World Vasectomy Day

Nov 21-22 is the 12th Annual “World Vasectomy Day,” an annual “celebration” during which vans prowl some neighborhoods offering male sterilization. Since 2022 the act has been designated a sign of male “ally-ship” with post-Dobbs women by “taking responsibility” for fertility.

Such euphemistic claptrap has become so normalized as to be taken as true: “taking responsibility” for something that is natural, normal, and healthy means destroying it, eliminating it, repressing it. This bizarre thinking has reached such a level that there is no inconsiderable number of women who have been propagandized into believing that motherhood is an inherently dangerous state, not to be risked absent the right to kill your child at any point before he’s born.

But the truth is the root of this thought lies in the false idea that fertility is not good. I write that deliberately: not good. I write it because, while some people think fertility is positively bad, others think they can carve out space by declaring it “indifferent,” value-neutral except in the concrete case. That distinction without a difference is the root of many of today’s problems. Fertility is not just something. It is inherently connected with human life: fertility makes life possible. So, to claim fertility is indifferent is to claim life is indifferent, its value dependent on its utility in concrete cases. The step from “sanctity” to a “quality” of life ethic is a simple step.

Fertility is good. It is the natural and normal state for healthy human beings from puberty onwards, in women until menopause, in men practically until death. This is how healthy human beings function. As Karol Wojtyła masterfully argued in Love and Responsibility, the possibility of parenthood is an inherent dimension of the whole human person, the rejection of which is the rejection of the person, using rather than loving. Infertile, sterile human beings are not how God created the functioning, healthy human person.

Americans rightly recoil at the genital mutilation trans and gender ideologues are pushing on minor children in the name of “transitioning.” Hormonal doping to prevent puberty, mastectomies (lopping off female teenagers’ breasts), and castration (lopping off male sex organs) is not “medicine.” Most charitably, it is wish fulfillment; most honestly, it is quackery. Parents instinctively recognize that depriving a minor of the ability someday to become what they are — parents — is barbaric injustice.

But why? If fertility is indifferent, if not positively bad, does it turn that way only after age 18?

Consistency is not so much the “hobgoblin of little minds” as an idea to be excused or evaded when it trumps our convenience or self-will. Which brings us back to the root of the fight over sexual ethics, prophetically encapsulated in Humanae vitae: sex has both procreative and unitive significances that man, on his own initiative, should not destroy. This is a worthy thought to contemplate on World Vasectomy Day XII.

Many Faces of Scrooge

We’re in the time of year that causes great Angst in liberal souls: the time from Columbus Day to Christmas. Christmas is usually the main target, the holiday that dare not speak its name, the one public feast to be put in a securely locked closet.

The usual Grinches are out this year. Social media reports that a Melbourne tradition, the annual unveiling of Myers’ Department Store Christmas windows, was barred by the usual disruptive crowd of Hamas supporters. Another bunch protested next to Santa’s chair. In Toronto they had a “pray-in” blocking a major thoroughfare. (Good thing they weren’t truckers or Justin T would have taken care of them, including freezing their assets and branding them terrorists.)

In northern Italy, those who always begrudge the Church beauty are taking the form of green fundamentalists, upset that an old Christmas tree is being donated for St. Peter’s Square.

I’ve always said Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” is far more a morality tale for adults than a ghost story for children. The truth is: Scrooge has many faces.

The Thanksgiving Proclamation

While we’re on holidays, I’m curious to see how Joe Biden will write his final Thanksgiving Proclamation. As I noted last year, he scrupulously evaded to whom we should bother to be thankful. I’m wondering if Joe took enough Benadryl to overcome his obvious allergy to the Deity.

Chill a Little

One problem of social media is that it often generates kneejerk reactions rather than thoughtful commentary. Two recent examples:

-An Irishman took exception to a Muslim cleric running for office in Ireland who said “Ireland is not necessarily a Catholic country.” Well, Irish friend, he’s telling you the truth. There are plenty of born-on-the-green-sod-of-Eire and splashed in the face with water shortly after birth whose lives and politics also tell you “Ireland is not necessarily a Catholic country.”

