“You do not bleed with the moon.” (A Battle of the Sexes)
Confession: I went to public school. But sometimes I have to call my homeschooled wife to explain the ways of the world to me. A recent encounter at Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, OH) is a case in point.
To the Man
Being dismissed for my gender is nothing new. Since I first picked up a sign to create conversation about abortion, people have both assumed that I’m a man (which I’m actually okay with) and told me I have no right to have an opinion (which I’m less okay with).
Now, this is clearly an ad hominem (literally: “to the man”) fallacy. When we make an argument for or against abortion, we are using our minds and our mouths, not our sexual organs. Those parts may have a lot to do with the creation of new people, but they can’t marshal a single argument for or against the killing of those people.
The case against abortion, then, is objective. It stands apart from the individual making the argument. Whether the person be black or white, rich or poor, male or female is interesting, but it cannot change the truthfulness of what they are saying.
To Truth
Imagine two people consider an apple hanging on a tree. The first, a man dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and bearing an axe, says, “That’s an automobile.”
The second, someone identifying as nonbinary with rouged lips above a full beard says, “Nah. That’s a piece of fruit.”
Who is speaking truth? The second person.
It doesn’t matter what someone looks like or what type of gonads they have. What matters when we want to know what is true is which of them is making a claim that matches the real world. This is because truth is a relationship between an idea and reality.
The manly man may be able to fell trees faster than the other can trim his her zir? beard. But it doesn’t matter when they’re debating a truth-claim about the real world. What matters is whose claim matches the real world (i.e., whose claim is, in fact, true).
Back to the Woman
But there’s more at play here than a fallacy, as one user commented on my Instagram reel.
When we hear fallacies like dismissing a man’s argument because of his body parts, we are right to correct it. But sometimes there’s more than bad thinking at play. When the woman in the video railed against me, she gave me not only a reason to call my wife for a little understanding (see blog title) but also a reminder: There’s a reason so many women so openly hate men today.
Consider another recent interaction. This time from Youngstown State University (Youngstown, OH).
Another young woman angered by men today. Why? Because many of the “men” her age use women for pleasure but are MIA when it’s time for responsibility.
We should feel great compassion for these young women. It’s likely they didn’t just wake up one morning with a sudden case of misandry. Perhaps their hatred of men was built over time as they were treated like objects of cheap pleasure rather than whole persons to be loved.
And yet, it is curious that many of these women seem to think the solution is killing their children.
There’s another fallacy we have to remember: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Men abandoning women to the world does not mean women should abandon their children to the abortionist’s knife.
After all, it may be true that I don’t bleed with the moon. But something else is true, too: Preborn children are in fact bleeding—and not in some rough correlation to the lunar cycle. Every time the sun sets, another couple thousand of these forgotten people will have been dismembered and discarded.
That’s a great moral crime staining all of us—men and women.
Ready to do something about it? Contact Created Equal to start reaching hearts and changing minds today.