Christian Rout in the Culture War
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States.
"Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services.
Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.
Remarkable. The least respected of American institutions, Congress, with an approval rating of 13 percent, is imposing its cultural and moral values on the most respected of American institutions, the U.S. military.
Why are we undertaking this social experiment with the finest military on earth? Does justice demand it? Was there a national clamor for it?
No. It is being imposed from above by people, few of whom have ever served or seen combat, but all of whom are aware of the power of the homosexual rights lobby. This is a political payoff, at the expense of our military, to a militant minority inside the Democratic Party that is demanding this as the price of that special interest's financial and political support.
Among the soldiers most opposed to bringing open homosexuals into the ranks are combat veterans, who warn that this will create grave problems of unit cohesion and morale.
One Marine commandant after another asked Congress to consider the issue from a single standpoint:
Will the admission of gay men into barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island enhance the fighting effectiveness of the Corps?
Common sense suggests that the opposite is the almost certain result.
Can anyone believe that mixing small-town and rural 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring Marines, in with men sexually attracted to them is not going to cause hellish problems?
The Marines have been sacrificed by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the homosexual lobby, with the collusion of no fewer than eight Republican senators.
This is a victory in the culture war for the new morality of the social revolution of the 1960s and a defeat for traditional Judeo-Christian values. For only in secularist ideology is it an article of faith that all sexual relations are morally equal and that to declare homosexual acts immoral is bigotry.
But while this new morality may be orthodoxy among our elites in the academy, media, culture and the arts, Middle America has never signed on and still regards homosexuality as an aberrant lifestyle, both socially and spiritually ruinous.
To these folks, homosexuality is associated with a high incidence of disease, HIV/AIDS, early death, cultural decadence and civilizational decline. And no sensitivity training at Camp Lejeune is going to change that.
Behind these traditionalist beliefs lie the primary sources of moral authority for traditionalist America: the Old and New Testaments, Christian doctrine, natural law. Thomas Jefferson believed homosexuality should be treated with the same severity as rape.
And 31 consecutive defeats for same-sex marriage in state referenda testifies that Middle America sees the new morality as the artificial invention of pseudo-intellectuals to put a high gloss on a low lifestyle.
Not until recent decades have many in America or the West argued that homosexuality is natural and normal. As late as 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Today, anyone who agrees with that original APA assessment is himself or herself said to be afflicted with a mental disorder: homophobia.
The world has turned upside down. What was criminal vice in the 1950s—homosexuality and abortion—is not only constitutionally protected, but a mark of social progress.
Yet, just as busing for racial balance led to violence, white flight and the ruin of urban schools, this social experiment is not going to be without consequences. And it is the military that will endure those consequences.
Yet, again, if we believe our armed forces to be the best in the world, why are we doing this, against the advice of countless senior officers and NCOs? What is the motivation other than the payoff of a campaign debt?
What happens now to Evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic chaplains who preach that homosexuality is a sinful and shameful practice? Will they be severed from the service as homophobes?
That cannot be far behind when the Family Research Council, a respected organization of religious and social conservatives that has fought the homosexual agenda from same-sex marriage to gay adoptions, has now been declared by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a "hate group."
The advance of what was once a radical agenda has accelerated.
In 2004, John Kerry may have lost Ohio and the presidency because same-sex marriage was on the ballot in almost a dozen states, bringing out committed social conservatives to the polls. Six years later, the gay rights agenda is imposed by Congress and Obama on the 82nd and 101st.
Let the reader decide if the direction America is headed in is toward those "sunny uplands," or straight downhill.
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Antiphon: certain rigorists--for instance Jansenists--were actually predecessors of modern revolutionaries, so the "liberal" label might not be unwarranted.
I know very little of Feeney and try not to think of him.
@147, Mr. Gervaise,
That is a very funny letter, thank you. I wonder if Mr. Mingledorff of the Marines also read one of Joe Sobran's last few columns posted here at Chronicles, "The Eclipse of the Normal", a column which Mingledorff echoes a few times. It is well worth your time if you missed it, and for anyone who enjoys a lucid and uproarious statement of just what homophobia means.
Two anecdotes can illustrate the difference between the traditional military culture and what is going to replace it when DADT is repealed, and what this portends.
