Chapter Ten_
FIGHTING
DIABOLICAL FIRES:
Abortion,
Euthanasia, Sodomy, Cloning and Pornography
The life of the nation is
secure only while
the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
Frederick Douglass, 1885
Numbered are the days of true
liberty if the response to forces that promote cultural decadence is simply to
sing the praises of freedom. The freedom to feed diabolical fires till
they conflagrate society is no more affirmed by prudent constitutional
principles than an arsonist's freedom in the Capitol Building.[1]
Postmodernists claim that religious minded
Christians, Jews and Muslims interfere with the democratic process by urging
politicians to oppose, for example, homosexual marriage. In the case of
the Vatican, argues Fr. Frank Pavone, the Pope is really giving democracy a
helping hand. As Pope John Paul II wrote in The Gospel of Life (#70),
"‘[T]he value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it
embodies and promotes.’" They are indeed friends of the Republic who
resist forces hell-bent on destroying the real value in democracy.
Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois has expressed
the same truth: “To have a virtuous kingdom it is enough perhaps to have a
virtuous king, but you cannot have a successful democracy without a virtuous
people.”[2] Hyde’s truism
harkens back to the maxim of John Adams, quoted in an earlier chapter but worth
reemphasizing: “Our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.”[3]
Democracy is related to Jefferson’s most
valuable freedom, the “right of self-government,”[4]
for as Fr. Frank Pavone warns, no people is fit for self-government who cannot
tell the difference between what is right and wrong, between what is helpful to
us and what can destroy us. “What we need is virtuous democracy – a
self-governing people free to strive for and do what is right.”[5]
Postmodernist dogma rejects the very notion,
however, that some principles are intrinsically wrong or innately evil.
Instead the “dictatorship of relativism” expects all evaluations to accord with
one’s personal or collective situation in time and location. Here alone we find ample
justification for a counterrevolution. The elevation of situation ethics
to the level of a governing paradigm constitutes, ipso facto, a
compelling reason to overthrow the postmodernist regime. For situation
ethics works against morality in the populace, and democracy works badly
without a body politic that is moral.
Postmodernists were not the first to launch high
level attacks against the ethical fiber of an entire nation. Witness the
moral sabotage by British trade barons who mass-produced opium for sale to the
teeming masses of China. The Chinese population then became more and more
addicted. Witness the subsequent Opium War (1839-42) in which Britain
fought to put down patriotic resistance to the degradation of China.
Anything to maintain lucrative trading markets for English entrepreneurs!
Likewise in America, if there is a profitable
commerce in sin, then suppress any sign of contradiction. Witness the
concerted campaign to push the Ten Commandments out of public life.
Downplay the Decalogue! Yes, they demean or play down anything that
discredits the multi-billion dollar industries in sex and abortion – driven in
part by unscrupulous profiteers, backed by libertine lawyers. And, of
course, money is the bottom line. Profit trumps the fact that their
products and services corrupt the hearts, molest the minds, and corrode the
souls of young and old, both domestically and globally via America’s influence
as the world’s cultural superpower.
Sinfulness in the entertainment industry is not
only getting filthier and more pervasive,[6]
it is also playing a leading role in the ongoing postmodernist revolution.
For generations, pornography has been
catering under-the-counter garbage to the prurient. But in recent years,
a marked change has occurred, one which looks to the Marquis de Sade for
inspiration. For Sade, pornography was not garbage but the voice of
liberation, the declaration of humanistic independence from God and all
law. The new pornography thus differs from the old: it is now a crusade
for a new freedom and an all-out war against God and His law.… The old garbage
has become 'garbahzh,' pretentious garbage masquerading as the new enlightenment
and the new freedom.[7]
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Liberty
vs. License
Never can fast be the same as slow,
Nor is an ebb tide at all like flow.
Though both of these pairs come from motion,
Although each might share common ocean.
Freedom likewise has opposing poles,
One dreadful with bergs and many shoals.
Liberty, though, is hopeful and clear,
And, under God, gives our souls good cheer.
Oh some freedoms unleashed can accursed be,
As when levies demolished admit the sea;
Saltwater, brine, kill what we grow,
Katrina unchecked brought death and woe.
The boundless freedoms can jail bars become,
Like radio audio through background hum,
Melodies or conversations caged by din,
Like someone lovely trapped in whisky and gin.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address on freedoms four,[8]
Skipped ignoble freedoms we do well to deplore;
For they coexist harshly with versions we revere.
Liberty’s parodies, fear; noble freedoms hold dear.
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The constellation law
aims to promote genuine liberty by choking off its antithesis. The
arch-amendment will preside over a five-pronged counteroffensive[9] against the postmodernist cultural
revolution. Sections ten and eleven address the
sexual revolution as manifested in abortion, sodomy and pornography. In
addition, euthanasia and cloning would be banned. A regime able and willing
to subdue these hydras would of necessity be pro-life, pro-traditional family,
and partial to the sanctity of conjugal sex.
Among the consequences of such a cultural
counterrevolution would be to advance the quality and appeal of
democracy. Adversaries of freedom point accusingly to the licentiousness,
which oftentimes accompanies democratization. Just as with Gresham’s law
of economics – bad money drives out the good – so with freedom: the parodies of
liberty drive out the genuine commodity. This tension between liberty and
license touches a chord even among ardent friends of freedom, like the Pope who
worked jointly with President Ronald Reagan to bring about the fall of “the
evil empire” in Eastern-Europe and Russia.[10]
Less than two years after that wonderful victory for freedom, John-Paul II
traveled to the newly emerging democracies of the former USSR to warn of the
"enormous contradictions" and risks of democracy when it is
insufficiently rooted in ethical responsibility.[11]
License
they mean when they cry liberty; for
who loves that must first be wise and good.
