Has Everyone Gone Crazy?

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” was a tool Rudyard Kipling used to measure a man in the early 20th century. I think he’d agree that in the 21st century, it has gotten much harder. A few examples:

One — The “smartest guy ever to become president” is pushing a peace agreement with Iran, the biggest terrorist nation on earth. We’re about to release $150 billion Iran will use to perpetrate even more terrorism against us and our allies. Our wicked-smart president tells us not to worry when over a million Iranians chant “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” because they don’t really mean it. Iranian leaders promise to “wipe Israel off the map” but they don’t mean that either.

Two — A local Maine daily showed a picture of a woman with a buzz cut and wide eyes with a confused and profoundly troubled expression. A sane person senses immediately she’s mentally ill and she’d just been arrested for murder. As the Portland Press Herald reported it:

Police said MacCalister saw Wendy Boudreau [her victim] in the parking lot and followed her into the store. In the ice cream aisle, he grabbed Boudreau from behind and slit the woman’s throat, Kennedy wrote. Others in the store then responded to screams. Alexandra Gogos, who works in the Shaw’s bakery, ran to the scene and tried to stop Boudreau’s bleeding. Gogos asked MacCalister, “Why? Why did you do this?”
MacCalister replied, “She looked at me funny.”
Another witness who responded to Boudreau’s screams, Benjamin Williams, also asked MacCalister, “Why?”
“I’m off my meds,” he said. “She looked at me wrong.”

Victim Wendy Boudreau

I feel bad for Boudreau’s family, of course, and for MacCalister as well. She’s haunted by mental illness, but the saddest part is how the media call her “he.” MacCalister “presents” as a man, so we’re all expected to go along, even when we consider her sexual confusion another dimension of her mental illness. If she “presented” as Napoleon, would the media then call her “Emperor”?

The York County sheriff said he can’t decide whether to house MacCalister with men or women. I have some advice for him: Your instincts tell you MacCalister is a woman, sheriff. Trust them. Don’t let the PC Thought Police convince you that you’re wrong or you’ll become just as crazy as they are.

Prosthetics for UK prisoners

Three — That’s already happened to jailers in the UK. They have to call men “Miss” when male prisoners are sexually confused, or pretending to be. Such prisoners are also to be provided with prosthetic breasts and prosthetic female genitalia they can strap on. While normal prisoners are required to wear prison uniforms, “inmates who wish to transgender may wear high heels, lingerie, dresses, wigs, make-up, nail polish, suits and ties, and other body coverings as well as,” according to gendertrender.wordpress.com and the UK Telegraph. Do you suppose some of those cons could be con artists? UK taxpayers must also fund “gender re-assignment” surgery and hormone treatments. Massachusetts taxpayers are too in that very blue state to our south. Our colleges and universities — schools at all levels — are teaching that “gender” is fluid and can change on a whim, also with our tax money.

All of which reminds me of another British thinker, George Orwell, who pointed out that: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

Four — All this craziness is having an effect. In the UK, for instance, the International Business Times reports that half of 18-24 demographic say they’re not exclusively heterosexual, while those in older demographics have traditional tastes. This plays against the carefully constructed leftist narrative that “gay” people are born that way — which they insist is the case even though scientific evidence to support it is slim or none.

About 3500 students passed through my classroom during my 36-year teaching career, including my own children. I heard about their former classmates who had claimed to be homosexual in high school or college and lived that lifestyle. Sometimes I was surprised and sometimes I wasn’t, but then I learned several were wrong about their homosexuality and ultimately married people of the opposite sex. Now they’re happily raising families.

Five — Leftist members of our Supreme Court recently claimed to find a right for people of the same sex to marry in our Constitution and are imposing it nationwide — no matter that millions and millions of Americans believe homosexuality unnatural and sinful, along with every major religion on earth for millennia. Kim Davis, a clerk in Kentucky, refused to issue a marriage license to homosexuals on religious grounds and went to jail for it. Even though another clerk issued the license, Davis remains in jail at this writing.

Kipling also said you’re doing well when:

...you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken 

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, 

And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools.

Catechism is Hate Speech?

About three years ago I began wearing a crucifix 24/7. It identifies me as a Christian. Among Christians, it identifies me as a Roman Catholic. Atheists who see it may think me an intellectual lightweight who could just as easily believe in the Tooth Fairy, or that the earth was created six thousand years ago.

Back in 2002 when the homosexual priest scandal broke, I almost left the Catholic church. There are still issues the American Conference of Catholic Bishops champion that make me cringe. Some things Pope Francis says make me uncomfortable too. Nonetheless, to follow the Magisterium (official teachings of the Catholic Church) is to believe abortion kills a human being and homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered.” That puts me on a collision course with the progressive Thought Police who would force me to shut up about what I believe.

Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, who I’ve quoted in this space before, died a few weeks ago. Five years ago, he said something prophetic: “I’ll die in my bed. My successor will die in prison. His successor will die a martyr. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” Two years later in 2012, he said he was being “overly dramatic.” Here in 2015, however, rhetoric coming from Democrat and Republican candidates for president in 2016 indicate he was more right than he knew.

The late Cardinal Francis George

He did die in his bed. Will his successor die in prison? That might have been plausible if Pope Francis appointed conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke to take his place after removing him from a key Vatican post. Burke stands his ground, and that’s probably why he didn’t fit in at the Vatican. Instead Pope Francis banished the conservative Burke to Malta and appointed someone more likely to go with the “progressive” flow in Chicago.

Last month, the leading Democrat presidential candidate for 2016 said: “Laws have be backed up with… political will… and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary Clinton was speaking about “reproductive health care,” her favorite euphemism for abortion, but her remarks indicate how far the left may go pushing their social/political agenda. They’re throwing down the gauntlet for conservative Christians — ready to use the power of government to make us change what we believe about the very nature of God and human life. Obamacare mandates to pay for abortion-inducing drugs were only the beginning.

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio seemed to pick up Hillary’s gauntlet when he said last week that anyone who believes marriage is between one man and one woman is labeled: “a homophobe and a hater. The next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech…”

Marco Rubio

Canada’s Supreme Court ruled two years ago that biblical speech opposing homosexual behavior is a “hate crime.” The Province of Alberta passed its Education Act three years ago under which “homeschoolers and faith-based schools will not be permitted to teach that homosexual acts are sinful as part of their academic program.” How long until such rulings are passed down in the USA?

It’s not as if the Catholic Church in America is conservative. With the exception of Cardinal Burke and a few others, it’s not. I attend mass every Sunday in Maine or New Hampshire, and never in the last ten years have I heard a sermon about abortion. Only once was homosexual “marriage” discussed when Maine’s Bishop Malone urged parishioners to vote against a homosexual “marriage” referendum in 2009. Rather, parish priests seem to go out of their way to avoid those subjects. That’s why I was surprised to hear Pope Francis say: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods… it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

Perhaps it’s different in Rome or in Argentina where Pope Francis comes from, but up here in Maine and New Hampshire, they’re not talked about “all the time.” They’re not discussed at all, and silence implies assent. Prior to Francis, we had two conservative popes in Benedict and John Paul II. Although Francis hasn’t tried to modify the Magisterium, he’s signaling a willingness to bend, even cozying up with President Obama on several issues. Leftists who dominate in our mainstream media are predictably thrilled. Out here in the trenches, however, conservative Catholics are dismayed.

What difference does it make?

Some of us feel we have more in common with conservative protestants than with many of our Catholic leaders in the United State, in Europe, and in the Vatican itself.