Bryan Fischer's weird ideas about valor and being a man.

Bryan Fischer of the AFA is just one of these astonishing natural wonders of the world that I just can't stop contemplating. He's so often so illogical that the source of his mental pathology practically begs to be unearthed, and yet, the people most inclined to offer critiques either come from the "Point and Laugh" school, where one simply says, "Hey, look, this dumb ass said a dumb thing" with the assumption that practically everyone will understand why it's dumb, or of the "This is evil" school, that imagines that Bryan Fischer knows better than the overtly weird Biblical readings he takes and wrests into images and suggestions so utterly divorced from reality that you just kind of know that he and reality did not have a good pre-nup, and reality doesn't want him near the kids, and there's Bryan Fischer, always insulting reality every chance he can get, the way some really bad divorces do turn out. But he has been writing some foolish nonsense lately on the subject of our "feminized military" and what constitutes bravery, which is so sexist and wrong-headed, that I really wanted to try out what I think is wrong with his world-view.


Here's what Fischer has been saying:

We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

According to Bill McGurn of the
Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has
been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties
on the enemy. Not one.

Gen. George Patton once famously said, "The
object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for
his."

When we think of heroism in battle, we used to think of our boys storming the
beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe do Hoc
while the enemy
soldiers fired straight down on them, tossing grenades into
pill boxes to take out gun emplacements.

That kind of heroism has
apparently become passe when it comes to awarding the Medal of Honor. We now
award it only for preventing casualities, not for inflicting them.

To Fischer, putting oneself in harm's way is not an exercise in courage in the way killing is. Fischer is fond of the notion of killing, having advocated for killing orcas, killing bears, and now just killing people in general. The Bible might say things like "Turn the other cheek" or "Thou shalt not kill" or "Do unto others," but as far as someone like Bryan Fischer is concerned, the only right thing to do is kill something--because otherwise, you're just a big girl.

That's what he seems to be saying when he refers to the actually quite valorous act of facing enemy fire, risking one's own life and limb to save another human being (for some reason my own brain only references the following quote with respects to this act as "No greater love exists than this; that a man give his life for another man" but I surely could not tell you from whence I got it--yes, snerk implied) as not deserving and award because it is "feminine". WTF?

Risking one's own life, health, safety, is courageous, and courage has no gender. Many women have performed valiant acts of rescue and served as example of grit against a killing force. And there is nothing that stops a woman herself from doing violence. But Fischer seems to view this self-sacrifice as a submissive gesture, possibly inviting the penetration of bullets, instead of doing one's own penetrating. It's almost reflexively referent to the anatomical.

By associating anything short of violence "feminine", Fischer seems to be associating the male with violence. He goes so far as to rearrange the martyrdom of Christ from a figure of one done unto--to one who is a general victorious in battle--

I'm going to step back from a theology I don't believe in and a line of thinking I find besides the point, to challenge his idea of manhood--WTF? A man isn't a man unless he's active, violent, a raging boner of destruction? He equates the act of salvation with weakness, and the act of violence with strength? Um, what?

Great men have laid down their lives for a cause in the path of nonviolent struggle. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi. They weren't perfect men, but I don't think you could have called them anything less than brave and committed men, who understood that service to truth did not need might to win, but only its innate rightness to win. These were men who knew they faced death, but faced it nonviolently, and in their example, also probably saved their followers from serving as examples that lead to death.

In the words of Jesus--"Be ye wise as serpents, and gentle as doves." I see a parallel between the character of Jesus Christ and these more recent, gentle men. They were brave and proud and committed--

And they did not kill. Were they less "manly" for it? Methinks Fischer is very confused. And not just wrong, but pathologically so.

Shorter me: Bryan Fischer strikes me as the kind of guy who lays awake nights worried that if he doesn't live up to a cartoon notion of what he thinks a man is or should be, he will morph into a giant vulva. And I think vulvas make him nervous.

Also I find I realized post-posting that trying to creep into his headspace makes me want to creep out.