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Moms at (Culture) War

In Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, the pseudonymous Peachy Keenan, a convert to the Catholic Faith, takes aim at feminism and advocates for traditional human values rooted in faith and family.

July 3, 2023 Jesse Russell The Dispatch 29 Print

(Image: www.regnery.com)

“Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.” — Aristotle

While commenting on the long 1960s, the redoubtable Roger Kimball once observed: “The long march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians.”

This sentence, which has been repeated by other conservative figures, was written in 2008, before the advent of the Obama and then post-Trump/post-George Floyd, “woke” era. Most people living in the Western world during the Bush era were indeed “liberals” and have been since the end of the Second World War. These liberals mostly agreed that individuals have inherent rights and freedoms that are not dependent upon titles or birth. It was thought that America, although historically allowing chattel slavery as well as various forms institution racialism, had shed these wrongs and was in the process of creating a truly just and meritocratic society.

Those who argued for affirmative action in the twentieth and early twenty-first century did so, by and large, believing that diversity quotas were temporary measures that would redress disadvantages in the playing field and allow for a truly just and meritocratic society. Yes, men and women were fundamentally different but both should be allowed equality of opportunity in academia and the work place, granting a level playing field where the best and brightest would rise to the top. Sexuality was largely a private matter, but some form of Christian ethics combined with Enlightenment liberalism should govern public policy on gender and reproduction.

Arguments, overall, were framed in terms of rights, freedom, and the ethics of equality. Now, in 2023, this liberal stalemate of sorts between the political right and left has been completely abolished.

There is, in effect, a hot war raging in the United States between left and right. Dismissing earlier liberal arguments over rights, privacy, and freedoms, both sides now demand that the other submit in adherence to a political orthodoxy. Both sides, moreover, apparently believe that executive force—from the county level up to the national level—is necessary in order to achieve their goals. Rational debate has been replaced with what has been called “psychological warfare” or “memetic warfare”

Both sides, finally, believe that losing the twenty-first century culture wars will result in apocalyptic devastation.

In Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, the pseudonymous Peachy Keenan—a southern California progressive turned Catholic populist mother of five—argues for women to reconsider what she perceives as the empty promises of the 2nd and 3rd (and 4th and 5th?) waves of feminism. The central premise of Keenan’s book is that women who choose to marry, reproduce, stay at home (even if working part time from home as Keenan herself does), practice their faith, and raise their family according to traditional human values are considered, in the current era, “domestic extremists.”

Keenan’s work is part of a (relatively) recent internet phenomenon of the “trad wife” or women who advocate a return to some form of traditional female virtues. However, as she makes clear in her work, Keenan does not advocate a return to early “homesteading” lifestyles that reject much of modernity; for instance, she humorously notes her distaste for raising chickens, a staple activity on many “trad wife” social media accounts. Keenan confesses that she bakes with Duncan Hines mixes and does not have any of the handicraft skills with which tradwives adorn their social media.

These elements set Domestic Extremist apart from other tradwife manifestos and thus make the book appealing to modern women who do not have the luxury or the desire to raise chickens and sow scarves on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Keenan believes that the culture war can be fought and won by women who remain firmly modern while being rooted in the domestic life of suburban America.

There is an notable autobiographical element to Domestic Extremist. Keenan explains that she was a quintessentially suburban Southern California girl who watched Sesame Street and MTV growing up, and later even attended an Ivy League school. She further once identified as feminist and advocated, prior to her conversion to Catholicism, the long litany of left-wing reproductive issues. However, she now identifies feminism as being the key lynch pin in the decline of American life. Keenan argues that parents have lost influence over their kids, who are now being raised by the State—sometimes covertly and against their parents’ will (Keenan provides a number of horror stories of children taken from their all too conservative parents).

Keenan argues that feminism is to blame for both the transformation of women into neurotic “harpies” (Keenan’s words) as well as men into effeminate weaklings. She notes that this lifestyle has come at personal price for her and will likely do so for those who follow her advice. The work is not especially focused on Keenan’s Catholicism, although there is one chapter dedicated to faith (there are a few of Keenan’s comments with which some readers might take issue; at one points, argues for an alliance between conservatives and “old school” homosexuals and some of her language is graphic). She nonetheless, at one point, identifies later forms of feminism as an “evil”.

