Quite Useless

You would think that anyone who was raised in Chicago with a name like Wachowski would likely know something about the Catholic Faith. After all, Chicago has a larger Polish Catholic population than Warsaw. Sadly, the Wachowski brothers are living examples of a phenomenon the Pope described in his very first encyclical, On Catechesis in Our Time.

You may not be familiar with the Wachowski name, but you almost certainly know their work: Larry and Andy are the brothers who wrote and directed the Matrix movies, along with the accompanying anime shorts which comprise the Animatrix, and the video game, Enter the Matrix. This movie series is one of the top-grossing films of all time; The Matrix was the first film ever to sell more than a million DVDs.

The Matrix movies have an enormous appeal for much the same reason The X Files did: they encourage people to think about mystery and hidden meanings. The convoluted Matrix plots are layered with hidden symbols, secret connections. However, while the way the symbols are used betray the Wachowskis' Catholic education, both the connections between symbols and the dialogue between the characters demonstrate that the Wachowskis never got beyond a grade-school understanding of the Faith.

The media makes a point of emphasizing how brilliant the Wachowski brothers are and the media is absolutely correct. The Wachowski brothers have clearly read a lot of intellectually stimulating books and have used what they read in an innovative and visually exciting way. However, it is just as clear that most of those books weren’t Catholic, that is, most of the concepts are not as logically coherent as one might hope. As a result, what is visually brilliant is logically flawed.

Take, for example, one short speech given by Morpheus, a major character whose early role somewhat resembles that of John the Baptist. He tells Neo, the hero, “Faith is not a matter of reasonability. I do not believe things with my mind. I believe them with my heart… in my gut. You are the sixth and the last. You are the One.” While this is a popular understanding of faith, and certainly the kind of thing one sees in many theology and philosophy books, it is a caricature, not the real thing.

Faith is not an emotion. It may have emotion as a consequence, but faith is not a feeling. Faith is a hard-headed look at the facts. Faith is a cold-sober, objective analysis of reality. Contrary to Morpheus’ misperception, faith is absolutely a matter of reasonability and of logic. It is always fact-based.

Consider a real world example: assume that you have just traveled to your friend’s house in another city. You offer to drive to the store to pick up a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread, but when you get to your car, you find it won’t start. So, you ask your friend where you should have it towed in order to get it repaired, who is a good mechanic in this town? He tells you. As soon as you decide to accept and act on the information he provides, you have demonstrated faith. Let’s see why.

You have faith that the mechanic he directs you to is, in fact, a good mechanic, capable of repairing your car. This faith is not an emotion: it is based on your past experience with your friend, your knowledge that he is reliable and he has never consciously steered you wrong in the past. After all, he is your friend, not your enemy.

Your faith is fact-based, you believe first with your mind, only after with your gut. If the mechanic ends up charging you an exorbitant fee and not fixing your car correctly, your faith in your friend, that is, your past experience with him, the facts of your previous relationship, will tell you that this failure is not your friend’s fault. He did not intend this failure, rather, the injustice was committed by someone who was beyond his influence.

But let’s assume the reverse. Perhaps you know your friend is lousy at differentiating a good mechanic from a bad one. Past experience with his recommendations has demonstrated this. As a result, you don’t have faith in his recommendations: they never panned out before, why should now be any different? In this case, you have faith that whoever he recommends is going to be lousy. You keep this in mind as you page through the phone book. Either way you look at it, faith is about facts.

For a Christian, faith in God, also known as divine faith, is precisely the same thing. It is based on facts: the facts we know from history about God’s interactions with man. We know these facts because we have an historically accurate account of them in a book that is commonly called Scripture. When we study this historically accurate account, we discover that God is reliable. When He tells us He will reward us, He does. When He tells us that, if we keep acting a certain way we will regret it, we find that we do.

The difference between human faith and divine faith lies in the reliability of the facts at hand. Human faith relies on human recollection and recounting of facts. Sadly, we humans sometimes don’t get the facts right, so our hard-headed analysis of those facts, that is, our faith, ends up being mis-placed, wrong. Fortunately, God prevents this error by recounting the facts for us Himself, via Scripture. That way, we know we have a good account of the facts. Our hard-headed analysis of those facts, that is, our faith, will not be misplaced or wrong as long as we don’t make any logical errors in the analysis.

But wait. People do make mistakes in analysis. So, even if we have the facts right, how do we know we haven’t done the analysis wrong? Because one of the historical facts is this: God promises to send us the power to get the analysis right. This power is called grace. God empowers His Church with the grace necessary for a correct analysis of the historical facts. This is the charism of infallibility. The facts are right, the analysis is right. This is divine faith.

Having the facts right and the analysis right leads to an emotion (joy) but the emotion is not faith. It is a consequence of faith. Faith is just a short-hand word for an accurate analysis of accurate facts. Divine faith is the divinely given power to accurately analyze the facts God gives us about Himself.

One logical consequence of this? There is no such thing as blind faith. It’s as ridiculously silly to speak of blind faith as it is to say, “Faith is not a matter of reasonability. I do not believe things with my mind. I believe them with my heart… in my gut...”

The Wachowski brothers, two men who were undoubtedly raised Catholic, wrote the script to The Matrix. They put these nonsensical words into Morpheus’ mouth. Why? Because they never got past a hazy, grade-school level understanding of faith. Instead of studying Catholic faith at an adult level, these two adults walk around trying to live an adult life with an eighth-grade understanding of Catholic concepts. It isn’t a pleasant thing, as I well know. Up through my mid-thirties, I was right there with them. I was a living example of what Pope John Paul II warned of in article 43 of Catechesis in Our Time. For “instruction in the Faith to be effective, it must be permanent. It would be quite useless if it stopped short on the threshold of maturity.”

A lot of time, energy and money was undoubtedly poured into the Wachowski brothers' Catholic education. Unfortunately, their education, like mine and that of many other adult Catholics, stopped short on the threshold of maturity. The Pope’s hard-headed analysis of the facts, his faith, told him what the result had to be.

Without adult education, we can look at all that parochial school instruction and sum it up in two words.

Quite useless.

The Infallibly Dirty Dozen

Councils in the early days of the Church were not quite so easy as today. Not only was travel arduous, disputing bishops were not above threatening physical violence to each other. At the Council of Ephesus, for instance, Cyril of Jerusalem had a bodyguard of sailors, while his opponent, Nestorious, brought gladiators from the circus. Back then, bishops played for keeps.

Ephesus met in order to decide if Mary could be called Mother of God, or if should she just be referred to as Mother of Christ. The faithful already knew the answer. The earliest known prayer to the Virgin Mary is the Sub Tuum Praesidium, “We fly to thy patronage, O Holy Mother of God: despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.” It had been in constant use by the faithful for more than two centuries before the council. In fact, large crowds of Catholic faithful gathered around the building where the bishops met, and chanted, “Mary is the Mother of God!” That kind of attention from the faithful seemed to help focus the minds of the bishops.

Catholics are getting out their bullhorns again.

Have you heard about the Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas that isn't being built? It seems one contractor, a good Catholic, has organized every concrete supplier within 60 miles: no one will sell the abortionists the construction materials they need to finish the job. The main contractor just threw in the towel, saying the project could not be finished. Some babies in Texas will owe their lives to a Catholic who got angry and did something about it.

Have you heard of the Dirty Dozen? The shame of being on the list goes to Senators Ted Kennedy (MA), Tom Harkin (IA), John Kerry (MA), Tom Daschle (SD), Christopher Todd (CT), Jack Reed (RI), Patty Murray (WA), Mary Landrieu (LA), Patrick Leahy (VT), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Joseph Biden (DE), and Susan Collins (ME).

These are the Congressmen who simultaneously claim to be Catholic and pro-abortion. A pro-abortion Catholic politician is like a cop on the take - they keep their jobs, but nobody they serve is very happy about it. Their superiors, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t do anything, the cops have “friends” who make sure the community stays quiet, and we in the community are too scared to speak.

Well, the times, they are a’changin’.

For the last several months, the American Life League (ALL) has run full-page ads in major newspapers denouncing pro-abortion Catholic Congressmen as heretics. This may seem harsh. It isn’t.

Pro-life Catholics have tried to be nice to these particular heretics for thirty years. All we got in return was partial-birth abortion and RU-486. If this is winning, how many body bags does it take to lose?

You may wonder where ALL gets the idea that they have the authority to declare someone a heretic. That’s simple. ALL is simply repeating the constant teaching of the Church - anyone who claims to be Catholic has to publicly live their Catholic faith. Insisting that abortion or contraception is compatible with being Catholic is heresy. That’s as nice as one can put it without lying.

The saints would agree. In A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More points out that a certain young man, being a heretic, could not marry his daughter. The young man replies heatedly, “Sir Thomas, now that’s a word I don’t like!” The saint replies with perfect courtesy, “It’s not a likeable word, it’s not a likeable thing,” and sends him home. Sir Thomas lost his head at the block rather than tell a simple untruth. And he wasn’t even a consecrated man.

While the silence from the pulpit has become deafening, the lay faithful are beginning to chant. Check out your nearest major newspaper. ALL is now asking the Catholic bishops of America why they have been silent on the attempt to starve Terry Schiavo to death, why they allowed her to be denied the last rites and viaticum without raising a word of protest to the secular authorities.

These are darned good questions. These are questions the Catholic faithful have a right to ask. And we all have a right to a darned good answer. Heterodox groups are very fond of pointing out, the Second Vatican Council wrote: “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief.”

Catholic heretics use this as a basis for demanding women priests, a married clergy, changes in the teaching on contraception, and immediate co-equal participation in the procession of the Divine Persons within the Trinity. Well, they haven’t demanded the last yet, but it’s sure to come.

