Related to this are contraception and abortion. The liberals use the environment to rationalize abortion and contraception. At the end of the day, they can excuse their own sins by saying, “The world is overpopulated anyway.” If we have a right to kill wolves and other destructive creatures, then our own human needs and the prerogatives of human dominion precede those of wild creatures. Which means that child who was aborted or who was never conceived was more important than all the wolves in the world.  Also, liberals displace their desire for children upon animals. Somehow they feel that by treating irrational animals like persons with rights they can compensate for the execution of their own pre-rational (as opposed to irrational) children. Surely it bugs them that conservatives somehow “delude” themselves into accepting the traditional distinction between a human fetus and a dumb brute in the wasteland. More bothersome is the fact that the benighted conservatives, most of them Christian, are unbothered by this medieval fairy-tale that humans and animals are essentially distinct. Heck, some of these troglodytes don’t even think that they’re even *descended* from animals! Shudder!

And worse yet, these gun-toting, wolf-hunting, baby-making, Darwin-denying conservatives are *happy*! The liberals envy the conservatives the happiness that they (the liberals) had to abandon when they adopted the position that humans and animals have the same rights and abortion is no different than hunting. In fact, they think that abortion is *better* in that it is self-inflicted! Damn those conservatives for not sharing in the miserable existential truth! Indeed, in many liberals’ thought patterns the division between people who believe that man is supreme over irrational creation (if we can use such creationist jargon!) and people who deny it replaces the division between brute and man. The old ways represent an earlier, less ”advanced” and “humane” phase in evolution. As the un-evolved won’t cull themselves the way the WASP and Jewish ruling clique does, they need to be socially engineered into thinning out their own herd.  That, or treated to forcible eugenics.  Instead of hunting wolves, the government should be aborting babies.   

So you can see why Sarah Palin was so offensive to liberals — why they have such hatred of her.  Not only did she have a number of children, but she kept one who will never manifest his human rationality fully.  Yet she acknowledges him as human nonetheless.  Nor did her teenage daughter abort the child she conceived out of wedlock.  Palin killed off *unwanted wolves,* not children who came into existence with an unwanted disability or at a time when they were unwanted.  Wolves and humans are not equal.  And while the liberals with all their pretensions to higher education cannot see this, the relatively uneducated Palin can.  It *really* bothers liberals when someone less educated than they are grasps a bit of wisdom that escapes them and therefore is happier than they are with all of their conceits and displaced guilt.   (Actually, to get all Freudian — Freud got some things quite right — the liberals are guilty of both displacement and projection when it comes to their own guilt.  Much as I am blasting away at liberals right now instead of mortifying my own passions and examining my own conscience.)

I return now to the helicopters. Some liberals faulted the method. I guess they found it “unfair” somehow. I mean, to bring such high-powered technology as helicopters and rifles into the killing of an animal is such a gross, gauche (in the non-political sense of the word) demonstration of human reason and animal inferiority, right?  Remember, this wasn’t about sport or skill. The goal was to kill the quota of wolves in an efficient way. That meant helicopters. Were the hunters supposed to ”violate” the ”virgin” wilderness with four-wheelers that would leave tracks and cause erosion? Or were they supposed to build roads, maybe with Stimulus Bill monies? Wouldn’t helicopters burn up the least amount of fossil fuels?  Were the hunters supposed to kill wolves *and* contribute to global warming . . . er, “climate change” . . . which would only kill more Alaskan polar bears?  So the liberals want to kill wolves *and* their precious polar bears?  Really, what was the Alaskan government supposed to do to take care of the wolf problem? Probably ban the hunting of moose by humans (the wolves were competing with human hunters), decree the public celebration of Darwin Day (as we have in Ithaca), and dispense condoms to Eskimo women (and *yes* that *is* the proper nomenclature! the *Canadian* Inuit are only *one subset* of Eskimo!) so the white man can finally finish off these superstitious, un-evolved savages once and for all.

St. Augustine of Hippo, “Divine Providence and The Problem of Evil”

What can be mentioned more sordid, more bereft of decency, or more full of turpitude than prostitutes, procurers, and the other pests of that sort? Remove prostitutes from human affairs, and you will unsettle everything because of lusts; place them in the position of matrons, and you will dishonor these latter by disgrace and ignominy. This class of people is, therefore, by its own mode of life most unchaste in its morals; by the law of order, it is most vile in social condition. (emphasis added)

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Part II of book II, question 10, article 11

I answer that, Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.” Hence, though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided. Thus from the fact that the Jews observe their rites, which, of old, foreshadowed the truth of the faith which we hold, there follows this good–that our very enemies bear witness to our faith, and that our faith is represented in a figure, so to speak. For this reason they are tolerated in the observance of their rites.

