Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Patriarchy - 2

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.
  - Malachi 4:5,6 [RSV]

This was the reading for morning prayer this past Sunday, the Solemnity of the birth of John the Baptist. The scriptural reference to fathers and their children caught my attention, coming just one week after Fathers' Day. One week, also, after my last post on Patriarchy, which I might synopsize as follows: The best indicator of whether or not a particular human society is civilized is to ask whether or not men know their children, and children know their father.

Uncritical adoption of egalitarian and feminist ideals is feminizing our culture, often preventing fathers from acting like fathers (like men), and then despising them for being irresponsible. The more radical feminists openly deride fatherhood as useless or obsolete. Thus we droop slowly into savagery.

Looks like it's high time for the promised Elijah to come and turn us from our collective stupor.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Patriarchy

Thanks, Dad! Patriarchy, the word and the concept, has gotten bad press in the past few decades. And that's a shame, because patriarchy, a.k.a. fatherhood, is perhaps the key element of civilized society.

The mother-child bond is irrefutably primary, dictated by nature, by biology. In a completely natural (i.e. savage) society, the one stable relationship would be the one between mother and child. As social beings, humans would still congregate and form other, lesser relationships (when I hear "it takes a village to raise a child", I picture a circle of grass huts occupied by women and children, with the men off in the bush), but motherhood is primary.

Fatherhood is a bit more tenuous. It requires two steps that go beyond biology: 1) the bonding of the woman to one man, and 2) the acceptance of that bond by the man, the decision to shoulder responsibility. When the woman thus 'belongs' to the man, he can know that her children belong to him as well. Thus he will be motivated to care for the children whom he now knows as his own. Further, he will be motivated to care for his wife. And, thirdly, other men become his partners in this patriarchal arrangement, rather than sexual rivals. And all that makes civilization possible.

In simple terms, civilization consists of the domestication of men, the protection of women, and the nurturing of children in stable homes. And the early feminists were correct: this structure is patriarchal. Only by putting fathers in charge is it going to happen.

Put another way: Without fathers there would be no families (there would only be 'villages'). Without families, there would be no real civilization.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Global Warming - 2

This time I will quote someone else (who, in turn, quotes another), as a better appraisal of the Global Warming question. The outer quote is from Mick Eugene Hunt of G.A.P. (Genocide Awareness Project), and a fellow blogger:

We need rain. The weather is uncanny. Early heat wave, late freeze and now a drought. Global Warming? I don't know; it could be. Are we causing Global Warming? Maybe yes, maybe no, but if yes, not the way the GW crowd thinks. I have shared this passage before, but it bears repeating.

There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.
  - Hosea 4:1b-3 [NIV]

Friday, June 8, 2007

Something for everyone

I have been quoted. No kidding. Little ol' corn-pone, backwoods hick Dogpatch of the North Jerry DePyper has been quoted on the Internet. Not once, but twice!

The first quote was no real surprise. Matt C. Abbott is a young Catholic writer (a good one), and I had e-corresponded a bit already with him in connection with issues detailed in the Roundtable post below. Matt has reproduced that first letter from Lenore and me to the Catholic Herald in an article on the RenewAmerica website. (Scroll about 1/3 down to see our letter referenced.) This is a website of Alan Keyes, and it's an honor for us to be included therein.

The other source is a bit more interesting. A site called "The Picket Line" advocates, among other things, tax resistance as one of its focal topics. In that vein, Dave Gross, quoting from my Strike Three! post below, identified me in his 30 May 2007 article as a rare "right-wing counterpart to left-wing war tax resisters". Again, I am honored, and I heartily accept the moniker.

Now, Alan Keyes and left-wing tax resisters may not represent extreme opposite poles. In fact, in an interestingly radical manner, they have much in common. But I think it's fair to claim that these two groups span a pretty wide ideological range, wouldn't you say? To be mentioned in a favorable light in two such diverse forums is gratifying indeed. Such broad appeal is seldom attained by even the big household names.

Maybe I should run for President.