But It Ain't Racism

A friend of mine told me the story of his illegal immigration. It was quite an eye-opener.

When he was young, his family lived in a country crushed by poverty and crime, government corruption and greed. Bribes to government officials were frequent and necessary because the country was a conduit for drug trafficking, which was rampant.

Nearly all of the citizens were dirt-poor, many keeping subsistence-level gardens in order to assure themselves of enough food during the year. Because everyone was poor, because no one had anything, everyone shared. It was the only way to survive.

His mother slowly scrimped and saved enough over the years to pay what we now call a "coyote" to smuggler herself and her son out. She recognized that neither she nor her eight-year old boy could survive a walk across the border - another way had to be found. So, she negotiated with a man whose company regularly ran a van filled with workers back and forth across the border checkpoint. Because the van made the transit every day, border guards were used to it, they paid less attention to it than to the general population.

Each seat in the van could be opened to store tools underneath the cushions. The cavities were also large enough to store people, if the hidden person was willing to put up with the contortions necessary to fit inside.

On the appointed day, he and his mother each climbed into their box, the seat cushions were adjusted and a worker took his place on the seat for the ride across the border.

They made it, but, as it turned out, their success was simply the first trial. The van didn't travel very far past the border checkpoint. Once they were safely across, they needed to get away from the area as quickly as possible. They had tickets for the train and began to walk towards the train station in order to get to where relatives would take them in.

On their way to the station, they were stopped by the police. The police officer noticed that they appeared to be lost, discovered they were not legally in the country, pointed them back to the border, ordered them to return to their own country and walked away. The mother and her boy walked in the direction the officer pointed out until he was out of sight, then turned and quickly headed back towards the train station.

This happened six times.

Finally, they made it onto the train, to their relatives and to freedom. The young man joined the air force, became a jet pilot and spent years ready to defend the country against attack. But it would be years longer before he finally became an American.

As Horst told me the story of his escape from East Germany, I thought it incredibly ironic. The same conservatives who used to champion every escape from the oppression, fear and poverty of communist governments now vilify those who wish to escape similar oppression, fear and poverty in Mexico. The same liberals who used to decry the way these communist immigrants were lauded in the West now themselves laud the migrant.

Despite the fact that these illegal migrants (from East Germany's point of view) were often deliberately infiltrated with spies and criminals intent on destroying the West, despite the fact that East Germany deliberately trafficked drugs across the border, despite the fact that the communist East bent every power at its disposal to destroy the capitalist civilization its citizens invaded, West Germany welcomed the immigrants and the West applauded her for it.

What a difference a few decades makes.

In Praise of Religious War

War, as has often been noted, is hell. But what if you got to take weekends off? The Catholic Church long insisted on the necessity of exactly this kind of holiday. Between 989 AD and roughly the mid 1200’s, war could only be waged between sunrise Monday and sunset Wednesday. Likewise, no one could do violence nor confiscate anyone’s goods during the four weeks of Advent and the octave of the Epiphany, or during Lent and the octave of Easter, or during the two weeks prior to or the week following upon Pentecost. Anyone who violated these days of peace was exiled for thirty years and excommunicate. Such were the rules imposed by the Peace of God and its close relative, the Truce of God.

Now, keep in mind that peasants could not be expected to take to the field of armed service when they were needed in the field to sow and reap the harvest. In a subsistence level economy, part of the spring and fall were already off-limits to warfare if only because lack of attention to the fields would mean starvation for the whole land within a year. So, when the Truce of God and the Peace of God are taken together with the natural disinclination to wage war during the sowing and harvest seasons, we see a most remarkable result: only 80 days of each year were left for fighting. Can anyone imagine Alexandar the Great succeeding under such terms? Even the famous Jewish reverence for the Sabbath did not restrict warfare to this degree.

Contrast this distaste for war and carnage with Martin Luther’s opinions about the usefulness of war, especially war against the peasant: “whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man. Just as one must slay a mad dog, so, if you do not fight the rebels, they will fight you, and the whole country with you… For we are come upon such strange times that a prince may more easily win heaven by the shedding of blood than others by prayers.”

Luther merely mimicked the Muslims in his fondness for violence. Muslims, of course, have never had any holy day prohibitions on warfare. Nor, for that matter have the leaders of our own lovely and civilized scientific culture. Just for comparison’s sake, here are some numbers to compare:

Wars of science (begun or waged to support specific biological, political, economic, etc., principles)

• World War II – 72 million, including 25 million military deaths.
• World War I – 40 million total, including 9.7 million military deaths.
• Franco-Prussian war – 750,000, including 250,000 military deaths.
• Napoleanic wars – Estimated 6 million dead.
• French Revolution – 40,000 in the Revolution; probably 500,000 killed in the Vendee.
• American Revolution – estimated between 50,000 and 100,000 dead total.
• Seven Years’ war – estimated 1.3 million dead, including 700,000 military deaths

Religious Wars

• Crusades – Total deaths from 1096 to 1270 are estimated at about 1.5 million.
• Germany’s Peasants’ War – 100,000 dead. 
• Hungary’s Peasants’ War – 70,000 dead. 
• Thirty Years’ War – 7.5 million 
• War on Terror – about 70,000 military deaths to date.

Religious wars tend to be low-violence affairs. Our current War on Terror, for instance, sees a handful of people killed every few weeks – not even comparable to traffic deaths, in most cases. Even the deaths resulting from the destruction of the World Trade Center barely matched the number of abortions committed on September 11.

If we are going to have a war, let it be a religious war.

It tends to be a lot less nasty.

For Your Listening Pleasure

I have reduced the number of essays I write each week for several reasons, most revolving around my new position as director of adult formation for a parish in Texas.

However, if you would like a weekly dose of Catholic doctrine from me, you now have two new options:

You can click over to www.grnonline.com
I am co-hosting a radio show each Friday between noon and one pm, CST.

Or you can click over to www.thegodpod.com and listen to the RCIA talks I do each week.

No registration is required for either listening session, and the latter can be downloaded for your iPod.

CNN: God’s Gift to Religion

Thank God CNN understands religion better than any of its ignorant adherents. We need CNN’s unparalleled interpretive skill to understand complex Jewish, Muslim and Christian issues. For instance, without CNN, we would never know:

“…that during the last 30 years, each faith has exploded into a powerful political force, comprised of followers – “God’s warriors” – who share a deep dissatisfaction with modern society, and a fierce determination to place God and religiojn back into daily life and to the seats of power. Their political and cultural struggles to save the world from what they view as secular materialism, greed and sexual corruption have caused (sic) anger, division and fear.

You see? It isn’t secular humanism that causes problems. How could it be? Secular humanism has only been around since the Enlightenment, has only really gained traction in public culture with the growth of industrialization in the late 1800’s, and only had public advocates in the American political sphere in the latter half of the 20^th century, that is, within the last thirty to fifty years.

No, the problem isn’t secular humanism, rather, it’s the explosion of faith into a powerful political force in the last 30 years that causes “anger, division and fear.” As every CNN viewer knows, faith in politics was never a powerful political force prior to 1970.

“Wherever I go,” CNN’s Christiana Amanpour says with wide-eyed amazement, “what the believers do all have in common is that they want to bring the politics of faith into the very center of public life - we are seeing this now on almost every continent."

