1983: This year, breaking celibacy was quite understandable.
TV’s popular romantic lead was Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds, portraying a fictional Australian priest who had an affair with a married woman. Catholics protested because ABC aired the miniseries during Holy Week, and progressive opinion pish-tushed us.
2004: This year, breaking celibacy is an actionable tort.
Archdiocese pays hefty settlement to adult children whom priest fathered in illicit relationship. Any chance we could file a counterclaim against ABC and Colleen McCullough? A responsible novelist would have made the priest an obvious villain who gets sued in the end.
[Thanks, Dom.]
Month: January 2004
I’m a “deserter,” too
According to the official records of the Department of the Navy, I’m a deserter. Or possibly a drug addict. I learned this several years ago when I applied to get my final two months of my G.I. Bill benefits, and received a letter saying that I could not have them because I was discharged by the Marines under “other than honorable” conditions.
That came as quite a shock, because not only was I not discharged that way, I’ve never been discharged at all — I’ve been in the Marine Reserve continuously for 13 years (as of today, come to think of it!) But somewhere in the administrative bowels of the military, there is a record in a database saying that I was “administratively separated” from the Marines in 1997. That’s the kind of discharge they give you when you commit an infraction and they don’t want to bother with the expense of a trial. It’s most often used if you don’t show up for training, or if you test positive for illegal drugs. I’ve tried several times to correct this, because it bothers me that some computer is questioning my character.
I have also had an unusual training history, according to the Marine Corps’ online information system. It says that I went to boot camp in 1994, but that I attended basic infantry school and radio school in 1991. It’s unusual to be in the Marine Corps for three years before learning to be a Marine, but according to this Web site, that’s what happened to me.
So when I hear corpulent gasbag Michael Moore talk about President Bush being a “deserter” because there is no record of him showing up for training in 1972-73, I take it with a grain of salt. Moore’s assumption is that military records are never wrong, which is laughable to anyone who has actually been in the military.
Funny how Moore’s crowd thinks of military men as murderous buffoons when it comes to warfare, but they think the same people keep meticulous, impeccable records of routine matters. They’ve got it exactly backwards: our Department of Defense is superb at fighting. It’s the administrative part that never works quite like it ought.
Gay marriage and the decline of marriage in general
An interesting article by Stanley Kurtz about Nordic countries’ experiment with gay marriage. He claims that gay marriage, far from strengthening traditional marriage, has contributed to the latter’s decline.
I don’t think Kurtz proves his case. He does prove that gay marriage has done nothing to stop the collapse of the family in Nordic countries. However, I don’t think you can make the leap to say that it has hastened it, either. More interesting are some other points, particularly that mothers working outside the home, bastardy, and weak family bonds are caused or at least aggravated by a huge welfare state. (In other words, if you’re a Catholic Democrat, you are in favor of creating conditions where sexual sins will flourish.)
Here’s some good news, though, about the Nordic folkways and their growth in Europe:
Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly. And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system. Religion is a key variable. A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are “strongly dominated by the Catholic confession.” The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence.
My ancillary theory, based on being in Norway for a couple of weeks, is that Scandinavians have a very high incidence of beautiful women in their population, and that it would take severe mortification to avoid temptation. But my view has not gained ground among social scientists.
Hooray for St. Thomas!
Why, yes; my confirmation name is Aquinas, so it is my name day! Oh, thank you! Oh, you shouldn’t have!
Katholics for Dean Pipe Dream
Katholics for Dean — the “K” stands for “Kennedy” in case anyone wondered — has responded to one of my earlier blog entries. Amidst the usual leftist accusations of “hateful language”, KfD continues to misinform the public vis-a-vis President Bush and Howard Dean’s respective records when it comes to pro-life issues other than abortion. (As an aside to those who have been around the right-to-life movement for some time, unlike our innocent brothers and sisters in the womb, Howard’s scream coming out of Iowa wasn’t silent.) Anyway, John Betts does a fine job calling out KfD on the primary right-to-life issue. Meanwhile, I’ve blogged a little comparison between the President and the Governor on secondary and tertiary right-to-life issues. Not surprisingly, even if we set aside abortion, the GOP comes out way ahead of the Abortion Democratic Party on most right-to-life issues.