert tour, accompanied by Bebe, who tells us: “He was crazy . . . totally drunk, really out of it. . . . Steven destroyed his dressing room at Hammersmith . . . when we got back from Europe. . . . One night I found him on the floor of his bathroom having a drug seizure. He was writhing in pain.”

This was followed by Steven’s “Tuinal days” — a period he spent stoned on massive doses of the barbiturate. He says: “I would eat four or five a day . . . and be good for a couple of months . . . which is why that period is blackout stuff.”

This is the dysfunctional recipe for dealing with post-traumatic stress: Take heavy doses of drugs to numb the memories and feelings — and throw in a portion of toxic rage at bandmates and hotel rooms. Anger, especially in men, is often an undiagnosed sign of depression and repressed grief that needs a healthy expression and healing. Many post-abortive fathers tell us that anger management was a major problem for them after their abortions.

[…]For many post-abortive men and women, the anxiety associated with an abortion can surface at unexpected times, triggered by events such as a subsequent pregnancy, the death of a pet or a loved one, or some other person, place, or thing that in some way connects with the traumatic memory. Years later, when Tyler married, and he and his wife were expecting their first child, he was still haunted by the abortion: “It affected me later. . . . I was afraid. I thought we’d give birth to a six-headed cow because of what I’d done with other women. The real-life guilt was very traumatic for me. Still hurts.”

There are so many interesting things about this post:

  • how some men at a certain age have difficulty in making commitments and being responsible
  • how men at a certain age never think that anything bad will happen to them
  • how parents need to be more careful about standing up to their children and saying NO
  • how statistics do matter – the more you use something risky, the greater chance it will fail
  • how the rock-and-roll lifestyle that people seem to venerate can be destructive
  • how abortion really does harm men

In my next post, I will be writing about a different kind of behavior by a real hero. I find it very strange that so many people celebrate rock-and-roll musicians who merely entertain us. That doesn’t necessarily qualify them for being good husbands and fathers, though. I think women need to realize that some young men can be very dangerous and destructive because of their foolhardiness and irresponsibility. But sometimes a lack of fear can be a good thing in responsible young men, as we shall see in the next post.

Commentary

Should Christian men marry Democrats who claim to be Christians?

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I don’t think that Christian men should marry women who are politically liberal who claim to be Christians, because I don’t think that political liberalism is compatible with Christianity. But I’ll write some things that liberal Christian women tell me and you can see if you think it’s compatible with a Christian worldview, and a Christian view of marriage and parenting.

Some of this is based on a recent comment I received from a liberal Christian woman who accused me of being a racist (I’m darker than Barack Obama) and opposed to women succeeding (I have a longstanding record of supporting Michele Bachmann for President in 2012), etc. She also basically called me homophobic, because I oppose the gay agenda of sexualizing preschoolers with gay propaganda and because I think that children do best with a mother AND a father.

Her comment shows that the best liberals can do when debating policy is name-calling. Imperialist! Racist! Corporatist! Homophobe! Sexist! Bigot! Greedy! That’s what this woman did, and I encounter these Christian feminists a lot in churches.They learn their secular leftist worldview in the schools, and then they “read” the Bible by having feelings about what the secular leftists tell them to believe. If you ask them what the Bible says, they’ll say “it says that all religions are equal, that people should feel good, and that people shouldn’t judge other people”. This is what the secular leftists told them that the Bible said, and they believe it. And then they vote. And then they expect that Christian men will marry them for voting for policies that utterly destroy the minimal social requirements for Christian marriage and Christian parenting, (e.g. – she votes for things like no-fault divorce, etc.).

