Being Lured to the Common and Mediocre

Man, feeling secure and enjoying the increasingly abundant benefits of a modern civilization, was slowly releasing himself from the compelling pressure of strict and demanding rules derived from religion and classical ethics. He was no longer in the mood to embark on a painful and uncertain journey to higher goals…. 

The gradual process in which the higher aspirations were being replaced by the lower tells us, no doubt, something about human nature: namely, that unless met with strong resistance or an attractive inspiration it shows a powerful tendency to be lured by the common and the mediocre. “Common,” indeed, has ceased to be a word of disapproval in a liberal-democratic rhetoric, or rather, has ceased to be used at all. When so much is common, nothing really is. This change is but a small signal of corruption of basic categories by which for centuries people described and evaluated their conduct.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.30, 31.

Questions Rendering Darwinism Useless

If the Theory of Evolution has so much evidence backing it up, then why are critics so heavily assaulted with ad hominem attacks? How does one account for the times when proponents of Darwinism made forgeries? (Examples would include Piltdown Man and the Archaeoraptor.)  Why are there contradictory results when geologists use dating methods? How does one account for the fact that humans have characteristics that provide no advantages for survival such as music and religion? Why do living organisms have symmetry? Where did all the elements originate? How does one account for their precise design? When and where did compounds come into being? (Many compounds must have came into existence as compounds because interaction between elements is relatively scarce.) Which elements and compounds were included in the primordial soup? Where did gravity and energy come from? Why are babies still born helpless? How could the precise, natural process of blood clotting arise from blind, unguided chance? These are only some of the countless questions that render Darwinism useless.

Jesse L., Why I Reject Darwinism As Science

When You Lower Standards

Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, it is only a matter of time before natural inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse. Quite often a step down has been welcomed as a refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum. A liberal-democratic man refused to learn these artificial and awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him at first doubtful, and soon—null. He felt he had no time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make life easier and more enjoyable. In their place he established new criteria: ease, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification, the combination of which turned out be a deadly weapon against the old social forms. The old customs crumbled, and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum, a respect for hierarchy. 

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 29-30.

Inevitable Consequences of Liberal Democracy

In a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that sooner or later a family will have to liberalize of democratize, which means that the parental authority has to crumble, the children will quickly liberate themselves from the parental tutelage, and family relationships will increasingly become more negotiatory and less authoritarian. These are the inevitable consequences of the civilizational and political development, giving people more and more opportunities for independence; moreover, these processes are essentially beneficial because they enhance equality and freedom in the world. Thus there is no legitimate reason to defend the traditional family—the very name evokes the smell of mothballs—and whoever does it is self-condemned to a losing proposition and in addition perpetrates harm by delaying the old despotism: with its demise the despotic system loses its base. The liberalism and democratization of the familiar therefore to be supported—wholeheartedly and energetically—mainly be appropriate legislation that will give children more power: for example, allowing increasingly younger girls to have abortions without parental consent, or providing children with legal instruments to combat their claims against their parents, or depriving parents of their rights and transferring those rights to the government and the courts. …

In a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that schools have to become more and more liberal and democratic for the same reasons. Again, this inevitable process requires that the state, the law, and public opinion harshly counteract against all stragglers—those who are trying to put a stick in the spokes of progress, dreamers who imagine that in the twenty-first century we can return to the school as it existed in the nineteenth, pests who want to build an old-time museum in the forward-rushing world. And so on, and so forth. Similar reasoning can be applied to churches, communities, associations.

As a result, liberal democracy has become an all-permeating system. … Whatever happens in school must follow the same pattern as in politics, in politics the same pattern as in art, and in art the same pattern as in the economy: the same language, the same habits. Just as in real socialism, so in real democracy it is difficult to find some nondoctrinal slice of the world, a nondoctrinal image, narrative, tone, or thought.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 21-22

The Political Desires of the Left

In their view, today also consciously or unconsciously professed by millions, the political system should permeate every section of public and private life, analogously to the view of the erstwhile accoucheurs of the communist system. Not only should the state and the economy be liberal, democratic, or liberal-democratic, but the entire society as well, including ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations. The people, structures, thoughts that exist outside the liberal-democratic pattern are deemed outdated, backward-looking, useless, but at the same time extremely dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Some may still be tolerated for some time, but as anyone with a minimum of intelligence is believed to know, sooner or later they will end up in the dustbin of history. Their continued existent will most likely threaten the liberal-democratic progress and therefore they should be treated with the harshness they deserve.

