Some say the third time is a charm. So I've tried to be a little more charming in my third book than I was in my first two. Make no mistake about it, though: I'm glad to have written two hard-hitting books on life in the academy. The first was needed to expose the intellectual shallowness of the campus diversity movement. Another book was needed to chronicle the absurdity of campus feminism. But my latest book is written from the heart.
I see kids going off to college and losing their faith every year. I also see them adopting radical political positions soon after enrolling in college. I understand what they are going through because I went through the same thing thirty years ago. I abandoned my faith my very first semester in college. Later on, I embraced left wing politics that only made sense in conjunction with a secular worldview. But circumstances and, ultimately, Providence turned that all around.
In 1993, an unarmed fraternity brother of mine was shot and killed execution-style by the side of a highway near Starkville, Mississippi. I immediately abandoned my support for a full federal ban on handguns. In fact, I went out and bought my first revolver.
In 1994, I sat on my first university hiring committee and learned how race-based affirmative action really worked. I immediately abandoned my support of affirmative action.
In 1996, I abandoned atheism in a prison near Quito, Ecuador. I saw some human rights abuses in that prison but had no moral standard by which to judge them. I learned that day that there was a Moral Law that transcended cultural norms. I realized that it meant there must be a moral lawgiver.
I eventually made my way back into the church. It was largely an intellectual journey and it served me well when I got the call to enter the campus cultural wars shortly after 911. The details on how I got drawn into those wars are less important than the lessons I learned fighting them. First and foremost, I learned that the main problem in higher education is not that we don't teach religion at the university. The problem is that we teach false religion.
We teach kids that they may define the unborn as property if it will facilitate their sexual lifestyle or their economic well-being.
We teach kids that both their conduct and idea of right and wrong are determine by society and culture respectively.
We teach kids that man has the capacity to construct a utopian society so long as he is freed from the constraining idea that he is broken by sin and separation from God.
All of this is dangerous because it amounts to self-worship. That is dangerous because it requires a rejection of God, not just a rejection of tradition. Somewhere in the process, the idea of inalienable rights gets lost. Rights suddenly come from man. And that means man can take them away. These ideas have consequences.
Because the secular progressive worldview is so pervasive and because I was once led astray by it, I decided to write Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand. It all began when a young man had an angry outburst in one of my classes. He was angry over something he learned in college that simply wasn't true. After I wrote to him asking him to consider a different point of view, I realized it was wrong to only write to him. So I started writing to an entire generation. I published the final collection of thirty five letters as a book. Today is the official release date. (You can pick it up in any major book store, or just order here.)
I could have called it Letters from a Former Progressive. Because that's what my third book really is. I hope you read it and enjoy it. But I also hope you share it with a young progressive who is inclined to protest things he really doesn't understand.
The term “moronic” is defined as “notably stupid or lacking in good judgment.” It is frequently used as an insult.
The Obama administration is moronic.
This is not an insult.
President Obama’s latest “notably stupid” stoke of America’s calculated slow burn is the decision to lift the ban on women in direct combat. Along with the move a few years back to turn the Officers’ Club into the Blue Oyster Bar, this most recent social experiment with national security represents one small step for the “progressive” agenda and one giant prance toward the pansification of the greatest military in world history.
It’s a jaw-dropping “lack in good judgment.”
In 1991 the late Gen. Robert H. Barrow, former commandant of the Marine Corps, gave compelling testimony on the subject before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee. He stated, “If you want to make a combat unit ineffective, assign some women to it. … In three wars – World War II, Korea and Vietnam – I found no place for women to be down in the ground combat element,” he concluded.
In a recent column headlined “Women in Ground Combat,” Bing West, former Marine officer and assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan, notes that, during his testimony, Gen. Barrow “cited the 1950 fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in temperatures of minus 20 degrees, with one Marine division pitted against eight Chinese divisions. Had women comprised 15 percent of his division, Barrow concluded, the Marines would have lost the battle. ‘The very nature of women disqualifies them from doing it (killing so brutally),’ Barrow said. ‘Women give life, sustain life, nurture life; they don’t take it.’”
Evidently, Gen. Barrow never met one of today’s abortion-worshiping feminist “Flukes” of nature. Still, they only kill innocent children who can’t fight back.
