religion

Merry Christmas!

Mark Noonan9 Comments

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.

When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.

Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.

Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”

When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. He had no relations with her until she bore a son, and he named him Jesus. – Matthew 1:18-25

Enslaved by Lies

Mark Noonan

I was suddenly reminded yesterday of the Christmas Truce.

If you are not aware of it, this occurred on Christmas of 1914 between the trenches in France. World War One was four months old by then and the armies, by that time, were exhausted, incapable of mounting any serious offensive actions. As Christmas Eve came in, entirely spontaneously all along the front, groups of soldiers started to fraternize in No Man’s Land. It was especially marked in the areas were British and German troops faced off, but even in many areas where French and German troops held the line, this happened.

It was, of course, all every much in defiance of orders and many officers on both sides deplored it, but it was so widespread that no action could seriously be taken against the soldiers. Essentially, they called a one day walk out on the war and enjoyed themselves immensely: exchanging souvenirs, food and drink and even, according to some stories, engaging in some soccer matches.

The following year there was some repeats of this but very much rarer: the high commands of all armies decreed raids and artillery barrages for Christmas, 1915 just in order to prevent a repeat. By 1916, the bitterness of the war had sunk so deep that no one on either side was in any mood for a truce.

It was, in retrospect, one of the last acts of decency in the world.

The War was a mistake. A huge miscalculation by the German military class which, while brilliant, was entirely focused on strictly military affairs and simply did not have the corporate ability to consider anything else. They had seen their chance in July of 1914 – with Britain on the verge of Civil War, revolutionary ferment again rising in Russia – to smash France and reassert German dominance of the Continent. They guessed wrong. They should have made peace as soon as possible after the failure to destroy France. But they felt they couldn’t. Meanwhile, the French certainly didn’t feel like making peace while German soldiers occupied parts of France and that held true for Britain, as well. But the cause of the war – a stupid German attempt to simply be strong and show it – was not enough to sustain a major war effort for long. Nor was it sufficient in France and Britain to merely make the war about getting the Germans out of France and Belgium.

And so the lies crept in. Both sides started accusing the other of being monsters. And while Germany was ever in the van, both sides started to behave as monsters. Step by step every rule of war was tossed aside in a desperate attempt to find some expedient which would give a decisive advantage. At the end of it all, as Churchill pointed out, the scientific, Christian States of Europe had only denied themselves torture and cannibalism as tools of warfare, and these of doubtful utility. And it was merely to sustain a war which was a mistake and which should have been composed as swiftly as possible once it was clear (say, by late 1915) that neither side could win quick and cheap enough to make the effort worthwhile. That, once again from Churchill, that in that war victory could only be bought so dearly as to be indistinguishable from defeat.

There was one more chance at human decency – the Marquis of Lansdowne, a senior British politician, circulated a letter in early 1917 arguing that peace must be made on the basis of the pre-war status quo before Civilization was wrecked. He became despised by all sides. And so the grind went on until sheer exhaustion hit the Germans harder than the allies and they quit.

I think that what happened in World War One provided the foundation of our current Age of Lies. Government got into the habit of deceiving the people, and itself. Lies became routine. It began to be asserted that certain things couldn’t be told to the public. They put high minded phrases around their justifications but the reality was that they didn’t want to admit things like 20,000 dead British soldiers on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Release that, and the British people might have decided that giving peace a chance had merit. Hide it and you could lie that things were moving along splendidly. This habit of lies and deception even worked into popular culture. You might recall the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the Dr Floyd character is apologizing to the assembled scientists about the cover story of a plague to hide the fact that evidence of alien intelligence had been found – and then further goes on to say that they had to find a way to release that information in a manner which wouldn’t alarm the public. As a kid when I watched that, it made immediate sense that the government had to lie and carefully dole out information. But now that I’m older and (we hope) a little wiser, I can see it: the only people who gain advantage from lying and hiding facts are con artists. People who are trying to get what they shouldn’t have.

Think about it: sure in the Civil War Lincoln and his people would try to play certain things close to the vest and try to put the brightest face on failure…but when the Battle of Cold Harbor cost 13,000 Union lives for no advantage, there was no way to hide that – the casualty lists were published within days and the newspapers were calling it the hideous failure it was from the get-go. In today’s world, can you imagine that sort of openness? Of course not. They’d hide it. Call it a victory. Call anyone who questioned it a traitor. And then they’d do the same thing again and again…the thing about Cold Harbor is that it was Grant’s only serious mistake of the war and he never repeated it. Because it was out there right away and he and his officers couldn’t deny it. They could only do better going forward. Because it was a time of truth and they were truthful men.

