COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT AND THE TEMPTATION OF DECEIT ---------
GUILE, GULLIBILITY AND THE GREAT DIVIDE
Filed by Pauly Fongemie
April 3, 2013
Feast of St. Irene of Thessalonia, Martyr
This column is in response to FOX News' Bill O'Reilly's intemperate exchange with the ever unflappable Laura Ingraham, radio host and author, Tuesday, April 2. The topic was the majority support for "gay marriage" as Bill and the left put it. Actually the term itself is an oxymoron in more ways than one; however, this is not part of our analysis here. I simply want to stipulate that the widespread acceptance of this term, a ploy of the homophiles themselves, by way of acknowledgment for those who may think I should be discussing this deceitful phrase as well. It is the big picture that is our focus today, because of the pettifogging by O'Reilly under the guise of being insulted that anyone would think he intended to or managed to insult sincere Christians who place their trust in the Word of God --- the Bible.
Miss Ingraham indicated that Bill had invited her on his program to discuss the triumph [my term] of the homosexualist movement in garnering so much support for their latest sortie in turning the natural law upside down, while completely vanquishing it all in one stroke: To wit, the inartful at times methodology of those who support marriage as given by God, whom Bill called "Bible thumpers."
Bill began by using an ad hominem attack while claiming he was only presenting facts and hard analysis based on those supposed facts. He never gave Laura Ingraham an opportunity to challenge his assertions of facts as actual facts because he kept the argumentation to his implied insult to Christians and not the facts themselves. He blustered and flustered in an angry tone to even have it suggested that he might have insulted Christians, whether intended or not.
Laura was right on point, as usual, because she told him that he ought not have used the incendiary, pejorative phrase, "Bible thumpers." [She did not use this characterization, I am doing so here.] Bill is ever telling the public that he is not an ideologue, but a parser of facts and subsequent analysis. He continually decries the spin of character assassination, yet here he is spinning his own peculiar web of deflection and intimidation by adopting the left's demeaning, disdainful use of code words to denigrate faithful followers of Christ who may not always be adept at political intrigue and countering the arguments of those who despise Christ and His teachings, which they consign to a private closet only, as Bill did also by stating that the Bible argument is not for the public square as this is, in so many words, a losing proposition. Well, in accord with Miss Ingraham, insulting well-meaning Christians, and make no mistake this term "Bible thumpers" is an insult to them, and most especially to God, the ultimate author of the Bible and the author of Truth Who is all Truth, I answer: I recall hearing that phrase, along with "mackerel snappers" for us Catholics and Protestants back in the 50s. Believe me, we knew it was meant to sting, to marginalize us. It mattered not to those who disparaged our cherished beliefs that we were and are bound to forgive them. In fact they considered this aspect the frosting on the cake as they could act hypocritically with impunity, knowing full well that we knew it, too. Anyone asserting that he is so up on facts all the time as Bill insists that he is, should have been aware of this by definition. He could have more easily and convincingly made his point by saying, instead, "Well-meaning Christians need to use more than Biblical arguments in our current situation." Or any similar phrase. The fact that he was so irate that anyone might think he may have insulted Christians tells us much about his own inner core of beliefs. If he is really "looking out for the people" then he needs to keep the principle of not using the tactical ploy of the left, just as he refuses to use it for the right, squarely and firmly in mind. Otherwise he gives the impression, that he, too, is an ideologue of sorts. By engaging in this kind of ad hominem, Bill O'Reilly was but an irritable tempest in a teapot, a very cold one at that, despite the heat on his part. Score: O'Reilly, 0, Ingraham, 2+ and counting. I mean, O'Reilly was a "Christian basher" for all practical matters. Christian bashers and Bible thumpers. Think about it. I would be willing to bet that Bill would take umbrage at the former phrase, even as he employs the latter.
Now that we have the background of this segment of Tuesday's FACTOR, NO SPIN ZONE at hand, let us proceed with our own analysis of why the ascendancy of the homosexual ethos versus the normative, or traditional, which I title THE TEMPTATION OF DECEIT --------- GUILE, GULLIBILITY AND THE GREAT DIVIDE.
