Tag Archives: Human Sexuality

Politics

Men Don’t Give Birth

"Doctors prepared to do an emergency cesarean delivery, but in the operating room no fetal heartbeat was heard. Moments later, the man delivered a stillborn baby."

apnews.com/b5e7bb73c6134d58a0df9e1cee2fb8ad

If men have babies, what’s even the point of talking about gender and sex categories? The categories are literally meaningless.

First:
“Sex” and “Gender” were synonyms. They both meant male and female as traditionally understood. Girls. Boys. Pink. Blue.

Then:
“Sex” and “Gender” were separated. Sex referred to biology. Gender referred to cultural norms around biology. Male vs. Masculine. Gender—being cultural—was malleable, and things like gender fluidity and transgender became common terms.

Now:
Sex and gender are synonyms again. But now they mean “malleable designations that mean whatever an individual wants them to mean.” The malleability of culturally-based gender notions has been back-migrated into biological sex.

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Thoughts

On Male Monogamy

Note: This Facebook post is the rawest piece of writing I have ever published. Even today it’s hard to publish without some trepidation about being so transparent on the open Internet. But a core principle of this blog is to be honest about my intellectual and religious journey through life. I am committed to letting my past writing speak for itself, first and foremost as a reminder to me of where I’ve been. Looking back on this post now, a couple things have changed. First and foremost, I am no longer living as an unbeliever. I pray intentionally, and I have begun to read the Bible. I still see many reasons to doubt the historicity of parts of the Bible, but it has become increasingly clear to me that the Bible offers the only coherent framework for living that is accessible to me. Therefore, I accept the Bible as my guidebook for life and seek in faith to follow Christ in how I live. Secondly, the language of this piece is almost brutally jaded and unremorseful. Looking back and based on some of the feedback I received at the time, I wish it had been more gentle and treated pornography use s a sin of which to be ashamed. At the end of the post is a follow-up comment I posted a week later. (DL, June 10, 2023).

www.challies.com/articles/my-wifes-plea-to-christian-men

I want my Christian friends to read and let this article sink in.
In particular, absorb the line of thought reflected in the following quote. There are several threads in it I want to unpack.

Why do so many men, and even so many Christian men, have such weakness when it comes to sexual sin? . . . Why are so many of you failing . . .? Is it really that difficult? You would almost think that this one sin is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . The only conclusion I can come to is that you are so consumed with self-gratification that you are not willing to fight, and I mean really willing to fight, this sin. If it’s not that you can’t, it must be that you won’t.

I have some specific thoughts in response.

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Politics

Facebook Discussion on Cake Baker Rights

Notes: This series of Facebook comments took place on a post on the wall of a gay friend that I believe was related to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law passed by Indiana to prevent government from substantially burdening the free exercise of religion. The law, which arose in part as a reaction to the Colorado Masterpiece Cake Shop case, passed into law the day of this thread. I engaged in response to another commenter who’s content was acerbic and anti-gay. This series of comments is a good example of the kinds of discussions with strangers I had on Facebook when I was most involved with the platform. The consistent failure to actually change any minds through all this engagement (as evidenced here) is one of the reasons I ultimately left the platform. I posted on the same topic in a comment on another thread a few days later. (DL, June 14, 2023).

[Commenter 1 Name Redacted], I hesitate to engage you simply because I’m not sure it’s going to get us anywhere profitable, but silence can be its own form of complicity, so . . .

1) The formulations “degenerate minority” and “degenerate sexual deviant” are not an indicator of an open minded clear thinker. Your expression is dismissive and muddy. It basically comes across as bombastic namecalling. Perhaps you could have written something like: “You shouldn’t get extra rights at my expense simply because of your race or your sexual preference.” In this way you could have made the same point without unnecessarily raising the temperature level of the conversation and offending many of the people you’re ostensibly trying to dialog with.

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