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Rights
and Wrongs: In his eminent work, THE LAW, Frederic Bastiat opens with the following premise: Americans are inundated daily with "rights talk." But what exactly constitutes a "right?" In short, a right is a moral claim to do or refrain from doing something that assists man in perfecting his God-given life, and which right obliges another to honor it. The first right, by definition is life itself, or otherwise, all other rights are moot. Because man is subject to God, that is, has responsibility for the precious and inalienable gift of life, that he is also granted other rights that are adjuncts to this gift of life and as such exist only because man has this responsibility to perfect life. In other words, all rights proceed from God and God alone, including the right of the state to make just laws. Thus, no man can cede to government a "right of power" over his life and the life of others that he does not hold from God as an individual. Since God has granted the moral right to self-defense, man has the right to use proportionate force to preserve the life of himself and family. For practical reasons in a wide and diverse society, man therefore can willingly assign that right of self-defense to a government, which is the usual course of human events in modern times. But, since man is bound by God's Ten Commandments, he may not directly take an innocent life for any reason. Therefore he cannot direct government in his name to make licit a practice that is forbidden by God, such as abortion. Man has no right from God to steal or willfully appropriate the rightful property of his neighbor, and therefore he has no mandate from God to assign the "right" to steal to government in his name. And so forth. Now, since the family is the extension of self, the donation of self to God by cooperating with the Holy Trinity in the act of procreation [not "reproduction"], the family is the most sacred and the smallest unit of society, and the most basic, without which there can be no society or civilization. Thus, protection of the life of the family, its preservation and development, its very perfection through grace, is paramount both to society and to the individuals comprising that society. Since the ultimate end of man is union with God, society has the duty or obligation to uphold the individual's right to gain salvation. The state, which is the legal agent of society, has no moral claim on an individual other than that necessary to foster family life and individual perfection. It is the individual, and by extension, predominately the family, that has the prior moral claim on government, and this claim is collectively called "natural rights." In fact, government is restricted by those prior existing rights, and is not the dispenser of those rights. It must uphold them or society perishes, after first falling into anarchy or tyranny. As we have noted, the gift of life precedes all other gifts and is a right in itself. All other rights proceed from that right [through God] and are based on man's responsibility for his life before God. The primary responsibility of mankind is to be fruitful and multiple, to have dominion over the earth, to subdue it, and make sacrifice to God, to honor the Sabbath. Anything that prevents the faithful propagation of the family and the honor due to God is a defilement of life itself, wounding family life, because to profane what which is commanded by God is to also dishonor self and family, the "human Trinity." Now family is not a whimsical construct or a man-made convenience. The family is formed by God using human cooperation. And it is the state that must enable that family to prosper morally, intellectually, and physically, not hinder it through oppressive laws, or by neglect. The family, by God's plan and will consists in its usual form, which is, not coincidentally, the ideal form [the ideal being co-existential with normal and usual], of a man and a woman in a lifelong commitment before God, called the Sacrament of Marriage, open to the transmission of life, the rearing of children, begotten, or adopted, through morally licit means. Families headed by widows and other single parents or by grandparents and other guardians, because of death or non-sought divorce, that is, through no fault of the parties involved, validly constitute a family, albeit a more vulnerable one. Hence: the strict commandment to protect and help widows and orphans. In fact, the vulnerable family is precisely that, precisely because the father-mother who are also husband-wife are so integral to the family, there is no substitute, only a diminished capacity through death, etc., as in the above. Any other arrangement cannot morally or existentially be termed a family without doing violence to reality and to man's ability to perceive that reality. Any attack on the reality and nature of family is an attack on truth and life because alternate arrangements by the free will of sinful man distorts man's nature as God made him. When man can no longer adequately perceive his rightful nature, he loses