Abyssus Abyssum Invocat: The Futility of Fr. Facile & Friendship Up in Smoke

"Mercy," Fr. Facile began his sermon, "is not simply the absence of just punishment. Mercy is not simply what happens when a person of esteem deigns to give us something of his world. Mercy, you see, is a very really and proactive part of God's plan for us. Mercy is part of who God is in His love for mankind."

Alright, I thought, this could be quite good or quite bad.

"Think of what we sang at the beginning of the liturgy. The polyeleos repeats 'For his mercy endures for ever,' but that is just an extract of a much larger psalm about mercy. He brought the Israelites out of freedom, and his mercy endures forever. He parted the Red Sea, and his mercy endures forever. He smashed Pharaoh's armies, and his mercy endures forever. God's mercy is part of Who He is and what He imparts of Himself to us. This is what culminated with the Cross!"

This is much better than what I expected! Fr. Facile never gave a bad sermon. Some were quite good and the rest tried very hard to impress, but often fell short by overemphasizing relevance to daily life, at times passing by opportunities to focus on Who God is.

"My friends—and I know this is a controversial topic, which we rarely discuss here at St. Saccharinios—my friends, we witnessed a great act of mercy this past week." Fr. Facile paused for a moment. "God brought the Israelites out of the darkness of slavery. A similar and monumental event in the history of our country happened this past week. A great many people were brought out of darkness when their civil rights were expanded.

"Now, I know we have people with very passionate opinions on both sides, but let us remain calm in discussing this matter. This Supreme Court decision ends the conversation about this subject for our country and it has no influence on the Church."

Alright, I concluded, I know where this is going. The parish was priestless and run by church-ladies, including the notorious Helen Hawkins, prior to Fr. Facile's arrival. It is a divided parish and he is trying to placate both ends.

"The conversation in the Church is on-going...."

Damn.

"....and we need to show more mercy to each other in having that conversation here and everywhere in the Church. We have bishops and even a pope that are receptive to greater mercy. We are obligated to show that same receptivity to mercy. I look on Facebook and see some of the nasty things people write about each other when having this debate. In this debate I find opponents of this new right calling those in favor of it all sorts of mean names and the proponents of the new right in return are quick to call their opponents bigots, although they often are."

Hitting a priest is a reserved sin, I recalled from a catechism class. Still, that would mean a trip to Rome and Fr. Facile could use some fraternal correction.

"We need more mercy, like the mercy of the Cross and the mercy of delivery Egypt from bondage. For His mercy endureth for ever! Oh God, save Thy people and bless Thy inheritance!"

*          *          *

"We can never go to St. Saccharinios again, even 4 holy week," I texted to John Grump. "Meet at Cafe Preténse for breakfast?"

"Cya in 10", indicated the reply.

The clientele of Cafe Preténse

Cafe Preténse appealed to a young crowd of late teen and twenty-somethings still living off their fathers' new money. Patrons frequented the establishment to write their perpetually unpublished novels on MacBooks gifted for Christmas, to have inexpensive morning "dates," and to been seen wearing the latest boat shoes and sun dresses. An improbable assortment of National Geographics, Michael Crichton novels, and an old copy of Debrett sat on the shelves on the bookcase either as decoration or conversation pieces. No two walls were painted the same color. On a red wall sat two dozen examples of abstract bosh priced from $75 to $400 each. A pair of hipsters manned the bar.

"A pot of Earl Grey and a spice scone, please," I asked.

A sign on the counter displayed the words "Authentic European Coffee Shop." I wondered if the proprietor had ever been to Angelina's of Paris or Florian's of Venice.

I found Mr. Grump seated outside off the patio and joined him.

"How was Tradistan today?" I queried.

