The Impact of Feminism on the Family
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].
To accomplish their goals, 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 attack Christian beliefs, conservative organizations, and all the traditional family structures of America. Feminism is an evil monster!
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 recover 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 Keeping Men are Threatening to NOW
A million men willing to put their wives and families first is very frightening to Patricia Ireland, head of 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.
Abortion Kills a Child
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 Conference 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 semantics 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.
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"You can name anything you want to name, but I am opposed to anything in the world that de-emphasizes the line of difference between the sexes. I believe that ladies ought to be feminine and sweet and lovely and charming. I believe men ought to be strong and masculine and decisive. I’m opposed to anything that makes a man and a woman act alike, look alike, dress alike, or talk alike."
-Pastor Jack Hyles (quote taken from Dr. Hyle's sermon, Unisex)
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