Just Because It's Fun To Share

Aletheia Sharbel Liu:

Ambrose Keith Macbeth:

The other guy doesn't look worse:

Middle Age Visions (Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!)

How I see myself:

How I really am (trust me, watch the video):

Squirrel!

Ch, ch, ch, Chia Pet!

1989.
Style. Never. Dies.

Just Because

A Pic Only a Parent Can Love?

Well, maybe so.
World: say hello to my son.

The Coming Demographic Winter

Our Choice Today Matters, In a Sense

The single most damning objection raised by atheists is this: Why would a loving, omnipotent God permit sin, suffering, and the eternal damnation of souls? And our answer is stark and comfortless: For the sake of freedom. To give our choices consequence and meaning. To make our existence real.

Our reason accepts this. One's frontal lobe can process the logical steps entailed and determine the absence of fallacies. But our hearts aren't always moved. Personally, I don't think it's worth the risk. If God were to offer me Limbo, or certain annihilation after death, in return for the guarantee that I would never spend five minutes in Hell, I would jump on that offer as fast as I could.

But that's not the way things work. As I've explained more than once to Catholics who dissent over birth control: "I don't make the Natural Law, I just explain it."

Likewise in the economy of salvation: We may think what we wish about God's decision to give man a lethal freedom. But wishing won't make it so.

And so we must decide. Readers of this site have heard about the extremes to which Sen. Obama pushes his support of legal abortion. They know that he is likely to appoint enough justices to the Supreme Court to keep abortion out of the hands of democratic lawmaking for 20 or 30 years - in other words, indefinitely.

Failing a campaign promise by another candidate to start a nuclear war that would kill more people than the four million children who face legal execution during an Obama administration, the abortion issue alone should convince every orthodox Christian that voting for Obama is a grave sin - the kind to damn one's soul. Yes, even if you're black and voting for him out of racial solidarity, or white and voting for him out of racial guilt. Apart from simple ignorance, there's simply no excuse.

I want to go further and explain another implication of an Obama victory, one that should convince Catholic voters: I'll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Obama is elected with a large congressional majority - with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.

Senator Obama has promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Obama, the whole infanticide thing. But there's more. The FOCA raises abortion to (in its own words) a "fundamental right." According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act's language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state's "conscience" clause - the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.

So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, and nurse either to abandon their faith or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.

History tells us that steps such as this aren't where religious persecutions end; it's where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the "fundamental right" of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?

It can happen here. It is about to happen here.

What should we make of Catholics who vote for the persecution of their Church and the ongoing killing of millions of unborn children? That's between them and God. I'll just offer this little catechetical reminder: Holy Communion received in a state of mortal sin is itself a still graver sin - one of blasphemy. Perhaps when Obama Catholics see their local Catholic hospitals close, or their Catholic friends in nursing get jobs giving pedicures, they'll throng the confession lines. Let's pray that they do.

By this evening we will have a good idea of whether Christians have any lasting place in this country. In a few months - if FOCA passes, and is applied as the bishops predict - we'll know whether we should continue to participate as citizens, serve in America's armed forces, pay taxes except under protest, or think of our government as anything but an occupier - like the Hungarian or Czech regimes from 1948-1989. We will know if the democracy our military exports to other countries is any better than the tyrannies it replaces. We will know if there is any future, however fraught and fragile, for pro-life laws - or if the Berlin Wall constructed by Roe v. Wade will stand unchallenged for yet another guilty generation.

If the persecutors take power on the anger of voters rightly outraged by eight years of mismanagement, arrogance, constitutional abuse, and unjust wars, we must face the consequences - as the Israelites did when God answered their sins with the Assyrians. Like the Israelites, we will have lost our country. Unlike them, we'll have no Covenant that promises we'll ever get it back. With God's grace, we'll be ignored and tolerated, like the Amish. To assume that we'll always be safe is, well . . . gratuitous.

It will be time to make some choices - the kind that redound to eternity. It will be time, after 35 years of noble effort, to stop expending our energies trying to change abortion laws, or to fight for a vanished public "morality." We should keep on running pro-life pregnancy centers as long as they're legal. We should go on voting against all anti-life candidates and speaking our minds. But our time and treasure should be withdrawn from the bottomless pit of politics and transferred to fighting on the only ground where we have the advantage. Let us turn from the bloodied public square of an illegitimate regime to the care of souls, and focus our efforts on the propaganda fidei - the propagation of the Faith.

Verily Prosaic readers know that I've argued it's in America's national interest to restrict immigration. If America turns to persecution of the Church, I will turn on a dime from trying to save the country from immigrants to saving the immigrants from the country (though this does not mean I will no longer favor immigration restrictions). I hope that other Catholics will drop their various political efforts and do the same - pour their thwarted civic energies into a massive, lay-directed campaign to offer orthodox catechesis to incoming immigrants and evangelizing those of other faiths. (Do they print the Baltimore Catechism in Spanish? In Arabic?) If we showed one-tenth the energy and courage of the underground Church that survives a far worse persecution in China, our work would benefit numberless souls. Made subjects in our own country, we could prove ourselves patriotic citizens of heaven.

