Archive for February, 2012

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And who did Mrs Wright date, again, exactly?

Posted February 16, 2012 By John C Wright

Dating the Monsters

The beautiful and talented Mrs Wright, whose maiden name is also her nom de plume of L Jagi Lamplighter, authoress of PROSPERO LOST, PROSPERO IN HELL and PROSPERO REGAINED now has her essay for an Anita Blake anthology (in my opinion her best essay) entitled “Dating the Monsters,” up this morning on smartpopbooks.com. It will remain available until Wednesday at 12:00 AM

Time was when the Romance section of the bookstore was a safe and cozy retreat from all things unfrivolous. Sure, there might be an occasional gothic or mystery romance with a terrifying moment or two, but one could basically rely on the fact that any book you took off the shelves would be like eating spun sugar. Going to buy a romance novel was like visiting the confectionary section of a bakery.

Not anymore! Where once dwelt only roses and Almack’s, now live vampires, demons, werewolves, Greek gods, and yes, even robots. Though, most of all, it is vampires. And not all these books are sugar sweet, either. It’s like heading down to the confectionary and finding yourself in hot spicy foods instead!

By now, you are probably asking yourself: How did this happen …

It started on television with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was Laurell K. Hamilton and Anita Blake who brought stories of girls and monsters to the world of popular books. Though paranormal romance is now a booming business, Anita Blake still leads the way, a giant striding amongst her younger sisters. Anita both kills the monsters and dates them. It’s like having your cake and shooting it, too.

The question naturally arises: Why monsters? What is it about vampires and werewolves—once only the stuff of horror stories—that makes them the ideal modern romantic hero? To find the answer, we must first examine the age old war between culture and drama.

 

Throughout history, a tug of war has existed between the desire to use stories to teach and the desire for them to entertain. [….]

The desire to use stories to teach, I shall call for the purpose of this essay “the needs of culture.” Proponents of this idea hope to use the medium of entertainment to lead people to make the choices necessary for a moral, law abiding society. […]

The problem is that, most of the time, the more pleasant a culture is to live in, the less interesting it is to read about. A really fine writer can make anything interesting, but few writers achieve this pinnacle of brilliance. It takes a superb writer to make the process of painting a landscape interesting to an outsider. It only takes a writer of ordinary skill to bring excitement to a chase scene with a thief and a Company assassin on ski mobiles in the midst of the Winter Olympics.

In our entertainment today, the needs of drama often outweigh the needs of culture. We would like to teach our children to be peaceful and chaste, but violence and sex sell.

Read the whole thing at http://www.smartpopbooks.com/dating-the-monsters/.

And if you really like it, you might consider buying the book in which it appears: ARDEUR — 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (sic) Series. Laurel K Hamilton herself was the editrix.

Makes a great gift! Saint Valentine’s Day is just past, therefore it is too late to get any gifts for your true love, but today is the feast day of Saint Onesimus the Slave, so get this as a gift for anyone you’ve manumitted recently.

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From the Archives: Parable of the Chessman

Posted February 15, 2012 By John C Wright

I thought it timely to reprint this article from last year, since the topic has apparently surfaced again. Italic text is new, where dated material was edited.

Parable of the Chessmen

A materialist asks whether the electrons in a brain move “according to” the laws of physics as opposed to moving “according to” the willpower of the thinker.

The dichotomy proposed by the materialist is a false one — the choice is not between a brain-electron moving “according to” (meaning 2) someone’s will OR moving “according to” (meaning 1) the laws of Newton.

Note the differences here between a proscriptive and a descriptive use of the phrase “according to”. If I shake my head to signify a negative, that is according to my will and according to the convention that a head-shake means ‘no’. That is proscriptive, in accord with a final cause. If Jack Ketch chops my head with an ax, the fall of my head into the basket is “according to” Newton’s laws of gravity. That is descriptive, in accord with a mechanical cause. The head might indeed make the same motion, but asking for an account of the mechanics is not the same as asking for an justification for my refusal.

It is not an ‘either-or’ question.