"Quite a standard low Mass. The sermon raised the question as to whether or not one can become demonically possessed by listening to rock music. One fellow had to be exorcised after hearing the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album once through. Father did not wholly endorse the theory, but warned us that listening to rock was a risk we ought not take. Apparently a recent beata, Blessed Theodora Obscuria of the Hands of Joseph the Worker, had a vision of pagans dancing around a resounding noise kept in rhythm by percussive bangs while a woolly man sang mockingly of heaven. He insisted she had a premonition of a Led Zeppelin concert. "

"That last item makes the rest of it believable. Anything else?'

"There was also the weekly reminder that we aren't allowed to go sedevacantist or Greek Orthodox just because the pope is a bit loose. Other than that, nothing new. How was St. Saccharinios?"

I proceeded to discharge my memory of that horrific sermon and the unambiguous ambiguities contained therein. John barely sipped his cappuccino, listening with intent concern.

"How sad," he commented, finally taking a sip from his cup. "If he was willing to talk like this, he probably gave up inside a long time ago."

After breakfast I produced a Partagás from my jacket and peeled off the upper-most cap. "You know," I began, "I had a friend who went down this road in a rather dreary way. My best friend at university, you know." I struck a match and toasted the cigar. "I met a fellow during my first term at school after a gathering of the College Rabble Rousers. This man, name of Christopher—never Chris, noticed I was wearing a tee shirt advertising a defunct American car maker called Packard.

"'Does your family have one?'

"'No,' I replied. 'But my father had one forty odd years ago.'

"We grabbed dinner and became quite close thereafter. We were both Economics students. He told me his parents were from Armenia, but now lived in San Francisco, having escaped the Red Russians by the width of his father's ever vanishing hairs.

"Every free night I tore him away from those damn computer games he played so we could have dinner. We immersed ourselves in prolix discussions over matters of the day, but never personal matters, at least not for Christopher. He asked why I was a Catholic. I told him for the frightening reason that I really believed it all, which stupefied him."

I held up my burning cigar for John to see. "At some point during the second term Christopher bought a box of these things, imported from Cuba via some shady fellow in Canada we only knew as Matt. One night, after insulting a preacher's daughter at a university dinner, we lit our Habanos and strolled the Arts Quad, the lake, and the plaza.

"He asked me why God should matter in our lives. From a rational perspective, God must exist, but why care. 'Because,' I told him, 'because He cares about us. Whether or not we understand why God cares about us is quite unrelated to the fact He does. He intervenes in our lives personally and has since the time of Abraham. I remember once in high school having a breakdown over the troubles of a friend. No, I won't tell you how, not now, but God very literally intervened in my life. It was because I cared for this person. I learned that God's love isn't a nicety or a Santa Claus doting. It is the emptying of one's self for another entirely. It's what we Catholics believe Christ did for us and what people we called the Saints continued to do since.' His reply was 'I don't understand why people should matter. Their existence is somewhat annoying. Isn't the point just to reproduce and pass on wealth?'"

"Perhaps," John interjected, "you and your catechism could instruct these waiters on the finer points of fear of the Lord, or at least of a bad tip. I am sitting here surrounded by no coffee."

"Right! Well, I went off to study in England the next year and left him in the hands of a mutual friend of our's, Craig Lex. When I next heard from Christopher he told me he was tired of Craig ranting about some Frenchman named 'Lefeber' and the Pius X society, so he bought some cheap Porto and got the runt drunk out of his mind. It was Good Friday, too, he said. He accompanied Craig to the Novus Ordo Good Friday and was feeling better than other people for having gone to Church, so much better that he had no qualms about fibbing to the campus security concerning his under-aged possession of the Porto. Christopher was a good friend and an even better fibber.

"I suggested that the three of us meet in Rome for the break between Hilary and Trinity terms, which coincided with their vacations. Something was different in Christopher at that point. When we went into the Blessed Sacrament chapel in St. Peter's Basilica he asked us how to reverence the exposed Sacrament. I told him that he did not have to as a non-believer, but he insisted. He stared in amazement at the Latin Novus Ordo sung Mass at the throne that evening and gawked through the Lateran cathedral. At dinner he passingly mentioned that his father was out of America on holiday, visiting establishments where the women are 'cheap and clean.' I almost lost my Italian excuse for a steak.

