Straight Talk About the Homosexual Movement

By Steve Bolton

                The bottom line in the current debate over same-sex marriage is that George Washington didn’t support it. Neither did Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, FDR, JFK, MLK or RFK. Unfortunately, today no one is even allowed to ask why virtually every member of the human race until the early 1990s considered it a lunatic fringe cause. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it must be admitted that homosexual marriage will be an unprecedented step in human history, one that constitutes a drastic break with the beliefs of all of our ancestors. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, yet no proof is being given at all that our ancestors were wrong in their arguments; in fact, no one’s allowed to even mention them.

                That ought to be a clue that the debate over homosexuality has nothing to do with “freedom” or “equality,” two terms which have been put to Orwellian uses by the gay lobby. Another clue ought to be the fact that the only homosexual political leaders in history have all been monsters, like the butcher Alexander the Great, Nazi S.A. chief Ernst Röhm and Mao Tse-Tung, who was a closet bisexual molester and rapist. Many of the emperors of Rome were bisexual, including Nero, who may have been the first historical personage to attempt to marry a member of the same sex; its best philosophers, like Seneca, were vehemently opposed to it. None of these people had any love of democracy or freedom, just like our Supreme Court, whose decisions over the last century and a half have consistently exhibited three characteristics: they’re almost all anti-democratic, contrary to the teachings of Catholicism and against the wishes of the Founding Fathers. As I discuss in more depth in Contemptible Courts, these three characteristics (along with a fourth, deciding against the weak and powerless) have been starkly evident in such widely disparate blunders as Dred Scott (1857); Griswold v. Connecticut (1965); Lawrence v. Texas (2003);Civil Rights Cases (1883); Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Hirabayashi v. United States (1943); Yasui v. United States (1943); United States v. Abrams (1919); Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and last but not least, Roe v. Wade (1973). Some of these cases were favorable to the left of the political spectrum and others to the right, but what all of these cases have in common is that they aided the powerful against the powerless, flew in the face of one Catholic teaching or another and subtracted from our democratic rights in one means or another; worst of all, each one was deliberately contrary to the express wishes of the Constitution and its amenders, who are the only ones legally entitled to assign meaning to these documents. This means that these decisions represented illegal seizures of power on the part of the Supreme Court, which has a shameful history of abusing its power for nefarious purposes. We can be certain far in advance that SCOTUS will follow in the footsteps of lower courts and take away our democratic rights to decide against homosexual marriage, as most American voters would. Long ago, they already took away our free speech rights, by allowing employers to fire anyone for their political or religious opinions, as long as it is not on the grounds of membership in a particular party or church. This is but one corner of a net of persecution has already fallen over the Western world on this issue and many others, so it will not be long before any attempt at rebuttal is choked off.

                The invention of the label “homophobia” to falsely deride any opponents of gay marriage is just one of the nasty and anti-democratic tactics used to obstruct debate on the topic. Granted, there are people out there who have a genuine and quite unreasonable hatred of homosexuals, particularly among far right-wing groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. There is a faction within Protestantism that is strangely obsessed with this one moral issue, to the point that they probably think that the rhyme “rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub” is actually some sort of sinister homosexual propaganda. Such people rightly say that the Bible calls homosexuality a sin, but forget the rest of it in the course of their obsession – especially when it comes to the use of the slur “fag,” which flies in the face of the warning in Matthew 5:22 against name-calling: “…everyone who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.” Such people also tend to ignore all of the commandments against the sins favored by the so-called conservative crowd, such as those against usury, speculation, charging unjust prices and most of all, class prejudice, which motivated the Pharisees to kill Christ. Their behavior patterns and beliefs are almost identical to those of the religious Right today, particularly the kind of morality supported by the platform of the Republican Party – all of which represents a danger to the human soul and society at large every bit as great as sexual sins. Corporate greed and militarism kill millions of people every year across the global and corrupt the souls of many more millions and therefore represents a greater threat to humanity than many types of sexual evil. In Catholic doctrines supported by the Bible, homosexuality constitutes one of the four “sins which cry out to heaven for vengeance,”along with murder, but the Republican side is not fond of pointing out the two that they are guilty of: oppressing the poor and paying unjust wages, which the capitalist system is deliberately engineered to do. They are in love with money, the root of all evil, and pride, the Original Sin, which may be why it is apparently more difficult for people with a right-wing Pharisaical mindset to repent. Jesus once told the town of Capernaum that Sodom would have repented if it had seen the sort of miracles he worked there and on other occasions, warned the Pharisees that prostitutes and tax collectors were getting into Heaven before them; by the same token, I imagine there is more likelihood of Elton John repenting than a John Boehner. If I had to choose between the two, my money would be on Elton any day; in the age-old battle between Profligates and Puritans, it is wiser to avoid the sort of spiritual dry rot that the latter represents. Long ago, I ran across a website that I cannot cite because I cannot remember the address, but the gist of its argument was that homosexuals stood a better chance of getting into Heaven than your typical Young Republican, which is entirely true.
              That being said, however, a case can be made that it puts a person at serious risk of eternal damnation; which might well consist of a Westboro church member sharing a cell with Rainbow Coalition types for eternity. If a person chooses to damn themselves, that would be their own private business, as long as their activity doesn’t injure society. Our ancestors believed that homosexuality was one of many evils which, if left unchecked, would ruin America as much as it helped bring down ancient Greece and Rome, in tandem with many other errors. There is such a thing as rational opposition to same-sex marriage, but there is a certain faction supportive of the pro-gay side which refuses to let this perspective be heard, because it is every bit as vicious, violent and anti-democratic as the gay bashers on the other side. They think that any disagreement with their cause is motivated by hate, which would mean that Gandhi and Mother Teresa, like Washington and Lincoln and everyone else who lived before 1990, were homophobes. The mark of fanaticism is an ever-widening definition of one’s list of enemies in precisely this manner and is precisely what the nuts in Westboro do when they claim that relatively innocent celebrities like Tom Hanks and great leaders like Gandhi are headed to Hell.[1] Because nobody dares to talk to straight to them, they have succeeded in capturing the propaganda machines of the Western mass media and reeducating our entire civilization in a single unproven philosophy, in the course of just one generation. The speed of this change, compounded by the absence of arguments or evidence, together with the fact that any reasoned criticism of it is already forbidden, ought to arouse strong suspicions that we are being brainwashed, by a minority that is ironically dirty-minded.

Quackery and Queer Quirks

                The crux of the issue is a disagreement on the causes and consequences of homosexuality, or any sexual sin for that matter. Same-sex marriage proponents are trying to paint themselves as the “equality movement,” but that is merely an Orwellian term devoid of any real meaning. If this kind of sexual behavior is harmful to individuals and dangerous to society, then it is tantamount to asking for equality for thieves. The other side doesn’t believe that it is injurious to either and I honestly hope that they are correct. Unfortunately, there are obvious problems with the reasoning and evidence used to justify their case, which runs something like this: 1) homosexuality has been present throughout human history; 2) recent science confirms that it is the result of biochemical abnormalities within the human mind; 3) all of the opposition to it throughout history comes from people who were ignorant of the second reason because they were dumb yokels who lived in unenlightened times; 4) no harm has ever come to society from it. Sad to say, none of these arguments are true, while some are even self-contradictory. First, if were a caused by genetics, then under Darwin’s theory of macroevolution, those genes could not possibly survive because homosexuals, by definition, do not breed as a result of their own practices. Secondly the proportion of active homosexuals has waxed and waned tremendously from one place to another throughout history, which means that it cannot be the result of a mere genetic defect. It was relatively absent in the early American colonies, for example, but quite rampant in some of the city-states of ancient Greece, where it was sometimes mandatory for soldiers to choose male sex partners in the belief that it made them more likely to fight for them in battle. It tends to flare up in civilizations prior to the fall of dynasties, as it has on several occasions in Chinese history. These historical facts establish that it cannot possibly be the result of biochemical imbalances or genetics, but instead must be strongly tied to cultural changes. Yes, it is true that homosexuality has been with us for millennia, but it has not only waxes and waned, but done so in a culturally specific way; the fact that is has occurred in history has no bearing on its right or wrongness anyways, because war, murder, theft and adultery have also been with us. It is simply one among many permanent temptations mankind must face, although it is bit of a mystery as to why only a vanishingly small proportion of the population is subject to it during the waning phases, in comparison to other sins.

