Tag Archives: Sexual Harassment

Can secular leftist men find any value in women apart from sex?

Huma Abedin (left), Harvery Weinstein (center), Hillary Clinton (right)
Huma Abedin (left), Harvery Weinstein (center), Hillary Clinton (right)

So, lately we have had a lot of scandals in the media where secular leftist men have been accused of raping, sexually assaulting, and sexually harassing women. I have been getting increasingly concerned about how radical feminism’s sexual revolution agenda has destroyed romantic love and lifelong marriage for some time, and all these accusations coming out made me want to write something about it.

First of all, we can’t count on the secular left to stop this epidemic of abusing women. Secular leftists don’t care about women who are abused. As I mentioned in my previous post on the feminist defenders of Bill Clinton, feminists always circle the wagons to defend Democrat rapists and sexual criminals when they are discovered. Here’s another link for a different Democrat sexual assault apologist. This is what secular leftists do about sexual assault and rape. They make defenses for the rapists, and attack the victims’ character.

Matt Walsh has some helpful suggestions on how we can rollback the changes brought on by the secular left with their sexual revolution.

He writes: (H/T Dina)

I’m tired of talking about this sexual harassment thing. Let the victims come forward, let justice be done, but why are we spending every day talking about it? There’s no point.

There could be a point, but there isn’t. There isn’t, because we aren’t going to do anything to prevent these issues in the future. We aren’t learning anything. We aren’t coming up with solutions. We aren’t allowed to come up with solutions. The only thing we’re allowed to say is: “This is bad! So bad! Men are bad! So much badness! Very, very bad! Bad men! Bad!”

Matt’s article comes up with 3 solutions, and I’ll leave it to you to check them out. I only care about the third one for my post:

3) Emphasize chastity.

I mentioned this on Twitter and someone, who’s apparently a professional writer, asked me what the word means. That’s our culture in a nutshell. We literally don’t know what the word “chastity” means.

For anyone else who may be confused, chastity is the virtue which moderates our sexual desires. Basically, to be chaste is to practice restraint. A chaste person refrains from more than just sexual assault. He refrains, also, from pornography, vulgarity, sex outside marriage, and sex that is not in accordance with natural law. This all sounds downright archaic nowadays, I realize, but our outrage over sexual improprieties doesn’t amount to much if it isn’t rooted in a fundamental belief in the dignity of the human person.

Notice I say we should emphasize chastity, not that we are doomed unless everyone practices it perfectly. The problem is not just that people misbehave nowadays — indeed, people have misbehaved in the same ways throughout history — but that our culture has no real message and no real idea about how we ought to be behaving. We can say, “Don’t harass and assault,” but the message is not getting through because it’s insufficient on its own. People must be taught not to see each other as sex objects, but we can only teach them that if we teach them first about the sacredness of the sexual act and the inherent worth of all human beings. If we have ruled that out and abandoned chastity, then we cannot be shocked at the pigs who surround us.

First thing to say is that I don’t think that Matt’s ideas will be very attractive to a culture that is committed to an atheistic cosmos: random universe, no objective morality, purpose of life is happiness, no free will, no accountability when you die. Matt’s solutions require that people think that there is a design for human relationships with an objective right way and wrong way to handle relationships.

This sexual abuse epidemic is exactly what I would have predicted from powerful men who believe that they are machines made out of meat, living in an accidental universe with no objective moral laws, who will never have to answer to their Creator when they die. If God does not exist, then anything is permissible – so long as you can get away with it. If you want to know how secular leftist men treat women, look at how Harvey Weinstein treated women who were less powerful than he was.

On atheism, women are just animals – machines made out of meat. You can use them for your pleasure and then throw them away. There is nothing that women are “meant” to be, because there is no Designer. If you find a pretty girl who is fatherless, then by all means – take advantage of her but don’t get caught. This is rational on atheism. Atheism is the Harvey Weinstein religion. That’s what’s rational in a random, mindless universe with no free will and no accountability to an omnipotent moral lawgiver.

And if those nasty Christians disapprove of you, well you can just threaten them in court for refusing to celebrate your authentic atheist hedonism. That’s happening already – using the law to coerce Christians into approving of immorality. Weinstein himself donated millions to the Democrat party – the party that undermines sexual morality, and makes it easier for perverts to do what they want to do without being judged.

So what about Matt’s suggestion of a resurgence of chastity?

