What has happened — and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us — is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man’s image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we’ve confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It’s natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.I always hate the idea of building up one race, gender, culture, etc. at the expense of the other. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I hear in church someone talking about Adam and Eve, and always having to take some kind of shot at males, or the way in which Adam responds to God when God comes to visit them in the Garden of Eden after they had partaken of the fruit. Building up women does not mean we have to tear down men. Goodness knows that we men already do a good enough job of doing that on our own as it is. We do not need everyone pointing out every flaw that belongs to the male gender.
And perhaps, too, a neo-feminist backlash.
The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.
One recently divorced academic describes what attracted her to a future female lover. “She got up and gave me the better seat, as if she wanted to take care of me. I was struck by that,” she said. “I felt attracted to her energy, her charisma. I was enticed. And she paid the bill. Just the gesture was sexy. She took initiative and was the most take-charge person I’d ever met.”
This article isn’t about closeted homosexuality. It’s not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that’s in the arms of another woman.
The women interviewed in the article appear to want someone to take charge a bit — there is an attraction to, if not a need for, some hierarchy. And in a culture in which masculinity — well, at least in men — is so often suspect, some women seem to be looking to reinvent the masculine themselves.
All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose...Anyway, her main point is a good one - feminism has worked so hard to eliminate any conceivable differences between men and women that there is very little mutual desire to build up the opposite gender. Men should naturally want to build up and support women, and the same is also true for women, but in today's culture it's more competition than cooperation with one another, and this in turn leads more often to contention than affection.
Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. "Children are an heritage of the Lord" (Psalms 127:3). Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. Husbands and wives—mothers and fathers—will be held accountable before God for the discharge of these obligations.
The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.
As a child, I was kind of obsessed with ghost stories. I just absolutely loved them. I had all the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books, and I read anything else I could get my hands on. I even read them in a darkened room by myself. I think the illustrations throughout those books are almost as bad as the stories themselves.
Dear TV,
used to drive you Crazy?
Before it gets to be too far gone to bring this up, I wanted to link to some interesting articles on Christmas. This one is from my favorite columnist at NRO, Jay Nordlinger, talking about the assault on Christmas. This article comes from the Wall Street Journal detailing a brief history of the holiday - this is a really great read. And then this article from a Catholic perspective, gives a great explanation of the holiday but grounded in Christianity. Finally, there is this piece that I found on National Review Online (NRO - I don't know if I've ever clarified that abbreviation before).A solar cult of the Mithraic religion competed with Christianity for dominance within the Empire. Set up to climax the older Saturnalia which lasted from December 17 to December 24, the feast of the Sun climaxed a period of merrymaking when all classes of society mingled together in a carnival spirit of gift exchanging, the carrying of torches, and the wearing of colorful and outlandish costumes. In grafting the spirit of that pagan celebration onto Christmas, the early Fathers transmuted heathen revelry into Christian joy.
The last link is one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I try and avoid doing this, but I'm going to quote at length from the article. I'd really like you all to be able to partake in this because it will lead quite well to my last point. Anyway, you might think that the excerpts I include from articles are too lengthy as it is, but trust me...I do pare it down a lot from what I would initially like to include:
It’s easy for anyone with one part brain and two parts wit to puncture an incandescent bubble of faith. Sometimes, everyday life does the same. It was on a Delta jet somewhere above North Carolina that I first doubted everything I’d learned in catechism. Peering through clouds, those swirling puffs of fog that our ancestors thought concealed Heaven; looking down at the specks of cars and homes and skyscrapers writ small, one grasps with alarming clarity the idea of personal insignificance. In the clouds, a vision of a personal God retreats as quickly as the oxygen supply.At church this past Sunday a guy attended who has been investigating for some time, but I think at this point he is developing his own unique brand of faith. As we're leaving he starts asking how we, people who claim to belong to the true church, could celebrate a holiday with pagan origins. I like that my answer would come from the bits and pieces of these various articles offered by people from different faiths.
But then, you land. And it isn’t long before God creeps back in. Faith cracks, it mends, it matures. It takes in new information and adjusts. Like a GPS navigator, it recalculates constantly, sometimes a little too often, sometimes not often enough.
Or, is it just that damned temporal lobe acting up again? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s not my circuit board that’s misfiring, but Hitchens’s; there appear to be more of my kind than his. Usually, normalcy is something to be desired; not in the skeptic’s world.
But for those of us who don’t need a God Helmet, who intuit a Presence all on our own, what Hitchens writes doesn’t matter. Here is a man who admits he has no faith, nor capacity for it, but presumes to write volumes on the topic. Meanwhile, holly-sprigged rubes like me welcome Christmas and its admittedly pagan customs because we find in it, amid the carol-singing and present-wrapping and eggnog-swilling, little bursts of joy as inexplicable as a black hole, or a massive wet planet skipping through space.