Not on every continent, thank God, but almost every one. Who would have thunk it? Mrs. Amanpour, herself a Muslim, is apparently shocked, shocked to discover that some people actually expect religion to inform politics.

Her breathless revelation, indeed, the entire CNN special on religion is remarkable both in what it considers important and what it leaves out.

Take a look, for instance, at the timeline CNN provides on the documentary website. Beginning somewhat arbitrarily with WW I, it conflates international events like the fall of the Ottoman Empire, an event that changed several national boundaries, with purely local events, like the Scopes trial in Tennessee, an event that didn’t change much of anything.

Skipping entirely over WW II (the secular humanist's war of scientific economic theory and racism that created more body bags than all pre-20^th century wars combined), skipping over the atheist-inspired conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the timeline suddenly picks up twenty years later so as to claim that the 1960’s was the hinge decade of the 20^th century. “By the 1960’s, secularism was beginning to be in trouble,” says Karen Armstrong, "There's a certain feeling of bankruptcy."

Bankruptcy? But why? Every European and trans-Atlantic war since (and including) the French Revolution has been based in secular humanist principles. Together, they have generated more famine, rapine, torture and slaughter than the rest of human history combined. What could possibly be the problem?

Furthermore, given the enormous strides made by secularism between 1960 and 2007, the ability of politicians to actually embrace the dubiously titled "ethos" it promotes and still get elected, Armstrong's statement is curious, to say the least. Who is Karen Armstrong that she would reach such a conclusion? Oddly enough, the CNN website fails to tell us.

But it isn't difficult to find out. Armstrong’s qualifications to comment on religion in the 20^th century consists in the fact that she is an ex-Catholic ex-nun whose doctoral thesis in English was rejected by Oxford University. She herself claims to see no real difference between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, a position held only by Muslims. It is a pity that Christiana, herself a Muslim, didn't find a news story in that all by itself.

However, Armstrong's background might explain why she finds Roe v. Wade to have been “a rallying cry for Christian fundamentalists in the United States.” The ex-Catholic ex-nun is certainly a good enough scholar to know the 1970's opposition to abortion in the United States was originally led by, and unique to, the National Council of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). Most other Christian denominations didn't entertain the pro-life position until the late 70's and early 80's at best.

Thus, Armstrong is unique in referring to the Catholic bishops of the NCCB (now USCCB) as "fundamentalists", although given their notorious politically Democrat leanings, it is difficult to entirely disagree.

But, we are picking on a single one of CNN’s large list of “featured individuals.” Isn’t that unfair? Let’s find out. CNN provides a complete list of the “featured individuals” who will appear in its 6-hour opus. A quick perusal of the list is instructive.

The segment on Judaism features 28 individuals. Of these, at least five were either soldiers or directly involved in bombings, while several more actively funded military activity.

The segment on Islam features 34 people. At least seven are related to suicide bombers or were themselves soldiers, not to mention several more who directly support militant Islam.

The segment on Christianity lists only 14 people, one of whom, Jimmy Carter, is a repeat from the Jewish list. Of those fourteen, none have military ties. One pastor is creating an “army of Patriots Pastors”, men who urge their congregations to vote for change. Another is a couple who homeschools their five children. In the promotional video, this is represented as "frightening."

If the timeline and list of commentators is instructive, the map of “flashpoints” is equally so. For instance, in the US flashpoint, the Muslim attacks on the USS Cole, the 1993 World Trade Center and September 11, which killed 3000 people, are together counted equal to Eric Rudolph, the lone anti-abortion bomber who detonated bombs in a clinic, a gay bar and the Atlanta Olympic games. Apparently, one white guy is worth several dozen Arabs.

Oddly enough, however, there seems to be no reference to the 7000 acts of violence committed by pro-abortionists against US citizens and communities. Similarly, CNN somehow fails to mention the thousands of Christian pastors who denounced Rudolph, nor does its on-line material make any references to the reactions of Muslim muftis and imams to the multiple world-wide Muslim suicide bombings.

CNN’s silence in regards to Judaism is equally puzzling. The documentary claims militant Judaism draws inspiration from the Book of Ezekiel, "and saw Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 as the fulfillment of prophecy: they believe that when Jews return to their Biblical homeland and live according to the Torah, the Messiah can come." For some reason, CNN fails to point out that many orthodox Jews find the establishment of the state of Israel as counter-prophetic. These followers of Judaism see Israel as an abomination precisely because it was established by secular Zionists who have no respect for Mosaic law or authentic Jewish faith.

“There are millions of people around the world who feel that their faith is being ignored – pushed aside – and they are certain they know how to make the world right,” Amanpour says. “We cannot and should not ignore them. And, with this report, we’ve tried to explain them.” Apparently, billions of believers throughout the world need a secular humanist to explain their own monotheism to them and to the world at large. Thank God Christiana Amanpour and CNN are here to help us. We all look forward to the follow-up special, "Godless Warriors."

Update:

Apparently CNN isn't the only group of journalists who haven't a clue. Check out this Chicago Tribune review, in which the reviewer shows a complete lack of familiarity with the Islamic teaching on the hidden imam. She's apparently unaware that this is both a major tenet of Shi'a Islam and that Iran's president holds to this view.

Not Worth Discussing

While researching an issue for a friend, I ran across this 2007 news item about the mass murder that resulted from diversity training at a Lockheed Martin facility in Meridian in 2003. For some reason, this bit of news was not widely reported by any news organization in the United States. After a desultory search on Google, it seems only to have appeared in international editions of international newspapers. How odd.

Now, while the man who undertook the mass shooting was clearly a deranged racist (a rather redundant phrase – is there any other kind of racist, besides Senator Byrd?), it is also worthwhile asking why diversity training might have driven him to load his weapons and start shooting.

A quick look at the kind of language used by “diversity” groups helps explain the reaction.

"Respect = Affirm; Include, Disrespect = Denigrate; Exclude"

"Businesses that have maintained traditional views, values, and biases will be challenged to respect and value differences rather than the similarities between their employees."
"Approximately 10% of employees are gay or lesbian"

"Diversity is about uniqueness, each of us is different, even when we share a common ethnic, religious, and cultural background. Here are some of the elements that make us diverse/unique: ...age, gender, ... Sexual orientation ...religious beliefs, ... When we value diversity, we are supporting each person's right to be who they are -- a unique individual."

Traditional view: "Diversity is a potential liability."
Diverse view: "Diversity is a unique asset."

Traditional Underlying assumption: "Change the people and preserve the mainstream culture."
Diverse underlying assumption: "Modify the culture to support the uniqueness of people."

The quotes make it clear: diversity training is divisive. It promotes homogeneity, disrespects those it speaks to and denigrates their accomplishments. It is easy to show why this is necessarily true. Indeed, one almost (almost) feels sorry for the deranged racist.

To see why, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the diversity trainers really were interested in diversity. Let us assume that every viewpoint really is to be affirmed and included. If this were true, rapists, child molesters, drug addicts, and socialists have equal moral and conversational footing with George Washington, Mother Theresa, or any other cultural icon of your choosing. The rapist is no better and no worse than Mother Theresa. David Duke is no better and no worse than the diversity trainer. Each should be affirmed in their lifestyle choice.

