Tempus Fugit

As the old year winds down to its conclusion, it's only natural to meditate on the passage of time, our ever more distant youth, the death to which every day we are one day closer.  Our souls, of course, do not age, but our bodies do, and the world is not the same as it was when we were kids.

One thing that tells me I'm getting old -- besides the increasing sensitivity of my old injuries to changes in the weather, and the new gray hairs I keep finding all over my scalp -- is that my cultural referents are becoming obsolete.  My similes, metaphors and witticisms are intelligible to a more and more tightly circumscribed pool of listeners.  A generation has now grown into adulthood that has to Google things my generation took for granted.  More and more adults today cannot remember the following:

-- Cassette Tapes.  These were things we used to record songs off the radio -- something the newest generation of adults has probably never done.  Bonus points to you 20-somethings if you can identify an 8-track cassette.

-- Vinyl records.  Vinyl records are played on a revolving turntable.  A needle on a mechanical arm is inserted gently onto the record disk and transmits the recording from grooves in the disk to the speakers.  An LP (long-playing) record is 12 inches in diameter; in the '70s and '80s, we all had thousands of them.  There were also cassette versions of records, and we had thousands of those, too.

-- Televisions without Remote Controls.  In my house, I had to be the remote control.

-- Pong.  A video tennis game, played with a console plugged into a television set, consisting of two lines that moved up and down and a bouncing square.  This was state of the art and highly popular.  Seriously.

-- Playing Outside.  Although mine was the first generation to play video games at home, we still played outside.  I used to roller skate and ride my bike all around the block, even in the suburbs of Los Angeles.  The general rule was that when the street lights came on, you came home.

-- Paul McCartney and Wings.  In 1980, it was a revelation to us kids to learn that before Wings, Paul McCartney had been in the Beatles.  We all knew the Beatles, we just didn't know realize that Paul McCartney was one of them.  31 years later, it is a revelation to learn that there was such a thing as Wings.  I don't want to think about whether the existence of the Beatles is a revelation.

-- Rotary Telephones.  Yes, there was a time when a telephone actually had a dial where you stuck your finger into a hole in a wheel corresponding to a number (or letters, back in the days of telephone name exchanges), pulled the wheel back, and waited for the wheel to return to the start position before you dialed the next number.  I don't remember exactly when we got our first touch-tone phone, but it had to be the late '80s.  Mobile phones were a rarity, and structurally no different than an average touch-tone phone with a cord.  No cameras, no video games, no texting, no sexting, no 30-year-old adolescent co-worker taking pictures of his junk and messaging it to your phone.

-- "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran."  Also in 1980, we had the Iran Hostage Crisis.  This song, a parody of "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys (another cultural institution probably unknown to today's adults), was a reaction to the crisis.  "We're gonna rock your Ayatollah/sock your Ayatollah/bomb Iran."  In the far less politically correct climate of three decades ago, this ditty was quite popular and frequently played on the radio.

-- The Impending Ice Age.  Yes, during the 1970s, we were expecting a new Ice Age.  Any minute now.

-- Looney Tunes Cartoons.  Despite watching the unexpurgated version of these cartoons, we did not grow up to become racists.

-- All in the Family.  This show was so huge in the '70s that it is especially depressing to have to explain it to people today.  It is about the Bunkers and the Stivics, who start off all living in the same house: Archie Bunker, the loud-mouthed, bigoted, right-wing longshoreman and veteran of World War II who talks in malapropisms; Edith Bunker, his wife with the high-pitched voice, ding-batty yet wise in her own way (though inconsistently so, due to the producer's efforts to make her friendly to leftist ideology); their daughter, Gloria Stivic, who works to put her husband through school; and Mike "Meathead" Stivic, the hippie-leftist husband, diametrically opposed to Archie's politics.  The show made history with its immense viewership and its controversial subject matter.  Archie Bunker, played by the very-left-wing though gifted actor Carroll O'Connor, was basically Norman Lear's tool for making fun of conservatives.  Still, Archie is anything but one-dimensional.  He also got the last laugh in many ways: except for the bigoted blather, he turned out to be right about a lot of things, and even prophetic (e.g., predicting that Ronald Reagan would one day be president, years before the fact).

-- Mainframe Computers.  The average pocket calculator today is probably more powerful than the average mainframe, which ran on hole-punch cards and occupied an entire room.

-- Old Movies and Old Movie Stars.  We did not see the black and white films from Hollywood's Golden Age in theaters, but we did grow up watching them on television.   As a result, we could all recognize John Wayne, Cary Grant, Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart and the rest.  Today, I have to explain who these stars were, and it still doesn't ring a bell.

-- No Altar Girls.  When I was a kid, we only had altar boys.  I cannot recall that any of us girls ever lobbied to become altar girls, or were ever discontent about not being able to serve at the altar in this age before the feminists came along and told girls they needed to be offended about being "left out."  In fact, in an era when daily Mass was offered quite early in the morning, it was a relief not to be called upon to get up before the sun.

-- The Cold War and the Collapse of the Berlin Wall.  About a year or so ago, I was somewhat stunned to realize that many adults are too young to remember the Cold War or even the end of the Cold War; and a new generation just now reaching adulthood was not even born during the Cold War.  When I was a kid, we still had civil defense drills, complete with civil defense sirens.  We kids were actually concerned about what was happening between the United States and the Soviet Union.  After the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the parade of short-lived Soviet premiers, and the idiotic explanations given for their lengthy disappearances from public view, was a popular topic of conversation amongst us junior high kids.  No one who was not alive and in possession of reason during the Cold War can appreciate how all-pervasive and all-shaping it was.  No one not old enough to remember as far back as the Reagan Administration can understand just how sudden and miraculous were the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the fall of East Germany.  The Tienanmen Square Massacre in China had taken place only a few months before.  In October, 1989, my German professor -- a lady of no mean understanding, who had family in East Germany -- gave it as her opinion that the Berlin Wall would never come down, and Germany would never reunify.  Less than a month later, to her joy, the Wall came down.  Less than a year after that, Germany reunified.  Less than a year after that, the Soviet Union itself followed East Germany onto the ash heap of history.

Yes, generations before us have died out, and become mere footnotes in history; we shall not escape the same fate, nor shall those who come after us.  But the reflections inspired by the closing days of 2011 should not end there.  Although our time here is short, and the things and people that were once familiar pass away, we should still resolve, first, to use the time we have to save our own souls; second, to help as many as possible of our fellow men to save their souls; and third, to do what we can to leave this world a better place than we found it, even if we ourselves are forgotten.

Filth as a Political Statement

Much like their forebears at Woodstock...

...Occupy Wall Street protesters elevate America's level of political and cultural discourse -- not to mention hygiene.  Source.

