Easter Sunday, 2024. The Day Joe Biden lost the 2024 Election by choosing to lose it by lurching to the Progressive Left.

Just below this post, is this one:

Hurling invectives.

That post isn't limited to the left or the right, although right now, invectives are coming more loudly from the Populist right.  They do come from the Progressive left as well.

I note that, as people may misinterpret the post below as being solely aimed at Populists.  Indeed, Populists are likely to look at it that way, as they tend to be very shallow in their political analysis. All their opponents are members of "the Radical Left", they believe. Even Conservatives who oppose them are members of the "Radical Left".

Not hardly.

The actual Radical Left is in the news today through its capture of much of the Democratic Party, which started before the Populists became as influential as they currently are in the GOP.  Indeed, as we discussed last week, the Progressives, which are not the same as the Liberals, have roots in the Democratic Party that go back at least as far as the collapse of the Progressive Party in 1912-1914.

I've often said here that Democrats don't lose elections, they throw them away.

When future historians go back and find the point at which Conservatives who were teetering on the edge of supporting Joe Biden determined to reluctantly give their votes to Donald Trump, they'll cite the issuance of this proclamation:

A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2024

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm our Nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union — where all people are created equal and treated equally throughout their lives.  

I am proud that my Administration has stood for justice from the start, working to ensure that the LGBTQI+ community can live openly, in safety, with dignity and respect.  I am proud to have appointed transgender leaders to my Administration and to have ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in our military.  I am proud to have signed historic Executive Orders that strengthen civil rights protections in housing, employment, health care, education, the justice system, and more.  I am proud to have signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring that every American can marry the person they love. 

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation.  Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive.  They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.  But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families — silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.  These bills attack our most basic American values:  the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child.  It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year.  At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives.  Let me be clear:  All of these attacks are un-American and must end.  No one should have to be brave just to be themselves.  

At the same time, my Administration is working to stop the bullying and harassment of transgender children and their families.  The Department of Justice has taken action to push back against extreme and un-American State laws targeting transgender youth and their families and the Department of Justice is partnering with law enforcement and community groups to combat hate and violence.  My Administration is also providing dedicated emergency mental health support through our nationwide suicide and crisis lifeline — any LGBTQI+ young person in need can call “988” and press “3” to speak with a counselor trained to support them.  We are making public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including with more inclusive passports and easier access to Social Security benefits.  There is much more to do.  I continue to call on the Congress to pass the Equality Act, to codify civil rights protections for all LGBTQI+ Americans.

Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans:  You are loved.  You are heard.  You are understood.  You belong.  You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.  I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Defenders of this will no doubt state that Joe is just honoring the "right to be yourself".  Maybe he thinks of it that way.  Indeed, the statement is sufficiently bland enought to nearly be calculated to attempt not to really offend.

This isn't how many will take it.  Many will take it as "you are forcing me to accept a radical fraud about yourself and pretend it's okay".

And frankly, they're right.  Words actually do have meaning, and not only the spoken ones, but what they suggest.

This comes down, in a way, to the essential difference between how conservatives, liberals and progressives see the world (yes I've left populists out of this intentionally).  Only Progressives believe in the Existential Me, or the Isolated Absolute. Everyone else believes that you are part of a community.  Indeed, Progressivism is, ironically, the ultimate extension of a belief that Progressives claim to hate, that being American Individualism written large.  You can' be just what you want to be, and ignore everyone else.  

In reality, Homo sapiens are a community animal with a fixed nature, and you can't.

I'd normally be reluctant to cite Jordan Peterson, the right wing Canadian pundit, but he is a psychologist and he and a reporter have an interesting podcast episode entitled The Biggest Medical Scandal Of Our Time.  I'm not going to link it in, people can simply look it up, but it does a good job of pointing out the degree to which the entire transgender thing is simply a fraud.  Peterson spends much of the podcast being outraged, as he's a very poor interviewer, but what you'd basically learn is that in the extraordinary rare instances in which gender confusion arises, it's confusion and nothing else.  The basic proper course for minors is not to treat it, with most who are generally afflicted, according to Peterson, coming into adulthood comfortable with their genders, but being homosexuals.

I'm no doubt more radical yet, as I don't believe that transgenderism actually even exists, but is rather a psychological affliction that is limited to the Western world and expresses something else going on in our culture.  It's deeply contrary to nature, as much of our society is in general.  It's a reaction to some sort of unnatural stress, not an expression of nature.

