Crisis Magazine: A New Devastating Critique of the Global Sexual Revolution

"It is quite remarkable that we are fighting the same battle from before the French Revolution, the fight between sexual license and sexual morality. The fight has been non-stop. Sometimes we are winning, other times, like now, we are losing."

-Austin Ruse,  Crisis Magazine.

Crisis Magazine: A New Devastating Critique of the Global Sexual Revolution

The link above is to a remarkable article about a powerful book that analyzes the roots of the sexual revolution and its resulting destruction all around us. The most eye opening part of this article is that the immoral sexual ideology of today's progressive movement can trace its roots to cultural Marxism and arguably as far back as before the French Revolution. The battle between sexual license and morality really goes back to the serpent in the garden convincing our first parents that they could be like God and determine for themselves what is right or wrong. 

I recommend this book as well as Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage by Paul Kengor, Ph.D. Both these books provide the reader a much better perspective of what is really driving the LGBTQ agenda in today's culture and the historical roots of this revolution.

My hope is that books and other media like this will be successful in waking people up to the madness around us before it is too late.

Gay Marriage - A Pro-Life Issue

The video below is from the March 26 episode of Piers Morgan's show on CNN. By now you may have already heard about this video where Morgan and his guest Suze Orman try to debate Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation on the issue of gay marriage. Anderson did a brilliant job of defending traditional marriage despite the fact that the whole event was a farce and staged against him. I don't want to rehash the whole debate, but if you want more details please watch the video below and then read this article: How not to have a debate about gay marriage.

What I want to discuss here is what happened beginning around the 11:25 mark in the video. It was both eye-opening and disturbing. Anderson attempts to explain how the true definition of marriage  is not just about uniting a man and a woman, but also about the procreation and raising of children.It was at this point that Orman and Morgan mocked him and encourage the studio audience to do so as well. Their point was that Anderson was wrong and that marriage has nothing to do with children and is only about whatever two consenting adults want.

I shouldn't be too surprised about this reaction. Our society has embraced death through the use of artificial contraception and abortion. The logical progression from there would be to separate marriage from openness to life. Blessed John Paul II in the Theology of the Body, described marriage has having two important aspects that can never be seperated, the unitive and procreative. Unfortunately, as Ryan Anderson tried to explain in the video, we began to change marriage and split those two aspects 40 years ago with the sexual revolution and widespread use of contraception and abortion.

The sad result of that is exactly what we saw in the video, our society does not see the importance of both the unitive and procreative sides of marriage. Instead it sees marriage as just a type of recognition of a sexual relationship between two people. If children and openness to life is not important in marriage, then it's no surprise that a growing number of people support same-sex marriage.

This is why this battle to protect traditional marriage is a pro-life issue. It all goes back to the central issue of life. Gay marriage will only further the split between marriage and children that began 40 years ago. Future generations will not see children as a blessing and part of the very nature of marriage, but instead as an incidental outcome or even a burden. The daunting challenge that we face is changing people's hearts to accept that sex is sacred, every life is a blessing, and participating with God in the creation of a new human life is at the very heart of marriage.

Obama Announces He Supports Gay Marriage

From CNN: Obama Announces He Supports Gay Marriage

Does the above story really surprise anyone? I don't believe that his position on gay marriage has "evolved" at all. The truth is he didn't have the backbone to take a stand on this issue until he was finally backed into a corner by remarks by Joe Biden and others in his cabinet. As far back as 1996, Obama was on record supporting gay marriage. More recently, Obama's repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and his push to end the Defense of Marriage Act made it very clear what he thought of traditional marriage. Also in 2009, Obama criticized supporters of traditional families as trying to "enshrine discrimination in the Constitution" and "holding on to  outworn arguments and old attitudes". Make no mistake about it, Obama holds very radical views on religious freedom, marriage, family, and even human life.

