La naturaleza real del matrimonio y las consecuencias de su adulteración

In ForumLibertas

Una vez más, Francia a vuelto a sorprender. Con la ley del 'matrimonio' homosexual aprobada, ha conseguido movilizar a centenares de miles de personas, sobre todo en la gran concentración de París, pero también en otras muchas poblaciones de Francia. En este caso, cuando se echan las cuentas, los medios de comunicación olvidan de manera reiterada que, además de la gran concentración humana que se ha producido en cada convocatoria en la capital francesa, también se han reproducido a menor escala grandes movimientos en términos relativos en muchas localidades de aquel país. La razón por la que esto sucede pensamos que radica en el hecho de que la sociedad francesa, a pesar de su laicismo institucional único en Europa y la gran secularización de su sociedad, tiene mucho más clara la naturaleza del matrimonio que en la desarmada España.

Aquí hemos pasado en un fugaz tránsito histórico, porque desde esta perspectiva el tiempo transcurrido no es nada, de la obligación del matrimonio religioso al homosexual en un plis-plas sin que a muchos se les cayera la dentadura por el camino. La razón profunda de por qué esto sucede es digna de meditación y de análisis, pero en cualquier caso el hecho está ahí y no ha sido suficientemente debatido ni profundizado. Las fuerzas sociales que defienden el matrimonio natural, clásico, el único que ha existido en la historia de la humanidad, una vez aprobada la ley se han desarmado no solo como agentes movilizadores sino incluso intelectualmente. Y así siguen. La actitud del PP, que controla o al menos controlaba una parte de este electorado, tiene mucho que ver, porque su menosprecio por cambiar esta ley dice mucho de la visión que tienen las elites dirigentes de nuestro país, incluso en sus sectores más conservadores, sobre el matrimonio.

El homosexualismo político postula que para conseguir su pleno reconocimiento han de poderse casar. Es un error profundo. El rechazo a la homosexualidad no se resolverá a base de que una ínfima minoría de personas del mismo sexo se casen. El problema es otro, pero en todo caso sí hay que subrayar que prosperan en su intento de transformar las instituciones de la sociedad para que estén pensadas a su servicio y no al de la mayoría. De ahí que en la legislación española ya no exista, derivado del matrimonio, el hecho del 'padre' y la 'madre', el 'marido' y la 'esposa', sino 'progenitores' y 'cónyuges'. El lenguaje es representativo de las profundas transformaciones mentales y políticas que el homosexualismo político persigue en una operación de diseño social a gran escala.

El resultado final es malo para todos, porque no solo no existe relación entre la mayor o menor tolerancia y el 'matrimonio' homosexual, como lo demuestra la historia, sino que además la destrucción de la idea del matrimonio conlleva graves consecuencias a medio y largo plazo. En realidad, la tesis del homosexualismo político ha prosperado en España y otros lugares en la medida en que previamente se ha degradado la concepción que del matrimonio tenían amplios sectores de la sociedad, que han empezado a rechazar cualquier compromiso fuerte con el mismo, que incorporara el largo plazo y la descendencia. Desde esta perspectiva, el 'matrimonio' homosexual es una derivada absolutamente lógica. Pero ésta no es la función social del matrimonio, esto no es un matrimonio. La finalidad del matrimonio y de ahí su reconocimiento prepolítico es otra: consiste en reconocer y fortalecer la única institución que es capaz de generar descendencia y educarla, socializarla en la forma adecuada. Nadie más es capaz de hacerlo. Si observamos las causas del crecimiento económico a largo plazo, veremos que tienen una estrecha relación con lo que acabamos de decir. Solo una economía muy marcada por la escuela neoclásica y por lo tanto por una ontogénesis liberal que ha dado papel solo al individuo sin contemplar la función económica de las instituciones sociales ha llevado a tamaño error, a prescindir del papel económico del matrimonio y de la familia que se genera. Es bien sabido que el crecimiento económico a largo plazo depende de la productividad y que ésta a su vez tiene, entre otros, dos componentes absolutamente determinantes porque son los que generan la mayor parte de aquélla. Se tratan del capital humano y del agregado que denominamos productividad total de los factores.

El capital humano está en función del rendimiento profesional en igualdad de condiciones técnicas y de inversión; y este a su vez del rendimiento escolar. Un mal rendimiento escolar, como norma general, va acompañado de un bajo nivel de capital humano. Pues bien, es notorio que el factor determinante de él es la familia y, concretamente, el capital social localizado en ella, que está determinado por la existencia de la pareja, del padre y de la madre, de la estabilidad del vínculo, del tiempo de dedicación a los hijos como factores más determinantes, por encima incluso, aunque también influye de una manera importante, del nivel de ingresos y la renta. En la sociedad del bienestar, que ha tenido una cierta cohesión social, los ingresos de los padres son menos decisivos que el capital social que posee aquella familia en términos de capacidad educativa.