There's utterly no reason whatsoever for the Federal Government to recognize transgenderism and the fact that it does, and that it's even crept into surgeries being allowed within the Armed Forces, is in fact evidence of how deeply woke some elements of our society have become.  There's no reason to oppress people who express this, but going the next 100 miles and pretending everything about it is okay about it is frankly going a bridge too far, and most people instinctively know this.

People have become used to various months being declared to represent the history of one group of people or another.  Originally, it was a few definable groups who deserved to have their history brought forward.  Black History Month was a good example.  March is National Women's History Month, which was as well. 

November has become Transgender Awareness Month according to some, or there's a month in November that's been declared Transgender Awareness Week.  Now we're all learning that March 31, the last day of National Women's History Month, is Transgender Day of Visibility.

Some time ago I heard a podcast by somebody, I can't recall who, who discussed how transgender mutilation of men into women goes an extra level in being an existential insult to women.  That it's a fraud is self-evident.  You cannot change your gender, you can only surgically and chemically attempt to partially mask your actual gender.  

But what hadn't occured to me is that actual women go through, due to their natures, something that men can barely understand.  To experience in your youthful prime an event in which your young healthy body suddenly starts bleeding monthly and your hormonal system subjects you to a raging hormonal cyclonic storm is something men do not experience and cannot grasp.  To take pills and subject yourself to surgical butchery doesn't mimic that in any fashion.  Women's entire bodies, after a certain point in their teens, remind them of our species elemental genetic roles.  Boys have things turn on, but not in a way that can result in them bearing another human being, and in fact monthly demanding that they do so.

To have the Oval Office recognize something that, at this point, is basically hurled in everyone's face, and which all humans know at an elemental level to be existentially wrong, is insulting.

Do declare it on Easter Sunday is an insult beyond that.

That Biden did this is tone-deaf beyond belief.  His defenders are pointing out that this day is "always Transgender Day of Visibility", which is absurd on its face, as it hasn't "always" existed.  It's new, and it's misdirected.  Noting those who fall into this self-declared group is worthwhile, but to sympathize with their plight and seek to address it honestly, rather than to verify that their condition is a dandy one. But this is what we do now since the Progressive Left has become so inserted in our society.  We honor the afflicted in their affliction rather than seek to help.

Recently, an insulting event occured at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, in which a funeral that openly insulted conservative beliefs in general and the beliefs of the Catholic Church occured.  The tone-deaf appearance by those whose duty it is to protect the beliefs of the Church were widely discussed on the Catholic Blogosphere.  This, however, is wider yet.

No matter how imperfectly understood, a major element fueling Populist rage (and there are multiple ones, not just one) and horrifying genuine conservatives is the forced demand of acceptance of certain things that actually are part of somebody's "radical left agenda".  While much of the invectives that cite that are baloney, this much is in fact true.  When Justice Kennedy and his fellow robbed travelers insisted that Obergell didn't mean the onset of a societal revolution, they were obviously wrong at the time, and they set off the inevitable counter revolution.  We noted then:

These justices have perhaps assumed too much if they've assumed that they can now act so far that Marshall would be horrified, and I'd be surprised if, long term, this decision doesn't either mark the beginning of a Cesarian court and a retreat of American democracy, or the point at which the roles of the Court began to massively erode in favor of a more Athenian democracy.

Either result is really scary.

Well here we are.

So, with Joe Biden, who supposedly is an adherent Catholic (which based on his public positions, he obviously is not), having signed a proclamation that places a day honoring something that repels conservatives and enrages Populists, and which actually does offer insult to Christian tenants in general, and which places the honoring on Easter Sunday in an election year, he's sealed his doom in the Fall.  Those defending him that this "always" occurs on this day are essentially noting that Joe was too distracted to take note, which only fuels the fire that he doesn't know what he is doing.  Never mind that Trump either doesn't know what he is doing either, his adherents already know that the Führerprinzip means he'll follow their lead, as it gets him attention. And indeed, they are already.

And this points out once again the tragedy of a moronic "two party system". There's no reason that real conservatives, or real liberals, should have to vote for these two fallen parties and their ancient, unappealing candidates.  

Indeed, there's a good argument that thinking people shouldn't.

Related threads:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and LIberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

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We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

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Carrie Gress and feminism.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day : A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure....