John Milton,
On the Detraction II
If we are going to spread American-style
democracy we had better make our country a better model for foreign countries
to emulate. As outlined by economist, Robert Reich, the imperative is to restore a “new,
updated democratic capitalism,” i.e. “fashion a democratic
capitalism more suited to our nobler aspirations for the twenty-first
century,” rather than the amoral
supercapitalism that gives America a bad reputation overseas.[11a] In November, 2003, President George W. Bush attempted to put
a lasting imprint on American foreign policy. In a speech on spreading
liberty to the Middle East, not only for liberty’s own sake, but also to secure
our own safety against terrorism, the President declared that a democratic Iraq
could be the linchpin of “the next stage of the world democratic
movement.” He conjectured that the growing number of democratic nations
in the world – from 40 to 120 in a generation – was not unrelated to the fact
that “the
world's most influential nation was itself a democracy.”[12]
In noting the powerful influence of the United
States in the world, politically, militarily and culturally, Bush recognized a
plain fact – America influences the form that democracy takes overseas.
I’m sorry, Mr. President, but that is precisely what makes the USA the
problem! America’s morals, or rather her debased version thereof, is one
aspect of American imperialism to which Bush did not refer. A few months
later, however, news broke about the sadomasochistic treatment of Iraq
prisoners by U.S. troops, giving scandal to the world and generating
intensified resistance on the part of the Iraqis.
In the future, however, should the United States
defeat the postmodernist revolution, and prove that democracy and debauchery
are not kith and kin — that to fight effectively against internal decadence is
indeed possible in a democracy (or in our case a republic) — then Americans
will have converted a disturbing liability into a selling point throughout the
world, including the Middle East.
Otherwise, religious peoples will look to
Americanization as a byword for what is crass and ungodly about democratization.
They will tend to despise American-style democracy as yet another sordid U.S.
export – unless, here at home, we convert to a form of democracy more worthy to
present elsewhere. Beware lest believers overseas discover that the egg
America proffers is really a scorpion, whereupon our attempts to spread vulgar
versions of democracy will create enemies abroad, not friends. It is we
and our children who will have to suffer after the spectacle of a sham republic
exporting degenerate democracy brings a legacy of loathing for America down
upon our heads.
Reversing cultural
decline will greatly facilitate the process of redeeming American democracy and
rendering it worthwhile to spread abroad. Prerequisite to a
social/cultural reversal in America is a secular/religious combination – like
the aquiline alliance described in
chapter two. Is such a coalition possible in the 21st century? I
think haut-culture in the West provides a hopeful indicator, insofar as
world-class symphonies include sacred music in their repertoires, a secular
endorsement of religious beauty. While living in Austria in the
mid-1980’s, I remember a diverse concert audience (predominantly secular, I
would guess) marking the anniversary of Mozart’s death. On that cold
December evening hundreds of us stood shoulder to shoulder, packed into
Salzburg’s St. Peter’s abbey, for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass.
Even in the popular culture, during Christmas
season, hymns like Silent Night or Away in a Manger regale
shoppers in supermarkets and department stores. Such pious hymns are
enjoyed even by politically correct Americans who eschew religious greetings
like "merry Christmas." Though they prefer the secular
greeting, "happy holidays," many unbelievers are fair-minded enough
to admit the merits of a work notwithstanding its religiosity.
In light of a widespread willingness to applaud
a lyric for its internal qualities, irrespective of the listeners' sectarian or
anti-sectarian persuasions, we can take hope that a sacred / secular coalition
will form and endure, notwithstanding that the constellation law is a civic
response to the Biblical call, "sing to the Lord a new song."
We are hopeful that many Americans who pay the Lord little or no allegiance
will still appreciate the song and help the quintet of players – the quintuple
coalition – stage it in the public domain.[13]
If the alliance holds together, despite sacred / secular fault lines, then the
movers and minions of the postmodernist regime may glean a new insight into the
meaning of Requiem.
At present, unfortunately, the postmodernists
have a formidable array of means to push their agenda. They have given a
new twist to Robert Kennedy’s 1960 book title, The Enemy Within, which
concerned racketeering in America. Now with an effectiveness
worthy of the Frankfurt school,[14] they undermine the
moral character of American culture. In the process they provide external
enemies such as Osama bin Laden with plenty of ammunition in the propaganda
war, and thus thousands of recruits willing to strike America, the “Great
Satan.” In bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” (November 2002, part II) he
recites a litany of “immorality and debauchery” in American culture.[15]
Alas, it is not that his charges of
immorality are distortions or lies. On the contrary, it is precisely
because some of his accusations have elements of truth, or in a few cases hit
right on the mark, that bin Laden and his ilk are able to incite and inflame
public opinion – especially in the Islamic world – to see the American way of
life as loathsome, ignoble, and deserving of destruction.
Islam's clerics have had a field
day convincing their congregations that "Desperate Housewives" and
"Sex and the City" are true reflections of U.S. secret weapons to
destroy Islam. Military might to impose depravity is how the Bush doctrine
and its crusade for democracy are explained in countless mosques throughout
the Middle East.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor, UPI
and The Washington Times, 4/15/2005[16]
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Great Seal of the U.S.
Annuit Coeptis =
He has favored our cause |
For this public relations disaster we can
rightly credit hard-working American citizens, who have busily conducted the Devil’s
work, including (to name but a few) Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the late Justice Harry
Blackmun, Congressman Barney Frank, and Playboy mogul, Hugh Heffner.
America’s P.R. problem is more than a Middle
Eastern phenomenon. The American citizen body themselves are the picture
of polarization, and many of the best elements in society are reassessing the
meaning of their own patriotism. That millions of moral conservatives
refuse to vote, preferring to distance themselves wherever possible from the
postmodernist regime, is an alarming application of the Bible from within the
body politic — “come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord,
and touch not the unclean thing.”[17]
And what about the risk of alienating America’s
longtime Benefactor, acknowledged in the Great Seal of the United States?
The old saying, “it stinks to high heaven,” might be rephrased in more refined
theological terms to explain why God would withdraw protection from an apostate
nation.
To deny indictments stemming from the country’s
moral decline, or to condemn non-voters as politically unrealistic, or to
rationalize moral depravity as a lamentable but inevitable byproduct of freedom
– all that is just high-sounding spin. It will not silence enemies or
deter jihadists who see postmodernist America as a latter-day Sodom &
Gomorrah. What will really steal their thunder is this: overthrow the
postmodernist regime and in the process clean up our act as a nation.
