Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts

Friday, June 02, 2023

Too Hot to Handle: The Goodness of Abortion

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

In the last two weeks we’ve seen first New York then Virginia begin to rewrite their abortion laws.

Tom: In their new Reproductive Health Act, the State of New York removed abortion from the State’s criminal code and expanded access up to birth and the third trimester in what Governor Andrew Cuomo called “the most aggressive abortion law in the country”. Lawmakers and bystanders literally applauded. Not to be outdone, a Virginia Democratic lawmaker promptly proposed a bill that would make it possible for a mother to retroactively “abort” her child minutes after he or she is born.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Complements of John Piper

Darlene Parsons and/or Wanda Martin at The Wartburg Watch are deep into it over complementarian commander-in-chief John Piper. In an article entitled “John Piper Backs Himself Into a Corner and Even Reformed Complementarians Are Confused”, TWW points out that Piper has well gone well beyond any biblical mandate he might have for his views on the roles of the sexes.

If you have no idea what a complementarian is in the first place, join the club. Large numbers of Christians have never encountered the term. Though the idea has apparently been around for years, I only heard it used for the first time very recently.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Too Hot to Handle: Invincible Girls

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

You’ve seen the meme going around. Or maybe you haven’t. It reads like this:

“I took my girlfriend to see it. She knew nothing about Wonder Woman. In the opening training scene she leaned over and whispered, ‘Those are all women?’ After the movie, she had to take a moment in the car. She said, ‘So that’s what representation feels like. I had no idea that kind of role model was missing from my life.’ Then we cried. Thank you, Wonder Woman.”

Tom: Anything about that sweet story make you the slightest bit suspicious it isn’t 100% non-fiction, IC? (Hint: the claim, “Then we cried” is strongly suggestive.)

Immanuel Can: This is a guy we’re talking about, right? I just want to check, because it’s by no means apparent to me.

Friday, May 21, 2021

Too Hot to Handle: Another Kind of Empowerment

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

It’s an oldie but goodie. Much-loved opinion columnist Dave Barry has a few words to share about the Sailor Moon cartoon my own daughter grew up watching:

“Sailor Moon is the blond, ponytailed heroine of a wildly popular Japanese cartoon show. Sailor Moon leads a team of female superheroes who wear miniskirts and go-go boots; according to the AP story, they ‘combat evil and sexism’ using special powers that they get from their ‘magical brooches, scepters and compacts.’

That’s right: These heroines, striking a bold blow against sexism and outdated stereotypes of women, get their power from jewelry and makeup.”

Boom. Mic drop, long before mic drops were a thing.

Friday, February 15, 2019

Too Hot to Handle: The Goodness of Abortion

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Truth Out of Balance

When I’m working, I leave my car in a seven-storey public parkade across the street from a hospital. Recently it was thought prudent to increase the number of available parking spaces for disabled drivers, so the necessary repainting was done and the usual signs posted.

That would have been fine, except that the increase in disabled spaces was an order of magnitude greater than the need it was intended to address; ten times the number required even in the busiest hours of the average day. Virtually the entire second floor of the parkade is now empty morning, noon and night. Thirty drivers who would otherwise have paid for space in this busy downtown parking lot are stuck looking for accommodation elsewhere, and the City loses the revenue from their daily custom. On the bright side, the strategy virtue-signals magnificently, so the town hall clerks and administrators are likely unperturbed.

Christian instruction can be a bit like that parkade. We only have so much space in our craniums. A truth stressed out of proportion pushes other truths out of place.

Monday, November 20, 2017

Moving in Circles

History is cyclical, nothing is truly new, and the capacity of men and women outside of Christ for evil, self-involvement and delusional thinking is no different today than millennia ago. That’s not what progressives teach, but it’s reality.

God repeats the same lessons to mankind generation after generation after generation, but the penny never drops.

In the seventh century B.C., Isaiah watched, warned and wrote about a nation at the end of its civilizational cycle. What he saw was not pretty, and it looks alarmingly familiar to those watching our own culture circle the drain.

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

A Suspicious Inversion

It’s been a few years but this guy still grinds my gears, and since he’s quite literally the poster boy for a generation — or at least for the last administration — there is a problem with that, and I hope we can see it.

Now, to be fair, nobody wants to marry a guy who resolves domestic quarrels with a fist to the face. At least, nobody normal and emotionally healthy does. But be honest here: how many women truly want to partner up with a man who possesses neither the will nor the physical strength to act in a crisis?

That’s a different question, isn’t it. This guy is all that in spades.

Friday, July 07, 2017

Too Hot to Handle: Another Kind of Empowerment

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, June 30, 2017

Too Hot to Handle: Invincible Girls

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Monday, June 12, 2017

The Agenda is Served

I don’t read much that comes out of the wilderness of liberal Christendom (some will argue that’s a good thing, and I won’t argue back). So it was a little jarring to come across a rather poetic meditation on the Holy Spirit here that refers to him throughout as “she” and “it”.

Uh, no. Just no.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Love Is All Around

Mary Tyler Moore died last week, and her passing merits a word or two even if no millennial has the slightest clue who she was.

I am the child of Christian parents who went to the mission field in the sixties with me in tow and came back just in time for Abba, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Get Smart and the tail end of the Guess Who’s first incarnation. Pop culture in the seventies blew me away, and it fascinated my mother in her own way, or so it appeared to me. When we finally got a TV, she watched her share of then-current fare, flipping channels whenever the content became inappropriate for family viewing. I watched with her to the extent I was allowed — and sometimes from behind the couch when I wasn’t.

And boy, did I LOVE those early seventies sit-coms.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

People Whom One Cannot Instruct

Perhaps if we dropped this on their heads ...
Wayne Grudem devoted years of his life to understanding and expositing a single word in a single verse.

Why, you may ask? Good question.

In an article entitled “Personal Reflections on the History of CBMW and the State of the Gender Debate”, Grudem asks himself the same thing: “Why did I spend so much time on this?”

What he discovered is that nobody’s listening. At least, nobody’s listening that wasn’t listening already.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Generational Train Wreck Alert!

It’s becoming increasingly hard for me to dismiss the conviction that this generation deserves whatever it gets.

I refuse to believe every college or university student in the Western world is out of their minds, but the media seems bound and determined to prove me wrong.

For these lost twenty-somethings, the capacity to invent drama where no drama exists is apparently beyond measuring. Their will to be miserable no matter what their circumstances seems boundless. Their sense of entitlement and victimhood is off the charts.

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Complements of John Piper

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Getting Sucked In

As a Christian, how do you know when an argument is not worth getting sucked into?

The titular head of Roman Catholicism clearly doesn’t. Feminists, the media and the political Left (admittedly there is some redundancy in those categories) walked him right into five miles of social justice quicksand when he felt compelled recently to weigh in on the subject of equality.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Time to Man Up

No obnoxious gym teacher in sight.
photo credit
I hate that phrase. Always have. Puts me in mind of drill sergeants or particularly dull and obnoxious gym teachers pushing you to scramble up a knotted rope in front of the whole class.

But I can’t think of a better way to say it.

Implicit in the platitude is the suggestion that the way you are behaving is unmanly, which is not a fair assumption. Possibly it also intimates that to behave like a woman is a bad thing.

Which it isn’t, of course — provided you’re actually a woman.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the decline of masculinity among millennials (and men of previous generations), and we looked at greed and the push for universal higher education as societal causes of the epidemic of malaise on the part of males generally, and their failure to assume their God-given role in the family.

Today I’d like to look at a third contributing factor: