Unsex Me Here

“Half of American women are in the work force today, while male unemployment is setting new records.” – Phyllis Schlafly

There are a few white males who are willing (albeit only democratically) to oppose the government-mandated worship of black people, but there are no white males who are willing to criticize the greatest evil of our time, feminism. Only one white woman, Phyllis Schlafly, has been willing to oppose the feminists. In a recent column, for instance, “Obama Panders to Feminists,” she points out that feminist programs will be exempted from Obama’s new spending freeze:

A White House document titled ‘Opportunity and Progress for Women and Girls’ describes 15 federal programs that will receive increased funding to appease the feminists. Chief among them is the Violence Against Women project, which is targeted for a 22 percent increase, an extra $117 million more than current funding, which is already close to $1 billion a year.

That earmark is a Joe Biden project known as feminist pork because the money goes right into the hands of radical feminist centers where they teach their anti-male, anti-marriage ideology, counsel women to get divorces and urge criminal prosecution against a man no matter how slight or unverified the alleged offense...

To please the feminists, other spending that will be exempted from Obama’s freeze includes an additional $400 million for the discretionary nutrition program for low-income women and an increase of $10 million for family planning.

And we know what ‘family planning’ means: it means the murder of the innocents.

The central tragedy of our age is the tragedy of feminism. The triumph of feminism throughout the Western world has inverted every Christian virtue and turned our society into a satanic society. It is impossible to exaggerate the evils of feminism. Lady MacBeth’s request that Satan “Unsex me here,” has been echoed throughout the world, and Satan’s army is filled with murderous, unsexed women who drink the blood of their own children.

When a woman asks Satan to unsex her, what is she really asking? She is asking to return to her unredeemed, pre-Christian state of existence. She wants, as Eve wanted, to be as God. But Godhood is not available for a woman, or a man, in the Christian Faith. The position is already filled. One must apply to the lower regions if one desires godhood.

Lady MacBeth is a case in point. She appeals to the devil to unsex her and to give her the power that the Christian God denies her.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Having given herself to the devil, Lady MacBeth needs a man to do her bidding before she can gain the power she desires. This is always the case. An evil woman always needs a male to abdicate his authority in order for her evil will to triumph. Eve needed the abdication of Adam as Lady MacBeth needs the abdication of MacBeth.

MacBeth wants to please his wife. He kills Duncan because he wants to please her, but does he love her? If we are not to debase love, we must assert that MacBeth’s love is a distorted, pale caricature of real love, as Satan’s kingdom is a distorted, pale caricature of God’s kingdom. There can be no love of another creature outside of God’s love. Lady MacBeth steps into Satan’s kingdom and her husband embraces her in that kingdom. The irony is that by having murdered Duncan out of ‘love’ for his wife and, by doing so, separating himself from God’s love, MacBeth is unable to love his wife or anyone else. Toward the end of the play, when MacBeth is told his wife is dead, he responds with the famous soliloquy on nothingness:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time:
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It is important to note that MacBeth does not conclude “life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing” because he loved a woman instead of God. There is no ‘either-or’ choice between the love of God and the love of a woman. If a man truly loves a woman, he will love her in the Pauline sense; he will love her as Christ loves His Church. The traditionalist sects, with their deprecation of the marriage state, support the heretical thesis that a man must love either God or a woman; he can’t love both. This notion is rooted in Manichean dualism, not in the Christian tradition. God gave Adam a woman to love and to love him, because it was good for Adam. The gifts of God are always good. But Adam and MacBeth, following in Adam’s path, step out of God’s light where love is sacred, and for the sake of their women’s evil wills they forsake God.

We are a nation that has “supped full with horrors,” because we have institutionalized and declared holy the male-female relationship of the MacBeth family. Lady MacBeth wants to kill her children; Mr. MacBeth will prepare the saline solution. Lady MacBeth wants to wear army boots and drive a tank; Mr. MacBeth will let her. Lady MacBeth wants to dress like a priest and hand out communion; Mr. MacBeth will acquiesce. In the United States we have raised the satanic banner of feminism higher than any other nation has ever done before.

Why have white males abdicated their authority? Avoiding the obvious reply, “Why not?”, let’s state it plainly: The European male has no faith. There is nothing as fearsome as a confrontation with an aggressive female. Rip Van Winkle knew this. That is why he hid out with the little men in the woods for twenty years. The only way a man can face an aggressive female is if he believes that his God will sustain him in the day of battle. But if a man’s faith waivers, even slightly, he will not have the ability to oppose a woman who is completely possessed by her own will.

