A bit of magazine advice

Not sure if there is a logical end point to this kind of thing. Look at the magazine cover below (a lifestyle magazine for the Melbourne Herald Sun):

Notice anything odd? Maybe a close up will help:

The cover is advertising a story about "Women who are single, sexy and over 60." It's Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex in the City lifestyle being promoted now to women of grandmotherly age.

The magazine story itself is what the internet writer Dalrock calls "divorce porn," i.e. it is trying to sell divorce to women as a great lifestyle move.

The story was first published in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, back in January. The Melbourne version has the heading "Meet the freemales. Deprived? No. Lonely? Definitely not. These women are happily single, sexy and 60 - and their numbers are on the rise."

The gist of the story is that women who grew up as part of the sexual revolution want to pursue the same ideals into their 60s, leaving their husbands and marriages in order to live a life that "has infinitely more possibilities" than anything experienced by previous generations of women, choosing instead of marriage a great "adventure" and doing so alone.

In a way, these women really are acting out the values of liberal modernity. In liberal modernity there are no goods that exist as part of an objective reality. Instead, value is created by the act of choosing our own subjective goods. So what matters is being free to self-determine what we do. Marriage restricts our ability to act however we want at any given time. Therefore, a liberal modern might think it "liberating" to reject marriage in favour of the "infinite possibilities" of life as a single 60-something woman.

Our commitments to others are easily dissolved in the liberal schema. It is noticeable that no thought at all is given to the husbands that these women have left. Nor to the damage done to the institution of marriage itself. There is no mention of the duties we might carry to others, instead one woman is thought of as liberated because she rejects the idea of "caring for others" - she readily admits that she is "more selfish" than those who choose to marry.

The tension here between marriage/family and liberal values is resolved in favour of liberal values. And so you have the spectacle of a major newspaper publishing "divorce porn" for women in their 60s.

You don't know what you've got until....

I have met several white South African migrants to Australia in recent months. Quite a few seem to be choosing my region of Melbourne to resettle in. I can't help but ask them, out of curiosity, why they left South Africa to come to Australia. So far they have all listed just two things: crime and quotas.

The crime issue hit home to me with the last South African I spoke to. She said a decisive moment for her was when she was forced to the ground during a robbery and had an AK47 pointed at her head. I said to her that I had heard of some terrible things done to white farmers in South Africa, and she told me that it wasn't just a farm issue but was happening in the cities as well. She thought that it was now foolish for white people to remain in South Africa if they had the opportunity to leave (her family had to give up a lot of money to get here). She expressed some sadness at witnessing Australia heading down the same path as South Africa (I think she was referring to the carjackings and home invasions being carried out by the Apex gang). She said it was difficult as someone who had seen her own country become unliveable to observe another country heading down the same path.

I think that we as Australians take a lot for granted. It is a very basic freedom to be able to live without fear of violent attack in your daily life. Another white South African who moved to Australia wrote of his decision that:

I am grateful to my Father in heaven for the chance to leave. I will not throw stones when asked by people about my former country, but I will be candid about the facts.

It is indeed, Cry The Beloved Country. I sleep now with open windows; don’t worry about the guy selling a paper at the traffic light (robot) or the lights behind me on the way home. SA citizens, you are going to have to stand up and demand accountability. Call me what you wish, but I am happier now than I have been in 20 years.

My children have a genuine shot at goals. To those who choose to remain and those who cannot leave, I salute you.

For this (former) South African it is a great blessing simply to be able to sleep with open windows. Or not to worry when the traffic lights turn red.

Liberals do not seem to realise that in holding to an ideal of "equal freedom" by which everyone is supposed to have the right to migrate to the West regardless of the likelihood of assimilating or upholding a law-abiding culture, important personal freedoms are likely to be lost, as has happened in South Africa. To live in a more traditional society in which you can move freely and with security is a greater freedom than to have open borders and to have to barricade yourself in your home or your car.

The second reality of life for white South Africans is quotas. One of the South Africans I spoke to said that the decisive moment for him in choosing to leave his country was getting a job and observing the older and experienced white males being passed over for promotion because of the quota system in South Africa in which white males get put last. He realised that he had little chance for career advancement in South Africa, and that his children would also face the same penalties (he also explained something about white business operators having to accept majority black ownership of the company in order to receive government contracts, but I'm not sure about the details of this).

The point to be made is that it is possible to lose your country in the sense that it is no longer a place that is safe for you or that offers you normal opportunities for work or education. This is the reality for white South Africans. Some are choosing to tough it out, some are leaving and coming to places like Australia. We do need to try to preserve, for our own populations, what we have and not take it for granted.

