Students Hate Trump's SCOTUS Pick... Don't Realize He Hasn't Made It Yet

The level of ignorance on every level is palpable.

Stephen M. Krason : Old and New Tyrannies Borne of Lust

From an essay published today at Crisis Magazine:

We have seen many examples of the tyrannical mindset of those who are at the forefront of this latter stage of the Sexual Revolution, led by the homosexualist movement and its political and governmental allies. We have observed the treatment by state human rights commissions of bakers, florists, and photographers who religiously object to serving same-sex “weddings”; the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate; Catholic adoption agencies being shut down because they won’t place children with same-sex couples; New York City’s threatening to fine employers, businesses, and landlords who won’t use a person’s preferred pronoun referring to his or her gender... 

What these examples show is a massive assault on such time-honored liberties—ultimately grounded in natural law and concerned with protecting human dignity rightly understood—as religious freedom, free speech, and respect for basic privacy in the name of claimed sexual liberties of all sorts. Essentially, what is held is that the latter take precedence over every other right—even those specifically catalogued in traditional human rights documents such as the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, European Convention on Human Rights...  Moreover, they represent a clear attempt to force people to accept and even endorse behaviors and practices that they find morally objectionable and that affront the natural law...

 This shows the extent to which many people, driven by the master passion of lust, will go to suppress a deep-down guilt which most have—despite their denials of any such thing—for their transgressions...

There is a need to get people to endorse one’s immoral conduct to lighten the burden of guilt and insecurity and reassure him that what he’s doing isn’t so bad after all—oh, and if one is in the position to do so, he will even not hesitate to force people to do that... 

To read the entire essay, click on the below link:

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/old-new-tyrannies-borne-lust

 

 

Prager U: Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids

Anthony Esolen: Threats of Murder at Providence College

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/threats-murder-go-unpunished-providence-college

This article is a continuation of the previous, written on behalf of Michael Smalanskas, the brave student at Providence College who posted a sign affirming reality: because the Catholic teaching that only a man and a woman can feasibly marry is but a plain recognition of what is biologically, physically, and anthropologically the case. We do not need special revelation to tell us that the sun rises in the east, that two and two are four, and that the congress of the sexes requires the sexes. But we live in a time of political madness.

So after Michael was threatened with rape, and had for several nights to walk a gauntlet just to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth, and after the president, Father Brian Shanley, refused to meet with him or his father, and he became a marked man on campus, what could possibly be worse?

A murder threat is worse.

POPE HONORS KATY PERRY: Vatican Promotes TM

Campus Free-Speech Crisis

Control the Words, Control the Culture

Matt Walsh Calls Out Christian America

TRUE PATRIOT: It's time to stop all the myths about guns and DROP the di...

Heather Mac Donals: Reject the Deversity Mandate

Heather Mac Donald wrote what could be considered the most important piece of social commentary in a very long time today at City Journal.  It takes great courage today to write the Truth, and Heather Mac Donald never shrinks from that task.  Here is the entire piece:

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy. 

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. 

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

The most distinctive moment during the 2016 presidential campaign was Trump’s insistence that he did not have time for political correctness, in response to then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s feminist naggings. Here is a moment for the president to make good on that pledge by rejecting the relevance of race and gender to any job within his administration. As for Zinke, even if he didn’t reject diversity explicitly, he ought to do so now.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

Victor D Hanson; (NEW) A Thorough Explanation of California's Failing Ut...

Get over it! Offer it up!

The following opinion piece is from the Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2018:

Knock It Off’ and ‘Shake It Off’: The Case for Dad-Style Parenting
Tough love offers more than expedience. It can offer emotional nourishment too.

By Abigail Shrier
March 12, 2018 7:34 p.m. ET

117 COMMENTS  

When my 7-year-old twin boys were first learning to play piano, I would check in with them regularly to see if they were still enjoying it. Finally, their teacher—a Russian woman who was evidently unfamiliar with fashionable theories of child rearing—told me that if I wanted my kids to learn an instrument, I needed to cut it out.  

