Part # 2
TANGENT
BY DAVE SIM
Anyway, I just found that I couldn't live that way. A woman is going to do whatever makes her
cheerful at the moment and that, in my experience, is the extent of her perception of ethics. In
order to maintain a relationship with an emotion-based being it is necessary to be cheerful
about anything that makes her cheerful. Coupled with a “woman's right to choose” as central
ethic – or, rather, “ethic” – this involves a wide and variegated spectrum of feminist actions and
behaviours and opinions. At one time, I rated sex as being very, very, very high on my list of
life's pleasures. Ultimately, for myself, the spiritual toll which was exacted by maintaining a
rictus grin in the face of all feminist actions, behaviours and opinions across the full range of
that spectrum made the price of sex too high – which, considering how highly I once rated sex
as a pleasure is really saying something, I think.
[I discovered, through celibacy and the avoidance of masturbation that sexual desire is a lot
like a rash. If you keep “scratching it” you make it worse and, thus, “scratching it” comes to
seem like an urgent, toppermost of the poppermost, central necessity in your life. If you learn
to leave your penis alone, I discovered, your penis will learn to leave you alone.]
This dovetailed with the “second source” in answering “Where do you think your ideas about
women come from?”: my own decision to alternate periods of intentional celibacy (as opposed
to “not getting laid”) with periods of monogamous sexual activity and semi-monogamous sexual
activity. Having gone back and forth between the two states over the course of a decade, I can
state unequivocally that celibate Dave Sim sees reality more clearly than sexually-active Dave
Sim (who wilfully hypnotized himself into seeing the world in a manifestly untrue way and
persuaded himself that feminist lies were true, that many feminist lies contained elements of
truth, that feminist lies were not wholly untruthful). Surrendering an accurate perception of
reality for a world of fairy-tale falsehoods was part of the high price of sex, a price I was no
longer prepared to pay.
I got tired of Believing Five Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
(Odd to say that one out loud for the first time.)
“For instance?” the fellow asked.
“Well, take Government-Funded Daycare,” I said, “a central plank in the platform of the fairy-
tale world emotion-based beings inhabit – Their belief/feeling that it is the responsibility of
government to raise children. Feminists and their hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet husbands .
. .
(. . . please bear with my use of that … admittedly . . . prejudicial phrase until I've had the
chance to elaborate . . .)
. . . have universally adopted Government-Funded Daycare in principle. Not only is it fiscally
irresponsible and an inherently unfair use of public funds (benefiting only those mothers who
choose to work), it is diametrically opposed to a central tenet of any civilized society: that
children are the responsibility of their parents to rear. When was the last time you even heard
it described as ‘rearing children’? ‘You rear children. You raise hogs.’ What the feminists and
their ventriloquist puppet husbands are talking about doing with Government-Funded Daycare
is raising children as if they were a herd of interchangeable swine. No surprise coming from a
gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong. Just hand the kids over
to the voodoo profession, social workers, government bean counters and go along with
whatever happens to be the Ethical Consensus du Jour. ‘Raise’ boys to be girls, ‘raise’ girls to
be boys.”
How?
“Well, I'm sure I don't know. I'm just Porky/Petunia's mother. They have experts who know how
to ‘raise’ boys to be girls and ‘raise’ girls to be boys. I'll let them decide. Listen, I'd love to chat
about this, but I have a meeting with a client at 9:00 and I'm going to be late as it is.”
This connected quite neatly with an article I had read in that morning's Globe & Mail which said
that some astronomical percentage of parents thought it was the responsibility of public
schools to teach sexual morality.
I mean, that one just stinks of feminism.