-Another outraged person posted a video of a pro-Hamas protest in Toronto calling for jihad in Canada. But he seems to have omitted the salient fact of why he was so outraged. Perhaps it is because the jihadist failed, unlike Taylor Swift during her Ontario tour, first to acknowledge he was calling for jihad while on the unceded lands of the “Mississauga, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat” peoples? (By the way, to the best of my knowledge, Taylor didn’t add, “And, in indigenous solidarity, all my profits today are going to the Mississauga, Anishinaabeg…”)

Why Do People Copy the Gothic?

I recently attended a think tank talk in Washington. The symposium rented space in a building belonging to one of DC’s secular universities. What struck me about the site was its copycatting of the Gothic style: frosted glass windows in cathedral style, arched ceilings, woodwork reminiscent of stalls, fireplace. All the accoutrements say “Gothic” or at least “Oxford.” Why? Why do universities — otherwise incubators of anti-Western thought — frequently default to medieval trappings? What does a medieval chamber room say that Pizza Hut contemporary doesn’t?

I probed this issue about six months ago in these pages (here), noting how “sleek barbarians” — destroyers of our culture — still love to convene amidst its religious trappings. Perhaps we might call it “Episcopal Gothic” because — like Anglicanism — it likes the ecclesiastical “smells and bells” atmosphere but not the doctrine, morality, or discipline.

Finally, as paradoxical as that all sounds, I still have to ask myself: Why do the sleek barbarians still want to create and inhabit an Episcopal Gothic aesthetic while our ecclesiastical architects haven’t completely gotten over Pizza Hut utilitarianism?

While on this subject of using Western backdrops to protest the West, social media recently featured an incident (here) involving a “Haka” protest in the New Zealand Parliament. The Government had introduced legislation to reinterpret how indigenous Maori “rights” are to be construed. As I understand it, to date the treaty governing the matter had been applied along lines something like U.S. affirmative action: everybody’s equal but some are more equal than others. The Government sought to change that in the name of simple equality of all New Zealanders, which elicited a Maori “Haka” dance around the chamber and adjournment of the session. Defenders called it a “protest” against the “colonialist” legislature.

Well, like it or not New Zealand is a modern country with a Westminster-style Parliament in which decisions affecting all New Zealanders are made. No doubt if pro-legislation New Zealanders marched through a Maori meeting with a New Zealand flag singing “Rule Brittannia!” that would elicit condemnation as “insensitive,” maybe even “racist” or “white supremacist.” But Haka snake dances in a solemn session of the national Parliament? No problem there.

Revising the Motto

The UK is in the throes of aggressive policing — not of the streets but of the internet. A recent picture showed British bobbies in front of a lorry with a banner, “Being offensive is an offense.” Well, I guess we should also then revise the WWII motto, “Keep calm and carry on,” to “Don’t keep calm, and carry on ostentatiously about being offended!”

When I worked in Poland, a Polish colleague who had gone through the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as a teenager asked me why American Gen Z-ers were always complaining about their “stress.” “If you have to swim through a sewer so that you don’t get shot, that’s stress.” I had no answer for her.

Seventh Century Colonialism

A recent New York Times article discussed in usual terms the “far right extremism” that was once “fringe” but now “mainstream” in Europe: closing borders to constant, illegal migration. That the Times served up the same stale leftovers was no surprise. What did surprise was the relatively strong pushback from commenters. My favorite was what I thought a particularly insightful comment that hoists the Left on its own petard, from an “LG” of Boston. He asked why Europe should accept unlimited and unassimilated Mideast arrivals, which he characterized as the latest installment of continuing Islamic “seventh century colonialism.”

Yep. Were the Battle of Tours and the Siege of Vienna “xenophobic” and “intolerant” acts or defenses of religious and proto-national identity? Should we recognize or reproach the Reconquista of Spain? Were Charles Martel, Ferdinand and Isabela, and Jan III Sobieski heroes or unwoke hooligans to be erased from European history? And were the Crusades the epitome of “religious fanaticism” (even though the issue was abridgement of Christian access to the Holy Land) while “seventh century colonialism” out of Arabia was just a different method of proselytism? Maybe we need to rethink Tours, Granada, and Vienna as European liberation movements.

