Category: Culture Matters

The massacre of innocence

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This one was too long coming, often thought but ne’er so formidably expressed. This is truth speaking to the entrenched liberal establishment, that is, the power of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Who are the sexual abusers of our children asks Lisa Fabrizio, columnist in The American Spectator?  She doesn’t name names – because there are too many of them – but she mercilessly blasts the hypocrisy of the pharisaic establishment feigning scandal at the atrocities which they themselves have been perpetrating while pointing condemning fingers by the new time.

The last time we saw someone raise their head above this parapet and suggest that the permissive culture of the ‘sixties and subsequent decades had anything to do with the increase in the abuse of children there were screams of outrage from the defenders of the spirit that particular age who saw in it a threat to their precious “freedom” to engage in whatever “consensual” aberration grabbed their fancy.

Fabrizio will have none of it and shouts “stop!” to the hue and cry in the wake of the Pennsylvania State mess and the revelations of the heinous abuse crimes of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky.

She writes: The unanimous war cry across the nation has been: ‘We have a moral responsibility to protect our kids; we must preserve the innocence of our children!’ Are they kidding? Can they be serious? How can our children be innocent or protected in a country that, rather than defining deviancy down, has defined deviancy up; up to the level of not only acceptance, but approval.

Penn States’ scandal is for her just another example of the putrefying infection that runs right through American culture. There are few of us who cannot also apply it to our own diverse cultures and societies. The price will be paid in millions of dollars by Penn State for its negligence – as the price has been paid by other institutions for their negligence. But how long are we going to have to wait for recognition of the responsibility of those driving the ideology of permissiveness for the corruption of the innocence of whole generations of children. When will they be confronted with the reality of the abuse they have perpetrated: the TV organisations, film producers, the entertainment industry, the political campaigners for so-called freedoms to indulge this, that or the other deviant behaviour – on the basis that no such category of behaviour exists.

Fabrizio asks: What are the messages that our culture daily delivers to our kids? That they don’t need fathers to nurture and raise them; the idea that males are essentially useless to the family unit has proven not only dangerous to society — it is no coincidence that Sandusky chose as his victims, boys with no fathers in their homes — but criminal. That any brothers and sisters they might have had are too expensive or inconvenient, and will either be chemically destroyed or murdered in the womb because in today’s America, the family budget prioritizes toys for adults over the desire and care for children.

How can innocence survive in any of our citizens — let alone the youngest and most vulnerable — when our very laws now define classes of people based solely on their sexual proclivities? No, the innocence of our children cannot be preserved until it is restored.

If we really cared about our children we would stop teaching filth and perversion in our public schools by brainwashing them to believe it is good for Heather to have anything other than one Mommy and one Daddy who are married to each other. We would stop promoting the idea that free and unfettered sex is beneficial for them in any way and stop glorifying it on TV, using children as straight men for any number of unfunny and repulsive sexual jokes.

Sandusky and others who physically assault the bodies of our children are indeed monsters, but as the lynching parties assemble, let them broaden their gaze to include those who wound the innate innocence of our children’s souls.

Until that happens, child protection in this or any other country will be little more than a sticking plaster on a hopelessly putrefying wound.

Life, death or deadlock?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

What has gone wrong? There can be no doubt but that something has gone very badly wrong when the very basis of mankind’s self-understanding has come to a pass where the vision of life and good living itself has been perverted beyond recognition. How did we get to the point where the termination of life, both by oneself and by another is considered a moral option? How did we reach a point where in the chaos and confusion emanating from the meltdown of our financial system, everyone talks about regulation and regulation agencies but no one talks about a moral sense of right or wrong or of the springs from which such a sense emanates. How did we come to lose our sense of the meaning of human love to the extent that it is now the pretext for the wholesale abuse of human sexuality?

Some years ago – not too many – in the aftermath of the emergence of Islamic rage against the West, the historian Bernard Lewis asked the same question about the collapse of Islamic civilization. He did so in a book which was simply titled, What Went Wrong?

I attended Mass one morning recently in a Dublin parish church. The parish priest concelebrated while a priest whom I had not seen before was the main celebrant and he preached a short homily. That homily gave me at least part of an answer to the question, what has gone wrong for us?

Bernard Lewis, 85 years of age, is professor emeritus at Princeton University and for many is thedoyen of Middle East studies in the West. How, his question asks, did the preeminence that the Islamic world once enjoyed and the civilization it had created collapse?

