Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well, wherever y'all are, whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate y'all joining me and giving me a little bit of your time, energy, a little piece of your day. Hopefully it'll give y'all, give you something. Hopefully it'll give our country a little something, help us to turn back to God and Jesus Christ, even if only a little bit. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast, tell others about it, help it to grow, thank y'all so much, very grateful for that. For those of y'all that leave your kind words, encouragement, thank you so much for that, whether it's online or in person. And for those of y'all that pray for the podcast and for me, thank you. I'm very, very grateful, very grateful for that.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Not a lot on the homestead. I'm going to try and get a little bit of work done out and about. We'll see how that goes. Have so much, so much that needs to be done. I guess it's never ending, right?

Speaker 1: 1:36

Father? Thank you for today. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for the blessings of things to do. Thank you for the blessings of people that need us, that depend on us, that look toward us for love or encouragement or attention. Help us to better follow the example of your Son, jesus Christ. Help us to be more concerned with people, with the eternal treasures, building up eternal treasures in heaven rather than here on earth. Be with our nation, lord. Be with the nations of all those listening around the world. Help us to turn back to you and your son Jesus Christ. Help us to trust you, father. I lean on you, instead of our own understanding, to acknowledge you in all our ways. Be with our leaders. Help them to rule in fear of you. Be with those who defend us. Keep them safe, bring them home safe to their families. Be with those who grow our food, father, our farmers, our ranchers. Be with them and their families. Help us to spread your word in the light of your son Jesus Christ, into the darkness, even if just a little bit. Fall and God, my words are pleased your son's name, we pray Amen. Have you made time for your Bible, for God today, reading your Bible and praying, even if just a few minutes? Come back and join us in the evening on the podcast. And if you're married. Have you made time for your spouse? Do they know, without a doubt, each day, when they lay their head down on the pillow, that they are your second priority, second only to God? This happens often.

Speaker 1: 4:32

I talk about it on the podcast. It's amazing to me the number of people that will claim to follow Christ and we all do this to some extent, folks, christ and we all do this to some extent, folks but a lot of us don't like to acknowledge that we do it and we certainly don't appreciate it when people call us out on it. But it's amazing the number of people that will pick particular Bible verses that suit our desires and really talk about those and promote those, and then the ones that go against what we really want or that don't fit our desired outcome. We ignore those, we make excuses for those, the ones we don't really want to follow, exceptions. One of the ways that I see this in my interactions particularly online, but they would be in person as well one of the clearest ways is our responsibilities, roles and responsibilities as men and women.

Speaker 1: 5:43

We're actually going to take a break from the State Constitution podcast and talk about an article today out of the Epoch Times. But particularly in marriage and sex. We like to pick the verses that support our stance, but we want to ignore the verses. We like to talk about our spouse needing to follow their roles and responsibilities in marriage, but somebody comes after us and asks if we're following them. We don't like to talk about that too much. It gets kind of sensitive.

Speaker 1: 6:23

I'll throw this in real quick before we get into this article 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3, titus 2, ephesians 5. You really want to know what the roles and responsibilities of men and women are, particularly in marriage? Go read those instead of listening to somebody else. Go read those instead of listening to somebody else and then pay attention to yourself and see which ones you want to deny, because you don't like the fact that you need to follow that and be aware. Be aware, all right.

Speaker 1: 7:03

So this is an article in the Mind and Body section of Epic Times from August 7th to 13th. That's the issue. So a couple weeks ago this is by Cara Michelle Miller, I believe. The title is Combat Exposure Raises Chronic Pain Risk for Servicewomen by 53%. The subtitle is A Recent Study of Over 3.4 Million Active Duty Servicewomen and Dependents Highlights the Unique Challenges they Face, and so there's a number of issues that feminism over the last century has really tried to make wholesome and good and done a pretty good job. The left and feminism have done a really good job Welfare State, the 1947 version of Separation of Church and State, which is the opposite of Jefferson's comments in his letter. Women in the Military, which we're going to talk about today. Getting the Bible taken away from school, getting prayer removed from school, getting homosexuality removed, as it was correctly labeled as a mental illness, getting that removed.