The man with the guns clearly didn’t get that vibe from the trainers leading his session. Instead, he appears to have felt deeply insulted, to the point of taking the diversity session as “fighting words.” Why?

People hold seriously different viewpoints on seriously important topics. If they are serious about their topics and their viewpoints, they want to discuss those things, not be told their views don’t matter. They certainly don’t want to “agree to disagree.”

In order to “agree to disagree”, we must first agree that neither my cherished values nor your cherished values are ultimately important enough to discuss. Weather, sports, or the best summer vacation spot – these merit discussion. The proper way to raise children, human sexuality, and faith, or lack thereof, in a Supreme Being – these do not. 

Diversity training necessarily assumes that the ingrained values and viewpoints which every individual uses to guide his life are not worth having an argument about.

Deranged racists are deranged, not stupid. Even a racist is smart enough to know he’s being insulted by such an attitude. Even a racist understands that the point of the diversity seminar is not to celebrate his point of view, rather it is to make sure everyone understands that only one point of view will be permitted from now on, and everyone else's point of view is not really worth discussing, not worth having an argument over. Everyone else's point of view has no real worth at all. 

The diversity value set is very narrowly focused. It doesn’t celebrate other cultures – the widow who throws herself on her dead husband’s funeral pyre, the men and women who volunteered to be human sacrifices in Mayan temple worship, even the worshipers of Kali, who strangled travelers indiscriminately, are not brought forward as lights to be imitated in their alternative lifestyles discussions. Apparently, all of the above would qualify as advocates of “traditional values.”

No, those who value diversity are quite different in the sense that they always value the same brand of diversity: (1) Heterosexuals are denigrated, (2) anyone who is not heterosexual is to be celebrated, (3) every minority is henceforth treated as part of the white man’s burden, as the famous diversity expert Rudyard Kipling so eloquently put it.

The deranged Ku Klux Klan member is deranged because he is not in contact with reality. He has never had the chance to work closely with and learn to admire an excellent man or woman whose skin is black or whose religion is Judaism or Catholicism. The diversity trainers, by the very content of their seminars, tell him excellence is not relevant.

You see, the company that “celebrates diversity” hires the black man and pats itself on the back, but it never deals with the issue that lies in this man's heart. Every morning, as that man puts on his suit and tie, he looks at himself in the mirror and asks, “Was I hired because I am good, or because I am black?” He will never get an answer. That’s not worth discussing.

UPDATE: Seems I anticipated the latest release of a university study. The largest study ever done on diversity shows that it destroys the social fabric of the organization it is introduced into. Funny how theory and fact go together.

American Freedom

In 1955, the University of Chicago Press released a remarkable book, They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer. Mayer had traveled to a small town in post-war Germany to live and befriend ten of the common citizens, every one of them a Nazi. He wanted to know what life was really like under Hitler, how the common man viewed it, whether they understood the evils inherent to the socialist system that had ruled them.

Keep in mind that in 1955, Germany was still looked on with enormous suspicion by everyone. German invasions of neighboring countries had started three of the last three major European wars (Franco-Prussian, WW I and WW II) in the last century, and there were quite a few people who believed the German people were congenitally unable to live peacefully. Indeed, prior to his death, FDR even proposed that the entire nation be sterilized.

Mayer’s conversations found something quite different. The small-town citizens in Germany were much like small-town people everywhere. They paid their taxes, went to their jobs, had their little internal quarrels and that was about it. They were Nazis because National Socialism was freedom and they were free men under its rule. Only one of the ten saw anything problematic in it at all, at any time.

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. I once had a sociology professor who spouted on and on about how dictators oppressed their subjects, forcing them to do things that the free man would never do.

He was completely wrong, of course. As history has shown time and again, the strongest man is only as strong as his arm or his vision.

Any ruler, whether democrat or despot, saint or sinner, potentate or president, rules only because a substantial number of people permit him. A ruler maintains himself in power by convincing enough people that (a) there is an insoluble problem and (b) he is the best man to address that problem. If either (a) or (b) ever fails to be convincing, then his rule ends.

When the Italians were convinced that Mussolini was no longer an asset, he became a lamp-post ornament. The Italians could have hung him anytime they wanted to; they simply weren’t convinced his exit was in their interests until they met a stronger strong-man. In this sense, the only distinction a democracy has over a dictatorship is a reduced (but not entirely eliminated) tendency to kill the ex-leader as he exits, stage left. It’s not at all clear that there is such a thing as a dictator.

Mayer points this out early on:

When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.”

I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, “What do you mean, ‘what it would lead to,’ Herr Wedekind?”

“War,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war.” [The baker saw nothing wrong with Nazism until September 1, 1939, when, he was told, Poland attacked Germany.]

The lives of my nine friends – and even the tenth, the teacher – were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now – nine of them, certainly – as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets.

****

An anti-Nazi woman jailed for listening to foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal), said, “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother’s arm and whispered, ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren’t a Jew, I think I’d be a Nazi!’ No one outside [of Germany] seems to understand how this was.”

That, Mayer discovered, is how Nazism became a mass movement:

The crash of the synagogue dome awakened the Rupprechts. They could see the glowing half dome from their house.

“Papa,” said the mother, “It’s the synagogue.”

The father said nothing.

“Of course it’s the synagogue,” said 14-year old Horst, excited, “Juda verrecke! May the Jews drop dead! May I go to the fire? They’ll all be there, Pa. Can I?”

“They won’t all be there, Horstmar. You won’t be there.”

It was a long speech for his father.

“Horst, Where did you learn to say ‘Juda verrecke’?”

Horst replied, “In the Ha-Jot, the Hitler Youth.”

“So,” said his father, “in the Ha-Jot.”

“They don’t teach it, Pa, you just hear it there. The other kids say it. They all say it.”

“Like ‘they’ll all be there,’ ” said his father.

“You just hear it, Pa, don’t you understand?”

“No.”

America is free in the sense that it is the strongest. It has the strongest economy in the world, the strongest military in the world. But, as Scripture points out, every man under the power of sin is a slave, not a free man. So, is America free?

The Nazis killed six million Jews, five million Gentiles, three million of those being Catholic. They were tried for crimes against humanity, one of which is abortion.

America has killed forty million children and thousands of mothers precisely via abortion, millions of these abortions being carried out using exactly the same techniques used by the Nazis in the camps.

Adolf Hitler attempted to carry out a Putsch in 1923 and received a five year sentence, of which he served about nine months.

The serial murderer, Jack Kevorkian, who used essentially the same gassing and poisoning techniques used by the Nazis, was acquitted of murder numerous times before he was finally convicted and sentenced to 25 years: he served eight.

Nazi doctors conducted deadly medical experiments on camp prisoners for about four years starting in 1941.

American doctors conducted deadly medical experiments on the black community for about forty years, starting in 1932 and only ending in 1972.

The Nazis began compulsory sterilization programs in the 1930s. Theirs ended in the 1940s.

America began compulsory sterilization programs in the 1900s. Ours ended in 1981. Certain segments of our population even today recommend mandatory hormonal sterilization for welfare recipients and/or illegal immigrants.

By 1935, it was illegal for a Jew to be a citizen in Germany. Hitler contemplated mass deportations of Germany's illegals to Madagascar.