Once one sends one’s opponents to the dustbin of history, any debate with them becomes superfluous. Why waste time, they think, arguing with someone whom the march of history condemned to nothingness and oblivion? Why should anyone seriously enter into a debate with the opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish? People who are not liberal democrats are to be condemned, laughed at, and repelled, not debated. Debating with them is like debating with alchemists or geocentrists.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 20-21.

Nothing True About Evolution

Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, anything that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.  I tried it on members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and eventually one person said, “I do know one thing—it ought not be taught in high school.”

Colon Patterson (Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History), keynote address to the American Museum of Natural History, 11/5/81.

Socialist “Modernization”

Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change for the better. They are—to use the current jargon—modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and—so to speak—impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by “modernizing” it.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.5-6

Liberal Democracy Is Like Communism

[H]e is able to demonstrate that liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism. Both are utopian and look forward to “an end of history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their directions. Both therefore require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Because that is not so at present, both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. And because such engineering is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a confused way, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc). In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.

John O’Sullivan, Forward to Ryszard Legutko’s book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. 

The Punishment of God

That rabble had a mighty power over minds, for when the Lord God sends punishment on a nation he first deprives its citizens of reason. And so the wiser heads dared not resist the fops, and the whole nation feared them as some pestilence, for within itself it already felt the germs of the disease. They cried out against the dandies but took pattern by them; they changed faith, speech, laws, and costumes. That was a masquerade, the license of the Carnival season, after which was soon to follow the Lent of slavery.

Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz

Leftists Will Abuse You for Your Beliefs

I have found from many observations that our liberals are incapable of allowing anyone to have his own convictions and immediately answer their opponent with abuse or something worse.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

Democracy Keeps People in Perpetual Childhood

I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain . . .  I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. . . . Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Rage of the Snowflakes

A toxic combination of identity politics, an increasing tendency to perceive campus problems as medical problems, and altered parenting styles has produced a student body intent on ridding their environment of any ideas deemed threatening. This requires the bastardization of language. Though the mainstream media portrays campuses as extraordinarily unsafe, the crime rate at most U.S. universities is far below the national average (not counting underage drinking). But the perceived danger has called forth a new vocabulary, with “vulnerable” students demanding “safe spaces” to protect them from the unknown. The label “vulnerable,” first used by U.S. media to refer to university students in 1991, appeared 1,407 times in indexed publications in 2015-16. The “remarkable increase in allusions to the vulnerability of students,” [Frank] Furedi writes, “provides a striking illustration of an important transformation of the way that university students are represented and perceived.”

Students and their bureaucratic campus allies demand protection in a variety of ways. “Safe spaces”—like vulnerability, a term that has proliferated and broadened in meaning in recent years—allow students to avoid viewpoints with which they disagree. … Combating “microaggressions,” meanwhile, provides cover for restricting the most innocent speech, if “marginalized” students interpret it (regardless of intent) as hurtful. Students obsessed with identity politics perceive “slights as a form of victimisation” and employ “rhetoric that continually reminds the world of [their] victim status.” …

Campus social life is an easy target for adherents of this new, infantilized order. Harvard’s senior administration recently resolved to penalize students for joining off-campus, private, single-sex social clubs—a policy enforceable only if students report on their colleagues. … At Bowdoin in early 2016 some students held a tequila-themed birthday party. Moved to act by the “traumatizing” presence of tiny sombreros, the school offered counseling to students “victimized” by the morally offensive “cultural appropriation.” Two student government members who attended the party faced impeachment hearings. Other students had to move out of their dorm. It’s no surprise that some Bowdoin undergraduates informed the Washington Post that the lesson they learned from the affair was to keep their opinions to themselves.