Por otra parte, la productividad total de los factores se ve influida por el capital humano y por derivadas concretas del capital social en el entorno y de la propia empresa. Además, el sistema de bienestar, tanto público, a cargo de las instituciones, como privado, cuando quien lo realiza es la familia, guarda una fuerte relación con la existencia de matrimonios estables que garanticen la sostenibilidad familiar a lo largo del tiempo. El sistema del bienestar depende de la productividad, a la que ya nos hemos referido, y de otros factores más. A largo plazo, de la natalidad; y a corto y a largo, en la vertiente de los costes, por el mayor o menor dimensión de sus costes sociales y de sus costes de intermediación. El eliminar la idea de matrimonio, cuyo fin es la estabilidad para que pueda procrear hijos y cuidarlos adecuadamente, tiene una trascendencia económica frívolamente subvalorada y que está también en parte en el origen de aspectos concretos de la crisis que aún experimentaremos en mayor medida. No es que solo el 'matrimonio' homosexual tenga esta consecuencia, dado su carácter muy minoritario. No, no se trata de esto, sino que él constituye el estadio máximo, el símbolo máximo de desvirtuación del hecho matrimonial entre los heterosexuales. Y en este elemento de contagio es donde radica el problema. Acentúa la tendencia a degradar la naturaleza y fines del matrimonio y esa es la razón del rechazo que debe producir, de la misma manera que objetivamente la ruptura familiar, llevada al extremo de facilidad y en número que registra entre nosotros, es también una causa negativa que afecta a nuestra capacidad de bienestar y de prosperidad.

Cultural imperialism on the march - Obama Promotes Gay Pride Worldwide - by Robert R. Reilly

In MercatorNet

As June approaches, get ready for the official celebration of “Gay Pride Month” by US embassies abroad.

If sodomy and same-sex marriage are constitutional rights, what is their relationship to American foreign policy? Despite the tremendous controversy regarding these issues within the United States, the Obama administration has gone ahead and placed them at the center of US diplomacy. Why? In Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones wrote that the rationalization of sexual misbehavior “could only calm the troubled conscience in an effective manner when it was legitimized by the regime in power… [which] went on in the name of high moral purpose to make this vision normative for the entire world.”

Therefore, the Obama administration, after promoting homosexual rights and marriage in the US, has undertaken the task of universalizing the rationalization for sodomitical behavior and is doing so with high moral rhetoric – in this case, by appropriating the language of human rights.

The effort began in earnest on International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, with a powerful pair of events. President Obama issued a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, directing them “to ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons”. Mr Obama said that, “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights”.

The departments and agencies included the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export Import Bank, the United States Trade Representative, and “such other agencies as the President may designate.” All US agencies engaged abroad were directed to prepare a report each year “on their progress toward advancing these initiatives”.

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, explained,

“They have directed their embassies everywhere to monitor and assist domestic homosexual movements whether the host country and their people accept it or not. The US is very powerful and can force governments to submit to its social-policy views. They are intent on forcing homosexual ‘marriage’ and homosexual adoption on countries that are offended by such things. They are intent on forcing sexual orientation and gender identity as new categories of non-discrimination that will trump the rights of religious believers… Most people recognize that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful to public health and morals. The effect of the Obama policy is to offend billions of people and force this view on reluctant governments. This is most especially offensive to countries that are predominantly Christian and Muslim. In fact, Christianity and Islam are among the chief obstacles of this agenda and policy.” 

State Department sophistry

While President Obama took the action, Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, gave the rationale in an International Human Rights Day speech on the same day, December 6, in which she proclaimed that that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. She also announced that the US would give more than US$3 million to a new Global Equality Fund in order to help civil society organizations promote homosexual advocacy.

Mrs. Clinton came energetically to the defense of those “forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm. I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people”, whom she described with a strong Rousseauian echo as “human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity…” But, if they were born free, why are they not free now? No doubt, because society oppresses them, just as South Africa once oppressed its black population through apartheid – an example Mrs. Clinton gives. But history overcame that, and since, as Rousseau taught, man is a product of history, history can overcome this, too. Thus, Mrs. Clinton ends with the admonition, “Be on the right side of history”.  

It is a testimony to the influence of Rousseau that Secretary Clinton should have appealed to history for the vindication of “gay” rights rather than to moral principle. Had it been the latter, she would have had to say rather that, in order “to protect themselves from harm”, LGBT persons should “suppress” precisely that part of themselves inclined to indulge in disordered sexual acts, just as anyone should resist their inclinations to immoral acts, whatever their kind.