This is not a time of truth, nor of truthful men. We live by lies. We are enslaved to them. Grumpily for those of us who see the con, joyfully for those still enthralled to the lies. But all of us live by them. Ever said “Happy Holidays”? You participated in the lies of our times – in this case, that anyone would be doing anything special the last week of December absent the birth of Jesus. And if there ever was a Jew pissed off that we didn’t mark Hanukkah or a Muslim who felt slighted by our lack of Ramadan greetings…then they were the few jerks which always show up in any community. No decent non-Christian person ever had the slightest complaint about “Merry Christmas”. It is on and on like that. It is drilled into our brains. It keeps people justifying the lies because we need the lies to live. After all, if we told the truth about things, then some people would be upset about it! If you look at some of the people writing about what the FBI did with Twitter or the way Ukraine corruption has been swept under the rug, you can see it – they are essentially saying that these are noble lies in a good cause.

But there are no noble lies. There are just lies. And we do have to break free of them. We have to stop being slaves.

Our Grim New World

Mark Noonan25 Comments

So, it turns out the bald guy in a dress that Team Pudding Brain hired to look after nuclear waste is a weirdo who steals women’s luggage.

Who could have guessed!?!?!?!?

Saw an ad for a clothing store or maker – didn’t look to closely at that aspect of it – which was lauding assisted suicide in Canada. It is really bad up there – basically, if you’re a depressed teenager or a soldier suffering from PTSD, killing yourself is offered early on. Part of this is driven by bureaucratic cost-saving: each dollar spent on treatment is one less dollar in the health budge for pay and benefits, after all. But it is also the Culture of Death writ large – and they are trying very hard to bring this to the United States. It is, of course, already here in various States and localities…but if we ever get single-payer, offing yourself will quickly become part of the basic plan.

It must be kept in mind that forgetting about God doesn’t make you a happy pagan doing blow off a hooker’s a**…it makes you eventually into a miserable, greedy, narcissist who hates everyone who can’t bring immediate comfort. That is the thing about God. Or, more accurately, what God cannot be – He cannot be your salvation in sin. Only your salvation out of sin. If you live in sin – and I mean really wallow in it, like our Leftists do – then you find that all you have is sin. God is good – He is Joy, Hope, Charity, Courage…all that. If you reject God then you reject what God has to give…and what’s left? Sorrow. Despair. Greed. Cowardice.

I know that various Saints have told us they have seen visions of Hell and most of them accord with the popular vision of fiery pits and, of course, Our Lord used words about burning to describe Hell. But I think it may be a bit different front that. The damned will, indeed, burn. But they’ll also freeze. They won’t be able to move. Or see. Or remember joyful things. All these things are good and all good things come from God…and if you are completely absent from God, you can’t possibly have the least good thing. All those who have completely separated themselves from God have is what God isn’t – hate, fear, loneliness, crushing cold, burning fire. It is very sad to contemplate – and more sad to contemplate those who are still alive and day by day are separating themselves from God. Damnation isn’t easy to obtain – salvation is easy, damnation is hard. You just have to ask for salvation, but you’ve got to work at being damned. And all these people with their assisted suicide, abortion, tolerance of objective evil, their thievery and lies…day by day building hell for themselves.

But that need not concern us directly: as far as salvation or damnation, each person is ultimately on their own: you will ask God for it, or you won’t. But it seems to me that we do approach a breaking point. Another thing I saw recently was this head of marketing for some fancy clothing line and the images this person uses are clearly of a sexually abusive nature towards children. It has caused some controversy…but not a lot of people dropping their contracts with the clothes maker. Lets not get silly here, right? Sure, Nike (or whatever) had to drop Kanye like a bad habit…but he said Bad Words. How can you compare that to gross images of abused children? Kidding aside, we’re seeing our Ruling Class clearly out to normalize sexual activities with minors. Partially this is to get ahead of possible indictments…but it is mostly, in my view, the final progression from the Sexual Revolution. Once disconnect sex from marriage and children – once, that is, stop having it for what it is – and you’ve pretty much removed any argument against any sort of sex. One commentator asserted that in ten years Disney will have a movie featuring and adult-chlld relationship and I won’t bet against that. The only taboo left is against forcible sex…and that will be a high hill to climb, but the Left will gamely do so…because its the last step in normalizing adult-child relationships. Remember, they don’t have to square the circle: they’ll just assert that normal male to female sex even with consent is always rape but anything else, consensual or otherwise, is just part of a person’s sexual identity. Think I’m kidding? They’re already on the assertion that you can’t have free speech if people are able to speak freely.