To put it bluntly, it is unconscionable for any Catholic to vote for Barack Obama. While there may be issues where he is in agreement with Catholic doctrine, absolutely nothing outweighs his stances on the intrinsic evils of abortion and gay marriage and his blatant attacks on religious freedoms. I cannot fathom any circumstances that would justify a Catholic voting for Obama. The problem here is that too many Catholics are not educated enough in their faith and don't fully understand the Church's teachings on these critical issues.

This is a crucial point in our nation's history. Never before has a sitting president been so opposed to the teachings of the Catholic Church on marriage, family, and human life. With the upcoming election, we have the opportunity to right this ship and get our nation off of the deadly course it's on right now. This isn't about being a "progressive catholic" or "liberal catholic" or "conservative catholic" or a "traditional catholic". This is about being a Catholic first and foremost and standing shoulder to shoulder with our Bishops and priests as well as our brothers and sisters from other denominations to defend our faith and families.

I strongly encourage you to read "Our First Most Cherished Liberty" by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It is a powerful document that details the current threat to our religious freedoms by the the recent HHS mandate, gay marriage laws, and even illegal immigration laws. It is very important that we as Catholics educate ourselves and share these truths with as many people as possible. Our Church and our faith are under attack and we can't afford to be complacent. To quote Roger Cardinal Mahoney in the above Bishop's statement, "this must be fought against with all the energies the Catholic community can muster."

Rebuild the family, rebuild the nation

This post ties in with my previous two posts on the social and economic importance of rebuilding the family in our society. Below I have three more outstanding articles which use history, statistics, and current research to underscore the importance of the family to our economy and society in general.

• The Basis of Civilization
• As The Family Goes, So Goes the Economy
• The Family-Centered Economy

Read the articles and then take a look at the world around you. It's hard to ignore that all the problems associated with the disintegration of the family, as mentioned in the articles, are happening right before our eyes. I just pray that more people, especially our leaders, wake up and see this before it's too late.

I want to end with some wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, quoted from The Basis of Civilization by Dale Ahlquist:

Chesterton says that every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. The obvious things are the ordinary things, and we have forgotten them. The modern world that we have created has brought with it great strain and stress so that even the things that normal men have normally desired are no longer desirable: “marriage and fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man.” Those are the normal and ordinary things. Those are the things we have lost, and we need to recover them.
“The disintegration of rational society,” says Chesterton, “started in the drift from the hearth and the family; the solution must be a drift back.”

Catholic weddings drop 71 percent in R.I.

This article recently appeared in the Providence Journal from my home state, little Rhode Island:

Catholic weddings drop 71 percent in R.I.

The Providence Journal, typical of most news media, loves to publish anything that will cast the Catholic Church in a negative light. This article was no exception. In an example of sloppy one sided journalism, the 71% decline in Catholic weddings was stressed over and over, but no other statistics from any other church was given. No context was provided to let the reader see how the number of Catholic weddings compared to other denominations. This article made you believe that it was time to put the last nails in the coffin of the Catholic Church. This is hardly surprising from the Providence Journal, since it many of its past articles have had an obvious liberal slant and heavily biased against the Church.

The truth of the matter is that this 71% decline is more indicative of societal problems than issues within the Church. One of the few bright spots in this article were these quotes from two priests in the Diocese of Providence:

The Rev. Joseph D. Santos Jr., pastor of Holy Name Church in Providence, contends that the falloff in Catholic weddings has its roots in the 1970s. That, he says, is when Catholic educators started revamping religious education and “basically destroyed or watered down” traditional teachings to the extent that increasing numbers of Catholics no longer understand what marriage and sexuality are about.

The church has traditionally taught that matrimony has two purposes: To allow the couple to love each other in a way that mirrors Christ’s love for his church, and to become partners with God in bringing new life into the world.

Unfortunately, says Father Santos, the failure to show the connection between those aspects has caused many Catholics to mistakenly think that sex can be primarily about pleasure and gratification and to believe that premarital sex, and even living together without marriage, are OK.

The Rev. Ronald E. Brassard, pastor of Immaculate Conception parish in Cranston, says there is no doubt that cohabitation has been the biggest factor in the decline in the number of Catholic weddings.

