Another nation is moving to eliminate parental rights for fathers. This time, it’s Taiwan:
Taiwan’s Health Promotion Administration (HPA) on Wednesday (Dec. 9) announced it will propose eliminating a law that requires women to receive permission from their spouses to have an abortion. Article 9 of the Genetic Health Act states that if a married woman wishes to undergo an abortion, she must first receive consent from her spouse. However, a petition to rescind the law on the Public Policy Proposal Platform received 7,441 signatures, exceeding the minimum of 5,000 needed to require a response from a government department.
On Wednesday, HPA Deputy Director-General Wu Chao-chun (吳昭軍) announced that in order to comply with the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and after consulting with various groups in the community, the department is planning to amend the Genetic Health Act to meet the expectations of the public and achieve the greatest consensus, reported CNA. Wu said more discussions will be held internally and that a draft of the new legislation will be announced in March… among the countries in the world where abortion is legal, fewer than 10 explicitly require spousal consent.
In short, men are required to pay child support if women decide not to kill their babies (something I support)—but conversely, they have no right to protect their children from the tools of the abortionist if they wish to meet them face to face. It is a sick world we live in. This sort of feminism is straight-up poison.
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Regular readers of this blog will know I tracked the debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari quite closely. While it is true that the defanged liberalism of David French is inadequate to respond to the cultural revolution we’re undergoing, it is also true that Ahmari’s call for greater government intervention simply doesn’t seem strategically feasible (although my heart is with him—I’d love it if it was.) Now, Ross Douthat—who is also more oriented towards Ahmari’s side of the debate—has articulated perfectly the problems with both strategies in a post-Christian America in National Review. An excerpt:
The problem with French’s prescription is that pluralism depends on decentralized institutions, and the centralizing forces in American institutional life right now — in media, education, politics — are extremely difficult to resist. Meanwhile American social life is atomizing in many ways, and local life especially — and that pull and push means that structurally the country almost seems to want a new religious center, a magnet to pull our lonely individual selves back together, to forge community and a sense of the common good in the only smithies still in operation.
But the difficulty with Ahmari’s prescription is that most of the people who work in those national smithies simply prefer woke ideas to traditional religious ones, or at least still tilt away from anything resembling cultural conservatism when pressed to choose a side. I find traditional Christianity more coherent and plausible and belief-inspiring than secular liberalism or woke-progressive zeal. But I have also seen enough in my career as a professional arguer to doubt that the more-effective use of judicial or administrative power will induce a critical mass of culture-workers and culture-shapers to see the world my way.
The Trudeau Liberals’ radical bill to drastically expand euthanasia—something we’ve been tracking very carefully—has passed the House of Commons and moved to the Senate. A dark day in Canadian history, and an awful day for the vulnerable, those with mental illness, and those with disabilities.
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This is not going to make me popular, but I think Eric Metaxas has jumped the shark on the issue of the election. To state up front: His biography of Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, is one of my favorite books; I’ve met him several times and found him to be gracious and lovely; I had him on my show before the election and had a fantastic conversation. In short: I’m a fan and have been for years. But he appears determined to portray this election in the most apocalyptic terms. He had Trump on his show briefly and informed the president that he’d die for him (a sacrifice that Trump would probably think about for mere seconds and accept as his due) and told him that God was on his side (reminding me of Lincoln’s famous reply: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”)
Rod Dreher, who I recently had on my show to discuss his New York Times bestseller Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, is a long-time friend of Metaxas, and laid out his problems with Metaxas’ recent interview with Charlie Kirk in a column titled “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse.” He noted up front that this is nothing personal against Metaxas (and I would echo the same for anyone who disagrees with me on any of this.) Then he notes the danger of what Metaxas is saying, which I agree with:
Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,
“So who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened, and I am going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”
Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.
So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:
“We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.”
There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.
Read the entire thing. It’s worth thinking about. Again, I’m a big fan of Metaxas’ work. I have signed copies of three of his books. I’ve followed him for years. But this sort of thing—stating that regardless of the evidence and regardless of the courts, we simply know that the election was stolen—is dangerous. The moment something becomes a matter of faith rather than the result of examination and evidence, we’re in a personality cult impervious to reason rather than an ideological culture war. We need to be very, very careful.
