Abortion Myth # 18

MYTH: "Nobody has a right to use someone else’s body without their consent; therefore a woman should not be forced to be pregnant against her will."

TRUTH: This is wrong on a number of different levels.

First, this attempt to equate an unborn baby with an attacker or trespasser is a false analogy because:

1)      Unborn babies are fundamentally unlike a trespasser or rapist: they are exactly where nature designed them to be, in their mothers’ wombs.  Criminal assailants are criminals precisely because they are where they are not supposed to be. 

2)      The unborn child in her womb has been created through the natural functioning of the mother’s own body, and has received half of her genetic material directly from the mother.  An unwelcome assailant is completely separate, and has no intrinsic connection to the woman’s body.

3)      Unborn humans are incapable of asking “consent”: it is absurd to hold them to a standard that applies to adults only. Even if there is a violation, we are executing an innocent party.

4)      Do we permit killing 2 year-olds, or 10 year-olds, for instance, for “using someone else’s body without their consent”?  Children continue to “use” their parents’ bodies for years after birth, depending upon them for shelter, food, education, and a host of other things. A woman who kills a newborn baby, or a 2 year-old, or a 10 year old will still be held liable, regardless of whether or not she “consented” to have them.  Parents’ obligation to protect and nurture their children is based on their biological relationship, not the parents’ attitude.

Randy Alcorn, in Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Arguments also makes the following points in response to similar arguments:

1)      The vast majority of pregnancies result from consensual sexual intercourse, and pregnancy is the natural consequence (in fact, the biological purpose) of the sexual act.  Also, there is no contraceptive method that is 100% effective.  Over 90% of pregnancies are the result of a free choice on the part of the mother.

2)      Pregnancy is a temporary condition , and since “the great majority of abortions take place from seven weeks to six months of development, the actual difference between the woman who aborts her child and the woman who doesn’t is not nine months  but three to seven months.” Is a few months inconvenience too much to ask in return for the life of an innocent child?

3)      “Any civilized society restricts the individual’s freedom to choose whenever that choice would harm an innocent person.”

4)      “The one-time choice of abortion robs someone else of a lifetime of choices and prevents him from ever exercising” his or her rights.

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Why We Fight: Powers, Principalities & The Culture Wars

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was published October 9th, 2014 under the title "Why We Fight". To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

The latest bizarro piece of news from the Culture Wars: a school district in Nebraska has decreed that its teachers and its students may no longer use gender-specific terms  - like "boys" and "girls".  Instead, teachers must use alternative terms like "Purple Penguins" (I'm not making this up!) so that "all genders" will feel "welcome". [link] As absurd as it seems, this story shows just how far the assault on the Family, traditional morality, and plain common sense has come. It brings to mind the following scripture passage:

Put on the whole armor of God,that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the  powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; besides all these, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one.  And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. -Ephesians 6:11-20

   Every time I look at the news I am reminded that we are engaged in a Spiritual Battle, we collectively, and each one of us personally.  It has always been this way, and will be until Christ comes again in glory. The nature of the battle is constantly changing: for individual believers there is always a personal, internal struggle, but there is also a more external, public conflict which changes and ebbs and flows over time and in different places.  We can see this external spiritual battle raging all around, and picking up intensity, in the so-called “Culture Wars”.  A major theme of George Weigel’s authorized biography of Pope John Paul II is that the Pope understood that culture trumps politics and economics, and that culture grows out of religion, a given people’s understanding of God.  And acting on that understanding, St. John Paul the Great helped bring down the walls of that latter-day Jericho, Soviet communism.     

     If the cultural war is really spiritual warfare, then, who is the real antagonist?   This becomes tricky, not because we don’t know, but because saying so in our current climate is difficult.  Those of us of a certain age will remember the Flip Wilson Show.  One of the comedian’s most successful gags was a character called “Geraldine”, actually Wilson himself in none-too-convincing drag, whose most memorable laugh-line was “The devil made me do it!”  More recently, Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” on Saturday Night Live always provoked uproarious laughter from the audience when she said “Could it be . . .(pregnant pause) . . . SATAN?!?”  For a long time now, the message in the popular culture has been that anyone who actually attributes anything to the Evil One is, well, ridiculous (interesting, by the way, that both of the examples above involve men dressed as women).  We are set up to be dismissed as unserious cranks if we see the hand of the Devil anywhere.     