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Flynnine Brilliance from Mike Flynn

Posted February 14, 2012 By John C Wright

From the irreplaceable pen of the irrepressible Mike Flynn, venerable Boy Genius, a charming man, and one of the people to whom I will grant Way Cool Mind Powers (including clairgustatory sense)  to rule the Earth in my name once I unravel the mystery of the Dimensional Omnihedron.

Here is an article on lies, damned lies, statistics, and government mandates, with the emphasis on statistics.

If you like his essay, go out immediately and buy nine copies of IN THE LION’S MOUTH as a Valentine’s Day gift for any veterinarian dentists working on leonine dentistry.

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2012/02/statistics-obamas-and-internet-memes.html

here is one money quote:

This power grab was evidently made not so much to control the birth of untermenschen as to assert the Executive’s authority to order private citizens to buy Stuff the Executive thinks is Really Kool.  (cf. Obamacare wrt buying insurance).  It has nothing to do with whether contraceptives are a good idea; nor with whether they are legal, nor with whether lots of people want them.  It does have to do with the Omnicompetent State instructing a religious body as to which of its activities are “truly” religious and which are not.  That is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment to do so.  As Jefferson said, “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

But this president said, long before his election, that the Constitution was an “obstacle” to doing the right thing and has on more than one occasion expressed the wistful desire to rule by decree – though quickly backing off after doing so.  And after worrisome applause by his audience.  The appeal of fascism did not die with the 1920s and 30s.

Now, the old encyclical Humanae Vitae warned of four trends that would result from freely available contraception.  These can easily be seen as raving delusions of a “slippery slope.”  He predicted:

  • a general lowering of moral standards throughout society;
  • a rise in infidelity;
  • a lessening of respect for women by men; and
  • the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

As you can see, none of these…  Er, um…

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If you only read one blog post today…

Posted February 13, 2012 By John C Wright

… your day will be more productive than mine.

But by all means read this one. Bad Catholic is the Man. Ecce Homo, dude.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/02/how-the-catholic-church-became-cool-overnight.html

Marc Barnes here quotes Walker Percy, who speaks with Chestertonian eloquence and power:

This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.

And he speaks with the tongue of a lover for his beloved, a Dante to his Beatrice:

But here’s the thing about the Church. Once you begin the radical task of defending Her right to practice what She preaches, you can’t help but notice how excellent that preaching is. Thus the issue of why — precisely — the Church is against the use of artificial contraception is similarly irritating the public eye, and as it turns, ’tis a beautiful irritant. The Business Insider, an entirely secular journal, found it alarming enough to publish Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control. From the article:

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That’s it. But it’s pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it’s probably never been as salient as today.

Today’s injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

  1. General lowering of moral standards
  2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
  3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
  4. Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what’s been happening for the past 40 years.

So what happened overnight? Why is the Church’s most controversial teaching something that — suddenly — can be affirmed in the secular, public sphere without fear? The teachings didn’t change — they’ve always been awesome. Our culture didn’t change — it continues to suck. No, we owe this shift in disposition to the remarkable act of placing our hands on the desk, pushing firmly down upon it while pushing firmly up with the toes, and straightening the kneecaps until the body is aligned vertically between heaven and earth.

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Four Gates to Dis, or, the Linnaean Taxonomy of Corruption

Posted February 13, 2012 By John C Wright

In an earlier essay in this space, I offer a fourfold classification to categorize philosophy: I used the terms Stoic, Hedonist, Idolatrous, and Nihilist. The division is based on the writings of the Russian Orthodox monk Seraphim Rose. A reader has asked me to justify the classification.

The terms chosen were a balance between precision and clarity. I could have used a technical term like ‘normative’ for ‘stoic’ but at the cost of being obscure; again, I could have used a clearer term like ‘ideology’ for ‘idolatry’ but at the cost of losing a crucial implication, that ideologies are ersatz religions or secular cults, serving the same psychological need that faith in God serves, in the same way that masturbation serves the psychological need that the nuptial consummation serves, and with the same degree of fertility.

However, since I took the trouble to define my terms, the question of what connotations surround the terms becomes moot. I was not using the words in a fashion alien to their general meaning, but I did say what I meant by them, to wit:

In order to be logically consistent with the conclusion that the answers to any or all of the ultimate questions of the meaning of man’s life in the cosmos is forever beyond human reason one must either be a Stoic, or a hedonist, an idolater or a nihilist.