In the afternoon, I went out fishing and took the dog.  On the way, I was listening to a podcast, like I'll tend to do.  It was a Catholic Answers Focus interview of Carrie Gress and it was profound.  I'll post on that elsewhere.  

Here is elsewhere.

The title of the episode, and it should be easy to find, is Can Catholic's Fix Feminism?  Gress' answer seems to be no, but what was so interesting about it is that she, as a woman who holds a PhD has had a career as a professor was frank on some things that we've addressed here repeatedly, but from a more academic standpoint, and she was able to thread them together. Without really expressing it the same way we have here, she's spoke on metaphysics, theology and evolutionary biology, as well as political science.

We've typed out all of that here, but without really including the Marxism portion.

Gress basic thesis is that feminism really came out of the same radicalism as Marxism, and adopted a Marxist view that women should be compelled to live to the male standard.  It didn't really free women at all, it forced them into the male world where they're now judged on how well the live up. . . and down, to it.  She dared to say something that's an anathema to modern Americans, that your career will not make you happy, and it very well may make you miserable.

Tying it in to Marxism is also a bit of an anathema of a topic too, to most, but if you look at it, it's hard not to go there, at least in a fellow traveler's sort of way early on.  To at least a degree, even if you want to just lighten it up, early feminism fits into the family or radical movements of the early 20th Century, all of which were pretty heavily dominated by far left thought.  Communism itself was very hostile to motherhood and marriage, and wanted to destroy the latter.  The early radical Communists were opposed to both, and Whitaker Chambers discusses in Witness.  The association, at least tangentially, is there.  And of course, as the far left saw human value only in terms of people being "workers", this makes sense.  The American far left still speaks this way today, with Bernie Sanders, for example, being in favor of warehousing children so that their mothers can work, adopting the traditional leftist view that a human's value is found only there.

We've dealt with all of this before, of course, and frankly we've taken it one step further.

Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about.  The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force.  In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them.  Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.  

Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss.  Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy.  Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s.  Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family".  The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family.  Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to.  Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.

The problem with it is that it's a lie.  Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy.  Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.

We are so in the thick of this that we hardly appreciate where we at on these matters now.  But this explains much of the misery of the modern world.  We don't live in accordance with our natures, or at least very few of us do, and we're really not allowed to.  An aspect of that is this topic. Women have careers open to them, and should, but they are now compelled to act like men within them, in every fashion.

I've recently had the displeasure of witnessing this in a peculiar fashion.  It hasn't been a pleasant thing to observe.  The interesting thing is that in observing it, when people feel free to make comments, they grasp their way back to the old standards, as with so much else, even while not living them.

Related Thread:

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.

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Cliffnotes of the Zeitgist Part 14. The Industrial Revolution and Child Care and other musings.

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Blog Mirror: Getting "On With It"

From the excellent blog City Father.

Getting "On With It"

We've had a variety of posts sort of ballpark on this topic, more or less, recently.  Most of them have come up in the context of comparing "then and now", one of the purposes of this blog

This entry is so well done, I really can't riff off of it much.  What Fr. Franco states is so well stated, that I should just leave it alone, so I'll mostly do so.

To the extent I won't, it should be noted I guess that things in the Western World are so existentially screwed up right now, it's frightening, and it's expressing itself in corrupted ways in our culture and our politics, which are an expression of our culture, so much that it threatens to destroy it, and perhaps even us.  A certain getting back to the basics, or roots, seems to me to very much what is needed to be done, which one party in this contest seeks to do, but doesn't understand how to do it, or what the existential truths are, and the other seeks to eliminate it and create a bold new world which it won't succeed in doing.

I was unaware of the Rituale Romanum's "Exhortation before Marriage discussed in this text.  I wish that hadn't been removed, and I wish it would return.

And then suddenly the Law of Unintended Consequences arrived at the party

The logic of it, even without reading the Alabama Supreme Court opinion, is clear.

Life begins at conception, and therefore embryos artificially conceived are alive, and entitled to teh same protection as other early infants.

It's not really that shocking, and frankly, I agree with that.

Hence the logcial question presented to the  Alabama Supreme Court by

This Court has long held that unborn children are "children" for purposes of Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, 6-5-391, Ala. Code 1975, a statute that allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for their child's death. The central question presented in these consolidated appeals, which involve the death of embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, is whether the Act contains an unwritten exception to that rule for extrauterine children -- that is,unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed. Under existing black-letter law, the answer to that question is no: the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children,regardless of their location.