“It’s not so much that Catholics are getting married someplace else,” he says. “They are not getting married, period.

“In 1965, if a couple was living together, it would have been scandalous. Today, it seems no one blinks an eye.”

I completely agree with these statements. It's not hard to see how many Catholics and society and general do not have a healthy understanding or respect for marriage, family, and sexuality. This is evidenced by the proliferation of pornography, contraception, and abortion in our culture. Young couples also don't value marriage like previous generations did, and many decide on cohabitation instead. So many young adults today came from broken homes and single parent homes. Unfortunately, because of these experiences, they don't fully appreciate marriage as a lifelong commitment. Add to that the fact that many young couples that do decide to marry, are opting to have their wedding outside such as on a beach rather than in a Church. This also has a lot to do with the messages they get from media and Hollywood. They are bombarded with images of romantic outdoor ceremonies which overshadows the truth that a marriage is a sacrament and lifelong vow before God that should occur in a sacred place.

The article also had comments from recently wed young couples who call themselves Catholic but chose to marry outside the Church. The common theme was that these couples did not agree with Church doctrine. They did not want the Church telling them what to do or believe. They wanted to decide for themselves. Isn't this what happened in the Garden of Eden? We want to be in control and ultimately lead self centered lives rather than lives centered on God. That is the whole issue behind this decline in marriage. The Catholic Church is not alone in this as virtually all denominations are experiencing this. Our society is turning away from God and becoming more secularized. So it should come as no surprise that as we turn away from God's will for marriage that we will try to redefine it to suit our own wills.

The Catholic Church in the Obama Era

I have posted a link below to the keynote address of Dr. Charles E. Rice to the national meeting of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists held at Holy Cross College in Notre Dame, Ind on Oct. 22. I can urge you strongly enough to read this. It is a brilliant and passionate speech about the challenges facing us as a Church in today's society. I only wish more priests and bishops would be as bold and courageous in their homilies.

Click here to read the speech: The Catholic Church in the Obama Era

It is a long speech but well worth the time to read it. Please consider sharing this speech with others, as it contains an important message that all Christians need to read.  I posted a few excerpts below highlighting some of Dr. Rice's powerful statements on our government, culture, and our Church:

On Obama and the Government:

It is, unfortunately, credible to say that Catholics played a major role in putting the Obama Regime in power. Highly visible Catholic academics, Catholic politicians who obey their own magisterium, and Catholic clerics and publicists, paved the way for Catholic voters and others to fall for "hope and change." Sadly, there is precedent. For a comparable example of the rapid concentration of executive power by a legally installed regime, we have to look to Germany in 1933. Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor on January 30. He consolidated his power over the next few weeks. The decisive event was the Reichstag's approval of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, by which it ceded full and irrevocable powers to Hitler. That was the point of no return. The Enabling Act received the needed two-thirds vote only because it was supported by the Catholic party, the Centre Party. [1]

Obamacare, enacted with the decisive support of Catholic members of Congress, is the Enabling Act of our time in the wide-ranging control it cedes to government over the lives of the people, including the takeover of student aid. Why are student loans in the health care bill? The common denominator is control. No student can now get a federally guaranteed educational loan without the consent of a federal bureaucrat. This can make political loyalty a test for educational advancement, as it was in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Catholic Church and Homophobia

Since same sex marriage and bullying against gays have been in headlines lately, many people are quick to blame Christians and the Catholic Church especially for spreading intolerance and hate. In many heated discussions I have had with gay marriage advocates, their accusations of bigotry and homophobia are due to the fact that they have no moral, legal, or scientific basis for their argument to redefine marriage. However it is frustrating to constantly hear these lies from not only same sex marriage advocates like the very anti-Christian Human Rights Campaign, but also from those in the mainstream media.