In short, Gen. Barrow observed that opening the front lines to, um, “infantrywomen” would not only cost precious American lives, it would ultimately “destroy the Marine Corps.”
Now, I know, who the heck do Barrow and West think they are, right? Did they ever bravely serve God and country as a glorified teacher’s assistant at Harvard Law?
I think not.
Did they ever do “a little blow,” march with the Black Panthers, “organize their communities” into welfare-dependent hellholes, or drink lattes with “Marxist professors and the structural feminists”?
No.
Sheesh.
Even so, despite an obvious lack of credibility on combat readiness and a meager century or so in combined service, I think we should at least humor them a bit.
“To Barrow, a warrior admired by three generations of grunts,” wrote West, “ground combat meant killing under the harshest of circumstances. Barrow opposed the incorporation of women into infantry units characterized by primal instincts: sleeping, defecating, eating, and smelling like wolf packs while hunting down and slaughtering male soldiers.”
That’s the problem with political correctness – with liberalism in general. It raises a pseudo-utopian barrier to reality. Often times that barrier is deadly.
This is what happens when a gaggle of left-wing civilian politicians who don’t know which end of the gun goes “bang!” are placed in charge of national security. These yahoos couldn’t bust a grape with a sledge hammer, let alone lift a sledge hammer.
This is what happens when we allow “progressives” to deconstruct our culture by imposing, through public policy, the fantastical delusion of a “genderless society.”
I fully support women learning self-defense and packing heat for protection. I’ve known a number of gals so tough that, for his own safety, a fellow would be better served to break it off via text message should the relationship go south.
Still, as a former professional boxer and police officer, and having served 12 years in the armed services myself, I can say this without equivocation: While there may be the extremely rare anecdotal exception, in direct one-on-one military combat, the toughest, baddest, meanest chick out there is going to get stomped by the weakest infantryman.
This is life and death stuff. Women are no more made for the front lines than men are made for childbearing.
Don’t get me wrong – I love women. I’m married to a woman and am on the hook for two future weddings of future women who, admittedly, have me hopelessly wrapped around pink-polished little fingers.
Even so, if I’m on the front lines and Ahmed, Abdul and Hakeem come charging with fixed bayonets, I danged sure want Billy Bob, not Barbara, in my foxhole.
This doesn’t even scratch the surface. What of the sensitive dynamics of sex and jealousy? How about the reality that, despite feminist protestations to the contrary, chivalry is not dead? Men are naturally wired to protect the weaker sex, even if it runs counter to combat mission. Honorable men will drop everything to protect a woman, even if it means dying in the process.
If the presence of women is not a factor, than neither is sex, jealousy or chivalry (putting aside the whole “gays in the military” debacle). More importantly, if women remain shielded from direct combat, lives are saved and battles are won. Add women, and you add weakness. Both lives and battles are lost. It’s felony stupid.
Am I suggesting that the sitting president of the United States is stupid? Not exactly – not in terms of overall intelligence. But, as Momma Gump always said: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
I’m sure that Mr. Obama has an average or slightly above average IQ. Still, objectively, measurably – as a point of fact supported by the overwhelming weight of the evidence – this man stupidly, perhaps even seditiously, insists upon circumventing Congress to shovel executive order after executive order atop the Mount St. Helens of dictatorial dung heaps.
Eventually it has to blow.
The question is no longer whether Barack Obama is weakening every noble aspect of American life, including our military. The question now becomes whether the rest of us will be able to put the pieces back together once this radical lefty is finally back in Hawaii for good – Mai Tai in one hand and leather-bound copy of the Communist Manifesto in the other.
The question is whether America will survive Barack Obama.
The upcoming elections aren’t about Republican vs. Democrat; conservative vs. liberal; Romney vs. Obama. Not entirely, at least. They’re much bigger than all that.
November signifies nothing new. It’s a microcosm of a much greater struggle – one that predates mankind. These elections are about truth vs. lies; light vs. darkness; good vs. evil.
Ultimately, November represents a high point – or a low point if you prefer – in the epic clash between diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible worldviews.
On the one hand, we have the Judeo-Christian worldview. It is both informed by and fully acknowledges absolute truth as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. It holds that individuals and nations together are accountable to a sovereign, holy Creator who “does as He pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth” (Daniel 4:35).