"Who are we to say you shouldn't feel insecure?"

The head of Australia Post, Ahmed Fahour, is a Muslim. He has defended the right of Sonia Kruger to express her concerns about Muslim immigration:

"Who are we to say, 'you shouldn't feel insecure, you just suck it up'. That's not right. They have a right.

"I feel insecure. I am a Muslim and I feel insecure about what Daesh is doing.

His comment came as news arrived of a bombing, most likely carried out by the Taliban, in the Pakistani city of Quetta, which killed the senior lawyers of that city:

About 60 of them were killed in one attack on Monday in Baluchistan's capital, Quetta. They were packed into an emergency room where the body of a slain colleague lay, riddled with gunshot wounds. A widely circulated video showed lawyers milling about the hospital before an enormous explosion. A Pakistani Taliban offshoot claimed the attack, as did the Islamic State, though analysts say the latter's claim is dubious.

A generation of lawyers has been wiped out in Quetta, and it will leave Baluchistan, in more ways than one, lawless.

Barkhurdar Khan, a member of the Baluchistan Bar Council, was one of the few lawyers who survived the attack...After the attack, Khan offered his singular perspective in a heartrending stream of posts on social media.

"All, I repeat ALL senior practicing lawyers and barristers died today," he wrote. "Most of those who died were first-gen educated. The scenes of misery and loss cannot be put into words. The bent shoulders of their fathers, the broken backs of their brothers. Their kids, still oblivious to their own loss, playing and hoping," Khan continued.

"Heartwrenching is an understatement."

And, finally, something that we traditionalists have predicted. In Italy, homosexuals have been granted the right to civil unions. Unsurprisingly, the leading Muslim organisation in that country has argued that if two men can marry, then a man should be able to have more than one wife and have it recognised by the state:

Following the introduction of civil partnerships, Muslim representatives in Italy are now demanding the legalisation of polygamy.

Responding to a new law allowing same sex couples to enter civil unions, Hamza Piccardo argued that if gay relationships, which Muslims disagree with, are a civil right then Italians must accept polygamy as a civil right too.

The founder of the Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations (UCOII) in Italy took to Facebook to claim polygamy is a “civil right” and that Italy would benefit from the large number of Muslim births it would promote.

It's only a matter of time, isn't it? If, as liberals claim, family is whatever we define it to be and marriage is a celebration of love between people, then on what logical grounds can you say that men shouldn't have more than one wife?

We have a combination of a watered down liberal definition of marriage and mass Muslim immigration into the West. The result will inevitably be the legalisation of polygamy. Liberalism and Islam are working together, in this instance, to radically change the Western tradition.

My suburb to become more "vibrant" - and who is responsible?

We have seen how Muslim refugees have been brought en masse into Sweden and Germany and then put into various kinds of social housing in local communities.

Well, it's happening now in my own suburb here in Melbourne, though on a smaller scale.

I live in the suburb of Eltham on the fringes of Melbourne. It's a pleasantly green, family-oriented place to live and the demographics haven't changed much over the years - according to the 2011 census those from Italy (5%) are the only major non-Anglo ethnic group.

But that is soon to change with an influx of Muslims from Syria and Iraq. How has this come about?

Well, the first person responsible is the supposedly "conservative" politician Tony Abbott, who decided as PM to resettle 12,000 refugees from the Middle-East in Australia (admittedly smaller numbers than Germany and Sweden).

The second institution responsible is, predictably, the Catholic Church, which has decided that "social justice" means helping to Islamify Australia.

There is a large aged care facility in Eltham which was run until recently by a group called Melbourne City Mission. Last year it was taken over by St Vincent's Care Services:

Melbourne City Mission Chief Executive, Rev Ric Holland, said the sale announcement was a fantastic outcome for Eltham’s residents and their families, as well as the centre’s staff and volunteers, and it will be business as usual for operations.

That wasn't true. St Vincent's Care Services is committed to a vision of social justice which is no longer focused on helping the local elderly:

Our focus is on addressing the health care needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people experiencing chronic homelessness and people living in the community seeking asylum.

So the mission is to help asylum seekers. What this means is that St Vincent's is going to start leasing places at the facility to young Iraqis and Syrians, then allow them to buy them cheaply, alongside the elderly residents still living there.

The local paper ran a story on this highlighting the worry for the elderly residents:

Retirement village residents fear being victimised if they speak out against plans allowing Syrian and Iraqi refugees to lease units in the same centre they call home.

