RITA WRITES:

I pray for Mrs. Wood every day (my yahoo calendar reminds me!) because I know she tells the truth and I know she catches a lot of flack for it. I know she is right because up until rather recently I was a feminist and it wasn’t working for me. It’s a bitter lonely way to live. Since you have cursed Mrs. Wood, I am going to respond by blessing her.

Laura, I hope that your marriage stays intact, your husband continues to be your partner, lover and best friend and your children and husband rise up and call you blessed (Proverbs 31:28) later on in life. I pray that in your old age you will be surrounded by loving family, husband, children, grandchildren, sisters, brothers and so on, and have time to reflect on all God has done through as you so graciously shared His truth with others. Your price is far above rubies (Proverbs 31:10). You open your mouth in wisdom and in your tongue is the law of kindness.(Proverbs 31:26)

I pray that God would bless you and your family and enlarge your border, that his hand would be with you and that he would keep your from harm. (1 Chronicles 4:9-10)

May you be like a green olive tree in the house of God and may you trust in the mercy of God forever and ever.(Psalm 52:8)

A.C., I pray these blessings on you as well, if you wish to receive them.

Laura writes:

Thank you. I am grateful for you.

Carolyn writes:

Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I am an avid reader of your site. I find your perspectives completely refreshing and truthful. Your site articulates many of my feelings about our cultural demise. It is affirming to find someone else who shares my same perspective and who is able to articulate it so succinctly & honestly. Your words have taken my breath away with their truth.  

My story brings me to this point via feminism. I was a career gal with a 20 year job when I finally grew up and came home to my calling as a mother and wife. It has taken me about 5 years to mend the fences and to repair the carnage I left in the wake of my feminism journey. You understand with such clarity so much of what I learned and experienced through trial and error. You are a beacon of light in our world which has bought into all the propaganda & lies. Your posts have inspired me many times over the past year. 

I admire you for taking up the cause amidst the hateful e-maisl. I am disappointed that folks would take the time to write hate mail. It is such a reflection of our culture and the lies they believe. 

God Bless you and your family. They are blessed to have you as wife and mother. I admire and respect your work. I look forward to reading your posts on a daily basis.

Sean writes:

It looks like your blog has come to the attention of “the haters” – that amorphous group of Internet denizens whose sole purpose seems to be to viciously attack anyone and anything they perceive to be the enemy. Since you consistently speak the truth about human relations and society, it was inevitable that you would come to their attention.

First of all, I will pray for you that you do not lose your nerve here. Your blog serves an admirable purpose and you should take hope that the best your respondents can do is sling mud at your character. That is a clear sign that you have are speaking truths they cannot refute.

I am constantly amazed at how vitriolic some of these people can be. I am sure each of us can produce examples of arguments or exchanges with people whose rage and desire to destroy their enemies knows no boundaries. Recently, in reading an exchange about the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, I witnessed people (who were not presumably direct or indirect victims of the scandals), express wishes that the Pope be assassinated, priests tortured and murdered, and other thoughts to horrible to repeat.

There is a type of healthy anger and outrage that men and women can and do express in the face of evil. In the example above, I know many Catholics who are truly angry and outraged by the sinners in the Church’s ranks. But their anger springs from a place of love and an obvious desire to heal the wounds in the Church. Some of them have vowed to do nothing direct, but rather to love their fellow men more and to perform works of charity. When righteous anger is tempered by a sense of humility and compassion for one’s enemies, it can be a force for great good in the world. It takes as its example Christ’s purging of the Temple and denunciations of the Pharisees.

That healthy anger stands in contrast to the wounded, narcissistic rage of many secular liberals and which is on display on “The Curse” below. It reminds me of an adolescent temper tantrum, but at least adolescents have the excuse of immaturity. Everybody probably went through a egotistical phase as a child or young adult where they could not control their anger. But in many cases, young people slowly learned from the adults in their lives to control and channel their anger, and to recognize in themselves a capacity for evil.

Your commenter obviously did not, and now that they are an adult, that anger is corroding their capacity for love and compassion. You are witnessing a person being consumed by demons. How horrible it must be to be that person! How much must they loathe themselves to project that rage onto someone else!

I am glad you are posting these comments. They are a good reminder for the rest of us not to become too proud or selfish, and to confess our sins and seek absolution.

