Your Body; the Left’s Choice

I knew better, but I clicked on a link to The Washington Post. I have only myself to blame. The headline I clicked said, “As a young evangelical, I believed a bestselling book that warned me to stay ‘pure’ until marriage. I still have a stain on my heart.”

Weird way to write a headline.

You really have to see the core “argument,” in order to believe it:

Purity culture taught me that I ought to be passed down from father to husband, more an inheritance than a human. I was taught that men are my cover and my shield, when for the most part they have been the ones causing damage through molestation, rape, and abuse. I was taught that my holy calling was to open my legs for one and only one and bear him children. Barring that, I was to keep them closed and never express desire or lust or fear or longing. So many women in my life cracked under the untenable pressure, often giving up on God all together. Others were forced into marriages with men who hit them and hid their abuse behind another message of the church borne from purity culture, that God hates divorce.

Are you kidding me?

This isn’t a Christian led by the Holy Spirit. She’s probably not a Christian at all. It reminds me of the famous Internet comment lead-in: “As a lifelong Republican,” which means, “As an extreme leftist who posts comments, pretending to be conservative.”

Maybe there is a church out there somewhere that teaches women they are their fathers’ possessions. I have never heard that doctrine. I’m pretty sure it disappeared during the Renaissance.

The line about women “forced” into marriage is classic victimhood spiel. Who “forces” women into marriage in 2016? I mean, not including Muslims? This isn’t the Middle Ages. Christian parents are some of the most passive people on earth. A typical evangelical would rather walk off a pier than “judge” his daughter or tell her whom to marry. The “judge not” crowd has us penned into a dark corner, like Moonies at an airport. The devil talked us into unilateral disarmament.

Is it possible that there are non-Christian women who slept around a lot and still ended up in abusive marriages? Just maybe. Call me crazy, but I believe that. Or maybe Mike Tyson was a virgin when he got hitched.

Suddenly, purity is human trafficking. Fathers and husbands of pure brides are pimps. Insane. We have entered the age of virgin-shaming.

But it’s not surprising, from a woman who clearly feels hostility toward men (not the typical evangelical attitude). She says, “I was taught that men are my cover and my shield, when for the most part they have been the ones causing damage through molestation, rape, and abuse.” Did Rachel Maddow write this?

It’s a remarkable thing. Suddenly promiscuity is wise, and purity is perilous and foolish. If you can believe things like that, there is probably no lie you can’t swallow.

If you aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, you can be persuaded to believe things that go against doctrine and your upbringing. You have weak walls. This is why Jesus told the disciples not to do anything until he gave them power.

I looked at the comments, expecting to gag, but even the Post’s readers were not completely on the side of sleaze. That surprised me.

I keep getting these not-at-all subtle reminders: “America’s goose is cooked. Stop thinking about fixing it.” I have stopped. I will not resume. It’s like the feeling you get when you realize God wants you to stop trying to reform someone who has already decided not to listen. Often it’s okay to let people destroy themselves. God does it every day.

You’re not really letting them destroy themselves; you’re just acknowledging that you can’t help them.

I got some interesting comments about The Aeneid, which is now high on my list of least-favorite books. One commenter pointed out that it’s actually a poem, and that prose translations suck the life out of it. Another person said I should consider a different translation.

These comments make sense. Imagine reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in prose form. Not something I would look forward to. It would be a terrible book. You would have to change everything about it to make it digestible.

The translation I quoted in an earlier post keeps rhythm and rhyme in the poem (I am assuming the original rhymed so I don’t have to look up the Latin). It’s considerably more palatable than the version I’m reading. It’s broken up into short lines, which makes it less imposing. My translation is just a wall of letters.

I wanted to use the translations Columbia College used, so that’s what I bought. I’m sure they have a good reason for subjecting students to the version I have. Just like they have a good reason for coed showers.

My new strategy is to use my phone to read the book. The screen is small, so it breaks the prose up into little pieces that cause less pain going down. But maybe a different translation is the way to go. I’m not going to remember this stuff anyway, so it shouldn’t matter much. I just have to convince myself I’m not cheating.

Sooner or later, I have to tackle Don Quixote, which weighs a good pound and a half in paperback. Maybe I should give it a pass. I had to read it for another course at Columbia. There was a strange old guy who was held out to be a great genius, and his Don Quixote course was a Columbia College staple. I failed to perceive any signs of genius–I thought he was boring and barely coherent–but then you don’t have to be Marilyn vos Savant to do well in the Liberal Arts. You just have to memorize well and pretend you agree with your warped leftist teachers.

Maybe he was a different person if you dealt with him one on one, but everyone I knew thought he was an empty suit. Nice guy, I think. Smiled a lot. A LOT. It was a little strange.

He kept calling Don Quixote “the quicksut.” No idea what that was all about.

I may get yammered at for this, but it seems like Spanish-language literature is not on the same level as literature in English, French, German, whatever language the Scandinavians write in, and Russian. There goes my diversity merit badge.

Spain-boosters always cry, “Cervantes!”, when you say this. I don’t think Cervantes was all that good; Rabelais did the same kind of thing with much more skill and erudition. If you skip forward a few centuries, you run into Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I like Borges okay, but I thought Four Hundred Years of Solitude was windy, coarse, and pointless. The world is bad. Babies get eaten by ants. Okay; what are you trying to get at?

It may be that Spanish-speaking authors get an automatic push to the front of the line, like black directors. Okay, I apologize. Spike Lee really is a genius. The only reason his stuff goes straight to DVD is that the general public is too unsophisticated to appreciate Oldboy.

I didn’t know that movie existed until thirty seconds ago. It does exist, right?

If Spanish literature were really good, you would see a wall of translations when you walked into Barnes & Noble in America, just as people surely see walls of translations when they walk into bookstores in Spain. If it’s good, it will be translated. Publishers like money. They like new markets for old merchandise.

Maybe Spanish literature is to French literature as Spanish brandy is to cognac. As everyone knows, the French have accomplished huge things in literature, as well as math and science. I’m sitting here trying, and I can’t think of a theorem, law, or principle named after a Spaniard. France, though…Poisson, Cauchy, Descartes, Pascal, Ampere, d’Alembert, Lagrange…and they invented the bidet. Maybe.

I guess the Spanish had other things on their minds.

Spanish brandy is really bad, by the way. I got fooled into buying it once. It was said to be the equal of French XO, at a fraction of the price. Don’t you believe it. I bought something called Le Panto, and it tasted like it had been made from cooking wine that had been left outdoors in troughs for a month. I did not finish the bottle. I’ve also tried Gran Duque D’Alba, which is like a cheap domestic brandy with sugar in it. I paid forty bucks for a bottle, as a gift. Never again. Now I get Korbel’s top offering, for $19. It’s excellent.

I hope Virgil is behind me soon. When this ordeal is over, I will be able to say I read the whole book, and that will put me in, I would guess, an exclusive group making up perhaps 2% of the people who took Lit. Hum.

The quicksut himself would stand up and applaud.