Gloria Steinem sounded the war cry,
"We don't
just want to destroy capitalism," she said,
"we want to
tear down the whole f____ patriarchy."
As the women's
movement turned fanatical and ugly in the 1960s and 70s the focus began to
shift from reform and equal opportunity. The feminist leaders - humorless,
militant, pugnacious, and angry with their particular lot in life, launched
programs that were anti-God, anti-capitalism, anti-family, anti-birth,
anti-heterosexual and fostered a virulent hatred of anything having to do with
males. They no longer wanted to equalize the status of women, but instead
wanted to irreversibly alienate women from men and vice versa.
"The fiction of fatherhood is a giant religion called Christianity."
- Jill Johnston in Lesbian Nation
Home and traditional family values are no longer accepted answers to
the questions, "Who am I?" and, "What am I here for?" The preeminent purpose
for some women have become their careers, and they decided against the value of
home and family.
Taken over by radical leftists committed to adultery,
lesbianism, and the perpetuation of "self" over motherhood and family, the
women's movement led by the National Organization of Women (NOW), became an
adjunct of the Democratic party. The Democratic Party left millions of
evangelicals and pro-family Christians when they lurched to the left under
George McGovern and his successors. During the 1970s, the Democratic Party
abandoned its centrist pro-family base and became captive to the special
interest of the radical left, including the feminists, extreme
environmentalists and gay rights activists.
Radical feminists linked
all the Marxist causes together by writing, "We want to destroy the three
pillars of class and a caste society - the family, private property, and the
state."
[Peter Collier and David horowith, Deconstructing
the Left: From Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, 1991].
The concerns
at recent national conventions have been bashing the Christian men's group
Promise Keepers and pushing for the rights of "transgendered people," which
could be anything from hermaphrodites to people waiting for sex change
operations.
To accomplish their goals, terrorist organizations such as the National
Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, the National Education Association,
and the People for the American Way, the Gay-Lesbian Caucus, and their ilk have
arisen to champion unrestrained sex, homosexual rights, abortion on demand,
while they attacked Christian beliefs, conservative organizations, and all the
traditional family structures of America.
Dissolving the
Family
Betty Friedan, founder of NOW, referred to traditional
family life as a "comfortable concentration camp" from which women needed
liberation. Sheila Cronan, one of the feminist movements most respected leaders
and spokeswomen said, "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is
clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking marriage."
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s they launched an all-out assault on
our nation's time-honored laws protecting the marriage union. Divorce was
presented as an easy way out for the frustrated, disappointed or adventuresome.
Mel Krantzler, writing in Creative Divorce, stated: "To say
goodbye is to say hello ... hello to a new life - to a new, freer, more
self-assured you. Hello to new ways of looking at the world and of relating to
people. Your divorce can turn out to be the very best thing that ever happened
to you." That was a widely held professional opinion for almost a decade.
Within a few years, they and their Radical Left allies succeeding in
overturning all fifty of the nation's "fault" divorce statutes and replacing
them with what is called no-fault
divorce. It was understood as an effort to secure for women the economic,
political and social rights and protections that men have always enjoyed. A
spate of pseudo-scientific studies assured parents that children were resilient
and would revcover quickly from the effects of divorce.
In their zeal
they also stripped away from women, especially mothers with children, many of
the economic and legal protections they had historically enjoyed in this
nation, thus creating a whole new underclass in American society: the abandoned
housewife.
The number of displaced homemakers rose twenty-eight percent
between 1975 and 1983 to more than three million women. Another twenty percent
increase from 1983 to 1988 brought that number to more than four million. An
astonishing sixty-one percent of those women suddenly left alone had children
under the age of ten at home. Often without job skills and stranded without
alimony or child support, as many as seventy percent of these women make less
than ten thousand dollars a year, and fifty percent are employed at minimum
wage or less. It is, thus, readily apparent why a full seventy-five percent of
all Americans living below the poverty line in the United States are women and
their children.
[Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The
Myth of Women's Liberation in America (New York: William Morrow,
1986)]
Promise Keepers
Threatening to NOW
A million men willing to put their wives and
families first is very
frightening to the National Organization of Women (NOW).
The men of Promise Keepers promise to love their wives, their children, and
their neighbors as themselves, in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ,
according to the New Testament. Why that should be threatening to Ireland and
others of her ilk is apparent. One only has to look at their lifestyles for the
answer. Non-Christians have no understanding of God's plan for our lives. What
they DO have is a great deal of fear about the subject.
In more recent
years feminism has turned more to a fight for abortion rights,
lesbian rights, environmentalism and witchcraft. Gone are concerns about
equal pay, assertiveness, and expressing one's individuality. In their place
are women ensconced in bitterness, hatred, and resentment.
It is
frightening for Ireland, and for Karen Taggart of the Washington, DC Lesbian
Avengers, who said about the Promise Keepers, " we'll show them that lesbians
are everywhere. We'll show them that lesbians have super powers" Taggart is
truly afraid that the men of Promise Keepers have tapped into just such a super
power that will render her message irrelevant to women.
What is it
exactly that Promise Keepers promise that is threatening to NOW?
The men
of Promise Keepers promise:
- To honor Jesus Christ and obey His word.
- To pursue relationships with other men, provide one another with spiritual strength to keep his promises.
- To practice spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity.
- To build strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.
- To support his church.
- To reach beyond racial and denominational barriers.
- To influence the world by witnessing and obeying, loving God and loving his neighbor as himself.
Militant feminists searching for power found the absolute best way
to exercise their control was in the area of reproduction. Abortion became the
single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and
advance their belief that men aren't necessary. They don't need men to be
happy. They certainly don't want males to be able to exercise any control over
them. The real message of the 'Dan Quayle' Murphy Brown episode was that women
don't need men. shouldn't desire them, and that total fulfillment and happiness
can be achieved without men or husbands. Abortion thus became the ultimate
symbol of women's emancipation from the power and influence of men. With men
being precluded from the ultimate decision-making process regarding the future
of life in the womb, they are reduced to their proper, inferior
role.
Gender feminists rallied in Beijing China in 1995 for the United
Nations Fourth World Confernce on Women. The Beijing document -- the text of
which was heavily influenced by Bella Abzug and other radical feminists --
includes over 200 references to "gender" in various contexts, i.e., "gender
equality," "mainstreaming a gender perspective," "gender diversity," etc.
However, "husband" and "wife" are nowhere to be found in the 121-page document,
and the terms "mother" and "family" were proposed to be changed to "caretaker"
and "household." Clearly, the effort to change the samantics associated with
the family is the first step in altering the way the world thinks about the
family.
The roles defined by nature for men and women had become clouded
in feminists minds and has led to all kinds of confusion, suspicion, and
distrust between the sexes.
Women were liberated from the home, from
their husbands, from their children - from having to bear children at all.
Fathers were liberated from their authority. Children were liberated from
limits, from rules, even
their
parents. And the entire population was liberated from moral and ethical
standards. Yet it turns out that those things were precisely what held society
together. "Family values" have been so scorned that we are left with neither
families nor values. What do we have? Rampant illegitimacy and sexual disease,
widespread divorce, and a generation of unloved, undisciplined, and uncared-for
kids.