...a person living inside the village...said that residents were not consulted about the proposal. "It was either like it or lump it," the resident said.

"We were told it was going to enliven the community and become a more vibrant and dynamic place, but this is a retirement centre."

...The relative of another village resident, who also did not want to be named, pleaded...for the application to be refused. "The residents are feeling very scared and unsafe," the letter read.

So elderly people in a retirement village are being told that they are going to live in a more "vibrant" place with the arrival of young Muslim refugees.

What is to be said about all this? I can only point again to the fact that the Liberal Party is more correctly described as a right-liberal party rather than a genuinely conservative one. Tony Abbott, who is often portrayed in the media as a right-wing politician, implemented policies that are radically liberal in nature rather than conservative. And the Catholic Church seems to have joined in the great liberal death wish - it is hell-bent on a future Islamic Australia rather than a Christian one.

As for those who wish to help asylum seekers, it is a very odd thing to take people from Iraq and drop them half-way around the world into an aged care facility in an outer suburb of Melbourne. If they really do need help, rather than wanting welfare and Western women, then they should be supported to resettle somewhere in their own region, where living standards and culture are similar to their own country.

Another feminist falls

Sandra Hochman was a second-wave American feminist, perhaps best known for a documentary film Year of the Woman.

Her daughter, Ariele Leve, has published a book, An Abbreviated Life, giving an account of her childhood. If it is an accurate portrayal, then it is clear that her feminist mother was psychologically disordered, possibly borderline or narcissist.

It's another case of modern society being influenced by people unfit for the role.

You can read reviews of Ariele Leve's book, including descriptions of her mother's unusual behaviour, here and here.

Melbourne Traditionalists meeting a success

Have just got back from tonight's meeting of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It was a very enjoyable get together, with some great discussion of recent events and future directions. I'd like to give some credit to Mark Moncrieff of Upon Hope who organised the event. My wish would be that such meetings could be reproduced in suburbs and towns across Australia - when you participate you get the feeling that traditionalists should not be isolated, or connected only electronically, but should form the kind of connections that arise from meeting together. Thank you to all who participated!

Is virtue signalling feminine?

This a just a personal observation which may or may not hold true across the board. I've encountered several blatant "virtue signalling" episodes at work lately and they have each followed a pattern.

Each time the initiating group has been the handful of young childless women I work with. They will suddenly raise an issue like Trump or Sonia Kruger and immediately step into group enforcement mode. What I mean by this is that if a man were to raise a political issue he might say something like "Hey, how about that Donald Trump guy?" According to his politics he may expect the others to say something negative or positive about Trump, he may even make it clear that he expects something negative or positive. But it begins with a relatively open-ended topic-raising comment.

But with the young childless women the intention from the beginning is very clearly to shut off any kind of discussion. It will be something along the lines of "Hey, what about all those dumbass Americans who support Trump. They're all stupid hicks. I've never met anyone stupid enough to support Trump. Everyone I know has basic morals." Then one of the other young childless women will pipe in enthusiastically in support and say something similar. Then another one.

The level of interest in thinking about the issue is zero. The level of interest in relating the issue to real world events is zero. The interest is, first, in signalling one's own virtue by holding to the "right" political views. But, secondly, I think it might also reflect young women enforcing social boundaries within the group and doing so in a way that I don't think would happen in an all male workplace (i.e. it is an expression of a certain kind of young female instinct to ostracise or "group patrol").

Anyway, after the young childless women have set the scene, a few of the younger apolitical men will join in, albeit more half-heartedly. So it is a case of the youngest, least invested, least experienced women leading men.

One of the difficulties in countering all this is that men like myself are more used to there being an opportunity to "make an argument" - but this is precluded by what happens at the very beginning. The expected entry point for argument never happens. What I have found works instead is not to directly oppose the virtue signalling but to simply raise for discussion something that undermines it. If the virtue signalling was "Sonia Kruger is bad/mad for raising concerns about Muslim immigration" I'll throw in something like "Hey, did you hear what happened yesterday in ......" It immediately switches the conversation to a real world event, which then begins to allow discussion, which then allows others (usually the older staff members) to voice their ideas.

What I am doing, I suppose, is to create an entry point for discussion that the virtue signallers are doing their best to avoid.

The women with children are generally (not always) more genuinely concerned with the real world effects of politics than the childless women. I don't know if this is because they identify more with the political concerns of their husbands or because they are concerned about the future safety of their children, but the distinction does seem to be there.