The more I hear about the Occupy Wall Street mob, with their overrunning of public places, turning parks into garbage dumps and open-air elimination, the more I compare them to their hippie/yippie/SDS forebears -- and the more a paragraph from Leo Rosten's 1970 classic A Trumpet for Reason kicks around in my head.  I couldn't rest until I'd thumbed through my autographed copy and found, on p. 51, Rosten's pithy comments on the deliberate cultivation of filth by radicals:

The glorification of dirt is a clinical signal of psychological disturbance.  I feel sorry for the hippies who cannot know the psychological price they pay for this infantile regressing to the anal level.  The "corruption and chaos" they reject, in their search for Arcadian innocence, is -- alas -- transported within themselves.  Their hell is inside them.  It is folly for adults to glamorize the hippies' weird cult.  It is cruel to idealize mental illness as a new "youth culture."

Any less true today than it was 41 years ago?     

The Real Discrimination

Jesus, Parent 1, and Parent 2 most kind,
Bless us now and in death's agony.

It has been announced that henceforth applicants for British passports will not give the names of their mothers and fathers, but instead will be asked about "Parent 1" and "Parent 2."  This is in response to pressure from the homosexual lobby, which complains of "discrimination" against the children of same-sex "parents."

I think the best response to this so far comes from Fr. John Boyle of Caritas in Veritate, who says:

When you enter the world of political correctness you end up discriminating against those who have natural rights, the right of a father and a mother to be recognised as such, not simply as a parent. "Parent" is a term that includes both father and mother but does not distinguish between them. Each has a right to be recognised. Feminists should protest about the lack of recognition of the woman as mother. In this sense, all distinction between the sexes is denied, which is of course one of the fruits of the denial of the purpose of sex: the generation of offspring. This denial begins at contraception.

In our rush to acquire "rights" to things we have no business pursuing, we chuck our legitimate rights out the window.  Then one fine day we will wake up and find ourselves chained up from head to toe, and wonder why.

A Better Way to Commemorate 9/11

Against all odds: the Battle of Lepanto, 1571

A few weeks ago, I commented in this space about how America's quest for law, order and security has ceased to reflect a civilized order.  Now, ten years after the Islamist outrage that has provided Big Government with a convenient excuse to balloon out to ever vaster proportions, one woman is fighting back.

On March 31, 2011, a blogger named Amy Alkon refused to go through the naked scanner at the airport.  She decided not to submit quietly to the obligatory body grope that was her only alternative to the scanner, but instead to protest by sobbing loudly at being searched and bereft of her dignity without probable cause or even reasonable, articulable suspicion.  When the searching fingers of the TSA goon-ette got rather too searching and too rough -- repeatedly -- Amy took her name down and consulted a lawyer.  And also blogged about it.  Enter attorney Vicki Roberts, who sent Amy a letter on behalf of the goon-ette demanding half a million dollars for slander, libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Amy's own lawyer, Marc Randazza, fired off a response that ought to be required reading for anyone about to board a plane in the post-9/11 era.  A choice excerpt:

After the 9/11 attacks, America wallowed in fear, and ignoble politicians took advantage of that national temporary psychosis. In doing so, they foisted an intrusive security apparatus upon us, but one that was never effective at making us safer. It was, however, effective at rolling back our rights under the Fourth Amendment. We may have killed Osama Bin Laden this year, but he actually defeated the American way of life ten years ago.  On September. 11, 2001, America went from "the land of the free and the home of the brave" to a nation of mewling cowards, eager to give up their liberties for perceived "safety." One of the worst symptoms of this transformation is the TSA and its minions of blue-shirted "officers." As numerous investigations of these checkpoints' efficacy reveal, anyone with a marginal IQ and the desire to evade them can and will do so. 

While the TSA fails miserably in providing security, it excels in undermining our protections under the Bill of Rights. This petty army has done its best not only to grind the Fourth Amendment into dust, but to strip us of our dignity as human beings. The Internet is replete with videos of travelers being groped by the TSA in a way that would result in sexual assault prosecutions for people other than TSA agents, all while the victims cry, protest, and express their horror. Your client may feel that she is in no way culpable for these wrongs, but her continued employment by the TSA and her actions against Ms. Alkon are an integral and inseparable part of the TSA’s abuse of all Americans. Fortunately for all of us, people like my client take the position that TSA agents cannot simply do whatever they want – not without dissent.

Kudos to Amy Alkon for not just bending over for the enemies of liberty.  While Mayor Bloomberg purges the official 9/11 commemorations of clergy and first responders, others have found a more appropriate way to cherish the memories of those who died on that bright September morning ten years ago because our enemies hate freedom.

Throwing Your Heart in the Trash

He who is sated loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet.  

Proverbs 27:7

Now that the feminists have made the world safe for neanderthals by clearing away all the rules and taboos and social norms that once kept boorish behavior in check, and put the kibosh on the sexual exploitation of women, all sorts of things are acceptable that should not be.  And now that the unacceptable is not only acceptable but respectable, many women seem unable any longer to distinguish between a good catch and a loser.  It is at once amazing, frustrating and heartbreaking to see what members of my sex are prepared to put up with in the name of Not Being Alone.  In our oversexed world, full of promiscuity, fatherless families and irreligion, we have been trained to view ourselves as nothing.

This is a depressing tide that I cannot stem alone.  But I still want to do my poor bit to shed some light into this overwhelming darkness.  So, for all the ladies out there who are in a bad situation or teetering on the brink of one:

Your Boyfriend Is Probably a Loser If:

...He Is Violent and/or Emotionally Abusive.  Yes, this should be obvious, but sadly, for many, it is not.  Where there is true love, there is peace and trust.  Real love wants nothing but the best for the beloved; in fact, the ultimate goal of real love is the salvation of the other person as well as oneself.  No one who truly loves you is going to use physical force on you.  Period.  No one who truly loves you is going to terrorize you, or keep you in a constant state of frenzy, or belittle you or manipulate you.  Such behavior is repugnant to true love.  True love would rather die than treat the beloved that way.  If that is the treatment you are getting, run, and don't look back. 

...He Is Chronically Unemployed.  Bad times hit us all.  I have been out of work in my life, and I know exactly how harrowing it is to have bills mounting and no money coming in.  But if your boyfriend is out of work, what's he doing about it?  Is he out pounding the pavement?  Is he at the unemployment office coming the classifieds, sending out resumes, making phone calls, visiting potential jobsites, signing up with temp agencies?  Is he taking anything and everything that comes along, no matter how grueling or humiliating, until he finds a good job?  Sending out an application a day is not looking for work.  Devoting ten minutes a day to job hunting and spending the remaining 23 hours and 50 minutes to sleeping and playing video games is not looking for work.  Waiting to be named ambassador to the Court of St. James is not looking for work.  Is your boyfriend capable of holding a job for more than two weeks at a stretch, or has he had six jobs in the last six weeks?  Does he show up on time to work, and do his job diligently?  Or does he party all night and then sleep until 3:00 p.m.?  Is his mother paying his bills?  Are you?  If a guy is not serious about work, how can he be serious about a relationship?