The medical hypothesis holds that it afflicts certain people as a result of biochemical changes in the brain, but the three studies used to popularize this view in the late ‘80s were all performed by homosexuals and could not be replicated by straight scientists. Even if they were repeatable, they were invalid, because like most of today’s psychiatrists and neurologists, they fail to take into a necessary corollary of free will: our neurons must rearrange themselves to fit the thoughts we choose to think at least part of the time, otherwise there is no such thing as freedom. Any hypothesis that tries to explain any form of human behavior in terms of biology must take that problem into account, but this doesn’t happen, which is why our psychiatrists are fond of explaining away all manners of criminal behavior as the results of chemical imbalances they ironically never test for. The lion’s share of modern psychiatry and behavioral neurology are junk science for this very reason. I was fortunate to get training in evaluating medical studies when I was younger, so I got into the habit of reading the original source documents, which is a skill that came in handy for various reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere. Quite frankly, the frightening truth is that a growing proportion of medical studies in these fields are invalid for this reason and many others; there is a strong trend toward loss of reasoning and weakening of empirical standards with each passing generation. Unlike any of the proponents or opponents of homosexual marriage that I’ve ever met, I actually consulted some of the original studies that the whole movement depends upon before making up my mind, and was disappointed to see how poor their research and reasoning was. This handful of research papers is the only evidence that the same-sex marriage lobby has in its arsenal to overturn several millennia of tradition on the part of our ancestors, but none of them were repeatable or even reasonable. One, for example, claimed that homosexuality is the result of biochemical changes merely because it found certain brain cells to be enlarged in gay men – without addressing the opposite possibility, that the structure of the human brain must rearrange itself to fit the thoughts we think, even rancid ones. The research is therefore invalid on its face, even before we consider the fact that straight scientists have been unable to replicate it. Yet even if none of that were true, the gay lobby routinely invalidates its own argument whenever circumstances are convenient. If this behavior were the result of neurochemical imbalances, then why aren’t treatments being devised for it? The gay lobby claims that it is an affliction on the one hand, but when it is treated as an illness, it switches tactics and invokes “freedom” to “choose” an alternative lifestyle. It cannot work both ways; one cannot voluntarily choose a thing if that choice is dictated by genetics or the mere mechanical movement of molecules in the mind. The clincher is that the same lobby has succeeded in making it illegal for therapists in California to try to treat homosexuality as a psychological disease, which is what the profession believed it to be until 1973, when the American Psychological Association (APA) declassified it as such. It is essentially forbidden by law to reclassify that way now; one perspective is now verboten. Many homosexuals claim they are helpless to fight off an unwanted burden, but when offered help, they bristle – which might signify that it is not as unwanted as they would like to believe.

                They may indeed have difficulty in resisting the temptation, for many of the same reasons that hard core drug addicts have difficulty kicking their own habits. Unlike many critics of either drug abuse or deviancy, I happen to really like a lot of people whose particular weaknesses are in those areas, so I can directly see the similarity between the two in a way that someone whose learning is strictly academic cannot. It is not necessary to resort to Christian arguments to prove this Christian conclusion, but the warning in John 8:34 that “he who sins makes himself the slave of sin” may be the shortest way of explaining it. The deeper the evil one succumbs to, the more problematic resistance to it will be; just as cocaine or heroin have no hold over a crackhead or junkie until they choose to give in to them, so too may homosexuality become a problem only after a person has failed to resist it. I was once guilty of giving cigarettes too much power over me, to the point that I ended up with permanent lung damage and probably would have lost my life by now, had I not quit; it took a huge sacrifice and some good fortune on my part to get rid of that demon, which I voluntarily let in the day I took my first puffs and slowly ceded power to each time I smoked again. The same dynamic is operative in any kind of addiction, which is most likely the real culprit in homosexuality. Personally, I have known about a dozen gays and lesbians, who I get along because there are many other issues besides this that I can find common ground with them on; all but two or three of them, however, have been the victims of sexual abuse, which may kick off of the whole cycle of addiction for them. It dominates their thinking so much that they talk about little but sex, so such things quickly come out in casual conversation. The only exceptions to I’m personally acquainted with have been hedonistic adulterers with no sense of sexual morality at all, who are merely hopping on the bandwagon now because it’s the latest thing. They’re also invariably hard-core atheists or even Satanists. I had to admit years ago, before I recognized how much smarter than me the Catholic saints were, that this division dovetailed well with the two reasons for homosexuality given by St. Paul. In Romans 1 he speaks darkly of people being “given up” by God to “shameful lusts” for rejecting him, which is exactly what happens to the second group. Elsewhere he speaks against the practice of pederasty, or rape of young boys, which was common among the Greeks and later spread to the Roman Empire, on the grounds that it made them effeminate homosexuals. This also fits with the first group, which has a more legitimate excuse because of the burden they’ve been handed. If this assessment is true, the first group will proliferate in tandem with a society’s rejection of authentic religion, while the latter will also expand indefinitely in tandem with child molestation. It is said that molesters tend to go through 30 or 40 victims before they are caught, but if just two of them turn into molesters themselves, then it can become a plague that slowly erodes society over the course of several generations – which is precisely what happened during the fall of Rome, whose ruling class eventually stopped enforcing laws against pederasty after it became widespread. Both of these causes would also tend to accelerate during the kind of social decay that often accompanies the fall of civilizations, which may explain why homosexuality is more prevalent at such times.

                While listening to a group of homosexuals speak about various perversions at a beer party once, I pointed out that they seemed to be trying to outdo each other in breaking taboos. Prior to this, I had often heard them say that they couldn’t explain the origin of their own strange attractions, but now it was quite clear from the utter silence that stopped them cold dead in their tracks: written on their faces was one word, “Busted.” In that instant I knew that sex addiction was indeed the real culprit, and a particularly virulent form of it at that: the addiction to breaking taboos. The whole point of any kind of taboo-breaking is pride, the first of all sins, which supplies a person with the cheap thrill of seeing if they can get away with it; just as kleptomaniacs steal for the thrill of it, so too does a serial killer get off on committing murder or a child molester derive their pleasure from destroying innocence. I didn’t understand this explicitly until reading G.K. Chesterton’s prescient argument that cannibals often eat people precisely because they know it is wrong; it is the more cultured and civilized tribes of the tropics like the Maoris that indulged in it, just as it was the more advanced civilizations of the Americas that practiced human sacrifice, like the Aztecs and Mayans.[2] It is also why Hannibal Lecter of Hollywood infamy had such refined tastes in other matters aside from his cannibalism. What unites all of these disparate crimes is that they are all motivated by a pursuit of a forbidden fruit of some kind. The problem is that they’re usually forbidden because they’re rotten and will poison a person’s soul. On one occasion long ago, a friend of mind wondered aloud at a party how men could possibly turn homosexual; he could understand lesbianism, on the theory that double the beauty equals double the fun, but saw male homosexuality as plain ugly. On another occasion, a relative of mine said he couldn’t fathom why so many lesbians he knew deliberately aped the appearance of men, as if they were going out of their way to make themselves ugly. What both arguments point out is that it is a sin which ends in ugliness. It is designed to dehumanize. Like any other forbidden fruit, the point is to think of a beautiful thing, then derive enjoyment from exercising the power of making it ugly. This is the common denominator in all sexual perversions, running the full gamut from child molestation to rape to more innocuous ones that are frequently practiced among heterosexual adults. Because the cold thrill of taboo-breaking is unsatisfying in the long run, the practitioners of all of them either get caught in an endless loop of becoming hungrier each time they try to sate themselves, thereby kicking off a cycle of addiction, or by burning out their sexuality altogether. In the latter cases, they often move on to far worse sins, particularly class prejudice; it is at this point that they may try to paint themselves as an upstanding citizen by joining a church for all the wrong motives, while doing a lot of flag-waving and the like, when all the while they have merely jumped out of the frying pan and into the same fire that consumes the Pharisees. Sex is supposed to have certain characteristics, including beauty, radical equality between the partners and mutual love, all of which can lead to the creation of life itself. A pervert is not merely an adulterer, but a person who adds malice to adultery by turning all of these qualities on their heads. Perversions of all kind imply some sort of ugliness, inequality between the participants and therefore some sort of derision or fouling of the inferior, all of which in the end do not lead to the creation of life, or may even result in death. Homosexuality is merely the same pattern of taboo-breaking applied to a different object, this time a specific sexual one.