Melbourne Traditionalists meeting

Mark Moncrieff has called a meeting of the Melbourne Traditionalists for August 1st. It's an excellent chance to meet up with likeminded people and to have face to face discussions. It contributes, as well, to taking a local movement to the next level, so I'd encourage interested and sympathetic readers to come along. For further details read here.

Sonia Kruger takes a stand

Sonia Kruger is a popular media personality here in Australia. She was invited to debate the issue of whether Muslim immigration increases the risk of terror attacks. She courageously answered yes. The following video doesn't take long to watch and Sonia Kruger defends her position ably:



Update: Ben Fordham has spoken out in support of Sonia Kruger:

This afternoon, television and radio presenter Ben Fordham spoke out in support of his colleague, saying he would "rather be honest than popular".

"I think Sonia Kruger should be congratulated first and foremost for speaking her mind and not worrying about what everyone is going to say about her for speaking her mind," he said on his 2GB Drive program.

"And I think she’d be surprised if she knew how many people in Australia agree with her.

"While an outright ban on Muslim immigration might sound extreme, that's where we'll be headed if we have more terror attacks because of radical Islam."

Drew Barrymore 2

So Drew Barrymore files for divorce from husband Will Kopelman. They then issue a media release announcing "Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family."

I asked my readers what could lie behind the seemingly odd view that divorce "does not take away from us being a family". I received several excellent replies, but I'd like to focus on the first one, which argued that it was a classic case of women pursuing a strategy of alpha sex and "betabux".

These are red pill concepts, and I think there's something to it, though I'd modify the argument. The idea is that it is in the nature of women to want sex with alpha men but then to want provisioning and security from beta men, i.e. alpha sex and beta money. At red pill sites it is often argued that women will purse alpha sex until they are near to "hitting the wall" at which point they will settle and seek to marry a beta man for his money.

The connection to Drew Barrymore is the suggestion that she is trying to have it both ways: that she wants to do the family thing with beta man Will Kopelman, whilst still being free to pursue sex with alpha males.

What is true in this, from what I can tell anyway, is that women are strongly conflicted between their sexual drives and their desire for family and security. Their sexual drives flow most freely with men who are perceived to be untamed, undomesticated, fun (or perhaps dangerous) types who are there just for sex. The men they want for family duty are the stable, loving, trustworthy, reliable types, but with these men sex is for leverage (it is transactional) and sometimes women will not have sexual feelings towards these men (or worse yet they may feel repulsion). And yet women do want these men, at a particular point in their lives, for establishing a family.

It's a pity, I think, that the red pill sites use the terms alpha and beta the way they do. It assumes that the player type men, the ones women identify as being there just for sex, are the superior men. But that's not always so. A woman might see a psychologically muddled no-hoper as being a man she would never consider as a beta provisioner, but if he can thug it up a bit (even in looks), or appear a little cool, or even come across as risky and dramatic, she might see put him in the "there for sex" category. On the other hand, the man who is emotionally open to a loving relationship, able to hold down a good job, good father material, and loyal might objectively be superior in character but the very fact that he presents himself for the domestic role can flick a "beta switch" in women from which there is no coming back.

I have no idea of what Will Kopelman is like as a person, but if you look at photos he is tall and handsome and fashionably dressed, and he has a high status job (art consultant), is wealthy and comes from a high social class. And yet in red pill terms he is "beta". I suspect that once he is divorced he will suddenly look very alpha to a lot of women.

At red pill sites there is a term "alpha widow". It refers to a woman who has bedded many men (the alpha men) and who then settles for a beta provisioner (betabux) but can't form a loyal attachment to him because she still pines for one of her past alpha lovers. The thing is, though, that I have known women whom you might term "beta widows" - they divorce a husband and after a relatively short period of time try to replace him with a replica of what they once had. They were not attracted to him for the reason that they were married to him not because he lacked attractive qualities as a man.

Marriage, it seems, puts men at a great disadvantage when it comes to holding the attraction of women. It means that men have given away all the commitment they have to offer; that they cannot appear attractively aloof when they have so much to lose in the event of the wife leaving; that they will appear unattractively domesticated; that they will have to offer comfort and security rather than danger, fun and risk; and that just by virtue of being the loyal provisioner they will be cast in the beta role in their wife's mind.

A society that values marriage is going to have to bolster the position of married men. It is going to have to give married men a boost to their power and status compared to the unmarried guy in the band. It is going to have to grant to married men resources that a woman cannot get anywhere else except by being married (or perhaps through her own hard, lifelong labour).