...You Are Taking Care of His Financial Obligations to the Criminal Justice System.  First off, if your boyfriend has constant entanglements with the criminal justice system, don't walk, but run for the nearest exit.  He's not in all that trouble because the cops are out to get him: the common denominator in all his woes is him.  Secondly, if you are constantly bonding his ass out of jail, or paying his fines, or paying for his court-ordered domestic violence treatment that he has to do because he beat you up, that should tell you everything you need to know about what he thinks is your mission in life.

...You Are Constantly Accompanying Him to Court.  This might be your turkey's idea of a date, but it should not be that of any woman in her senses.  Add another three strikes if the reason you're accompanying him is because his driver's license is suspended and you are his ride.

...He Does Drugs or Abuses Alcohol.  A guy who does drugs is not taking care of business.  He is, however, wasting a lot of time and money on his habit.  Habitual drug use does impair your mental faculties over time, and it does stunt your emotional growth -- and yes, this includes marijuana.  Also, if the guy does illegal drugs in your home, or uses your car for his illegal drug activity, you could end up having your property forfeited out from under you.  Plus, people do steal in order to nourish their habit.  A guy who abuses alcohol will be a source of endless domestic misery even if he can hold down a steady job.  Marrying an addict will not cure the addiction.     

...He Asks You for Sex.  Startling -- in this day and age -- but true.  Sex is not merely recreational.  It is the deepest expression of love and commitment possible between two human beings.  It is a total self-giving.  It leads to the creation of life.  It calls for reverence.  That is why it is only for marriage.  Anything outside of marriage is a mockery.  A man who wants to bed a woman down without any sort of commitment is only using her.   Every good father understands this: that is why good fathers are the natural enemies of boys who want to bed down their daughters.  It is a shame that so many girls grow up in fatherless families, and therefore never learn this.  But if you have a good father, or know one, think about this: run from any man who wants to do anything with you that that father would protect his daughter from.

...He Wants You to Shack Up.  Remember this, ladies: shack-up relationships are made to be walked away from.  What else could possibly be the point of playing house without a marriage license?  Moving in with him will not make him marry you.  Repeat: moving in with him will not make him marry you.  All you are doing is providing this jerk with a housekeeper, an economic advantage (is he even working?) and commitment-free sex into the bargain.  And by the way, you will not hang on to the bum by getting pregnant by him, either.  If he really loved you and any future kids, why would he be afraid to enter into a legally binding commitment with you?

Ladies: it is perfectly okay to be alone.  In fact, that may well be your vocation.  It is far, far better to be alone than to live in the captivity of an emotional slave-driver.  If your man is a bum, he doesn't just need the love of a good woman.  If he is a bum, he is incapable of appreciating you or your love, except to the extent you serve his purposes for the moment; you cannot fix him.  If he is a criminal, it is beyond your poor power to reform him.  You will not succeed where the criminal justice system, with all its money and coercive police power and shrinks and probation officers, have failed.  The cube of sugar he tosses you now and then is not worth the gallons of bile you get the rest of the time. 

A man is not a unique fixer-upper opportunity.  If you can't cure a decent man of annoying little habits like leaving the seat up, or throwing his socks on the floor, or filling the bathroom sink with his whiskers, how much less can you expect to succeed in making Sir Galahad out of Al Capone.  

The Front Widens in the War on Children

I have previously reflected in this space on our society's hatred of children under a veneer of sentimentality.  Until now, nothing made this more clear than the twin scourges of contraception and abortion, jealously guarded and cherished as "rights," coupled with the spectacle of western governments attacking the seal of the confessional in the name of "protecting" the innocence of children.

As the much-reviled Ann Coulter correctly points out in her book Guilty, marriage has been effectively destroyed as an institution that protects children.  We have grown complacent in the face of wave after wave of assaults on marriage, and therefore children: the promotion of licentiousness under the guise of freedom; the divorce of the sex act from procreation; the wide acceptance of concubinage and fatherless families; the movement for "sex education" for younger and younger children, together with the distribution of contraceptives to children; and, most recently, the increasing legal recognition of "marriages" between people of the same sex.

Now that we are so nonchalant about promiscuity, and homosexuality has come out of the closet, is it any wonder that aficionados of other forms of perversion are feeling a little bolder? Now the pedophiles are lobbying to have their twisted predilections removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  At a symposium hosted by a child-molester advocacy group called B4U-ACT, Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, expressing his support for the destigmatization of sexual attraction to children.  It is claimed, among other things, that "children are not inherently unable to consent" to sex with adults; that pedophiles "have feelings of love and romance for children" indistinguishable from romantic feelings between adults; and that "the DSM should 'focus on the needs' of the pedophile, and should have 'a minimal focus on social control,' rather than obsessing about the 'need to protect children.'"  There is now even a euphemism with its own acronym for pervs: "minor-attracted people" or "MAPs."

There can be no doubt that ours is an age in which the unthinkable quickly morphs into the commonplace.  A hundred years ago, who could have imagined that by 2008, 41% of all children born in this country would be born out of wedlock?  Fifty years ago, who could have imagined that by 2011, the number of abortions performed in this country since 1973 would approach the total number of those killed during World War II?  Thirty years ago, how many people seriously believed that by 2011, ten countries and six of the United States (not to mention D.C.) would legalize gay "marriage"?

So perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss the disgusting pretensions of the cho-mo lobby.  It is now a crime in some countries to publicly ventilate views consistent with the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality; we may very well live to see a day when it will be a crime for parents to keep their children out of the reach of degenerates.

H/T The Digital Hairshirt.

Worshiping in Glass Houses...?

Bishop Tod Brown -- who, by the way, used to be the Bishop of Boise -- wants this to be the next Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.   In fact, the diocese has upped its offer to purchase the building from $50 million to $53.6 million -- cash. 

I dunno.  On the one hand, subscribing as I do to the Catholic Church's peculiar claim to be the One True Church, I kinda like the idea of the Catholic Church baptizing a building that had not previously been devoted to Catholic worship.  Plus, it is suggested that this may be the best the diocese can expect in the way of a new cathedral from Bishop Brown, who (a) is running out of time before he has to tender his resignation to Rome; (b) has a great desire to raise a Tod Mahal in the Diocese of Orange, and (c) is a man of the same stamp as the Cardinal who gave Los Angeles the Taj Mahony. 

On the other hand, there are some inescapable facts about the Crystal Cathedral:

-- It's ugly.

