A Time for Truth

Yesterday was Father’s Day. I thought I might approach today’s topic by talking about fathers in the family as an essential ingredient for civilization. That’s true. But the urgent situation doesn’t give us enough time to solve things by means of that necessity only.

So, with that fatherhood idea in the background, this message is for those who already learned enough about living in a civilized world.

Truth is always better.

Jordan Peterson’s Rule for Life #8: Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.

Also,

Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor.—Exodus 20:16

Some things we’ve known for a very long time, but as humans we keep re-testing. As if, “Maybe it’s different now, for me, in my circumstances.”

Hint: It’s not different. You don’t make things better—in the long run—by lying.

So when some new power monger comes at you with a threat of ruining your life if you don’t bow and speak untruths that they dictate to you, would your life be better off if you lie?

Back in the day, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were told to lie by kneeling to display their worship of the king as their deity. They didn’t. Their honor was at stake. Their standing with the God they worshipped was at stake.

August Landmesser, the man who didn't salute Hitler
image from here

Bowing down has meaning. Often religious meaning. Certainly it is submissive. By doing it you grant power to the entity to whom you are bowing down. If you’re doing that while it is a lie, you are granting power to an entity you do not wish to serve.

Sometimes it’s another gesture, maybe a salute, or taking a disrespectful knee when the national anthem is playing.

What am I referring to? A power-mongering movement disguised as a gesture of goodwill.

Black lives do matter—as well as all other human lives. God is no respecter of persons. God-given rights are granted to all humans. In our country, founded on the idea that all of us are created equal—rather than granting certain classes or individuals special rights before the law, as has been common historically—that should be obvious to us.

But suddenly it’s uncomfortable to say so. More than that, it’s dangerous to say so. People have lost their livelihoods for holding such a belief.

Something is very wrong.

It’s bigger than this issue, but this is one that illustrates our dire straits. Here’s what it is. While black lives matter, Black Lives Matter is a coercive force intent on taking down our civilization and replacing it with a tyrannical racist regime. And they’re working to force you to submit to them.

Bad guys have a pattern that includes depending on people of goodwill to act as expected—to humbly do what it takes to get along, to be sympathetic, to examine themselves and recognize their own imperfections. To say, “excuse me,” even when the other person bumped into them; to assume maybe they were in the way. People of goodwill are expected to be apologetic for the sake of civility.

With the bad guys, your very act of saying, “Maybe you’re right; I’m certainly not perfect” is used, not to improve the relationship between you and the bad guy, but to give the bad guy ammunition to use against you.

The solution? Tell the absolute truth. At the very least, don’t lie about some pretend sin you’re accused of in the hopes of getting exoneration and moving on. You’re not dealing with civilized people; this isn’t a small thing to be dispensed of with an “excuse me.”

If you have never enslaved anyone, you do not help anyone by apologizing for slavery to someone who has never been enslaved. If you’ve been falsely accused, expect to be convicted of the crime once you confess to it. Don’t give a false confession.

If you’ve treated people of all races equally, not only before the law, but as a natural part of your community of friends, acquaintances, and coworkers, then do not say, “Please forgive me for my inherent racism.” Why are you speaking that lie? Your words and life have already revealed your heart. If that isn’t enough, then you’re dealing with something completely outside of civilization.

The bad guys are not looking for ways toward peace; they are looking for ways toward power.

And right now Black Lives Matter is an entity seeking and gaining power—not for the sake of benevolent rule, but for the sake of ruling in violently coercive tyranny.

A few days ago Tucker Carlson discussed this on his show. It was frightening. Polls show this political force actually has higher approval than the president, or the Democrat candidate for president, or really than either party. People have been told by a lying media that approval of Black Lives Matter equals recognizing the struggles of a particular race—and, since you don’t want to appear racist, then of course you must support this movement.

No. Don’t fall for this bait and switch. Having sympathy for a group, instead of individuals, may be unwise in itself, but still it does not require you to give up approval of your nation with its freedoms, prosperity, and civilization. It does not require you to bow down to Marxist thugs whose plan is to dismantle everything you know as civilization and replace it with tyranny—with them in charge—along with the natural results: poverty, and savagery.

That’s the choice you’re making by supporting them. At least have the presence of mind to do it consciously.

Here’s something to think about: blacks do not need you, as a person of a different color, to grant them the right to matter.

There’s a PragerU video out this past week, combining part of a talk by Jordan Peterson on privilege with a 5-minute video by black former cop Brandon Tatum on the wrongness of supporting the idea that you’re required to feel guilty about some invention called “white privilege.”