In the '70's bar scene I unfortunately wasted much of my time in, one frequently ran into homosexual men and their entourage of twisted, embittered women. I suppose they came around to some of the looser hetero joints because Chicago's queer scene had not yet expanded into the billion dollar, city funded vice playground and tourist destination known today as - sinister appropriation of innocence! - "Boys Town". I became "friends" with two of these chaps, partly because of their bizarre entertainment value, mostly because they were friends with a certain young woman who had entranced me with one look. One of them, the tall one, was actually fairly well behaved, tolerably considerate of non-gays, and had a stoic acceptance of his condition. The other one, however, was a mercurial blend of self-loathing, superciliousness toward heterosexuals, and contempt for women combined with ardent jealousy of any hetero male who appeared to attract one of his female followers, who doted on him for his flashy clothes, dancing ability, and talent for ridiculing normal men. This one had a virulent sexual appetite, or talked like he did, and was torn between wanting to be manly, one of the guys, and wanting to be attractive to them. He often seemed to be seething over the slights, real and imagined, of men who had the unpardonable bad taste to prefer women to him.
One night he came in alone and was unusually subdued, and, after closing time, I do not recall now if it was because I truly took pity on him, or that I thought thereby to gain standing in the eyes of the above mentioned camp follower by being nice to him, anyway I invited him over to my place, a short walk away, for coffee. After the coffee and some desultory attempts at conversation, I mentioned that it was late and I had to get up early. Immediately I realized I'd made a mistake in inviting him over, for evidently leaving had never been part of his plan. He petulantly complained about how far he had to drive to get home, how tired he was, and when that didn't work, flashed angry and accused me of prejudice against gays. When that didn't work, he accused me of cowardice, of being "afraid that something might happen to me while I was asleep." Well, he got it half right: I knew very well that "something" would happen if I should be so foolish as to go to sleep with him around. After some nasty back and forth, he was finally convinced that it was he, not I, who had something to fear if he did not leave posthaste.
Contrast this with what happened at around that same time with my friend Fred, like me, a Namvet and former Marine. Fred, a medium brown son of sharecroppers who had come north in the '40s for war work, still lived out on the West Side a couple of blocks from my parents' house, and occasionally came by my fancy new digs in fashionable Newtown to sample the nightlife with me in bars where guns were not likely to be drawn. One night after we'd closed the bar and had coffee and a sweet roll in a diner, we realized that it was too late for Fred to get home, change, and get back downtown for his job. I suggested he could catch a few winks at my place and go to work from there, his snappy nightlife clothes being as suitable as any for his job as a salesman. At my place, it was immediately obvious that my sofabed would be too small for the two of us, and I'm sure we both felt a natural aversion for such a thing anyway. After some banter as to who outranked who and therefore should get the bed, the solution came to both of us at the same time: off came the blankets and onto the floor they and we went. Fred, who had spent his tour in Viet Nam walking point with a line company of One One, the highly decorated First Battalion, First Marines, had slept rough far more often than I, and the return to the ground brought back more memories for him than for me. Of a sudden he brought it all back to me, though, when he called out "Who gets first watch?" First watch was always the prized one, because all the trooper who drew it had to do was stay awake an extra three hours after digging in for the night, and then, barring action, he could sleep through the rest of night uninterrupted, whereas those on later watches had to wake up at an ungodly hour and often could not return to sound sleep thereafter. With a wistful laugh, we settled back, and slept soundly, shoulder to shoulder.
What the new military is going to get now is a constant repetition of the first example above, while men of the caliber of the old point man of the First of the First disappear from the ranks, and perhaps cease to be produced by our increasingly effete society altogether.
Mr. T. Chan,
I appreciate your acknowledgement of my earlier comment.
#151 "certain rigorists–for instance Jansenists–were actually predecessors of modern revolutionaries"
And don't forget the New England Puritans. If Spain, England, France, Southern Germany, etc.. are Roman ruins, it would surely be correct to say America since 1865 is a New England ruin.
Meddling, Ecumenism and Family Feuds,...
http://www.abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&id=219562
As to religion:
A guy came into my store one day and told me that only 5% of all Christians were going to Heaven. Really, he actually said that.
It kind of made me mad because I grew up believing that 6% of all Christians were going to Heaven.
Chesterton's apothegm, like most apothegms, is subject to some limitations. If anyone has ever had to accompany his child to a Suzuki violin class or attended amateur night at a comedy club, he will understand. By the way, RAS's witticism was actually not that bad, but when a joke is made at the expense of a friend, one is obliged to deflect the blow.
Dear Antiphon. I use Feeneyite to describe attitudes I saw reflected in your 1st post at Chronicles. If you do not have those attitudes you might consider modifying your approach to the EENS question so strangers will not be misled.
There is absolutely no doubt that Latter Day Feeneyism (LDF) has many adherents online despite the fact that, beginning with, for most Baby Boomers, The original Baltimore Catechism (Question 121) has taught a mundane, openly acknowledged truism; that EENS is not understood in the heretical way Fr Feeney understood it.
