Category: Religion

Omar Mateen: Muslim Commits Murder Rampage at Orlando Gay Nightclub

Posted on Comments

 

This morning, the TV was on the local NBC affiliate — my wife is having a yard sale and wanted to check the weather — and the report was that about 20 people had been killed when a man armed with an assault rifle attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando. However, NBC said nothing about a motive. June is “Gay Pride” month and, honestly, my first thought was, “This is going to be a redneck homophobe.” Expecting the Left would turn this into a political crusade and find some way to blame Republicans, I checked Twitter and was at first doubtful when I saw reports that radical Islam might be the motive. Then the facts started piling up:

Omar Mateen has been named as the gunman involved in the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, CBS News reports.
Police said at least 20 people were killed and about 40 more were wounded in the attack early Sunday morning.
Mateen is a U.S. citizen from Port St. Lucie, Florida, according to CBS News. . . .
Mateen died at the scene after he was shot by police. He had barricaded himself in the nightclub after opening fire. . . .
FBI Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Ron Hopper said at a press conference that there are “some suggestions” the gunman “may have leanings” toward Jihadist ideology. . . .

Well, the death toll in Orlando is now reported at 50, and liberals are unable to say anything about this without making fools of themselves.

UPDATE: “Religion of peace”:

An MSNBC staff writer spoke with the father of Omar Mateen, the gunman who shot and killed at least 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday.
“We are apologizing for the whole incident. We weren’t aware of any action he is taking, we are in shock like the whole country. This had nothing to do with religion,” the gunman’s father said. However, he also claimed his son got very angry when he saw two men kissing in downtown Miami recently.

It is possible to get “very angry” about something without going on a shooting rampage — or flying jets into skyscrapers, for that matter.

UPDATE II: Nothing is easier to predict than Third Wave feminists making excuses for Muslims who commit terrorist violence:

Laurie Penny hates America so much she will always defend anyone who shares her anti-American hatred. Muslims kill homosexuals and brutalize women, but that’s OK with Laurie Penny, because Muslims hate America.

UPDATE III: My rage against Laurie Penny’s sort of “feminism” — hate propaganda as “social justice” — tempts me to say that feminism is a greater threat to the world than Islamic terrorism, because feminists (and their “progressive” allies) seek to destroy every means by which we might defend ourselves against the menace of jihad. The ordinary citizen’s understandable concern about terrorism is condemned as “racism” by the Left, no matter how much evidence indicates the truth: Muslims hate everyone who is not a Muslim, and Islam is an evil doctrine of bloodthirsty hatred that commands its followers to kill us. However, because the Left hates Christianity even more than Muslims hate Christianity, the Left is willing to ignore the endorsement of violence that is inseparable from Islamic theology. Any manifestation of anti-Christian evil is acceptable to leftists like Laurie Penny, so that when Muslims commit mass murder, she always looks for an excuse to implicate “Islamophobia,” as if fearing people who want to kill us is irrational. Meanwhile:

Omar Mateen of Port Saint Lucie, Florida, came to the attention of federal authorities twice prior to being identified as the gunman in the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, a senior law enforcement source told The Daily Beast.
Mateen killed 53 people and shot more than 100 in total at the Pulse gay nightclub early Sunday morning, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
The senior law enforcement source reports that Mateen became a person of interest in 2013 and again in 2014. The Federal Bureau of Investigation at one point opened an investigation into Mateen but subsequently closed the case when it produced nothing that appeared to warrant further investigation.
“He’s a known quantity,” the source said. “He’s been on the radar before.”

We can’t arrest every Muslim who wants to kill us, because all Muslims want to kill us. This is what their so-called “religion of peace” teaches, and freedom of religion protects their murderous hatred.

UPDATE IV: Terrorists are everywhere, it seems:

Man with weapons and explosives arrested,
was going to L.A. gay pride parade, police say

Just another random coincidence, I’m sure.




 

Feminism: It’s About SCIENCE!

Posted on Comments

 

Sex is about reproductive biology. Human beings are mammals, and any eighth-grader can figure out what that means in terms of sex.

Once you understand this scientific definition of sex, everything else is just details. Young people have to figure out how to attract potential partners, how to choose a good partner from among the prospective candidates, and how to negotiate a relationship that will lead toward lifelong monogamous pair-bonding — i.e., a successful marriage — because this is the ideal situation in which to raise children.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”
— Genesis 1:27-28 (KJV)

Science and the Bible are not really in disagreement about sex. Godless atheists enjoy denouncing Christianity as “superstition,” but insofar as successful reproduction and child-rearing are concerned, do we find that Darwinism actually has anything to teach us? And am I the only one who has noticed that the fanatical advocates of Darwinism generally don’t do much in the way of reproducing the species? Having announced the Death of God in 1966, making godlessness the basis of their worldview, the secular elite now claim to worship at the altar of Science, and you might expect that pursuing a “survival of the fittest” strategy would lead these devout disciples of Darwin to procreate abundantly. Alas, no.

 

Those who imagine that they can kill God simply by not believing God exists are not as scientific as they claim to be. After all, if God does exist, his existence is independent of human belief, and therefore the logic of atheism is highly irrational. Atheists begin their argument with the conclusion — “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1 KJV) — then seek evidence to support that conclusion, and confirmation bias always leads them to believe they are correct.