Speaker 1: 8:19

Roe v Wade I think we're at like 63 million and counting. I still think somewhere across the nation we ought to have a baby counter, like we have a debt counter. Maybe that would wake some people up. No fault, divorce, amnesty of mass illegals under Reagan. And then what we see in the last couple decades affirmative action, critical race theory, dei, so worth of individuals based on their skin color, majority, two-income families, out-of-wedlock birth percentage, transgenderism removed as a mental illness as it was correctly identified, and then again the massive illegal immigration that we see. All of these have become viewed as positives in our society by the majority of society over the last century, since suffrage, since the 19th Amendment, and you can go find some polls, for example, that say that people maybe we have a higher percentage now that don't approve of Roe v Wade. But that's not what our actions and our voting line up with, based on the people that we elect, the policies that we support.

Speaker 1: 9:36

So, women in combat and if we get a chance I don't think we're going to, but we're going to talk about an article that we talked about a while back. This was from 2008. It's the paradox of declining female happiness and if we get a chance, we'll at least read a paragraph or so out of it. But what it really highlights and there's multiple studies that highlight this now in the time since then is that with the increasing quote-unquote opportunities of women over the past 50 plus years, their happiness has declined. So you would think the more opportunities someone has, the more fields that are open to them, like in the case of women better pay, more job opportunities, more college opportunities, more opportunities, for example, in the military that the happiness would increase concurrently. But that's not what they find at all. Really, in industrialized countries, but particularly in Britain and the United States, they found that the happiness of women has declined. So if we get into that, it ties in to this. So this article, again by Kara Michelle Miller if I'm saying that right, we're going to read a little bit some excerpts Talking about a 45-year-old Army, retired Army captain, marissa Mitchell.

Speaker 1: 11:12

A couple of quotes of hers I walk like an old woman. My doctor said you've got the spine of a 75-year-old woman, the muscle volume of a college athlete. There's an article in the Marine Corps Gazette, which is the professional journal of Marine Corps officers, probably from 10 years ago, and they interviewed a female I think she was also a captain but in the Marine Corps who was a combat engineer, I believe, or she was with combat engineers and this article, written by herself. She talked about all the medical problems she was having now that she was out of the Marine Corps because of the wear and tear on her body. Some people are going to tell you that, well, we just don't need women in the combat MOSs. But I'm going to tell you, if you really find people that are honest, your co-ed units in any MOS degrade good order and discipline.

Speaker 1: 12:15

And this right here, this physical pain, is just one example of what happens when we reject those roles and responsibilities that God gave us. Women in combat isn't one of those roles. And the rare, rare, unbelievably rare exceptions to that prove the rule. No country throughout history has willingly put women in combat successfully without hurting their society. You look at Israel. A lot of people use them as an example. Israel their back is completely against the wall. They're surrounded by enemies. They have absolutely no choice but to throw everyone and everything they have at their enemies from time to time. That's not a voluntary force, that's a survival, a fight for survival.

Speaker 1: 13:27

So this study, this recent study of over 3.4 million active duty service women and dependents, average age was 29. About 18.6% were active duty service women. 9.3% were diagnosed with chronic pain. This is important to note. Women with pre-existent chronic pain weren't included in this study. So this is all chronic pain coming from after their experience in the JAMA Network, open suggest a 53% higher risk of chronic pain for women who have been deployed during times of increased combat versus those who were deployed in calmer times. They really break down this the years like 2006 to 2013, where the combat was more intense, versus those who have served from 2014 to 2020, right, the earlier group was 1.5 times more likely to have chronic pain. So this article, again, it's talking mostly about the physical repercussions, but realize that the psychological repercussions on a unit, a co-ed unit in the family, are just as great, if not greater. Family members of service personnel in that early period were also nearly twice as likely to have chronic pain as those in the later period. And they broke it down by rank. A lot of it had to do with the job that the women were doing and their rank enlisted service women seem to be more likely, and lower ranks seem to be more likely of this chronic pain. The Army and the Marine Corps seem to be more likely of this chronic pain than the Air Force, for example. And then also they found that lower income played a factor after it was harder for them to get the medical attention that they needed. Mental health contributed to it right, and that's really the psychological factor too.