Lewis’s argument is that the success of Muhammad in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also an empire dominated by that faith, served to create a society that is totalitarian by its very nature, bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West where Christianity, in contrast, does not demand control over the political and economic spheres.  The very foundations of these respective faiths for him hold the key to the histories of both civilizations – to date.

Could it be that the true crisis of the West today is that it may now be about to abandon the very reason for its triumph – its Judaeo-Christian heart, in favour of an amalgam of so-called “politically correct” principles founded on…nothing.

 Lewis argues as follows: The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by Christian example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures.  The first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others follow, can be seen in the contrasting  foundation myths–and I use this expression without intending any disrespect–of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. 

The children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land.  Their leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter.  Jesus was humiliated and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over  the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose. 

Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own lifetime.  He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace.  In a word, he     ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.

On the contrary, Lewis goes on to explain, Judaism and Christianity had the concept of the secular state forced upon them by circumstance from their very beginnings. Where Christian theologians like St. Augustine developed complex theories to explain and justify the secular state, Muslim thinkers never even had to face the dilemma. 

Judaism and Christianity, in that view developed spiritually and lived spiritually in alien worlds before they came to terms with those worlds. They knew what true freedom was. They knew the place of law and regulation but also knew what their foundation was. On the other hand, lacking any sense of the secular and the eternal play between the City of God and the City of the World within which lives our sense and enjoyment of human freedom on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic world became crippled and dangerously resentful of its triumphant rival.

But if that rival now abandons the principles of the faith – and in particular if the ministers of that faith begin to abandon the authentic teachings which, in its Scriptures and traditions, have sustained it for millennia –  and which have given it its very essence, then the future is very uncertain indeed.

And this is where my epiphany in a Dublin parish church comes in again. After that Mass I went to talk of my concerns to the homilist – but the bird had flown. What had he said that was so worrying? It was more what he did not say that was the problem.

His homily referred to a film in the context of the gospel of the day (Matthew 9. 1-8). The film recounted the story of a young man who announced to his family and friends that he was gay. His mother was distraught and left the event at which this announcement took place, apparently rejecting her son in the process. The preacher made no further comment on this other than simply to pose the question to himself and his congregation: “How do I react when people tell me things I don’t particularly want to hear”.

It was no earth-shattering heterodoxy. But that phenomenon of late 20th century heterodoxy of which it is a symptom might ultimately put in the shadows the breach in Christendom effected by the 95 theses nailed on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. The moral implication was clear to all. There was no moral issue whatsoever about the choice and actions of the gay son. The moral deviance was on the mother’s side, in failing to deal adequately with nothing more serious than something that she did not want to hear – like a choice of political party she might have disapproved of, a choice of a wife deemed unsuitable, or ever a rejection of her very good dinner. There was no recognition that what the mother might have been dealing with was the realisation that her son had made a choice which she knew to be immoral according to the norms of natural law, the teaching of the authentic Judaeo-Christian faiths and the law of God.

If our secular world continues on its rudderless way, guided only by groundless and flawed politically correct principles, and if the ministers of the Judaeo-Christian religions abandon their duty to hold up before their faithful followers the authentic shared principles of those religions, then the freedom we have enjoyed coming from the very heart of those religions will perish and we will end up with totalitarian systems fighting it out among themselves – to the death or deadlock.

The Shattered Mirror of Our Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Many years ago the late Bernard Levin, the most gifted columnist of his generation, wrote an article for The Sunday Times entitled The Cracked Mirror of Our Times. In it he cited a number of social and cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century that for him represented all that was rotten in the British society in which he lived and – often – lamented. I am glad he has been spared witnessing the shattered mirror of the culture of our times today.

Even the most hardened cynic must have found his stomach turning as he listened to the Irish Foreign Minister proclaim his support for “true love” and marital commitment  in Dublin at the weekend. The Irish Labour Party leader, Eamon Gilmore, proclaimed these sanctimonious words in what was probably the most tacky and tasteless  and naked – almost literally – display of hedonism and sexual exhibitionism ever seen on the Irish capital’s streets. It had nothing whatsoever to do with true love, true friendship or any kind of permanent commitment.

