The issue of sexual misconduct is a dark subject. No one wants to hear about how awful some people can be. The primary distinction between sexual crimes and other dark and evil crimes is that it is done in secret. When one commits murder, there is open proof that a crime has been committed. When one steals, there is also proof. When one commits a sexual crime, they do so, often with a calculated, premeditated approach to ensure the victim does not reveal the crime nor the perpetrator. This is mostly done by scaring the victim into believing something very bad will happen if they reveal this dark information. Sexual crime is a secret crime. Sexual predators can continue their crime and often there is no open evidence of a crime having been committed.
This type of hidden malevolence invites any type of individual, not just the typical criminal. In murders, there are all types, but the most common are those killing for passion, status, or an addiction. These killings involve types. In theft, it is often for the same reasons. Also, these criminals have types. Usually, they are not the type of person that has a positive reputation, a job that requires a background check, and a close direct tie to their community and family they grew up around. Sexual predators do not have a type. It could literally be anybody. They can hide behind their perfect family, their cub scout leadership status, their money, and even their position at a church.
Before I go any further, it needs to be made abundantly clear, I despise sexual predators. They ruin entire lives, even if they don’t murder their victims after their sexual crime. The damage they do is lifelong and though it can be healed, the victim is never truly the same. Now that this is clearly established, let’s address the pendulum swing.
Many supporters of drag queens performing in libraries have decided to call out the hypocrisy of clergy committing sexual crimes. More about that in a minute. For now, let’s talk about children in libraries. There has been an attempt by parents to not allow drag shows to be performed in public places, particularly where children will be, like a library. First, the issue is not of hate, or even judgment. The issue surrounds children and their proper development. For centuries, we have known that children need to be exposed only to that which fits their current developmental stage. This exposure expands as they get more mature. But for some reason, there are a group of people that have decided that this exposure is perfectly acceptable for small children. The idea that someone with autogynephilia or gender dysphoria might have their feelings hurt is enough to risk the development of an innocent child. That is a problem.
Here’s also where part of the problem is: imposition. For decades now, many have been averse to the Christian religion, citing that they continue to impose their beliefs onto American society. Every time someone wants the Ten Commandments up in a public courthouse, they cry foul for reasons of imposition. This is where it gets quite hypocritical. Now, the T in LGBT wants to impose their beliefs onto our children. I know people in each letter. And I can assure you that the Ls, Gs and Bs do not impose their lifestyle on my children. But the Ts are certainly trying. Here’s what parents are truly saying, We want you to be happy in your lifestyle. We want you to love the way you wish to love. We just want you to honor and acknowledge centuries of child development understanding, and conduct your sexual life behind closed doors, or at least among consenting adults. Children do not belong in rated PG-13 movies, much less sexually charged dance shows. Do what you want, just leave our kids out of it. But there’s a new issue.
The hashtag “#notadragqueen” has become wildly popular lately. This is primarily concerning Christian clergy who have committed some form of sexual criminal activity. The sarcastic slogan basically suggests, “It may be a dark sexual crime against children, but at least it’s not a drag queen!” Or “This crime was not committed by a drag queen.” Obviously, this is intellectually dishonest. No one endorses sexual crimes against children… anywhere in the world. No one approves of anyone, especially someone in a place of power and influence, committing sick atrocities against children. But the hashtag suggests something more serious, it suggests an epidemic of sorts. Is it an epidemic? Are all pastors doing this? Well, let’s look at the numbers.
In America there are approximately 465,000 ministers, pastors, priests in America. What percentage of these clergymen do you think are committing these sexual crimes? If you said .001%, you’d be wrong. That’s too high. There have been approximately 7000 allegations of sexual abuse from a clergy member in America over the last 20 years, approximately 350 per year (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2007). In 2022, there were 10 pastors in Texas charged with child abuse. If you applied that number to all 50 states, there would have been 500 charges that year. This still equals .001%. This means, that using the highest year of sexual crimes committed by clergy, 464,500 members of clergy each year were doing the right thing, helping those they loved, honoring their commitment to God and God’s people, loving people where they are, sacrificing their lives to ensure those they serve are helped, and being attacked for doing so by people that simply don’t understand the life of a pastor.
But why pastors? Why leaders who preach against this? And why does it seem like it happens all the time? The reason it appears to happen all of the time is the media. The media covers it because it is an easy target. They don’t report that 21% of transgender women (men with gender dysphoria (GD): DSM-V, section II, vi, page 1059) spend time in prison (Movement Advancement Project). That’s an estimated 220,000 people in the US. They won’t report that over 70% of transgender prisoners in British jails are serving sentences for sexual and/or violent crimes (Rayment, S., The Telegraph, “More than 70 per cent of transgender prisoners in British jails are serving sentences for sex offences and violent crimes, February 2024). You will not see a report that says on average, 1 in 424 transgender women (again, men with GD) have been convicted of a sexual crime in the UK and New Zealand. I’m not suggesting that all drag queens suffer from GD, but almost all either do suffer from GD or autogynephilia.
I’m not suggesting that one is better than the other. They’re both awful. But the numbers on clergy don’t suggest an epidemic. To ensure I’m not letting the pastors off the hook, one of the primary reasons they are so prone to this is what I mentioned at the beginning of this article, secrecy. It is a hidden crime. They don’t deal with their issues because it will cause their power and status to come into question, so they commit a private, secret crime. There is never a reason that will be satisfactory to commit a sexual crime of any kind, especially against children. But for the T community to suggest that there is a huge problem with ministers committing sexual crimes against children (7000 over 20 years) without glancing into the mirror (220,000) is the literal definition of hypocrisy.
Most pastors are doing it right. Most are not predators. A very small number (<.001%) of sick miscreants do not represent an entire occupation. So while #notadragqueen is cute, gets emotions stirred up, and sends a virtuous signal that they possess moral superiority, this is #notarepresentationofchristian either. It’s just a small subset of sick people doing sick things.
Empathy: Is it a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing? Does being high in empathy make you a good person and does being low in empathy make you a bad person? Good questions. We turn to research to find the answer.
Turns out, the answer is actually that empathy is not moral or immoral, rather it is amoral. It’s just a thing. It does not make you a good person to have a lot or a bad person to have little. There is no such connection.
In a 2014 paper for the Psychological Bulletin, researchers reviewed all available data on this subject in a meta-analysis and found that 1% of the variation of aggression was due to lack of empathy. There is no real correlation to low empathy making you a bad person.
Studies show that when “spotlighting” one through empathy, one is willing to disregard laws, ethics, morals, and good reasoning to make sure the one they’re empathizing with is taken care of. This clearly clouds our judgement.
Participants in one study were willing to move one subject up in the list of transplants, even if it meant there was a good chance the subject would still live and a good chance the ones she skipped would die. It didn’t matter. Participants had empathy.
Another study took it another step and participants were willing to inflict pain that could result in hospitalization on a math contest participant that was opposing the one they were empathizing with. Didn’t matter. Gotta empathize.
You can only empathize with one person at a time. You can sympathize with many and have compassion for many. But you can only empathize with one at a time. This is why it is so dangerous.
Is it all bad? No. Cognitive empathy, theory of mind, and effective altruism are all ways in which empathy can be a good thing. We can allow it to drive us in a good direction but empathy must be met with analytic and altruistic reasoning that calibrates the possible upcoming action for effectiveness and realistic achievement. Understanding where someone is and how they are feeling is a good thing. When it propels us into unfettered, unbridled, blind action is when it becomes a problem.
Compassion is the best emotion to feel for those suffering. It is a true feeling that keeps bad decisions at bay long enough for your prefrontal cortex to get involved and make a rational decision. Rational compassion.
So, please remember this when you begin hearing people claiming empathy is the one all encompassing path to morality and goodness. It is FAR from that. On a good day.
I’ll start walking your way, you start walking mine…
I heard the story of girls in college who were roommates. The four of them were eating dinner and the conversation turned to politics. One girl said to one other girl, “You can’t be part of this discussion because the three of us are not on your side. We are on the other side.” This was brought to my attention because I know some of them. My immediate response was, “Why is there a ‘side’?” But really, why does there have to be a side? This isn’t a new problem.
There we were, people were willingly losing lifelong friends in the name of “Their team.” The entire first term of Trump and the entire time Biden was in office, this permeated throughout society. Biden and his team were making claims that no one consciously believed to be true. Men were not having babies. But this was being said by very important people that were believed to be smart. But this is what one “side” was saying. The more the conspiracy theories became true, people began questioning what a conspiracy theory really was.
Then comes Trump for a second term. Trump could announce that he will dedicate a state park and include outstanding black men and women in American history and someone would still find a way to hate him. In fact, he did just that! Notable black people in American history, like MLK Jr., Fredrick Douglas, Muhammed Ali, Harriet Tubman, and many more, will be honored by this new park. But it will somehow become a bad thing. Why? Because we can’t find the middle.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner speaks as President Donald Trump and Tiger Woods listen during a reception for Black History Month in the East Room of the White House Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025. AP/PTI(AP02_21_2025_000007B)
What does the middle look like?