So I thought I would list out some of the things I’ve heard from women in churches over the years and you can tell me if you think that marriage to them would be a good idea (by marriage I mean real practical marriage meant to provide God with an ROI higher than he would get if the two people stayed single). Should a Christian man marry a woman whose entire worldview consists of slogans without any evidential support? Should Christian men accept the bare statement “I’m Christian” as though it proves that a woman has a worldview that is compatible with the Bible? Should the Christian man ask her to connect a Christian marriage plan to specific policies and laws,  such as one might read about in Jay Richards’ “Money Greed and God”, Nancey Pearcey’s “Saving Leonardo”, Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”, or most importantly Wayne Grudem’s “Politics and the Bible”? Do “Christian” women have any idea what moral values, skills, policies and experiences are conducive to a successful marriage and the production of effective, influential Christian children?

According to liberal Christian women:

  • conservatives are close-minded
  • conservatives are oppressive
  • morality is not objective, it’s relative to each person, or to different cultures
  • God does not expect people to avoid sinning
  • it’s wrong to judge others
  • all religions are equally true
  • there is no such thing as the Devil or Hell
  • sinning is OK because God will still let unrepentant sinners into Heaven
  • there is nothing wrong with abortion
  • there is nothing wrong with the gay agenda
  • opposition to Islamic terrorism is racism
  • world war II was an imperialist, unjust war
  • the best way to prevent a war is to disarm your own forces, withdraw to your own borders, and appease evil dictators by granting them concessions and abandoning your democratic allies to their aggression
  • Christianity is about agreeing with people who do everything the Bible forbids, and making non-Christians feel good about their rebellion against God, so that they will like you
  • conservatives are racists (FYI, I have dark brown skin and am the son of first generation immigrants)
  • the best way to avoid being a racist is to obsess over the color of people’s skin and demand that people with different skin color be treated differently
  • the desire of Christian husbands to keep the money they earn is greedy
  • Christian husbands have a duty to have the money they earn confiscated by the government so it can be redistributed as the secular government sees fit to redistribute it
  • Christian men are stupid and evil and cannot be trusted, which is why women should be able to count on big government social welfare programs
  • fathers are not needed to raise children, and can be replaced with sperm donors and welfare checks
  • it is bad for poor people to have to depend on their neighbors if they make poor decisions, because asking their neighbors for money and being accountable to their neighbors will make them feel bad – it is better if the government takes money from Christian husbands (in part) and then just gives the poor people the money directly, no matter what poor decisions they made – so that they don’t feel bad about making the poor decisions and they don’t have to change their poor decision-making
  • the government should use the public schools teach children as young as 5 to have sex, use fallible contraceptives, and have abortions, and this teaching should be done using the taxpayer money collected in part from Christian husbands
  • if an individual or a group has a lot of money, then the secular government should be able to take that money away to redistribute it – regardless of how hard they worked for that money
  • taxing and regulating businesses will have no effect on a Christian husband’s ability to hold onto his job, or find a new one if he is laid off or fired
  • the best way to create more jobs is by taxing and regulating businesses and raising tariffs and the costs of energy
  • the best way to have an intelligent discussion with someone you disagree with is to attack their character and call them names that your teachers taught you to call them – reading good books by the people you disagree with and watching academic debates is a complete waste of time
  • watching Michael Moore movies is adequate preparation for debating policy with conservatives
  • watching the Comedy Network and listening to NPR are excellent ways to stay aware of the state of the world
  • the secular leftist government can be relied on to use money from Christian taxpayers to protect religious liberty and practices like homeschooling
  • economic policy can be determined through feelings and intuitions – as long as politicians say happy words and expressing good intentions, then the people they claim to care about are sure to come out ahead
  • capitalism doesn’t create wealth, socialism does – just look at how much richer North Korea is than the United States
  • churches have too much money and they don’t spend it on the poor, so they should be taxed and regulated by secular government
  • private and parochial schools are only available to “the rich” so they should be abolished and all children should be forced to attend public schools, which are run by the secular government
  • homeschooling should be outlawed because parents can teach their children moral values that are offensive and close-minded and make liberal special interest groups feel offended
  • a baby isn’t a person until a woman decides it’s a person, and abortion should be taxpayer-funded
  • children don’t need a mother and a father, and we should have policies that make people feel good about raising fatherless children – like welfare programs
  • corporations “control people” by making useful products, and providing useful services, that people are free to buy, or not, depending on whether they think that those products and services are worth the money being asked for
  • government doesn’t control people when it forces preople to buy health insurance that covers abortions, sex changes, drug rehab, IVF, or any number of things that Christians will never need and may even object to on moral grounds
  • it is ok for Christians to vote for a secular government that reduces the costs of pre-marital sex by allowing taxpayer-funded abortions and taxpayer-funded welfare payments, because the God of the Bible wants people to have premarital sex more easily and at a lower cost
  • conservatives support the death penalty for people who disagree with them on religion and morality (not on a criminal matter, this woman called herself a Christian and literally thought that conservatives wanted the death penalty for people of other religions and sexual orientations – no criminal charges or anything)
  • the death penalty is mean and has never been shown to have a deterrent effect on violent crime rates in peer-reviewed research
  • Christian women can best impress Christian men by showing no understanding of the needs of young children, and by having no plan to produce effective/influential Christian children in a challenging secular environment
