Qohel

Archive for the ‘Gender’ Category

With the boundaries of what marriage means being vigorously stretched, this comes as no surprise:

Taiwanese Woman to Marry Herself.

“Age 30 is a prime period for me. My work and experience are in good shape, but I haven’t found a partner, so what can I do?” Chen said.

“I’m not anti-marriage. I just hope that I can express a different idea within the bounds of a tradition.”

Ah, yes. The old ‘different idea within the bounds of a tradition’ trick.

Sadly, Taiwanese law discriminates against such unions, and Ms Chen’s marriage will not be recognised by the state.

But I say, if one person truly loves herself, then why not?

Amidst the general left wing media outrage (‘small-minded’, ‘ignorant’, ‘bigoted’ are frequently occurring words) at the prosecution of two young people in Queensland who attempted to abort their baby, I came across this review of the film Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go traces the story of three apparently normal young people who discover they are clones produced to provide spare parts.

In the end they accept their own destruction and dismantlement for parts, even thought this means they are not regarded as human, and that they only have value for the convenience they provide for someone else.

They accept this despite the fact that they think, feel, love, because ‘In fact, love doesn’t conquer all, and the clones don’t fight back, because they’ve been infected with the kind of belief that already is poisoning our society: the belief that humans created in a lab are lesser beings who can be sacrificed for the greater good. These young men and women give up their lives for a misguided idea–the idea that for them to be treated as humans, with worth and value of their own, would be to take all of humanity back to a time of “darkness.”

Chilling.

The Island was a well made 2005 Hollywood film on the same theme. ‘We have a product.’

You can’t be a bloke if you don’t respect women. But ask a group of women if they respect men and you will likely be greeeted with hoots of derisive laughter.

Not true of all women, of course, but true of more than it should be.

Interesting, and not unexpected, then, the instant castigation of footballers and men in general after the latest accusations of sexual assault against some Collingwood players. More work is needed! Players need more sensitivity training! Men are bastards!

I saw one comment by a woman connected with a sexual assault centre to the effect (I couldn’t find it again later) that even if women were throwing themselves at footballers, the footballers needed to behave appropriately.

She didn’t elaborate as to what she thought the appropriate behaviour might be.

But given the currently popular ‘casual shagging does no one any harm and is probably healthy’ opinion of most women’s magazines and popular shows like Sex in the City, it is hard to see why any bloke should not think that the appropriate form of behaviour in any circumstances where a woman is asking for sex is simply to let her have it.

To suggest, as that person did, and as others have, that only men should be responsible for their decisions, and that if a woman later regrets what she has done, the man is the one at fault, is to treat women as lesser beings – more like children than adults.

This is not respectful of women, and it does not encourage respect for women.

Even when both are drunk, and meaningful consent cannot be given, responsibility lies with both, not just with the man, even if he is a footballer.

Of course, life would a lot simpler if people kept sex for marriage. Casual sex devalues both men and women, and makes it easier for persons of both genders to see persons of the other as simply means to an end – their own pleasure. This really means treating a sexual partner as nothing more than a masturbation aid.

Some men do think this way. Anyone who has seen Sex and City, and seen how popular that show is, and how some of its stars are regarded as role models(!) knows that women are capable of thinking this way too.

The harm this way of thinking and acting causes to individual men and women (and their offspring) and to gender relationships and understanding, seems to me to be simply obvious.

Also obvious is the fact that easy availability of contraception, especially the pill, and the easy availability of abortion, has encouraged this ‘if it feels good, do it’ mentality, a disregard of (or deliberate ignoring of) the consequences of sexual activity, and a deepening disregard for the different emotional needs of men and women, and for their value as persons.

Freely available contraception has not enhanced the lives or status of women.

Of course this should have been, and was, clear from the beginning. The Catholic faith said so, and so did sommon sense. Cardinal Pell has recently made these points with his usual no nonsense clarity.

Incidentally, Cardinal Pell points out, and rightly, that the Christian consensus on this matter was first broken by the Anglican Church at the Lambeth Conference in 1930 – the point from which, in my view, the Anglican Communion could no longer claim only to teach and practice the faith once delivered to the saints, and at which it began to come loose from its moorings in Scripture and Tradition in ways that are now disastrously obvious.