A Stoic says that he can endure the pain of not knowing his purpose and destiny because he must.

A Hedonist says there is no purpose and destiny aside from those pleasures a man can devise for himself before he dies, and laughs at the notion that such pleasures will pall and fail with passing time.

A man can adopt some human cause, some simplistic and simply wrong idea, such as libertarianism or communism or environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, and bring to the idols of this world those selfless impulses and spiritual hungers which otherwise would draw man’s heart to the next world.

A nihilist says such questions can have no answer in this or any other universe, because life is meaningless by definition, and the only truth is that there are no truths.

Please note that I am only discussing the four possible viable reactions to an foundational belief in the vanity of discussing ultimate questions. I use the word ‘agnosticism’ throughout not to mean merely the belief that question of God cannot be answered, but also questions of the meaning of man’s life in the cosmos.

At least one reader dismisses this classification as arbitrary and flawed. To the contrary, allow me to argue that the classification is exhaustive, essential, and correct.

Human psychology, for all its inventiveness, cannot invent a new moral code or a new motive for disobeying it. The Golden Rule exists in some form in all civilizations of East and West, as do recognitions of duties to parents and elders, charity to the poor. Murder and theft and fraud praised in no civilization, nation, or tribe; fortitude, justice, prudence, and temperance are dispraised likewise in none.

Customs and regulations differ between races, eras, and nations, but the moral principles do not. The application of the principles, however, do: It is true that primitive tribesmen, existing in a state of continual war and rivalry with all other tribes, regard strangers as enemies; but neither do our laws consider the slaying of a foe in wartime to be murder. Despite the differences in customs, the morals do not differ. A Hottentot or Bushman brought to a civilized court of law for murder, theft, rape or fraud has no difficulty understanding the moral concepts the law enforces, just as an Englishman accused of murder, theft, rape or fraud dragged to the feet of a tribal chieftain has no difficulty in understanding the nature and wrongness of the act.  Were it otherwise, anthropologists would be able to provide contrary examples.

There are, however, degrees of corruption from the universal moral code which men, including famous men who inspire or found both movements and cults and cultures. But the human mind can only invent a limited number of reasons to elude or evade the moral code their conscience reveals to them, and the reasons fall naturally into four categories: (1) doubts about the authority of the moral code (2) elevating one aspect of the moral code to an indubitable absolute, so that any other aspect of the moral code can be doubted and discarded at will (3) elevation the emotions and intuitions and irrational sentiment above the moral code (4) total denial that the moral code, or any aspect of it, exists at all.

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Slavery in China, or, a Little Unavoidable Mockery

Posted February 9, 2012 By John C Wright

In a recent article in this space The Theist Widow Cannot Regain Her Atheist Virginity I said the following:

In order to be logically consistent with the conclusion that the answers to any or all of the ultimate questions of the meaning of man’s life in the cosmos is forever beyond human reason one must either be a Stoic, or a hedonist, an idolater or a nihilist.

A Stoic says that he can endure the pain of not knowing his purpose and destiny because he must.

A Hedonist says there is no purpose and destiny aside from those pleasures a man can devise for himself before he dies, and laughs at the notion that such pleasures will pall and fail with passing time.

A man can adopt some human cause, some simplistic and simply wrong idea, such as libertarianism or communism or environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, and bring to the idols of this world those selfless impulses and spiritual hungers which otherwise would draw man’s heart to the next world.

A nihilist says such questions can have no answer in this or any other universe, because life is meaningless by definition, and the only truth is that there are no truths.

A reader, whose name in kindness I will not repeat, in reply to this, wrote:

I was speaking specifically about the arbitrary and flawed categorization of Wright’s “four groups” of stoicism, hedonism, idolatry (that one makes me chuckle the most), and nihilism … which are three out of four, philosophical theories. Not morals.