It probably looks like a place where I get to think for myself. If I like Trump more than Harris, and I vote for Trump, then he renames the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, I can think for myself and come to the conclusion that this was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen a president do. The middle is also a place where I can acknowledge that one the best moments of the Biden administration was when they began making steady moves towards bringing mental health to a place where it is recognized similarly to physical health, in the way of insurance coverage and medical recognition. It is being normalized by the medical society and subsequently helping save lives every day. This was because of the Biden administration.
If I loved Biden/Harris and despised Trump, the middle would look like a place where I could acknowledge that the insanity of claiming men can have babies and that anything non-white is good must cease if we are to move forward as a country. In the middle, I could despise the things that Trump says, enjoy the things that Biden or Harris say, and still recognize that both Trump and Biden gained the most financially from the production of covid vaccines. In the middle, I could see that while Biden was my choice for president, He changed the catch and release program from release back to Mexico awaiting trial to release into America while awaiting trial, causing there to be less actual trials for asylum seekers than ever before. I could recognize that the First Step Act enacted during Trump’s first term released over 1000 black men on day one of the implementation, and that this is a great thing. I could acknowledge that one is my president but call him out when he makes a bad decision. Because in the middle, I am my own person.
We have this terrible tendency to look at politics in much the same way we do sports. There is a binary way of thinking. Me against you. One way or the other way. Good verse bad. In sports, it is my team against your team. The problem with this analogy is that, in sports, when the Eagles beat the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, America still won. When one part of America defeats another part, nobody wins. We become the divided states of America.
We find ourselves looking at the middle as if it is a severe compromise that denigrates our own conceptualization of what is right and wrong, causing us to combat such cognitive dissonance with blind fervor in an effort to retain what’s left of being right, regardless of whether we are right or not. This perception of the middle is a very nihilistic and produces nothing good. We would rather hang on to wrong information than accept that fact that we could be wrong and welcome new correct information. James Baldwin once said,
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.”
So what happened to the middle?
Well, it moved. If you found yourself just slightly to the left of the middle 10 years ago, it is now moved to your left. You are now slightly right of the middle. How did that happen? Each group pulled to the outer realms of their beliefs. The right pulled towards the far right and the left pulled to the far left. The results were that the left pulled stronger. How did that happen? Negative emotions. Studies show that when an emotion is tied to an event, you are far more likely to remember it, especially if it is a negative emotion (Kensinger, 2009). This is because during episodic encoding and retrieval, neurologically encoding negative emotions involves the sensory systems of process and positive emotions involve conceptual processes. So when something good happens, we see it from a conceptual framing, as if it contributes to the overall existential congruence we hoped for. But when something negative happens, it catches all of our senses, particularly sight, feeling, and hearing, which is directly involved in the release of cortisol.
Why is this relevant to the left pulling stronger?
Because the left are typically the ones responsible for suggesting new ideas to replace old broken ones. This is vital to our country’s success. However, this usually involves being emotionally tied to a negative situation where there needs to be a new policy or a changed policy. So they feel strongly about a situation and begin acting on this negative emotion. This activates the sensory system and gets emotions directly involved, which studies show can severely cloud good judgment. That’s where conservatives come in. Conservatives’ job is to address the new suggestions from a more analytical approach. So when the pulling began, the emotional ties to policies were stronger than the conceptual ties to policy. Thus, the left pulled stronger.
Why are feelings bad when making policy?
It has been shown that empathy can cloud judgement beyond the scope of morality or even legality. Studies have shown that juries are more likely to find one guilty based on the emotional display of the victim regardless of facts, laws, or evidence (Prinz, 2011). Studies also show that people are willing to inflict pain on an innocent person if that person is in competition with the person one is empathizing with (Buffone & Poulin, 2014). Lastly, studies show that people are willing to be unfair and unjust to someone if they are in the way of the person we are empathizing with getting the help they need, even if it means someone else, or a group of people all dying as a result of the person you’re empathizing with getting help (Batson et al., 1995). It is a terrible idea to make policy based on emotions.
So how should this work?
The ideal situation goes like this: A liberal sees a flaw in a policy or a lack of a policy and suggest, “This is broken (or missing) and we need to do something about it. I think we should do_(xyz)__!” The conservative says, “Ok, let’s look at history. Has it been done before? Has it worked? What do we think will happen if we implement this policy? How will it affect the overall population?” Then the liberal and the conservative reach a compromise, and a policy is enhanced or created that is better for society as a whole. Emotions drive it, analytics define it, and reason implements it.
Why is this not happening now?
Algorithms. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. The algorithms of social media are designed to only show you more of what you say you like. So the amount of opposing views you now see is minimal, on purpose. If you only see what you like, it only pours gas on the fire of fury you have over perceived atrocities. If we can remember this, we can understand that the real world looks nothing like the online world. Then and only then we may be able to meet in the middle… beneath that ole Georgia pine (please tell me you’ve heard of Diamond Rio!).
Stay Classy GP!
Grainger
References
Buffone, A. E. K., & Poulin, M. J. (2014). Empathy, Target Distress, and Neurohormone Genes Interact to Predict Aggression for Others–Even Without Provocation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(11), 1406; 1406–1422; 1422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214549320
Are bunny rabbits cute? Sure they are. So let’s talk about them. One group of researchers took babies between the ages of 3 months and 7 months old and conducted an experiment. They put on a puppet show with little stuffed bunnies. They were wearing various colored shirts. The primary bunny had a gray shirt on. He was trying to get an item into a box and needed help. Along came a bunny with a blue shirt and helped the gray bunny get the item in the box. Nice thing to do. They did the scenario again, but this time a bunny with an orange shirt came and closed the box so the gray bunny could not get the item in. Not so nice. Afterwards, they presented the blue and orange bunnies to the baby and allowed them to choose which one to pick. Over 80% of the babies chose the blue bunny. They instinctively knew the blue bunny was good and the orange bunny was mean.
Next, they had a yellow bunny and a green bunny involved. First, the baby was to choose a food item, a golden graham or a cheerio. Let’s use the cheerio for this scenario. The baby chose a cheerio. Then the yellow bunny chose a cheerio. Next, the green bunny chose the golden graham saying the cheerio was bad. Again, they presented the bunnies to the baby and over 70% of the babies picked the bunny that chose the same food they selected.
This last experiment is where it gets interesting. They used the bunnies who chose the food items, yellow and green, and conducted the first experiment. For instance, the baby chose the cheerio, and the yellow bunny had also chosen the cheerio. The yellow bunny approached the gray bunny and slammed the box shut so that the gray bunny could not get the item into the box. While the green bunny helped the gray bunny get the item into the box. This produced an internal dilemma for the babies. They liked the good bunny in the first experiment. They liked the bunny that chose the same food they liked. But what happens when the bunny that chose the food they liked is the bad bunny in the next experiment? When presented with the yellow and green bunny in the situation I just presented, the baby still chose the yellow bunny who selected the same food as the baby, even though the yellow bunny had been mean to the gray bunny.
What does this mean? The baby chose what was familiar over what was good. In fact, most babies in this experiment chose what was familiar over what was good. This indicates a natural tendency in humans to choose the familiar over the moral or ethical. The implication for human behavior is that when we encounter adversity in our lives, we quickly return to whatever is familiar. We like, and ultimately choose, whatever is familiar because there is safety in this. We recognize this. It shields us from the unknown. If abuse is familiar, this is what we will return to. We are quicker to return to abuse if we a) don’t know our worth and b) possess too much empathy for our abuser, also known as identification with aggressor (IWA).
Setting the tone for our children to learn and fully understand who they are and their worth is vital to adequate development. They must be taught what their actual value is. If they are not taught by parents, someone else will teach them, and it will likely be wrong. When we believe we have more worth than we actually do, this causes problems, as we overestimate our abilities, as seen in the Dunning-Kruger effect. When we believe that we have less worth than we do, this causes problems in assertiveness, standing up for ourselves, and allowing others to take advantage of us personally and professionally. The solution is simple. Who is God in you? That is the question. If we truly understand that we are nothing without God, but we are everything with Him, this gives us proper perspective. I have accepted this perspective, and subsequently, I do not allow someone to offer me less than what I deserve, but I simultaneously do not believe I am owed more than I deserve either. When you do not understand your worth, you allow things to happen to you that you would never normally allow if a) you knew your actual worth and b) it wasn’t previously familiar.
