who love righteousness more than peace

For the past year or so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about the role of men in our culture.  From my previous posts you can see that I have very little patience with cultural or moral relativism or a reliance on feeling over logic and reason.  Men are in a place right now where they are seen as being inherently chauvinistic, racist, bigoted, and homophobic.  Boys are being brought up without a true sense of masculinity that either turns them into men who are afraid of commitment or conflict or they are try to develop their own sence of masculinity that oftens shows it’s in the form of gang warfare.

My own story begins with my father.  He wasn’t raised by his father who serviced in the pacific in WWII.  After the came home from the war, he and my grandmother were living on a base in Buffalo, NY.  He beat her one night, and her sister sent her a train ticket back home. My father would have been around 2 years old.  The divorce happened shortly after that and my father, to the best of my knowledge, never seen him again. My father was bounced between foster homes as a teen and eventually dropped out of high school, lied about his age, and enlisted in the Marine Corp.  While he was in Vietnam, he sent a letter to his father.  His father denied knowing him, and few years later someone who knew my grandfather said that had died. From what I can piece together, this was the late 70’s or early 80’s.  My father was a bully plain and simple.  He was court marshalled for firing a weapon in a mess hall in the Marines and his rank was dropped.  After he got out, he was always good and ready to pick a fight.  Besides his misplaced machismo, I think he did care about us and always worked hard at whatever job he could find.  On the few occaisions that we were on welfare, it crushed him to know that he couldn’t work.

My relationship with him was never very good.  When I was in first grade, my dad and step mother gained custody of me.  This was even more of a rarity in those days than it is now.  Not long after, I started gaining wait.  First I was chubby, then I was portly, and by 5th grade I was fat.  I was never athletic.  The only things that I wanted to do as a kid were too expensive, namely tee ball and boy scouts.  I was a disappointment to my dad.  I was also very sensitive.  I never felt loved, and I found girls much earlier than my peers.  Once in Jr. High, I was moping around because I was depressed that I would never have a girlfriend.  I never told my family about these feelings, but they wouldn antagonize me for being sullen.  One afternoon, my dad called me a pussy.  A hell broke loose then, I went to the only source of comfort that I could find, and that was my grandmother.  The tear in the relationship with my dad became a chasm.  The disappointment that I caused him was now in the open, and I learned that I had to take care of myself.

I learned early on from my stepmother that my dad was not to be trusted.  She was raised in an ultra-fundamentalist religion.  The kind that went so far as to reject shorts on women or hair below the collar on men.  They were against alcohol to say the least.  One night, she plowed us all into the car to find my dad.  He was at the corner tavern having a beer.  I had already been taught by school, church, and my step mother that alcohol was evil, but here was my father drinking the devil’s brew.  I was in elementary school at the time, but this tainted my view of him from then on.  Later in life, I caught him watching a porno when he thought I wasn’t home.  I was horrified.  Another time, I was with my dad at a demolition derby and he made some sexual comment about a woman.  Again, I was sick.  These experiences taught me to be afraid of men and masculinity.  I tried hard to always be nice, because that was the closest thing to being good that I could come to.  In reality, I had no idea what being good was.  I thought that keeping out of people’s way and avoiding conflict was good.  That was the opposite of good, it was simply weakness.

So, here I am.  I’m nearly 31 years old and living in an unhealthy relationship.  I don’t have any kids, though I would like to be a father.  I haven’t had any contact with my own in years.  My father in law is the adopted father than I never had.  I’ve read Iron John, listened to lectures from men who want to see this fatherless chain in America broken.  I want to help, and yet another purpose has been added to this empty blog.

“One of the things that we’re seeing today in North Carolina is a lot of politicians running on an anti-Latino campaign, knowing that these folks can’t vote anyway, so you can go ahead and bash them to your heart’s content,” (Full Article, NPR.com)

I saw this quote on a Libertarian mailing list, and it pisses me off that folks who supposedly stand for freedom will have nothing negative to say when someone gratuitously uses the race card.  Dammit, they easily confuse protecting national sovereignty with anti-Latino racism.  There is never any room for debate.  If you don’t agree, then you’re a racist.  This is the bullshit that makes me furious at liberals.

I’ve heard for the past few years that we are only a few years away from the artificial womb, and I was thinking about that last night. What if a process were available to remove a fetus from a womans body and implant it into another woman’s body or temporarily into an artificial womb so that the baby can have a chance to be born and live a full life? I think I would give money to such an organization and even volunteer my time and effort to seeing.

There are two main objections I can see to this. First, you have the woman who wants to kill her baby. That’s blunt, but I’m being honest some women don’t want to think that there could be a person out there somewhere that has her DNA that she might feel an attachment to, and it would be better to just avoid any kind of messy issues like that. There is also the issue of cost. The cost of temporarily housing a fetus would be immense. Who would pay for something like that? I believe that religious organizations could pay for it, though the sheer magnitude of abortion on demand would make it difficult, but any advancement would be welcome.

Finally, I can’t speak for all Christians, nor would I want to, but many of us really don’t care what a woman does with a body. The line that is often told by women that Christians in general want to take away their freedom to own their own bodies is a lie. It’s just pro-abortion propaganda. The truth is that we care about the lives of the unborn more than we care about the person’s sex life. Sure there are some nut cases that go outside of the norm, but they are the deviants, not the rule.

I am a huge fan of podcasts.  Being an avid Linux user, at home I listen to them through Amarok, and at work I listen to them through podcastsender.com.  That’s right, I’ve ditched iTunes.  I see no reason to download a podcast unless I really want to.  Streaming is the way to go.

I’ve just added Horror Reader’s the Pod of Horror and Dean Koontz’s podcast to my list of favorites.  Just copy the url’s into your favorite podcast client and enjoy.