One of the most curious threads of the book is Keenan’s reflections on the plight of Generation X. As she notes, Gen X is the last generation of Americans to mature with relative stability. While Millennials and Generation are usually considered a mess of social disfunction (in fairness, this was largely due to outside stressors), Generation X has largely matured into functioning members of American society. Like their Baby Boomer parents, Gen Xers sowed their wild oats in the decadent but relatively orderly 1980s and 1990s. However, they then, for the most part (Keenan notes friends who fell to suicide and addiction) graduated into adulthood. Oddly though, Gen X is another “silent generation” wedged between the very vocal Baby Boomers and Millennials. Moreover, Gen X is stuck in a Janus-faced position of having grown up in a united and functional United States, only to witness the country’s unraveling in the twenty-first century.

There is no question that many of Peachy Keenan’s examples of radical left-wing institutional oppression are shocking and have had dire consequences for the lives of those who have attempted to “fight the power” and resist conformity. Moreover, her anti-feminist vision of celebrating monogamy, motherhood, and a more domestic life has, ironically, been voiced among some left-wing feminist figures lamenting the effect of the corporate life on motherhood. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the “Benedict Option” movement on the right is that some of the earliest critiques of the medical establishment, as well as some of the pioneers of homeschooling, were in fact “Old Liberals” and hippies.

However, the key issue with Keenan’s proposals are the very same problems that some of have raised with Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. While the American family is in shambles, and both parents would do better to spend more time with their kids, there is also the need for leadership in the public square. Thus, Peachy’s “domestic extremism” should be complimented with a political realism that engages the cultural left with strength while also seeking to work to build a just and moral public square.

Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War
By Peachy Keenan
Regnery Publishing, 2023
Hardcover, 347 pages

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About Jesse Russell 18 Articles
Jesse Russell is the author of The Political Christopher Nolan: Liberalism and the Anglo-American Vision (Lexington, 2023), as well as a number of articles on twentieth-century Catholic political thought and the poetry of Edmund Spenser. He is assistant Professor of English at Georgia Southwestern State University.

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On transgenderism: Common ground, and real differences, between Catholics and radical feminists

December 31, 2020 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Dec 31, 2020 / 12:10 pm (CNA).- This article is the second part of Mary Farrow’s two-part series on the Church, gender-critical feminists, and transgender ideology. Part one can be found here.

In their efforts to teach the truth in the face of the transgender ideology, Catholics are finding an unlikely ally: trans-exclusionary, or “gender critical,” feminists, who say the transgender movement hurts women.

But while there are some points of common ground between Catholics and gender critical feminists, there are also important points of disagreement, even on the issue of what gender is.

One point of unity between the Church and trans-exclusionary radical feminists is agreement that the growing transgender movement is especially dangerous to children, who will often outgrow feelings of gender dysphoria naturally, or are led to believe their gender differs from their biological sex simply because they have atypical toy preferences for their biological sex.

“We agree that children should not be subjected to medical experimentation by doctors who profit from ‘affirming’ children, especially girls, in transgender or non-binary identities” in ever-increasing numbers, Mary Rice Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne Fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and director of the Catholic Women’s Forum, told CNA.

Kara Dansky, a board member of the Women’s Liberation Front, agreed, telling CNA that children going through the typically-turbulent time of puberty deserve care and guidance, but not medical treatments that could cause them permanent harm.

“A child who is confused about her or his sex definitely deserves compassion and care and guidance to understanding that they’re not born in the wrong body. Their body is fine just the way that it is (barring physical, medical ailments that should be treated appropriately), but we’re all born in the bodies that we’re born in,” she said.

“And we need to learn how to love ourselves physically and emotionally,” Dansky added. “So any child who is struggling to figure out what sex they are really needs caring, compassion and concern and guidance, but not sterilization and mutilation.”

Hasson said she hopes parents are aware of how the growing transgender movement is “radically reshaping how our children understand themselves and others, in ways that are incompatible with Christian beliefs. We need to be compassionate and kind to those who embrace transgender ideology, but we must be wise, and educate and guard ourselves – and our children- against the lies it proposes.”

