As I continue to establish a (virtual) paper trail for what feminists could only possibly deem to be “misogyny,” I submit for your approval James G. Bruen’s article unmasking the true tragedy of Christa McAuliffe’s death in the Challenger explosion:  she abandoned her children in order to pursue her career as an astronaut.  As a result, her children were left motherless.  I have had past disputes with this Bruen fellow, but he’s right and on the right (politically, culturally, morally) about this.  (Of course, should we ever colonize outer space, we’ll need to send women.  But that’s because we’ll be establishing families out there.)

Apparently — apparently, from what the idiot liberal media report — an innocent man may have been executed in Texas. If this is so, he suffered a great injustice. However, there is more to the story. First, if this story is truly newsworthy, that must mean that this is the one case where the liberals claim that they can prove that an innocent man was executed. The liberals are citing this one case and not any others. And if they had more stories like this, I would think they would be linking them all up on TV with pictures of each executed man. *One* case out of the hundreds — thousands? — executed since the 1970s. So at most this case shows that in this country we execute guilty people well over 99% of the time. It literally does not get any better than this on earth. I am perfectly willing to let one person suffer procedural injustice so that the vast majority of people may get *some* justice. If *one* mistake were to invalidate a penal system, we’d all have to become anarchists. Whoever said, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” clearly was not considering that upon their release those ten guilty men are probably going to kill far more than one more innocent man. So in that system the decision to spare the one innocent man really results in far more innocent people dying.  In order for there to be any justice anywhere for anyone, somewhere some innocent person is going to suffer procedural injustice. Chalk it up to original sin. There is no alternative other than no one getting any justice at all and many innocent people dying at the hands of murderers. And over 99% accuracy is pretty impressive in a fallen world. So my faith in the death penalty is, if anything, encouraged by this story.

I am  a Latinist. I know how Latin works and how to translate it. And maybe the new Mass translations are a bit too slavishly literal here and there. Here’s the old translation for the absolution in the Penitential Rite:

“May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.”

Here’s the new translation:

“May almighty God have mercy on us and lead us, with our sins forgiven, into eternal life.”

You’ll note that “with our sins forgiven” is the ablative absolute (here in the context of an absolution — zing!). This is a *very* literal translation, or rather a transliteration. It is not very elegant English and clearly is a translation from another language. I was taught to transform ablatives absolute into subordinate clauses in English so as to make things smoother. The sense of the Latin is clearly that God will have mercy, forgive our sins, and lead us into everlasting life. That is the sequence that the Latin ablative absolute indicates. There is no real problem that I can see with the original translation, which is much smoother English. I am not sure why the translators found this worth “correcting” except because they wanted, well, slavish literalness. And I remember reading some other translations in the new Missal that also seem to be needlessly and inelegantly literal. Not that I oppose lofty, hieratic English. And certainly I will prefer the new translation to the old one — absolutely (hah!). But as a Latinist I don’t see what benefit comes from keeping this particular construction latinate when English can convey precisely the same meaning in a more elegant manner.

Here is an argument that I use when liberals say that Christ could not have supported female ordination or homosexuality or the abolition of slavery because He lived “2,000 years ago” and no one would have believed Him if He said such things. The premise of this idiocy is that Christ was limited by the culture He lived in and “just couldn’t get by” with opposing patriarchy or heterosexism or slavery. The obvious answer is that Christ felt perfectly free to defy whatever social norms He wanted to whenever He wanted to. After all, He antagonized people until they nailed Him to a Cross. So He certainly wasn’t frightened of being rejected or being killed for saying unpopular things. Nor were the thousands of martyrs who died in His Name. If Christ had wanted to die on the Cross for espousing women’s lib, He would have. But He didn’t. And no, that is not an argument from silence. But it is proof that Christ did not hold back truths because He feared the status quo.