ABORTION, EUTHANASIA
and CLONING
As
distinguished from its coarsening cultural effect, the great political
damage associated with abortion is the way our politburo of nine sullied the
Constitution, the epic composition described by Gladstone as “the most
wonderful work ever struck off at a given moment by the brain and purpose of
man.” Writing in 1973 (Roe v. Wade) on behalf of seven of the nine U.S.
Supreme Court members, Justice Harry Blackmun tainted our most cherished
national document by incorporating an alien component, i.e. the “right” to kill
one’s own offspring. And the malignancy was much more widespread than
abortion:
Unborn child? Cruel
choice rules!
Let kids pray? Banned in
schools!
By the Constitution bent,
The agenda was sent.
God’s Ten Commandments despised,
Our Moral heritage revised,
Pornography regaled,
Sodomy hailed.
The injury inflicted on the U.S. Constitution is
a political crime, to be distinguished from the ongoing genocidal crimes
against the youngest component of humanity, i.e. the holocaust of unborn babies
liquidated each year in the United States.[18]
In other words the problem is dual in nature: First,
the regime defiles the nation’s highest law, which takes on the sheen of
sinfulness by serving as a cloak for evil. The Constitution is converted
by the politburo of nine into the high born guarantor of the “right” to commit
wicked and bloody acts against the most
innocent and helpless among us. Second,
with sinfulness set at liberty to operate on a massive scale, the unleashed
holocaust barbarizes society, advancing the culture of death throughout the
country. Whereupon, by virtue of our status as the world’s cultural
superpower, the barbarity radiates around the globe.
The constellation law contains countermeasures against this double
catastrophe: Section 10:1-2 attacks the first
part directly at the federal level. Section 10:3-4 assails the second obliquely by delegating the solution to
the states:
At the federal level the taint introduced into
the U.S. Constitution will undergo expurgation, expunction and eradication – i.e. erasure. In Shakespeare’s words, “out, out damn
spot” (Macbeth). By
amending the Constitution we can blot out any judge-made quasi-amendment.
To override the ostensible “right” to kill a baby in the womb, the reformed
Constitution would read:
In 1776 the Declaration of
Independence designated life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as
inalienable rights that government dare not seek to destroy. The first of
these rights, human life, is sacred from conception to natural death.
Under this Constitution, therefore, abortion and active euthanasia are neither
rights nor civil liberties, but criminal acts. Constellation law, (section 10:1)
Insertion
of this language will cleanse the Constitution from its befoulment by
association with abortion. In addition section 10:3-4
will end defilement of the Constitution by judges who elevated unnatural sexual
proclivities, i.e. sodomy, to the level of a “full right” under the
Constitution.
Another downside of
the infiltration of abortion and sodomy into the Bill of Rights is that they
give a bad name to civil liberties generally. Citizens begin to look
askance at freedom itself. Now increasingly the connotation in the
critical mind is freedom without responsibility, and liberty stretched
to encompass leniency for vice. Elevating sin to the level of a
civil right renders our claims as free citizens suspect. Entitlements
long associated with the virtues assume shades of gray, and in some quarters
fascism itself begins to look like the lesser of two evils. Among well
meaning men, tolerance takes on the tint of licentiousness.
Suspicion of
freedom plays into plots by ill willed politicians, like Herman Goering in Nazi
Germany who declared brazenly that words like compassion and tolerance gave him
a twitch in his trigger finger. Under the constellation law, however, the
expulsion of abortion and sodomy from the Bill of Rights will preempt
proto-fascists and remove arrows from their quivers.
Abortion is an affront like none other in the
West today. It confronts people not just as an abstract “right,” or
jurisprudential concept, but as the corporeal reality of an ongoing
holocaust. On this level, where it will be toughest to break, we face a
formidable redoubt – a tenacious resolve on the part of millions of Americans –
against which we must look to decentralization as a strategy. The
constellation law reads (emphasis added):
Penalization
for these crimes within U.S. borders shall be according to the laws of the
State or territory in which the abortion or euthanasia takes place; and as
regards American citizens outside U.S. borders according to the laws of the
country where the abortion or euthanasia occurs. But no state or
territory of the United States may finance abortions or procurement thereof,
from taxation or other public revenues. (section 10:2)
Like the title of Dostoevski’s famous book, Crime
and Punishment, offenses against society have two aspects: [1] the state’s declaration that an action is
criminal in nature; [2] the
imposition of penalties.
Recognizing the thorny nature of enforcing a standard of righteousness more
suitable to a Judeo-Christian culture like that which preceded the
postmodernist revolution, the constellation law will decentralize the questions
of punishment for the crimes of abortion and euthanasia, to be resolved in
state political arenas. In states like my own (the state of Washington)
where a state
referendum failed to outlaw even so obvious an abomination
as partial-birth abortion, the new policy would concede citizens the option of
treating abortion like a traffic offense, some lesser slap on the wrist, or
even imposing no penalty whatsoever.
The latter course – complete leniency – would,
in this citizen’s opinion, be appropriate governmental policy when
applied to the mother in cases of rape or incest. In any event the
problem of the exceptional cases so often cited [rape, incest and the life
and/or health of the mother] would be left to each state to decide at the
enforcement level. How to resolve such prickly issues is best decided in
a decentralized process, where the people have a greater voice.
This tactic of differentiating between crime and
punishment is not unfamiliar to my fellow Washingtonians. Until 1990, the
state statute requiring flag salute exercises in the public school
classrooms was backed up by penalties:
Any
person willfully refusing or neglecting to comply with this section shall be
guilty of a misdemeanor...and if ...such person is an employee of a school
district, such action shall be grounds for discharge from such employment.
Since 1990, however, state law omits the
punishment provision. The revised code of Washington includes nothing
about penalizing teachers or administrators who fail to implement the required
patriotic flag exercise.[19] From their
professional experience, classroom teachers know well enough that without
consequences there is no discipline. So teachers averse to expressions of
patriotism opt simply to ignore the law in Washington schools, there being no
state imposed consequences. As a result we have government (public)
schools in our state where students never salute the flag, or at best rarely,
notwithstanding what the law happens to say.
