Tag Archives: Leader

News

Neil Simpson on gay NBA player Jason Collins and his 8-year fiance Carolyn Moos

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Read Neil’s post here first.

And here’s my comment to his post:

Neil, the story of this woman investing eight years with this man has been on my mind all week. I am not saying she is innocent. She is a fool. And she is responsible for choosing him. But my point would be this: why is everyone CELEBRATING this man? All he did is steal 8 years of her life and then abandoned her for the gay lifestyle, with all that that entails. Why is this good? I am not minimizing her responsibility. She is 100% responsible because she chose him over better marriage-minded men. But why celebrate this guy? What is there to celebrate? I would rather celebrate Neil Simpson and his marriage and family and Christian children if we are going to have to celebrate anything.

So, I wanted to make a comment about women who choose cads like Jason Collins.

What is it that causes these women to think that just because a man is athletic that he has what it takes to protect, provide and lead on moral and spiritual issues? Why pick someone who has fame from shooting a basketball or playing a guitar? What does that have to do with making commitments, being faithful, and teaching children? It’s completely irrational. Remember Tiger Woods? He could whack a golf ball really well, but commitment and fidelity were just not his things. Why celebrate him? Why marry him? What does swinging a club in front of a crowd have to do with life-long married love?

Don’t be that gal

If you are a woman and want to avoid making poor choices like Carolyn Moos, you can reverse engineer my dating questions and use them to detect fakes.

Here’s question 8 from the list that I ask women:

8. Marriage

Explain the public purposes of marriage, and then outline three threats to marriage and explain what legislation you would propose to neutralize these threats. What choices should people make before marriage to make sure they will have a stable, loving marriage?

SAMPLE ANSWER: Some public purposes of marriage are i) to force moral constraints on sexual activity, ii) to produce the next generation of humans, iii) to provide children with a stable, loving environment in which to grow up. Three threats to marriage are i) cohabitation, ii) no-fault divorce – which leads to fatherlessness, and iii) same-sex marriage. There are others, too. For legislation, there are things like tax incentives, shared parenting laws, school choice to de-monopolize politicized public schools, etc. Pre-marriage behaviors are things like chastity, experience with children, having lots of savings, being physically fit, etc. Having a degree in experimental science, math or economics is excellent for a woman. Avoid artsy degrees, especially English.

BONUS POINTS: Name more threats to marriage, explain the effects of fatherlessness on children, explain how divorce courts work, explain how socialism impacts the family through taxation and wealth redistribution, explain what happens to women and children after a divorce.

WHY IT MATTERS: It’s important for people who want to get married that they understand that marriage takes time and effort, and it requires both spouses to prepare for marriage, to be diligent at choosing a good spouse, and to understand what spouses and children need in order to stay engaged.

I can assure you that Jason Collins wouldn’t survive 5 seconds with a woman who was using my checklist, and it would save her a lot of time. Guess what? There is more to marriage-mindedness than broad shoulders and basketball skillz. Marriage requires a worldview that grounds self-sacrificial love and objective moral obligations RATIONALLY. The man should be able to present a plan for marriage that shows that some thought has been put into what he is trying to achieve with the marriage and the children, and why he needs you in particular to help.

Good behaviors have to be reasonable to a man, based on his prior efforts to study areas of knowledge that make them reasonable. He has to have a worldview that makes the duties of a husband and father – providing, parenting, teaching, fidelity, commitment, etc. – REASONABLE TO HIM. His goodness cannot be just talk. His goodness cannot be rooted in just preferences. It has to be rooted in knowledge derived from reasoning and a careful study of evidence. It takes study to ground the worldview that makes a good marriage. When will women learn?

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News

Support for my view of courting from… Jane Austen?!!

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I get into a lot of trouble because I have this loooong list of questions that I pose to women during courtship in order to evaluate them for marriage, and to let them know how I want them to prepare for my plan for the marriage.   Basically, my view of courting is that it is the time for the man to present his plan to serve God as a married couple, and where he wants to be effective, and how he wants to be effective, and where the woman fits into to his plan. The purpose of the pre-marriage courting is for me to explain all of this, and then the woman has the opportunity to first decide if she wants to help with that plan and then demonstrate that she can help with it. My job after laying out the plan is to make sure that she has all the tools she needs and lots of affection and tenderness, too. I am auditioning for the roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. And she is auditioning for the roles of helper, motivator and nurturer.

