Letter From America (About Disdain For Parents in Scotland)

Scotland’s “Named Persons” to Replace Parents

By Wendy Wright 
January 13, 2015
Turtle Bay and Beyond 

Under a new plan, Scotland will assign a state-employed guardian to every child from birth until age 18, who can intervene without parental consent and share information with a wide range of public authorities. Though the plan comes into effect in 2016, it is already being rolled out — and early indications are “named persons” will replace and trump parents’ legal rights.

Among its first appearances is sex education guidelines.

The Christian Institute reports the Scottish sex ed guidance’s section on confidentiality states: “Staff should discuss any concerns they have with the young person and ensure they have access to confidential, young people friendly services, where appropriate.”

“If there is judged to be a risk to the child’s wellbeing, staff should inform the child’s Named Person.” Parents are not mentioned.  “It beggars belief,” said a spokesman with No To Named Persons (NO2NP), “that a teacher with concerns about the wellbeing of a child – including underage sexual activity, which is a serious criminal offense – should be told by the Government to pass on those concerns to the Named Person and not the child’s parents.

“How can a professional with potentially hundreds of kids to keep an eye on be given priority over the people that care about children the most – their own parents?”

“The Government thinks the Named Person is entitled to know confidential, sexual health information about a child that its own parents are not,” added the spokesman.

The overall scheme “encourages suspicion among professionals about the dangers parents represent to their children,” said Colin Hart of the No To Named Persons campaign. The Christian Institute along with parents and other groups have filed a legal action against the plan.  Attorney Aidan O’Neill said it appears to be “predicated on the idea that the proper primary relationship that children will have for their well-being and development, nurturing and education is with the State rather than within their families and with their parents”.

James and Rhianwen McIntoshes were told their child’s medical reports would be given to a “named person.”  The named person is anonymous. Parents have no ability to opt out.  “I love my child better than anyone else and so for the Government to tell me that I needed someone who knew better about my child to see to their wellbeing, that was really quite belittling to me as a parent,” said Mrs. McIntosh.

“The whole fundamental principle of consent seems to have been done away with, swept underneath the carpet,” said Mr. McIntosh. As “parents our role is being undermined,” he said, and “there is an implicit lack of trust that we are the best people to bring our children up.”

Deborah Thomas learned of the Named Person scheme when her son was asked to fill in what he described as a “creepy and weird” survey at school – without her knowledge or consent.

Hat tip to Christian Institute.

The Chebar River Beckons

Those Who Hate God, End Up Loving Death

Some slopes truly are slippery.  Not necessarily slippery by force of reason or logic (which depend upon assumptions underpinning premises).  But spiritual forces and sociological trends are what make a slope slippery.  When no-fault divorce was introduced in New Zealand in the 1980 some people argued that it would lead to a dissolution of marriage as an institution.  They were mocked as extremists and idiots–as tawdry scaremongerers.  Not only was the slope not slippery, there was not slope to be seen or had anywhere–the mockers said.

When Christians point out the likely end results of radical changes to law–particularly laws structuring society according to the biblical blueprints–they face a double jeopardy.  When they warn of the slippery slope and what is likely to happen, they are mocked as being cheap alarmists.  When the slippery slope actually emerges, they are then mocked for being  judgemental and harsh.  Rarely are they credited with being right in the first place.  For example, when no-fault divorce was introduced, some people argued that it would lead to an inflation of  the meaning of marriage.  If the union were so tenuous and ephemeral that anyone could just walk away for any reason, then anyone could enter the union.  Including homosexuals.  Nah.  Don’t be so idiotic, you ignorant Christian scaremonger!  

Now, within 30 short years, homosexual “marriages” have been recognised in law in New Zealand.  Today, when Christians protest against that monstrosity, they are not acknowledged as being right all those years ago, they are pilloried as being bigoted, enemies of the human race, unfeeling, human-rights deniers, etc. “Have you no love or feeling or compassion or respect for “gay” people?”  

It’s the zeitgeist of the times.  What humans will to do eventually becomes a human right promoted, sanctioned, and protected by the brute force of an unholy state. 

The animation to support no-fault divorce was based upon an  appeal to faux love and pity.  “Spare a thought for those poor people locked into a relationship that is generating so much suffering and harm and degradation.  You must be a hater of the human race to want to see people locked into such unhappiness.”  These arguments are always little more than specious appeals to selective pity.  What became evident over time are the consequent evils of being able wilfully to dissolve a marriage without fault or cause–such as children forever blighted and distorted through the selfish narcissistic actions of their parents.  Those with genuine compassion and pity would never have allowed the no-fault divorce in the first place.  

Take, another example:  euthanasia.  The same dynamic is playing out.  

Euthanasia rests upon a similar appeal to pity, to a desire to reduce suffering.  If it’s an individual’s choice, what can be wrong?  Don’t you Christians have any compassion for those that suffer?  But compassion is a big tent. Many different kinds of people in diverse circumstances deserve compassion–even of the terminal kind.  How about thinking compassionately about the suffering of loved ones and relatives having to care for the terminally ill, or the perpetually disabled, or the mentally stricken?  Should not our compassion extend to their suffering and the consequent decision to ease or remove their suffering as well.  The suffering and burdens of those who care for ill or perpetually disabled people must also be considered, non?  Of course.  Over time it will become obvious and clear to everyone.  

Thus, the following headline is no surprise:

650 Babies Euthanized in the Netherlands Each Year Under Right to Die law

by Donna Rachel Edmunds 

2 Jan 2015

BreitbartNews

Just over a decade on from assisted dying being legalised in the Netherlands, as many as 1 in 33 Dutch people are thought to have died this way, including 650 babies a year, euthanized so that their parents don’t have to witness them struggle with disability or disease. The escalation in death by euthanasia over the last six years has led one Dutch ethicist, who had been in favour of the law when it was first passed, to warn “some slopes truly are slippery.”

The article goes on to discuss the latest attempt to introduce “mercy” killing in the UK.  The secular elites are also pushing for the same in New Zealand.  But in the Netherlands which was the first to introduce “assisted dying” laws (out of love and compassion and respect for human rights, don’t you know) things have morphed rapidly over a mere ten years.  Now euthanasia is being promoted there as a “lifestyle choice”.  People who oppose are, naturally, cast as haters of the human race. 

However, evidence from the Netherlands, where the first assisted dying law was passed in 2002, has shown that, far from being a method of last resort, assisted dying is fast becoming a ‘lifestyle choice’. People who have chosen to die this way include a 47-year-old divorced mother of two who was suffering from tinnitus, a loud ringing in the ears. She left behind a 13-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, the Daily Mail has reported. 

Her mother told the Mail: “Gaby told the children that she was planning to die, she was in pain and there was no cure for her.  “The euthanasia was agreed by doctors and she said her goodbyes and had time to organise her memorial service. She died a month later. Of course the children miss her badly, but they understand her decision.”

Sure the children understand her decision.  They understand their mother simply did not love them enough to put them before her own illicit lusts.  Try bearing that as you get older and face your own physical infirmities.  But the slippery slope is even more relentless.  There are lots of ways to suffer apart from physical infirmity.  How about mental suffering?  Yes, of course.  Such suffering cannot be excluded from the right to die.

Although the law was designed to help terminally ill patients have a dignified death, the right to die has also been granted to a growing number of people who are physically healthy but have psychological problems. Official figures show that 13 patients suffering from mental illness were euthanized in 2011; by 2013 this number had risen to 42 patients.

What about disabled infants?  Well, they cannot express their “will to die” but those who love them have a deep and abiding compassion for them.  Let’s kill them so they don’t suffer–sort of the same way that one would “put down” a suffering animal.  Their lives will not be worth living.  The sub-text is our lives will not be worth living if we have to take care of you.  So, it’s you or me, kid.

And it is not just adults who are being euthanized. According to the Royal Dutch Medical Association, as many as 650 babies are killed by doctors each year because they are deemed to be in pain or facing a life of suffering.

Writing in the National Review, Wesley J Smith, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism has called on those who support assisted dying to “stop pretending assisted suicide is about terminal illness and admit it is much more about disability–which is why the disability rights movement remains so opposed as they are the primary targets.  It is about allowing killing as an acceptable answer to many causes of suffering, whether terminal or chronic disease, disability, mental illness, or existential despair.”

Activists who once promoted euthanasia laws in Holland are now changing their minds.  But it’s too late. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

The scale of the deaths has led former supporters of the right to die to change their minds. One such person is the Dutch ethicist Theo Boer, who, in 2007, said “there doesn’t need to be a slippery slope when it comes to euthanasia. A good euthanasia law, in combination with the euthanasia review procedure, provides the warrants for a stable and relatively low number of euthanasia.”

However, earlier this year he admitted “Most of my colleagues drew the same conclusion. But we were wrong – terribly wrong, in fact.”  Although the numbers of deaths remained steady between 2002 and 2008, even falling back a little in some years, over the last six years there has been an exponential growth in the number of assisted dying cases. 1,882 were euthanized in 2002, and by 2006 the number had barely risen, reaching 1,923. Yet by 2012, 4,188 cases were recorded, and in 2013, nearly 5,000. Figures aren’t yet available for 2014 but are expected to have topped the 6,000 mark.

Once the “right to die” is recognised in law, campaigns against it become framed as “anti-human rights”.  Groups doing the campaigning become cast in the same category as Nazis.  Any questioning or challenging of the law becomes immediately pilloried as extremist and oppressive.  

This is due in no small part to constant pressure from Dutch Right to Die Society (NVVE) to push the boundaries of acceptability. Under Dutch law, GPs can administer injections to end life. The intention was that a person’s GP, who would have a long term doctor-patient relationship with that person, would have the option open as a last resort. However, the NVVE set up a number of travelling euthanasia “End of Life Clinics”, who either euthanize the person or send them away. On average their doctors see a patient just three times before killing them.

“The NVVE shows no signs of being satisfied even with these developments,” Boer has said. “They will not rest until a lethal pill is made available to anyone over 70 years who wishes to die. Some slopes truly are slippery.”  He warned “I used to be a supporter of legislation. But now, with twelve years of experience, I take a different view. At the very least, wait for an honest and intellectually satisfying analysis of the reasons behind the explosive increase in the numbers.