Another aspect of this conversation is empathy. Too much empathy can be absolutely poisonous. Empathy has a dark side to it that discriminates against anything or anyone not in perfect alignment with the individual you are currently showing empathy for, even in the face of moral or even legal dilemmas. This happens in the context of this subject as women try to show empathy to their abuser, believing there are good parts of them and they choose to focus on those aspects of the person they are in a relationship with. In this case, empathy drives IWA and blinds them to the reality of the boundaries this person has obliterated, in the name of empathetic dysfunction. A pre-covid study was done on this subject. Victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) were surveyed, and it was discovered that over 66% of women had reported to have left and returned to an abusive relationship once and 97% reported to have left and returned multiple times. There are many reasons for this, but the primary reason is not knowing your worth. It is fair to suspect these numbers are even higher post-covid.
This only highlights the need for parents to instill in our children good habits and good interpersonal perspectives. My parents forced me to go to church when I was younger. Then later, when life became very difficult, I returned to what I knew, church. Whatever you instill in them as a child, they will return to when things get tough. My parents made sure that I knew that I could accomplish great things, while understanding my place in the home and in the world, all while putting me in the position to return to healthy practices when life did what life does. Set your children up for success by instilling a balance of knowing who they are and who they are not. This will take care of the self-esteem issue and knowing their worth will help them avoid many obstacles in life.
Was 2024 different from 2023? Better or worse? The answer to that will be drastically different for those who experienced severe tragedy in 2023 or 2024. For those that didn’t, what was different about 2024? And the real question, what are you going to do differently in 2025 to make it better than 2024? The real answer is a very uncomfortable one. We have work to do.
Anytime something is better than before, it goes through an arduous process prior to the improvement of status. When making glass, it goes through extreme heat. For muscles to get bigger, they first tear. If you obtained a degree, license, or certification, you first took some very difficult tests.
There is no workaround. There are no cliff notes for actual progress. There’s no “swipe right” or “door dash me a degree please.” It’s the hard process that makes it real, adds value, makes it better, provides a sense of accomplishment.
What does that mean for you? For most, we could start with opening our minds. If I type, “Liberals are..” and you immediately finish that sentence with something negative, you have work to do. Because my first instinct is to finish the sentence with the word “needed.” I said this on the first page of my book, America’s Greatest Threat: America, “Without both liberals and conservatives, we don’t have a thriving country.” The same can be said on the other side. No “side” is any better than the other. They have work to do.
A recent example of this was the tragedy of the man driving the truck through a New Orleans crowd. Conservatives ran immediately to border policies, which was disrespectful of the deceased, if nothing else. They ran without all the facts. Just like liberals did with the last 5 mass shootings. They just ran headlines to push an agenda without waiting for the facts.
The facts came out that he was an American. Border policies had nothing to do with this. If you can’t see the problem with that, just because they appear to be on your “team”, you have work to do.
This thinking only comes about from limiting our informational intake to resounding echo chambers of negative outrage that captivates our attention and merely stokes previously held beliefs, that on the surface appear to be axiomatic, regardless of whether they are actually right, wrong, good, or bad. There was a paper recently released that showed that most Americans believe that if someone disagrees with them, it was because they did not listen properly. They must not have actually heard them. That is a big problem. They may just disagree because people have varying perspectives. Perspectives that you don’t have. And it is likely that you may benefit from other perspectives. Actually, it isn’t likely, it is a guarantee. We all have work to do.
If 2025 brings us anything, may it bring us the instantiation of diverse conversation, leading to and from diversity of thought, completely irrespective of nonmalleable identity characteristics. May it bring difficult, yet civil, discourse, with a central goal to make the immediate world around us better, often beginning with understanding others better, especially those we don’t align with optimally. May it produce conversations that have a central aim, and may we not be so rigid in our thinking that we can’t see that there may be a better way of thinking than the mode we currently employ.
If you want to see 2025 as being better than 2024, start with reshaping how you view those you don’t often agree with. Jesus did. So can we. Clearly, we have work to do.
Why is polarization so bad? I mean, I like what I like. And what I dislike, I don’t want any part of it. There are people who like pineapple on pizza and there are those who are right. You either hate pineapple on pizza or you’re wrong! There are only two options. So far, polarization sounds pretty good. There is group polarization. This type of polarization is when there is a group of people that consistently reinforce previously held beliefs or opinions. The more the group opinions are discussed, the more extreme they become. To understand the impact, we must break it down a bit. Binary thinking and beneficial opposition are two good places to start.
Binary thinking is the process of thinking in terms of two. It is either this way or that way. There are no other ways. This has roots as old as time. But as it pertains to the U.S., we can go to the Revolutionary War. It is us, the new British, against them, the old British. It is the unrepresented against the negligent representatives. It is the oppressed against the oppressor. Karl Marx capitalized (ironic word to use here) on this weakness of the mind when he wrote the Communist Manifesto. He highlighted the oppressor (Bourgeois) and the oppressed (proletariat). Marx realized that if he could accomplish the task of everyone thinking in terms of two, then get the two at total odds with each other, this would open the door for someone to come in and “save the day.” This is how you take control of a group or country. As a result, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao attempted just that. Even Hitler knew to get people within Germany at odds with themselves. He also set out to divide the country into groups so that they fought with each other, allowing him to do whatever he pleased because they were so preoccupied with the fight at hand.
So what does binary thinking have to do with polarization? When we are in a binary mode of thinking, one against the other, it turns the argument into being polarized one way or the other. If we could get our thinking out of binary and into multivariate thinking, it would begin to eliminate polarization because there are many different ways of viewing something or someone. For instance, politics is the easiest mechanism to use for this conversation. People often think we are either republicans or democrats. But what if we’re neither? We feel ostracized. What if I believe in liberal ideals in some areas and conservative ideals in other areas? What if there aren’t only two ways of viewing a problem or a solution? If we open our eyes, we will see that there are many reasons why someone would want the government out of their business. There are many different ways to view a problem and even more ways to view a solution. If you limit your thinking to bi-directional, you miss out on so many other vantage points that are very plausible.
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Another part of the problem with this polarized way of thinking is that it only stokes existing fires and begins to remove anything beneficial to you coming from such sources. For example, you believe orange man is bad for our country. So everything you will see on social media and everyone you talk to will echo this sentiment. You will never be able to digest him doing anything good, if indeed he does something good. Polarization exacerbates negative emotion… “Get your pitchforks and your torches!” they said, when they were running to lynch Shrek. They knew only what they had been told by their echo chambers and never heard another perspective that may challenge theirs. As the story goes, we learn that Shrek was actually a very kind gentleman.
Beneficial opposition is maybe the most interesting concept, and yet a quite simple one also. Opposition, in the way I’m using it here, can be explained in terms of working out. When you lift weights, you cause opposition, or resistance. You tear the muscle to make it heal stronger. You put force against it so that in the final analysis, it benefits the muscle. We require beneficial opposition to keep us calibrated in life.
Another interesting version of beneficial opposition is marriage. In the Bible, God says that it isn’t good for Adam to be alone and that He is creating a “helpmate” for Adam. That term helpmate is made of two Hebrew words, ezer and kenegdo. The term ezer means to rescue, save, to be strong. Kenegdo means to oppose, compliment, counter. This term is used 21 times in the bible; 3 for military, 2 for women, and the other 16 times it was the term used to describe God as a stabilizing helper. This is how important women are to society and to us. So God said (paraphrased), “I’m going to give you someone who will help you on one hand, and oppose and counter you on the other.” This is a principle that is used in neurophysiology when they want to stabilize something. Applying opposing force to something causes it to become more steady, less shaky, and more capable of direct linear movement. If you have recently changed a car battery, there is usually a block that is bolted down that helps stabilize the battery so that it doesn’t move around and cause harm to the engine. That is a beneficially stabilizing force. So God Himself knew that we needed beneficial opposition and created just that for us. In common vernacular, God gave us someone to keep us in check, because as men, we need it!
Back to polarization. If we now know that we need multiple viewpoints to avoid binary thinking that leads to inevitable polarization, the only way this is possible is through beneficial opposition, hearing something we haven’t heard before. We must open our ears to viewpoints we don’t typically share in order to hear a perspective we haven’t thought of. The problem is that listening to viewpoints that may conflict with our previously held presuppositions causes internal conflict. This internal conflict is uncomfortable. We are presented with an idea that, if accepted by us, means we have been wrong the whole time about the previously held idea. And this goes against our very nature to seek proper understanding. Now we’re faced with the possibility of being wrong, which could cause us to second-guess everything else in our lives. What all have I been wrong about if I was wrong about that? For some, this causes them to rethink their entire existence, which is detrimental to their health. Hopefully, at some point, we get more and more comfortable being wrong about something in order to become more knowledgeable and closer to the ultimate aspiration in proper understanding. It’s ok to be wrong. Let the old idea go. Accept the new idea and let it propel you forward.