Calls for outright restrictions on campus speech have become common. Writing in Slate, University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner justifies campus speech codes on the grounds that “students today are more like children than adults and need protection.” He contends that speech codes, far from reflecting the ideological agenda of “lefty professors” (although speech codes are almost always targeted at non-leftist speech), are popular because “universities are simply catering to demand in the marketplace for education,” supplying “what most students want.”

Read the whole, thought-provoking article by KC Johnson

Stumbling Blocks

The difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way a man uses them.

Author Unknown

Do You Protest Evil?

He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Charity?

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

John D. Rockefeller

How Do You React?

Let us realize that what happens round us is largely outside of our control, but that the way we choose to react to it is inside our control.

Edward J. Byng

Do the Task

If a task is once begun, never leave it ’til it’s done.

Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.

Living vs Pretending

When a person uses up all his energy in pretending, he has nothing left for living; and life becomes shallow and tasteless.  A person who pretends not only robs himself of reality, but he keeps himself from growing: his true self is smothered under the false self.

Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Real, pg.35

Perhaps those who pretending to be the opposite sex should heed Wiersbe's wisdom.

"Gay Marriage" Relies on REAL Marriage to Exist

Gay "marriage," taken to its reductio ad absurdum, would terminate in the disappearance of the human race from the face of the Earth.  In weakening the institution of marriage, gay people calling themselves spouses actually endorse the logic of species annihilation.

Moreover, to contend, as same-sex couples do, that they can adopt children or rely on sperm donors merely accentuates the paradox, for they reveal themselves as dependent on precisely the sexual fertility which they forsake and the procreative function they have renounced.  There would be no gays in the absence of the bonded heterosexual couple that rears children and is socially constrained to provide for their future.  There is a debt to be paid in the only way possible: do not insult or damage the institution that gave you existence and continues to sustain it.  The fact often adduced by skeptics that not all heterosexual unions are fertile or permanent is beside the point; the ancestral purpose of marriage as an institution remains intact.

David Solway, The Problem with Gay Marriage

Darwinists’ Assertions Are Not Arguments

An assertion merely states a conclusion; an argument, on the other hand, states the conclusion and then supports it with evidence. Darwinists make assertions, not arguments. There is no empirical or forensic evidence that natural selection can account for new life forms, much less morality. Darwinists simply assert that morals have evolved naturally because they believe man has evolved naturally. And they believe man has evolved naturally, not because they have evidence for such a belief, but because they’ve ruled out intelligent causes in advance. So the Darwinian explanation for morality turns out to be just another “just-so” story based on circular reasoning and false philosophical presuppositions. 

Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, pg.191

Evolution Cannot Explain the Immaterial

Darwinism asserts that only materials exist, but materials don’t have morality. How much does hate weigh? Is there an atom for love? What’s the chemical composition of the murder molecule? These questions are meaningless because physical particles are not responsible for morality. If materials are solely responsible for morality, then Hitler had no real moral responsibility for what he did—he just had bad molecules.  This is nonsense, and everyone knows it.  Human thoughts and transcendent moral laws are not material things any more than the laws of logic and mathematics are material things. They are immaterial entities that cannot be weighed or physically measured. As a result, they can’t be explained in material terms by natural selection or any other atheistic means.

Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, pg.187

The Destruction Of Culture by the Sexual Revolution

Perhaps the most diabolical instance of progressivism, however, has been the Sexual Revolution launched in the Sixties. It has progressed (= regressed) from miniskirts and premarital sex to gay “marriage” and transgenderism. The Playboy culture and easy availability of condoms were not enough. In fact, they were just the start. The progressivist revolution must devour everything in its path. Its main impediment has been the institution of marriage. The gay “marriage” agenda is not to expand the marriage franchise, but to destroy the family. What makes marriage what it is, is the uniqueness of its participants: one man and one woman covenantally committed to one another before God for a lifetime. To redefine marriage is to destroy it. If just any relationship can be marriage, there can be no marriage.

