The ignorant believe that freedom means they can do whatever they like. Nobody ever taught them correctly that freedoms only exist because of responsibilities. What they want is chaos, not freedom.
— Jerid Ure (@JeridU) September 12, 2022
Do you agree I have the right to tell a faggot that he can be cured? I mean, we know that we all have the responsibility to educate/remind sodomites about how conversion therapy offers one of only two escape routes from their evil lifestyle choice, but we do also indeed have that right. So looks like "rights and responsibilities" align better than you might think.
What other "responsibility" does Jerid think I need? Well, for that let's turn to (rare a specimen as it may be) an even deeper thinker than me. Again we open the pages of Ted Byfield's The Book of Ted which at this rate I will have completely reproduced on this blog by the time of our 20th anniversary.
If Chatelaine weds Penthouse, the marriage can't lastI was given the other day the publication of one of the human rights lobby groups which cited and deplored the alarming statistical evidence of social disintegration in Alberta - suicide, juvenile crime, family breakup and so on. It struck me as odd that a civil rights group should deplore such things. If any single factor can be blamed for the contemporary social collapse, it is our ceaseless and impatient insistence upon our "human rights," and our concurrent silence on the subject of human responsibility.
While the causes of our malaise are many, most can be traced to one, notably the seeming failure of the family unit. It in turn is directly attributable to the modern instability of marriage. When the marriage fails, the home breaks up. However "civilized" the divorce (and many are not in the least civilized), the resulting trauma to both parents and children creates many of the other statistics. To solve the problem therefore we must somehow re-establish permanence in the marital partnership. We need a tougher, deeper, more durable commitment that can withstand the storms that all human relationships involve, and emerge from them stronger and more resilient than ever. To achieve this, however, we are going to have to stop yapping about our rights and begin pondering most diligently our responsibilities.
The kind of yapping I'm talking about is eloquently illustrated by certain mass circulation magazines, some addressed to women, some to men. Take, for example, that bountifully profitable Maclean Hunter publication called Chatelaine, which is by a mile Canada's most widely read women's periodical. Much of its content has not changed for generations - advice on cooking, dieting, fashion and home improvement. But in the last ten or so years it has developed a new editorial thrust. This consists in one long, ceaseless and increasingly strident whine for assorted rights. There is the right of women to equal pay, the right of women to equal pensions, the right of women to equal job opportunities, the right of wives to minimum wages, the right of secretaries to refuse to make coffee, the right of mothers to pass child care onto fathers, and on and on. Why is research so retarded on a male birth control pill, demands one article. Why do fifty per cent of married women in their thirties who have good jobs cheat on their husbands? (The answer after about five thousand words: because their husbands are no good in bed.)
The justice of most, if not all, these claims is not in dispute here. The point is that the whine is pretty well the only kind of message which the entire magazine conveys. Its whole communication is described by the single word: GET. There is not the faintest evidence of GIVE. There are no appeals to women to sacrifice their interests to that of their children, no gentle suasions for devotion to husbands, no homilies for the care of aged parents, the nursing of the sick, the bandaging of wounded shins or the healing of wounded hearts. Yet even the most superficial examination of the tough marriages, the ones that work, invariably reveals a wife and mother who does all this and a great deal more besides. And in Canada's biggest and most influential women's magazine it is almost nowhere to be found. This surely is significant.
But it pales into pedantry when contrasted with the implications of Canada's most popular men's magazine. This, as it turns out, is not a Canadian magazine at ail, but an American one that outcirculates all rivals in Canada. It is called Penthouse and its most obvious distinction is the recurrence of four-colour, high-gloss pages full of gynaecology. Its purpose, as every male heart knows but won't admit, is to take the dignity and poise of womanhood and strip it raw, thereby fulfilling some dark desire in the further reaches of our minds that delights in the destruction of innocence. Hence the purer and younger the subject the greater the gratification, so long as it is old enough to look female. This sensation is no more related to art than it is to sex. It is an experience not of body but of mind that comes straight from hell. When women fear and banish it, they are on very certain ground, serving our ultimate interests better than their own, and in moments of lucidity we know it.
But it is not only in its pornography that Penthouse poisons the societal order. It is in the tacit assertion of certain inalienable male rights - the right of perpetual gratification, the right to possess, exploit and abandon, the right of infidelity, the right of concubinage, the right of progeneration without commitment. And again, where is the call to responsibility? Nowhere does it declare that a man must serve, protect and nourish that which he begets, that his loyalty to his wife must be unreserved and inviolate, that her vulnerability in childbirth lies upon him as a holy obligation, and that his abandonment of that duty is not a declaration of independence but one of a despicable treachery. These things we do not read in Penthouse. Instead we find the ceaseless incantation of the coward who creeps away from the battle during the night. "I value my freedom," he declares, and he may therefore walk on the face of any who threaten it. That is the message of Penthouse. Now it seems obvious that if many couples approach marriage, she with her mind full of Chatelaine and he with his mind full of Penthouse, the amazing fact is not that two out of three marriages fail, but that one out of three succeeds. Unfortunately, however, a two-thirds failure rate inevitably portends the impending doom of the social order. A next generation there always must be. if the conventional family cannot provide it, then the state, furnished with the new and terrible resources of biochemistry, will do so instead with all the Orwellian horror that this implies. So it is time we quit bleating about our rights, and got down to the serious and thrilling business of our responsibilities.
Ted Byfield - November 29, 1982
It's worth noting that Ted did miss out on the third rail of population shoring: insanely high immigration from third world shitholes that slowly import a populace that might be okay with me curing faggots but probably has a few ideas about breweries that Jerid would have issues with.
While Ted's concern is that married couples need to worry more about responsibility than rights, Jerid's is a misguided belief that "society" is giving me some nebulous responsibilities which is much shakier ground. In a marriage I have to be responsible for one person and sacrifice some personal desires to make them happy. Trying to do it for 35 million "Canadians" (less than half of whom actually are) is completely untenable. I'm part of this society, can I give Jerid a list of rights he can't enjoy because he's responsible for my happiness and sanctity?