In 2007, we call for the mass deportation of Hispanics who have been declared legal outlaws by the state.

We think we are free. Are we?

I am an American of German extraction. Are we - am I - more free in this country than my cousins were in Germany sixty years ago?

Well, there are no brownshirts to break down my door. I can run a business more easily here than anywhere in the world. Economically, I am very free, just like the ten men Mayer interviewed. But is money all that matters?

Aren’t we all in the American version of the Hitler youth? Euthanasia, contraception, abortion, sterilization: even when it is not explicitly taught, everyone talks about the need for these things. It's obvious that we should accept contraception, sterilization, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, and fight to deport Hispanics without proper papers.

Don't I understand?

No.

As long as we sterilize ourselves, kill our own children, euthanize the aged among us, rail against the dirty, conniving illegal, are we free? Are these things to be proud of?

In these respects, I am not proud to be an American, because I am not sure we’re free.

Ann Don't Know Nothing

For years now, I have argued that the animus against Hispanic immigrants who cross the border without first asking permission from the Border Patrol was driven more by anti-Catholicism than it was by a concern about the lack of papers.

Now, Ann Coulter has taken the wraps off the facts and demonstrated that truth in spades. America is great because it is Protestant, and if it ceases to be Protestant, it will cease to be great.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who opposed and voted against the Mexican-American war during his tenure in Congress, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican President who said America's theft of Mexican territory was the only armed action he had ever been ashamed to be involved in, and unlike Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an entire book, Civil Disobedience, while serving jail time for refusing to pay taxes to support our illegal invasion of Mexico, Ann is fine with Protestant Manifest Destiny.

The main problem with illegal immigration isn't the illegal part, it's the Catholics.

The First Time
When President Polk declared war on Mexico in 1846, he claimed that "American troops had been shot on American soil." In fact, Mexican troops had fired on American troops that had deliberately violated disputed territory between Texas and Mexico. The Mexican province of Texas itself had been forced into rebellion by illegal American Protestant immigrants, who refused to abide by Mexican law and become Catholic, as was required of all settlers. Many of the WASPs also enjoyed holding slaves, even though this was outlawed by the Mexican constitution of 1824.

As an interesting sidenote, Sam Houston, the illustrious leader of the band of invading WASPs (the American version of killer bees), was actually on the run from his family at the time, trying to avoid having to financially support his wife and children in Tennessee. In short, he was sort of an early Bill Clinton.

When Abraham Lincoln demanded to know exactly what spot of American soil had been violated, the Democrats began an illustrious tradition: they ignored the question. Democrats supported the war because it held the opportunity of bringing in more slave states.

As a result, John Quincy Adams joined Lincoln and fourteen other Whigs in voting against the American invasion of Mexico. Though they lost the vote in the House by a wide margin, the Senate only approved the war by a single vote. The results were well-known - we successfully provoked a war and got the land we wanted.

The Second Time

Unfortunately, going to war against Catholics in order to grab Catholic territory was not a trait peculiar to Lincoln's generation of WASPs. The Spanish-American war fifty years later was nothing more than American interference in the internal affairs of Catholic Spain and her colony, Cuba, in order to gain still more land.

Journalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst successfully inflamed existing Protestant opinion, that of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing and Ku Klux Klan factions, through their stridently skewed journalism, with Hearst reportedly telling his photographers, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." By the end of that war, Protestant America picked up Catholic Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

The Third Time
But assaults against Catholics didn't stop there. Although the Spanish American War ended hostilities on August 12, 1898, with a peace treaty signed on December 10, the Catholic Philippines had already declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. Despite this, America had sent 11,000 occupying troops by August of the year.

We also insisted on "buying" the Philippines from Spain for $20 million in December. Then, we proceeded to start yet another war of pacification in that new Catholic territory by February 1899.

What was the provocation this time? Well, a Filipino man crossed San Juan bridge into US-occupied Manila. Not understanding English, he ignored an order to halt as he walked across, and was summarily shot by American troops. That's what those damned foreigners get for not understanding English.

President William McKinley, who had to look on a map in order to find the Philippines, would later describe the incident to reporters by saying "the insurgents had attacked Manila." A better description of the offense might be "walking while Catholic."

This war, never formally declared, limped on violently for years. As a result of the United States' inability to pacify the region, the U.S. imposed strict quotas against Filipino immigration. Asians were already barred from US citizenship by 1870, and any American woman who married an Asian automatically lost her citizenship. By 1934, the annual immigration quote for Filipinos was fifty (50).

Catholics Need Not Apply
We make up 25% of the population, we have supplied some of the greatest scientists the world has ever seen, we have surrendered our Faith through endless political compromise, staunchly supporting the American Protestant worldview for decades. Our thanks?

Get the hell out. This is America. Catholics who insist on being Catholic aren't wanted here.

Losing Our Culture

Recently, a correspondent chastised me for being so much in favor of open borders and allowing illegal immigrants to work.

If we were to get rid of our immigration laws, the U.S. population would explode in an uncontrollable fashion. According to a recent study, as many as 1 in 6 persons around the world would leave their countries and come here. That's one billion people, many of them would have tremendous cultural differences that would make much of this nation unrecognizable. Our population is up to 300 million. Do you honestly believe we should allow our population to double or even triple in the next hundred years or so? Our quality of life would evaporate into even more gridlock and crime, not to mention the burden on social services. Your open borders would see something like one billion people in America by the next century, America would turn into a chaotic welfare state.....bleeeech.

The points are curious.
While 1 in 6 would like to come here, it's highly unlikely that such a large percentage would actually make it. But even if they did, how would this loss of culture be any different than what we have already experienced?

Consider the country of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln:

They lived in a country:

• 80% agrarian (we are now 80% urban),
• built around family farms with
• no abortion or contraception,
• no naked women in advertisements,
• no naked couples publicly copulating in theaters to the delight of audiences,
• no mass shootings (apart from shooting Indians),
  
• institutional slavery,
  
• no vote for women, slaves or men without property,
• virtually no divorce,
  
• virtually no standing army,
• the bare minimum of a navy,
  
• no separation of church and state (in the modern sense),
• government representation at a much higher per capita level than today,
  
• no all-powerful Supreme Court (SCOTUS was seen as the WEAKEST of the three branches, even decades after the ruling which ostensibly gave it supreme power),
• no Environmental Protection Agency,
• no CIA, FBI, NSA or Secret Service,
• no Social Security,
• No Medicare/Medicaid,
  
• no corporations,
• no taxes on personal income,
• no taxes on business income (there was no corporate income - see point above),
• no sales tax,
  
• no Department of Education,
• no public school system,
• virtually no private school system,
• no literacy problems (nearly 100% literacy in the colonies in all the decades prior to the Civil War).

If we take the argument at face value, this hasn't been America for quite some time.
So what's the beef?

We're worried that Hispanics may change our culture?

Without a rapid increase in population, we will not have enough people to sustain the changes we have already imposed - Social Security will collapse, despite the extra billions of dollars poured into the coffers by illegals with fake SSNs. Old people will have to be euthanized. And Muslim Europe is growing more Muslim by the minute.

So, which is the greater danger: the Hispanics or us?