The motive for this search, of course, is that fools wish to live in a godless world where they can pursue their own selfish desires without limits. If God does not exist, there are no rules, you see. Atheism therefore attracts to its banner immoral hedonists and greedy materialists, as well as power-mad totalitarians who want to dictate their own rules to the rest of us without regard for any eternal standard of Right and Wrong. If we are Beyond Good and Evil, as Nietzsche believed, then everything is simply about The Will to Power and, once people start thinking this way, it is only a matter of time before the Panzer divisions are rolling across the Polish frontier and the Stukas are dive-bombing Warsaw.

The lessons of the 20th century, however, have not been properly taught in our schools, and so our university campuses are nowadays under the administration of godless fools, who sometimes seem shocked to discover that their students are dangerous totalitarians. It turns out, quite routinely, that the atheist decides the Meaning of Life is “Give me what I want” and “Do what I say,” a philosophy of selfish irresponsibility.

Marriage and parenthood are not very compatible with such a philosophy, which is why the godless so often fail to reproduce. Nietzsche, of course, died a lunatic, most likely as a result of tertiary syphilis, and more recently Michel Foucault died of AIDS, but it is among feminists that we find the perfect philosophical expression of the Culture of Death.

The road to Equality is paved with dead babies. Feminism’s idea of “empowerment” for women requires forsaking motherhood and, once the possibility of procreation is excluded, what does sex mean? If a woman decides to be a non-participant in the reproduction of the species, does she have any need for marriage? Indeed, why bother with men at all? This feminist argument has been obvious for many decades:

In 1980, Australian feminist Denise Thompson described how “countless numbers of lesbians” joined the feminist movement because it offered them “the possibility of a cultural community of women whose primary commitment was to other women rather than to men.” Furthermore, Thompson added, the rise of the feminist movement produced a “mass exodus of feminist women from the confining structures of heterosexuality” in such numbers as to raise questions about “the institution of heterosexuality in the consciousness of those feminists who, for whatever reason, chose not to change their sexual orientation.” . . .
Women “changed their sexual/social orientation from men to women,” Thompson explained, “in response to the feminist political critique of their personal situations of social subordination.” If the personal is political (as feminists say) and if women’s relationships with men are “confining structures” of “social subordination,” why would any feminist be heterosexual?

That quote from my book Sex Trouble (pp. 109-110) is not merely a summary of arguments by Denise Thompson, who is author of the 2001 book Radical Feminism Today. All she did was to describe a phenomenon that may be observed by anyone who studies feminism. Whatever else her ambitions include, if a woman desires to find a husband and have babies, there are obvious limits to how far she can go in supporting feminism, because the feminist movement is anti-marriage and anti-motherhood.

 

Feminism is fundamentally an anti-male ideology, and therefore is ultimately also an anti-heterosexual ideology. Whether or not the young woman who joins the feminist movement begins with any inclination toward lesbianism, she will discover that her commitment to the movement’s ideology makes it difficult for her to find happiness in heterosexual relationships. The kind of men who seek women as wives — romantic men, those who hope to find lasting love in a permanent, monogamous relationship — will tend to avoid women who denounce marriage as slavery, an institution of “social subordination.” Likewise, the young feminist will find that her support for the movement tends to exclude from her companionship any man who desires to become a father. Feminism is implacably hostile to motherhood, advocating abortion and contraception, and celebrating childlessness as the ideal expression of women’s liberation from the oppressive yoke of patriarchy. The social consequences of this hostility are obvious.

“Certainly all those institutions which were designed on the assumption and for the reinforcement of the male and female role system such as the family (and its sub-institution, marriage), sex, and love must be destroyed.”
— The Feminists, 1969

“Pregnancy is barbaric.”
— Shulamith Firestone, 1970

“Women’s oppression is based in the fact that she reproduces the species. . . .
“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy.”
— Margaret Small, “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (1975)

“Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and terrorized by men. … Women’s bodies are possessed by men. … Women are an enslaved population. … Women are an occupied people.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1977 speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in Letters from a War Zone (1993)

“The lesbian liberation movement has made possibly the most important contribution to a future sexual liberation. . . . What the women’s liberation movement did create was a homosexual liberation movement that politically challenged male supremacy in one of its most deeply institutionalized aspects — the tyranny of heterosexuality.”
— Linda Gordon, “The Struggle for Reproductive Freedom: Three Stages of Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein (1978)

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
— Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988)

“Woman’s biology oppresses her only when she relates to men. The basis of the inequality of the sexes here is seen as the inequality inherent in heterosexual intercourse as a result of sex-specific anatomy. To transcend or avoid this in personal life by having sexual relations only with women — lesbianism — eliminates the gender-based underpin­nings of sexual inequality in this view. . . . Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”
— Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“To the extent that women harbor negative attitudes toward lesbians and lesbianism, we demonstrate identification with men. To the extent that women express negative attitudes toward lesbians in our words and deeds, we strengthen patriarchy.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“The term motherhood refers to the patriarchal institution . . . that is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women.”
— Andrea O’Reilly, Feminist Mothering (2008)

“In the early 1970s both gay and feminist movements concurred in critiques of patriarchal, heterosexual institutions, such as the family, and there was a sense of common cause. . . . [A]ddressing the patriarchal structures that shaped family life, revealing women’s discontents with heterosexual relationships . . . feminists laid the foundation for a thoroughgoing critique of heterosexuality . . .”
— Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, Theorizing Sexuality (2010)

The logical consequences of feminism are not usually apparent to young women when they first join the movement. A young woman feels she is treated unfairly in some way and the promise of “equality” appeals to her, and so she starts calling herself a feminist. She begins reading feminist writers who tell her that she is a victim of oppression, and she learns a vocabulary — “sexism,” “misogyny,” “objectification,” etc. — to describe male behavior she doesn’t like. She develops an attitude of resentment and suspicion, a sort of sexual paranoia that makes it impossible for her to enjoy normal interactions with men. If a man expresses admiration for her beauty, he is objectifying her with the “male gaze.” She despises men who are sexually interested in her, who want to possess her body, to degrade and enslave her in the tyranny of male supremacy.

