September 30, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

TWO ESSAYS PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL JOURNALS on the Kavanaugh Process – My Comments

Friends,

I pass on to you today copies of an earlier installment of MY CORNER, slightly edited, picked up, and published nationally both online and in a print edition by The Remnant, the very traditionalist national Catholic journal. The Remnant has for well over fifty years stood forthright against the disfiguring and destruction of Christianity, and in particular, against the infectious and fatal Modernist barbarity and evil that has flooded Western culture since Vatican Council II, and now in particular, with the occupation of Rome, itself, by forces that can in many ways be called “Anti-Christ.” And that, tragically, is no real exaggeration.

The online version, with its link, is attached to this short commentary. The number of readers is now approaching 5,000. I have written extensively for The Remnant—twenty-four published essays since September 2017.

Since the conclusion of the riveting “Kavanaugh Hearing” this past Thursday, September 27, the incredible has continued to be succeeded by the unthinkable, the disgusting by the despicable. There was the loathsome Never Trumper, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose hatred for and outright jealousy of President Trump outweigh by far any modicum of rational judgment that may be left in his cowardly and bitter soul. Is it any wonder that his constituents in Arizona found him so unacceptable that he opted not to run for re-election in 2018?

But there he was, there was Flake after publicly pledging to vote “for” Judge Kavanaugh, caught in an elevator with a couple of literally screaming feminists, bawling with demonic anger, suggesting that it was the malleable Flake—no doubt because of his weak signal to vote “yes”—who was somehow, in some way the guilty party who had “raped them”! He couldn’t escape their mad clutches.  Of course, whether or not those wailing banshees, those Harpies from Hell, actually had experienced such abuse, no one knows. But there he was, and—overwhelmed and sucked in by their venomous tongues—he recanted, just like Jimmy Swaggart [remember him?] did back in 1988, exclaiming “I have sinned! What do you demonettes want me to do?”

And after his “Road to Gehenna” experience, he came back to the Senate Judiciary Committee and, all mentally disabused, he threw a monkey wrench into the proceedings: there would have to be another—the seventh—FBI investigation before he might vote for Kavanaugh in the full Senate. And given the narrowness of the pro-Kavanaugh majority that was that. Even the supposedly fearless Senator Lindsey Graham seemed to cave, giving in to the mania and the demands for MORE investigation, after having denounced such a continuation on Thursday.

Thus, the president was impelled to order another FBI probe.

But consider: the Democrats and the vile feminist revolutionaries already know what that will produce. A new short investigation will reveal nothing more, but only confirm what is already out there.

What this is all about, in reality the actual reason for this additional week after two earlier delays, is to have seven more days to enable the feminist fanatics and their luridly corrupt Democrat voices in the Senate to feverishly  “discover” at least one more “abuse victim” who will, as if on cue, come forward to denounce Kavanaugh and grind the process to a screeching halt: “Mr. Chairman, we cannot proceed because of this new charge, this new victim who has declared that judge touched her privates when she was on a church picnic when she was five!”

By now you know the routine, you know the praxis here, and everyone in Washington should know it, although too many Republicans apparently don’t (or simply don’t want to because of fear that somehow they will offend the feared feminists).  The objective is to continue to push these endless hearings and investigations out into October until right before the election. And then, well, all bets are off. “We can’t continue our investigations now! Elections are before us, so we must wait.” And, of course, the Democrats are still betting that those November elections will return Democrat majorities; then for certain Kavanaugh is dead, and endless FBI investigations are meaningless. No matter that he will be found clean and spotless; the utterly filthy work will have been completed, and one more nail in the decrepit coffin of the creaky American republic will have been secured. And the fetid odor of death will only intensify.

Talk about scorched earth! This makes the Mongol hoards seem like noble cavaliers or Franciscan friars!

That is the strategy, and it is a strategy that Republicans must understand if THEY are to be in any way credible.

Of course, the idea that just one more FBI investigation confirming what is already known—no corroborative evidence being found—would be fine, if that is all that happens.

But my view of human nature is far darker. For the intrinsically diabolical nature of those feminists drenched in pure Evil convinces me that this is not the final step, but rather their madness and demonically-inspired passion will not cease this week as the FBI completes its report. The stakes are far too high.

I may be wrong…I hope and pray that I am; but given the sheer frenzied lunacy which possesses them, I will not be surprised to see more of what we witnessed last week.

Like any demonic possession, the only cure is either to drive the demons out back into Hell, or, the victim eventually perishes. Those screaming feminists are not, in reality, the victims. We are. What is left of our Western Christian culture has been victimized for too long by their venomous lunacy.

They must be exorcized, driven out, and in the end banished from our civilization. No time for niceties—either that, or we perish.

Here is The Remnant essay (online version):

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh, Feminism, and Modern Witchcraft

https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/4109-brett-kavanaugh-feminism-and-modern-witchcraft

[see also the September 30, 2018, print issue where this article also appears]

Written by  Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

 The new witch hunt has begun...