In any case, these same heretics always forget what follows the phrase they lift so carefully out of Lumen Gentium, #12, “They manifest this special [infallible] property by means of the whole peoples' supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God. Through it, the people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the saints, penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it more fully in its life.”

What Lumen Gentium describes is known as the sensus fidelium, the sense of the faithful. It is one of the three infallible expressions of the Magisterium. When Catholic faithful who (1) have a properly formed conscience (2) express the faith as given to the saints, then these same Catholic lay faithful speak infallibly. Bet'cha didn't know you could do that, did ya'?

That’s what makes ALL’s work different from Voice of the Faithful. ALL is simply shouting from the rooftops what the universal Church has always taught, though some particular local bishops have not. The problem with “orthodox” Catholics is that we’re too shy. This is not good. As long as we are shy about speaking the truth, we aren’t really orthodox. There is no opposition between right belief (orthodoxy) and right action (orthopraxy). They inform one another, they need one another. We cannot say we are orthodox if we do not proclaim the Gospel. Silent orthodoxy is not orthodoxy, it is the sin of apathy at best, the condemned heresy of Quietism at the worst.

Some might point out that there is a season for everything under the sun, and it is certainly true that one should not speak out of season. However, thirty years is rather a long winter, and this winter’s plagues have been particularly harsh. We’ve dug a lot of graves because we haven’t stood up to the heretics, because we haven’t given them the names they’ve worked so hard to earn. It is a mark of respect for the man and for the truth to honor every man with the name his work deserves. If we want what the Pope wants - a springtime of evangelization - then we had better join our voices and shout the Gospel from the rooftops.

But remember, shout loud.

Some of our fellow citizens are kind of deaf.

Laughter: The Best Medicine

The United Nations is upset with the Church again.

What a (yawn) surprise.

Recently, Cardinal Trujillo pointed out the obvious: condoms do not protect against HIV. Though he simply echoed the point several dozen secular experts have made for years, namely, that HIV is several dozen times smaller than the smallest holes in a latex condom, and therefore not effective, the press immediately took offense.

The World Health Organization disagreed. “When you use a condom badly so that it breaks or slips or it is past its 'use-by date' it is not very effective," spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said. "Two years ago, in June 2001, there was a big study that reviewed all the literature on male condoms. This study showed that condoms are 90 percent effective against HIV/AIDS infection, and the other 10 percent is when they were used wrongly.”

Unfortunately, the ‘big study” Miss Chaib refers to says nothing of the sort. Open up a new browser window, point it at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/organization/dmid/documents/condomreport.pdf and follow along for the fun.

The “Assessment of Data” on page one admits that the scientific literature is inadequate: the experts simply don’t know how effective condoms are in preventing STDs. Certainly Miss Chaib would have bothered to read the first page? But wait. It gets better.

By page 2, the government study is insisting that, though it can’t be certain about how effective condoms are with any other STD, it knows for sure that condoms are effective against HIV. Well, let’s see their reasoning.

The experts collected all the studies on condom use they could find, then examined and compared them in what is called a “meta-analysis”. Note their warnings on pp. 5-6, particularly conclusions 6 and 9. “Most studies” did not provide useful information on condom usage or on exposure to disease. So, they admit their meta-analysis isn’t really based on 138 studies, it’s actually based on just “a few” – how few, they won’t tell us.

By page 9, they admit that most studies they used are older (they don’t include newer, ostensibly higher quality condoms), they rely heavily on user recall of events and self-reporting, and they cannot be considered rigorous. Yet, these older studies tend to be all anyone has. They end by estimating that the newest condoms have only a 3% failure rate, but the statistics they include in their own report tends to corroborate the 10% to 30% failure rate given by the older studies.

Consider: On page 10, the study insists that couples using condoms correctly experience only a 3% failure rate. Their evidence? One rigorous study, consisting of user couples in a long-term monogamous male-female relationship who claimed a perfect use rate showed a 1.1% pregnancy rate for "consistent [condom] use" and a 6.3% pregnancy rate for overall condom use.

First, even a high school science jockey knows that one study does not prove anything. The whole point of science is to replicate results. If other researchers cannot replicate the results then the event didn’t happen, from a scientific point of view.

Second, even assuming this study was done perfectly and can be replicated, the actual pregnancy rate given in the study necessarily means the actual condom failure rate was at least four times higher. After all, sperm can only fertilize an egg that is present, and a woman can only get pregnant for about one week a month, on average. This "one week a month" takes into account that the egg is only able to be fertilized for a period of 24 hours (it disintegrates 24 hours after release), and that sperm can survive in the woman's reproductive tract for between three and five days. This also assumes there are no other problems inhibiting pregnancy: e.g., the man does not have a low sperm count, and the woman doesn't have other biological problems (scarred ovarian tubes, insufficient endometrial lining in the womb, etc.) that prevent implantation, etc.

Thus, if a condom study is using pregnancy rate to demonstrate condom effectiveness, the pregnancy rate is always going to be 1/4th the actual condom breakage, because the egg is only available for fertilization 1/4th of the time. If the experts want to assume that the pregnancy rate correlates exactly to the condom failure rate, they have to assume that condoms only fail when a woman has just ovulated or is just about to ovulate. That is, either condom using couples are only having sex during the woman's fertile period (one week a month), or the condom itself is able to maintain its own integrity when the woman is not fertile, but it somehow senses the woman’s impending ovulation and, unable to cope with the additional responsibility, slips or breaks. Obviously, both of these suppositions are absurd, and no one has ever asserted either of these things to be true.

So, the very pregnancy rates cited in the “one rigorous controlled trial” for "perfect use" condoms require that the actual condom failure rate has to be at least between 4.4% and 25.2%. Worse, these rates can only be this low if we assume all the people in the studies cited are in perfect health and able to conceive - something no one looks at in any condom study. Thus, we can safely assume that the condom breakage rate in the NIH approved study is most definitely higher than 4.4% to 25.2%. This is verified by the next few sentences: according to another study, 14% of couples experience an unintended pregnancy in the first year of use, which means these couples have an actual condom failure rate of at least 64%!

But wait! It still gets better!

The studies cited here are between “long-term monogamous male-female couples.” These couples have the time, the experience and most important, the motivation, to be deliberate and careful about their condom use. They think children will harm their sex lives, and they want to maintain their long-term relationship, so these couples are motivated to use condoms effectively. Will such motivation be present in a one-night stand man, who is moving quickly with the flow of the moment in order to get his new acquaintance's panties off? Will it be true of the homosexual using a "glory hole" in the public restroom, who gets his thrills in the danger of possibly being caught? Myriad other scenarios of a people engaged in similarly less deliberative situations could be brought forward. It seems unlikely that every couple would have the same success rate as a long-term monogamous heterosexual couple, who has a vested interest in not getting pregnant precisely because they want to preserve their long-term relationship and fear that pregnancy would somehow alter that relationship. NIH is cherry-picking their situations to get that 1.1% failure rate, and they know it.

They even admit it. The panel points out on p. 12 that none of the studies considered by the panel evaluated the rate of condom slippage or breakage in persons under 18 years of age. This is rather important, because other studies have repeatedly shown and already established that teenage condom use is associated with alcohol and drug use.

Put another way, teen risk behaviours travel in clusters. Consider the following group of risk-taking activities: smoking, alcohol use, drug use, sex. All researchers agree that if a teen engages in any one of the activities in that group, s/he is also much more likely to engage in at least one other activity in that group - if s/he regularly engages in two activities in that group, s/he is almost certain to regularly engage in three or four. That means that teens having sex are not infrequently going to be drunk or stoned while doing so. Now, what is the likelihood that a drunk or stoned teen will correctly use a condom? The panel deliberately ignored the teen population because it destroys their "condom failure" figures.

Finally, the WHO's own studies indicate that condom use is not all its cracked up to be in terms of AIDS abstinence. The only African nation which has seen not only the relative, but the absolute number of AIDS cases drop, is Uganda. Coincidentally, Uganda is also the only country that does not have a government condom distribution program. The Ugandan government relies on abstinence promotion to reduce AIDS cases.

So, let’s sum up. The experts admit that condom studies don’t prove anything, their own pregnancy rate numbers show a condom failure rate four times higher than they admit to, and they manage to get their low rate only by ignoring both teenage sexual practices and the practices of any other couples whose actual use would increase condom failure figures.

And they wonder why we laugh at them.

Nailing Christ to the Cross

It wasn’t a coincidence.

When Martin Luther decided to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenburg Castle Church, he chose Halloween to do it. This Augustinian monk held fiercely to many grievous doctrinal errors, but he did understand one thing: the liturgical year of the Catholic Church.

The liturgical year is meant to do two things at once: through it, we cast our eyes back towards Christ’s life on earth and through it we simultaneously cast our eyes forward through the long history of mankind, a history which will be crowned in the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ. Luther understood this. That’s why he really had no choice. His attack on indulgences had to take place on All Hallow’s Eve. We moderns don’t realize the significance of the day because our seasons are confused.

For instance, we all know that America celebrates New Year’s Day on the wrong day. The new year doesn’t begin January 1st, it begins on the first Sunday of Advent. Advent, of course, is the season during which we meditate on man’s sinfulness and prepare for Christmas. At least, we used to.

Up until World War II, every Christian treated Advent as a time of preparation and repentance. Stockings, ornaments, even Christmas trees, were not erected in any house until Christmas Eve. During Advent, everyone meditated on the world’s wickedness prior to God come in the flesh (past), and prepared themselves for the Last Day, when God comes as Judge (future). For centuries, Christmas was at once both a reminder of the Incarnation, the First Coming, and a reminder of Dooms-Day, Judgement Day, the Second Coming.

That’s why Christmas gifts were exchanged only during Christmas season (which doesn’t start until Christmas Eve). The exchange of gifts not only recalled the gifts of the magi to the Christ child (past), they also reminded us of the wonderful exchange of Divine Persons within the Trinity, the exchange we enter into in Heaven after Judgement Day (future).