If Washington state finds itself in a reformed Union governed by the
constellation law, (and presupposing that by then the cultural landscape has
changed none for the better in the Evergreen State) then the pro-abortion
mentality will probably inspire the legislature in Olympia to enforce the
abortion provisions of the arch-amendment in much the same way as it enforces
the education code requiring flag salutes.
Pro-lifers in Washington state, or any state, will
then have to take into account St. Augustine’s dictum, that if harlotry were
eliminated the world would “convulse itself with lust.” Because the sins
of the flesh can be eliminated only by liquidating the entire human race, the
title of this chapter begins, advisedly, with “fighting diabolical
fires” rather than extinguishing them. To press the metaphor
somewhat, fire fighters prefer to cordon off forest fires with fire lines,
rather than expend lives recklessly by charging directly into an inferno.
Similarly with sins conflagrating the culture. Prudence requires some
concessions in the political sphere to the reality of people’s condition in the
present. Decentralization makes this possible on a case-by-case basis,
i.e. state by state.[20]
Meanwhile, to my fellow pro-life activists in
Washington State, let me say this: we can oppose abortion by continuing our
longstanding efforts to change the minds and hearts of Washingtonians, and also
to modify the votes of legislators in Olympia. To which ends the
decontaminated U.S. Constitution will be a herald, trumpeting the sanctity of
life in our state and every state, indeed throughout the world. The fight
will rage on, but with prevailing constitutional law favorable to the solution,
rather than (as now) reinforcing cultural decay and presiding over the problem.
In the mean time, the financing of abortion from
public funds will end at once. Even in pro-abortion states like
Washington, devout Christians chafing under the compulsion of anti-Christian
tax laws will, after the reforms, carry a lighter and less irksome load on
their consciences.
Furthermore, in those states most inclined to
embrace the culture of death, the constellation amendment will intervene
against euthanasia, or mercy killing. This will preempt usurpatious
federal Courts, lest they extend the trail blazed by Oregon into a nationwide network
that all 50 states are compelled to construct and maintain.
The postmodernist regime has launched a kind of
pincers attack on the two ends of human life – at gestation and gerontology.
To justify attacks on the two extremities of the life-span we are told that the
high goals of furthering human progress, advancing civil liberties, and making
dying more humane are all promoted by easing the termination of human life as
it waxes in the womb, and as it wanes toward the tomb. In other words,
abortionists and mercy killers would move the bookends of life inward.
The constellation law will reaffirm human life
across the spectrum. Rather than toss out human life like so much useless
protoplasm, the opposite and far better option is to hurl the culture of death
into the garbage heap of history.
As for the ominous new issue of human cloning, it is unclear at this
writing whether such a thing is physically possible.[21]
From time immemorial it has been banned, as it were, by limitations in the
power of science. That could change.
Acknowledging the danger, the UN General
Assembly voted early in 2005 to support a worldwide ban on cloning and on
research using embryonic tissues.[22]
In the United States the best course of action is to play it safe. If
aberrant science does manage to emulate Dr. Frankenstein, the constellation law
will have empowered society to nip profiteering in the bud, rather than wait
for an infrastructure in human cloning to develop. Let the cloning
industry get established with lobbyists, a propaganda machine, and the wealth
to pay for it all; and instead of a caged cub we will have to deal with a mature
tiger on the prowl.
SODOMY
On the issue of special
rights for sodomy, we are again – as with abortion – obliged to decontaminate
the Constitution and rededicate it to God. The constellation amendment
will purge the Constitution of that “full right to engage in their conduct”
which the Supreme Court extended to sodomites in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas).[23] Exercising their
penchant for legislating from the bench, the Court rehabilitated the old crime of
buggery by newly cloaking it in the folds of the US Constitution.[24] The
postmodernist court has thus besmirched and befouled the highest law of the
land, thereby committing a twofold crime: inserting sodomy (buggery) into
the Bill of Rights, and stealing power that belongs to the people and their
elected representatives.[26]
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Counter-protesting
the Judeo-Christian “Mayday for Marriage” rally, 2004, Safeco Field, Seattle. |
As part of our counterrevolution, the
constellation amendment, section five, bolsters the Constitution against
judicial usurpation (theft of power) generally. Section ten is more
specific: it inoculates Constitutional jurisprudence against the contagion of
sexual perversion. Contagious is the key element here, since the
people who are, as one activist put it, “going to hell, and proud,” should not
be empowered to take the country down with them.
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The traditional family is the
first and fundamental unit of civilized society. It consists of a male
husband, a female wife, and any children that the married couple conceives or
adopts. Such a family has natural prerogatives. (constellation law, section 10:3)
For sodomy, however, no special
right or liberty proceeds from this Constitution. Nor do nature, or the
dictates of political wisdom, or the imperative of defending marriage afford
favor to sodomitic activity. For the purposes of this section sodomy is
defined as a sexually active relationship, practicing and ongoing, between
same-sex partners. (10:4)
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Note that the term practicing governs the
issue, as distinguished from orientation. The phrase “sexual
orientation” is commonly used in the debate over this contentious topic, much
to the confusion of the issue. For orientation is affiliated with
temptation, and no Christian, Jewish or Islamic believer can rightly suppose that
salvation turns on whether or not one gets tempted. Among the ways God
tries, tests and strengthens us is by tribulation. Temptation is one form
of tribulation in this world by which every human being is subjected to trial.[27] Theologians down through the ages
have seen great merit in a person’s determination to resist temptation, but
they identify no sin whatsoever in the temptation or the orientation itself –
unless one is negligent in avoiding the occasions of sin, and thus invites the
onset of temptation.