A woman in her unredeemed, Lady MacBeth state, represents the most powerful force in nature. A man with his superior strength and size is no match for the fecund power of a woman. From the first moment a man leaves the womb, he desires to return to it. He fears confrontations with women because failure to please a woman entails a threat of banishment. He might be denied access to the womb, but it is a fatal desire for a man to seek a return to the womb. It is a return to nothingness; it means an extinction of a man’s personality. If femininity is worshipped as pure force – “I am woman, hear me roar” – the individual woman will be consumed by it as well as the man.

This worship of femininity as pure force, as found in the pre-Christian mystery cult of Cybele, a cruel, matriarchal goddess, is diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christianity. Mary agrees to be the “handmaid of the Lord,” and by her submission to the will of God, she realizes the potential of her own femininity and allows Christ to reveal to all mankind the divine nature of their own personalities. A man does not have to give himself up to an impersonal earth goddess; he knows, through Christ, that he possesses a personality with an eternal destiny.

A true respect for women entails a refusal to submit to the impersonal feminine principle. When a woman acts as a nurturer of children and all things Christian, she should be given all the respect and love that the code of chivalry demands. But when she steps out of that role and becomes a Lady MacBeth, she should be fought to the death, preferably her own. When MacBeth refuses to oppose his wife’s demonic will, he not only loses his soul, but his wife loses her soul as well.

In his play, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare good-naturedly shows us the only way to overcome a Lady MacBeth. She must be opposed every time she steps outside the Christian orbit. If she is successfully opposed, as Petruchio successfully opposes Katharina, tragedy is avoided and there is domestic and civil peace. The difference between Lady MacBeth’s statement, “Unsex me here; And fill me from the crown to the toe, top full of direst cruelty,” and Katharina’s, “Thy husband is they lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign,” is the difference between heaven and hell. The European male prefers hell. +

The Mutual Flame

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’s sight;
Either was the other’s mine.

--Shakespeare

Let’s be clear about what the new Supreme Court nominee’s condemnation of the white male means. She did not condemn white males for being too liberal, for ceding white civilization to the colored barbarians; she condemned everything associated with the white male of history, namely Western civilization and the God of that civilization. But she was careful to follow the proscribed liberal formula and leave the white female out of her condemnation.

Liberals have taken the Christian doctrine of original sin and made it applicable to only one sex and one race. All females and all non-whites are without sin. This is why the colored man takes race so seriously and the liberal white male denies the existence of race. As a member of the sinless race, the colored wants race to be the determining factor in everything. Then he will be granted sainted status in everything. The liberal white male, on the other hand, has a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there is no such thing as race. In his world of pure mind, race doesn’t exist. And in contrast to the colored male, the white male must always deny the existence of masculinity. The result of that denial is the end of chivalry. Instead of Beau Geste, the white Christian model of masculinity, we now see only colored masculinity which celebrates pure animal lust and barbarism. The white females need only refrain from marrying white men from the old European stock in order to avoid the taint of original sin. And the vast majority of white females have voluntarily refrained from marrying white Christian males. But I think a time is fast approaching when white Christian women will be forbidden to marry white Christian males.

The consistent liberal will rejoice that the Christian male is extinct (see The Underground Men), because he knows that Christianity is a patriarchal religion. If there is no patriarchy there can be no Christianity. But there are some halfway-house Christians who want to retain the benefits of living in a Christian society while supporting the principles of a primitive matriarchal society. The late John Paul II was a classic example of this type of religious schizophrenic. On the one hand, he condemned abortion, and on the other hand he supported feminism.

The late Pope praised the feminist movement, saying it had championed “the dignity of women.” In his weekly audience of November 29, 1995, he called feminism “in great part legitimate,” and said it had added to a more “balanced vision of the question of womanhood in the contemporary world.” He further went on to say that feminism had reacted against everything that has “impeded the value and full development of the feminine personality” (from Inside the Vatican, January 1996).

We must make up our minds. Is the story of Adam and Eve true? If it is, then the responsibility for the original sin rests on the shoulders of the male and the female. In fact, the responsibility rests even more squarely on the female’s shoulders. So if we exempt the female from original sin, we are not behaving like Christian gentlemen; we are behaving like the male devotees of the religions of Cybele and Isis.