"Later that evening we returned to the Vatican square and shared in some of Christopher's Cubanos. He kept staring at the full moon and repeating that God is good. A couple got engaged, which made him smile. Before boarding the plane back to JFK he hugged me and, perplexingly, thanked me for being a 'good influence'. I started to pray daily for his conversion.

"The next year he went to Oxford and I was back in America. He was received into the Church by a priest on St. Giles Street and soon thereafter adopted an not entirely healthy religious attitude. He could never take a joke at face value, always accosting any humor when the salvation of souls was at stake. At mere mention of the Mass, especially in Latin, his eyes faded into ecstasy. Immediately he wanted to become a monk!"

"I take it," groaned Mr. Grump, "that this story has a point, or, even better, an end?"

"Yes, yes, yes," I said. "We parted after graduation and spoke infrequently. In the Fall he had dropped the 'salvation of souls' angle and returned to the evolutionary produce-and-inherit line. By the Spring of the following year we had fallen out of contact. Then one afternoon, working from my home, he calls me at tells me, 'I've just been released from a hospital. I've gone cold on that whole God thing. You see, I'm a woman.'"

"Damn!" exclaimed John. "You've made me spill my remaining coffee."

"It's a favor, friend. Wool in the Texan summer? Really?

"Regardless, I asked if I had missed something like ambiguous genitalia, XX DNA, or something of the like. He said that I hadn't, that he was simply born with a female brain and that an operation to 'clean out of the basement' would make him a normal and accepted member of society, that 'I won't have to hate myself everyday now.'

"We talked and he confessed that his parents fell out shortly after coming here from Armenia. 'That whole God thing,' he commented, 'made me deal with them a little more, but I cannot go on with a lie. If I don't do this I'll kill myself. I've finally found who I am.'

"I tried talking some gentle sense into him a few days when he was still on an emotional from his great discovery. I pointed out some basic things, like that being a woman entails a physical experience related to brain chemistry, that he could have an incompletely male brain but not an actual female brain. I brought up his family situation, his history of embracing one new lifestyle after another. He didn't care. He asked me if I could 'accept this' and I asked him what that meant. He was a friend and I loved him as a friend, but he didn't care. He wanted affirmation and I wasn't going to give it to him. 'Bugger off,' he told me, 'until you get over your bigot bull$h!+.' That was some time ago and I have no anticipation of hearing from him again. Last I heard he had frozen some sperm with the hope of fabricating a child one day.

"The liberals have taught us the lesson of acceptance and they've taught it well. We don't question anything anymore. Anything different is now just an alternative expression of the same thing. Shacking up, divorce, single parent households, and now gay families are really just as good as straight families, if one ignores the impact on the kids. We can't ask why people are as they are. One theory behind homosexuality blames pre-natal secretions; another claims it's a recessive gene; and yet another, less accepted, says it's the result of nurturing. Even if it were a combination of the three, we still can't do anything about it. I knew a therapist who told me that in twenty years of practicing psychology he had never met a gay man who had a normal relationship with his father. It's only anecdotal, but still pretty significant. The people behind the gay rights movement are not looking for equal treatment. They're looking for personal affirmation that many of them don't get as individuals and they'll remake society to do it. It fools people. It destroys friendships. It destroys love. And it has destroyed a very good friend. Christopher, or 'Eleanor'—as he now likes to be called, was an extreme case. Still, how much of it is really normal?"

My cigar was down to the nub.

"Fr. Facile bought the movement hook, line, and sinker. No use crying about the decline of Western society. I could read Russell Kirk or John Senior for that. Both of them enjoyed anti-technocratic existences. I rather wish I could be a hermit. I wouldn't have to worry about anything other than prayers and maintaining a few books."

"Amazing," John said. "Amazing how indifferent people can be."

"To God?"