The ordeal of orientation along homosexual or
lesbian lines is certainly no cause for legislating against victims of such
temptation. But neither does yielding to such temptation by sodomizing
someone else warrant equivalency legislation for marriage — like that pioneered
in North America by Canada, or by state "laws" in Connecticut, Massachusetts,
and Vermont, or by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s now voided grant of marriage licenses in
San Francisco. To roll out the red carpet in the form of so called
“gay-friendly” laws and government policy is to grant tacit public approval to
“intrinsically disordered” conduct. Such conduct is “in no case to be
approved of,"[28] according to America’s
largest religious denomination – also the largest and oldest form of
Christianity in the world.[29]
The argument over sodomy in the United States has, like abortion and
euthanasia, seen a bitter quarrel. For the most part the national brawl
has favored militant paganism, because the war has been waged in the context of
civil liberties. Postmodernists have tried to confine the issue to civil
rights, and have pretty much succeeded in keeping religious teaching on the
immorality of homosexual practices off the table. Secularists either
ignore or seek to discredit the many clear condemnations of sodomy, like the
moral guidance of the Bible, and the heterosexual orientation of mainstream
Western culture down through history.
In short, postmodernist revolutionaries have
achieved a breakthrough with their blitzkrieg on the traditional family.[30] We have, therefore, no honorable
choice but to take counterrevolutionary action. Section 10:3-4 restores the negative bent
on buggery that governed society until the onslaught against Judeo-Christian
faith and morals began in earnest about 1963. Section 10:5 follows up
with enforcement.
No laws,
federal, State or local, may finance or otherwise countenance unions that are
sodomitic. In particular, adoption of children by same-sex partners
engaged in sodomy is hereby forbidden. Sodomy is moral disorder, and
sexually disordered morals magnify the risk of child abuse, thus imperiling the
innocence of youth and the future of society.
At the moment of the arch-amendment’s
ratification, public funding in support of what Montesquieu called “the sin
against nature,” will become unconstitutional, as will special laws
countenancing such practices. We should not, however, be so hard line as
to impose reciprocity, or require states or localities to reverse particular
arrangements made earlier under laws enacted prior to ratification.
In the case of human cloning, for example (if
perverted science ever produces such a being), immigration would be forbidden
from the day the constellation law goes into force. But section 10:7 would not mandate the
deportation of such a person previously admitted legally to a state or
locality. Likewise with same-sex marriage. Such unions already
sealed under state or local laws would not be annulled legally, “unless and
until rendered retroactive by the jurisdiction which originally enacted the
law.”
Before moving on to section eleven, we need to
reflect on tough love: As concerns fellow citizens who have fallen into a
shameful perversity,[31] we
do them no favor when the highest law of the land positively reinforces the
very condition that ensnares them. As pointed out by the head of Family
Research Institute, Paul Cameron, Ph.D.,
Homosexuals are sexually
troubled people engaging in dangerous activities. Because we care about
them and those tempted to join them, it is important that we neither encourage
nor legitimize such a destructive lifestyle.[32]
Tough love is not hatred for
gays and lesbians, as the postmodernist propaganda machine would have you
believe. As Rev. Brian Fischer put it recently:
God does not hate
homosexuals; Christians believe that he sent his only Son to die for them. We
as Christians do not hate homosexuals. We love them, and love them enough to
say that there is a better way to express sexual intimacy than by distorting
God’s design.[33]
Neither,
however, is it genuine love to force children into sodomitic living
arrangements –– the postmodernist adoption policy affirmed in Canada, South
Africa, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, The Netherlands, Iceland, and the UK.
Also practiced by some government adoption agencies in the U.S.A., such a
policy exhibits de facto malevolence for the hapless minor.
Merely to
protest the moral reality of the illicit living arrangement into which the
adopted child could be immersed may in itself fall under the category of so
called “hate-speech,” given the nature of today’s politically correct climate
backed by hate-crimes legislation. However, human legislation is no law
at all, but rather oppression, if it contradicts divine law:
“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”
(Psalm 97:10; cf. Romans 12:9).
It is best that we understand such Biblical hatred according to what St. Thomas
Aquinas terms right reason.[34]
“Love the sinner; hate the sin,” is an abiding principle of the moral code that
stands preeminent down through the ages. We should not despise
sodomites. But right-minded people ought to detest sodomy,
notwithstanding fashionable ethics that spring forth from a culture in the
throes of decadence.
Defenders of postmodernist culture try to portray any restriction on sexual
activity as theocratic. The notion that by forbidding same-sex marriage
and civil unions, for example, we are establishing a theocracy is, of course,
preposterous. Until July 1, 2000, when Vermont legalized civil unions,
none of the 50 United States or its territories possessed such a system.
Are we to believe that prior to that date – including 7˝ years of Bill
Clinton’s administration – Americans lived in a theocracy?
It does not take a theocracy to set an immoral
system aright. Once ratified, the constellation amendment will do so by
eradicating the accretions whereby postmodernists have contorted the
Constitution to lend political legitimacy to sin. In restoring the
integrity of the Constitution, the United States will lift up an example of
righteousness from which foreign nations will hopefully profit.
In conclusion, affirmation and tolerance can drive a double-edged dagger
to the heart of fellow human beings whose moral peril calls instead for
forewarning and admonishment. Under the constellation amendment, the law
will cease to extend a comfort zone for either sodomy or abortion.
Section 10:1-2 will extend tough love into the minds and hearts of pregnant
mothers, with whom sadly the ultimate child abuse begins. Section 10: 3-4
will offer equivalent tough love to hedonists who have crossed the line into
sexual perversion, or who seek governmental help to adopt children into their
lifestyle.
Both sections ten and eleven aim generally to
restore sobriety on civil rights, lest an inebriated sense of tolerance and
drunken celebration of diversity carry the whole country down into irreversible
decadence. As a formal culmination of the American Revolution, the great
concluding sentence of the US Constitution christens the document as follows:
“done in Convention … in the Year of our Lord
one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth.” By contrast, the French revolution
not only secularized the dating system but de-Christianized the Cathedral of
Notre Dame in Paris. The Jacobins encouraged harlots to contaminate the
sacred edifice, so that after the restoration of its Catholic character the
venerable structure was liturgically cleansed and rededicated.
Analogously sections 10-12 of the constellation law, together with the invocation, will decontaminate and
rededicate to God that sacred legal edifice, the U.S. Constitution.