Take a look at the video below from the National Organization of Marriage 2010 Summer for Marriage Tour and ask yourself who is displaying hate and intolerance. I am a supporter of the NOM and while I was not able to attend the rallies, I had several friends who did. I am very proud of the way they behaved in a dignified and respectful manner even while very hostile gay marriage advocates were screaming in their faces. But yet, Christians and the NOM are constantly painted as extremists, homophobes, and bigots by this anti-Christian culture.



Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Diocese of Providence in Rhode Island, recently released an article which I think all Christians should read and commit to memory. He clearly explains in a very pastoral manner why the Catholic Church is against homosexual behavior. Here are a few excerpts from the Bishop's article:

In addition, however, we preach the truth of the Gospel with such insistence precisely because we love other people, including those involved in these morally challenging situations. That means, then, that the preaching of the truth must always be infused with love, a gentle and compassionate love.

What parent, because they love their children, does not teach them about right and wrong, challenge their harmful behavior, and encourage them to live a better, more Christ-like life?

As I wrote to my correspondent, the fact that the Church has love and respect for homosexual persons does not mean that we can ignore the immorality of homosexual acts or the homosexual culture. Nor does our respect for homosexual persons mean that we should sit back silently while a highly-organized political movement seeks to hijack the institution of holy matrimony and change its definition as a union of man and woman – a definition that comes from God and has existed from the beginning of mankind.

You see, we speak about the immorality of homosexual acts and culture, not because we disdain persons of that orientation, but rather because we love and respect them; because we want them to embrace a better and more life-giving path; and because we want them to do what is good and holy in the sight of God. And what parent or grandparent would ever do less?

Please take the time to read the Bishop's entire article and spread it to others.  It's important that in this fight to save traditional marriage, we also do our best to communicate the Church's message of love to those who oppose us. Thank you Bishop Tobin for this outstanding article.

Bishop Tobin's article: Because We Love, We Preach the Truth 

Related articles

• Homophobia in the church? Really? (beliefnet.com)

Priest to Catholic voters: Stop being stupid!

My first reaction about this statement from Fr. Father Richard Perozich of San Diego is: WOW! This priest has some serious guts. Why can't more bishops and priests do what God called them to do and lead their flocks like this priest? Thank you Fr. Perozich for being a true priest of Christ and boldly telling Catholics everywhere what they should have been told long ago. Too many Catholics blindly follow Catholic-in-name-only politicians who promise economic prosperity and supposed "social justice". But the ultimate price for this is the lives of the unborn and the destruction of the family.

I have tried to stay away from politics in this blog, but as we approach election day, I felt I had to speak up. I am disgusted with moral decay of this nation. It causes me to fear greatly for the future of my children and grandchildren. I feel as if I don't even recognize this society any longer. In my 40 year life span, our society has declined to where human life holds little value and supporting traditional families is bigotry. Our nation was founded on Christian principles and Catholics are the largest religious denomination in this country. Yet we continue to vote for those who promote death and sexual immorality to our children. This is nothing short of insanity. We have politicians and huge corporations publicly supporting groups like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, which are responsible for promoting abortions, sexual immorality and anti-Christian bigotry. Yet we foolish Christians are afraid to speak up against this evil for fear of being "intolerant" or "bigotted" or "politically incorrect". We keep selling ourselves and our children's future to these politicians for promises of "hope", "change" and financial gain. Before you go and vote this season, read Fr. Richard Perozich's statement and then spend time thinking about what it means to vote as a Catholic should.

Thank you to Matt Abbot and RenewAmerica for spreading this important message.

Priest to Catholic voters: Stop being stupid!

Elections are coming up November 2, 2010. Catholics must engage in the political process to form a nation that reflects the values held by Christ's followers. Learn who you are and act like a Christian. 1 Peter 2.9 But you are "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises" of Him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Your job is to announce to the whole world that Jesus is the anointed King of God's everlasting reign — and to offer all men His salvation given by grace and received by faith. One forum in which you do this is politics. Politics comes from the words pole and polarity. Poles are opposite ends of an idea, of a temporal structure, or of a force.

