Saturday 28 January 2017

How Did It Come to This . . . ?

The Liberated Woman Shows What She Wants

We awoke the other morning to the completely unexpected news that Donald Trump is going to do something inconceivably horrible.  He was going to remove Federal money from funding the odium of abortion outside the boundaries of the United States.  The howls of protest have even reached far away New Zealand.  

Yet, some perspective is in order.  The prohibition on funding abortions offshore was first enacted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.  It was reversed by Billary, but was subsequently reinstated by every Republican president since.  Trump is merely following suit.  We say "merely", not because it is an unimportant or insignificant step but because it was an expected outcome.  Nevertheless the banshees and the dervishes protesting outrage at the restoration of the "Mexico City Policy" tell us that killing babies is regarded by some, if not many, as a mark of ideological purity and zealotry.

And that leads us to Douglas Wilson's reflections on nasty Canaanite women.
A couple days ago there were “women’s marches” all over the country. It was a very important event I hear tell. Momentous.  Charged with meaning. Galvanizing. It was sort of like a Tea Party protest of the left, only without any particular point. There were lots of pink p**sy hats, and so I guess that showed us. Madonna managed to attract the attention of the Secret Service—and about time—and f-bombed her way into an affirmation of the need for all of us to choose the way of love.

And Ashley Judd demonstrated for us that she rants like a girl. If you want a real rant, you need a peeved Scotsman who was left out in the rain for a little bit. So for such an object lesson, we are that far to the good.

In fact, Ashley Judd encapsulated the besetting problem of this whole business, which is the standing problem of the Irony Fail. She read a poem that began “IIII am a naaaasty woman.” The rhetorical stance of her whole approach was to mock Donald Trump’s dismissal of Hillary as “such a nasty woman.” But it order to mock something like that, it cannot be self-evidently true. And it was true of Hillary, and true of all her imitators. But back to Judd, it is too much to have that bile come out of a face that looks like a real down home sweet pea, and expect all the rest of us to keep a straight face. Like keeping battery acid in a cocoa mug.

Look. You cannot be the kind of movement that applauds topless slut walks for a decade or two, and at the end of it still attract the instinctive respect that men used to show to their great grandmothers. That is what you feminist ding dongs deliberately threw away. You cannot be the organizer of the city-wide Herpes on Heels March and somehow have the same moral authority that Galadriel had.


These are the people who, if you were talking to them about the authority of the Scriptures, would protest that the Bible cannot be taken as the Word of God because it required the extermination of Canaanite men, women and children. These are the same people who, just two days ago, were out there marching in the defense of their own right to slaughter their own children. In short, they do not object to taking of human life, but rather they object to the taking of Canaanite life by the God of Scripture. They object to this because they are obviously Canaanites, and so the whole set up makes them nervous. They do agree that the deity has the right to take life as the deity wills it—they just insist on the right to be the deity.

And don’t you love how that word “protester” gets used so creatively these days? It is so hard anymore to tell the difference between protesters and rioters. Here is yet another Irony Fail. As David Burge pointed out, during the Inauguration, “protesters” were a couple blocks away from the main event, all dressed in black, smashing windows, setting fire to cars, because they were . . . wait for it . . . drum roll . . . protesting fascism. And for good measure, I have ten bucks here that says these stalwart anti-fascist “protesters” would overwhelmingly have a deep antipathy for the state of Israel, and would love nothing more than to broaden their protests into a little Jew-baiting.

But one of the first things the election they were protesting is likely to result in is a move of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and a state of high coziness with the Jewish state. This new friendliness is no doubt opposed by glass-smashing rioters, in black shirts, who are also worried about our new president’s Hitlerian tendencies. These black shirts never need to be pressed because they have all the irony they need already.

I interrupt this important series of observations to remind my readers that I did not vote for our new president. This is not being written by a Trump partisan. That is not my point here. As soon as Trump does something idiotic, I stand ready to say so, using all the adjectives I can find. But golly. The aftermath of this election has provided us with one gaudy display after another of why Trump won.

And I will observe in passing that if the pantywaist opposition to Trump that was displayed by the evangelical leadership in some quadrants were in charge of everything, they would have, if confronted by anything like these women’s marches, capitulated ten times already, and apologized twelve times. For if anything distinguishes the stalwart, modern man of evangelical action, it is his fear of women.

I am a mere observer. A reporter. I simply comment on what I see. It is not lost on me that our nation is in the throes of a cartoon convulsion, an animated algospasm, a painted paroxysm. The Anglo Saxon weird is upon us. The lovers of normal have chosen the oddest champion ever, and so he has ridden out to fight with the nasty women. It slowly begins to dawn—with horror it begins to dawn—on the soi disant evangelical intelligentsia that he intends to actually fight with them. Not only that, but it looks like he might even fight dirty.

So let’s get back to those pink p**sy hats for a minute. These are the people who have been degrading public discourse for a generation, fighting for the mainstreaming of every form of vulgarity, insisting that the taxpayers fund their blasphemous art, fighting technology that has figured out how to scrub crudity from our entertainment, and have been demanding that various forms of filth be decanted into fifty gallon drums and imported into polite company. And then Trump says something that would have gotten him drummed out of polite company seventy-five years ago, and they want to turn it into material for a national march. Where have you been?

We had a women’s march here in our community as well, and one of my parishioners saw a woman wearing a shirt with the text I have included off to the right. There it is, out in the open: “Keep calm and kill babies.” Kind of right out there. Isn’t it? What was the problem with what God did to the Canaanites again? They could never believe in a God who would kill babies.
  
No, not really. They could actually never believe in a God who would ask them to have babies. That is the root of the problem, the source of their rebellion.

And so, rebelling against their own nature, revolting against the sweetness that God gave to them, rising up against the impulse that is down in their bones, they really have become nasty women. What impulse is it that they are repressing? The impulse to conceive a child, carry him for nine months, suckle him at the breast, hold him on her hip, push a stroller around, and get back home in time to make the child’s father a sandwich. If you start by making fun of such decent things, it should not be a surprise that you end with “keep calm and kill more babies.”
“Fill their faces with shame; That they may seek thy name, O Lord” (Ps. 83:16).

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