The Dignity of Unpaid Work

But where does it say that the dignity of work depends upon being paid for it? If that were the case, then a whore selling her wares on a seedy street corner would claim greater dignity than my grandmother could who stretched a poor income to clothe and feed and in innumerable unnamed ways to bless my parents and their fourteen siblings between them. That makes no sense.

Anthony Esolein in Out of the Ashes

Egalitarian Nonsense Meets the Real World

In our egalitarian world, we like to think men and women are exact replicas of each other, performing the same functions equally well. This is patently not true but is a lie we have been fed from childhood in our schools and popular culture. Girls can do anything boys can do!

And so we get to the stage where we have a police force that has frontline women officers. What happens when things get rough? This. A male policeman is overpowered and pushed to the ground by a violent young man. What does his female partner do? Does she get stuck in and help out? No. Instead she ‘could be heard repeatedly yelling “stop it” to the man attacking her colleague.’ Who could blame a woman for this reaction when faced with such an aggressive and strong man? We don’t expect our women to have to stand up to this sort of thing. But imagine if that police officer’s partner had been a 6 ft male. We might have seen a slightly different ending to that video.

Now I know, I’ve heard the argument before that women officers are helpful in a domestic violence situation. Fine. Maybe that’s true. But in frontline work, we’d be better off with men – and big strong ones at that. Men that crims are going to think twice before taking on.

Dating Advice #1

My wife recently shared with me this article written by a Jana Hocking, who laments the lack of good men. What she doesn’t get about men becomes swiftly apparent. So I decided, being the good bloke I am, to help out with a bit of dating advice. Let me begin by making a general observation about the different standards we hold for men and women. It’s often assumed that women can and should be picky about men, but when men have the temerity to be picky about women, whiny cries of “Where are all the good men?” are heard. If a woman can’t find a man, the fault is automatically seen to be men. While this might be true, there also might be more to this. Complaining that you are single and then expecting men to take you on is backwards. If you want a man, you probably need to think carefully about what men are looking for. So what are men looking for?

Sex. Yes well there is obviously that. Men are attracted to youth and beauty. That is why women will find it easier to get dates in their 20s than they will in their thirties where the dates are likely to start drying up. And unfortunately in our current environment, the sexual revolution has done women no favours in this regard. In the old days, women held real power. If a man wanted sex, he would generally have to marry a girl. Thus marriage occurred at an earlier age. Now, the tables are turned. Women, in the name of liberation, have given the very power they held over men away for nothing in return. Men don’t need to make any commitments for sex. The ‘price’ of sex has never been lower for men. And that, unfortunately, affects every single woman – even the chaste ones.

Jana writes about her friend group. “I might be biased, but seriously, they are all gorgeous, outgoing, have awesome jobs and are hilariously fun. Yet, here we are in our 30s, still chatting about the various dates we’d been on and pondering about blokes taking forever to text us back.

Now men, are not (honestly!) all one-dimensional. Sex is clearly important to men, but for many (most) men, there is also a desire for a long-term partner. What we are looking for here is someone who complements us. And this is where Jana goes wrong. She quotes Dr Kate Adams, a TV vet;  “I have found that successful women generally aren’t seen as appealing for guys, particularly when the opposite tends to be true when women view a potential partner.” What a wonderful discovery. Men and women look for different things in a partner. Jana later tells of her experience that most men aren’t interested in her career ambitions and goals. She writes of men who have “really championed my cause” in the realm of career, but questions, “where are they in the dating world?

Here’s the thing. A lot of men aren’t interested in your career. They are looking for a romantic partner who will complete them and offer what they do not have. If they are a strong candidate – i.e., they have a successful career themselves, they are most likely looking for what they do not have, that is, someone who can make a home and children. We are not interested in your careers if we are interested in a romantic relationship with you. If we care about your career, we are treating you more as a mate or colleague and less as a romantic possibility.

Men are driven by their design to provide and protect. They need someone to provide for and protect. We want a woman – in all her glorious differences. We want someone who will build a glorious haven and have children with us. We do not want someone aspiring to be a man. And that’s how a career woman comes across to many of us. Now you can call us backward if you like. You can tell us we need to get with the modern age. But many of us have found great wives who do complement us. And as the Proverb says, she is worth far more than rubies. Maybe we don’t need to change, maybe you do.

So you have a choice – you can either meet the market, or you can whine about it. There are two distinct markets that Jana will need to think about. First, there are guys out looking for a cheap score. These are the guys just looking for no-commitment sex. Then there are men who are looking for sex yes, but also want to find a woman to complement them. Let’s face it, neither of these markets are particularly interested in a woman’s career, but one is more likely to be interested in and value a woman more than the other. Jana seems to be opting to market herself to the men in the first market. She is marketing herself on sex appeal. We have a picture of her in sexy lingerie that she has shared on Instagram. That ticks box one. But as she ages, she will have less and less value to men in that area. What will she compensate with?

What is life for?

What is life for? Why do we work? If Christians cannot remember the answers, then we are lost indeed. Work is not something you are supposed to balance against the claims of your family. Unless you are one of those few whose talents are required in a broad way for the common good of multitudes, if you are not working in the first instance for your family, then something is severely out of order. We live in comforts that the richest aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child to too, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony Esolen – Out of the Ashes

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

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?

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.

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.