Gilmore declared that it was time for Irish legislation to move in the direction of public opinion and legislate for gay “marriage”. This will not be easy because constitutional hurdles will have to be overcome by means of a popular referendum. At that point many feel that the politicians in parliament – who are fully subscribed, almost to a man, to the media’s gay agenda – will find that public opinion may be of hues other than those of the rainbow. It will be even less easy if the people  Mr. Gilmore is campaigning for continue to display themselves in  vulgar exhibitions of the type witnessed in Dublin’s Fair City at the weekend.

In Facebook comments on Gilmore’s statement,  Maria Conroy Byrne asks if there is “any political party that would disagree with him? As far as I can see, they all seem very similar at the moment. Is there any brave TD (member of the Irish parliament) who’s willing to put his head above the parapet and express a different opinion?” Brendan O’Regan’s view is simply that “they’re afraid to appear illiberal.” That fear stalks the political streets of Ireland today just as the rainbow exhibitionists did in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on Saturday.

As the gross display drew to a close on Saturday Gilmore said he congratulated the organisers. He said that the parade also had a political dimension.

“As leader of Labour, a Party for whom the politics of personal freedom is so central, I acknowledge that when it comes to promoting understanding and respect, progress has been made in recent years. However, there are some outstanding matters, and if we as a Party are serious about building a new progressive society, these are matters that we will have to resolve.

“I believe that in certain key areas, our laws are out of step with public opinion. I don’t believe for example, that it should ever be the role of the State to pass judgement on whom a person falls in love with, or whom they want to spend their life with.

“That is why the issue of same-sex marriage is to be included for consideration by the Constitutional Convention. I believe in gay marriage. The right of gay couples to marry is, quite simply, the civil rights issue of this generation, and, in my opinion, its time has come.”

If it has, and if that time has anything of the flavour of what Dublin witnessed on Saturday, then it is going to be a nasty and brutish time indeed. The bizzare and grotesque representatives of humanity who displayed themselves on the streets of the capital last week are the people who claim to be eligible for the nurture and upbringing of children. Good night.

(an earlier version of this post appeared on MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog this morning)

An open letter to Mr. Kevin O’Sullivan, the Editor of the Irish Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

While there is an element of what you, Mr. O’Sullivan, might call ideology – but what I would simply call professional instinct and religious fidelity – in this, ultimately it is a matter of trust in the integrity of your newspaper.

I am a journalist and at the start of my career worked for a newspaper which stood alongside The Irish Times as one of Ireland’s three national dailies. I know how honest mistakes, errors of judgement and differing personal perspectives can all render news presentation less accurate and dependable than editors would wish.

However, the story on the front page of yesterday’s Irish Times shattered all my confidence and trust in your paper’s sincerity and commitment to even-handedness. The entire thrust of the story and my dissatisfaction with it as straightforward presentation and reporting seemed to me to come from something inherently dishonest.

I would be reassured if you were to tell me that there was here an honest mistake or a simple error of judgement at play. If not I have to say that I doubt if I can continue to subscribe to the Irish Times, something that I have been doing consistently for 50 years. A paper which could bring itself to stand over such a gratuitous and tendentious news report is no longer a reliable source of news.

The news report was in fact nothing less than a pretext to make a not-so-veiled attack on the Catholic Church and its teaching. I had to read it several times before I could believe that it was actually saying what I seemed to understand. I still cannot work out what connection it was making between Catholic moral teaching on contraception and sterilisation and the dubious medical procedure which was ostensibly the subject of the report.

In the end all I could see was that an individual doctor seemed largely responsible for the continued use of this procedure in a particular hospital when other hospitals had ceased to follow this procedure. That he did this was attributed to the “church”. Carl O’Brien’s introductory paragraph on the front page – or was that your subeditor’s work, as undoubtedly your headline was – told us that the Government’s draft report “says one of the reasons it was used was to obey laws influenced by the Catholic Church that banned contraception and sterilisation.” However, in his report on page 5 Carl writes that the “report suggests this”. There is a difference.

This is a bad and regrettable scene, Mr. O’Sullivan. It simply adds to my growing suspicion – a suspicion I have so far tried to resist out of respect for the integrity of my profession and my colleagues – that the Irish Times really does have an anti-Catholic agenda.

I asked a few friends this morning if they had read the article and what they thought in meant. One described it as an utterly ridiculous story with a ridiculous angle. Another no longer reads the Irish Times because of the constant slant it gives its stories on the Catholic Church. A third only reads the Irish Independent now. That is something I would rather not have to do – but I fear that for Irish news coverage I may now have no alternative.

Sincerely, Michael Kirke.