The answer to any social ill is integral Christianity. You can’t take just one aspect of Christianity, such as respect for women as the life-bearers and life-nurturers, and make it the whole of Christianity. David C. Reardon illustrates this half-way house Christian approach to women in his book, Making Abortion Rare.

Mr. Reardon says the pro-life movement failed because pro-lifers failed to make the movement a pro-woman movement. If we shift our focus from the harm abortion does to babies to the harm it does to women, Mr. Reardon says, we will win the support of middle America and gradually win the abortion war.

Mr. Reardon suggests pro-lifers start initiating malpractice suits against abortion doctors for not following the guidelines of Roe vs. Wade. Doctors never inform women that abortion harms the woman having the abortion, nor do they inform the woman having the abortion of the emotional trauma her abortion will trigger. The doctors’ failure to comply with the Roe v. Wade guidelines will leave them open to legal action and hurt them where it counts – in the pocketbooks.

The launching of malpractice suits against abortion doctors for cruelty to women and spending more money to tell women about what abortion does to them is not evil. But Reardon’s strategy of appealing to the woman’s self-interest and not to her soul has many holes in it.

First, he claims that the pro-life movement has been too judgmental about unmarried pregnancies. My wife and I spent a few years “sidewalk counseling” outside abortion clinics, and we did not detect the “judgmental” attitude among our fellow counselors that Mr. Reardon writes about.

Secondly, Mr. Reardon assumes that the pro-life movement was anti-woman in the past. Again, I don’t see that. People I worked with did stress, rightly I think, that the baby was the primary victim; but pro-lifers have always stressed and been concerned about the physical and spiritual well-being of the woman having the abortion.

Thirdly, on the subject of free will and forgiveness, Mr. Reardon frequently makes statements like this one: “All too often pro-lifers have tended to characterize aborting women as selfish and immoral. A far more accurate generalization would be to portray aborting women as confused and driven by despair. This insight is a vital one to our pro-woman/pro-life strategy.” He misses the point. An aborting woman is selfish and immoral, and there can be no forgiveness for her sin if the sin is never her fault, but only the result of confusion and despair.

Mr. Reardon further claims that we should let women who have had abortions know that God forgives them. No, that is bad theology. We should let them know that if they repent, God will forgive them. It seems to me to be a crucial distinction. Do we really want to treat women as inferior creatures who are incapable of sin because somebody else has forced them into their decision? Do we not then deny them the opportunity to, “Like Mary kneel, like Mary weep, ‘Love much’ and be forgiven”?

Mr. Reardon thinks his woman-based strategy will win over the 70% of Americans who are “personally opposed but...”; by making it a woman’s rights issue, the 70% will turn against the abortion industry. Here I must ask: if we make it a woman’s rights issue, are we not conceding that the baby in the womb has importance only if the woman says the baby has importance? If we say abortion is bad only because it harms the aborting woman, which it certainly does, and we enshrine that concept in law, haven’t we permanently damned the unborn to a nebulous status? The unborn will exist only if women say they do.

Reardon’s suggestion that we can make abortion illegal without restoring patriarchal Christianity is of course absurd. But there is also a dangerous reaction against the matriarchal pretensions of our current feminists that must be avoided, and which is exemplified by Patrick Mitchell in his book, The Scandal of Gender: Early Christian Teaching on the Man and the Woman. Mitchell’s earlier book on the feminization of the military was quite good (the author wrote under the name Brian Mitchell); Mitchell was the only author I’ve come across who based his argument against women in the military on the Christian principle that women should not be in the military rather than on the merely pagan principle that they could not.

The case that Mitchell makes against Christian feminists is a pretty standard one, but it is a case seldom made these days. I felt, while reading it, a bit like I did when I read Mary Lefkowtiz’s Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. It seemed ludicrous that anyone should have to write a book proving that Socrates, Beethoven, Cleopatra, etc., were not black, but nevertheless, the insanity of the modern world made it necessary. By corollary, it seems ludicrous that someone would have to write a book about Christianity being the patriarchal religion, but of course even John Paul II thought one could have a Christian feminism, so this book is a refreshing antidote to the current prevailing nonsense about gender.

Mitchell calls himself a “reader” rather than an “author.” Presumably he does so because he merely cites Scripture and the Church Fathers on the subject of gender. To wit:

Within Christian teaching, loving one’s wife cannot mean ceding to her the husband’s headship or freeing her from her duty to obey and revere. This is the lie of the serpent by which both the man and the woman were and are undone. For while the women’s deepest need is for communion in submission, ultimately to God, Satan deceives her into revolting against God with an offer of power in equality.

