Some Observations re. GSAs

The whole "Gay-Straight Alliance" nonsense is something on the minds of Ontario Catholics. Sorry if you aren't an Ontario Catholic and find this boring.

1. McGuinty is pursuing this because he thinks it will make him look like a human rights hero and, thus, pay off at the polls. Normal type of thinking for a politician. Is he correct? Only time will tell. This poll says 'no,' he is very incorrect. Apparently he might be going to the polls as a guy who doesn't respect different viewpoints. Certainly the age of same-sex heroes is over. No one even really thinks that way about Obama. The 'first to do x' about gay this and that is getting a little silly now. One of the men in my wedding party went on to become the 'first out gay Mountie.' Do you know his name? Bet you don't. And no one will remember McGuinty in about five minutes.

2. The pathology closest to homosexuality is pedophilia. Why are we expected to embrace the one and abhor the other? I have compassion for every one who suffers. That is very Christian of me.

3. Why would one ever think that a Catholic school would need a club for gays? Because people have bought into the lie that Christians treat gays poorly. It is a lie created by Hollywood. There is no statistics proof of it, nor can there be since the Church teaches that those who experience same-sex attraction must be treated with great compassion.

4. It is true that there are people who experience same-sex attraction. Why should such a psychological state be privileged as per se virtuous? There are no rational grounds for this, thus there must be non-rational grounds for it. Part of it is hatred for Christianity, but part of it is the strong need to feel good and/or important. Wouldn't it be great if there was a group that was being mistreated and you stood up for them? The problem is, the Catholic Church treats people with same-sex attraction very well - exceedingly well - and, you would not be helping a disenfranchised group at all, but a group with a lot of wealth and political power.

5. Homosexuality is a very problematic lifestyle. That it can yet be considered 'healthy' all hinges on the role that social ostracization plays. If one judges the Church negatively for failing to see the healthiness of homosexuality, upon what do they base their conviction that it is healthy? Studies have typically indicated it is very unhealthy. See here too. In this light, celebrating homosexuality seems an awful lot like celebrating smoking.

6. These confused young people who say they have same-sex attraction (SSA) are being treated like pawns by the McGuinty government. People who are experiencing psychological turmoil should not be thrown into the public gaze like this. Now, of course, there are two types of young people who identify as SSA - genuinely confused adolescents, and those who just want any kind of attention, who don't have a genuine bone in their body. The latter group is unfortunately the larger one. My comments here refer to the former group, those who are genuinely struggling. Homosexualists don't distinguish between the two, won't admit there are these two groups.

7. It all comes down to whether or not SSA is normal or not, good or not. The philosophical inconsistencies of the popular approach to it (as exemplified by the McGuinty Government) are so astonishing as to require pages of analysis themselves - maybe some other time. Is it normal? No, it is normal for the sexes to be attracted to that which can lead to the procreation of new life. That is the biological norm of organism that reproduce sexually. Is it moral? Catholicism privileges with moral legitimacy only married, heterosexual intercourse aimed at procreation. You don't have to share this view. In that case, don't attend a Catholic school. I wouldn't attend a Muslim school, but I would recognize its right to exist.

8. In terms of recognizing differences, even Medieval Christians usually recognized the right to exist, to maintain schools, to worship, of a people who denied the divinity of Christ, i.e., the Jews. When so-called modern, educated, tolerant people cannot recognize the right of Catholics to practice their Faith they are worse than the bigoted Medievals they excoriate. That is a very low bar, and there is no shame greater than the one of failing to meet it.