-- It was not designed to serve as a setting for Catholic worship.

-- It's ugly.  

-- The present bishop of the diocese is not likely to want the Crystal Cathedral to look like a space for Catholic worship.

-- It's ugly.

-- The next bishop may very well want a Catholic-looking cathedral, making this a huge white elephant to cope with.

-- It's ugly.

And what about the fact that southern California is where we keep a huge percentage of all the world's earthquakes?   Sure, the Crystal Cathedral is still standing, but it's only 31 years old: it hasn't really exactly stood the test of time.  I can picture hundreds of worshipers being julienned under a Niagara of shattered glass.

And did I mention: the Crystal Cathedral is ugly?

It is true that the current Cathedral of Orange is notso hotso, and that the diocese could really use a new one.  But maybe it's time for Catholics to stop resigning ourselves to settling for the least ugly alternative.  Surely, the best thing would be to leave the relatively small current mess to the next bishop, whoever he is, rather than saddle him with the enormity now contemplated.

Bishop Brown turns 75 this November 15th.  Let him offer up, for his flock, the sacrifice of not being able to give the diocese his own peculiar stamp.

And the Crystal Cathedral would indeed be peculiar.

To Save Bruised Reeds and Smoldering Wicks

I have been thinking lately about an occasion on which a friend in the Charismatic movement decried the rules and conditions attached to novenas, the gaining of indulgences, the practice of pious disciplines, etc., and the alleged tendency on the part of many people to get so caught up in these rules as to deprive themselves of peace of mind and freedom of spirit.  Some relief was expressed over the fact that many of these rules have been abandoned over recent decades.

Naturally, I objected, and registered my protest.  I admit to being of a legalistic bent -- it is no accident that I became a lawyer.  But although I have previously decried, in this space, the tyranny of petty rules and regulations, the question of religious disciplines and devotions does not come under the category of petty rules.  Rules that help us in the primary business of our lives on earth -- gaining heaven -- cannot possibly be thought of as petty.  In fact, I submit that Catholics who would like to do away with rules and disciplines in the Church come dangerously close to courting a parsimonious, judgmental spirit that may one day lead them out of the Church altogether.

It would be wonderful if we were all so mature in our faith as to be able to fly straight to God like an eagle flying up to the sun, instead of needing signposts and guides and road markings and other things that assure us that we are on the right path.  But Jesus knew better when He instituted the Church, and gave her the power to make rules in His name.  These rules are not bludgeons against charity; they are the product of charity.  They are tutors.  They help us to love God in the way He wants to be loved.  They help us to persevere in prayer.  For some, they help to make up for a lack of childhood formation.  They make it clear whether or not we have attained some spiritual goal for which we have striven, such as the gaining of an indulgence.  (Some Catholics, by the way, are in the unexamined habit of conceding that Martin Luther was right about indulgences, forgetting -- if they ever knew -- that he opposed not merely the sale of indulgences but indulgences themselves, which violates the teaching of the Church.)  In short, the rules are teachers, helpers and supports.  They are a means by which God not only meets us halfway, but actually stoops all the way down to us in our littleness.

There are those who think that obedience to rules is a bad reason for ever doing anything for God's sake, and that if we are going to pray or attend Mass or use the Sacraments, it is worthless unless we do so in a spirit and with a feeling of joyful generosity.  The ultimate end of such thinking is the belief that it is wrong to require Catholics to attend Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation, or to receive Holy Communion or go to confession at least once a year.  I submit that this view is not only foolhardy but opposed to generosity.  The inescapable facts are that we still suffer the effects of original sin, and therefore most of us will not do what we ought to do unless we are required to.  For proof, one need look no farther than the effective abolition of Friday penances.  If we have the choice whether to abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year, then most of us will not do it.  I did not do it until I entered the Order of Preachers, in which year-round Friday abstention is still practiced.  Nor can the case be made that the world is a better place for the failure of Catholics to observe disciplines.  This is probably one of the reasons why the bishops of England and Wales are bringing back mandatory abstention on every Friday of the year.

But those who don't like obedience are overlooking one very important thing: God does like obedience.  Ask any faithful priest or religious, in whose lives obedience is central.  St. Faustina teaches that the tiniest acts stamped with the seal of obedience are of immense value in God's eyes.  And most of us ought to know from experience that most of the time, God wants us to labor in obedience in order to train us up in the will to do His will.  Good feelings about doing things for His sake are a pure gratuity that He grants or withholds at His good pleasure, and so it is a mistake to judge the quality of good acts based on their presence or absence.  Merit lies, not in our feelings, but in our will.  And our will, tainted by the effects of original sin, needs training.  Hence rules.

Rules consistent with the Gospel and made in charity uphold the weak.  For some people -- maybe many or even most people -- obedience to rules is all they have to keep them on the straight and narrow.  Far be it from anyone to judge the quality of their love for God, or to take away their only support during hard times.  To abolish the rules is not freedom.  It is not mercy.  It is in fact an act of brutality.  It is the breaking off of bruised reeds, and the quenching of smoldering wicks.  God save us from those who want to "save" us from rules.

Dashing Ourselves on the Iceberg of Law, Order and Security

As a denizen of the criminal justice system, I can't help reflecting constantly on how much charity has cooled in the world.  It is not merely the crimes that people commit against one another that inspire these reflections.  More frequently, they are inspired by that which is done in the name of law and order.  We are now so enmeshed in a thicket of picky laws rigidly enforced that it is becoming increasingly difficult to go about one's business without running afoul of the authorities; and when we do, we suffer penalties out of all proportion to the gravity of the offense.  We put up with all this because we are led to believe that it is necessary, for the good of ourselves and of society at large.

My trip to Oakland a couple of weekends ago provided me with an especially sobering occasion to reflect upon the retreat of charity from the world, and how "necessity" provides us with excuses for driving it away.  At the Boise Airport, after having been divested of my shoes, my purse, and everything out of my pockets, I committed the unforgivable crime of not unpacking my liquid toiletry items from my carry-on suitcase before putting it through the X-ray machine.  A rubber-gloved TSA goon pawed through my personal items and held them up for public view.  While another set of goons in the background selected cute young girls out of the crowd of passengers to put through the naked scanner, I received a lecture about exceeding my ounce limitations for liquid shower soap.  As he shoved my soap, shampoo and toothpaste into a ziplock bag, the TSA goon sought to assure me of the indispensability of this degrading process.  "All this is necessary," he said, the corner of his mouth upturned.

Yeah?  When human beings are herded like cattle; made to take off their shoes and belts; groped or forced to stand naked (in effect) in front of an electronic scanner; subjected to a myriad of petty humiliations; crammed into a confined and cramped space for the duration of the flight, during which they are bossed around and generally treated like infants pursuant to federal law -- and are charged exorbitant rates for the privilege -- it is difficult, if not impossible to remember that we are incarnate spirits, made in the image and likeness of God.  Does this reflect a civilized order?  And if civilization is to collapse, what exactly are we defending that is worth all this?