PORNOGRAPHY
(section eleven)
Introduction
|
Sexually Obsessed
Their
life’s pilot resides in the loins;
Heart,
brain, soul, subordinate to the crotch;
Trumping
all desire to think, weigh, watch,
Or
discern and do what wisdom enjoins. |
| |
In his book, Supercapitalism (2007)
economist, Robert Reich, addresses the link between physical pollution and
moral pollution. Under unregulated supercapitalism, Reich observes,
the process of giving competitive deals to consumers “may depend on
filling the air with gunk, filling the airwaves with sex and violence, or filling our stomachs with junk food.”[34a]
The
most intimate of human relations is the last sphere in which society can afford
to let the profit motive run rampant.[35]
A fundamental message of
pornography and violence is disdain,
the consideration of others as objects rather than as persons.
Thus, pornography and violence can eat away at tenderness and
compassion and can foster insensitivity and even brutality.[36]
Author, editor and television host, Patrick
Madrid,[37] wrote a perceptive
piece in Catholic Exchange after the Abu Ghuraib prison abuse scandal of
2004 in Iraq.[38] Entitled, “Coming
Home to Roost,” the article applies the old ‘monkey see, monkey do’ principle
to our unruly troops, the young Americans who invaded Iraq and brought with
them the pornography saturated culture whence they came. Mr. Madrid
refutes the alibi that sadomasochistic U.S. soldiers were merely a few bad
apples.
…The
multi-billion dollar porn industry is finding and forming eager consumers at
every level. Its many tentacles slither across our culture, snaking their way
into our homes through our computers, televisions, radios, and DVD players.
Which leads
me to my thesis about the "bad apples" among our troops in
Iraq. Of course it's only a small minority of Americans there who are
acting out these macabre sexual impositions against their Iraqi captives, but
it seems to me that it's a significant minority. They reflect the moral
state of the nation. They are America. And though we recoil in
shock and embarrassment when confronted with their stupid and shameful antics
with the prisoners, we shouldn't be surprised by their behavior. They
learned it here, stateside, on the Internet, in the movies, at their
neighborhood video store, in their living rooms….
Los Angeles Times commentator, Benjamin
Schwartz, observed in 1999 that “those who call themselves conservative fail to
recognize that the free market they embrace destroys the ‘community’ and
‘family values’ they espouse.” As for liberals, wrote Schwartz, “the left
in America seems not to realize that the unlimited autonomy of individual
desire and the ‘personal liberation’ that it celebrates goes hand in hand with
the very economic system it finds so disquieting.”[39]
In 1989 a Vatican commission looked at the
problem of pornography and reported the following effects:
Even
so-called 'soft-core' pornography can have a progressively desensitizing
effect, gradually rendering individuals morally numb and personally insensitive
to the rights and dignity of others.
Exposure to
pornography can also be – like exposure to narcotics – habit-forming and can
lead individuals to seek increasingly 'hard core' and perverse material.
The likelihood of anti-social behavior can grow as this process continues....
Indeed,
pornography can militate against the family character of true human sexual
expression. The more sexual activity is considered as a continuing
frenzied search for personal gratification rather than as an expression of enduring
love in marriage, the more pornography can be considered as a factor
contributing to the undermining of wholesome family life.[40]
The significance of social revolution is
comparable to, or may exceed in national importance, the historic changes that
take place in the political and economic sectors. In the social sphere
retrogressions and advances involve what the historian Macaulay called
"the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities...from knowledge
to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity."[41]
We admit with all sincerity that
our first duty is within our own household; that we must not merely talk, but
act, in favor of cleanliness and decency and righteousness, in all political,
social, and civic matters. No prosperity and no glory can save a nation that is
rotten at heart. We must ever keep the core of our national being sound, and
see to it that not only our citizens in private life, but, above all, our
statesmen in public life, practice the old commonplace virtues which from time
immemorial have lain at the root of all true national wellbeing. Teddy
Roosevelt, 1901[42]
It should be obvious to observant Americans that
powerful processes are reshaping society and the character of its
culture. Our prosperity and happiness will never hinge on resisting
inexorable historic shifts, or on keeping culture in a frozen state of status
quo, but rather on guiding changes in a positive direction. To repeat a
maxim that is trite but timely, "not all change is progress."
The apocalyptic cultural changes that have hit
us with a vengeance during the postmodernist era were driven or at least
spurred by campus activists who gave abject submission to their glands and
called it sexual liberation. Columnist, Mona Charen, writes of the 60's
revolutionaries that they "ushered in a coarse and vulgar age in which we
lost the capacity to control pornography."[43]
In other words the postmodernist revolution launched a blitz against American
culture in 1963, and this shock and awe campaign included heavy barrages of
pornography.
A great deal of what we cherish in this country
is attributable to the American Revolution – a classic case of change that was
reasonable and moderate in purpose. By contrast, the French Revolution
was in some respects a tragedy for the host country as well as for
Europe. The more moderate forces in France held the upper hand outside
Paris, yet they failed to prevent Parisian based radicals, the Jacobins, from
grasping the political controls in the capitol city, and launching the Reign of
Terror against the Girondists, revolutionaries who were comparatively moderate
but indecisive.[44] Thus the
revolution degenerated into a crazed and licentious rampage. The great
historian, Thomas Carlyle, summed it up in these words:
the friends
of freedom and order
lost to the friends of freedom simple.[45]
The ongoing social change in America offers
similar alternatives. In regard to sexual mores, we can continue the
policy of drift and passively acquiesce while profiteers ranging from Playboy
Magazine to the operators of pornographic video stores and internet sites
fashion social change in their own image and interest. Or we can
intervene decisively to defend the sanctity of sex from the powerful alliance
of lust and monetary greed.