Depressing, huh? But I’m really not depressed. Concerned! Very much so. But mostly because I know that the collapse and reaction on such things tend to be exceptionally violent. I’d rather we didn’t have that – but with Congressional GOP getting ready to sell us out on amnesty and Ukraine aid, I don’t think we have in place a mechanism to even put the breaks on the Culture War at the federal level. Betting is that the weirdo luggage thief won’t see jail time – probably won’t even have security clearance pulled. The Ruling Class can’t risk having their first non-binary (or whatever) in that position come a cropper, right? Desantis fights against it. Abbott a bit, as well…but this is hardly enough to really turn the tide. And we’re running out of time to turn it!

On the plus side, I am starting to see even a few on the Left realize that it has all gone too far – San Francisco is ok in its place, but when you try to shove it into Omaha, it can get very dicey. We’ll see, I guess!

Happy Easter!

Mark Noonan10 Comments

I’m a little late in getting to this, so we’ll go ahead with what Peter had to say about it afterwards:

Peter proceeded to speak and said:
“You know what has happened all over Judea,
beginning in Galilee after the baptism
that John preached,
how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth
with the Holy Spirit and power.
He went about doing good
and healing all those oppressed by the devil,
for God was with him.
We are witnesses of all that he did
both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,
not to all the people, but to us,
the witnesses chosen by God in advance,
who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commissioned us to preach to the people
and testify that he is the one appointed by God
as judge of the living and the dead.
To him all the prophets bear witness,
that everyone who believes in him
will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Acts 10:34a, 37-43

To me, it is impossible to not be moved by this – as well the reading where Peter and “the apostle Jesus loved” run to the tomb and find it empty…still not knowing and still not sure, but you know they were running through their heads things from “they stole his body” to “didn’t he say he would rise again?” and in hope and fear wondering what was going to happen.

And as my pastor did this morning, I’ll ask all Christians reading: do you believe in the resurrection? Because if you don’t, then there’s no point in going to Church. That is the unique thing about the Christian faith…to have it make the least of sense, the resurrection must be believed. I do believe it, as it turns out.

God bless you all!

Enlightened Insanity

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Do you realize why there was an Inquisition? That is something I think most people don’t ponder much. Most just consider it to have been a uniformly horrible thing which we happily dispensed with as the Enlightenment instructed us in the value of tolerance. To a certain extent, there is some truth to such a view, but it doesn’t cover the entirety of it.

That which we call the Inquisition started in response to the Albigensian heresy in the 12th century. If you read secular history about it, you’ll find that the poor Albigensians were horribly persecuted by the Church because they simply wanted to practice their simple faith. Ok, fine. But they also believe that sexual reproduction was inherently wrong – that the physical world was something created by an evil god and it had to be renounced so that the human spirit could unite with the good god. In other words, if the heresy had been allowed to continue, it would have ended civilization. The Church, of course, was also concerned with what happened to human souls – being rather interested in their winding up in heaven rather than hell and so looked in horror upon a sect which pretty much ensured via its beliefs a one-way trip to hell. So, there were two reasons to go after these guys: they’d imperil your soul and end civilization. That is why there was an Inquisition – to root out people preaching insane, destructive ideas.

To be sure, any institution run by human beings is going to mess up. It is in the nature of things because we’re human. Whether or not the attempt should have been made or whether or not the right methods were used in the attempt is a matter for debate. But the fact that lunatic ideas which bring death should be stopped is not something I will debate about. Lunatic ideas bringing death are bad. And bad things are to be held at arms length to the best of our ability.