It's a logical question, and it was brought by the upset parents.

The decision is lengthy, and involves a host of issues, but the basic conclusion is this:

Here,the text ofthe Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified. It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. Itis not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding "unborn life"from legal protection. Art.I, 36.06 ,Ala. Const. 2022.1

The Court reached the right decision.

And now people are reacting in horror, including the putative nominee for the Oval Office on the GOP side, who has tweeted: 

Let's start with some obvious things.

Firstly, I don't know what Donald Trump thinks the "ultimate joy in life" is. Given as he's a serial polygamist who cheated on two spouses, I'm skeptical that it's a happy family life.

I'm frankly quite skeptical that Trump really is that against abortion in the first place, although that's just skepticism on my part.  I can't see where Trump really holds that many values on anything in particular, really.

He does value getting reelected however and now he, like a lot of Republicans, are scrambling to figure out how to react to this, in no small part because a large number of Americans are probably now looking at the actual meaning of what social conservatism, and I am a social conservatism, is, and they're now really uncomfortable with it.

Americans overall, or at least a lot of Americans, claim that they are all for traditional values and are conservatives, but what they mean is that they are in favor of marriage, sort of, and family life, sort of, as long as that means you can easily dump your spouse and get remarred as much as you want to, and kill your offspring in utero up to sixteen weeks. This applies as much to Republicans as it does to Democrats.  If you are looking at a GOP candidate, and they've been married more than once, it's frankly a perfectly fair question to ask them if they really believe in what they claim they do.

Indeed, the whole close embrace to religion the press claims is going on is really a close embrace to the American Civil Religion.  It's certainly not a close embrace of Apostolic Christianity.  At least Catholicism holds that artificial insemination of human's is morally wrong in the first instance, and this provides just one of the reasons why.  It's completely contra natural.

But here's the added deal. When people claim they're advancing values, how deep have they looked at their arguments and how far are they prepared to go, and are they willing to apply them, to themselves?

Are those on the right in favor of traditional values, really in favor of them. Are those on the left who claim to be in favor of nature, willing to really live with it?

Related Thread:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

On being blisteringly dense and contra-natural

 Chilean couple, 1940, no doubt a lot more natural than "all natural" folks today, in every sense.

I'll have to start this again with a quote I had here the other day from Cardinal Sarah

The dying West.

I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. No more childbearing. You are invaded, still, by other cultures, other peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and completely change your culture, your convictions, your morality.

Cardinal Sarah

I guess because I'm a big reader, I'll get advertisements for books and also book reviews in email form.  One that I get is the New York Times book reviews, which I've come to barely notice.  A big part of that is because as the Times itself has declined, and it very much has, its book reviews are focused on whiney self-indulgent narcissist who write whiney self-indulgent narcissist memoirs that nobody reads and which are soon forgotten.  Stuff like the struggles of a middle class homosexual 1st generation Pakistani American in the big city whose extended Islamic family doesn't get him. M'eh, get over yourself, dude.

Anyhow, I got more than one email on Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, More on her sexual immorality.  The first time I disregarded it as it was a New York Times review (of course), but the second time I did take brief note of it.

Basically, she and her husband, who do have children, like to f*** other people than their spouses and for some reason their licentiousness is to be shared with others, making them both not only sexually reprehensible, but exhibitionist as well.  They'd define this as being "polyamorous", but that description does violence not only to nature, as we'll see, but to "amour".  Polylicentiousness would be a better description, but licentious would simply do, although they apparently (I haven't read it) keep their affairs down to one person at a time.  Indeed, one item I found she wrote in an op ed was about her sneaking out to her "boyfriend" during COVID and lying about it to her mid teen son, whom she must think is really dense, so she can screw her paramour in his household while his wife, whom he is trying to get pregnant, is out.  

Like all books in this area, this will be read only by people, probably mostly women, who want either 1) a peak into somebody's Fifty Shades of Grey lifestyle or 2) are thinking of cheating on their spouses and want to learn what that's like while being encouraged to do so.  I'm not going to bother with that, but instead make an evolutionary biological and medical observation.

Setting aside morality, this sort of conduct can only occur if you've carpet bombed your system into sterilization and have a platoon of antibiotics ready to come to your rescue.