So, when you begin by citing that ancient Encyclical, and do it in two of your first three posts, - without even addressing to whom it was addressed, and for what reason, - you risk giving informed strangers the impression you adhere to the Feeneyite position.
And why sever the history of Tradition by stopping at Pius XII?
Why not a simple reference to the current Universal Catechism as regards the matter of salvation? After all, Universal Catechisms are one means Holy Mother Church explains in what way ancient Encyclicals are to be understood in Tradition; a Tradition that, in this particular instance, has two streams of theology, both orthodox, although apparently at odds, that had to be reconciled, and which were reconciled at the most recent Ecumenical Council.
In any event, I have no monomania about Feeneyism. I simply know of its fetid existence and I try to cut-off its monstrous head every time it rises from the pit to tell those who are not explicit, formal, members of The Catholic Church, that they are going to Hell.
Had I not had the great Blessing of having been born into a large Catholic Family in Vermont, had I been instead born into a different Christian Church and been Baptised and adhered, like my Father and his Father had, to what, for all that I could see, and for all intents and purposes, had been the historical Christianity of our family, and somebody cited a 14th Century Bull to me and told me I was going to Hell, I'd say the man was speaking Bull and I'd tell him to go to Hell.
For Lord's sake. How often is it the case that an increase in knowledge of Papal Encyclicals leads to a decrease in Christian Common Sense when it ought be exactly the other result that might be expected. I think that is due to the spirit of our age.
Liberalism and private judgment has seemingly infected all Catholic Lay intellects - rigorous and lax, right and left, modernist and traditionalist - and about the only recourse is humility, obedience, and submitting our judgments to Holy Mother Church.
It was good enough for Sr Augustine and it ought be good enough for us.
As an aside,I was driving into town today when I thought of what might serve as a measure of our own orthodoxy that each of us could apply to our own selves to see whether or not we, not others, are fully members of The Catholic Church.
Are there any Doctrines/Disciplines/Precepts of the Catholic Church that we disagree with or do not understand yet accept with a humble and obedient docility?
If not, we only believe/accept from the Church what our intellects and wills have already concluded is right and just and true which is just another way of saying that we, and not the Catholic Church, are the authority; which is just a Confession we are protestants.
On Chesterton apothegms: "The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."
On Old Jesuits: Evelyn Waugh's biography of St. Edmund Campion.
On New Jesuits:
I once asked an elderly Jesuit at Georgetown University if there were any real Jesuits still around Georgetown, he pointed out his window towards the cemetery and said, "Yes, there are some out there!"
Are there any Doctrines/Disciplines/Precepts of the Catholic Church that we disagree with or do not understand yet accept with a humble and obedient docility?
the ministration of the sacraments be given, not to the angels, but to men. The efficacy of the sacraments comes from the Passion of Christ, hence from Christ as a man; men, not angels, are like unto Christ in His human nature. Miraculously God might send a good angel to administer a sacrament (Summa Theologiæ III:64:7).
BUT, from the controversy between St. Augustine and the Donatists in the fourth century and especially from the controversy between St. Stephen and St. Cyprian in the third century, we know that personal holiness or the state of grace in the minister is not a prerequisite for the valid administration of the sacrament.
This is only slightly off topic regarding the "Christian rout" in the culture wars.
The so-called new natural lawyers--who make me grind my teeth the more I think about their mode of reasoning--have managed to make their position against same-sex marriage THE argument against it. This, in my view, makes a conservative rout much more likely. I have a lot of reasons for thinking so, some of which I'm still thinking about, but I won't bore anyone here, other than to register the fact that the NNLers do NOT agree with Romans 1:26-27 (they implicitly reject the "perverted faculties" argument of St. Paul and the tradition becasue it supposedly violates the naturalistic fallacy). I wonder how many "Christian" conservatives are aware of this.
Ken,
This whole affair has been one steady rout of Christian teaching for the last one hundred years -- from contraception, to abortion, to euthenasia, to homosexuality, to stem cell research, incest, bestiality, to whatever consenting adults want to do. There is no authority but only a cloudy kind of faith in --- RESPECTABILITY -- it is composed of faith in democracy, education, a nifty standard of living and every man for himself.
Today's natural lawyers are like the old scribes and Pharisees who had a law but no spirit for it.
@155: Except that "ruins" implies New England Puritan order was some sort of great civilization on the order of Rome. I'd compare them to the Goths laying waste to Rome, but as a German I would find that insulting.
I just remembered a letter to my friends from two years ago in which I said a more apt analogy for our times might well be Ottoman Turkey overrunning Byzantium. Eventually nothing is left but inanimate (dead) ruins. Even the people have forgotten.