Chastity is a Judeo-Christian value that states that men and women who aren’t married to one another cannot engage in sexual activity. Chastity isn’t just abstaining from sex, though. It’s having opposite sex relationships in which you are actively seeking to set goals with a woman and help her to achieve those goals. So, let’s see what that looks like for me as a chaste man, then I’ll talk about whether this is even possible on any worldview other than orthodox Judaism or evangelical Bible-belieing Christianity.

In Christianity, women are equally made in the image of God as men, and they are made for the same purpose as men – to enter into a relationship with God through Christ. So, right away, I have a set of priorities for every woman on the planet that comes from my worldview. My goal with them is to help them to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and then after that, I want to lead and advise them to grow their skills so that they are able to live lives of influence and effectiveness. You can read all about Christian fellowship in Philippians, by the way. Fellowship in the work of the gospel is the business of Christianity and women are meant to be equal partners with men in that business. (Although they might have different roles at different times). Every woman is a potetional partner in the fellowship of the gospel, and so they all have value,

In my case, I have always tried to help women to study and find work that would prepare them to have an influence. For those who are too old to marry, I encourage them to have an influence through speaking, teaching or organizing events, for example. I have female friends who are too old to marry who I monitor. If they need support to get things done for God, then I give them encouragement and gifts to make their operations run smoother. Just today one of them e-mailed me her answer to an atheist who was trying to justify being moral on atheism. For a chaste Christian man, women don’t have to be young and pretty and sexually permissive in order to get basic care. They get care because they play for the same team as Christian men do, and they have the desire to get things done for the team.

There are other young women I mentor who are in other states, and/or are too young for me to marry. I try to get them to change their majors to STEM, to read books on apologetics and economics, to get jobs in the summer, to go to graduate school, to save their money by not wasting it on fun, and to keep an eye out for husband candidates by looking past mere appearances. The goal is to get them to have an influence, and that’s not going to be achieved with crazy emotional life choices made without any wisdom or experience. Again – they have value without having to be pretty or give in to my sexual desires. I don’t even understand what sex means outside of marriage. Sex is what married couples do in order to balance out the challenges of marriage and re-affirm the union. It’s a thing you speak about to your spouse who has committed to you for life. I wouldn’t speak about sex to someone I wasn’t married to, what sense would that even make? It makes no sense.

Is treating women well rational on atheism?

When you keep seeing stories of powerful secular leftists using their power to take what they want from women and then throw them away, remember that on atheism this is rational. If you want to get male-female relationships right, you have to get the worldview right.  Young women have a natural desire to dismiss rules and to pursue fun, without seeing the consequences of their actions in the long term.  There has to be some reason for a man to tell a woman the truth about what follows from her decisions. Men have to be willing to reason with a woman about what she should be doing today so that she reaches the goals she is aiming for tomorrow. Christian men have the capacity to put their self-interest on hold and say what needs to be said to treat women well. Atheist men don’t have any such restraint. We need to remember that ideas like atheism have consequences. It’s no use complaining about the effects when you put the causes in place yourself.

UVA retracts rape story after Columbia University calls it “journalistic failure”

UVA students following their leftist masters
UVA students blindly following their leftist masters

The Wall Street Journal reports on the conclusion to this radical-feminist scandal. I’ll explain later why I am writing about this, too.

Excerpt:

Rolling Stone retracted an explosive article detailing an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism concluded that the story was a “journalistic failure that was avoidable.”

The Rolling Stone story was written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and published last November under the headline “A Rape on Campus.” It sparked a national uproar over sexual misconduct at college campuses. At UVA, President Teresa Sullivan suspended all Greek activities for six weeks and students marched in protest.

But before long, other media reports raised serious doubts about the veracity of the article and the reporting and editing process behind it.

[…]The “most consequential” decision, the report found, was Rolling Stone’s acquiescence to the fact that Ms. Erdely “had not contacted the three friends who spoke with Jackie on the night she said she was raped.” If Rolling Stone had done so, it said, it “would have almost certainly led the magazine’s editors to change plans.”

[…]The Charlottesville, Va., police concluded in March after a four-month investigation that “there is no substantive basis to support the account alleged in the Rolling Stone article,” the Columbia report notes. Police said at the time they were unable to interview the woman featured in the story and their investigation remains suspended until she decides she “wishes to cooperate.”

Jackie was later discovered to be a radical feminist. The author of the retracted rape story is also a radical feminist. And she is presenting herself as a victim:

Ms. Erdely, in a statement, said the past few months have been among the most painful in her life, and reading the Columbia report detailing her mistakes was “a brutal and humbling experience.”