World War II changed all that. Because it took six weeks to transport anything by ship over the ocean, Americans were told to buy their Christmas gifts for their sons overseas by Thanksgiving, or their sons would not receive those gifts during Christmas season. American businesses liked the extra income generated by the much longer and earlier selling season – six weeks beats twelve days hands down.

Sixty years of advertising broke two millenia of Christian practice. Halloween has now become the closest thing we have to an Advent season. Advent is now a four-week long Christmas season, and Christmas season is now Purgatory. The season during which we are supposed to celebrate our life in heaven with the Christ child is now the time we pay all the bills.

In Luther’s time, everything was still in its proper order: Death, Purgatory, Judgement Day. Death and Purgatory were recalled first through the commemoration of All Saints’ Day, emphasizing those who died and went straight to heaven, and all Souls’ Day, emphasizing those who died and still had more purification ahead of them.

Purgatory, of course, is not someplace any of us are supposed to end up. God calls each of us to purify our lives of every sin while we are still alive here on earth. Indeed, we are called not only to purify our lives of every sin, but to purify the universe of every consequence of every sin we may have committed. And make no mistake about it: every sin carries a consequence, not just a spiritual consequence, but a material consequence.

When you or I sin, we remove grace from our lives. Grace is power. It is the ability to live life in peace and joy. When we remove this power, we are unable to live life peacefully or with joy. So, no matter how secret my sin may be, because it removes from me the power to be peaceful and joyful, I will be rendered unhappy by my sin. Because I lack the grace of joy, I will inevitably lash out at you, with unhappy word or fist, as a direct consequence of my oh-so-secret sin. Because I am not at peace, each of you who meet me are tempted to relinquish your peace. If any of you do, you will pass the pain along to the people you meet. The effects of my secret, solitary, stone-hearted sin ripple inexorably out into the world, tearing apart more and more lives.

There is good news. When I go to confession, my sins are forgiven and the grace, the power, to be joyful and at peace is restored to me. All I have to do is live it.

There is bad news. Even though my ability to live peacefully is restored, the effects of my earlier sins are still rippling through the world. Others are still being tormented by the consequences of my sin.

There is astonishing news. God expects me to purify the world of these rippling consequences. He gives me the grace to do it through the works of indulgences.

An indulgence is the flood of grace brought into the world through my obedience to Christ and His Bride. It is a somewhat arbitrary obedience that answers for my earlier arbitrary disobedience. God does not owe me this grace, He gives it to me freely, for He knows I cannot clean up the mess I made unless I receive this assistance. The flood of grace from my repeated obediences slows or removes the negative consequences of my past disobediences.

Paul tells us that we are God’s co-workers (1 Cor 3:9). God’s work is the total eradication of sin and all its consequences. Thus, our work is likewise the total eradication of sin and all its consequences. He expects each of us to do our part.

We each learn obedience as Christ did, through suffering (Heb 5:8). Every living man must learn obedience, must clean up his own mess. I can only win the flood of grace, the indulgence, if I am first in a state of grace: my sins must first be forgiven in confession. I can win the flood of grace only for myself, or for those who can no longer obey in the flesh because they no longer have their flesh with them. That is, I can assist those who cannot easily help themselves – the dead.

Some people die in a state of grace, but have not finished cleaning up their mess. This poses a problem. There is only one way to cleanse the world: join in Christ’s suffering. But Christ suffered in His own body. When I am dead, I do not have a body until the Last Day. Because of this crippling lack, my spiritual suffering must do double-duty, for the part of me which is supposed to do the work of suffering, that is, my flesh, is not present to help out. This double-duty suffering is Purgatory.

When I, as a living man, offer indulgences for the dead, I acknowledge that 1 Corinthians 12 is correct: when one suffers, all share the pain. The pain of those in Purgatory is my pain, for the consequences of their sins still affects me – that’s part of the reason they are in Purgatory. But, when my assistance has helped a soul complete the necessary purification, 1 Corinthians 12 likewise applies: when one is honored, all share the glory.

In Luther’s time, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day were the pre-eminent days for Catholics to remember and apply 1 Corinthians 12. On those days, Catholics flocked to perform indulgences, for they wanted to purify the world of the consequences of sin, they wanted to purify themselves, they wanted to help those who had died complete their purifications.

The weeks between All Hallow’s Eve and the First Sunday of Advent corresponded to the end of the ages. In a few short weeks, the new age would be upon them! In this new age, Christmas-Parousia would be celebrated. Everyone had to prepare, all had to sweep their house clean of leaven, that is, the consequences of sin, and ready themselves for the heavenly banquet, where they would feast on the pure flesh of God.

Sadly, Luther’s badly-formed theology had no place for meaningful human suffering or men as divine co-workers. He rejected both indulgences and purgatory. So, he attacked indulgences at the crucial moment – the moment during the year when men began to prepare themselves to consciously live as divine co-workers.

His attack on Catholic theology may have begun with indulgences, but it ended by destroying the common understanding that God empowers man to sanctify everything, even time itself. Today, what Luther began on Halloween has reached full crescendo. He did attack it at the crucial moment, for the word “crucial” comes from the Latin “crux”, which means Cross. By nailing his attack on indulgences on that door, he crucified the idea that men should share Christ’s sufferings.

Now, especially in America, Christ suffers alone.

Do you want to change that?

Then take back the seasons.

Are YOU my Mother?


Have you heard the news from out west? It seems that Utah had, in 1989, effectively outlawed surrogate motherhood, the practice of conceiving a child outside the womb and implanting him into a genetically unrelated woman. You see, in Utah, the woman who gives birth is listed as the mother, and her husband as the father, regardless of the child’s genetic make-up. In order to become legal parents, Utah residents who used a surrogate had to wait for the surrogate to give up parental rights, and then go through the adoption process. Money exchanges were forbidden. That is mostly gone now – Bruce Jenkins, the US District Court Judge, overturned part of the law so genetic parents can be listed as the legal parents on the birth certificate.

For the whole of human history, the law has always recognized the mother who gives birth and her husband as the rightful parents, even if the husband was known not to have fathered the child. But, in our enlightened age, the wisdom of countless generations must defer to the wisdom of the last fifteen minutes.

“[The genetic parents’] fundamental liberty interests in their parental relationship with their children arises from the fact of the biological parent-child relationship, independent of any grant of right, privilege or designation of status by the state," Jenkins wrote. "Even as it is called upon to consider new questions thrust upon it by the advent of new technology, the legislature, no less than the court, must keep the fundamental liberty interests of the people clearly in mind."

Poor Judge Jenkins. He has no idea how bad this will get.

We have allowed technology to divorce sex from procreation. As both contraception users and abortion supporters like to point out, the decision to have sex is not a decision to have a child.

Alright. Let’s take see how they deal with their brave new world. Let's consider a few of the scenarios our new reproductive freedoms provide us.

We’ll consider an easy scenario first. Imagine identical twin brothers, Joseph and Luke. Luke is an in vitro fertilization specialist. Joseph is a ditch-digger. Joseph gets married. He and his wife, Lucy, decide to have a child. Joseph asks Luke, the doctor, to artificially impregnate Lucy. Dr. Luke readily agrees. Joseph gives Dr. Luke, his sperm, Dr. Luke extracts an egg from Joseph’s wife, fertilizes it with sperm, and implants the child into her womb.

Now, here’s the kicker: who is the father of the child? Is it Joseph, the laborer? Why on earth would he be the father?

After all, Dr. Luke is Joseph’s identical twin. That is, Luke used sperm genetically identical to his own to conceive a child and impregnate Lucy, Joseph’s wife. Sure, he isn’t having sex with Lucy, but sex has nothing to do with procreation, remember? Dr. Luke did everything a father does: he conceived a child with sperm identical to his own (indeed, he could have substituted his own sperm: who would know?) and impregnated Lucy.

Wouldn’t that make Dr. Luke responsible for child support? If not, then why is Joseph responsible for child support? Perhaps Joseph changes his mind after he provides the sperm, but Lucy decides to go ahead and have the child anyway. That means he didn’t even choose to have the child. If a woman can change her mind and have an abortion, why can’t a man change his mind and avoid child support, especially when he isn’t the one impregnating his wife? Isn’t Joseph’s financial considerations part of a “fundamental liberty interest” a la Judge Jenkins?

It may seem a puzzler, but today’s sophisticates will undoubtedly figure out a perfectly just and equitable solution one day. But let us cease from considering such childish trifles as this case and move on to something challenging.

Let’s go back to Joseph and his wife, Lucy. They want to have a child, but Joseph is impotent and Lucy is entering menopause. What to do? Well Lucy gets her friend Henny-Penny to donate an egg and they contract for an anonymous sperm donation in order to get the egg fertilized. Because of the menopause problem, Lucy talks another friend, Broody Hen, into being a surrogate. Broody Hen’s husband, Chuck, is fine with it, because he managed to get Joe to cough up $2500 plus medical expenses for the service. So, now we have two genetic parents, the egg donor and the sperm donor, two surrogate parents, and the two parents who finance the whole operation.

But wait. There’s more. If life begins at conception, the lab tech who fertilized the egg can be considered a parent, as can the doctor who performed the implantation procedure. This child has eight parents.

That’s not too bad. It could be worse. What if Joe were cloning his best friend, Jake, who died recently? The number of genetic parents would increase, because we would now take Henny-Penny’s egg, remove its nucleus and replace it with a nucleus from Jake. Cloning allows us to dispense with the anonymous sperm donor, but we must now consider Jake’s parents, retired and living down in Florida, to be genetic parents of the baby being carried by Broody Hen for Lucy and Joe. After all, they were Jake’s parents the first time, weren’t they?