Homosexuality as a Hate Crime

                The whole point is to deliberately destroy a divine gift, which is what sexuality is. The gay lobby pretends to take offense when heterosexuals express open disgust at their abuse of this divine gift, but the true aim of their conduct is meant to offend, for reasons of pride; in its worst form, flamboyant “flamers” are like skunks, whose disgusting stench serves to both repel their enemies and attract mates at the same time. The gay lobby often points out rightly to the gay-bashing Westboro crowd that God doesn’t hate gays, and they’re right; he doesn’t. They hate him. It is quite clever and incredibly Orwellian of homosexuals to label criticism of their practice a “hate crime,” because homosexuality is itself a hate crime. They’re simply asking the wrong loaded question, because it is obvious that God already loves them; that’s a given. He’s standing still the altar waiting for us, but you can’t have a wedding if one of the parties chooses not to show up, which is what we all fail to do each time we commit evil. Jesus warned us all in John 14 that “he who loves me will keep my commandments,” and by the simple virtue of acting against his commandments – as I have done many, many times – we prove that we don’t love him. There is such a thing as adding malice, however, which is equivalent to deliberately thumbing your nose at his commandments, or throwing rotten tomatoes at the person standing at the altar. All perversions have this taint of malice, including this one. God loves the sinner but hate the sin, as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was so fond of saying, but he hates this sin in particular because its whole motivation stems from a malicious desire to mock one of his greatest gifts. That is the same motivation that has driven the gay lobby to pursue the cause of same-sex marriage with a vengeance; the whole point is to lampoon the divinity in ordinary marriages, while simultaneously feeding the egos of people who haven’t earned the same rights as ordinary married couples. It is envy, not in the sense of jealousy, but in the broadest sense of either cutting a good thing down to an inferior level or raising an inferior thing to a level it doesn’t deserve, for reasons of pride. The whole term “gay pride” gives away what it real spiritual motivation is, for pride was the Original Sin that first brought down the Devil, then Adam and Eve. Everybody has a duty to be thankful yet no right to be proud of anything, especially when it comes to acts of malice. Centuries ago, Thomist philosophers developed a system of psychology based on the seven virtues and seven vices, two of which are pride and avarice, which can be used to analyze modern behavior more accurately than secular psychology, which always gets the wrong answers because it is forbidden to speak of the human soul. One of the most damning arguments against homosexuality is that the Thomists long ago theorized about ranks of sexual sin, which follow a progression as the sinner is driven to acts of ever-greater depravity by pride, as it flowers into malice and addiction to taboo-breaking. In the last century or so the whole of Western civilization has moved precisely through this progression, by legitimizing such practices as divorce and contraception (i.e., birth prevention) in one generation, then fornication and abortion in the next. Now we’ve reached the point where the only sexual sins left that are not considered shameful are child molestation, incest and bestiality, as well as sexual murder. All three of the remaining perversions were eventually legitimized in the same order in decadent civilizations, such as Rome, where laws against molestation were eventually ignored and bestiality was practiced right in the Coliseum to titillate the public.

                Approval of same-sex marriage will put all of these far worse perversions next on deck for activists to pursue. Polygamy and polyandry are not officially sanctioned yet, simply because everyone already practices them by sleeping around without marrying, so that the forces working to legalize both really can’t paint them as a forbidden fruit unjustly denied to the people by a mean government. The day is coming when they will be legalized too, but so too is the day when laws against child molestation go unenforced. This is precisely what happened in Rome after homosexuality was tolerated; after a few generations, pederasty became so common among the upper class that the stringent laws against it became dead letters. This is also what is happening in Canada, where homosexual rights groups like the Gay Alliance Towards Equality and Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition and have targeted age-of-consent laws now that they’ve won the battle on same-sex marriage, in an effort to essentially legalize pederasty. The Catholic sex abuse scandals of recent decades provide even more damning evidence on where we’re headed. Most of the Catholic clergy of the Western world long ago ceased being Catholic, by voluntarily accepting a whole smorgasbord of heresies, all of which entail the automatic penalty of excommunication latae sententiae, meaning that anybody who holds them also commits sacrilege by taking Eucharist. For the first time in history, the large proportions of the people who call themselves Catholic not only accept relatively benign theological heresies, but a whole range of moral heresies with immediate consequences in this world, from tolerance of usury on the right to acceptance of contraception and divorce on the left. The former bishop of Rochester, Matthew Clark, was notorious across the world for sheltering Rev. Charles Curran, a theologian who sanctioned bestiality, as well as tolerating the teaching that homosexuality is not a sin. This viewpoint spread throughout the clergy of the Western world in the middle of the last century, then many of the priests acted on it themselves, which led directly to the sex abuse scandals. The most striking fact about the clergy abuse scandals was that most of the victims were not girls but boys, who were molested by homosexual priests. Whenever I bring this fact up in debate, or cite other evidence like what happened in Rome and is happening now in Canada, my opponents invariably say, “That’s not true,” without citing any counter-evidence. It is true, and it bodes very badly for the future of our civilization, as well as the safety of our children. It is bad enough that gay parents today are encouraged to teach their kids that homosexuality is a good thing, which could have gotten one jailed for endangering the welfare of a child a generation ago. If the public really cared about the safety of America’s children half as much as it pretended to, it wouldn’t tolerate the barbaric practice of abortion, which has claimed the lives of 47 million American children since 1973, each one butchered in cold blood by their own mothers. If we’ll tolerate that, we’ll tolerate anything – even all the loose sex talk which has now saturated the mass media. In the supposedly raucous 1970s, Saturday Night Live pushed the limits of public morals in the middle of the night, but now its reruns seem almost quaint and innocent, now that daytime talk shows and sitcoms are awash with incessant references to genitalia and other such garbage. The whole debate on homosexuality merely contributes to that poisoned atmosphere. Like most other kids growing up in the ‘70s, I didn’t even know what a homosexual was until about age 11 or 12, when I saw two men walking hand in hand at Cape Cod; now elementary kids are taught about it, even though they ought to be kept completely ignorant about sex to protect their innocence. Our whole society is pervaded with an attitude that “it’s just sex,” without realizing that this is precisely the arguments that pedophiles use to justify their behavior. By encouraging homosexuality, we are directly enabling pedophilia, which will become a rampant plague within a generation or two, just as it was in ancient Rome and Greece. We’re also making it easier for activists to refocus their energies in other directions that will prove equally fatal to society in the long run - particularly euthanasia, which will probably claim a million or more American lives a year after it is finally legalized a generation or so from now.

                Regardless of whether or not currently popular perversions like homosexuality are the equivalent of “gateway drugs” to these far worse evils, they are already doing far too much damage to our society. The whole point of it is to mock the divine spirit of romance, as well as the institutions of marriage and the family, by setting up caricatures in their places. These things are valuable in and of themselves, regardless of how they affect our pocketbooks, which is usually the first consideration in our money-mad commercial civilization. Typically, debates skip over this point and move on to the issue of whether or not a particular sexual evil costs the nation money or detracts from its security. As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere, related sins like abortion and contraception really are wrecking our economy over the long term, while simultaneously sapping our national power; the immigration crisis, the Social Security crisis, the decline of American social life and our inability to control the rising powers of the Third World all stem from our self-engineered Baby Bust. Like rampant adultery, divorce, fornication and other lesser sexual sins, homosexuality merely erodes the structure of the family further, thereby undermining the only alternative institution we have to the tender mercies of Big Government and Big Business. The next time there is a national crisis of the scale of a Great Depression or a war between the great powers, or a famine or pestilence like the influenza pandemic of 1919, America will be unable to fall back on strong extended families in order to weather the crisis. Regardless of the fact that extended families no longer exist because Americans have become accustomed to aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence, as well as divorcing and moving around rootlessly in pursuit of Mammon, we cannot establish a new social institution out of gay marriage. We can label these sham relationships as families, but in practice they will not have the same strength. Homosexuals are simply far more promiscuous than the general population. This ought to obvious, but this fact didn’t become clear to me until I read Laurie Garrett’s excellent tome The Coming Plague, which deals with recent battles against emerging diseases; she is no homophobe, but in a chapter on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, she provides a disgusting inventory of the sexual practices and discusses the sheer frequency with which gays change partners, all of which contributed to the early spread of HIV.[3]

                Rampant homosexuality will have truly deleterious public consequences, just as rampant divorce and contraception already have, which is why it cannot simply be dismissed as a private matter. If a person wants to damn themselves, it is their business, up until the point where their behavior injures other directly or undermines society, at which point it becomes public business. Adultery in any form constitutes an injustice; for example, in cases of marital infidelity or fornication, the participants cheat the people their partners would have married, or already have married, out of the sort of undiluted intimacy that is necessary to build strong families. This means that the pilgrims who set foot on Plymouth Rock recognized that they had a right and a duty to punish sexual crimes, as our ancestors did for many generations, because they are not victimless crimes. All of the aforementioned consequences I have spelled out here are among the reasons they used to forbid this sort of thing; they were not ignorant yokels, but wise, unlike our willfully blind generation. The Pilgrims, like the Founding Fathers and every generation of Americans up till the middle of the last century, were democrats but never libertarians. They passed laws against homosexuality and hard drugs for the same reason: it is dangerous for society to have a large number of addicts running loose, pursuing their idols like maniacs, with reckless disregard for how their actions dissolve the social fabric of our nation. We’re letting the future of our whole civilization ride on an analysis of homosexuality developed by homosexuals themselves, even though many of them profess that they do not know where their own strange attractions come from. They are obeying an imperative they themselves do not understand yet are demanding the leeway to obey it, and to teach others to follow them. If we legalize same-sex marriage to succeed, the consequences will be the same as if we followed the advice of libertarians and simply stopped enforcing laws against cocaine and heroin trafficking: a generation from now, they will multiply to the point where it will not be possible to change our minds. This is already happening before our eyes, thanks to the excessive toleration already granted them; in the course of just one generation, the prevalence of lesbianism among teenage girls has already leapt to one in eight. Misguided tolerance is already enabling the spread of a behavior that is difficult to repent from, once it has been surrendered to.

