Stand Up For Real Women

Not a day goes by now where we, the normal mentally stable, are not assaulted by the lunatic ravings of the woke elites of our society. They truly have lost the plot. One of the latest outrages is the attack on a group in New Zealand called Speak Up For Women. Anyone who reads this blog will understand that I am no feminist, and I do not support all of the principles of this group. Nevertheless, my readers should understand that I am pro-women. The Stand Up For Women group is opposing the government’s plan to allow sex self-identification on birth certificates. This means that a person can change their sex on their birth certificate to match the gender they identify as. The group has organised events around the country to talk about this issue, which they believe will be detrimental to women’s rights because the terms female and woman will become meaningless.

In response, councils have refused to allow the group to host meetings in council-owned buildings until court action forced them to. This gives you an idea of the thinking of our leaders on these sorts of issues. Furthermore, a billboard company, Go Media, has shown its lily-livered timorousness by running for the hills and taking down the billboard below, no doubt after some outraged man pretending to be a woman complained.

How controversial! How outrageous! How hateful and hurtful. Who could dare define a woman as an adult human female?!

How do we respond to this? We the normals have been far too passive and ‘live and let live’ about all of this. It’s time to push back. Check to see if your Councils was involved in this attack on free and sane speech. If so, then determine which members of your council supported it, and refuse to vote for them again. Make sure you tell others. These people are punishing citizens they don’t agree with by refusing them access to public venues. They should not be allowed anywhere near the halls of power. Furthermore, if you are a business that uses billboards, contact Go Media and tell them why you won’t be using them in the future.

Thankfully, the Free Speech Union has been all over this, being responsible for the court action that forced councils to allow the events to take place and also for that turkey, the Hutt City Mayor Campbell Barry’s apology for suggesting some bins as an alternate venue for the Stand Up for Women’s events. They are also hoping to put up the following billboard on a Wellington building. If you haven’t joined them yet, do so. This is the fight of our time.

Dictionary

Excuses for Avoiding the Responsibility of Christian Education #1

It has long been my bitter experience that many Christians are ambivalent to Christian education. Sure it might be good for some children they say, but my children don’t need it. So today we are beginning a series highlighting the excuses Christian parents make for avoiding the responsibility of a Christian education.

Excuse 1: I want my children to be salt and light

This has to be the most virtuous excuse that I have heard. What Christian doesn’t want their children to be salt and light? Yet while the number of Christians who use this excuse is significant, the number of children in government schools who are actually salt and light is far fewer. For many Christians, this is just a pious platitude, an excuse to assuage their guilty consciences that they might just be prioritising material goods or something else over obedience to Christ.

While there are some children from exceptional Christian families who by God’s grace are actually salt and light in their public schools, far more frequently, the witnessing and converting is occurring in the opposite direction. Christian children are being conformed to the pattern of this world. Compare if you will, children who attend decent (as opposed to nominal) Christian schools or are homeschooled to children who are at public schools. The public school children are often ‘cooler’ and far more attuned to what is acceptable to the secular world. Their ‘secular and religiously neutral education’ has done its job well. You can see this often in their dress and demeanour as well as their speech and values. How many children has the church lost to the faith because we have deceived ourselves into thinking this ‘salt and light’ approach to be an effective evangelistic strategy? Spoiler alert; it’s not.

Now while there are some sincere Christians who use and believe this excuse, it is important for us to see what is often actually going on. This is an attempt to paint a decision that runs counter to God’s commands as a righteous decision. It’s actually quite clever, and man has been doing this sort of thing forever. I’m looking at you Saul. But it will not do. To obey is better than to sacrifice. God holds parents and particularly fathers responsible for the education of children. In Ephesians 6:4, Paul exhorts fathers to bring their children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. He categorically did not suggest bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of Caesar or any other pretender to the throne of the universe.