"Yes, and to patrons with empty cups. Next week we should meet somewhere else, like Grandoise Grounds. Sad about your friend. People are more and more indifferent to God, too. Trads need to stop talking about abstract ideas of 'truth' and first get people to understand that there is a necessary good in the world beyond their own immediate gratification. Friendships fail for the same reason nowadays. It's not even a conscious selfishness anymore. Broken families are replaced by shiny toys from Silicon Valley or, a baby from a test tube. Whatever fills my emotional vacuum now will do. Your friend's perspective is likely the only one he can imagine."

"But it wasn't always like that," I continued. "Or maybe it was always like that. Perhaps he was sincere once. He once conspired with my girlfriend to have a surprise party for me. He bought me walking stick for my birthday once and a box of cigars just because he thought I might enjoy them. There was goodness there. Now he claims he has never had a good memory of another person, not until he found his true self. Lex orandi lex credendi. How long will he have to behave in his new religion until he is convinced he believes it?"

"I think he'll cave before I get another cup. No coffee here, but plenty of Glenfiddich at my place," John suggested with wry enthusiasm.

"It's not even noon!"

"It will be by the time we pay up and get back to my place."

"Alright, alright. The point stands. The people going down that road are not generally well off. All talk of acceptance and mercy, no care for their actual welfare."

We settled our bills with some wrangling. We picked up our jackets as I snuffed my cigar.

"How many more people," I pondered, "must go up in smoke, either in this world or the one to come, before Churchmen learn their lesson?"

"Best drink it away," assured John. "Come to my place. We'll drink 'til we've had enough, and then just a touch more."

"Isn't that a sin?"

"No, that's being drunk. I'm talking about the Point of Hilarity."

"What's that?"

"It's not yet sloshed and quite happy. It's a Chesterton idea. He might be a saint and he was lubricated all the time!"

"Let's get hilarious!"

Post-Modern Critical Theory and Sports Media

How shall we describe Post Modernism? As that thing that follows Modernism? "Modernism" was the name given to the intellectual trends of a democratizing Europe, shedding the vestiges of Christianity and the former political order while maintaining the social framework and preserving it during a transition to a new society more in conformity with the beliefs of those who sought to usurp the usurper capitalists and eventuate an egalitarian populace. Post Modernism is what comes after that....

Modernism, meant in its philosophical and not Pian usage, was an abject failure. For all its manifold errors, and there were many, it rightly assumed objective truths could be found given the right frame of mind. Advocates of Modernity often did not believe in God or the value of marriage—one example among many—and hoped that with efficient and accessible rhetoric the masses would meet their conclusions. Post Modernist critical theory contrasts starkly with its Modernist antecedent. The Post Modern critical theorist hopes to alter perceptions of reality by means of his critique. The difference is subtle in approach yet drastic in effect.

The most prominent example of Post Modern critical theory in action can be seen not in the New York Times, nor on the campus of some dreadful Ivy League school, but on ESPN, the Disney owned sports media channel. For the last several months this channel has given near daily coverage to the second to last player picked in the NFL draft, a defensive end named Michael Sam, for no reason other than that the player in question is openly gay.

Sam admitted to his homosexuality some months ago and has garnered relentless media attention ever since. In college Sam had a productive, although over-achieving career. During the Combine, a physical skills test for NFL scouts, he performed poorly and his draft stock tumbled. During the draft—seven rounds during which each of the thirty-two teams pick—Sam fell and fell and fell until the St. Louis Rams (my favorite team) picked him second to last (the last player picked is called "Mr. Irrelevant"). Sam then gave his significant other a peck on national television, dealing a blow to remaining decency standards everywhere.

Where critical theory enters the matter is here. ESPN, hoping that this man would be selected in the third round, has allowed commentators to go on air and writers to publish articles on their website which speculate Sam was picked so low because he is gay. I agree with them, although not for the reasons they give. Given his average physical talent and his marginal success against elite opponents in college, no team other than the Rams thought he was worth the trouble. With him, every day of training camp, would be a media circus, an inundation of questions about the gay political agenda, about his "making history," and pressure to put him on the team for reasons un-related to sports. The Rams either took the risk on him because the pick was so low that they would not lose anything if they have to release him or because the pick was so low that they could afford to bring the press attention to themselves. Either way, the days of Kurt Warner are long gone in St. Louis.

