Shocking Revelation: Promiscuity leads to Sexually Transmitted Diseases!

We learn from the Catholic News Service a shocking truth recently uncovered by the UN: having sex with fewer people decreases the chances of contracting AIDS!

So simple, it’s brilliant! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? All these years we’ve been throwing condoms all over Africa, billions of condoms, and yet AIDS just continues to spread! Why didn’t anyone ever think of just asking people to limit their sexual contact?

Oh, wait. Somebody did. The Catholic Church. That’s right.

The problem is that we live in modernity, and modernity wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to eat everything and anything it wants and still remain trim. It wants to sleep with anything it feels like sleeping with and never get sick. It wants all the joy and fun in the world but none of the consequences. It wants negative behavior with freedom from the negative results. It wants anything other than self-control, the submission of the passions to the reason.

The only way to lose weight—short of invasive surgery, anyway—is to eat less and move more; that is, to control the appetite, to subject the quantity and quality of the food we eat to the control of the reason. Similarly, the only way to prevent the negative effects of unvirtuous sexual activity is to subject the sexual appetites to the control of the reason. This means limiting sexual activity to the married state.

Modernity can’t have its cake and eat it, too. We need to abandon modernity and return to sensible ethical thinking focused on the virtues, perfected by the grace of Jesus Christ.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Rape, Incest, and Abortion

Typically, one hears people say that they support laws limiting abortion—except in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother.

For now, the “life of the mother” exception can be left aside; it’s at least based on the vaguely rational idea that killing one person is acceptable if it’s done to save another. Ultimately it doesn’t hold water, but it’s at least understandable. But the first two exceptions, rape and incest, deserve some closer inspection, particularly given Marc Cardinal Ouellet’s recent remark. Cardinal Ouellet rightly noted that abortion is always a crime, even in cases of impregnation due to rape. People are throwing fits about it. Why?

The objections to this statement are based entirely on emotion. We feel bad for women who have been raped, and we should; what’s been done to them is despicable beyond description. Because we feel bad for these women, we want them to grow past their experiences, forget about them; a child resulting from them makes that impossible. Therefore, we want to get rid of the child.

But let’s examine that with our reason, rather than with our emotion. Why do we oppose abortion in circumstances other than rape or incest? Naturally, because it kills a child; a still developing child, to be sure, but a child nevertheless. So how is that different when the murdered child’s father was a rapist?

Opposing abortion in all circumstances except rape and incest is irrational. Worse, it’s despicable upon even the slightest examination. It’s supporting the murder of a child based solely upon the sins of his father. The child certainly hasn’t raped anyone. He’s not a threat to anyone. He just is, totally oblivious to the heinous crime that’s been committed against his mother. The difficulty of a mother bearing a child conceived under such circumstances is certainly serious, but it does not justify homicide.

Murder is murder, no matter how old the victim is. Killing an old man one second before he experiences his natural death is murder; killing a man in the prime of his life is murder; killing a child playing in a field is murder; killing a child still in his mother’s womb is murder. The last we euphemistically call “abortion.” But abortion is murder, even if it’s motivated by the sins of the child’s father.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Behavior and Identity

The response always comes whenever discussing sodomy, which we now euphemistically call homosexuality. “But it’s part of their identity! You’re asking them to deny their identity! How can they live a lie?”

It sounds very compelling. It is, after all, an appeal to what modernity holds most sacred: individuality, bringing to mind Polonius’s long monologue in Hamlet:

And this above all: to thine own self be true;
And it shall follow, as the night the day,
That thou canst not be false to any man.

Really, this sounds brilliant, an unanswerable argument to those who would force the “gays” among us to live lies and deny their true selves. It’s too bad that it’s the argumentative equivalent of horse feces. Indeed, it’s even less beneficial; horse feces is at least useful, while this particular pile of piffle serves only to obfuscate and confuse.

At root is the question of identity; namely, what is it? Identity is who we are. There are many, many factors that go into making us who we are; our families first and foremost, our ancestors, our place, our education, our friends. And certainly our sexual behavior is part of that. These factors have varying degrees of influence on various people; for myself, my father was a huge influence on who I am, while for others the mother was a larger influence. And, of course, some people totally reject their families and form themselves entirely on the influence of other factors. It depends upon the person himself.

And therein, of course, lies the rub: people accept or reject that influence as they will. My father taught me that men don’t cry (though reputedly he did cry, once, when his mother died); as a result, I don’t cry. (I’ll admit I’ve come pretty close at times.) I didn’t even cry when my father died, dear as he was to me, because he taught me that men should appear strong at all times. This is part of who I am. But could I decide to cry? Could I reject this influence of my father and start bawling like a baby every time I stub my toe?