In other words, while the promoters of this sort of thing like to claim it as sort of natural, it's the opposite.

We've dealt with it elsewhere, but the bargain of our species was that the male in a couple got the female. . .you know. . . that way, for his life, and she got food and protection, which she couldn't provide once she had a child or children.  Slice it anyway you want, but that's the evolutionary basis of monogamy and that's why our species exhibits it.

People will talk about affairs etc. and the degree to which they've been historically common in our species, but they really miss the history of it.  By and large, while they do occur, amongst the masses, which were most people, who lived close to the economic bottom line, or who were aboriginal, or pastoral, or nomadic, the Old Law provided that such offenses were punishable by death, by and large.

People like to claim, "oh that was just for the women", but that's simply not true.  Yes, women adulterers were killed, as we all are well aware.  The underlying logic of it, as brutal as that was, is that a man shouldn't be forced to raise the offspring of some other man, and death put an end to the chance of that occurring, and perhaps to the offspring as well as the offending woman. 

Grim.

But death was the common punishment for men as well, and it was typically directly meted out.  The man discovering the offense very often simply killed the other guy, and that was regarded as okay.

Indeed, as late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code provided:

Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided that the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance or assent to the adulterous connection.

In other words, if husband came home and found Jim Bob Diddler in bed with his wife, he could kill him.

And we should note that yes, that's completely contrary to Christian morality.  You can't run around killing people, even those in bed with your wife.

But the old, pre-Christian, law allowed for this.

Black Buffalo Woman.

Indeed, a famous example of this is given by the example of Crazy Horse, whose early affections had been towards Black Buffalo Woman.  In spite of his known feelings for her, she married No Water while Crazy Horse was on a raid.  In 1870, he carried her off while No Water was out on a hunting party.  The next day, No Water caught up with him, shot him in the face with a revolver (hitting his nose) and breaking his jaw, his shot being misdirected due to a third party attempting to intervene.  Crazy Horse was laid up due to his injuries for months, but had escaped death.  The blood feud was ended by No Water giving Crazy Horse a horse in compensation for his injures, which must have been galling to No Water knowing that Black Buffalo Woman and Crazy Horse had spent one night together, but which was deemed justified in light of there being questions about Black Buffalo Woman's long term marital intent.  Crazy Horse was stripped, in turn, of his position as a Shirt Wearer.

No Water in later years.

I've known, FWIW, of one killing here which was pretty much under those circumstances and I personally know a fellow, who was an FBI agent, who came home to find a coworker of his in bed with his wife.  In the latter case, he gave the guy one hour to clear out with the stated intent that when he came back in an hour, if they were still there, he was killing him.

His instructions to his spouse were to clear out as well.

They did.

Anyhow, Ms. Winter's behavior is only possible, as noted, due to chemistry. We've used chemistry to defeat our biological functions, but not our psychological and psycho-biological ones, and at least for the time being, we're not close to doing so.  Indeed, if we do, it'll be the end of the species.

Let's go back to Black Buffalo Woman.

Several months after Crazy Horse's attempt at taking her, she gave birth to a light skinned child.  That must have been all the more galling to No Water, as Crazy Horse was light skinned as well.  Indeed, while people aren't supposed to speculate on such things, his light feature and aquiline nose have lead to some speculation that he descended from a French trapper a generation or two prior to his birth, and I'll just go out on a limb and say it's likely so.¹   Anyhow, this gives a biological example of why this is so deep in our DNA.  No Water wanted his wife and knew what the relationship between men and women meant.  He already had three children by her.  Her departure with Crazy Horse was a massive act of betrayal as well as resource disaster.  Some nine or ten months later, he likely ended up burdened with the child of another man, but sucked it up and carried on.

And here's a second reason.

Disease.

Whatever the multiple partner of this type has been common in any form, venereal disease has been absolutely rampant.  There's really no exception.  Indeed, that's probably all the more we need to say on that.

Now, on this, a person might wonder for a second about polygamy.  I'm not a defender of polygamy, but polygamy and polygamous behavior aren't the same at all.  The wives of a husband in a polygamous society are his, not for sharing.  Pretty obviously, if they were shared in any fashion, with our without his knowledge, the disease spreading opportunity is really enhanced.

This shows, once again, how prophetic Humanae Vitae really was.

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. 