In Peterson’s part, he says that we have all kinds of privileges, and we shouldn’t apologize for them. Here are his words:

I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it’s not because white people aren’t privileged. We have all sorts of privileges. And most people have privileges of all sorts. And you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say.

But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group—there is absolutely nothing that is more racist than that. It’s absolutely abhorrent.

He talks about the kulaks, farmers in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed and raped and robbed by the collectivists, who insisted that, because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. One of the consequences of the prosecution of the kulaks was the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famine in the 1930s.

He makes the point, “The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous.” The 20^th Century has plenty of history to teach us that.

But, as you’ve probably noticed, history is one of the things the thugs are tearing down.

If you’ve paid attention to history, you know that punishing children for the crimes of their fathers was common in the ancient and pagan world; bringing it back is not progress.

Brandon Tatum, in his part, talks directly to those white people who think they’re more sensitive than all. To them he says,

Woke white people, I’d like to ask you a favor: Please stop asking for forgiveness for your white privilege. You’re not fooling anybody. You’re not helping black people, or any other minority. And your public confessions don’t make you look virtuous. They make you look disingenuous, which is a really nice way of saying fake, phony, and fraudulent.

He debunks the white privilege myth. Those things he’s supposed to have suffered? He hasn’t. Not only that, he says,

In many ways, in today’s America, blacks have more privilege than whites. It’s been my experience that whites bend over backwards to give blacks every possible advantage. If two people are equally qualified for a job, the black person will usually get it. Big companies and prestigious universities fall all over one another trying to sign up talented black people. If you deny this, you’re denying reality.

But his main point is that, you people apologizing for your skin color, you’re doing it for self-serving reasons:

To acknowledge your white privilege is supposed to make you feel bad. Only it doesn’t. It makes you feel good, because, by acknowledging your white privilege, you’re declaring yourself to be enlightened. And, as a virtue bonus, it also makes you a better person than those whites who don’t acknowledge their privilege. White privilege, which is supposed to make you feel bad, ends up making you feel good.

Meanwhile, the real damage is to blacks. What makes whites feel good makes blacks angry. More than 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, the message is, “You’re still oppressed.” How can this not create a victim mentality?

He takes on the idea that the type of privilege you get from skin color matters more than plenty of other factors:

screenshot from here

Let’s take this for example. A black lawyer and his wife have a baby. And a meth addict single white woman has a baby. Which kid has privilege? The white one? Because he’s white? Come on, now.

Finally, he tells us what’s really going on:

So let’s be real. White privilege is an attempt by the left to divide Americans by race. It’s all theory, and all nonsense. If you want to fall for it, go ahead. It’s a free country. But don’t try to sell it to me.

I’m an American who deals with my fellow Americans one-on-one. Try it. It works.

screenshot from here

Brandon Tatum feels a lot more a part of my community than a person of my color who is a Marxist America hater. Maybe ideas and behavior matter a whole lot more than melanin content.

Candace Owens has been called a traitor to her “black community” for speaking out against Black Lives Matter, and in favor of personal responsibility. Here’s how she answers:

The criticism that I often get is, “Candace, how can you not support your community?” My answer to that is, How could you think that that represents my community? My community is not a group of men that do drugs. It’s not a group of men who taser police officers. It’s not a group of men who assault police officers, or who don’t want to listen to basic instructions.

My community is the larger American community, the community built on law-abiding citizens, who want to make sure they can raise their children and their families in a country that they recognize. In a country that is not run by radicals. In a country that is free of autonomous cities and states being built of radical individuals and socialists screaming, and demanding justice, and setting fires, and rioting and looting businesses. That is not the America that I recognize. It is not the America that I want to raise my children in. It is not the America that I want to see my family live in. And so I use my voice to speak out against it.

My question is, Why don’t you?

The people trying to sell the “white privilege” idea? They’re the racists. They hate you for your skin color. And they intend to rule over you by force. Do you really think that would be an improvement over our constitutional republic?

My concern is that, while we’re not looking, while too many people are pandering and mollifying and patting themselves on the back for their wokeness, an evil force is gaining power in our country, and that power doesn’t care about laws or elections or civilized expectations.

Don’t give in. Don’t sympathize with their false narrative. Don’t play nice to get along. Don’t kneel and mutter a lie.

Speak up with truth—or at the very least don’t lie.

Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters

In Minneapolis Friday a police officer was arrested for the murder of a black man he was detaining and restraining in a manner that led to death. It was captured on video, so the whole country has seen it.

Protests break out calling for justice for George Floyd. The perpetrator is in custody. The other officers, who didn’t step in to prevent the officer’s actions, are also charged as accessories. All were immediately fired, not suspended, no waiting to see.

Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, calls for peace.
"That's not going to bring my brother back at all," he says of riots.
Image from here.

The arrest wasn’t instantaneous. In such a high-profile case (because of the media), the prosecutors need to be careful not to charge more than they can prove. It doesn’t appear to be premeditated, for example, so if they charged first-degree murder and couldn’t prove it, the officer would be found not guilty. And, because of double jeopardy protection, he couldn’t be charged again for the same incident. So the charges are what they can prove for certain. If evidence later appears to prove a higher level crime, the charges can be raised.

There were things to take into account. I suggest this op-ed, which explains those legal details. 

But do you know anyone or have you heard anyone say that the brutality was justified and the police officer should be let off? In regular media? On social media? Anywhere?

This is one of those times that civil society is in agreement. A serious crime was committed, and there must be justice.

found on Ben Shapiro's Facebook page today

So what is being protested?

If justice is underway, what is the message of the protest?

I think it’s something like, “Until America can guarantee that this will never happen to another black person, America is evil.”

But that’s an impossible ask.

America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal—no one is entitled to more consideration under the law than another. Society isn’t stratified by birth, as it has historically been in most countries on earth throughout history.

Unfortunately, slavery of blacks was instituted on this continent by the Mother Country, and it needed to be rooted out. The Constitution was written with that expectation. It took too long, and it took a bloody Civil War to accomplish. But that’s what America sacrificed to make it happen.

Even then, people who had been taught their whole lives that people of a certain bloodline were inferior didn’t automatically unlearn that false teaching. It took another century for people to get fed up and actually grant equal rights.

We’re still divided. But let’s define things a little more carefully.

The Republican Party was created to fight slavery. All slaveholders were Democrats. Even in the northern non-slave states before the Civil War, the pro-slavery people were only Democrats. Coincidentally, it is Democrats who run the cities with most of the racial issues. This is true in Minneapolis—local on up to the governor.

The Republican Party pushed for the Civil Rights laws in the 60s. It was Democrats, mainly from former slave states, that resisted letting go of the Jim Crow laws they had perpetuated.

Then, somehow, the lie got told that it was the Republicans all along who had been racist. The lie became that what conservatives wanted to conserve were the old, pre-Civil Rights, ways. That conservatives wanted to conserve the Democrat way of thinking and living. That was never even close to reality.

So, here we are, decades later, and the lie is bigger. Now, at a time when most Americans don’t even understand the mindset of a racist, and have never felt that way in their lives, have never treated different races with disdain—those people are being told they’re guilty of systemic racism.

What are the protests saying, then? That we should stop being white, or Hispanic, or Asian, because blacks need to be knelt down to? If that isn’t it, what is the message of the protest?

Houston Chronicle May 31, 2020

I’ve seen a number of people reference other protests—implying that this is just an escalation, because we didn’t listen before. Such a message covers the full front page of yesterday’s Houston Chronicle Sports section. Colin Kaepernick protested by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, and that offended us. “If only we had heard his message!” people say.

We did hear him. It wasn’t his method of protest that offended us. It was the lie of his message—that America is an evil, systemically racist country—this from a millionaire black man playing a ball game for a living, and not playing it spectacularly well enough to merit his hiring amid the bad media he brought on.

Black Live Matter protested. And when people of goodwill answered, “Yes, your lives do matter to us. All lives matter,” those people got shouted down with, “No! You’re not hearing us. Black lives matter!”

What is that supposed to mean? That our lives don’t matter because we don’t have the right skin color?

Their protests were related to the Ferguson incident, which wasn’t a case of racist police brutality; it was a case of a black thug attacking a police officer who defended himself; even black eyewitnesses testified of that. Still the protesters shouted the lie that the perpetrator had held his hands up and called don’t shoot and was just gunned down. When it was proven that didn’t happen, the protesters insisted, “It’s still symbolic of the systemic problem.” Then where is your real evidence?

I assert that there isn’t a systemic racist problem going on in America, particularly toward blacks. Black radio host Larry Elder has the stats. Such as today, when he pointed out that police are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around. That studies that set out to prove racist police brutality found instead that, surprisingly, blacks are less likely to be harmed, because every officer is hyper-aware of the media ramifications of an error.

Elder recites the evidence often. So does black commentator Candace Owens. When they provide data, they’re called traitors. Sometimes they’re even called white supremacists, which is more than a little ironic. They get called these things because their experience and the data they provide does not coincide with the going narrative that there’s systemic racism in America. But those calling them those names don’t provide data; they only cite isolated incidents—which we all agree, when they actually happen, are injustices, and we all agree that justice should be done.