The way to avoid polarization is to open your mind to multiple ideas and be willing to hear opposition to a previously held idea with the possibility that you were already correct or maybe you were not and now that you have accepted this new idea, you are now correct in your thinking on that subject. It’s possible. Having said all that, don’t expect me to start putting pineapple on my pizza. I have to draw the line somewhere.
The founders were on to something when they left England. They left a situation where they knew it was wrong and couldn’t last. They left a monarchy. They had already seen what a pure democracy did. The mob rules. Two wolves and a sheep decide what’s for dinner. Every night. So pure democracy didn’t work. Monarchy didn’t work either. The rulers corrupted the church and caused an alliance between church and state so powerful that no one could stand against it. This is the reason they sought to keep it separate. To put a check on the government, the church, and ensure freedom to worship without such corruption looking over their heads. If you can’t tell me how to worship, then you can’t tell me to worship or not to worship.
This leaves them with brainstorming possible solutions. Fortunately, they eventually came to the correct solution. A republic: a representative democracy. Alexander Hamilton stated, “But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”
Ronald Reagan said it best…
However, this can only come about if it truly represents the people. And the way this was ensured was to document that those governing only do so by the sovereignty of the consent of the governed. Meaning, the people being governed are those who chose the government. Those who make rules, enforce rules, and execute rules, only do so with the consent of the governed. This is what it means to be in a representative democracy. When people far away from the meeting itself needed to be at the meetings, they would send a representative to speak on their behalf. Whose behalf? The governed, who gave consent.
This representation keeps both the government and the governed in check. The first check in the constitution was consent. This checked the government. The second check in the constitution was the sovereign being excluded from government. That’s a check on the governed- us. In this manner, neither can have too much power. See, Athens didn’t last nearly as long as Sparta for one main reason, Sparta had divisions of the government and Athens did not. In Athens, the government was the governed and it was all ran by the people entirely.
Ok, enough with the history lesson. What does this have to do with the presidential candidates? Glad you asked. If you were to poll Americans, the overwhelming majority would say that Trump and Harris are NOT the best two options we have for president in this country. Most conservatives and liberals would rather someone less divisive. Someone that will unite the country. But that is definitely not what we have.
What we currently have in our country are two people running for president that the majority of the “governed” did not “consent” to. This is a massive problem. Politicians have routinely been accused of lying. Why? Because they say they are going to represent us in order to get our vote, then once elected, they do the opposite, which is always what they intended on doing anyway. It is rare to see a politician truly vote and lobby on behalf of the people that elected him or her. Recently, there was a group of politicians that got together to discuss the future of the area they served, and one stood up and said, “You expect us to listen to these people that don’t know as much as we do and just do what they want?” To which the speaker said, “Yes. That’s exactly what a representative democracy is.” This happened this year, 2024. Someone had to be reminded publicly that they represent people. They didn’t just get elected to do whatever they wanted. They got elected to represent us. That’s tragic.
If we don’t begin holding the “government” accountable to the “consent of the governed”, the government will only get bigger and bigger until it’s too big and we no longer have a republic, but rather an oligarchy or aristocracy. While an aristocracy is labeled as the better of the two because of a lack of corruption, neither are good, because they do not keep each other in check. As it stands, we have two candidates that were not chosen by the “governed”, but by financial elites that believe they know better than the entire country. The “governed” must get louder, or they will be silenced.
Here is a fair question. How is that we have both a massive rise in mental health cases like never seen before and more mental health professionals than ever before? If we have more mental health professionals than ever before, then we should have fewer cases of mental health issues. That’s the logical assumption. But that’s not what’s happening. We have both an increase in mental health cases and more mental health professionals than ever before.
So how did we get here? To answer this question, we must look at the differences in the overall value structure in societies before the mental health crisis explosion and after. Because what we value is what we will espouse, pursue, and emit into the world. Our values point us towards an end goal, whether we realize what that goal is and regardless of whether it is a positive and uplifting goal or a negative and destructive one.
The value and belief system of yesteryear is one of simplicity. Boys and girls grow up in school together, use different bathrooms, understand that their issues are different, and respect and appreciate the inequality of boys and girls. The values and beliefs of the past espouse the notion that where I lack, my neighbor will fill in the gap until I can stand again on my own. The community raises our children. If there was a problem with a teacher, we were instructed that we were the problem (if indeed we were, and we were most of the time). We all play a part and live closely by the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In the midst of this, if someone in our community was out of line, we stepped in to help right the wrong. If it hurt your feelings, so be it. You were better for it afterwards. Men could accomplish things that their wives couldn’t. And likewise, women could accomplish things their husbands couldn’t. And that was ok.
The values have shifted. Now, boys can go into girls’ bathrooms. Girls can join the “boy” scouts. Read that again. Now girls believe they can do anything a boy can do causing boys to react citing they can do anything a girl can do, neither of which is correct. Today’s values say take care of yourself because you can trust no one. Today’s belief system says that you can’t say anything to my children or there will be consequences. If there is a problem with a teacher, it has to be the teacher’s fault. Today’s golden rule is “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Wives believe they can do absolutely everything their husband can do, allowing for no individualism, cooperation, negotiation, and contribution by both parties. As a result, this goal of “equality” emasculates their husband and leaves him feeling useless and worthless, which contributes to divorce. Men and women simply are not equal and appreciating that and utilizing one’s strengths where their partner is weak, and vice-versa, makes a relationship thrive long term. There is so much science that proves this.
Today we are so afraid of hurting anyone’s feelings that are willing to allow a total falsehood to control the narrative of human existence. We will deny thousands of years of objective science, thousands of years of learning and figuring out which way is the best way, and thousands of years of believing that we are not the highest being in the universe so that one person won’t have their feelings hurt.
How did we get here? We removed objective truthfrom our society. When I throw a ball in the air, it will come down. If a fetus has XY chromosomes, it will be male. Subjective versus objective can be explained this way: Merle Haggard is a great singer. That is a subjective truth. I believe that but my wife doesn’t. Merle Haggard has won multiple Grammy awards. That is objective. Regardless of how my wife feels about that, it is a verifiable, objective truth.
Some objective truths that we have let slip away include differences in sexes, appreciating the two genders, the family system is the best unit on earth for sustaining a society, the best possible environment for a child to be raised is in a low-conflict home with two biological parents, and the fact that religiosity balances, sustains, and causes any society to flourish. It promotes well-being, community, helping those in need, and unselfishness.
But we are so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that we ignore these facts and tell outright lies. By “we”, I mostly mean mental health professionals. Although “we” as parents and societal members can also be included. And by outright lies, I mean telling society that a child being raised in a single-mother home is the same as being raised by two parents. My children don’t get to be in this category. I am divorced and remarried. That hurts my feelings. But it is a fact, regardless of how I feel about it. Or that males should be allowed to compete in female’s sports because we don’t want to hurt their feelings of being confused and qualifying for a mental health disorder, according to the DSM-V manual. This is where feelings override solid facts that point you towards healthier living. Healthier living requires that we die to one belief in order to make room for another. That requires that we hear something uncomfortable and are forced to acknowledge it and evaluate it for validity.
Regarding religiosity, when you believe you are the highest order of being in your universe, you are aware of your humanity, aware of the mistakes that you can and have made, and this frightens you. Therefore, you are either frozen in fear and refuse to take risks, or you are completely nihilistic about it and take far too many risks. Neither are good. When you believe in a higher power (God), you understand that you make mistakes but follow the One who doesn’t. You are willing to take risks, but not catastrophic risks. You understand that you have an ultimate goal to reach for, thereby making you better each day than you were the day before. You acknowledge your shortcomings, but chase the perfect One, which only makes you better, which makes your family better, which makes your community better, and so on.
We MUST return to a belief in an objective truth. Facts. Facts that say that discipline reroutes a child to success from where they were otherwise headed. Gentle parenting does not work. Facts that include teaching children that they are not the most important person in the universe and the world isn’t about them. It’s about others. Children are growing up believing they are so important that when they find out that they really aren’t, it is causing a mental health breakdown. These are measurable, scientific facts. There is an argument for and against objective morality. You can read that HERE.
Once we return to facts, even if it hurts someone’s feelings, objective truth, belief in something higher (God), we will begin to see the mental health crisis start to subside. Until then, we still have more mental health cases and more mental health professionals than ever before, which makes no logical sense. Bring logical sense back.
We have all heard people say, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I will be with them” (Matthew 18:20). We have all most likely said it in our lifetime. “Father, I know you’re here because you said where two or three are gathered…” Having said that, I have rarely, if ever, heard this verse quoted in its correct context. I have been guilty of misquoting it myself. I think we all have. But learning to read the Bible in context helped me with many things I was struggling to understand. Think about it, if it takes two or three, does this mean God isn’t there until then? So when I’m by myself, God doesn’t show up? I can easily find verses that say He is there when I’m by myself. So that would be contradictory.