     There are some who are still willing to speak out, however.  Just a few years ago, one South American cleric described a law legalizing same sex marriage as “a move by the devil, looking to confuse and deceive all children of God” [link] (interesting that this same cleric, who now has a rather prominent position in Rome, was recently named "Person of the Year" by the gay magazine The Advocate).  Closer to home, I was listening to a radio interview the other day with Joseph Bottum, who was arguing that one reason why it’s so difficult to make any headway with those who have left the faith and are now clinging to new enthusiasms like gay marriage, global warming, Marxism, etc. is that those beliefs have taken on a religious significance for them, and are occupying the place reserved in our hearts for God. Those other things, of course, are poor substitutes indeed for the Real Thing, the One who made us for himself, as St. Augustine tells us, and to Whom we can say “our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te). For which reason they cling to their false spiritual consolations all the harder, in the unconscious hope that if they just try a little harder, they'll feel fulfilled; but such things do not ultimately satisfy.   We can see here where we get the word “Devil”, from the Greek Diabolos, the Divider, because he divides us from God.       

     None of us is immune to the temptations of Division. St. Ignatius of Loyola represented this internal battle as a conflict between the Spirit of Jesus and the Spirit of Satan, and pictured it as Two Standards, as in Roman battle standards, around which the armies of each Spirit gather.  When we follow the Standard of Jesus internally, we serve in his army out in the world as well, and so it is in the case of the other side. As St. Paul tells us, our battle is with "spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places".  Those whom we take to be their foot soldiers here on Earth most certainly do not think of themselves in those terms.  Having spent many years as secular leftist, I know that the vast majority of those who serve in that camp are well-meaning, and honestly believe they are on the side of good and righteousness, not realizing that the breastplate of righteousness is part of the full armor of God. That’s the other message of Paul’s letter: we can’t withstand in the evil day without "the armor of God", without the "Gospel of Peace", without "all prayer and supplication". When we separate ourselves from God, or don’t avail ourselves of all the spiritual arms with which he provides us, we are helpless against the wiles of the Divider.  We need to remember this in our interactions with those who are on the other side.  We need to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15), and aim for the conversion of their hearts, and, ultimately, their redemption, not their destruction.     

     Finally, this is the reason why St. Paul asks that "utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak". Jesus rallies an Army of Love around His Standard. That’s why we engage in the culture wars: not because we like brawling (see Eph. 4:15 above), and not to inflate our egos (Scripture is chock full of warnings about getting “puffed up”), but to win hearts and souls for Christ. 

Cicero at Planet Fitness

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was published March 15th, 2015 on the blog Nisi Dominus under the title "Cicero at the Gym". To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

"Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, latrinis femineis nostris?"

O Tempora, O Mores!

Are we living in a neo-pagan culture?  One could argue that we are doing just that, or heading in that direction, given that our culture has largely abandoned God and Christianity.  If we are, then we Neo-pagans are in much sorrier shape than the Old Pagans ever were, because they had no access to the Revelation of Jesus Christ, but we do, and we are consciously rejecting it.  Along with Supernatural Truth, we are also increasingly abandoning even natural truths in a way that would have horrified the heathens of old.  Consider, for instance, what the Roman orator, philosopher, and writer Cicero has to say about what we would call Natural Law:

There is a true law, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil.  Whether it enjoins or forbids, the Good respect its injunctions, and the Wicked treat them with indifference.  This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and it is not liable either to derogation or abrogation.  Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice.  It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience.  It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this eternal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable.  It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings.  God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer.  He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man.  For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.

We live in a culture that no longer believes that: today's conventional wisdom is that we can make reality whatever we want it to be (we are like God, as the serpent promises Eve in Genesis 3:5, “knowing good from evil”). We scoff at the pagan philosopher’s assertion that the natural law “cannot be contradicted by any other law”, and we are increasingly using the power of the state (the senate and the people, as Cicero would put it) to this impose Bold New World on those who won’t accept it willingly. If Cicero were to say today what he says above, he might find himself employing his prodigious rhetorical skills to defend himself from charges of "hate speech."

Intolerance Won't Be Tolerated

     The cutting edge of the new paganism, after all, is the question of what today is called "gender".  This is no longer a function of one's biological sex, but is an "identity" chosen by individuals that need not correspond to any external reality (which frees us from the tyranny of being either male or female, there now being dozens of genders from which we can choose).  Cicero never guessed how truly a man might fly from himself, and do “violence to the very nature of man.”

