Analysts seeking to understand why 62 million Americans voted to elect Donald Trump president might consider how Third Wave feminism — “gender theory” and all that — has alienated every Christian parent in the country (to say nothing of many radical feminists who oppose it). Postmodern academic theory about the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix has made its way into the world of Hollywood, journalism and now, advertising:

So what does it mean that CoverGirl’s latest face (joining the ranks of Zendaya, Katy Perry, Pink and more) is . . . a boy? And a noncelebrity boy at that?

He is James Charles, 17, a high school senior from Bethlehem, N.Y., who lives with his parents and a younger brother and does makeup for friends in his spare time (at no charge). In the past year or so, Mr. Charles has amassed nearly 650,000 followers on his Instagram account and more than 90,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts tutorials for creating fake freckles or layering chunky glitter around the eyes.

He gained attention last month when he posted to social media about retaking his senior photos because he didn’t like how the highlighter on his cheekbones looked in the originals. . . .

The selection of Mr. James by CoverGirl comes amid a broader questioning of traditional gender boundaries in fashion and beauty, and the growth of a crop of internet-famous beauty junkies who have built followings through social media.

That New York Times article was published four weeks before Election Day and quoted this boy gushing: “We’ve made so many amazing progressions with gay rights, gender inclusivity and self-expression.”

What some consider “amazing progressions,” however, others may view as decadence, what the Hebrews called toeba (“abomination”) which seems to have flourished in Obama Nation. Permit me to digress here to deliver a brief Bible study on Deuteronomy 22:5, wherein cross-dressing is condemned as toeba. Because I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, when boys wearing long hair and girls dressing in what was then called “unisex” (i.e., androgynous) styles alarmed our elders, I have an appreciation of cultural context and the influence of fashion in this regard.

The Christian who seeks to understand Deuteronomy 22:5 must interpret it in light of Leviticus 18:22, in which homosexual activity is likewise condemned as toeba. The practices of cross-dressing and homosexuality were among the sins of the pagan Canaanites, especially those of the coastal Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. Read Deuteronomy 7, in which the Israelites are commanded to “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, in order to fulfill the covenant that God had long ago made with Abraham. Despite this strong warning (“the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly”), the Israelites failed to uphold their covenant with God, so that they were conquered first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians and yet again, after the remnant of Judah was restored in 538 B.C. by Cyrus the Great (Ezra 1), Israel nevertheless was conquered by Rome in 63 B.C. The rebuilt Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. — fulfilling the prophetic words of Jesus — beginning the long diaspora of the Jews. You don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to study the actual history of the Israelites and learn a valuable lesson, but I would argue that the repeated fulfillment of ancient prophecies would lead an intelligent person to suspect that maybe the God of the Bible is real, and that God’s word can be trusted.

It is not only the individual who must fear “the anger of the Lord,” for God also judges nations (see Psalm 82:8, Psalm 110:6, Joel 3:12, Micah 4:3) and this was well understood by the devout Protestants who came to America seeking freedom to live and worship according to their Bible-believing faith. Our ancestors were not ignorant, as some advocates of “amazing progressions” would have us believe. Rather, the American nation was established by men and women who were among the most literate people of their age. The pioneer settler in his rude cabin, reading the Bible by candlelight, knew more about the history of the ancient Middle East than does the average college freshman today. Nor were our ancestors in any other way ignorant. Everyone who has read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin remembers how this great American — grandson of an English blacksmith, whose father emigrated to Boston where he earned his living as a maker of soap and candles — got his education from his “father’s little library.” This collection of books “consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity,” Franklin wrote. However, his father’s library also included Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, “in which I read abundantly,” Franklin recalled. And as a lifelong student of history myself, I would say Plutarch ought to be required reading in our schools, along with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Most young people today are actually more ignorant of history than the American patriots who fought our War of Independence and subsequently established our Constitution.

Knowing history, and seeing in their own lifetimes how God had blessed their nation with liberty, those Americans must have been astounded to see how well the Lord had kept his ancient promises. For as he carefully read Isaiah 66, the pioneer settler in his frontier cabin would find verse 19, in which God declares “the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory . . . shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.” Americans really ought to think hard about this prophecy. The Romans under Pompeii conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C., and it was a Roman census under the Emperor Augustus that led to Jesus being born in Bethlehem. Not long after Christ was crucified by the Romans under the prefect Pontius Pilate, a Roman army commanded by Aulus Plautius invaded Britain (44 A.D.), and by 122 A.D., the Emperor Hadrian built a wall from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth, marking the northern limit of the Roman Empire. Twenty years after that, the Romans pushed their frontier about 100 miles further north, where they built the Antonine Wall from Old Kilpatrick to Carriden. Yet the Romans never did succeed in taming the wild barbarians of present-day Scotland, and not only were the Roman legions unable to maintain the line of the Antonine Wall, but by 180, the savage hordes sweeping down from the north broke through Hadrian’s wall and killed the Roman governor of Britain. And those ferocious savages, I’m proud to say, were my ancestors.