In one of his red-lettered annotations to a letter Fr. Rutler recently sent out about the new Anglican converts, Fr. Z. writes:  [Right.  They are not recognized as equal on the playing field.  I wish this same approach would be taken with a certain non Christian group!]  The “they” in question are Anglicans.  But who are the non-Christians to whom Fr. Z. refers?  Note that Fr. Z. is referring specifically to a “certain non Christian group.”  Might he mean the Jews?  After all, the USCCB just caved and, in a shameful and cowardly manner, agreed to retract a comment in which they defended the evangelization of Jews!   But, given Fr. Z.’s politics, don’t you kind of suspect that he meant Mohammedans?  Who knows what he meant!  A plea to bloggers — if it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying in a non-cryptic remark.

The Thinking Housewife (I’m still looking for my own . . .) explains why Sarah Palin’s candidacy was one more liberal nail in the conservative coffin.  (This was supposed to go in Ephemeris, but I have forgotten how to do that.)

Ah, Cornell Society! How have I missed thee! This past month I put myself under a posting ban, in an effort to finish an academic project that desperately needed finishing. I figured I really had to conserve my mental energy. Of course, now that this project is complete, others immediately crowd in demanding attention. But I’m lifting my self-imposed ban because, well, I quite miss it, and I wouldn’t like to disappear entirely.

Besides, I’m sure crowds of people have been waiting on pins and needles for the second installment of the vegetarianism debate.

For the present, however, I wanted to make a small report on the Cornell Catholic Community. We’ve kind of gotten away from our roots on this blog; reporting on the abuses of the CCC was one of the main things that brought this little clan together. Now that all but one of us have moved on to greener pastures, we haven’t much to say on that subject anymore. Of course, I personally never did. I arrived on the scene comparatively late, and was warned away from that unhappy organization. Thus, when I accompanied a friend to Mass on Cornell’s campus this last Sunday, it marked only the third time I had ever done so.
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So this weekend I got to spend an awkward dinner with an offensive man.  Okay, since that description could equally well describe me dining alone (as I usually do . . .), I’ll specify that this time the offensive man was someone other than me.  Typical “progressive,” except he didn’t believe in slavery reparations.  Seeing that he was offending me (perhaps my suggestion, “Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss this matter any further” was an indicator), this ungentleman said that he actually sympathized with (I think he meant “patronizingly pitied”) Christians, of whom he is not one, on one thing.  To wit, my boorish dining partner said that he felt sorry for Christians when he heard a televangelist say that Katrina was God’s punishment for a homosexual parade held in New Orleans.  And the boor saw Pat Robertson nod approval when the other Protestant jerk said this.  And the boor was amazed that no Christians spoke out in protest; their silence meant that they tacitly approved.

Now, whatever God’s actual reasons for sending Katrina against New Orleans, certainly the city’s approval of some sodomite march was *sufficient* cause for the entire city to be sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico with no survivors.  Which didn’t happen.  Sodomy is a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance, which is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  New Orleans got off light and still didn’t repent.  Until they stop these wicked marches, the U.S. taxpayers should refuse to pay for dam and dike (dednetni nup) maintenance there.  Heck, we should send the Union Army back in and literally reconstruct the Hell out of these decadent liberal Southerners. 

But I digress.  The question is, what should I have said at this dinner in mixed company at an academic function?  Especially as I have a job where Liberalism is virtually a mandatory religion?  Speak up and garner for myself both immortal glory and perpetual unemployment?  Or remain silent in my cowardice?  Well, the ill-mannered jerk across the table from me helped me out.  He claimed that the Christians of the United States expressed their approval of the claim “God smote New Orleans over sodomy” when they (the Christians) failed to denounce the statement.  So silence=approval.  So when my dinner companion went on about this story, I simply stared silently down at my plate and waited for him to change the subject.  Because *by his own standards* my silence implies assent, not to him but to what that heretic televangelist said in a rare moment of orthodoxy, lucidity, and courage.  By keeping My Big Mouth shut (and stuffed with chicken) I told my progressive neighbor (nigh enough to kick, if not to punch) just what I thought about homosexuality.  May your liberal dining partners be so gracious!