Yes of course we should announce the news of the kingdom! Yes of course we want our children to be salt and light! We don’t just want the right outcome and let’s face it, our current obsession with public secular education over the last few generations hasn’t achieved this, but is at least partly responsible for the decimation of the church. What we also want is that our process and methods are God-honouring. And we know, that when we honour God in obedience, he blesses us. Look at Psalm 78. As we the covenant people of God honour Him by teaching our children so that the next generation will know His law, then we will see a new generation putting their trust in God, remembering his redemptive deeds and remaining loyal to him. These children will be more salty and far brighter lights for having developed a Christian rather than secular worldview.

A Mass of Contradictions

Consider what a mass of contradictions we are. If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop. If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living – if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town – we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent. if a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall. But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents. Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Colonisation

Recently there has been a bit of controversy over the benefits or otherwise of colonization to New Zealand. The National party’s education spokesman Paul Goldsmith suggested that colonisation “on balance” had been a good thing for Māori. Cue the howls of outrages from ignorant and divisive politicians.

Goldsmith’s statement is an obvious truth. The fact that there is any disagreement over it is beyond belief. Maori before European colonisation had very low life expectancy. They did not have iron. They were not blessed with having access to many scientific discoveries due to their geographical isolation. They had no stable government and might was right. Warfare was brutal and regular. The very fact that there are land claims and compensation is paid for past injustice is a testament to the benefit of colonisation. Maori have been blessed by the coming of British law to these islands. Prior to European settlement, there was no recourse for the weak when they were abused by the strong. For all its faults, colonisation, and particularly the impact of Christianity has been a benefit to Maori culture.

Those who doubt this are either ignorant of history, or deliberately divisive. Let me leave you with Michael Bassett’s comments on this issue. I particularly love his description of Peen Henare and Wille Jackson as two of the weaker minds in our ministry! You can find the rest of his article here.

So, in the opinions of Peeni Henare and Willie Jackson, two of the weaker minds in our ministry, Paul Goldsmith MP is “ignorant” and talking “nonsense” when he says that on balance, Maori benefited from the colonization of New Zealand. According to Henare, Goldsmith who, incidentally, is a First-Class Honours graduate in history with an impressive number of well researched books to his credit, “set back the country” by stating what, on balance, should be obvious to all of us. As that sage Maori leader Sir Apirana Ngata always said, colonization of New Zealand could not have been prevented; Maori were just lucky that it was the British, and not some of the less enlightened imperialists who undertook the settlement of New Zealand. When will our ministers learn some history?

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #7

We continue today our look at the Directory for Private (Family) Worship. While I think we can commend the idea of church authorities encouraging families to develop the discipline of regular private worship, there seem to be a number of times where, (according to my cultural sensibilities) the church authorities who have written this directory are potentially overstepping the bounds of their realm of government. Today is another case of this I think.

VII. Whatsoever have been the effects and fruits of meetings of persons of divers families in the times of corruption or trouble, (in which cases many things are commendable, which otherwise are not tolerable,) yet, when God hath blessed us with peace and purity of the gospel, such meetings of persons of divers families (except in cases mentioned in these Directions) are to be disapproved, as tending to the hinderance of the religious exercise of each family by itself, to the prejudice of the publick ministry, to the rending of the families of particular congregations, and (in progress of time) of the whole kirk. Besides many offences which may come thereby, to the hardening of the hearts of carnal men, and grief of the godly.

So what does this mean in more current language? As I understand it, this rule begins with noting that in the past, when the church has been troubled, multiple families have gathered together to worship, and that God has indeed blessed this. However, in times of peace, they believe this ought not to be the normal situation. Why? Firstly, it can hinder the religious exercise of each family. My guess is that when you have a big gathering of families, it might be harder for the father to help individuals in his care than when families meet on their own. The second reason they give for this not being helpful is that it can prove to be to the prejudice of public ministry. In other words, it can cause division and families can tend to sense they do not need the local church when they band together regularly. It can lead to further error and hardening of hearts.

Now once again I see the points that these leaders were making, but I am not sure that this is something we should be making a rule against. Yes, families should be part of a local congregation, and the banding of families together ought to be in the context of a local church. Yes I think there are dangers in the denigration of the public ministry when families think they can replace the local church, but at the same time there are regularly times in Church history when the church is governed by men who do not love Christ, or who are teaching what is not true. It is in these times when rules against families banding together for worship are problematic.