“Is it because the law should have had better safeguards? Or is it because the mere existence of such a law is an invitation to see assisted suicide and euthanasia as a normality instead of a last resort? Before those questions are answered, don’t go there. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely to ever go back in again.”

As always, Christians weep bitterly, but do not despair over such things.  We recognise that one of the ways God brings a people to repentance is to let them taste the poisonous fruit of their Unbelief.  It was in exile by the river Chebar that our fathers came to a point of holy disgust at the idolatry of their parents and grandparents as well as disgust at their own evil.  Only they then repented, and were eventually restored. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Sexual Smithereens

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Monday, December 29, 2014

In a remarkably prescient joke, Bob Hope said this back in the seventies. “I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

As we look at what remains of sexual ethics in America — the old sexual norms that somebody took a weed eater to — we need to come to grips with what is actually happening. There are two principles that we have to learn. We have to get them down in our bones. When we have done so, we will be able to understand what our only objective must necessarily be.

The first is the inescapable concept. This is a “not whether, but which” situation. It is not whether a sexual norm will be established for all society, but rather which sexual norm will be established for all society. But there is another layer. More is involved here than just competing norms. A battle between Islam and Christianity would be a battle between competing sexual norms, but what we are up against here is a collision between a norm and an anti-norm. The sexual devolution that is now clamoring for acceptance is not a stable norm with “some differences” that could simply replace the old norm.

This is not simply a choice between a tux and wedding gown on the one hand, and a tattered and stained overcoat on a dirty-old-man-hanging-out-near-the-city-playground on the other. No, the overcoat is expansive enough to cover a large amount of explosives, and the point of everything here is sexual smithereens, which is another way of saying societal smithereens. In other words, their enemy is not heteronormativity, their final enemy is civilization. Civilization requires norms, and Christian civilization requires heterosexual monogamous norms. This is simply anarchism.

First he was extreme for predicting that this was all going to end by screwing the pooch, and now he has become extreme for objecting to the pooch having access to a mutually affirming relationship.

The second point is that any normal person who predicts what is coming next will find that he is going to be labeled extreme twice. He will first be called extreme for arguing that if we allow x, then we will also have to allow y and z. “You’re crazy — nobody is arguing for the normalization of bestiality, polygamy, pedophilia, etc. You’re a loon from the fever swamps.” And then, when precisely this has transpired, right on schedule, he will then be called extreme for daring to oppose what all progressives have always known was the destination all along. He is clearly a hater, and the fact that he is a hater with a good memory — recalling that just three years ago all these same people were taunting him for his dire predictions — only helps to add another layer of irony to the whole affair. First he was extreme for predicting that this was all going to end by screwing the pooch, and now he has become extreme for objecting to the pooch having access to a mutually affirming relationship.

Asa and Jehoshaphat were good kings who had suppressed the demands of the sodomites in the land of Judah. First Asa: “And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.” (1 Kings 15:12). Then Jehoshaphat: “And the remnant of the sodomites, which remained in the days of his father Asa, he took out of the land” (1 Kings 22:46). Neither Asa nor Jehoshaphat were well read in the latest developments of R2K theology. But what they did should not be whitewashed. They suppressed sexual perversion. But if we have been paying attention, we have learned above that it is not whether, but which. What is the only alternative? The only alternative is Bob Hope’s prescient joke. It is not whether we suppress something, it is what we suppress.

Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, assumed the throne upon the death of his father, and his first move was to have his brothers all killed (2 Chron. 21:4). He then sought to arrest, and then reverse, the sexual reforms established by his father and grandfather.

“Moreover he made high places in the mountains of Judah, and caused the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication, and compelled Judah thereto” (2 Chron. 21:11).

And so this brings us to our only reasonable objective in this conflict. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this downward slide can simply be halted. We are out of our minds if we think we can just say “thus far and no farther.” If we keep gay pride, we are going to get a lot more than gay pride. And if we avoid the final destination set for us by this long parade of the sad people, it will only be by reversing course. We cannot pitch our tents toward Sodom without eventually winding up in a townhouse there.

In other words there is hope, but the hope is to reverse the sexual revolution, to undo it. This would be sexual reformation. What is not possible is to simply fight the thing to a standstill, pausing awkwardly where we are in order to teeter for a bit. No, if Yahweh is God, follow Him. If Baal is god, then the pooch awaits.

Secularism’s Messiah

Salvation by Law and the Prison

It is axiomatic in a Christian Commonwealth that a sharp distinction is drawn between sins and crimes.  All crimes, of course, are sins.  But not all sins are crimes–in fact, very few of them are.

But in the world of Unbelief no-one can draw a demarcation between sins and crimes.  All iniquities, all evil is potentially criminal.  Since, in modern secularist Unbelief there is no god or saviour apart from the state, all attempts to remove evil from society will lead inevitably to more and more sins being criminalised.  The upshot is the rise of a progressive tyranny.  The state becomes more and more authoritarian, intrusive, hectoring, demanding, ruling, and bossy.  In the end, authoritarianism risks developing into full throated totalitarianism.

In the United Kingdom (once a Christian Commonwealth, now a secularist paradise) a draft bill would have husbands face fourteen years in prison if they shout at their wives.

Men who exercise “coercive control” over their partners by restricting their personal or financial freedom, or through overt criticism could face up to 14 years in jail under new laws set to be announced by Home Secretary Theresa May this week.

Campaigners, who have been arguing for a change in the law to bring emotional abuse into line legally with physical abuse, have praised the proposals as a “major step forward”. The new law will be introduced as a series of amendments to the Serious Crime Bill, and will alter the legal definition of domestic abuse to include psychological, as well as physical damage. It is expected to pass into law in the new year.[Breitbart London]

Orthodox Christian teaching declares that sin is universal in human thoughts, words and deeds. As James puts it, “whoever observes the whole law, but slips in one point, becomes guilty in every respect.” (James 2:10)  The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “But can those converted to God obey these commandments perfectly?” and answers, “No. In this life even the holiest has only a small beginning of this obedience.” (Question 114.)

When secularist Unbelief parades as its own saviour, its final desperate attempt at redemption is to make crimes out of mundane sins like “critical words” or Scrooge-like stinginess.

Seema Malhotra, Labour’s shadow anti-domestic violence minister, suggested earlier this year that husbands criticising their wives weight or appearance may be guilty of domestic abuse. “It can be part of a pattern of controlling behaviour that leaves people feeling fearful and terrorised in their own homes,” she said, and may be an “indicator of physical abuse in the future”.

Ironically, this represents in principle a variant of Islamist  theology.  Salvation by compulsion.  By the keen edge of the sword.  Submit to righteousness, or rot in gaol.  At this point the fruits of secularist redemption are the same genus and species as Islamism, which claims, even boasts, that it saves by the sword.  What these similarities suggest is that Unbelief has far more in common with Islamism than many would care to acknowledge.

For Christians there are no surprises here.  Both secularist Unbelief and Islam are alike satanic in origin and genus.  It’s not at all surprising that redemption by authoritarian oppression will end up as the driving animus of both systems. 

What will be the outcome of such idolatrous secularist folly?  Grave damage indeed.

Firstly, this new law will need to be written in gender neutral language, despite its target being men, not women.  Since women often make up for an inability to match men in physical strength by resorting to verbal abuse (sarcasm, insults, hate speech) it is to be expected that more and more women will be criminalised and end up doing serious gaol time.  This will take “taming of the shrew” to new heights.  No doubt an entirely unexpected outcome of the secularist’s “salvation by law”. 

Secondly, whilst the gaols will be bursting at the seams, cases of actual physical assault will continue unabated.  The authorities will become so busy apprehending and prosecuting verbal assaults or fiscal stinginess, real abuse will continue cloaked in secrecy and darkness.

But not everyone is happy with the legal changes. Three years ago, when similar changes were being proposed . . . Erin Pizzey, who in the 1970s set up the network of safe houses now run by Refuge, slammed the proposals as trivialising domestic violence.

She took to the Daily Mail to offer a detailed explanation of her criticisms, saying: “When I began my refuge four decades ago, I took in victims of severe domestic violence who were literally running for their lives.  They were prepared to leave everything behind to escape the horrendous situation they found themselves in for a safe house for themselves and their children.

“Unless you have seen real, shocking abuse as I have, it is difficult to imagine some of the awful violence that people can inflict on each other in the home. And that’s why I’m convinced that bringing other, lesser, wrongs under this same legal umbrella does a great disservice to the women who really suffer.  “At this rate, we’ll all end up under arrest, and that is not a situation that’s going to help the police tackle the cases of true physical violence which must be stamped out.

“People behave badly in relationships because we have human frailties. This is not an area in which the State should meddle; leave it to relationship counsellors and divorce lawyers. They already help people escape toxic relationships.”

Every day, thousands upon thousands of domestic disputes end up being called into 999.  The vast majority of them involve not physical violence, but verbal arguments and altercations.  By making such sins to be crimes, police and courts will be overloaded by the trivial, whilst predatory gangs will continue to rape unimpeded in places like Rotherham.  Police will be too busy elsewhere.  Young girls being subjected to gang rape don’t tend to call 999.  Interdiction of the perpetrators requires dedicated, long-term investigative work.

“Women want to see real crimes punished and vulnerable children protected. But if the law changes and the definition of domestic violence is watered down, the genuine victims of abuse will suffer because the authorities will have less time and energy to devote to helping them,” [Erin Pizzey] concluded.

Turning sins into crimes is a vast overreach by secularist Unbelief.  But Unbelief is both impotent and one-dimensional.  It cannot save souls.  It cannot convert hearts.  It has no objective standard to distinguish between sin and crime.  All it has is a blunt bludgeoning sword.  It is resorting to it more and more, even to control thought and speech.