So, where is the evidence of this systemic, widespread problem that is making them so angry?

I’m not saying they don’t really feel what they’re feeling. I believe they do.

Steve Locke, who tells his story
of being detained because black
image from here

I read a story over the weekend, from an incident several years ago, that tells what they’re feeling better than most. It’s the experience of a black man, a college teacher in Massachusetts, who was heading to get a burrito for lunch before going to teach a class. Police pulled him over and questioned him, and then detained him. He fit the description, they said, of a black man, his approximate size, wearing a knit cap and a puffy coat, who had just robbed a nearby business. His jacket (a designer brand, and not a parka) didn’t look very puffy. He was wearing a lanyard showing his ID at the university. Everything he said checked out. He remained calm and respectful. Nevertheless, the police kept him, didn’t believe him, and were considering taking him to be identified by the victim. Fortunately, a detective arrived, saw that his story checked out. The new officer on the scene ran through the details and let him go.

This teacher had felt endangered. He believed it was because he was black. Literally, it was, because the actual perpetrator had been black. That is an unfortunate reality for blacks; they have a particular attribute that looks like the people who are doing an outsized proportion of the criminal activity. That’s a problem caused by those criminals, not generally by the police. But you can see how an officer—even a black officer—could come to be suspicious of people who, in their experience, so often turn out to be the bad guys.

I have sympathy for that teacher. It’s an upsetting thing to happen to a decent person. What could he have done to prevent it? Nothing. He even knew to handle the situation in a way that prevented escalation.

What could the police have done? Detected truth more accurately. Seriously. The detective who arrived later on the scene could tell almost instantly that this wasn’t the bad guy; this was a college professor, and his story rang true. Why didn’t the first officers see that? I don’t know. Maybe they need better training. Maybe they need more experience—combining more seasoned officers with newer ones until they learn? Maybe there’s something else.

But what I see is not racism, but police officers checking out someone who partly matched a not very detailed description of a criminal, a man who had the bad luck of being at the wrong place at that moment. That’s a very different thing from, “He’s black, so we’ve got it in for him. Let’s get him.”

No one’s arguing that racism never happens. Unfortunately, it does. The vast majority of Americans are not only not racist; they’re disgusted by actual racism.

We hear the peaceful protests. The message is, “We’re upset because of racism.” Yes. We understand.

It is similar to people who are afraid of the coronavirus. This fear is intensified for someone whose experience is that it has killed or severely affected someone close to them. So they insist on things that do not help fight coronavirus: economic collapse, wearing of facemasks alone outdoors, contact tracing at a point when prevalence is so widespread that such practices guarantee practically permanent loss of freedom. Yes, we understand you’re scared. The best solution is not to end society as we know it until every case of the virus in the world is gone; the best solution is for you to get a better understanding of the situation so you get over the fear. Then we can all cautiously get on with our lives with that new awareness.

We stopped being racist so long ago that most of us Americans have lived our entire lives without a racist heart. What more can we do? The best solution is not for all races to bow down to blacks in abject humiliation and repentance; that would be a lie coming from people who did not do anything wrong.

Protesters are saying this should never have happened. The people they’re protesting to? They agree. The message has been heard. The wheels of justice are underway. If you value civilization, it’s time to go home and watch the process play out.

Ah, but there’s the issue. People who do not value civilization are using this moment for their own nefarious purposes.

Protests are acceptable—even when their message is wrong, a lie, or misguided. Wrongness in a protest message has more to do with emotion overriding reason than it has to do with moral wrongness. So we value their right to express their views in peaceful protest.

Riots are not protests. Riots are evil acts of violence. They are literally anti-civilization; they are savage. They destroy property. They harm people—usually innocent people, sometimes even the demographic of people the protests were stated to support. And sometimes they take lives.

Rioters are criminals. Sometimes they get away with their crimes by overwhelming the law enforcement resources. That is intentional.

Some riots grow naturally out of crowd emotion. Mob mentality. Those are always bad.

The riots we’re seeing now are even worse; they are unnatural. They are instigated. They are planned. They are funded.

We don’t know all the details yet. And who knows whether the stories we’re seeing will turn out to be true.

Antifa is involved. US Attorney General Barr has identified them as the organizers of looting and mob violence across the country. And President Trump is right to label them a domestic terrorist organization. 

There’s a collection of photos from various cities, where people have noticed pallets of bricks showing up, mysteriously overnight, where there is no construction going on. They have cones placed around them. They’re staged strategically to be available—for throwing by rioting thugs. One instruction included a suburban neighborhood, miles from downtown, with the intention of making the previously safe feel unsafe.