Gay activists are fond of saying that Jesus was an apostle of tolerance, which is true in a certain specific sense. He laid down a very specific code of morality and spent half of his ministry speaking of the dire consequences that awaited those who defied him; our generation forgets that the “blessed are those” sentences in the Sermon on the Mount were balanced out by an equal number of those beginning with “woe to you.” He believed in forgiveness, but only if a person was sorry for their sins; I shudder to think of what would have happened to the adulterous woman he saved from stoning, had she taken the modern approach and screamed in Christ’s face that he had no right to tell her what to do. As long as a thief intends to give back what they stole, or a kleptomaniac seeks treatment, it is best to let them go quietly rather than burdening them further when they are struggling to change for the better; according to St. Thomas Aquinas, this is the meaning of "Do not muzzle the ox when it is treading out the grain,” in Deuteronomy 24:5. When we’ve gotten to the point where the homosexual lobby is fabricating scientific studies, organizing to capture power within the government and mass media, persecuting those who disagree with them and marching in pride parades, then I think we can safely say that we long ago passed the point where this minority was privately working to change their character. Instead they are marching in public and coming out of the closet without shame. Skeletons are supposed to be left in the closet for a reason. When they shamble forth out of the closet in horror movies, they next run amok.

The Pyrrhic Victory of Same-Sex Marriage

                In the name of tolerance, those coming out of the closet are already spreading intolerance of a kind that was never directed at them. In Canada and much of Europe, they have already effectively succeeded in making Catholicism illegal, by making it a crime to criticize homosexuality behind the pulpit. Outside of the West, the Catholic Church is spreading like wildfire in places like sub-Saharan Africa and India, but within Europe and the countries it settlers colonized generations ago, the clergy are already in a state of rebellion anyways; homosexuality is merely one of the many of issues they are unwilling to inform their parishioners about, but now they have legal incentives to disobey the pope. America is too paranoid about the dangers of Big Government and too ignorant about the dangers of Big Business, so it goes about political repression in a different way: by allowing Corporate America to punish its workforce for taking public stances it doesn’t like, while simultaneously gobbling up the mass media so that revolt never crosses the public’s mind in the first place. Nevertheless, formal laws against criticism of homosexuality are still creeping forward, such as the aforementioned one against treating it as a psychological disease in California. So much for freedom of speech, the press and religion, all of which have been gutted by hook or crook. Although it claims to be “tolerant,” the homosexual lobby frequently resorts to violence to get its message across as well. Gay activists, for example, were among the thousands of protestors who attacked the Human Life International conference in Toronto in 1995, pelting the participants with objects like glass-filled condoms.[4] All of this is purely and simply bigotry, in its rawest form, deliberately directed at the most orthodox forms of Christianity precisely because they’re good and right and true. Hate is being used in defense of a hateful act and is being justified on the grounds of preventing hate. If this column ever gets any widespread exposure, watch how quickly those on the other side resort first to insults, then to outright persecution. I have made general criticisms of the movement, but the responses will be entirely personal, ugly, false and quite probably violent.

                Unlike other critics of the gay lobby, I believe that gays and lesbians have rights; we merely disagree on what those rights are. It would not be right, for example, to discriminate against them in housing and employment, because all people need a place to live and have a right to eat; nor should they have their kids taken away except in cases of where risks of sexual abuse are well-established, simply because families are more important institutions whose rights should normally trump those of lesser ones like governments. Nor should slurs like "fag" be directed at them. If such arguments come up in my presence, the gay lobby can count on me to side with them on those particular issues. On the other hand, in an ideal world, this hate crime ought to be recriminalized and accompanied with moderate enforcement, because it constitutes a danger to the public welfare. In Lawrence, the Supreme Court essentially took away our democratic rights to enforce such laws, which all the leaders of past generations assumed to be constitutional, including the Founding Fathers; this is merely one in a long string of illegal decisions on the part of SCOTUS, which was only granted the power to interpret the Constitution, not write it. Every time the Imperial Judiciary reaches a decision that it knows is contrary to the wishes of the framers of the Constitution, or those who approved its amendments, it commits the high crime of usurping power; the only difference between this and the military coups which overturn banana republics is that they can write more floridly. We can already say well in advance that sooner or later, some iteration of the Court is going to take away our democratic right to vote against gay marriage, precisely because it is against the will of both the Founding Fathers and the Catholic Church. Those who actually admire either one of these enemies of the Imperial Judiciary must stop thinking in terms of merely holding the line, because any team that plays defense forever is bound to lose. We must think in terms of rollback, to the point that such contrived propaganda terms as “homophobic” are eliminated from our language and discussions of the issue take place in whispers away from the ears of children, not discussed openly on the airwaves. I generally avoid the use of the term “gay” for that purpose. It is another Orwellian term, because if there’s one thing homosexuals are not, it is happy; depression among them is rampant, as well as numerous other self-destructive behaviors, which is why the average life span of a gay male in America is only 49 years. Chesterton recognized that when a person allows any idol to dominate their mind to the point of madness, it slowly begins to color everything they say and do, which is why so much of the public art in ancient Greece and Rome were pornographic in nature. When the early Christians are criticized for tearing down pagan temples, the fact that many of them consisted of giant depictions of genitalia is generally left out. Our society is likewise slowly being stained by constant sex talk, particularly of the most unwholesome kind, and if we really care about our children, we will clean up the public discourse. Homosexuality is among many topics that kids shouldn’t even hear of before reaching junior high, at a minimum. Unfortunately, the gay lobby has no such concept of boundaries. Like every other lobby for any other prominent cause in Western civilization, from the NRA to the feminists to the apostles of the so-called “free market,” they do not recognize that there is a point where their pursuit of rights may conflict with someone else’s genuine rights, or even ironically destroy their own cause. No faction in the American political landscape has any concept that there could be a stopping point, let alone what that point might be, which is the mark of unbalanced fanaticism.

                Politics makes strange bedfellows, and gay politics makes for even stranger bedfellows. The really queer thing about the political systems of the entire West today is the strange alliance quietly developing between profligates and Puritans, between left and right, between any factions that hate the Catholic Church. It is much like the friendship that once bloomed between Herod and Pilate when they concurred with the Pharisees and high priests to kill Jesus, for entirely different motivations. Every popular political opinion today has this in common: they’re all virulently anti-Catholic, to an extent never before seen. All of the social teachings of Catholicism are contrary to capitalism, i.e. the religion of the rich, who love to commit usury, speculation and numerous other economic sins. They have a sort of thieves’ bargain with factions that want to perpetuate other evils, of which homosexuality is merely one. What this constitutes, essentially, is an insuperable alliance against love itself, by people who differ only in what brand of hate they prefer. There are simply too many enemies on the fringe for the center to hold any longer, some of which are far more dangerous than homosexuality, such as abortion and unchecked militarism. If it were possible to make some sort of political bargain with the gay lobby to approve same-sex marriage in return for ending the holocaust of abortion, or preventing capitalists from exploiting the Third World, I would take the deal in a heartbeat, because both led to tens of millions of deaths of innocents each year. Those acts of genocide invalidate everything America and its Western allies do; in comparison, homosexuality is a pinprick. If we cannot roll those back, we will not be able to stop lesser threats like same-sex marriage. That is merely one symptom of what is perhaps the most rapid and broad decline of any civilization in human history. We cannot roll back the tide of perversion, break up Corporate America, dismantle Wall Street, eliminate divorce, forbid abortion, start putting our white collar criminals in prison and bring wayward institutions like our military-industrial complex and Imperial Judiciary to heel simultaneously. A failure in any one of these areas will, in the long run, be fatal to our civilization though. I have heard many times that it would be impossible to restore respect for marriage in our society, by recriminalizing homosexuality, forbidding divorce and the like, even though our ancestors did all of those things effortlessly. They are right. I also heard from a highly placed, fervent fan of capitalism that it would be impossible to police Wall Street today. He was also right. We cannot roll this things back, at least not before our civilization gets a severe spanking that it will never forget, should it even survive. We are speeding towards a disaster of epic proportions but there’s no one left in the car competent to take the wheel.

