Washington, DC and Gomorrah

November 21, 2009

Sodom in the Nation's Capital

Star Parker

At a time when our country is sick, it shouldn't surprise that one our sickest places is our nation's capital.

The poverty rate of Washington, DC, almost 20 percent, is one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation's highest. DC's public school system, with a graduation rate of less than 50 percent, is one of the worst in the country.

According to DC's HIV/AIDS

office, three percent of the local population has HIV or AIDS. The Administrator of this office notes that this HIV/AIDS incidence is "...higher than West Africa...on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya." And the principal way that HIV is transmitted continues to be through male homosexual activity.

Amidst this dismal picture, the DC City Council, perhaps on the theory that serving up another glass of wine is the way to help a drunk, is scheduled to vote on December 1 to legalize same sex marriage in America's capital city.

Looking at realities in Washington, DC should make clear why George Washington said "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." But the America that our first president had in mind was very different from the vision of our DC government officials.

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Swing Time

But here, banned in Baghdad and by all fundamentalists everywhere, basically, is a tasty metaphor of the sacrament of holy matrimony for your Sunday evening viewing entertainment!

Better Than Sominex

And under the category of, This Will Make Us All Sleep Easier Tonight, there is this.

Consider the Source

Here is the impeccable (luciferian) logic you have come to expect at the UN:

Lock up your baby prams and strollers, or at least don't take them out in the daylight hours. Children are, according to one United Nations agency, the new enemy of climate change.

The latest report from the United Nations Population Fund was released on Wednesday at news conferences in Ottawa and other key venues where policy makers could be made aware of the news: more babies will undermine attempts to stop climate change..MORE>>

Hubris Comes Before a Fall

For those who argue that the "health care reform" (sic.) being rammed through the United States government is a mandate of the gospel, my dispute is this: the entire process from beginning to end has not been ostensibly a clearly stated way to "love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength" - the First Great Commandment with a mind to care for all of God's human children, imago dei. Neither has it been done with the explicit mandate of the Second Great Commandment: "love your neighbor as yourself."

At most, it has been done with murky humanist motives - a slathering of benign concern for every single American citizen - legal or illegal - as a lump sum: all of the "humanity" in our country. But, as usual, "some animals are more 'equal' than others" in Orwell's inimitable turn of phrase from Animal Farm. And, as we know from common sense, there is no such thing as "humanity", only persons, and many of us.

What is being ramrodded is not that all human beings stand on the same level at the foot of the Cross of Our Lord. Rather, a lump sum totality of American citizenry stands a-begging at the foot-stool of the Executive Branch and, soon, the Legislative Branch.

How concerned should persons be by this ramrodding? Mutatis mutandis. The best of our land, our governance, our civilization can be retained if - IF - we put the Cross and the gospel first:

"Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." - Jesus, Matthew 6,33

But anything, no matter now monumental and monolithic it seems, is liable to falling and crumbling (cf. Genesis 11) so long as it puts forth a puny ideological pipe dream with no regard to the Kingdom of God and putting first things first.

Hubris indeed comes before a fall.

Christ the King

Giotto di Bondone (1304-06)

Christ gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified He "did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness" (G. MacDonald). From before the foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience ... From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever.

- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Stead

Constance Cast Adrift (1901 - Illustrates Chaucer's 'The Lawyer's Tale')
- Frederick Stead

Unholy Grail

For the record: Marita Vargas' Our second (nefarious) Camelot. Ht: Karen Hall

God's Battalions

Even USAToday is beginning to get it, noticing Rodney Starks' book, God’s Battalions on the radar screen. Bravo.

Glimmers of light like the above and this getting through the cracks of the anti-truth barricades give me hope.

Soufflé of Doom or Élan of Hope

As even CNN begins to acknowledge that political correctness in the Army contributed to the 13(/14) deaths at Fort Hood, I recalled that friend and mentor, Gil Bailie, recently cited a New York Post story about terrorists in New York: They were filled with rage and wanted to take it out on what they considered the source of all problems in America - the Jews.

The naïveté of everyone educated in the sacred halls of multiculturalism "knows" that humans are not stained with Original Sin. I heard a PhD in Education bemoan not long ago the way that textbooks betray our ethnic and cultural bias in the way they refer, for example, to Native Americans as "savages". Of course, the sentiment not to victimize is admirable, but to ignore the fact that Native Americans were members of the fallen human race and, therefore, ipso facto, as savage as, say the Meso-American Aztecs and Mayans and Clockwork Orange urban youth of today's Paris and London, is as dangerous as a branch of the military ignoring the warning signs of a Army psychiatrist who emailed jihadists overseas to say he was looking forward to seeing them in Paradise and - by the way - when is it permissible to slaughter innocents?

The time is rapidly approaching when two things will become manifestly apparent: first, that those who become "filled with rage" are the problem. And, secondly, we cannot "pussy-foot" around them in feeble, limp-wristed attempts "not to offend" them, but rather call them accountable for their uncontrolled lack of impulse control and immature bent to violent and inappropriate tantrums.

True political correctness is recognizing where the true problem lies. René Girard's mimetic theory and the wisdom to "think with the Church" - sentire cum ecclesia - in discerning truth, goodness, and beauty, as well as disordered passions, fruits of the flesh, and egregious evil is the pathway to survival for humanity.

Anything less, including and inescapably a soufflé of multiculturalism and elitist naïveté, bode only doom.