   If this were simply a matter of people calling themselves what they want, it would be sad and unfortunate.  It seems, however, that those who create their own reality cannot tolerate any opposition, even the unspoken opposition of those who simply live in accord with a more traditional understanding of the nature of things.  That's why we see cases such as this one (link) in which the highest court in the state of Maine ruled that "School officials violated state anti-discrimination law when they would not allow a transgender fifth-grader to use the girls' bathroom."  There is no law, apparently, forbidding discrimination against the vast majority of girls who don't want a boy in their bathroom (the reporter refers to the student in question as "she" throughout the article, but does concede toward the end that the student "is a biological male who identified as a girl beginning at age 2").  In a similar case involving adults, “The head of Ontario’s human rights commission” defended “the right of ‘transgendered’ men to use women’s changing rooms in response to a woman’s complaint that she was ogled” by a man who was not, shall we say, adhering to traditional norms of modesty in his attire or his behavior (link, for mature audiences only).

A Non-Intimidating, Welcoming Environment . . . For Some

   Now it has gone a step further.  We heard last week (link) about a woman who was banned from her local Planet Fitness gym because she complained about a man (who "identified as a woman") in her locker room, and warned other female patrons of his presence.  The gym declared her behavior "inappropriate  and disruptive to other members", and so she was asked to leave, since “Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members”.  Except for female members who object to undressing in the presence of naked men. Apparently, there is nothing inappropriate or disruptive about a man (whatever he thinks of himself) invading an area where women are accustomed to changing and showering.

   It may be that Chesterton didn't really say, "when people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything."  It perfectly describes, however, what we're seeing in our society today, and is a reminder that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood" (Ephesians 6:12), but is at root a battle in the spiritual realm, which is why spiritual and natural Truth rise and fall together.  And so we must continue to oppose unreason with reason, but also offer prayer and sacrifice in response to unbelief and, of course, always engage our opponents in a spirit of love.

   

A Couple Paving Stones On The Road To Hell

This Throwback Thursday Post was first published on December 12th, 2014. Warning: contains content of a sexual nature.  

      There’s an old saying: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  It’s a little odd, when you think about it: shouldn’t our intentions be good?  The road to Heaven certainly isn’t paved with bad intentions, is it?  The answer, I think, is that the second half of the proposition is left out.  It's about good intentions that are not grounded in reality, or in wisdom, or in God’s law: they create more problems than they solve (if, indeed, they solve anything at all). 

“Is it OK if I take my pants off?”

     A classic example of the Road to Hell Principle is the thoroughly modern practice known as “Sex Education” (Sex Ed informally).  A concern, and I believe a sincere one in most cases, for the well-being of young people in an increasingly sexualized world has led to instructional programs in schools (and not just public schools) that, because they are disconnected from God’s law, and Natural Law, and plain common sense, promote the very harm they are intended to ameliorate.      One such program has been in the news recently: a class run by a Planned Parenthood chapter in California that was invited to teach a class on sexuality to 9th graders in the local public high school.  According to the Fox News story [full story here]:  

. . . some parents are irate that their children’s sex ed class at Acalanes High School in Lafayette is being taught by employees of Planned Parenthood without their prior knowledge. They are also fuming over the methods and materials being used, including a checklist that asks students if they are “ready for sex” and another worksheet that describes how to give and obtain consent, as well as a diagram that uses a "genderbread" person for lessons in gender identity. 

The Gingerbread Person is a cute little fellow who clearly was designed to appeal to children, much like the old Camel Cigarettes mascot “Joe Camel”; and like the much maligned cartoon camel, who was criticized for promoting an unhealthy product to children, Gingerbread Person offers reassurance to the very young that whatever they want to express or do sexually is not just all right, but good and desirable.  Things, perhaps, that had not even occurred to them before.  As for the class itself, many of the children “felt the sessions were pressuring them to have sex” or, as one parent put it, “Some of the kids were distracted because it was divergent from what they were taught at home.”  Indeed. For example:   

Included in the materials provided to students were documents and worksheets that included a checklist entitled, “Sex Check! Are You Ready For Sex?” in which the 13 and 14-year-old students are asked questions such as if they have water– based lubricants and condoms and if they could handle a possible infection or pregnancy. Another worksheet reads like a how-to on obtaining consent from a possible sexual partner and offers possible statements like “Do you want to go back to my place?” and “Is it OK if I take my pants off?”  

"You can go now."

There are more problems with school-based sex ed classes that I can get into here.  I will point out that the foregoing tends to support what many of us have been saying for a long time: that such classes not only debase sexuality and separate it from its appropriate place in a loving marital relationship, but actually encourage (or even “pressure”, as the students say above) early and promiscuous sexual activity. 