This verse is mostly used to imply that when two or three people are gathered, you now get to enjoy the presence of God. It is also used to justify “forsaking the assembly, as so many are in the habit of doing.” Yes, they justify not being part of a local church with this verse, taken completely out of context. In order to get the true context, we must read Matthew chapter 18, verses 15-20.
First, these verses have absolutely nothing to do with the church. He does use the word Ekklesia, but He is not referring to the “two or three” people mentioned later. The church was only mentioned as a way of handling conflict. So “two or three” is not referring to a local church or a church gathering of any type.
Next, it is not referring to the presence of God. The presence of God is ever-present, according to Psalm 46:1. So you don’t need two or three in order for God to be present. He is omnipresent, according to Psalm 139:7.
This leaves us with what Jesus is actually talking about. He is referring to conflict and discipline. It is a very practical matter for a practical people. His audience was most likely people who understood the Torah, because he was referring to it. Jesus says that if someone sins or falls, we are to go to them and point it out to them. Now wait, I thought we were to never judge? Another misconception. We are only to never judge non-believers. But other fellow believers, we are certainly to judge each other, according to this verse and many others.
Jesus then continues and says that if they won’t listen, take one or two others along so that every word that is said is said in the presence of witnesses. This was very practical and not new to the listeners. Again, Jesus was quoting the Torah. The passage is from Deuteronomy 19:15. This was the law handed down by Moses. It was put in place to prevent someone from being prosecuted by one person. It would be unfair and unjust for one person to hand down judgment. So they put this practice in place to prevent an unjust prosecution from happening and Jesus was echoing this law. Jesus then says that if they still won’t listen, take them to the Ekklesia (derived from two words meaning called and out of, the gathered people of God- the church) and if they still refuse, treat them as a tax collector (or someone who just does not know God).
One thing to keep in mind in all of this, treating someone as if they do not know God means, according to Jesus’ other teachings, that we are to love them, accept them where they are, teach them through our example of living, but not allow them to be in leadership positions. That’s how non-believers were to be treated. They are to be taught and loved but not to teach in the church. This is important because recently, someone took to social media to chastise a church for not letting them be in a leadership position because they were knowingly living in a life of consistent sin and not letting the very verses we are discussing play out. She was told of her sin. She has chosen to deny that she is living in such sin. The Bible then teaches that we are to treat them as thought they do not know God. They can no longer be in a position of leadership or authority. When this church did exactly what the Bible teaches, she took offense. And many came to her defense. The real problem was that she was already in this place of leadership and they recently decided to remove her. And for that, this church was wrong.
So after Jesus says all of this about pointing out sin, taking it to them, then with two or three witnesses, per the Torah, then to the Ekklesia, then treated as a tax collector, Jesus then says that “whatever they agree on and ask for, It will be done for them”, meaning that the conflict at hand has been resolved. He then says, “Where two or three gather in my name, I am with them.” The two or three Jesus is speaking of are the witnesses to the conflict and discipline. Jesus is basically saying, “Follow the Torah. This law is good. Once you have followed what God has commanded, I will be there to deal with the consequences, whether positive (“they agree on”) or negative (“They still won’t listen”).
Now that we know the context of this, it makes sense with the description of the church in Acts 2, Ephesians 4, Hebrews 10, and Hebrews 13. It also makes sense with the verses in Psalm 46 and Psalm 139. It all fits. But only in context. And it teaches a good lesson on how to deal with conflict and discipline with love.
So next time someone says, “Where two or three are gathered…”, you can respond by asking what they witnessed. Stay informed. Read the bible in context. Taking scripture out of context only hurts us and those around us. In context, it displays truth, and the “Truth shall set you free.”
Upon choosing to enter college and earn a degree, I was aware that I would hear and see things that were being portrayed as true that were verifiably false. I knew I would have to simply keep quiet about factual evidence that debunked what was being taught in these classes in order to get a good grade. And as you can imagine, I was not disappointed. At the same time, there were some bright spots along the way. After all, I was attending a central conservative and central liberal school. It was not very radical on either side of political ideology. But then there is the sociology department. This paper documents this journey in the best way I can.
One thing I am noticing in sociology is that the overall view is to see what is happening in society and just react to it without any sort of aim at the best possible good. There quickly becomes a fear of hurting someone’s feelings if they suggest they should aim at the best possible way to go about life. Based on research, it is best to get married prior to cohabitation. The best possible environment for a child is to grow up with both of their biological parents. It is best for parents to get married before having children. This is all backed by science. But sociology says, “Well they are doing it, so let’s show how it is best now where it was not best in the past. Times have changed. Now marriage is outdated. Now family is overrated.” ALL WRONG! This paper primarily covers the topics of marriage, cohabitation, children, gender, and government. Each point throughout this paper is refuted with research.
Marriage
I had a few classes specifically on marriage and one overall theme was that marriage was outdated, overrated, and in some cases, needless. This was what they were teaching in every single “marriage” class I took. This would be in “Marriage and Family”, “Sociology of Families”, “Child Development”, among others. The question you must ask yourself as you read this is why. Why would one want to destroy the marriage institution? I will let you answer that as you read.
One of the first outright lies told was concerning education status and earning status among heterosexual couples. Keep in mind that there was no textbook, only articles plucked from various journals by the instructor. Here is a text from one such article: One of the dire predictions about educated women is true: today, more of them are ‘marrying down.’ Almost 30 percent of wives today have more education than their husbands, while less than 20 percent of husbands have more education than their wives, almost the exact reverse of the percentages in 1970. But there is not a shred of evidence that such marriages are any less satisfying than marriages in which men have equal or higher education than their wives. Indeed, they have many benefits for women.”LIE. There is a mountain of evidence that this presents an increase in the likelihood of divorce.
Research
One such piece of evidence was in a paper written by Alexandra Killewald for the American Sociological Review (2016). In this study, Killewald looked at data from different-sex couples ranging from age 18 to 55 years old from 1968 to 2013. What she concluded in her research was that couples where the husband worked part time or not at all were at a higher risk for divorce than couples where the husband worked full time. What was slightly more interesting than that was that whether wives worked full time, part time, or not at all had absolutely no effect on the risk of divorce, only the husbands (Killewald, 2016).
I pose two possible reasons for this. First, women do enjoy being provided for and protected. They value safety and predictability more than men. This is a verifiable biological fact. So, when the husband is earning a part time salary or not earning at all, it becomes very unattractive to the wives and the romance fades in concurrence with the time the husband is not earning a sustainable wage for the family. Another possible reason for this finding is that men are genetically wired to produce. When we are productive, it releases the proper neurochemicals in our brain. We get a release of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, as well as a healthy dose of testosterone that gets released into our system. When this is not happening, it contributes to a decline in mental health and brings on symptoms of depression. This depression can easily lead to divorce. Wives do not need any of that. They are just fine working, not working, working some of the time. It does not matter to them. Women want to be loved and men want to be respected. This plays out in our productivity and our educational status is the driving factor behind our productivity, in most cases. Therefore, there is evidence that relationships suffer when men are less educated and less employed than their wife. The solution there is to make sure the husband is employed full-time, regardless of what the wife decides to do.
Along the lines of dating/marriage, the issue of a truly egalitarian relationship was brought up. One question was posed: “How does this research shed light on why, after marriage, many women married to men find that their partnership is less egalitarian than they intended?” To which the answer was, “This research suggested that women feel the marriage is less egalitarian as a result of the dating process being unequal.” Unfortunately, this is also a total lie. When social inferences are completely removed (the literal definition of egalitarianism), all that is left is biology and research on this biology proves that women still prefer masculine men to protect them and provide for them. Many want to provide for themselves also but prefer a chivalrous and masculine man. This is laid out in many different research articles in reproductive biology.
Then there was a discussion about marriage being a luxury and that being the reason more and more couples do not marry. It was too expensive. I responded by saying that I was not sure where that notion came from because it costs little to get a license and very little to get a ring. The teacher’s response… Marriage is not a wedding. A wedding can be expensive or not, but the luxury idea is not about that event. Marriage is a social institution where couples involve the state in their personal lives because to be legally married you have to go to your local county to get a license. So the idea of marriage as a luxury is referring to the linking of financial stability and success with decisions to marry. The larger idea with marriage being a “luxury” refers to the pattern where people with education and financial stability are marrying later, staying married, and not having babies outside marriage.
Predictably, she had no real refutation and dodged the pure fact that there is no real financial difference. She kept linking bad decisions to get married too early, people that choose to get an education after high school and get married and have children later in life once they are more financially stable. These are all individual circumstances that have no bearing on the ability to get married, if a couple chooses to. It is not expensive at all. She completely dodged the fact that there is no real reason to not get married except that you do not want the commitment. You want to “try the other person out.” But if it were reduced to this, it would destroy the Marxist narrative the universities are pushing. The destruction of marriage is clearly one of the narratives.
