The State of the Nation

I've written from time to time about how our laws increasingly focus on "guaranteeing" the voters sex without restraint or consequences. Politically, this is an easy sell to a growing segment--probably a majority--of the populace. However, legal consequences are not the only ones, and no matter how we ignore, deny or pretend, short of death we will not escape being human beings as designed by God. As we ignore His instructions for a life well-lived, we will reap consequences, no matter what the law of the land may be. "I can call poison sweet, but it will still kill me. I can call sand bedrock, but it will not stand" writes Professor Anthony Esolen. Following is his powerful essay on the unreal state of our country.
Curt
**********************************************************



Unreal Nation by Anthony Esolen

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)

I live in a country that gave birth to an organization conceived in lies and dedicated for the purpose of murder. It is called, with a wry irony that escapes us, “Planned Parenthood.” If you are a young woman and you go to “Planned Parenthood” and say, “I am with child, and I need help to bear it and to care for it, because its father and I are not married, and I am poor,” the people at “Planned Parenthood” will not assist you one bit. They will not give you food or clothing for the baby. They will not put you in touch with people who open their homes to unwed mothers. They at “Planned Parenthood” will do nothing for your parenthood at all.
They will kill the baby in your womb, that they will, and make a nifty living from it. We now learn that they have studied at the Josef Mengele Institute of Medicine, with internship at the local junkyard. They dismember babies with especial care, so as to trade in their brains, transmissions, livers, pistons, hearts, pumps, flesh, upholstery, kidneys, and catalytic converters. “It’s a blob,” they say, when they are before the cameras, or when they are persuading the nervous mother to go ahead with what everybody knows is a lie. “It’s a boy!” they say, as they see his cute little boy-parts in cute little isolation on a glass dish.
Most of the media, that vast windowless Ministry of Truth, ignore the lies. Why not? The man who runs the news agency rocks the bedsprings with the woman at the foundation that funnels a half a million dollars to the liars. They funnel that money because they are concerned about the poor, in the way that their pricy lawn specialists are concerned about weeds.

And man, though he was set in honor, would not understand: he was likened to the witless beasts, and has become like them…. They have been herded like sheep into hell, and Death feeds upon them. (Ps. 48:13, 15; Vulgate, my translation.)

I live in a nation conceived in liberty, raised high in empire, and fallen into moral lassitude, impotence, and automatism. God help me, but I still believe that my countrymen are better than the follies they believe. But no puddle in the alley behind the fire escapes is so muddy, so rank, and so shallow as are their souls of my countrymen, if I am to judge by their own unwitting testimony.
Let me give an example. A young man at Yale is engaging in a protest against pornography. Porn, as you may know, is a kind of wire service whereby people pay for regular and meaningless electric jolts to the more reptilian centers of their constitutions. The consumers, an apt noun if ever there was one, then try to flog their dead souls into some caricature of a genuine human feeling. So one of the future leaders of my nation enters into a conversation with the protestor.

“You mean that you actually are opposed to pornography?” asks the beardless Cicero-to-be.
“Yes, we are. It reduces human beings to commodities. It’s a sacrilege against the holiness and the beauty of the human body. It destroys many a marriage. It’s essentially loveless and heartless.”
“That’s interesting,” replies young Abe Lincoln with a leer, and then he plays his ace of trumps. “But what do you use when you [vulgar term for self-abuse], huh?”
The young man shakes his head. “I don’t do that.”
Incredulity. What, is not everyone a slave to the automatic—the jiggered robo-lusts of the sexual revolution? “You lost me there!” laughs Danny Webster.

It has come to this. Someone’s kid has to simulate sexual intercourse in order to help work off the sweaty ennui of a student at Yale, who has not the courage nor the honor nor the inner spiritual liberty to hold the hand of a real woman, and to sing in his heart for the gift of her hand.

And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot, for it is sealed. And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned. (Isaiah 29:11-12)

I live in a nation whose form of government is predicated upon a trust in the intelligence and the good sense of ordinary people, to accomplish the ordinary ends of life for themselves, their children, and their neighbors.
Therefore all oversight of local schools has been snatched from them; sweet and community-building customs have been discarded or suppressed; and children are taught to despise what their forefathers believed and said and did, or rather they never really learn what they believed, they never hear what they said, the worst construction is placed upon what they did, and sins they never committed at all are attributed to them, so as to clear the way for the new and improved—toothpaste, elections, deodorant, marriage.
More than a hundred years ago, in my nation, teachers who breathed the true air of democracy wished to bring to ordinary people the best of a classical education. Why should a carpenter or a mason or a housewife not also thrill to hear the words of Mark Antony, demagogue extraordinaire, on the steps of the senate house: “When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept; / Ambition should be made of stronger stuff.” The men and women of Chautauqua wished to raise themselves and their fellows to those heights; nowadays professors at Princeton and Yale scoff at the very idea of greatness. You are far more likely at Princeton to take a course in tawdry novels for teens than in Shakespeare.
There is nothing so stupid (a woman walking around with a mattress on her head, to protest rape), so fatuous (“poetry” found by rearranging words on the cover of a pack of matches), so nasty (a portrait of the pope, made of rubbers), and so perverse (any current television show), that cannot find its way into the august halls of education, that fraud of the age, that mechanism for making the wealthy as ambitious and soulless as possible, and keeping the poor as dependent and ignorant as possible.

