OK, we have mercifully reached the final article in our three-part “Fundamentalist Dating Series.” This one is called “Training Suitors,” and it’s thankfully a lot shorter than the previous two. But first, be sure to read S.Z.’s piece about Sarah Faith, the lovely woman who authored “Daddy’s Girl.”

And now, I present you with… “Training Suitors!”


Above: “Is that a bouquet in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?”

The Bible teaches a son leaves his parents in order to take a wife, and daughters are given in marriage. Wise parents do not wait until the time arrives for their children to marry to begin thinking about this.

Because if you wait too long, your kids might realize how fucked up your family is.

The differences in their children, according to sex, should be evident to parents from birth…

You’d certainly hope so.

…and consequently their preparation of their children should differ accordingly.

“If you catch your little boy playing with dolls? That’s a stonin’. If you find him trying on his mother’s shoes? That’s a stonin’. If you hear him singin’ songs from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical? Oooooh, you better believe that’s a stonin’.”

Genesis teaches, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 3:24). When Paul applies this passage, his treatment of it shows that it is a paradigm for all marriages (Eph. 5:17-33). When a son leaves to court a woman, he is fulfilling God’s creation design for the formation of marriages. He is not abandoning his parents; he is leaving them, with honor, according to God’s Word.

He probably should abandon his parents, but that’s another story…

A son must be trained to leave. Obviously, when he has left, he must stand alone, and when he has taken a wife, he must be equipped to stand as a source of strength for his wife. Preparation for this does not begin when a young man first notices a young woman. His training for courtship begins when he is little.

“He should be able to do ten cock push-ups by the age of five.”

Strength is necessary because he is not approaching a young girl willing to be impressed by him. He is approaching her skeptical father.

“The father should inspect the boy’s buttocks to make sure they are tight and firm. The boy should be able to defeat the father in a naked Spartan wrestling match.”

So he must be strong for the process of courtship, but a godly masculine strength cannot be instilled at the last moment.

“And while professional sports teams might look the other way if you use steroids, God won’t. You can’t fool the Almighty, asshole.”

When he is knocked down when he is little, a kindly father must show him how to get up again without tears. Moreover, godly parents will allow him to get into situations where he will probably get knocked down.

“Have him hook up with the Crips or the Bloods at an early age.”

If a boy is mollycoddled, his search for a wife will tend to be a search for a maternal substitute someone to assume the important duties of pampering him and running his life.

So if you fondle your wife’s breasts during sex, it’s obviously because you want her to mother you. Besides, breast-fondling often leads to clitoral stimulation, and we all know about the trouble that little Satanic organ can cause…

One of the more frequent causes of such mollycoddling occurs when a mother is bringing up her son without adequate direction from the son’s father. Good intentions do not prevent this problem from happening. If he falls out of the tree, he might break his leg. But if he, banned from trees, must spend all his time reading edifying literature, he will be a pantywaist.

So you should break your son’s leg at an early age, otherwise he’ll waste his time reading books.

Are you guys starting to understand me when I say, “Some cultures just suck?”

And it would have been better for his future marital happiness if he had broken his leg in two places.

And since my father didn’t break my legs at a young age, I’m doomed to be a pathetic loser pantywaist until I die and go to Hell, at which point I’ll suffer for my childhood coddling by being forced to suckle Satan’s lava-lactating nipple.

A suitor must also be self-controlled. This quality does not arrive by Federal Express at the last minute.

Especially since Fed Ex break’s God’s commandment that “thou shalt not have affordable overnight shipping.”

Parents inculcate character over years. When they look at a two-year-old running around their living room, they must be able to see twenty-years down the road and discipline in line with that vision. When a healthy young man considers a woman he believes to be attractive, he must restrain himself. But the way parents teach a grown son to control his sexual and romantic impulses is by shaping before he has any. His adult impulses are disciplined through a godly handling of his infantile impulses.

Meaning you cock-punch him if you catch him watching Meg Ryan flicks (though to be fair, that’s probably not such a bad idea).

A son who is to court a woman must have a deep respect for familial authority, not just his own family, but all families…

(Unless they’re Jewish, Muslim or any other family that’s bought themselves an express boarding pass to Hell.)

…and he must proceed with this understanding of household government clearly in mind. The position held by the father of the woman who interests him must not chafe him. He should rejoice in the fact that he currently has no authority over the woman he wants.

Such a respect originates with a respect for the teaching of Scripture. Household governments are to be respected because God requires it, not because all household governments are managed well.

Like Sarah Faith’s household government, for instance.

If a son has a high view of family authority when he is thinking about his authority in his upcoming marriage, but a low view of it when he considers any other household authority that gets in his way, then he is simply a tyrant looking for subjects.

And that’s why Saddam Hussein became a murderous thug- because his father never broke his legs.

Authority is understood by sons who delight to exercise godly authority and who delight equally in submitting to godly authority.

“God’s an S&M type of Guy.”

And this, like so much else, begins in the cradle.

God help us.

OK, for those of you who are actually mad at me for trashing the fundamentalists’ “culture,” take a peak at this column by Cathy Young in today’s Boston Globe. I don’t agree with Cathy on everything, but I think this piece is spot-on (plus, she writes for Reason Magazine, which is the best libertarian opinion rag on the planet… come to think of it, it’s the only one that’s half-sane… at any rate, it’s good stuff):

ON APRIL 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam: While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain’s attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

“There’s still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society,” Long opined to the gay news service PlanetOut. “Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer.”

Welcome to Politically Correct World, where acts that would merit unequivocal condemnation if committed by white males are viewed in a very different light when the offenders belong to an “oppressed group.”

In Germany, these shock waves have generated a long-overdue interest in the sometimes deadly violence toward Muslim women, mostly in the country’s 2.5 million strong Turkish immigrant community. A German-Turkish women’s group has documented 40 “honor killings” since 1996 — murders of women and girls by family members as punishment for besmirching the “family honor.”

In February, 23-year-old Hatin Surucu was shot to death in Berlin, allegedly by her three brothers. The young woman had divorced the cousin she had been forced to marry at 16; she had also started dating German men, given up her head scarf, and enrolled in a training course to become an electrician. What made headlines, Der Spiegel reports, was not the murder itself but a letter from a school principal reporting that some Turkish boys at his school had mocked Surucu as a “whore” who “got what she deserved.”

“Honor killings” may be relatively rare; but a recent study by the German government found that half of the country’s Turkish women are pressured into arranged marriages — often to men they have never seen before the wedding — and more than one in six say they were forced to marry.

Serap Cieli, a Turkish-German author and filmmaker who escaped an arranged marriage, told Der Spiegel that until recently, the German media refused to publish her accounts of her and other Turkish women’s experiences for fear of appearing “racist.”

That about sums it up, folks.

We shouldn’t be afraid to criticize abhorrent practices because of “cultural sensitivity.” My gripe is not with Christians or Muslims, it’s with fundamentalists. I’m a very tolerant guy, but when someone murders their daughter because she wouldn’t consent to an arranged marriage, I draw a big fucking line in the sand.