ESPN's talking heads, Skip Bayless among them, insist that it is the NFL's uneasiness with gay people forced Sam's drop in the draft. He was so good in college, how could he not go in the top three rounds of selection? Sam is a trailblazer, a bold pioneer for gay rights in their politically correct minds and their agenda is entirely focused on political correctness. The NFL is not anti-gay. The NFL is not anti-anything if it will cost them money. Really I cannot think of any non-governmental business in these United States more disconnected from its fans than the National Football League. A few weeks ago the League banned use of the infamous n-word, that mispronunciation of the word Nigerian so commonly used in Southern America to describe black people derisively and by black people in America to describe each other casually. Use of this word now warrants a 15 yard penalty and probably a fine. Going back to the Michael Sam issue, a player on the Miami Dolphins found the aforementioned smooch distasteful and was suspended and fined by his team.

Most telling about the entire affair is the comment box section below articles on ESPN's website. As a rough guess I would estimate upwards of 80% of fans are tired about Sam's sexual preferences being used to excuse his low selection and the endless coverage of him. NFL fans in America are as average as can be. They are a broad cross section of the country, white and black, rich and poor, and unlike the other major sports leagues the NFL has a not insignificant female following. The NFL has a reputation as being a part of Americana. The fans right now, reflective of the nation at large, are not very interested in the gay agenda, but they are not exactly anti-gay either, at least not as the press imagines them to be. So the press engages in Post Modern critical theory by constructing a straw man, a red herring narrative of discrimination against Sam, an active adversity opposing the "rights" of oppressed people such as himself. Recently I have heard him compared to Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson in baseball (who, unlike Sam, were good players). Yes, the fans see through it, but they will still go to the games, buy their tickets, buy their merchandise, buy their television viewing packages, and watch the Super Bowl. And then when this generation of fans dies their children will have known nothing but the modern and accepting NFL, epitomized by its hero Michael Sam, who so bravely stood athwart the bigotry of the day to bring people like him to the NFL. And that new generation will think its fathers foolish.

This pattern occurred many times in the past. Most prominently it transpired on American university campuses (or should that be campi?) after World War II. Prior to the War the great American institutions had minimal exposure to the growing Marxian schools in Europe and the sexual radicals like Freud and Simone de Beauvoir, although Freud did give a series of lectures in the United States. G.I. loan bills in hand, many veterans sought education after the War and were shocked to find atheism, Marxism, and leftist party politics occupying the lecture halls of the greatest of schools. William F. Buckley Jr's God and Man at Yale is indicative of the reactions wrought by the paradigm shift. Buckley recounts that the head of the religion department called himself "80% atheist and 20% agnostic," quite a change given that Yale's president mentioned Christ prominently during the commencement exercises just years earlier. Buckley's generation, the "Greatest Generation" as Americans call that group, did not lose its faith. The universities did not succeed there. The universities did succeed however in creating a newly presumed norm though, wherein God does not exist, a socialized economy is an inevitability, traditional social frameworks are at best antiquated and at worst indicative of backwardness, and those who oppose the myth of progress are stupid bigots. The children of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, went to college two decades later and swallowed the new story hook, line, and sinker. Beneath the white picket fences, the chromed cars, the new televisions, the burgeoning wealth, and the post-War confidence, a new America was fostered. The facts did not change. The narrative changed, which in turn changed the facts.

Was not this the plan of the dedicate Post Modern critical theorists at the universities all along? Is this not the plan of ESPN with regards to Michael Sam? Dare I ask, is this not what happened in the Catholic Church in the 20th century?

Considering Same-Sex Marriage

 

The prominence of pro-marriage protests in France and the revelation that a few persons I knew in high school were homosexuals—only on of the individuals surprised me—has led me to consider the issue of same-sex unions in a bit more depth.