Three-hundred and twenty-six years ago several towns in Massachusetts were beset by what some historians and observers have termed a form of mass hysteria: the 1692 Salem Witch Trials remain seared in our public consciousness, and, even more, have occupied a prominent place in our literature and popular culture. Some 200 people—mostly but not all women—were accused of necromancy and black magic, and nineteen were found guilty and hanged.

Those trials, so engraved in the popular imagination, are illustrative of what occurs when corrupted religious sentiment, faulty ethical and moral thinking, and the power of suggestion on a mass scale have free rein in society. 

We only need recall a few more recent examples—the infamous McMartin (in California) and Edenton (in North Carolina) day care “child abuse” cases of a few years back, when the constant coaxing and continued suggestion by so-called professional “child counselors” convinced not only some children—some as young as four or five—but also their gullible parents that their offspring had been, for instance, taken up in spaceships where they were sexually abused by day school faculty. And those accusations, firmly asserted as true by those same “counselors” at the time, made it to the courts where, initially, guilty verdicts were handed down…only to discover years later, after dozens of lives had been destroyed and ruined…that the tales of abuse and the accusations were fabrications, made up—largely due to the insinuations of counselors who wanted the charges to be true.

Another mass hysteria, mainly coming from the politically-driven Democrats and frenzied #MeToo movement feminists but also including some Republicans, has been evidently in full force in the imbroglio over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

For the Left, the feminists, and the increasingly radicalized Democratic leadership, the present bitter, unleashed, and no-holds-barred opposition to the nomination is one more example of the growing extremism and lunacy of the Left in America. And, yes, too many Republicans—most of its leadership—are scared to death of the “R” word (“racist”) and, in this case, the “S” word (“sexist”).

This present situation did not just occur; its deeper and more profound roots stretch back into our history and society, and it can be traced linearly back to the early feminist movement in America, to women’s rights proponents, and to suffragettes in the nineteenth century—to zealots like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucrecia Mott—whose own religious and ethical formation owes much to the same intellectual framework that had produced the favorable environment for the Salem trials 150 years earlier: except that this time it was the fanatical “witches,” many possessed of equal religious fervor, who led the campaign for radical action.

It was the same ideological inheritance and social fanaticism from which issued other “reformist” movements, including Prohibitionism and Abolitionism—movements that sprung as bastard but entirely logical offspring of those seventeenth century Puritans, as both historian Paul Conkin (in Puritans & Pragmatists) and Perry Miller (The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century) have thoroughly documented in their impressive studies.

And in the twentieth century the virtual triumph of the so-called “women’s movement” gained almost irrepressible power, as influential and governing members of the opposite sex, brow-beaten and progressively convinced that the “god of equality”—the imperative to “make everyone equal,” supposedly contained in the Declaration of Independence and then proclaimed by that secular saint Abe Lincoln as a “new Founding” of the American republic—simply caved and gave way to the demands of feminism.

The present #MeToo movement has been viewed in various ways: most visibly it has gained substantial momentum since the election of that gate-crasher iconoclast Donald Trump who is seen by feminists as highly unsympathetic and contrary to their cause—that is, a type of man who cannot be manipulated or controlled by their siren song against “male supremacy” and of their having suffered from historic “male oppression.”

But, of course, President Trump is just the latest and most significant target and symbol who must be exposed, crushed, and expelled from any authority.

What is unfortunately lost and largely forgotten in the present hysteria is the undoubted fact that there are genuine cases of abuse committed against women, and, indeed, the Harvey Weinstein scandals serve as a poignant example. But there have always been such serial abusers in our midst, yet the frenzy surrounding the current situation betrays something missed by many observers and sorely lacking in the present discussion…and it demeans real instances of abuse.

Ironically, it has been the very progressivist demands—and the successes—by the feminist movement for the destruction of our inherited Christian standards of ethics and morality, the repeal of laws on the books, and the end of the kind of moral instruction once provided to our children, which have assisted tremendously in creating the fetid stew that we now find ourselves in.

How is it possible to educate a pubescent thirteen-year-old suffering through the public schools if that young man (or young women) is brow-beaten with an inflexible and ironclad normative view that traditional manliness is bad, that old-fashioned moral standards are passé—that sex is fine if it “feels good” and your partner agrees—or that transgenderism, same sex marriage, and “gender fluidity” are perfectly acceptable (and you’d better not be caught criticizing or making fun of such folks, lest you be suspended from school and ostracized by society).

Of course, sexual dalliances have always existed, as long as men and women have existed…but the difference between the past and present is that then we knew we were going against the moral law (even when we did), but now we are told there is no law, other than something elusively called “informed consent.”

I am put in mind of the English poet, the late Sir John Betjeman and his prophetic poem, “The Planster’s Vision,” written many decades ago (Collected Poems, 1958), but accurately predicting what we now behold before us and around us, and which threatens to drown us in its putrefaction:

I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The worker's flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
"No Right! No wrong! All's perfect, evermore."