On Causes, churches, and homophobia

On the causes of transgenderism, feminists and Catholics have both points of agreement and of disagreement.

Feminist Mary Kate Fain, who grew up in a conservative Evangelical church and community, said she thinks that in some cases, an overly rigid take on gender roles has contributed to the rise in the transgender phenomenon. For example, she said that feminists have long fought the gender norm that the only way to be a woman is to desire to stay home, cook in the kitchen, and raise children.

Feminists have argued that women can partake in any role in society that she wishes, Fain said.

But today, she said, a pervasive social message has become: “If you want to stay at home, work in the kitchen, and be feminine, have children, then you must be a woman. And therefore, if you don’t want to do any combination of these things, you must not be a woman.”

Fain also said that from her perspective, some communities with rigid gender roles also speak about homosexuality in particularly negative or disparaging ways. That can lead children in these communities who experience same-sex attractions to believe they were born in the wrong body, Fain believes.

She added that she has friends from such communities who, upon experiencing same-sex attractions, choose to identify as transgender or non-binary (neither male nor female), rather than face the stigma of identifying as gay or lesbian.

“We’re seeing this new ‘trans-the-gay-away’ movement happening, and people think that it’s progressive, when in reality this is happening in some of the most conservative areas across the globe,” Fain said.

“It’s happening in Iran where the government outlaws homosexuality on pain of death, but they’re paying for homosexual people to transition in order to no longer be gay. Then we see it in the United States, where the most red states are where you have the highest rates of transgenderism, and it’s no wonder that this is deeply linked to homophobia,” Fain said.

But Hasson cautioned against the assertion that homophobia in Christian and conservative churches is a significant contributor to the rise in transgenderism in youth. She said the assumption that most Christian churches with a biblical view of homosexuality are homophobic is unfair.

“I can’t speak to the views of ‘conservative’ or ‘evangelical’ churches as such. But I can say that those who adhere to biblical morality, like Catholics who adhere to Catholic teaching, are frequently charged with being ‘homophobic’ because they believe that homosexual sexual activity is wrong, or that the homosexual inclination is not what God intended, because sexual desire should be ‘ordered’ rightly towards the opposite sex,” Hasson said.

“So there’s an unfortunate tendency for those who identify as gay or lesbian to cry ‘homophobia’ when a Church teaches against same-sex sexual relationships or behavior,” she noted.

Hasson said most churches today that teach a biblical view of sexuality do so with the distinction of the action and the person. – the Church’s rejection of homosexual acts is not a rejection of the person, but of the act of sexual relations outside of marriage, which the Church holds is only possible between a man and a woman. 

“But there are a significant number, including Catholic churches, that rightly reject the expression of sexuality towards a same-sex partner (which is always outside of marriage, as understood by the Church). We need to push back on the left’s talking point that Catholic teaching is by definition ‘homophobic.’”

Furthermore, Hasson said, she doubts the assertion because Christian parents by and large would not prefer that their children be transgender instead of homosexual, as both transgenderism and homosexuality go against God’s plan for human sexuality.

“…conservative churches and evangelicals who are against homosexual behavior are generally not going to accept assertions of a trans-identity,” Hasson said.

“They both involve deviations from God’s explicit design, plus no parent would prefer a trans-identity over a same-sex attraction issue with a child, given the chemical castration and surgical interventions that are becoming commonplace ‘treatments’ for identity confusion.”

Hasson acknowledged that there are some fringe Christian communities that could be perpetuating truly homophobic attitudes. She also added that she is aware of a small subculture of Catholics who hold overly-rigid gender roles, such as that women shouldn’t wear pants and are not capable or fit to hold jobs outside the home.

“I think it’s not healthy when someone does that and that strain of Catholicism is nothing new,” Hasson said, though she added that the sliver of truth there is that there is a different between men and women, and there are certain social cues used to distinguish between men and women that vary from culture to culture.

“Within that narrow slice, my sense is that someone who’s growing up and feels constrained, if they feel some sort of weight of conscience like – ‘Oh, my gosh. I’m being a terrible woman,’ – they’re also going to be getting a message that there are men or women,” Hasson said.

