Pete Vere: March 2004 Archives

A priest friend of mine (and a fellow Casey Democrat supporting Bush) tipped me of to the following troubling story. It appears that the Kerry campaign reportedly assaulted a woman for using her first ammendment rights to express remorse for her abortion. "I just wanted Kerry to know my abortion hurt me," the woman says, before Kerry's campaign aids grabbed her sign and tore it to pieces. "They wouldn't even let me keep the pieces."

Not surprisingly, I just checked the website of a certain fourth year philosophy student and there isn't a peep out of him about this incident. Ah well, I imagine he only would have attempted to blame the President for making abortion a wedge issue. Don't be fooled. It is the demoncrats who, in positioning themselves as the Abortion party, and reportedly assaulting the rights of women who dare speak against Terry's patriarchy, have made abortion a wedge issue among Catholics.

I was reading an interesting article the other day, one which I now wish I had bookmarked. The crux of the piece is that most boys tend towards either wimpiness or barbarianism, whereas true manliness is found as a happy medium between these two extremes. Since most boys won't find this happy medium on their own, however, they need fathers to guide the course and correct them were needed.

Unfortunately, because divorce is rampant in today's society and fatherhood has been greatly devalued, we're seeing a generation of boys grow into either barbarians or wimps. This reminded me of a couple of incidents, the first from my college days and the second from my primary school days.

Back in college one of my best friends was a male librarian. He immensely enjoyed the library sciences and had hoped to make a career out of it. When I asked him why he had returned to college to study some other discipline, he replied bluntly: "Because all the other male librarians with whom I worked were homosexual. As a heterosexual I got sick of 1) being stereotyped a homosexual by the general population; 2) being stereotyped a homosexual by other male librarians trying to pick me up when we would get together as male librarians, and 3) always being exposed to the homosexual chatter from the other guys at librarian conferences that basically amounted to size and how it was (mis)managed."

Concerning the third point, I am not and have never been homosexually inclined. Yet for some reason the topic seemed -- albeit in a manner much less promiscuous -- vaguely familiar. Where had I experienced these as topics of conversation before? The answer hit me the other day while conversing with another orthodox Catholic author. I was explaining how, from my Tribunal experience, homosexuality is often linked to narcistic personalities. The same goes with certain acts of a solitary nature.

"Yeah, that was one of my favorite activities when I was fourteen," the individual replied. "I prayed about it because I knew it was wrong, but what really stopped me was when my dad caught me. He embarrassed the heck out of me."

And this takes me back to when my dad was studying for the permanent diaconate. The families of the candidates would travel once a month to a town located in the middle of the diocese. Here our parents took classes while some of the men and ladies from the local KofC organized events and babysat for the families at the local Catholic school where our parents studied. One morning, in the boys' change room at the gymnasium, I was hanging out with the other boys who fell between the ages of eight and ten. For whatever reason, we began to compare the size of something other than the floor hockey equipment we had been using out on the gym floor. One of the younger brothers told on us and we got caught.

Our fathers were called out from their classes to correct the situation, and they did. First they dealt with us collectively, then each father took his son somewhere private to deal with the issue individually. We were told, both individually and collectively, that what we had done is wrong, that certain things were to remain private, that this is not how Catholic men behave, that they as candidates to the diaconate were embarrassed at having their classes interupted because of our misdeeds, that a priest was being made available for our confession, etc... Our fathers really stuck together on this issue and continued to embarrass the heck out of us for the rest of the weekend. Additionally, there was no peer support since we were all separated for the remainder of the weekend.

Although resentful at the time, we were fortunate to have fathers who told us "to grow up". Men don't engage in certain behavior and our fathers let us know where we crossed the line. I've heard a lot of similar stories from other guys. In one case, with a friend who grew up without a father in the inner cities, and whose entire gang had been stopped by the police one evening for minor acts of mischief, it was the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps who administered the correction. With another friend in a similar situation, it was his football coach.

Which makes me wonder whether, in many cases, homosexuality is simply a progression from a sophomoric jocularity that went uncorrected. Boys will be boys. Which is why they need fathers (backed up by coaches and drill sergeants) to turn them into men. Where boys don't have men to guide them into manhood, young women suffer. For they end up having to choose between barbarians who treat them as sexual objects, or wimps who need to be mothered.