So, for those who prefer to clone, the child has four genetic parents: the egg cell donor, the nucleus donor and the genetic parents of the nucleus donor. He also has four additional non-genetic parents: the gestational mother, her husband, and the rearing parents, that is, the man and woman (or man and man or woman and woman) who commissioned the child’s creation.

And that doesn’t count the lab techs and doctors who actually create the child in the first place. There’s at least ten parents here.

No question of it: family reunions will have to be potluck.

As the above examples demonstrate, our intellectual sophisticates have fooled themselves into thinking we can divorce sex from procreation. Ironically, the very culture that created the fifty percent divorce rate has conveniently “forgotten” how messy the consequences of divorce are.

Poor Judge Jenkins. It’s a pity he didn’t remember his Shakespeare:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.

The Great Plan

Did Margaret Sanger oppose abortion or support it? The question isn't easy to answer. We can find public expressions of distaste for abortion in many of her writings, but her phrasing in other areas of her work do not carry the same attitude. There is good reason to believe that she did not publicly advocate abortion for the simple reason that she was having a difficult enough time advocating birth control to a recalcitrant public.

Feminists like Victoria Woodhull, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sarah Norton, and Mattie Brinkerhoffn had all actively opposed abortion virtually within her lifetime (1860s-1870s). The American Medical Society had spent the forty years between 1840 and 1880 getting state legislatures to outlaw abortion. Consequently, American society was much more well-informed and adamantly opposed to the practice at the turn of the century than it would be in the 1960's, when feminists ignorant of their own history foolishly took up the cause before a public who had likewise forgotten why the procedure was made illegal.

Margaret Sanger had two primary goals in life: replace marriage with the public acceptance of sexually libertine adults like herself, and create a race of thoroughbreds through the use of eugenics. Sadly for her, she was up against a much more thoroughly informed society than Gloria Steinem and Faye Wattleton have to contend with. She played the hand she was dealt.

Clearly, she believed the use of contraceptives was the key to accomplishing both of her goals. Unfortunately, the 1873 Comstock laws, passed by a Protestant Congress, forbad the distribution of contraceptives. Medical and public opinion was against both contraceptives and abortion. She had to show that contraceptives should be legalized. The plan she hit upon is the one still used by Planned Parenthood today. She would play one off against the other.

In her public writings, she showed a nearly uniform distaste for abortion ("See? I'm mainstream like you are"). Then she pointed to contraception as the means to help women avoid abortion ("You should be enlightened and compassionate, like me."). That is, she leveraged the public's own abhorrence of abortion to position contraception as an acceptable middle way. Planned Parenthood continues to play this card in exactly this way today. "Without contraception, abortions will increase!" they cry cynically, knowing full well that the increased use of contraception inevitably increases abortion rates. But did she really dislike abortion?

Consider these slips of the pen:

"We know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under the right conditions brings almost no danger to the life of the patient ..." --Margaret Sanger. "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 5 (May 1919), page 10.

"Infanticide did not go out of fashion with the advance from savagery to barbarism and civilization. Rather, it became, as in Greece and Rome, a recognized custom with advocates among leaders of thought and action. So did abortion, which some authorities regard as a development springing from infanticide and tending to supersede it as a means of getting rid of undesired children.

As progress is made toward civilization, infanticide, then, actually increased. This tendency was noted by Westermarck, who also calls attention to the conclusions of Fison and Howitt (in Kamilaroi and Kurnai). 'Mr Fison who has lived for a long time among uncivilized races,' says Westermarck, 'thinks it will be found that infanticide is far less common among the lower savages than among the more advanced tribes.' Following this same tendency into civilized countries, we find infanticide either advocated by philosophers and authorized by law, as in Greece and Rome, or widely practiced in spite of the law, civil and ecclesiastical." - Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race, Chapter Two.

Chapter Seven of the same book begins "Are overburdened mothers justified in their appeals for contraceptives or abortions?" Unsurprisingly, she goes on to answer, "yes", noting that women have a right to abortion.

We know that Sanger saw birth control as the "pivot of civilization". In Women and the New Race, she describes increased rates of abortion and infanticide as marks of civilized society. Indeed, she spends long passages in the book describing how abortion is extremely common in numerous civilizations. That is, she builds a case for the legalization of abortion on one hand (all civilized countries do it), while decrying it as barbaric on the other.

She will do the same for abortion's medical consequences: in some writings, she claims it is very dangerous. At the same time, she claims the procedure is very common, asserting that between one and two million abortions are performed each year. Now, if abortion is so dangerous, how on earth is it possible that one to two million women a year are having abortions in a country whose population of fertile women is perhaps 20 million? The entire population of fertile women would be dead within a lifetime, if it were true.

She makes these logically contradictory claims for exactly the same reason she publicly opposes abortion. By emphasizing the dangers of abortion and artificially inflating the numbers, she creates a pressing need for a solution, and surprise! She just happens to have the solution at hand: contraception. Today, we would call it "stacking the deck". Once contraception is legalized, the game can be played again. She can even use the same argument. She just emphasizes the word "illegal" this time and point outs that legal abortions would be much safer.

This is all hypothesis, of course. It is possible Margaret Sanger was ambivalent about abortion. It is more likely that she was playing a cynical game in order to get the first part of her agenda in place. We like to think Hitler was an aberration, but he was not. He was a product of the scientific thinking of his age. He did not do anything that hundreds of intellectuals throughout Europe and America had not already suggested. He simply employed the practices recommended by the science of eugenics. Scientists today claim Nazis were unscientific. They weren't - not by the standards of the day. They were perfectly good biologists by the standards of the first twenty years of the 1900s. Hitler shows us the face of science when the guiding force of religion is actively purged away.

All eugenicists are ruthless, and Sanger was a eugenicist. World War II, the general abhorrence of Nazi eugenics policies and the Nuremburg trial declaration that abortion was a crime against humanity threw her timetable off. She spent the forties re-tooling her message for the post-WWII world. It was only after her death that the organization she founded was able to completely put in place the program she envisioned from the beginning: baptizing the genetically unfit into the unholy trinity of sterilization, contraception and abortion.

Democracy at work

Some things just don’t add up. For years, the media has told us that voter turnout is too low, that citizens need to become more interested in electoral processes and legislative agendas, that we all need to vote. “Whatever it takes to bring voters to the polls, that’s what we’ll do,” has been a common theme.

In California, over one hundred citizens took this message so much to heart that they didn’t just vote, they ran for governor. So, how did the public patrons of voter participation describe this response? “One of the most bizarre episodes in recent U.S. political history” warned CNN. “A circus”, bellowed ABC. “Absurd,” cried political commentators across the nation, both liberal and conservative.

You can’t have it both ways.

In a highly individualistic society where everyone is politically active, we would expect to have dozens, if not hundreds, of candidates for every particular office. In fact, if we were really interested in raising voter turnout, we would rig election rules to encourage multiple candidates.

It would be easy to do. The American marketing machine has told us for years that we have a right to have every product exactly the way we want it. Indeed, even our babies have become products; IVF parents now shop around for specific genetic traits. So, why is the ballot box the only place our choice consists of spam or meatloaf? Americans do not shop where we cannot choose. You want people to shop? Then give them what they have been conditioned to expect: endless choice. The California experience brought the highest turnout in years.

In another sense, the recall election was actually rather close to the founders’ vision. For the founders of the country, Cincinnatus was the man to imitate. In 458 B.C., an army was preparing to besiege Rome. Frightened citizens promised to give Cincinnatus dictatorial powers if he would only rid Rome of the threat. He agreed, left his small farm, destroyed the opposing force and returned to Rome where he immediately resigned his dictatorship and got back to farming. He had been in office for all of fifteen days.

He didn’t have to resign. He could have stayed in power and had a formidable political career. He didn’t. That is the kind of selfless service the earliest Americans expected from their leaders. Indeed, that’s why Ohio named one of their towns Cincinnati – as a reminder that his example was supposed to be followed in public life.

America’s founders intended political service to be public service, not self-service. It was never supposed to be a career for anyone. People were supposed to volunteer to serve in much the same way that people gave time to their local church or soup kitchen: not because they got anything back personally, but because it was expected and somebody needed them. Like Cincinnatus, Americans who had useful skills to contribute to a problem were expected to help out by contributing the necessary skills. But they were also expected to return to their real work in a relatively timely fashion. This attitude of service explains why many of America’s early Presidents died either penniless or reasonably close to it. They were away from their real work, and their income suffered accordingly.

Can you remember the last time anyone died penniless as a result of being elected to political office and serving honorably?

Me neither.

Yet, instead of promoting the idea of regular people running for office, the “powers that be” vilify it. The government/media chatter on about diversity being the source of our strength, but they attack it when they see it. Why? Because our educational system, our media, our political system, all of it, is designed to crush real diversity and force conformity. John Gatto’s recent book, An Underground History of Education in America, shows how the field was planted. A century later, we reap the harvest.

Catholics should be concerned. We know how diversity stacks up against conformity. As G. K. Chesterton points out, hagiographies – those remarkable stories the medievals wrote about the lives of saints - had a very practical purpose. By writing them, Christians were attempting to outline a science of holiness. They compiled saint stories for somewhat the same reason the FBI now compiles criminal profiles. The hagiographers were looking for common lifestyle and cultural patterns in the lives of the saints, patterns which ordinary people could use to become holy. Their results were surprising. The only pattern they found was attachment to the sacramental life. Apart from that single thing, the lack of uniformity was stunning. They discovered that holiness is wildly unique and diverse. No two saints are precisely alike in how they achieved it or in how they lived it.

The FBI’s criminal analysis, on the other hand, has discovered quite the opposite. Crime, that is, sin, is banal, common, uniform. Simple observation of a major crime scene is often sufficient to tell us the economic, social and political culture in which the criminal moves, even detailing age, sex, race and personal habits.