Mrs Clinton averred that “being LGBT does not make you less human”. That is certainly so, unless you consistently give in to one of these disordered inclinations. In a parallel case, being an alcoholic also does not make you less human. However, practicing alcoholism by living life in an inebriated stupor does make you less human in the Aristotelian sense that it impairs your Nature or incapacitates you fulfilling it. If it is virtue that enables man to reach his natural end in becoming fully human, then it is vice that prevents him from doing so, thus making him less human.

Fully embracing the rationalization of the same-sex cause, Secretary Clinton espoused “gender identity” as equivalent to being black or being a woman. It is “who they are”. In a moment of humility, she stated that, “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country.”

It was? What was it? Being homosexual or lesbian was not a crime in the United States, so what was she referring to? Mrs. Clinton never said, but the it to which she alluded is sodomy, the elephant in the room. She repeated the mantra that “it is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay…” and “it should never be a crime to be gay”. One would have to agree in so far as persecution of and violence against homosexuals is concerned but, as Austin Ruse has pointed out, “Such attacks upon individuals are already recognized as violations of human rights in international law particularly in the 1966 Covenants implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other existing treaties”. This, then, is moving beyond that to the moral and legal endorsement of certain behavior. Some governments continue to have laws against homosexual acts, which is not the same thing as violating their rights as human beings. Was Mrs Clinton saying that it is a violation of human rights to declare sodomy illegal?

Apparently, for that would be consistent with an understanding of Section 1 in the Obama directive, instructing agencies abroad to engage in “Combating Criminalization of LGBT Status or Conduct Abroad”(emphasis added). What kind of conduct might this be? The only conduct that is or has been consistently criminalized by many countries is sodomy. Morally speaking, sodomy is a fairly unattractive act. Why should it not be criminalized? Perhaps there are prudential reasons for not doing so, but what might be the moral objections to such laws?

The somewhat evasive answer in the Presidential Memorandum is because “no country should deny people their rights because of who they love…” In her speech, Mrs Clinton echoed this response and set this test: “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love?’”

Well, that depends.

What if the person one loves is already married? What if the person one loves is a sibling? How about a teacher in love with a student? Or a pastor in love with a choir boy? Or an uncle with his niece? Acting upon any of these loves in a sexual relationship is, in most places, a crime. It is not so much whom one loves, but how one loves. How it would feel does not really matter since, in each of these cases, it is morally wrong to sexualize the relationship. Feelings do not change the moral nature of an act.

Why, if all the above cases deserve prohibition, do homosexuals deserve an exemption when it comes to sodomy? Secretary Clinton never said why we should feel for them and not for any of those mentioned above, nor did she raise any of the above examples of criminal love as violations of human rights. Why not?

Rationalizing immoral behaviour

As with all rationalizations for moral misbehavior, Mrs. Clinton’s speech was rife with denials of reality, three of which came in one sentence. She said, “Now, there are some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can become caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not true”.

Well, these notions have to be seen as not true for her to promote the “gay” agenda internationally and get away with it. I have never met anyone who believes that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but many of them are certainly pederasts. By setting up the pedophile straw man, Mrs. Clinton avoids this unpleasant reality. Whether homosexuality is a disease or not (it is certainly a disorder), there is ample evidence that it can be cured. Of course, a fair number of people float into homosexuality in their youth and float out again as they mature – no cure required. So much for its being an immutable characteristic.

Others who have become immersed in this life and who later wish to leave it have successfully done so through a variety of therapies. In 1995, the New York Times reported that “Dr Charles W. Socarides offered the closest thing to hope that many homosexuals had in the 1960s: the prospect of a cure. Rather than brand them as immoral or regard them as criminal, Dr Socarides, a New York psychoanalyst, told homosexuals that they suffered from an illness whose effects could be reversed.” Dr Socarides said that his cure rate was about one third. For Secretary Clinton to deny this is an enormous disservice to the very people whose rights she purports to be defending.

Lastly, the bigger the lie, the bolder the assertion – as in Mrs. Clinton’s outright denial that “gays recruit others to become gay”. In my professional career in the arts, I witnessed such recruitment, saw its occasional success, and was several times the object of it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the homosexual subculture could not possibly make such a statement.

Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton could have referred to homosexual literature, such as Lavender Culture (1994), in which Gerald Hannon described the need for a youth recruitment campaign: “I believe…we have to behave in a certain way vis-à-vis young people. I believe that means we have to proselytize… The answer is to proselytize. Aggressively so”. He added that, “To attract young people to the gay movement in large numbers should be the challenge to the next phase of the movement. It is a challenge we have set ourselves…” This is not to say that all homosexuals recruit, but to assert that none do is a complete denial of reality – which, after all, is the point of the rationalization.

The State Department celebrates

What this is all about was very clear from the 2006 Yogykarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, adopted by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights, and homosexual activists to influence the interpretation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all UN human rights treaties, and international law as a whole. One requirement of the Principles is to: “Repeal criminal and other legal provisions that prohibit or are, in effect, employed to prohibit consensual sexual activity among people of the same sex who are over the age of consent…” This is the nub of the issue. It is not the status of homosexuals that is so much the matter, as it is the status of their conduct.