Let us make a pact with the reader, here and
now, to approach this subject, the subject of censorship, in a rational matter
without vituperation and personal invective. As Brian Wright O’Conner
puts it:
The days are past when the war-cry
of censorship worked like a charm,
branding the “moralists” as a pack of cultural fascists
eager to revive book-burnings and city censors.[46]
The constellation law would instead strike a
blow for morality by capping one of the worst forms of pollution a society can
suffer. The aim is to put a lid on the problem, not to repress democracy
or genuine liberty. Regretfully, some people who acknowledge the enormity
of the pornography problem still become overwrought at the idea of any
intervention beyond voluntary boycotts. Though effective in isolated
cases, boycotts have proven as potent in dealing with the aggregate problem as
in fighting a cockroach infestation by using one’s thumb to squish them one at
a time.[46a]:
When a solution to the problem of pornography on
the macro level is proposed, defenders of prevailing postmodern paganism have
no scruples about branding reformers with slanderous labels, like their ad
hominem trump-card, “Nazi.” Even when the censorship is proposed in a
form similar to what was commonplace in America for generations, an influential
minority discounts history and opposes moves to restore order, being as they
are dead-drunk on civil rights.[47]
The truth is that we already have some
censorship, on child pornography for example; though even there – where it
does not take a so-called moralist to have one’s conscience offended – cultural
libertines are winning in postmodernist courts.[48]
So for anyone who can apply logic to the issue of suppressing pornography, the
question is not whether we should cap the problem, but how far down society
should push the lid. The pornography problem is so thoroughly out of hand
that limits need to be applied with a firm purpose of restoring moral order.
"There is," says Edmund Burke, "a
limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue."[49] Allow the neo-Jacobins, the
postmodernists, to retain their political leverage in the courts, and they will
rip society away from what moral roots still remain. On the other hand,
we can secure the Constitution for the forces of moderation; which is indeed
what the constellation amendment proposes. Section eleven is proposed as a means for
moderate society to intervene firmly, to act decisively in defense of genuine
human dignity.
Pornography and Society
Some who acknowledge a
personal revulsion for pornography nonetheless dismiss its social impact as
relatively trivial. The very quantity of analytical literature on the
problem indicates otherwise, however. In 1980 an annotated bibliography
on the conflict over pornography in the United States — covering books published
over the previous two decades and articles during a single decade — fills a
volume of some 130 pages.[50]
Law professor, Peter Teachout, wrote that the legal battle over pornography involves "a life-and-death struggle
between two powerfully competing conceptions of law," between society's
right of self defense on the one hand, and the individual's right of personal
preference on the other. The drama being played out over obscenity law is
nothing less, according to Teachout, than a "critical struggle for the
soul of the law."[51] During the
quarter century after Teachout’s forewarning, the postmodernists won the sexual
revolution and consolidated their gains through the courts. Groups like
the American Family Association lost the battle, and the law lost its soul.
With the postmodernist regime now firmly in
place, working assiduously to promote sordid sexual manners, nothing short of a
counterrevolution can reverse the trend. Trying to convince the regime to
restore high standards of sexual morality is, and will continue to be, an
exercise in futility.
Surveys and referendums indicate that
rank-and-file public opinion in America as a whole still opposes pornography
and desires to curb it, though the strength of popular conviction is gradually
eroding.[52] The popular
desire to do something about the problem indicates what political science
professor Harry M. Clor calls "an awareness (however unarticulated) that
vital questions, ultimate questions, lie beneath the surface."[53]
The founder of the sociology department at
Harvard University, Petrim Sorokin, looked at the whole issue of the sexual
revolution in the Western World. Anarchy in sexual mores "deserves
as much public attention as any political or economic change," wrote
Sorokin, and the consequences "are likely to be more far-reaching than
those of almost all other revolutions, except perhaps the total revolutions
such as the Russian Revolution."[54]
According to Sorokin, Euro-American culture is
in a degenerating phase similar to that of ancient Greece and Rome, where also
sexual anarchy and eroticism began to pervade the cultures.[55] For America, however, the process
is not yet irreversible. "Once in a while," says Sorokin,
"through a lucky combination of circumstances, and through an earnest and
strenuous effort of the society itself, it may regain its mental and moral
sanity; may halt the dangerous drift...."[56]
Sorokin cites the massive cross-cultural study, Sex and Culture, by
Joseph Unwin who presents historical evidence that the falling away of sexual
restraint does not exert its full negative impact upon the vitals of a culture
for three generations.[57] For nearly half
that duration the postmodernist regime has been ruling America.
There are voices today who will oppose any
concrete action to save the situation unless it is justified beforehand not
just by historical, philosophical and religious rationale but by the most
rigorous scientific demonstrations of a cause/effect relationship. Theirs
is a formula for paralysis, inasmuch as the effects of a bad moral environment
are in some cases impossible to isolate in controlled laboratory conditions.[58] Society is virtually helpless to
defend itself if it must
first justify that defense by tracing visible social evils back through a
labyrinth of complicated causal sequences until the culprit is bird-dogged by a
consensus of sociologists.
In
the struggle of the last four decades or so to win protections against despoilers
of the environment, corporate polluters have sponsored scores of
quasi-scientific studies purporting to prove that we have little or nothing to
worry about. Inevitably, also, they resort to the mantra that "more
study is needed." In other words they want us to wait interminably
for still more studies and "scientific evidence" before we attribute
any blame to industry for the long-term health problems that burden our society
with productivity losses and health-care costs.[58a]
Likewise
as regards cultural pollution: Corporate pornographers hire
psychologists and other "experts" to wrap the frock coat of the junk
scientist around denials of good sense. Reason, logic and religion all
give testimony that profiteers in pornography are giving a powerful push to the
moral decay of American society, with a host of attendant costs to all of
us. But the multi-billion dollar pornography industry has an interest in
confusing the issue with demands for empirical proofs so stringent as to cast
doubt on any value judgment, no matter how well it might accord with right
reason and intuitive understanding.
