The night is falling, again, in Baden-Wittenburg.

As parents in Germany have protested a new pro-homosexual “sexual diversity” curriculum in their schools, homosexual activists have attacked them by hurling feces and destroying their property, according to the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, which documents anti-Christian incidents in Europe.

And the Communists in France are, at times overtly antichristian. I like the way the word Fundamentalism has moved to apply to Catholics. Anyone who understands Church history would know that the term was coined by a bunch of Reformed theologians fighting against liberals among the Presbyterian and Reformed churches: it has moved from a specific set of principles to “this person believes and I dislike them”

Vincent Maurin, a Communist candidate of the Left Front in the city of Bordeaux, not only opposed the opening of a Catholic School in a district of Bordeaux in December but in February the construction of a church in the same area also. A new election propaganda leaflet included a list of changes to be made in Bordeaux under Vincent Maurin, one item being the disappearance of the parish St. Eloi, which he described as a “stronghold of religious fundamentalism”. The word “fundamentalism” is printed in red.

And in case we think it is just Europe, Matt Walsh reminds us that the US and feminist groups are, again, being ridiculous.

It doesn’t matter if Hobby Lobby is a religious organization. Nowhere in the First Amendment does it stipulate that only religious organizations are afforded religious protections. This argument is like something out of a 20th century dystopian science fiction novel.

We have the right to live by our convictions, but only if we are officially employed by some group that the government defines as “religious”? Religious freedom, but the government gets to decide what constitutes “religious”? By that logic, only priests count as “being Catholic,” and only rabbis really get to be Jewish.

What an impossibly ridiculous argument. Besides, where is it written that only “religious people” might prefer to forgo purchasing some forms, or all forms, of birth control? Other kinds of people might have other kinds of objections. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They own the business. They purchase the plans. They make the decision.

This is exceedingly clear to anyone with their brain fully engaged, but sadly, the sheep will follow the pigs on the Animal Farm, because they’re too dumb or too selfish or too apathetic to realize that this sort of tyranny will eventually come back around and destroy them.

Contraception, for the occaisional feminist who might visit here, is not that expensive. I’d suggest, if you are going to sleep around, that you do get the HPV vaccine (which is funded in NZ) because I have seen people die of Cervical Cancer, and that can be prevented. And you can cut your chances of having a baby down by 99% if you have a Jadelle implanted — that lasts five years (and you can have it taken out). It costs under $200. There are other alternatives, which, again, are generally funded in NZ, our of our taxes.
Our taxes pay for a lot of things we disagree with — from the existence of the Armed Forces (if you are a pacifist) to promotion of beef and lamb consumption (if you are a vegan) to regulating and allowing gold mining (if you are a greenie). I could go on. But no, we need to force, in the USA, organizations to pay directly: to not have freedom.

There is a term for that, which JB uses. JB is on form today, and knows when it is the correct time to ignore Godwin’s law and recall that posters and slogans are very good at drumming up hatred [edited down, JB]

I could go on, but surely it’s clear that posters asking men not to be that guy, you know the rapist guy, will be just as effective as posters asking black guys not to be thieves. And why are these posters not effective?

MOST MEN AREN’T RAPISTS
MOST BLACK MEN AREN’T THIEVES
…
MOST MUSLIMS DON’T BUILD BOMBS

And the ones that DO? They don’t give a fuck about your stupid posters. They’re risking their lives and freedom and their livelihoods. A police officer with a gun might stop them. Some jackass poster won’t.

What the posters accomplish is to teach men they are natural born rapists. And to teach women to fear and mistrust men. To hate them.

All men. It’s a hate campaign. There is no other word for it. Does this look familiar?

Posters played a key role in convincing the German population that Jews were evil, scary, bad, some “thing” you should hate. And we know how that turned out, don’t we? Don’t Be That Guy is hate speech, pure and simple. And the more voices that call it out for what it is, the sooner we can expose the real aims of women’s groups that promote these campaigns. They’re the new Nazis. Sound harsh? Just too much to swallow? Think comparing rape campaigns to Jewish propaganda is a false comparison? You might want to think again. Silence is what makes these campaigns possible. You may have other things to say about these posters, but say them you must.

Yep.

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Since this is a linkage and quotage list, let’s change tacks, and consider domestic issues. Haley has just read a book, and is, as usual, quite wise.