In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France introduced a statement at the UN General Assembly, titled Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights. It proclaimed that, “We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention”. The Statement was signed by 66 nations.

Under the George W. Bush administration, the United States declined, but in 2009 the Barack Obama administration signed the Statement. While the Statement did not go as far as the Yogykarta Principles, it was clearly headed in that direction. The majority of the criminal penalties it was decrying were not, as the Statement disingenuously suggests, aimed at orientation, but at activity. It is the activity that must be vindicated and blessed as a universal human right.

One of the most immediate results of the priority given to the homosexual cause by President Obama and Secretary Clinton has been the profusion of “gay pride” commemorations and celebrations in US embassies abroad. June is the month singled out for this because, in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month”, with the last Sunday reserved as Gay Pride Day. June was chosen to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots as the beginning of “gay” liberation. Ever since, every government agency has observed it. As of 2011, it moved overseas as part of US foreign policy.

Therefore, the US Embassy in Islamabad celebrated its first-ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) “pride celebration” with an event on June 26, 2011. The embassy said the purpose of meeting was to demonstrate “support for human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout Pakistani society.” Richard Hoagland, the US deputy chief of mission, was quoted on the embassy website, as saying, “I want to be clear that the US Embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way”.

However, it is Pakistan’s Penal Code, not extremist elements, that, in Section 377 (introduced at the time of British colonialism), states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished… with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC held a public event in which it encouraged that the domestic laws in the United States be changed in order to re-criminalize sodomy, we might be somewhat surprised and irritated. Why should the Pakistani people be less annoyed by the US Embassy telling them to change its laws in order to decriminalize sodomy? Why exactly is that our business?

All Islamic groups in Pakistan condemned the “pride” event as a form of “cultural terrorism” against democratic Pakistan. Students protested against what they called “the attempts of the United States to promote vulgarity in Islamic societies under the pretext of human rights”. One speaker at a demonstration said, “Now the United States wants to project and promote objectionable, unnatural, abnormal behaviors under the pretext of equality and human rights, which is not at all acceptable… If you destroy the morality of the society, you have destroyed it completely.”  

In Nairobi, Kenya, June, 2012, the US Embassy hosted what is thought to be the first “Gay Pride” event in that country. John Haynes, a public affairs officer at the US embassy, introduced the event: "The US government for its part has made it clear that the advancement of human rights for LGBT people is central to our human rights policies around the world and to the realization of our foreign policy goals". Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya, just as they were in parts of the United States until 2003. Now, as part of our foreign policy, apparently we tell Kenya to change its laws.

The US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos, proudly displays webpage news from its 2012 “first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride event on June 25 in Vientiane. The event, called ‘Proud to be Us!’, was produced by a group of young Lao LGBT activists and featured music, dance, skits, and dramas exploring issues faced by LGBT people in Laos today, such as discrimination, gender roles, and sexual health”.

On the webpage of the US Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic, a joint statement was issued which the US ambassador, Norman Eisen, had signed. It declared: “On the occasion of the 2nd annual Prague Pride Festival (2012), we express our solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities of the Czech Republic in their celebration… The Prague Pride Festival reminds us that ensuring LGBT rights is an important aspect of fulfilling our broader international human rights commitments since the full recognition of those rights is still one of the world’s remaining human rights challenges. Safeguarding human rights and guarding against intolerance requires constant vigilance in the Czech Republic, as in all our countries. Therefore today, we align ourselves with the Prague Pride participants…”

This type of thing at US embassies has become standard. As then-Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed in June, 2012: “United States Embassies and Missions throughout the world are working to defend the rights of LGBT people of all races, religions, and nationalities as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. From Riga, where two US Ambassadors and a Deputy Assistant Secretary marched in solidarity with Baltic Pride; to Nassau, where the Embassy joined together with civil society to screen a film about LGBT issues in Caribbean societies; to Albania, where our Embassy is coordinating the first-ever regional Pride conference for diplomats and activists to discuss human rights and shared experiences”.

Forcing other countries to adopt US standards

As in Pakistan, there has been some blowback from the effort to legitimize sodomy and promote same-sex marriage. When the acting ambassador in El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, wrote an op-ed in a major Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica, implying that the disapproval of homosexual behavior is animated by “brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred”, a group of pro-family associations fought back. On July 6, 2011, they wrote,

“Ms. Aponte, in clear violation of the rules of diplomacy and international rights laws, you intend to impose to (sic) Salvadorans, disregarding our profound Christian values, rooted in natural law, a new vision of foreign and bizarre values, completely alien to our moral fiber, intending to disguise this as ‘human rights’… The only thing we agree with from your article, is to repudiate violence against homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc.; Against these, just the same as against skinny, fat, tall or short ... This of course does not mean accepting the legal union between same sex individuals or to add new types of families like bisexual, tri-sexual, multi-sexual and the full range of sexual preferences. Not accepting the legitimacy of ‘sexual diversity’ does not mean we are violating any human right. There can be no talk of progress if this is how ‘modern’ is defined. We prefer to feel proudly ‘old fashioned’, keep our moral values, preserve our families and possess the clarity of what defines good and evil.” 