But, in the event, those who argued against the Inquisition and in favor of tolerance won the debate. The Enlightenment – so called – happened. And people were free to express themselves in any way they chose. This did have the benefit of giving us the Declaration of Independence…but it also gave us the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Bit of an up and downside on that – and the Declaration of Independence could easily have been written by St Thomas Aquinas…the Manifesto and the Kampf, not so much…because both of those were heresies and St Thomas would have seen right through them.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because earlier today I saw a Twitter thread by a Muslim which expressed the view that Islam needs an Enlightenment. There is much merit to such an argument on the face of it. But I also immediately had my doubts.

First off, of course, is my belief that Islam is itself a heresy – Mohammed taking various aspects of Christianity (and a little Judaism) that he liked and dispensing with the bits he didn’t like. The classic heresy model – leaving something or things out. Be that as it may, if it started as a heresy, it developed rather rapidly into its own thing. And as a Christian I can and do take various issues with it. But whatever one wishes to say about it, for quite a long time it was just another part of the world tapestry. Violent as all things can be, but also beautiful, as all things can be. Yes, I can list for you a large number of Muslim sons-of-bitches but any Muslim out there can come up with a list of Christian SOBs to match – but in neither case were the SOBs the thing about the religions or the civilizations they created. I’ve read quite a bit of history of Islam and I do have to say that something changed over the ages – and the change was rather recent.

Some time in the 19th century or maybe a little earlier, the historical records start to document people of the Muslim faith acting in ways which they simply had to know were wrong. Not just in Christian ideals, but in Muslim ideals. There is a difference between fighting for your side – however brutally you may do it – and committing acts of cruelty. One early example of this is the massacre of about 50 British captives in Delhi during the Mutiny of 1857. But it got worse as time went on – acts of supreme cruelty which had no justification and which the perpetrators knew were wrong when they did them (on the simple fact that they would never want such things done to them). It wasn’t, after all, backwoods Muslim peasants who set the bombs which started the Battle of Algiers in 1956 – it wasn’t, that is, regular, old fashioned Muslims who came up with the idea of setting a bomb off specifically where children gathered so as to cause the most horrific death and injuries to people who could have in no way caused offense.

That takes a modern, Enlightened mind to come up with.

You could say that the things like the bombing in Algiers was provoked – and, to a certain extent, that is correct. The French, far more than the British, could be very brutal overlords when challenged. There were plenty of reasons for the Algerians to be displeased with the French. But it should be noted that the first serious effort of the Algerian rebels wasn’t so much to go after the French, but to kill those Algerians who were friendly to France. And kill them quite brutally, without sparing women and children. That sort of thing isn’t done in response to provocation – that is a cold blooded act of murder. So were the bombings. So, later, were acts like the Munich attack and the Avivim school bus bombing (seriously: what sort of a sick person even thinks up a target like that?). Muslims were involved in these things, but to deliberately seek to murder – usually very cruelly – people who specifically can’t fight back…no, sorry, I’m not going to say that is a Muslim thing. That is an Enlightened thing – that is what happens when people are allowed to pursue insane ideas to their logical conclusion.

Given things like bombed school buses and, well, Treblinka, I’m going to have to come down a bit against the Enlightenment – the idea, that is, that everyone should be able to proceed unchecked wherever their thoughts take them. I’m going to assert that there needs to be a corrective, here and there, which will tell the insane to sit down and shut up – before they get gas chambers or bombed buses into their heads. I think that I’d rather have to deal with the most deeply orthodox Muslims around as they deal with me, a deeply orthodox Christian. I think we’d probably get along better than modern, Enlightened folks. Even if we ended up fighting each other, it wouldn’t be a contest to see who could be the most merciless.

Anyways, this is where my thoughts are leading me these days. A sort of Endarkenment…where being a lunatic gets you a padded room rather than a tenured position or a promotion to Dear Leader.

The House of Christmas

Mark Noonan1 Comment

By: G. K. Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

The God in the Cave

Mark Noonan10 Comments

I’m going to post some things about Christmas that I have found interesting over the years. Feel free to share any that you like!

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child’s visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians, because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. G K Chesterton

Happy Easter!

Mark Noonan40 Comments

On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead. John 20:1-9

National Divorce or Civil War?