Desmond Berg, The Progressive’s March Toward God’s Judgment.

Sociology vs Morality

A common mistake of relativists is to confuse behavior with value. That is, they confuse what is with what ought to be. What people do is subject to change, but what they ought to do is not. This is the difference between sociology and morality. Sociology is descriptive; morality is prescriptive.

Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, pg.182

What Pornography Teaches

Porn teaches its consumers that women exist for the pleasure of men and that their purpose is to be degraded and dehumanized for men’s excitement—and that they like it, even if they pretend not to. But this is part of the lie of pornography: many women in porn are there against their will and are being exploited. … The physical, emotional, and psychological damage to the women and children in porn is heartbreaking, but equally insidious is porn’s effect on men and the culture by normalizing the degradation and dehumanization of women. … The prevalence of porn means that people are becoming desensitized to it, and are seeking out ever harsher, more violent, and degrading images. …

Justin Holcomb, Hugh Hefner’s Legacy is Not Harmless

Avoid Porn and Keep the Erotic Bond Between Husband and Wife

In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

Naomi Wolf, “The Porn Myth,” paragraph 11; cited by Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.200.

Be Wise

A good man does not hesitate to own he has been in the wrong. He takes comfort in knowing he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

The Pill and Porn — United to Destroy Marriage

Cheap sex has been mass-produced with the help of two distinctive means that have little to do with each other—the wide uptake of the Pill and mass-produced high-quality pornography—and then made more efficient by communication techniques. They drive the cost of sex down, make real commitment more “expensive” and challenging to navigate, have created a massive slow-down in the development of long-term relationships, especially marriage, put women’s fertility at risk—driving up demand for infertility treatments—and have taken a toll on men’s marriageability. The “pure relationship” regime, which has flourished alongside the dramatic rise in cheap sex, is not nearly so consonant with other long-standing priorities like childrearing and relational stability. But it is becoming the norm in the West—the template for evaluating relationship development. And it has changed how men and women perceive themselves, their sexuality, each other, and the point of relationships. Cheap sex does not make marriage unappealing; it just makes marriage less urgent and more difficult to accomplish.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.193-194

The Sad Decline of Marriage

Young Americans are taking flight from marriage—by avoiding it, delaying it, or exiting it. It should not surprise us, either, since this is cultural lag in action: the uptake of contraceptive technology is slowly undermining long-standing reasons for marrying. And yet we still want to marry, but the difference between needing and wanting marriage is a big one. Cheap sex—that is, the wide availability of sexual access—is arguably diminishing men’s marriageability, since the quest for sex was long a key motivator for men to marry. No more. Cheap sex has transformed modern men (and women), undermined and stalled the marital impulse, and stimulated critics of monogamy, who fail to recognize the goods historically secured by it and polyamory’s reliance on a male-dominated mating market. Despite increasingly unfavorable terms for marriage, men are not going their own way. Once in it, they tend to like marriage. Women, on the other hand, exhibit higher ideals for marriage. They remain far more likely to want out once in. And given their comparative recent economic successes, women are in a better position to leave—and still thrive—than ever before. Marriage has changed, no doubt. Once a staid institution characterized by its functional gain in trade between men and women, it has become a symbol of success shared by two increasingly similar spouses. All of it has thrown organized Christianity—marriage’s biggest supporter—for a lop. Cheap sex, it seems, secularizes. The more traditional ways American Christians think about marriage and family remains distinctive from emerging norms of confluent love for now. Cracks in the foundation, however, are visible.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.191-192

The Value of Education

Education is a companion which no misfortune can decrease, no crime destroy, no enemy alienate, no despotism enslave; at home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a solar, in society an ornament. It chastens vice, guides virtue, and gives grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.