See here for a detailed account of St. Thomas’ teaching on prostitution and his arguments for its legal toleration.  And see here for St. Thomas on the sin of seduction, i.e. the seduction of a virgin outside of marriage. He ranks this as worse than simple fornication, a category in which he includes prostitution. In other words, the seduction of a virgin is a worse sin than prostitution.  And modern secular culture vastly prefers that young men seduce virgins rather than turn to prostitutes. 

And now for a recent quotation from H.E. Gustaaf Cardinal Joos (R.I.P.), a Belgian cardinal raised to the sacred purple by none other than H.H. Ven. Pope John Paul II of fairest memory and “Theology of the Body” fame: 

If a man thinks he needs sex or is going to explode, it is better to find a prostitute than seduce or rape a girl. At least there are no innocent victims involved.

I am primarily writing to open this for debate, only secondarily to say, “Maybe this route in some circumstances might be more preferable.” For instance, it seems better to have legally tolerated prostitution in a moral culture where everyone regards prostitution as both evil and as an evil than the current situation where prostitution is illegal but sexual promiscuity is rampant in the general populace and is not regarded with shame.

Also, general promiscuity leads to a general desensitization of the populace to vice.  Now for a very touchy point:  the women who become prostitutes, strippers, porn stars, etc., generally are not corrupted by the people who lure them into those jobs.  Most were sexually abused as children.  When it comes to sexual intimacy, a sense of shame, etc., these poor women generally died inside long before they entered these jobs.  So while this life is definitely very evil, I am not sure that these professions lead to an over-all increase in the number of women who have been corrupted.  As I say, they are a self-selected group.  If legal tolerance for the abuse of these women’s condition — and it is an abuse! — might lead to a net decrease in the number of women corrupted (as by fornication), then this situation might be preferable to the alternative of rampant promiscuity among all classes.  

That, at least, is what St. Thomas, St. Augustine, and Cardinal Joos seem to be saying.  So, do you think that this is sensible?  Practical?  Impractical?  Completely immoral and intolerable?  Is it better to have rampant fornication and illegal prostitution?  Or are both so evil as to require criminalization?

P.S. I am *not* saying that the legalization of prostitution would help the current situation of our culture at all. It would merely add one more vice to the pile. Obviously, what we need is a Catholic reform of morals. Still, even when 100% of the populace is Catholics, there will still be pornography and prostitution going on somewhere among some. Should that be legally tolerated but legally restricted, or entirely banned?  And N.B.:  my argument and that of the saints listed above is completely different from the libertarian argument that people have a *right* to prostitution.  There is no right here.  Only a matter of prudence as to whether a legal ban (as opposed to legal restriction) would really be advisable.

Some have sought to defend medical cannibalism in similar terms.  The idea is that as long as one does not participate in or approve of the killing of embryos, one may legitimately use their stem cells or vaccines made from the embryos.  They say that this is analogous to the cannibalism practiced in the Andes.  This supposedly shoots down the common objection that embryonic stem cell research is ”medical” cannibalism.  The people in the Andes did not kill the people whose bodies they ate, but they did eat the flesh once the person died.  The argument goes that so long as we do not participate in abortion we may still prosper from it. 

I counter:  the problem with stem cell research, etc., is not cannibalism per se but the fact that the cannibalism does not take place in extremis.  In the Andes, the people were facing starvation.  For everyone on that mountain the alternative to cannibalism was imminent death, a choice that at least one person made.  They used the dead human flesh as something that everyone needs in order to live — food.  Like air and water, food is an ordinary requirement for life.  Stem cell research and vaccine research does not produce food without which any person would die.  *At best* they might produce one particular type of potential treatment for diseases and disorders for which a variety of other treatments are available or might be if we pursued an alternative line of research.  There are alternatives available which were not available on that mountain.  I therefore highly doubt whether we can legitimately compare the pressing imperative of the Uruguayan students to eat with the desire of a Parkinson’s sufferer to combat the effects of his disease over the course of years.  This is entirely apart from the immorality of abortion and the question of tacit participation in murder after the fact.  The relevant criteria that rendered the Andean cannibalism permissible are absent from medical experimentation.