  • the best way for a Christian women to understand the needs of men and children is by focusing on her own education and career and avoiding any peer-reviewed research that addresses the needs of men and children
  • marriage consists of the woman working full-time and treating her husband as a roommate and treating her children as pets who are dropped off at the day care – preferably government-run day care – and eventually moving the children on to government-run schools
  • conservative men, especially the Tea Party supporters, are sexist and don’t want women to be successful – especially the ones who want Michele Bachmann to be President
  • if a man asks a woman to read anything on economics, science, philosophy, etc., then he is oppressing her because she should be free to construct her entire worldview based on her feelings, intuitions and peer expectations
  • whenever a woman is asked how she has prepared to deal with a husband and children, she should turn the question around and ask what men and children will do to serve her and make her happy
  • government subsidies for unmarried women who raise fatherless children doesn’t cause more women to have babies out of wedlock, and out of wedlock babies do not increase poverty or criminal behavior
  • corporations who sell products and services to people who are willing to buy them of their own free will causes poverty and criminal behavior
  • the best way to prevent a mortgage lending crisis is for government to lower interest rates for extended periods of time and then impose restrictions on housing construction, driving home prices higher, and then to force banks to make loans to unqualified applicants who don’t have to report their citizenship, report their income, or even make a downpayment
  • the best way to respond to the policy question about whether high tax rates are bad for Christian families is to ask the questioner how much money they personally give to charity
  • God is more impressed by people who give their money to voluntarily homeless alcoholics than by people who give money to sponsor an on-campus academic debate where university students will hear arguments for and against God’s existence, God’s character, and what God has done in history through the person of Jesus
  • the best way to learn about marriage and parenting is by listening to feminist teachers, not by reading Jennifer Roback Morse and Laura Schlessinger
  • the best way to learn about economics is by listening to socialist teachers, not by reading Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams
  • the best way to learn about what the Bible says about politics is by listening to secular teachers, not by reading Wayne Grudem and Jay Richards
  • the best way to learn about foreign policy is by listening to draft-dodging bleeding-heart hippy teachers, not by reading Frank Gaffney and John Bolton
  • developing a Christian worldview is best achieved by believing whatever ignorant, inexperienced teachers in government-run secular schools tell you to believe so that you can get an A – this is called “critical thinking” and conservatives don’t do that
  • it’s more important to be liked by your liberal teachers and inexperienced, foolish peers than to conform your behavior and worldview to what the Bible actually says
  • if a Christian woman engages in global warming alarmism, recycling, veganism and yoga then Christian men will think that she is moral and suitable for marriage and parenting
  • Church is a place where you sing songs and meet people, have happy feelings, and get comfort for the uncertainties of life and death
  • men are just as likely to marry and have children with a 50% tax rate, a 15% unemployment rate and a 20 trillion dollar debt as they are with a 15% tax rate, a 5% unemployment rate and a 5 trillion dollar debt – what really matters is whether they are in love or not
  • men are just as likely to marry and have children with a no-fault divorce law and 90% sole-custody awards for the woman as they are with at-fault divorce laws and mandatory shared-parenting
  • if you pay poor people $35,000 a year in cash and benefits for not working, then they will try as hard as they can to get out of poverty
  • affirmative action is a great idea and it is no problem at all that 60% of all undergraduates are women, because men are just as willing to be husbands and fathers when they don’t have college degrees or jobs
  • God doesn’t want us to do anything effective to advance his causes and his concerns or to defend his moral values and moral duties – God just wants us to have happy feelings and to be liked by others, no matter what they believe and what choices they make
  • the purpose of having children is to let them do what they want so they are happy, and not to make them effective and influential for God
  • it’s wrong to call your children “garbage” even if they later look back on you with love for spending so much time parenting them effectively and are accepted to Harvard and Yale and are set to have an enormous influence for Christ – that’s bullying and God doesn’t like parents bullying people into Harvard and Yale (he prefers poets and ballet dancers)
  • the best way for mothers to deal with children is by handing them to strangers and then assuaging the guilt from child neglect with excessive permissiveness coupled with excessive spending on material rewards and suppression of the father’s desire to discipline and lead the children toward greater effectiveness and influence for Christ
  • defending the faith is something that only a few people do if they have that “spiritual gift”, but other people have the spiritual gift of reading Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling novels – both choices are equally pleasing to God, though
  • if  a Christian man cares about keeping the money he earns for his current or future family, then he is selfish and only cares about himself
  • patriotism, national honor, advanced weapon systems and a large military are all ways to encourage aggressors to attack other nations
  • peace talks, appeasement, betraying your allies, weakness, moral equivalence, coddling terrorists captured on the battlefield, and a weak military causes aggressors to not attack you or other nations
  • legal firearm ownership causes violent crime rates to increase
  • multiple victim public shootings never occur in areas where weapons are banned (for the law-abiding), like shopping malls and schools
  • slavery was invented by Americans and has never been practiced anywhere else or in any other time
  • slavery is only practiced by whites against blacks
  • slavery was abolished first by non-whites, and then only at the very end by whites
  • the American military is largely a force for evil in the world
  • man-made catastrophic global warming is real and needs to be countered by imposing a communist government to control industry, because the Earth has never been warmer than it is now, certainly not during the Medieval Warming Period
  • America is imperialist because Americans spend their blood and treasure liberating other countries from tyranny like South Korea, France, Kuwait, East Germany, etc. and then instead of occupying those countries they leave, and then airdrop supplies (The Marshall Plan) or foreign aid or massive private donations