Who Do They Belong To?

One of the idols of our age is the state. And education is very important to the state, particularly the leftist state which seeks to control and manipulate every area of life to achieve utopia. They need to produce compliant citizens who will follow their dictates mindlessly. Part of this of course is that much of what they say is arrant nonsense, and it takes a certain type of idiot to listen to them. For example, only someone bereft of sanity – an idiot – can sagely proclaim that a man with a few bits chopped off and given some hormone treatment is a woman. So you see, they believe they must control education, and education is not about developing critical thinking and intelligence as much as they try to tell you that. If it was, they would free it up to different views and approaches.

You don’t believe me? At teacher’s college, I wrote an essay suggesting that teacher registration was a waste of time, because it didn’t protect students, and it didn’t improve teacher standards. Moreover, I argued that independent schools should have the freedom to employ people who have not jumped through the ideological hoops required by registration since to attract students who pay fees when the government holds a monopoly of ‘free’ schools obviously forces those schools to provide a superior service. Predictably, my essay was not looked upon favourably. Written comments from more than one lecturer were recorded on the paper which I had never seen before. One comment in particular stuck with me. “We must have gatekeepers.” Yes, quite. The statists have to control who teaches your children. That is an assumed good.

So statists, and unfortunately most teachers are statists, do not believe that parents are responsible for the education and training of their children. Setting themselves against Christ, they believe that children must be rendered unto Caesar and his bureaucratic minions. They arrogate to themselves what belongs to parents. In New Zealand, we see this in their monopolistic control of education generally, and in their zoning rules (and a host of other rules) specifically. We also see it in the way teachers think they have the right to teach values contrary to the wishes of parents.

Indeed, this evil has saturated the Western world. A couple of recent examples are in order. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the district educational leaders have proposed policies requiring teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. At a public meeting on this issue, parents were so opposed to this, that the board closed public comments at the meeting, and the police declared an unlawful assembly. Two parents were apparently arrested for refusing to leave the meeting. There is nothing so frustrating to these control freaks than to have parents arrogantly assume they have a say in what their children are being taught.

In other parts of the US, teachers, are complaining about the crackdown by conservatives on critical race theory being taught in schools. Here’s one example of the kind of ill-educated brainwashing robots government schools tend to attract.

So what should you do? Get your children out of government schools. Seriously. What are you waiting for? Do not render to Caesar what belongs to God. Give your children an actual education. “Free compulsory education” gets a one out of three. Yes, there is compulsion. It’s not free and it’s not education. It costs the souls of our children and stifles their ability to think and challenge the idolatrous State.

Different Bodies Mean Something

Hate speech alert. God’s design for marriage is a man and a woman. The Bible makes this clear, but sometimes we don’t think too hard about this. Why do we need a man and a woman? Is it just because two are better than one? Are we essentially to function in the same way? Are we like dual hard drives in a desktop computer – just in case one fails, we have another exactly the same that can carry on functioning? Sure, we admit we have different bodies. We understand the birds and the bees. But do we realise that our different bodies mean something?

Modern Christians don’t seem to consider the significance of our bodies. This is probably why we have failed to be effective in so many areas. We seem to do pretty much the same things as the pagans around us. We don’t often consider that we are designed and that our differences are deliberate, and that they, therefore, have meaning and purpose.

Consider the modern evangelical Christian couple. They marry – usually later in life than in previous generations. Why? Like most pagans, they consider getting their careers on track is more important than sexual purity and creating a successful family. We don’t tend to question the relatively recent narrative that university education for all is the path to fulfilment and success, because we have accepted individualistic materialism and its focus on personal fulfilment. Then, like most secular couples, at some point, our evangelical couple decides they want to add children to their lives. And note, children are an optional accoutrement. They are not integral to the purpose of marriage. They are not core to the purpose of a man and a woman. No, career is much closer to this.

