Tag Archives: Mark Driscoll

News

Sandra Fluke: Georgetown students spend $3000 on contraception

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From CNS News, a very funny story.

Excerpt:

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control.

Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.

Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.

“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.

Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.

But, back to this woman’s complaint that she’s spending $3,000 for birth control during her time in college.

“For a lot of students, like me, who are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary,” she complains.

So, she earns enough money in just one summer to pays for three full years of sex. And, yes, they are full years – since she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently.

The problem with government-run health insurance is that it turns into nothing but vote buying. The government forces everyone to pay for coverages they don’t want so that they can redistribute the wealth from people who don’t engage in risky, costly behaviors to people who do. It encourages people to be more reckless and irresponsible when someone else is paying for it. In economics, this is called “moral hazard”. Promiscuity costs money – money for contraceptives, abortions, etc. What happens when support for promiscuity it is counted as “health care” is that people who abstain from promiscuity end up subsidizing the promiscuity of others. And that’s why we get more of it – you get more of anything when you reduce the costs of it.

The most troubling thing about subsidizing premarital sex is that research has shown that premarital sex reduces the stability of marriages as well as the quality of marriages. Another study showed that teenage premarital sex increases the risk of divorce. Furthermore, the more marriages break down, the more society pays to deal with the fallout – $112 billion per year according to a recent study.

The same thing happens with subsidized single motherhood by choice – the more that the government subsidizes single motherhood by choice, the more of it you get. Many women want the baby without the husband now, and it’s easier for them when the government pays for it by taking money from workers and businesses. This is in spite of the research showing how harmful the decline of marriage is to society, especially because the decline of marriage leads to increased child poverty and increased violence to women and children.

The testimony by Sandra Fluke reminds me of that Christina Hoff Sommers book “Who Stole Feminism?” where the feminists just make up numbers out of nowhere in order to blame men and portray themselves as helpless victims in need of new laws, policies and bailouts. I guess this is what they learn to do in Women’s Studies programs.

What’s scary to me is that women like Sandra Fluke become lawyers and judges and they do influence what society will look like. Men have to make decisions about what to do in a society that does not support men or marriage very much anymore.

UPDATE: A little bit more information about Sandra Fluke.

I put that in quotes because in the beginning she was described as a Georgetown law student. It was then revealed that prior to attending Georgetown she was an active women’s right advocate. In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend, and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services, she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy. During this time, she was described as a 23-year-old coed. Magically, at the same time Congress is debating the forced coverage of contraception, she appears and is even brought to Capitol Hill to testify. This morning, in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, it was revealed that she is 30 years old, NOT the 23 that had been reported all along.

In other words, folks, you are being played. She has been an activist all along and the Dems were just waiting for the appropriate time to play her.

The whole thing was engineered, but don’t expect the mainstream media to report that to you.

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Commentary

How feminist pastors like Mark Driscoll and Kevin DeYoung undermine marriage

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Disclaimer: I agree with Mark Driscoll and probably KevinDeYoung on the vast majority (like 99%) of what they teach, and I applaud them for being conservative in their theology. This post is attacking them from the right – I don’t think that they are conservative ENOUGH. I disagree with all the people who attack pastors from the left. However, I do think that it is OK to attack them and expose them on the right. Mark Driscoll and Kevin DeYoung are liberal on some issues, because they are uninformed about men and marriage, and influenced by feminism. They need to be held to account. And I will do that now.

At Dalrock blog, I found an interesting assessment of a column by the famous feminist man-blamer Mark Driscoll. (H/T Fred, straightright)

Excerpt: (links removed)

Several readers have asked that I share my perspective on Pastor Mark Driscoll’s recentWashington Post piece “Why men need marriage”.  Driscoll opens his contribution to the man up and marry career gal sluts genre with an anecdote about a middle aged career woman who never married:

She was smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind, in her 40s, and still single.

A man of biblical wisdom would recognize that this woman had squandered her youth chasing a feminist dream of career and/or fornication.  Were he a wise man, a story starting this way would be a cautionary tale to young Christian women not to make the same mistakes this woman did. However Pastor Driscoll is steeped in the foolishness of our feminist culture and not biblical wisdom.  He finds no fault worth mentioning in this woman’s own choices, and instead looks for a man to blame for her terribly mismanaged life:

After my wife Grace and I spent some time with the woman from our church, we could not fathom why no one had married her.