                Some of the fanatics who now have the wheel are rabid capitalists, to whom regulation of any kind is anathema; they do not recognize that some of their crimes, like outsourcing, are slowly sapping the strength of their own country and handing it over quite treasonously to foreigners bent on supplanting our empire. Another set of fanatics has forbidden honest discussion of the Koran, or the atrocities and other crimes openly committed by Mohammed. Like homosexuality, “tolerance” is extended to Islam for the simple purpose of getting back at orthodox Christianity, not because its defenders have ever bothered to read the Koran. The real reason is that any stick is good enough to beat Christianity with, as Chesterton pointed out. Orthodox Christianity cannot possibly survive against this long list of enemies – but when it is gone, nothing will be left to stop the true enemies  of the West from turning their sticks against us. Even the vast majority of the clergy today beat on it, including most of the bishops and much of the staff of the Vatican, where the popes are now virtual prisoners. Our current pope recently pleaded for us to make a greater space for God in our society, but secularists will continue to deliberately drive him out of politics, academia, the media and even our very consciousness, until there is nothing left. Once we have succeeded in locking God out of the planet, we will shudder to realize exactly what we have locked ourselves in with. The odds of anyone understanding what that means before it is too late to turn back are quite low, given the many signs that our civilization has completely lost touch with right reason. Homosexual marriage is merely the latest fit of madness our civilization has been gripped with, along with  public toleration of torture by the Bush Administration; Rush Limbaugh and the rest of hate radio foaming at the mouth over “socialism,” which has been dead in America for 80 years; an invasion of illegal immigrants that no one has the will to check; all in a nation that went from the world’s greatest creditor to its leading debtor overnight, under an incompetent president who is now worshipped by the political Right. Gay marriage is just another example of our civilization’s exceptional arrogance, as it tries to change the most ancient laws without overwhelming evidence that they ought to be changed, or even any evidence at all. It is a quite radical and unprecedented step, based on the flimsiest arguments and the shortest of debates.
              This bizarre social experiment is not going to work. It cannot end any other way except badly. Our nation is already doing a lot of purely evil things that it is fortunate to have escaped punishment for, ranging from the genocide of the Vietnam War and the funding of Latin American death squads in the past, to the holocaust of abortion today. Same-sex marriage is a lesser offense but a no-brainer; it is like Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump shaking his fist at the sky and saying, “You’re not going to tell us what to do!” Like Forrest, we can be certain that a storm is coming. Historically, this sort of thing has always reared its ugliest head before the fall of dynasties and empires, which are usually terminated when they become too weak to defend themselves against external aggression. Sooner or later, this sort of arrogance and foolishness is going to bleed over into foreign policy, the one area that I can claim real expertise in, until it leads to fatal mistakes in strategy. I heard it said recently that House Speaker John Boehner was on the wrong side of history because he was bound to lose both the gay marriage debate and the budget struggle in Congress, where he routinely defends the narrow interests of the super-rich. Actually, all of these factions are on the losing side of history. While Boehner and his ilk continue to bilk the public on the Right and his opposition on the Left drags us down into Sodom, while the apostate Catholics continue to waver and do nothing to stop either, dark clouds are quietly gathering in North Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, where our empire is in flaking away at the edges. As we speak, people bent on using violent methods to overwrite our civilization completely with their own are multiplying and scurrying from one hot spot to another like cockroaches. We can do little but weep like Jeremiah, because by the time America and its allies realize how truly vulnerable our empires have become, it will be too late. We may soon see how tolerant Islam is, or how wise it is to hand over our industrial base to a fascist government like that of mainland China. If we cannot abide by the firm but fair wisdom of Christ, perhaps the cold caress of steel from the heirs of Mao and Mohammed will be more to our liking.

The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.

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[1] See the Youtube.com video “Russell Brand Interviews Westboro Baptist Church,” available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBA6qlHW8po I don’t agree with Russell Brand’s views, but I could find some common ground with him, especially on the issue of corporate greed being a greater threat.

 

[2] See the sixth chapter of Chesterton, G.K.,1993, The Everlasting Man. Ignatius Press: San Francisco.

 

[3] Garrett, Laurie, 1994, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out Of Balance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

 

[4] Gosgnach, Tony, 1995, “Mob Weaks Havoc at HLI Convention,” published at 2:37 p.m. in the May 29, 1995 edition of The Interim. Available online at http://www.theinterim.com/issues/abortion/mob-wreaks-havoc-at-hli-convention/

Poxes from Both Houses: How the Liberal-Conservative Feud is Contributing to the Decline of Western Civilization

By Steve Bolton

                In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio cries out for justice against the feuding Capulet and Montague families with the infamous curse, “a pox on both your houses.” Yet Shakespeare’s pen never set to paper a story half as tragic as the modern quarrel between so-called liberals and conservatives, both of whom are leading us to ruin because they are poxes upon humanity.

                The faux debate between the two factions has deceived and drawn in so many of our opinion makers that there is no room left for a Mercutio to point out the disgusting injustices of both sides. It took a Canadian comedian, Jon Stewart, to shine light on the damage the partisans of both sides are doing to American politics, in a broadcast of the CNN news program Crossfire on October 15, 2004. "It's hurting America,” he implored the rabidly right-wing host Tucker Carlson and left-wing co-host Paul Begala. “Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop... You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably."[1] Many Americans recognized the truth in Stewart’s words, which is why that particular episode was the most watched in the history of show and continues to accumulate hits on YouTube almost a decade later. Every word he uttered was right on the money. Unfortunately, it was an incomplete truth, for the situation is actually more dire than a mere obsessive quarrel between two partisan factions. The real tragedy is that there is no faction left anywhere in the politics of America, or Canada, or any other Western nation for that matter, which stands for good or right reason. This makes it highly unlikely that good will be done anytime soon, or that the decline of Western civilization can be halted.

                On its face, the rivalry between the political Left and Right is simply stupid. This is quite easy to prove; simply lean over in your chair further and further in either direction and you will fall down. Or if you prefer, try to imagine the American eagle trying to fly with just one wing. In this way, the very terminology of “left” and “right” implies failure from the beginning. Few political pundits today actually stop and think about such things, because real thinking is hard work; they may be well-dressed, articulate and have impressive degrees, but many apparently have no experience in the kind of self-critical thinking required for actual insight. The media personalities and politicians on both the left and the right today are perfect illustrations of the lesson of Sirach 21:18: “To an ignorant person, wisdom is as useless as a house gone to ruin. He has never even thought about the things he is so sure of.” Thanks to a widespread breakdown in reason throughout our whole civilization, we are beset by legions of people who don’t have any understanding of the political terminology they use, demonize certain people or groups without once asking why and make grotesque assumptions about the state of the world, without bothering to check their facts. Nevertheless, the simplistic idea that the world is divided into camps called the liberals and conservatives has become increasingly common in recent decades, in large part because it takes no mental effort, while providing villains to hate and allies for the weak-minded to lean on.

The Cons of Conservatism

One of the clearest examples of this is hate radio, which lambastes the designated villain of the day on cue, in a frightening parody of the political ritual called the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the same crowd that despised Bill Clinton in the 1990s immediately attacked Barack Obama without mercy the day he was elected; when prompted by the right-wing propaganda machine, they began spewing hate at a deeply personal level, without any real bearing on the bona fide mistakes both of these presidents made in office. Like the brainwashed people in Orwell’s novel, much of America is so myopically focused on the present that they have lost all sense of historical memory – which is precisely why the Clinton and Obama bashers don’t realize how far to the right both presidents were, at least on economic issues. Neither man was a rabid Tea Party supporter, but they were certainly less critical of capitalism than any Democratic president of the last century, or even such Republicans of the past like Teddy Roosevelt with his trust-busting or Dwight Eisenhower with his warning against the military-industrial complex. That of course depends on how we define what phrases like “the political right” actually mean, which isn’t clear at all. If it means supporting capitalism, then Nixon was a bleeding heart liberal by Reagan’s standards, who would in turn be considered a pinko by the lunatic fringe in the Tea Party today. Such people like to charge everyone on the left of the political spectrum with being a “socialist” or a “Marxist” without any understanding of what those terms mean. They are not synonymous with political and economic equality, progressive taxation, trust-busting, moderate state involvement in the economy, regulation of business, the welfare state or even nationalization of key industries; these are all things that capitalism preaches against, but which are not part of Marxist thought. All of them are explicitly permitted (and some are even mandatory) in the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which also condemns Marxism, for entirely different reasons. Just as in Orwell’s novel, it has largely been forgotten that Marxism has been as dead as doornail in America since the 1930s, but that doesn’t stop our political commentators from tossing out epithets like “socialist” quite routinely.

