Letters to the Editor: April 2025

Mistaken about Marriage

I believe Edward Wilneff (letter, Jan.-Feb.) is mistaken about National Review’s being in favor of same-sex marriage. The publication came out against the Respect for Marriage Act, which was signed into law by Joe Biden in 2022 and requires the U.S. federal government and all U.S. states to recognize the validity of marriages between individuals of the same sex. National Review was in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and which the Respect for Marriage Act repealed.

Erin Kurtz

Steele, North Dakota

THE EDITOR REPLIES:

When the editors of National Review came out against the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), it wasn’t due to any moral misgivings about same-sex marriage but because they thought RFMA was bad policy. Its purpose, they wrote, “appears to be to demoralize social conservatives, to cast the opponents of same-sex marriage as a dwindling band of bigots” (July 21, 2022). Indeed, the editors were quick to state that they “do not deny that committed same-sex relationships can and often do have much of great value: affection, mutual caregiving, love. Some same-sex relationships clearly exceed some opposite-sex ones in these important measures.” But “love,” they said, “needs no license from the state” — hence, they urged Republican senators to vote down RFMA.

If their “personally in favor but politically opposed” position weren’t clear enough, National Review editor Philip Klein doubled down, saying on the publication’s website, “I have long supported allowing same-sex couples to get married. Had it ever come up for a vote where I lived prior to Obergefell, I would have voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, and nothing that has happened in the post-Obergefell world has caused me to change my mind” (July 21, 2022). Recall that in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.

So, Erin Kurtz and Edward Wilneff are both correct: National Review came out against the RFMA but is in favor of same-sex marriage. Let’s call it another disappointing case of conservatives’ cognitive dissonance.

Identifying Value Despair

I write to express my gratitude for “Why Must Man Work?” by Edmund B. Miller with Patricia Bonar (Jan.-Feb.). They insightfully bring together “on the street” pro-life counseling, the perennial philosophy, and Scripture itself.

Miller’s decades of sidewalk counseling give him a telling, and heartbreaking, context for identifying what he terms “value despair.” If you are not economically productive, or so it seems, you are largely worthless. This despair often encourages abortion. The same dynamic promotes assisted suicide. Indeed, it can draw young people into a military whose goals are obscure and whose means are indiscriminate.

Borrowing from Karol Wojtyla, now St. John Paul II, Miller and Bonar make a classic distinction between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of human acts. Our actions are transitive insofar as they change the world; they are intransitive insofar as they change us. Which takes priority? Wojtyla, in his essay “The Problem of the Constitution of Culture Through Human Praxis” (1977), writes that “the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” Work is for the person, not the person for work.

And how, Miller and Bonar ask, does Scripture direct us? It teaches us that as stewards of creation we are to live creatively. We are to work even as God works, and His work culminates in the self-donation of the Eucharist to which we are invited. In contrast, when we live as if God does not exist, we no longer know what to make of our own existence.

The grim and ghastly Thomas Malthus, Miller and Bonar tell us, was quick to dismiss “nonproductive” lacemakers. In his view, they deplete our gross product, while in return they leave us only “a bit of lace.” Nonsense. Lacemakers leave us delicate evidence of beauty. What of the beauty of a bride’s veil? Does not like evidence grace the altar linens we put in service of the Holy Mass, that is, the divine work of sacrifice and redemption?

James G. Hanink

Inglewood, California

EDMUND B. MILLER REPLIES:

I have admired James G. Hanink’s writings for many years, so I am honored by his response to and elaborations on my and Patricia Bonar’s article. The words of Pope St. John Paul II, of which Dr. Hanink reminds us, are vitally important: “The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” Yet, if the person is severed from his work, as has been incrementally the case since the industrial revolution, and if his work is one of the ways in which he participates in the nature of God, then why do we wonder that this is the generation of identity crisis?

Foolish Fighting Words

A. James McAdams believes that the U.S. Catholic bishops should call out Donald Trump for allegedly lying about the existence of a Deep State and rigged elections (“Symposium on Catholics & American Political Life, Part II,” Jan.-Feb.). Thems may be fightin’ words, but it seems like a waste of breath to bother arguing. Every day since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, new light is shed on government misdeeds, injustices, and — yes — conspiracies to undermine fair elections. Any bishop who follows Dr. McAdams’s advice would end up looking pretty foolish.

Alberto Mora

Boonton, New Jersey

Our Fork in the Road

Christian politics in America is more than opposition to abortion and more than blind obedience to the pope and the Founding Fathers. Holy Scripture, history, and prophecy are our surest guides. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the NOR’s “Symposium on Catholics & American Political Life, Part II” (Jan.-Feb.), though it is an improvement over Part I (Dec.) due to two impressive contributions.