“Homosexuality is just another lifestyle choice, completely normal.” “Homosexuality isn't a
choice, it's a genetic reality” Oh. Okay. So (leaving aside the obvious fact that those two
realities contradict each other) [my own view is that all sexuality is a matter of choice since it is
not a life-sustaining necessity: what or whom you have sex with – or whether you have sex at
all – is optional. I would not be here if it weren't for sex, true, but if I choose never to have sex, I
am still “here”], when do you want to start teaching this lifestyle choice/genetic reality in the
classroom? What age? Six? Seven? Ten? Twelve? And how do you want to teach it? Bring in a
couple of dykes and a couple of interior decorators to talk to a bunch of third graders?
“Well, I'm sure I don't know. I'm just Porky/Petunia's mother. They have experts on cultural
diversity and alternative lifestyles now, don't they? I'll let them decide. Listen, I'd love to chat
about this, but I have a meeting with a client at l0:30 and I'm going to be late as it is.”
[This is actually “jumping the gun” a little on Tangent II's examination of the feminist-
homosexualist axis, but suffice to say that their feminist-homosexualist consensus view of
teaching homosexuality in the schools seems to be a) it's a very good idea and b) men are
wrong. It's difficult – actually impossible – to discern any agreement beyond that point].
But, this is way too many words for our CNN “Get To The Point News” Information Age, isn't it?
So, let's distil Daycare and Government-Funded Daycare into short and concise Impossible
Things to Believe Before Breakfast form:
1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children
eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her
children full time.
2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a
daycare space for a child so its mother – who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes – can be a
contributing member of society.
All you husbands and daycare daddies are just nodding like crazy. “Makes sense to me,
Dave.” “Gotta have it. Government-Funded Daycare. No way around that. Gotta have it.” “A
woman's right to choose! A woman's right to choose!”
For the benefit of the rest of my readership, I decided to compose a partial list of Impossible
Things To Believe Before Breakfast (jotted down over the course of an hour while working on a
Cerebus page – I figured a dozen or so would get my point across).
I'll just continue the numbering from our Daycare entries.
3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus
than does the father of that fetus.
4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of
making an unethical choice.
[I was going to allow the Impossible Things to stand alone and “hatch out” however they might
in each individual reader's mind once they had been planted – to mix a metaphor. However, in
the aftermath of Carol West's resignation, that seems unnecessarily naive, given the wilfulness
with which the hard questions are ignored in our society. So, here, interposed, is my more
elaborate opinion on abortion:
The far larger question, to me, is one of “what God therefore hath joyned together let not man
put asunder” (Matthew 19:6, Mark 10:9). (This, so far as I know, being the only genuinely
Biblical quotation – the Synoptic Jesus again, caveat emptor – in the otherwise wholly and
completely secular Christian wedding ceremony is a major reason that I have no objection to
gay marriages. I'm reasonably certain that marriage is a completely pagan, completely female
invention no more sacred as an institution than are feminism or communism. It is, after all,
called Matrimony and not Patrimony, isn't it? I mean, duh.) It seems to me utterly foolish to
ascribe virtually any of our society's haphazard – literally “catch as catch can” – marriage
unions to our Creator. In my view, an omnipotent and omniscient being simply wouldn't have
that lousy a track record.
Pregnancy, it seems to me, is an altogether different matter.
Inexplicable as it is that some acts of coitus produce offspring while others do not (despite the
best efforts of medical science to establish irrefutable “laws” of cause-and-effect) it seems to
me that here, God's hand is very much in evidence and “what God hath joyned together let not
man put asunder” – sperm and egg, fertilized egg and uterine wall – very much applicable. If
abortion is, as the feminists insist, a matter of a woman having control over her own body, then
I think a public demonstration of a woman willing herself to become un-pregnant or willing her
fertilized egg to detach itself from her uterine wall would settle the issue once and for all. At
which point I would happily go along with the secular-humanist consensus view.
But, of course, a woman no more has control over her reproductive functions – apart from
abstinence – than she has over the number of hairs growing on her head or the colour of her
eyes.
