Different Kinds of Special Effects

“In such a movie, a petite woman can throw five 300-pound guys around like they were made of balsa wood. All she has to do is have the director on her side. But that’s not the way it works in the real world. If your daughter buys into it, at some point she is going to be thirty-eight, owner of her own company, very lonely, and wondering where all the good men have gone. It turns out they didn’t want to be married to a girl boss.”

Keep Your Kids, p. 78

Liberty is a Religious Value

“So I don’t want liberty for secularists because secularism is true—it isn’t. Secularism is an opium dream, complete with flashing eyes and floating hair. I want liberty for secularists because Jesus is Lord. Because Jesus is Lord, the right of fallen sinners to wield coercive power must be strictly limited. One of the toughest lessons for sinners to learn is the necessity of leaving other sinners alone.”

Mere Christendom, pp. 74-75

Not That Daughter Either

“We can all acknowledge that a father spitting in his daughter’s face is not something that we would call a great moment in child-rearing. This is obviously a family with some serious dysfunction going on. Nobody reading this should want to be that dad. So don’t be that dad. Not ever. But here is the point. Suppose I had gone a different route and said something like “Whatever you do, don’t be that daughter, man. Whatever she did, it must have been pretty bad.” Enlightened moderns everywhere would be aghast. They would be aghast for a reason, and that reason is the thing I want to point to. The striking thing here is that, even in such a grim scenario, all the social pressure in ancient Israel was applied to the daughter, and not to the father. She was the one who bore the shame” ‘If this happened, should she not be ashamed for seven days?’ This default assumption seems almost inconceivable to us. We tend to wonder, ‘Why was the father not arrested and charged?’”

Keep Your Kids, p. 72