Cohabitation
One of the ways we know this is a narrative is the overall push to promote cohabitation. Again, ask yourself why would someone promote cohabitation over marriage? Read on and answer it yourself. The first thing to note about cohabitation is the trends on premarital sex. This was plucked from an article for us to read: Contrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, research shows that almost all individuals of both sexes have intercourse before marrying, and the proportion has been roughly similar for the past 40 years. Thus, premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans and has been for decades. Abstinence-only sex education is problematic in light of these trends. So, the solution to premarital sex, which clearly causes problems with unwanted pregnancies, children growing up in poverty, and an increase in substance abuse among those parents, is to just eliminate the idea of teaching abstinence altogether. Got it. Am I the only one that thinks this is nihilistic and asinine?
In this next text, the writer lays out facts, decides to disagree with the facts and begins to lay out opinions rooted in individual disbelief of the facts he just proposed. It is quite remarkable the way the writer does a 180 and then contradicts himself in the same piece. Check this out:
These trends are troubling to some because nearly a dozen studies from the 1970s into the early 2000s showed that men and women who lived together before marriage were far more likely to divorce than couples who moved directly from dating to marriage. In fact, on average, researchers found that couples who cohabitated before marriage had a 33 percent higher chance of divorcing than couples who moved in together after the wedding ceremony. In light of those findings, some commentators have argued that reducing the stigma attached to living together outside marriage has been a mistake, leading many young couples to make decisions that put their future marriage at risk. This is called the normalization hypothesis. More on that later.
Here in the next sentence, he just disagrees with years and years of research. It turns out that cohabitation doesn’t cause divorce and probably never did.What leads to divorce is when people move in with someone – with or without a marriage license – before they have the maturity and experience to choose compatible partners and to conduct themselves in ways that can sustain a long-term relationship. Early entry into marriage or cohabitation, especially prior to age 23, is the critical risk factor for divorce. No one is questioning the various reasons why cohabitating prior to marriage increases your risk for divorce by 33%, we are just stating a fact that it does. But again, we cannot just have facts. We have to explain them away so feelings will not get hurt.
Lots of people keep asking, “Does living together before marriage increase your chance of getting a divorce?” In my recently published study, I finally answer this question with a definitive, No! So, again, we have facts followed by a statement of someone’s feelings and an opinion. No facts to refute other facts. Keep in mind that the above statement was written in 2016. Below, you will see research from 2019 directly contradicting this. But first, more text.
With the majority of couples now living together before marriage, if cohabitation somehow caused couples to divorce, you would think that divorce would be more common in recent generations of young adults, who were much more likely to live together before marriage compared to earlier generations. But recent research has found that for young adults born in 1980 or later, divorce rates have been steady or even declining compared to earlier generations. This genius stated something that has an obvious reason… it is because they never got married. That was not hard to deduct. It is hard to get divorced if you never get married. But the blatant dishonesty of his approach was fascinating.
My study found that the rest of the connection between divorce and cohabitation can be explained by one thing that previous researchers never took into account: the age at which couples moved in together. Cohabitors moved in together at earlier ages (on average) than couples that didn’t live together before marriage, and since living together at younger ages is associated with higher divorce rates, cohabitors are more likely to divorce. WAIT! You said they are not more likely to divorce. Now you are saying they are! Which is it?!? This writer has already contradicted himself in the same article. Amazing.
Research
So should you live together before marriage? Should you get married at all? That’s up to you! But living together won’t increase your chances of getting a divorce if you choose to go that route. Again, total lie. Here are the facts. One study (of many studies on this subject) came out in 2019 by researchers at Stanford University and was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Rosenfeld & Roesler, 2019). In this study, they looked at data for different-sex couples from 1988 to 2015 between the ages of 15 and 44 years. They specifically looked at the possibility of efficacy in the normalization hypothesis. The normalization hypothesis argues that as the negativity around cohabitating couples is reduced, the risk for divorce among couples who cohabitated before marriage should also decrease. The researchers in this study found no evidence for this hypothesis (Rosenfeld & Roesler, 2019). What they found was that couples who cohabitated before marriage had a higher relationship satisfaction rating during their first year. However, every year after the first year, the rating steadily declined and usually bottomed out during the fifth year of marriage. Divorces usually happened just after this fifth year, thereby showing the increase of risk for divorce among those who cohabitated before marriage.
While having kids “out of wedlock” used to be a serious taboo, today, 74 percent of people say it’s okay to have children while you’re cohabiting. “There is no negative norm against it, it’s accepted,” said Wendy Manning, the director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University. “My question isn’t ‘Why have children as an unmarried, cohabiting couple?,’ but ‘Why not?’” “Shotgun weddings,” Manning told me, are quickly being replaced by “shotgun cohabitations”—in response to an unintended pregnancy, a couple is three times more likely to move in together than get married. So according to that, as long as I can attain it and society does not think bad of me, then it MUST be a good thing. Really? That’s the conclusion we have come to in academia?!
In the same class, but a different article, this text came up: “Cohabiting unions, however well-intentioned, are still far less stable than marriages. (So they admit it!) They lack what Kuperberg calls the “external barriers”—legal fees, formal paperwork, court processes—that stand between marriage and divorce. Compared to kids born into marriage, kids born to cohabiting parents are less likely to continue to live with both parents as they grow up. It’s clear that American families are changing, at least somewhat. Then again, maybe families with cohabiting parents aren’t all that different. “This (cohabitating parents) is the two-biological-parent family that everyone has been talking about forever,” Manning said. In many ways, she told me, it’s the familial “gold standard.” It just might take some time for everyone to see it that way.”
Once again, we are faced with facts followed by feelings that appear to supersede the facts as morally superior. Those pesky facts. Facts that show us that couples who cohabitate before marriage are at a higher risk for divorce than couples who go from dating to marriage. Facts that show us that a child raised in a low-conflict home with their two biological parents is the best possible environment for a child to be raised. This leads us to university’s approach to children.
Children
Another clear agenda of universities is the push to not have children at all. Here we go again. Ask yourself why would a university push their students to not have children? Every family class I took taught me that having children only posed a burden and caused me more problems than children were worth. They taught that if I was to have children, I should wait until I was in my late thirties or early forties, but really shouldn’t have them at all.
There was a document given to us to read for various assignments. It was called “Childfree Adults.” The document pushed for the idea of being child free as a morally superior thing. People interviewed in the text we were required to read said they were making sound decisions, unlike those that chose to bring a child into a crazy world. Another said they saw how much pollution children caused and knew they were better than that. Another said that population control was at the core of their beliefs.POPULATION CONTROL! There is not anything more nihilistic, Marxist, or tyrannical than population control. Ask China.
One question on a quiz was: According to the reading “Childless or Childfree”, non-parent couples are more likely to: a) Hold less traditional beliefs about gender, b) be less religious, c) be more highly educated, d) Work in professional and managerial occupations. The correct answer was D. So, they attacked parents as having traditional beliefs about gender, being religious (as though it is a bad thing), and being less educated. So here they are clearly pushing for not having children. But it gets worse. They spit out blatant lies in order to make everyone feel good about themselves.
Here is an excerpt from another text we were required to read and comprehend: Donald Trump stated children born during slavery were more likely to be raised by a mother and father in a two-parent home than children are today. This is a verifiable fact. But let’s continue. On the campaign trail in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump described a nightmarish world for black Americans, rife with poverty, homelessness and crime, and asked for their votes by saying, “What do you have to lose?” Outrageous, yes, but not surprising. If your impression of black families comes mostly from what you see in the news — and not just Fox News — then you might think black families have it worse today than when they were enslaved. Yet another indication of a specific political ideological agenda. They could have mentioned any one of 30 media outlets, they chose Fox News. I am not a fan of Fox News either. But I hide it better than they do. There were many references to Fox being full of evil lies and CNN and MSNBC being the only place you can get truth. They consistently denounced any publication that leaned conservative in any way with total opinion, leading these teenagers to learn WHAT to think, rather than HOW. They were steered away from anything that the instructor did not agree with personally.
Research
Here’s another excerpt: “The multigenerational or two-parent family is not necessarily an improvement over single motherhood. This is a total lie. Studies have shown that children living with both biological parents are 20% to 35% more physically healthy than children from broken homes (Gillespie Shields, 2016). Following divorce, children are 50% more likely to develop health problems. A child raised in a married family can reduce the child’s probability of living in poverty by 82%. Studies show that kids who grow up in two parent homes have higher high school and college graduation rates as well as a higher likelihood of sustaining long term employment. Studies have also shown that growing up in a two-parent household is influential on reducing out of wedlock births (Gillespie Shields, 2016). Out of wedlock births are important because one study conducted by the Brookings Institution showed that in order for one to move from lower class to middle class and succeed, they needed to do three things: finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have kids within marriage (Haskins, 2013).
