The Federalist on Homosexualists

First, misleading title. Our language hasn't quite caught up with the fact that it's not just homosexualists per see that are looking to destroy our culture with the deviant sex and sexuality department. The transexuals are in many ways worse by far, and the two movements aren't necessarily one and the same (though they are closely allied).

With that said, The Federalist's Stella Morabito has really done a nice job of outlining what is at stake in the whole redefinition of marriage (and ultimately, the family) battle:

We’ve seen also how the Obama Administration’s push for same sex marriage has occurred in lockstep with policies that are hostile to marriage, such as the severe marriage penalty written into Obamacare. 

Activist judges have taken their cues from Attorney General Eric Holder who used the DOMA repeal to proclaim open season on any state that recognizes marriage as an organic (i.e., heterosexual) union of one man and one woman. In their crosshairs are state constitutions, businesses, students, communities, churches, and all of those bogus “conscience clauses” that were written into same sex marriage legislation in order to sway wavering state legislators to vote “aye.”... 

Without civil marriage, the family can no longer exist autonomously and serve as a wall of separation between the individual and the state. This has huge implications for the survival of freedom of association.

The homosexualist movement is ultimately totalitarian, both in its means and ultimately in its end. And the most commonly used tactic for all of this is, of course, also aptly described:

Indeed, “civil rights” is always a nice line. It works well to stop debate. There’s lots of emotional blackmail involved because of the social punishments (labels of “hater” or “bigot”) heaped upon anyone who might question the agenda.

No questions about it, this is one of the most destructive (to culture and civilization) lies we've bought into as a civilization.

The Experts

The experts often agree that X, Y, and Z are all healthy, normal, ethical actions or beliefs, but the Church says that X,Y, and Z are sinful, disordered, or immoral. I hear "arguments" like this from time to time, covering a wide variety of topics: homosexuality, pornography, abortion, adultery, hook-ups/fornication, contraceptives... in our sex-saturated culture, it's pretty much any item on an exhaustive list of the sexual sins condemned by the Bible, by Tradition, and by the Magisterium which is brought into contention.

Often, the experts agree because consent is a criterion of becoming an expert. There are many examples of this. Students studying psychology and psychiatry are told that they cannot graduate or get licensed to practice unless they counsel a gay patient--and the counselling cannot be towards chastity. A sociologist publishes a peer-reviewed study with a large sample size which contradicts previously peer-reviewed studies using small and at times self-selected samples sizes, and brings upon himself the secular inquisition because his study found that children raised by heterosexual parents fare better in life than children raised by homosexual parents. And, to add one last recent example, the licensing practicum requirements in Britain to become an OB/GYN are prohibitive for Catholics and others of good faith:

Dr O’Donnell told the conference at Ealing Abbey, west London, on 17 May that a Catholic training to be a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology would soon find he or she had conscientious objections to such tasks as prescribing artificial contraceptives, giving unmarried couples fertility treatment or Viagra to gay couples. 

To be a sound Catholic regarding sexual ethics it is not possible to train as a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist but this is not because of discrimination against Catholics. There is a total conflict of culture of what is good sex, a dichotomy of belief between what we as Christians believe is good overall for the individual and what secular society believes.’

Indeed, there have been attempts in the US to require that all OB/GYNs either commit abortion themselves, or refer their patients to another doctor who would commit the abortion instead. And there are medical schools which have required "abortion training" as a part of their residency programs, not to mention some states which have toyed with making such training a requirement of all medical schools.

Is it any wonder, then, when the experts' opnions are at times unanimously on the side of evil?

Assorted Doom from Abroad

Homosexualists in Denmark have decided to force their beliefs on the churches there. The parliament passed--by a wide margin--a law making it mandatory for all churches to conduct "gay marriages."  Worse still, "Under the law, individual priests can refuse to carry out the ceremony, but the local bishop must arrange a replacement for their church." It is entirely possible that, decades hence when Christianity has been driven underground, the places which have implemented Sharia Law will be preferable to those which have implemented it secular analogue.

Meanwhile, the homosexualists in the United Kingdom are calling for some votes concerning "gay marriage," but also are suggesting that only those who vote the right way should be counted. It's an election which is every bit as fair and open and democratic as in the totalitarian communist countries. Opposition to "gay marriage" will by branded as "not acceptable," An most ironically, given Denmark, is this little nugget:

 But Mr Clegg disagreed, pointing to the fact that the original law bringing in civil partnerships was also not passed on a free vote in the House of Commons.

He the BBC’s Andrew Marr porgramme: “My view is that in the same way that the civil partnerships legislation that was introduced under Labour was a whipped vote, I personally don’t think this is something that should be subject to a great free-for-all because we’re not asking people to make a decision of conscience about religion.” 

Mr Clegg said gay marriage was not “a matter of conscience” because the Government was not forcing churches to marry homosexual couples.

Yes, but for how long will that be true?  As Chesterton observed, "that road goes down and down."

A Few Good Links (vol. 13)

It's D-Day, so please take a moment to remember those who fought and sacrificed and died taking Normandy.