His logic is off, or at least his statement is false, when he claims that these philosophies exist to “to produce a satisfactory account for life, a moral standard consistent with human dignity, and a motive to uphold civilization.” He’s adding all this excess baggage to them, in order to fit his assumptions. I can’t speak for idolatry, but the other three are not this, and certainly not in isolation. He has also left out tellingly Confucianism, which did a fine “moral” job of maintaining one of the largest and most enduring human empire without slaves ….

My Comment: I did not at first address any reply to this reader because I did not think he was serious. In this, I did him a disservice, because an objection should be answered, even if it is not serious, if for no other reason some other reader who is serious might indeed have the same objection, and merit an answer.

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We Will Comply with Christ

Posted February 7, 2012 By John C Wright

Elizabeth Scalia over at FIRST THINGS has said, and with more charity than my crabbed heart and more clarity than my dull brain could muster, the response to be uttered to the detractors of the Church — including the talking-points reader might recognize from the comments in this space.

I reprint the whole thing without further comment:

The Counter-Cultural Church has a Credible “Yes”
Feb 7, 2012
Elizabeth Scalia

Last week’s column on the HHS mandate brought a rash of email from the usual suspects—men and women who feel passionately inclined to inform me that the church is “mysogynistic, women-hating, gay-hating, authoritarian, fetus-idolizing…” well, you get the drift. People who could not begin to accurately articulate the church’s position on most matters are quite sure that her counter-cultural stances are grounded on nothing more than hate.

The dominant narrative of the mainstream is that whatever gets in the way of what you think you should have must be founded on hate, and not just hate, but hate-without-reason. Love, in this narrative, is nice; it always says yes. Alternative points of view offering nuanced philosophies and theologies, reasoned compellingly and with depth through the ages and offered with respect? The very definition of twenty-first century hate.

Aside from revealing a general deficiency in reasoning skills and a stunning lack of curiosity as to why the Catholic church objects to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, there existed in these emails a general lack of interest in identifying what the conflict between the administration and the church is actually about. What little coverage has surfaced in the mainstream has been framed along predictable lines: those nasty Catholic bishops are trying to deny women contraception, which “even Catholic women” use. The constitutional question of whether the government has the right to define a church’s mission or usurp its conscience is ignored. For my correspondents, at least, it’s “all about contraception and the Catholic Church of No.”

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We Will Not Comply

Posted February 7, 2012 By John C Wright

IN A RELATED STORY to my last — the Leftists now would prefer schools and charities and hospitals be penalized, fined, and closed rather than be run by Catholic charities, because we do not promote sterility and prenatal infanticide.

Those champions of freedom and progress would rather see children uneducated, the sick unhealed, the poor in the street and the prisoner in the jail go hungry and untended, rather that let our despicable and unclean Christian hands touch them.

This letter sums up the situation:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever!

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith.

The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception.

Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).

The Obama Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.
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An Answer and a Question

Posted February 7, 2012 By John C Wright

This story, in two paragraphs, explains why I am no longer a Libertarian, and why I have never been a Leftist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-abortion-issues-split-obama-administration-catholic-groups/2011/10/27/gIQAXV5xZM_story.html

… a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services in late September to end funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to help victims of human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. The church group had overseen nationwide services to victims since 2006 but was denied a new grant in favor of three other groups.

The bishops organization, in line with the church’s teachings, had refused to refer trafficking victims for contraceptives or abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and HHS officials said they made a policy decision to award the grants to agencies that would refer women for those services.

[…] On the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS awarded the new grants to the bishops’ competitors despite a recommendation from career staffers that the bishops be funded based on scores by an independent review board, according to federal officials and internal HHS documents.

I am no longer a Libertarian because under Libertarian political theory it is morally wrong to give taxpayer dollars to a Catholic charity to help the victims of slavery.

Libertarians are so in love with liberty that they will not help slaves.

I have never been a Leftist because I have always been a man of logic, reason as cold and clear and shockingly clean as the streams of water from an Alpine peak. Logically, reality is real and symbols only refer to reality. When the symbols are substituted for reality, that it is a fetish.

Leftists would prefer victims of slavery not to be helped if they cannot be given abortions and condoms, and the other things Leftist fetishize as symbols of freedom, but which are either indifferent to freedom or antithetical to it. (Certainly the dead baby is not free except in the most cynical sense of the word: free of life.)

