James Kalb

True love waits

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As counterpoint to the “queering the schools” agenda, here’s a footnote-laden Family Research Council report on Abstinence until Marriage: The Best Message for Teens. We’ve touched before on the widespread technocratic prejudice against “abstinence-only” sex-ed programs. Nonetheless, it should be obvious that it’s the abstinence curricula that are based on reason and common sense and the “comprehensive” ones—the ones that treat sex ed as a matter of providing information so that teenagers can make their own informed choices—that are untried and narrowly ideology-based. One bit of evidence on the point is that unlike “comprehensive” sex ed abstinence-based curricula do work. Another is that teenagers, who do after all have some sense of what kind of world makes them safe, welcome such programs because they want society to take a strong stand against teen sex.

O Times, o customs

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Since the New York Times plays such an important role in defining American public life, accounts of life backstage are of some interest: ‘Republic of Fear’. It seems that things have gotten really nasty under the rule of new editor Howell Raines. We have pointed out that “diversity” makes terror and utter inefficiency the two … Read more

O tempora, o mores

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A tale of two causes: “queering the schools”—mainstreaming homosexual and polymorphously perverse themes throughout education—goes forward, and the only people who complain are said to be homophobic cranks. Meanwhile, it’s a huge scandal if the Secretary of Education praises Christian schools very moderately (“all things being equal, I’d prefer to have a child in a school where there’s a strong appreciation for values, the kinds of values that I think are associated with the Christian communities, so that this child can be brought up in an environment that teaches them to have strong faith and to understand that there is a force greater than them personally”).

The links are well worth reading. “Queering the schools”—the goal is the abolition of all order in a fundamental part of the human person, his sexuality—is a remarkably evil undertaking, but nobody objects to it. After all, the abolition of gender as a principle of social order is considered an obligation of public morality today, and in order to abolish it publicly it will no doubt have to be undercut and disrupted privately in every way imaginable. Radical measures are needed to get rid of something that’s always been so basic to human life.

Radicalism and hatred often go together, so in a way it’s not surprising the comments on Secretary Paige’s remarks have been so virulent in their bigotry. U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) said they stood for “the Taliban approach to education,” for example, and joined 11 other members of Congress in sending a letter to him saying, “If you are unprepared to make clear that this sort of religious bigotry has no place in the Department of Education, then we would urge you to resign.” Personally, I’d suggest other resignations, starting with Ackerman’s.

Afghanistan now as ever

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Why does September 11 mean we should care about this? Old warlord proves thorn in the side of Afghan government. Afghanistan has never been fully under the control of any government. On the whole, that has not been so bad for those on the scene. So why should our soldiers stay there and try to … Read more

Marriage as whatever is called marriage

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In London, Ontario, a judge declined to recognize three people as the legal parents of a single child (the mother, the father, and the mother’s lesbian partner). And in an older London, the Lords rejected a request to interpret English law as permitting transsexual marriage.

The victory for the traditional definition of the family was more apparent than real. The Ontario judge declared that he would have granted the application, but held back for lack of jurisdiction. And while the Law Lords held that the requested change in legal concepts was a matter for Parliament, they also declared the existing law incompatible with the right to respect for family life and the right to marry, and ordered the Lord Chancellor to pay half the costs of the appeal.

This is where the millenial traditions of the Common Law and Anglo-Saxon self-government have ended: respect for family life and marriage means equal treatment for whatever sexual arrangements people work out for themselves and say they intend to live by. There’s nothing more or less to it than that. There’s also no apparent reason why sexual arrangements should get more respect than other arrangements. What we come down to, therefore, is that “respect for family and marriage” means “equal validity of all contracts, subject to the right of the government to intervene when it seems beneficial.” “Family and marriage” thus turns out to be identical with the abolition of family and and marriage: the extension of the regime of bureaucratically-regulated markets to the ground those institutions once occupied.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey the Supreme Court said “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As to the concept of liberty in present-day Anglo-American law, the Supreme Court was right. “Liberty” is now simply the triumph of the will, and the “respect” of which the Lords speak is simply recognition that the triumph must be equal for all wills. Such a view means the abolition of all institutions other than market and regulatory bureaucracy. Why be surprised when that result applies to marriage and family life?