Just as we are inclined to purchase peace at any price (and history is full of examples), it appears that we have allowed ourselves to be reduced to saving our hides at any price, as if there is nothing in this world or the next that is worse than death.  We will jettison every virtue, from modesty to charity, in order to stay alive; and in the process, we become slaves.  To quote a line from a famous Charlton Heston movie: is life in bondage better than death?

We must remember that we are not put on this earth for the sole purpose of prolonging our time on it.  Our overriding duty is to view this life in the light of eternity, and act accordingly.  So far from providing us a way of running from our problems, including threats to our security -- viewing the world in the light of eternity does not require us to jettison common sense -- this would actually provide us with the only really worthwhile solution. 

Can I Ask Just One Politically Incorrect Question Here?

In all honesty, I have not closely followed the Casey Anthony trial.  I haven't watched streaming video on the internet, and since I don't have cable or satellite or any other television signal coming into the house, I haven't seen most of the lurid coverage of the trial.  I did see part of the defense's closing argument, which I found tiresome as well as difficult to follow due to my not having seen most of the rest of the trial.  

One thing that does seem clear, however, is this: whatever the jury may have thought about the evidence that Casey Anthony was a miserable human being and a rotten mother, they did not think that it was enough to overcome the presumption of innocence on the most serious charges.  And now the floodgates of outrage open against the system, against the jury, and against the woman who is said to have chloroformed her child so she could go out and party.

So can I ask just one, tiny, politically incorrect question here?

Suppose that as soon as Casey Anthony found out she was pregnant, she had walked straight into a Planned Parenthood clinic and paid some doctor to abort that little girl.  Would we have gotten national outrage?  Wall-to-wall news coverage?  Twenty-four-hour legal pundit commentary?  Weeping talk-show hosts?  I mean, same outcome as what people generally believe now: a little girl, dead by her own mother's hand.

Yes.  I, too, hear only crickets.

Organ Transplants and the Culture of Death

Paragraph 2296 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Organ transplants are in conformity with the moral law if the physical and psychological dangers and risks to the donor are proportionate to the good sought for the recipient. Organ donation after death is a noble and meritorious act and is to be encouraged as a expression of generous solidarity. It is not morally acceptable if the donor or his proxy has not given explicit consent. Moreover, it is not morally admissible to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.

This paragraph reaffirms the principle, taught by Aquinas, that one cannot do evil in order that good may prevail.  But this principle is vacated so often in today's world that one has to doubt seriously that an ethical post-mortem organ donation is possible.  Call me selfish, but I refuse to be an organ donor: immediately in the wake of the first successful heart transplant in 1967, the definition of death changed so as to allow organs to be harvested from people who are not in fact dead (see this and this).  

What proponent of assisted suicide and euthanasia does not also advocate organ donation?  That the serial killer Jack Kevorkian was an outspoken proponent of harvesting organs, particularly from suicides and criminals, should give us pause to consider to what extent organ donation serves the cause of death, rather than life.  But it turns out that Kevorkian was merely one of a line stretching all the way back to Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who performed the first successful human heart transplant.  In his excellent 1980 essay on euthanasia, "The Humane Holocaust," Malcolm Muggeridge sheds light on the ghoulish side of the man lauded by the world as a medical hero:

Dr. Barnard’s own attitude to his surgery is well conveyed in his autobiography, One Life. His account of his first post-mortem is almost lascivious; as are his first essays with animals, whose snug little abattoir, he tells us, “smelt of guinea pigs, rabbits and hundreds of mice. Yet it was like heaven, and even today those odours excite me with memories of our first days, so filled with hope and dreams.” One of his dreams was to “take a baboon and cool him down, wash out his blood with water, then fill him up with human blood”; another, to graft a second head on a dog, as has allegedly - though I don’t believe it - been done in the USSR.

In the world's first successful human heart transplant, Barnard took the heart of 24-year-old Denise Darvall, who had suffered severe brain damage in an auto accident, and put it into the body of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky.  Washkansky survived for 18 days.  It turns out that Barnard injected potassium into Denise Darvall's heart in order to paralyze it, so that she would be technically "dead" for purposes of performing the transplant.  In other words, he murdered her for her heart.

Wasn't the killing of Denise Darvall worth it?  Heart transplants are all but routine now, thanks to her sacrifice and the pioneering work of Christiaan Barnard.  Besides: she would either not have survived long, or else she would have lived out her days as a vegetable.  The answer is that we come back inevitably to that now-foreign principle that you cannot do evil in order that good may prevail.  How can we press cold-blooded murder into the service of life?

"In Christian terms, of course," says Muggeridge, "all this is quite indefensible."

Our Lord healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the dead, gave back sanity to the deranged, but never did He practice or envisage killing as part of the mercy that held possession of His heart. His true followers cannot but follow His guidance here. For instance, Mother Teresa, who, in Calcutta, goes to great trouble to have brought into her Home for Dying Derelicts, cast-aways left to die in the streets. They may survive for no more than a quarter of an hour, but in that quarter of an hour, instead of feeling themselves rejected and abandoned, they meet with Christian love and care. From a purely humanitarian point of view, the effort involved in this ministry of love could be put to some more useful purpose, and the derelicts left to die in the streets, or even helped to die there by being given the requisite injection. Such calculations do not come into Mother Teresa’s way of looking at things; her love and compassion reach out to the afflicted without any other consideration than their immediate need, just as our Lord does when He tells us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked. She gives all she has to give at once, and then finds she has more to give. As between Mother Teresa’s holocaust of love and the humane holocaust, I am for hers.

How easily murder disguises itself as compassion.  But the reality is that as soon as we are in a situation where we can avoid one evil only by committing another, we have at that moment reached the end of human resources.  Then the only course open to us is to prostrate ourselves before Him in Whom no one trusts in vain.

Color Me Unsympathetic

So Live Nation's attempt to cash in on Charlie Sheen's continuing implosion by getting people to pay to watch his drug-induced rants is off to an inauspicious start.  Sheen's "show" at the Fox Theatre in Detroit ended prematurely amid boos, jeers, and a steady stream of walk-outs.  People who paid anywhere from $49.00 to $84.00 (and God knows how much more from scalpers) are demanding their money back.

Articles on the bombed-out performance quote audience members as saying they expected a comedy show.  Baloney.  Whatever other kinds of expectations these sharks may claim, the fact is, they smelled blood in the water.  Spurred on by Charlie Sheen's prior embarrassing conduct, they paid for front-row seats to his continuing meltdown.  As far as I'm concerned, they can consider the loss of their shekels a down payment on the penance they deserve for exploiting a fellow human being in his affliction and demeaning his dignity -- however complicit Sheen himself might have been in it.