Yes, in “the isles afar off,” as God declared by the prophet Isaiah circa 700 B.C., my ancestors were as heathen as any heathens could be. This point was made by Judah P. Benjamin, a Sephardic Jew who was elected in 1852 to represent Louisiana in the Senate. During a debate about the conflict over slavery in the Kansas territory, Ohio Sen. Ben Wade — a staunch abolitionist and Radical Republican — mocked Benjamin as “an Israelite in Egyptian clothing.” In doing so, Wade said Moses had “enticed a whole nation of slaves” to run away, which in 19th-century politics would have led Southerners to denounce him an abolitionist. This reference to the Israelites as a “nation of slaves” could be interpreted as an anti-Semitic insult, but Benjamin turned it around in his brilliant reply to Wade: “It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.”

A long sequence of historical events led to the fulfillment of the prophecy that God’s glory would be manifested among the Gentiles in “the isles afar off.” The Romans conquered both Israel and Britain, crucified Christ and destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem. About 600 years later, after the Roman Empire collapsed, Christianity finally established itself firmly in Britain, when the last pagan ruler of the Anglo-Saxons, King Arwald, was killed in battle by the armies of King Caedwalla of Wessex. Missionaries like Columba, Aidan and Cuthbert commenced to convert the fierce savages of the British Isles into a Christian people so that, after another thousand years had elapsed, the first English settlers of America brought with them the Bible, declaring the glory and fame of the God who had given His commandments to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. In 1630, aboard the tiny ship Arabella sailing from England to Massachusetts, the Puritan leader John Winthrop promised his fellow colonists that if they were faithful, God would bless their American colony:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.”

For we must consider that we shall be as a “city upon a hill.” The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And in reminding his fellow colonists of their mission, Winthrop quoted Deuteronomy 30, a passage I have frequently quoted myself:

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it. But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live . . .

Those who “choose life,” God said, will “live and multiply,” and will be blessed “in the land whither thou goest to possess it.” This blessing calls to mind God’s original commandment to mankind in Genesis:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .

The distinction between male and female, we see, was clear in God’s plan of creation, and His blessing was accompanied by this commandment to “be fruitful, and multiply.” Let us ask, insofar as America kept the covenant that John Winthrop urged, what were the consequences?

Yes, by June 6, 1944, barely 300 years after the founding of the English colonies in America, we had become a nation of more than 130 million people, the greatest military power the world had ever seen. The United States had the manpower and industrial technology to land an invincible army at Normandy. More than 2,000 American troops died on Omaha Beach. This toll in casualties – suffered on one day, to capture a single beach on the French coast — was roughly twice as large as the number of Puritans in the fleet that Winthrop led to America, but it was only a fraction of the roughly 75,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen who took part in Operation Overlord on D-Day. Within two weeks, more than 300,000 U.S. troops had been landed in the Normandy beachhead.

“Be fruitful and multiply,” you see, had produced from the first small English settlements on the Atlantic coast a mighty nation, powerful enough to crush the Nazi empire that had persecuted the Jews.

Well, to return from that 1,800-word digression, do the Bible teachings against “abominations” (toeba) in Deuteronomy 22:5 and Leviticus 18:22 make more sense if we understand these words in light of prophetic history? If we choose “life and good,” we have the promise of God’s blessing, and shall prevail against the forces of “death and evil.” Benjamin Franklin was one of 17 children of Josiah Franklin, who in turn was the ninth child of Thomas Franklin.The early settlers were devout Christians who had large families, and the population of the English colonies in America grew with astonishing speed. Those who say we are “a nation of immigrants” forget that we are also a nation of breeders, and in such circumstances — trying to establish civilization on the frontier of a vast wilderness — the toeba of Deuteronomy 22:5 and Leviticus 18:22 were so rare as to be almost unknown in early America.

Given the tremendous sacrifices of World War II — when more than 400,000 American men gave their lives to the cause of defeating Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Tojo’s Japan — the “Greatest Generation” knew what price had been paid for our freedom. The troops who came home from that war then fathered the “Baby Boom.” When their children reached adolescence, however, many rebelled against America’s patriotic and religious heritage, and by the time I started high school in 1973, the so-called “Sexual Revolution” had been raging for nearly a decade. Grown-ups strongly disapproved of the whole “hippie” youth culture. Our parents and teachers, our coaches and preachers were in unanimous agreement about the need to suppress this social upheaval that had erupted, the cause of which they believed to be either (a) Communism or (b) Satan, insofar as Communism and Satan weren’t the same thing.