So, what the media and the government point to as generators of diversity are exactly the reverse of what really does generate diversity. They point to skin color, economic condition, age, sex. In fact, as the medievals discovered, diversity is actually found in our individual responses to grace, our drive to reach the individual perfections that God enables each of us to achieve by the gift of His grace.

But, since both the media and the government reject theology, they are forced to settle for anthropology, the study of man. Ironically, precisely because they don’t have theology, they not only do not understand God, they cannot understand man, for Christ is the One who reveals man to himself.

Thus, they aren’t really competent in anthropology either. When faced with their own artificially generated diversity – the diversity of over a hundred “Joe Sixpack” candidates for office – they mocked and attacked it. And that clarifies the situation enormously.

They don’t want diversity. What they want from us is banal conformity. We are supposed to know our place, bow to their expertise, and allow them to create their idea of a perfect world for us. After all, if it’s their idea, it must be perfect.

If the California election proved anything, it proved that neither the media nor the government really want voter participation. It’s too dangerous. If real, unique individuals got involved and reached positions of power, they would brand their very uniqueness upon society. That is, they would begin to mend and re-create society’s human law, basing it on the natural law common to every man's heart. As these categories of the divine law were enacted and followed, the sacraments would be more greatly frequented. Grace would flow. Diversity would break out everywhere. And that kind of diversity just isn’t tolerated around here.

Mutual Admiration Society
Back in 1975, Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently indicated a certain admiration for Hitler, “because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker."

The Democrats were quick to pounce. "I don't see how anyone can admire Adolf Hitler," nearly ex-governor Gray Davis told the ABC television show Good Morning America, "Any decent American has to be offended by that phrase." Senator Dianne Feinstein declared, "If this was a man that found Adolf Hitler to be a glorified and acceptable and a desirable character …I don't want that man as my governor.”

Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic presidential candidate, added, “You know, after reading in the paper this morning about the pill popping and skirt chasing and Hitler praising, it would be very tempting to point out Republicans' hypocrisy on values. But would it be right to do? Absolutely." Senator Joe would know a thing or two about hypocrisy. He claims to be an Orthodox Jew, but doesn’t mention Orthodox Judaism excommunicated him during his last presidential run for his support of homosexuality and abortion rights.

And herein lies the source of everyone’s amusement. The Democrats don’t want in a future governor what they happily accept in their physicians, or at least, in their nurses. Planned Parenthood, the darling of both Arnold and his Democratic attack dogs, was founded by ex-nurse Margaret Sanger, an outspoken supporter of Adolf Hitler. There is, of course, one major difference between Sanger and Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger condemned Hitler’s actions while admiring skills historians all agree Hitler displayed: he did rise from obscurity with very little formal education and he was a brilliant speaker. Sanger, on the other hand, expressly admired Hitler for what he did. He forcibly sterilized genetic inferiors.

Margaret Sanger, the keynote speaker at a 1929 KKK rally, knew what most people today don’t. Hitler’s philosophy was largely made in America. Darwin, the philosophical foundation of the eugenics movement, was English. One of his major American supporters, Charles Davenport, founded the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor. America was the first country to sterilize “inferior” people. California was the second state to pass a law permitting forced sterilization (1909). Even today, the government’s right to sterilize whomever they please is legally uncontested. After all, the 1927 US Supreme Court Buck vs. Bell decision which expressly gave the state that right has never been overturned.

That’s why German leaders before the court at the Nuremburg trials were mystified. The American prosecutions attacked the Nuremburg laws, laws that forbad inter-marriage between Jews and Aryans. But the Germans had simply modeled their law on the laws of the state of Virginia, which forbad marriage between blacks and whites, laws that the US Supreme Court had upheld. Indeed, one of the men eventually convicted at Nuremburg was the former Harvard Medical School faculty member who drew up New Jersey’s law legalizing sterilization of the “unfit.” The Nazis on trial pointed out that German laws were more liberal than American law: a man was considered black if he had 1/32nd part of “Negro blood” while Germans considered anyone with 1/8th Jewish blood to be Aryan. Certainly, Jews were forbidden to practice medicine in Germany by 1938, but 5000 black doctors were kept out of the American Medical Association in 1939. What, exactly, was the problem?

Margaret Sanger and her associates saw only one, "There is a great danger we will fail because the Negroes think [birth control] is a plan for extermination." In 1939, Sanger advised; "We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." She recommended getting Negro religious ministers on board. W.E.B. Dubois already supported birth control for eugenics purposes, others could be convinced. The strategy paid off. Planned Parenthood even found Dr. Martin Luther King a willing recipient of the Sanger award. To this day, nearly eighty percent of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in minority neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood supporters insist that Sanger was just a product of her time, and merely used eugenics as a means to promote her real object, birth control. She was a nice lady who abhorred racism.

While her personal views on anti-Semitism are debatable, she kept Lothrop Stoddard on the board of the Birth Control League, even after he praised Hitler in 1940 for having finally solved the “Jew problem.” One of her numerous lovers was an SS officer. True, Hitler burned her books. But he burned them because they advocated pansexualism, and he was afraid Aryans might start contracepting. He agreed with her birth control philosophy concerning the unfit. She expressly advocated forced sterilization or lifetime incarceration for people she considered of sub-standard intelligence. She expressly noted that “Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans." Her views never changed.

Margaret Sanger was, to quote “Tailgunner” Joe Lieberman, “pill popping and skirt chasing” for most of her life. She told her granddaughter “as for sex, three times a day is about right” and became addicted to narcotics and alcohol in her final years, dying in a drug-induced stupor.

While Hitler certainly adopted his famous one-armed salute from American football cheerleaders, Schwarzeneggar, Feinstein, Lieberman and the Democrat party have long led cheers for Margaret Sanger and the work of the organization she founded. Sanger advocated abortion, the medical procedure the Nuremburg trials would label “a crime against humanity.” The Nazis, good students of Americans like Sanger, legalized abortion in Germany for the first time, using eugenics as the rationale. Hitler just put into practice what Sanger advocated. What’s not to admire?

The Art of Being Human

Every year, our town holds an art festival. This year we went. As art festivals go, it was fairly typical. There were lots of formless kiln-fired clay lumps, sticks arranged so that they looked like... well... sticks, and framed examples of what happens when you drop paint on a canvas from a great height. The prices approached that of my first car, now twenty years gone.

Driven out of the adults’ area by ugliness, we discovered the children’s area. Here, among the face painting, the clay play, and the soap bubble blowing, we found a children’s community mural in progress. The children always enjoy painting, so we stopped to get them paper plate “palettes” and let them daub away.

As they worked, it occurred to me that this single activity summed up all that was wrong with what the ignorant elites term “modern art”.

The term “ignorant elites” is specifically chosen, for their ignorance is of a very specific nature. They are not ignorant of art. Many, if not most, of the self-styled avant-garde who buzz like flies around art’s decaying corpse are quite knowledgeable about various periods of historical art styles, the masters of each style, even the techniques used to create them. Neither are the idolized artists always bereft of talent. Most of the exhibits we had abandoned contained at least one piece that implied the possibility of beauty, except.... except they had not the knowledge.

Ignorance is not necessarily damning. As Will Rogers once observed, everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects. The artists and their “sophisticated” followers lacked only one fact: the why. That was enough.

Like the man born blind who understands form but cannot identify color, today’s sophisticate knows the form of man, but not his color. They don’t know what he is made to do. They see man is natural, an animal like other animals. They conclude there is nothing more. Herein lies their ignorance.

Nature cares not a whit for anyone or anything. It maims and kills without remorse. According to evolutionary theory, over eighty percent of the species that have ever existed were wiped out in the pre-Cambrian explosion, long before man ever came on the scene. This is nature’s form.

But, though man has nature’s form, he is beyond it. This “beyond” is typically referred to as man’s “supernatural” aspect. Man is supernatural because he is what nature is not - he is a person. We have the power to act as persons. That is, we are capable of forming relationships nature cannot form. A person loves, preserves, cares for, other persons. Consequently, a person will even preserve and care for the things of the world, knowing that these things are necessary to the existence of other persons.

When we act supernaturally, we act as persons. We imitate the color, that is, the spirit of God. Christians generally agree that God is three Persons, but they rarely remember the three Persons of God are distinguished only by their relationships. That is, God is three Persons only because there exists within the Godhead exactly three kinds of relations: He who begets and He who is begotten, He who breathes and He who is breathed. Father breathes/begets Son, Son is begotten, Father and Son together breathe/beget Spirit, Spirit is breathed/begotten by Father and Son. One God containing but a communion of interpersonal relationships, and man in His image.

Consequently, man, unlike nature, is always attempting to build personal relationships in the world. Absurdly, we often try to do this even towards non-persons. We put sweaters on dogs, “baby” our cars, and protect threatened owls. But adults are perfected by successive iterations, successively closer steps towards the reality of perfection. As we become better at recognizing and loving persons, we become more like God.

True art is about personal relationships. It teaches children to move from crude drawings of relations between things toward successively greater perfection, more accurate expressions of relationships.

Conversely, sophisticated avant-garde art strives for chaotic crudity, it is purely natural, maiming and killing our proper understanding of ourselves. The painters on a community mural paint without regard to who has come before them, ruthlessly painting over whatever was originally laid down. The work is ephemeral. Like those lost species of the pre-Cambrian explosion, most of what is created is destroyed without ever really being seen. In that sense, the mural expressed the chaos of the natural animal, not the order of the supernatural man.

Children know this is wrong. When a child creates, that creation is meant to be permanent: put on the refrigerator, hung on the mantle. They instinctively know art reflects something that should be eternal, unchanging, true, real and most of all, beautiful. Children paint Mommy, Daddy, Brother and Sister. They know art ultimately expresses personal relationships, that true art perfects our ability to participate in divine, eternal, personal love.