Besides which: these vultures got exactly what they paid for.  They bought their tickets in the hopes that Sheen would behave like a drug-crazed jackass, and that's precisely what they got, however unrealistic their idea of such behavior might be.  The reality of addiction bears no resemblance to a sitcom: scripted and predictable, with every crisis neatly resolving within half an hour.  The reality of addiction is perpetual chaos, frenzy, injustice, selfishness,  manipulation, insecurity, unpredictability, bottomless consumption, and an endless series of catastrophes, one after the other, punctuated by fines and terms of imprisonment.  These people paid to see all this, and now they're not happy; whereas anyone who has ever had to live with a substance abuser could have described it to them for free.

I for one have no sympathy.  In fact, I hope these hyenas don't get their money back, just as I hope Live Nation loses huge on this disgraceful speculation of theirs.  

Vulgarity as a Servant of the Common Good

*****WARNING: CRASS LANGUAGE IS QUOTED HERE*****

For quite some time now, I have been noticing bumper stickers with this logo:

The pink ribbon, of course, is a symbol of breast cancer awareness.  But this logo is an example of how, in recent years, the crusade to find a cure for breast cancer has been coupled with fifth-grade-boy-humor slogans like "Honk if you love boobies!" and "I love my big tatas" and "Caught you looking at my tatas."  So I started wondering: how did the cause of breast cancer research, of all things, fall into the hands of the vulgarians?

It turns out that "Save the Tatas" is a brand.  "Save the Tatas" sells a wide variety of products, from T-shirts to ball caps to baby and dog attire to something called "Boob Lube" soap, all sporting the above logo or some similar specimen of mammary-gland humor, a percentage of the proceeds of which (the website claims 25%, totaling $606,000.00) is supposed to go to funding breast cancer research.


But "Save the Tatas" has competitors.  There is another outfit out there called "Feel Your Boobies," which also sells merchandise, whose goal is to issue a constant stream of adolescent reminders to women to perform breast self-examinations -- or, as they can't get enough of calling it, to feel their boobies.  Then there is "Save2ndBase," another hawker of merchandise, including T-shirts with slogans such as "Take Care of Your Rack," surmounted by an image of deer antlers, and "Save 2nd Base, surmounted by two large, strategically-located baseballs.   (At least now, at long last, I finally understand what "getting to second base" means.)

Clearly, there is money to be made with all this breast cancer merchandising, and the adolescent gimmickry is a tool for making money.  The purpose of this inquiry, however, is not to determine whether the money for all the pink ribbon junk is really going to fund breast cancer research (and there are those who say that very little of it actually does).   Nor is it to find out how much of the money raised actually goes to the abortion industry (in fact, donees of  the above groups include the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which in turn gives money to Planned Parenthood, and also takes time out to publish documents that purport to debunk the theory that abortion contributes to breast cancer). For our present purposes, we can assume that every last dime raised by the sale of "Save a Life, Grope Your Wife" T-shirts actually goes to fund legitimate breast cancer research.  The question here is whether a net gain redounds to the common good by pressing vulgarity into the service of finding a cure for this deadly disease, even if it raises huge quantities of money that would not otherwise be raised.


I can already hear the howls of opposition.  "But this is about breast cancer research!  This is about curing a disease that kills thousands of women every year!  This is about raising awareness for early diagnosis!  What could be more important than saving lives?"  Certainly, saving lives is important (although, as noted above, the Susan G. Komen Foundation does not further the cause of life by contributing to the already overflowing coffers of Planned Parenthood).  And breast cancer is no joke: the National Cancer Institute says it is the most common cancer in women after skin cancer. 


But there are other values.  We are not put on this earth either for the sole purpose of prolonging our time on it, or to devote ourselves entirely to eating, drinking and being merry.  Our overriding duty is to view this life in the light of eternity, and act accordingly; and we ought, while we are here, to do all we can to create a society that is conducive to this end.

The coarsening of public discourse, and the celebration of the low and the crass, is destructive of this end; nor can it really be said to achieve its ostensible purpose.  So far from drawing attention to the seriousness of breast cancer, the vulgarisms peddled on bracelets and T-shirts and hats really draw attention only to themselves, and to those who sport them -- witness the websites that peddle these wares, which encourage customers to send in photos of themselves wearing or displaying them.  All these things really are are a way for people who feel straitened and confined by the requirements of decorum to publicly flout the rules of polite society; to congratulate themselves on "caring" while avoiding the grueling and messy toil that making a real difference requires; and to win admiration and validation for their impudence, which is touted as courage or forthrightness.

And by exalting coarsened sensibilities, all we end up with is the transformation of people -- especially women -- into objects.  All this focusing on "boobies" and "tatas" does nothing but reduce women to nothing more than the sum of their body parts.  And since women are the ones pushing and promoting this garbage, we make the world safe for neanderthals by stripping ourselves of the social defenses that formerly kept their boorish behavior in check.   Worse, we lose the ability to distinguish between decorum and boorishness.  It should come as no surprise to us to find ourselves at the mercy of the mouthbreathers and knuckledraggers who regard us as nothing more than playthings.  But it will be our doing, because we encouraged it, and because we lashed out at the good, chivalrous men who would otherwise have intervened to prevent it.


When you stop and consider it, we really do not want a world that encourages the proliferation of this sort of thing:

But that is exactly where we are headed.  Crassness and vulgarity make treacherous servants, and we are fools to think we can harness them for the good.

How We Hate Our Children

I suspect that when we read Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickelby, we are tempted to give ourselves virtuous airs over how far advanced we are as a society.  After all, there are no Dickensian workhouses presided over by overfed tyrants in this country, or festering cesspools of tuberculosis, thin gruel and regular scourges passing as boarding schools.  Armies of grime-covered, emaciated children do not rise before dawn to file into textile mills, and couples with ten or 15 children are not forced to crowd into one narrow, windowless room in a rat-infested tenement in a broken-down slum.  

Dickens paints a picture of a world dominated by naked brutality.  But we today sigh and cluck and shake our heads at it from the midst of a world in which brutality reigns even more supremely, and is only papered over with sentimentality.  Witness these gushing felicitations over the success of Elton John and his homosexual partner, David Furnish, in securing an infant for themselves:

We are beyond thrilled Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish were able to fulfill their dream of having a child, and on Christmas Day no less! But we can't help wonder who their "mystery" egg donor was, and which sperm was used to create little Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John.

Technically Zachary has two dads and two moms -- it was reported yesterday that sources at the surrogacy center in Encino, CA confirmed Elton and David used an egg donor separate other than the surrogate mother. So was a separate surrogate used to protect the egg donor's identity? Or did Elton and David find a willing donor with all the right genes who was willing to have her eggs harvested but NOT willing to carry the child?

