The real civil war in America

Democrats like to taunt Republicans by claiming that there are all these "racist old white men" in the party. Their claim is based in part in truth, in that there was an influx of old Southerners back in the 1960's who fled the Democrat Party over the civil rights movement. However, this is only the very surface of the story, and held at an angle that gives people a very misleading impression of what actually happened.

This is what actually happened.

McCarthy, previously vilified by history as having started the "Red Scare" and "being wrong", is increasingly being justified in retrospect. Though many of the people he targeted in his investigations were not specifically planning open treason against the government, they were card-carrying Communists who were bent on a much longer game plan. Communism did spread from its birthplace into America and lay dormant through the World Wars. In the 1960's, it finally did make itself visible.

History books talk about the "Civil Rights Era" and the "Civil Rights Laws". There were actually two Civil Rights Eras, each pushed by radically different people, for radically different purposes, with radically different results.

The first was the work of the Republicans. Old South Democrat racists, seeing their power slipping further and further as businesses saw no reason to refuse blacks (their money was as green as everyone else's, after all) and blacks themselves were rising quickly through the economic ranks, set out to make state laws prohibiting the free market from treating people of all races equally. This, like the American Civil War itself, was a desperate holding action against the natural, corrective power of our country the way it was created by our Founders. Blacks were on their way up. Within another generation, they would be indistinguishable from the rest of the country, from the Germans and Irish and all those other cultures which had started out on the bottom of the heap. The Republicans in the Federal Government correctly sought to strike down the artificial barriers being placed against blacks by the state governments.

The second was the work of the newly-infiltrated Democrat Party, and it was not actually about race at all. Like Modern Feminism, which came out of the same era and the same birthplace as Socialism (which is meant to be the transitional stage to Communism), this new Democrat Party was merely seizing upon the grievances of a minority in hopes of imposing government control on the majority. Their goal was not to remove artificial barriers that were oppressing a people, but to change the function of the government from one that keeps the playing field level to one that rewards 'winners' and 'losers' according to government policy. (If you want to know who sets the policy and how, I strongly recommend the entire Francis Schaeffer "How Should We Then Live?" series, made up of ten half-hour episodes.)

They sought, not to remove government barriers to one race, but to impose government barriers upon another race. The Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action (once more correctly called Reverse Discrimination) came from two different sources; from two different sides of this new civil war.

What is this new civil war about? It isn't about gay wedding cakes and transgender bathrooms. It isn't about birth control and 'Equal Pay'. It's about what President Obama so neatly explained as "negative rights" versus "positive rights". Is it more important that the government be allowed to pick winners and losers according to government judgment? Or is it more important that the government be restrained by the people? Some mistakenly believe (I have addressed this before and may do so again) that the fight is Corporatism vs. Fascism. It doesn't have to be. A government focused on "negative rights" does not have the power to support either path. As I've said before:

Capitalism - the system in which the government is empowered to prevent companies from using lawlessness to stifle competition, and the government is constitutionally fettered to prevent companies from using laws to stifle competition.

The Republican Civil Rights provided a shining example of "negative rights": the government shall not be permitted to force one race below another. The Democrat Civil Rights provided a shining example of "positive rights": the government shall have the power to elevate one race above the other.

What prompted all of this? The North Carolina Bathroom Bill, actually. Talk about going far afield, right? The Charlotte ordinance that the bill is meant to strike down is an artificial barrier set up by the government in order to have the government choose 'winners' and 'losers'. It embodies the "positive rights" that Obama loves: the government has the right to tell you what it can/must do for/to you. What it states, in short, is that no private business or organization has the right to bar anybody of either gender from a gender-separated space. In short, by the law, a battered woman's shelter must permit a man to enter the ladies' shower room, sit down, and watch them shower naked, if that's what he wants to do. He cannot be told to leave just because he is fully and unapologetically male.