sight of his creatureliness and then of his Creator. Man was made to know, to love, and to serve God. To do that he needs truth, which is that which corresponds to reality and represents it to man so that he might respond to God's overtures. American society is more pagan than Christian, despite all the polls purporting to demonstrate our religiosity. We may attend church and synagogue and mosque, but for the most part that attendance is social and cultural, not moral, at least among the first two groups. This explains why it is that in such a supposedly "religious country" we have abortion on demand and persecution of Christians who try to rescue preborn babies with merely a yawn from society as it turns back to the football game and the movie of the week. As we have abandoned our dependence on God and rejected His dominion over us, He has withdrawn His grace and light, and we are blinded to the truth. This process of corruption is interdependent: the one fostering the other and vice versa. One of the penalties for apostasy is spiritual and moral blindness, the other is the destruction of the family, predominately through perversion. The Epistles of St. Paul are a warning to Christians and society in general of the penalties for that apostasy. A primary corollary of the former penalty is that we have lost our ability to make the necessary distinctions residing in the truth, especially the nature of a validly constituted "right." We are ignoramuses through our own laziness, a punishment for apostasy. Today any so-called "moral" [which is more than likely immoral] claim that is co-existent with "any desire" is now raised to the status of a right "deserving" our endorsement. Our ignorance renders us powerless to respond in the collective, and sensing our man-made futility we fall back on surrender through pretense, preferring lies to truth. We live under rocks with our heads buried in the sand surrounding the rocks. We know not the light, forgetting that---God's people will "perish for lack of" the truth "knowledge". In Scripture Truth and Light in Christ are co-eternal in the supernatural order; in the natural realm, truth and light go together like marriage and children do. As we permit perversity to win by default, a little at a time, evil on the installment plan, we lose light because we no longer acknowledge the truth before God and before men. The ultimate perversity is untruth, the most insidious, the lie about gender as if it were merely a biological accident and not preordained in the very nature of human existence and responsibility, the very soul of man. And the price for our willingness to be blinded to maleness and femaleness and their attendant responsibilities, their lack of sameness while remaining equal in dignity, blind to the incontrovertible fact that maleness and femaleness are not interchangeable, thus our neglectful negation of necessary rights because of those duties adhering to nature as male or female, is the ultimate gender-bender, sexual degradation and the homosexual nightmare. The practice of homosexuality is an affront to God, a defilement of His creation because it is a direct attack on the essence of male and female and the family. And it is a frontal assault on the Holy Trinity. It is sterile, not life-generating by sinful participation and thus rejects the Trinity, which is mirrored in the family as created by God. The stakes in the cultural war are of the highest importance. To lose this battle is to relinquish our very hold on life itself because human life will have no family, no hierarchy in which to develop and know God. We will have rendered homage to defilement, committed sacrilege beyond human repair or reparation. Then, we will be under God's interdict, His chastisement for our capitulation. Almost alone, striving against what many perceived as insurmountable odds, a woman named Carolyn Cosby appeared in our midst to take up the mantle in defense of co-gendered life, the family, against the assault of unbridled lust and inversion, the war of the world, flesh against spirit , Satan's advancing horde. It is strictly my opinion, but I think that the Antichrist, when he comes will be a sodomite or a homophile. In his perversity, Satan will attempt to "mirror Christ" through his collaborator, Antichrist. Because only male and female chastity, which is the right use of sexual faculties, can image God, however dimly we creatures must, and since the Fathers of the Church have taught that Antichrist will mirror Christ backwards, it occurred to me that the ultimate inversion for him would be the vice that ought not be mentioned, if times were different. While sexual inversion has been with us since the fall of man most likely, I do not consider it accidental that the forces working for the Advent of Antichrist---I believe that we are in the age of the last and great Apostasy predicted by St. Paul---that homosexuality is on the ascendancy and becoming so widespread and acceptable. Prescient as she has shown herself to be, and with the conviction of a prophet, an outcast among those whom should be counted as her