When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error. (Romans 1:21-27)

In my nation we deny truths that lie in front of our eyes. Any fool can figure out that a man is not a woman, a cesspool is not a womb, a drug that thwarts the natural action of an organ is not medicine, an orphan is not a privileged member of an alternative family, pictures of people doing vile things are not the same as speech, and a law whose substance no one can know (because it is too vast, or vague, or incomprehensible) or rely upon (because it is subject to the caprice of inventive judges) is not a law at all. Any fool; but we are not any fool, just as Michelangelo was not any artist. We have judges who legislate, legislators who defer to bureaucrats and judges, and executives who do what they will. We call it “democracy” because the technology of elections is still in place, a monstrous Rube Goldberg array of machines, fed by thousands of polls and billions of dollars, cranked and kicked and oiled and fueled by a swarm of parasites, all to spit out a president whose platitudes are as flat as Kansas, with never a tornado-tossed house to fall upon the Great Leader’s head and set the Munchkins free.
We have “Boy” Scout leaders who don’t know the meaning of the word “boy,” we have physicians helping people kill themselves, we have priests turned atheists as did Eli’s sons, we have a Common Core of emptiness; even our madness has gone mad, so that the man who has accepted the madness of Monday finds himself unforgivably sinning against the madness of Tuesday, as varieties of madness increase and multiply beyond the enumerative powers of the alphabet.
All to be expected. Lies disintegrate. Shall we believe the lies? I can call poison sweet, but it will still kill me. I can call sand bedrock, but it will not stand:

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which build his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house: and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24-27)

________
Anthony Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. He is a senior editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity

The Meaning of Words: Who Will Be Master?

Over two months since I posted. It's been a wonderful summer but very busy with our girls home from college, LifeSpan meeting in JH, Mode Camp, and the usual summer version of busy-ness at the office. But here is a very compelling article from John Stonestreet about the disturbing state of the law in our country.
Curt

 **************** 

The Court’s Attack on Language

By John Stonestreet

of BreakPoint/Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview

Why is a raven like a writing desk?” is a famous riddle from “Alice in Wonderland.” Here’s another: Why is a parking ticket like a revelation?

You might have missed this story. On June 22 the 12th District Court of Appeals in Ohio overturned a parking ticket. Andrea Cammelleri had been cited for parking her truck on a city street. She fought the citation, saying the ordinance only prohibited parking a “motor vehicle camper” on the street, not a simple motor vehicle. The trial court ruled against her, writing that “anybody reading [the ordinance] would understand that it is just missing a comma."

Well, Judge Robert A. Hendrickson disagreed. He explained that the rule of law demands using the “rules of grammar and employing the common sense meaning of terms.” He wrote, “If the village desires a different reading, it should amend the ordinance and insert a comma between the phrase “motor vehicle” and the word “camper.”

Now what does a simple parking violation have to do with the larger culture? My colleague Daniel Weiss teases this out in his recent article on BreakPoint.org. The parking ticket story might not mean so much, he writes, if not for the two misguided Supreme Court decisions handed down just days later.

Now I’ve already shared quite a bit about these decisions, but I think Weiss’ point is worth exploring. In their own ways, both Supreme Court decisions dealt severe blows to the common meaning of words. Beyond the immediate impact of the rulings, their attack on the function of language might be the most significant long-term threat.

In Burwell vs. King, the Court found that the clear, plain language of the law commonly known as Obamacare wasn’t adequate to make the law work. So rather than asking Congress to rework the law, as would be proper, the Court gave it new meaning based on nothing more than the justices’ own desire to see the law stand.

Ironic, since the world just honored the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, which established the idea of Lex Rex, that the law is king. It was an important check on the abuse of great power. That idea seems to be lost on this particular Court. If the federal government doesn’t have to abide by its own laws, why should average citizens?

In their other ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court violated thousands of years of human history that understood marriage to be the conjugal union of a man and woman for the purpose of family, and it found in the Constitution something that was not there. Even after tens of millions had affirmed their support for marriage at the ballot box, five justices redefined our foundational social institution and silenced an essential public debate.

The absurdity of these rulings is mindboggling until you understand the ideas driving them. Weiss unearthed a clue from the self-absorbed ramblings of Alice in Wonderland’s Humpty Dumpty, who said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

For Humpty, co-opting the meaning of words makes perfect sense, because his goal is not to communicate Truth, but to become the master. The recent court rulings—and many cultural disruptions over the past decades—are really about who will be master.

As Weiss indicates, there’s a long history detailing the manipulation of language for the purpose of social control. George Orwell described the process well in his book "1984". The language was forever being altered, “to make all other modes of thought impossible. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings….”

But this isn’t something only of science fiction. When Communists took over mainland China, they perpetrated a “Cultural Revolution” that disrupted family bonds, discouraged religious devotion, and dismantled the Chinese language. Simplified characters replaced five thousand years of meaning and culture.

Now, we have it here. Words like “husband” and “wife” are discriminatory, confining marriage to two people is hateful, and “religious freedom” is bigotry. And many in our society wish to make words mean just what they want them to mean. But we have something they don’t: the Truth. And our loyalties remain: to the Christ who Himself is that Truth.