She said she didn’t necessarily see how someone who failed to fit into rigid gender stereotypes would then assume that they were actually a different biological sex.

“The most fundamental thing is whether you are a female, and that just doesn’t change,” she said.

“And the fact that someone has put you in a box as to how to express that, it would take quite a leap of logic or something to talk that around and say, ‘Oh, that means I must be the opposite sex,’ when everything else that you would be taught in that same environment would say, ‘No, you are one sex or another.’ And your body tells you that. And science tells you that.”

First-person voices

A growing number of people who were given medical treatments to transition their gender, and then regretted it, are now speaking out against the push to medically treat minors with gender dysphoria.

Keira Bell, a 23 year-old woman in the UK, has recently joined a lawsuit against the gender clinic that began her gender transition when she was 16 and wanted to be a male.

At 16, Bell was given hormone blockers to stunt her development as a female, and then was given male hormones. Bell said the treatments gave her symptoms of menopause, depleted her sex drive and weakened her bones, and may have rendered her infertile. At the age of 20, the National Health Service paid for a surgery that removed her breasts, the Daily Mail reported.

It was not long after the surgery that Bell started to question her gender transition. She told the Daily Mail that she felt “stuck” between male and female, and that she didn’t feel she fit with either gender. At the age of 22, she decided to detransition back to female, and to fight giving such treatments to other young people. She said she felt like a “guinea pig” that was experimented on by the gender clinic, without much thought given as to how the treatments would affect her life in the long-term.

Bell is now considered a key witness in a high-profile case against Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the gender clinic where she had gone for treatments. The lawsuit was brought against the clinic by a psychiatric nurse formerly employed at the clinic, who is arguing in the suit that children are not capable of consenting to the powerful and experimental puberty blockers and hormones being prescribed to them.

Bell is just one of many people – many of them women – who are speaking out after having gone through experimental gender transitioning treatments as minors and who are now in the process of detransitioning.

Charlie Evans, a 28 year-old woman living in the UK, is in the process of detransitioning after identifying as trans since her teenage years. After sharing her story, Evans was contacted by so many men and women who regretted their gender transitions that she was inspired to found The Detransition Advocacy Network, a non-profit that seeks to support men and women who regret their gender transitions.

Evans told The Telegraph that she attributes her own desire to transition as a young person to abuse that she suffered outside of her family, that made her hate her own body so much that she wanted to cut parts of it off. That experience seems to be common among the people who contact her Detransition network, she added.

“…you can’t be born in the wrong body – it’s our minds that need treatment, not our sex,” Evans said.

This article was originally published on CNA Feb. 13, 2020.


[…]

27 Comments

  1. President Biden is out of sorts and out of his element. His era passed away and the “old guard” is gone. By “old guard” you have to picture the “consensus” that worked very well in the favour of the Democrats, in days gone by, Trent Horn, Ted Kennedy, John Boehner, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi, the Clinton Brigade and others -even if you will Newt Gingrich. On top of that the Democrat Party is all over the place on issues for which people like Biden never got prepared. They never really saw it coming and did NOT get a grip. One side of it is a reflection on the President but the other side of it prompts the troubling question: who can govern with the Democrat Party.

    Can ANYONE be a sound leader for Democrats?

    Reply

    • Dr. Simone Gold has worked out that 20% of US economy is medical care “dominated by Government”. That can trip into medical tyranny and an economic dictatorship.

      The latest proposed cuts don’t necessarily rectify the situation/deficits either.

      ‘ “This isn’t the end,” McCarthy said. “This doesn’t solve all the problems. We only got to look at 11% of the budget to find these cuts. We have to look at the entire budget. … The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending. It’s Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt.” ‘

      America’s Frontline Doctor, Simone Gold on Medical Marxism | CPAC 2023
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9VQbS9Aay0

      https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/major-cuts-to-social-security-are-back-on-the-table-what-s-being-proposed-now/ar-AA1cE0vg?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=a9af2d3f0d494b6abb4f62ebe3120c6c&ei=100

      Reply

      • Under the new Dobbs “mandate” many “stabilized” situations necessarily become unstable. For instance they can no longer command complete uniformity; or, entrenched interests have no bearing how to frame things or where to draw lines.