I dread this prospect, of course. I wish for a long and comfy, moderately fruitless life - one that peters out in a state of grace and a haze of fine whiskey and wine, in a house full of happy children and dogs, my wife by my side. Like the English Catholics who followed the marital prospects of Henry VIII, I nervously hope for the best - and pray to be spared the worst. Like most of you, I'd rather schlep my way to purgatory than sweat blood storming heaven. But wishing won't make it so.

More Signs of Impending Doom

Things get worse before they get worse: ". . . closing the infidelity gap . . ."

What?

Two Cheers for Parochialism and Little Platoons

The phrase “mediating structures” was in recent decades popularized by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, but the concept has been fundamental to conservative thought since Edmund Burke. The term refers to the social groups and associations that lie between the individual and the state—the family, parish, guild, village, voluntary associations, and all other such local and parochial communities. At times, such groups are also referred to as “intermediate” or “secondary” groups, as in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. Whatever the precise language employed, the defense of mediating structures has been essential to modern conservatism, and, while certain liberals (such as J. S. Mill) and radicals (especially P. J. Proudhon and P. Kropotkin) have mounted at least tepid defenses of mediating structures, conservatism has been both more consistent and more vigorous than either liberalism or radicalism in efforts to preserve the corporate rights of social groups.

Burke first stated the conservative case for mediating structures in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke observed that the French revolutionaries subscribed to a version of modern natural law that refused to recognize the salutary influence of any traditional social institution. The Jacobins believed that rights reside within individuals and that there are no legitimate interests beyond the particular interests of individuals and the national interest. Accordingly, the revolutionaries abolished the guilds, attacked the monasteries, institutionalized divorce, bound the clergy to the Revolution by oaths, and eliminated primogeniture and other laws protecting family property. As Burke discussed in the Reflections, the revolutionaries also redrew districts according to population size and geometric symmetry in order that “the people would no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans but Frenchmen.” Burke says, however, that instead of being Frenchmen with one country and one heart, the people “will have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality or real affection to a description of square measurement. We begin our public affections in our families . . . [,] we pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual connections. . . . The love of the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.” Indeed, Burke asserted that “to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections."

To disband the little platoons is to foster individual “weakness, disconnection and confusion,” according to Burke. Mediating structures provide the individual guidance through custom, tradition, and habitual practices—“the coat of prejudice.” In a word, Burke believed that mediating structures militate against what Tocqueville in the next century called “individualism."

Tocqueville was preoccupied with the dangers of the loss of mediating structures, especially civil associations. In Democracy in America (1835), he describes “individualism” and the centralization of state power as rising in tandem, both rooted in the passion for equality. According to Tocqueville, the individual and the state are not opposed to one another. Rather, they are reinforcing poles, each opposed to the social groups and associations lying between them. The state secures individual rights and, without mediating structures to buffer the individual, the individual looks to the state to secure his needs—including the need for community. Tocqueville maintained that individualism fosters “democratic despotism” and that the centralized state vanquishes mediating structures, isolating individuals. Conversely, and more optimistically, Tocqueville argued that mediating structures simultaneously combat the chief evils of democratic egalitarianism—individualism and the overweening, tutelary state.

Much of modern thought has been hostile to mediating structures. For example, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham each envisioned an ideal condition in which the state guards the rights and fulfills the needs of unencumbered, desocialized individuals. Nonetheless, recently in America the rhetoric of “community” has become commonplace, even fashionable. At times this rhetoric has certainly been abused, as in the widely noticed Habits of the Heart (1985), a book by Robert Bellah and several others that used the language of community to justify an egalitarian state dedicated to the redistribution of property. But such rhetoric is clearly not always disingenuous, and the recent concern with “community,” “civil society,” and “mediating structures” bespeaks a genuine and profound presence of conservatism in America today. Indeed, the strength of concern for mediating structures in any modern society is an excellent barometer for measuring the vigor of that society’s conservative philosophy.

Do Moms and Dads Matter?

You be the judge.

How "Gay Marriages" Weaken Marriage Overall

And, consequently, for the rest of us. See here.

If Marriage is Natural . . .

. . . why is defending it so hard? See here for why.

Good News

. . . for my wife, daughter and all the other children in the US.

Birthday Bash

Gotta share it: so much fun. My wife: my daughter. Life is good.

This Just Kills The BattleAxe

This Just Kills Me

A Political Message That Matters

Children Are Like Parasites

This . . .


And this . . .


Lead to this . . .


And this . . .

But not always.
Parents know what I mean.

Wherever I Go . . .

. . . I always take a little part of you with me Aletheia:

Thank you Lizz - you always take care of me.