SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes:

I realize that this ad for Navy Federal Credit Union which has been showing on TV lately was not commissioned by the Navy as a recruiting ad per se, but that changes nothing—it is an expression of a view of our armed forces which is aggressively promoted by the Department of Defense.

The ever-more-worshipful attitude of the American public toward its uniformed personnel coincides with an ever-more-ridiculous and subversive military, and I no longer want any part of it.

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

The Marine Corps has ordered Marine spouses’ clubs – which I should have thought were private, voluntary associations – to admit the same-sex “spouses” of members of the Marine Corps. Here’s NBC’s story on the decision.

While this little vignette of America’s social destruction speaks for itself, it still got me thinking. In addition to its inherent disordered weirdness, it is an example of what I believe (writing as a former Marine officer) is an historic weakness of the Marine Corps.

Partly to show that it is more hard-core than the three larger services, the Marine Corps is hard-wired to pursue any mission assigned to the max.  It doesn’t matter how stupid or wrong-headed that mission may be, if it comes in the form of a legitimate order, the Marines are going to go Take That Hill, no matter what it costs.  In the social revolutionary realm, we saw this when General James Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps – after expressing reservations on several occasions about “normalizing” homosexuality in the armed forces – as soon as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was “repealed,” turned sharply through 180 degrees and directed that Marine recruiters conduct special outreach to homosexuals to be the leading service in recruiting them.  (more…)

STANISLAV MISHIN, writing in the English language version of Pravda, rhapsodizes about the U.S. Second Amendment and recounts the history of gun control in the Soviet Union. Russians lack the basic right to possess firearms to this day. He writes, in rough English:

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment (sic) is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are (sic) in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. (more…)

BILL CLINTON, the liar and adulterer who has just one daughter and no sons (which means he produced no fathers), has been named Father of the Year by the National Father’s Day Council. Since Clinton is married to a woman who is committed to demonizing fathers around the globe and empowering mothers, he is an ideal father for our times. Let’s hope next year’s Father of the Year is a mother — or perhaps a man with no children. That’s only right.

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JOE BIDEN said today that Obama is considering enacting new gun control measures by executive order. See The Weekly Standard. One man walks into an elementary school and commits a horrible and devastating massacre and the entire nation is under siege, so much under siege that the president must enact emergency measures, as if a foreign enemy had just landed on our shores. All this in a country where it is almost never reported when an armed citizen stops a gunman. Biden said, “It is critically important that we act.” Critically important? What is so critically important that normal legislative processes are expendable?

I have been inclined to dismiss the possibility of extreme new restrictions on guns, but now I believe they are likely. The Newtown massacre is a beautiful opportunity to divert the nation’s attention and display sham authority. Gun owners are the new scapegoats. As Matthew Bracken writes:

Scapegoating an unpopular group is standard operating procedure for budding socialist dictators wrecking once-free economies.

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  CONSTANCE FOSTER writes: Speaking of Episcopalians, the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. has decided to perform same-sex weddings. Those who say same-sex "marriage" will have no effect on traditional marriage should take note of what the Cathedral's dean, Canon Gary Hall, had to say to the Washington Post: The “heterosexual marriage [ritual] still has some vestiges of patriarchy, with woman being property. There’s hope in same-sex marriage that it is a teachable moment for heterosexual couples. The new rite is grounded in baptism and radical equality of all people before God,” said Hall, who has been blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples for decades. “I’d like to use it for heterosexual weddings because I think it’s so much better than our marriage services."

DON VINCENZO writes:

As a direct result of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church is in a shambles. It’s a walking self-wrecking machine, and one of the unintended – or was it? – consequences of that disaster is the continuing diminished power and prestige of the papacy.

The pope’s visit to St. Mary’s College, Oscott, once the premiere Catholic seminary in England, tells you all you need to know. Oscott has refused a request for the Latin Mass by seminarians, despite the pope’s 2007 apostolic letter, Summorum Pontificum, which requires that any faithful group’s request for the Extraordinary Form be accommodated.

The rot within the Church is profound; yet, it never fails to astound me just how deep it runs.

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AT Galliawatch, Tiberge writes:

On Sunday January 13 all Frenchmen interested in stopping the bill on gay marriage from becoming law are mobilizing with determination and zeal for the march in Paris. They are coming from all over France, by bus, by train, by car. Some reports are predicting over half a million demonstrators. (more…)

DAVID C. writes:

TWO EPISCOPAL ministers in Maryland “married” last week. They are interviewed here by an excited Fox News reporter who laments the fact that one of the women does not have the same immigration rights as a heterosexual spouse.