        ‘ Clare has led NFPRHA and its 1,000 organizational members through the most damaging policy attacks in the history of Title X, America’s family planning program. Under Clare’s leadership, NFPRHA repeatedly sued the US government in 2018-19 to prevent the Trump administration from doing irreparable harm to the Title X program, which serves millions of people with low incomes who otherwise may go without critical contraceptive and sexual health care. ‘

        https://www.nationalfamilyplanning.org/page.aspx?pid=662

        Reply

    • I am a recovering Republican. You say “Can ANYONE be a sound leader for Democrats?”.

      I am not a RINO, rather a RINOP, Republican in need of a party. I am sick of hearing “left vs right” Right is good, Left is wrong”. That idiocy foments our current national dilemma. No compromise, no bi-partisanship, not invented here.

      The “WOKE” acronym, invented by RIGHT,(wrong), DeSantis who fails to define it causing more issues. Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism. His WOKE vitriol speaks volumes.

      You say, the Dems need a strong leader. I agree, but where is the strong GOP leader? Because of Trump’s destruction of the party we need sane new blood, We are not doing the people’s business. We are buffaloed by the violent right, Marjorie Taylor Green, who now runs the House GOP caucaus, and several other toxic radicals investigating the investigators, impeaching Biden.
      God save the Union.

      Reply

      • morganD:

        I agree that Republicans are — with a few exceptions — a fairly craven and pusillanimous bunch.

        But there’s one thing that makes them the only party worth voting for: The fact that they’re not Democrats.

        The Democratic Party is a death cult.

        They favor killing children in utero. At any time. For any reason. In this way, generations of individuals are canceled from existence.

        And for the lucky children who escape that horrific death? Democrats favor sterilizing them. Mutilating them. Sexualizing them.

        Legalizing drugs; gay “marriage”; the sexualization of children; the green new poverty; the open border fentanyl conduit; the denial of the biologically determined sexes; the racist, divisive CRT curriculum — everything the Democratic Party advocates is aimed at attenuating life and promoting death.

        Death is the Democratic Party’s central tenet.

        Which is why it is quite clear. Undeniable, in fact.

        The Democratic Party is doing the bidding of its real master, the lying, ratfaced evil one.

        And, no, I am not referring to Biden.

        Catholics who continue to vote Democratic, look to your souls.

        Reply

        • brineyman. I never said I favored the Dems. I implied they need a return to Jesus. Biden is an anomaly and must be defeated. My Republican fear is that we must find a younger conservative. Trump is our worst frontrunner. Because of his criminal penchant. He is not a Republican, he is an autocrat. Just consider Trump’s ridiculous attempts to regain power defying the will of the people.

          Reply

          • Would to God that Mr. Biden actually was an anomaly in the Democratic party, but that’s not been the case for decades. He’s pretty typical of what that party has become.

      • What you have set forth as a definition of “WOKE” is how it is used as a slang term, not as an acronym.

        More importantly, as just a made up slang term, the reality is actually this:

        “WOKE”: The benighted pretense of being specially alert to various forms of prejudice and discrimination, often punctuated by jumping to false conclusions to unjustly declare that prejudice and discrimination exist where there is no objective evidence to support such declarations, and to also wrongly insist that people must act in certain ways based on the false conclusions. Among those who frequently enjoy membership among the “WOKE” are Marxists and their fellow travelers, far left liberals, conspiracy theorists, historical revisionists, and modern day secular gnostics who often pretend to have special knowledge and insights that others do not have. When asked to prove the objective truth of any of their claims, those who are “WOKE” will often only respond by unjustly declaring the questioner to be motivated by some kind of bigotry.

        Because of the much greater reliance on false narratives than on objective truth, as an acronym, “WOKE” is rightly recognized as referring to all those delusional people who very proudly act Without Objective Knowledge & Enlightenment.

        Reply

        • I will leave a final note. In 2024 pray for our democracy and our children. The babies are listening and watching. They are innocent and not familiar with incendiary and hateful rhetoric.

          God save the union.