Ecumenism in Action

http://www.citizenlink.org/CLNews/A000004659.cfm

In the spirit of ecumenism, which the Catholic bishops in America support so vociferously, wouldn't it be wonderful if the USCCB listened to our separated brethren and acted on their recommendations?

Paternity problems

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LegalCenter/story?id=3195632&page=1

Identical twins in a custody dispute.
It cannot be resolved.
I predicted this years ago.

See
http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=13

http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=218

http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=216

http://bridegroompress.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=92

Invading Mexico

Why are America’s elites so anti-Western? Or, to put it another way, what does a tortilla maker in rural Mexico have to do with a university professor at Harvard or a Hollywood producer? To see the connections, we have to step back a century.

At the end of the 1800’s, industrialization was changing the face of America, but industrialists had an enormous problem: how could they keep the factory floors filled with workers when most of the American workforce was agrarian?

Farmers were famous for not wanting to leave their farm. American farms were largely self-sufficient affairs – nearly everything a family needed could be grown, raised or produced on just a few dozen acres of land. True, farmers could sometimes be lured into factory work, but they were unreliable, showing up only when and for as long as they needed hard cash. As soon as family or farm responsibilities called, they would disappear. This was not good for industry.

Worse, anyone who entered America could get a piece of land to farm without too much trouble. There were essentially no immigration restrictions for the first century of America’s existence. Any immigrant who had the cash could step off the boat, walk to the nearest land office and buy whatever land he could afford. True, few immigrants were in the financial position to do this immediately, but most oriented their financial life towards the goal of eventual land ownership.

In order to own land, immigrants needed money, and factory jobs were a steady source of income. American industrialists soon discovered immigrants were an excellent source of cheap, steady labor. Because they were immigrants, they didn’t own land. Because they didn’t own land, they had no land to run back to. The only sources of refuge were their churches and their families.

But these refuges were dangerous. They represented a source of hope outside of the job, an alternate means of ordering one’s life apart from the factory job. Worse, people would go to enormous lengths to protect their families and their sanctuaries. The connection to family and church had to be broken.

Building a Better MousetrapThe European experience, both on the continent and in the European colonies scattered throughout the world, had shown the importance of schools, especially urban schools, as a means of social control. If children could be wrested from the influence of their parents, if the family and the church could thereby be broken apart, the factory worker would become more easily controlled, more focused on the only important thing: his job.

Starting in the late 1800’s, child labor laws forced young men and women out of apprenticeships and onto the streets. The passage of child labor laws was always immediately followed by mass schooling laws, requiring those now-unemployable children to be indoctrinated in the culture of mass consumption at the factory school. At the same time, immigration laws were passed, preventing immigrants from gaining easy access to land. Within twenty years, factory labor was trapped on the factory floor.

But that wasn’t all. Whereas the university stood at the margins of American cultural life in the 1800’s, it became the center of American cultural life in the 1900’s, but American culture had changed. In the early 1800’s, it focused on self-sacrifice, church and family. By the mid-1900’s, it focused on narcissism, consumerism and comfort.

How Hollywood and Academia Fit In
If the business of America was business, the business of American education was producing consumers, not entrepreneurs or pioneers. Likewise, American culture both created and fed off the consumers it produced. Hollywood became an industry, as did American education, and both made their money by producing consumers – a state of affairs at complete odds with the founding documents written by self-educated American farmers in the last quarter of the 1700’s. American elites hate the founding documents because the founding documents keep them from doing their jobs.

As the culture industrialized, the self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle slowly corroded The destruction of the family created what is called “the demographic transition”: American families went from an average of 7 children in 1800 to 3.5 children in 1900 to 1.8 children in 2000 as the population changed from 80% agrarian in 1800 to 80% urban by 2000. Today, less than 2% of the US population owns or works on a farm.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, this transition from an agrarian, family-oriented lifestyle to an urban, job-oriented lifestyle is a great boon for the economy. Narcissism increases sales and profits across the board, as does making business “Job One” for every American.

The only possible flaw in the ointment is the very family breakdown the process is designed to create, i.e., the eventual lack of narcissistic consumers available to buy things. While narcissists do, from a business perspective, show a laudable interest in their own comfort, they tend not to have children. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to exploit the next generation since that generation tends not to exist. As the old saying goes, if your parents didn’t have any children, chances are you won’t either.


Enter Mexico

In the early 1800’s, Anglo-Americans illegally immigrated into Mexican territory in massive numbers, but largely refused to assimilate into Mexican Catholic culture. Instead, with the active assistance from Washington DC, American illegals eventually rebelled against the legitimate government authority and provoked the war of 1848, resulting in the American capture of what is now the entire southwestern portion of United States. That was the first invasion.

NAFTA was not the opening salvo in our second invasion of Mexico, but it was the opening of a major operational front. Roughly 30% of Mexico is agrarian with a strongly family-oriented Catholic culture. But things are changing.

As noted above, less than 2% of America’s population is now devoted to farm work. The heavy industrialization and low absolute population of US farms allows US farm output to be heavily subsidized: a lot of money can go to just a few organizations.

Meanwhile Mexican farmers, 30% of the Mexican population, receive essentially no government subsidies and are only lightly industrialized. Of the several dozen areas in which trade tariffs between the two countries are reduced or abolished, farm tariffs were the first to disappear. While the American media concentrated on the movement of American automotive plants, no one noticed what was happening to the price of Mexican corn and the backbone of the Mexican food economy, the corn tortilla.

Mexican tortillas are now made almost exclusively with American corn, as Mexican farmers are driven out of business by lower American-subsidized crops. This, in turn, creates an enormous migration pressure, forcing Mexican rural folk to the cities.

The men and women who designed NAFTA don’t really care which cities, American or Mexican, the campesinos choose. In either case, the farmers lose their land. In either case, the family is broken apart, children become expensive to have, and adults are pressured to stop nurturing babies and start nurturing themselves. A new generation of consumers is created.

Of course, from the perspective of the intellectual elites, it is best if the migrants end up illegally in American cities. Unlike the immigrants of old, today’s American immigrants will be unable to purchase land without documents. They will be unable to marry without documents. Even if they can marry and purchase land, they won’t be able to buy the self-sustaining farmland necessary to raise large crops of children since small family farms are as economically difficult in the United States as they are in Mexico.

By making marriage difficult or impossible, by making home stability difficult or impossible, we destroy every possible refuge, every possible source of support. Landless peoples are easier to control, landless peoples without documents are the easiest.

As with any war, our trade war with Mexico, conducted with the acquiescence of the Mexican government, has produced a large refugee population.

In 1848, our goal was to capture Mexico City in order to gain land.

Today, the goal of the Mexican government is to capture the land. 

Today, our goal is to capture the Mexican farmer and turn him into an American consumer. 

And, as in 1848, our plan appears to be working.

The New Racists

Don Imus has been in the news lately. His remarks about a women’s college basketball team have been correctly attacked as racist, he has lost his job, he has been – dare I use the term? – blacklisted.

Now, while no one has endorsed what he said, neither has anyone asserted that his remarks actually caused real or lasting damage to anyone. No one on the basketball team is alleging that the remarks have made it impossible for her to play or complete her college classes. No one is alleging fiscal or emotional harm.