Maybe that’s why Islamism is the new normal and so attractive to many Britons.  Enforced redemption by oppression and a vast expansion of state power has been Unbelief’s gospel for over two generations now, and Islam is merely a variant of the same. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

The Old Gray Mare

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

November 25, 2014

The goal of the pansexualist movement is to remove all creational distinctives. They want to batter down every border, every barrier, so that when we are all done, every sentient being has been melted down into their great cauldron of lust. If you really think that when same sex mirage is a done deal, everyone will settle down into a recognizable normal, then you are a chump, a patsy. We are already at the stage when mainstream publications can run puff pieces on guys who like to have sex with horses.

The issue is not the fact that there are pervs who do this kind of thing. We have always had them, and the Bible prohibits it for a reason. The issue is how everybody else is being manipulated. The issue is not the sin, but rather the societal response to the sin. Get a load of the first lines.

“Bestiality, the act of having sex with an animal, tends to conjure images of a mucky, socially inadequate, desperate farmer sneaking into the barn after dark, or depraved groups of thrill-seekers forcing sex with drugged, abused, or otherwise mistreated animals . . . But the sexual identity that can be attached to bestiality, zoophilia, remains little understood. In 2002 the sex therapist Hani Miletski published Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia, a book based on her study of almost 100 zoophiles — research that led her to conclude that many form deep, loving, and very nurturing relationships with their animal partners.”

Got that? Many of them have “deep, loving , and very nurturing relationships” and you are the one with very little understanding and certain prejudicial images you have conjured up. Hater.

By the way, I linked to that article so that you might understand that I am not making this stuff up. I am not recommending that you read the whole thing. I myself didn’t read the whole thing because, as you all know, I am just crammed full of prejudices and seething meanness.

These people are iconoclasts in high revolt against the central image of God in this world, an image that God Himself established (Gen. 1:27). Male and female, one of each, is the way God wants His image represented in this life, and it will be represented in that way until the the end of the world. To revolt against such creational distinctives, as in our current attempts, is to throw rocks at the moon, to hurl snowballs at the sun.

We are constantly told, and some of us are foolish enough to believe, that we opponents of same sex mirage are on the wrong side of history. Well, I would rather be on the wrong side of history, as they see it, than on the wrong side of stupidity, as God sees it. Because, as it turns out, the concepts of history and stupidity are intertwined, in ways not friendly to those who would build their utopian Lego castles without use of the male/ female couplings feature. All they are going to wind up with is a great jumble of plastic pieces.

Now this is the situation we are in, and this is the one thing the First Things Marriage Pledge had right. The pomosexuals want to remove all distinctions between what they are doing and what we are doing. They are levelers. Combine postmodern relativism with deep gonadal yearnings, and you get pomosexuality, and the right to hump the world soon shows up in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

So wherever they want to eradicate distinctions, we should want to affirm and reinforce them, right? Right — but we shouldn’t do it in a way that cedes the bad guys much more authority in eradicating the next round of distinctions. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be. We have to think of her in all of his.

As I have been saying, we need to do a lot of work on all of this. We need to fight for those jurisdictions where same sex mirage is still rejected. We need to research what sorts of protections we need to incorporate into our church documents to head off mandatory participation in such incoherencies. And we also need to have, in places where our people are given the Spouse A/Spouse B treatment by the clerk at the courthouse, an additional covenant, with the legal force of a prenup.

This covenant will declare that the marriage is occurring within the boundaries of natural and biblical law, and that both parties agree never to pursue civil divorce without first getting a formal, written determination on the legitimacy of the divorce from the church that solemnized their union. This would not prevent civil divorces (although I think it might help curtail them), but it would mean that churches would have to be present at the divorce, and not just at the wedding.

Instead of the Marriage Pledge, ministers would decline to do a wedding in any state that recognizes same sex mirage unless the couple agreed to the ecclesiastical covenant as well. This gives us the distinction we need, and it does not remove us from the battlefield.

But while we are on the subject, what about Spouse C? Why doesn’t anybody ever think of her?

Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

Betting With Real Money

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

November 12, 2014

I want to answer two very basic questions. Let’s all wish me luck. First I want to define marriage — what is marriage anyhow? — and I want to explain why the answer to this first question is any business of the civil magistrate. The two matters are wound tightly together, as we shall see.

I have defined marriage before in at least a couple of places.

“A common error among Christians holds that if the sexual act is completed, then the couple are married ‘in God’s sight.’ Many destructive complications occur in contemporary culture because we have adopted the idea that people can be married in God’s sight without being married. It is hard to say where this idea originated, but it has caused a lot of damage . . . Marriage is scripturally defined as a sexual relationship within the boundaries of a covenant commitment that has been formally ratified. The sexual relationship by itself does not constitute marriage” (Her Hand in Marriage, pp. 28-29).

“The first is that you must have an explicit covenant surrounding a sexual relationship. Not everyone who is sexually united is married, and not everyone who has exchanged vows is married. The covenant exists when the two elements are there together: covenant vows surrounding a covenant union” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 33).

Thus far the assertions. Why do I believe that the two essential elements in a marriage are sexual union (of the sort that could result in pregnancy) and a publicly recognized covenant? To use the language of the philosophers, these are necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions. A necessary condition means that without it you do not have the thing in question. A sufficient condition means that with it you will have the thing in question, of necessity. Thus the presence of oxygen is a necessary condition for a blazing fire but not a sufficient condition.

You cannot have a marriage without old school heterosexual copulation and you cannot have a marriage without a covenant. Nevertheless you can have a covenant without a marriage and you can have sexual intercourse without a marriage.

If a covenant alone can constitute a marriage, then homosexual marriages are marriages, not mirages. If sexual intercourse alone can constitute a marriage, then a man who has visited every woman in five brothels is married to all of them, and all of them are married to every john who has ever been with them — which is absurd. Yet Paul acknowledges that the “one flesh” union occurs in an encounter with a prostitute, which is why doing so is such a significant sin. “Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh”” (1 Cor. 6:16, ESV). But those Corinthian men who were still visiting temple prostitutes are rebuked and told to stop it and walk away. They are not told that they are actually married to all the women they have been with. They are part of a one flesh union with these women, but are not married to them. They had no business partaking of a one flesh union without marriage, but it has happened now, and the solution is repent and flee. Run away. Two verses later Paul tells these men precisely what to do. “Flee fornication” (1 Cor. 6:18).

But if sexual union by itself creates a “marriage in God’s sight,” then a man could continue to visit the prostitute to whom he is now married. A man could continue to maintain and visit his mistress and so on. This is not what repentance looks like, and because repentance looks like breaking it off entirely, we see that sexual union by itself does not constitute a marriage.

So what is my basis for saying that a covenant is also necessary? The answer is simple — the Bible teaches that a man’s wife is his wife by covenant. “But you say, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Mal. 2:14, ESV). This is speaking of men who were being treacherous to the terms of that covenant, but it speaks of the marriage relationship as having been established by covenant. The same thing is true of a treacherous wife. “Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, And forgetteth the covenant of her God” (Prov. 2:17). Marriages are formed by covenant, and they are a covenant that surrounds an inaugural act of heterosexual intercourse, to be followed by many more such acts.

If a personal covenant between persons –sans sex — were sufficient to establish a marriage, then David and Jonathan were married (1 Sam. 18:3). If sexual activity of any description between two persons is sufficient to establish a marriage, then this world would be a literal pandemonium of marital relations. But Paul tells men to flee the prostitutes, which ought not to be understood as fleeing your “wives.”

Now a covenant is a solemn bond and it is publicly enforceable. Covenants have sanctions. When Billy is whispering to Suzy in the back seat of a car that he will love her forever and a day, that is not a covenant. That is what Suzy’s mother described, later that same evening, as a sweet-talking lie. A covenant is made in the public eye, and the surrounding society stands to witness to the terms of the covenant and to ensure that it will be kept. Different cultures have different customs that establish a covenant bond — God once made a covenant with Abraham by cutting animals in two and passing between the pieces. We don’t have to do that at our weddings. The particular form the marital covenant takes does not matter — what matters is that the society within which the covenant is being established recognizes the speech/act in question (“I now announce that  you are husband and wife”) and recognizes any attendant symbols (“with this ring I thee wed”). Other societies can accomplish the same reality with a different set of words and symbols. That is fine. What has to be constant, however, is the fact of sexual intercourse and the mutual and public obligation of both parties to each other.

What about Adam and Eve? Were they married by this definition? Yes, they became one flesh (Gen. 2:21), and their union was recognized by the whole world. In fact, at their wedding, the entire human race was present. Moreover, their union was the paradigmatic union for all subsequent marriages, meaning their union had to be a marriage as well (Gen. 2:24; Matt. 19:5).

So then, what business does the magistrate have in all of this? There are three aspects to this answer. The first concerns what ought to be when a society is well-ordered in the sight of God. The second concerns what the church ought to do when they are ministering in a culture that is not at all well ordered. And the third has to do with the current propensity of many Christians to give up the good fight far too early.

First, one of the most obvious things about sexual intercourse is that, while it is much more than just an economic transaction, it is also at least that — an economic transaction. Feminists have made cheap points off of this reality by describing marriage as glorified prostitution. Actually, the comparison runs the other way — prostitution is a gross parody of marriage.

Marriage is a sublime and wonderful thing, but there are monetary realities necessarily involved in it. Urgent young men with screaming hormones and medium-sized paper route need to be told that a woman is expensive, son. We even get our word economy from the Greek word for household.

Sex necessarily involves issues of property and custody of children, and inheritance, and houses, and cars, and so on. These things cannot be separated from the way God designed sex to function. Marriage therefore needs to be recognized by the magistrate so that everybody beforehand has a good grasp of how these things are going to be adjudicated. We need to agree on the rules beforehand. We need to understand what the weights and measures actually are. I would rather abandon the language of marriage licenses — as though the state has the authority to tell John and Mary, an ordinary couple, whether or not they can get married. But we need something like marriage registrations, and the magistrate has the authority to refuse to receive or file them under certain circumstances (non licet), as when a brother and sister try to file one, or two homosexuals, or a man and his llama.