And:

No doubt our Christian Fathers would condemn the feminist reorganization of modern society, with its strenuous denial of sexual differences and coercive integration of women into all activities at all levels, on all three counts: (1) for turning the natural order upside down by making men subject to women and deposing husbands and fathers from their rightful headship in the home; (2) for opening the door to immorality by mixing men and women together as if sexual temptation were either easily avoided or not worth resisting; and (3) for obscuring the divinely ordained differences between the sexes so important to the social, sexual, and spiritual health of individual men and women.

There is yet a fourth charge the early Christians would bring against us for our disregard of the different duties of men and women. It is less obvious in early Christian teaching because of the assumption that mothers would always care for their children out of both social necessity and natural affection. It is now the case, however, that mothers are encouraged not to care for their children and instead to abandon them, at a very early age and for most of their waking hours, to the far inferior care of paid strangers. A powerful taboo in our society suppresses all criticism of mothers who do so, and fathers who let them. The Saints would not have been so sparing.

And also:

The prophecy of Adam that the woman was “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” was deeply meaningful to the Fathers. The woman was not a separate species, created from the earth as all other creatures were, as indeed Adam himself was. Alone among all creatures, the woman was created “from the man.” Her nature is derivative of the man’s. She participates “through the man” in both his earthy origin and his divine likeness.

There is a major weakness in the book, however; an irredeemable one, in my judgment. Heretics from the left de-emphasize or, more often, attempt to abolish structures and forms. They point to the ‘spirit’ of things and use words like ‘love’ and ‘charity’ out of context. Heretics from the right, on the other hand, tend to worship form and discipline and do not stress love and charity, fearing that such things lead to a lack of form and discipline, which will then lead to soft-headed liberalism. Mitchell falls prey to the latter, formalist heresy.

This blasphemous interpretation of the Apostle Paul is an example:

The Apostle Paul commands husbands to love their wives, but wives he commands not to love their husbands, but to obey and revere them. In doing so, he bids that wives render to their husbands that which is most needful and consistent with the natural headship of the man, for it is more important to the one in charge that he be obeyed and revered than he be loved. This truth we find also in the world around us, for in all human organizations it is indeed more necessary that the head be feared than loved. The beauty of the Christian order is that the head also loves the body, as Christ loves the Church.

One thinks after reading this of Shakespeare’s comment in The Merchant of Venice: “The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose.” Scripture should be interpreted in its entirety. (St. Paul also had a memorable quote about charity superseding all other virtues.)

Should a marriage be primarily a military arrangement? I will concede that even the best of women need some fear of their husbands, but should that be their primary reason for obeying? No! Wives who are obedient only from fear and not from love are not real wives and will abandon their husbands once a stronger, more forceful warlord comes along. The true wife obeys because she loves; Katarina’s injunction to wives at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is an example:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord? —
I am asham'd that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toll and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

I see in Mitchell a man who has gone wrong by only a hair, but it is a significant hair. If we were to adopt Mitchell’s interpretation of the Fathers and Scripture, we would have a religion “that have not charity. Fear is the beginning of wisdom, not the end result. I see in the tradition of chivalry that came to fruition in Europe an elevation of the Church’s teaching on gender. Without abrogating any of the Church Fathers’ teaching, the chivalric tradition shifted the balance in male-female relationships from fear to love, as Christianity shifted the focus from fear to love in man’s relationship with God. When one truly appreciates the nature of the beloved, one only fears disappointing the beloved. One is not fearful of the painful consequences of disobedience for one’s self.

The downside of the chivalric tradition is that the true knight’s reverence for women, which is noble and uplifting when women are obedient as Mary was obedient, becomes blasphemous when women imitate Cybele rather than Mary. This habit of reverence for the female, rightly developed and cultivated in the traditions of chivalry, was continued in the European culture after the female went over to Cybele. Hence, the tradition which was the highest and purest embodiment of true masculinity and true femininity became the embodiment of all that is cowardly in the male and unfeminine in the female.