But what if Imus’ remarks had caused lasting harm? What if the derogatory statements caused so much turmoil that it actually reduced the team’s ability to play basketball, or reduced the players’ ability to complete their education?

What would we do if we discovered that engaging in certain kinds of conversation actually harmed the young lads and ladies who were taught that conversational style? Conversely, what would we do if we discovered that engaging in certain kinds of conversation actually improved the lives of the young men and women who engaged in it?

Well, that’s a rhetorical question. You see, we know what kinds of conversation harm people and what kinds help people, so we promote the ones that damage them and denigrate the ones that assist them.

Researchers at Long Beach University in California have demonstrated that the scholarship gap between white students and persons of color is easily bridged: just get all students involved in a faith community.

According to William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University, Long Beach, examination of data gathered in the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) demonstrates that “Religious faith and intact and stable family units are two resources that enable youth of color to achieve at the same levels of white students.”

He found that the quality of the school has essentially no effect on learning ability. Rather, the driving forces were family stability and religious fervor. The more religiously active the family, the higher the academic scores. The entire academic “race gap” can be explained in terms of religion and family structure.

Indeed, highly religious minority students actually outperformed the aggregate of white students in certain academic areas, such as their desire to take college placement courses and their likelihood in being left behind a grade in school.

Viewed in this light, we can see that atheism is simply a form of racism.

This is actually not surprising. Atheists tend to be eugenicists, which is to say, they tend to be racists. Christians do not wish to “breed a race of thoroughbreds”, as Margaret Sanger urged. American Christians may have enslaved blacks, but English Christians, and subsequently American Christians, were also at the forefront of the abolition movement. Catholic Christianity invented the orphanage, the university and largely invented the hospital. Because Christians who live Christian Faith care for the well-being of every man, Christians improve every man. Contrast this to the atheists, who simply write off large segments of humanity as insufficiently well-endowed by genes or circumstance, unworthy of the social resources necessary to maintain them.

For a logically consistent atheist, altruism enables mediocrity. There are people whose best will never even approach adequacy; investing resources into these people is a dead loss from an atheistic economic perspective.

The Christian economy of value strenuously denies this. Every person has intrinsic worth because God, who alone knows the value of all things, has loved that person into existence and continues to love and maintain that person in existence for all eternity. The widow’s mite is worth more than the whole treasury of the Temple. The best that the least among us produce is worth more than anything the intellectual elite can manufacture.

Therein lies the source of the problem: the intellectual elites instinctively know this. Just as a bully harasses his victims as a way of denying his own inadequacies, so the elites harass religious belief precisely because it completes what they cannot complete.

Insofar as the intellectual elites insist on destroying students’ faith, they destroy students’ futures. But it is better that other human lives be destroyed than that any atheist be forced to face his own weakness or be forced to acknowledge a power greater than himself.

America’s elites natter on about racism, they project racism onto everyone they encounter, because they are racists. They are too narrow-minded to believe that other people may not think as they do, may not value the same things they value.

To a mind that cannot see beyond the skin, the minds that can see beyond skin, the persons who can see the image of the living God dwelling within, these people are the greatest danger. The schools must be stripped of this knowledge, men and women cannot be allowed to learn these truths, for if they do, society as we know it will be destroyed.

Journal of the Plague Years

In The White Plague, Frank Herbert imagined how society would be transformed if struck by a genetically engineered plague that preferentially killed women. In his vision, post-Christian Europe and the United States ultimately transform the few surviving women into virtual goddesses who control society by choosing which men they would have sex with, choosing whose children they would bear.

Herbert’s future is barreling down upon us, but it will look rather different than he imagined.

While the ratio of marriageable women to marriageable men is indeed dropping throughout the world, albeit slightly more slowly than Herbert imagined, the drop isn’t due to a virus, but to abortion and polygamy.

As anyone who pays attention to demography knows, China and India have both been killing infant girls at an enormous rate, creating male to female population skews as high as 156 to 100 in some areas. Ultrasound machines combine with a cultural preference for males in Confucian and Hindu societies to create massive female infanticide, both in and out of the womb.

Oddly enough, however, few people have noticed another odd fact: though China and India are killing infant girls at an alarming rate, Muslim societies seem to slaughter them at an even greater rate.

Consider the table from the CIA World Fact book, reproduced in sortable format at Wikipedia

Sort the table on the sex ratio at birth for children and you will discover the “under the age of 15” column shows the Arab Muslim countries have essentially normal male/female birth ratios.

But now sort on the “15-65” age bracket. Six of the seven countries with the worst male-female skew are Muslim. For the “over 65” age bracket, all seven countries with the worst skew are Muslim.

We all know India and China kill pre-pubescent girls, no one mentions that Muslims kill post-pubescent women.

But, wait, there’s more.

China is the only country in which the suicide rate is higher among women than men. The male/female ratio of suicide increased between 1991 and 2001 and the trend is likely to continue. The suicide difference is driven entirely by young rural women: only that subgroup had a much higher suicide rates than their male counterparts.

Now, China’s drive to reduce its population growth rests on more than just infanticide. It is also working hard to move its rural population to the cities. Urbanization is associated with lower population growth because it destroys the extended family, and thus destroys the support network into which a child is supposed to be born.

Chinese authorities are forcing rural populations into the cities just as they have forced women to abort children. It is projected that, by 2040, the rapid drop in Chinese birth rates will actually create a greater imbalance between young workers and retired dependents that is greater than the problem the United States will face.

Everyone knows China will soon have an enormous number of single men. A large surplus male population is associated with increased violence (e.g., the American West in the 19^th century). Many fear that China will go to war by 2020 in order to bleed off the excess men and stabilize what will become an increasingly violent society.

But China can’t do that, because most of those young men are only children. You see, by 2020, China will also have an enormous number of old people who rely on their only children for support. If millions of only children are killed in a war, there are that many million fewer workers to care for the elderly.

In short, China can’t afford a war – it will kill too many young people, and the Chinese are already short of young people. The lack of women creates a social pressure cooker with no good way to release the pressure. No matter what happens, the Chinese will be stacking a lot of body bags in the coming years; the Chinese economy will implode, just as Japan’s has today.

But Europe is no better off. Its native population is shrinking, its Muslim population is increasing. Europe will be much older, much smaller and much more Muslim by 2040. Muslim policies of polygamy and sharia will create a severe European shortage of women, both through sequestering and murder/suicide. This will likewise leave a large percentage of single young men on the streets, exactly as happens today in the Middle East.

In all of these areas, the shortages in women are currently being met by buying or kidnapping women from low-income countries for use in areas where girls and women are routinely killed. How long can this continue? It depends on how much money families can get by selling their girls. It depends on how much money slavery can generate.

When Frank Herbert imagined a future lacking in women, he imagined its impact on Catholic Ireland. In reality, the lack of women affects communist, Hindu and Islamic countries.

The vision is quite different from the reality.

He's Got My Vote

"Wasted": that's the assessment of ex-cocaine user Barack Obama on the lives of soldiers killed in Iraq.

The former Muslim now insists that he regrets having made the remarks about US soldiers who died fighting world-wide terrorism.

Obama, who vociferously supports crushing the heads of infants as they are being born, instead wanted to discuss "how we want to put an end to the nasty slash-and-burn, trivialized politics of the last couple of decades."