I'm not sure, but it is possible that marriage can only survive in a patriarchal culture, by which I mean a culture in which fathers are the spiritual, moral and legal heads of the family, and in which this paternal leadership and authority is felt within the daily life and culture of the family. If not, women will tend to identify married men with a powerlessness that they can live with platonically happily enough, and will sometimes endure for the sake of the children, but that will have them looking elsewhere for sexual fulfilment.

"We do not feel this takes away from us being a family"

The American actress Drew Barrymore has filed for divorce from her husband Will Kopelman with whom she has two young daughters. Announcing the divorce, the couple wrote in a press release that:

Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family.

I have heard this before - the claim that after divorce you are all still a family just like before, that nothing significant changes. And I really don't understand the mentality behind it - maybe readers can suggest to me what is going through a person's mind who says something like this.

After all, a divorce dissolves a family. It means that a father and mother no longer live together; they are likely to go off and find other partners and form households with them; it means that the unique little community that a family once was no longer exists.

I can only think that some people are beginning to separate in their minds, as two different things, the raising of children platonically with the children's father/mother and the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfilment with someone else. In other words, family is something you do separately to the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfilment. If you are comfortable with this idea, then perhaps you might well think of 'separate household families' as being part of a normal family life.

I don't really know if this is what is happening, I'm just speculating. But when I read the quote "Sadly our family is separating legally, although we do not feel this takes away from us being a family" I am still struck by it. Divorce does not take away from you being a family? Then does marriage have nothing to do with family? Does growing up together in a family unit have nothing to do with being a family?

Why feminism is evil 2

Most people will be aware of the feminist insistence that we in the West live in a "rape culture". You might think that this would make feminists angry at men who rape or molest women. But that's not quite true. Sweden and Germany have recently experienced a wave of rape, molestation and sexual harassment of women in public swimming pools, at train stations, and at music concerts, sometimes by large groups of men, but feminists are not really up in arms about this. Why? Because the attackers are not white men, but immigrants from North Africa and the Middle-East. In fact, a Swedish feminist politician, Barbro Sörman, has tweeted that it is worse when Swedish men rape than when immigrant men do, because Swedish men do it as an "active choice".

What feminism is directed at is not so much opposing men but more pointedly at the defeat of one's own men. White feminists are seeking the defeat of white men (if you believe I am overstating this you need to read the twitter feeds of some prominent feminists - they do not hide their intentions, they nearly always specify white men as the group they are trying to bring down).

One purpose of this is, I believe, to disrupt the normal processes of heterosexual bonding between men and women. A person who no longer sees goodness or worthiness in the opposite sex is far less likely to feel the deeper and more enduring kind of love for a member of the opposite sex and is therefore less likely to make a commitment to marriage or family.

The constant feminist denigration of men as hostile attackers of women is one way of disrupting this bonding between men and women. It severs the natural sense of a larger loyalty between the men and women of a society, the sense of men and women united together for the benefit of a family, community or nation.

There is another aspect of the way that heterosexuality works that feminism disrupts. Young men and women usually have a sense of the finer qualities of the opposite sex that draws out admiration and love. It is not that a young man suddenly finds the unique qualities of just one woman something to love - if that were the case he might just as easily fall in love with a man. Instead, he sees something fine within womanhood, and he looks for a woman who embodies these qualities. Sometimes, young men and women idealise the better qualities of the opposite sex as part of this process.

Traditionally men would perceive a kind of delicacy of beauty and goodness in women ("loveliness") that might be felt as something transcendent (hence much Western art and culture).

How can young women come to a sense of a transcendent ideal of manhood if they are brought up on the idea of men as a hostile, violent enemy to women? And if men have a sense of women as the ideological, political enemy, then the feminine ideal is likely to be lost as well. And with it part of the bonding process.

(I know that red pillers might point out that this allows men to recognise more clearly the flaws within female nature, which is no doubt true, but what a traditional society is focused on is strengthening the path to family formation and encouraging the loves and commitments associated with family life.)

A healthy society would not allow men and women to be set apart into hostile camps, as we can see happening under the influence of feminism. It would allow the discussion of issues relating to men and women, but would not permit the institutionalisation of feminism as a state backed political movement. It would promote culture that displayed the higher expressions of manhood and womanhood, as an aid to the bonding process between men and women, alongside realistic portrayals of marriage and family life - but would not allow culture to be dominated by expressions of gender war. It would encourage a communal identity, giving a common identity and purpose to the men and women of a society. It might, as well, encourage small, mutual courtesies between men and women, as expressions of good will between the sexes.