What is truly shocking, however, is their misuse of the word “liberal” as an insult. It is a historical fact that the Liberals of the 19th Century believed in precisely the same economic principles as the capitalists of today; each time hate radio mongers like Rush Limbaugh demonize “liberalism,” they are ironically actually undercutting their own philosophy. Such gross misuses of terminology stem from sheer stupidity, not the nefarious kind of word play that Big Brother’s party machine uses for mind control purposes in 1984. Nevertheless, it feeds political myths that help take the focus off the real villains in the upper class, just as the careful manipulation of the Party does in Orwell’s novel. For example, much of the American public now believes that “the System” is rife with excessive entitlements, to the point that the rest of the world is now dependent on our charity and the inner cities are populated with legions of welfare queens. Actually, as I have detailed many times before (most recently in Incompetent Austerity), our military and economic aid is carefully crafted to extract wealth from other nations, not to aid them at all; in fact, many of those children you see starving overseas are going hungry as a direct result of our policies, or those of institutions we control like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank. Likewise, welfare abuse is at an all-time low, thanks to decades of continual bare-bones cuts; our present entitlement crisis comes directly from two sources, the Birth Dearth brought about by abortion and contraception, plus the dismantling of progressive taxation in the Reagan years. Bashing the poor takes the heat off of the rich (and those among the poor who admire them) while providing defenseless scapegoats for people to take their frustrations out on, but it has no more bearing on reality than the scapegoating of the Jews in Nazi Germany. America makes the poor into its whipping post, rather than a particular ethnic minority, because our national sin is class prejudice and our national idol is money, not worship of a particular race or ethnic group. Whenever the Right fulminates against “liberals” and foams at the mouth about socialism, they simply demonstrate what an ignorant rabble they have become, as well as what God they truly serve. It is a weakness of both mind and soul to hate other men on cue, as the listeners of hate radio do with demonized politicians like Obama and Clinton; it is positively insane, however, to hate an enemy that does not even exist. We are basically at the same level of the citizens in Orwell’s horrific future, who wholeheartedly rage against internal and external enemies that may not even be real, with the sad difference that our political commentators could learn the truth, if they bothered to read it. There are no socialists or Marxists left in America; there is only one economic philosophy that the upper classes of the entire planet (save for a few holdouts like Cuba and North Korea) will tolerate discussion of, and that is capitalism. It has only one rival left, distributism, which most of the Western world has not heard of precisely because it is a proven, viable alternative to all of these failed philosophies. If the public bothered to read and think for itself, rather than parroting back what the corporate media tells it to think, this would not be true. If the common people were not gradually losing their common sense, they would realize that Corporate America owns the mass media and will never permit genuine, effective criticism of capitalism. Perhaps the most twisted triumph of the Right in recent decades has been its uncanny success in painting itself as an underdog, valiantly fighting off the “liberal media.” There is one thing that the mass media will never be as long as it is owned by the rich, and that is liberal – if we understand that term to mean anti-capitalist, which is ironically the exact opposite of its original meaning.

                Although terms like “liberal” and “conservative” have become commonplace in our political discourse, it is hard to say exactly what they mean. It is difficult to distinguish between them based on their economic policies now, because the so-called liberals are also succumbing to capitalist dogmas with each passing decade, albeit at a slower rate than the lunatic fringe in the Tea Party. Perhaps the political Right is so obsessed with money and the status is brings that this minor difference is sufficient to explain their hatred of “the liberals.” They call themselves “conservative,” but this is also a misnomer, almost to the point of being a lie, because this faction is hardly averse to radical social change of a certain kind. Over the last couple of centuries they have been on a crusade to supplant existing social structures with capitalist ones in every corner of the globe, through every conceivable means ranging from military intervention to trade embargoes to union busting to vote manipulation. For generations they have sought to build a global marketplace in which usury, speculation, commercialism, class prejudice and every other ugly doctrine of capitalism could flourish and now, at last, they have it. Turning the world into a paradise for the rich has been a bloody affair, however, in which a slew of disparate opponents had to be overcome, all of them truly conservative in nature. Peasants, for example, are normally set in their ways (often for very good reasons) but their old-fashioned social and economic traditions have been intentionally uprooted everywhere across the planet, from the wheat fields of Kansas to the highlands of Guatemala and from the countryside of India to the jungles of the Congo. In the last few centuries capitalists have deliberately engineered a planet-wide shift away from independent family farms focused on local trade to giant agribusinesses directed towards export markets; in the process, they have also purposefully reduced the peasantry of the whole planet into mere landless laborers, millions of whom are deliberately kept just a day’s unfair wages from starvation. As part of the same process, global capitalism has disrupted or even forbidden innumerable locally devised ways of fending off economic disaster, like community seed banks or the complex systems of water rights devised by North African peasants, thereby leaving the poor even more vulnerable to economic shocks. This is the where the planet’s starving children come from, not a shortage of resources. Right-wing economic policies can hardly be considered “conservative” in any sense of the word, although they are ironically quite liberal, at least by the oldest definition of that word. On the other hand, the people they now call “liberals” have also stopped decrying abuses of economic power of any kind, even ones that directly threaten the pocketbooks of American voters, such as outsourcing and union busting. The two sides only differ on how quickly they’re willing to allow capitalism to spread and deepen. The political Left is now marching in step with the political Right on these issues, although it may be a few paces behind. If there is actually a bona fide division between the two political factions, then it must be a dispute between two groups of capitalists within the elite, who own together own the propaganda machine we call the mass media lock, stock and barrel. If there is a bone of contention between them, then we will have to look at other issues, beyond the socio-economic ones that the political Right focuses on so compulsively.

                 Their loathing of this shadowy, amorphous thing they call “the Left,” yet cannot coherently define, is just another example of the obsessiveness that characterizes our political system today. The smorgasbord of disparate causes they call “liberal” actually have little in common with each other, save that they are equally unbalanced and single-minded; perhaps the only thing that holds the fractious political Left together is its common dislike of the Right, which is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy of right-wing paranoia. It is hard to give credence to the Right’s insane vision of a monolithic bloc of liberals conspiring to foster radical social changes, when there is no coherent philosophy welding together such widely divergent ideas as gun control, homosexual rights and environmental protection, beyond the old saying that politics makes strange bedfellows. Unlike capitalism, which is intrinsically evil, these causes are beneficial, at least in the right place, time and proportion. You don’t have to be a supporter of gay marriage, for example, to recognize that homosexuals have some rights, even if we don’t agree on what those rights are. Gun control doesn’t mean we should confiscate every sharp blade in America, nor does the right to bear arms cover nuclear weapons. That all seems obvious on paper, but unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of common sense that has entirely vanished from our public debates. One disturbing fact darkens our political discourse today: the partisans of any cause simply don’t have any concept of ever stopping, let alone where the precipice into madness might be. Some of our fanatical forbears forgot the dangers of fanaticism as well and thereby turned temperance into Prohibition, anti-Communism into McCarthyism and aversion to the occult into the Salem Witch Trials. Yet temperance was a good cause, if we take it is in its original sense as a synonym for moderation, just as opposition to Marxism and witchcraft certainly are. They went sour precisely because some of our ancestors failed to stay within reasonable bounds and turned them into virtual idols. The mark of unreason is this inability to see the proper bounds of a good thing, but the single-minded fanatics who dominate our politics today don’t seem to be conscious of any limits to their causes whatsoever, which is positively dangerous. For example, you don’t hear many passionate advocates of either gun control or gun rights delineating any specific bounds at all to their demands. The same is true of any other single-issue lobby in the political arena today, whether it is in favor of increased defense spending, or women’s rights, or black civil rights, or any other cause in between. This is why so many of them have already passed the telltale mark of madness: destruction of the very causes they set out to champion.

Conservative hawks, for example, have been overspending on the armed forces for so many decades that they have actually undermined our national security in the long run. As Paul Kennedy pointed out in his classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers[2], this has diverted funds away from the resources our industries, educational systems and families need to churn out more weapons and soldiers. Another classic example from the opposite side of the spectrum is the feminist movement, which started out demanding liberty for women but by World War II, had merely succeeded in taking women out of homes they owned with husbands who loved them, working to raise children who would love them in return, in order to toil in factories and offices making widgets and shuffling papers for capitalist employers bent on extracting maximum labor from them for minimum pay. As English philosopher G.K. Chesterton pointed out, “Ten million young women rose to their feet with the cry, We will not be dictated to: and proceeded to become stenographers.”^[3] Since then, the feminist movement has gone so far over the edge that it now champions causes like abortion, which early feminist heroines like Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and the like universally despised. In the effort to protect women, feminists have killed a half a billion female babies in the last 40 years alone. Of course, this left-wing cause isn’t the only genocide that stains our hands, for the right wing of the political spectrum is hardly averse to mass murder. During the Cold War the U.S. and its Western allies killed Third World peasants by the millions through direct military intervention, military aid to the dictators of banana republics and similar means, all to buttress a capitalist system that still starves to death 8 million children worldwide each year. As one American commander put it so infamously, as he and his fellow soldiers destroyed the homes of innocent civilians in the town of Ben Tre, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." In the course of the Vietnam War, the U.S. and its allies calculatingly destroyed half the homes in certain provinces, killed one-tenth of the civilian population and locked up many of the survivors in “strategic hamlets,” in a military campaign that met the international legal definition of genocide. As a result, we lost the hearts and minds of the people of South Vietnam and then the war itself as a consequence. Many of the soldiers who came home from that conflict were called “baby killers” by a generation which tolerated the killing of one million American babies each year, following the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade. This sort of disgusting hypocrisy on both sides only worsened in the ‘80s, when Ronald Reagan funneled arms to death squads and dictatorships that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, including innumerable innocent children, while simultaneously disparaging abortion in public. If there is a difference between the political Left and Right in terms of atrocities, it is that one side believes that the murder of foreign children is tolerable, while the other believes that the murder of our children is inhuman. The truth is even worse than that, however, for both the Left and Right are slowly learning to tolerate each other's crimes, even as the hate between them becomes more intense; neither side is willing to stand up for their virtues any longer, but they are willing to fight for their vices. Reagan was the quintessential example of this, for he was willing to subvert the Constitution in order to funnel arms to the murderous terrorist group known as the Contras, as well as commit treason by dealing with our enemies in Iran to do it, yet didn’t lift a finger to stop abortion. Although he preached in public about Christian moral and “family values,” he was our first and only divorced president, despite Christ’s direct warning in passages like Matthew 19:4-9 that divorce and remarriage are equivalent to adultery. There is one faction left on the planet that stands against both extremes, one that has been increasingly silent for the last generation, but it is taboo even to mention it.  In the meantime, those extremes have been slowly converging to forge a new political mainstream, one that flies in the face of everything our ancestors stood for. For a deeper understanding of the forces that really animate modern politics, we will have to consult some of them.