Irish lawyer Charles Phillips, O'Mullan v. M'Korkill (1817)

Historical Marriage vs Polyamory

Historically, getting (monogamously) married meant “getting serious.” It meant hight expectations of one’s proper behavior. The social ties of marriage create interdependent systems of obligation, mutual support, and restraint.  Marriage meant having someone to care for and having someone to take care of you—yes, being interdependent—and these responsibilities and obligations only grew stronger when children entered the family. Non-monogamy flouts such norms, exhibits little constraint, a great deal of “checking in,” and invites partner jealousy and pernicious bugs, all in the pursuit of genital pleasures and perceived “needs.” 

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.184

The Downfalls Of a Poly Society

A poly society will require a more vigilant public health system, a more active security stated to protect its citizens—especially women—and a more aggressive social welfare system, since invested fathers will continue to recede. Misogyny is embedded in polyamory, too, however “ethical” it claims to be. That’s because sexual objectification—the treatment of persons as objects—is unavoidable in a non-monogamous system, especially a modern one characterized less by plural marriage than by the serial circulation of multiple, over-lapping sex partners.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.183

Monogamy Is Foundation to Family

Monogamy also means confidence in the biological link between mother, father, and child, a combination long known to reduce the threat of abuse, violence, and homicide in the household. And monogamy means greater equality—more men and women have the opportunity to meet, marry, save, and invest for the long term, instead of competing (and spending resources, etc.) for others’ available attention. This is why monogamous marriage systems preceded the emergence of democratic institutions in Europe, and the rise of notions like human rights and equality between the sexes. … Monogamy, after all, is disciplined—by definition. No other form of organizing relationships between the sexes does a better job of fostering a fair exchange between the distinctive interests of men and women. Societies that disregard monogamous norms undermine their own long-term interests.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.181

Wisdom and Love

To learn and never be filled is wisdom;

To teach and never be weary is love.

Is Great Diversity Good?

Greater diversity means inevitably that we have less in common, and the more we encourage diversity the less we honor the common good. Any honest and clear-sighted observer should be able to see that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation—and we should not be deceived into believing that its proponents do not understand the full impact of their advocacy!

Diversity, of course, marches under the banner of tolerance, but is a bastion of intolerance. It enforces its ideological liberalism with an iron fist that is driven by political correctness, the most ingenious (and insidious) device for suppressing freedom of speech and political dissent ever invented.

Edward J. Erler, “Does Diversity Really Unite Us? Citizenship and Immigration,” Imprimis, July/August 2018.

Monogamy is BEST for Society

…monogamous arrangements comprise a historical minority of the globe’s societies, but the vast majority of the more successful and flourishing ones.  Monogamous marriage…fosters savings and economic output, and reduces competition among men for women, which functions to reduce the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. (It reduces competition not through sex-ratio manipulation, but through normative expectations of one partner.) And that, in turn, lowers multiple types of crime, abuse, household conflict, and fosters greater paternal investment in both their work and in their children, who are more apt to enjoy their attention and exhibit notably lower stress levels than in households displaying all manner of outsiders. Speaking of outsiders, a review of data from 69 polygamous societies from around the world failed to reveal a single case where the relationships between a man’s partners or wives could be described as consistently harmonious.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.181-182

Why Liberals Want Gay “Marriage”

When the institution of marriage is compromised; when single mothers proliferate and are even applauded; when children are separated or alienated from their parents; when the bonds of heterosexual intimacy are breached; when gender politics sabotages concord between the sexes; when same-sex couples receive the same rights, privileges, and rewards as child-bearing couples; and when matrimony becomes the prerogative of any group whatsoever with no relation to fecundity or cultural stability, the underpinnings of Western society will inevitably collapse.

This is why Marxism, for example, considers marriage an institution that needs to be destroyed, since procreant marriage with all its attendant responsibilities is the foundation of bourgeois society.  This is why its dissolution or misprision is a prerequisite for the revolutionary socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the sovereign collective, not to the family.  And this is why calling two men or two women in a union "marriage" has been serially championed by the left.