What does and does not constitute a well-thought-out sexual union is very much in the interest of the civil magistrate — because the magistrate will have to sort out the ones that were not well-thought-out also. Should a one-night-stand biological father have to pay child support? How about if she lied to him and said that her tubes had been tied? How about if they agreed beforehand that she would have an abortion if she needed to, and then she changed her mind? Should a husband have the right to veto an abortion, contra Roe v. Wade? Whenever men and women have sex, they are betting with real money. Disputes will inevitably arise. Since the magistrate is authorized by God to deal with all property issues (Rom. 13:4,9), the magistrate therefore has a solemn obligation before God to know what a real marriage is. The magistrate is the one, the only one, who can effectively police the property-related boundaries of a sexual union.

The second thing is that of course the church should supply whatever accountability they can when the culture has abandoned its appointed role. But this will always be a makeshift affair. Suppose you have a society where slaves are not legally permitted to marry, but a Christian man and woman who are slaves want to marry. It is appropriate for them to exchange vows in the eyes of the church, and for the church to bless their sexual union. But if that man later abandons his wife and children, and runs away, and the most the church can do is excommunicate him, there are still injustices that need to be rectified — and which only the magistrate is authorized to fully rectify. When men and women wrong each other with marriage as the instrument of their sin, there are certain things that cannot be put right unless physical coercion is involved. The church does not have, and ought not to have, that kind of power. The magistrate does, and under such circumstances ought to wield it. And when the magistrate acts in coercion, we should all want their standard to be biblical. Otherwise, everybody is hosed.

This means that when the church sets up “covenant marriages,” over against our current same sex parodies, as we ought to be doing, we may only do this as a testimony against the magistrate abandoning his God-given function, and we should do this as a way of calling the magistrate back to his duties. If the church acquiesces in the idea that marriage is merely a matter of private, religious conviction, then this only means that the church has joined the magistrate in the general dereliction.

And last — I will be brief with this one — to have as many Christians as we have in this country throwing up their hands in despair, saying that maybe the “definition of marriage” is not a concern of the magistrate anyway, is a testimony to our loser eschatology. Loser eschatology is a particular kind of future orientation that pampered Christians have developed for themselves — but the only thing that ever gets fulfilled is its own prophecies, tailor-made for all Christians who have no stomach for a fight. But nothing biblical gets fulfilled by them.

Contradicting Borg Assimilation

Christian Rapper Jackie Hill-Perry Comes Out 

Ex-homosexual Firebrand

 By David Daniels 

The Washington Times 

Monday, October 27, 2014

Jackie Hill-Perry considers herself not merely an agent of change, but its embodiment as well.

A Christian spoken-word poet from Chicago, Ms. Hill-Perry professes to be a former lesbian — a change she ascribes to God.  God, she says, “not only changes your affections and your heart, but He gives you new affections that you didn’t have.” Now married to a Christian man, the 25-year-old poet is pregnant with the newlyweds’ first child, which is due Dec. 13.  Her debut spoken-word album “The Art of Joy” will be released for free on Nov. 4 by Humble Beast record label.

Ms. Hill-Perry’s experience runs counter to pronouncements by gay rights groups that exclaim sexuality as an inherent, immutable characteristic. What’s more, her assertions come amid wide-ranging reports about the psychological dangers of so-called “reparative therapy,” which aims to change the orientation of homosexuals.

But she remains steadfast in her belief that anything is possible with God as she meets criticism — and outright contempt — for speaking out about her experience. And thanks to her nearly 65,000 followers on social media, as well as encouragement from famed Baptist theologian John Piper, Ms. Hill-Perry’s story has been far-reaching.

“The word of God itself, apart from Jackie Hill, testifies that people can change,” she said in a July 2013 report on Wade-O Radio, a syndicated Christian hip-hop broadcast based in New Jersey.  She was criticizing a lyric in rapper Macklemore’s Grammy Award-winning song “Same Love” that says “And I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.”

“I think we’ve made God very little if we believe that He cannot change people,” Ms. Hill-Perry said on Wade-O Radio. “If He can make a moon, stars and a galaxy that we have yet to fully comprehend, how can He not simply change my desires?”  Thousands of people on social media shared her comments — with approving or condemning remarks of their own. She estimates that about 40 percent of the messages she has received have been negative.

“On Twitter, this girl wrote me like 15 different tweets, pretty much saying that I was delusional, in denial and brainwashed,” Ms. Hill-Perry told The Washington Times.  After she married Preston Perry, another Christian spoken-word poet, in March, another Twitter critic accused them both of being gay and marrying to “play God to a bunch of ignorant people.”

Ms. Hill-Perry says she was sexually abused by a family friend when she 5. Around the same time, she experienced gender confusion that had coalesced into an attraction to women when she turned 17. She became sexually active with her first girlfriend, and then another. She became a regular at gay clubs and at gay pride parades in St. Louis.

While lying in bed in October 2008, she reflected on her lifestyle and had an epiphany that she addressed in her spoken-word piece “My Life as a Stud”: “Then, one day, the Lord spoke to me. He said, ‘She will be the death of you.’ In that moment, the scripture for the wages of sin equal death finally clicked.”

“What I had been taught in church until the age of 10 coincided with the truth in my conscious that a holy God and just God would be justified in sending me, an unrepentant sinner to hell,” she said, “but also that this same God sent His son to die on my behalf and forgive me if only I believe.”  She left her girlfriend and returned to church. The next year, she met her future husband at the first spoken-word event where she performed “My Life as a Stud.” Over time, she lost her attraction to women and gained an attraction to Mr. Perry, who she began dating three years later.

Now pregnant with a girl, Ms. Hill-Perry is concerned her daughter will face persecution for sharing her beliefs by the time she reaches 25 years old.  “I think we’re moving toward a time in our society when, in the next 20 to 25 years, Christians are going to see a massive amount of persecution when it comes to the topic of homosexuality, and there will be no such thing as tolerance for Christianity,” she says. “[People will believe that] if you’re a Christian, you are a horrible human being, period.”

“The true church of Jesus Christ will still stick to the Scriptures,” Ms. Hill-Perry says. “Now, those buildings that have people in them where the authority of God doesn’t trump their own feelings and emotions, I see a whole bunch of turning away from the faith — turning away from truth.”

© Copyright 2014 The Washington Times

Priggish Hypocrisy

Light in Dark Places

Incest remains officially verboten in New Zealand.  Consequently, a brother and sister who have borne a child, are before the courts.  This from Stuff:

A brother and sister who met as young adults have been sentenced for incest as they co-parent their child in Christchurch. The sister has been put on community detention that will keep her at home at night caring for her daughter – a healthy baby – and she must do a year of intensive supervision.

Her older brother’s sentencing was put off at the Christchurch District Court sentencing today because his probation report had not been done. Judge David Saunders told the brother that he must not go within 100m of flat where his sister is living unless he has prior approval of the Community Probation service. The sister has the child for five days a week, and the brother has it for the other two days. He will be sentenced on December 2, on charges of incest, wilful damage, and a breach of a community work sentence.

One self-confessed liberal blogger sniffs the wind in both directions: 

While incredibly yucky, they are both consenting adults. I find their decision abhorrent, but I don’t think my moral judgement should have the force of law on them.

Herein sits the elephant-in-the-room:  this brother and sister were consenting adults, and this nation in its secular humanist hubris has declared that in New Zealand it must be legal, moral, ethical, and civilised to permit homosexuals to marry.  The secularist West cheered its little heart out.  The justification for this monstrous shift in marriage law was (of course) the alleged immorality of continuing to deny true love between consenting adults.   The self-confessed liberal blogger joined in cheering and celebrating that ignominious move. But if homosexuals be permitted to marry because of “truuuu wuv”, why not a brother and sister, eh?  No, no, no–incest is something evil.  Our liberal blogger says he finds “their decision abhorrent”.  The blogger’s position is nothing more than hypocritical priggishness.  The “principle” and “righteous demands” of truuuu wuv, once so important when it came to homosexuals, disappear in a puff of smoke.  Actually, true love is what the liberal secular humanist says it is.  Anything else is verboten.  Abhorrent. 

We are thankful that incest is still a crime in New Zealand.  But doubtless it will not long remain so.  Within twenty or thirty years it will likely all be gone.  The law recognising and preserving marriage, already reducing that institution to rags, will itelf be in tatters.  Secularists will not long tolerate hypocrisy in their position.  They will compel true belief.  They will force the ilk of our liberal blogger to abandon hypocrisy and comply.

It pleases the Lord to give rebellious cultures enough rope on which to hang themselves in the void.  Trying to knot the rope, crying “this much, but no more” will not hold.  When a people sow to the wind, they reap the tornado.

For Christians, merry warriors that we are, we must relish the joy of battle–praying, watching, worshipping, labouring, and doing good to all men, particularly those of the household of faith.  Like Frodo’s Light of Elendil, it is in the darkest places that it becomes brightest.  As Galadriel put it: “I give you the light of Elendil, our most beloved star. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

Advocates Posing as Academics

Propaganda and The Anti-Smacking Shills

The fallacy of false cause is pretty much universal amongst academics these days–which is to say they cannot think straight.  We have had presented to us one of the more hyper-ventilated examples recently.  In the NZ Herald an Australian academic breathlessly informs us that parental smacking of children to discipline them is utterly terrible.  The academic in question, Bernadette Saunders is introduced to us as follows:

Bernadette Saunders is a Senior Lecturer Social Work at Monash University. She has received two separate funding grants from the Australian Research Council and the Legal Services Board Grants Program to pursue research on the physical punishment /lawful correction of children.

Our academic expert has received money to “pursue research” into the “physical punishment/lawful correction of children”.  This is a thorough misdirection.  Mz Saunders is an ideological advocate, a shill, not an objective researcher.  She is being funded for purposes of propaganda.  She is not an honest trader.  How do we know this?

Firstly, the piece published in the NZ Herald was based upon an article by Saunders published in The Conversation  otherwise known as The Diatribe.

The recently released UNICEF report on violence against children draws on data from 190 countries to present a very grim picture of the physical and emotional harm children continue to suffer. Much of this harm is perpetrated by the adults upon whom the child depends for his or her safety and well-being, guidance and positive example.

The UNICEF report clearly states that violence in all its forms can rob children’s dignity, diminish their self-worth, and threaten their optimal development. Children not only suffer its immediate physical and emotional effects; the violence they see and experience is likely to impact on the type of adult they become and the future society of which they will be part.

