Doug Wilson of Blog and Mablog tends to post snippets of his various poorly-written books as if they were nuggets of gold instead of dung. Most of his blog is his book snippets. A clever, or not so clever way to convince others to pony up the ten bucks to read them. Sometimes they make me laugh in their breathtaking misunderstanding of the subject matter.

Right now he’s posting from a book on the role of children and this one, on rebellion. But it’s pretty clear he has no idea about rebellion, branding everything done in rebellion against his white man entitlement ideas as deviance.

Let’s just take a brief look at this week’s group:

“For example, during the 60’s, many of the social norms that governed relationships between the sexes came under sustained criticism. Traditional male ‘gallantry’ involved showing a somewhat exaggerated concern for the health and well-being of women: opening doors for them, offering them one’s coat during inclement weather, paying for their meals, and so forth. Feminism argued that these norms, far from helping women, served only to reinforce the conviction that they were helpless and unable to care for themselves . . . Men took the criticism of the older male obligations as a license to do whatever they wanted. This gave rise to the widely noted epidemic of boorishness (or, as the English like to say, ‘yobbishness’) in the male population. Rather than finding alternative ways of expressing concern and respect for women, a lot of men have simply stopped paying any attention to the needs of women at all. For these men, equality means ‘I look after myself, she looks after herself’”

Nation of Rebels, p. 80

What Doug does not mention while twittering on about how gallant men were towards women of that time is that they exhibited also, to use his word, yobbishness towards women in every other way. What good is having a man who opens the door for you, yet will not pay you the same wage as a man in the same position? A guy that gives you his coat, yet date rapes you at the end of the night. This fictional place of gallantry came with a huge heaping helping of abuse, denial of things like checking accounts and credit cards, a limited jobs market, limited rights and being treated like children.

Sorry, but I would rather look after myself if that gallantry comes with a side order of abuse.

“We must distinguish, in other words, because dissent and deviance. Dissent is like civil disobedience. It occurs when people are willing in principles to play by the rules but have a genuine, good-faith objection to the specific content of the prevailing set of rules. They disobey despite the consequences that these actions may incur. Deviance, on the other hand, occurs when people disobey the rules for self-interested reasons”

Nation of Rebels, pp. 79-80

So please explain to me again, Doug, how all the people marching on our government asking for freedom for the migrant children are being ‘deviant’?

Here’s what Doug gets wrong. People disobeying regardless of the consequences can be a noble thing. We would not have had the Civil Rights Movement that changed things for good. We would not have eight hour work days, the end of the Vietnam War, votes for women, the end of child labor, and so many other things if we had not have civil disobedience, people willing to protest in the face of a huge personal price. This is exactly the opposite of what Doug is preaching here. Just because you have a personal stake, and many do, in what you are protesting does not mean you are some sort of demonic deviant.

“One way of articulating the central idea of the counterculture is simply to say that it collapsed the distinction between deviance and dissent (or, more accurately, that it began treating all deviance as dissent).”

Nation of Rebels, p. 80

And counterculture merely means a culture that runs counter to the prevailing one. Doug’s little cult church could be seen as ‘counterculture’ by its very definition.

He needs to stick to writing fiction, even if his romance novel was about as romantic as a pig wearing a bonnet and bustle.

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