Cassandra calling…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Jonah Goldberg has just written a new book entitled The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Goldberg is the bestselling author of Liberal Fascism, a book which set out to dismantle what he saw as the “progressive myths” that are passed-off as wisdom in our schools, media and politics.

Goldberg’s view of ascendant liberalism is that it portrays itself as reasonable, rational and rooted in the truth of the real world. The members of the liberal establishment claim to know what justice is and that those who oppose them don’t. If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, he argues, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that they’re not ideological.

Goldberg identifies the ideology of non-ideology as the Trojan Horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He argues that the grand Progressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false-flag of reasonableness is alive and well. He holds the view that this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

Golberg’s line is basically that this Trojan Horse is carrying within its belly a selection of “objective” journalists, academics and “moderate” politicians peddling some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun aphorisms.  Their hero is Barack Obama who casts himself as a disciple of reason and sticks to one refrain above all others: he’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and dogma of the right, solely concerned with “what works.”

Typifying this aphoristic onslaught are the following, with Goldberg’s antidote response:

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?

Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with the British Empire and ended slavery.

Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer: So you won’t mind if those ten guilty men move next door to you?

We need complete separation of church and state: In other words all expressions of faith should be barred from politics …except when they support liberal programs.

David Mamet, a one-time liberal who blew the whistle on that establishment in the past decade, likes the book. Mamet in his liberal days was in fact a genuine liberal. The time came, however, when he realised the shallowness of his fellow travellers. He shouted “stop”, loud and clear, in his own book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, published last year.

“What can one say”, Mamet muses over Goldberg’s book, “to the self-proclaimed ‘independent’ who never has nor ever will vote other than Democratic; or to the wise soul suggesting, of any conflict at all, “the truth must lie somewhere in between”? Mr. Goldberg reminds us that one must stand up and demand of the muddled and supine either an absolute declaration of their principles and acknowledgment of the results of actions having flowed therefrom or a straightforward admission of their intransigence in refusing a concise reply.”

Goldberg’s take on the predicament of our civilization in terms of Barack Obama casting himself as a disciple of reason – whereas in fact he is nothing more than a pragmatist who is solely concerned with “what works” – finds an echo in another assessment of our current culture by Toby Young in the current issues of The Spectator. Young is re-visiting that seminal 25 year-old book by the late Professor Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, which opened with the following sentence:

‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’

In the intervening years since Bloom’s book was published, Young believes that this belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. This all-encompassing relativism, he says, — which Bloom said was accepted as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free society’ — is shared by the educated and uneducated alike.

How did this happen, he asks? He first offers what he describes as a superficial answer – it is simply that children are taught to believe it.

If they happen to be studying the International Baccalaureate, they are literally taught it. One of the core requirements in the IB diploma is something called ‘Theory of Knowledge’ — or TOK for short — which is essentially a crash course in epistemological relativism. On the IB’s official website, it’s described as follows:

‘It is a stated aim of TOK that students should become aware of the interpretative nature of knowledge, including personal ideological biases, regardless of whether, ultimately, these biases are retained, revised or rejected.’

And the deeper reason? Why, he wonders, do responsible grown-ups feel a moral obligation to impose this doctrine? How did the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger become such an integral part of the fabric of liberal democracy?

The root of the problem, I think, is that the bonds of Western civilisation have become too weak. In our increasingly diverse and multicultural society, the only values that command anything like universal assent are procedural ones — ethics, rather than morality. We’ve been taught to value tolerance and mutual respect and to abhor racism and homophobia — essential conventions if all the different ‘communities’ are to get along — without being asked to believe in anything substantial to anchor those conventions in.

On the contrary, as Bloom observed, the prevailing orthodoxy that’s taught in our schools and universities is that one set of substantive moral values is no better than any other and to claim otherwise is to risk appearing racist or sexist. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the survival of the procedural conventions depends upon a general scepticism about anything deeper or more meaningful — that the one strengthens the other.

At the time, I thought of Bloom as just another Cassandra, albeit one who could write with extraordinary clarity and power. Now, as the forces of chaos gather on the darkling plain, I’m beginning to think I was wrong. Today, he looks more and more like a prophet.

Kevin Tobin, commenting on Young’s Spectator essay brings us right up to date on the state of play.

