MY family once vacationed in a campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where we unfortunately pitched our tent next to a group of campers who were having a wild time. They included a man who every fifteen minutes or so would call out ecstatically for everyone around to hear, “Freedom! Free-ee-ee-eedom! Free-ee-ee-dom!” As the night progressed, and the emptied cans of Budweiser piled up around him, his praise of freedom grew louder and louder. Finally, in the early morning hours, he proved just how committed to freedom he was. He sat right in the middle of the campfire. After that, there was a hush. We never heard from him again.

Freedom as an end in itself doesn’t make sense. If freedom is the power to harm or even destroy oneself it is not freedom at all, but a kind of slavery. On this national holiday, when we love our country and celebrate our heritage, we can commit ourselves to a wiser understanding of freedom than the one mindlessly promoted as the epitome of American patriotism. There is no political freedom — for individuals or society — without moral freedom. Moral freedom consists in the power to act in accord with the order of being and eternal law.

As Pope Leo XIII wrote in his majestic encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum, On the Nature of Human Liberty, dated June, 20, 1888: (more…)

THE U.S. SUPREME COURT ruled today, in the landmark case Scarsbury v. Scarsbury, that under the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, children are entitled to establish their own bedtimes and eat whatever they darn well please. The 5-4 ruling was the culmination of years of struggle by children’s rights advocates. It was widely hailed as a victory for equality.

Eight-year-old Zachary Scarsbury spoke at a press conference outside the Supreme Court Building. “My parents made me do so many things I didn’t want to do,” he said. “I didn’t have any rights at all. This is a victory for equality.”

Zachary has been living in a five-bedroom condo funded by George Soros’s Children Rule campaign while awaiting the decision. “I finally can go back home,” he said. “With the federal government backing me up, my parents understand their obligations and probably won’t give me anymore trouble.” Zachary prefers macaroni and cheese without any vegetables on the side.

Mr. and Mrs. Scarsbury, who sold their four-bedroom house two years ago to meet legal expenses, appeared somber as they addressed the press outside their mobile home. They said from now on they would do whatever Zachary ordered them to do. “We were living in the past,” Dan Scarsbury said. “It’s time to move on.”

Parents across America reacted to the ruling with indifference. “I’ve been letting my children do whatever they want for years,” said Heather Jones, a single mother interviewed on the street in downtown Columbus, Ohio. “I think everyone should have equality. My children prefer double-crust, cheese-stuffed pizza from Pizza Hut.”

Richard Helward, interviewed in Macon, Ga., said he gets angry whenever he thinks of how parents controlled their children in the past. “If my son wants to play video games for 12 hours a day, I think he has the right to do it. Who am I to say, no?”

The court also ruled that parents are no longer permitted to impose their religious beliefs on their children. Under the First Amendment, no family can establish a religion.

“My parents kept forcing their fairy tales on me,” said Zachary, who is an atheist. “I felt sorry for them.”

“They can still give me presents at Christmastime, but that’s it.” (more…)

A READER writes:

Some months ago I stopped following “the news.” I know mainly what’s going on by following a few blogs but I cannot bear to look at the poisonous culture and vicious propaganda of the new regime. I used to check Drudge, the Daily Mail, the Post or Daily News… no more. I won’t even read the New Yorker for their cartoons, or the New York Times real estate section, which used to be a Sunday morning pleasure. I stopped watching TV years ago. We don’t have cable, I don’t watch modern movies. They turned us into zombies with their toxic mass media, the devils. If I am not already imprisoned in the cell next to yours I will be honored to visit you in jail. Or maybe I could organize a jailbreak — the storming of the Bastille, in reverse. I wonder if I’m too old and cowardly to strap on a sword and ride out for the Lord. All I really want to do is read beautiful books, hear beautiful music, see beautiful art, make beautiful things with my own two hands, and commune with beautiful souls. Is that too much to ask? Yes, it’s an ironic question. :-) The world keeps shoving its ugliness in our faces. (more…)

THE Canadian professor Douglas Farrow makes a couple of important points about same-sex insanity in this piece at First Things. These points have been made here before but they deserve repetition, endless repetition.