Now that some of his old financial supporters have fallen out of favor, he also wants to discuss "how we want to reduce the influence of money in politics... how we want to come up with common-sense and practical solutions instead of being driven by ideology".

But the black man who supports gay marriage and opposes school vouchers, even though the majority of the black community oppose gay marriage and support school vouchers, insists "it isn't about me."

The evidence bears him out. After the statute of limitations expired, Barack Obama described in his autobiography Dreams From My Father(s) how he readily engaged in marijuana use and underage drinking, but he never did smack, i.e. heroin. After the book's publication, fellow Harvard Law School graduate and Democrat Attorney General Tom Miller of Iowa called Obama the smartest person to attend the institution in the past 25 years.

Among the members of the audience who applauded the rookie senator's latest address were Miss USA and Donald Trump.

As Senator Joseph Biden observed, Barack Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Given the decaying looks of the former cheerleader Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama is the Democrat Party's best hope for President.

A Compendium of Problems

It's been several months since the Compendium to the Catholic Church was released, and to date, there have been no corrections to several egregious errors in the text.

The major problem:

#57 - Jesus Christ who died and rose in order to vanquish that moral evil, human sin, which is at the root of all other evils.

Human sin is at the root of ALL OTHER evils?
Human sin caused the fall of Satan and his angels?
That seems very unlikely.
If human sin did not cause the fall of Satan and his angels, then it could not be at the root of all other evils.

In fact, #57 is specifically contradicted by #75 which says When tempted by the devil, the first man and woman allowed trust in their Creator to die in their hearts.

Certainly this phrasing needs to be corrected, right?

Other problems

The Compendium uses the phrase "original holiness and justice" but never bothers to define the terms.

It uses the phrase "human soul" but never points out that the soul is comprised of the intellect and the will, thus the discussion of Jesus two wills #91 is a bolt from the blue.

It mentions Jesus human intellect in #90, but never uses the phrase divine intellect, or explicitly says that He possessed it, although it does admirably state he knew fully the eternal plans which he had come to reveal.

#134 failed to mention that the Lord's Second Coming depends on the conversion of the whole Hebrew people to the Faith, that is, it summarizes CCC #675-677 but carefully omits any reference to #674. Oddly enough, Compendium #215 does the same thing. If you mention the Second Coming twice, wouldn't at least one summary mention this rather important detail? It's almost as if someone systematically removed the portions of the CCC he didn't like.

#168 "Who belongs to the Catholic Church? All human beings in various ways belong to or are ordered to the Catholic unity of the people of God." Compare this summary of CCC #836-838 to the original and the Compendium's distinction between those who are baptized and those who are called to be baptized is shown up as the palest of shadows. This is especially disturbing given how emphatically this same distinction is emphasized in the original CCC articles. As #168 is worded, an uncareful reader might conclude that everyone is Catholic.

#259 fails to mention that parents help children grow in Baptismal grace, although it is at pains to point out that godparents and the ecclesial community do this.

#506 says we must give special attention to those species which are in danger of extinction as part of respect for the goods of others. The CCC makes absolutely no mention of this "special attention."

#507 completely changes the emphasis of CCC #2416-2418. The CCC specifically warns us not to accord to animals the level of respect due only to persons. The Compendium article spends all its words warning against inflicting excessive pain in animal experiments. True, one might argue these are differences in emphasis, not meaning, but the difference in emphasis is exceedingly great, nonetheless.

Finally, according to the index, the Compendium makes no mention of homosexuality, fornication, pornography, sex. It shows that abortion appears one time, adultery thrice, and has a section on birth control but no cross-reference for contraception. Celibacy is mentioned twice, chastity in two sections. Given the challenges faced by the Church in the 21st century, this seems an unusual set of omissions.

It is also interesting to see how many Catholic bloggers over the last several months have praised the Compendium without, apparently, having read it and compared it to the original.

No Pain, No Gain.

Teen sex and drug use leads to depression. That’s a fact established by several studies, most recently one out of UNC-Chapel Hill based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found that the more sex and/or drug use young girls engaged in, the more likely they were to become depressed. Young men showed similar responses to these activities. Nearly one-third of American teens suffer from depression.

Combine this with another fact: the savings rate of American citizens has dropped to a 74 year low. Only four years in American history has seen a negative savings rate, two of them being 2005 and 2006, the other two being 1933 and 1934. Only 1933 had a savings rate worse than last year. We are spending more than we are making. The Baby Boomers are retiring and they have, in total, less and less money to retire on.

Now, consider a third fact: life-changing events cause people to shop. Advertisers are well aware of this. As Dr. Joseph Pilotta, vice president of Big Research, points out:

“[Life events like marriage, divorce, having a baby, etc.] are disruptions in principle. These are transitional moments. You stabilize transitional events by trying to anchor yourself with things that make you secure. In our world, you concretely rearrange your life so you can see the change. For some empty-nesters, the only way they can manage that change is to move literally into another house to stabilize that transitional effect. We have a consumptive way of operating when it comes to these transitions, but they help stabilize our environment…

The funny part is that in getting married and getting divorced, four of the five items being purchased were the same. When getting married, we found the No. 1 thing that people looked for was furniture, which is not unexpected. Second was a vacation. Third was a computer, then TV, then home appliances. The computer is the new fixture with everybody. Anchoring the household now is essentially TV and computer, as opposed to TV being the centralizing feature. There was always a media that anchored the house and now we have two anchors. The computer was higher on the list than TV…

Getting married and getting divorced involved the same top four purchases. The only difference was number five: in marriage it was home appliances, and in divorce it was a digital camera. There was an interesting affinity between children starting college and retiring. The first four in order were vacation, computer, furniture, home improvement. It only varied on the fifth item, which was a new car when children started college and home appliances for retirement.”

From an economic perspective, all that a national economy needs to create a solid GDP is churn. If the citizens are in constant turmoil, constant life-changing events, they will buy stuff. If they are depressed, they will buy more.

So, from a standpoint of pure economics, from a standpoint of “how much money can Mr. Capitalist make today”, we don’t want stable marriages. People in a stable marriage save more money than single or divorced people. If they save their money, Mr. Capitalist can't get to it.

No, we want people who go through two, three, four or five marriages. We want people who are fornicating drug-users, we want people to have abortions, get raped, see their lives destroyed, re-built and destroyed again. Every time their life changes, our sales go up.

If you have ever wondered why any corporation would fund Planned Parenthood, throw money into no-fault divorce or create the kind of culture that we live in today, the answer is simple. Your pain is their gain. It really is that simple.

Welborn but Badly Considered

We all get caught in contradictory logic at times, but it's jarring to see the examples when they are brought before us.

Consider Amy Welborn's recent post. She felt it was wrong for a deacon to make a homiletic reference to the fact that a parishioner, a politician present at Mass, had voted in favor of embryonic stem cell research. The deacon suggested that parishioners might enter into conversation with the man on that subject. Bloggers have since observed that a close look at the parishioner's voting record as a public servant demonstrates he had a 100% rating from NARAL.

Now, Amy's disappointment with the deacon's homiletic observation and recommendation would be unremarkable - everyone is entitled to their opinion, after all - if not for her earlier public attacks on priests and bishops who have had even the slightest hint of scandal surrounding them during the recent child sexual abuse scandals. In those instances, Amy was in high dudgeon even when there was no actual accusation, much less conviction, of child abuse. See, for instance, this or this.