Leftists are so in love with liberty that they prefer slavery to life itself. They would rather we not help the slave at all, if we will not help her kill her child.
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Futurism and Shoepiles

Posted February 6, 2012 By John C Wright

Too often we Catholics have been criticized, nay, have been savaged, for being mere medievalists, disloyal to the modernism; the Christianity we confess has been dismissed as an anachronism promoting a moral code past its sell-by date.

I confess I am always amused when those who denounce eternal truths as old-fashioned seem not to realize this denunciation was fashionable in the days when Marx and Hegel, bastardizing Darwin, took pen to paper. The idea that truth is relative to its time period belongs to the optimistic Victorian Age. It is an idea long past its sell-by date.

The argument about anachronism is itself anachronistic: the last gasp of grayhaired and dying conformity in no sense fitted for life in the future. It is not an accusation one needs soberly to answer, since it is not a sober accusation.

But I was reminded of this recently. Crisis Magazine has an essay written by Jason Jones that you would do well to read. It is from last month, the dread date of January 22. (Hat tip to Frank Weathers at Why I am Catholic). Allow me to recite some telling paragraphs:

For most of you this weekend contains a date you’ll never forget, along the lines of September 11, or December 7 — anniversaries of profound wounds to our country as a whole, even if we didn’t lose a relative in those surprise attacks or the wars that ensued. For millions of Americans, however, January 22 portends a loss that is much more rawly personal. One woman in three who came of age after Roe v. Wade has exercised the “right” the judges discovered in 1973 to terminate a pregnancy; millions of men took part in those decisions; too often forgotten are men who (like me at 17) were bereaved of our unborn children against our wishes. All those Americans lost a family member in the events of January 22, and so this day will never slip by unnoticed, much as most of us wish it would. We’d rather not “go there,” not dredge up the guilt of many flavors—participant’s, bystander’s, survivor’s. It all feels much the same. If I can speak for the many, let me tell you we’d rather think about almost anything else, be it baseball, stock prices, or shoes.

So let’s talk about shoes.

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An Apology and an Argument about the Argument

Posted February 6, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader with the sartorial name of AndyHat writes:

Also, please watch the ad hominem: “You talk exactly like a PC Lefty seeking the unearned moral high ground, reveling in the strength of an unrestricted state.” I resent that; you have no idea what my actual views are, and I don’t believe that they’re particularly germane to the discussion. I’m simply trying to present counter-arguments to your views from a variety of other viewpoints in order to better understand the arguments you’re making.

Sir, the justice of your comment cuts me to the quick, and I admit the error and seek to make amends. Having once been a Libertarian myself, I have great respect for the breed. The main flaw of the philosophy is that it is inflexible to the point of folly, but the main virtue is that it is inflexible in its purity. To hear a Libertarian blithely espousing statements in direct opposition to the foundational principles of Libertarianism is unheard-of.

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Army Chaplains Gagged & Occupiers Throwing Condoms on Catholic Schoolgirls

Posted February 6, 2012 By John C Wright

Two stories, passed along without comment. Draw your own conclusions.

First story, quoted in full:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/290147/army-silenced-chaplains-last-sunday-kathryn-jean-lopez

Army Silenced Chaplains Last Sunday
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
February 3, 2012 4:58 P.M.
Comments
29

In Catholic churches across the country, parishioners were read letters from the pulpit this weekend from bishops in their diocese about the mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services giving Catholics a year before they’ll be required to start violating their consciences on insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. But not in the Army.

A statement released this afternoon — which happens to be the 67th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Dorchester, on which four chaplains lost their lives – from the Archdiocese for Military Services explains:

On Thursday, January 26, Archbishop Broglio emailed a pastoral letter to Catholic military chaplains with instructions that it be read from the pulpit at Sunday Masses the following weekend in all military chapels. The letter calls on Catholics to resist the policy initiative, recently affirmed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, for federally mandated health insurance covering sterilization, abortifacients and contraception, because it represents a violation of the freedom of religion recognized by the U.S. Constitution.

The Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains subsequently sent an email to senior chaplains advising them that the Archbishop’s letter was not coordinated with that office and asked that it not be read from the pulpit. The Chief’s office directed that the letter was to be mentioned in the Mass announcements and distributed in printed form in the back of the chapel.

Archbishop Broglio and the Archdiocese stand firm in the belief, based on legal precedent, that such a directive from the Army constituted a violation of his Constitutionally-protected right of free speech and the free exercise of religion, as well as those same rights of all military chaplains and their congregants.

Following a discussion between Archbishop Broglio and the Secretary of the Army, The Honorable John McHugh, it was agreed that it was a mistake to stop the reading of the Archbishop’s letter. Additionally, the line: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law” was removed by Archbishop Broglio at the suggestion of Secretary McHugh over the concern that it could potentially be misunderstood as a call to civil disobedience.

The AMS did not receive any objections to the reading of Archbishop Broglio’s statement from the other branches of service.

So not only were chaplains told not to read the letter, but an Obama administration official edited a pastoral letter . . . with church buy-in?

Didn’t people flee across an ocean-sized pond to be free of this kind of thing?

UPDATE: Army spokesman confirms “the Army asked that the letter not be read from the pulpit.”

Second Story, quoted in part:

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/occupiers-dump-condoms-on-catholic-school-girls.html

By Todd Starnes

A group of Occupy Wall Street protesters disrupted a Right to Life rally and threw condoms on Catholic school girls inside the Rhode Island state capitol building.

Barth Bracy, executive director of Rhode Island Right to Life, said their rally had to be cut short after the Occupiers began screaming and refused to allow a Catholic priest to deliver a prayer.

“This is their idea of civil speech but we believe it’s an outrage,” Bracy told Fox News & Commentary “They started heckling, chanting and blowing whistles. They shouted down a priest.”

Last week’s rally was held inside the rotunda of the state capitol in Providence. Bracy said the Occupiers, along with some pro-choice demonstrators, infiltrated the crowd of some 150 pro-lifers. He said the pro-life crowd was made up of senior citizens, mothers with young children, Cub Scouts, and school kids.

Bracy said one of the most egregious incidents occurred when an Occupier climbed to the third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms on girls from a Catholic school.

“What kind of individual throw condoms at Catholic school girls,” Bracy asked.

Bracy said capitol police were outnumbered and overwhelmed by the protesters. At one point they even attacked State. Rep. Doreen Costa.

“This was one of the most disturbing sights I’ve ever seen,” Costa told Fox News & Commentary. “It was horrendous. “

Costa said a female Occupier hit her on the head with a sign

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The Unearned

Posted February 4, 2012 By John C Wright

From the invaluable Bill Whittle

My comment: I have always wondered why, once they know their game is up, the Political Correctionists continue to pretend that they have some sort of moral high ground, intellectual or moral superiority to the rest of us.

Only slowly has the realization dawned on me that perhaps they cannot help it. They simply cannot stop, long after they know their efforts at pretense are in vain.
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Brave New World or That Hideous Strength?

Posted February 3, 2012 By John C Wright

Compare and contrast. Which of these is science fiction?

Which shows more clearly a devotion to that death-cult into which modern thinking has descended, now that we have all, out of courtesy and political correctness, lost all respect for religion, for reason, for honor, for reality?

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-chat/2836721/posts

NORWICH, U.K., January 23, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In remarks that critics have said are disturbingly reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel “Brave New World,” a UK ethicist [sic] has argued that since pregnancy causes “natural inequality” between the sexes, women must be liberated from the “burdens and risks of pregnancy” through the use of “ectogenesis”, or artificial wombs.

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Caesar Commands the Jews Eat Pork, Quakers Join Army, Amish Get i-Pods, Christians Burn Incense

Posted February 3, 2012 By John C Wright

To all Roman Catholics who voted for Mr Barack Obama: SUUUCKERS! 

To all men of good will, Roman Catholic or no, who believe that the Constitution (or simple common sense) is more important than the odd mixture of self-righteous death-cult and feckless national orgy the sexual revolution ushered into being, and which somehow became the core political stance of the Left in the modern day, allow me to urge you to go sign this petition: http://www.stophhs.com/

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