He rightly points out that the problem with the Supreme Court decision is not, as the dissenting judicial nincompoops argued, that it usurped the legislative branch or popular referenda. If every single American had voted to institute by Constitutional amendment same-sex insanity, it would still be an act of tyranny. As Farrow points out, marriage is a pre-political institution. (more…)

A “CORRESPONDENT from an Occupied City” writes:

Josh F., in the previous entry, stated:

“This desire [for self-annihilation] has passed the critical threshold. We’ve crossed the event horizon. Western Man measures his freedom in the metric of self-annihilation and daily grows closer to more primitive “man.””

While I love Josh F.’s description of our current stage as having passed the “event horizon” I don’t necessarily agree that we have reverted to primitive savagery. I think we are much worse off because we are primitive savages with nuclear weapons – the nuclear weapon of a vast, far-reaching legal apparatus, the nuclear weapon of all-encompassing corporations. (Try to boycott one and see how far you get.) (more…)

STEVE writes:

In light of the two recent Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and, especially, on “gay marriage,” it has become almost impossible to put off the two questions that have been circling the country like satellites for at least a decade:

“Is it time to resist?” And, “Resist how? (more…)

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IN THIS two-part video, Ryan Sorba of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality debunks the immensely influential myth, deliberately propagated by the media, that people are born homosexual.

A “Correspondent from an Occupied City” writes:

Apropos of your pointing out that same-sex “marriage” has solid corporate support, I was accosted by an “LGBT” rights campaigner on the street last weekend. Against my better instincts I engaged with him. Never again, it’s not worth it.

I said to him, “You’ve got marriage, now what?” He screamed (yes, screamed), “You can legally fire a gay person or transgender person in 28 states!” I responded that I thought that was fine, an employer should have the right to hire and fire at will, and that I didn’t want a man in the bathroom stall next to me, and went on my way. (more…)

FROM Goodbye, America (in a photo).

These children, by the way, are merely political pawns. They can have no idea that the rainbow flag stands for tyranny and perversion. (more…)

In the Shadow of the Prodigy by Frank van Dun

Reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau

I happened to have been reading Frank van Dun’s novel In the Shadow of the Prodigy (2015) during the week of the United States Supreme Court’s latest trespass into the constitutional domain of law-making, formerly reserved to the legislative branch. The same week saw several new instances of Islamic savagery – in France and Algeria – and the collapse of the Greek economy. It is difficult to say whether these events colored my assessment of van Dun’s prose or the other way around. I have been carrying a knot in my stomach for days; my brow has been creased. One way or another, In the Shadow of the Prodigy is a book for our time, breaking up the white dazzle of overlapping crises that constitutes the contemporary scene into the refracted strands of its elementary colors. Van Dun’s story is a mystery, so I will be calling attention to it in such a way as not to divulge too many of its plot-points.

In the Shadow of the Prodigy narrates the collision of naivety with evil. The novel’s various manifestations of evil appear banal but are no less wicked for their appearances. Indeed, as van Dun sees things, contemporary shoddiness and a fixation on low stakes belong to the prevailing corruption. The vileness that drives men and women to wanton deeds is as paltry in its objects as the evil is banal. Van Dun sets his action twenty-one years ago, in 1994, on the verge of that epochal event, the Internet, which serves the author for one of his chief symbols – a creeping multi-tentacular but invisible monstrosity that ensnares the multitudes of the unwary. (more…)

FROM a letter by St. Louis Grignion de Monfort to the inhabitants of Montbernage, France on the occasion of his banishment: “I stand in face of many enemies. All those who love and esteem transitory and perishable things of this world treat me with contempt, mock and persecute me, and the powers of evil have conspired together to incite against me everywhere all those powerful ones in authority. Surrounded by all this I am very weak, even weakness itself. I am ignorant, even ignorance itself, and even worse that I do not dare to speak of. Being so alone and poor, I would certainly perish were I not supported by Our Lady and the prayers of good people, especially your own. These are obtaining for me from God the gift of speech or Divine Wisdom, which will be the remedy for all my ills and a powerful weapon against all my enemies. “With Mary everything is easy. I place all my confidence in her, despite the snarls of the world and thunders of hell. I say with St. Bernard: ‘In her I have placed unbounded confidence; she is the whole reason for my hope.’ …. Through Mary I will seek and find Jesus; I will crush the serpent’s head and overcome all my enemies as well as myself for the greater glory of God. “Farewell then but not goodbye, for if God spares me, I will pass this way again."

SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes: I recommend that you spare some space on your busy blog to this piece of propagandistic "history," which nonetheless contains the following very important observation: "The [New York Times] seems to have always had a pro-pizza bias. In a 1947 full-page Times spread, food writer Jane Nickerson insisted that 'pizza could be as popular a snack as the hamburger if Americans only knew more about it.' "This pizza ignorance became legal record when an upstate jury had to have pizza explained to them during a 1950 New York Supreme Court appellate hearing." The speed with which the forces of Progress have transformed this country is a terrible marvel.  The article notes that within 12 years of the proceedings described above, pizza had reached almost hot-dog levels of popularity in America. Still, it is encouraging to note that not so long ago, things were very different.  This suggests that they could be so once more.

FROM Novus Ordo Watch:

This past Friday, June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS) handed down its decision in the case Obergefell v. Hodges, in which five of the nine judges “decided” that states do not have the right to refuse to issue marriage licenses to “couples” of the same sex. In other words, this Supreme Court decision “legalized” and imposed the unnatural aberration known as “gay marriage” in all 50 states.

This latest attack on society, the common good, the natural law, and all that is right and just is simply the latest milestone in the gradual dismantling of what was at one point Christian Western society. This monstrous and absurd decision did not, however, come unexpected. To the contrary, it is simply the logical conclusion of the idea that the sexual act can be divorced from procreation, or the latter can be subordinated to some other purpose. If sexuality is essentially or most importantly about pleasure or affection or some other such non-procreative end, then logically any sort of “arrangement” must be allowed that furthers such an end between consenting adults. And this also means that it’s going to get worse from here.

However, there is no reason to be discouraged or despair. On the contrary. Judging from the viewpoint of Divine Revelation and prophecy, we could say that “everything is going according to plan” — so to speak.

Read more here. (more…)

  THOMAS DROLESKEY writes at Christ or Chaos: Although I have scoured the website of the Occupy Vatican Movement for any sign of some kind of reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges from the Uber Apostate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, there is, of course, none to be found. “Pope Francis” has maintained the same kind of silence now on the “moral issues” as he has done so many times in the past two years, four hundred fifty-seven days. If one may recall, the marauding Argentine kept his ever-moving mouth shut when the lower house of the French national legislature, the National Assembly, approved “gay marriage” on April 22, 2013, and he said not a word to the renegade former Marxist guerilla fighter named Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, about a then pending bill in the Brazilian Congress that would provide a “back door” means to surgical baby-killing on demand when he was in Brazil for the hootenanny known as “World Youth Day” between July 21, 2013, and July 28, 2013. That bill was approved on August 1, 2013, just three days after Jorge had returned to Rome to place that beach ball and sports jersey on Our Lady’s altar in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. [...] Bergoglio, who is taking conciliarism’s mockery of the papacy to its ultimate conclusion in the same manner that Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America have taken advantage…

THE Protestant preacher James Manning reacts to Friday's Supreme Court decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges. Mr. Manning is not very nice. He is one black leader who will never be invited to the White House or the Democratic National Convention.

IT’S OKAY for a Jewish organization to celebrate and point out Jewish hostility to Christian morality and to brag of Jewish funding for the systematic deconstruction of American laws protecting the family.

But, I guarantee you, it’s anti-Semitic for a non-Jew to point it out.

A non-Jew who points it out is a Nazi.

A non-Jew who points it out secretly wants to drag every single Jew, even the Jews he has sincerely loved and treated well for decades, to a concentration camp.

A non-Jew who points it out is evil and filthy.

A non-Jew who points it out is … not nice. He belongs in a concentration camp. Oh, wait, he is in a concentration camp. It’s called the New World Order. It’s the anti-Christian concentration camp of Luciferian America, brought to you in part by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League. (more…)

A MALE READER writes:

I just read your post about “Not Coming Out” and I wanted to send along my sympathies to the reader Jacqueline and applaud her sense of self control in the matter.

To Jacqueline:

Currently I work in a job that is closely related to the music theatre business and I do not think I am being a bigot by stating that there are a lot of homosexuals present at my workplace. Along with you, I could have been considered an ally to them once but no more. The things I have seen, the politics along with how I have been treated, have drastically changed my mind. (more…)