But the truth is ever unpopular, especially amongst those whose theme song is  ’I want to, so dont’ tell me it’s wrong.’

The week’s Weekend Australian Magazine contains a mercifully short article by Susan Maushart called ‘The Bitter Pell.’

I have met Cardinal Pell, and enjoyed several minutes of conversation with him about Anglican – Roman Catholic relations. He is far from bitter. In fact, he struck me as a person of very considerable intellect, who is driven both by a passion for truth, and compassion for those harmed by the lack of it. He certainly was willing to listen respectfully to views which differed from his own.

Susan Maushart, however, gives every impression of harboring deep bitterness against anyone who holds views that do not co-incide with hers.

Her article contains no reasonable arguments at all, just a series of cheap shots about the Chruch and the faith, even including a mention of the inquisition, for heaven’s sake.

The best way to earn respect is to give it. It can be a hard lesson to learn.

An interesting article from Kelsey Grammer’s Rightnetwork from a home schooling journalist.

Just a sample:

Academically, we couldn’t help but observe that  our fourteen-year-old son was made to watch My Big Fat, Greek Wedding in English class because they’re supposed to be studying Homer — and Homer’s Greek, you know; or notice that he’s seen Al Gore’s carbon footprint infomercial four times already, once each in four different classes; discover that none of the teachers or administrators can spell or operate a sentence, never mind the students, but they’ve seen Supersize Me twice already; or see that all his textless textbooks looked like a cross between a comic book and a collage. Such things indicated that nothing serious was ever going to happen in school. As far as behavior goes, we’ve had enough experience with both sons now to know that males of the species are simply not welcome in public school. That was Samuel Burgos’ real crime. He acted like a little boy, and that’s not allowed.  His parents should embrace it, and never send him back. That’s what we’ve done, and we couldn’t be happier.

Student Tyler Clementi committed sucide after being videoed having gay sex.

He was the fourth gay teen suicide in the US this month. The national LGBT community is reeling.

The bullying must stop! Gays must be given equal rights now!

That’s the approved narrative.

But actual events do not support that interpretation of Tyler Clementi’s death. He was aware he had been taped, and didn’t seem that bothered by it. Remarkably unbothered, in fact, compared with how I would feel if someone had surreptitiously made a sex tape featuring me.

The gay lobby is using this young man’s suicide to gain political advantage, as they did with the death of Matthew Shepard.

The approved narrative was that Matthew was murdered simply because he was gay.

The reality is that his death had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. He was killed by two drug addicts, one of whom was known to him (Shepard was also a heavy drug user) in a robbery that went wrong.

There seems to be an instant assumption by Ellen DeGeneres and other ’being gay is my career’ minor celebrities that the murder or suicide of any person who has ever had gay sex, or ever spoken about gay sex, must have happened because they were gay.

That is not only nonsense, it is insulting. Homosexual people live lives as varied as anyone else.

Their lives are no less likely than those of any other citizen to intersect with people who are cruel or dangerous. More likely in the case of Matthew Shepard, who was both indiscriminately sexually active, and a drug abuser.

To claim these deaths for political purposes disregards other aspects of the lives of the victims. It makes them one dimensional, cardboard cutouts suitable for placards, not real people.

It is cynical and exploitative.

She goes out of her way to look attractive. Her employers reward her for looking attractive.

But woe betide any man who finds her attractive.

NFL security officials are investigating the conduct of New York Jets players after complaints by Reporter Ines Sainz that players wolf whistled and hooted at her when she interviewed team members in their locker room.

This is she:

Ines Sainz Annoyed at Men Looking at Her

So let me get this straight.

A woman who goes out of her way to look attractive to men goes into a locker room where men are getting changed, having showers, etc, and then is outraged and her feelings hurt because some of the players whistle at her?

This comment from Lori Ziganto:

She chooses to look attractive. She wants to look attractive. Being attractive is, in fact, part of her image and it is actively pursued by her employer and Sainz herself. Yet, we are to be outrageously outraged – when men find her attractive? Here’s an estrogen-insider secret for all the politically correct, totally aghast at human nature people: most women want to feel pretty and they want to hear you say it. Hence, her clothing that accentuates all her, um, “positives.” It doesn’t make men evil and it doesn’t somehow magically remove the woman’s ability to do her job.

