Moral issues

The Progressive Road to Hell

OrthodoxyToday.org | Timothy Birdnow | May 26, 2008

This is what “progressive” social policies and good intentions have wrought! (What is paved with good intentions?) Feminism, welfare, and the sexual revolution, along with the explosion of narcotics, have completely destroyed the black family. This woman had a father, who was probably a drug addict or alcoholic and who likely lived on welfare. In another time, he would have been poor and uneducated, but would have worked and cared for his children. Thanks to the compassion of the Left, he was freed of any responsibility and could destroy himself and everyone around him at his leisure. Because more children mean more government largesse, poor women frequently become baby factories, spitting out more hopeless welfare recipients and keeping our prisons full. [Read more…]

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Bishop Hilarion Opposes Radical Liberalization in Protestant Communities

OrthodoxNet.com | Jun. 9, 2008

Not all participants of the inter-Christian dialogue are ready to pursue partnership and solidarity, Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria, Representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to the European Institutions, said.

“The divergence is so deep, that it can be compared to bottomless abysses,” Hilarion said in his interview to the Soyuznoye Veche, the newspaper of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia, commenting his dialogue with a Lutheran bishop. [Read more…]

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California is rewriting its marriage forms for gays

Exactly what Dennis Prager predicted will happen is now happening in California. The state is removing “bride” and “groom” from marriage licenses. Why only “2” partners?

AP | Michael R. Blood | May. 22, 2008

You have to figure “bride” and “groom” are out. So, what will the California marriage license look like in the new era of same-sex marriages? Will it list “Partner A” and “Partner B”? “Intended No. 1” and “Intended No. 2”? Or will it contain just blank spaces for the betrothed?

The court decision last week that legalized gay marriage in California has created a semantic puzzle with scant time to solve it. With the ruling tentatively set to take effect June 16, state bureaucrats must rapidly rewrite, print and distribute a marriage license application. [Read more…]

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California Decision Will Radically Change Society

Townhall.com | Dennis Prager | May. 20, 2008

Americans seem mesmerized by the word “change.” And, by golly, they sure got it last week from the California Supreme Court. It is difficult to imagine a single social change greater than redefining marriage from opposite sex to include members of the same sex.

Nothing imaginable — leftward or rightward — would constitute as radical a change in the way society is structured as this redefining of marriage for the first time in history: Not another Prohibition, not government taking over all health care, not changing all public education to private schools, not America leaving the United Nations, not rescinding the income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax. Nothing. [Read more…]

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Some Logical Corollaries of California’s Gay Marriage Decision

American Thinker | Paul Shlichta | May. 19, 2008

As Lady Macbeth said, “what’s done cannot be undone” — except by constitutional amendment. In order to appease an intransigent minority group, the California Supreme Court has, in the manner of Roe v. Wade, resorted to inventing a new legal principle to justify their predetermined goal.

But one does wish that they had thought the matter out a little more carefully. In creating a mechanism for justifying gay marriage, the justices have set in motion an infernal machine with consequences far beyond their limited imaginations. Cliff Thier has already pointed out that these unintended consequences may include the invalidation of no-fault divorce and the legitimization of polygamy. Let us extend his line of argument further and assess the range of logical consequences of this decision. [Read more…]

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Teen Sex: There are No Positives

Human Events | Armstrong Williams | Dec. 7, 2007

Recently a study was released by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia, that claimed teenagers or pre-teens who have consensual sex are less likely than their virgin counterparts to engage in delinquent behavior later on in life. Then, last week I read about an author who was telling parents to encourage their youngsters to engage in sexual activity. And to top it off, just the other day I read about the results of a recent Associated Press poll which showed that 67 percent of American adults favor public schools providing birth control to students. All this after the nation’s teen birth rate rose 3 percent from 2005 to 2006, which was the first increase in 14 years and births to unmarried mothers hit a record high (Center For Disease Control). [Read more…]

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Why the art world is a disaster

New Criterion | Roger Kimball | June 2007

It is now that we begin to encounter the fevered quest for novelty at any price, it is now that we see insincere and superficial cynicism and deliberate conscious bluff; we meet, in a word, the calculated exploitation of this art as a means of destroying all order. The mercenary swindle multiples a hundredfold, as does the deceit of men themselves deceived and the brazen self-portraiture of vileness.
—Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis

Some of what she said was technical, and you would have had to be a welder to appreciate it; the rest was aesthetic or generally philosophical, and to appreciate it you would have had to be an imbecile. —Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Last month, a friend telephoned and urged me to travel to Bard College to see “Wrestle,” the inaugural exhibition mounted to celebrate the opening of “CCS Bard Hessel Museum,” a 17,000-square-foot addition to the college art museum. It sounded, my friend said, spectacularly awful. She’d just had a call from her husband, a Bard alum, who had zipped through the exhibition while doing some work at the college. Huge images of body parts—yes, those body parts—floating on the walls of a darkened room, minatory videos of men doing things—yes, those things—to each other, or to themselves, all of it presented in the most pretentious fashion possible. It really was something … special.

[Read more…]

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