Her hostility toward “the patriarchal institution of marriage” (Jaggar) may not immediately lead the young feminist to reject “the inequality inherent in heterosexual intercourse” (MacKinnon), yet she must avoid any man who is interested in finding a wife, and she must also renounce any desire to have children, because her “oppression is based in the fact that she reproduces the species” (Small). Having thereby abandoned the kind of scientific understanding of sex that is apparent to any eighth-grade biology student, what purpose is served by her relationships with men? If sex is nothing but immoral hedonism — the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake — then what is a man to her, other than an instrument to serve her own selfish needs? And if a man does not willingly accept this role, if he has needs and purposes of his own, how or why would he possibly be of any interest to a feminist?

A young woman who becomes a feminist as a high school or college student is unlikely to perceive all the implications of her ideology. She aspires to a professional career and, insofar as she thinks of marriage and motherhood at all, these are merely potential choices for the future, activities she might choose to pursue when she’s 25 or 30, once she has gotten her degree and established her career. She therefore must avoid any genuinely serious romantic involvement with her boyfriends, because such a relationship could lead toward “the patriarchal structures” (Jackson and Scott) of the traditional family. In postponing serious relationships with men, the young feminist thereby makes herself unavailable to any man who is interested in finding a wife, and she makes this decision at an age — in her teens or early 20s — when young people normally begin pairing off together, engaged in the process of courtship aimed toward forming lifelong partnerships. Despite the trend toward postponing marriage and parenthood, the typical first-time mother in the United States is about 25, and most American mothers have two children by the time they’re 30. More than 42% of women who eventually become mothers have their first baby before age 25. A woman who delays motherhood thereby diminishes the likelihood that she will ever have any children, and there has been a remarkable increase in childlessness.

 

These trends demonstrate the influence of the feminist movement, which encourages young women to reject sex in its basic scientific meaning, i.e., as naturally related to procreation. Feminism tells young women that they should pursue sex on the basis of immoral hedonism, as pleasure without responsibility. Most young women who adopt this irresponsible attitude do so with the mistaken belief that the choices they make in their teens and 20s will have no permanent consequences. The young feminist believes she can be promiscuous in her youth without impairing her ability to find a husband later, and that she can choose to postpone motherhood without any increased risk of childlessness. She believes in equality, and therefore listens to feminist advice. She doesn’t bother to ask what equality may require, or who is giving her this advice.

“I was the editor of my campus sex magazine. I had some one-night stands. I explored my sexuality and what I wanted, and I met a guy at a party and he was amazing. He was super-charismatic and sexy and funny and brilliant and I fell really hard for him. We started seeing each other and then, three weeks later, I woke up with an outbreak of genital herpes.”
— Ella Dawson, September 2015

“The labels I currently use for myself are queer, gay, femme, and homoflexible. (Basically, I’m a lesbian with exceptions.) The label bisexual doesn’t work for me right now. . . . I’m on the asexual spectrum somewhere . . . I don’t experience primary sexual attraction.”
— Miriam Mogilevsky, October 2015

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.”
— Laurie Penny, October 2015

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

Do you suppose many young women would call themselves feminists if they were informed of the character of those who lead this movement? Do you suppose many teenage girls hate babies, identify as “genderqueer,” or look forward to the morning when they wake up with genital herpes? Yet these are the attitudes, beliefs, identities and behaviors that the feminist movement celebrates. This is the “empowerment” and “liberation” that feminism encourages in the name of “equality.”

Those who worship at the altar of Science exhibit a remarkable willingness to ignore any fact that does not fit their theory, and we are not surprised to see strange claims made by those who ignore eighth-grade biology lessons. Feminist Tumblr is full of these young lunatics.

Simple Objective Fact of the Day:
opposite-sex relationships are favored in society because of heterosexism. People in same-sex relationships are allowed to point this out.

Actually, ma’am, “heterosexism” is necessary to “society” because without “opposite-sex relationships,” there would be no “society,” because there would be no people. This is an “Objective Fact” that we are allowed to point out, but even if we never pointed it out, it would still be true.