     Here’s another case, this time from the UK [full story here].  After a sex ed class, a thirteen year-old boy and girl   

. . . went to a secluded area where they discussed what they had just been taught about sexual intercourse. The boy said that he asked the girl if she wanted to "try sex." Although the young girl repeatedly said "No," the schoolboy proceeded to pin the girl down and rape her. Afterward he allegedly told the girl, "You can go now."  

     This is only one case to be sure, but we can see a clear connection between the instruction and the act.  And, as it turns out, many British students have misgivings similar to those expressed by their American counterparts above.  From the Life Site story:  

Earlier this year a poll of UK teenagers by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) [here]found that a large majority of both boys and girls complained that sex education often presents promiscuity as normal, putting additional pressure on them to become sexually active before they might otherwise do so. Many of the teens criticized the sex education lessons they had received at school for not doing enough to discourage them from becoming sexually active. One 18-year-old girl responded to the poll question about her sex-ed experience: "I always felt pressured by teachers, like, 'sex is normal, just be safe OK' when actually I wasn't interested in having sex at the time and was happy to wait for the right person.” "I don't think sex should be taught as 'the norm'. I think people should be made to feel comfortable and teachers should say, 'you should wait, the law states 16, don't be pressured'." 

The Definition Of Insanity

According to Dr. Philip Ney, a retired professor of psychiatry, there is plenty of research to show that the negative effects of sex ed programs are very real.  In an essay he wrote for Life Site News [full article here] he says: 

It is quite conclusive now, that the more sex education, the more sexual activity and all the problems that go with that.  The introduction of sex education is well correlated with the increase in abortion, STDs and boy-girl interpersonal problems. Good education gives people the desire to try it out or learn more experientially.  Paradoxically, in that respect, current forms of sex education are good education but have the wrong results . . . The earlier the sex education, the younger children explore sex and try various sexual techniques. Present evidence makes it possible to also conclude that the earlier the sex education, the earlier the sexual behavior. Thus sexual education is sexual titillation.  

     Despite all the evidence that these programs do the opposite of what they intend, the “experts” have nothing to offer but more of the same.  In response to the British case above, one such expert said that “in her opinion the solution to this type of misbehavior is more sex education, ‘and much earlier than 13, I would say.’”        This whole situation brings to mind an old saying: “Insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result”.  But what else can they do in the public schools, or in the secular world in general?  They have rejected a worldview in which healthy sexuality is nourished and supported.  They have torn down the social attitudes and institutions that protected people from the consequences of lust run amok. In a world where the most important thing is feelings (and isn’t that what the Genderbread Person is all about?), right and wrong are random abstractions.  That’s why even abstinence classes, while better than the Planned Parenthood inspired alternative, are still not enough.  Young people need to be taught not simply the (negative) practice of abstinence but the (positive) virtue of Chastity, and not just in a classroom: they need to see it as part of a coherent worldview, as something that not only works but can be lived out joyfully, especially by the example of the adults in their lives. 

         It has happened before. There are many reasons why Christianity spread as quickly as it did throughout the Roman Empire in the first few centuries after Christ.  I have heard that one of them was that pagan Romans saw the joy in the lives of their Christian neighbors, not the least part of which was the love and respect Christian men had for their wives.  In a culture that more and more encourages people to use each other for pleasure rather than embrace each other in love, we are again called to show a more excellent way.  We need to understand, and help our fellow Catholics see, that Church teachings on sexuality and marriage are not so much a series of prohibitions as they are a road map to happier, more productive, and holier lives.  We need to rebuild, one person, one family, at a time a culture in which Christ is King.

Abortion Myths # 15

MYTH: "Pro-lifers are a bunch of religious fanatics trying to impose their faith on everyone else."

TRUTH:

-While it’s true that most pro-lifers are religious believers, so is the population as a whole, at least in the United States [see here].   Even if pro-lifers tend to be more observant than their fellow citizens, they adhere to a moral tradition that the vast majority shares.

-Also, the public arguments pro-lifers make against abortion are rooted in natural law and concrete scientific fact. The most fundamental pro-life argument is that science proves that unborn babies are both alive and human from the moment of conception, and so to destroy them is, by definition, the taking of a human life. The taking of innocent human life is always wrong in and of itself, and if we can declare some human lives expendable, then none of us has a clear right to exist.