Teachable Moment: If you truly don’t want to be ogled and whistled at, don’t, you know, go into a male locker room sporting a camel toe.

Seeing Stephanie Rice sobbing her way through an apology for using the word faggot, acknowledging her dreadfulness, her betrayal of the Soviet everyone’s trust in her, and affirming that she really did love big brother gay people of all shapes and sizes, and everyone of any sexual preference at all, you might have thought you were watching a remake of 1984.

And then Jaguar dumped her.

Poor girl. She had the honesty poor sense to say publicly what was almost certainly said privately in a number of Australian households when the Wallabies won a last minute victory over South Africa. Namely, Yay! Suck on that, faggots.

Poor taste? Sure. Inappropriate? Maybe. But the game was pretty exciting, and a bit of gloating was entirely justified.

How do a few words uttered, or even tweeted, in the heat of the monent, justify demonizing and publicly humiliating a hard working and kind-hearted young woman?

She, and her agent, should have just told the professional offendees to sod off.

There are more important things in the world to be upset about.

And I’m glad I got rid of my Daimler. It was probably the worst engineered car I have ever owned.

So suck on that,  . . .

There is no getting around reality.

Someone decides it is insulting to call people whose intellectual development has been retarded ‘retarded.’ So we are told to call them ‘intellectually handicapped.’

Soon ‘intellectually handicapped’ becomes a form of insult. So we are told to call them ‘slow learners.’

A couple of years later, every time you want  to insult your mates you say ‘Looking like a slow learner there Joe!’

So that term naturally becomes unacceptable, and anyone who has ever used it is obviously insensitive and uncaring.

Let’s call them ‘special children’ instead. Let’s have ‘special schools’ for ‘special children.’

Scene in schoolyard: ‘You’re a special child!’ ‘I am not. I’m telling.’

There is no getting around reality.

So when you are no longer supposed to call homosexuals homosexuals because that might be insulting, and instead you are supposed to call them ‘gay,’ what is going to happen to that word?

Any school teacher can tell you that the worst possible insult in the playground is beng called gay. You can say someone is lame, you can insult his mother, or her father. But but if one child calls another child gay, be prepared for trouble.

Whether being gay really is gay, I don’t know. Most homosexuals of my acquaintance don’t demonstrate a a high level of satisfaction with their lives, so I suspect it might be.

But they really are gay, the ones who objected to principal Garry Martin’s replacing the word ‘gay’ in the Kookaburra song with the word ‘fun.’

Firstly, when the song was written ‘gay’ pretty much meant fun. Remember The Gay Divorcee? OK, there aren’t many of them either. Or the Gay Nineties? Not the recent nineties, the ones before?

No? Well, you know what I mean.

Before the word gay, a good word, was hijacked, it meant happy, light-hearted, fun.

Now it just means gay.

Marion Sinclair meant that a kookaburra’s life was carefree, fun. So Principal Garry was being true to the original text. And Kookaburra, fun to sing though it is, is not Shakespeare.

Secondly, this was about children singing. Children singing. Children, at school, singing together.

The word gay is an extreme insult in the playground. So naturally the kids were rolling around the floor laughing when asked to sing about a gay kookaburra.

So why not do the sensible thing and replace the word ‘gay’ with the word ‘fun?’

Garry describes what he was thinking:

“I wasn’t trying to incite or insult gay people, or trying to violate the copyright of Larrikin Music; it was just a decision at the time that I thought would minimise a disruptive atmosphere with grades one and and two.”

But after a controversy in which it has been suggested he is trying to make gay people invisible:

In an interview on the Nine Network, Mr Martin was backtracking on his decision, saying that perhaps he should have discussed the true meaning of the word with the children.

So Garry now thinks he would have been doing the right thing if he discussed homosexuality with year ones and twos?

Well, that’s what the brownshorts wanted.

No, Garry no. You were right the first time.

And not radical islamists?

Given that Sarah is an attractive, powerful, intelligent woman who is successful in her own right and has challenged and beaten corrupt men and corporations?