own people, Carolyn Cosby has waged a stunning victory, fighting two enemies working for Satan, the pagan left and part of the "Christian right." Her Concerned Maine Families coalition has managed with God's help, surely, to put Maine on the map as the beachhead upon which the invasion of the sexual idolaters will be repelled and vanquished or the family will perish. To quote her words in an interview with the Portland Press, "I'm doing something unique. I'm either going to have a stunning victory or a stunning defeat." Before I present a brief biography of her background as well as a report on her extraordinary referendum drive, which appears to have been successful, let me recall for you a chance meeting I had with her and one of her most stalwart and faithful soldiers, Ron Stauble of Maine's Pro-Life Education Association, in Waterville recently: I was exiting the public parking lot of one of the downtown shopping centers in a hurry to get back to Augusta to work, when I spied Carolyn and Ron in the burning late summer sun at a table smack in the middle of the lot. They were gathering signatures for the referendum and time was running out on the deadline. She wanted to be "over the top" with signatures anticipating that the Secretary of State would invalidate a certain percentage of them. Surprised and happy to see them I stopped to ask how the effort was going. She indicated "not good." The US Postal Service had asked them to leave after a homosexual made a fuss; rather than ask the troublemaker to cease and desist because he was violating the rights of citizens to engage in the political process in the public square [a US Post Office is the very essence of a public square], the police decided to evict both the homosexual protester and the peaceful signature gatherers. It's too bad the intruder had not been a pro-lifer so that the police would have removed him and him alone. Naturally, only pro-lifers are "troublemakers" and are the only ones who interfere with the right to "choose" whatever that choice may be [it always remains undefined like a hanging participle, just "choice"] to kill or to gather signatures, etc. So Carolyn and Ron were in the blazing sun without shade and she was red as a Maine lobster after it is steamed. However, feisty Carolyn was determined to endure and triumph. She has been described by friend and foe as "tough." I prefer to think of her as fighting for our very lives because the stakes are that high. Life under homosexual reign will be untenable, more hideous than any Gulag, its horrors beyond description. That afternoon she was discouraged because time was so short and because some of the Christians, whom she should have been able to count on to pitch in were instead backbiting her efforts and refusing to help. In essence they had joined the Philistines. But she would not give up and acknowledged that there was no time to fret over their bitterness caused by misplaced egos and a love of being accepted by the powers of this world, a desire they are blind to, but is obvious to any observer. They want things their way "or else." Red and burnt, perspiring, she was gallant and beautiful, almost radiant with determination and lit by true grit. I could picture a small but mighty sling shot in her hand, instead of a pen. Well, God must have been looking down especially on her and Ron and the other soldiers in her army, Concerned Maine Families, that day and the next few, because they got enough signatures to go "over the top." If enough of the required signatures pass muster, the referendum on "special rights" will be on the 1995 ballot and not a moment too soon. You see, last time the legislature passed, thanks to our Bishop's "neutral stance," a "gay rights" bill, which was vetoed by Gov. McKernan. But next time it won't be that way at all because all the gubernatorial candidates favor "gay rights". We are a hair's breath from Sodom in Maine, except thanks to God and His human agent Carolyn Cosby. Carolyn was aware of the assault of the homofascists as early as 1980, far before most of us were, but it was not until 1989 that she came to our attention. That year was a turbulent turning point in Maine political history, the year that Mainers woke up to discover that homosexuals and lesbians had stormed the barricades, once known as the Maine legislature. One, Robin Lambert of Portland lost a primary bid that was wrongfully attributed to Cosby because she was an outspoken leader in Portland politics as head of the City Republican Committee that year, and an avowed opponent of "gay rights." She earned our respect and the homofascists' undying enmity. [A report by this editor was published in an earlier issue of the GUARDIAN over a year ago which detailed the extent her enemies went to intimidate her.] In 1992 City Councilor Peter O'Donnell proposed Portland's "gay rights" ordinance, subsequently approved by the council. Cosby joined Concerned Portland Citizens, which collected enough signatures to force city officials the send the question to the voters. As we have already outlined, that local initiative lost, by about 