Sarah Lamming, who apparently has never read the New Testament despite her degree from Yale Divinity School (or perhaps because of her degree from Yale Divinity), says of her “marriage” to Dianna Carroll, “I acknowledge it is difficult for some people, but I am gay and I was created that way by God.” Translation: “God made me disdain men and prefer masturbation. God made me reject motherhood altogether.”

Now, if a hardened burglar came to Rev. Sarah or Rev. Dianna and said he liked being a burglar, what grounds does she have for objecting to his way of life? He could say, “I acknowledge my thefts are difficult for some people, but I am a thief and I was created that way by God.”

The argument that homosexuality is right whenever it feels natural presumes that whatever feels natural is right.

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor is organizing a prayer vigil to take place next Sunday, January 13th, on behalf of the writer Lawrence Auster, who has advanced pancreatic cancer. The vigil does not require that you go anywhere or do anything other than offer prayers from your home or wherever you happen to be. While individual prayer is always good and always beneficial, collective prayer, which is easy to organize in the age of the Internet, is even better. Kristor writes:

Massed intercessory prayer has been the occasion of some truly remarkable events – not all of them physiological, by any means (and, for that matter, not all in the intended beneficiary of the prayer). Some background information may be found here.

I hope you will join with me in praying for Mr. Auster, who has done so much to defend and clarify the traditionalist worldview.

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THE latest issue of Praesidium features an essay by Thomas F. Bertonneau on René Guenon, the French reactionary who died in 1951. Mr. Bertonneau’s article provides an excellent overview of the writings of a man who attacked “the stultifying massiveness of modern society, with its conformism on an unprecedented scale.” In the Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guenon saw the glorification of quantity over quality as fundamental to the modern obsession with equality. Mr. Bertonneau writes:

The “Reign of Quantity” requires that its constituency live unconnected with any past in a kind of perpetual present, on the multiplying distractions of which the untutored mind remains stupidly fixed.  Guénon remarks how industry fills life with things, objects and devices, which monopolize attention, and which assimilate individuals to the pattern of the consumer.  In our own time the variety and fascination – and the idiocy – of these things have only increased.  (more…)

IN A 2008 discussion at VFR, the commenter Thucydides wrote:

Why is the idea of armed self defense so repugnant to liberals? It crosses their core assumptions in several ways.

First, the need for it suggests that human evil is a normal, expectable state of affairs, not something aberrant that is produced by some imperfection in collective social arrangements. The core liberal assumption is the sentimental faith that humans are essentially good and reasonable; violence is explained away as the regrettable result of anger proceeding from some form of injustice, real or imagined. The problem then is not the violence, and not human nature, but some social condition. (Small comfort to the victims!) (more…)

FIVE  years ago, at VFR, I proposed a plan for preventing school massacres. I called it “Three Teachers, Three Guns,” and suggested arming a minimum of three teachers in every school building (more in sprawling buildings). A sign could be placed on a school identifying its participation.

Today, despite all the talk of draconian gun control, something like this plan is actually being envisioned in some states. A Tennessee lawmaker is the latest to propose a bill for arming and training a small number of teachers. Legislators in a few other states– Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota and Oregon —  have discussed laws permitting teachers to carry concealed weapons in recent weeks. (more…)

  DANIEL S. writes: Here is how the Muslim world celebrated Christmas: In Pakistan, a Muslim mob armed with weapons attacked Christian worshipers in the capital city leaving Christmas services. In Egypt, the army foiled a plot for a Christmas day attack on a Coptic church. A similar plot by Chechen Muslim terrorists directed against Christmas services was disrupted in southern Russia by security forces. To top it off, Muslim terrorists in Mosul, Iraq slit the throat of a female Christian teacher.

WHEELER MACPHERSON writes:

I am encouraged by some of the comments, here and here, regarding cremation, funerals, and burial. I say “encouraged” because my heart rejoices at any glimmer of people weaning themselves from the control and ordinances of illegitimate authority. I believe the funeral industry is such an authority.

Some years ago, I read several books on death, dying, and funerals, including Lisa Carlson’s excellent “Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love.” I used this book as a jumping-off point for a Sunday School class on “A Christian View of Death, Dying, and Funeral Preparation.”

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IN The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote of the Magi, the Eastern philosopher kings who traveled to Bethlehem under the guidance of a star. While the shepherds were drawn out of simplicity to the baby in the manger, the Oriental kings, carrying expensive gifts, were drawn by a longing for truth and wisdom.

The mere sight of the newborn satisfied their deepest intellectual yearnings.

Chesterton wrote in his chapter, “The God in the Cave”:

It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. (more…)