-Since the pro-abortionists can’t produce any facts or scientific evidence that unborn babies are not living human beings, they need to create a philosophical definition such as “personhood” that is designed to exclude living humans who don’t meet certain subjective standards (brain activity, ability to feel pain, emotions, viability, etc.). Some also use quasi-theological arguments, such as that unborn babies do not yet have souls: I recall one “pro-choice” cleric, not a Catholic, who relied on the etymological connection in many languages between “breath” and “spirit” to argue that we don’t have souls until we are able to breathe (notice that the pro-life argument doesn’t use or need the concept of the soul). They also use emotional arguments to obscure the injustice done to aborted babies.

-Religious believers have the same right to try to persuade their fellow citizens as anyone else; if their fellow citizens don’t find their arguments persuasive, they don’t have to go along.  To paraphrase Saint John Paul II, we propose, we don’t impose.

-In the United States the purpose of the First Amendment to the Constitution is to protect religious believers from the state, not the other way around. Certain opinions are not prohibited simply because they have a religious basis.

-Just because a law corresponds to religious convictions does not make it an imposition of religion.  Murder, theft and all sorts of other crimes are condemned in the Bible and in Church teaching, but I don’t hear anyone calling for the revocation of those laws on that basis.

-The abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and many similar movements for social improvement were led by believing Christians; should we reject the laws that resulted from these as an “imposition of religious faith”?

-There are agnostics and atheists who nonetheless recognize the injustice of abortion, such as the atheist writer Nat Hentoff, or the abortionist and NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson, who was still an atheist when he changed to a pro-life position (only later did he embrace the Catholic Faith).

DON’T BUY THE LIE!

Essential Pro-Life Resources:

Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments (link)  

The Elliot Institute (link)  

National Right To Life Committee (link)  

Care-Net (link)

The Nurturing Network (link)


To See The Entire Abortion Myths Series Click HERE 

Benedetto Marcello's Requiem & Weekly Roundup of Posts

Benedetto Marcello

     Today at Mass our music director brought along a trumpet player, who played an interesting piece by a composer named Benedetto Marcello, with whom I was unfamiliar.  After I returned home I was looking at a clip from Johann Christian Bach's Requiem (the opening of which I posted last week), when I noticed a recommended link to a Requiem by this same Benedetto Marcello. I decided it was time to learn something about this composer.
     Marcello was a Venetian who lived from 1686-1739.  A trained composer, his first love was music, but he was also a nobleman whose family expected him to take on a life of public service. Throughout his life he had to find time for composition while serving various positions in the Venetian government.  He also faced frustration in his personal life: he fell in love and married one of his students, Rosanna Scalfi but, because she was a commoner and legally ineligible to marry the noble Marcello, they wed secretly, and after the composer's death the marriage was voided by the authorities.  Their relationship did, however, provide material for an opera called (naturally) Benedetto Marcello by the composer Joachim Raff.
     The clip below is the haunting opening to Benedetto Marcello's Requiem,  one of the nine Masses he composed.  While you listen, feel free to peruse the links below to past week's posts at Principium et Finis; who knows? you might find something worth reading . . .

Weekly Roundup, July 5th 2015

It was a busy week, for the summertime at least, at Principium et Finis: there was something old, something new, nothing borrowed (except a few pithy quotes from minds greater than mine, all properly attributed), and I must confess that I was a little blue about the state of the culture.  A theme common to a number of the posts below is the sad course a society will follow when it turns its back on God.  The Good News, of course, is that Jesus Christ will triumph in the end, and would be happy to have us along . . . if we’re willing to follow, that is.

Tuesday - “On Being A Child Of This Age” We start with Chesterton’s famous observation that the Catholic Church “is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age”, and man, what an age . . . [here] 

Wednesday - “Feed My Sheep (Worth Revisiting)” In which we see, first, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (when I attempt to apply my modest Greek skills a passage from John’s Gospel), but more importantly just how far Jesus is willing to go in order to give us a chance to repent [here] 

Thursday - “Archangels, Morality, St. Jerome, & God’s Law” This post combines the themes of the first two: God is speaking to us in a variety of ways, but we desperately want to believe that we can ignore him and still have everything turn out all right.  Guess who’s right? [here] 

and -  “St. Monegundis Is An Example Of God’s Loving Providence” None of Monegundis’ plans worked out; fortunately, she listened to the plan God had for her.  That’s why we call her “Saint.”  [here] 

Saturday - “July 4^th: An Experiment In Freedom Under God” The First of two Independence Day posts.  In this one we look at what George Washington had to say about the importance of religion and morality in a free society, and see why we are unwise to ignore his advice. [here] 

and - “‘Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World’ – July 4^th” A revision of a post from last year about the Declaration of Independence.  The Declaration asserts that “the protection of Divine Providence” is extended to citizens, not governments.  Without that protection, however, free citizens can’t hope to remain free from the power of the state. [here] 