She has been of marriageable age for over twenty years, yet she never married.  Pastor Driscoll seems to think this is because men have failed her.  It is far more likely that she followed the feminist advice to delay marriage until at least her 30s, while in all likelihood riding the carousel.  As a result she may well have lost the ability to experience love and attraction for a normal man.  Note that amongst the marriageable attributes he mentioned about this woman he left two out;  he didn’t say she was a virgin, and he overlooked entirely the fact that she is almost certainly no longer able to bear children.  In fact, notice that all of the attributes he lists are what one would normally advise a woman to look for in a husband (smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind).  He seems to have gone out of his way to cleanse his mind of traditional views of the sexes in marriage.  Why else would he refer to a woman using only terms which would apply to a man?

More: (links removed)

But Driscoll is apparently entirely unaware of the trends of the last 40 years.  Instead he coins a new euphemism for the carousel (fools parade) and ladles out a healthy serving of the Apex Fallacy.

Eventually, some get tired of the fools parade and settle for some guy who is more likely to act like a baby than help raise a baby. These guys make the worst husbands: gambling away the money, out late with the boys a lot, unfaithful, can’t seem to fit a full-time job in around his hobbies, and eventually trading in their 40-year-old wife for two 20-year-old girlfriends.

He sees women thinking with their genitals and seeking out men with dark triad traits and instead of holding them accountable for the devastation they cause their children he blames men in general.  Then he trots out the canard that men are driving the divorce epidemic by divorcing older wives when the data proves that divorce rates plummet as wives age.

He ignores the epidemic of women kicking fathers out of their children’s lives committing frivolous divorce and divorce theft and doesn’t warn men to be extremely careful when choosing a wife.  Like any other form of addict, he will do or say anything to get his next fix.

Men are like trucks: they drive straighter with a weighted load. Young men are supposed to load themselves up first by being responsible for themselves and not expecting their mom to fill up their sippy cup with beer and push them in a stroller to the unemployment line. Young men who take responsibility for themselves are then ready to marry and take responsibility for the life and joy of their wife.

But what about young women? Do these pastors think that women have “load themselves up” with anything that men might expect them to know? Should they have strong informed views favoring chastity, opposing divorce, and really really opposing fatherlessness? Of course not – because Mark Driscoll is afraid to tell women that there are things that they ought to be doing in order to be prepared for marriage. I have a whole list of things that women should be encouraged by pastors to load themselves up with, but none of those are on Mark Driscoll’s list.

Pastors don’t ask the right questions of women. They somehow have gotten the idea that Christianity only imposes obligations on men. It is so bad that Mark Driscoll actually blames the non-Christian men that “Christian” women choose have relationships with when they act like non-Christians! Pastors shouldn’t tell women that it’s not their fault if they choose bad men – it makes them think that they are victims and that they are not responsible for their  own decisions. That will not protect woman from making more bad decisions in the future. We don’t want women to get the idea that they don’t need to have informed views on these issues so that they will make better decisions.

Here’s Mark Driscoll explaining how men are to blame for single motherhood:

Part of it is the unintended consequences of divorce. Forty percent of kids go to bed at night without a father. Not to be disparaging toward single moms, but if you’re a single mom and you’re working 60 hours a week, and you’ve got a boy, and he’s home all by himself with no parents and no dad, he’s just going to be hanging out with his buddies, feeding himself pizza rolls.

The number one consumer of online pornography is 12- to 17-year-old boys. What that means is he’s home eating junk food, drinking Monster energy drinks, downloading porn, masturbating and screwing around with his friends. That really doesn’t prepare you for responsible adulthood. That’s a really sad picture, especially if you’re a single gal hoping to get married someday. You’re like: “Seriously, that’s the candidate pool? You’ve got to be kidding me.” That’s why 41 percent of births right now are to unmarried women. A lot of women have decided: “I’m never going to find a guy who is actually dependable and responsible to have a life with. So I’ll just get a career and have a baby and just intentionally be a single mother because there are no guys worth spending life with.”

Single motherhood is no problem for Mark Driscoll – which implies premarital sex. It’s all totally OK – for women. Because he thinks that men are to blame for the decisions that women freely make. But I think that the men that Driscoll is complaining about are produced by the conditions that he refuses to condemn – like premarital sex, which is a risk factor for divorce, and single motherhood. So, he is basically supporting fatherlessness, and then complaining about the results of the fatherlessness that he supported. In his rush to avoid condemning women, he creates the very situations that result in men who do not do well in school, do not work and do not marry. All because he doesn’t think that the Bible’s moral teachings apply to women – but only to men.