David Solway, The Problem with Gay Marriage

No One Needs Multiple Partners

[P]eople “need” multiple partners like they need four houses or six automobiles. These are wants, not needs. And when seemingly reasonable people argue that in previous eras people didn’t live so long, such that the death of a spouse functioned as a way for humans to fulfill their “need for sexual variety” it pays to be skeptical. (Since when did golden anniversaries become something to pity rather than something to celebrate?).  No, the new turn away from monogamy was made possible not because we figured out that we are still animals but because we figured out how to effectively prevent pregnancies or end them prematurely, freeing us up to pursue the art of sexuality—the body as a tool of consumption rather than production.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.179

They Want Marriage Without Planning

[N]early all of the women—and a solid majority of the men—with whom we spoke in person want to marry.  But many of them do not know how to make it happen. Marriage as it has been conventionally understood—faithful, closed (to others), enduring, kids, the whole package deal—is a desired state into which very many young Americans hope someday to naturally and passively find themselves. They do not think of it as a pathway requiring their present-time discipline, discernment, sacrifice, self-control, and prudent judgment, together with ample amounts of the same from their peers. Young Americans are not practicing to be married, but rather hoping to someday wake up in it.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.174

Cheap Sex Makes Men Less Productive

[C]heap sex does not make men more productive. And it will not contribute to their marriageability in an era in which marriage rates are tumbling. Bumeister and Vohs [Sexual Economics] hold that “giving young men easy access to abundant sexual satisfaction deprives society of one of its ways to motivate them to contribute valuable achievements to the culture.”

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.152-153

What Feminism Hath Wrought

Nowadays young men can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex. Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forego other women forever. Female sex partners are available without all that. . . . Sex has become free and easy. This is today’s version of the opiate of the (male) masses. . . .  Climbing the corporate ladder for its own sake may still hold some appeal, but undoubtedly it was more compelling when it was vital for obtaining sex.

Kathleen Vohs, Sexual Economics, pg. 523. Cited by Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.149

The Lies and Destruction of Pornography

I cannot help but note the contrast between classic descriptions of marital sexuality and how sex is portrayed in modern pornography. The latter redirects sex away from any sense of it as involving relationships of permanence, exclusivity, or expectations of fertility. On the contrary, pornography typically treats gazers to a veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity, and presses its consumers away from thinking of sex as having anything to do with love, monogamy, or childbearing—all traits that most Americans long equated with marriage. So, add to the sharing of bodies temporarily and non exclusively a significant dose of alternative sexual activities—different positions, roles, genders, and varying numbers of participants—and that is basically where porn leads today: away from sex as having anything approaching a classic marital sense or structure.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.125-126

Sex Is the New Opium of the Masses

In a world increasingly bereft of transcendence, sexual expression is emerging as an intrinsic value. Sex is the new opium of the masses…, a temporary heart in a heartless world. Unfortunately, something so immanent as sex will not—and cannot—function in the manner in which religion can, has, and does. … Sex does not explain the world. It is not a master narrative. It has little to offer by way of convincing theodicy. But in a world increasingly missing transcendence, longing for sexual expression makes sense. It should not surprise us, however, that hose who (unconsciously) demand sex function like religion will come up short. Maybe that is why very liberal women are also twice as likely to report being depressed or currently in psychotherapy than very conservative women.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.79-80.

When Relationships Start With Sex

When relationships start with sex…the odds that women will flourish and enjoy a long-term relationship are dramatically lowered. It is not impossible, just rare.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.66-67

The Truth is That “Sexual Orientation” is NOT Congenital

If we all really believed that sexual orientation was congenital—or present at birth—then no one would every worry that social influences could have an effect on our sexual orientation. But I think that in reality, we all know that sexual desire is deeply subject to social, cultural, and historical forces.

Jane Ward, “No One Is Born Gay (or Straight): Here Are 5 Reasons Why,” cited by Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.55

When You Separate Sex From Reproduction and Kinship

The creation of plastic sexuality, severed from its age-old integration with reproduction, kinship and the generations, was the precondition of the sexual revolution of the past several decades.

Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy. Cited by Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.54

The Reason for Rampant Sexual Immorality

But since pregnancy can be easily prevented now—a reality we take for granted today, but one that was unimaginable not so long ago—having sex and thinking about or committing to marry are two very different things today. Now we have a split mating market, one corner of which is for people primarily looking and hoping for sex with no strings attached (NSA) and the other corner of which are people interested in making the strongest of commitments (marriage), with a rather large territory in between comprised of significant relationships of varying commitment and duration. Marriage is still widely considered to be expensive, by which I mean that it is a big deal, not entered into lightly, and is costly in terms of fidelity, time, finances, and personal investment. Sex, meanwhile, has become comparatively cheap. Not that hard to get.

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.35

Why Are So Many Men Such Losers?

There are 2.4 million more women in college than men. In 2015, 39 percent of 25- to 34-year-old women, but only 33 percent of men, had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. There are now more women than men in the paid labor force.  Documentation of the dismal state of men almost constitutes a genre of literature today. Where exactly are all these missing men? As recently as October 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that over 11 percent of men between the ages of 24 and 54—about seven million people—were neither employed nor seeking work. What are they doing, and why have they come to languish? How, if at all, does some men’s failure to thrive shape not only their own relationship behavior and sexual and marital decision-making but also those of their more successful male counterparts? There are, of course, a variety of reasons that have been floated to explain the plight of men, and the state of marriage and relationships. But few if any have wrestled with the possible sexual sources of these significant shifts. Basically, does cheap sex undermine men’s motivation to achieve? Perhaps.

[In the book, the author proves this is the case.]

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pg.11-12

Contradictions Between Sexual Revolution and the #MeToo Movement

There is a deep tension between the premises of the sexual revolution and those of #MeToo. The sexual revolution promises greater availability and enjoyment of sexual pleasure without commitment or guilt. This promise can only be accomplished by the trivialization of the intrinsically personal meaning of sex. It is very difficult to see how we can simultaneously promote the trivialization of sex and treat sexual assault with the seriousness that it deserves. 

But a powerful personal drive like sexual desire cannot really be trivialized, and its personal meaning cannot be completely denied. If sex ceases to be about love, it will necessarily be about war. This is evident in the hook-up culture, which pushes the revolution’s core premise—sex without marital commitment, or “free love”—to its logical conclusion by elevating sex without any commitment at all. In the hook-up culture and its #MeToo reaction, we can see how sex without comprehensive commitment necessarily becomes predatory, thus paving the way for sexual assault.

Elizabeth Schlueter and Nathan Schlueter, What #MeToo and Hooking Up Teach Us About The Meaning of Sex

Sex Needs More Than Just Consent

Certain moral norms follow from the personal meaning of sex. In the first place, there is a need for consent. Sexual contact without consent is a direct assault against the whole person. It is deeply depersonalizing. But sexual assault is only the most extreme kind of sexual depersonalization. Every time a person is used for sexual gratification, he or she is depersonalized. This fact accounts for the true meaning of sexual modesty (and shame), not puritanical repression. It is our natural defense against the “objectifying” gaze, against being used for someone else’s gratification. 

But not just any kind of consent is adequate to the intrinsic and personal language of sex, and thus to the dignity of the person. Because sex is an embodied union of the whole person, consent to sex without total commitment to the whole person contradicts the meaning and language of the body. It makes an act that speaks love between persons into an act of use of persons.

Sex is thus very different from other human activities. In some contexts, the mutual “use” of persons is morally acceptable. In typical market transactions, for example, the parties “use” one another for their own benefit. When someone purchases bread from the baker, each person is unproblematically looking to his or her own advantage, and (unless the transaction involves force or fraud) neither person feels “used.”

Why is it that “feeling used” is a common experience in sexual intercourse, even when it is consented to? And what conditions for sexual intercourse would prevent that feeling? While “affirmative consent” may at least avoid rape, most people have a sense that consent should be broader, that sex should at least be “a part of a relationship.” But what kind of relationship is sufficient to prevent sex from being depersonalizing? A committed one? How committed? Experience leads us to the following conclusion: Nothing short of comprehensive personal consent—in other words, marriage—is adequate to the intrinsic language of sex or the vulnerability it necessarily entails. 