Because a statistically insignificant fraction of the world’s children are now conceived with the extraordinary assistance of Science, some people seem to believe that “opposite-sex relationships” are as obsolete as VHS tapes, manual typewriters, and vinyl 45-rpm records. Everybody’s gay now, and in the near future, all babies will be conceived in laboratory petri dishes, implanted in hired surrogates who will be paid to give birth, and then this generation of scientifically produced super-babies will be raised by trained experts in government-subsidized daycare centers. It is only the ignorant prejudice of “heterosexism” that causes “society” to expect that children will continue to be produced the old-fashioned way. And now, for some Simple Objective Facts:

Top Ten Countries by Total Fertility Rate
(Average lifetime births per woman)

  1. Niger …………………….. 6.76
  2. Burundi ………………… 6.09
  3. Mali ……………………… 6.06
  4. Somalia ………………… 5.99
  5. Uganda ………………… 5.89
  6. Burkina Faso ………… 5.86
  7. Zambia …………………. 5.72
  8. Malawi …………………. 5.60
  9. Angola …………………. 5.37
  10. Afghanistan …………. 5.33

Excuse me for suspecting that “heterosexism” is still quite prevalent in Burundi and Burkina Faso, Uganda and Afghanistan, and that all births in these countries result from “opposite-sex relationships.” While I suppose there might be some people in Mali or Malawi who could afford the “scientific” method — in vitro fertilization, etc. — why should they bother? These high-fertility societies aren’t suffering from any shortage of mothers and babies, whereas on the other hand . . .

Total Fertility Rates for
Selected Industrial Nations

South Korea …………… 1.25
Japan …………………….. 1.40
Greece ……………………. 1.42
Italy ……………………….. 1.43
Germany ………………… 1.44
Austria …………………… 1.46
Spain ……………………… 1.49
Switzerland ……………. 1.55
Canada ………………….. 1.59
Denmark ……………….. 1.73
Australia ………………… 1.77
Belgium …………………. 1.78
Netherlands …………… 1.78
United States …………. 1.87

The appropriate phrase here is demographic collapse, although “decadence” and “societal death spiral” might work as well.

Making atheism the basis of their belief system, celebrating selfish immoral hedonism as Science, feminists are the Darwinian Dead End.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live . . .”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

To reject God is to reject life. The curse is upon them.

Science? It’s so simple any eight-grader could understand it.

+ + + + + +

The Sex Trouble project has been supported by contributions from readers. The first edition of Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature is available from Amazon.com, $11.96 in paperback or $1.99 in Kindle ebook format.





 

 


Trump Trolls His ‘Christian’ Chumps

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

Hot Air has the audio clip. It’s a relatively obvious troll. It underscores the notions that either (a) Trump isn’t even slightly serious about the job for which he’s purportedly campaigning, or (b) if there is a serious bone in his body, it’s dislocated from any real competence.

I’m actively curious as to how anyone with even the tiniest bit of ‘Evangelical’ leaning could possibly support Trump. If you want to study a religion that cleaves closer to Hammurabi, as Trump appears to do here, have a glance at what Islam teaches.

‘Obsessed With Sex’?

Posted on Comments

 

A stunning incident happened earlier this month at a debate in Toronto over immigration. This debate particularly concerned the flood of Muslim “refugees” that has provoked a crisis in Europe. The proponents on the open-borders side of this debate were Louise Arbour, former UN Human Rights commissioner and Columbia University history professor Simon Schama. Their antagonists were Nigel Farage, leader of Great Britain’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), and the incomparable Mark Steyn.

Farage and Steyn made extensive reference to the wave of violence that Muslim immigrants have unleashed in Europe, including the New Year’s Eve nightmare in Cologne, Germany, where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted. (See, “Muslim Rape Gangs Attack Women, and Feminists Won’t Say a Word About It.”) Because of liberal bias in the media, however, very few Americans — or Canadians, for that matter — are aware of the extent of what can fairly be called sexual terrorism that is being perpetrated in Europe. Facts that do not fit the liberal narrative have a remarkable tendency to elude the attention of editors at the New York Times and producers at CNN, so that unless you are in the habit of seeking out samizdat published by politically incorrect sources, you have never heard of The Rotherham Horror, nor are you aware of why Sweden now challenges South Africa for the title of Rape Capital of the World.

 

Because of the major media’s near-total suppression of stories like this, however, you have to be a “right-wing extremist” even to be aware of it, and the situation reminds me of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd lyric:

If you don’t know what I mean,
Won’t you stand up and scream,
‘Cause there’s things going on
That you don’t know.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, Steyn and Farage were enlightening the debate audience as to what’s going on in Europe, and the open-borders apologists responded rather flippantly. Ms. Arbour mockingly called Steyn and Farage “newborn feminists” — eliciting laughter from the predominantly liberal audience — and Professor Schama got an even bigger laugh when he sneered: “I’m just struck by how obsessed with sex these two guys are, actually. It’s a bit sad, really.” Well, that hit the trip wire with Steyn, who exploded like a Claymore mine:

“I made a decision tonight that I wasn’t going to do funny. I was going to be deadly serious. I’m slightly amazed at our colleagues’ ability to get big laughs on gang rape. Madame Arbour scoffs at the newfound feminists over here. I’m not much of a feminist, but I draw the line at 3-year-olds getting raped and the 7-year-old getting gang-raped in a basement. And when Simon tells us … we’re obsessed with sex — maybe we don’t get enough action in the Toronto singles bars — Madame Arbour, as she said, is a feminist of a certain generation, and those feminists were very clear, as Madame Arbour was very clear in Sudan, that rape is not about sex. Whatever Simon may say, rape is about power, which is what Madame Arbour says.”

Steyn then listed a series of sexual assaults committed by Muslim men in Germany, concluding: “These are all gang rapes in public places . . . and I congratulate you for getting big laughs for that, Simon. . . . It isn’t funny.”