What men expect from women when we pursue them is that they will be passionate about identifying the causes of social phenomena like the decline of men , and then demonstrate to us what actions they have taken in order to defeat those trends. We expect women to talk about no-fault divorce, shared parenting, cohabitation, hook-ups, binge drinking, day care, single motherhood, gay marriage, school choice – to show men that they have some familiarity with the issues that they would face as mothers and wives. But when pastors respond to the real problems facing men with “man up” and women believe them and accept the view that they are not responsible for solving these problems, then we all lose. Women today are complaining that the sons of single mothers and divorced mothers from yesterday will not man up. But where did these single mothers and divorced mothers come from? Surely pastors who refused to confront women about the morality of premarital sex (which reduces the stability of the marriage, leading to divorce) and single motherhood by choice deserve some of the blame?

Men are getting 40% of the undergraduate degrees in many universities. Is it incumbent on pastors to read books like Christina Hoff Sommers’ “The War Against Boys” and find out the root causes of this effect? Is it incumbent on pastors to read books like Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody” and find out another root cause of the marriage strike – no-fault divorce? Or should pastors just remain ignorant and lazy, and refuse to confront women with the causes of the decline of men? It seems to me that pastors like Kevin DeYoung and Mark Driscoll just dismiss these problems with the slogan “man up”, because they are just not intelligent enough to be able to read books by Christian scholars that explain the causes for the decline of men. It’s much easier to write blog posts bashing men, with no citations, and get accolades from the feminists in their churches, who are only too willing to blame men for problems that they themselves have caused by embracing anti-marriage, anti-family ideologies.

Pastors think that Bible doesn’t apply to women

Here’s my view:

  • Bellow “How Dare You!” to men who have premarital sex and have babies out of wedlock and get divorced.
  • Bellow “How Dare You!” to women who have premarital sex and have babies out of wedlock and get divorced.

Here’s Driscoll’s view:

  • Bellow “How Dare You!” to men who have premarital sex and have babies out of wedlock and get divorced.
  • Tell women that it’s not their fault if they fornicate and have babies out of wedlock and divorce because they are not happy, and then bellow at men to “Man Up” and marry women who think that the Bible doesn’t apply to them.

Many women who claim to be Christians are very sympathetic with the government handing out goodies to women who don’t care what the Bible says.

It seems to me that what pastors like Driscoll are saying is this:

  1. Women should not be told not to have babies out of wedlock
  2. Women should not be told not to have premarital sex, which often leads to divorce (marital instability)
  3. The poverty that results should be fixed by government redistribution of wealth

Where does government money come from for all of the social programs to deal with broken homes (112 millon per year)? It comes from men who work. We have to pay higher taxes to subsidize women who get into situations that are very expensive for working men to pay for. This in turn reduces out ability to afford to get married and have children.

And Mark Driscoll comes along and bellows at us “How Dare You Complain About High Taxes For Sin Subsidies! Man Up and Marry Those Sinners! Pay for their social programs!”

Here’s what one devout Calvinist Christian woman just wrote to me:

I know there are some men who start out being really nice and sweet and they get the woman crazy about them and then slowly, little bit by little bit they persuade her that if she “really loves them” she’ll sleep with them and they’re “going to marry” her and they “love her” and all that rot. And one night she gives in because she’s weak. But she doesn’t really want to. But she’s bad at resisting the man and he’s manipulative.

And he lied. He didn’t mean it. She did mean it. She believed him when he whispered sweet nothings in her ear.

Yeah, she’s not too bright to fall for the liar. Yeah, she should be vigilant. Yeah, she should think logically instead of emotionally.

But often she’s younger than he is and she falls for his good acting. It’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.

Between her and the liar, I’m with Driscoll.

See? The Bible doesn’t apply to women. It only applies to men. That’s what pastors have been telling women and this is what creates an entire generation of fatherless children, who the pastors then bellow at to “man up”. If the pastors had been man enough to challenge women with the Bible in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess. They caused this by refusing to believe what the Bible says.