We have to learn from what has gone wrong in the West, and one lesson is that feminism cannot be given free rein to disrupt the relations between the sexes. What kind of future is there, as this hardening into oppositional forces continues?

You know the haka, but the Icelandic Viking Clap?

Most people will have heard of the Maori haka but I had never before seen the Icelandic Viking Clap. After their team lost in the quarter finals of the 2016 Euro tournament, a mass gathering of Icelandic fans performed the Viking Clap - it must have been stirring to have taken part:

A richer sense of belonging

I'm not sure what to make of this. Ian Tuttle is a young National Review writer, who, as you might expect, is generally an "establicon" in his politics (aka a right-liberal). His column on Brexit, though, is surprisingly good:

Liberal cosmopolitanism, regnant since the end of the Cold War, has bought completely into its own rightness. It is entirely devoted to an increasingly borderless political future carefully managed by technocrats and tempered by “compassion” and “tolerance” — all of which aims at the maximal amount of material prosperity. It sees no other alternative than that we will all, eventually, be “citizens of the world,” and assumes that everyone will be happier that way.

It’s not unreasonable to think otherwise. Anti-EU movements and renewed nationalism in the United States are on the rise precisely because they offer alternatives to this self-assured order. It’s not clear whether a United Kingdom withdrawn from the EU will be better off. But it’s entirely defensible to think that it might be. Likewise, it’s not unreasonable to prefer loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history. Or to prefer local rule to government outsourced to distant bureaucracies. Or to prefer a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market. There are alternatives to a transnational super-state that are not fascism.

The inability of our political leaders to envision political futures other than the one to which they are wedded has facilitated the polarization, and the unresponsiveness, of our politics. That people are now looking for alternatives is, in fact, entirely reasonable.

This is not what you'd generally expect from a right-liberal. Right-liberals want a liberal society to be regulated by the market rather than by bureaucracy. Tuttle is making a criticism of both options in his post, as leaving out too much.

Perhaps there are some on the establishment right who see that the world order being created is a heavily bureaucratic, stifling one and so prefer the national option to be preserved and who can see that "market participation" is not a sufficient argument for preserving national existence (markets, after all, can easily be transnational).

Tuttle therefore makes an argument for local (i.e. national) loyalties and government. Tuttle is a right-liberal so I do not believe he supports ethnonationalism, but his argument for local loyalties does at least overlap with an argument for ties of ethnicity ("loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history"..."a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market").

So now Christians can't mingle?

A court in California has approved a settlement of a discrimination case brought by two homosexual men against a Christian dating site. The owner of the dating site, Christian Mingle, has agreed that the site will no longer ask users to click either "man seeking woman" or "woman seeking man". The website will now only ask users to click on whether they are male or female, not which sex they are seeking.

The case demonstrates clearly how liberal claims to tolerance and neutrality simply don't work in practice. Christians and homosexuals aren't left each to their own under the terms of liberalism - Christians are being required to cease being orthodox Christians.

You can see as well what a liberal society is going to require from its citizens. The future liberal citizen, in order to function in the public square, will have to hold to no substantive identity or moral code, but be committed to neutral attitudes and functions, such as market activity and consumption. There is a process by which individuals are squeezed toward this outcome, because that is what is required of them by the rules of the society they live in.

A future "Christian" for instance, to avoid social marginalisation, is going to have to believe that all forms of sexual expression are equally worthy/valid, which then becomes a positive belief that sexuality is contentless in the moral sense, merely whatever the individual makes of it. Christians are going to have to move toward the "empty world" assumptions that liberalism is based on.

And it won't stop with sexuality. Surely it will only take a transsexual to complain about people being given the options of "male" and "female" at a dating site and this too will be considered discriminatory.

Christians should stop trying to fit in with liberalism, and recognise how incompatible liberalism is with a belief in anything substantive.

P.S. I've just read another news item on this story. It includes a statement from the homosexual men's lawyers which illustrates the kind of mentality that fits within a liberal society:

“I am gratified that we were able to work with Spark to help ensure that people can fully participate in all the diverse market places that make our country so special, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Vineet Dubey, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, said in a statement to the Journal.

Liberal America is special because people "can fully participate in all the diverse market places"? I don't think so, but it might be true that participating in diverse market places is one of the few things that fits in well with the liberal framework of society, i.e. that is sufficiently contentless.