Yes. These factors influence identity, they do not determine it. We can accept, reject, or mitigate their influence exactly as we will. Doing so may or may not be a wise decision, but it’s still a decision, a decision that lies within the self.

So let’s say I did reject this lesson of my father. Let’s say, when he died, that I wept like a willow after a storm. Would I be living a lie? Or would I just be deciding that my father was wrong about something and acting out that decision?

But that’s different, cries the protagonist of sodomy. You don’t really want to hold your tears in; you’re just doing it because of what you were taught. What you want to do is to cry. That’s who you really are, because that’s what your heart of hearts is leading you to do. So really you’re living a lie by not crying; you’re denying your true self under the influence of your family.

How many poor, innocent “gay” people have endured this suffering? How many have, in their deepest selves, desired sexual relations with those of their own sex, but denied their deepest selves because of what they were taught? They were forced, by others around them, to live a lie, to deny their own identities. This is wrong; we should let such people embrace their sodomy, and smile and applaud them when they do. That’s the only way they can live out who they truly are.

And here’s the real rub. Proponents of sodomy aren’t talking about sodomite identity; they’re talking about sodomite desires. “Gay” people desire sodomy; therefore, it’s part of who they are to practice sodomy. Modernity is obsessed with desire and its fulfillment, preferably as immediately as possible; it has thus equated such desires with identity, and the denial of such desires with the denial of the very self.

But one might as well say that I’m denying my identity, that I’m “living a lie” when I decide not to eat another chocolate-covered cherry because I’ve already had enough. It’s my desire; I really want another chocolate-covered cherry. They’re delicious, after all, and I enjoy them immensely. And I like dark chocolate around them, not milk chocolate. But the fact of the matter is that, regardless of what I desire internally, I’m faced with a choice: I can eat a dark-chocolate-covered cherry, a milk-chocolate-covered cherry, or (God forbid!) deny my desire entirely and eat neither. It’s my choice. I’m not living a lie no matter which choice I make; I’m just evaluating my options and selecting one based on whatever standards I choose to apply.

So with sodomy. A man may really, really want to engage in sodomy. His passions may draw him quite powerfully to it. Similarly, a married man’s passions may draw him quite powerfully to a woman who is not his wife. But the second man is not denying his identity when he restrains his urges and remains faithful to his wife; nor is the first man living a lie when he restrains his urges and restricts his behavior to what is natural and good. They both are, in fact, forming their identities; specifically, they are building their characters, instilling in themselves habits of correct moral behavior. They are making rational choices to do rational things for a rational end. They are most decidedly not “living a lie.”

Let us not accept modernity’s ridiculous association of internal desires with personal identity. May God help us recognize that we form our own characters, begging Him for help and assistance; and may He grant us that assistance through Christ Our Lord and by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Amen.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Cult of Youth

Youth is a country. I used to live there. The inhabitants are determined to emigrate, exiles long to return. But the borders are sealed…
—Allan Sealy, The Brainfever Bird

When I first read this, I was struck hard by its wisdom. I’m young enough to clearly remember my youth mostly untainted by overoptimistic nostalgia, but still old enough to understand why youth is something so many remember so fondly. But after a little thought I realized that it’s completely brainless.

At first glance it’s understandable that we all pine after our youth. In youth, we had no concerns. My father went to work, and I never thought anything of it; that’s what fathers do. Keeping the house? The house just was; it was a law of nature. The notion that my father went to work so that we could keep our house was simply beyond me. Put food on the table? But Mom does that! She takes it right out of the refrigerator, cooks it if necessary, and puts in on the table. Done! What’s the problem?

My upbringing was not one of opulent abundance. I can remember many times wanting something and being told there wasn’t enough money for it. (Indeed, once my brother tried to steal some candy when our mother told him she couldn’t afford to buy it; in true, old-school, good-old-days fashion, she sent him back into the store by himself to return the item and apologize to the clerk, which cured him of his incipient kleptomania for some time.) But that was fine, too, because there were hundreds of ways for my brother and I to fill our time once our disappointment abated.

In those halcyon days, of course, before the rampant (and justified) fears of abduction and other harm to children, young children never wanted for diversion. We’d wake up and eat our breakfasts, then run outside and start playing. We had to tell our mother that we were going outside, of course, but “outside” was a sufficiently specific destination to satisfy her maternal instincts. We played outside, gathering together with whatever other children we happened to find running outside that day, until we got hungry, when our games split up and we all filed into our houses for lunch. We ate our lunches, took naps if we were young enough, then ran back outside and played until our father got home, when we ran to greet him, got thrown around and tickled a bit, then sat down for our dinner and an evening with our family.

