Category: Culture War

I’m not going to see “The Passion of the Christ” for a while, so I can’t comment on the movie itself. The reviews are quite interesting, though. I’ve noticed that most of the reviewers who did not like it are not religiously observant, and that their criticism almost uniformly faults Mel Gibson for dwelling too much on the physical sufferings of the event.
Such criticism is not always uninformed. One negative critic on the Today show said that the movie downplayed the Resurrection. A fair comment, if true. It is ironic that committed Christians are enthusiastic about seeing a movie where the God-man they worship is tortured to death, but secular people are offended by it.
Many secular commentators have said that they wished Gibson had more of the Sermon on the Mount, and less of the brutality. They seek to reduce Jesus to their dessicated conception of what a religious leader should be, saying things like “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Someone ought to remind them that Christ also said, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34)

Something hit me this morning as I got out of bed. Namely, when did the homosexual lobby successfully co-opt the word “gay”? The word use to mean “happy”, which from many accounts I have read, the homosexual lifestyle is anything but.
That being said, every marriage should be gay. That is, every marriage should adhere to the pro-life principles that make for a happy marriage. Unfortunately, the homosexual lifestyle contradicts many of these principles.
For example, the foundation of a gay marriage lays in the complementarity between a man and a woman. So for a marriage to be truly happy, it must be heterosexual in nature. This in itself will not ensure happiness in marriage, but it is constituative of all happy marriages. So gay marriage is by its nature heterosexual.
So is gay sex. This sounds a little strange, but as we read in Familiaris Consortio, there are two functions of conjugal relations that cannot be separated from one another. The first is unitive, in which the spouses enjoy each other’s natural complementarity. Which is why homosexual relations can never be gay — it lacks the unitive function because it fundamentally lacks this complementarity.
The second function of conjugal relations is the procreative function. It is also lacking within homosexual relationships. Thus a homosexual marriage can never be gay since such a relationship is intrinsically sterile.

Now that everything is dying down, I thought I would blog a little wrap-up on the Katholics for Dean controversy. (BTW, here’s the text of the flame war between Kathy Shaidle and Katholics for Dean) As I noted in the comments section of Against the Grain, I now seriously question whether Katholics for Dean is pro-life when it comes to abortion.

When I first visited their website, something troubled me, but I couldn’t quite finger what beyond Dean being the most extreme pro-abort among the Abortion Party’s presidential candidates. Upon further reflection, however, here’s what IMMEDIATELY turned me off of the Katholics for Dean website. Admittedly, the first point is relatively minor when compared to the second.

First there is the smugness and arrogance, in my opinion, with which Tim approached Kathy Shaidle. I know Kathy from around St. Blog, through her writings and through private email correspondence. I don’t know Tim from a hole in the ground, not even by reputation. Therefore, his coming to St. Blog and demanding to ball with us, according to his rules and not ours, over something most of us consider highly distasteful, just turned me off. St. Blog is a pretty open community, but since Tim is the one seeking to foster his strange ideas upon us, it is up to him to play by our rules and not us to play by his.

Yet this is only minor compared to the next point. The website only pays lipservice in my opinion to the pro-life movement, especially with regards to abortion. It was obvious to me from my first visit there that Tim expends the utmost effort trying to convert Catholics into Democrats, and very little (at least on the site) trying to convert Democrats into pro-lifers. While there is an admission that Dean is not pro-life, Tim simply rolls over and play dead in the name of tolerance and working together. He offers both excuses and apologies for Dean and the Abortion Party’s extreme support of abortion but no calls to account. He attempts no correction of his comrades within the Abortion Party, and avoids any confrontation with the pro-abort Deaniacs on the site.

This is not good in my experience. Politicians who often start out pro-life, but who refuse to call their own party to account in public, usually end up selling out to the pro-aborts in order to move up the food chain. Dennis Kucinich is a good example. While he’s a little loopy on a number of other issues, he did more or less have a consistent pro-life position up until he launched his presidential bid. Had he held to his previous pro-life position, he likely would have pulled in support from the Casey Democrats and a number of other pro-life Democrats who haven’t yet crossed over to the GOP. But Denis sold out because he wanted more money to finance his campaign. One cannot serve both God and money, and Denis’s previous pro-life constituency quickly abandonned him when they found out which one he served. (As an aside, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul in the process — but for two percent of the Abortion Party faithful? Why would he sell his soul for that?)

This is why, while I may not always agree with Democrats for Life or JCecil’s blog, I’m willing to respectfully listen to them as they make their case for supporting the Abortion Party. Unlike Katholics for Dean, these latter websites firmly rebuke the DNC for positioning itself as the Abortion Party and they call the DNC to account. You don’t see this with Katholics for Dean which, like the battered wife, tries to hide the problem until forced to admit it, then makes excuses for it rather that firmly stand against it.

Again, most of us at St. Blog parish were deeply involved with the Terri Schindler-Schiavo situation. Come the ballot box in November, we will remember President Bush’s firm support for his brother in Florida as well as Gov. Dean’s (although it is doubful he will be the Abortion Party’s candidate) outrage against the intervention of the Florida Governor and Legislature. We will remember Terri in the ballot box. So Tim would be better off trying to convince the Democrat Party to become pro-life rather than try and convince orthodox Catholics to support the Abortion Party.

Although Dean’s regime is now crumbling faster than a cookie in my toddler’s hands, I had this real wierd dream last night. It was Autumn of 2002 and I was watching Fox News when President Howard Dean came on to address the nation concerning his administration’s plans for Iraq. Here’s what he said:

“While we haven’t convinced Saddam and his sons to close their children prisons, give up their rape rooms and stop pushing Iraqi citizens through plastic shredders, if you had told us a year ago that Saddam would now be allowing weapons’ inspectors back into Iraq, we would have given anything for this. So there remains a lot of work to be done. First we’re gonna go to France, and then to London. AND ON TO MOSCOW and GERMANY and BEJING and NORTH KOREA and to SUDAN! AND ARGENTINA! AND PAKISTAN! AND NIGERIA! AND BELGIUM! AND AUSTRALIA! AND THEN ON TO GENEVA TO FORCE THROUGH A RESOLUTION AT THE UNITED NATIONS…. YEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!”

Geesh…and the Abortion Party thinks Dubya’s a cowboy on foreign policy?

The Lay Witness just released its annual pro-life issue, which features a wrap-up co-authored by Fr. Johansen and I on our experience this past fall with Terri Schindler-Schiavo.