The most common form of violence that children suffer is the often taken-for-granted “disciplinary” violence – physical force and verbal intimidation – used by parents and teachers as punishment and or to control or change children’s annoying or unacceptable behaviours. Worldwide, six out of ten children aged between two and 14 are regularly physically punished.

It is dubious indeed that an ostensibly credible academic would cite a United Nations report as any kind of authority.  The UN is a morally bankrupt, corrupt institution and any advocacy by it or its offshoots must be treated with a great deal of caution.  But that aside, the sentence in Saunders’s diatribe which especially caught our eye was this:

In Australia, a study of child homicide between 1991 and 2005 in New South Wales concluded that prohibiting the corporal punishment of children could save children’s lives.  Thirty-five years ago, Sweden became the first country in the world to legally prohibit the corporal punishment of children in all settings. It is now banned in 39 countries, including New Zealand, the only English-speaking country to adopt this progressive step. [Emphasis, ours]

Smacking has been banned in New Zealand now for years.  It is at this point we come to the fallacy of false cause.  Advocates and ideologues allege that parental smacking of children as part of disciplining them is a form of violence against children, which risks subjecting them to ever greater forms of violence (the old “slippery slope” argument).  It is alleged that those parents who smack their children for purposes of correction and training are more likely to beat them mercilessly and even kill them in blind fits of rage.  Really?  But worse, children subject to parental correction by use of a smack or spank are likely, themselves, to become violent adults in time.  Violence begets violence.  That’s why policemen are such violent thugs at home, repeatedly putting choke holds on their four year olds.  That’s why soldiers who have seen active duty bayonet their children and neighbours as they lie sleeping.  That’s why slaughter men at the abattoirs are likely to stab their children at will.  It’s all so obvious.  Right before our eyes.  

If all of the above were even remotely true, New Zealand’s rate of child abuse should now be declining rapidly, since smacking has been banned here long enough now to make a startling impact upon adult-child violence.  New Zealand, thus, has become an interesting test case to see whether the ideologues, such as Saunders, are right, or whether they are engaged in fallacious, crooked thinking.  Clearly, the latter is the case.  Why?  Because, according to the NZ Government, in 2014

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of physical child abuse in the development [sic] world. We also have one of the worst rates of child death by maltreatment within the family.  Children can also be abused emotionally and sexually.  All such abuse has a damaging effect on a child’s well-being and future development. [Emphasis, ours]

Therefore, we are on safe ground to reject utterly the arguments of Mz Saunders and her ilk.  New Zealand made child smacking illegal years ago.  Our rates of family violence are at the highest of the “developed world”.  So, Saunders causal argument trying to link smacking and child abuse collapses in a heap.  She has attempted to pull wool over our eyes using the fallacy of false cause.  In fact, she and her ilk are just plain wrong.  Hucksters.  Propagandists.  Ideologues.  The New Zealand evidence refutes their argument. If smacking to correct and train a child actually cause further violence against children and intra-family violence in general, our rates of physical abuse of children and family violence, now that smacking is illegal, would be declining rapidly by now.  Since the reserve is the case, Saunders’s argument implodes. 

And how about Sweden–that oft-cited paragon of social virtue?  It has also banned smacking many moons ago.  Ah, not so good.  Sweden has the third highest rate of rape in the world; people there fear crime more than in the United States.  The total crime rate is second highest in the world.  The rate of actual assaults in fourth highest in the world. 

The prima facie evidence is the exact opposite: outlaw reasonable force as part of the discipline of children and the outcome is greater crime and greater violence both inside families and outside them.  Now, we would not have the chutzpah of a modern academic to assert that such corollaries are necessarily true.  More research would need to be done.  But the prima facie evidence is much, much stronger than the contrary case asserted by Mz Saunders and her colleagues. 

But advocacy and research have always been a dangerous combination. As the old saw goes, “our advocacy is based upon facts, madam, and if you don’t like our facts, we have different ones.”

Letter From America (About a "Miracle Baby" in the UK)

This Woman Refused to Abort

Doctors Said Her Unborn Child Only Had a One Percent Chance of Survival 

Billy Hallowell
TheBlaze
Sept 25, 2014

After her waters broke at just 16 weeks, Katy Evans said doctors recommended that she abort her unborn child. But rather than comply, she continued on with her pregnancy, ignoring claims that the baby would only have a 1 percent chance of survival.

Evans, 35, who lives in Hitchen, Hertfordshire, England, told the Daily Mail that she began attending support groups and reading about similar cases after being diagnosed with preterm prelabor rupture of membranes, a condition that leads to the loss of essential amniotic fluids.It was in her research that she found the hope she needed to continue on with her pregnancy.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

“I’m a positive person, by nature, and I refused to give up on the pregnancy or mourn this baby until we knew exactly what was happening,” she told the outlet.  After rejecting recommendations that she abort, Evans said she went home with uncertainty still abounding, but that something miraculous happened.

Two weeks after her water broke and left the unborn baby with almost no amniotic fluid, doctors found that it had somehow replenished — and that the baby was developing normally.  While it was still an uphill battle, as she faced infection and potentially having her waters break again, Evans said she was elated when doctors told her the news.

“This was a very much wanted pregnancy. I could feel my baby kicking. I already loved this little person,” Evans added. It’s amazing how you will fight for this baby inside you. I wanted my child to make it.”

AP

In January 2014, nearly five months later when she was at 34 weeks, Evans and her husband welcomed their second child, Leo, into the world; he was born completely healthy and came just six weeks early.

“We feel unbelievably lucky. It’s just over a year now since I was sitting in that hospital bed, waiting for a miscarriage,” she told the Daily Mail. “There was certainly a point when I told myself that there wasn’t much hope. To go from that to looking at my son, a year on, feels surreal and wonderful. Leo’s grandparents call him the miracle baby.”

Read more about the touching story here.

(H/T: Daily Mail)

Pederasty’s Easy Facilitation

Evil is Never Static

The Sydney Morning Herald has carried a piece about pederasty facilitated by misuse of the Internet.  The core of the piece reveals not just the extent of the crime, but the sophistication of its perpetrators. 

A special police taskforce has discovered the number of sex offenders who target children in in Australia has been wildly underestimated and local paedophiles have set up secure online sites to share intelligence on how to trap victims.  Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton says police are shocked at the number of active offenders operating in Victoria. “There are hundreds and hundreds. We have found some terrible stuff that would keep you awake at night,” he told Fairfax Media.

He said Taskforce Astraea is conducting 120 separate investigations and has rescued 40 children in Australia and offshore who had been targeted by paedophiles.   The taskforce began by using computer software to identify encrypted child pornography images but soon discovered many offenders move quickly from “passive” observers to aggressive molesters.
Astraea has found:

• Pay-for-view sites where children are abused and in some cases tortured.
• Teenage girls in Melbourne are being blackmailed for sex by adult offenders.
• Secure chat rooms where offenders discuss methods to groom children and tips to avoid detection.
• Elaborate internet stings designed to trap vulnerable teenagers.

Astraea investigations reveal offenders trawl sites until they find someone they feel can be exploited and make contact pretending to be a person around the same age.  They then introduce a second fake character who bullies the victim on line. The offender then steps in to “protect” the target to win affection. “They then share some images and the hooks are in,” Mr Ashton said.  “He says he will tell friends and parents unless we meet. We have had kids climbing out the window at 2am to meet a paedophile.”

He said most adults are unaware of the internet threat to their children. “Parents can be downstairs watching Family Feud while their teenage daughter is chatting to a notorious paedophile online in the bedroom upstairs.  They are sharing intelligence online and educating each other by saying, ‘This works, this doesn’t, don’t do this or you will be caught’.”

Depravity, whilst common to all, is never static in the human soul.  It is either growing or diminishing, waxing or waning.  When lust takes over, its servants will be found working industrially to satiate their slaked thirst.  More and more extreme perversions will be required to satisfy their spiritual, mental, and bodily cravings.

Some takeouts:

1. The dominant materialistic world-view and its hand-maiden evolutionism has no firm ground upon which to fight such evils–which is to say that modern Western society does not really believe in the existence of evil.  Evil is nothing more than an irritant to the machine  All if requires is the application of fragrant grease–other people’s money–and the evil will wane. The machine will run smoothly again.  Whenever modern society arises to combat an extreme form of wickedness, such as pederasty, it is compromised and dilatory from the outset.  Materialism and evolutionism do not believe in the existence of absolute evil.  It does not believe in the existence of Satan.  Worse, it ridicules the idea as primitive and superstitious.

2. Parents who allow their children unsupervised and unregulated access to the Internet and mobile phones are beyond irresponsible.  They are themselves complicit in immorality.  Might as well be completely permissive and allow their children liberty and license to wander the streets of red-light districts unaccompanied into the early morning hours. 

3.  Modern technology-besotted Western culture has worshipped at the feet of the great IT idol.  Parents have been repeatedly told that their children will not succeed in the coming generation unless they are utterly conversant with IT devices of every kind and their deployment and application.  Never has a generation of parents been so enervated and enfeebled; never has a generation of parents agreed that they are inadequate to prepare their children for effective adult like; never has a generation of parents been so emasculated in their own minds.

4.  Complicit in this mass stupidity is the statist educational establishment, which, having failed to teach children how to read and write in its academies of “learning”, has sought to deflect criticism by category revision: education no longer is about reading, writing, and maths and their derivatives.  All that is passée.  IT is the new real.  Children go to school to learn how to text and develop Facebook capabilities.  Any parent who subjects children to antediluvian pre-occupations with the 3-R’s is coming close to child abuse.  No classroom, unless it is replete with laptops, tablets, i-phones, and intranets, is worthy of the name.

5.  If we, as a culture, do not swallow our craven pride, turn from our evil ways, and repent of our sins, seeking the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness, it will get worse.  If it had been argued in the 1960’s that within fifty years, children would be being groomed and manipulated by adults into sexual perversion on an industrial scale, they would have been dismissed as an idiot.  If we do not humble ourselves, the next fifty years will see far, far worse.  Evil is never static.  It is either being itself eviscerated, or it will be growing in strength to where it will disembowel a society.  “We have had kids climbing out the window at 2am to meet a paedophile,” while their “parents are downstairs watching Family Feud,”  just about says it all.