As mentioned above, Secretary Clinton said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. The problem with this should be self-evident. The promotion of gay rights must come at the expense of the promotion of human rights because the two notions are immiscible. One is founded on the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the other on moral relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature – not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

The “most evil” speech ever delivered by a sitting American president - by James Schall, SJ

In Truth and Charity
 

“One in five women in this country has turned to Planned Parenthood for health care. One in five. (Applause.) And for many Planned Parenthood is their primary source of health care—not just for contraceptive care, but for lifesaving preventive care, like cancer screenings and health counseling.”

–President Obama to Planned Parenthood Convention, April 26, 2013

“They (Christians) play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them.”

–Epistle to Diognetus, 2d Century A.D.

The morning after President Obama gave his bemused lecture to an enthusiastic Planned Parenthood Convention in Washington, a friend of mine wrote to me. This man is experienced in political things and a man of good sense. He stated that this address to the Planned Parenthood Convention was the “most evil” speech ever delivered by a sitting American president. At the time, I had not yet heard or read the speech.

But one can hardly not be curious about why a good man would call this speech simply evil. What was his exact point?

One other item has been striking to me in recent years. It is the number of people from various angles of life who have spontaneously wondered about the similarity of the president to the anti-hero in Robert Hugh Benson’s 1913 novel, The Lord of the World. 

 

The similarity is not just in the sudden rise of an obscure American senator to the highest of earthly powers, but in the agenda that he advocated in reaching it. The Benson novel falls into the tradition of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 with its systematic effort not to name things what they really are so that we are never faced with what we are actually doing.

Be that as it may, I read President Obama’s upbeat urgings that the Planned Parenthood ladies get into the “fight” against those backward, out-of-date types who would work against the “woman’s right to choose.” The latter is a phrase that comes up suspiciously often in the address. It lingers in our minds because we know that it really means something else than what the words specifically indicate.

The president’s speech was full of warmth and affection. The head of Planned Parenthood was addressed by her first name, “Cecile.” Mr. Obama said that the effusive welcome there made him “blush.” Someone in the audience called out, “I love you.” The president responded: “I love you back.”

At the end, President Obama thanked Planned Parenthood, after telling them that the “President is going to be right there with you fighting every step of the way.” He even asked God to “bless” them, presumably for their “good” works. What Planned Parenthood is set up to do is to kill human babies on a massive scale. It is difficult to imagine why such a request of God is not, in fact, blasphemous.

Human life begins at conception. At any pre-natal stage what is at stake is an already begun human life. Most commentators on this address have remarked that the president was scrupulous never to pronounce the word “abortion,” as if that “service” were not an essential part of the Planned Parenthood agenda.

In Planned Parenthood clinics, over 300,000 abortions are performed per year. The vague phrases “reproductive services” along with “right to choose” are preferred over using the word abortion. The reason for this preference is a clue to why the president’s speech might be considered evil.

The “service” provided is the elimination of a child. The president’s address studiously contains no mention of what it is that is in fact eliminated when the “services” are provided, usually with government funding.

If the President has no problem with the rightness of the deed, why would he not want to use the proper word, abortion, to describe that deed?

The further question is this: “Why would a reasonable man consider this friendly Planned Parenthood address to be the ‘most evil’ address ever given by an American president?” The first approach to this consideration is, I think, grammatical. The oft-repeated phrase “right to choose,” which is said to underpin the whole rationale of abortion without mentioning its name, does not, in itself, really tell us anything about what is going on. That is why the phrase is used.

Let us suppose I spoke of a “right to hear” or a “right to eat.” Hearing, eating, and choosing are powers found in certain living beings. The fact that I have a power that enables me to hear, eat, or choose tells me nothing about what I hear, eat, or choose. I did not give myself these powers. They come with the kind of being I am. To say that I have a “right to choose” means only that I have, as part of my being, a free will, a faculty. It says nothing about what I do with this free will.

What I do with my choice or free will is the whole issue here. These capacities belong to what I am. Does my “right to eat” mean that I may eat poison? The capacity of eating may be abused by deliberately eating poison. We usually call it suicide. But the capacity itself enables us to eat what we need for our well-being. The capacity does not mean that we may eat whatever we want, with no restrictions about what it is we eat and its relation to the kind of being we are.