Catholics, even though we live in a country and are citizens of that country, have a higher calling and responsibility to God and to our neighbor to promote God's truth even when others hate it, reject it, and hate us for proclaiming it. We are citizens in an earthly realm, but more importantly we are citizens of the new kingdom of heaven with Jesus as the Lord, His laws as our prime way of life, and called to live them and to promote them even to unbelievers.

We live in a society where many people with power, possessions, and prestige are promoting ideas that are not founded in Christ. In order to promote their ideas over ours, they tell us we must stay in our churches, keep our religion to ourselves, and that their idea of separation of the church from the state (which does not exist in our American Constitution as they say it does) trumps any ideas we might have, so we have to shut up.

And Catholics sheepishly keep quiet and vote for men and women who promote evil.

Adults Acting Like Spoiled Children and the Pope's Visit to the U.K.

As many of you already know, Pope Benedict is visiting Great Britain for the beatification of Cardinal Newman. As expected, the media and the rest of the anti-Catholics are piling up the verbal attacks on the Holy Father. Just look at the list of headlines from CNN.com this morning:

Pope: Priest abuse came as 'a shock'
Pope hasn't done enough to stop abuse, British say 
Why I oppose the pope's visit 
Our moral code is out of date 

These articles are beating the usual drumbeat of how organized religion is bad, the Pope is out of touch and intolerant and the Catholic Church is evil. Blah, blah, blah. We are living in a world were the Pope can't even sneeze without someone attacking his every action, this includes some Catholics. But what I found most interesting about England recently was this article:

Catholic Marriages Plummet in Britain 

According to this article, Catholic marriages in Britain have declined dramatically over the past three decades. A Catholic priest in London made some interesting observations about this decline:

Fr. Timothy Finigan, a parish priest in the London diocese of Southwark and founder of the Association of Priests for the Gospel of Life, told LifeSiteNews.com that in general Catholics of Britain have followed the trend in the secular world of rejecting marriage.

“Sadly, Catholics who are not well catechised tend to follow the prevailing culture.”

“In the UK, marriage is regarded by many as risky because of the possibility of divorce,” he said. “They have not been helped to understand that non-marital relationship are far more likely to break up.”

He also pointed to a deeper cause, saying that men in particular are unwilling to commit to a permanent relationship. They suffer from “a mistaken belief that commitment involves predicting the future instead of making a promise whatever the future holds.”

There is a connection here between the reaction to the Pope's trip and the plummeting marriage rates. People are are forgetting what it means to be real men and women. In Britain and Europe, as well has here in the U.S., people are being brainwashed by a hedonistic culture that tells them it is normal and good to avoid commitments and true virtues such as loyalty, honor, humility, and self sacrifice. Instead they are acting like selfish spoiled little children whose only goal is their personal pleasure and entertainment. They choose cohabitation and contraception over marriage and children because it allows them to selfishly focus only on themselves.

Marriage and Manhood

The video below and the related post which can be found here are by Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington. He delivers a powerful and very direct message of how a real man should approach his marriage. The video is Msgr. Pope's sermon on marriage and manhood. He doesn't pull any punches when he describes the difference between a "boy" and a "man" in terms of how they approach relationships and their treatment of women. The post I linked to above is titled "Three Sayings About Marriage". In this piece, Msgr. Pope shares some of his advice on marriage that he has used in pre-cana settings. Again, he goes into the topic of real men and marriage with strong words such as this:

Boys run around and play the field, but a man looks for a wife and, finding her, leaves his parents and clings to her. This is what a man does. He works hard to preserve union with his wife. He seeks to understand her needs and to provide, to be affectionate, affirming and encouraging. He confirms her authority over the children and teaches them to respect her. Too many men today are passive husbands and fathers. But the Scriptures place on the man the first obligation to cling to his wife.

The video and posting contain timeless words of advice that many men in today's culture need to focus on more often. In a society already mired in the epidemic of divorce and now facing the threat of gay marriage, reminders of how real men should view marriage are needed now more than ever.