And who did the sperm come from? Was it Elton's, David's, or was another "mystery" donor thrown into the mix? There's no denying Sir John would be very particular about his future son's genes, and with unlimited money and resources at his disposal he can definitely afford to dip into the very best gene pools.

Perhaps time will tell who the biological parents really are, but until then we wish the John-Furnish family much love and happiness as they begin this new journey together.

We can't wait to see photos of Elton's brand new Blue Jean Baby!

How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

1. Two Gay Men Playing House.  A marriage consists in one man and one woman.  All the laws, constitutional amendments and treaties in the world cannot change this.   A homosexual relationship is made to be walked away from, no matter the veneer of legality. The life of a child brought into an arrangement such as that between Elton John and David Furnish is therefore a house of cards, just like that of a child born to a man and a woman not married to each other.  The desire to bring a child into such a situation is based on pure selfishness.

2. Uncertain Parentage.  We are advised that "technically Zachary has two dads and two moms -- it was reported yesterday that sources at the surrogacy center in Encino, CA confirmed Elton and David used an egg donor separate other than the surrogate mother....And who did the sperm come from? Was it Elton's, David's, or was another 'mystery' donor thrown into the mix?"  Will this uncertainty regarding lineage tend to enhance or detract from the child's sense of security?  The Catechism of the Catholic Church at 2376 says:

Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' "right to become a father and a mother only through each other."

3. The Manufacture of Designer Children.  The author of the above-quoted cloying eulogy gives it away in the first paragraph.  Note the phraseology: "But we can't help wonder who their 'mystery' egg donor was, and which sperm was used to create little Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John. And then again in the third:  "There's no denying Sir John would be very particular about his future son's genes, and with unlimited money and resources at his disposal he can definitely afford to dip into the very best gene pools."  So what happens when the child fails to measure up?  How many earlier attempts at "creating" a designer kid failed to measure up before this one was born, and what happened to them?  The Victor Frankensteins of the world no longer need to frequent morgues and charnel-houses  and get up to their elbows in filth and gore in pursuit of their disreputable aims; now they have nice, clean, sterile "surrogacy centers" to work in, with white lab coats, masks, microscopes and rubber gloves to separate them from the horror. 

4. Last But Not Least: No Proper Spiritual Upbringing for the Boy.  Suppose Elton and David take the child to church and get him a Bible.  How will the boy square what he hears in church and reads in the Bible with what he sees at home?   How will his conscience ever be properly formed?  How will he ever learn God's will for his life?  If he finds it out, what will motivate him to do it? Is it unlikely that the boy is to be groomed to follow in his "fathers'" "lifestyle choices"?  (Incidentally, was a male child part of the designer package?)

I think it's a safe bet we have never hated our children more than we do at this particular moment in history, or else we could not look upon such a spectacle as the Elton John affair with equanimity, much less beaming pride.  But we have been hardened and calloused for this moment over many years of licentiousness and sensuality.  We have given ourselves over to the pleasures of the flesh for so long that the only thing that matters to us now is our precious selves.  So when we're not aborting our children or contracepting them out of existence, we're overindulging them, or parking them in front of video games or television so we don't have to bother with them, or turning them over to the government to take care of, or sexualizing them at an early age, or -- as in this case -- treating them as commodities to be bought and sold and custom-made to suit our whims. The sentimentality with which we regard children in this society is nothing more than a cover for brutality of the worst kind.  

The Holy Father has also noticed the dire straits of children in our times.  What better way to close than with the following, from his December 20th address to the Roman Curia (emphases added):

We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin [of sexual abuse] committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility. But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times. From Bishops of developing countries I hear again and again how sexual tourism threatens an entire generation and damages its freedom and its human dignity. The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world’s great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities (cf. Rev 18:13). In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind. No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.

Dance Macabre

If you stood all of Hugh Hefner's exes in a line, one after the other, they would form a queue that would probably wrap around the earth's equator three or four times.  Having previously discarded two wives and a legion of concubines -- Hef has often economized by carrying on with multiple women at once -- the 84-year-old playgeezer has offered his soiled hand to Crystal Harris, a girl 60 years his junior.  And she, already foolish enough to have bared herself in Hefner's mag, is apparently compounding her foolishness by agreeing to marry this hound, who is old enough to be her great-grandfather.


Hey Hef: you can rob every cradle within a 100-mile radius of the Playboy Mansion, but: you're still going to die. 

On the Spoilage of Children

I have never had children, so I have been informed that my opinions on the subject of children screaming and carrying on and otherwise behaving badly in public places don't count.  From this you can probably guess what my overall opinion is: if I were in favor of children imitating air raid sirens in church or at the movies, no doubt my views would be considered perfectly legitimate.

Now I know that there are kids with special problems -- mental retardation, autism, various infirmities -- that need a little understanding.  I'm not talking about them or their parents here.  What I'm talking about here are blameworthy failures of parental authority, and their ramifications in the world at large.  And I speak as a person whose views have been -- to use a popular liberal/pop psychology buzzword -- marginalized because my childlessness has given rise to "insensitivity" and "narrow-mindedness."

So concerning children in public places, a few of my insensitive, narrow-minded and otherwise illegitimate opinions:

-- When I was a kid, I was taught to distinguish between my stuff and someone else's stuff; between my space and someone else's space; between a private place, like my own home, and a public place.  I was taught that what I can do with my own things I cannot do with someone else's (at least not without their permission); I was taught that behavior that is acceptable at home may not be acceptable outside the home.  Nowadays, though, the out-of-control behavior of too many children in public seems to indicate that they are no longer being taught these distinctions.   What ends up happening to kids who grow up thinking they can do exactly as they please at all times and in all places?  What happens to those who happen to cross their paths?  Ten years from now, are these children more likely to be thoughtful and considerate toward their neighbors? or are they more likely to wander in packs through the neighborhood, taking out mailboxes and car windshields with baseball bats, harassing passers-by, and generally making nuisances of themselves?

-- Some parents don't seem to see a need to check the behavior of small children in church.   Perhaps they are so used to tuning out rambunctiousness at home that they just carry on the habit at church.  Perhaps they don't view it as misbehavior, even in church.   Perhaps they are afraid to exercise their parental authority.  Or perhaps they want their children to think of Jesus as their Friend and a member of the family, and conclude that this requires them to let their kids run amok in church or in the perpetual adoration chapel, strewing toys and books and crayons everywhere and making noise as if they were in their own rooms or back yards.