Mark Noonan26 Comments

The other day I saw on Twitter an article about a Canadian case where a father was forced by a judge to address his daughter as a boy because that is what his daughter claims she is – a boy. This was, naturally, a minor child. It caused a lot of outrage but the real issue here isn’t whether or not a kid should transition or whether a parent should accept such a thing. These are important issues, of course, but the most crucial aspect of it was the judge ordering the father to do something he believed to be wrong – in this case, lie about his daughter’s gender. And that, really, is the point of the whole exercise: to force the lie. Either tell a lie – that your daughter is a boy – or be held in contempt of court and go to jail…where you won’t be able to do anything for anyone, least of all your daughter who is being destroyed before your eyes. But, also, if you agree to say the lie then you’ve just lost the most important thing you can be for your daughter: someone who is fearlessly honest. If you’ll lie about something like that, what won’t you lie about?

Another case that caused some comment was the Utah Senate’s vote to de-criminalize polygamy. From the article:

Sen. Deidre Henderson stood on the Senate floor Friday and asked her colleagues to reconsider a decades-old state law classifying bigamy as a felony and making implied criminals of the state’s polygamous residents.

Rather than deter or eliminate polygamy, the Spanish Fork Republican said, the state code’s threat of harsh punishments had driven polygamous communities underground; cut families off from jobs, education and health care; and given rise to a subculture that gives predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

Note how our Conservative Republican is busy Conserving…we have to legalize polygamy because if we don’t let these weirdos do what they want, they’ll be weird. Argument sound familiar? You have heard it before. Its the way Conservatism cements Liberalism…because the real reason they are doing this is because SSM became legal and once that was done, there was no argument to be made against polygamy except the same arguments used to attack SSM…it is against Natural Law (which Conservatives are supposed to Conserve). But we jettisoned that with SSM…and by “we” I mean “we Conservatives”. Not all of us, of course, but a large enough number that made the imposition of SSM a bipartisan event in the United States.

And we were all so happy about it, weren’t we? Love is love, right? Two men. Two Women. Three Woman and a Man. A 40 year old and a 15 year old…hey, wait! What are you saying? No one is advocating for that! You insane, mean spirited bigot! The very idea!

But, you know its coming. I’m sure if I dug around enough I’d find serious scholarship arguing for no age barriers, or at least much lowered age barriers. I won’t look for it because I don’t really want to see it – and if it doesn’t exist at this moment, it will in a short while. And you know it. And the argument which will be made – and eventually by Conservative Republicans Super Conserving Conservatism – is that if we don’t lower the age bars, we’ll be giving predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

But still in all that, the worst aspect of it all is that we are not being asked to tolerate, but to actively approve. That’s the real problem here: we definitely live in a post-Christian world which not only lacks a mechanism to enforce morality, but wouldn’t even agree most of the time on what is moral – but it isn’t enough, for those running the show, that we who still retain the old morality to live and let live. No: they insist that we participate and approve. We Christians are rather back to square one, as it were: just waiting to be rounded up and led to the arena to provide dinner for the lions. Because it is going to be like that – the Christians of 100 AD made no effort to stop the storied infamies of 1st century Rome. There was no demand that the Games be cancelled or that the licentiousness be curbed…and yet still the Roman world went mad against Christians and tore them to pieces…because they wanted the Christians to approve of the Pagan lifestyle. When such approval was withheld, off the Christians went to provide bloody entertainment to the offended Pagans. Do you get it? Your lack of immorality offends.

So, what to do?

I’m not sure – but I am inclining towards those who simply want a divorce. That the portion of America which believes a person can change their gender separates from that part of America which doesn’t believe such a thing can happen. It would take some sorting out – how much territory each side gets; divvying up the national debt and military assets; will people have a period of time where they can move freely from America I to America II (and vice versa) with immediate full citizenship status? My guess is that we’d vote by county – and if a majority votes for America I, they are America I…America II, America II. It would make for a bit of a chopped up America II (the Left side) as they have majorities in far few counties but that could be address by negotiation…which would also be a drawn out process.

But, if we don’t divorce, we’ll have to fight. One thing I can’t see is us staying together and at peace when the two sides differ not just on trivia like forms of government, but on basic things like “2 plus 2 equals 4”. For our citizens who really think that “genderfluid” is a thing, 2 plus 2 equals whatever the hell they want at the moment. I’d rather we divorced – because if we fight, then the losing side doesn’t get to live in the America of the winning side. And I mean, at all.