The Ground of Civilisation

Hell Hole of the South Pacific Waits in the Wings

Human civilisation is skin deep.  It can only be sustained in a society by a majority of families who live, believe, and practise the values of a civilised society in their homes and communities. This reality was caught most powerfully by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The law, its enforcement agencies, the rules and institutions of state, the courts, the schools, and the institutions of trade and commerce–all these can only continue to exist in any society by warrant of a majority of civilised families. After all, the law and justice are intangibles, grounded in ideas and concepts believed and respected in the heart of a community.  

We have had yet another illustration of these truths.
  In Northcote, a teenage miscreant preyed upon a single older woman outside a supermarket, attempting to snatch her bag.  Such crimes had been systemic in the area over recent days.  A mother of six, who was accompanied by two of her younger children, went to the aid of the attacked woman.  Lucy Knight (pictured below) was, in turn, struck by the criminal, fell to the pavement, and fractured her skull.  The criminal ran off to a waiting car and was driven away.

Police released CCTV images of the bag-snatching suspect near Northcote’s Countdown Supermarket. Inset, Lucy Knight.

Mrs Knight has undergone emergency surgery and is now in a stable condition.

Michael Dudley, 21, works at a takeaway shop nearby and was there when the drama unfolded.  “I was coming out of Countdown and I heard a struggle behind me,” he told the Herald last night.  “I turned around to see a swinging arm. Then the lady fell, she went down really fast and hit her head on the concrete. I saw the young kid take off down the carpark and I started to chase him.”  The youth got into a car that Mr Dudley said was waiting for him. He saw a woman in the driver’s seat. [NZ Herald]

Now this may be a small, insignificant incident in the “grand scheme of things”.  But it is not.  Society and civilisation are made up of, and sustained by, thousands upon thousands of such deeds of goodness and courage.   Reactions to evil like Mrs Knight’s are instinctive and spontaneous.  As a mother of six children she no doubt has devoted her life to the care of others who by nature are vulnerable.  Others.  We are reminded of how William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, sent out a telegram asking for donations to support the work of the Army.  The telegram has only one word: “Others”. Upon such values, civilisation is built and sustained.

No doubt Mrs Knight reacted instinctively and courageously because these values are engraved upon her heart and mind.  She responded without thinking.  She is a truly civilised person.  She represents the essence of the only way a society can maintain justice, truth, respect, honesty, gentleness, generosity, and thoughtfulness.  Without such values of the heart being inculcated in families, society disintegrates into a hell-hole. 

Not What We Meant

Secular Marriage is an Empty Vanity

One of the arguments used to confront homosexual “marriage” is that it makes true marriage meaningless.  Just as the concept of the family has been so degraded over many years of secularism–to where two women living together with a budgie is regarded as a family–so the secular form of marriage is now null and void.  True marriage, actual marriage as defined and delimited and ruled by Holy Scripture continues.  But the secular state has lost its moral warrant and integrity to rule over it and administer it.  Marriage, in the secular realm, has been eviscerated and rendered meaningless.

Homosexual marriage advocates, who declared they wanted to enjoy the special and enduring bond of marriage, based their argument on human rights and anti-discrimination laws. The upshot is they have inadvertently destroyed the secularist notion of marriage itself.  Or, to put it another way, they have inadvertently clarified the inanity and insignificance of secularist “marriage”.  This, we believe, is good news for Christians and the Christian Church in a tactical sense, because it widens the dichotomy between belief and unbelief.  The true face of Baal is revealed even more clearly.  The Kingdom of Christ is made more glorious.  The profane has become more profane; the Church is forced to make a clear stand upon Scripture.  Epistemological and spiritual self-consciousness of both secularists and Christians consequently is growing.

What is the latest fruit of secularist “marriage”?  The NZ Herald tells the story:

Travis McIntosh and Matt McCormick wrote their wedding vows yesterday, brimming with”nervous excitement” about their big day.  The Dunedin men will marry tomorrow, but their move has horrified gay groups.  The pair are heterosexual best mates.

Engineering student Mr McIntosh, 23, and teacher Mr McCormick, 24, will tie the knot to win a The Edge radio station competition and a trip to the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England.  Mr McCormick said from Auckland yesterday opposition to the wedding was understandable but the pair never intended to offend anyone.  “We are not here to insult anyone. We are here to do our own thing and travel our own path.” Mr McIntosh said the wedding was not mocking the institution of marriage.

Right.  Glad we have cleared that up.  Actually, McIntosh is telling the truth.  What these two are doing is certainly not mocking the institution of secularist “marriage”.  They are perfect exemplars of the perversion.  Secularist “marriage”, after all, seeks to recognise human beings who “love” each other and want to live together.  And that’s all.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Consequently, under New Zealand’s secularist marriage law, McIntosh and McCormick will be legally married, though they will not engage in sexual relations.  They will remain “just friends”.

The pair said their wedding vows would touch on their friendship and recall their time playing rugby together at King’s High School in Dunedin.  They were undecided if they would take hyphenated surnames and who would walk down the aisle. . . . Mr McIntosh said he thought the marriage would last at least two years.

Mr McCormick, a teacher at Musselburgh School, said the friendship began after the two met at Pirates Rugby Club in Dunedin when he was aged 6.  His family, like Mr McIntosh’s, was excited about the wedding.  “They’re backing us 100 per cent,” Mr McCormick said.

Homosexual groups are outraged.  Those who had fought to be married, pressuring all their fellow secularists in Parliament to recognise homosexual “marriage”, had no idea (apparently) what would be let loose from  Pandora’s Box.

Despite the apparently innocent enjoyment afforded by the competition, local gay rights groups are “horrified” by the move, according to the New Zealand Herald. A “queer support” coordinator from Otago University criticised the union, saying it was an “insult”, and that it “trivialises what we fought for”. 

Nah, mate.  It’s a perfectly consistent expression of what you fought for.  Secularist “marriage” makes human wilfulness the bedrock of their perverted institution, and we know, if we are not blindly obtuse, that the wilfulness of the human heart is legion, and takes many, many forms.  Secularist “marriage” is a meaningless oxymoron.  Secularism cannot produce nor sustain “marriage” as an exclusive life-long bond.  It inevitably breaks upon the shoals of human lusts and idiocies.

Like Prufrock, the homosexual marriage advocates are learning that winning the prize of homosexual “marriage” comes at the cost of making the institution meaningless.  And so the empty vanity of secularist “marriage” is becoming plain.  They are left gnashing resentful teeth:

“That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”

Welcome to the depraved world of secularist “marriage”.  Welcome to the world where the glory and honour of Christ consequently shines more brightly than before. As the darkness deepens, the light becomes more radiant.

 

Secularism and the Borg

Its  Doom is Sure

Here is yet another case exposing how the Borg-like mind of secularism works.  A couple in New York State who rent the use of their farm for social events, including weddings, is now shutting that part of their business down.  Why?  Aren’t people getting married any more?  Not at all.  Rather–and you know what’s coming next–the couple, Cynthia and Robert Gifford are Christians and they do not want their premises to be used to sanctify homosexual “marriage”. 

They were approached by two women who wanted to rent their facilities to mark their faux-marriage.  The Gifford’s refused.  The “couple” complained to New York’s Division of Human Rights, asserting that they had been discriminated against because of their homosexuality.  The judge ruled in their favour.  The Giffords were fined $13,000.  They have been required to teach “classes” of their employees the state’s definition of marriage and non-discrimination.  A nice bit of state imposed re-education.  Shades of 1984.  The Giffords have shut that part of their business down, stating they will no longer hold any wedding ceremonies on their property.

What can we learn from cases such as this?

Firstly, the incidence of such faux discrimination cases will multiply greatly.  The logic of secularism is closed and operates within four windowless walls.  The only operating deity is the state.  Marriage is defined by the state, legalised by the state, and defended by the state.  Whatever the state says, goes.  If the state says that couples of the same sex can enter marriage, then the Borg has spoken; the hive must obey and think and act as they have been told.  Secularism allows no other view inside its four walls.  Christians will never comply.  Their room is open and answers to the Living God.  The state is but a servant of God–in this case, a rebellious servant.  Christians will traduce the illegalities of the secular state, and suffer the consequences if necessary–as the Gifford’s have done.  It’s called persecution.  It will become increasingly common.

Secondly, the secular state will end in ignominy.  The logic of the Borg is relentless.  If two people of the same sex must be allowed to marry, so must half a dozen people.  Welcome to polygamous “marriages”, polyandrous “marriages”, bestial “marriages”, and the sanctioning of relationships promoted by the “Man-boy Love Association”.  The secular state defines marriage to be a human right–but its definition of human rights embraces whatever someone wants to do as a human right.  Since marriage is a coalition of the willing, by definition all who are willing to get married have a human right to get married.   The secular mind is a universal acid: it will progressively burn through everything, including itself.

Thirdly, notice how private is now defined by the Borg.  In more Christian days, privacy and what deemed private was offset against the state.  A private business was one not owned and operated by the state.  The “public” in this context was the state.  Now, no business is a private business because it sells or trades with others not itself.  Secularism has re-defined private to be limited to what goes on within one’s head.  As soon as another person is involved, it is a public act and the public authorities–known as the state–can rule and regulate it to its heart’s content. 

Judge Migdalia Pares ruled that Liberty Ridge Farm is a public accommodation because it rents its space and regularly collects fees from the public. The judge said the fact that the owners live on the premises does not mean that their business is private in nature. [The Blaze]

Luther used to joke that the only part of the human anatomy not controlled by the Pope was the rear end.  The growing Borg-like secularist tyranny, however, is no joke and its vaunted ambitions to possess and control all things are without bound.  But its overreach, its rebellion against King Jesus, is doomed to failure. 