It does not surprise me at all that the spread of premarital sexual activity occurred at precisely the same time that college became increasingly popular.  It is one thing to ask young people to save themselves until the age of about 18-20.  It is another to add on four years of college.  We are asking people in their  young, most fertile and most sexually potent years to accept the fact that their teenage crushes and high school sweethearts will never marry them.  Why?  Because they have to go to school for another four years!  You don’t want to be stuck with your high school sweetheart through four years of separation at college, do you?  So unless these young lovers make love when prom rolls around, they will never make love to one another.  Because the entire  society is built to make them defer their natural, innate, God-given desires until, in the case of women, their biological clocks are already ticking.  I think that it is cruel to make marriage something that is practically impossible until one is at least 22.  I think it is cruel that so few high school sweethearts are permitted to marry each other when high school ends.

And we should do something about it.  I think that we need to raise our expectations of primary and secondary education and get rid of our expectation that everyone will go to college.  If this means that America loses some affluence, so be it.  We need more people and more moral people, not more technological prowess. I say that it would be a much better country if the average 20-year-old had already completed his necessary job-training and was settling into the married life.   Teenage pregnancy outside of marriage would probably be much less common if people could marry soon after turning 18.  Teenage pregnancy with teenage marriage need not be such a bad phenomenon. 

P.S.  This is also why we need to get our manufacturing jobs back from the Third World.  An 18-year-old guy on an assembly line could once support a family.  Now there are no such jobs and that man must incur the debt of four and often now more years of college in order to support a family.

Yes, to most Americans “dating” means just what was described above.  However, to most Americans “marriage” also means contraception, false feminist equality, easy divorce, and, yes, abortion.  Are we going to say that “marriage” is a bad word because generally most marriages are bad?  “But dating only means bad things.”  No, dating means going out on *dates,* which are scheduled outings by a couple.  If you are a couple and you go out on scheduled outings, then you are dating.  Mind you, most people who get married do in fact start their relationship by dating.  While a good many people date without the intent to marry, almost all people in this country who marry dated first.  If you say to a modern person, “we are dating and saving ourselves for marriage,” most modern people might wonder at your choice to save yourselves but almost no one would find the description of the relationship as “dating” to be problematic or self-contradictory.  If you are “courting” a girl and you schedule times and places and circumstances under which to meet, then you are going out on dates and are dating, period.  To try to say, “dating bad, courting good” is a lame attempt to redefine words.  And it will ring false for a lot of people.  As long as you date the girl you’re courting and court the girl you’re dating, there can’t be a problem.

Another example:  I recently read a good (if occasionally flawed) book, Joseph Pearce’s “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church.” Pearce makes me want to read more of C.S. Lewis (I’ve read only “The Abolition of Man”). He also makes me an even firmer believer that Lewis was culpable in his heresy. Pearce more or less proves that the reason Lewis did not become Catholic, if he ever considered it, is because he was an Ulster Protestant bigot. Let me repeat that: it was about bigotry. Not ignorance, at least not inculpable ignorance, for Lewis was friends with the Catholic Tolkien (who, when discussing his disappointment with Lewis, said that Anglicanism is nothing but hatred of Rome) and even corresponded in Latin with a now-canonized saint (St. Giovanni Calabria) who tried to get him to convert! Oh, and in addition to bigotry it was about not causing discomfort to others via “inter-denominational” controversy. So it was *lukewarm* bigotry! So I call Lewis out as a formal heretic. But how am I to judge that? Well, how do *you* judge Arius and Luther and Calvin? “The Church said so.” Yes, and *before* the Church could formally judge them, somebody had to indict them. Which means somebody had to accuse them. By definition, that person was acting on personal judgment. So I stand as an accuser against C.S. Lewis.

Do I know for certain that Lewis was guilty of a mortal sin? No. But there are all sorts of people we simply assume are. We just assume that most adulterers know that what they’re doing is wrong, right? In any individual case some screwball problem might preclude full consent, but on the whole we write that group of people off as damned. I say that, even if Lewis was personally innocent of mortal sin, all of the actual indicators are there that usually incline people to believe in guilt. So *for the purposes of moral exemplarity,* I say we lump him with his fellow Protestants Cranmer and Calvin and Jim Jones.  In other words, to put it in a way Lewis himself would appreciate, Dante would be right to place Lewis in the Inferno or the Purgatorio (in the latter case if he converted *before!!!* his judgment), not in the Paradiso.  Pearce shows that his life was marred by bigotry and irrational rationalizing (=Anglicanism) and we should remember that.

When Brown thanked his family, he rather shamelessly told the entire country that both of his young, attractive daughters are available. Then he corrected himself — only one of them is available. He broadcast the fact that he is a typically, and endearingly, bumbling father and is interested in, well, in his daughters mating.

Coakley also thanked her family — her husband, sisters, nieces, grand-niece, etc. She also embarrassed them — by actually calling them dysfunctional! What Brown said about his daughters was very embarrassing but also a compliment to them — he thought that young, red-blooded American males were interested in them:  “YES, they *are* available.”  At best, Coakley was teasing her family.  But dysfunctionality is by definition a problem and it is not a compliment to comment publicly on this. 