Speaker 1: 16:04

You can't take our inherent design out of this equation. You can't take the fact that men and women were created with different roles and responsibilities and just take it out of the conversation and pretend that we're interchangeable. And that's really what we've been doing for the last 50 years. I guess you could make the argument really for the past 80 years, a hundred years, almost century We've been pretending that men and women are interchangeable, that they're just different cogs in a machine and you can take one out and you can replace it with another one, and that's just not true. It's kind of like, actually, my father and I were working on a lawnmower the other day and we had an English size ratchet I don't remember what the size was, it doesn't really matter, but this was a metric bolt and so the first time we tried, the fit was okay, it was close, but it wasn't just right, and so we rounded the edges off that bolt. If you don't understand what I'm saying, the bottom line is I was trying to take a really big screw out and I got just the wrong size of tool to do that with and it caused problems. And that's what we've been trying to do as a society. We've been pretending, even when you can find some women that meet the physical requirements although we've been lowering constantly the physical requirements, the entrance exams made completely different ones for men and women to get into our military academies and our military over the years but even if you can find those few women that make that physical test, that can pass those tests, we're still not the same. It's not right and we put the wrong size, the wrong cog in the wheel and it messes the whole thing up. So these authors are looking to do some more research and one of the things they're looking at is the fact that women are receiving higher rates of opioid prescriptions than men now from the military. So that's just another thing to add, another problem that we're going to get.

Speaker 1: 18:32

One of the interesting things is you know, in a paper you put in the chances for something. Some reason the study wasn't quite right. You know some mistakes that you could have made. And they said you know the reliance on claim-based data. So do you feel good? No, okay, so you're asking a question. There's always a chance for somebody to really not have as much chronic pain as they say. But they also said that the methodology might have led to an underestimate because it didn't take any cases into account that were diagnosed after military service or during care provided by the VA.

Speaker 1: 19:19

So a lot of these women that have gotten out and seemed okay when they got out and then have started to have these mental health issues or physical chronic pain issues they didn't look at any of those, they just looked at the ones that got the injuries while they were in the military. So it goes back to Mitchell, who this article started with right the captain, the Army captain, marissa Mitchell, and she's really had trouble. She's gone through all these different treatments to try and reduce the pain Physical therapy, acupuncture, medication, psychotherapy, and this is the last quote here. Despite exhausting various therapies and even undergoing a full fasciotomy a surgical procedure to reduce muscle pressure by cutting the surrounding tissue In 2013, she continues to grapple with persistent orthopedic pain in her knees, hips and back. She worries about her future mobility. I'm afraid of what it's going to look like in 10 years.

Speaker 1: 20:31

We've been pretending for a long time, folks, that men and women are the same. The military is one prime example. Co-ed units don't make us stronger, they make us weaker. They make our nation weaker and more vulnerable. But any time, in any arena, when we stop fulfilling those roles and responsibilities, marriage is probably the key one. Roles and responsibilities Marriage is probably the key one. When we don't fulfill our separate, different but equally valuable roles and responsibilities, the mechanism gets messed up, and we're really, really messed up right now.

Speaker 1: 21:12

I won't keep you too much longer this article, if you get a chance. It's the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. It was by Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from 2008. It talks about this declining unhappiness, a 2009 study by the National Bureau of Economics talking about women's subjective well-being declining. And then Stevenson and Wolfers again in 2016, talking about women reporting feeling less satisfied. Since the 1970s, it used to be that women reported overall higher happiness in their lives than men, but that's changed and has continued to decline. So, folks, again you want to really look at God's design. Some places to start Titus 2, 1 Peter 3, 1 Corinthians 7, ephesians 5. Go back and look at some of these If you're really interested in having your life function correctly, your marriage function correctly, your future marriage function correctly. But this idea that we're interchangeable it's not helping anybody. We'll try and get back into the state constitutions, I think, maybe the next day. God bless y'all, god bless your families, god bless your marriages, god bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon, folks, looking forward to it.