So what happens next? The wife takes a short amount of time off to have the baby. She takes maternity leave of perhaps a year if the baby is lucky, and then she is back into her career. Childcare is then outsourced to others while the couple continues with the main purpose in their lives – personal fulfilment and the pursuit of materialistic success and wealth. This of course leaves the couple, and particularly the wife feeling guilt as she tries and fails to ace her career, care for her husband and be a wonderful mother.

Is this the way it is supposed to be? Should Christians follow this narrative? Of course not! As Christians, we need to rethink the cultural narrative around us. Our bodies are designed by God and tell us about our purpose. Unfortunately, the story that a woman’s body tells has been placed on the book-burning list. Instead of raising our young Christian woman to see the glory of the domestic sphere – being a supportive wife and mother, as Paul notes (see Titus 2:4, I Timothy 2:15, ) we have taught them like the culture around us to glory in career. We have taught our girls to be men.

Now in Christian circles, highlighting the importance of motherhood and children for our girls is often critiqued. When young Christian women make decisions about further education (for instance choosing not to go to university) that express their desire not to rack up years of study and debt which might make being a full-time wife and mother from an early age more difficult, there are Christians who frown on this. Sometimes we are told, ‘What if she does not get married?’ Now there is an element of truth in this. Not all young women who desire marriage do in fact marry. Yet this does not negate a few important truths. First, marriage is normative, and this means that for most Christian women, the way they will fulfil their Christian kingdom work is in the context of being a wife and mother. Preparing for this is therefore of primary importance. Secondly, the argument can be flipped the other way. Most intelligent and capable young women are exhorted to aim for careers that are not conducive to fulfilling wifely and motherly duties. My question is, ‘What if they get married?’ This is the far more likely eventuality. And yet we ignore it. We end up putting both financial hurdles and temptations in the way that are likely to be a stumbling block to their primary role. Finally, we must recognise the cultural blinders that make us assume that more time at university is the path to success. Maybe a young girl won’t marry and have children. But does that mean working as a nurse is less important than working as a surgeon?

A woman in marriage is designed primarily to help her husband in his dominion task by carrying and nurturing children and creating a wonderfully supportive domestic realm. She is not designed to provide for herself. We should not be ashamed of these truths. The world and culture around us have neglected these truths, to the detriment of men, children and women. The Christian way is beautiful and provides an arena for us to flourish in the bodies and roles God has given us. So let’s encourage our girls that it is legitimate to long for children and desire to support a husband. Let’s innoculate them against the secular lie of our age that a woman’s greatest happiness can be found in a career or pursuing the masculine calling of dominion. Too many miserable and stressed women testify against this. Let’s teach our girls of the supremely important role they have in Christ’s kingdom. Let’s excite them with the impact that strong marriages and families have for the kingdom of God.

Parent-Controlled Childhood

The truth is…yesterday’s parent-controlled childhood protected children not only from sex, from work, and from adult decisions but also from the dominance of peers and from the market, with all its pressures to achieve, its push for status, its false lures, its passing fads. – Kay Hymowitz in Ready or Not – Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future – and Ours

Think about the impact and control your child’s peers are having on them. How are they being shaped by them? As parents our role is to shape our children, and part of that is controlling how they are shaped and who shapes them. Hannah Arendt is quoted by Hymowitz as pointing out that the authority of a group is stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person. We would do well to recognise this and protect our children.

Straining Gnats and Swallowing Camels

Recently we highlighted our callous politicians and cultural elites including the media who have no compassion for children despite constantly bleating on about how caring they are. These are people who constantly attempt to position themselves as on the moral high ground yet have no qualms about supporting the murder of innocent and defenceless unborn children.

Well I read of this tragedy last week. The title begins with “Abortion Tragedy”, and some of my readers with more sanguine hopes for human nature and culture in NZ might be thinking at this point, “Oh wow, there are still some out there who see abortion as a tragedy.” Yeah nah. The rest of the headline reads, “Couple left to terminate pregnancy at 25 weeks after midwife misses two ultrasounds”.