Ultimately, that’s how we got our children to leave the mural. We told them they could bring the paints home, create, and hang their work on the mantle. They abandoned the mural immediately. They understood what was wrong.

Wanna Bet?

Americans. We willingly accept a level of risk in one area that we find horrific in another. Take, for instance, the risk posed by alcohol or cigarettes. Fifty years ago, alcohol and cigarettes were fairly innocuous diversions. Hollywood showed the good guys smoking and drinking throughout the course of nearly every movie. A drunk behind the wheel was high comedy. On the other hand, the industry that embraced a drink and a smoke forbad any scene where a man and a woman shared a bed.

Times change. Now, movie plot devices have flipped. Martinis and cigarettes are out. Casual sex is in. We've made progress, right?

Well, let’s see. Grab a calculator and a copy of any United States statistical abstract published in the last thirty years. Now, turn to the section on law enforcement. Write down the number of people ticketed for driving under the influence. In the year 2000, for instance, that number would be 915,900. Now, in the section on transportation, find the number of fatal accidents: 37,409: forty percent of these, or 14,963, involved alcohol. So, what percentage of drunk drivers were involved in a fatal accident? Divide the second number by the first: 1.6%. Here's the funny thing. It doesn’t matter what year you choose. In any given year, between one and two percent of drunk drivers are involved in fatal accidents. This is considered very dangerous.

Keep in mind, 1.6% is artificially high. After all, most people involved in fatal accidents are caught, while many people who drive drunk are not. But let’s say 1.6% was perfectly accurate. Now, compare the failure rate of drunk drivers with the failure rate of the best contraceptives. The pill, the patch; no matter what you look at, they all have the same user failure rate: around 2-3%.

So, consider two women: one is on the pill, and one is drunk. The contraceptor has sex, the drunk drives home. The contraceptor is twice as likely to become pregnant as the drunk is to kill someone. We laud the first woman for her “responsible” sexual habits, and lambaste the second as a positive danger to society.

Drunk drivers make up 0.5% of the driving population. They cause thirty percent of all accidents. That’s pretty bad. Happily, there are less than a million drunks on the road. There are eleven million unmarried women using contraception, eleven million women who don’t know their contraceptive device is twice as likely to leave them pregnant as a drunk driver is to leave someone dead.

You may consider this misogynistic. Why didn’t I compare men? Alright, let’s do that. Consider a man who uses a condom versus one who drives home drunk. Condoms have between a ten and thirty percent failure rate. So “safe sex” is between ten and thirty times more likely to have life and death consequences than drunk driving is.

Of course, we’re only looking at pregnancy here. We are ignoring all the STDs that the condom does not protect against, like genital warts or human papilloma virus, which is responsible for 93% of all cervical cancers. We are also ignoring those STDS which condoms provide little protection against like gonorrhea, herpes and chlamydia, an asymptomatic infection which causes female infertility. We’re ignoring the costs of the STDs, we’re ignoring the cost of treating the subsequent infertility, the abortions and the post-abortion medical effects, the cancers. We’re just looking at the obvious life and death issues.

But now we’re heterosexist. So, let’s get gay. According to the thirty-one homosexual groups that filed a “friend of the court” brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Lawrence v. Texas case (2003) that legalized sodomy, “[t]he most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS).” The NHSLS survey shows that 0.9% of men and 0.4% of women in the US have been engaged in exclusively same sex partnerships since they turned 18. That is, less than 1.4 million people in the US are homosexual, or about 0.5% of the population (there’s a coincidence). Let’s ignore the 10% figure the homosexual lobby pushes, and just stick with the actual results of the survey the homosexuals themselves favorably quote in their own legal document: 0.5%.

According to the Census Bureau, this 0.5% of the population is responsible for fifty-one percent of the new AIDS cases in 2001. The CDC says it costs over $150,000 to treat one AIDS case. That means the homosexual spread of AIDS by our liberated 0.5% is generating $6.5 million dollars in health costs every day. And that’s just AIDS. The other STDs together cost an additional $25 million a day, ignoring the costs involved in treating the resulting infertility, cancer, etc. By comparison, alcoholism creates roughly $20 million in daily direct medical costs.

We take car keys from drunks because they're dangerous.
We hand out condoms because they're safe.
Any questions?

Hot Potato, Hot Potato

Hot Potato, Hot Potato

Here's an impertinent question. What's the missing number in the latest Illinois health reports? The Illinois Department of Public Health reports 281 abortions were performed on girls 14 and under, an additional 2,902 on girls between the ages of 15 and 17, for a grand total of 3,183 abortions in 2002 on underage girls. So what's missing?

While having sex with a girl between the ages of 13 and 17 is criminal sexual assault or aggravated criminal sexual assault, depending on the age of the rapist, there's a convenient loophole in the collection of statistics. Since the statute covers several kinds of sexual offense, the state of Illinois does not maintain data on the age of sexual assault victims. That is, we know 6,037 criminal sexual assaults were reported in 2002. We don't know how many of those assaults were committed against girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

Why don't we? After all, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, teens "who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely to have experienced coercive sex: seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age 14 and 60 percent of those who had sex before age 15 report having had a forced sexual experience" (Guttmacher Institute, Sex and America's Teenagers, New York, 1994). Two-thirds of teen mothers were victims of molestation, rape, or attempted rape prior to their first pregnancy (Family Planning Perspectives, Jan./Feb. 1992).

Abortion clinic personnel are required by law to report cases of child abuse. So, one would assume the people who sell contraceptives to kids and scrape babies out of under-age wombs would certainly report abuse. That makes the following transcript of a taped conversation with personnel at the local Peoria Planned Parenthood all the more interesting (transcripts and MP3 recordings can be found here).

CLINIC: Planned Parenthood. This is Leandra.
CALLER: Hi. Yeah. I was wondering if you guys do abortions there.
CLINIC: No, we don't. I can give you a number that do.
CALLER: Okay.
CLINIC: 691-9073.
CALLER: Okay. Well, could I ask you a quick question?
CLINIC: Um-hmm.
CALLER: My friend told me that since I'll be 14 in March that you guys have to tell my parents. But my boyfriend's 22. Could he take care of that, and we don't have to tell my parents? Because I don't know what would happen if they found out.
CLINIC: Oh. We don't say anything. Everything here is confidential. I mean, as far as outside, that's on you. But we keep everything here confidential.
CALLER: Okay. Well, do you guys have to tell anybody about my boyfriend or anything?
CLINIC: Uh?uh. We don't tell anybody nothing here. I mean, just you. Unless you give us permission, we tell no one nothing. It does put us in a little awkward position because we have been asked to report ... actually we're not ... it's something we're kind of on the borderline whether we're suppose to do anything about or not. Because there are legislators and others there concerned, not that we necessarily think it's our job to decide that. But if we have somebody under 17 coming in with somebody over 18, then there is come concern.
CALLER: Well, are you going to tell anybody?
CLINIC: No. But it would help us to decide ... just don't talk about his age when you come in. I guess I would say that.
CALLER: Okay.
CLINIC: And if you could come in by yourself, it might be best.
CALLER: Oh. So it would be better if he wasn't here?
CLINIC: Usually I would say it's better if he is there. Maybe I can put a note to the counselor you're going to see and tell her, don't ask. Don't ask, don't tell I guess is sort of unfortunately where we have to be about this.

The caller in this instance, was part of a nation-wide sting operation on abortion clinic providers. She was only pretending to be 13. Yet, when a real teenage girl gets pregnant, the father will be over 20 years old in 90% of the cases, one-third will be over 25. The younger the mother, the more likely that the father was three or more years older. 40% of all 15-year old girls who carried to term were impregnated by a man over 20 years old.

Life Dynamics, the Texas organization which called Peoria, along with over 800 other Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics throughout the nation, points out that the overwhelming majority of the clinics contacted either indicated they would not report the situation or instructed the caller in how to avoid being detected. More than 90% of the clinics violated the law, thus helping child predators continue sexually violating children. Study the numbers. If all underage abortions were reported, and if every criminal sexual assault were of an underage teen, it still means Planned Parenthood sold contraceptives to less than three thousand underage kids. If that's true, what happens to their claim that their contraceptive programs reduce teen pregnancy? The numbers don't add up.

Planned Parenthood's research indicates underage girls are being sexually molested by older men. Government statistics and their own employees tell us their clinics don't report this child molestation, despite the law's requirements. The media is silent. Discuss.

Educating the System

Educating the System

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s a French saying, and the French understand how the game is played.

The state of Illinois, like many states, is having a budget crisis. Allegedly, one great way of cutting back on expenses is to de-certify all private schools for athletic competition. This move will save the superintendent about $300,000 a year. Enough to pay ten teachers. Of course, it will also make hundreds of non-public schools in Illinois ineligible for many state and federal grants, hobble tens of thousands of non-public school student admissions to some colleges and universities, and deny the possibility of athletically based scholarships to these same students. But, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, eh?

Though the state now says non-public schools don't need their curricula examined, at least one regional superintendent in Illinois disagrees. Sort of. Despite the fact that the US Supreme Court recognizes home schooling as a perfectly legal and reasonable method of assuring your children’s education, this state official is willing to spend his department’s funds to thoroughly investigate the various curricula used by home schooling families throughout his region. He’s afraid student education at home might be worse than their education in the public school system. His deep concern touches the hearts of dozens of families, and has already brought many to tears.

For Catholics, none of this is surprising. The American public school system was specifically designed to enable this kind of abuse. Indeed, that’s why the Catholic parochial school system was created: Catholic bishops recognized the dangers inherent in the public schools and developed their own alternative. The state has never been very happy about that development, neither in this country nor elsewhere.