          Reply

          • You mean like the often incendiary and hateful rhetoric that constitutes many of your posts? People in glass houses…🙄.

      • What you have set forth as a definition of “WOKE” is how it is used as a slang term, not as an acronym.

        More importantly, as just a made up slang term, the reality is actually this:

        “WOKE”: The benighted pretense of being specially alert to various forms of prejudice and discrimination, often punctuated by jumping to false conclusions to unjustly declare that prejudice and discrimination exist where there is no objective evidence to support such declarations, and to also wrongly insist that people must act in certain ways based on the false conclusions. Among those who frequently enjoy membership among the “WOKE” are Marxists and their fellow travelers, far left liberals, conspiracy theorists, historical revisionists, and modern day secular gnostics who often pretend to have special knowledge and insights that others do not have. When asked to prove the objective truth of any of their claims, those who are “WOKE” will often only respond by unjustly declaring the questioner to be motivated by some kind of bigotry.

        Because of the much greater reliance on false narratives than on objective truth, as an acronym, “WOKE” is rightly recognized as referring to all those delusional people who very proudly act Without Objective Knowledge & Enlightenment.

        Reply

  2. As intelligent as Aristotle was, we should not take our political guidance from him, unless you want to be ruled by an aristocracy or oligarchy. He thought women inferior to men and hence his labelling of democracy as feminine — weak, emotional, easily swayed, irrational.

    Reply

    • Read Aristotle’s Politics for a bigger picture. He predicted a lot of things that have happened in cycles for centuries.

      Reply

  4. As an addendum to my comment on Aristotle, Taylor Caldwell wrote a lot about this political deterioration.

    Reply

  5. Wow. I am a life-long Republican. Would occasionally vote for a Democrat who clearly had the NATIONAL or STATE INTEREST at heart, instead of that of his party. Mayor Ed Koch of NY was one such example. I wouldnt vote DEM now with a gun to my head. Their deliberate destruction of the US over the last few presidencies is far too well known and clear to bother repeating. Calling suburban parents at school board meetings “terrorists” ranks right up there with the old McCarthyism.Intimidation at it’s slimiest. Their attempts to buy votes with cancelled student loans for example, is so obvious only the grossly uninformed would fail to see it. Ditto their efforts to destroy American history, Americans families, and divide us into competing and thus weaker slices of demographics. Their next telegraphed move appears to be the stacking or destruction of the Supreme Court, whichever they can accomplish, largely because not EVERY decision goes their radical way.That it has worked to preserve the country on a fair and even course for almost 250 years means nothing to them. Nor does verified voting which they oppose at every step. (The “why” of that could not be more obvious). Their destruction of our history bothers me the most. And removal of vestiges of American history continue with another statue of a Revolutionary War general here in NY last week. “Racism” has become the accusation du jour. It is trite and generally a lie, hurled ironically by those who are themselves well educated, well connected and well-off, and I no longer listen to it. Many of our present DEM leaders are clearly impaired and should not be in office at all( Biden, Feinstein, Fetterman). I can only say I have never seen the country in so much danger and in such bad shape. Science and biology has been turned on it’s head, and criminals are permitted to attack ordinary citizens and rob businesses with no penalty. Cities are being emptied while their leftist rulers shrug. I no longer recognize us, and I am not young. I pray for the country each day at Mass. We stand at the edge of an abyss, and it feels like time is running out.

    Reply

    • Absolutely, LJ.

      It’s astonishing to me that Catholics continue to vote Democratic, considering all the outrageous policies you mentioned and many, many more.

      As you say, the left is intent on destroying America. It’s undeniable.

      And that’s clearly okay with half of the country.

      Reply

    • ALL Dems are evil? Painting your own corner? You disregard my concerns pertaining to Trump, not “Catholic” CINO Biden, and the TRUTH. Examples of some…

      I see little evidence that current Democrats openly platformed a lie. defying the constitution by trying to overthrow the government, gerrymander voter suppression, openly threaten my family if I disagree with him, fake electors, using hateful nicknames for those in objection, align with extreme criminal cults, visiting NRA meeting 2 days after Uvalde, pardoning criminal leaders of the 1/6/21 Capitol incursion, oh and himself, Trump and Stormy Daniels Had Sex Four Months After Melania Gave Birth, and on and on.