Or to be as blunt as possible, the tactics expounded in The Overhauling of Straight America by Marshal E. Kirk and Hunter Madsen and their follow-up book, After the Ball, How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. As John Vennari of CATHOLIC FAMILY NEWS wrote, "It is a blueprint of media
Folks, this is the crux of the issue before us. It matters not what non-Biblical arguments we offer, the public by and large, through media hype, day-in and day-out, 360 per year, one of the worst purveyors of distortion being FOX News, how exquisitely ironic, has been conditioned to think of Christians as nothing but O'Reilly's "Bible thumpers" and worse. And why has the public been so gullible to the propaganda expertly dished out? Because we long ago abandoned the natural law, its irreplaceable principles, when we decided that we were willing to put abortion on the back burner, to tolerate it, even if individually some of us were opposed. We lost the grace of God, the loss of which has deprived us of normal reasoning power, rendering us susceptible to the blandishments of guile or the temptation to be deceived as it is considered "compassionate" or what passes for it today. Actually treating others with respect as Miss Laura interjected, while part and parcel of the Christian ideal and action does not have to include the willingness to not expose the cunning deception of the enemy --- make no mistake, the proponents of same-sex "marriage" are the sheer enemy of normalcy and the natural law basis of all society --- and its total lack of respect for us. To be fair to our opponents, to be just and respectful, we must be willing to speak in all candor, not only for the sake of truth itself, but for their sake. In THE GRAPES OF WRATH, August 4, 2012, I wrote [reduced font size]:
The weapon of choice in the war against normalcy, and sexual continence, or virtue: pressure applied to the most vulnerable, and often the most common occurring points of society, the young and the elderly. The first which has yet to fully learn the righteousness of shame, that which is opposed to honor and dignity, both of the individual and of the community are captive minds in the government schools where they are indoctrinated to accept the perverse and feel ashamed of the normal as normal; the latter, too, often have grown lax and weary, thus are easily exploited by "rights" talk. It is sentimental bathos and casuistry, a sham compassion. Every two years or so, especially the last twelve, the body politic has had to go to the polls to repel the advance of Sodom, sometimes over the heads of our elected officials who chose to ignore the people. Meanwhile the national scene has been replete with the inexplicable. Some years ago I wrote by way of an introduction to a series of articles, titled, HOMOSEXUAL WATCH:
"Traditional Catholics and some who are socio-political conservatives are confounded at the advance of the social acceptability of the vice of sodomy [just as long as the vice is not committed within "marriage"] by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, among others, recently. How could this be? they ask. The company they keep, in the media and without. The undermining of the natural law by our willingness to tolerate the abortion, divorce and remarriage almost ad infinitem we claim to abhor, has weakened our will and blinded our reason, a self-inflicted chastisement with moral consequences so all-encompassing, those who still possess their heads in the confusion that has seized even those who ought to know better, could have said almost a quarter century ago, watch out we don't have to to say 'Told you so!' "
In the first installment of that series I wrote [text in red, slightly modified for this presentation]:
Showing no "embarrassment or regret" typifies our cultural manners today, from OPRAH to DONAHUE to Clinton. In order for the sodomite cultural mandate to predominate and influence American society, mankind's God-endowed natural modesty and sense of shame must be undermined. Those very things that St. Paul taught should not even be mentioned are now the hallmarks of the day, vulgarity of every variety is now ascendant. The most hideous distortions of human nature are mentioned as if in passing; what used to shock is now only schlock theater. By eroding the natural law and the normal sexual ethic that once accompanied the observance of that law, the homosexuals and those who make common purpose with them, have rendered us powerless, or at least with a growing sense of powerlessness, to defend normalcy against deviancy, precisely because we have compromised our God-given nature, nay, even corrupted, our normalcy and become deviant ourselves as a society --- divorce, remarriage, and contraception being the opening pass into the erosion process. ...
Every time the Sodomite vanguard attempts another sortie, the vote tally in favor of the natural law is a little less as the people grow tired. Most normal people have families and related obligations. Too often they are besieged with propaganda at work that disconcerts them and leaves them a little more vulnerable, which is why the tactic is used. In the meantime the homosexual collective has all the time in the world to advance their agenda and with little or no scruples about it, save public perception or the easily effected facade of "being nice guys who just want to be like everyone else." Of course it never occurs to them or anyone else that if they really want to be like everyone else, they would stop agitating for what is deviant or abnormal, cease asking for rights based on a proclivity for a certain vice or sin and be like us: None of us expect to have rights based on our sinful inclinations; we certainly do not want the basic laws of society changed to suit our sinful nature, whatever that sin is for each one of us. Let me repeat, non-deviants who sin against the Sixth Commandment at least are normal in that this sin is not one of the four that cry out for vengeance from God. They recognize the supremacy of the natural law which is the Divine law written in the very nature of man as fully male and fully female by God Who created him for Himself, not the world, even if they may not always keep it. There is no equivalency at all.