9. There is no such thing as moral evolution. Change, yes, but not evolution. The greatest lesson that the great work, Time Machine, of H.G. Wells, teaches is that evolution doesn't necessary lead you where you want. That is a lesson not only for us in terms of biological evolution, but of social evolution too. People who speak of the evolution of human consciousness have imported an unfortunate error of Karl Marx. Marx's view of history was Christian eschatology on crack. The Christian idea of progress is towards the extraneous telos that is Christ, where we will be transformed beyond ourselves without ourselves. In other words, men will not make men better, God will. Marx was closer to the truth when he said that the means of production (our culture) will produce our moral view point. Thus, women in the work force, 'homosexual marriage,' are tied to a certain type of industrial status. What this means is, change the type of culture change the ethos. You can imagine the ethos changing regarding 'homosexual marriage,' and it won't take a very big structural change to bring this re-imagining about. And the Church will still be here, as it has from the time of the Roman Empire, to the Medieval feudalism, to Early Modern mercantilism, to the Industrial Revolution, to the rise and fall of Marxism, to the age of the microchip and after. Today's liberal is tomorrow's conservative. The only problem is, history will not yield.

Things to Pray About

Fr. Hattie, OMI, is undergoing surgery tomorrow. Not a huge deal, but pray for his quick recovery.

Crossroads has started up again. Please pray for these young witnesses for life. Visit their site here.

One of my good friends is about to have her baby - today, maybe, but at least very soon. Pray for a safe and quick delivery, and good post-partum period for her and the whole family.

For a miraculous change of mind for Ontario's MPP's vis 'Bill 13.' That these legislators will come to understand that victims of violence come in all shapes and sizes and that religious freedom is at the heart of a just society. That those who wish to defend the innocent will see a fuller, more realistic perspective - one that includes all the reasons for victimization, including the profession of Christianity! That those who are under the manipulative influence of evil people in this matter will come to realize this.

A prayer for my grandfather, Ira, who will be 94 in a few weeks!

A prayer of thanksgiving for my new job! Your prayers helped me get it, that is why I entrust these intentions to you now...

(I'll give you the details re. that eventually, my friends...)

Free Education

It's all in how you understand the adjective.

Many in Quebec are pushing for tuition-free education.

I am pushing for government-free education.

Never thought I'd end up here, having been socialistically educated.

Frederick the Great, totalitarian par excellent.

One generation's truth is sometimes totally missed by another. Most education has been government-free over the millenia. In this age of so-called democratic freedom one might be surprised to realize that one doesn't enjoy a fraction of the freedoms that a citizen of Rome did, for instance, yes, oppressive Imperial Rome. For instance, the freedom to learn what and how one desired. No, the freedom wasn't limitless but it was certainly freer than today - by a long shot. Astronomically. So, how is it that Western Democracies are so inconsistent in this - that they exalt the freedom of the press, but not the freedom of education? I respond by saying that we are currently experiencing a domino-effect, one that began with the circumvention of freedom in education.

When was educational freedom circumvented? It was never totally free, I repeat, not even in the minds of the most 'free-thinking' Enlightenment figures, like Voltaire, etc. The first big problem was endemic to the initial rejection of church-run education: it was a new arrangement of sovereign and philosophe, typified by Voltaire, on the one side, and Frederick of Prussia, on the other. Voltaire's famous History of Charles XII of Sweden indicates very clearly how both sides had in mind how education was to be used to further the totalitarian pretensions of the state. In every case - England, France, Germany, Russia, education was sponsored, not out of abstract love of the good or the true, but to make the state more powerful. People were pawns in this. So, in other words, state-run educational systems are extension of totalitarianism. This three hundred year history has seem some darker moments and some lighter moments, but the progress has been relentless and the greatest casualties, truth and freedom. The fact that all Western States have very fixed limits for variation in education seems to argue that the contemporary state depends upon uniformity. I don't this is strictly speaking the case, but inertia is a powerful thing.

I think we need to recognize that the state can only interfere with education, never aid it. People were made for freedom, and the state merely to facilitate that from egregious violations, usually from external, hostile forces.

Going back to the history lesson. I recall how universal education was sold in my Canadian history textbook in grade twelve. People like George Brown and so on were heralded as heroes. I say, rather, that they are villains. Universal is always unilateral and homogeneous. Whereas the Romans permitted Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, Epicurean, Jewish and other conceptions of pedagogy, our system does not.

Voltaire, best bud with all the totalitarians of his time.