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch:

The Munk tradition is to poll the audience before and again after the debate. The first poll was 77% in favor of the motion, 23% opposed. After the debate, the pro side dropped to 55% and the con leapt up to 45%, a huge, 22% shift, revealing how a dynamic elaboration of the facts of the case can persuade people of the dangers of welcoming mass numbers from an alien culture into Western societies.

Mark Steyn himself has a good round-up of the post-debate reaction. The accusation from liberals that conservatives are “obsessed with sex” is, of course, highly ironic. For more than a half-century, liberals have advocated every manner of perversion, and feminists were even willing to defend President Clinton’s disgraceful debauchery in the White House.

“I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
— Nina Burleigh, 1998

Liberals have no moral principles whatsoever and, in fact, they actively seek to destroy morality. Not content to have banned Christianity from schools, they now use the schools to indoctrinate children in atheism.

Who is “obsessed with sex”? Perhaps the feminists, who have managed to gin up such a climate of sexual paranoia on university campuses that Rolling Stone was willing to publish Jackie Coakley’s false gang-rape tale, without basic journalistic fact-checking. Who is obsessed with sex? Perhaps the feminists, who take to Twitter to proclaim their herpes infections, or maybe the liberals like Bruce Springsteen, who canceled a concert in North Carolina to defend the “right” of men in dresses to share public restrooms with your daughter. Who is “obsessed with sex”? Maybe the Colorado public school teachers who are trained in a program called “A Queer Endeavor” to promote homosexuality in their classrooms.

Liberals are doing everything they can to destroy whatever remains of decency and religious morality in America, so that everybody has a “right” to be a herpes-infected feminist or a transvestite, and normal people have no rights at all, but it is conservatives who are “obsessed with sex”?

Yet where is Nina Burleigh, who called pro-life conservatives a “theocracy,” now that Muslim theocrats are rampaging across the globe? And where are the feminist “rape culture” mobs — who applauded when the captain of the Yale basketball team was expelled — now that women and children are being gang-raped by Muslim “refugees” in Europe?

Like the song says, there are things going on that you don’t know.




 

Never Take Advice From Feminists

Posted on Comments

 

Peggy Orenstein is a feminist whose books include Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World (2001):

At 34, Peggy Orenstein faced a series of dilemmas shared by many women of her generation: She was unsure whether she wanted children, unsure about the impact of motherhood on her career, her relationship, and her sense of self. Why, when women seemed to have so many choices, did she suddenly feel that she had none? After feminist liberation and its subsequent backlash, she realized that women’s lives, including her own, were now in a state of flux.

Question: Why would a woman wait until she’s 34 to start thinking about “whether she wanted children”? Quite frankly, by the time a woman is 34, she may be past the point where motherhood is even possible. Infertility is a serious problem affecting women in their 30s, the risk of birth defects is substantially higher for older mothers and, beyond this, there are other considerations to keep in mind. Suppose you become a mom for the first time at age 23. You’ll be 39 when your child turns 16 and gets a driver’s license, and not yet 45 when your kid graduates college. If you delay motherhood until you’re 38, well, just do the math.

Is parenthood a task best performed by the young and energetic, or by weary middle-aged folks? When my wife and I babysit our grandsons, we are reminded, as my wife says, “This is why old people don’t have babies.” Children are a blessing, but every parent knows how exhausting the task can be and, whatever prudential arguments you make in favor of delaying parenthood, you cannot pretend there are no trade-offs.

When my wife and I had our first child, we were living in a $250-a-month rental in Georgia, and struggling to keep up. My father came to visit and, when I mentioned our financial difficulties, Dad said, “Son, if you wait to have kids until you can afford to have kids, you’ll never have kids.”

This is the answer to Peggy Orenstein’s question, “Why, when women seemed to have so many choices, did she suddenly feel that she had none?” Somewhere amid their celebration of women’s “choices,” feminists neglected to consider the inescapable realities of human nature. Time moves in only one direction — forward — and you have only one life to live, and the “choices” available to Peggy Orenstein at 34 were limited by the choices she had made at every previous stage of her life.

“It’s not that we’re stupid. It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”

That quote, from a woman who realized she had lost her chance at motherhood by waiting too long, is the brutal truth behind the myth of “choice.” How did things work out for Peggy Orenstein? After years of struggling with infertility, she gave birth to a daughter, Daisy, in 2003.

The influence of feminism tends to steer individual women, and even entire societies, toward “The Darwinian Dead End,” as I’ve called it. The rhetoric of “choice” and “empowerment” is so strongly associated with declining fertility that, nearly a half-century after the eruption of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1960s, you might suppose this ideology would have perished along with its proponents.

Shulamith Firestone was found dead, alone in her apartment in 2012, after years of mental illness. Andrea Dworkin died in 2005 after years of health problems caused by her extreme obesity. Just last year, another feminist pioneer reached her final destination:

Longtime NYC-based feminist and lesbian activist Sidney Abbott, 78, was found dead Wednesday morning after a fire in her home in Southold, Suffolk County.
The fire was discovered by her next-door neighbor, an off-duty volunteer firefighter who rushed to the burning Cape-style home and found the former member of the “Lavender Menace” and author of “Sappho Was a Right-on Woman” on the floor of her smoke-filled living room. . . .
Abbott was a force for gay women’s rights in New York and beyond since the ’70s, when she helped urge NOW not to ignore lesbian issues.
She had been wheelchair dependent in recent years, and had limited mobility, said Jacqueline Michot Ceballos, a friend for nearly 50 years.
“We were the earliest members of NOW, from day one in New York City, back in 1967,” said Ceballos, a former NOW-New York president and founder of the Veteran Feminists of America.