And then they wonder why men do not think that women are suitable for marriage or children. I think it’s an act of treason against God for authentic Christian men to marry Democrats, or even to give them the time of day.

The point of this post is that today I am seeing a lot of women complaining about men not wanting to marry them, and going on to have children out of wedblock as an alternative (and then they collect welfare and throw the children in day care and public schools – i.e. – child abuse). The thought never occurs to them that men HAVE thought women and marriage and children through, and they have decide that many women are simply not qualified morally or spiritually for the tasks of marriage and parenting. Men decide this based on their knowledge of the needs of men and children, and women’s lack of preparation to meet those needs, and women’s unwillingness to sacrifice their own interests to meet the needs of others. What many women, Christian and atheist, seem to believe is that men should fall in love with them with a complete disregard for their worldview and preparation for marriage and parenting. And what they mean by marriage and parenting is not self-sacrifice and service to men and children, with the larger goal of serving God. They actually mean a combination of postmodernism, moral relativism and narcissistic hedonism. They think that this is what marriage provides – a perpetual state of bliss where they do whatever makes them feel good moment by moment and men and children just celebrate that. Rah rah day-care! Rah rah sex-withholding! Rah-rah wealth redistribution! That’s apparently what men and children should expect from a woman in a marriage situation. And of course, God, if he exists, exists only to guarantee happy feelings and cannot judge or interfere or impose moral obligations on the woman.They think marriage is fairy-tale narcissism. Even the wedding is a day of expensive attention-getting narcissism.