We do not know anything about the so-called “right to choose” until we have put an object to the infinitive. To choose what? It is a verb and needs an object. Until that object is stated, we do not know what this “right to choose” means in practice.

The “right to choose” does not give me a “right” to choose to kill someone.  All it does is to tell me that I can kill someone if I choose. I have the power to do so, not any “right,” unless, like many moderns, by “right” we only mean “power.” But if I so choose, I am responsible for the act that, because it was a choice, came out of my freedom and power. What we have here, then, is the deliberate use of bad or incomplete grammar to cover up what we are actually promoting.

In the context of the president’s speech, the “right to choose” is cagily used to avoid stating what it is that, in every case, is chosen when this so-called “right” is exercised. The question is: “Why does President Obama not want to say this word?” Evidently, it is not because he has any problem with approving abortion itself or what it actually is. He does not deceive himself about what happens. He just does not want everyone to know what he is doing. Hence words are used that obscure what is happening, at least to those unwilling or unable to catch what is actually meant by these words.

No one can doubt that President Obama knows what is chosen to happen when this “right” is exercised. A child’s life is terminated in her mother’s womb. By the judicious way he avoids calling abortion what it is, the president implies that he does not want to name in public what it is that happens when the “choice” is exercised. What can we conclude from these observations?

Plato often said that the worst thing that can happen to us is to have a lie in our soul about the most important things, to tell ourselves something is good when it is evil. Even though it takes place in millions of instances yearly throughout the world, the fact is that objectively every abortion is the killing of an already begin, innocent human life. In using the phrase “right to choose,” we never simply talk of the “woman’s right” as if it had no object chosen.

The child about to be aborted has a prior claim to be protected and cared for. That is implied in the begetting itself and that to which a woman’s (and man’s) being is directed. We cannot separate the two by stressing only a natural faculty (power of choice) and not the complete act that results in another actual human being.

The direct consequence in every instance of the exercise of the “right to choose” is the killing of a begotten human child. It is clear that the “right to choose” really means “freedom to kill the human child.” No wonder no one wants to speak what it is. But if we won’t admit in public what we do, we must latch on to words that obscure, confuse, or deny what we do and know that we do.

Whenever President Obama spoke in his recent address to Planned Parenthood about the principal activities of their organization, he talked about dealing with “contraceptive services.” Now let it be stated that, if all that the Planned Parenthood organization were doing was searching to cure diseases in women, like cancer, we would all be delighted to join them. Many other organizations exist for the purpose of treating medical issues that do not imply abortion in their work. 

When the president includes a good or neutral activity along with the evil (albeit unnamed), he wants us to believe that both were in the same acceptable moral category. Who would want to be against helping women with cancer?

Here, however, we are asked to believe that finding cancer is equivalent to having an abortion. But pregnancy is not a sickness, while cancer is. We are meant, by the president’s rhetoric, to glide over these two different things as if they are the same worthy moral act. This is a deception. It seeks to puts a lie in our souls about what is.

President Obama, in his lecture, ridicules states like Mississippi and North Dakota for their efforts to limit abortion. He implies that these efforts are wrong because they are “out-of-date.” This is his argument: “So the fact is, after decades of progress, there’s [sic] still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s, than in the 21^st century … When you read about some of these laws, you want to check the calendar, you want to make sure you are still living in 2013.” The criterion of truth here seems to be chronology, based on “progress,” which is always what we do now.

The president, to be sure, does not always eschew the language of right and wrong. “Forty-two states have introduced laws that would ban or severely limit access to a woman’s right to choose.” He calls the North Dakota and Mississippi initiatives to restrict abortion (i.e. “woman’s right to choose”) “absurd” and “wrong.”

If it is “wrong” or “absurd’ to seek to limit or ban abortion, then what the president is doing must be right, namely fostering and providing facilities for abortion. God’s “Thou shalt not kill” now means “Thou shalt kill certain designated groups according to the time or year in which they live.” It is evil to say of what is right that it is wrong, and of what is wrong that it is right. The more subtly we do this, the more effective.

With regard to whether something is right or wrong because of the time in which it was enacted, we recall Chesterton’s comment about those who say something can be right in one century but wrong in another. “It’s like saying something can be right on Tuesday but wrong on Wednesday.” It is striking that President Obama’s logic would allow him to invoke such a dubious chronological principle to justify what he wants.

Moreover, as Robert Reilly pointed out, if we go back not to the 1950s, but a hundred years ago to the founding of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger’s influence, the whole impetus of that organization was based on Darwinian eugenics. It was to weed out inferior races by preventing them from breeding. With this background, the president’s own genetic origins would have been the object of Planned Parenthood concern.

Whether a thing is right or wrong does not depend on the time in which it appears but on the truth—on the validity of the argument that establishes it.

