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
[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."
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.
And help us keep up the pressure by Subscribing Today!
And help us keep up the pressure by Subscribing Today!
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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