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

What was warned of here has now happened on a large-scale, with not only men regarding women as mere instruments of satisfaction, and vice versa, but a modern Western society obsession with our lower regions, even basing entire "lifestyles" on it.

None of which is capable without a complete chemical sterilization of our natural systems in a manner that we'd not tolerate on any other topic.  It's unnatural on an epic level.

Footnotes

1.  One of Crazy Horse's two wives, Helena "Nellie" Larrabee (Larvie), was half French.  

History has strangely not treated Larrabee well, seemingly because she influenced him to basically settle down.  That's really unfair, quite frankly.

Related Threads:

I know how.

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Leopold

Going Feral: Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Le...: 

Subsistence hunter/fisherman of the week. Aldo Leopold

Famous for his writings and the creation of "The Land Ethic", Leopold came to his views on nature and philosophy because he was an avid lifelong hunter.

Leopold bow hunting in New Mexico, 1938.

Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Note:  This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives.  I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.

There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.

What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:

2 Dubium about the claim that the widespread practice of the blessing of same-sex unions would be in accord with Revelation and the Magisterium (CCC 2357).

According to Divine Revelation, confirmed in Sacred Scripture, which the Church “at the divine command with the help of the Holy Spirit, … listens to devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully ” (Dei Verbum 10): “In the beginning” God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and blessed them, that they might be fruitful (cf. Gen. 1, 27-28), whereby the Apostle Paul teaches that to deny sexual difference is the consequence of the denial of the Creator (Rom 1, 24-32). It is asked: Can the Church derogate from this “principle,” considering it, contrary to what Veritatis Splendor 103 taught, as a mere ideal, and accepting as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine?

Which was:

Question 2

a) The Church has a very clear conception of marriage: an exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the begetting of children. Only this union is called “marriage”. Other forms of union are realized only “in a partial and analogous way” (Amoris laetitia 292), which is why they cannot strictly be called “marriage”.² 

b) It is not a mere question of names, but the reality that we call marriage has a unique essential constitution that demands an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities. It is undoubtedly much more than a mere “ideal”.

c) For this reason the Church avoids any kind of rite or sacramental that could contradict this conviction and give the impression that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

d) In dealing with people, however, pastoral charity, which must permeate all our decisions and attitudes, must not be lost. The defense of objective truth is not the only expression of this charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness and encouragement. Therefore, we cannot become judges who only deny, reject, exclude.³ 

e) For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage. Because when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea to be able to Live better, a trust in a Father who can help us to Live better.

f) On the other hand, although there are situations that from the objective point of view are not morally acceptable, pastoral charity itself requires us not to treat as “sinners” other people whose guilt or responsibility may be attenuated by various factors that influence subjective imputability (cf. St. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17).

g) Decisions which, in certain circumstances, can form part of pastoral prudence, should not necessarily become a norm. That is to say, it is not appropriate for a Diocese, a Bishops’ Conference or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and in an official way enable procedures or rites for all kinds of matters, since everything “that which is part of a practical discernment in a particular situation cannot be elevated to the category of a norm”, because this “would give rise to an unbearable casuistry” (Amoris laetitia 304). Canon Law should not and cannot cover everything, nor should the Episcopal Conferences claim to do so with their various documents and protocols, because the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to the normative ones.

Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing.  This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did.  Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.

Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs.  Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves.  Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.

Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned.  Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves.  Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.

Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it.  Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O.  Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.

Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.

What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:

Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.¹ And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.  

Eh", you may be thinking.  I thought this thread was on something else.  One of these is not like the other.

Oh, they very much are.

Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics.  He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either.  The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch.  It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.

Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic.  Of interest, the document stated:

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present, because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience... We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.[17] It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity

* * *

72. If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries,[44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.

Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden.  They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."

We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative.  It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel.  A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.  Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow.  That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view.  A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.

Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view.  He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety.  Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science.  He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.

On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this.  People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it.  At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about.  Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy.  It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.

So the connection in all of this?

What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt.  A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:

Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.

Kennedy Hall in Crisis. 

We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.

Is there a world view that counters any of this?

The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.

Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature.  Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above.  We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.

People don't like the modern world.  It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.

We really don't have to do this.  Getting back from this, however, will not be easily.  It would take a purpose driven societal effort.

The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past.  It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not.  It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.

It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air.  It just isn't synthesized.

If it were. . . 

Footnotes.

1. These Bushmen bands are not Christian, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.