Money was something that we knew existed and that we knew was necessary, but not something that we ever worried about. Once, my mother gave my brother and I a quarter, each. The young (truly young; as in, even younger than my young self) may not remember, but at one time people carried around something called cash, which included both paper bills (which were worth one hundred or more cents) and coins (which were worth one hundred or less). This was near the Canadian border, so we were also familiar with Canadian money; they carried around one-dollar coins called “loonies” (because there’s a loon on them), and later two-dollar coins called “toonies” (by analogy with “loonies), plus paper money that looked like it came from a Monopoly set. (Again, for the young, Monopoly used to be played on a board, with actual paper bills and pewter game pieces, not on a screen on the Nintendo Wii.) A quarter is worth, unsurprisingly, one quarter of a dollar. These quarters made us ecstatic. My father (RIP) came home, and we ran to him in paroxysms of joy: “Daddy! Daddy! I’ve got a quarter!” I’ll never forget the look on his face: “Wow! You’re rich!”

And we were rich. Even then, a quarter wouldn’t buy much—though it would, unlike now, buy something—but we weren’t rich because of the quarters. We were rich because of our youth.

Now, of course, we are grown. I am married and have four children of my own. My children can’t run around the neighborhood playing with whatever other children they happen to run into; times are just too dangerous now. They need to be in the backyard, behind a fence, with children that I know and can trust. I could give my children a quarter now and then to teach them about money, but it wouldn’t do any good, since trying to buy something with a quarter will just elicit laughter from any shopkeeper. (We bought a candy bar with ours, which we split, as I recall; while I’m too young to remember penny candy, I do remember two-penny bubble gum and nickle candy quite clearly.) Youth today are not as carefree as they once were; but regardless, we are no longer youth. We’ve grown older, and we can never grow young again.

But is that really a bad thing? Do we really want to be young again? And if we do, should we? Remember the words of the Apostle:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.

I Cor. 13:11. Pining after youth is pining after eternal insufficiency; it’s desiring a permanent defect. Youth is the process by which we are trained to be adults: that is, morally self-sufficient individuals capable of making our own rational judgments. Clearly, this is a skill that is growing vanishingly scarce in these sad times.

We worship and adore youth in our society. The young are exactly what we would all like to be: delighted by things that are not rationally delightful, completely without care, without the ability or desire for rational discourse or judgment, and most especially without a clear set of moral principles to guide our actions. We don’t want restraint; we want the freedom of adulthood without any of the consequences of its exercise.

I have good news for those who wish themselves back into such a state: they’re already in it. Arrested adolescence may be a pop-psych trope, but it’s still a real thing, and such people are suffering from it. Unfortunately, they don’t have their parents around anymore to whoop their butts and send them to their rooms until they’ve learned their lessons; as a result, society has to deal with them, which causes it no end of grief.

Yet, despite this grief, people go on wanting youth and living as though they still have it. But the bottom line is this: I’m not a child anymore; I’m a man. I’m responsible for myself and I need to live like it. I need to choose courses of action based upon a coherent set of moral guidelines, and even within those guidelines based on a rational and prudent analysis of the consequences of those actions. Children don’t do that; that’s why they’re children. The process of raising children is that of teaching them to do this. So why should we desire to be a child?

Youth is not a country. Its inhabitants are determined to emigrate because it’s not a fit place for men. Its exiles might indeed long to return, but that’s because they never really left. Unfortunately, our real country is overrun with such exiles, desperately trying to hang on to a youth that is, and should be, long gone. And so we’re equally overrun with substance abuse, unwed parenthood, irresponsible work ethics, and sexual perversions. These eternal adolescents have no principles; they either never got any, or long ago abandoned them. They behave as though there is no morality and there are no consequences for what they do.

Grow up, people; seriously. The adults of the world have more than enough to do teaching the real children, and have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with permanent teenagers, as well.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Congressional Duplicity from Tom Perriello

I know we’ll all be absolutely shocked to see congressional duplicity. Why, they’ve all seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, haven’t they, and become Scout leaders and refuse to prevaricate about their principles? But I’ve got another one, and it comes from the Pence Amendment.

For those of you who don’t know, the Pence Amendment was set to amend an appropriations bill to forbid any of the funds going to Planned Parenthood, which not coincidentally is the largest provider of abortions in the country. Indeed, Planned Parenthood already receives large quantities of cash from the government, and those quantities actually increased to the tune of some $26,000,000 during the Bush presidency. So much for our “pro-life” former president.