The much-derided "bathroom bill", on the other hand, embodies "negative rights". It says that the government does not have the right to force a private business to let somebody into a gender-separated changing/showering/bathroom/etc. space, unless said person can show, if challenged, documentation that he or she is of the declared gender. (Your gender is on your driver's license and your birth certificate, and post-op transgender/transsexual people can have it officially changed.) Now this is not a requirement upon the business; nobody has to ask, nobody has to check, and nobody has to try to bar anybody from entering a bathroom. The choice is theirs. If they choose to tell a given person, "You look like a man, so you can't go in there," the person who is challenged can display that document and must be permitted to enter.

Under the "bathroom bill", the battered woman's shelter can bar anyone with  functional male genitalia from entering the shower. However, the Walmart can set up a DADT policy in which people who are obviously transgender and "passing" are allowed in, and any liberal fruitcake hippie shop can choose to let men and women freely intermix in one big, 'happy' locker room. And people can choose to frequent the places of which they approve and avoid the places which make them uncomfortable.

Along with the freedom to choose comes the ability to react quickly and fluidly to unexpected situations. The most religiously gender-separated facility can choose to let a desperate pregnant woman into the men's room, or to let an elderly man assisting his disabled wife into the ladies' room. When the government makes the decision, however, the leering middle-aged man cannot be removed even if a sexual abuse survivor needs to use the facility... because such reasonable decisions made by private people in the course of day-to-day business are now against the law.

The real two sides of this civil war are no longer to be found between the Democrats and the Republicans, because there are people who are only Republican because they disagree with the decisions coming from up high, not with the notion of centralized power. If the Democrats decided to set government policy throwing homosexuals in jail for engaging privately in government-forbidden sex acts, or to mandate that all public meetings must start with a prayer led by a confirmed member of their favorite Christian sub-denomination, there are "Republicans" who would quite happily jump ship again. The real civil war is between them and those who say, simply, "The government cannot have this power," and hold to it even when people are not forbidden from doing things that they personally find abhorrent.

Dr. Ruth and the Evil Warnings

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the mildly scandalous sex therapist, now in her mid-80's, has suddenly managed to turn the entire feminist movement against her. Oh dear. What on earth did she manage to say to rattle them so much?

"I know it’s controversial, but for your program, I’m going to stand up and be counted and, like I do in the book, be very honest. I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man or two men or two women, but I talk right now about woman and man, can be in bed together, and at one time, naked, and at one time, he or she — most of the time they think she can say, I changed my mind. No such thing is possible."

 Aye, that's relatively controversial as stated, However, in subsequent tweets, she clarified what she meant - and didn't mean - to say:

I am 100% against rape. I do say to women if they don't want to have sex with a man, they should not be naked in bed w/him.
That's risky behavior like crossing street against the light. If a driver hits you, he's legally in the wrong but you're in the hospital.

So what's the problem?

Apparently, the naysayers insist that Dr. Ruth is claiming that the man's action is no longer rape and should no longer be prosecuted as such, that the man has no responsibility over his actions whatsoever, and that she is basically placing the full fault of rape on the woman. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be able to refute her position without resorting to the bizarre, possibly because her position is quite reasonable. One commenter on an American Thinker article claimed that "blaming women for the rape", as Dr. Ruth was supposedly doing, was like "saying that if a dog humps your leg, it's your fault for having a leg." Others have brought up the old "asking for it by wearing a skirt that exposes her knees" claim. I find it strange that feminists are so bent on their goals of "free sex" that they cannot bear the thought of a woman engaging in any sort of selective behavior in her sex life without having to come to the bizarre conclusion that men are incapable of being responsible for anything they do.

But that isn't, at the core, what is bothering me about this "controversy".

What the naysayers are doing, at the core, is claiming that a private individual, however notable, cannot give advice to women in order to minimize the chances of them becoming victimized without somehow affecting the legal responsibility of the perpetrator of the crime. The reason this bothers me is because it depends upon the belief that we cannot simply choose how to regulate our own behavior; it must be unregulated entirely or under government control.

It seems that people are losing sight of the excellent "third way" between regulation and deregulation, the way upon which this country was founded. John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Putting aside the question of Christianity and religion in morality for the moment, I would hope that we can all agree that the intent of structuring the Constitution such that the government should not regulate us was to allow us to take up the responsibility of regulating ourselves. If we lose sight of that, we may deserve the tyranny we risk bringing upon ourselves.