         

"Appealing To The Supreme Judge Of The World" - July 4th

      A defiant group of Englishmen and Scots-Irish who were tired of getting pushed around made a formal announcement 239 years ago today that they had had enough, that they were declaring independence from Great Britain and her grasping monarch, George III (to my British friends out there, by the way, no hard feelings – I think we’ve smoothed things over since, especially in the war begun a hundred and one years ago this summer, and even more so the in one that followed a few decades after). Here’s how that document, the Declaration of Independence, begins:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

     “The laws of nature and nature’s God”.  Here’s an extraordinary thing: they were going above the head of the king, as it were, and appealing to God for justice.  Likewise in the next paragraph:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

     So, governments exist only by God’s leave, and their purpose is to protect the people’s God-given rights.  The end result of this idea can only be a republic, and a republic was formally codified eleven years later in the U.S. Constitution, but this was to be a republic different from those that had gone before: while technically the sovereignty belonged to the people, the true Sovereign was God himself. And yet it was not a theocracy: the protection of individual freedoms demanded that the citizens individually be governed by God’s law in pursuit of their individual interest.  That is what John Adams meant when he said (I won’t quote directly this time; if you’re familiar with this blog you’ve seen the quote) that the U.S. Constitution was fit only for a moral and religious people.  In the absence of religious faith (particularly Christian faith), citizens without a sure moral compass make a people incapable of self-government.

     We can see how true this is simply by looking around us.  There have been several periods in American history referred to as the Great Awakenings, dramatic revivals of religious faith.  In the past half century we seem (both in the U.S. and other Western nations) to be going through a Big Sleep, a dramatic decline in religious belief.  At the same time we see an equally precipitous decline in morals, a rapid disintegration of the family, and a growing and ever more coercive state eager to step in and make more of our decisions for us.  It’s worth pointing out that our growing weakness as a culture is also a major factor in the growing boldness of jihadists and others eager to complete our downfall.  People unwilling or unable to govern themselves are incapable of directing the government of the state; the end result can only be tyranny.

     The Declaration ends with a final invocation to the sovereignty of God.  The document concludes:

           

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states . . . And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

I submit that unless we are equally willing to submit to the “Supreme Judge of the world”, and ready to pledge our “lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”, we will find ourselves under the weight of a despotism heavier than anything George III could have imagined. 

On Being A Child Of This Age

G. K. Chesterton

The great G.K. Chesterton said of the Catholic Church: “ It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” If you doubt that the slavery of our particular age is getting more degrading by the day, consider the following random samples from the unraveling of our once-Christian culture:

- The big news from last week, of course, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s “finding” that the Constitution of the United States mandates that states may not exclude same-sex couples from their definition of marriage.  In his dissent from the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts  wrote “The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.” No, but it is perfectly attuned to the Spirit of this Age.

- A major newspaper in Pennsylvania announces that it “will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage”, with the grudging exception that it would “for a limited time, accept letters and op-Eds on the high court's decision and its legal merits.”  Journalists in the United States may claim to have an unshakable commitment to free speech, but the Spirit of our Age does not tolerate opposition.

- It is equally intolerant of any disagreement on the new conventional wisdom that sex, or “gender”, is not something inborn, but a thing we can create for ourselves and change at will. Actress Alice Eve learned this the hard way after she pointed out via social media the seemingly obvious fact that cosmetic surgery can’t turn male Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner into an actual woman.  After a torrent of abuse from the forces of tolerance, she was soon sounding uncannily like the victim of one of Stalin’s show trials: “Maybe this needs a little thought. I felt confused and now I feel enlightened and like I know what education I need to move forward.” 

-Since “gender reassignment” surgery is such a good thing, how can we withhold it from anyone? The New York Times, in an article celebrating surgical intervention of this sort for teens, reports that in Oregon 15 year-olds can undergo this mutilating, life-changing procedure at state expense . . . and without parental consent. The Times reports that “advocates say that extending treatment to teenagers will alleviate depression and suicide”, although it concedes that “The evidence is mixed. A large-scale Swedish study at the Karolinska Institute found that starting about a decade after gender reassignment surgery, transgender people were still more than 19 times as likely to die by suicide as the general population [link here, which the NYT somehow forgot to include].”  Other researchers have published similarly grim results, such as this U.S. study that found more than four out of ten transsexuals have attempted suicide. Perhaps it would more “mixed” if they could point to other studies  demonstrating an upside?