You will note that she did not thank her children. She has none. Instead, Coakley said that now that the campaign was over there would be two very happy dogs in her home. So she is one of those modern professional married people who has dogs in place of children. That description basically tells you everything you could possibly want to know about who she is and where she’s coming from. 

Which is the more appealing image? A man who has contributed even two children to the future of his country, or a woman with two dogs? Right.  And guess who won the election.

King did not get the govt. to pass civil rights legislation by peacefully winning over Southern hearts and minds through long-suffering, charity, study, work, and lives of virtue.  That was more the Booker T. Washington school of thought.  King preached provocative confrontation and defiance.  While the marchers did not engage in violence, part of the hope of the marchers was that they would *create* racial tension, not defuse it.  When white racists reacted with force, whether police violence or KKK banditry, the marchers publicized this.  King wanted Northern whites to see Southern whites beating blacks.  Then the Northern whites would vote for civil rights legislation.  And the Southerners did react violently (often immorally) and the Northerners did pass the legislation.  Here’s where things get interesting.  The laws were enforced by agents and soldiers with guns.  In other words, King did believe in using force and the threat of force (i.e. violence) to get his way.  He just thought that it would be more convenient to have federal officers carry the guns and push the Southerners around than try to arm blacks.  And he was right — that did prove more successful. 

I believe that there may be times when such tactics of tension are correct.  But what I do not like is when people delude themselves.  And thinking that King won the civil rights movement by non-violent means is bogus.  He worked to provoke *limited* outbreaks of violence on the part of whites so as to induce the federal government to use its massive power (and guns) to impose his ideals upon hostile white populations.  Good or bad, that’s what he did and we should acknowledge it, perhaps even admire it in some sense.  His was a secular version of, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  I’m not saying that King preferred this route.  Maybe he would have preferred to have converted hearts and minds.  I think that the Protestant/Masonic/KKK racism of the South was probably too entrenched for Booker T. Washington’s view to prevail.  But at the very least King’s route was not the Christian ideal, which would have been to win people over.  And the imposition of federal control over state and local governments via the civil rights legislation — although perhaps understandable at the time, maybe even necesssary in order to secure basic constitutional rights – did not conform with the American and natural law ideals of subsidiarity.  But that is for another post.

This is because our nation was *born* from an identifiable ideological — and propagandistic — movement. Contrast the situation in France, where at one time at least there were royalists, republicans, and Napoleonists running around. Yet all were French. Look to most European countries and you will find reactionaries, Christian Democrats, fascists, classical liberals (i.e. capitalists), Social Democrats, and Communists. Generally the nationality of the country is not tied up with any one political ideology. Italy, Germany, and France have all gone through a variety of forms of government. In this sense their political cultures are less conservative than ours. We do not know whether an America that did not at least *claim* to be a federal republic would still be the nation-state we know.  The Confederacy is usually written off as a rebellion or deviation, not a major challenge to the Unionist position.  And even the Confederates were republicans (with a small “r”!) and invoked the Founding Fathers against the North. 

As a Catholic and a European-style reactionary/counter-revolutionary, I do not formally “believe” in the Declaration of Independence or the First Amendment. In this sense I am less an American (ideologically speaking) than even the most left-wing liberals in office. In this sense I am also more radical as judged against the standards of American politics, even though I am probably more content with many of our country’s actual, individual political traditions than are those same liberals.

But, despite this hypocrisy, I find that it is generally true that believing Catholics are *less* likely to be guilty of the more egregious of these sins, or at least of having developed a habit of them, than the general populace. Then we’re damned as naive. We don’t know what we’re talking about and how dare we and our celibate virgin priests judge anyone till we’ve walked a mile in their shoes, etc.

So when a sexual libertine begins the ad hominem (“Haven’t you ever done X? Don’t tell me you never did Y!”), first establish a rule. Your personal experience (i.e. hypocrisy) or inexperience (i.e. naivete) is irrelevant to the question of whether something is wrong or not. Most of us have never been raped. Most of us have never raped. But we all speak out against it. So neither ad hominem works. And remember that these people, being malicious and dishonest, will use whichever ad hominem suits their position at any given moment. I mean that they are as willing to fault you for having known sin as for not having known it. So you need to get an agreement established in advance that neither ad hominem is relevant. Then when they backtrack, point out their own (avoidable) hypocrisy.