Bricks pre-staged for rioting, image found here

Minneapolis, where the incident took place, and possibly Houston, where George Floyd was from, were not surprising locations. But these things are happening in cities all over the country. What is the message when thugs deface the Lincoln Memorial, where MLK gave his historic speech in the fight for Civil Rights? There is no connection between the damage caused by the evil rioters and the anti-racist message of peaceful protesters.

Anarchist rebels tend to make a common mistake—that once they set things in motion, people will rise up and join them.

What we need to have happen is the arrest and prosecution of each and every perpetrator of the crimes involved in rioting—violence, property damage, theft, assault, murder. Cleanse our free society of those who are actively working to oppress destroy our way of life so that they can get us vulnerable enough to easily oppress.

I believe the numbers of actual believers in the anarchist Antifa worldview are small. People of goodwill do not join such savages.

A community near Minneapolis held a food drive
to help victims of the riots. Image from here.

One good sign is that people showing up in the mornings—to clean up the damage. Pick up debris. Wash off graffiti. Repair what they can. That is what good people do: the exact opposite of the evildoers.

Here are eight examples of good things that have happened. 

Here’s a story of people in Minneapolis bringing groceries to the aid of victims of the riots.

Here is George Floyd’s brother calling for peace. 

What we need is overwhelming civilization to wash away the savagery. Let’s pray we can do it.

Over-Civilization

Back in early September, Candace Owens interviewed her fiancé—now husband—George Farmer on her weekly PragerU podcast. They answered questions from viewers as a way for us to get acquainted with him.

Candace Owens and George Farmer
screenshot from here

There’s a segment where they’re talking about one of the things she learned from him, which was about hunting—he does big game hunting—and which has been fascinating for her. He was talking about the difference between what liberal Westerners think compared to the Africans, who benefit from the hunting. It keeps predators down. When it’s an animal such as an antelope, which is mainly what George has hunted, the village cuts up the meat to share. So they get income from the hunters, and they get the food. It’s in their interest to keep the animal populations healthy so this can continue.

The conversation goes on to talk about how out of touch with nature some people are—maybe particularly in New York and California. Candace Owens suggests they should, “Go out and see the lions. Pet them. Talk to them about their feelings. And see what happens.”

George Farmer then brings something to the conversation I’ve been thinking about since: “Let’s put it like this; they’re not having a debate about which bathroom to use in Africa. Right? Because, at the moment, it’s about survival.” And this leads to more on this and related subjects. I’ll just share some of the transcript here:

CO: We’re so over-privileged… We talk about this a lot, the idea of over-civilization, where your society has become so civilized that it starts going backwards, and you start treading just towards stupidity. Like if you’re debating bathroom signs, you are way too privileged—way too civilized, if you are even talking about bathroom signs.

I mean, go to Africa. This is like one of you and I—we’re really big on just watching clips on the internet and just cracking up for hours. The best clip, I mean, the one that never gets old, is this African reporter who’s breaking a story, and interviewing someone, because they cannot grasp the concept of being gay or being a lesbian.

GF: Oh, yeah, that’s brilliant.

CO: And the interviewer is, “Welcome here to the show,” and he’s got this woman who’s a lesbian. She’s a girl and she’s a lesbian, and he just turns around to her, and his question, in this African voice is, “Why are you gay?”

"Why are you Gay"
screenshot from here

[I looked for the video. I think this is it. Being interviewed is a transgender male—i.e., a female who presents as a male, who is attracted to females. The interviewer doesn’t understand the motivation for making such choices.] 

GF: It’s the supposition, something that we’ve talked about. You’re absolutely right, the word over-civilization is a great word.

I’ve been to the Far East as well. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been— This is making me sound edgy and trendy. I’m not, as you well know—but, I went to Bhutan, which is this kingdom in the middle of the Himalayas. It’s the last Himalayan kingdom. And it’s a Buddhist kingdom. It’s basically sealed off to the world. It’s very difficult to get into. And they perform a—they are part of a Buddhist theology which involves tantric Buddhism, which is a form of sexual Buddhism. And, this was about six years ago—seven years ago. And I said to them, I said, “What’s the feeling about the gay rights movement in this part of the world?” And they looked at me as if I was an alien. They had never even heard of this. And I said, “Well, you know, relationships between men, and relationships between women.” And they just said, “Well, he’s my friend. Please explain,” kind of thing. 