“Some weeks they won’t like it,” she said. “So what? Stop asking.”  

Experts have long debated child-rearing methods. What’s best for the children? What’s best for the parents? Now the vogue is to refer to parenting “styles,” adding a patina of theory to what was once a matter of instinct. “Authoritarian parenting” describes those who believe “because I said so” is the best reason a parent can give. “Authoritative” describes those parents who offer children actual reasons. And “permissive” describes those who provide a Hobbesian childhood in the State of Nature, when children were raised like Mowgli, by wolves. 

Long before the official classification of parenting styles, two ancient approaches prevailed. I’ll call them “dad-style” and “mom-style,” but either parent could perform them equally well. Together, they aimed at a balance, which is important for boys and girls alike. 

Dad-style parenting consisted in, roughly, “knock it off” for bad behavior and “shake it off” for bad feelings, while mom-style relied on nurturing, accommodation and, above all, discussion. The masculine method generally tracked the authoritarian school, but it never formed any self-conscious philosophy. That was its beauty. At best, dad-style parenting promised total and reassuring consistency. Dad’s physical presence provided comfort and discipline like a home-cooked meal, straight from the source.  

When a dad-style parent said “knock it off,” it was the child’s job to figure out the precise behaviors from which to desist, accepting that definitive knowledge of what or why might never come. The pestering touch of persons and things, drumming of fingers and clicking of tongues, ululating and whining—each on its own might not be grounds for punishment, but together they could drive an adult to madness all the same.  

Discipline socialized children. They became tolerable to those who didn’t already love them. 

As Orthodox Jews, my husband and I frequently host other families for Sabbath meals at our home. I often spend Thursday night and many hours on Friday preparing several-course meals only to have a parent turn up and confess that junior had something else in mind. Could I possibly whip up a dish more to his liking?  

I get it. In the age of psychology, we mom-style parents are hyperattuned to our children’s needs. We treat their thoughts and intentions like satellite signals. With enough effort and the right equipment, we think, we ought to be able to unscramble every whine, answer every plea. It’s a hard habit to quit. 

But there is a time and place for “knock it off,” though I can’t remember the last time I heard a parent use that expression. What I hear these days from moms and dads alike is so much pleading and explanation. “Please stop doing that, honey, it’s annoying.” Then comes the negotiation. “All right, three more tongue clicks, and that’s it. No, I said, three. OK, four.” 

Here’s the rub: Kids need dad-style too. “Shake it off” conveyed a dad-style certainty that children could survive minor injuries. Not every scratch called for a stretcher. Children should learn to overcome, not exaggerate, their pain. If an injury is unserious, a child should rise to the occasion and play on. 

I learned this lesson the way you do, the first time I prepared one of my kids for surgery. For six years of his life, unknown to us, an aggressive growth had snowballed in my son’s inner ear, dissolving bone structures in its path and burrowing toward his skull. Major operations were necessary to remove the growth, eardrum and ear bones, and to fashion a new eardrum from a piece of temporal muscle. A year later, my son needed another surgery to insert a prosthetic device that would restore his hearing. I never doubted the necessity of the surgeries. And yet, just before they took him into the operating room, after he’d drunk the “happy juice” and I was instructed to say goodbye, I had the impulse to throw myself on the cot like a human shield 

I didn’t do it. I did what we all do in such situations. I borrowed strength from a role I’d seen others play. I faked a godlike certainty that everything was going to be fine because the possibility it wasn’t was too frightening to bear. For the sake of the little boy barely visible under all those sheets, I pretended I had confidence. I told him he was more than tough enough for a six-hour surgery, and then another. My pretending made it true. He believed me.  

The dad-style approach offers more than expedience. Tough love can offer emotional nourishment too. And kids learn to soldier into the world with what a cynic might describe as naiveté. Others call it courage.

Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Dear Celebrities: No One Cares What You Think

Fr. Pokorsky: The Morality of Gun Control

From The Catholic Thing yesterday:

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/02/24/on-the-morality-of-gun-control/

Questions of gun violence causality need a continuing dispassionate investigation by the laity and the experts among them. (My educated guess is that pornography plays a large part in causality. When the porn fails to satisfy, a twisted mind seeks other methods of excitement. And of course at root is the breakdown of the family including legalized abortion. Disrespect of unborn human life begets disrespect of all human life.)

Remnant TV: SCHOOL SHOOTINGS & CHURCH CLOSINGS: The Neo-Catholic Spring

Remnant TV: Women March & Babies Die

In the spirit of Madame Defarge: Michael Matt takes a hard look at the George Soros-backed Women's March in D.C., New York, London, Rome and all around the world--and asks the question: What are they really protesting and what does it mean for our country and for all of us?

What happens if Trump loses in 2020?  And what's with the little reddish hats? Do these not harken back to "les bonnet rouges"--the red "liberty hats" worn by the terrorists who beheaded Catholic France back in 1789? What's the connection? Why do these women hate us President Trump? Why do they hate pro-lifers?

Archbishop Chaput: Memory, Sex, and The Making of the "New Man."

From Crisis Magazine Blog today:

Editor’s note: The following paper was delivered at the “Into the Breach” men’s conference sponsored by the Diocese of Phoenix on Saturday, February 3, 2018 and is published with permission [...]

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/memory-sex-making-new-man

Fr. Hunwicke: Weinsteins and Things

3 February 2018
Weinsteins and things

A colleague once informed me "You are so contrab****ydictory?" Perhaps I am. But I am getting ... well, restless about the hunt going on for men who have 'assaulted' women. In this country, we have reached the stage where "He fleetingly touched my knee" may be enought to do for a politician's career. Apart from anything else, this is surely an insult to women and girls who actually have been horribly abused.

And if some bimbo does get a job in showbiz or whatever by accommodating the sexual incontinence of some impresario or whatever, which of the two is 'the victim'? Especially if she morally initiated the commercium by her behaviour, words, or immodest dress? But the feminist fascists have got it all set up so that a woman is 'entitled' to dress and behave as provocatively as she wishes and woe betide any male who draws any conclusion. These are narrow times for those who dare to make any semiological inferences based upon non-verbal data; narrower, I suspect, than any other periods in human civilisation. Not least because in earlier times relations between the sexes were at least notionally under the control of conventions either formal or informal.

Any suggestion that a woman should conduct herself with normal human prudence and plain common sense is now deeply, profoundly, Politically Incorrect.

Perhaps we need a statute outlawing both the buying and selling of sex, and including a definition of constructive prostitution, whereby the securing or bestowing of non-financial advantages by a sexual exchange is also criminalised.

Perhaps that would enable us to lock up all the Dirty Old Men and all the Dirty Young Women. Perhaps they could all be incarcerated together, each DOM in the same cell as his DYW, and left to get on with their rabid symbiotic impurities until they all fell down dead from exhaustion.

Posted by Fr John Hunwicke at 10:30

Anthony Esolen: Church Teachings on Chastity

Professor Anthony Esolen writing today at Crisis Magazine Blog:

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/essay-on-chastity

When the Church upholds the rules of chastity, she is not so much prescribing a diet, as she is identifying what is good for man’s sexual being, and what is not good. She is describing facts. You may say that these are not facts; you may not be a Roman Catholic. But we must be clear about what the Church is affirming. She says that to engage in sexual activity outside of marriage is bad for you, and by extension it is bad for the people around you, because no man is an island, and autonomy is a lie. There are things that chaste people can do and can enjoy that are spoiled or rendered impossible by the vice; and there are things that a society that expects chastity can enjoy that a society that expects vice cannot. 

People who believe that the Church can change her teaching about these things do not see what is implied. They believe, it seems to me, that the teachings are arbitrary, “mere dogma” as they say. But we are arguing ultimately about facts. The Church is saying, “This here is laced with poison. It will riddle your bones. You will begin to cough and spit up blood. You might as well be bound and fettered. Here are the directives instead that will make you powerful. They work.”

Take a Knee... my Ass!!