Anti-Catholicism: The Fulcrum of Modern Politics

There are real divisions between the Left and the Right, but it is not possible to understand them explicitly without Thomist psychology. This school of thought may have been founded by St. Thomas Aquinas back in medieval times, but it still explains human behavior better than most of the half-baked theories of today’s modern psychologists. Under the principle of Occam’s Razor, the seven virtues (charity, faith, hope, prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance) and seven vices (pride, avarice, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy and spiritual sloth, also known as acedia) ought to be one of the leading tools in the discipline of psychology, given that they  illuminate the inner workings of human thought so well. Instead, they are ignored in favor of the unsubstantiated ravings of men like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and John B. Watson, which explain nothing, for one reason: religious prejudice. The discipline of psychology has suffered terrible failures since its inception at the end of the 19th Century precisely because those who staff it are not allowed to speak of the human soul, let alone the Catholic description of it, which has the distinct advantage of being true. Like those who staff every other academic discipline, our psychologists are going to continually get the wrong answers to their questions because they have thrown out half of the pieces, forcing them to jam together the remaining ones in incoherent ways. If Thomist psychology, or even merely the human soul, are reflections of reality, then any theory that leaves them out will eventually fail. That is precisely why our opinion makers have little understanding of the nation’s political psychology, let alone their own. One single litmus test explains the whole of modern political behavior best: with each passing generation, it is increasingly anti-Catholic. If the well-defined, ancient code of morality set down by the Catholic Church two millennia ago is correct, then we are in big trouble, for it is rapidly being rejected by every political spectrum across the whole of Western civilization. This standard is also much closer to the original ideas of the Founding Fathers, who retained some of the Catholic ideals lost by their forebears in the Reformation. What almost all of today’s political factions have in common is that we know for certain that the founders and heroic figures of our democratic past would not have approved of them. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington have this in common: they certainly did not support either homosexual marriage or concentration of Big Business in the hands of the few. Nor did Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy, for that matter. Many of these historical figures also opposed large, permanent standing armies for the same reasons that Eisenhower cautioned against the military-industrial complex. Susan B. Anthony and the original feminists considered abortion an unspeakable crime; the vast majority of the American public still frowned on contraception until the early 20th Century. Just a short time ago, all of these positions were the mainstream, especially among the extraordinary men and women who are now considered great leaders, but today their lone defender is the Catholic Church.

The one common denominator to all of the rapid political and cultural changes occurring in Western civilization today is its accelerating flight from Catholicism, an event called the Falling Away that was foretold in Matthew 24:9-24:14. This division between the political Left and Right is not the locus upon which politics turns in other civilizations in which this mass apostasy is not occurring. In India, politics revolves the efforts of organizations like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena to forestall the decay of Hinduism, against continual inroads by Islam, Catholicism and the West’s consumer culture. China is facing the bizarre, insoluble dilemma of reconciling its official Marxist ideology with the widespread practice of the exact opposite, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Its real religion is xenophobic nationalism, which is using capitalism as a mere tool towards its single-minded goal of building power on the international stage. Among the 1 billion people in the Muslim world, politics increasingly revolves around the battle between Islamic fundamentalism and decadent Western materialism implanted when the area was colonized by European powers a century ago; if current trends continue, that battle will soon be over, with the next one looming between divergent brands of fundamentalism. In Sub-Saharan Africa, orthodox Christianity is spreading like wildfire and quietly changing the whole political dynamic of the region, which is creating flash points in North Africa in areas where it is colliding with Islam. A generation ago, Latin American politics was characterized by a genuine divide between capitalist military dictatorships and Marxist guerrillas, some of whom were hard core Communists and others whose ideas were closer to the Catholic Church’s concepts of social justice. Today, that division resembles the pointless gulf between Left and Right found in North America and Europe, albeit to a lesser extent, perhaps because the region is closer to its Catholic roots. The politics of the whole Western Hemisphere south of the Rio Grande are simply adrift, with numerous ideologically bankrupt leftist movements coming to power through the ballot box but not following through on their promises, while Western materialism and heresies simultaneously spur crime and the steady growth of heresies at the same time. The stark differences between the politics of these major civilizations are directly tied to their religions for a reason that would seem alien to secularized Westerners: it is not possible to separate your religion from your politics. When our forefathers forbade the establishment of religion and decreed religious tolerance, they did not forbid religion by being intolerant to them all, as our generation has; they merely sought to prevent the clergy from directly ruling, not to prevent religious commentary on politics. Even if this were desirable, this kind of extreme secularism is not logically possible, because a person’s actions are determined by their religion or lack thereof. Our formal religious affiliation doesn’t necessarily have an effect on our actions, but what we actually believe always does. To put it simply, the heart determines what the mind thinks, which in turn determines how we act. This is especially true when it comes to our moral code, which each person takes into consideration when voting, whether they realize it or not. Our behavior is best explained by the idols that we worship and what devils we fear, including how we act in the voting booth.

                A complete discussion of Thomist psychology and its ramifications for political behavior could take up volumes, which ought to be written but have not yet. Suffice it to say that the liberal vs. conservative prism that Western politics is typically viewed through doesn’t really explain anything any longer, unless we group the two factions by the vices they prefer. In a very broad sense, the so-called liberals are more prone to the “hot vices” like lust, gluttony and envy, whereas the so-called conservatives turn to wrath more readily in pursuit of the “cold vices” of pride and avarice, the Original Sin and the root of all evil respectively. We’re better off using the term acedia for the last of the seven vices, for spiritual sloth has nothing to do with laziness; it is a sense of inability to feel pleasure, thanks to ingratitude. It is a sort of black hole that all the sins converge towards if left unchecked. What Western civilization is beset with is basically a battle between a loose coalition of hedonists and their austere opponents, who want to turn the world into a monument to their own spiritual pride. It is a division between moral “wet rot” and “dry rot,” so to speak, in which the profligates and Puritans are each calling the kettle black. Neither side is a stranger to genocide, with the Left being guilty of supporting abortion, a crime which kills 30-40 million children a year, while the economic policies Right are almost entirely to blame for the starvation that kills another 8 million annually, as well as the lion’s share of deaths in unjust wars in the last century. They differ only in their preferred victims. In their passionate pursuit of causes without any sense of boundaries, the Left long ago passed the point of causing more injustice than it has fixed; they have taken liberation to the point of liberating monsters, thereby letting loose such horrors as abortion and the breakdown of the family institution upon us; there is nothing particularly “free” about taking someone else’s freedom, permanently, as fetal murder does. Of the two sides, however, the political Right presents the more alluring deception, for it masks itself in virtue, which fools many Christians into thinking that self-proclaimed conservatives are our allies. In truth, it was the conservatives of ancient Israel who demanded the Crucifixion of Christ, which is merely one of the heinous crimes he warned us they would commit in God’s name.  He gave us a detailed personality profile of the Pharisees and Scribes, perhaps because the spiritual pride they represented was a permanent temptation to the souls of the upper class. As I have discussed in more depth elsewhere, today’s conservatives bear a striking resemblance to these bitter enemies of Jesus, who masqueraded as religious men in order to gain public esteem. They were lovers of money; they were fastidious about ceremonies and dress; they routinely defrauded the poor and then gave a pittance back in order to get public applause. In short, they were the spitting image of today’s capitalist bourgeoisie, who fill the ranks of the Republican Party and other factions like it in Europe. Their deception has succeeded in fooling many Catholics, including some who believe that they are safe merely because they celebrate the traditional Latin Mass, don’t miss holy days of obligation and the like. Jesus said these things are important, but churchgoers strain out gnats and swallow camels if they substitute observance of those things for authentic justice, which many conservatives simply despise. They merely differ from the Left in which heresies they prefer; instead of supporting gay marriage or whatever, they instead flaunt the just war doctrine and innumerable dogmatic condemnations of every tenet of modern capitalism, like hoarding of the means of production, charging interest, engaging in speculation, overcharging customers and underpaying workers. The latter is classed among the four “sins which cry out to Heaven for vengeance,” along with homosexuality, but the Right normally only picks on the latter. Jesus warned the Pharisees in Matthew 21:31 that prostitutes would get into Heaven before them, which is probably also true today, for the spiritual pride which infects them is exceptionally difficult to get rid of it. Class prejudice is the same force that animated Satan when he believed that his superior gifts gave him more worth in the sight of God than other angels. The results are just as deadly to both the sinner and those they sin against, for millions of innocent civilians died in the Third World in the last century at the hands of men motivated by their favorite injustices, like militarism and greed. They also bear some responsibility for the holocaust of abortion, for it is the class competition that they deliberately foment which in turn serves as the primary motivation for the vast majority of fetal murders across the planet. 