So here is what happened in a nutshell. The couple’s midwife failed to read two early ultrasounds which would have ensured she identified problems with the pregnancy up to four weeks earlier. The tragedy (apparently) is not the abortion itself, but the fact that it would have been better to happen earlier, since abortions after 20 weeks are not advised.

The New Zealand Herald noted that the couple won an apology from the midwife. Talk about straining gnats and swallowing camels. Sure, the midwife did not do her job properly. The baby seemed to have abnormalities that are consistent with some kind of chromosomal abnormality (like Downs syndrome) based on what I can understand from the notes on the case. But these would-be parents have sacrificed their child because of his or her disability. They have essentially determined that there is no dignity in a disabled child, or that raising one would cramp their style. Where is their apology? They have demanded a midwife apologise for not doing a good job, when they have killed their weak and defenceless child for the crime of being abnormal, and then have the brazen audacity to complain that they should have had the information they needed to commit this killing four weeks earlier.

They are Mad

No doubt many of my readers will have seen the British ‘influencer’ (surely a better term is narcissist) who has undergone a number of operations to make himself look Korean. He claims he identifies as Korean. Of course, there is a certain amount of logic in his madness. If you can make up genders in your little Fairyland, then why can’t you make up your race? If one can construct one’s own gender identity and identify as a pansexual unicorn, then why the heck can’t you choose your racial identity?

Because…that’s racist. Thus say other loonies who have escaped the asylum. It’s OK to make up stuff about gender. Thinking a woman is all bust, long hair and dresses and assuming that simply adding these is all a person with male appendages who identifies as a woman needs to do to be a woman is apparently not at all sexist. But thinking that changing what one looks like to have features more like the race one identifies with? That’s racist. In fact, it is apparently a “prime example of racism, cultural appropriation, and transphobia, enacted from a perspective of considerable privilege.”

We are piously lectured at without any apparent irony, that gender is our internal sense of self, whether that be man, woman, neither or both. Yet, on the other hand, race ‘presents as categorised (often physical) traits that are socially constructed and understood.‘ You know, kinda like how sex used to be. As my grandmother sagely put it to me when I was a kid, you either have a Willy or a Mary. Quite. These physical traits used to be understood before we as a culture grew so stupid.

Maybe we now need to make up a semi-related word to race, let’s say ‘kith’ and then pompously argue that ‘race’ and kith are different. We could argue that ‘kith’ is our internal sense of self, whether that be Asian, Black or White racist.’ And then, just like the fruitcakes who separate gender and sex and assume that a transwoman dude with his male appendages cut off, on hormones and wearing women’s clothing is a woman; we can be consistent and do the same thing with this chap who identifies as Korean. You know, a clearly white dude who has had bits and pieces added and subtracted to his appearance to make him look like a Korean, because he feels his kith is Korean is totally entitled to do that because kith is not the same thing as race you bigots. At least we could claim to be consistent in our insanity.

But our moral superiors say “No!” Just go ahead and read the sanctimonious twaddle these people write. “It is racist to think someone can pick and choose parts of a race or culture they like, then distance themselves from that culture when it suits them.” And yet it is apparently not at all sexist for a massive dude to choose the parts of a sex he likes and use this to his advantage in weightlifting at the Olympics? A little further on we are told in a Pecksniffian manner that there “is a difference between affirming your gender as a trans person, which doesn’t harm anyone else, and choosing to live and appropriate another culture.” What is the difference? You are just making stuff up. You’re inventing the rules as you go. We can see the emperor, and he is stark naked, and because he has a “willy”, we can also see that he is a man, despite his petulant toddler-like ravings about being a transwoman sometimes two-spirit pansexual.

The bottom line is these people are clearly mad, but unfortunately, they are often in places of considerable influence. The author of the article is Pro-Vice Chancellor at Edith Cowan University. We need to mock and scorn them. They are doing their best to destroy this world, and we the mentally stable need to point out their hypocrisy and stupidity. It should also go without saying that we don’t give our children to these degenerate flakes to be ruined.