“Engaging the culture”

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Christian conservatives sometimes talk about “engaging the culture,” meaning participating in mainstream public life with a view to influencing the habits and standards it presumes. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. “The culture,” as authoritatively represented by all respectable public institutions, holds that values are simply personal preferences to be aggregated and reconciled with the aid of bureaucratic and market institutions. It follows that “the culture” is willing to engage in a civil and respectful fashion only those views that lend themselves to such treatment—that are willing to view themselves as personal preferences on a par with other personal preferences. Other views are instances of “bigotry” and “hatred” fit only for therapy or suppression. So “engaging the culture” requires accepting liberal modernity in advance and so—for Christianity—committing suicide. What’s needed is something quite different: to deny the rightness of liberal modernity and to offer and live by an alternative.

The permanent identity crisis of atheism

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The question of personal “identity”—who or what I really am—is unanswerable apart from a personal God whose creative word decides the issue. That is why Eastern religions that lack such a God have no use for such questions and consider them illusions to be dissolved. The same applies to notions like a “true friend,” “true … Read more

More complaints about the post-Vatican II Church

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Why has the Church taken such a turn toward engagement with the world on the world’s own terms? The idea of opening the windows of the Church to the world is an odd one. You open your windows to life and reality. Which has life and reality, the Church or the world? When I compare mass to TV or even contemporary literature I’m not sure it’s the latter.

The job of the Church as a teaching institution, I would think, is to present the world with something the world lacks and desperately needs. It seems then that the Church, while accepting its intrinsic relation to the world, should be distinct in some visible way. Otherwise it does not look like what it is. The intention of updating things was to present eternal truths in a more accessible way. The evident effect though has been to make them invisible. They seem to blend into everything else.

The Church, it’s true, hasn’t always been visibly distinct. Paul became “all things to all men, that [he] might by all means save some.” I Corinthians 9:20-23. But what suits a man living on the edge and giving his all doesn’t suit a huge and well-established institution inevitably populated—we are talking about human beings—mostly by mediocrities and timeservers. Nor did Paul play down the scandalous aspects of Christianity. He preached “Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” I Corinthians 1:17-25. He was willing to be a fool for Christ. I Corinthians 4:8-13. Is that true of the average functionary in the present-day Church?

We cannot simply imitate the apostolic or patristic Church. When the Church came out of hiding and the living memory of the apostles, martyrs and fathers was lost, special observances became needed to remind people what the Church is. In concept they aren’t necessary but as a practical matter they are. Why has it been thought advisable to give them up?

More on Martino

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The worst thing about Archbishop Martino’s comments on the current impossibility of just war is the secular utopianism they suggest. They imply that the most fundamental issues of social life are now securely under man’s control. To the contrary, though, the reason we need God is that basic things are not under our control.

Secular utopianism is everywhere today. Support for the European Union is another instance of cooperation with the belief that a human world can be built to man’s desire and under man’s sole control. The EU has no need of God and in fact wants to get rid of Him because He is not part of their system and is therefore disruptive. So why think it’s a good thing that will turn out well?

There is also of course the problem of tyranny and indeed totalitarianism implicit in the attempt to create a fully human world. If the social world is made by man it is determined in all its details not by man in general but by particular men who as worldmakers acquire a sort of divine status. It is only insistence on the transcendental aspects of religion that can liberate us from the gods of this world. We need it now more than ever.

The peace of this world and God’s peace

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The Pope’s recent World Day of Peace message suggests that Archbishop Martino, while perhaps one-sided in his statements, wasn’t speaking altogether in a vacuum. In his message, the Pope reviewed with approval the thought of his predecessor John XXIII in Pacem in Terris. He can’t help but present the encyclical as somewhat of a medley that began with the statement that “peace on earth … can be firmly established and sustained only if the order laid down by God be dutifully observed,” but soon moved to the United Nations and wholly abstract definitions of truth, justice, love and freedom—to all appearances, an order of things laid down by purely human reason and desire.

Both popes attempt to square the circle in various ways, although John Paul II seems more vividly aware of the dangers of over-reliance on formal procedures and authorities rather than particular substantive moral commitments. The problem though is that if the latter are necessary, there’s no reason to believe that wars will come to an end. It’s like expecting sin to come to an end. But then “working for peace” becomes a matter of trying to resolve particular issues rather than creating the gigantic structures of universal permanent peace that people want. The very possibility of a “peace movement” as now understood in the world at large disappears. And if that’s right it’s not clear what these messages, with their talk of a “new stage” of the human journey, are about.

(Some background relevant to various “peace movements” can be garnered from a recent article at FrontPage about the failures of rationalist foreign policy.)