One could conclude, from Amy's remarks, that looking at the wrong photos of children (even though there was no evidence that any action was ever taken) is infinitely worse than fighting to make sure that children are legally torn limb from limb: sex abuse, even when no actual abuse took place (as in the Allgaier case), is apparently worse than the actual use of deadly force.

This is what over 30 years of legal abortion has done to us. We are willing to publicly chastise every priest who is associated even by rumour with an activity which is (currently) illegal while being unwilling to so much as publicly reference the documented fact that a lay person actively promotes a legal activity.

Like many Catholics, Amy seems to feel that sexual abuse is an opportunity to publicly pile on while abortion is a political third rail that should be dealt with sotto voce. It matters not that abortion is just a more craven form of sexual abuse. What matters to Amy, and Catholics like her, is that one act is legal and the other is not. Legal abortion activists needs to be handled with kid gloves, while illegal sex abusers should be stoned. It is an odd permutation of morality when American Catholics insist on the Protestant principle: separation of Church and State.

Recall that the homily is supposed to be the pre-eminent place for showing Catholics where the Gospel interacts with our daily lives. How many times have we heard from the pulpit that we must give a preferential option to the poor, that we should open our purses to donate to the second collection for Honduras, Guatamala or something similar?

Here, the deacon merely recommends a similar course of action, but instead of asking for monetary support, he asks parishioners to converse with a specific man, a man who not only represents his political district, but a man who represents his Catholic parish to the larger political community. Is this not social justice in action? Did we not see the like when Paul immortalized the incestuous sin of one man in his letter to the Corinthians?

If St. Ambrose could threaten to excommunicate an emperor for slaughtering innocent civilians as he put down an insurrection, certainly a deacon can ask parishioners to enter into conversation with a fellow parishioner who has actively supported the slaughter of millions of children. Given the fact of Childermas, the major feast of the Church whose entire liturgy is built around the commemoration of Herod's slaughter of innocent children, such a community invitation is certainly not out of line with Catholic tradition or liturgy.

Would it not be appropriate to ask parishioners to write their representatives on this point? How much more to appropriate to ask parishioners to personally discuss the issue with their representatives? And is it not convenient that this same representative happens to be here at Mass today?

John the Baptist was the greatest saint of the Old Testament, but he was the least of the saints of the New Testament, because he had not the full Gospel, the fullness of which would not be revealed until the Paschal Mystery had been completed. Still, even that portion of the Truth that he possessed forced him to publicly and repeatedly denounce Herod for his incestuous marriage. If the martyrs under the altar can cry out for justice, as they do in the book of Revelation, then certainly deacons can make factual points about justice from the ambo.

It is not without reason St. Ignatius said that of all ordained men, the deacon is most like unto Christ. As this deacon goes through crucifixion from his pastor, his bishop and Catholic commentators like Amy Welborn, we can recall St. Ignatius as he journeyed towards the circus, guarded by four soldiers of leopard-like ferocity. He rejoiced that he would be ground between the teeth of the lion. We can only hope and pray that this deacon be given similar courage and faith for having done what, if we are to believe the book of Acts, deacons were originally ordained to do: identify the injustices within the Catholic community and work to correct them.

Joy To the World

How many people have sung this song at Christmas Mass?
How many people have sung the third verse, ever?


Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.


Seems odd we would miss out on that one so consistently, doesn't it?

America's Servants

Phyllis Schlafley is a woman to admire, except when she is crazy. This thought came to mind as I read her recent column on the injustice of allowing an increase in the number of H-1B visas, the visa which permits high-tech industry to import foreign tech workers at incredibly low wages. Now, it is certainly the case that industry’s latest attempt to skim the cream of foreign workers from their homelands is unjust, but Schlafley’s reasons for opposing the attempt are nothing short of ludicrous. She claims that such an expansion amounts to indentured servitude, wage slavery, which is “a form of servitude that offends the free enterprise that made the United States the economic world leader.”

Let us leave aside the argument about whether H-1B visas actually create such indentured servitude, and just look at the history.

The New Deal: FDR's Story

The United States was founded on the backs of slaves and indentured servants. By one estimate, three-fourths of the white population were indentured servants when they arrived in the New World. Indeed, many sailed without a contract – if they couldn’t find work, the ship’s captain could sell them to whomever he pleased. Similarly, from the 17^th century through the 1808 federal ban, slaves were sold throughout every one of the original thirteen colonies.

But America did not rise to greatness on contractual and legal slavery alone. We also used drugs to enslave foreigners.

The successful circumnavigation of the globe in 1522 fundamentally changed commerce. By the late 1700's and early 1800’s, global trade had become a real possibility. As it turned out, China had much to sell the West, but the West produced virtually nothing China needed or wanted. As British and American citizens consumed tea in great quantity but failed to produce anything the Chinese wanted, the threatening imbalance of trade between East and West became acute.

Both British and American companies solved the problem by illegally importing opium into the Chinese mainland. Chinese officials had long outlawed the drug because they recognized it as a poison. By the late 1700's, however, Britain had control of India’s poppy fields and her navy made it possible to smuggle tons of the stuff across the Chinese border and into Chinese harbors. American businessmen, having no access to Indian poppies, dealt themselves into the illegal drug trade by encouraging Turkish farmers to plant poppies so they, too, could grab part of the drug business.

China responded by confiscating and destroying the huge opium stocks in British warehouses on Chinese soil. Britain went to war to recover the cost of the lost opium, not once, but twice (1839-1842 and 1856-1860). The resulting British victories not only opened Chinese ports to the Western importation of opium, it also gave American citizen Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather, the enormous wealth which FDR would use to such excellent effect in his own presidential election campaigns. In short, it is not too incorrect to say that FDR's presidency was made possible in part via drugged Chinese slaves.

A Made Hand

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Even as legal slavery was abolished in the United States, the practice of wage slavery in Northern industrial factories mushroomed. By the time of the Great Depression, it was not at all difficult to find entire towns dedicated to soaking the factory employee. The factory town, occupied solely by factory workers whose every payment found its way back into the factory owners' pocket, is well-known in song and story. The factory might pay their workers a wage, but that wage was quickly swallowed up by rent payments to the company for housing, by food costs in the company store, and by the various fees the company town charged its virtually captive inhabitants.

Ultimately, this need for factory labor, men and women who were unable to produce anything apart from the factory, and would therefore consume all that the factory produced, was the driving force behind the creation of the public school system. Like their late 19th-century forebears, today’s schools are designed and intended to create needy, semi-skilled consumers, not educated, confidant, self-reliant entrepreneurs.

In short, it is a myth that America was built on the back of independent or entrepreneurial individuals. In fact, it was built on the back of various forms of slave labor. That is how it started, that is how it grew to greatness, that is how it maintains its greatness today. We are an economic powerhouse precisely because we have created the perfect society of slaves – men and women who seek happiness by building walls of consumable goods around themselves.

If freedom is money or creature comforts, than America is a free country. If there is something more to freedom than just raw economics, than America is not free. But in either case, we cannot assert that America is built on anything other than slavery and indentured servitude, for that is her history.