Erin writes:

I am a Christian single mother, and I have to say I am truly disgusted at the comments that you posted on Alaina Sheer’s book and blog. [Laura writes: Just for clarification, I never posted comments at Alaina’s blog, only here.] What experience as a single mother do you have to draw from? What experience do you have as an abused woman? I would be inclined to think none due to the casual way you refer to abuse and the difficulties in raising children on your own. I have suffered both, and then some, to the point where even my ex-husband’s family nearly disowned him after the way he treated me in our marriage. [Laura writes: But I was not talking about you. I was talking about Alaina and other women who openly celebrate single motherhood and bash their former husbands and encourage others to embark on single motherhood.] From my point of view, I can see that her reactions are honest and truthful, and regardless of the fact that I wouldn’t have done everything she has chosen to do, I respect her honesty and her joie de vivre. [Laura writes: If you see calling men names and exploiting them as “joie de vivre,” we disagree. You say you are a Christian and yet you openly support a woman who promotes extra-marital sex.]  I’d like to see you live for four months with her ex-husband and truly view what life was like in her shoes. I doubt you’d come up with a different conclusion than she did.

I don’t feel she glamorizes being a single mother in the least. She is beautiful, both inside and out (despite what you would view as sinfulness) which you may be quite jealous of. Maybe in the future you should choose someone for target practice that you have actually met. I doubt you’d have the courage to do so.

As a Christian, you clearly miss the mark. We are never called to judge as Christians. You may choose not to participate in sin, and not to be a member of a group that does things that you object to with Biblical basis, but I sincerely doubt that Christ would condone your actions via this blog post. We are called to “build up one another in love”, not to vitriolically condemn those we disagree with. Rather than remove yourself from the situation, you made a fool of yourself and of all Christians by your childish behavior. This is grossly familiar to many playground bullies I’ve seen pushing down the kid in the funny glasses. Bullying never solves problems, it only enrages and further isolates the victim.

In the future, don’t you think that sending a kind but direct e-mail about the behavior would be a better method of spreading the message of Christ rather than a public flogging? May God reveal to you the truth of His message, and of His forgiveness.

The only “bully” in this situation is you.

Laura writes:

If Alaina Sheer had only sent private e-mails to friends encouraging them in their personal hardships, I would have no reason to publicly assail her. I would indeed be wrong. But she has not done that. She has become a virtual celebrity, revealing the details of her personal life for all to see and offering herself as a model to other women. She has made a very public statement, in her blog posts, in her book, in her photographs and videos. Why do you say only she can send a public message, but not those who disagree with her message?

If you are the victim of an evil man, I will say what I said before. I offer you compassion and believe if you are raising your children alone and are the victim of abandonment, you have reason to view yourself as heroic. But I think anyone in such circumstances would not publicly flog their ex-husband, offering this as a model to other women, and would humbly admit that they themselves chose their spouse and while they did not ask for hardship, this is the inevitable consequence for some of a vow. I would think anyone in such circumstances would go on to celebrate marriage for others because they recognize its sacredness.

Again, it is not true that we are never called to judge as Christians and it is logically impossible. After all, Erin is judging me. Christ was not a Christian if all judgment is wrong. Our judgments are human, not divine. God’s judgments are never wrong and ultimately we cede to them. By the way, I wonder if Erin is familiar with Christian sexual ethics? Her claim to be a Christian in support of Miss Sheer is hypocritical. Miss Sheer celebrates extra-marital sex and gossip about men.

Pat from out West writes:

I have read the posts at the Thinking Housewife regarding single motherhood. It’s a good thing you can’t ignite the Internet! We’d have flames from here to Halifax.

Isn’t it amusing that those who fling the most mud are oblivious to the fact that they have totally smeared themselves in the process? And despite her claiming to be a “Christian” (of the “All-Roads-Lead-to-God” type?) it’s obvious from her actions that she is unaware of the Proverbs statement that the curse causeless will not come. In trying to curse someone who is innocent of the tripe she accuses Laura of she is inviting those curses back on herself. She will get bitten in the behind for that some day! Such hatred! She would have been right at home burning “heretics” at the stake and congratulating herself for doing so.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your encouragement, but I  do not wish A.C. any harm in return. I do not welcome curses, but I cannot summon any animosity for A.C. I offer her prayers instead. To turn the other cheek, however, is not to accept or approve of what is an outrageous verbal assault on me and my family.

Alex A. writes:

The vituperative assault on your integrity, which you’ve had the philosophical impartiality to publish in your blog, seems to be an example of “Bulverism” – a term coined by the Christian apologist C S Lewis.

According to Lewis, Bulverism is a common fallacy in which a person’s arguments are ignored or assumed to be wrong so that his motives or person becomes the object of analysis. (Bulverism first appeared in the essay God in the Dock which I believe was written in 1941.) 

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