Logic and intuition are anathema to the most
avid apostles of the empirical method. An example of the way exclusive
reliance on empiricism would paralyze social activism is exhibited in a recent
column. The author quarrels with prominent posting of the Ten
Commandments for lack of scientific proof of their worth:
Some would have the Court scuttle
its interpretation of the First Amendment and allow the posting of the Ten
Commandments in public places. But to do that, we'd need irrefutable evidence
that it's the absence of the Ten Commandments in public places that's
the main cause of our social ills, and that simply posting the document would
cure those ills. Allegations wouldn't be enough here.[59]
The demand for a rigorous proof of the cause and
effect relationship between pornography and social decay is probably more
unreasonable than requiring similar proof in the case of poverty and
crime. Our intuitive belief that poverty breeds criminal behavior would
alone suffice to justify anti-poverty action, even though cause/effect can be
demonstrated for only a small minority of impoverished people.[60] As Clor points out, given the
impossibility of proof, "science tends to give way to social philosophy
and to sober reflection upon common experience."[61]
In the case of the pornographic deluge of recent
years we may be inclined to say with Burke, "there are some follies which
baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule; and which excite no feeling in us
but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it."[62] Today, unfortunately, it is
necessary to say more, if only in response to groups like the majority for the
President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) who not only
whitewashed the problem of pornography, but tried to claim scientific support
for the proposition that pornography is socially harmless.[63] Sixteen years later, during the
Reagan administration, another U.S. Government commission on pornography took
the opposite view.[64] The years between
the two commissions saw pornography increase vastly, both in magnitude and
malevolence. New studies on sexual morality and conduct were also
forthcoming, notwithstanding that for the most part "methodological
problems would seem to be insuperable.”[65]
Not all attempts to overcome the difficulties of
the empirical approach in intimate matters have been complete failures.
As detailed in the University of Pennsylvania's Journal of Communications,
professors Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant subjected 180 college students to
varying doses of pornography over an extended time frame. The longer the duration
of viewing time the more the students surveyed tended to trivialize the
seriousness of rape, and to lose compassion for rape victims.[66] Pornography callused the viewers
to what had previously revolted them, and eventually even allured some to it –
by the same process which Alexander Pope put to verse 2˝ centuries ago:
Vice is a monster of so frightful
mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.[67]
Not all social scientists limit themselves to
empirical studies under controlled conditions; some like Unwin venture into the
great record book of history. Others find contemporary evidence in the laboratory
of the living society. Ernst van den Haag, finds desensitization operable
on the national scale and draws conclusions. "If we indulge
pornography," says Haag, "our society at best will become ever more
coarse, brutal, anxious, indifferent, de-individualized, hedonistic; at worst
its ethos will disintegrate altogether."[68]
A wealth of scholarly literature is available
dealing with pornography and other forms of sexual anarchy, and their effects
upon culture and society; but the literature is too extensive for a
thoroughgoing survey here. Recommended are the cited works of Berns,
Clor, Devlin, Haag, Linedecker, Mishan, Robertson, Sorokin, Stanmeyer,
Sunderland, Unwin.
Walter
Berns' analysis suggests that it is natural and healthy when the publicizing of
private parts begets a personal sense of shame; this instinct of shame serves
to protect private tenderness and love. By breeding shamelessness,
pornography diminishes the social prevalence of compassion and true love, which
are great wellsprings of self-restraint in a populace.
There is a sense of shame
laden with guilt,
and a shame that merits honor and respect.
Old
Testament, Sirach 4:21
Democratic
forms of government require of the citizenry a self-governing of the passions;
and when this government from within the personality gives way to license, the
political government gravitates naturally toward oppression. Berns
concludes that "tyranny is the natural and inevitable mode of government
for the shameless and self-indulgent who have carried liberty beyond any
restraint, natural or conventional."[69]
In other words, there is not only a distinction
between license and liberty but also an implacable enmity. License
undermines liberty as surely as termites can ruin a house. As license
becomes more prevalent in society the populace becomes tumultuous and
unstable. Civil liberty is used with less and less responsibility; it
becomes an excuse for discord and sinfulness. Finally an increasing
yearning for order is answered by some form of despotism.
|
|
|
|
|
Herbert Marcuse
(1898-1979) |
Of course there are increasingly vocal and
highly placed Americans, like Debra Haffner of the sex information council, who
fail to see anything positive in a personal sense of modesty and shame when
confronted with explicit sexual terminology. On the contrary, Haffner
disapproved of the discomfort exhibited by Senators over vulgar language during
the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ms.
Haffner perceived the senatorial qualms as a manifestation of puritanical mores
that is overdue for extirpation. Extending sex education with the most
explicit terminology even to kindergartners is the way she would rid society of
its scruples.[70]
There are an increasing number of Americans like
Haffner who see our reluctance to talk freely and openly about intimate sexual
matters as a "hang-up" that needs to be overcome. Such people
will not agree, of course, with Berns on the cultural utility of a sense of
shame. They see modesty as a vice and shamelessness as a virtue.
Indeed, the pornographic mentality is quite in tune with Marxist, Herbert
Marcuse, and the Frankfort School in advocating free and open sexuality as a
weapon with which to destroy the system and usher in Marxism.[71] Most Americans have never heard of
the Frankfort school, or Professor Marcuse, and would, I dare say, oppose them
in proportion as they understood them.
Relatively few Americans would embrace, for example, the Marcusean principle
that moral perversions are good insofar as they cause traditional culture to
crumble and Judeo-Christian morality to disintegrate. Riotous rock music
did not escape Marcuse’s attention as a harbinger of neo-Marxist
“freedom.” I’m not sure if James Hetfield, cofounder of the heavy metal
rock group, Metallica, has ever read Marcuse, but his conception of freedom
exhibits a similar, if less erudite, mania.
Upon learning that the U.S. military had adopted Metallica CD’s as a new form
of weaponry in “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Hetfield expressed satisfaction that
his tunes were proving culturally offensive to the Iraqis. “For me, the
lyrics are a form of expression, a freedom to express my insanity,” said
Hetfield. “If the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part
of their exposure.”[72]
Hetfield was at least willing to be direct. The Frankford School was less
candid. Their approach was to insinuate poison into a country’s culture
gradually, rather than blast it into unreceptive ears via boom boxes and
speakers as big as sepulchers hung on Humvees.[73] But Metallica
and Marcuse do exhibit common traits. Both propose a wild and
selfish vision of freedom, and neither care a whit for the freedom of
respectable Americans to creat