What the president evidently calls wrong is anything that disagrees with his own conception of what the law, in the service of his ideology, can do. But by his own chronological logic, if states finally succeed in limiting or forbidding abortion, since that would take place after the time when it was available to everyone, it should be accepted as up-to-date, and the abortion position as outdated.

Mr. Obama is a clever rhetorician but not a careful thinker. Hitler and Stalin were once up-to-date. One needs more than chronology to challenge them. Perhaps this is the reason the Declaration of Independence was not cited during the Planned Parenthood meeting.

The final point that needs to be made concerns the starting point of the so-called “right to choose” rhetoric. What should govern this whole question is not the woman or the man but the child. Neither a woman nor a man by him or herself has any “right” to choose to have or not have a child. What they have is a freedom to marry. If a child is begotten of them in this relationship, it is their duty to bring it to birth and care for it in a home.

A child is always a gift, not a “right,” nor the product of a contract or a scientific process. The primary focus is the child, not the parent. The logic works in exactly the opposite manner from the way we insist on thinking of children. Every child thus has the right to have both a mother and a father (not one mother or one father or two mother s or two fathers) bound together in an exclusive relationship in which the family is formed. We should be speaking not of a “woman’s right to choose” but of a “man and a woman’s duty” to accept and care for what they beget as a gift in their personal relationship. This arrangement is what is best and normative for the child and its parents and the society in which they live. When this principle is violated, everything in the society itself begins to unravel.

Thus, in answer to the initial query, “Why was this the most evil speech of an American president?,” in my opinion, it is because the speech systematically lies to us about what is really happening when the “right to choose” or “contraceptive services” are put into practice.

The words are chosen carefully with full knowledge of what they are intended to convey and full knowledge of what actually happens. C. S. Lewis, following the Socratic tradition, said that evil is to call what is good evil and what is evil good. This is basically what Genesis said of the sin of the First Parents who wanted to place the distinction of good and evil in their own hands, not God’s.

Stripped of all the rhetoric and masked words, this address told the American people, probably too ready to listen, that what was evil was really good, a “right” in fact. Why this speech is particularly heinous is not that it was spoken by some professor or distraught lady, but by a president pursing public policy. He maintained that what was proposed was worthy of God’s blessing. It was right, not wrong. These are not ordinary confusions. They follow, knowingly or not, a logic and force determined to overturn, in the name of progress and being up-to-date, all the proper relations of man, woman, child, family, and society.

The second century Epistle to Diognetus, cited in the beginning, already affirmed that Christians marry like other men, have children, but, it added, do not “expose,” that is, abort, them. This criterion is still what defines a human being and a Christian. We are told that such “teaching” is backward and not current. We are asked not to think about what we are doing but only to ask about our “right to choose.” But we all know what we choose when we exercise this oft-cited “right.” We do not have the courage to call evil what it is.

We must hide our evil in obscure language. This hiding tells us better than anything else that, when we so lie to ourselves, we know that we do so lie. We prefer the power that this lie gives us to the truth of what happens when we exercise this very strange “right,” with no acknowledged object. We are asked officially to deceive ourselves about the most innocent and wondrous act in human reality—the conception and birth of a human child. We are asked to do this so that we will be “up to date,” because our only criterion of truth is what we choose, not the proper question, of whether what we choose is good or evil.

A Possessão dos católicos portugueses - por Nuno Serras Pereira

27. 05. 2013

Como diz a malta nova “não dá para acreditar!” De facto, como podem crer em Cristo e a Cristo aqueles que verificam que um “povo católico” (que deveria ser povo de Deus, Corpo Místico de Cristo) serve escravocraticamente o Maligno?; e que imensos Prelados têm como prioridade evangelizadora o serem simpáticos, o agrado mediático, a consonância com a mentalidade reinante?; com pânico de chamar as coisas pelos nomes, pressurosos em manter-se na ambiguidade, incapazes de serem sinal de contradição?; julgando, contraditando desse modo o exemplo de Cristo e dos Santos, que basta anunciar o bem e se podem dispensar de combater o mal? Santo Atanásio, salvador da verdadeira Fé na antiguidade, seria, nos dias de hoje, dado como agressivo, mente obcecada, afugentador de fiéis, de pagãos, de ateus, remetido a um ermo enclausurado, senão mesmo excomungado.

Quando há Pastores (eclesiásticos ou civis) que por acção ou omissão, por cumplicidade, por indiferença ou tacticismo político não protegem nem defendem adequadamente os mais vulneráveis e inocentes (arriscando os seus cargos, as suas carreiras e se preciso for as suas vidas), isso significa que não são tais, mas sim lobos vorazes e predadores.