But the failure of that magnificent synergy between the sexes that was at the core of Western civilization should not force us to make the mistake of Reardon and the liberals, and exempt the woman from original sin. Nor should we settle for Mitchell’s militaristic and juridical arrangement between the sexes. Instead, let us say with Unamuno that we will have all or nothing. We will have knights, chivalry, dragons, fair and virtuous ladies, and the God whose love passeth all understanding, in the civilization to which we bend our knee, or else we will not bend the knee.

Of Decadence and Decay

“The love of woman and womanliness is a masculine characteristic, and the love of man and manliness is a feminine characteristic... [I]t is almost impossible for a woman to irritate a real man, and as to the woman, a man is never quite contemptible, never altogether rejectable, as long as he remains a man.” -- Isak Dinesen

That our society is decadent is self-evident. But if the question, “Is our society decadent?,” were put to the American public, you would get an assortment of answers, ranging from, “Hell, no,” to, “The polls say that 90% of all Americans believe in God,” to, “70% of the American people believe promiscuity and stealing are wrong.” In short, there would be no agreement on the subject of decadence. Which is, of course, what one would expect; no society, having achieved decadence (maybe ‘dis-achieve’ would be a better word), is able to identify decadence. To the decadent, health is sickness and sickness is health.

Climbing out of the mire of decadence is not easy for an individual. And it is even more difficult for a society, because a decadent society has lost all connection to reality. The nerve endings are dead. Faith is gone and hence all the sentiments that elevate the human soul are gone as well. An individual living in a decadent society, who has managed to take his first baby steps out of the decadent swamp, will find himself isolated, marginalized, and possibly institutionalized. He will find individuals willing to criticize symptoms of the disease, such as child porn and legalized abortion, but those same individuals will draw back in shocked dismay if he criticizes modernity itself. That we are marching ever onward toward the light, despite some unpleasant detours, is an article of faith for modern man.

Satan is a very clever fellow. He does not make societies decadent by attacking God directly; instead he attacks the connecting links God has to His creatures. And one of the primary links is the divinely ordained, differentiated sex roles. Indeed, a significant indication of a decadent society is the complete blurring of the sex roles, and one of the key signs of a civilized, Christian society is clearly defined sex roles designed to support the patriarchal family.

The patriarchal society was in fact the creator of those moral ideas which have entered so deeply into the texture of civilization that they have become a part of our thought. Not only the names of piety and chastity, honour and modesty, but the values for which they stand are derived from this source, so that even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created. – Christopher Dawson in The Dynamics of World History

I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the evils that are wrought in a society when God’s benevolent ordering of the sex roles is put aside in favor of liberal utopianism. And it is halfway-house Christians who want to retain a faith in God, while destroying all of mankind’s connecting links to God, who allow the liberals to substitute Cybele for Christ.

The late John Paul II was a textbook case of the schizophrenia of half-way house Christians. The late Pope praised the feminist movement, saying it had championed “the dignity of women.” In his weekly audience of November 29, 1995, he called feminism “in great part legitimate,” and said it had added to a more “balanced vision of the question of womanhood in the contemporary world.” He further went on to say that feminism had reacted against everything that has “impeded the value and full development of the feminine personality” (from Inside the Vatican, January 1996). Gloria Steinem couldn’t have said it better.

Let me defend my critique of the halfway-house Christians, such as John Paul II, who support feminism. Who was the human conduit Satan used to transmit his evil to Adam? Eve, of course. She fell because she made a bargain with the devil, who claimed he could make her equal to God. And Adam fell because he feared the loss of Eve’s love so much that he was willing to love her outside of God’s love.

Staying true to his poetic nature, the Lord God counter-balanced Adam and Eve’s sins with the faithfulness of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Eve was a conduit for Satan, and Mary was a conduit for Christ. Mary, in contrast to Eve, who desired equality with God, desired only to be the handmaid of the Lord. Christ, in contrast to Adam, never consented to any request outside of God’s orbit. “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.”

Who is a man imitating when he calls our attention to the “great contributions of the feminist movement”? He is imitating the old Adam. His love for the feminists is illicit; it debases him and the feminists because it separates both from God’s love. Feminism in its very essence goes back to the old Eve. The spirit behind the movement is a desire to make a deal with the devil in order to obtain equality with God. It is positively ludicrous to mildly chide the feminists for their stand on abortion and then go on to praise feminism to the skies, as if abortion is just an inconsequential part of the feminists’ agenda. Abortion is the feminist agenda! How can they obtain equality with God if they do not control life in the womb? Their soul mate is Satan, who promises them divine equality if they will do his bidding and unsex themselves. Lady Macbeth -- “Unsex me here!” -- is the patron saint of the feminists.