Capitol Hill Bathrooms

Whether Tim (a.k.a. “Sarah”) McBride, the newly elected Member of Congress from Delaware, will use the women’s (as the representative prefers) or men’s bathroom is the latest “transgender” controversy in Washington. South Carolina Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace introduced a resolution to make it clear that women’s restrooms are for women and men’s for men. This has generated a mix of Democratic derision (“this is the most important thing Congress should worry about”), minimalization (“there aren’t that many ‘trans-women’ using women’s restrooms or taking away female sports medals, and they’re no danger”), and talk of “dignity” (“is this how you welcome a new Member of Congress?”).  Democratic Senator Tom Carper from Delaware is joining in the deflection effort, posting on November 21 that “I’ve known Sarah since she was three years old …” — except, at age 3, “she” was (and still is) a “he.”  Democrats should stop this gaslighting: after all, their policies told us for four years that they hated gas.  It’s just one part of a concerted effort to push gender ideology.

Well, yes, it is. The new Member of Congress is welcome to the floor of the House. It doesn’t mean he’s welcome in women’s bathrooms, even if he “identifies” as a woman. No doubt had the Biden-Harris Administration continued, they would “have the back” of such behavior, which is why this is an important issue for Congress to draw the line on now. Because Congress has to send the message, which the American voters made clear by denying Democrats the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, that they have had enough of gender fantasyland as a matter of public policy that requires the majority of women to forego their privacy to “accommodate” these “identities.”

Furthermore, Americans sent the message that they agree with President Trump that they will not be bullied into silence on this issue. Someone’s “identity” doesn’t mean every other person must be cowed into silence or forced publicly to lie about that identity. That’s why breaking this juggernaut now is vital.

In questioning gender ideology and suggesting it contributed to their losses, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts wanted to begin a frank and honest discussion of what went wrong for his party. Instead, he got a target on his back, with Democrat activists in Massachusetts already promising to run against him even before he’s been sworn into the new Congress. We saw similar mindless homogenization over abortion, to the degree that the next-to-last prolife Democratic Congressman was denied his seat by his own party. If Democrats plan on marching in similar lockstep on gender ideology, faithful Catholics will have even more reason to abandon them.

Not Satire

Rachel Zegler recently gave an interview about Disney’s remake of “Snow White,” in which she has the starring role, to be released next year. She disses the original beloved Disney film as creepy and insists on the need to recast the princess as a tough girl-boss who can do it all herself without that romantic interest.

I recently saw an old episode of The Addams Family. In the episode “Morticia the Writer,” Mrs. Addams decides to become an author, rewriting traditional fairy tales like “Snow White” in light of Addams Family values. In one book, she attacks Goldlilocks as the troublesome blonde who bothers three nice bears. She asks Gomez to send her next manuscript to “Demon Press” because “it sounds like a wholesome children’s publisher.”

In The Addams Family, the joke is in the satire. But Zegler and Disney are deadly serious. Which means they are likely going to bleed money. Big money.

See, Disney is really rewriting another old tale: the legend of Midas. Midas’s wish was whatever he touched should turn to gold. Disney’s wish clearly is whatever it touches turns to dross.

Word Games

The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute “committed to advancing health, science, and technology” just published an essay (here) in which it admits that euphemism is often used to justify euthanasia. What’s unique about the essay is its unspoken defense of using evasive language (e.g., “Medical Assistance in Dying”) to buffer the reality of “Getting Doc to Kill Grandpa,” a formulation Hastings might deem “polemical.” The truth is what Paul Greenberg pointed out years ago in his syndicated column: “verbicide precedes homicide.”

Pronouns

I was recently asked whether I’d list my pronouns on social media. My response was: Take a look at my posting picture and you should know. If you’re still unsure, get thee to an ophthalmologist… quickly!