     - This article at Life Site News reports on Laura, a healthy, 24 year-old woman in Belgium who will be killed by lethal injection this summer, simply because she doesn’t want to live.  She says, “Life, that’s not for me.”  Well, to each his or her own, I suppose.  After all, she has received official approval. Interestingly, one of the psychiatrists who signed off on her case is currently hawking a book touting “euthanasia for psychological reasons”, so Laura can get what she wants and give the doc a little publicity as well.  The Spirit of the Age calls that a win-win!

I could go on, but you get the idea.  The proverbial Visitor From Another World could only conclude that we are in the midst of some sort of suicidal societal dementia, or possessed by a malevolent demon that renders us incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, and that is intent on destroying not only us as individuals but also the institutions that sustain us.  Or perhaps, if he’s familiar with Earth literature, he might see us as an entire world full of Victor Frankensteins who, like the eponymous protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel, seek to usurp God’s power of creation, only to spawn a destructive force beyond our control.  It would be easy to look at the Signs of the Times and despair.

    Despair, however, is not an option for us, because despair means giving up hope. Christian hope is the confidence that God will fulfill his promises of mercy and salvation, and if we surrender that trust, we are giving up on God; we are in fact, committing a grave sin. Instead, St. Paul instructs us to “Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12).  In other words, if we stay connected to our Lord, and endure our present hardships with His help, we will be with Him in His final victory. That’s not a bad deal.

    Clinging to the Lord, of course, is not simply a personal matter; we are called to be witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Who knows? Our wayward countrymen may yet amaze us like the Ninevites surprised Jonah when they repented in sackcloth and ashes (see Jonah 3).  Short of that happy but unlikely outcome, we might at least rescue some fortunate individuals; as scripture tells us,“whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins” (James 5:20).  Finally, by remaining faithful to Christ we can serve as one of his instruments in preserving his Church, which will be a source of healing after today’s craziness has run its course.  As the future Pope Benedict XVI said in a famous radio address almost half a century ago, “when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.”

    Which brings us back to where we started. Chesterton tells us that the Catholic Church is the only thing that frees us from enslavement to whatever the current foolishness happens to be.  But it is not a freedom for our own sake alone, it is freedom for service: service to our Lord and our fellow men and women, and service to the Truth . . . and the truth about humanity is and always has been that we were made to love and serve the Lord in this world, and to be eternally happy with him in the next.  Isn’t that infinitely better than anything the Spirit of This Age has to offer?

    

Who Dares To Tell The Emperor He's Naked?

The Emperor’s New Body

    I’m sure we’re all becoming a little tired of hearing about Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn, his new female identity, but I can’t simply ignore a cultural (well, maybe “pop-cultural”) event that is both so large and so perfectly captures the spirit of the age.  I’m not speaking so much of Jenner himself, however (except to offer the suggestion, as others have done, that he is very much in need of our prayers), I’m more interested in the reaction from the elite opinion makers, the media, and society at large.  They remind me of the well-known story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, but with an important difference.  Most of us are familiar with the old fable of the foppish monarch deceived by con-men who exploit his vanity to convince him that he is wearing a splendid new set of clothes, when in fact he is strutting about stark naked.  None of his subjects dare to say anything other than agree that his new “clothes” are indeed magnificent, except for one innocent little boy who blurts out the truth that the emperor is wearing nothing at all.  That breaks the spell, and the emperor and his subjects, realizing how foolish they have been, come to new wisdom.

Bruce Jenner in simpler times

    The first part rings true.  The news media and the arbiters of the conventional wisdom are falling over themselves to call Bruce Jenner “she” and tout his purported bravery, even though he is not really a woman at all, but a man whose outward appearance has been altered by plastic surgery and breast implants. So far, life imitates art. But back to the story: imagine that, instead of sheepishly admitting their foolishness, the emperor’s subjects instead grab the little boy by the scruff of the neck, throw him over the town wall into the moat, and then go back to congratulating the deluded emperor.  That’s how it works in our world. Anyone who does not publicly affirm that Jenner has indeed become a woman, and that this is a marvelous thing, risks being castigated as a “hater” by the cultural elites, and suffering the same treatment as, for instance, the various business executives, bakers, photographers, etc., who have had the temerity to support marriage as it has been traditionally understood. Such are the times in which we live.