What all of these women have in common, in addition to being (a) feminists and (b) dead, is that (c) they never had children.

“Pregnancy is barbaric,” Firestone declared in her influential 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex, and hostility toward motherhood has been a defining message of the feminist movement for decades.

 

The impact of this anti-natal ideology has been reflected in a decline in birth rates and an increase in childlessness. However, this logical result of the Feminist Death Cult has not been random in its effects. Because feminism is relentlessly promoted in higher education, where university Women’s Studies programs function as the intellectual/activist core of the Feminist-Industrial Complex, the sharpest declines in fertility have been among college-educated women. Consider the Census Bureau data on fertility by educational achievement:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts. Over the course of decades, as feminism discourages motherhood among highly intelligent women, fewer children will be born to educated mothers and, inevitably, the overall percentage of children born to less-intelligent mothers must increase. While there is not a total correlation between (a) intelligence and (b) years of school attendance (as college dropouts like Bill Gates prove), data suggesting the “dumbing-down” of motherhood should concern any student of demographics and public policy. (See “The Value of Motherhood” and more about The Contraceptive Culture.) Despite the dangerous consequences of feminism’s bizarre hostility toward normal human behavior, proponents of feminist gender theory now have so much power among the “progressive” elite that the White House on Wednesday held an event about “breaking down gender stereotypes in children’s media and toys” so as to “encourage all of our young people to pursue their passions and interests without regard to their gender.”

What this talk of “stereotypes” means is that the federal government is committed to promoting an anti-human ideology that has caused many young people to become hopelessly confused about their “gender.”

Do you want your child to be a “genderfluid polyamorous demiromantic grey-ace” when they grow up? Probably not. Why do you think feminism in the 21st century attracts so many confused weirdos?

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.”
— Laurie Penny, “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist”

“Right now, today, as of writing this, I identify as queer. But I didn’t always. And no, I’m not referring to that awkward, uncomfortable time in my life where I knew that something felt ‘off,’ but I couldn’t quite place it, and so I paraded around in the charade of ‘straight.’ I mean that a few years ago, I identified as homoflexible. And before that, a lesbian. And even before that, bisexual.”
— Melissa Fabello

“The labels I currently use for myself are queer, gay, femme, and homoflexible. (Basically, I’m a lesbian with exceptions.) The label bisexual doesn’t work for me right now. . . . I’m on the asexual spectrum somewhere . . . I don’t experience primary sexual attraction.”
— Miriam Mogilevsky

Why do you think the Everyday Feminist website, edited by Ms. Fabello, features Ms. Mogilevsky as a columnist, sharing advice like “5 Ways Straight Women Can Be Better Allies to Queer Women”?

If it is “sexism” to believe men and women are different, as Ms. Penny insists, and if feminism teaches that these “made-up categories” are “violently imposed,” then are we surprised that Ms. Fabello condemns heterosexuality as a “charade”? Do we need to speculate why the “homoflexible” Ms. Mogilevsky cannot “experience primary sexual attraction” and thinks it an important task of feminists to teach women how to “be better allies to queer women”?

No, these are all entirely logical consequences of feminist theory. Once “progressive” parents (and schools, and media, and even the White House) decided that there are no meaningful differences between male and female, and that “gender stereotypes” must be destroyed, this kind of pathetic confusion was an inevitable result. When I describe feminism as a War Against Human Nature, does anyone think that this phrase is hyperbole? Am I a misogynist, a bigot, an enemy of “equality”? Or rather is it the case that Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver warned, and that crazy ideas have crazy consequences?

Never take advice from a feminist, and certainly don’t let feminists tell you how to raise your children. Feminists hate children.

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

The road to feminism’s utopia of “gender equality” is paved with dead babies. Yet these Death Cult fanatics still expect to be taken seriously when they offer parenting advice to those of us who consider our children a blessing from God. Peggy Orenstein has published a new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, that is being hyped by the liberal media, including the New York Times:

Advice on Boys and Sex, From
the Author of ‘Girls and Sex’
I invited readers to submit questions to Ms. Orenstein. Amid all the questions about our daughters — how do we talk to them, how do we teach them, how do we protect them — were a flurry of questions about our sons. Ms. Orenstein understood. “Obviously you’re only having half the conversation if you only talk about girls,” she said. “Boys absolutely need to learn the same things.”

Here’s some advice from me: Warn your sons to avoid feminists and, while you’re at it, teach your daughters to avoid feminists, too.

What kind of fool would believe that a feminist like Peggy Orenstein has any useful advice to share about boys, girls or anything else? If you need advice on how to avoid motherhood until your ovaries have nearly withered away, well, I guess maybe she’s an expert on that. On the other hand, if you’d prefer to have children before you’re on the cusp of menopause, and hope that your children will do the same — so that you might become a grandparent before you’re in the nursing home or the graveyard — then maybe you need to seek advice elsewhere.