Eu tenho consciência, e isto não é retórico, da enormidade das minhas limitações, sei bem que em comparação com os demais confrades eclesiásticos sou um deficiente. Mas porra! (“expressa uma reacção de dor”, in Dicionário Houaiss. Etimologia: prov. de porro, vegetal de talo largo e um bulbo num dos extremos, sugerindo a comparação com um bastão de cabo grosso; Corominas comenta que um lat. *porrèa, de caráter adj., '(maça) semelhante a um porro (alho)', der. do lat. pòrrum ou porrus,i 'porro (alho)' poderia explicar o voc. port.; ver porr-), não há quem entenda a gravíssima escravidão demoníaca de numerosíssima porção dos católicos portugueses!?! Não há quem o veja e lhe dê remédio?!? As mais graves possessões demoníacas não são aquelas que, subjugando a liberdade, levam as pessoas a fazer ou padecer coisas contra sua vontade e que, por isso, delas não são responsáveis. O maior mal consiste na sedução diabólica que as conduz a consentirem no mal que praticam e na omissão do bem. Esta cumplicidade da multidão (de cada um que compõe essa massa) produz “estruturas de pecado” que se apropriam do poder, fortalecendo e perpetuando os grilhões malignos.

Quando deparo com a insurreição evangélica continuada dos franceses tenho vergonha, confesso, de ser um católico português; quando leio os textos de uma jornalista (um e dois), Maria Teixeira Alves, não ter medo de sofrer insultos e ameaças, como tem padecido desde que os redigiu, dou muitas Graças a Deus por suscitar nos aparentemente “de fora” aquilo que em primeiro lugar e principalmente competiria aos “de dentro”; quando me maravilho com a clareza brilhante de um artigo de um Sacerdote, pergunto-me se o Episcopado português é incapaz de redigir algo semelhante; quando exulto com a leitura de uma crónica desassombrada e clarividente de um economista, logo me entristeço por sei uma raridade singular.

Cinquenta crianças nascituras, CINQUENTA, são em “virtude” do voto católico, legalmente dizimadas quotidianamente, TODOS OS DIAS, no nosso país, por capricho das mães grávidas; devido ao voto católico, foi “legislado” e “promulgado” o “pseudo-casamento” entre pessoas do mesmo sexo; o mesmo povo católico elegeu aqueles que aprovaram a co-adopção de crianças por “casais” do mesmo sexo (quem não se opôs mas se absteve objectivamente conluiou com os promotores), como segundo passo (o primeiro foi o “casamento”, pois quem admite este, lógica e necessariamente desembocará na adopção) para a adopção plena e para o recurso dos mesmos “casais” ficcionais à reprodução artificial. Esta, como já indiquei em outros textos (ver aqui, por ex:) faz uma multidão incontável de vítimas humanas.

Os católicos subjugados pelo pecado têm escolhido e promovido os partidos que os têm subjugado. Desde há muito que as opções que nos têm sido impostas são as de escolher entre Satanás e o Demónio, como se não foram o mesmo. Numas organizações partidárias ele apresenta-se de carranca ameaçadora e feroz em outras de aspecto simpático e lisonjeiro, mas é sempre o mesmo Maligno que manipula os bonifrates, que se dizem e/ou se têm por católicos. Mas, infelizmente são possessos, para usar as palavras de Jesus Cristo, têm por pai o Diabo (Jo 8, 44).

É tempo de dar o “grito do Ipiranga” e de exorcizar a multidão dos demónios que nos infesta. Pela minha parte, confesso, que para além do pouco que procuro fazer (segundo não poucos, melhor seria para todos que nada fizesse e me silenciasse), se fora exorcista procuraria imitar frei Silvestre. Andavam as gentes da cidade de Arezzo em raivosas lutas intestinas, num desvairamento de mútuas agressões homicidas, quando S. Francisco de Assis acompanhado de frei Silvestre, que para lá se dirigiam, avistou um amontoamento de dianhos imundos por de cima das ruas e habitações influindo malignamente nos cidadãos. Logo tomou a decisão de enviar o seu confrade às portas da cidade para a exorcizar, enquanto ele se detinha orando com instantes súplicas ao Altíssimo, Omnipotente e Bom Senhor, de modo a garantir toda a eficácia ao esconjuro. Foi feliz o sucesso: os diachos puseram-se em fuga espavoridos, o povo aquietou-se, as aversões deram lugar a reconciliações, a paz foi estabelecida a contento de todos. Santos, conheço eu que me poderiam assistir com as suas orações enquanto, como exorcista, logo me dirigiria ao parlamento, à sede do governo, à presidência da república, etc., etc.

Mas enfim, cada um com a sua missão e/ou profissão, Sacerdote, Religioso, Diácono, Leigo, crente ou não crente pode dar o seu contributo. Mas tem que começar já! Com toda a determinação! É tempo de despertar do torpor mortal! Lázaro, povo de Deus, levanta-te! Ressuscita!

À honra de Cristo. Ámen.