The triumph of feminism in society and church has left society and church without any moral authority, because there can be no authority without masculinity. And ironically, there can be no femininity either, because femininity needs masculinity to survive, just as masculinity needs femininity. All decadent societies (Sophocles, Virgil, and Shakespeare wrote eloquently on this topic) lose the ability to distinguish between a man’s and a woman’s divinely appointed sex roles. It is Satan’s wish that such divine distinctions be blurred, because once the blurring takes place, a society becomes decadent and loses all sense of God’s redemptive grace.

As with all modern innovations, we must ask who is being served by feminism? Are Christian men and women benefiting from feminism? Certainly not. Are the feminists benefiting? Of course not. Nothing, not the right to kill their children in the womb or the right to hold jobs formerly reserved for men, will appease them or make them happy. They denounced their souls when they became feminists, and only a ‘road to Damascus’ experience can release them from the feminist hell in which they live and in which they expect others to live as well.

A story from the Brothers Grimm, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” reveals the true aims of feminism, and man’s inability to ever make women happy by appeasement.

As you recall, a fisherman catches an enchanted fish. The fish begs the fisherman to put him back in the water. The fisherman, being a kind-hearted soul, throws the fish back. But upon his return home and after telling the story to his wife, the fisherman is berated by his wife for not demanding a wish from the fish. So, the fisherman returns to the sea and repeating the sin of Adam calls, “Flounder, flounder of the sea, Come, for I am calling thee! My wife, whose name is Isabel, Has a wish against my will.”

Each subsequent wish is granted, and every wish is not good enough for the fisherman’s wife. She goes from a cottage to a palace, and from being a fisherman’s wife to Queen, Emperor, and Pope. With her last wish, she demands to be God. Presto chango! She lands back in her shack and is once again just a fisherman’s wife.

Of course we all know the reason a man acquiesces to a woman, even though he knows, in his heart, that she is wrong. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath lays it right out in the open. But every Christian male knows that he can’t do the bidding of a Lady Macbeth, no matter how compelling the reward for acquiescing, and no matter how unpleasant the punishment for a refusal, because to do so places his soul and the woman’s soul into Satan’s realm. Patriarchy and Christianity are of necessity linked. Feminism and Satan are irretrievably linked as well. The former link must be restored, and the latter must be destroyed.

Feminism, like so many of the heretical –isms, had always lurked on the outskirts of Christendom. You could find its adherents in witch’s covens and the surviving underground cults of Cybele. But in the later half of the 20th century, feminism became mainstream, and patriarchal Christianity became an underground, proscribed religion. And it is significant that institutional feminism had its roots in the ‘civil rights’ movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Radical women working in the civil rights movements saw themselves as even more disenfranchised than the black man. But because the black man was also ‘victimized’ by the white male, the feminists always reserved their criticisms for the white Christian male rather than the black male. The feminist silence during the O. J. Simpson trial was deafening.

If we just look at the stated beliefs of the feminists, their alliance with the black males seems ludicrous and inconsistent. If they are against masculinity, shouldn’t they be against every single male, no matter what the color? But when dealing with men, and even more so with women, we must, if we want to truly understand them, go beneath the surface of their stated beliefs to the spirit that motivates them. And at the spiritual level, the feminists and the blacks are united. Both groups despise femininity and worship pagan masculinity. We are back with Lady Macbeth. She asks Satan to “unsex her” and make her heart as cold and merciless as a pagan male warrior. And she will only give her husband conjugal rights if he forsakes his Christian masculinity for a perverted and savage pagan masculinity.

MACBETH: We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

LADY MACBETH: Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,
'Like the poor cat i' the adage?

MACBETH: Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

LADY MACBETH: What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

So true femininity, the type of femininity that Christian European poets used to rhapsodize about, is demonized along with the masculinity of men like Alfred and Tell, who fought and killed in defense of, rather than out of blood lust or desire for material gain. Only pagan masculinity remains, in the blacks, in the feminist Lady Macbeths, and in the white males who kill in the abortuaries at the behest of the feminist Lady Macbeths.

The black and the feminist revolts are compact in their ideological roots. Both movements are anti-European and anti-reality. The black revolution runs counter to the traditional Christian European view of the black man as the descendant of Ham, the lascivious son of Noah, who needed to be held in check by his more godly brothers. And the black movements which advocate black supremacy, under the guise of racial equality, directly contradict the historical reality that whenever blacks rule, Satan reigns. The pigmentation of the black’s skin is not just an insignificant coloring. It is a warning from God; we dare not let darkness rule the light.