And remember: there is a very good chance that the person you are talking to has had an abortion or helped someone else get one. As a Catholic, I often fall into the trap of thinking that abortion is something that “other people” do, not something that people I know (and people I am related to, in real life) have done and might do again. So remember that in your hypotheticals. The morality of abortion is for at least one-third of all women a *personal* question, not a theoretical one. So they’ve staked their eternal souls on a lie. That explains a lot of their irrationality and hostility. Maybe making a personal appeal to repentance — don’t argue the wrongness, which the woman already knows in her heart, just offer forgiveness — is the best approach in such situations.  If it comes out that the other person has had an abortion, don’t even allow that she doesn’t feel guilty.  Say, “I know that you deal with an awful amount of guilt.  There is healing for this.”  I am not sure that this would work as well for men.  These are just my suggestions, based on speculation and limited experience. 

Hypocritically and naively yours,
Bonifacius

Next up, should we concede with the trad Catholic William Biersach (author of “The Darkness Did Not”) that vampires might be real? Might vampires be corpses possessed by demons? No living human soul and hence no true postmortem re-animation, but a sort of situation in which the devil acts upon the body as a puppeteer upon a marionette? In the Earling, IA, case of demonic possession and that of Anneliese Michel in Germany (the basis for the movie, “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”), the possessed women in question claimed to be possessed by the *damned human souls* of Judas Iscariot, Nero, Cain, Hitler, etc. Can the souls of the damned possess living people? If so, can they possess corpses? Might this explain vampires? Zombies?  (Somewhere or other Jimmy Akin addresses zombies; Google it if you wish.)

What of incubi and succubi? Your favorite exponents of Scholastic rationalism believed in them. Certain passages of the Old Testament have been interpreted by otherwise rational believers as evidence that fallen angels lay with the daughters of men and conceived monstrous human offspring.  The Medievals seem to have hit upon the idea of artificial insemination when they opined that the same demon might come to a man as a succubus, take his seed, reappear as an incubus to a woman, and thereby impregnate her with completely human offspring by diabolical means.  Hence all the stores of demi-gods and heroes conceived by pagan deities (“All the gods of the Gentiles are demons”) raping mortal women? 

Werewolves: are the purported lycanthrope and his victims both affected by demonic obsession to the point where they mistakenly believe that an actual metamorphosis has taken place? Do infernal powers grant super-human ferocity to the werewolf?

Has writing a dissertation about the darkest piece of epic literature ever written driven Bonifacius completely stark raving mad? Or is he just really, really desperate to procrastinate? You decide.  On a related note, I am willing to pay twenty dollars American to anyone who can prove that the writer Montague Summers (the source for some of my speculations above) was a legitimately ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

I next follow the traditional age given to Our Lady at the time of Christmas — fifteen. As her birthday is September 8, she was born in 16 B.C. So the Immaculate Conception took place on December 8, 17 B.C. That year was famous in Roman history as the time the Roman Princeps (emperor) Augustus held the Secular Games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Games). These ceremonial games signified that an entire generation (saeculum) had perished since the time of the last games. The Romans held that the longest human lifespan was 100 years, so this was to be the interval between Secular Games. The last games before Augustus’ reign had been held in the 140s B.C., so the next games should have been held in the 40s B.C.  However, the civil wars between Pompey and Caesar, the assassins of Caesar and the Caesarians, and then Octavian (Augustus) and Antony prevented this.  They were postponed until 17 B.C., the very year of the Immaculate Conception.  

And what did the games represent?   Whatever their original intent in past centuries, Augustus used the Secular Games as a sort of purificatory rite after the civil wars.  The old saeculum of war was over and there was time for a new beginning.  Offerings were made to the chthonic (underworld) deities and sacrifices made for feritility in the new era.  That year Our Lady was conceived.  The old generation (saeculum) stained by original sin had run its course and there was a new generation upon the earth, one pure and holy from conception.  The true and living God answered the pagan Romans’ prayers in a manner far beyond their knowing.

Additionally, by some accounts 17 B.C. was the year Herod began rebuilding the Temple.  In the Gospels, Our Lord mentions that the Temple had been under (re)construction for 46 years.  He said this in about A.D. 30 or so.   He also said that if they tore down the Temple He would raise it again in three days.  We know that the three days prophecy refers to Our Lord’s Body and the Resurrection.  But what if the 46 years of construction also refers to His Body?  From Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception at the very end of 17 B.C. to the beginning of A.D. 30 would be, depending on one’s counting, 46 years.  Our Lady was conceived in order to be the Mother of God, so Our Lord’s Body had in a certain sense been under construction (or at least the preparations had been in progress) for 46 years, the same number of years as Herod’s Temple. 

Just some speculations.  No one’s salvation depends on it until I hear otherwise.