And it was just bizarre. Because it was a case where, we’ve got to a point in the Western world where the debate’s become self-fulfilling. We start talking about these issues that become issues. The issues develop their own issues, etc., etc.

I’ve written here on this blog[i] quite a bit about LGBT issues. But this idea that, in some parts of the world these issues don’t even come up was surprising to me. I’m wondering what the social research would show, if the question of LGBT issues occurring in a society focused on survival were asked, or in a society that had never had the idea brought in.

In J. D. Unwin’s research[ii], in which he showed the power of what he calls absolute monogamy on a society—using data on every society in history he had any social data on—he had a sort of throwaway comment about homosexuality. He didn’t research it, but it appeared to him that it was a phenomenon that shows up in a society that is in decay. By decay, he means a society that does not embrace absolute monogamy.

I don’t know if we could get the right question studied today. For one thing, so much of the world is connected that the Hollywood culture has affected all but very few pockets. And you’d have to be able to do the study without introducing the idea where it hadn’t previously been thought of.

There are countries where homosexuality is illegal, and those societies eliminate the issue by executing any instances of it. Nazi Germany did that. Iran does that. But we’ve assumed that instances pop up about as often as average—about 2% of the population—and just stay hidden when the consequences are so dire.

But those examples aren’t survival societies or even fully separate-from-the-outside-world societies. If these things appear naturally (nature, not nurture), you’d expect the same natural incidence regardless of circumstances.

If (and this is what George Farmer is suggesting, but not something I have data on) the incidence is near zero in a society focused on survival, that’s interesting. Even more interesting is the near incidence in a society that simply hasn’t had the idea introduced by the outside world. If these zero-incidence places do exist, that leaves causation to something other than nature. Which I think we knew the umpteenth time it turned out there’s no gay gene[iii], according to DNA mapping.

But we don’t know exactly what part of nurture (possibly combined with some personality trait or combination of traits we’re not sure of) is causal. If we knew that, could we prevent it? Or find a way to heal from it? (Assuming the person wants healing; I’m not suggesting anything by coercion or even pressure.)

I don’t think we’d want to voluntarily become a subsistence society focused on survival. There are way too many advantages to thriving economically and socially. But it would be interesting to know what it is about a survival-focused society that leaves no room for wondering about LGBT issues. If you’re going to survive—as a species—you need to reproduce. We know how that happens, and LGBT behaviors obviously do not get us there. As the African interviewer said on the video, “Why are you gay?” Why would you make a lifestyle choice that offers no chance of procreation?

Those who have these issues often do not feel like they have a choice. But if, under the surface, there are psychological issues combined with life experiences that lead to these LGBT issues—many of which could be described as failure to accept the body one is born into—then it would be a kindness to learn how to help[iv].

About the assertion of over-civilization: I don’t think it’s possible to have too much civilization. But, then, I am defining it a specific way here at the Spherical Model[v]. When Candace and George use the term over-civilization, I think they mean that we are disconnected from what is essential. We over-complicate and over-emotionalize all kinds of things that, if we had a better perspective, would simply not be issues. The fact that we never seem to face life-threatening issues—our privilege of being so safe—leads us to weaken, and decay, and invent problems that aren’t relevant to thriving.

I believe if we actually lived fully civilized lives, without the decay that so much of the sexual revolution has characterized, some or all of the symptoms of decay would stop afflicting us.

The simple but not easy solution is for a critical mass of society to honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership. It’s what we find in the Ten Commandments. It’s still true.

---

[i] I compiled “The Defense of Marriage Collection” in 2013.  That’s a start, but these issues continue to come up regularly on this blog.

[ii] Joseph Daniel Unwin, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior," an address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society in 1934, published in 1935 (Library of Congress No., HQ12.U52). I mentioned his work here and here.

[iii] I wrote about this in September, here. 

[iv] I’ve written here about the work of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr., who has developed what he calls reintegrative therapy, which is intended to deal with underlying issues from childhood that lead a person to dissociate from who they are, and to then heal that underlying issue. The therapy is to gain a person greater peace but has in cases led to decreased or apparently erased feelings of same-sex attraction. It is my supposition that reintegrative therapy is based on principles that could also help people with gender dysphoria, although I haven’t heard Dr. Nicolosi assert that.

[v] At the Spherical Model, I describe civilization this way:

   Families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.

   Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

   There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.

   Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

   People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.

Stop Throwing Out the Baby

There are some ideas that have been around a very long time, experimented on, varied—and then it turns out the original was the best idea all along.

We’re about to talk about some truths that are very nearly lost in today’s society, because of unwise throwing out of ideas, simply because they’re old. And this has led to some literal throwing out of babies with the proverbial bathwater.