In reality, it is not some egalitarian Utopia we strive for and approach in the United States circa 2018—not some afterbirth of that “shining city on a hill” of Puritan dreams which were but nightmares that have infected our politics, our culture, and have rotted our educational system at its core. But, rather, that vision was and is one of fanaticism, and it is a secularist fanaticism that fuels the feminist and #MeToo movement (and scares the Hell out of pusillanimous politicians), and which is in open rebellion not only against 2,000 years of Western and Christian civilization, but against both the Natural Law—the laws of nature, itself—and the wise teachings of traditional Christianity and Divine Positive Law.

What is feminism and, in fact, virtually every “reform movement” which posits across-the-board equality, an abnormal and unnatural condition for humanity, as its objective? What are such examples of mass hysteria other than radical attempts to violate and undo those God-given laws, and blur and destroy those differences ingrained in and between each of us?

Recall the teaching of St. Paul in various epistles of the New Testament:

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord. [Colossians 3: 18-20]

Wives, in the same way, submit yourselves to your husbands, so that even if they refuse to believe the word, they will be won over without words by the behavior of their wives when they see your pure and reverent demeanor. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment such as braided hair or gold jewelry or fine clothes, but from the inner disposition of your heart, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in God’s sight. Husbands, in the same way, treat your wives with consideration as a delicate vessel, and with honor as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered. [I Peter 3: 1-4, 7]

And, lastly, most tellingly, from the First Book of Corinthians:

As in all the congregations of the saints, women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.  If they wish to inquire about something, they are to ask their own husbands at home; for it is dishonorable for a woman to speak in the church. [I Corinthian 14: 33-35]

It is not my point to enter into Biblical exegesis here, nor to advocate that the solution to our contemporary malady is to lock women away or imprison them necessarily in what the older German Lutherans called “kinder, kuche, und kirche”— “children, kitchen, and church”: a return to complete and subservient roles of domesticity. I don’t believe that is the essential message of St. Paul.

But what nature demands, and the Church and our civilization have wisely understood, is this: women and men are not only physiologically different, but functionally so, as well.  And there is a definite psychological differentiation between the sexes which exists in the entirety of our human species. That differentiation does not signify that men are “better” than women, but rather that there is a special difference in historic roles and duties, all of which are estimable and honorable. This is not only completely natural but affirmed and held up and glorified by historic Christianity.

This article appears in the September 30th Print Edition of The Remnant Newspaper. Preview the issue HERE.
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Indeed, in the history of Christendom it has been the Blessed Virgin, that unique example of spotless purity and holiness, of obedience to the Will of God and of incredible power both symbolically and actually as Mediatrix, who, because of the Incarnation and as Mother of Our Lord, must serve as our model and the model for women.

The incapacity of—the fear by—the so-called “conservative movement” to manfully meet head on the outrageous demands and unhinged assaults of feminism have much to do, certainly, with the triumphant and largely unopposed advance of cultural Marxism in our culture. That present-day triumph began its march through our institutions more than a century ago—a slow but constant march which has never veered from its objectives and its utilization of race and gender as the Hydra-headed Trojan Horse in subverting our civilization.

On several occasions I have quoted the Southern Post-War Between the States critic Robert Lewis Dabney’s superb characterization from 130 years past of the kind of weak-kneed and cowardly “conservative” opposition to feminism back then, and it is even more applicable today:

"It may be inferred again that the present movement for women's rights, will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its "bark is worse than its bite," and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it "in wind," and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women's suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position." [Secular Discussion, vol. IV, pp. 491-493]

I don’t know if Dabney believed in witches or not. But like most traditional Christians he understood the concept and historic reality of a society where Christianity was in disastrous retreat. And he understood that ideology abhors a vacuum, and that evil quickly enters when good departs.

T. S. Eliot’s much quoted aphorism never ceases currency: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

I am certain that neither Eliot nor Dabney would have accused the fanatics involved in smearing Judge Kavanaugh of anything approaching demonic possession. But there is indeed a lesser state, a condition where the Good and Ethical have been driven out…and there is only room for malevolent ideology, for Evil, and for its dominance and its frenetic ravaging of the souls who exhibit it.

As I saw being interviewed on air Debra Katz, the attorney for Judge Kavanaugh’s feminist accuser, the first thing I noticed were her eyes. Forgive me if I make a personal observation: they were beady and striking, fierce and gleaming, seeming to hide behind them a ferocious passion and uncontrolled anger. There, it seemed to me, was an apt metaphor of the #MeToo movement, a movement that G. K. Chesterton would have most assuredly identified as trafficking in lunacy, cut off from rationality and nature, and, most critically, in rebellion against the Creator Himself.

The witches of Salem have indeed returned, but this time they are very real and they are calling the shots and dominating our culture. Will they be opposed courageously by what remains of the guardians of our traditional civilization?

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