 

Anyone looking for Catholic teaching on this matter can find it without problem. The Tridentine Catechism discusses marriage as a Sacrament. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church goes into greater depth on marriage. Numerous bishops have made statements affirming the Church's position. Biblical prohibitions against sodomy are arrant in their nature. The moral aspect here is not really in much doubt for Catholics.

 

But how does this work in a practical sense? That is, how does God's definition of marriage look when put into practice in the world? Numerous books, most recently Charles Murray's Coming Apart, have documented the decline of the family unit in the middle and lower classes of wealth and cognitive ability in the last five or six decades, with the upper-class remaining mostly unchanged. I find it amusing that the class which usually decides the cultural and political trends of the nature generally do not adopt these behaviors themselves, by that is beside the point. Let us think about marriage in practice.

 

Marriage, until the mid-twentieth century, was not primarily done out of love for the spouse. Marriage was, obviously, for the propagation of children. The spouses made a vow to love each other, which indicates that mutual love was not already a given. Marriage was expected to be a life-long effort, a joint-partnership is raising children. Women, aside from whatever education they received, learned how to judge and attract potential suitors and men were sure to have bright futures with well-paying jobs. The point was to say: reproduce with me!

 

The excess-wealth, at least in the United States, resulting from the post-War boom introduced a novelty to marriage: it was now primarily about the pre-existing love between the partners, which is, usually, expressed in feelings rather than demonstrated dedication. In the old way the vows at the altar were the dedication and love was supposed to follow.

 

The main reason why in the West the State became involved in marriage, a pre-existing social institution, was to champion the Christian religion by creating formal respects for the married in the form of tax and inheritance policies. A secondary reason, which became the primary reason when most nations secularized in the 19th and 20th centuries was to incentivize fecundity, to get people to keep providing a population at an increasing rate. The point of marriage in every culture in history has been to reproduce. Even polygamist societies, which would allow multiple wives but not husbands, emphasized children.

 

The problem with gay unions being put on par with marriage is that they are a further step in the West's protracted cultural and demographic suicide. We know a gay couple cannot reproduce by God-given means, but they could by artificial means: in vitro, sperm donation, and test tubes might be in the near-future for gays. How could this be a problem?

 

Think about it! Children learn how to function in their sex from the respective parent. Just as significantly, they learn how to pick a future spouse based on the traits they find in the respective parent by sex. A woman will look for a man based on what she saw in her father, whether she liked what she saw or not; she understands masculinity and how to approach it. A gay couple not only cannot provide the same care-dynamic as a straight family, but it cannot provide a model for a person of a particular sex either! The vast majority of gay men are highly effeminate, with some ready to wear mini-skirts. Among the lesbian population one can more easily find less ostentatious persons, but the "butch" woman is a reality. One should not learn femininity from a Brown alumna with a buzz cut, aviator sunglasses, a plaid shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. Not only would the child normally get a distorted view of the parents' sex, he or she would also only see half of the sexual population in an intimate, family setting. A child in a gay-male household would only be able to understand genuine femininity from a distance. This is emotionally and parentally cruel. Some may advocate a more "open" approach to parenting, but would that really be better? Divorce is already troublesome enough on children—increasing their own odds of divorcing in the future—without introducing more parental instability.

The political correctness that accompanies such radical social upheavals also influences the future of normal marriages. The Boys Scouts decided to begin to admit openly homosexual members. The Scouts, a setting where boys could socialize and learn traditionally masculine behavior, must open its door to—and eventually, cater its practices to—a minute and effeminate segment of the population. A place where boys could start to be men and practice the conventional values associated therein is now a setting for political correctness and experimentation. Virtues like honesty probably will not disappear immediately from the Scouts, but there will certainly be a decline.