And that she doesn’t believe, for example:

• Women are inferior to men.
• Women should have fewer rights and responsibilities than Larry the Cable Guy.
• Women count for one-half of a dude in giving evidence in a court of law.
• Women should be horse whipped if they ever make their husband feel like a dork.
• Victoria’s Secret Miraculous Bra (with extreme level 5 cleavage) makes God angry.
• Women can’t say squat in regard to whom they’ll marry, what they’ll wear, where they’ll live, or whether or not they can divorce their cheating and/or abusive husband.
• Girls can be wed beginning at the ripe old age of frickin’ nine.
• Women should be cool with hubby having a couple of hoochies or female slaves on the side.
• Women, on the pretext of “honor,” should be locked up, isolated and unable to have a girls’ night out at Mango’s on Ocean Drive.

While radical islamists do believe those things, and are earnest about putting them into practice, to the point of killing people who disagree.

It’s a mystery.

I am not normally given to swearing, but honestly, for f&#%’s sake.

As if you needed another one, reason number 126,475 never to go into an Anglican church again.

Gay vicar, 65, to ‘marry’ Nigerian male model half his age.

According to the article, they met and fell in love at a Christian conference in Togo.

And don’t they look lovely together:

Gay vicar to marry male model

Really, for f&#%’s sake.

Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a dog has if we call a tail a leg. The answer, he said, is four: calling a tail a leg does not make it so. We chuckle and move on. …

Today, marriages crumble, families are torn, society flounders. Why? We are not living in the truth. We accept a bad definition of marriage, acquiesce to almost any sexual arrangement, glorify the quest for sexual pleasure, treat children as a means to fulfill our desires. Overwhelmingly, research shows that rearing children in any other environment than with both their natural parents is damaging. Sometimes that damage is unavoidable, as when a parent dies, but we shouldn’t seek it. And it certainly won’t help to say the impossible is real.

We need the truth. We need to fix the legs. Calling a tail a leg only makes matters worse.

 A couple of quotes from A Marriage Tail, by Stephen J Heaney.

Naughty Wendy Francis. Doesn’t she know that expressing opinions contrary to those approved by the Federation of Angry Gays is not permitted?

Wendy is a Queensland senate candidate for the Family First Party.

She, or someone on her staff, tweeted that allowing the adoption of children by homosexual couples was equivalent to legalising child abuse.

She was not suggesting that children brought up in such relationships are more likely to suffer violence, neglect or sexual abuse.

Such an argument could be made, and perhaps should be considered, given the relative instability of homosexual relationships, the high rates of domestic violence, and the disproportionate amount of child sexual abuse committed by male homosexuals. But that is not what she was saying.

What she was saying is that research suggests that children do best when raised in a stable family headed by a male and a female. There are obviously times when that is not possible, when parents must do their best alone.

But for the state to put children into situations which are known to be less than optimal is not responsible. In matters of adoption, the children’s needs come first. Children are not fashion accessories, and having children is not a right.

The Courier-Mail reported that Wendy had ‘apologised unreservedly’ for the comment.

No she didn’t. She said she would have put the matter differently, and apologised if anyone was upset over the language used. But she continues to insist that allowing homosexual partners to adopt children is to make those children guinea pigs in an extraordinary social experiment that cannot be justified.

It is possible to argue that sufficient evidence exists now to be able to claim that children raised by homosexual couples show the same sexual, intellectual and physical development as other children. That is not that case - the research purportedly demonstrating this does not meet basic standards in terms of sample sizes, statistical analysis or reporting, and in almost every case was conducted by gay advocates.

Catholic Education’s Review Of Research On Homosexual Parenting, Adoption, And Foster Parenting is worth reading for some solid background on this issue, and comparison of outcomes for children raised by homosexual couples with children raised by male/female married parent families and other family types.

And the other apology? That was the absurd apology by Channel Nine CEO David Gyngell for Mark Latham’s questioning of PM Julia Gillard.

The PM was never in any danger (except of being embarrassed). Political journalists used to believe it was part of their job to ambush politicians with difficult questions.

So what the heck has happened to our media organisations when the CEO of a major TV network feels the need to apologise over a perfectly reasonable (if irrelevant to most voters) question?