The Cowardly Center

                That failed angel has our civilization caught in a particularly devious trap, in which we are left to believe that there is no choice between the two extremes that the Left and Right currently represent. This false dichotomy is a bit like preferring the Devil’s Left Hook to his Right Jab; either way you’re going down. One of the telltale warning signs that a Christian – especially a traditionalist Catholic – is at risk of being hit by the Right Jab is when they begin to use “Left” or “liberal” as a synonym for heretical, or “conservative” as a synonym for orthodox. There is nothing particularly devout about giving in to a different set of heresies in order to combat another. As Proverbs 4:27 says, "Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil." As Jesus once said, when the blind lead the blind, they both fall in the ditch[4] - but that doesn’t mean there is only one ditch. It is tempting for humans to take sides, for social support, but it does us no good if our newfound friends are leading us into the ditch on the opposite side of the road, especially if it's apparently more difficult to climb out of. Passages like James 3:16 and Philippians 2:3 forbid party faction, but the problem of the Religious Right goes far beyond that, for their program is riddled with numerous heresies which make it just as intolerably anti-Christian as those of their rivals on the Left. Unfortunately, the stark truth is that we have no allies left, save perhaps for one lonely old man in the Vatican, who represents the last voice of sanity on an increasingly unstable world. The pope is really the last prominent defender of Christian orthodoxy, or even the noble ideals of our great secular leaders of the past.

                After seeing such a grim picture painted of the world, it may be tempting to simply ignore politics and religion altogether – but to put it bluntly, the smorgasbord of problems discussed here will continue to injure and kill innocent people if they are not fixed, which will require everyone to pitch in to solve. Perhaps the most startling example of unwisdom bandied about today as if it were common sense is that topics like these ought to be avoided, for they cause nothing but trouble. In truth, it is easier to remain ignorant of them out of laziness, but that ignorance leads directly to injustice. Politicians decide who lives and who dies. The religion you choose will color everything you do, including your politics, and in turn make your actions either good or evil. If you make a choice to ignore injustice and let it flourish, merely to maintain peace and comfort in this life, you will deserve to pay a price in the next. This is one of the chief reasons that Jesus warned in  Luke 12:49-53 and Matthew 10:34-37 that he did not come bring peace to earth, but to divide everyone:

                "I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law…”

                "…Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

                There is something to be said for defusing tensions in political debates if it's not constructive, as Stewart pointed out in that classic episode of Crossfire. Passionate but pointless polarization only plays into the hands of the Devil. It is absolutely necessary to point out injustice, however, if need be to the point of provoking all-out war, if the sin in question is commensurate. Simply toning down debate is not an answer, especially if the topics under discussion are killing other human beings; mildly acquiescing to all evils out of a spirit of false tolerance is not a solution either If we fail to act out of a love of justice, we become guilty of a different sin, discussed in Revelation 3:15-17: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” It is possible to lose one’s soul by falling headlong into the ditches on either the Left or Right sides of the road, but it is also possible for us be lost by not walking down it at all. There is no safety in the center lane of the primrose path. There is only one straight and narrow path, one delineated precisely by the moral code and theology promulgated by Jesus, which is identical to Catholicism. The key to setting the world right, which is practically identical to the mission of Jesus, is to polarize the human race around this one particular axis. The world may indeed appear to us as shades of grey, but only because the Devil has succeeded in intermixing its constituent colors, black and white; it is the goal of God to separate the two again, because that will make it impossible for his rival to operate.

                Until this becomes the linchpin that the politics of the planet revolves around, it will be dangerous to adopt any kind of Us vs. Them mentality, because the chances are that both You and They are both in the wrong. It will also be just as dangerous to ignore politics and religion altogether. If Catholicism is actually true, then the whole planet is in big trouble, because the field has been largely ceded to these three factions. There is a fourth fate, however, that bodes even worse for the future: the steady convergence of both the Left and Right, as both gradually accept each other's vices, in a sort of thieves’ bargain. Among those Westerners who still retain some common sense, there is an unspoken hope that the rivalry between the Left and Right will at least frustrate the plans of the radicals on both sides, but this tug of war between evils is beginning to fail. If either side were free to implement its entire agenda without interference from the other, they would rapidly bring what remains of our empire crashing down, which is a fate we have avoided momentarily. In the long run, however, both sides are grudgingly ceding what the other wants, so that the vices of each are gradually being established. Over the course of the 20th Century, the Right caved in on every threat to the family values they supposedly cherish, from contraception to divorce to abortion and now to homosexual marriage. Many of them, like Reagan, now openly engage in the very same vices. In the same span of time, most of the Left betrayed its commitments to defend authentic social justice, which is now moribund, and to prevent militarism, which is now endemic. In the brief discussion on Thomism and political psychology, I didn’t mention how the seven virtues affect the conduct of both parties because as the last century wore on, they increasingly paid little more than lip service to any of them. Just as Reagan was willing to violate the Constitution to prosecute his illicit wars in Central America, but not to end abortion, so too was Sen. Ten Kennedy, his nemesis on the Left, unwilling to really defend labor rights but entirely passionate about defending the right of women to choose to murder their own kids. Yet neither George W. Bush nor the entire crop of Republican candidates in the 2012 election were even in the same league as Reagan; likewise, Sen. Al Gore, Bush’s opponent in the 2000 election, proved himself to be a right-wing extremist throughout much of his career by voting in favor of such measures as aid to the Contras. Gradually, these two factions are forging an immoral consensus that is the exact opposite of Christian orthodoxy, or even the wishes of the Founding Fathers for that matter. If the American eagle cannot fly without both its Left and Right wings, then how more difficult will it be for it to avoid going into free-fall if it flies upside down?

                This unspoken convergence has tainted our whole political discourse to the point where there are no more Mercutios willing to call both sides to account for their crimes, but plenty of sycophants willing to congratulate one side or the other for their vices. The Left and Right may be forging a new consensus to sprint down the primrose path together, thereby creating a devilish new form of political centrism, but that doesn’t mean that the political rhetoric between will become any less vituperative; if anything, the more shallow their differences are, the more likely they are to intensely hate each other, for that is a personality quirk of the master that they both serve. The level of political discourse is likely to fall further in tandem with the loss of reason and wisdom, thereby causing the third-grade level understanding that our hate radio mongers have to degenerate further, into kindergarten-level bickering. As William Butler Yeats once put it in the The Second Coming, one of the most famous poems of all time, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The only practical solution is for the falcon to hear the falconer again; only then will centre hold fast and the blood-dimmed tide be dammed again. As Chesterton once said, the difficult part of Christianity is not to hold one virtue, but to hold them all simultaneously, with ferocity; today, there is little left on the political landscape except factions which ferociously hold their vices. Yeats must be flipped on his head, so that the best are full of passionate intensity, while the worst lack all conviction. Until that day comes again, Western civilization will continue to sink under the weight of increasingly bad leadership, tolerated or even approved of by increasingly bad citizens. Our religious leaders must likewise realize that the false dichotomy between “liberal” and “conservative” is a deadly trap, one which can cost them their souls. There is only one important dichotomy, between orthodoxy and heresy, which mirrors precisely the real dividing line in the human race: between those who deserve to go to Heaven and those who get what they deserve when they are sentenced to Hell. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., we must dream of a day when men are judged by the content of their character; a time that name as a name, Judgment Day, when no one will be wronged and justice will be done at last. Perhaps only one prominent religious or political figure on the planet would consider that to be Good News; to the rest of us who refuse to listen to him, including the vast majority of Western bishops who have abandoned him, it will be Bad News. Hundreds of millions of people still listen to the pope, but they are the invisible, forgotten poor, whose opinions are regarded of little consequence because they are scattered and seemingly powerless, like the urchins on the streets of Calcutta or poor peasants tilling small plots in Colombia. They may be simple and even illiterate, but they something that our wayward political hacks don’t understand:  the only true division is between good and evil, not Left and Right. The rest of the planet is in for a painful reminder of that, if they fail to heed the only voice of common sense left today, that of the pope. Until we listen to him, every reform we attempt will be poisoned and doomed to failure; because religion is a matter of practicality, we will not see practical solutions to America’s problems until it has a serious change of heart. I often wonder if the pope ruminates on Yeats while pondering the bleak future of the Western world, for it is going to be quite difficult for us to maintain his vision of Spiritus Mundi, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, in a twenty-first century of stony sleep. If we fail to awaken from our unprecedented moral free-fall in time, then that rough beast may soon slouch towards Bethelehm to be born, its hour come at last. Whether it slouches to the Left or to the Right is of no consequence.

The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.

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[1] This quote comes from the Wikipedia page Crossfire (TV Series).

 

[2] Kennedy, Paul M., 1987, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers : Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. Random House: New York.

 

[3] See p. 51, Dale Ahlquist, 2003, G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense. Ignatius Press. He In turn cites p. 205, Maisie Ward, 1942, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Sheed and Ward: New York.

 

[4] Luke 6:39 and Matthew 15:14.