An article was brought to my attention that I thought might be worth reacting to. The piece is for an online forum called Human Parts, which I hadn’t heard of before. Gabrielle Blair writes “Men Cause 100% of Unwanted Pregnancies.” 

image from here

Technically, she’s right. If you go ahead and read her piece, be forewarned that it’s explicit—not in a prurient way, but still not something you want to have up on your computer screen with a nine-year-old looking over your shoulder.

Blair points out that men can cause pregnancy with every orgasm, while a woman can only get pregnant, all things being healthy, during about 48 hours a month. Nature is not equal.

She also accurately points out that contraceptives for women have lots of negative side effects. Meanwhile, the most common contraceptives for men, condoms, are cheap, plentiful, and free of side effects. But men don’t like them. Because they cause slightly less pleasure. Here’s how she puts it:

Imagine a pleasure scale, with pain beginning at zero and going down into the negatives. A good back-scratch falls at 5, and an orgasm without a condom is a 10. Where would sex with a condom fall? A 7 or 8? So, it’s not that sex with a condom is not pleasurable, it’s just not as pleasurable. An 8 instead of a 10.

Let me emphasize that again: Men regularly choose to put women at massive risk in order to experience a few minutes of slightly increased pleasure.

She comes up with a rather radical solution: all men should get a vasectomy, which they can have reversed once they’re married and want to have children.

Yes, that’s radical. No, it’s not likely to catch on. Her point is that men ought to take on the responsibility, rather than women.

But here’s where we differ. She’s talking about which way men should go about mitigating the natural consequences of having irresponsible sex. That does nothing but perpetuate the actual root problem: men having irresponsible sex—and women allowing men to have irresponsible sex.

Here’s something that might seem mind-blowing for young people today: this issue has been part of the human race for all the millennia we’ve had the human race. That means people have had plenty of time to work out solutions. And there is one solution that actually works: absolute monogamy. (We've talked about the research of  Vico and Unwin before, here.)

That means no sex outside of marriage, and absolute fidelity within marriage. Not just for women, but also for men. In another word, that means chastity for both women and men.

Candace Owens (left) and Lila Rose on the Candace Owens Show
May 19, 2019 screenshot from here

This past weekend, Lila Rose, pro-life advocate, was on the Candace Owens podcast, and they had a conversation about this old idea of chastity. Lila Rose got married within the past year; she was a virgin up until marriage. She is 30. Owens is also 30. Her journey to conservatism comes from another direction.  She lost her virginity in high school. She lives differently now and regrets that:

Candace Owens: Because the person meant absolutely nothing to me, and I was doing it because I wanted to fit in. I was doing it because this was the normal thing to do, and you were considered weird if you didn’t do these sorts of things.  

And it’s not even just peer pressure from other students; it’s peer pressure from society. It’s everything that you’re seeing on TV. It’s everything that you’re being taught by your teachers.

Now I’m engaged. I wish I had waited. And that’s a really sad thing, and a weird thing, to say now, obviously, because I live a different lifestyle. But that guilt started creeping up on me before I got engaged.

Before I met my fiancé, I was in a relationship, and I had this conversation where I was, “I think I kind of want to recommit myself back to God.” And my boyfriend at the time said, “No.” Like, if you don’t have—  And this is when I knew something was really wrong. Right?

Lila Rose: Meaning, “I’ll love you if you have sex with me.”

CO: That’s what I heard.

LR: That’s not love.

CO: I think his excuse, what he said to me was, “Sex is how people connect.” Right?

LR: It is, but with someone that you’re going to love lifelong, and you’ve given everything to. It’s more than that.

It ought to be more than that. Think about the difference between giving sex to a man who isn’t committed to you, in the hopes that he might come to love and commit to you—and to earn this chance, you risk pregnancy (not to mention STIs) without his support, just for a hope. Meanwhile, to him it means nothing but temporary pleasure.

Compare that to sex with a man who has already committed to stay with you forever—and has declared that to the whole world with a signed covenant. Then sex becomes the enjoyable expression of that love and commitment, founding an actual family. The social science data shows that sex is better for married couples, and enjoyed more often, than it is for singles. And among married couples who are religious and attend church regularly, they have the most enjoyable sex of any demographic.

As Lila Rose points out, outcomes are better for both women and men when they wait for marriage:

Outcomes meaning, your relationship happiness, your economic happiness, physical health—because of STIs, the potential for pregnancy when you’re not prepared for it. So I think that—  First of all that’s just the social data on that. But from a spiritual perspective, if we think sex is just an act you do, right, and all that matters in consent—  It’s all about consent today, right? All you need to do is consent, and then you’re good, right? That’s the #MeToo movement: as long as there’s consent, that’s good. We need consent. But consent is not enough. Sex should be about love. It should be about commitment. It should be about responsibility. And it is built to be about children.