Making men better without nagging

I sometimes wonder if pastors think that men are just there to serve women, and not to serve God. Pastors seem to have no idea where men are really needed in this society – to counter anti-Christian ideologies – and how to get them there. Pastors are supposed to inspire and encourage Christian men to become effective and influential in the areas where we need them to be, and to inspire women to select those men who are having an influence over non-Christian men who are just good looking and fun. But they fail miserably at these tasks. The don’t seem to be able to look at an effect (declining men) and trace it back to causes, and then address those causes.

 Here are a few things that pastors could talk about in the church:
  • how should schools change to help men to learn better?
  • what sort of education policies will help parents educate their boys?
  • what sort of books should boys be reading?
  • what should parents be doing to make their
  • what should a single man be doing to please God – not women?
  • what economic policies encourage job creation?
  • how does socialism (social programs) minimize the roles that men play in a family?
  • how do we make church more interesting for men?
  • how has feminism changed law and government to be more hostile to men?
  • how has feminism changed the workplace to be less accessible to men?
  • how can we convince women to stop getting drunk and hooking up?
  • how can we get men to be able to understand the truth of Christianity?
  • how can we get women to affirm men in their traditional roles?
  • how can we point men towards careers in science, engineering, math and technology?
  • how does the culture undermine strong Christian men?
  • what are some areas where Christians are needed to be influential today?
  • who are some of Christian men who are effective and influential?
  • what academic disciplines should men focus on in order to have an influence?
  • what laws and policies are hostile to the Christian life plan?
  • how can we get men to speak intelligently about Christianity and how it relates to other areas of knowledge?
But questions like this never occur to most pastors. They often can’t even talk  about things like apologetics and politics for fear of being “divisive”. Instead of complaining about men, pastors need to start thinking about how to solve the problem. That will involve deliberate study and taking action to address the root causes of the decline of men, providing men with a positive vision instead of just nagging them, and holding women accountable for their own sinful actions, like premarital sex (a risk factor for divorce) and single motherhood, which both cause their children to be raised without fathers.

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Videos

Is Mark Driscoll afraid to hold women accountable for their own choices?

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Watch this video.

Who is to blame for this woman’s troubles? Well, I agree with Driscoll that her family, the church and other Christians were to blame for not telling her the truth about sex. On that we all agree. Christians do a lousy job of explaining sex to young people, because they don’t want to talk about “dirty” stuff, and they don’t want to use arguments and evidence, and they don’t want to go outside the Bible to give real reasons and evidence. But thumping the Bible is a poor response to peer pressure and pop culture.

But she and Mark Driscoll also seem to think the man is to blame. Is the man to blame?

Well, the man certainly did bad things, but I think that none of these bad things could have happened to this woman in particular if this woman had not first chosen this man from all the other men that she knew, and then given him the opportunity to do these bad things. Without her own free choices, she would never have been harmed. So her own bad choices played a part in her suffering but she didn’t mention her own choices at all. So, let me take a look at how she could have made better choices below.

Can women expect a non-Christian man to act like a Christian man?

Women need to be careful to realize that they should avoid being alone with non-Christian men, especially when they are not even old enough to be dating men at all. That’s what courting is designed to prevent, by the way – the man has to go through the father to get to the woman, and they need to be accompanied by a chaperone at all times. And in any case, a woman can get love without touching a man just by listening to the man’s words, reading his writings, letting him serve her, washing a car together, and accepting gifts from him.

Women: you don’t go to a deserted beach with a non-Christian man. Don’t take risks like that. Especially when you have probably already done a lot with the guy. And don’t drink alcohol, it impairs your judgment. The purpose of men is to marry them, not to have a good time with them. No alcohol is allowed!

Paul says that you cannot expect non-Christians to act like Christians, which is exactly what many Christian women do.

1 Cor 5:9-13:

9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—

10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.

11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?

13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

And, 2 Cor 6:14-16:

14Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

15What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?

16What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Christians should not pursue non-Christians romantically – it’s disrespectful to God to leave him out of your romantic operations.

Women can stop a lot of the bad behavior of men just by choosing authentic Christian men by using rigorous objective criteria to evaluate men. If a woman chooses a non-Christian man, then she cannot complain if he acts like a non-Christian man. And there is more to a man being a Christian than just saying that he is, memorizing Bible verses and singing praise hymns in church. Christianity is a worldview. It has to be applied across the board. Christian women need to study to develop a Christian worldview of their own so they know how to evaluate the worldviews of candidate men.