Elizabeth Schlueter and Nathan Schlueter, What #MeToo and Hooking Up Teach Us About The Meaning of Sex

The Uniqueness of Human Sexuality

… human sexuality is somehow bound up with the whole person in a unique way. It has a deeply personal meaning that we cannot simply construct for ourselves. If the meaning of sexuality is wholly conventional—if sex is merely a biological event—then the seriousness of sexual assault and ubiquity of sexual shame make no sense.

In fact, in human experience, the meaning of sexuality is closely connected with a particular desire, the desire for embodied union with another person. … This desire is not simply reducible to biology, although it is certainly inseparable from it. Each of our other organs can fulfill its complete organic function within our own bodies. The genitals alone, as reproductive organs, can be organically actualized only in sexual intercourse, when a man and a woman become a single, complete organism.

This reality suggests that sexual intercourse will always mean a wholly personal union, whatever the partners to that union may intend or think. In other words, sexuality has its own language, which human beings cannot completely change. They can only choose to live the truth of their bodies with integrity or to contradict and falsify that truth with their bodies, damaging their own integrity as well as that of their sexual partners. In sexual intercourse, the body uniquely says “I give my whole self to you, and I receive your whole self, which you are giving me.” 

Elizabeth Schlueter and Nathan Schlueter, What #MeToo and Hooking Up Teach Us About The Meaning of Sex

It’s Just the Emperor’s New Clothes Updated

We're living through a strange era, one in which logic and reason has been turned on its head, forcing us to view the world through the lens of the seriously deranged.  These insidious distortions of reality come in many forms, but, in this instance, I'd like to address the issue of biological sex.  A mere few decades ago, who would have imagined that one day we'd be told that there are more than two sexes?  With a plethora of scientific and commonsense evidence describing a male and female as the necessary ingredients for the continuation of the human species (and non-human species) on this planet, we are now instructed to learn that there have been many other sexes hiding in the shadows. … Unless we want to lose our grip on reality, we should always keep in mind that there's a natural order to the universe.  Yet it's tough to keep an orderly mind when one's cerebral cortex is constantly inundated with some frivolous science made up of whimsical proclamations from politically correct politicians and social theorists.

Bob Weir, Making sexual dysfunction appear normal

There IS an Objective Moral Standard

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pg.25

Virginity IS a Treasure

You cannot laugh at virginity and then act surprised when men act like pigs.

Matt Walsh, when commenting on this article.

Logic and Truth

With Democrats and liberals, “logic is the enemy and truth is a menace.

Rod Serling

We Have an Oligarchy

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.

Abraham Lincoln

When Liberals Rule

The Liberal “Word” Ideology

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”  

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean of many different things.” 

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all."

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Think how the LEFT has redefined “gay,” “marriage,” “family,” “hate,” “bigot,” “fascism,” “male,” “female,” “gender,” et al. They are controlling the language.

Patriotism American Style

Patriotism in America means loving limited government. It is that simple. You love that America has a constitutionally limited government, or you do not love America.

Jesse Kelly

Keep Sex in the “Fireplace"

In the book of Proverbs, the author takes great strides to warn his son of the dangers of sexual promiscuity and adultery, which could destroy his character and ruin his life. For it is only in the safe pastures of marital fidelity that a man will find joy and satisfaction.  Sexual passion is good, as long as it is kept in its proper context. For once the fire gets out of the fireplace (its proper place), it does nothing but burn everything it touches.

Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, pg.142

Keep Sex Exclusive

If there is one reason why sex becomes dull and a bore, it is that it is commonplace. It’s available anywhere, everywhere, to everybody who is looking for it.  Nothing is kept in reserve. No pleasures are saved for the wedding night, let alone for the bride and bridegroom exclusively.

Elisabeth Elliot, Passion & Purity, pg.147