Remember, assigning the legal title of "marriage" to vile, sordid venereal acts that violate man's nature, does not purify them, but adds sacrilege and blasphemy, the ultimate impudent defiance of human reason conjoined to the natural law which forms this human unity in natural perfection.
From article three of the series mentioned above, with some paraphrasing [text in green]:
"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 in accord with the natural law which is binding on all men by virtue of their humanity. Man has no authority to change the natural law. He can deny it, disregard it, but he is setting up himself and his neighbors for a diabolical slavery characterized by chaos, unimaginable to most, until and only after it is "too late". Hence, 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 natural or genuine family is the most sacred and
the smallest unit of
society --- the most basic, without which there can be no society or
civilization.
The family is based on marriage, a sacred bond that is immutable in its
essence. 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 culmination of the
existence of man
is union with God, society has the duty or obligation to uphold the
individual's
right to gain salvation. One of the foundations for attaining salvation
is the proper observance of the natural law. The state is not only not
free to refrain from doing so, it must positively do all it can to
uphold it through just laws, for it has no authority to do otherwise.
Any other arrangement of political and social affairs is utter contempt
for the common good, not to mention
the Good itself. The common good is not what the people want
necessarily, but rather, what is good as defined by the natural law.
"The
state,
which is the legal agent of society, has no moral claim on an
individual
other than that necessary to foster natural family life and individual
perfection within its light.
It is the individual, and by extension, predominately the traditional
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,
especially the tyranny of the absurd.
"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 multiply, 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 [natural] family and the honor due to God is a defilement of life itself, wounding family life, because to profane that 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 and the farce of redefinition.
"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 morally permissible divorce [a
very
limited entity], 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, 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."
I also
included the following in slightly modified form here for brevity:
The same applies to single non-homosexual persons who adopt children. They at least might marry in the future, are in no way precluded from the same, and merit our respect and protection.
The same truth is applicable to the homosexualists [henceforth referred to as the collective], whether they want to recognize it or not. In fact, to lie to them or tell them what they may think they want to hear is to invite the disrespect of the members of the collective themselves for they know down deep in their guts that such persons are really demeaning them as grown-ups, to patronize them like second-class citizens, and it is to dishonor them by treating them differently as if they were sub-human. Without truth there is no respect, no charity, not even a shard of kindness in the end. It is because we love our neighbors, which includes those with the affliction of same-sex attraction, we owe them the dignity of the truth; not because we sit in personal judgment of them as individuals, for that is not our purview, but because as good citizens we are bound to judge rightly about right and wrong, and rights and wrongs. Apart from an honest consideration of the mandates of the natural law, rights easily become devalued, debased, and a political weapon to punish those who are not willing to deny the necessity of the natural law bedrock, by those in power. The Chick Fil-A news sensation is prima facie case #1.
This is it in the proverbial nutshell. Until we again recover, if we even can, our respect and upholding for and of the natural law, we will always lose, period, although we may win as individual persons, with God. Abortion and its sister crimes, which we tolerate in so many ways, are so abhorrent to Almighty God that He is delivering us up to our iniquity, the final onslaught of which always includes the unnatural vices.
The vice of the practice of homosexuality has become acceptable because the opponents of the natural law have convinced us, in our merited weakness by the following tactics as outlined by Kirk and Madsen as incisively analyzed and explained by John Vennari:
"The first order of business is desensitization of the American public concerning gays and gay rights. To desensitize the pubic is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of keen emotion." John Vennari correctly and insightfully recognized that "The authors go on to note their goal to make sexual preference placed on a par with preferences in ice cream flavors or sports. You prefer chocolate, I prefer butter pecan. You prefer hockey, I prefer baseball. No problem."
Step 1: Talk About Gays and Gayness as Loudly and as Often as Possible
"The way to benumb raw sensibilities about homosexuality is to have a lot of people talk a great deal about the subject in a neutral or supportive way."
Step 2: Portray Gays as Victims, Not as Aggressive Challengers
“In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented, instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression. For that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our ‘gay pride’ publicly when it conflicts with the Gay Victim image. And we must walk the fine line between impressing straights with our great numbers, on the one hand, and sparking their hostile paranoia —'They are all around us!' — on the other.
"A media campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which reduce the mainstream's sense of threat, which lower its guard, and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep very low profile in gay commercials and other public presentations, while sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability such as NAMBLA, [North American Man-Boy Love Association] must play no part at all in such a campaign ..."