Anyway, all of that is evil, if you ask any non-Christians and Christians today. The ladies in my workplace are always telling me that I am “too strict” and that I need to “lower my standards”. What they mean by this is that they resent me taking on the role of leader in the relationship and telling them what marriage to me will be about and what they need to be able to do to help. And they especially resent having to prove that they can do it. Men they’ve known in the past have been pacified with some earnest words of agreement, and maybe some hugs and kisses. But that doesn’t work on me. I want books to be read, and actions to be performed.

For example, I want public speeches defending marriage, presentations on abortion in church, apologetics book clubs, apologetics conference organizing, apologetics lectures and debates in the local university, economics degrees, law school degrees, and pro-family conservative political views. (These are all the things my current favorite lady and her predecessors have done / are doing). In short, if I am coming to the table with lots of evidence that I can do my roles, then I want to see evidence that she  can do her roles. I call this view of courtship the wisdom view, and the popular alternative to it I call the fairy tale view.

The funniest thing is that right now I am working together with a woman who is very very high up in her profession. Manages dozens of people, has her own receptionist, wins lots of awards. Her job is incredibly stressful. But the funniest thing is that she is actually the easiest one of all to lead. And that’s because she is a good listener and she reads a ton of books and then independently designs and executes operations designed to move the ball forward on the things that I care about. She thinks my vision for serving God is good, and she knows how to get the job done, without being micromanaged. Here is a close-up of some flowers that I sent her recently to recognize her. She is also the least attention seeking female of the ones I know. She doesn’t want public recognition for what she does.

And with that said, let’s take a look at a quote about my favorite British author, Jane Austen, courtesy of Reformed Seth’s blog:

[Austen] was committed to the ideal of “intelligent love,” according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guidance in one’s growth. The idea of a love based in pedagogy may seem quaint to some modern readers and repellent to others, but unquestionably it plays a decisive part in the power and charm of Jane Austen’s art. And if we attempt to explain the power and charm that the genre of the novel exercised in the nineteenth century, we must take full account of its pedagogic intention and of such love as a reader might feel was being directed towards him in the solicitude of the novel for his moral well-being, in its concern for the right course of his development.

– Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 82.

There! I’m vindicated by someone who ought to know how these things work. When I was a young man, I read everything I could get my hands on from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t misinterpreting what they were telling me, and that I’ve applied it well. Just because it’s not “cool” today, doesn’t mean it’s not right.

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Commentary

John Hawkins: 7 reasons why marriage is falling apart in America

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John Hawkins, who blogs at Right Wing News, has a new post up at Clash Daily in which he lists 7 reasons why marriage is in decline.

Here are his reasons:

  1. The Sexual Revolution
  2. The Inability Of Many Poor Men To Support A Family
  3. A “Marrying Up” Gap
  4. No Fault Divorce
  5. Increased Economic Options For Women
  6. Marriage has become a much less attractive option for men
  7. Children have become more of an economic hindrance than a help

And here is one in detail:

6. Marriage has become a much less attractive option for men: There was a time when the man was expected to provide for his wife and kids and in return, he was treated as the king of the castle. Now, men are often treated more like partners than kings. Moreover, if there’s a divorce, men know they may not be treated fairly by the court system. Almost every man knows a guy who has had access to his child used as a bargaining chip, who has to pay Draconian child support payments or who has otherwise been generally treated unfairly because of his gender, not the merits. No man wants to end up as the guy paying a huge chunk of his income to a woman who broke his heart while he wonders if he’ll be allowed to have access to his own child.

As far as I can tell, the response to men’s lack of incentives to get married has been to legislate and spend even more to help women. In fact, I’m not even sure if most people understand what Mr. Hawkins outlined about male needs. Do women realize that one of the major reasons why men might like to get married is because then they would have a little team to protect, provide for and lead? Men don’t like it when government steps in and steals half their earnings, teaches their children bad ideas, and prevents them from protecting their family by disarming them. Maybe women can get men to be more interested in marriage if they think about why men would want to get married, and then make marriage more like what men want. That might involve rolling back feminism and socialism, and it might involve women changing who they are. There are two people in a relationship, and both of them have needs.