It was within the framework of this worldview that our great nation was formed. The historical record is undeniable. Our unique constitutional republic can operate harmoniously within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition alone.
It declares that, rather than by man – than by government – we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
On the other hand, we have the secular-humanist worldview. It, too, represents a tradition old as the days of Noah. It holds that there is no absolute truth and imagines, absolutely, that, as theological giant Francis Schaeffer often described, “Man is the measure of all things.”
It is from this humanist perspective that Barack Obama views the world. He and other “progressives” who share his worldview willfully ignore that, as history proves, when man is the measure of all things, all things can, and usually do, go horribly wrong. Consider, for example, the hundreds of millions killed under the humanist regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et al.
When man is the measure of all things, all things are necessarily relative. Relativism measures our deeds on a scale unbalanced, with no fixed lines of demarcation between right and wrong. It presumes that the only thing immoral is to presume that there are things immoral.
Schaeffer, writing in “The Christian Manifesto,” noted: “What we must understand is that the two worldviews really do bring forth with inevitable certainty not only personal differences, but total differences in regard to society, government, and law. There is no way to mix these two total worldviews. They are separate entities that cannot be synthesized.”
Indeed, we are at an impasse. We play a zero-sum game that is no game at all. Somebody must win, and somebody must lose.
“It is not too strong to say that we are at war,” wrote Schaeffer, “and there are no neutral parties in the struggle. One either confesses that God is the final authority, or one confesses that Caesar is Lord.”
Under the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the final authority. What God giveth, God taketh away. Under humanism, man – through government – is lord. What government giveth, government taketh away.
Evangelical luminary Dr. R.C. Sproul once observed: “Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.”
That snake’s eggs have hatched, leaving us to contend with a nest of humanist vipers.
In the end, eternal Truth – the image of God in the person of Jesus Christ – will crush, underfoot, the heads of that snake and his viperous brood. Yet, until such time, believers must not tarry but, rather, faithfully join the struggle – no matter how rough the waters become.
And the waters are becoming rough.
Our Founding Fathers had the divinely inspired foresight to construct a constitutional levee against the humanist hurricane. Regrettably, in recent decades that levee has given way, resulting in a devastating secularist flood. Amid the debris and drifting out to sea are, among other things, the dismembered bodies of 55-plus million unborn babies, the tattered institutions of natural marriage and family and respect for sexual purity, virtue and morality.
Also drowning beneath humanism’s neo-Marxist undercurrent are individual liberty, American sovereignty, fiscal solvency and national security. Each of these indispensable items, within both public policy and our cultural at large, barely clings to life.
Ephesians 6:12 declares: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Indeed, we are at war. Our struggles are complicated by the reality that many of the aforementioned rulers and authorities – to include Barack Obama and the larger “progressive” establishment – embrace the humanist philosophy. As noted, this philosophy was first planted in the mind of man by the very garden snake who commands “the powers of this dark world” and the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
But there is hope. Real hope. Not some nebulous, superficial hope fabricated to fuel a cult of personality.
There is hope in Christ.
Jesus commands His followers to be His hands and feet – to be salt and light in a rotting world that loves darkness.
True, salt preserves, but in an open wound, it also burns. Humanism is an open wound.
True, light’s bright glare can be illuminating to those eager to see. But it is also blinding to those whose eyes have become adjusted to darkness. When the light of Christ is shined, it sends lovers of evil scurrying for the shadows.
Indeed, we struggle to survive the humanist hurricane. America is keeping her head above water; but barely. The upcoming elections may determine whether we as a nation sink or swim – live or die.
Still, whatever happens in November, we must continue to faithfully tread the torrential waters. Although we have a profound opportunity to calm those waters on Nov. 6, humanist storms will always come.
We can once again gain solid footing on dry land, but to do so, we must first save ourselves.
Yet, not alone; we’ve been offered a hand up. We’ve been thrown a lifesaver.
Some say the third time is a charm. So I've tried to be a little more charming in my third book than I was in my first two. Make no mistake about it, though: I'm glad to have written two hard-hitting books on life in the academy. The first was needed to expose the intellectual shallowness of the campus diversity movement. Another book was needed to chronicle the absurdity of campus feminism. But my latest book is written from the heart.