The lesson for Christians and the Church?  Keep faithful.  Keep on one’s knees.  Refining through suffering first begins with the household of God.  Our sins and unfaithfulness are great.  How appropriate that our willingness to cede false honour to the secularist state has resulted in the Borg attempting to colonise us.  Resist we must and shall.  Here we stand.  We can do no other.  The victory and the honour belong to Christ.  He is a jealous God, and will brook no rivals.  The secularist state and its mind-eating Borg will eventually be broken asunder. 

Luther, at this point, is the wisest of counsellors:

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing;
Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing:
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He;
Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us:
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

A New Form of the Slave Trade

‘Baby Gammy’ raises awareness for true nature of ‘surrogacy motherhood’.

Posted on August 12, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

 

After two weeks of media reports on baby Gammy, is difficult to discern which version of the story is the one we should believe. Is it true that the Australian couple who used the services of a Thai “surrogate mom”, upon learning that one of the two children that the “surrogate mom” was expecting suffered from Down syndrome, asked her to have an abortion? Is it true that, when finally the “surrogate mom” gave birth to both children, the wannabe “parents” took the healthy child home to Australia, leaving the “surrogate mom” with the handicapped one? Is it true that they were aware that they were in fact having two children instead of one? Or is it true, as they claim, that the agency that was handling the “surrogacy pregnancy” never informed them of the second child and its handicap?

Whatever may be the case, one thing is certain: such cases are bound to occur, and even with great frequency, wherever the practice of “surrogacy motherhood” is accepted.
Surrogacy motherhood is the quintessential expression of a mentality that is unwilling to accept parenthood as a gift, but that assumes that everybody has an entitlement to have a child. And of course, once this “right to a child” is accepted, it soon evolves into a “right to a healthy child”. Children that suffer from mental defects or physical malformations need not be accepted, because our self-given entitlement is to have only children that fully correspond to our ambitions.

Children, it appears, are now a commodity. It is a “flesh-for-cash” business. In other words: a new form of trafficking, or of slave trade.

If I buy children from a “surrogacy mom”, they better had be perfect. If not, they will be returned.

A Good News Story

 Progress At Last

Separation and divorce is painful enough for adults, many of whom remain permanently scarred.  In hindsight not a few come to regret their decision to split apart and look back at the conflict and circumstances that led them to that fateful decision, concluding (now) that it was all small change in the grand scheme of things. They regret their immature decisions and hasty actions.  But we have learned that the children of such divorces often are damaged for their entire lives. 

This bad situation is made ten times worse if the divorce is acrimonious.  Far too many divorces have ended up that way, even if the decision to separate initially was reasonably amicable and mutual, due to the involvement of the Family Court.  Courts require lawyers, and lawyers’ stock-in-trade is disputation and argumentation, getting the best-deal-no-matter-what for their client.  The resulting anger and bitterness can last decades, inflicting yet far more needless damage upon children. And, not a few lawyers have preferred a long drawn out process because of the higher fee payoff. 

Finally, the NZ government has introduced some reforms which are deconstructing the hostilities.  The Minister of Justice, Judith Collins has announced:

More parents are resolving their disputes outside of court only months after the Government’s family justice reforms came into effect, Justice Minister Judith Collins announced today.  “Progress to date confirms our reforms are empowering people to resolve their parenting disputes outside of court, minimising the stress children often face when their parents separate,” Ms Collins says.

Since the Government’s reforms came into effect on 31 March this year, 562 assessments for the New Family Disputes Resolution (FDR) mediation service have been completed and another 530 are in progress.  Of the 122 mediations completed, 87 (71 per cent) have resolved all matters in dispute between parties, without going to court. Urgent matters, such as those involving family violence, still go straight to court.

The number of Guardianship applications to the Family Court has also dropped from 481 per week to 231 per week.

Collins concludes:

“This is an encouraging trend and shows parents are taking responsibility for their actions and putting the welfare of their children first,” Ms Collins says.   The Ministry of Justice has also provided 40,000 parenting plans and booklets to a range of agencies for distribution. A further 1700 have been downloaded from the new family justice website (http://www.justice.govt.nz/family-justice).  The website has had around 1.7 million page views since its launch on March 31 – more than double that of the old Family Court site.

“It’s fantastic to see parents making a real effort to work their problems out themselves. As a result, they avoid the unnecessary conflict, delays and expense the court process may involve, and the Family Court remains free to focus on the most serious and urgent matters.”

One absolute travesty of the previous approach, racked with terrible unintended consequences, was the Family Court almost always favouring the mother in the allocation of parental cares and duties.  This was due to a strong feminist bias throughout the system, the primitive ignorant belief that young children needed a mother whilst a father was an unnecessary optional extra, and the poisonous criticism and character assassination of the father by the wife and her lawyer in order to bolster the case for maternal custody.  The residual anger and bitterness has lasted for years and years in many cases.  Legions of disaffected and disillusioned fathers departed for Australia and other places, concluding they had lost everything worth living for in New Zealand, leaving the state to pick up their child-support payments.

Having argued successfully before the court, former wives all too readily concluded that their former husbands were useless appendages, of no value to their children or to them, and useful only for the provision of money.  The former husbands began to live the role ascribed to them by society and the court, disappearing forever into the great Western migration, along with their child support payments. 

We are sure that, whilst not solving all the issues and problems, having a mutually negotiated settlement by parents working issues out themselves, not contending and fighting in court, will be far, far better in most cases.  It will be exponentially better for the innocents–the children.  This is a very positive, good-news development. 

Pots and Kettles

The Irresponsible Amongst Us

Every so often editorial writers get hopelessly confused.  Here is an example:  an editorial in the NZ Herald made this statement of fact:

Domestic violence . . .  is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children.

Then, a few paragraphs later, the writer states:

Professor David Fergusson, who has studied the lives of 1265 people born in Christchurch in 1977, said his research suggested the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar and in many instances involved mutual violence between couples. “Women do suffer more in terms of fearfulness and related outcomes,” he said, “but what we do find in our study is that violence is usually mutual and there isn’t a predominant aggressor.”

The writer then adopts the tone of a scold with respect to the Professor and his research:

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible message to give to the sort of men who resort to violence against women.

What about women that resort to violence against men?  What are our responsibilities toward them. Ah, writes the editorialist, it’s not that bad.

Men have the physical advantage. It may be unfashionable to say so but it should not need to be said.

Male violence against females is really bad.  Female violence against males . . . not so much.  Try telling that to a male whose skull has been cracked by a cast iron frying pan.  What the editorialist is implying is that the public campaign slogan, “It’s Not OK”, which is an attempt to combat the plague of family violence in New Zealand, needs a bit of refinement.  It needs to read, “Family Violence: If You are a Man, It’s Not OK.”

The research by Professor Fergusson shows that the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar.  Mutual violence between men and women is extremely common.  The study shows that males are not the predominant aggressor.  The aggression is gender neutral.  The editorialist simply ignores these claims.  Are they true or not?  Don’t care.  They are irrelevant.  Men are bigger and stronger.  Therefore, they need to bear the blame.  The focus needs to be upon the bigger and stronger perpetrator.

Actually, it matters a whole lot.  In most households there are children.  Both male and females–if aggressive–are both substantially bigger than children.  If you care about the most defenceless amongst us think of what an angry, drunk or drug-fuelled woman can do to children close at hand when she unleashes her vitriol upon them.  Think of the most profane, filthy, verbal abuse spewing forth from the mouth of an enraged woman as she mercilessly beats a defenceless child.  Not a problem.  It’s men.  That’s where the problem lies–at least according to the confused Herald editorialist. There are few more egregious examples of the fallacy of a false dichotomy.

If Professor Fergusson’s research is accurate, the editorialist has missed the point and begged the question.  By responding in a superficial, almost hysterical manner, he or she has been gulled by the political rhetoric presently swirling around this issue.  If the editorialist had been a bit more thoughtful, the concluding paragraph which reads:

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s not manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, women should be safer.

would have been recast,

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s neither feminine, nor manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, and girls are brought up to respect their femininity, both men and women and children should be safer.

Scolding researchers and their research as giving an “irresponsible message” simply will not do.  To respond that way is the real irresponsibility.  Such confusion is not helpful in the least. 

The Webs We Weave

Conditioned to Rebellion

At present there is a brouhaha bubbling more strongly than a Rotorua mudpool over a Maori youth discharged without conviction.  The man in question just happens to be the younger son of the Maori king.  The fact that there is a Maori king will no doubt come as a surprise to many of our international readers.  It’s a long story.  Suffice it to say that the “king” is an honorary figure belonging essentially to one tribe–the Tainui.  Maori remain tribal to this day in a way that the Scots, the Welsh and the English are not, but in a way that the French and the Germans are.  Which is to say tribal divisions still matter.

In any event, the swirling controversy involves the allegation that the son of the current Tainui/Maori King was released without conviction for theft because of who he is and because it may hurt his future prospects of succeeding to the throne.  The tribal under current to the controversy was neatly summarised by one Dover Samuels, a former MP:

While his drink-driving was moderately serious, Judge Cunningham said, the direct and indirect   consequences of a conviction were “out of all proportion” to the offence.

Mr Samuels, a former Labour MP, criticised that logic as that of someone under “cultural hypnosis”.  “You tell that to the younger generation that are in Her Majesty’s Marae. The guy got off because one day he may become king.  Well, that may be relevant to a few people in Tainui, but it’s certainly not relevant at all to our young people in Ngapuhi.” [NZ Herald]

What caught our eye, however, was the following startling statement in the Herald.

But a source close to the family said Mr Paki [the youth in question] had always been a mischievous child and had never been expected to take over from his father.  The source said King Tuheitia’s eldest son, Whatumoana Paki, had been groomed from a very young age to one day rule.

“Whatu was brought up to be the successor to his father and was also raised by a lot of old people in Tainui. Whereas Korotangi was the spare — and he was never expected to do anything. I think Whatu would be an ideal successor because he is a . . .  nice kid.”

Being raised “as the spare”, never expected to do anything, and disregarded by the tribe seems to us to be an excellent, effective recipe for producing a sociopathic adolescent delinquent.  What about the father’s expectations of the son to be a decent, honest, respectful, hard-working, trustworthy man?  Nah, he’s just the spare. 