While reading the book, I found myself wanting to shake Gottlieb for being so unreasonably picky. She would discount men for the most insignificant reasons, like naming a movie she didn’t approve of as his favorite. She basically had it in her head that she could only relate to and be attracted to men who fit a very narrow profile (basically that of a fashionable, sophisticated, secular UMC Jewish SWPL with all the “right” tastes who still had his hair and wasn’t more than a few years from her in age). With her discounting men for the slightest of reasons, it was no wonder she had gone through life without ever marrying. Actually, what I found the most disheartening was not that she had dated a bunch of guys that were not marriage material – it was that some of them HAD been marriage material, but she dumped them for not fulfilling her ideals. It would have been one thing if she had only dated cads – but she didn’t.

As I grew frustrated with Gottlieb’s bullheadedness, I started thinking that modern Christian women have been taught to think like Gottlieb – to be what she calls “maximizers”: people who will only accept the absolute best. The fear of settling for a less-than-totally on fire for God man is implanted in Christian girls from at least junior high on, both in church and in Christian media. How many times have Christian girls been warned not to marry a man who doesn’t TOTALLY LOVE JESUS WITH ALL HIS HEART, with dark implications or outright warnings that life will be TERRIBLE otherwise? How many times have Christian girls been told that the man must be the Spiritual Leader, with the implication that if he’s not leading the charge to go to Sunday School and lead devotions and pray all the time, that he must be disqualified as a potential husband? Conversely, how often have Christian girls been told to give Christian men encouragement to grow in their faith and to have patience with them if they weren’t as “strong” in the faith as the women? The bar has been raised so high that hardly any Christian man can be marriage-worthy.

Ladies, this is taken from OK cupid, but it’s close enough to make the point.

And to hammer the point home, same source…

The older you get, not so young lady, the older you have to go to be marriagebale. And the smallr the dating pool there is. And the more cautious the man is. But we all end up taking risks. Marriage, itself is a risk.

I learned early in the counseling work I did that most men think they are SPECIAL AND DIFFERENT. I knew this like I knew how to find my nether region with both hands. It is a basic human function of men. Yet, I imagined that I really was special and different, because of my extensive counseling work and activism.

One day while looking around my section of high-tech technicians, it came over me that if we wrote the life story of each man on a paper, and crossed out no more than one or two lines for each one, INCLUDING MYSELF, we couldn’t tell them apart. INCLUDING MYSELF. I was one shamed and embarrassed individual, I tell you.

I finally realized we men can’t even analyze our own marriages, ourselves in general. The only way we can learn to understand ourselves is to observe the men around us. watch them, study them, try to understand them. Once we learn to understand the men around us, we then can understand almost everything we have learned applies to ourselves. And, I guarantee you, the truth is not pretty. Not for thee; not for me.

The reality is that none of us are God, and none of us has any guarantee that our mates aren’t going to decide one day to up and leave. That’s been true for just about everyone in the age of no-fault divorce. Control is an illusion. An intoxicating one, but an illusion nonetheless.

That said, it’s silly to insist that there is no way for a man (or a woman) to have any inkling of the character of their mate. You seriously don’t think Leif Erikson received no signs that his wife had checked out of the marriage? Of course he did. Sometimes people get blindsided, but not most times. The signs that something is wrong are usually there if they dare to look.

The idea that a person just *thinks* they have a happy marriage and then one day their spouse just springs it on them that it’s over may be something that happens on occasion, but I really don’t believe it’s the norm.

“There is none so blind as he who will not see”. On the other hand, I don’t think you really grasp the knowledge base that Anonymous age 71 has – he walked a whole lot of men through the divorce machine, and if memory serves me the majority of those men felt blindsided to some extent, that is, they “never saw it coming”. So you are contrasting your opinion vs. the experience of hundreds of men, which one has more real-world evidence supporting it?

So the real issue Anonymous age 71 appears to be putting forth is simple: women are responsible for their actions, just as men are, and claiming that the Bible holds men responsible for women’s actions is not supportable – not in the real world, and not in the words in the Bible either. I could be wrong, and if I am I”m sure he will correct me. That will be fine with me, I do not wish to misquote or misattribute.

Yes. This is what I was getting at. And while I have not even an inkling of the experience Anon has dealing with men who have been through the “divorce grinder”, like almost any American over the age of 30 who hails from a large family, I have seen men I love decimated by faithless wives. Even seen one go through the devastation of cuckoldry.

The idea that one has to have been divorced to have any sort of clue is fallacious.

Both men and women have to realize that they are not that specail, and Anon71’s conversation with Elspeth covers both sides of this. Men think they are special and because they have skillz and gamez they will keep her in love with them. Until their wife decides they are supplicating when they agree, and in contempt pushes the trigger. Women think they are special and that they can get someone perfect, when the only perfect man is one who is faking.

We are all fallen. And in this world, we need to move beyond blaming each other to working together and forgiving each other.