Now, once again, I am talking here, not about parents of children with special problems, but about a parental state of mind that amounts to culpability in the matter of failing to discipline kids.  To the parents who are guilty of not teaching their children reverence, I say: okay.  So you don't believe in reverence.  I guess you can't pass on what you yourself don't have.   If you  had it, I don't see how you could bear to look upon anyone, especially your children, behaving in a manner inconsistent with it.  But what about other people who are trying to pray and pay attention, but can't because your kids are such a distraction?  The rest of us are told we need to be charitable and understanding toward you, but where do your duties to your neighbors begin?  Why does the whole world have to be at the mercy of your kids?  And if you won't rein them in, what is to become of them?  And if your kids are too little to be reverent, then why not take turns going to Mass or adoration, while one parent stays home with the kids?  Sure, it's not ideal for the family not to be able to worship together; but is this a permanent state of affairs?  Besides: why put a little child through the ordeal of being in a place where he is not old enough to observe necessary standards of behavior?  

 -- And now we come to a huge personal pet peeve of mine.  There are some places that children -- particularly little children -- should, frankly, never be taken to at all.  Part of the reason that little kids should never be taken to these places is because they are not old enough to behave with the  decorum that is demanded in them.  But then there are some places that children should simply be protected from.  Two of them are courthouses and penal institutions.  To parents who bring their kids into these places, I ask: why aren't you willing to move heaven and earth to spare them things they should not have to experience?  If you are in jail or prison, why in heaven's name would you ever want your child to see you in an orange jumpsuit or black and white stripes, caged and surrounded by armed guards?  I'm sorry, but, difficult as it may be, you ought to bite the bullet and forego the visits, so that the child need not be exposed to the sights and sounds and smells  of where you're incarcerated -- particularly, the sight of you, his parent, being locked up.  Maybe it's just not possible to hide the fact that you are where you are.  But even if there is no way to keep it from the kid, is there ever a really compelling reason to put it in his face?

As for bringing the kid to court, why would you want your kid to see you in trouble with the law?  I know why some of you bring your small children to court, and it's reprehensible: because you figure that way, you won't have to go to jail.  Not only are you using your own flesh and blood as a human shield; but you are also risking landing your kid in the system, too.  There are judges out there who will take the parent into custody and put the kid into foster care; I've seen it done.  But even if this does not happen, it pays to ask yourselves the following questions.  What will be the long-term results of allowing my child to form the impression that brushes with the law are normal?  If I expose my child to my legal embarrassments, what effects will that have on my authority over him, and his respect for me?  By forcing my child to confront these matters at an early age, am I building up or tearing down his innocence?  his sense of well-being? his sense of security?

Unfortunately, we live in an age when sentimentality has overtaken our common sense.  What is lurking underneath that sentimentality?  It's about time we gave that some serious thought.

Thread by Thread

An interesting development of the 20th and 21st centuries: the criminal courts are swamped, more than they have ever been, even in Idaho, a state whose entire population is smaller than that of many cities.  The county jails are stuffed to capacity and beyond.  I practice exclusively criminal defense, and my filing cabinet is about to explode.  Yet we live in a society where an increasing number of evils are accepted and even condoned.  How can so many people be in the system in a society where bad behavior is so celebrated?

The law distinguishes between two types of bad acts: malum in se and malum prohibitum.  Malum in se refers to something that is evil in itself -- violations of the law of God: murder, rape, theft, perjury, etc.  Malum prohibitum is an act that is (at worst) morally neutral in itself, but which the law of man prohibits -- what we might call "regulatory crimes": driving without privileges; carrying a concealed or unlicensed weapon; possessing alcohol as a minor; being in a city park after dark (yes, this is a misdemeanor in the city of Boise); carrying an open container of alcohol within city limits; tearing the tags off mattresses.   


These regulatory crimes account for a substantial percentage of my caseload and take up an awful lot of my time.  Many citizens have racked up a criminal record and even spent time in jail because they have run afoul of the law of picayune peccadilloes.  And when they are convicted of these crimes -- for more often than not, there is no defense to the charge -- they may, if they are unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of overzealous prosecutors, suffer penalties out of all proportion to the seriousness of the act.  In most cases, having a misdemeanor conviction on one's record is already a disproportionate consequence, yet this is only the beginning.  Being lawbreakers in need of rehabilitation, these newly-minted criminals may be placed on probation, made to take classes or undergo treatment, herded into programming designed to cure their criminal mentality, and generally forced to expend an inordinate amount of time, resources and money into paying their grossly inflated debt to society.  The size, scope and reach of the criminal justice system is proof that charity has grown cold in the world, and not just on the part of lawbreakers.


Where does this preoccupation with creating regulatory crimes come from?  My own theory is that it arises from the fact that we love licentiousness more than freedom.   This slavery of individuals to their appetites -- especially the appetite for sexual immorality -- extends out into society, creating havoc and confusion. Finding that there are consequences to bad behavior doesn't seem to motivate us to straighten up; instead, we search for ways go on behaving badly without consequences.  Political correctness is one way we try to blunt whatever pricks our consciences; another, and extremely popular method is to invoke the police powers of the state.  Every time an outward manifestation of spiritual disorder crops up, instead of coping with the source of the disorder, we figure the solution is to pass a new law.  Each new law is like a thread, holding back our freedom just a little.  We figure it's only a little restriction, and that it confers great benefits, so we tolerate it.  But thread after thread is wound around us until, like Gulliver, bound by hundreds of Lilliputian threads, we can no longer move.  We have exchanged true freedom -- the freedom to do what is right -- for mere license, which amounts to slavery.


We are choked with petty laws, but can't figure out why the cure for the disorder of society continues to elude us.  We strain at gnats, and let through camels.  We save the world from the scourge of open containers of alcohol in city limits, and close our eyes to the evils of promiscuity and making babies out of wedlock.  Cops with binoculars stake out school yards to keep tobacco products out of the hands of children, and the schools fill those same hands with how-to manuals on contraceptives and filthy sexual practices.  We crack down on glass bottles in parks, and celebrate in glossy magazines the adulterous affairs of bubbleheaded celebrities who live in glass houses.  We send the Civil Air Patrol out to break up kid keggers in the desert, and enshrine the murder of children in their mothers' wombs as a constitutionally-guaranteed right.  These picky rules rigidly enforced are a product of, and a distraction from, our failure to live uprightly.


The idea that it is possible to separate private life from public life is a lie.  The fact is that if morality and order prevailed in our private lives, they would also prevail in society at large, without the need for petty legislation.  But we have ceased to govern ourselves.  We want to be free to do whatever we want, so we try to beat back the assault of bad consequences, not by stopping the behavior that brings on those consequences, but by ever stiffer regulations on otherwise legitimate behavior.  We try to have it both ways.  In vain.

It is time we acknowledged that the law is a poor substitute for self-governance.  It is time we started living moral, upright lives and cut the paralyzing threads.

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.

John Adams