Who knows whether the “source close to the family” is telling the truth?  But if so, it’s a shocking indictment upon the parents, the whanau and community.  Give me a child for the first seven years of his life, said the Jesuit, and I will present you the man.  It appears that the adolescent in question might well have been conditioned to rebel.   

Integration Into the Void

Forthcoming Reformation

In his important essay, The End of Courtship, Leon Kass makes the following observations about love, courtship, and marriage as it now plays out in college campuses and universities across the United States.  His observations would hold true, we believe, pretty much everywhere throughout the West. 

Below is a summary of excerpts to enable us to get the flavour.  (We will draw some implications for Christians, churches, and the Kingdom at the end.)

I:

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage:
the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock, who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as ‘the time of our lives,’ imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.

II:

The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control—the pill for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences. Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality—as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman’s anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning. 

III:

Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage. Taking for granted, and thereby ratifying, precocious sexual activity among teenagers (and even pre-teens), most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS. While some programs also encourage abstinence or noncoital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for ‘safe sex’; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.

We may add the latest devolution to this list: as the politics of sexual identity have taken hold, and one’s gender becomes whatever one wants, prefers, or declares it to be, the sexuality attached to such genders as bisexual, trans-gendered, bestial–recall Facebook’s fifty-six gender identity options, (see below)–secular sex education in schools is already moving not to discriminate against any sexual identity.  All gender identities will have to be included, so sex-education will move even more radically to focus upon sexual techniques and the technocratic aspects of sex. 

IV:

The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue, wishfully against the empirical evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know how important it is to choose well. But the deck is stacked against them. Not only are many of them frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe, but they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; worse, their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world.

Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives. They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively; for good reason, they believe that they must always be looking out for number one. Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another and, their own needs unmet, they are not generally eager for or partial to children. They are not good bets for promise keeping, and they haven’t enough margin for generous service. And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood, except in the purely biological sense. Even where they dream of meeting a true love, these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.

The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity’s most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex had no necessary link to procreation, Kant redefined marriage as ‘a life-long contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.’ If this be marriage, the reason for its permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity vanishes.

V:

 But it would appear to require a revolution to restore the conditions most necessary for successful courtship: a desire in America’s youth for mature adulthood (which means for marriage and parenthood), an appreciation of the unique character of the marital bond, understood as linked to generation, and a restoration of sexual self-restraint generally and of female modesty in particular. Frankly, I do not see how this last, most crucial, prerequisite can be recovered, nor do I see how one can do sensibly without it. As Tocqueville rightly noted, it is women who are the teachers of mores; it is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence, both before and after marriage. Men, as Rousseau put it, will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power.

The collapse is so complete across Western society in general that we would argue that no government programme, no propaganda campaign, and no educational initiative will achieve anything like the reformation required. It’s too far gone.  The foundations have been destroyed; humanly nothing can be done now.

Only the Spirit of God, moving across the now formless, shapeless, inchoate mess of Western human relationships, has the power to reverse the evil we have put in play.  Nevertheless, we have a strong and sure hope that He will interdict and reverse the degradation, in the time and season of His pleasure.  Our hope, however, is most definitely in Him, not in Man.  As the Psalmist says,

³ Put not your trust in princes,
    in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
⁴ When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
    on that very day his plans perish.

⁵ Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord his God,
⁶ who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
⁷     who executes justice for the oppressed,
    who gives food to the hungry.
Psalm 146

But, let us keep in mind, His normal mode of operation is to allow evil to integrate into the void of self-destruction, and then, when despair is everywhere, to stretch forth His hand to save.  It was when Pharaoh began his programme of genocide against Israel that God heard the cries of His people, and stretched forth His mighty hand.  

Appendix:

Gender categories now available for self-choice on Facebook (as downloaded and catalogued by Slate)

• Agender
• Androgyne
• Androgynous
• Bigender
• Cis
• Cisgender
• Cis Female
• Cis Male
• Cis Man
• Cis Woman
• Cisgender Female
• Cisgender Male
• Cisgender Man
• Cisgender Woman
• Female to Male
• FTM
• Gender Fluid
• Gender Nonconforming
• Gender Questioning
• Gender Variant
• Genderqueer
• Intersex
• Male to Female
• MTF
• Neither
• Neutrois
• Non-binary
• Other
• Pangender
• Trans
• Trans*
• Trans Female
• Trans* Female
• Trans Male
• Trans* Male
• Trans Man
• Trans* Man
• Trans Person
• Trans* Person
• Trans Woman
• Trans* Woman
• Transfeminine
• Transgender
• Transgender Female
• Transgender Male
• Transgender Man
• Transgender Person
• Transgender Woman
• Transmasculine
• Transsexual
• Transsexual Female
• Transsexual Male
• Transsexual Man
• Transsexual Person
• Transsexual Woman
• Two-Spirit

The Character of Faith

Mother Courage

Miss Pennsylvania USA’s remarkable mother

By Kevin D. Williamson

June 8, 2014 4:00 AM

National Review Online 

[When the debate over abortion is joined, those opposing it sometimes want a bit of wriggle room in cases where a baby has been conceived as a result of rape.  This amazing story reflects the courage of a person and an extended family who did not buy into that compromised narrative.  Rather, they trusted to God’s providence and goodness toward them. Ed.]

Valerie Gatto does not want to talk about abortion. That’s probably prudent, inasmuch as she very much desires to be the next Miss USA, and contestants in that pageant are expected to have ruthlessly anodyne interests along the lines of reading children’s literature to blind dolphins. But she is admirably direct, even bracing, about the aspect of her life that intersects that troublesome issue: She was conceived when her mother, a teenager at the time, was attacked on the streets of Pittsburgh and raped at knifepoint.

Valerie Gatto (www.valeriegatto.com

Asked by a radio interviewer about whether her mother had considered abortion, Miss Gatto was as scripted as a contestant in a presidential debate (which is, after all, much the same business as hers), saying that her mother had been presented with the possibility but had never seriously considered terminating the pregnancy. Instead, she was determined to put the child up for adoption — until changing her mind the night before her daughter was born. God, Miss Gatto’s great-grandmother told her mother, would not give her more than she could handle. In the event, it became a question of what Miss Gatto’s mother and grandparents could handle; she had the benefit of being raised in an extended-family household, one that by every indication is composed of extraordinary and kind people.

Miss Gatto, deflecting the question of abortion specifically, said that she did not desire to be the candidate of Roe v. Wade. “My story is bigger than that.” In a sense, that is true, but in another sense, it isn’t.

Miss Gatto is of course under no obligation to be a standard-bearer for either side of the abortion debate; it is only the worst kind of fanatic who cannot accommodate the fact that his own interests and enthusiasms, however sincerely held, need not be universal. And if Miss Gatto’s message is scrupulously inoffensive — that life can go on even after enduring an act of horrific personal brutality — it is nonetheless a worthwhile one. 

There are many kinds of courage in the world, of which a mother’s courage is a very specific and demanding variety. Rape is a special kind of cruelty in that it transforms the life-giving act into an act of torture. To suffer the crime and yet cherish the life is an act of transcendence, a perfection of generosity rarely if ever equalled by the merely human.

My own view is that those in the pro-life camp who wish to carve out legal exceptions for cases of rape are undermining their own position. If our desire is to protect the lives of the innocent unborn, then the circumstances of their conception, no matter how horrible, cannot be allowed to overrule their standing as members of the human family. But that is not to say that the circumstances do not matter. We should be fully cognizant of exactly what our position implies, and of the extraordinary burden such a standard would impose on women who have suffered a particularly heinous kind of assault.  

The remarkable fact is that a not insignificant number of women who become pregnant through rape do not choose to terminate their pregnancies, deciding instead to forgo adding to the sum of violence in the world, even though a portion of it has been cruelly visited upon their own persons.

But set aside, for the moment, the question of the legal status of abortion. The fact is that abortion is at the moment legal and widely available. Miss Gatto was born in 1989, well into the age of the universal abortion license. Her mother could have terminated her pregnancy easily, and the matter could have remained entirely private. She chose to do otherwise, and then took the additional step of taking on the burdens and difficulties of raising the child rather than giving her to adoptive parents. This is by no means to denigrate the decisions of women who do give up their children for adoption — I myself am grateful that such a decision was made in my own case, and that abortion remained illegal in Texas in 1972. I have no idea whether my biological mother, whom I have not met, would have been tempted by the availability of legal abortion; still, I object to the notion that my own life should be optional under the law. Miss Gatto’s mother must have known that she was not choosing an easy road, even with the support and assistance of her parents.

The remarkable fact is that a not insignificant number of women who become pregnant through rape do not choose to terminate their pregnancies, deciding instead to forgo adding to the sum of violence in the world, even though a portion of it has been cruelly visited upon their own persons. In a culture that treats abortion as barely if at all distinguishable from mere contraception, that is heroic. And it is heroic regardless of our specific political differences on the issue of the legal standing of abortion, important — fundamentally important — as that question is.

That heroic act involves unusual personal endurance. Beyond the usual trials of pregnancy, women who have conceived via rape often have unexpectedly traumatic reactions to the sometimes-invasive medical procedures involved in pregnancy; they frequently experience unsupportive or hostile reactions from friends, family, even churches; many of them are not aware of such resources as may be available to assist them. They worry, inevitably, about what they will someday tell their children. The most common advice given by women who have gone through with rape-conceived pregnancies is to seek counseling and support as early in the pregnancy as possible.

“My story is bigger than that,” Miss Gatto says. And so it is. What’s in question in the abortion debate is not the scope or moral color of Miss Gatto’s story, but whether she gets to have a story at all. She does, but millions don’t. A Miss USA contestant has no special responsibility to wrestle with that issue. But citizens do, whether publicly or privately. We are burdened with that problem; it is more likely that we will arrive at a medical solution, in the form of some universally effective contraception, than a moral consensus. (“The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.” — Michel Houellebecq) And when we are thinking about what sort of citizens we want to be, we might consider the case of Miss Gatto’s mother and others in her position, who have endured what few of us will ever suffer and given more than most of us ever will be called upon to give.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.