In other words, the Pence amendment would mean that Planned Parenthood wouldn’t get any of the funds appropriated in this bill. Simple enough.

Naturally, the pro-abortion factions in Congress opposed it strongly. This included my own congressman, Virginia’s 5th District Congressman Tom Perriello. His vote agreeing to allow these funds to go to the murder of unborn babies is recorded at congress.org.

This by itself is unsurprising. Congressmen vote to fund the slaughter of innocent children on a regular basis, be it by foreign wars or domestic policy. The (more) upsetting part is what happened only a few weeks ago.

My church conducted a little leaflet-drive, sending large quantities of leaflets opposing the Freedom of Choice Act to our congressman and senators. Eventually, I did get a reply from Congressman Perriello (which is more than I can say for either of my senators), by mail, several months later. The letter was a model of prevarication, duplicity, and other typically congressional characteristics. I’ll cite some of it here.

(Given that this is a letter stating the Congressman’s policy [or not stating it, as the case may be], I don’t consider this publishing private correspondence. If the letter was meant as private correspondence, I hope someone from the Congressman’s office will explain to me why they consider it such.)

Congressman Perriello refused to say what he would do if the Freedom of Choice Act were proposed in Congress. He explained to us, ignorant peasants that we are, that Roe v. Wade is well-established law, and that he considered the Freedom of Choice Act to have merely a “largely symbolic impact” and a “low chance of passage.” Therefore, “[s]hould this legislation be reintroduced, I would not cosponsor it.”

Very definitive, of course. Notice that Congressman Perriello refuses to say whether he would vote for the bill, even though that’s precisely the issue that we’d written him about (namely, asking him to vote against it). He just says that he won’t cosponsor it, which of course makes little difference if he’s going to vote for it anyway.

But he goes on. “I believe it is a tragedy that 1.2 million abortions are performed yearly in the United States, and it is critical that we work together to reduce this number.” This, of course, means little or nothing. If abortion is a right, why is this a tragedy? If it’s not, and this is a tragedy, why not assure us that you’ll vote against bills that allow it? Congressman Perriello doesn’t even come close to answering these questions; indeed, all we get from him are more non-answers.

“I will support legislation that helps decrease the number of abortions performed in America without returning to the era in which abortion was criminalized.” His ideas for doing so are, naturally, myriad:

There are a number of improvements in our current policies that need to be made to make this possible, including education, access to family planning services and contraception, teen pregnancy prevention programs, pre- and post-natal and pediatric health care, child care assistance, and economic policies that empower women.

In other words, he’ll reduce abortions by throwing condoms around, telling teenagers to make sure that they wear the condoms when they fornicate, funding day care, and “empowering women,” whatever that may mean. This, he says, will “make great strides in changing the circumstances that currently propel many women to decide to terminate a pregnancy.” Terminate a pregnancy? You mean, kill a baby? Never mind that some of these proposals are only tentatively related to abortion at best, and others are also morally objectionable.

Congressman Perriello quite cowardly refuses to state his position on abortion itself or on abortion legislation; however, he gives us enough information that, if we work hard, we can glean a few facts about his ideas.

1. Abortion’s the law. Get used to it, guys, it’s here to stay, thanks to Obama’s election and his contribution to the Supreme Court.
2. I am happy to use “reducing the number of abortions” as an excuse to pass all sorts of legislation that I like, including those projects that many of those who are opposed to abortion will consider morally unacceptable. I hope that placates your moral qualms about ripping unborn children from their mothers’ wombs.
3. I’ll probably vote in favor of anything that makes abortion cheaper and easier.

This, at least, is what the letter would say, if it were honest. Instead, it’s a bunch of wishy-washy political Newspeak that does its level best to say nothing at all, but fails even at that.

But let’s assume that what little the letter actually does say is at least honest. Let’s assume that Congressman Perriello really wants fewer abortions; he really thinks that abortion is a tragedy and that reducing the number of abortions is a Good Thing. Wouldn’t an excellent way to accomplish that goal be to stop giving loads of money to people who use that money to provide abortions? I know I’m not in Congress, but surely that’s a reasonable conclusion that a reasonable person might draw?

Yet Congressman Perriello bravely stepped to the plate yesterday and voted against legislation that would do just that. He’d absolutely love to reduce the number of abortions, 5th District; really! That’s why he wants to make sure that the country’s biggest abortion provider will have even more money available to help fund its operations!

Congressional duplicity? Perish the thought! This is America! The good guys always win! Haven’t you seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?

Praise be to Christ the King!