A woman’s relationship with God, and the amount of thought and effort she puts into it, is a valuable window into how she views her relationships with men and children. If she reads a lot and takes on a lot of obligations to understand God and to serve him in effective ways (apologetics, politics, economics, foreign policy) then men should think that she will treat relationships with men and children the same way. But that takes time to assess. Men need to keep their hands off of women when dating/courting in order to assess her real views. You can’t assess a woman for marriage and parenting based on her physical appearance, weight and sexual skills. You would be surprised how little Biblical worldview capability there is for young attractive women, how little practical thinking about money and education, etc. has been done, how little planning has been done beyond the desire for wedding pictures and baby pictures, and how little is understood about how men and children impose obligations on women. God is better than men and children are. She won’t treat men and children well if she doesn’t treat God well. If she projects her feelings onto the Bible, and resents its plain meaning, and rejects the obligations it places on her, then she isn’t going to treat husbands and children any better. If she responds to God’s character by rejecting his differences, his judgments, and his expectations, then she isn’t going to respond well to the those same concerns in men or children.

A nice physical appearance and the willingness to hook-up on the first date are not qualifications for marriage and parenting. And they are not qualifications for serving God either. And women who soft-pedal immorality like abortion and gay rights in order to be liked by leftists are not Christians. Christianity means something. It doesn’t mean having happy feelings and being liked and projecting your goals and beliefs onto God. Men – don’t complain if you are shallow enough to think that you can test a woman by having fun with her. Going on trips and having fun experiences is not courting. Make her read hard books, make her do hard things, make her write essays on men, marriage, parenting, apologetics, science, politics and economics. Demand that she give you 10 scientific arguments from the peer-reviewed literature for God’s existence. Demand that she explain how laws and policies challenge the goals of a Christian marriage. Judge her on moral grounds at every opportunity. Load her up with moral obligations and tasks. Because that’s what she’ll be expected to do in a marriage.

I think that the liberal “Christian” commenter probably places herself more of the good end of the moral scale than the bad end, but I just want to be clear – I consider don’t consider her a Christian or even a good person. It’s not that she is deliberately evil, she is just incredibly ignorant on every subject, having imbibed her views from secular leftist teachers like a trained seal who is rewarded with fish by her trainer. She hasn’t read anything outside of schoolwork, she just parroted her way to good grades. The harm comes when she tries to pass herself off as a Christian to gullible Christian men who will be swayed by her looks and youth and physical contact instead of her knowledge, wisdom and experiences at practical things – like running a business, or evangelizing atheists in her workplace. Men need to have their goals for love, marriage and parenting clear, and to understand what questions to ask women to detect their real suitability for marriage and parenting. This woman simply has no capability to do the job. She hasn’t looked into these issues at all, she just accepted what the people around her believed. When you scratch the surface, she isn’t a Christian at all – she just uses frilly God talk to put window dressing on her own narcissism, vacuity and conformity.

By the way, the quickest way for her to join the reality-based community would be to buy and read Thomas Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”, which I just finished last night. Thomas Sowell is the official economist of the Tea Party movement, and, of course, he is black. As is the other great Tea Party economist Walter Williams. I would also recommend Wayne Grudem’s “Politics and the Bible”. He writes theology, which is something that these liberal Christian woman have never looked into. And of course they will never have looked into apologetics either, so they won’t have read William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland’s “Philosophical Foundations for Christian Worldview”. After all, they have feelings and intuitions and social expectations to guide them. Who needs truth?

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