In the first century, a man on the highway from Jerusalem would initially head northwest toward Joppa and would pass Golgotha, only to turn southwest less than a mile outside the Holy City. Five miles to the southwest he would pass within a mile of Bethlehem. Ten more miles to the southwest he would reach Hebron. From the fork in the road at Hebron, “broad is the way” that continues to lead southwest to Egypt, while “narrow is the way” that turns southeast to Sodom. St. John calls this highway “Sodom and Egypt” (Rev. 11:8).

Jesus, however, reverses the fork at Hebron (cf. Mt. 7:13-14). The narrow way that “leadeth unto life” is the broad but long way to Egypt, to the monasticism of the Therapeutae at Lake Mareotis. According to the historian Eusebius of Caesarea (d. A.D. 339), Christianity originated from this sect of Jews, which spread from Lake Mareotis to the Jordan River, with sympathetic homes along the way, so the monastic clergy could travel without carrying money, inasmuch as each community shared everything in common, once they reached it.

The broad way that “leadeth to destruction” was, in the first century, the narrow but short way to the tar pits of Sodom. In recent years, Sodom has grown to encompass Europe. With Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) the United States joined Europe as part of Sodom, too.

Jewish law permits lethal force to prevent homicides and sexual crimes, and it defines our rights to life and chastity. This law permits lesser force to prevent property crimes, which defines our right to property, as Jesus knew when He drove the moneychangers out of the Temple. The general illicitness of force otherwise defines our right to liberty. The Apostles taught their Gentile converts to love their neighbor by respecting life, chastity, liberty, and property.

From the beginning, Americans have recognized our rights to life, liberty, and property. Even now that they have ventured all the way down the Devil’s highway to Sodom, Americans still recognize these three rights. The one right that all Sodomites refuse to recognize is the right to chastity. Hardly a European, for example, is wont to prosecute rape nowadays, particularly when a prosecution would infringe on the liberty of a man higher up on the intersectionality totem pole than his hapless victim. What the Punjabi terms revenge rape the woke leftist terms equity.

All the contributors to the NOR symposium dwell on Dobbs v. Jackson and Roe v. Wade. These cases contest to whom the right to life applies but not whether life is a right in the first place. Obergefell is something else entirely. By themselves, the American principles of life, liberty, and property lead inevitably to homosexual marriage. Homosexual marriage is as American as apple pie. All it takes is one state to recognize it, and the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution compels every other state to recognize it, too.

Prohibiting abortion is laudable, but this goal can be attained entirely within the Americanist heresy. To denounce homosexual marriage, by contrast, is to repudiate the formula of life, liberty, and property of the Due Process Clause in favor of a different formula — the formula of life, chastity, liberty, and property of Jewish Noachide law. Overturning Obergefell means rejecting the Constitution in favor of God’s law.

1. James McAdams puts his Zoomer students on a pedestal for their commitment to the Americanist heresy, for pointedly overlooking stolen elections and federal corruption, and for their commitment to censorship and to the consensus that passes itself off as science nowadays. But the woke leftism these Zoomers espouse can lead only to the Church’s celebrating sodomy as if it were sacramental marriage, which is nothing less than blasphemy. Jesus Christ and the sacraments of His Church mediate our salvation. Sodomy cannot. Our Lady of Fatima foresaw that “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and family.” We find ourselves in the final battle, but no contributor to the symposium notices!

The fork in the road at Hebron is more than just chastity to the right and blasphemy to the left. Our rights come from God Himself and are His commandments to us, while the Due Process Clause is part of two amendments to the Constitution and is a product of — and subordinate to — democracy. The fork in the road between Egypt to the right and Sodom to the left is between God and His law to the right and democracy and its counterfeit laws in place of these to the left, which is nothing less than idolatry. If such blasphemy and idolatry on the part of His Church will not provoke the Great Day of the Wrath of the Lamb (cf. Rev. 6:16-17), I don’t know what will.

Life, chastity, liberty, and property are Christian morality, and respecting them is the second greatest commandment, which applies to everyone, individually and collectively. It binds a democracy, a pope, or an emperor as much as it binds every individual. Yet our democracy refuses to subordinate itself to God. It follows the Devil instead. As one impressive contributor, Jason M. Morgan, puts it, “America is truly exceptional in that religion has no braking power on the evils of government.” As Morgan declares, “Catholicism is America now. Because America is Catholicism. The Spirit of 1776 conquered the Roman religion decades ago.”

To elevate the law of a democracy (or any state) above the law of God is idolatry. Pagan Romans termed their idolatry emperor worship, and they termed abortion infanticide. They never contended that their god endows slaves with liberty. Unlike Americans, they had honesty. Like President Thomas Jefferson, they did not respect their slaves’ chastity. Thus, not only have the sins of America infected Rome, the sins of Rome, both Republic and Empire — especially the idolatry that is the Nietzschean state unfettered by morality — have infected America from the beginning.