People should have the freedom not to contribute to the state. Here is where some of you who have been sympathetic to me so far will part company. Hear me out. Education should not be treated according to the dictates of an industrialized economy, but rather, according to the dictates of the good of the human person. But this is a harder thing to plan for - and don't bureaucrats love to plan! It is easier to figure out what curriculum will make good workers for the industrialized economy, but to make good human beings - that is far trickier. We need freedom to discover the best way - and the government won't permit that.

Few would doubt that our system of education is poor, appallingly poor. When a single-mother can teach her child to read, write and calculate better in her basement than an entire, monolithic system supported by billions of dollars can, that is appalling, and yet we see this time and again. The fact that the only argument that is consistently made against homeschooling is how is comes up short in terms of the socializing aspect is not an argument against it at all. In other words, it is granted that a mother on her own can bring about better results than a billion-dollar system.

But that the system is poor does not deal with my objection to it. It could be good. Maybe. Let's say that it was, and by good I mean that it taught the 3-Rs well. Say that was so.

Even if it were effective, the cost is too great. I don't mean money (it is it is also too expensive), no, I mean the cost to freedom. Let me say it again, our modern states would not permit Socrates, Jesus, Plato, Buddha, Zeno, and Aristotle to do their thing. In Germany parents who would send their kids to any of the above-mentioned would be thrown in jail - as in Canada, so would people who went to Jesus' school (because of His teaching on marriage, among other things).

The state has come too far to permit rivals, like Siddhartha or any one else who wanted to discover a better way.

Maybe next post should be about the cost to virtue - particular to civic virtue - of this totalitarian kind of education.

She's Upstairs with Sarah

'Where's the baby?" I ask coming out of the bathroom.

TMI?

Having grown up in a house with just two brothers - the two most wonderful men in the world, by the way! - the younger of whom was only two years my junior, babies hardly ever came my way. It's not that we didn't have strong paternal affection for them though. Again, this younger brother and I were the loving fathers of two African-Canadian Cabbage Patch Kids.

What I wouldn't have done for a baby in the house! All of us. How our lives would have been markedly improved. Just like Sarah-Grace's life is now being blessed by playing with her baby sister one-on-one in her bedroom. In this day and age, that is an enviable scenario. Girls do not cease to love babies because their parents do not often give them siblings. I know this because, as a boy I did not!

What does a baby do for a girl, for a child?

Gives joy. For as difficult as it is to raise children, the hug of a little baby, her smile, her laugh, her silly noise, are serotonin factories.

Teaches empathy. Sadly lacking today. Real empathy, not I-heart-you-text-empathy. The baby is not like you and the child quickly learns that everyone has different needs and experiences things differently.

Teaches how to raise children. Teaches how to be a mom or dad. If you actually think those are good things!

Orients us back to the civilization of love. Loving human relationship are what matter most. That is the only kind of success that truly matters. Part of the ethical crisis facing young people today - nay, our society as a whole - could be solved by the addition of a baby to the family. Remember me bashing those Quebecois yesterday? Well, their behaviour is not their fault: they were only children and their families were, thus, quite susceptible to thing-orientation and to shallow relationships. They didn't learn to live authentically.

While most of her peers have posters of Justin Bieber on their walls, or those teenage vampires, Sarah-Grace has pictures of her baby sister.

A father couldn't be prouder.

(The attached pictures are all per my sister-in-law's, Mary Jane's, request, very delayed in satisfying!)

Why Do I Have To Say It?

On the Cardus Blog Josh Reinders was much kinder than I am about to be regarding the Quebec student protests. I have heard a lot of things said about this matter, a lot of things critical. But in my estimation they neither go far enough nor actually hit upon the fact of the matter.

Commentators have called the protesters selfish, lazy, unrealistic - and all those descriptions are true, but there is one thing they have not said: they are true Quebecois.

True French, true children of 1789, true socialists, true Europeans, etc. - whatever appellation works best for you. They are not anomalous, they are what their culture designed them to be. You'll know that I am right by noting two quick facts: the first minister of education couldn't cope with the situation; Premier Charest is almost as impotent.