Women should have every right to take control over their own sexuality by setting boundaries, starting with the very simplest and easiest to understand: if you don't want to have sex with a man, it will be much, much easier to avoid doing so if you do not climb naked into bed with him.

Elliot Rodger and the Willing Women

A few days ago, an angry, bitter, deranged young man who had been shuttled back and forth between two broken homes for much of his formative years enacted the ultimate act of revenge upon the people he had come to blame for his misfortunes. He killed both men and women by stabbing, shooting, and using a motor vehicle, thus making the usual blame-guns narrative a little more difficult to sustain than usual.

Various people have blamed various things. One article blamed his parents for divorcing (while making it clear that he is ultimately at fault for his own actions). Another blamed the video games into which he sought solace. Yet others have claimed that the girls who shunned him were at fault for refusing to have sex with him. They depict these girls, as he did, as bullies who tease certain types of young men by dressing sexily and then having sex with different young men instead.

I'm not going to blame the girls. That's silly. I'm not really 'blaming' anybody but him, in the end. He had a problem and he went off. It happens occasionally, even in the best society. If it hadn't been the girls, he would have found something else. However, I do want to discuss something that this whole situation has uncovered, a profound change in society that I see as a larger problem that daily causes its own griefs and tragedies, never covered on the news. The crux of the statement just happens to be the very point of Elliot Rodger's manifesto: He felt that it was the women's job to seek him out for sex, the way they had been seeking out other men for sex, thus their refusal was a personal slight.

When did our society change so profoundly?

Before Modern Feminism, the man's job was to pursue the woman, and the woman's job was to not make his task easy. I am not talking about flirting with him, making promises only to withdraw them, teasing him for amusement. Her job was to rebuff him unless he met a set of standards that were hardly arbitrary: keep himself clean, show respect for her, and ensure that he had the ability to provide for her should she make herself vulnerable through pregnancy. Then as now, she decided whether he was worthy. Then, unlike now, she required him to commit to her exclusively, first.

 "What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone." That quip, made by 1960's activist  Stokely Carmichael, seems to describe the position of women in this new liberal feminist 'paradise'. Around the same time, liberal feminist groups worked out the slogan "Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No", which basically promised free sex to men who did not join the military to fight in the Vietnam War. More recently, "Rock the Vote" encouraged women to offer sex only to men who supported Obamacare. Imagine the irony of a bunch of "liberated" women trading sexual favors in return for having someone else buy their hormonally-based contraception.

Now as I said above, Elliot Rodger had problems, and he would have fixated on something. I do have to ask, however, if those women did not grow up in a society that expected them to seek out men and have sex with them while teasing the others with their partly-clothed bodies, would he have developed the belief that it was their job to have sex with him?

The Modern Gentleman

A couple of days ago, my son went to his usual mid-week social function, a huge age-separated club with hundreds of kids... about thirty or so in his age group. He enjoys his time, learning to play team sports, doing crafts, and meeting up with all his friends. (He's a popular kid.)

On his way to pick up his coat, he realized that he had short sleeves, so he started doing that arm thing that boys and men do, showing off his muscles. Or, rather, showing off what he thinks are his muscles, bless him. He's just turned nine years old. He hasn't had the necessary testosterone kick to really develop anything noticeable. Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly to him, this girl about his size came up to him and started hitting him.

Oh it didn't hurt, or so he said. She didn't leave bruises. But the thing is, he's learned that he must never hit a girl. I've been trying to break his toddler sister of the habit of going after him. She'll pound on him when she's angry or frustrated at me. But he never hits back. Both Daddy and I taught him that way. That was fine with him, no big deal. But then he tried to move on and she blocked his path.

He didn't want to push her. She's a girl, and he's been taught to respect girls and not manhandle them. But manhandling her would be the only way to get where he needed to go. He needed to go... my sister was waiting for him, and my husband was waiting out in the car for both of them. He knew he was late, and he was frustrated. But he would not push her out of the way. He knew that the next step was to ask an adult for help, but she wouldn't let him get to one. He felt trapped and frustrated.