By the way, since I’m sharing advice here, don’t ever let feminists talk to your kids about sex. Feminists are all perverted freaks — “genderqueer” nutjobs like Laurie Penny, “homoflexible” weirdos like Melissa Fabello, etc. — and guess what? They want your kids to be freaks, too.

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Anyone who thinks it is an exaggeration to describe feminism as a satanic menace might want to read the 1997 book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America by Peter Jones. A professor of theology, Professor Jones pointed out that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “spiritual adviser,” Jean Houston, was closely associated with so-called “New Age” paganism. Professor Jones is also author of the 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age, and thus has been warning for more than two decades about this kind of degenerate neo-pagan trend.

Most feminists are atheists, of course, and I doubt Melissa Fabello or Miriam Mogilevsky would describe themselves as “spiritual” in any way. However, it is worth considering a theological understanding of 21st-century feminism, if only because the lunacy of Laurie Penny and the bizarre evil of Amanda Marcotte can scarcely be explained rationally.

+ + + + +

Thanks to the many readers whose contributions have supported the Sex Trouble project. Your prayers are always deeply appreciated.




 

 


Gender-Neutral at Notre Dame?

Posted on Comments

 

The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic school, most famous for its Fighting Irish football team and, uh, “gender-nonconforming people.”

Gender-neutral Bathrooms
Easy access to a bathroom without fear of harassment is a privilege that is often taken for granted. Transgender, genderqueer, and other gender-nonconforming people often feel uncomfortable and are subject to harassment and violence when using male- or female-specific bathrooms.
If you know of a gender-neutral bathroom on or around campus, let us know by filling out a brief Bathroom Survey so that we can make Notre Dame a safe and inclusive environment for everyone.
The most recent list of gender-neutral bathrooms can be found here.

About 8,500 students attend Notre Dame, where the tuition is $47,929 a year. How many Notre Dame students are “gender-nonconforming people”? Do these students not have parents or high-school guidance counselors who can advise them that, you know, if you want to be “gender-nonconforming,” maybe Notre Dame isn’t the best place to do it?

Alas, the advocates of “progress,” “equality” and “diversity” insist that every institution must be equally diverse and progressive, including Catholic universities. Here’s a headline from December 2012:

Notre Dame concludes comprehensive review
of GLBTQ student services and support
After a five-month review process, University of Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., has accepted recommendations from the Office of Student Affairs to expand and enhance the support of and services for students who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning (GLBTQ), including the creation of a University recognized student organization.
The recommendations are part of a comprehensive pastoral plan that includes an array of initiatives grounded in the Catholic mission of the University.
“I appreciate the careful and thoughtful work of this review that considered both the needs of our students and the teachings of the Catholic Church,” Father Jenkins said. “As articulated in the University’s ‘Spirit of Inclusion’ statement, Notre Dame’s goal remains to create and sustain a welcoming and inclusive environment for all students, and I am confident that this multi-faceted, pastoral approach represents the next step in advancing our efforts toward this aspiration for our GLBTQ students.”
The plan, titled “Beloved Friends and Allies: A Pastoral Plan for the Support and Holistic Development of GLBTQ and Heterosexual Students at the University of Notre Dame,” was crafted by members of the Student Affairs staff. It follows a study of Catholic doctrine and teaching, listening sessions with Notre Dame students and an examination of student clubs and structures at other Catholic universities. Rooted in Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender identity, the plan emphasizes the “respect, compassion and sensitivity” due to all, and calls all Notre Dame students to cultivate chaste relationships and to support one another in a community of friendship. A document detailing the review process, relevant Church teaching and specifics of the implementation of the plan is available online at friendsandallies.nd.edu.
After requests last spring by Notre Dame students for a gay-straight alliance or similar club, Father Jenkins asked for a review of the breadth of structures and support for students who identify as GLBTQ. While respectful of the education and awareness work of the University’s Core Council for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Questioning Students, students voiced a desire for services that provide greater community and support.

You see that once Notre Dame decided to appease the forces of “progress,” “equality” and “diversity,” complete surrender was inevitable.

The “Gender Relations Center” at Notre Dame now offers a plethora of services to the, uh, “gender-nonconforming” community:

 

LGBTQ 101
LGBTQ 101 is a two-hour long interactive presentation, designed to provide participants with a basic understanding and greater awareness of issues faced by students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) within today’s culture. This presentation includes an overview of the Catholic church’s teachings on sexual orientation, definitions related to sexual orientation and gender identity, introduction to the concepts of homophobia and heterosexism, as well as common myths and misunderstandings about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities. Please contact Maureen McKenney, Assistant Director for LGBTQ Student Concerns ([email protected]), for more information or to sign up for a session.

 

PRISMND
Founded in 2013, PrismND is Notre Dame’s first official student organization dedicated to serving the LGBTQ and ally community on campus. The organization provides programming dedicated to fostering the development of the community, and raising awareness on campus as to the community’s needs.
In the Notre Dame family, intolerance against some of us intolerance against all of us.

Certainly, alumni of Notre Dame University and parents of prospective students will want to learn more about the inclusive agenda of diversity, equality and progress at the university’s “Gender Relations Center.”