Aren't politicians like Charest time-tested fighters, who have clobbered political opponents in a milieu of such ferocity and incivility as to make mere bloggers like me quiver in fear? Don't they daily have to fight as equally well-attuned rhetorical machines in the National Assembly? Grilled by irate tax-payers, special interest groups, lobbyists, wealthy donors, journalists...? I mean, I'm a pretty good debater in the classroom setting, but these people would mince me.

So why are they altogether unable to confront a student protest, a protest which probably fewer than 10% of the rest of the country supports?

It's kind of like a JP II Generation Catholic having to dealing with an unholy pope. Luckily they have not had to cross that road. God is merciful.

Twilight of the Idols. (A wonderful work by F. Nietzsche)

Opposing a protest! But protests are holy movements of the people, according to that culture.

Now, things are about to get a little stinging.

Culture. No, they are culture-less morons. If they had culture they would not have blindly imported the decadent European extravagant opposition to every practical thing. Like industry, like education, like money, like family, like objective norms, like work. It's easy and lazy to tear down, and that's all their protest is.

What do they want? What do they believe?

It's ironic how some critics are saying that these students don't realize the economical implications of their wants. Oh, they do. They want a socialist system, thus, they are unresponsive to observations based on actual fiscal concerns. But the bigger problem isn't that they are like the Greeks - that they want something for nothing. The bigger problem is that the adults who should be teaching them - "No, Jacques, stuff costs money, and money comes from hard work" - are not teaching them this, because they only taught them one thing: that all that matters is wish-fulfillment. French culture - European culture - increasingly so since 1789, has been built around the fantasy that everything that is is bad and that new things should replace them, and that there will be no negative consequences. It is a culture against culture. Culture is about cherishing the way of a people. French culture is about deriding the ways of the people.

It's not that the parents of these children are lazy - any lazier than the rest of the country. It's that their ideas are lazy.

How do deriders protect a system of education against deriders?

Who cares. Vive le Quebec libre. And let the rest of the country move on,calling upon a bit of old fashioned Protestant work ethic, as they sink into the St. Lawrence.

And I have a right to these observations. As things go, I have the student debt of about 400 average Montreal students combined. Of course, I went to the same number of classes as 400 average Montreal students combined. So that's seems fair, I guess.

These protesters are exactly what their parents made them to be.

While the rest of the country meanders toward a state more like these Europeans-amongst-us, Quebec is feeling a fuller fury from moral bankrupcy.

Which is God, Which are You - Cat or Dog?

I am looking after - more like looking in on - my friends' dog.

Now, I was unsurprised by the outpouring of doggy-emotion that greeted my arrival when I came to feed him today. You expect that from a dog.

I never grew up with dogs. We were a cat-family. And now I see why that was intended by God for my well-being. And it wasn't in order to protect me from dog-stink. It was to give me a glimpse into my own self.

Leave a cat alone and you come back to resentment. Hard-looks and wounded feelings. Eventually she forgives - but she never forgets.

A dog, on the other hand. You can't leave them alone for two minutes. Needy. But grateful when you come back.

Which are you like? Easily wounded, but effusive and ever-forgiving? Or, slow to anger and very slow to forgive?

I am the resentful cat. Yes, I like my distance, but don't think that means I don't care. I'm watching you.

Now, which one is God like?

It's hard not to think of Him as the ever-grateful, ever-forgiving, ever-slathering, dog.

Yet, of course, to be theologically accurate here, God is not like people who are like dogs. Dogs are like people who are like God.

At Least It's Spring

Half the family is home sick, including me.

But unlike most times when this is so, we can look outside and see a lovely spring day, not a depressing, dark, cold winter's day. And we can open the windows so we don't have the feeling that we are just breathing back in the same putrid air over and over again.

When I started to feel better I immediately did two things: washed the dishes and mowed the lawn. Why? Nothing adds to the sick person's depression like being surrounded by mess and by jobs that he knows need to be done.

Small mercies from the Lord.