Good, Ethical Role Models Needed

What society really needs more of is good, trustworthy, ethical role models in leadership positions. Not needed are untrustworthy woke role models who are graduating from a failing, increasingly dogmatic, ideological, and misguided public educational system which now includes public colleges and universities. Education is failing miserably on many counts. Only time will tell whether individualized, interactive, audio-visual computer instruction will rescue education from its deterioration, especially in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Uldis Sprogis, “What should be taught in public schools”

Disagreement Isn't Hate

Support for marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t anti-gay. Believing the truth about marriage—that it unites a man and woman as husband and wife in an act that makes them one flesh—isn’t “anti” anything.

Believing that men and women aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t replaceable, that children deserve both a mom and a dad—that’s not hate. It’s truth. And even if you disagree, you should acknowledge that it’s motivated by love, not hate.

Anti-trans bigotry is real—and it’s wrong. And we shouldn’t tolerate it.

But biology isn’t bigotry. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality. And it’s entirely reasonable to have concerns about privacy and safety when males who identify as women can go into the ladies’ and girls’ bathroom and locker room.

Likewise, having concerns about giving children puberty blockers, or performing sex reassignment surgery on adults, isn’t anti-trans. It’s a disagreement about medicine.

Ryan T. Anderson, Disagreement Isn’t Hate, Despite What the Left Says

Manhood and Womanhood

A girl grows into womanhood more naturally than a boy grows into manhood, because the potential for motherhood is expressed so obviously in the form of her body; it cannot be missed.  A girl who climbs trees with her brothers and plays ball will naturally and easily turn towards more womanly pursuits as those brothers surpass her in bulk and strength, and as her own body grows less fit for the boyish things.  That is why female athletes sometimes take drugs to suppress the working of the natural hormones in their bodies; or the sports themselves suppress the hormones, as when female long distance runners lose so much of their natural fat that they no longer menstruate.  Their bodies “judge” that they are not fit to conceive and bear and care for a child, exactly as if they were starving.

But the boy must be made into a man; nor is it true, once he has established himself as a man, he need never worry about it again.  Manhood is risky.  It must be publicly affirmed, and you can lose that affirmation by cowardice or effeminacy.  See the movie Four Feathers.  See the old Western Branded.  Which cultures have recognized these truths?  Every single one of them but ours.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.97

Let Boys Be Boys

Sexual morality is predicated upon the reality of sexual being, male and female.  The morality is inseparable from the reality.  If there is no such thing, really, as male and female, only some convenient organs for reproduction, then there is no reason why “a man should leave his mother and father, and cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.”  We have to recover a strong sense of the beauty of each, and of their essence as being-for the other.; man is for woman, and woman is for man, and both are for God.  That means we must cease the destructive chatter about “gender roles,” as if they were thoroughly arbitrary and not built upon nature.  We must see past the factitious distinction between the natural and the social, because man is by nature a social being, and the societies he builds are predicated upon his nature.  . . .

We raise boys and girls, we raise them at once in accord with the sexual nature they possess already and with the flourishing of that nature that we hope to see as they become husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.  We must always shave that aim in mind.  They boyishness of the boy is to come to flowering in manhood and fatherhood.  The girlishness of the girl is to come to flowering in womanhood and motherhood.  That is what the sexes are for.  We want to no longer deny reality.  We want to work in harmony with it, shoring up its weakness, confirming its strength, and delighting in its beauty.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg. 95-96

Male and Female He Created Them

When the European missionaries came to the New World to evangelize the natives, they did not find creatures of a different species.  They found human beings, male and female.  They did not find any tribes in which the women met in council, hunted the large animals, smoked the peace-pipe, trained up their daughters in savage displays of physical courage and endurance (the “sun dance” of the Plains Indians, for example), and established elaborate hierarchies of honor.  They did not find any tribes in which the men took care of small children, gathered roots and berries, made themselves up with pretty decorations to delight their women, ground corn kernels to powder to make bread or paste, carried water while the women were singing war-songs, gossiped with one another to share the news and to keep daily morals in line, and made “nests,” as it were, as clean and neat as possible, for the sake of the little ones, and because that is the way they liked things best.

They found men and women. That is what you will find wherever you go in the world. . . . 

Men and women are different from one another, down to the roots—down to the cells.  We have merely trained ourselves not to see it or not to admit it when we see it.  It is a willed stupidity.  It is also a willed grimness, a willed refusal to delight in the natures God has given us.  There is nothing glad or merry about it.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.93-95

The Male Carries the Family Memory

In Hebrew, male and memory share the same word: zachar.  This may be why so many cultures continue to remember the family name through the male line only.  It may also be a reminder that marriages work best when women consider themselves to be joining their husband’s family just a bit more than having husbands join their own.  Taking a husband’s name is not only the highest compliment a woman can pay a man, it also ensures that each family is remembered into the future through the line of its males.  This is yet another way God has created a role for the male to compensate for the indispensable role that nature created for the female.  This is a gift of God given uniquely to humans.  

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.185

Man and Woman -- Equal Yet Different

Commenting on the special creation of Eve, Matthew Henry nearly 300 years ago wrote with quaint profundity that she was "not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved."  Perhaps he got this idea from Peter Lombard who in about AD 1157, just before becoming Bishop of Paris, wrote in his Book of Sentences:  "Eve was not taken from the feet of Adam to be his slave nor from his head to be his lord, but from his side to be his partner."

John Stott, Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today, p.263-264