I did not include Pat-Buchanan-style paleoconservatives on the list of people who are sad about Zarqawi’s death. My apologies to the nutters on the far right, especially the ones who believe that Iran is a better country than the United States. If you are taking up a collection to emigrate, please send me your PayPal account information and I will gladly donate to your cause.
Please note that I am not talking about people who merely disagree with the decision to go to war. But if you think Iran is a harmless, traditional country with great family values, and you write columns called “Is Bush a Sith Lord?“, you are a nut. If you give this blathering nonsense a platform by publishing it, you are irresponsible.
Month: June 2006
McCarrick unplugged
I caught a glimpse of a headshot of Cardinal McCarrick on FoxNews with the trademark line underneath: It said something like “Cardinal for Gay Unions?”
Here’s the sad scoop of what happens when one tries to be “moderate.”
From CWN
Without benefit of clergy: McCarrick stumps for same-sex unions
Theodore McCarrick, the tardily retired Archbishop of Washington, musters “defenses” of Church teaching so lousy, so mind-numbingly feeble, that they look like arguments for the other side. Yesterday CNN quizzed the Demosthenes of Dupont Circle on the Federal Marriage Amendment. (Tip to Gerald Augustinus).
BLITZER: So just explain. You think that you could live with — you could support civil unions between gays and lesbians, but you wouldn’t like them to get formally married, is that right?
MCCARRICK: Yes. I think — I think basically the ideal would be that everybody was — was able to enter a union with a man and a woman and bring children into the world and have the wonderful relationship of man and wife that is so mutually supportive and is really so much part of our society and what keeps our society together. That’s the ideal.
Really so much part of our society. You’d think he were talking about the ability to make a right turn on red.
If you can’t meet that ideal, if there are people who for one reason or another just cannot do that or feel they cannot do that, then in order to protect their right to take care of each other, in order to take care of their right to have visitation in a hospital or something like that, I think that you could allow, not the ideal, but you could allow for that for a civil union.
Inspiring. I don’t remember St. Paul’s urging the Corinthians to accept a wee bit o’ sodomy to expedite sick calls, but then McCarrick, the centrist, seems always to read from a different text. As a general rule, incidentally, whenever you hear a moralist use the word “ideal,” you know the argument has gone off the rails.
But if you begin to fool around with the whole — the whole nature of marriage, then you’re doing something which effects the whole culture and denigrates what is so important for us. Marriage is the basic foundation of our family structure. And if we lose that, then I think we become a society that’s in real trouble.
So we’re to understand that civilly legitimating male-male and female-female pairings is not “fooling around” with the whole nature of marriage? Pointless to ask, of course. That whole paragraph could have come verbatim from an Eighth Grade classroom debate. More significant is what goes unmentioned, viz., that souls are imperiled by giving consent to a life of mortal sin — something you’d have thought a Catholic might have an opinion about. But this is McCarrick. The centrist.
The Canadian author Stephen Leacock offered a cheerful and memorable explanation of his status as emeritus professor: “Emeritus comes from two Latin words. E, ‘out,’ plus meritus, ‘and rightly so.'” Obliged to continue listening to the egregiously emeritus Archbishop of Washington, one is moved to wonder, not why he’s out, but how in God’s name he ever got in.
The Left loses an ally in Iraq
It is a sad day for mainstream journalists and liberals everywhere: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is facing the judgment of God for his crimes.
Zarqawi scurried away from Afghanistan when the U.S., the U.K., and Afghan militias destroyed his protectors’ government. Despite the Left’s fanatical insistence that Saddam Hussein had “nothing to do with al Qaeda,” Zarqawi set up shop in Baghdad two years before the war, as an honored guest of the regime. He was in bad company — Iraq had sheltered several other major international terrorists. Saddam also had extensive contacts (not to say alliances) with terrorists, directly funded Ansar al-Islam and used terror groups as proxies in his vicious struggles with the Kurds and Iranians.
Two years ago, Zarqawi announced that his band of merry thugs and murderers would be the Iraqi franchise of al Qaeda. They have killed hundreds of Americans and thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis. They are the avowed enemies of democracy and have promised to institute a Taliban-style theocracy in Iraq if they triumph.
Zarqawi and other terrorist leaders have depended upon the Left’s footsoldiers to broadcast news of their murders and bombings, with little context or explanation, and the Left has been happy to comply in order to harm the standing of President Bush and the war in Iraq. With yet another major terrorist undergoing the anger of Allah, it will be difficult to spin this as anything other than a victory, but I’m sure journalists will do their best. Within 24 hours, you will see stories that say, “Despite the Zarqawi’s death, the violence continued in Iraq….”
May the remaining terrorists repent of their crimes and turn themselves in to the civil authorities for temporal punishment. For those who do not, may God visit his wrath upon them for the innocent blood they have shed, and the discord they have sown.
Is money starting to talk?
It looks like Over the Hedge is holding its own against the anti-Catholic DVC movie, and even edged it out Friday.
Summer Theater
The Epiphany Studio theater company is touring around Minneapolis/St. Paul this summer with its one-man play about the martyrdom of the young St. Maria Goretti and the conversion of her murderer Alessandro.