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss

    And those are curious times indeed, an era that only someone with a keen sense of irony can truly appreciate.  The two chief ironies that dominate our age both spring from the widespread rejection of God.  The first is that, taking our Lord to be a tyrant, we sought freedom from His laws, and as result find ourselves instead enmeshed in an endlessly growing tangle of man-made rules that are no less oppressive than the old laws, and in fact much more so, because they lack the clarity and consistency of the old ways. More importantly, they are not founded, as are God’s laws, on a perfect understanding of what our human nature requires. On our college campuses, for instance, the simple and straightforward (not to mention commonsensical) mandate that young men and women are not to fornicate has been abolished; in its place has sprung up an excruciatingly byzantine welter of regulations governing what constitutes consent for said fornication, when and how often such consent must be given, and so on.  It is near impossible to keep up with each new embellishment, but woe to the unhappy individual (invariably a young man) who runs afoul of the newest dictate.  By the same logic, our freedom to express our opinions on the matter of human sexuality must defer to the freedom of Bruce Jenner (or whoever) to declare themselves whatever gender they claim to be, even if it’s a “gender” we’ve never heard of before.

“What About Women Who Are Male?”

    The second irony, closely connected to the first, is best summed up in the remark often attributed to G.K. Chesterton (although the actual source is unknown) that when people cease to believe in God they don’t believe in nothing . . . they believe in anything.  And so we see that the secular world, having dismissed God as an “unscientific” fantasy, has itself lost any grounding in reality.  For example, we somehow don't see the immense damage to both individuals and society as a whole that continues to be wrought by the so-called "sexual revolution", and pretend that the manifest differences between men and women are really just a "social construct", in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.  Many of us are familiar with the quote from Fr. Henri de Lubac, that "It is not true, as it is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God.  What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man."  Now we can see that the Godless organize the world not only against man, but against plain common sense, and against reality itself.  In a recent piece columnist Jonah Goldberg explores the sort of mental ju-jitsu that necessarily results from trying to process something like the Jenner phenomenon through the current cultural assumptions:

But the most fascinating argument comes from those who have no problem with Jenner changing genders, but have serious misgivings about the word “woman.”

On a recent MSNBC panel celebrating the “Jenner Effect,” The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg (no relation), noted that many young feminists “no longer want to use the word ‘woman’ in relation to abortion because it excludes trans men.” There’s a lot of “conceptual murk to clear away,” she added with admirable understatement, “but among younger people that I’ve talked to, it almost seems amazing to them that anybody would question the need to have gender-neutral language.”

In a fascinating piece for The New Yorker, Goldberg wrote about this growing schism. Rachel Ivey, a young feminist told Goldberg, “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out.”

Some students, she explained, would ask, “What about women who are male?”

Limits? What Limits?

    Such extravagant absurdity seems like the stuff of parody, but the stakes are too high to laugh.  They are certainly high for individual transsexuals themselves, whose lives are no happier after their bodies have been mutilated.  A long-term study in Sweden of all the individuals who underwent sex reassignment surgery in that country from 1973 to 2003 concluded:

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

A recent study in the United States found that 41% of transsexuals reported attempting suicide, many time the rate of the rest of the population. In spite of that, it is now illegal in some states (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey) for therapists to try to help transgendered young people to resolve their feelings in favor of their actual sex . . . you can lose your license to practice if you criticize the emperor’s new clothes..

     There are broader implications for society beyond the issues of transgenderism and transsexualism. Their public celebration is a sign of a culture that has already lost a sense of the sacredness of the human person.  In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Bl. Paul VI said

. . . we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions . . . (Humanae Vitae 17)

    But why accept limits, when we think that there is no God above us to whom we are answerable?  And so we have abortion, lab experiments on human embryos and even the creation of human/animal chimeras at the beginning of life, Euthanasia and socially sanctioned suicide at the end, and in between more and more ways in which human beings and their bodies are reduced to playthings. And now, apparently, there are advocates for the “trans-abled” who say that we should applaud and assist those who feel a desperate need to sever perfectly good limbs, and that to do otherwise would be judgmental and discriminatory.

The Truth In Love

    The prognosis is not good for a society that so eagerly embraces such self-destructive insanity, and is at the same time so desperately determined to shut down anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth.  The logical end of it all is total disintegration unless there is a collective return to reason, of which there seems to be little chance any time soon unless people start turning back to God. We who profess to be Christians must continue to pray for the conversion of society (as well as for unhappy victims of its craziness, such as Bruce Jenner), and we should take very seriously our need to model a different, more Godly way.  But we should also not be afraid to speak the truth about the human person, lovingly but forthrightly, remembering that true compassion means trying to prevent people from harming themselves and others, not in encouraging them to do so or congratulating them after the fact.  After all, if those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ can’t or won’t be witnesses to His Gospel, who will?