Thus, to me, “a woman's right to choose” constitutes little more than an imbecilic paraphrase of
“free will”. That is, we are all, by the grace of God, free to choose. That is what free will is. We
can choose to commit murder, we can choose to steal, we can choose to commit adultery. The
underpinning of the life of the God-fearing individual is that there is a price to be paid –
sometimes in this world, sometimes in the world to come, sometimes in both – for choosing
incorrectly. The ritual sacrifice of babies is well-documented among the pagan peoples named
in the Torah and is, irrefutably, an abomination in the eyes of God.
Is abortion in the same category?
As a global civilization, here in the first nanoseconds of the 21st century the present
consensus would appear to be “yes, no and/or maybe”. Half of us believe that abortion is in no
way comparable. Half of us believe that it is. To me, all that is relevant is God's opinion and –
since medical abortion evolved well after the death of God's Last Messenger and Seal of
Prophets, Muhammad (peace be upon him) in 632 CE – that is unknown to us. It is unknown to
me and it is unknown to you and it is unknown to Pope John Paul II, his predecessors and his
successors. Likewise with God's opinion on condoms (ribbed, coloured or plain) and birth
control pills.
On the Last Day when all is made plain to us, I would not be terribly surprised – from my
present vantage point of self-admitted absolute ignorance – to find that abortions and birth
control will be indictable offences for some and non-indictable offences for others, based on
God's superior and perfect knowledge of each individual . . . just as I would not be terribly
surprised to find that abortion and birth control will be deemed murder, High Crimes against
one's own soul and (far worse) the soul of another . . . or to find that abortion and birth control
are considered lesser transgressions against one's own soul: more comparable to, say,
smoking than to, say, murder. Genuine faith in God, it seems to me, brings one face-to-face
with the profound level of one's own ignorance about what is right and what is wrong, post-632
CE. The fact that the various church hierarchies refuse to acknowledge their own ignorance in
no way alters my own belief that we are all ignorant in these areas. But, the bottom line, to me
is a) we won't know until the Last Day and b) “a woman's right to choose” contributes nothing
to the debate.
In my own sexually-active days, I found the idea of “a woman's right to choose” to be more than
a little “ethically convenient”. Had any of the women I had had sex with gotten pregnant (none
did, so far as I know), I could just take the secular-humanist “high road” of saying that I
believed in “a woman's right to choose” thus (theoretically anyway) allowing her to assume
whatever “karmic debt” or “spiritual burden” results from having an abortion while, on my own
part, “escaping” with just the financial burden of a few hundred dollars for the cost of the
operation. Even in my secular-humanist days it seemed just a little too, as I say, “ethically
convenient” considering what was actually involved: the irresponsible initiation of a human life
followed by the equally irresponsible (to me) eradicating of that human life. Two wrongs don't
make a right, at the point of greatest reduction. It seemed to me a double ethical pitfall and,
no, I don't blame women for that. Women have as natural an affinity for medical science as
they had for its progenitor, magic. If there is something that women can make use of that, in
their view, will provide them with immediate tactical gratification or relief from anxiety, they will
make use of it and then welcome any voodoo-professional feminist ideology band-aid
assistance in rationalizing away their (I think, natural) feelings of guilt – so long as the
assistance/rationalizing comes “after the fact”. It is, in my view, part of a man's ethical
obligation to his own soul and to his Creator to endeavour to be (or become) sufficiently wary
of this female trait and for men to not allow their penises to lead them down specific unethical
paths where a man's own fate in this world and possibly the next becomes “bound up” with
those disposed (predisposed?) to believe in these sorts of “ethical conveniences”. In saying
that, I no more believe that women are to blame in any way for those occasions when I allowed
my own penis to lead me down specific unethical paths than, as an example, cigarettes are to
blame for the fact that, a year and a half after quitting smoking, I still want to smoke a cigarette.
“It was my choice to smoke my first cigarette at the age of eleven and it was my choice to
smoke every cigarette I smoked thereafter.
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