We often hear from several sectors of the political world that we should be open to any social policy that does not directly hurt us. Drug legalization and same-sex unions are examples. Do gay unions hurt me? No, not physically or emotionally, but that does not mean they would not damage society on the whole. Gay unions would confirm that marriage is now just a formalization of mutual feelings of attraction rather than either a child-bearing venture or a permanent commitment. Enough marriages in the United States end in divorce (about 50%, and the rate increases in the middle and lower socioeconomic realms) that many couples do not marry, but just cohabitate. Cohabitation rarely produces children, unless the couple decides to have a child or their contraception fails. Cohabitation being neither a formal union nor a blessed one does not care the same stability as marriage and exposes the rare child born into such a relationship to a broken upbringing. Gay unions would further hurt the prestige and popularity of marriage-for-the-sake-of-children and further popularize cohabitation and a weak outlook on the part of those who marry anyway. Lost in all of this is children, who need a firm environment with a father and a mother in the household. Homosexual unions will lessen society's view of marriage as an endeavor worth one's time, which will impact the rearing of many children.

One last thing to consider is reproduction itself. Poorer demographics and immigrant demographics reproduce at a higher rate in the West than do those in the upper-range of socioeconomic status. Those in the middle and upper classes tend to have fewer children for many reasons: they enjoy their wealth and prefer a BMW 3-Series and a nice TV to another child; they do not need the physical labor and care that an extra family member provides; they have excess wealth, which can be spent on more effective means of contraception etc. My own country, the United States, reproduces at about 2.11 births per couple, which—when considering the infertile, those who never reproduce, and premature deaths—is on par with replacement rate, but is without growth. Immigrant and low-income groups are keeping that number where it is, which would be much lower if everyone followed the middle and upper-class lead. All I previously mentioned about the diminished attractiveness of marriage, the consequences for raising children, and the more casual and self-centered view people have of children comes into play here. Gay unions could indirectly have some small, but significant, influence on further lowering a country's fecundity in the ways I have enumerated above. Meanwhile, the poorer groups will continue to reproduce and shift the demographics of a given country. A larger poor and lower-middle class population will effect greater polarization along the lines of wealth and potentially contribute to political unrest. Gay unions can and will hurt society, even if I am not forced to wed a fellow. Note: I have nothing against poor, immigrant, and low-income; I am just trying to make a forceful point.

I wish our policy makers would stop pursuing such nonsense as this so they can congratulate themselves on how tolerant, broad-minded, and accepting they are, and instead consider the long-term damage their policies can and will create.

There. End of rant. God bless you all.

The Rad Trad

Pro-Marriage Demonstrators in France Number 1 Million, Press Take Little Notice

According to numerous press sources a demonstration in France in favor of marriage and against Francois Hollande's proposal for marriage "equality," as though a marriage is not an equal undertaking, numbered in the several hundreds of thousands and, according to some sources, over a million! Needless to say, America's mad media have taken no notice.

There are a lot of them! Source: CNN

One poll I read yesterday indicated over 50% of French person favored gay "marriage," but an identical percentage opposed adoption of children by homosexual couples. Many of the signs at the protest were a variation of something like "1 man + 1 woman = child." Here we see a integral element to the marriage debate sorely missing in the United States and United Kingdom: children! Perhaps the first daughter of the Church has retained common sense in some pockets after all!

In the English speaking world we have often framed the marriage debate over whether or not it is traditional to have one man and one woman unions, whether nature intended it to be that way or whether people who hold such tenets are just fuddy-duddy antiquarians who cannot adapt. Children change the matter.

It cannot be contested that one man and one woman are the procreators, the people who make children, and by virtue of that, the family, happen. No matter what strange devices are derived by vulgar imaginations, one fellows will never, ever conceive a child within the realm of the natural. Why? God made it that way, of course, but this reasonable explanation will not do for many these days. Consider this: the child takes his or her cues for future gender-behavior from his or her parents. A boy will learn who to behave, or not behave, from his father and learn what traits to seek in a woman from his mother. The mother also nurtures the boy while the father teaches him how to do things unique to being a man. Gay couples simply cannot do this, o at least not well, and certainly not without confusing children.

Come on people, think about it!