      May God shed his grace on the 2024 election.

      Reply

  6. There is not a hot war raging in the United States between left and right. Most Americans are somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. The noisy Americans are in the far right and the far left.

    Reply

    • Gerald. I disagree that America is not at war. Today the oft used word is “HATE”. We are so divided that we are imploding. There is no compromise in the congress. McCarthy has relinquished the GOP caucus power to crazy radical Marjorie Taylor Green The presidency has been defiled and SCOTUS, because of ethics issues, are at its lowest rating in decades. We are investigating the investigators and not attending to the people’s business. Internationally we have diminished our position as the leader of the free world. Imagine trying to remove the US from our NATO allies. Tell me where we start. Thanks. God bless.

      Reply

      • Marjorie Taylor Green is not nearly as radical or unhinged at AOC. She certainly voices her opinion, which by the way is STILL an American RIGHT, but the GOP does not operate in lock-step like the Dems do, where ALL jump if AOC speaks. AOC pontificates like an expert on every topic and yet knows not a single thing. The obvious “hate” I see is coming from the left. ONLY. In the pro-dem media especially, which cannot suppress enough conservatives, and they target with lies and accusations as many republicans as possible. On a more pedestrian, non-office holder minion level, there is all that violence in the street by BLM, flash mobs of thieves, and those who vandalize or set fire to pro-life centers and churches. In the judicial system it appears to be ok to attack people in the streets, stores and subways with impunity, but woe to conservatives attempting to engage a pregnant woman outside an abortion mill. You WILL be arrested and thrown in jail for that. That they put on trial in NY the young former Marine who saved himself and others from a subway attack with a defensive choke-hold, yet released a black man who had STABBED his assailant, tells you everything you need to know about leftist partisanship and corruption. There is NO violent movement on the right and making up breathless stories about white supremacists etc does not make it true, no matter how often that lie is repeated. The presidency has NOT been “defiled”, certainly not by Trump, who put America first and did a fantastic job with our economy. Biden however, is barely functioning and appears to have had relationships with China which can only charitably be described as highly dubious. That China has been circling the waters with its military lately, but did not while Trump was in office, should tell you who they feared. Now Biden has suckered us into a War in Ukraine which could turn into WW III. Many of us have no interest in sacrificing our sons for that. Americans in certain quarters persist in seeing “mean tweets” as more dangerous than nuclear armed Russia and China. Such uninformed views are exceptionally dangerous to our future.

        Reply

    • Gerald, morganD, I would just say as an observer abroad there has been some “hotness” in the war with 1. the large scale violence we saw in the mob rioting during COVID with the activists openly stating their claims and 2. the variety of physical attacks against pregnancy centres and pro-lifers.

      The other side to that “hotness” is the police and security services failing.

      The illegal immigration has been a very contentious issue but you do not see sustained mob violence going on organized and led by people opposed to it.

      The attacks on Trump are unrelenting and quite intense and ordinarily you wouldn’t say those are part of a “hot war” -but the fury is tangible and monstrous. Trump deserves some praise for this I think, deflecting the pummeling and being undaunted.

      Reply

  7. How does one know when “the cultural war” has been “won?”

    The fact is that the war comes down to alleged law and the intellectual milieu which is enabled by the same. The “cultural war” is ultimately about Satan attempting to lead all souls to Hell. As such, what is necessary is that Catholics are orthodox, uncompromising, political, and increasing in number and/or influence.

    There is one extremely weak US political party which ATTEMPTS to duplicate what in Europe were and maybe still are called or described as “Christian Democratic” parties. It doesn’t have all of the orthodox positions.

    Taking the traditional Democratic concern for the poor, and the Republican concern for faith and freedom and combining it with the proper application of Catholic social teaching and antiliberalism would likely make an ideally indestructible new political party.

    An alternative might be that the Republican Party would become more Democratic while embracing something described in the prior paragraph. There is a small group of “heretical” Republicans which seems to be moving in this direction.

    I would say that the cultural war will only be won after false religions have been vanquished and the Catholic Church, and the City of God are triumphant.

    Reply

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