This next part I thought was most telling:

And it’s only because we sterilize it. I mean, we use women—  Think about it. All these women our age and younger are taking birth control pills. They’re being told, “You need to sterilize yourself. You need to shut down your hormones in order to be sexually available to men.” I mean, that’s what that message is.

There’s something really wrong with a society that values sterility rather than fertility.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was not progress; it was the repeat of a rebellion that has occurred in every failing society in world history.

A young man who’s a friend on Facebook (used to be a missionary here in Houston—and he’s an eligible bachelor saving sex for marriage, and good looking, strong, and outdoorsy, so there are such men available, just saying) said this wise thing a couple of days ago:

You can judge a culture on how they treat their offspring.

In other words: High rates of abortion is evidence we are not committed. Not committed to those we express we love. Making the most intimate activity a lie. Taking advantage of others. Willing to take a life to justify a lie.

This is our culture.

Abortion has never been about empowering women; it has been about causing women to do unspeakable evil in order for men to have irresponsible sex without consequences.

Of course we need to be against abortion—which is used for a reason other than inconvenience in only about 4% of cases. At least 86% of women having abortions are unmarried—and of those, it’s hard to know what percentage are nevertheless because the man doesn’t want to support offspring. Married women are seldom selfish enough to kill their offspring when a man is willing to work out a solution to give that child a family.

The vast majority of abortions happen because a woman has allowed a man to have sex with her when he is not willing to stay with her and raise a child, when he is not committed to her or her offspring.

The sexual rebellion is touted as freeing men and women from the restrictions on sex of former, old-fashioned times. But look at what has actually happened. A woman used to have the support of society when she expected a man to respect her and wait for sex until after he had committed to love her and stay with her. Now women are expected to pretend, along with men, that sex is meaningless pleasure that they of course want to indulge in. Consider the idea that a woman is expected to “put out” if a man has paid for a nice dinner. She’s expected to give her body to him, risking all that nature brings with it, because he fed her one meal? That’s all she’s worth? And it’s a monetarily determined exchange? That’s what we’re supposed to believe is sexual liberation for women?

Compare this to a man respecting a woman’s reputation so much that he would never compromise her; he loves her and asks for her to marry him before he offers or expects sex in their relationship. And then they work together to have a happy family life together from then on. Not only is the woman happier—and freer from negative life outcomes; the man is also happier and lives a more meaningful life (with better sex as a bonus).

We don’t need men to come up with more and better ways to get away with irresponsible sex with women. We need men to respect and love women so much that sex is returned to its proper place within the sanctity of marriage.

This—men who never have irresponsible sex—is the answer to ending sex trafficking—and the pornography industry related to it. It would be the end to rape. It would be the end to abortion except to save the life of the mother when saving both isn't possible. It would be the end to unwanted pregnancies. It would nearly be the end to children raised without fathers in the home. It would bring about the end to more than 90% of poverty in our society.

Chastity is one of those simple but not easy solutions. But it is possible. Been there, done that, lived that life. And it is what we should be teaching.

Teaching birth control in schools, while failing to teach the meaning of sex, says, “Of course you’ll have sex; of course there are consequences, but our society wants to ignore them. So try these sterilization methods while you’re too young to know better.” And we shouldn't ignore that this approach doesn’t get good outcomes. More than half of women getting abortions were using some form of contraceptives during the month prior to pregnancy.

If you’re cynical enough—and about Planned Parenthood, which provides a large portion of sex education curriculum, this is a natural assumption—you’d think they were touting contraception knowing full well pregnancies would result, so they’d get more money from abortions.

Is more sex education in schools the answer? No! Heck no! We need real sex education, controlled by the parent, and preferably taught by the parent. There may be good programs parents can use. I'm told Utah recently adopted a good program, but I haven't seen it yet. If it's good, wouldn't it be best as a resource to parents? Churches can help. But promoting sex without morality is a bad experiment we need to end.

Nor do we need sexual repression. We don’t need to pretend it’s bad or disgusting. But we do need to celebrate it as the extremely important thing it is, and therefore keep it within marriage.

Let's stop, as a society, valuing sterility as a means of getting more irresponsible sex. And return to valuing fertility—which is a sign of health and vitality not only for women, but for all of civilization.

Chastity—for both men and women—leads to thriving civilization wherever it’s tried.