As the other impressive contributor, Thaddeus Kozinski, observes, “American power, both domestically and abroad, is authorized by nothing but itself.” He admits the counterfeit nature of medical freedom, individual sovereignty, and the will of the people. However, he overlooks the universality of Noachide law and the two greatest commandments. The demon Kozinski would exorcise is Satan, from the vision of Pope Leo XIII. Although Leo witnessed Satan boast that he can destroy the Church, Our Lord denies that Satan can do so (cf. Mt. 16:18).

After the Great Day of the Wrath of the Lamb, fear of God will hang heavy in the air, and Sodom will be a smoking ruin — an enduring reminder of the folly of democracy.

Thomas More Zavist

Houston, Texas

A Weapon for Spiritual Battle

When I came to prison at 17 years of age nearly 27 years ago, I was lost. I had been raised Protestant, but childhood experiences left me in anger and disbelief. Jesus Christ and Santa Claus seemed one and the same to me — both fake. Sin left me a blind beggar who couldn’t even walk. If it weren’t for faithful volunteers, countless prayers from others, and publications such as the NOR, I would still be lost. Instead, they all helped guide me home.

Prison is a broken place. Souls are housed here with other broken souls and left to churn in darkness until the gate opens and they are released. This darkness is then unleashed on a society that hopes the prison system has “reformed” these souls. Prison is a spiritual battleground that is often empty of the weapons souls need not only to survive but to become alive in Christ. The Christian witness of those who come into contact with us prisoners is an invaluable treasure. How can we measure the impact of a Christian staff member or volunteer on a person lost on death row? How do we begin to measure the influence such a Christian has on juveniles who are only starting to serve a life sentence without parole?

My message to you is to know that Christ still moves through walls. He still seeks those who are lost, afraid, and hurting. It is through Christian hearts and minds — the Body of Christ — operating and living as officers, volunteers, and sponsors, and in countless other ways, including through publications such as the NOR, that He reaches us. I am sure some of you have been hurt by us. Our actions, rooted in sin and often marked by violence and heartlessness, by their nature separate us. Yet I beg you to help us seek Christ more. Help us to experience Him more deeply, to heal and grow from the pain we have caused and have experienced ourselves.

I don’t want to be where God doesn’t want me. I’ve been there, and it did me and others no good. I will remain where He has me, doing all I can to serve Him. Like Peter, I denied Him. Unlike Judas, I’ve not rejected His love. Please help me share the NOR with others by sponsoring copies for us in prison.

William S. Walker

Casswell Correctional Center

Blanch, North Carolina

I was introduced to the NOR in 2007 when the Georgia Department of Corrections decided (after eight years and eight months of solitary confinement) that I was not the second coming of MacGyver. I wrote to then-editor Dale Vree to tell him how impressed I was with the publication and to ask if it were possible for me to receive a free subscription. He, of course, answered my letter and graciously provided me with a “scholarship subscription.” For the next 13 years I not only enjoyed every article, I used the NOR to strengthen each of the prisons I was transferred to by the GDC.

However, after COVID hit in 2020, the GDC terminated all religious gatherings other than those for Muslims. Those like me who wondered why the Catholic Church acquiesced to this arrangement were told to shut up by prison authorities and were utterly ignored by ecclesial authorities.

When I arrived at Phillips State Prison in Buford in 2013, we had Mass twice a week, RCIA and Catholic Scripture classes weekly, and monthly Catholic Community Fellowship. We had our own Catholic library in the chaplaincy department, and I was the chaplain’s administrative aide. Our library contained over a decade’s worth of NORs. I used the Breviary my mother had bought me 40 years earlier to lead daily morning, evening, and night prayers in my dorm. All this was terminated by the GDC, and I was removed from my job, in 2020. (The Baptist chaplain kept his Baptist aides but saw no reason to have Catholics anywhere.) Our Catholic library was either destroyed or claimed by the Baptist Seminary Program. This assault on the Catholic community at Phillips — which numbered around 40 and saw several conversions a year — was met with a yawn by the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

As the GDC slowly reopened for religious activities in 2021, some prisons like Phillips decided that having generic, inmate-led Protestant services now and then, and continued Islamic activities, was good enough. All efforts by inmates and family and friends on the outside to get the Catholic Church to send priests, deacons, or even just eucharistic ministers were met with overwhelming silence. The message could not have been clearer: Matthew 25 doesn’t really mean anything as far as Catholics in most Georgia prisons are concerned. When I refused to be quiet about this, I was transferred to my current prison. In a parting show of contempt, the administration at Phillips wouldn’t allow me to bring my Breviary with me. (Yes, that’s illegal, but at almost 80 years old, I’d be dead and buried before any court could order the GDC to follow the law.)

