The Women in My Novels

Heather Fitch and Melinda Overstreet are nothing like my wife. I think, if anything, they are conglomerations of all the girls I wished I could date back in school but never had the nerve to ask out. The real-life girls probably weren’t as together as Heather and Melinda, but in my young, immature mind, I didn’t realize that. “Gosh! She looks perfect so surely she is!!” 

So, if there’s a maturity in my thinking that comes out in the books, Sonya Kiel (in A Star Falls on Oklahoma) is probably in a line with Heather in Melinda in that she looks perfect, but hopefully is a little more realistic with her flaws. But she’s also a fantasy in that I see these young starlets and “influencers” in the news that are certainly outwardly pretty, but as I read about their constant break-ups and melt-downs, I can’t help but think that, in the long run, they would have been better off—especially spiritually—to have never been “discovered” and stayed in their small town somewhere, involved in a local church, etc. But I can see where, if you’re 22 years old and the world is throwing millions of dollars and lots of adoration at you, it would be nigh-impossible to turn that down. 

Then, the secondary problem within this is all the young people who are being influenced by these influencers and thinking that’s the way their life should be. Of course, it’s all portrayed in the media as so fun and glamorous (even the pics of some 40-something star stumbling drunk out of a bachelor party), which just adds to the problem. I have no idea what to do about the problem in a world-wide sense … short of another flood, but we know that’s not going to happen. Though, personally, I haven’t seen a rainbow since last summer.

Ezekiel and the Double Standard

A man is accused of having beat up a woman. As a result, he's being suspended from his job for 6 weeks. In his multimillion dollar business, that means he will also take a huge hit to the wallet. He's a professional athlete, so this is also a punishment on his team because they will be without his services for those 6 weeks and he's an integral part of their plans.

If he truly did what he was a accused of, I have no problem with the punishment.

What I don't get, though, is that our modern culture keeps telling us that there is no such thing as "man" or "woman", that such distinctions are strictly the choice of the one using them.

Incongruous picture of the highest military post in the U.S. Army

So why was it wrong for this guy to punch a woman? Shouldn't she be able to take it as well as any man?

The answer is two-fold. First, the cultural watchdogs who take care of such things live and die by the double standard. Like that woman who gave birth a couple weeks ago while thinking she's a man and getting a lot of publicity because men aren't supposed to be able to give birth (hint: they still can't) and then getting more publicity when she said her baby was a "boy" (i.e. saddling him with a gender stereotype from birth) and receiving no backlash from the useful idiots in the press who think she's a he, these same who have no problem in telling us that men and women are the same until a moment when they can advance another agenda by saying they aren't.

Second, and I stand by this: men and women are different. And while there are plenty of women in this world who could beat me up if they so desired, the reality is that--on average--men are stronger than women and, therefore, have an advantage in face-to-face fights. For millennia, then, it's been a standard rule of human behavior that men do not hit women. I think this rule also has some grounding in the idea that men should honor the gender of their mother, wife and daughters by treating all women with respect.

So, for the record, I whole-heartedly agree that if this young man struck the woman as alleged he should pay a penalty. I'm just surprised the SJWs agree with me.

P.S. Just as a matter of curiosity, would this guy have received the same penalty if he had struck a woman who self-identifies as a man and it could be proven that the blow had nothing to do with gender? (Maybe if there were witnesses to testify that they were arguing politics or sports.)