What else can we learn from the video?

Here are a few more things that stood out to me in the video:

  • She should take more responsibility for their actions, instead of blaming others
  • She should study these things (not just the Bible!) on her own before she starts dating, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
  • Her parents should have studied these things (not just the Bible!) more, and helped her more by being more convincing, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
  • The church she grew up in should provide her with extra-biblical arguments and evidence from the objective external world so that she could resist ideologies like atheism, postmodernism, liberalism, feminism, etc. – she can’t act morally unless she believes that God exists and that morality is real

Women should also know that the decision to have sex before marriage with a man who isn’t a Christian doesn’t magically change him into a Christian. Sex isn’t magic. It doesn’t cause a man to like a woman, or to fall under her control.

Women go to school for 4 years to learn a trade and they need to put some effort into studying courtship rules so they can be wise about their own choices with men. Jumping into a car and trying to drive it without lessons is a good way to get killed. And emotions, intuitions, peer-pressure and pop-culture don’t help you to know how to drive a car. Be careful, think for yourself.

I also recommend that young, unmarried women  become informed about anti-family, anti-father policies. If women don’t want to be hurt by men, then vote for stronger families, lower taxes, and policies that promote good husbands and good fathers. Girls need to see love modeled between a husband and wife as they grow up, and they need to have fathers in the home. Good public policies encourage men to marry and stay married.

Women need to get better criteria for choosing men

A while back, I posted on some of the criteria women have for choosing men, and here are a few:

  • Being tall
  • Being aloof and disinterested
  • Playing a musical instrument
  • Well-dressed
  • Stylish shoes
  • A deep voice
  • Handsome face

What do women expect when they choose men based on criteria like that? It makes no sense to blame a bad man for being bad. He’s BAD! Don’t go near him, he’ll be bad to you, too!

Shouldn’t women judge themselves first, before judging a man?

Shouldn’t women begin by removing the plank in their own eye before removing the speck from the man’s eye?

I think an excellent first step would be for Christian women to take a good look at the music they listen to, the movies they watch, and also what they read. Are they listening to Melissa Etheridge, watching “Thelma & Louise”, and reading Margaret Atwood? Are they informing themselves about truth in many areas, like economics and cosmology, so that they can make informed choices of men? Are they building resistance to cultural trends?

What is wrong with the woman in that video?

Shouldn’t this woman have put some effort into testing out the claims of her parents and the church by reading the Bible itself? I mentioned reading extra-biblical stuff but even the Bible doesn’t ground anything that she was doing or anything the church was telling her to do that was wrong. Driscoll seems to think that women are not obligated to read the Bible, and that if someone in the church tells them a lie, then the church is to blame. But shouldn’t we expect people who attend church to test these things out for themselves? I realize that she wasn’t a Christian, but in order to take responsibility, she could have said “I should have checked things in my Bible and so I share the blame”. She doesn’t say that because she doesn’t blame herself at all for anything that happened. Well, probably she went to church for the singing and never read what the Bible had to say – or didn’t take it as an authority. But she never blames herself for either one of those.

I noticed that she claims that if the church tells her something and she does it, then the church is to blame. Well, the church (or at least her parents) undoubtedly told her not to have sex before she was married, but she didn’t mention that in the video. Why not? Well, she only mentions things that other people tell her to blame them. When they tell her the right thing and she doesn’t do it, she doesn’t mention what they told her. Because she won’t blame herself for any reason. And Driscoll has nothing to say about that, either.  Any time the church tells her something bad and she does it… it’s the church’s fault. Any time the church tells her something good and she DOESN’T do it… she just doesn’t mention it because she isn’t responsible for anything she does – it’s always the fault of someone else.

I don’t mind if she explains the circumstances surrounding WHY she made bad choices. I don’t even mind the bad choices, because I make bad choices. I just don’t like her blaming other people, I especially don’t like her blaming bad men. Bad men are bad. Don’t blame them for not being good – it’s your fault for choosing them. There are other men who are good who get no attention from women at all.

We need to learn from Theodore Dalrymple

Remember this post?

Excerpt:

With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments.

And again:

Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.

This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.

Read the whole thing, you young women. And judge men hard. It’s good to judge them beforehand so that you don’t have to condemn them for being bad later.

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