As should be expected, the situation here at Washington State Prison isn’t much different. The Muslims can do whatever they want; no one dares to interrupt their jum’ah or ta’leem services. They get special diets and feasts. Various Protestant services, including those with outside volunteers, are permitted. But, as usual, the Catholic Church is A.W.O.L. I realize this is Georgia — in the Bible Belt — but this prison is less than an hour from three cities with sizeable Catholic populations: Augusta, Macon, and Savannah.

Unlike Phillips, Washington isn’t openly hostile to Catholicism. Even though no priest has been here in almost five years, two dozen Catholics — most of whom are Hispanics — gather twice a month to conduct a sort of Liturgy of the Word “service.” These men don’t remember all the words to the basic prayers, but they know they’re Catholic and don’t want to be anything else. That might not seem very impressive, but it’s better than nothing.

When my subscription to the NOR expired, it was hard to tell because Phillips had terminated regular mail delivery during COVID. By the time I realized my subscription had expired, I was already fighting the larger war that got me transferred. I would very much appreciate having my scholarship subscription reinstated. It would also be nice if someone would donate a Breviary so the Catholics in my dorm could use that as a more church-y practice while the bishop of Savannah decides whether Matthew 25 applies to us. If someone does donate a Breviary, it would have to be mailed to me via the chaplain directly from the publisher.

Thank you for your time, consideration, and prayers.

Frank Schwindler

Washington State Prison

Davisboro, Georgia

I am a relatively new subscriber to the NOR, thanks to the generosity of my wife, Amy, as I am a federal prisoner. I was a Latin Mass-going Catholic who was sadly caught in an online sting involving child-abuse photos. My personal failings led to a paradoxical hypocrisy that pulled me into lust’s deadly grip. This experience has opened my eyes to the greater evils in modern society: abortion, fornication, homosexuality, and greed — all of which cheapen life and feed carnal desires, pushing us away from God.

The NOR has helped me see the bigger picture of assaults on Christendom that lead to the destruction of religious life, the family, and life itself. Only a society that destroys a baby in the womb is capable of any of the other sins against God and nature.

I don’t know if I could ever contribute anything to the traditional Catholic movement or classical Catholic academia, but my better understanding of the modernist and liberal movements, and how family structures, parenthood, and the relationship between Church and state have led us to where we are today, will help me warn others of the pitfalls awaiting us and help me do my part to try to save souls. I credit the NOR with providing me the knowledge and guidance to do so.

Jon P. Frey

Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix

Fort Dix, New Jersey

I am so grateful for my scholarship subscription. I love everything about the NOR, especially the celebration of traditional Western academics and Western culture in general. I look forward to every issue. By far my favorite part is the letters section. I even had to look up what ad hominem means. Ha! I have six issues I haven’t adequately combed through yet.

Unfortunately, the Tennessee Department of Corrections is planning to switch to tablets, without installing even the first piece of infrastructure for them, and has stopped delivery of all periodicals. But — glory to God — I will be released on July 8, 2025. It will not be long before I can log on to the NOR website! I will always be loyal to you all because you were loyal to me — and to all the other “least of these” — and you have a true apostolate for prisoners. THANK YOU! I cannot express how grateful I am.

I always found it funny how the Prots will drop whatever they might be doing and go to great lengths for prisoners, but the shepherds of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church couldn’t care less about us. Yes, there are some true shepherds who love the smell of the sheep, especially in Nashville, where Bishop Mark Spalding came frequently to the prisons in his diocese. When I was in the Diocese of Knoxville, however, I never saw Bishop Richard Stika, who was eventually exposed as a defender and protector of homosexual predators. Now I am in the Diocese of Memphis, and we have no Mass and no Catholic volunteers who visit us. But there is a Protestant service twice a day!

I lament all this because even on a “shoestring” budget you do not hesitate to send the NOR to us. I am so grateful for that. Thank you for your compassion and for living out the corporal works of mercy. I pray that all the NOR staff and writers, subscribers and generous donors will be in good health even as their souls prosper, and that all they have given to the NOR for its support and longevity the heavenly Father will give back to them in abundant measure.

I will be in contact if the tablets arrive before my release. But for now, I must sadly decline your offer of a renewal of my scholarship subscription. It has been an honor. See you on the outside!

Patrick Corrigan

West Tennessee State Penitentiary

Henning, Tennessee

Ed. Note: If you would like to see to it that more prisoners, and others without sufficient means, may receive the NOR at no cost to them, please consider contributing to our Scholarship Fund. Additionally, if you know of someone who would benefit from a subscription but can’t afford one, please send us their information. Contributions and correspondence may be sent to: NOR, Scholarship Fund, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley CA 94706. We thank you for your generosity and compassion for the “least of these.”

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