 

The rhetoric of “Beloved Friends and Allies” cannot disguise what actually happened, i.e., Notre Dame’s abject surrender to the totalitarian demands of an anti-Christian movement which is ruthlessly determined to destroy the Church, insofar as it cannot control the Church. When you see what “The Radical Theology of Feminism” has done to the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), don’t you realize that if the Church refuses to cling to truth, and instead becomes “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2), eventually there will be no Church at all? My Catholic friend Pete Da Tech Guy had a big “I told you so” at the expense of the Lutherans, but what does Notre Dame’s surrender portend?

What we are witnessing in the 21st century is the revival of an ancient heresy, a postmodern version of Gnosticism. The theologian Peter Jones first described this weird phenomenon in his 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age. Jones further explored the neo-Gnostic trend in his 1997 book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America. This steady drift toward syncretism suggests that many Christian “leaders” and institutions are now “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (I Timothy 4:1-3 KJV).

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

If leaders of Christian institutions will not stand up for the truth now, eventually Christians will no longer have liberty to speak the truth.





 


The Radical Theology of Feminism

Posted on Comments

 

Augsburg College was once a conservative Christian school, but the salt has lost its savor (Matthew 5:13) and is now good for nothing. Founded in 1869 by Norwegian Luthern immigrants and named for the famous “Augsburg Confession” of 1530, the school was originally a seminary for the training of ministers and for its first 52 years of existence, Augsburg Seminary was a male-only institution. The school’s 20th-century conversion into a liberal arts college was accompanied by the slow-motion abandonment of its Christian heritage and mission. About 2,500 undergraduate students pay $34,431 annual tuition to attend Augsburg’s 24-acre campus on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis.

Augsburg is affiliated with the ultra-liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) which was formed in 1988 after a schism among Lutherans that emerged in the 1970s. A specific point of contention was the ordination of women, which the ELCA’s predecessor, the Lutheran Church in America, had endorsed in 1970. About one-third of ELCA pastors are now women and, having thus “baptized” radical feminism, so to speak, in 2013 the ELCA elected a woman as its presiding bishop.

To convey a general idea of what sort of ideas nowadays prevail in ELCA circles, the election of Elizabeth Eaton to the denomination’s top post prompted this enthusiastic outburst from Linda Post Bushkofsky, executive director of Women of the ELCA:

As the presiding bishop election process winnowed down nominees, three of the final four candidates were women. . . . As I’ve written before . . . it’s not just about numbers. To respond to the needs facing the church and society in the 21st century, a collaborative leadership style is needed, and studies show that women more naturally use this form of leadership.

See? It’s about “a collaborative leadership style . . . that women more naturally use.” In other words, women are superior to men, and therefore it is “not just about numbers,” but rather about women “naturally” taking control of every position of leadership, leaving men to do . . . what?

Questions like this are never supposed to be asked by those who ponder “the needs facing the church and society in the 21st century,” nor is anyone ever permitted to notice how the abandonment of biblical teaching is reflected by the collapse into secular decadence of formerly Christian schools like Augsburg College. Recall that it was Yale University’s abandonment of its own Christian heritage that was a major focus of William F. Buckley’s famous 1951 critique, God and Man at Yale.

We must wonder what the Lutheran founders of Augsburg College would think to see what the institution has become in the 21st century. The fate of Augsburg alumna Alison Rapp — the defender of child pornography who was fired from her public relations job at Nintendo Wednesday — makes this a “teachable moment,” we might say, for anyone concerned by contemporary trends in our culture. Ms. Rapp graduated from Augsburg in 2011 and wrote, in a 2014 proposal for a conference hosted by the International Communication Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies Special Interest Group, that she had “conducted research at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota on bisexuality in Tokugawa Japan, representations of women in Nintendo’s popular Legend of Zelda series, [and] depictions of gay and lesbian relationships” in pornographic Japanese manga cartoons.

Let the reader try to imagine what those 19th-century Norwegian Lutherans who founded Augsburg Seminary might have said about Ms. Rapp’s “research” and — when you have stopped laughing and caught your breath — think what a serious issue this really is. Continue reading The Radical Theology of Feminism →

Satan Is Pro-Abortion

Posted on Comments

Perhaps you already suspected this — I mean, we know Satan is a Democrat — but his followers at the Satanic Temple of Detroit made it clear that the Prince of Darkness supports Planned Parenthood:

It was a showdown that can only be described as biblical: The Satanic Temple of Detroit versus the Pro-Life Action League outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic on Good Friday.
Led by Detroit chapter director Jex Blackmore, who made headlines last December for blogging about her experience with medical abortion, members of the Satanic Temple traveled to Planned Parenthood’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, location to counter-protest the anti-abortion group.
In images from the protest, Blackmore can be seen wearing a crown of thorns and a faux pregnancy belly while carrying a cross meant to symbolize “the burden of oppressive mandates endured by women,” as the Satanic Temple noted in a press release.

(Via Memeorandum.)  The director of the Satanic Temple blogged about her abortion last year and shared such gems of satanic wisdom as this:

Apparently, some believe that women must accept the burden of motherhood every time they have sex. It might surprise you to learn that many people have no intention of procreating when they sleep together. I for one do not believe that sex is a contract for pregnancy.
Many of the messages I’ve received illustrate the resounding assumption that I’m pregnant because I was irresponsible and had unprotected sex. This is not true, but does this really matter? Perhaps it’s easier to demonize a pregnant woman seeking abortion rather than consider that she’s someone like you.

Yeah, don’t “demonize” the Devil-worshipper, you guys.