Back in the mid-1800’s, when the state began requiring schooling for all children, the proponents of the move had two motives. First, it was recognized that education improved productivity and general citizenship. Second, the huge wave of Catholic immigrants terrified most of Protestant America. The extremely influential Justice Hugo Black summed it up best when he referred to Catholics as "powerful sectarian religious propagandists" who were "looking toward complete domination and supremacy of their particular brand of religion." Compulsory public education in a Protestant environment was explicitly held up as an important tool towards stopping the infernal papists from taking over the country. Catholics had to be made to conform religiously.

As a result, only certain “acceptable” elementary schools were made eligible for public funding, and, lo! the only schools that qualified for funds were Protestant! Catholics yawned in amazement, and kept right on building their own schools. But even this was attacked. In 1889, Wisconsin made it illegal to send a child to an out-of-district (read parochial) school. By 1922, Oregon made it illegal to send a child to anything but a public school. The Ku Klux Klan lobbied in favor of such laws. So did the Republicans, for, by now, public school was good for business.

In the early 1900’s, public school had been partially re-engineered, adopting the Prussian system of schooling the lower classes. The Prussian system defined for the child what was to be learned, what was to be thought about, how long to think about it and when a child was to think of something else. Disciplines that were formerly an integrated whole were now broken up into artificial “subjects” to prevent the student from seeing the whole. Bells were used, not to enhance concentration on a subject, but to enhance obedience to bells. Industrial America needed workers who embraced repetition, responded to bells, and lived only for working the process and consuming the product. It was a new kind of conformity.

Jewish and Catholic immigrant families understood that this system of schooling was an offense against human dignity. Diane Ravitch’s book, The Great School Wars, documents the three week long riot that ensued after Andrew Carnegie tried to implement the Prussian system in New York. Though the Republican party had always been the anti-slavery party and a stronghold of immigrant support, the successful implementation of this method of schooling was one component which helped to destroy that support. The Prussian method, which viewed man as a machine to be harnessed, eventually destroyed the religious content of education, replacing it with the secular humanist bent that now pervades the system.

Today, teachers’ unions (ironically, “teacher certification” was also a Carnegie idea) have made the maintenance of the existing school system the province of the Democrats. Republicans, who made union-busting a national sport, have reversed their position and now support the underdogs: voucher-based education and the homeschooler. Now, not just Catholics, but all Christians are opting out of schools that push the new religion, secular humanism. And the system fights back, just as it did a century ago, attempting to use the courts and the laws to impose its worldview on families who don’t want it.

Alexis de Toqueville, at the beginning of the 1800’s, found America a most amazing country. Every farmer could read, and did so, balancing a book on the plow. It was not unusual to find the butcher conversant in Latin or Greek, the baker having an opinion on Plato or Descartes.

It is too bad the French are not always right. Times change. De Toqueville’s America is one thing that has truly changed, and is not likely to return. If the system has its way, that is.

In the Name of Love

In the Name of Love

"Man indicted for exposing lover to HIV." The CNN headline would be laughable if it weren't deadly. Love is a word often used, but rarely defined. This causes no end of confusion in discussions about love. As the headline indicates, this confusion is most clearly present in the media equation of homosexuals and love.

The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), for instance, promotes the sexual expression of love between men and little boys. For these gay men, outlawing such love is age-ist prejudice. These men point out that NAMBLA and other pro-pedophile organizations were long time members in good standing with the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA). Oddly enough, the ILGA suddenly reversed its position on man-boy love only when the United Nations stripped the ILGA of its consultative status because its member groups promoted pedophilia. Harry Hay, the founder and leader of the modern gay rights movement, along with many other prominent gay and lesbian activists, publicly demonstrated against the ILGA for its hypocrisy in ousting NAMBLA. The United Nations trusts the integrity of this flagship gay/lesbian organization to such a great extent that it has continued to refuse the ILGA consultative status to this day. Who was right in this debate? It all hinges on what love means.

What is love? Love is not an emotion. Love is a decision. It is a choice. Love is the freely made decision to serve another person or person(s) by giving everything I am to her for the whole of my life. The point of love is to bring the person being loved to perfection. I don't bring her to the perfection I think she should have, rather, I assist her in reaching the standard of absolute perfection she was brought into existence to achieve. In order for me to fully assist her in reaching her goal, I must give everything I am to her. Thus, love is the gift of myself to the person I love. This definition has interesting consequences.

It means that if I marry for love, I am marrying in order to serve someone else. If I marry for love, it does not matter how much I get out of the marriage or whether I grow in the relationship - that's not relevant. Rather, in a love-based marriage my only standard of success is, "How well have I served my spouse? Have I given her everything she needs to grow and mature as a human person?" The feeling of love may not be logical, but the decision to love, to serve, is.

This is important. The emotional surge of love and the logical life of love are distinct. The decision to love may be based on something along the lines of, "I like this feeling, this person I am gazing upon engenders this feeling in me, so I want to stay with this person and keep this feeling." That's a logical decision, but it is based on evidence that is neither logical nor illogical - that is, it is a logical decision based on an emotion, a fact. This is a perfectly reasonable basis for reaching a decision.

However, the life of love endures not on the basis of the feeling, but on the basis of the decision. Once I make the decision to stay, I have to do what is necessary to keep her happy. That means I have to take care of her, serve her. And, as I live year in and year out serving her, I find that the emotion comes and goes, but the decision to serve her is what keeps me there no matter what I feel like on a specific day. So love is expressed in service, in giving myself and my talents entirely to her every day.

For this reason, sex, while it can be a very important part of love, is not a necessary part of love, of service, to the perfection of the person being loved. Indeed, it can be something that gets in the way of love. If sex is likely to harm the person, then it is not an expression of love. That's why spouses have sex with each other, but not their children. As any doctor knows, gay sex is highly unhealthy. It is not an expression of love. Nothing is wrong with gays loving each other. Everything is wrong with gays having sex with each other. Despite the best medical care in the world, gays without AIDS in the US have the life expectancy of someone born in 1871, before antibiotics and sterile surgery were developed. Gays with AIDS are only slightly worse off. Gay sex is not love. It is mutual suicide.

But today, even educated people confuse sex with love. The American Psychological Association said homosexuality was fine thirty years ago. Today, it floats trial balloons for legalizing pedophilia. Its official newsletter, The Psychological Bulletin, has already published articles arguing that pedophilia should no longer be considered a mental disorder. The APA has long argued that an eleven-year old can give informed consent for an abortion (though, after the uproar over it’s pro-pedophilia articles, it now insists that eleven-year olds cannot give informed consent to have sex). Dr. Jocelyn Elders, President Clinton's surgeon general, wrote a glowing forward to Judith Levine’s pro-pedophilia book “Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex", published by the University of Minnesota press.

Gay love, child love if you’re born that way, then society just has to accept it, right? Even if the APA stands on sexual expression were not illogical and contradictory, the group goes beyond its mandate as a scientific organization when it provides value judgements on human actions. Science is in the business of description. It can describe an action and tell us what the physical consequences of that action are. It cannot tell us whether either the action or the consequences are good or bad. That is a socio-cultural judgement, not a scientific judgement. If the APA wants to tell us that homosexuality or pedophilia are good things, then it is acting as a religion, not as a science. Sadly, love is not the only thing the APA does not understand.

It’s a Religious War

It’s a Religious War

Miguel Estrada, the Hispanic Catholic judge whose nomination was put on hold seven times, is the latest victim of the latest religious war. He was left hanging for over two years, his nomination put on hold seven times, simply because he wouldn’t deny his faith. He recently withdrew his nomination in order to get on with his life.

Attorney General William Pryor made similar refusal to deny his faith and has suffered a similar filibuster. Thomas Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas, and others have also been subject to it. Apparently, the Democrats believe only Christians who do not hold serious Christian beliefs can hold office. One might call it the “Christians Resembling Avowed Pagans” (CRAP) campaign.

Reports on this issue always return to the phrase, “separation between church and state.” Ignore the fact that this phrase appears in neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence. Ignore the fact that several states, including Jefferson’s Virginia, had religious tests for office holders for years after the Constitution was ratified. Where did this idea of church-state separation come from? Prior to The American Constitutional Convention of 1787, every country in the world, every culture known to man, required its office holders to at least affirm the existence of a Supreme Being (seven U.S. states still have this requirement). Even John Locke, probably the biggest influence on Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, denied atheists (and Catholics) the right to hold office.

This opposition to faith in the public square is founded in part on the Reformation and its wars of religion. Even Islam did its part. It laid siege to Vienna, with armies composed in part of enslaved Christians, not once but twice in one hundred and sixty years. Indeed, the 1683 siege was so effective that, if it were not for Catholic Poland and her soldiers, most of Europe would now speak Arabic and live under sharia. These wars resulted in tens of thousands injured and killed, hundreds of villages burned to the ground, general famine in large areas of western Europe. It wasn’t pleasant.

People saw religion as the cause of the problem. Remove religion from the public sphere, and war would leave with it. Modern historians recognize there is some truth to this, but not much. When there is no formal science of economics or biology, when there is no enormous difference between the living standards of one country and another, what can motivate people to war? Whatever the king's real motivation might be, the public reasons have to resonate with the culture. When the culture is steeped in religion, the public reasons given for war will likewise tend to be steeped in religion. A ruler can’t appeal to the fall in gross national product when no one, including him, knows what that is.

The French Revolution became the first attempt to throw religion out of the public square. It enthroned a prostitute as a “goddess”, followed that with a public debauch and guillotines that rose and fell from sunrise to sunset for weeks on end. It also resulted in Napolean and the Napoleanic Wars, the first totalitarian and the first European experience of total war.

The Constitutional Convention tried a similar tactic. We had only slightly better luck. Within thirty years, we fought the War of 1812 and began the long series of Indian and other wars that would keep our army, navy, and now air force, busy right up to the present day.

