Tag Archives: Fathers

News

MUST-READ: What worldview emerges from serial hook-up sex?

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This blog post was linked from RuthBlog. And I didn’t even write it! (H/T RuthBlog)

The article talks about a hypothetical woman who hooks up with a man for premarital sex, presumably after a night of drunken partying, and then feels shame for what she has done. Should she feel ashamed? It depends.

Excerpt:

If her shame is telling her the truth, a truth that surpasses all social constructs, then she made a mistake.

[…]But what if a moral thinker steps forward and declares that she is wrong to feel shame, that her bad feelings simply show the extent to which she has bought into a social construct. Ethics is relative; it serves the power elite. She ought to reject her shame for lying to her and promoting the accepted social construct.

[…]Consoling words do not really have much of an effect. Better would be a new group of friends, a new social nexus where everyone will hold her in high esteem for having mastered the art of the hook up, or better, for having fully explored and expressed her sexuality.

Is there such a group? And could this group provide her with a new and revised identity? If being a woman, according to society’s standards, makes her feel ashamed of herself, why would she not transform her identity and become… a feminist. Some feminists do not look too kindly on hook ups, but still and all, feminists are not judgmental. They will welcome her into their midst and tell her that she has done nothing wrong.

[…]If society disapproves; if her classmates look down on her; that is their problem. They are committing one of the great sins of the therapy culture: they are being judgmental!

Note also that this perspective has absolved the coed of all responsibility for her own behavior. Those who are at fault are the ones who look down on her. Now, the new moral thinking holds them responsible for making her feel bad.

But what about those who continue to hold to standards that consider sex outside of marriage harmful to men, women, children and society as a whole, who must pay the social costs of irresponsible sex?

…she will proselytize her beliefs. You only ignore other people for so long. Eventually the numbness will start wearing off. Therefore, our coed must work to transform the culture to make it more attuned to her values. She and her group will work to affect a cultural revolution, a transformation of cultural values.

All of this implies that if you can change the way the culture sees certain behaviors then you can transform the value of the behavior. But, how do you go about changing the way everyone values behavior?

You have probably guessed already, that this way of making our coed feel better about herself contains what I would call a totalitarian will to control the minds, hearts, and speech of everyone.

Feminism isn’t an intellectual framework, it’s an emotional-fueled rationalization of sinful behavior. It becomes the problem of taxpayers when it uses government power and social programs to coerce others into celebrating and subsidizing sinful behavior.

(Note: I am not talking about first-wave “equal opportunity” equity feminism, I am talking about gender feminism – I’m drawing from Christina Hoff Sommers‘ book “Who Stole Feminism?” and “The War Against Boys” for my definitions of feminism)

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse answers the best argument for same-sex marriage

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Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She'll show you how to defend marriage

Jennifer Roback Morse likes to debate, and she’s very good at it. So good, that you can learn how to debate about marriage too, just by listening to her debates.

The audio of her recent debate in Manhattan just came out.

The MP3 file is here. (46 minutes lecture, 27 minutes of Q&A)

The main case that she makes is similar to the case she made in the debate she had at Columbia University, which I blogged about before. But the Q&A is new, and very interesting. It starts at 46:00 and goes until the end. But one of the difficult questions she was asked really stood out.

The argument

Opposition to same-sex marriage is the same as opposition to inter-racial marriage.

The answer

There are two ways to respond:

1) Race has nothing to do with the central purpose of marriage as being the natural way of binding children to parents, and parents to each other. Race doesn’t affect those goals. But gender is relevant to the the purpose of marriage, because if a baby is formed from opposite sex parents then both parents have a biological link to the child, which is a stronger bond than a non-biological link. This improves the chances that the child will be raised in a stable environment.

2) A better historical analogy to opposing same-sex marriage is opposition to no-fault divorce (unilateral divorce). No-fault marriage started in California. They also argued that only a few people would be affected, that the children would not be harmed, studies show that it will be OK, etc. But in hindsight, we now know that it was a disaster for the family, and especially for children.

You can visit Dr. J’s blog here.

Those of you who are into Christian apologetics need to understand that atheism is embraced for a whole host of non-rational causes. One of them is growing up in a fatherless household. It has a profound impact on a child’s worldview when the child’s father is defective or absent. That means that every Christian apologist who knows the standard arguments also needs to know how to defend marriage. Insofar as socialism attacks marriage, the Christian apologist needs to be able to defend marriage on fiscal grounds, as well.

I’ve written before about no-fault divorce, pre/extra-marital sex, single-mother parenting and same-sex marriage. Here is my post that cites research in order to explain why people oppose same-sex marriage.

News

New study confirms that men are losing their leadership role in relationships

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This article from the UK Daily Mail scares me.

First, an anecdote:

One of my male friends is looking to move home, out of the city centre and into the suburbs. I asked where he fancied  –  north, south, east or west. He shrugged. ‘I have no say in it,’ he said. ‘It’s not my decision.’

I pointed out that choosing where to live is one of the biggest decisions we make. Plus, he’d be paying for at least half of it. Surely he had some say? He shook his head. ‘The wife decides.’

This same friend last year kowtowed to his then girlfriend’s desire for a massive wedding with more than 200 guests and costing more than £20,000, even though he admitted that his preference would have been for a much smaller and more intimate affair.

And another anecdote:

One of my friends, a stay-at-home mother to two young children, says she is absolutely ‘the decider’ in her marriage.

‘My husband earns the money and I decide how we spend it,’ she says. ‘I feed and dress us all. I decide where and when we go on holiday. I choose everything for the house and have just decided to get an extension.

‘I even buy my own birthday present from my husband and our children. Actually, I quite often feel as if I have three children, not two. But that’s the way it is.’

She went on: ‘If I had to consult and strive for equality in every decision, we’d never get anything done. It sounds very old-fashioned, but basically my husband is the provider  –  in financial terms  –  and I am in charge of running the show.

‘Some people would no doubt say my husband’s “under the thumb” or that I “wear the trousers”. Although I hate the thought, it’s probably true.’

Then the research:

Studies appear to confirm that women are increasingly the dominant decision-making force in relationships.

A recent report found that by 2020 women will be driving the world economy and will have the final say in the majority of financial decisions in Britain’s homes.

Another study found that women make 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions, and 94 per cent of home furnishing purchases.

The study also found that in nearly half of all relationships men have no share in decision-making in the following four areas: household finances, big home purchases, the location of their homes, shared weekend activities and television viewing.

Does that sound like a good deal for men?

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