At a conference held here in the United Sates, just last week, he tells us, a spokesman for the University of Notre Dame observed that behind the current freedom of religion firestorm here lay a smug secular conviction that religious belief is mere bias and not particularly worthy of respect. That is how far the idea that truth is relative has already taken us — to a direct conflict between a secular government and millions of religious Americans. Dangerous stuff. Stay tuned.

Back in 1987, as Young says, Bloom was cast in the role of Cassandra. Not unlike Cassandra, while people were intrigued by him, not many really took him seriously enough to do anything about his dire analysis. There are now many more prophets of doom around. That they didn’t heed Cassandra in Troy was unfortunate – for Troy. That we remain beguiled by the relativism-riddled but nonetheless totalitarian clichés enumerated for us by Jonah Goldberg, and that so many cling to the idea that their personal choice is the only ground of truth, may prove to be the source of an equally great misfortune unless we come to our senses soon.

Triple tragedies of our times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The great tragedies of the 20th century are commonly accepted as Marxist Communism and National Socialism. No one should be so naive as to think that we have seen the end of either. But we can regard them as contained. But there was a third tragedy which may prove to be far more lethal. It is all-pervasive and is destroying societies across the globe. It is the elevation of sexuality as the most important element in life.

Think about it for a minute.

First of all, from its impact on lives. The combined body count of civilian deaths under the Nazis and under Stalin is about 20 million, according to Timothy Snyder, the author of the highly-praised 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. But according to the World Health Organization, there are about 40 million abortions, world-wide, every single year.

Second, from its impact on politics. In 2012 the most powerful nation on earth goes to the polls. The world is facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. The war on terror enters its tenth year. And what are the issues which divide Americans most? Same-sex marriage and abortion.

Opinion polls on the American presidential election show once again that the issue which concerns most people is the economy. Nevertheless, what is being highlighted by the Democrats is not the economy. Social policy issues, what they call human rights issues and personal attacks on their opponent’s characters – back down as far as schoolyard misdemeanours – seem to be their main concerns.

The issues they have chosen to fight on are important. Their policies on these issues, however, are leading their society further down the road of multi-faceted destruction through unrestrained individualism, coupled with chaotic and ungoverned sexual license provoking family break-up and educational dysfunction on a scale never seen before in a civilized society. They, of course, call this “progress”.

Where did all this come from? Prospect magazine in its February issue this year carried a short letter from a psychiatrist commenting on a feature on Sigmund Freud in its January issue. In it he rather unceremoniously rejoiced that the father of psychoanalysis was no longer flavour of the month – the idea suggested by the philosopher John Gray in the January article.

“Freud is out of favour because he was a deluded pervert who wrote a lot of idiotic tripe with about the same value as the Book of Mormon. I had to put up with this nonsense as part of ‘a balanced education in psychiatry’ as a medical student in the 1980s.”

Freud may be out of favour but the impact of what he did has remained long after the niceties of his theories on therapy have been forgotten or have been rubbished. He and the sources from which he derived his ideas and popularised them have had a devastating effect on the way a large portion of humanity now thinks about the human condition. The elevation of sexuality as the most important element in the life of human beings, the destruction of the idea of religion as anything other than – at best – a useful delusion, the coupling of science with atheistic determinism, can be clearly seen as a central plank on the platform of 21st century liberalism. This is the liberalism which is now responsible for the holocaust of the unborn; it is the liberalism which is behind the destruction of marriage and the family – with the consequent evils which flow from that. It is the liberalism which has generated the contraceptive mentality, separating the sexual act from its most fundamental raison d’etre, the generation of children.

Gray’s article emphasised the importance of the sources for Freud’s theories and among them highlighted Schopenhauer. He maintains that Schopenhauer

“shaped much of the central European intelligentsia’s thinking at the start of the 20th century. Schopenhauer’s impact on fin-de-siècle European culture can hardly be exaggerated. His view that human intelligence is the blind servant of unconscious will informs the writings of Tolstoy, Conrad, Hardy and Proust. Schopenhauer’s most lasting impact, however, was in questioning the prevailing view of the human mind—a view that had shaped western thought at least since Aristotle, continued to be formative throughout the Christian era and underpinned the European Enlightenment.”