14%. But it was a valiant try and a serious challenge that would have been successful, if the coalition had grasped in time---they were novices---that the enemy plays rough and dirty and that the battle is waged by gorilla warfare on the ground, in the trenches, not in the air by going merely "on the air." In 1993 Cosby formed Concerned Maine Families [CMF] statewide. This time they were successful in helping to defeat Lewiston's "gay rights" ordinance, which was finally repealed in 1993. That rout made the BBC and all the national media. This time she received more help from another coalition put together by Paul and Susan Madore, both of whom are running for the legislature, he for the Senate, and she for the House. [They both lost in a predominantly "Catholic" city.] While the Catholic Madores are credited with much of the victory, which they deserve handily, CMF was instrumental in firing the opening volley. They were able to reach the non-Catholic community and help them organize. [Carolyn is not a Catholic.] Carolyn has spent the past year assisting her volunteer brigade gather signatures for the statewide initiative. The wording of the referendum as proposed is inspired. Modeled after the Colorado initiative that passed before a judge ruled it as unconstitutional, Maine's proposed new law will not mention either homosexuality or heterosexuality, but addresses only the addition of a "special rights" category for legal protection under the civil rights umbrella. In other words the voters will be asked if they want current Maine law to remain as is, which does not refer to any gender or sexual classification in regards to rights. Even our marriage laws do not refer to either heterosexuality or homosexuality. They specify only a man and a woman, period. This is crucial to passing constitutional criteria before a liberal judge. And marriage and adoption "rights" are where the homofascists are headed, by their own admission. It is part of the overall persuasion that they are "normal." Peter O'Donnell said that a support of "gay rights" is equal to approval. Four years ago during the storming of the barricades I interviewed one of the present lesbian legislators who was running for her first term. I asked her what she sought when she spoke for "gay rights," that did it include the right to marry and adopt? She paused---this was on public radio by the way---then responded, "Well, no, we aren't ready for that yet." Note well the yet. In other words, special rights are on the way, later if not sooner. That Freudian slip should have cost her the race but instead she was propelled into office by a contrary electorate, the same that felt compelled to elect Clinton two years later, knowing about his lies and deceit and some of most of the rest. In fact, that lesbian, now a prominent State Senator on the Education committee [later to serve as State Treasurer and to openly have an in vitro baby girl with her "partner"] where she can make mischief almost unopposed: the committee is in the hands of liberals of both persuasions and she was elected with the help of a voter initiated signature drive backing her in the local newspaper. Known local Catholics were "proudly" on that roster as supporters. Make no mistake we face a Goliath of misinformation and downright lies and most Christians haven't a clue about the stakes or how the war is fought. They consider Cosby too strong in some quarters. All she does is tell the truth and keep repeating it. Surely we have received our wake up call from Crosby's certain trumpet, unlike our Bishop. We pay tribute to Carolyn Cosby in this special issue dedicated to life because homosexuality is a pre-eminent life matter. The next two years will not only reveal Cosby's fate but ours as well. Maine is a weird state. It has the reputation of being "conservative," while continuing to elect liberals in the humanist atheistic camp or fallen away Catholics. Our entire Congressional delegation is pro-abortion and now even Olympia Snow says she will oppose the Maine initiative on "gay rights." This means she is now for gay rights. Just a year ago she claimed she wasn't. We haven't had a pro-life governor in years and the last Catholic we had as governor was personally opposed but, of course, Brennan, now seeking the Blaine House anew. Mrs. Carolyn Cosby is seeking the governorship on a written ballot. Since we are non-profit we cannot endorse her officially, but we can salute her as a remarkable woman. Our only regret is that she is still as yet not a member of the One, True, Holy, and Apostolic Church. God bless you Carolyn and your efforts. May truth and light under His Royal and Supreme Majesty, Christ the King, once more shine forth from Maine so that again they will say ''as Maine goes, so goes the nation." Some rights are not right at all, but just plain wrong! Addendum: Maine currently is suffering under a "Domestic Partnership" law that mandates taxpayers to support homosexuals' lovers of state employees.Republished 1994 GUARDIAN Editorials, by Editor Pauly
Fongemie.
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