[…]The report said that Rolling Stone’s editors, as well as Ms. Erdely, “concluded that their main fault was to be too accommodating of Jackie because she described herself as the survivor of a terrible sexual assault.”

Columbia, however, disagreed with that conclusion, noting that editors made decisions about “attribution, fact-checking and verification that greatly increased their risks of error but had little or nothing to do with protecting Jackie’s position.”

Newsbusters quotes the report, which shows that Erdely’s story was agenda-driven from the start:

Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,” according to Erdely’s notes of the conversation.

Reason.com quotes this part of the report to show her editors were complicit:

Jackie proved to be a challenging source. At times, she did not respond to Erdely’s calls, texts and emails. At two points, the reporter feared Jackie might withdraw her cooperation. Also, Jackie refused to provide Erdely the name of the lifeguard who had organized the attack on her. She said she was still afraid of him. That led to tense exchanges between Erdely and Jackie, but the confrontation ended when Rolling Stone’s editors decided to go ahead without knowing the lifeguard’s name or verifying his existence. After that concession, Jackie cooperated fully until publication.

Reason also comments:

It’s actually even worse than that. When Erdely told Jackie that she really did need to know the name of Jackie’s date (the lifeguard who supposedly masterminded the attack), Jackie stopped answering her phone calls and texts for about two weeks. Eventually, Erdely left Jackie another voicemail in which the writer agreed to stop trying to contact the lifeguard and instead use a pseudonym, Drew. After that, Jackie magically reappeared, calling Erdely back “quickly,” according to the report.

Jackie, in fact, displayed impressive levels of self-preservation and rational behavior—at least, from the perspective of a highly disturbed person whose goal was to spread an incredible lie without exposing it as such. She was highly detailed in her account of the crime, gave descriptions, and recalled (wholly invented) conversations with great accuracy. And she studiously avoided any line of questioning that would have exposed the lie. If a particular question posed a threat, she either invented a reason why it couldn’t be answered, or simply stopped responding.

No one at Rolling Stone has been fired, much less charged with crimes. The woman who made the false rape charge has also not been charged with anything. So there is no deterrent there to prevent this from happening again – either to the women who make the charges, or to the radical feminists who “report” on them. Let’s hope that when the lawsuits shake out that both Erdely and her Rolling Stone cheerleaders find themselves bankrupted.

How often are rape claims false?

National Review explains:

Specifically, in their analysis of sexual-assault cases at a large university, the authors found that 5.9 percent of cases were provably false. However, 44.9 percent cases “did not proceed” – meaning there was insufficient evidence, the accuser was uncooperative, or the incident did not meet the legal standard of assault. An additional 13.9 percent of cases could not be categorized due to lack of information. That leaves 35.3 percent of cases that led to formal charges or discipline against the accused.

“35.3 percent of cases that led to formal charges or discipline against the accused”. That’s a lot of Jackie-scenarios.

The trouble is when people don’t do the homework and just come to have a general mistrust of men based on their intuitions and emotions from stories they hear about from the news media – stories like this one. And yet they become so sure that they have an educated and informed opinion, just from hearing news reports. They never hear about the retractions.

My take

So why did I cover this story in past blog posts, and why am I bringing up the retraction now? Well, it’s because of the feminist agenda. I want to point out how the feminist left uses stories like this in order to push a wedge between men and women. Women who are indoctrinated for four years in misandry are less likely to look to men as protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders. Marriage, with its traditional gender roles of men working and woman raising the kids, will be out.

If men are all rapists, then how could a woman give up her own dreams and career to stay home and raise kids? If men are all rapists, how could a woman trust a man to be faithful to her? If men are all rapists, then how could a man be trusted to provide for a family. If men are all rapists, then how could a woman trust a man to stick around when she is old and wrinkly? And of course, this lousy impression of men is all reinforced by the binge-drinking, hooking-up, and serial cohabitation that is so popular in university campuses.

There is a reason why Rolling Stone ran with this story, despite all the warning signs – it made the point that they wanted to make. Women who think that they can’t depend on men will naturally turn to bigger government to provide for them, and that’s what people on the left want women to do. Marriage is subversive to their plan. Having a lot of children is subversive to their plan. Homeschooling is subversive to their plan.

IPCC chief resigns over scandals, declares global warming “is my religion”

Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri
Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri

This is from the pro-global-warming Scientific American.