Step 3: Give Protectors a Just Cause [emphasis in bold added by me]
"A media campaign that casts gays as society's victims and encourages straights to be their protectors must make it easier for those to respond to assert and explain their new protectiveness. Few straight women, and even fewer straight men, will want to defend homosexuality boldly as such. Most would rather attach their awakened protective impulse to some principle of justice or law, to some general desire for consistent and fair treatment in society. Our campaign should not demand direct support for homosexual practices, should instead take anti-discrimination as its theme. The right to free speech, freedom of beliefs, freedom of association, due process and equal protection of laws-these should be the concerns brought to mind by our campaign."
Step 4: Make Gays Look Good
"In order to make a Gay Victim sympathetic to straights you have to portray him as Every man. But an additional theme of the campaign should be more aggressive and upbeat: to offset the increasingly bad press that these times have brought to homosexual men and women, the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of society. Yes, yes, we know — this trick is so old it creaks. Other minorities use it all the time in ads that announce proudly, 'Did you know that this Great Man (or Woman) was ____?' But the message is vital for all those straights who still picture gays as ‘queer’ people — shadowy, lonesome, fail, drunken, suicidal, child-snatching misfits."
The authors stress the importance of Celebrity endorsement. “The celebrities can be straight” (such as Ed Asner) "or gay."
Step 5: Make the Victimizers look Bad
"At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights — long after other gay ads have become commonplace — it will be time to get tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be vilified. (This will be all the more necessary because, by that time, the entrenched enemy will have quadrupled its output of vitriol and disinformation.) Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek to replace the mainstream's self-righteous pride about its homophobia with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types."
Step 6: Solicit Funds: The Buck Stops Here
"Any massive campaign of this kind would require unprecedented expenditures for months or even years — an unprecedented fundraising drive,” say the authors. They call upon homosexuals to contribute heavily to this campaign. “And because those gays not supporting families usually have more discretionary income than average, they could afford to contribute much more."
They go on to say, "the appeal should be directed both at gays and at straights who care about social justice."
Conclusion of citations from Vennari.
All the above have transpired, effectively, relentlessly. A number of years ago I became alarmed. Most people reacted by saying I was acting as Chicken Little, a tempest in a teapot, making mountains out of molehills. Ah, but I had my finger on the very pulse of what ailed us then and plagues us now. I wrote extensively about my concerns in the series I referred to supra, HOMOSEXUAL WATCH, in the monthly newsletter and Catholic paper of record, THE GUARDIAN in the late 90s.
The writing on the wall was there in broad daylight for those willing to see. Sometimes when the message is so severe and shocking, downright demoralizing, instead of reacting to confront the challenge head-on, we bury our head in the proverbial sand, hoping it will all go away, if we all pretend to be nice about matters; to further instill this fool-hardy response as righteous we condemn the messenger, rather than examine the message as we ought.
It is now too late. All the sincere Christian can do is save his own soul, in fear and trembling, for our dissolution as a nation, as a cohesive society is upon us full steam ahead, a virtual runaway train with no stop lights. The time is long past for a normative defense of the natural law, because it exists in a faded memory only. Until we can acknowledge our own perfidy and complicity in the elevation of the unnatural over that of the natural, the right, the true and the good as created and demanded by Almighty God, we are doomed. Of course, our religiously indifferent society makes it all the easier, because if we dare come out of our Catholic or Christian closet in the open public, why we are immediately and roundly denounced, per Bill O'Reilly & Co., which are legion, as Lucifer and his minions are legion, who tell us that Christ is not for the public square. The big lie, we soaked in, drank up and then complimented ourselves that we were being "reasonable, respectful", etc.
Yes, indeed, as O'Reilly rightly posits we have to do more than Bible quote, we must be wise in the way our enemy is, but we must never be ashamed of our beliefs and the righteousness of the Bible, which must be part of the very foundation of society, for God's Word can not be dispensed with as if merely a private system for action. The natural law is the simplified, non-denominational aspect of the Divine Law. This Catholic is not ashamed of the Holy Scriptures, which provide the very basis of the natural law in the TEN COMMANDMENTS, for instance. I proudly proclaim it, not as a boast for my only boast must be in Christ, but only because I am not ashamed, no matter who calls me a "Bible thumper." I have been called worse and am the better for it.
This is the great divide as a nation: those who truly believe and live God's Word to the best of their ability, aware of our sinful inclinations, but never ask for societal approval for those serious flaws, and those who refuse to do so, steeped in arrogance, complacency, self-satisfaction, and thereby dedicated in the end to the overturning of normalcy itself.