It continues, A true commitment to strong families and healthy children begins with a focus on the debilitating effects of poverty in the black community. This was said right after quoting single-motherhood stats and their negative effects on children. It continues, Living in a two-parent family does not safeguard children against poverty. True commitment to families requires critical analysis of the structural forces at work and gendered racism. Heterosexist, racist, and sexist agendas of getting black women married or molding black families to fit a two-parent ideal that rarely exists is not a solution for empowering families. So let me get this straight. Attempting to “mold” (black <not sure why that matters>) families into a two-parent ideal is not a solution for the issues that face all families, including black families? Well, I am all ears as to what might be the solution. Unfortunately, they offered no solution. Just that this was not a solution. The reason they could not offer a solution is because this is a solution. A standard to look to. A goal to reach. The problem is that they do not want to offend anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings if they did not grow up in that type of family structure. Unfortunately, this does not change the fact that the ideal family structure for a child to be raised in is the low-conflict two biological parent home. More on that.
Research
There are many studies that clearly show that the ideal environment for children to be raised is in a two-parent household. One study went a few steps further than that. Researchers at Ohio State University did such research that was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Sun & Li, 2011). In this study, they looked at disrupted single parent, disrupted two parent, disrupted stepparent, non-disrupted single parent, non-disrupted two parent, and non-disrupted stepparent families. When looking at children’s academic achievement, they found that children raised in non-disrupted stepparent homes performed better than non-disrupted single parent homes. They found that children raised in non-disrupted two biological parent homes performed better than those from non-disrupted single parent homes. And subsequently found that children raised in non-disrupted two biological parent homes outperformed all disrupted household types (Sun & Li, 2011). Therefore, it is statistically proven that the best possible environment for a child to be raised is in a non-disrupted two biological parent home. This is the goal to attain. The standard to measure society against. And yet another study came to the same conclusion. In this study, they showed measurements of higher emotional and behavior problems as well as chronic disease and overall physical issues among those in single parent homes as compared to two-parent homes (Rattay et al., 2014).
Another factor under the raising of children was whether a child was better off being raised by same-sex parents or nuclear parents. Here was one such text: Despite the above evidence that same-sex couples may be functioning better than heterosexual couples in terms of closeness and equality within the relationship… You NEVER put “evidence” in the same sentence with “may.” If it is evidence, there is no “may.” There is or there is not, by proof of evidence. Otherwise it is subjective, which is not evidential. This is the ongoing problem, a refusal to find an objective truth or reality. I found that while interacting with students, they had a very difficult time nailing down an objective truth, and objective morality, or a standard that was definitive. Everything was “up for debate.” And while I agree, like Socrates, that things should be questioned over and over again, there are some things that are certain and not up for debate. I will show you one such interaction in the next section.
But for now, here is another gem of a text that we were required to read: research on adolescents reared since birth by lesbian mothers found that youth with male role models were similar in psychological adjustment to adolescents without male role models. This is a total lie. My statement is backed by mountains of research.
Research
In one particular study, one significant finding was that youth living in fatherless homes have the highest levels of incarceration rates. However, for youths in homes where only the father is present, there was no difference in the rate of incarceration than that of youth living in two parent homes (Harper & McLanahan, 2004). Another study found that early on, not only is the absence of a father a clear predictor of an increased level of violent behavior, the presence of a father early on is a clear indicator of lowered levels of likelihood of violent behavior (Mackey & Buttram, 2012). This study was able to locate not only a cause of increasing the likelihood of violent behavior but also a cause of lowering the likelihood of violent behavior. I did an entire paper on the connection between juvenile delinquency and fatherless homes. And the results were staggering, repetitive, and easy to see in everyday life. Another study came to the conclusion that the only scientifically proven conclusion that has been reached on raising children is that children who are raised by their two biological parents are given the best possible opportunity to achieve the healthiest developmental outcomes (Finn, 2013). This does not state a guarantee of sorts, just that they have the highest chance for the healthiest developmental outcomes. They also concluded that there is zero evidence supporting the claim that there is no difference in the developmental outcomes of children from same-sex parents or two biological parents (Finn, 2013).
Here is another required text: With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father…” -James Dobson. This statement is empirically true. Yet the text says next, “although this kind of claim has been extensively repeated in the media by anti-gay groups, there has not been a shred of credible social science evidence that children raised by heterosexual mothers and fathers do better on any measure of well-being than children raised by lesbian or gay parents.” Nope. Wrong.
Research
One particular study showed that children from same-sex parents showed significantly lower psychosocial well-being than children not from same-sex parents (Potter & Potter, 2017). The results were less significant when comparing children from same-sex parents to children from single parent homes, but this only reiterates the fact that a biological two parent, low-conflict home is the ideal environment to strive for when raising a child.
The next article was literally titled, “Atlantic case against marriage.” I thought maybe by the title, it was an archived writing by Karl Marx. But no, it is recent. It stated, Regardless of this pruning of the tree of care, one of the main arguments in favor of marriage is that it’s still the best environment for raising children. If stability is what matters for kids, then stability, not marriage, should be the primary goal. The text was proposing the idea that marriage is not what we should strive for but rather stability. As we have seen, if stability is the goal, then the most stable environment is the nuclear family. But this may offend someone. So we withhold the hard truth for the easy lie. Professors are saying all the right buzzwords these days, like “critical thinking.” But telling them that children from single parents are just as well off as children from two biological parents is insanely irresponsible.
One name I was forced to read over and over again was Stephanie Coontz. One document stated: Stephanie Coontz has been among the most stalwart of marriage “progressives.” A historian whose name can be found in the Rolodex of countless reporters, she is the founder of the Council on Contemporary Families, which describes itself as a “humane and sensitive” alternative to family-values traditionalism. For years Coontz has argued: (1) that the traditional nuclear family is often an oppressive arrangement, especially for women; (2) that the decline of such families, along with the increasing acceptance of divorce, out-of-wedlock child-rearing, cohabitation, and gay unions, has been a liberating force and deserves public support; and (3) that traditionalists who fight these trends are suffering from an illusion, since the family model they prize was a short-lived artifact of the 1950’s. The nuclear family is oppressive, out of wedlock children should increase, and anyone who disagrees is archaic. Wow. All of this in direct contrast to clear research. Yet, this is exactly what they are delivering to 18-year-olds. At 18, I might have fallen for this nonsense. I learned quickly that this individual had a very Marxist and Nihilistic view of the world.
Gender
The subject of gender is both the utmost in fundamental objectivity and yet also the most misunderstood, primarily by people who refuse to find an objective truth and morality. The most common phrase I heard surrounding gender while in college was “Gender is a social construct.” This is an oversimplification, to put it mildly. Again, ask yourself why are universities ignoring biology? One statement made in one class was What we think of as appropriate behavior or characteristics of men and women are NOT natural but socially created. Again, this is false. But this was reiterated in every sociology class I took, particularly the classes on family.
There are portions of gender that are socially constructed. Men in ancient times wore skirts. Hair length for both men and women have changed over time to fit the current social climate. But to say that gender is a social construct is to leave out the rest of what gender is. Gender is an expression of an existing biological sex. It begins with XX or XY, then moves into interests. And interests, as you are about to see, are biological.
Research
The idea of interests being totally socially constructed has been proven false over and over again. One sexologist stated that what is determined as masculine or feminine is mostly culturally defined and therefore socially constructed (Soh, 2020). However, whether a person has tendencies towards the masculine or feminine is not. It is biological. Soh (2020) also covered the research led by James Damore noting that the differences in genders are driven by levels of exposure to prenatal testosterone. Damore found that this led women to mostly choose people-oriented jobs and men to choose thing-oriented jobs (Soh, 2020). You will see that theme again in a moment. Soh (2020) also mentioned that cultures with greater gender equality had greater differences in interest among men and women. Again, you will see more scientific research to back that up in a minute.
One particular study was done to show that while there are mostly overlapping interests among men and women, where the interests did not overlap, it was significant. Men had interest in things and women had interest in people (Su et al., 2009). The graphic below shows an idea of the results they found:
Effect size of RIASEC interests. R=Realistic; I =Investigative;
One study looked at gender preferences in interests as it pertains to economic development and gender equality in a specific country. What was discovered was that the higher the economic development and the greater the gender equality, the stronger the differentiation between genders in interests (Falk & Hermle, 2018). This means that in developed egalitarian countries, the differences in interests between men and women, where they do not overlap, are greater. This implies that when social “constructs” are removed, and the children are given trucks and dolls in a basket and not told which to play with, all social pressure to be a certain way is removed and all that you are left with is biology. This study shows that when biology is all that is left, their differences are more pronounced. There was another study that looked into a very similar issue and found the same thing. They found that in a very egalitarian community, when controlling for education, occupational class position, age, social and family status, and income, differences among genders were vastly different (Bihagen & Katz-Gerro, 2000).
