A Tyrannical Assault on Parental Rights

A Tyrannical Assault on Parental Rights by Nathaniel Blake at the World. The California legislature has passed a bill requiring judges in cases of contested child custody to consider whether a parent has affirmed a child’s “gender identity” or “gender expression.” Parents who do not support their child’s self-declared transgender identity may lose their parental rights and custody. This bill… is about to be the law of the most populous state in the nation. If a father does not want his teen daughter to shoot herself up with testosterone, or to have her breasts amputated, then California considers him an unfit parent. If a mother does not want her son to be chemically and then surgically castrated, California views that as the equivalent of child abuse. Read

We No Longer Talk about Such Things by Anthony Esolen at The Catholic Thing. It is the truth that our Lord affirmed, that “in the beginning God made them male and female,” and “for this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.” (Mt. 19:4-5) You may reject that truth initially because you want to have your forbidden pleasure, but the fruit soon disappoints, the inheritance is squandered, the famine strikes, the swine are fat, and you are hungry. Then to be grappling to the evil is a sin not of intemperance, but of stubborn pride and rebellion; and the common victims of it are staring at a screen, frying their imaginations, with no prospects for a normal family life…. These are sins of an intellect gone bad. They include a certain malice toward others, too. For the consequences are everywhere, in loneliness, childlessness, family disintegration, and blood. Read

The Trans Scandal and the Parent Underground by Jonathon Van Maren at First Things. In June 2021, two mothers launched a Substack called Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT). Here, parents of trans-identifying children could tell their stories and voice their opposition to the greatest medical scandal of our time. Within a year, the project became famous in the “parent underground,” with over 250 stories published and more pouring in from around the world…. A selection of these stories have now been compiled into a collection; it is a heartbreaking read. Read

Tolkien the Catholic by Joseph Pearce at National Catholic Register. The many Catholic elements in The Lord of the Rings are too numerous to mention but include symbolic Christological connections, embedded and subsumed within the text, to the Incarnation, Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Several characters serve as Christ figures and several others serve as Everyman figures who hold up a mirror to the reader, enabling him to see the applicability of the events in the story to his own life. At its deepest, The Lord of the Rings shows the sheer demonic power of evil, never shirking from the presence of its ominous shadow, but also how self-sacrificial love, wedded to courage and cooperating with grace, can overcome the darkest and most demonic evil. Read

Frisbees and Bibles for Freshmen: Catholic Chaplains’ ‘Rush Week’ to Reach New Students on Secular College Campuses by Matthew McDonald at National Catholic Register. “One of the most important times in the life of a college freshman is the first week,” said Kevin Bohli, who directs ministries for youth, college campuses and young adults for the Diocese of Arlington in northern Virginia. “They say if you don’t get a young person involved in campus ministry during the first week, you probably never will.” …. The social events are meant to start a conversation that leads to God. George Mason had 12 non-Catholic students join the Church last year; it averages 15. At the University of Mary Washington, 29 female students participated in a women’s group last semester discerning a call to religious life. Read

MiraVia at 10: Pro-Life Effort Helps College-Age Moms and Their Children Flourish by SueAnn Howell at National Catholic Register. Since 2013, this ground-breaking residential program has sheltered pregnant college students from around the country; the young women in need hail from nine different states and 13 colleges. These women and their children are paving the way for similar outreach efforts worldwide, and opening the hearts and minds of young adults to embrace their peers at college who are juggling higher education and parenthood. Read

Community, Solidarity, and the Disabled by Mark Bradford at Word on Fire. To remove community from individuals can be devastating, as we have all seen in the fallout from the pandemic lockdowns. During that time, when community life and human interaction—even going to Mass—was taken away from us, we experienced a steep increase in anxiety and depression, including increased drug use, self-harm, and suicide. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” The CDC has reported that in 2019, the percentage of Americans suffering from anxiety was between 7.4% and 8.6%, and depression was between 5.9% and 7.5%. From April 2020 to August 2021, the period of the pandemic, those numbers rose to 28.2% to 37.2% of Americans suffering from anxiety and 20.2% to 31.1% suffering from depression. Read

Sen. John Kennedy Reads Pornographic Novel to Senate Witness: 'Disturbing' by Jeremiah Poff at Washington Examiner. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) shocked congressional witnesses Tuesday when he used his allotted time during a Senate hearing on "book bans" to read aloud an excerpt from two often-challenged books that contain graphic depictions of anal sex. Kennedy read portions of Genderqueer by Maia Kobabe and All Boys Aren't Blue by George Johnson during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature." The passages the senator read contained graphic and sexually explicit depictions of anal and oral sex between gay characters…. Kennedy repeatedly asked [Illinois Secretary of State Alexi] Giannoulias, who had spent most of the hearing advocating for librarians to have the right to decide what is in libraries, what libraries should do about books such as Genderqueer and All Boys Aren't Blue. Read

Michigan Township Can’t Ban Catholic Group’s Stations of the Cross, Court Rules by Kevin J. Jones at National Catholic Register. A federal appeals court panel has unanimously ruled in favor of a Catholic group that said a local government in Michigan violated federal religious-freedom law when it blocked the use of the group’s 40-acre property for a Stations of the Cross trail. Read

Throwback Thursday

If Augustus Gloop Can’t Be ‘Fat,’ What’s The Point Of Roald Dahl’s Kids’ Books? by Nathaniel Blake at The Federalist on February 22, 2023. Roald Dahl’s works are now owned by Netflix (yes, really), and the publisher, Puffin, has announced hundreds of changes. Augustus being described as fat is among the casualties, lest someone’s feelings be hurt. And so “sensitivity readers” have been deployed to ensure that Dahl’s books conform to the sensibilities of the whiniest of the woke. It is tempting to compare this revisionism to Orwell’s classic dystopia “1984,” in which every book had been rewritten. But this is a softer (for now) form of thought control. Instead of a brutal government, it is corporations buying the rights to rewrite the past and its works. And those making these decisions are not motivated by profit, but by a small-souled censoriousness in service to a weird substitute religion. This censorship is different from a cancellation. Dahl had personal sins that could easily get him canceled, such as his antisemitism (of course, he also fought bravely against Nazi Germany — history, like people, is complicated). But cancellation would be financially painful, and the corporations involved want to squeeze every dollar they can out of Dahl’s works. Read