It says:

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resigned today following accusations of sexual harassment by a former employee at the energy think tank he heads in New Delhi.

The United Nations’ climate science body, which is currently meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, will now be headed temporarily by Vice Chairman Ismail El Gizouli.

Pachauri, 74, did not travel to Nairobi this week for the IPCC meeting due to a police investigation into a complaint filed Feb. 13 by a 29-year-old employee. According to to the complaint, she accused Pachauri of sending text messages and emails since September 2013 that were inappropriate (ClimateWire, Feb. 19).

Since then, at least one other former employee has leveled similar accusations at Pachauri through Indian media.

[…]Pachauri’s term as chairman of IPCC was due to expire in October 2015. He has served as head of the panel since 2002, and in 2007 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

“For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission,” he wrote. “It is my religion and my dharma [duty].”

It’s his “religion”. That apparently means you can believe anything you want and it’s untestable, and completely divorced from evidence. This guy would make a lousy Christian if that’s his view of what religion is.

Remember when he lied about Himalayan glaciers, as the radically leftist UK Guardian reported:

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the international body which produces key reports to advise governments on climate change, today defended the use of “grey literature” which is not published in scientific journals.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come under fire after a high-profile mistake was exposed in its most recent assessment of the scale and impacts of global warming — a claim the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

The claim came from a report by charity WWF and was based on remarks made by an Indian scientist which were never published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal.

Here is a reaction to the news from climate skeptic Marc Morano:

If Pachauri had any decency, he would have resigned in the wake of the Climategate scandal which broke in 2009. Climategate implicated the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists in attempting to collude and craft a narrative on global warming while allowing no dissent. Or Pachauri could have resigned when he wished skeptics would rub asbestos on their faces or conceded that the IPCC was at the ‘beck and call’ of governments. There were so many opportunities to to the right thing and fade away. But it took the proceedings of the Indian court system over the allegations of sexual harassment to finally bring Pachauri down. Things can only be looking up for the UN IPCC now that it has ridded itself of this political and ethical cancer.

Pachauri couldn’t be brought down for lying about the science, because that’s what the whole thing is about – that’s his job. He would have been fired by the UN if he had started to tell the truth about global warming nonsense.

So global warming is his religion, and guess what? This religion comes complete with witch-hunts!

Check out this article from the Daily Caller. (H/T Joshua P.)

Excerpt:

An investigation by Democratic lawmakers into the sources of funding for scientists who challenge details of the greater global warming narrative has already forced one scientist to call it quits.

University of Colorado climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. has been targeted by Arizona Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking liberal on the House Natural Resources Committee, for his research challenging the claim that global warming is making weather more extreme.

This investigation, and other attacks, have forced Pielke to stop researching climate issues. He said the “incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues.”

“I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject,” Pielke wrote on his blog.

Pielke is one of seven academics under Grijalva’s investigation for allegedly taking money from the fossil fuels industry in exchange for research. Pielke says he’s never been funded by fossil fuels interests — a fact to which Grijalva already knows since Pielke disclosed as much when he testified before Congress.

[…]So what’s Pielke’s connection to all of this? Grijalva’s staff wrote that Pielke “has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress on climate change and its economic impacts.” One “2013 Senate testimony featured the claim, often repeated, that it is ‘incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.’”

Why is Pielke a target? Because White House science czar John Holdren has “highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke,” according to Grijalva’s letter to the University of Colorado.

“Congressman Grijalva doesn’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing on my part, either ethical or legal, because there is none,” Pielke wrote. “He simply disagrees with the substance of my testimony – which is based on peer-reviewed research funded by the US taxpayer, and which also happens to be the consensus of the IPCC (despite Holdren’s incorrect views).”

Holdren said Pielke’s views were “outside the mainstream.” Pielke presented evidence to the Senate that global warming is not causing weather, like hurricanes and floods, to become more frequent or extreme. Holdren, disagreed, and singled out Pielke in a six page statement saying that global warming was making the weather worse.

The main problem with Holdren’s argument is that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which Holdren himself often defers to — has said the evidence favors Pielke’s argument that weather has not gotten more extreme.

I find it ironic that John Holdren is calling Pielke “outside the mainstream”. Recall that Holdren has the bizarre view that a world police force is necessary to oversee forced abortions and compulsory sterilizations. The man’s a psychopath, in short. Exactly the kind of man who would be selected as “science czar” by Democrat Barack Obama.