Desistence is becoming more prevalent among youth with gender dysphoria. This was never discussed in classes, not once. They pushed for gender affirmation, regardless of any existential factors. Any time this was brought up, the response from teachers was always that we should affirm every single person and give them the care they need. And by care, she always meant surgical and hormonal. She made that clear at the beginning of the class. I guess we should ignore the fact that most kids desist at puberty (Steensma et al., 2011). Surgical and hormonal interventions were put ahead in priority of mental health, even though in this same study, they found that up to 90% of children desist by puberty and most grow comfortable with their bodies (Steensma et al., 2011). Another thing that was never mentioned was comorbidities. One study found that only 39% of the almost 600 subjects they studied that stated cross-gender identification actually suffered from gender identification disorder as a primary diagnosis. In the other 61%, the cross-gender identification was comorbid with other disorders and in 75% of that 61%, cross-gender identification was merely a byproduct of something else entirely (à Campo et al., 2003).
I mentioned an interaction with a student earlier. Here it is. The class was asked a simple question. Susan was born a female but identifies as a transgender man. Susan, who now goes by Scott, is attracted to women. Is Scott/Susan heterosexual or lesbian? This was the question. The answer is closed-ended. It has an “A or B” vibe about it. Yet these students just could not bring themselves to find any firm objectivity in their answers. And then came after me when I actually answered the question. Here was my answer: Susan would be lesbian. The reason for this is because while society’s idea of what determines masculine and feminine are socially constructed, one’s gender and biological sex are not constructed. They are rooted in biology, as pointed out in the text when it was mentioned that research indicates that levels of testosterone in fetal development will lead to interests that are more or less masculine, depending on the levels of testosterone the fetus is exposed to This is backed up by a neuroscientist and sexologist named Debra Soh, in which she confirmed through many studies that differences in interests and behavior are not due to postnatal environment but biology (Soh, 2020, p. 41). This shows that gender expression can result in more or less masculine interests while maintaining that gametes dictate sex and gender itself, resulting in Susan being gay. One student replied: I would be careful coming to conclusions too quickly about Susan/Scott! To which I replied, I answered the question. What is your answer to the question? Crickets. He just could not do it. He could not determine XX vs XY. That astounded me.
Government
Lastly, and maybe the scariest, the issue of government was addressed in multiple classes in the field of sociology. One question I had on a test in two different chapters back-to-back in a sociology class was A difference between capitalism and socialism is that: and the correct answer was, socialism forbids private profits that are fueled by greed and exploitation of workers. Exploitation of workers is common in the capitalist system. The first problem is the question assumed they KNOW the motivation behind every company’s endeavors. Assuming something is fueled by greed is always a bad idea in any social system. The next problem is that the extra sentence is a statement of opinion, not fact. This can be proven untrue in minutes. Therefore, it is not a fact, it is opinion. Again, ask yourself why would a university want to place a negative stigma on capitalism, promote socialism, and interpret every aspect of society in oppressed vs oppressor?
The instructor in one particular sociology class on government was great. Amazing, actually. The author of the material was not. A large portion of the material was opinion presented as fact. In every chapter, Karl Marx was mentioned and only in a very positive light. The author (again, not the instructor, he was great) never once mentioned his ideas were tried and subsequently caused the deaths of millions of people. Deaths came from forced labor, war, deportations, man-made hunger, and executions. Here are the number of deaths from the areas that have proposed Karl Marx’s ideas as utopian and attempted to implement them: 65M dead in China, 20M in Soviet Union, 2M in Cambodia, 2M in North Korea, 1.7M in Ethiopia, 1.5M in Afghanistan, 1M in Vietnam, and more (Courtois & Kramer, 1999). Pretty big thing to leave out.
I would probably leave it out too if the majority of students in universities across America believe that life and people are strictly divided on two lines, oppressed and oppressor. Sound familiar? You either are oppressed by your country or you have implicit bias. There is no third factor. You must fall into one of those. While there are many problems involving this delusion that somehow communism (masked as socialism or “starting all over again”) will now work when it has never worked throughout history, it seems that one of the biggest contributors to this problem are the universities. They are pushing out the idea that Karl Marx was one of the greatest minds in history. Intellect may be the only part that was great. His disdain for anyone who had something he wanted was heavily documented. Marx’s own father wrote him a letter and said, “I hope you can, just once, not display evil towards those around you” (Kengor & Knowles, 2020). When the ideas of Karl Marx were put into practice, close to 100 Million people died! There are no redeeming qualities here. Yet on each quiz questions were spun to reflect the greatness of Karl Marx.
So, to get questions right on these quizzes, all I had to do was remember these were bad: men, white people, America, capitalism, Christians. As long as I answered that those people and concepts were terrible, I got the question right. Every. Single. Time. This was nothing short of an agenda laced opinionated attempt at indoctrination. I presented this material to many free thinkers, and all agreed with me. One person objected, but he is anything but a free thinker. He also hates America, white people, men, capitalism, and Christians with incredibly tribalistic views. I subscribe to no one, no party. I think for myself. This course attempted to teach me WHAT to think rather than HOW to think. I cannot reiterate enough that none of this reflects the instructor. He was amazing in delivering the material and allowing the free flow of free-thinking ideas. But the mere fact that the instructor was more than likely forced to deliver this material as fact when it was clearly opinionated is sad and scary at the same time.
Conclusion
As you can see, it was very enlightening, just not in the way I thought it would be. Marriage is clearly being attacked by academia. In spite of clear research that you are at a higher risk for divorce, cohabitation is being promoted. Children are being viewed as burdens to society, not the future of a great society. Gender is becoming victim to subjective truth, despite centuries of objective science and common-sense knowledge surrounding gender. And our current republic is viewed in a very terrible light. Academia is pushing hard to hit the reset button and attempt socialism, communism, Marxism, or some combination of those.
Throughout this you were asked a series of questions: Why would one want to destroy the marriage institution? Why would someone promote cohabitation over marriage? Why would a university push their students to not have children? Why are universities ignoring biology? Why would a university want to place a negative stigma on capitalism, promote socialism, and interpret every aspect of society as oppressed vs oppressor? I am not going to attempt to define the answer here. I will leave that up to you. But one thing I can definitively say, this is NOT an accident. Take care of your children. Teach them to be free thinkers and be strong in the face of ideological nonsense. Teach them to know right from wrong and to have an objective morality by which they calibrate everything they do. If you do not, someone will teach them, but it will all be subjective, fostering total confusion and only making the mental health crisis worse, not better.
Courtois, S., & Kramer, M. (1999). The black book of communism : crimes, terror, repression. Harvard University Press.
Falk, A., & Hermle, J. (2018). Relationship of gender differences in preferences to economic development and gender equality. Science, 362(6412), eaas9899. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aas9899
Finn, T. (2013). Social Science and Same-Sex Parenting. The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 13(3), 437-444. https://doi.org/10.5840/ncbq201313325
Kengor, P., & Knowles, M. (2020). The devil and Karl Marx : communism’s long march of death, deception, and infiltration. Tan Books.
Killewald, A. (2016). Money, Work, and Marital Stability: Assessing Change in the Gendered Determinants of Divorce. American Sociological Review, 81(4), 696-719. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416655340
Mackey, W. C., & Buttram, H. D. (2012). Father Presence in a Community and Levels of Violent Crime A Dynamic Beyond the Arm of the Law. The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, 37(2), 222-248.
Potter, D., & Potter, E. C. (2017). Psychosocial well-being in children of same-sex parents: A longitudinal analysis of familial transitions. Journal of Family Issues, 38(16), 2303-2328. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X16646338
Rattay, P., von der Lippe, E., Lampert, T., & KiGGS Study Group. (2014). Health of children and adolescents in single-parent, step-, and nuclear families: results of the KiGGS study: first follow-up (KiGGS Wave 1). Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz, 57(7), 860-868. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00103-014-1988-2
Rosenfeld, M. J., & Roesler, K. (2019). Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association With Marital Dissolution. Journal of Marriage and Family, 81(1), 42; 42-58; 58. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12530
Soh, D. (2020). The end of gender : debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society (First Threshold Editions hardcover edition. ed.). Threshold Editions.
Steensma, T. D., Biemond, R., De Boer, F., & Cohen-Kettenis, P. (2011). Desisting and persisting gender dysphoria after childhood: A qualitative follow-up study. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 16(4), 499; 499-516; 516. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104510378303
Su, R., Rounds, J., & Armstrong, P. I. (2009). Men and Things, Women and People. Psychological Bulletin, 135(6), 859-884. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017364
Sun, Y., & Li, Y. (2011). Effects of Family Structure Type and Stability on Children’s Academic Performance Trajectories. Journal of Marriage and Family, 73(3), 541-556. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2011.00825.x