The contrast between the traditional European view of women as the life-bearers and life-nurturers, and the modern view of women as masculine pagans with female body parts is best exemplified by the contrast between the Virgin Mary nursing our Lord and the rock singer Madonna... well, we know what she does. It is not possible to be reconciled to, or to live with, people who prefer the later image of women to the former. And which image conforms to reality? Is Madonna the end product of the liberal’s utopian dream?

The assault on Christian Europe is diverse, but the source of the assault is not diverse. There is one, demonic personality behind each assault. Only a people connected to Him can resist the assaults of that other ‘he,’ the malevolent ‘he.’ When we refuse to sever our links to Him, by resisting the new feminist and black ideologies, we are fighting the good fight and being true to Christian Europe. +

Love’s Labour’s Lost

The liberals have never liked Shakespeare. Oh, I know they give lip service to his virtuosity with words. But they are always uncomfortable with the themes of his plays. They have very little understanding of them, but from the little they do understand they get a vague sense that they are being insulted. They are right.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare attacks a liberal icon – Academia. As the play opens, the King of Navarre and three young lords have taken an oath:

You three, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here:
Your oaths are pass’d; and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honour down
That violates the smallest branch herein:
If you are arm’d to do as sworn to do,
Subscribe to your deep oaths, and keep it too.

Part of the oath includes a vow “not to see a woman in that term,” and “one day in a week to touch no food,” and “to sleep but three hours in the night.” All three lords sign the King’s contract, although Berowne signs it with the belief that “Necessity will make us all forsworn.”

It is not my intent to give a step by step exegesis of what ensues after the young men take their oaths. Let it suffice to say that all three men break their oaths, and the cause of the breaking of the oaths is, of course, four young women.

Berowne eloquently defends the breaking of the oaths:

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were tempr’d with Love's sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.
Then fools you were these women to forswear,
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men,
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn,
For charity itself fulfils the law,
And who can sever love from charity?

Having broken their oaths, the young men become ardent lovers and attempt to woo the objects of their hearts’ desire. But things do not work out the way they do in the usual comedy; there is no marriage feast at the end of the play. As Berowne comments:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.

Why is there no marriage at the end of the play? Because the women, seeing how easily the men have broken their first vow, do not take the men’s new vow of love seriously. They think the gentlemen are merely playing with them, and they respond accordingly. It is only when the death of one of the women’s fathers makes it imperative for all four women to leave Navarre that the four suitors manage to convince the young women that they are in earnest. The women, however, do not accept the men’s offers of marriage without conditions. Each man is assigned, by his respective beloved, a penance. They each must renounce the world for one year and do such works of charity and penance as to “visit the speechless sick,” and “…go with speed, To some forlorn and naked hermitage…”

“Ah,” the reader says, “it serves them right; they are being punished for breaking their vow to study for three years.” No, they are being punished for making satanic vows by being forced to take Christian vows. What was satanic about the first vow? They desired knowledge for self-aggrandizement. For them, knowledge meant power and fame. “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; Our court shall be a little Academe…” A Christian renounces the world for the sake of the world; an academic is abstracted from the world for the sake of himself. It is quite fitting that the men, to atone for a satanic renunciation, must show they are capable of a Christian renunciation.

The women in the play are not Lady Macbeths; they are good Christian women who, like Mary, inspire by fidelity and not by attempting to become men. Such women are “the books, the arts, the academes, That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

There is a wonderful symmetry in the male-female relationship when it is working properly. Men need the inspiration that comes from a woman who, in imitation of Mary, is planted firmly at the foot of the Cross. And a woman needs a man to take that inspiration, give it flesh, and reinspire her. A Christian academic, or a Christian monk might renounce the company of women, but he would not do it because he was abstracted from humanity but because he had been inspired by the God-Man to give himself spiritually to all women and to all men.

I am sure the four men of Navarre kept their second vow. How do I know this? The wisdom of the West supports me. The Florence Nightingales of the world always inspire men more completely than the proud abstracted goddesses of wisdom. (1) Because like Mary, their fidelity at the foot of the Cross shows us the pure image of Christ.+
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(1) It is a hideous perversion of Christianity to make the mother of God a goddess of wisdom.