1. Prof. Victor Davis Hansom has an article for National Review about our "medieval" universities. My complaint is that the universities aren't medieval enough.
2. On a related subject, and one even more dear to my heart, is this critique of any of the universities which actually do manage to be otherwise good universities: they tend to be bad at the STEM majors. There is also a comment on said article which helps to explain a little about why that is. There's a lot more to be said about this.
3. Apparently, one can't be a good new atheist if one enjoys fairytales or fantasies. I guess that's not so shocking.
4. Tolerance often leads to hatred, which is a good cautionary tale which I hope doesn't play out.
5. Obamacare is simply evil, which makes sense given that it was passed under false pretenses.
6. I am expecting some combination of ammo control and mandatory registration of 3D printers at some point in the near future.
7. Going back to tolerance, I've long held that to be disgusted by something does not mean that we hate people who engage in it. I don't hate cigarette-smokers, nor people who love to eat food which I find to be, er, unpalatable, But for some reason, being disgusted by behaviors once universally called "deviant" makes one a bigot, and therefore fair game as a target for public displays of two-minute hate and private malice.
8. Last but not least, a reflection on D-Day (sort-of) which ties into some of these other links.

That's it for now.

Quick Link: #YesAllWomen

"#YesAllWomen" seems to me to be twitter-speak for "promote a false dichotomy." To claim that women ought to act with modesty is not to excuse men from acting with decency. Is it unfortunate that women risk facing actual consequences for their immodesty, but men get off scot-free for their indecency? Yes, but that does not change the fact of it. The result of this and so many other "feminist" attempts to shift all blame to men has a curious effect: men will be increasingly treated as if potential (or actual) rapists in all things except for the affording of some amount of caution by women. Strange times are these, when a woman is encouraged to provoke the supposed potential rapist and the cry out in anger if he rewards her provocation (whether with intercourse or merely words and a lustful look).

And, as an alternative, there's this.

Quick Link: The Devil Went Up to Colorado

I can't think of many other explanations for this:

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colorado was directed to change his store policies immediately and force his staff to attend the training sessions. For the next two years, Phillips will also be required to submit quarterly reports to the commission to confirm that he has not turned away customers based on their sexual orientation.

Think of it as reverse conversion therapy (or straight man’s rehab) so that the state can mandate diversity through conformity....

The controversy started in 2012 when a gay couple asked Phillips to make their wedding cake. Phillips politely declined, saying he could not make a cake promoting a same-sex ceremony because of his faith. He offered to make them any other baked item they wanted.

There you have it. Forced conversions are a thing of secular humanism, in articular gay liberationism. There is, however, one bit of silver lining to all of this:

Meanwhile, the bullying tactics of the militant gay rights community have not hampered the bakery’s bottom line. They’ve gotten so much business from the sales of cookies and brownies, they’ve temporarily stopped making wedding cakes.

“Obey Christ rather than worry about what man can do to you,” Phillips said.

Seek ye first the Kingdom of God...

Quote of the Day: David Warren on Separation Between Church and State

Here is a thought-provoking set of ruminations by David Warren. The gist is basically that we start with separation of Church and State, and end with the State as replacement Church. I will quote from two of the ruminations:

Item, “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?” by Rémi Brague. Here we get to the crux of the matter. There will always be a theocratic order, even if it is an “atheocratic” pastiche. The question is not “whether we should have a theocracy or not,” as the progressives say — defining their own atheocratic order falsely as a non-theocratic order, when it is as arbitrary as any theocratic order the world ever endured. Rather: Which theocratic order should it be? (Shariah? Rabbinical, perhaps? Lamaist? Shinto? Lutheran? Calvinist? Marxist? Feminist? Gaian? Catholic?) Truly, we are spoilt for choice, but as the modern consumer can hardly understand, you can’t have everything. You have to choose one, to be morally coherent; or if you choose “none,” … someone else chooses for you.

Item, let me emphasize this point. Should the principles be not those of the ancestral Catholic Christendom — buried beneath our Western feet, yet serviceable still as foundation — then they will be of something else. We hardly got e.g. quickie divorce, or no-questions-asked abortion, or gay marriage for that matter, or soon, no-questions-asked euthanasia for your unwanted granny, because the masses suddenly spontaneously rose up to demand them pronto. We got them because the gods we are currently serving required them; and of course, we got them “democratically,” but only in the sense that the people are made to vote until they deliver what these gods require. … (Good news, incidentally. It turns out these gods may not want polygamy after all, so we won’t have to deliver that at the polling booths.)

You will have to go to his site to read the rest. These two in particular stood out to me, though. First, the age-old (and ever-true) observation that your can't have a government with a set of laws while at the same time disavowing any moral code. I believe it was Chesterton who noted that when the big laws are ignored, we get the little laws, the bureaucratic rules and red tape.

As a corollary of this observation, you can't really keep Church and State separate, in that you can't really banish religion entirely from the public sphere. By this is meant that if the Christian religion is silenced in the culture, something else must arise to take its place. There is no culture without the cult, as Dawson has observed. That something else can be another "Great" religion--as with the rise of Islam throughout many regions of Western Europe--or it can be a "lesser" religion, that is, a pseudoreligion like feminism or Marxism, or a quasi-religion like Gaia worship or other forms of neo-paganism. Most often, it is an alliance between these factions, though no such artificial alliance can last long.

Second, that replacement morality and replacement religion comes with its own gods, and also its own idols. The two may be linked, or the former may be in the background with the latter in the foreground: separated in the way that the Greek and later pagan Roman poets, philosophers, and priests each represented separate (and at time irreconcilable) aspects of the old pantheon. In the article linked, Mr. Warren identified the ultimate hand behind the false gods as being Satan's; perhaps it is at least some lesser demon's, or perhaps it is initially innocent but only later twisted to such evil purposes. It is certainly true that the mask slips at times, and is even removed on occasion.