But still he did not strike back, and she tired of the game and wandered off. He hurried to grab his coat and meet up with his people, apologizing for being late for all the world as if it was his fault. The incident has clearly bothered him. He's mentioned it several times.

My husband and I were at a loss when we heard the story tumble out. We don't want to teach him to hit or shove girls. But I realized that, in disarming my son for the sake of protecting young ladies, we had left him vulnerable to girls who were not ladies at all. We finally let him know that, yes, you could push aside someone blocking your path, even a girl, as long as you did not shove hard... and you could do so for the purpose of dealing with someone who blocks your path and refuses to move. That's an interim solution... I don't know what a better one would be.

Oh Feminism! You teach girls to hit boys, and justify your behavior by claiming that men do not respect women as they should. But when we women, in our positions of power, teach our men to respect women, we leave them vulnerable to the ones who hit! What are we to do? We are patiently and carefully building up the men that feminists say that they want. We are fixing all the problems that feminism was made for... fixing them at the root. We are bringing up young men who will honor and respect you, who will love and cherish you, who will value your intelligence and your ability to work independently. Men who will treat you as an equal in the business world, who won't stare at your breasts when talking to you, who won't dismiss your words just because you're female.

But instead of helping us, you're working against us. My son is a gentle soul, a real person, with dreams and wishes and an inherent human dignity. Modern Feminism will not acknowledge that human dignity. They are all too happy to beat on him, to block his path, to advance their goals. They see him as someone to compete against, someone to fight. You and I know very well that a nine-year-old boy doesn't show his muscles because he expects a girl to start hitting him. Peacocks don't spread their plumage so that the peahens will start pecking and scratching them. He did not at any time consider her to be someone to fight, someone to punch, someone to risk hurting in a testosterone-fueled brawl.

And if you want your daughters to be able to find a man who will not abuse them, who will not hit them, who will treat them with dignity and respect...
...I'd appreciate it if you teach your daughters to not fly into attacks against people who have no interest in fighting them, people who are constrained by morality to not hurt girls. Because as much as I want my son to respect women, I love him too much to leave him open and vulnerable to those who will not respect him.

Fashion Bugs

Women claim to dress for men. Men claim that women dress for other women. When you put your clothes on in the morning, for whom are you dressing?

Oh, plenty of women like me (homemaker bloggers) will talk about modesty, and I'm sure everyone's got their tips. Personally, it seem to me that some outfits are immodest for all women, while others are immodest for some and not others depending on body shape and size. Each woman has to develop her own awareness of what she should and should not wear. I'd like to introduce a method to figuring this out, and the main idea behind the method is to consider for whom you are dressing.

This came to my mind because today, this Sunday morning, I am dressing for a small group of 10-year-old girls.

I didn't make this dress for them, I made it for me. I used this pattern, a Simplicity costume pattern.



My particular gown is made up like the yellow flowered dress, only my material is a lavender muslin overlaid with lavender eyelet. The lace trimmings are white eyelet, like the picture, and the trim ribbon is dark purple. I made it because it's pretty and comfortable and I love long skirts and close-fitting bodices.

As I was walking through the church after the morning service one day, I realized that I'd caught the attention of a group of girls. I turned and smiled at them, and their 'leader' told me what they'd all apparently been whispering about.

"We love your dress. We think it's beautiful. It reminds us of 'Felicity'."

Felicity is one of the "American Girl" dolls, her story set in colonial times. I suppose I can see the resemblance.






I did a curtsey and thanked them. :) To me, that was a compliment. They were thrilled, and I hear them every time I wear this dress to church. "Oh! You're wearing your 'Felicity dress'!"

When you're dressing for a small group of 10-year-old girls, you don't wear low-cut shirts or skin-tight jeans. You don't wear skirts with slits up to mid-thigh. What pleases them most is your best princess look, the lovely dresses they so adore filled out as only their Barbies can. And it makes such a good impression on them to see women daring to do so.

Lest you think I'm a skirts-only person, I own and wear jeans and sweatpants as well. I have several t-shirts, including my "shocking" black Epica bandshirt and a few tank tops for summertime. My closet is quite eclectic. But I do love those vintage dresses.