“Schopenhauer posed a major challenge to the prevailing Enlightenment worldview. In much of the western tradition, consciousness and thought were treated as being virtually one and the same; the possibility that thought might be unconscious was excluded almost by definition. But for Schopenhauer the conscious part of the human mind was only the visible surface of inner life, which obeyed the non-rational imperatives of bodily desire rather than conscious deliberation. It was Schopenhauer who, in a celebrated chapter on ‘The Metaphysics of Sexual Love’ in The World as Will and Idea, affirmed the primary importance of sexuality in human life, suggesting that the sexual impulse operates independently of the choices and intentions of individuals, without regard for—and often at the expense of—their freedom and well-being.”

Isn’t that were we are now, whether we accept it or not. If not, why the all-pervasive exploitation of sex in advertising and marketing, in entertainment, and its emphasis in education? Gray argues that

“From one point of view, Freud’s work was an attempt to transplant the idea of the unconscious mind posited in Schopenhauer’s philosophy into the domain of science. When Freud originated psychoanalysis, he wanted it to be a science. One reason was because achieving scientific standing for his ideas would enable them to overcome the opposition of moralising critics who objected to the central place of sexuality in psychoanalysis.”

Of course, the “moralising critics” have not gone away you know. They are still battling against this terrible legacy of Schopenhauer and his disciple and all their descendents. Just now it seems an uphill struggle but it is without doubt one on which the future character of civilised society depends: one where man will either succumb to a hedonistic and materialistic slavery, characterised by the callous destruction of life of the very young, the old and the infirm, or one where he can live a life in true freedom.

(This is an edited and shorter version of an article posted last Wednesday. Part of the original article has been incorporated in the article about Jonah Goldberg’s new book which will be posted later today)

A very sobering but useful presentation

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Mercatornet’s Conjugality blog has just posted a video presentation from the American Family Research Council on one of the burning social policy issues of the hour. What? The political drive to change the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman to a bond between – well, who knows where it will stop? It looks at the the issue from a Judaic-Christian point of view but the factual picture it presents is truly disturbing from any perspective. Watch it here.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – that’s nature’s way

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

“No celebration for this lesbian”, Lauren Taylor tells us in yesterday’sWashington Post. She makes some good points in her response to President Obama’s jump off the fence earlier this week – but she still misses the truth at the heart of this debate.  Like her we all “love the idea of commitment, of getting community and family support for a relationship, and of the accountability to that community and family.” The institution of marriage as we have known it for millennia is about far more than that. Essentially the things it is about have to do with the very special relationship which a man and a woman can share, a relationship which can never be equated with that between two men or two women. In other words, conjugality.

We will all agree with her that “anyone who wants to should have a ceremony and make a commitment and throw a big party. But that shouldn’t affect whether they then get health insurance, or get to take time off to take a sick person to the doctor, or are able to sign a permission form for a field trip.”

She tells us that  she is “not fighting for access to marriage, and I wish that wasn’t where the gay rights movement was putting most of its effort and resources. (Violence, housing, employment, education, anyone?) But (with apologies to Groucho Marx), if someone is trying to keep me out of this club, I want in. How dare anyone say that I don’t deserve access to marriage and all it brings? How dare they say I, and my relationships, aren’t good enough?”

Those fighting for the very existence of the institution of marriage are not telling her that her relationships are not good enough. They are just telling her that they are not the kind of relationships which fit the definition of marriage. Try this analogy: If you want to swim you need water to swim in. Mountain air is very refreshing and beautiful but it won’t support you swimming. Pretend you are swimming in it and you will just look silly. If you are a man and want to marry you need a woman to marry, and vice versa. Or as Julie sings in Jerome Kern’s Showboat, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta love one man till I die, Can’t help loin’ dat man of mine.” The sea is for fish, the air is for birds and marriage is for men and women – sorry, that’s Mother Nature’s way.

(Posted earlier to MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog)

Are Obama and Cameron playing with electoral fire?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

As was widely anticipated, President Obama’s “evolution” on the marriage question has now reached its final resting place in the gay lobby camp. But the political consequences are not so clear and the electoral rout which the other convert to the redefinition of marriage cause, Britain’s David Cameron, experienced at the polls last week might be worrying him. But really, given his imprisonment – not necessarily an unwilling confinement – by the ultra liberal caucus, he had little choice as to which side of the fence he was ultimately going to choose.

Political observers in Britain are already speculating that the coalition government there, following the disastrous showing in last week’s nation-wide local elections, rewrote the content of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, the speech written by the Prime Minister but read by the Queen to Parliament and outlining the forthcoming legislative plans. “Gay marriage” was not mentioned in the speech…. Read more on the Conjugality blog.