I will let St. Paul have the the last word, from THE WORD:
For such false apostles are deceitful workmen, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no wonder: for Satan himself transformeth himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers be transformed as the ministers of justice, whose end shall be according to their works. [2 Cor. 11:14-15]
ADDENDUM, APRIL 4:
Some people have inferred that we ought not maintain the effort to overcome that which I implied was futile for now. No, actually I thought you would conclude that while socio-political matters are a devastated wasteland and that our arguments, however artfully and masterfully crafted will not win the day, because we are under the interdict of Heaven if we fail in our bounden duty as Catholics and or Christians, we must persevere to the best of our ability, or else be found wanting at our particular judgment. But we ought not set ourselves up for a false optimism. Make no mistake, we are justly being chastized by Almighty God. We are all the more obligated in justice and in charity to be the tellers of truth, not as we imagine it to be or reconstruct it to be because of pride and or personal devotion to an ideology, but because it is in man's dignity to seek the truth --- that which is given by God and not designed merely by men --- to cherish it once discovered, to uphold it and to disseminate it, for the truth is such that it must be proclaimed without surcease, for this is part of the work of sanctification itself.
To quote the Catholic historian, Hillaire Belloc, who says the same but is far more eloquent than I am:
"No man who has the truth to tell and the power to tell it can long remain hiding it from fear or even from despair without ignominy. To release the truth against whatever odds, even if so doing can no longer help the Commonwealth, is a necessity of the soul."
----The Free Press, p. 26
ADDENDUM, APRIL 5:
There are those of you who are wondering how divorce and remarriage has impacted our ability to be effective in arguing for marriage as one man, one woman, etc. Simple. These have weakened our ability because we allowed others whom we elected to office to legalize divorce [as opposed to the rare, legitimate annulment] and remarriage, which is a kind of reversal of the natural law --- the principle has been nullified in so many words. Those not afflicted with same-sex attraction have endorsed approval or toleration from those of us who have no power to change policy for now, and thus the proponents of same-sex "marriage" have a ready argument here, and I will use one particular phrase I have heard ad infinitum: "So-called heterosexual marriage is not so sacrosanct, look at all the divorce and remarriage!"
Admittedly it is hard to overcome this, for once the principle is conceded --- and divorce and remarriage is an integral part of the overturning of the natural law --- a violation of the Sixth Commandment, it tends to remain conceded per force of human nature. Remember our system of law was founded on the natural law as expressed in the Commandments. If you remove the natural law as the foundation stone, anarchy and whim rule the day as power has the attribute of tending to corrupt, always in the direction of more arbitrary power that crushes. We have essentially accomplished the dismissal of the natural law, abortion being the notable example. Now we see that our rulers in Washington think it licit to seize private property to assist the tax base by ceding privately-owned property to large businesses that will pay higher taxes than the small homeowner. Once the government succeeds without effective opposition in Cyprus in its seizing of funds from private bank accounts to pay the debt incurred through malfeasance of office, how long do you think it will be before it will happen here? Three guesses and the first two don't count.
Already the Obama regime has arrogated unknown till now inordinate power by refusing to enforce justly instituted laws and redefining others as they see fit, all using the police power of the state. And so forth.
Without the natural law, which we have rejected per se, if not officially pro-forma, anything and everything eventually goes. It is like the man who decides to no longer believe in God or the Catholic faith. He does not then believe in nothing, he accepts anything and everything but God and the Catholic faith. Again, this is built into human nature. What arguments will hold up in this regard as to the homosexual collective? This is what I meant by not setting ourselves up for undue optimism just because we are on the side of right in the ultimate sense, if not "might". We are being chastised by God for our own infidelity as a society, make no mistake about it; I realize that many of you do not want to hear this, but I am convicted in my very soul by God if I do not proclaim it, for this, my people, is God's very word upon me, this day as it was when I wrote this column.
ABOUT ST. IRENE:
She and her sisters were martyred in the fourth century because they would not renounce their Christian beliefs and honored the Christian texts, a forbidden practice. Irene, in particular was given an unusual sentence. Before executing her, the enemies of Christ placed her in a brothel so that she would be assaulted, demoralized, etc. The grace of God did not permit this, she remained unmolested and died a virgin in every way. It is most appropriate that [not by chance?] I should be writing this piece today, on her Feast.
The banner image is William Blake's LUCIFER, BEARER OF LIGHT, 1757-1827.
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