Tag Archives: Women

Podcasts

Should pro-lifers argue against sexual libertinism?

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Consider this article from Christianity Today about the tactics of the pro-life movement by Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

Why then, in the face of its bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically?

I think it’s because abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century. Today a widespread social understanding persists that if there is going to be sex outside marriage, there will be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution to this social reality.

In order to have a sexual revolution, women must have the same sexual autonomy as men. But the laws of biology contradict this ideology, so feminists who have championed the sexual revolution—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, among others—have found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as an invasion of the female body. The fetus becomes, in Firestone’s phrase, an “uninvited guest.” As long as the fetus occupies the mother’s womb, these activists argue, the mother should be able to keep it or get rid of it at her discretion.

If you’re going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. And if you’re going to have a sexual revolution, you have to be ready to clean up the debris. After 35 years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society, we are still adding bodies to the heap. No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this. It’s not only politically embarrassing, it’s also painful to one’s self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn.

This analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, unborn persons.

Here is a podcast from the Life Training Institute discussing that article.

The MP3 file is here. (Just the first 34 minutes)

Topics:

  • Dinesh says to argue against sexual promiscuity as part of pro-life apologetics
  • LTI’s general position is to focus on the humanity of the unborn
  • should pro-lifers change strategies to argue against sexual libertinism
  • is Dinesh right to say that arguing for the humanity of the unborn is not enough?
  • how strong are the philosophical arguments for the pro-life position
  • why has the effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood failed?
  • have the best arguments for the pro-life position become common knowledge?
  • do women who have abortions believe that the unborn are human or not?
  • do the arguments against abortion address the real circumstances of the woman?
  • why do people accept the humanity of the unborn, but still are pro-choice?
  • do people accept abortion because they refuse to give up sexual libertinism?
  • what is really behind the disrespect that people for the right to life?
  • is it possible for pro-lifers to convince people to give up irresponsible sex?
  • how did people begin to believe that a sexual revolution was a good idea?
  • has the sexual revolution increased or decreased social ills like divorce?
  • can a scientific case be made that sexual libertinism is destructive and costly?
  • should pro-lifers argue abortion on moral ground alone, or on utilitarian grounds?

This first file switches topics about 34 minutes into the podcast. There is actually a second file, too.

The MP3 file for part two is here.

The second topic is a paper written by an abortionist who is performing abortions while she is pregnant. She talks about performing a second-trimester abortion in the paper. Just as she describes tearing out the leg of the baby inside the other woman, her own baby kicks inside her abdomen. It’s interesting to hear this woman explain her feelings about this occurrence, and how she wants to suppress them. You can listen to the rest of the first MP3 file and then the second file as well to hear about that topic.

My thoughts

I have a lot of friends in the pro-life movement, and I also donate to pro-life debaters and sponsor pro-life events, (and I do the same for the marriage issue). But there is something else I do, too. I feel very, very badly about how women have adopted the habit of having sex before marriage, simply because they have bought into feminist ideology hook, line and sinker. Premarital sex causes women a lot of pain and emotional damage, as I described before. By abolishing sex roles, women are left with no idea about how to make a man love them and commit to them.

So it’s not just that I oppose abortion and support traditional marriage. It’s not just that I oppose women who murder their unborn children and who raise children without fathers. It’s that I oppose premarital sex, period. And I oppose the root of all these problems – feminism. It’s feminism that abolishes sex roles, chivalry, courting, romance, traditional marriage, two-parent families, at-fault divorce laws, small government, and eventually, liberty itself. And the way that I argue against feminism is by sharing the way that I treat women with you, my readers.

You can read more about my anti-feminist, pro-woman, pro-life, pro-marriage views in the related posts below.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

Related posts on feminism and sexual libertinism

    Related posts on abortion

    Related posts on adult stem cell research

    Videos

    MUST-SEE: Jennifer Roback Morse lectures on marriage and family

    1 Comment

    I am sure you will all LOVE this lecture delivered by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse at Houston Baptist University. (60 minutes, start listening at 11:15 though!)

    Topics:

    • what is the purpose of marriage in society?
    • do children really need a mother and a father?
    • is each child entitled to a relationship with their 2 bio-parents?
    • how is the purpose of marriage being re-defined today?
    • how does same-sex marriage redefine traditional marriage?
    • should the state be able to determine who counts as a parent?
    • are mothers and fathers interchangeable?
    • how did no-fault divorce redefine marriage?
    • does the government provide an incentive to divorce?
    • are men interchangeable with women?
    • where did feminism come from? how did it start?
    • how does the Marxist worldview view marriage and family?
    • who do feminists believe should be raising the children?
    • how Christianity conflicts with Utopian views
    • what can a Christian university do to turn the tide?

    This is a fun lecture to watch, because she’s very articulate, informed, and passionate. She’s an excellent speaker, because she taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University. You can’t help but follow what she’s saying because she keeps your attention. I am also a huge fan of women who are concerned about threats to the marriage, fathers and children. I like when women put marriage first. I like it when women think that fathers are important. I like it when women want to protect children. She’s very funny in this video, as well.

    I’ve learned a ton about marriage and economics by listening to Jennifer Roback Morse. I thought she was kind of slacking off lately, but this video more than makes up for it. I like to complain a lot about women today not thinking much about love, marriage and parenting. But Dr. J knows everything about those topics. Everything! I remember chastising her once by e-mail that she had never taken clear sides on no-fault divorce and she MAILED ME a hardcover book of essays where she wrote an essay on that very topic! Naturally she took the pro-marriage, pro-father, pro-children side.

    Commentary

    The bigger the government, the smaller the person

    2 Comments

    An article from Dennis Prager in Front Page Magazine. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

    Excerpt:

    The need to be needed is universal. Men need it; women need it. The sexes may feel needed in different ways, but the depth of the need is the same. Many women feel particularly alive when needed by their young children; many men feel worthy when needed by their family and/or their work.

    […]Only when we are needed do we believe we have significance. Give a boy a special task — just about any task — and he blossoms. Give a girl a person — in fact, almost any living being — who depends on her, and she blossoms.

    […]As I regularly note, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. One can add: The bigger the government, the less significant the citizen — especially men.

    This is easy to explain because it is definitional. The more the state does, the less its citizens are needed to do. One well-known example is the way welfare robbed so many men of significance when women and their children came to depend financially on the state.

    And it goes further than that. In order to feel significant, men not only need to have others depend on them, they also need to depend on themselves, on their own work and initiative. But that, too, is destroyed as the state gets bigger. Fewer and fewer people work for themselves (which leads to, among other things, the disappearance of that quintessentially American ideal of the risk-taking entrepreneur).

    It gets worse. As being needed and significant shifts from the individual to the state, the state increasingly determines who is needed and who has significance.

    Prager goes on to explain three groups who have increasing influence as government grows – politicians, news media, and intellectuals.

    Mark Steyn has more to say about the decline of the West. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

    Excerpt:

    Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

    Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

    Could it happen here?