Today, we are told a non-religious society is more peaceful. It isn’t. It’s bloodier. In Christian society, wars were governed by certain rules: no fighting on Sundays or holy days. No fighting on fast days. No fighting during Advent or Lent. War still wasn’t a holiday, but it did not involve the whole of society. Often, the inhabitants of two countries at war were only barely aware of the fact. The two groups of citizens often continued visiting each other as if nothing were wrong. Nothing was.

Science is not so indifferent. The Franco-Prussian war (1871) was fought to validate Darwinian theory that only the strongest races survive. Both the French and the Germans thought of their nations as “races”. That war led directly to World War I. Anglo-American legislation and eugenics theory gave Hitler the law and the science to support his ideas on race, World War I gave him the reason. Now the “superior” Germans fought the “inferior” Slavs and Jews, the “superior” white Americans fought the “inferior” yellow Japanese horde. With World War II, the world-wide race war, we discovered that science provides not only the rationale to fight a war, but the means to exponentially increase the violence. In terms of body bags, one hundred years of scientific wars, particularly those based on American eugenics and Marxist economics, have killed many times more people than all the religious wars combined ever have.

Maybe it’s time we divorced economics and biology from public life, and put religion back in.

I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Spiritual

I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Spiritual

“It's not a religious film, it's a philosophical film. It uses themes and elements from various religions and spiritual beliefs. Stop simplifying things...”

“Look, I’m not religious, I just have my own spirituality.”

How many times have we heard, or perhaps even made, remarks like this? Better yet, what in blazes do these remarks mean? It seems that people throw around words like “philosophical”, “religious”, and “spiritual” without having more than a vague idea of what the words signify. As long as we are vague on the definition of the words we use, we cannot say precisely what we mean. So, in order to see how these terms fit together, we have to know their precise meanings.

Consider the first difficult word in the sentences above: religion. “Religion” comes from two Latin words “re” and “ligare”. That is, religion means “to bind back together.” But what are we binding back together? What got torn apart that needs binding? The next difficult word tells us.

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek words “philos”, or love, and “sophia”, or wisdom. Thus, philosophy means “love of wisdom". A philosopher is someone who pursues wisdom for its own sake, for the love of wisdom. “Fine, fine,” I hear you say, “but what is wisdom? “

“Wisdom”, comes from the Old English roots “wis” and “dom”. This is key to everything, actually, because “wis” is Anglo-Saxon for “the way or mode of doing a thing” and “dom” means "judgement."

If a king-dom is an area subject to the king’s judgement, then wis-dom is anything subject to the judgement of how a thing is to be done. So, let’s substitute this meaning back into the previous paragraphs. Philosophy is loving the judgement of how to do a thing. A philosopher is someone who pursues judgement on how a thing is to be done. Something is philosophical when it tells us how to judge the way of doing a thing.

Now we can see how religion relates to philosophy. If we do not know how to judge the way in which a thing is to be done, then we are in un-wisdom. We need something that will bind us back together with the right judgement of how a thing is done. Religion heals broken philosophies.

That explains two of the terms above, but what of the third: spirituality? “Spirit” comes from the Latin “spiritus”, which itself comes from “spirare”, that is, “to breath.” Spiritus means “breath, courage, vigor, life itself.” Life breathes. Spirituality is the very breath and vigor of life.

So, let’s look at the first two sentences again and decode them. When someone says that a movie, book, or article is philosophical, but not religious, they are saying that the way of living described in that movie, book or article is unbroken, perfect, not in need of healing. Similarly, when they say they have their own spirituality, that they are not religious, they are saying they have their own vigourous, unbroken life, a life that is not in need of healing.

Pardon me if I doubt that.

Truly philosophical minds always truly seek to attain right judgement about how to live life. In that sense, we are all truly philosophical. We want to know how to live our lives. We seek wisdom. We seek right judgement. There is only one source of right judgement, one wis-dom belonging to one king’s judgement, or one king-dom. That is where theology comes in.

“Theology” comes from the Greek words “theo”, or “God”, and “logos”, or “word”. Thus, theology simply means “talking about God”. This is made easier if we use God’s own words during the discussion. Scripture is pure theology, men talking about God using God’s words. The Scripture writers are the best theologians. Everyone else is an also-ran.

So, discussions about wis-dom, philosophy, necessarily lead to discussions about God, theology. Why is that? Consider: any contemplation of the world necessarily leads to the conclusion that the world is built in a certain way. The rules of the world must be followed if we don’t want anything to break.

Whoops. Too late.

Something is already broken. As the four-year old standing near the pool of water and the shattered vase says, “It was like that when I got here.” And you know what? For us, the world really was.

So, now we need to bind it back together. Philosophy naturally leads to religion, because there is no pursuit of right judgement that does not lead us to realize that we’ve lost quite a lot, though not all, of our right judgement. Our lives are broken. They have to be put back together. It is only after our lives are healed that we can fully live. Put another way, it is only through religion that we can come to spirituality, the full vigor and breath of life.

Philosophy (the pursuit of wis-dom) leads to theology (discussion of God).
Theology leads to religion (binding that which is broken).
Religion leads to wisdom (right judgement).
Wisdom is the only real spirituality (the breath of life).

Anyone who tells you different is selling something.
Don’t bite.

What's Natural About Marriage?

What's Natural About Marriage?

Laura Kipnis’ latest book, Against Love: A Polemic, makes an old case in a new way. Marriage, specifically monogamous marriage, is alleged to be… well… unnatural, a violation of human nature. That’s the old part. The new part? Monogamous marriage is just a capitalist trick designed to make people slaves.

Marriage – that is, any relationship that demands emotional and sexual fidelity – is bad because fidelity is bad. Fidelity is bad because it isn’t easy to live. Since fidelity isn’t easy, it must necessarily violate human nature. The evidence is near at hand: look at how many people cheat on their spouses! The logic is clear. If homosexuality, which comprises only three percent of the population, is normal, then adultery is certainly normal. Natural is normal. Unnatural is bad. Marriage is unnatural. Therefore…

But, a problem arises. Marriage is demonstrably good, both for spouses and children. Married people are, on average, happier than single people, in better health, and have better sex. Amazingly, recent studies have shown that even relatively bad marriages are better for children than the most amicable divorce. How can an “unnatural” institution be good for us?

We equate “natural” with “good” precisely because we don’t have much contact with nature. As we sit in our office cubicles, or slave away over various machines, we dream of a rustic cabin in the wilderness, by a pleasant stream or a sparkling lake. We dream about it because we haven’t lived it. The people who lived it weren’t generally that fond of it. They wrote of nature “red in tooth and claw” and a natural life “nasty, brutish and short”. Nature has insects, storms, floods, plagues. As one mariner observed about the sea, “She’s a beautiful lady, but she’ll kill you in a minute and no regrets.” Nature is a beauty, but dreadful.

Why dreadful? Because she is impersonal. Stephen Crane, also a mariner, expressed it most clearly, “A man said to the universe:/ ‘Sir I exist!’/ ‘However,’ replied the universe, ‘The fact has not created in me/ A sense of obligation." Nature possesses no intellect, no will. Nature does not think, nor choose. It is ungoverned. It just does.

The alert reader might argue that nature most certainly is governed. It is governed by the laws of nature: gravity, the speed of light, etc. True. But the natural laws that govern physical events are not passed by a collection of apes, dolphins and slugs, meeting in assembly. These natural laws simply express nature itself – together, these laws constitute what nature is. And this is precisely the problem.

We hold contradictory views of ourselves. When we want to indulge a particular lust, we argue, “But of course it’s alright to do this. Animals do it all the time, and we are nothing but animals!” But, we know our tools and ourselves effect the world far out of proportion to a colony of termites or hive of bees. Something about us is unnatural.

We simultaneously hold ourselves to be nothing but animals, and something far different than animals. But why? After all, virtually everything we are, we use or we do is natural. Atoms are the building blocks of nature, and – apart from a few very short-lived laboratory elements – everything is made of this natural stuff. We didn’t invent any of it. We just move the stuff around, like a beaver moves wood around to make a dam. A Corvette is just as natural as a coral reef.

But we can’t shake the knowledge: we are unnatural animals. This contradiction explains everything. You see, the relationships between persons are governed by laws which slugs do not know. Even when men meet in assembly to pass laws, our human laws must reflect the immutable natural laws governing personal relationships, or the laws will crush us as surely as the laws of physics crush a snail against a stone. Physics, on the other hand, knows nothing of fairness. Nature’s laws are nature’s lusts. The only laws it obeys are its own. In that sense, nature embodies most American advertising slogans. Because nature obeys only itself, it is quintessentially deadly, maiming and killing without remorse. It is impersonal precisely because it does not, it cannot, relate to us as persons do.

We, who care for and about each other, cannot abide this natural mindlessness that cares not a jot for anyone or anything. It is a well-known, though little-noted fact, that over ninety percent of all species were wiped out several million years ago. When we wipe out species and habitats, we are acting in a purely natural fashion. It is our attempts at “nature conservation” that are distinctly unnatural. When we ignore the effects of our actions on persons, we operate at an animal level, that is, a natural physical level. Serial adulterers, rapists or killers are acting in a purely natural fashion. Those who try to stop them are not.

Insofar as anything acts without regard to persons, it is acting as nature acts. Capitalism, socialism, fascism – all are capable of encouraging people to act as animals, to act naturally. Laura Kipnis rejects the idea that marriage is about the other person, that it is about helping your spouse and children become better people. She rejects the fact that marriage is about service. She mistakenly thinks marriage is all about self-actualization. Since marriage clearly collapses, crushing spouses when treated this way, she concludes that marriage is the error and adultery must be the solution.

So, naturally, she wrote a book about it.