In high school, I was just a teenager who wanted to be a cool dude, and among my hoodlum buddies, being a cool dude meant getting high and growing your hair long, because that’s what all the cool chicks were into. So I was as far-out as I could possibly get away with, and I got away with a lot more than I ever got caught with. Could I blame all this on “peer pressure”? Maybe, except that I was an active agent of evil, rather than a passive participant. My extensive adolescent experience in the ways of sin — and all the consequences of evil that I witnessed with my own eyes in the ensuing years — left me quite cynical toward the kind of enthusiasm James Charles expresses about the “amazing progressions with gay rights, gender inclusivity and self-expression.”

Hey, kid, listen up: I could name a few guys I went to high school with who died of AIDS, and I could name many more relatives, friends and acquaintances who died in other awful ways. Drunk driving fatalities, drug overdoses, murder, suicide — a childhood buddy of mine named Kim McMichen murdered his ex-wife and was sentenced to Death Row, but died while awaiting appeal. Lives were ruined, wrecked and destroyed by the “amazing progressions” that affected my generation, young man, and so you’ll excuse me if I refuse to applaud the abomination of your becoming the first male model for Cover Girl cosmetics.

Call me a hater, if you wish, but what I see is how the entertainment industry, the advertising industry and the fashion industry are now doing exactly what they were doing in the 1960s and ’70s, i.e., shrewdly exploiting youth to make a profit by promoting cultural decadence. Read this account from a Christian homeschooling mom:

Mommy, why doesn’t daddy wear makeup?

This is the question my 6-year-old asked me on Friday afternoon. We were watching Countdown to Christmas on ABC, and a commercial came up in between watching Toy Story.

A commercial for mascara. . . .

The first image is of a boy in a backwards hat with ink and black makeup. He narrates the commercial, but doesn’t reappear until the end. In the last few scenes, he is arching his back and holding his thighs next to six or so other girls. His appears to be the most feminine of all the poses. The tagline read, “Equal is beautiful.” The final image was branded with #LashEquality.

My son watched this commercial while I wasn’t paying any attention. Because it was just a CoverGirl commercial, I didn’t think I would need to cover the screen. I was pre-occupied, speaking with David (my husband).

Both of us were caught off guard, we didn’t know how to answer. I don’t know why, but the most logical thing we could think of at that moment was to say, “No, that’s a girl.”

The commercial comes on a second time. It is undeniable, it’s a guy.

Now we knew we had to talk about it.

“Daddy doesn’t wear makeup because makeup is for girls.”

Well why is that boy wearing makeup? . . .

Read the whole thing. Is this really what Cover Girl and the ABC network think is an appropriate ad to air during Toy Story? Are parents now expected to explain transvestitism to a 6-year-old?

“Hey, boys and girls, let’s talk about the word ‘abomination,’ and why America is going to Hell, because Satan is the CEO of Disney!”

Disney owns ABC, and Disney CEO Bob Iger got paid more than $40 million last year to run the network that broadcast this toeba. Proctor & Gamble (P&G) owns Cover Girl, and P&G CEO David Taylor was paid $14 million last year to run the company that paid for this toeba. Cover Girl’s advertising agency is the Grey Group, whose CEO is James R. Heekin III and, while I can’t find current salary information for Heekin, he needs to be driven into retirement for producing this toeba.

There are still quite a few Americans who believe in the Lord whose anger is kindled against those who turn away from him, and we have already tolerated enough “gender inclusivity and self-expression” that it’s a wonder God has not already destroyed us for this “amazing progression.”

Probably when Cover Girl and its advertising agency came up with the idea for this “Lash Equality” commercial, they believed themselves to be on the “right side of history,” along with Hillary Clinton, whom all the Smart People™ expected to cruise to a landslide victory Nov. 8.

Oops! Didn’t happen, did it?

America has had enough. Our ancestors did not establish this nation with the expectation that their descendants would squander their precious inheritance of God’s blessing. The men who died fighting to gain a foothold on that beach at Normandy did not give their lives so that America could sink into decadence, insanity and perversion.

Texas Teacher Impregnated by 13-Year-Old Student She Had Sex With 'on Almost Daily Basis' Pleads Guilty: … https://t.co/ixFZoplLCj via @ktla — Kirby McCain (@KirbyMcCain) November 21, 2016

@PatriarchTree 'Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology', at Swarthmore College https://t.co/qxc59Z9tOU — Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 4, 2016

Why did Democrats lose the election? Maybe because Democrats kill babies and hate Jesus? https://t.co/3xM7Nn0upo #tcot #MAGA pic.twitter.com/eOmhO5guiU — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 2, 2016







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