Archive for problem

The War on Women and Population Control

Copyright © 2013 by P. A. Ritzer

10 January 2013

In a December 30 article in the New York Times, Heather Timmons and Sruthi Gottipati reported on the reaction of women in India to the recent brutal gang rape that killed a young woman in New Delhi and to the cultural conditions that allow for such brutality. The article contained this paragraph:

After years of aborting female fetuses, a practice that is still on the rise in some areas because of a cultural preference for male children, India has about 15 million “extra” men between the ages of 15 and 35, the range when men are most likely to commit crimes. By 2020, those “extra” men will have doubled to 30 million.

After admitting that the source of the problem is the aborting of female babies, we are informed that the reason for it and the criminal problem that ensues are due to males: “a cultural preference for male children,” and “15 million ‘extra’ men.” Really? I submit that the problem is not 15 million extra men. The problem is over 15 million missing women, who were violently destroyed while in the sanctity of their mothers’ wombs.

Rational and knowledgeable demographers have long warned that the coercive and brutal government programs, in which unborn children are savagely and often forcibly sacrificed to the false god of Population Control, would lead to an imbalance of male to female children. Contrary to population-control propaganda that such an imbalance would lead to women and girls being treated far better for being more rare, rational demographers have long and accurately predicted the present reality of horrendous treatment of girls and women when there are too few women compared to men: the raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare that would ensue. The “cultural preference for male children” contributes to the problem when families are forbidden by law or otherwise coerced to have no more than one, two, or few children.

So in the real world there exists a genuine war on women born of liberal policies. That real war contrasts starkly with the one concocted by Democrats that consists of a thirty-year-old, third-year law student–who could expect to make $160,000 a year upon her graduation–not being provided free contraception by a Catholic university in violation of its core principles. And the real war is violent: the violence of abortion and sterilization committed against the mother, the violence of abortion committed against the baby, and of course the resultant raping, bride sharing, bride stealing, sexual slavery, human trafficking, and warfare. Throughout Asia female babies are disproportionately aborted, especially in China with its one-child government policy “complete with forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, kidnapping of ‘illegal’ children” (wonder what happens to them), “and other brutal tactics” with the help of United States taxpayer dollars provided by the Obama Administration (“UN Slammed for Its Forced Abortions in China Using U.S. Funds” by Alex Newman in The New American).

How many Americans would stand by and allow the government to forcibly abort a child and sterilize a woman after she had already had one child. And yet, now that the United States is under a Democratic administration again, that of the radically pro-abortion President Barrack Obama, we United States taxpayers help to support just such carnage through population-control programs of the United Nations and other organizations abroad, not to mention the sweeping work of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States, here at home. As I wrote in an earlier post “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat”:

So the Democratic Party uses our tax dollars to support Planned Parenthood ($487.4 million in the last reported year 2009-2010), the largest abortion provider in the country, founded by the Democrat darling and racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who had a special enthusiasm for aborting black babies. (Sanger even addressed a meeting of the Lady’s Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, fully consistent with the racist history of the Democratic Party.) But don’t worry about Democratic funding of Planned Parenthood, because President Obama assures us that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms for poor women. Another Democrat lie. Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms; they commit abortions. And they make millions of dollars a year doing so. Here is one case in which the Democrats do not denounce making a profit. And Planned Parenthood also gave $12 million to re-elect President Obama. So, they get nearly $500 million a year from the Democratic government and donate $12 million of it back to re-elect the Democratic president. How . . . mutually beneficial.

By the way, recently released information indicates that Planned Parenthood received $542 million of taxpayer money for fiscal year 2011-12 from the Obama government to violently kill 333,964 babies in their mothers’ wombs. I wonder who the Planned Parenthood folks voted for.

And so much of this is justified by another liberal lie, that of overpopulation. The overpopulation lie has been so pounded into the heads of people over the last several decades that we have come to accept it as a given when all evidence points to the contrary. Overpopulation is just one more in the great mesh of lies that liberals have woven to blot out the light and subject all of humanity to a dreadful darkness of fear, from which the liberals promise to rescue us as long as we grant them ever more power and control over our lives. Think environmentalism, man-made global warming .  .  . (And keep in mind that one of Al Gore’s homes uses twice the energy in one month that the rest of us use in one year. Also consider his recent sale of his network to Al Jazeera for a big profit. Do you think he really believes the stuff that he and other Democrats have been shoveling at all the rest of us?)

So here is the truth: Human beings have not and will not overpopulate the world. Proving that to you is beyond the confines of this post; so do your own homework with just a click of the mouse at Population Research Institute and/or Overpopulation is a Myth. Get informed. Remember, ignorance is one of the liberals’ most potent tools for enslaving people. (Just to give you one thing to consider: there is no relationship between population density and poverty or prosperity except that a community must reach a certain level of population density before division of labor, which raises the standard of living, is feasible. Some of the most densely populated regions and countries are some of the richest, and some of the least densely populated areas are some of the poorest. What really matters is the political and economic makeup of the place. Generally, those with the least controlling governments and the freest markets are the richest, those with the most controlling governments and shackled markets are the poorest.)

There is plenty of room for all the babies. So, get married first, and open yourself to the result of your loving relationship, more human beings graced with a supernatural destiny. Do not be afraid. Fear (like ignorance) is one of the great weapons liberals use to drive us into bondage. But according to the One who could not be vanquished by the lie, “the truth will set you free.” So shed your fear, take personal responsibility for your life, and come out from the darkness of liberal tyranny and into the light. Live in the light and freedom of the truth, and savor the sweetness of life.

 

Dumping the Social Issues

We hear it again. After a Republican loses the election, moderates (with every encouragement from the left-wing Old Establishment Media (OEM)–wonder whose side they’re on) tell us that the problem is the social issues.

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Attraction, Feelings, and Love

3 April 2012
Copyright © 2012 by P. A. Ritzer

I called in to the Laura Ingraham show on 22 March to comment on the issue of living together before marriage. Basically, I said: Women need to get a clue; if a man loves you, he’ll wait. As I used to ask my students: when you live together, how do you break up? You still have the rent and the electrical bill. You are more likely to remain in an unhealthy relationship. It comes down to the fact that love is not a feeling but an act of the will. It is a giving of the self that involves commitment. Feelings rise and fall, that is why you need commitment.

All we need to do, especially during Holy Week, is to take a look at a crucifix: the greatest act of love ever, and it did not feel very good.

In Seven Ox Seven, Part One: Escondido Bound, Tom has to grapple with the question of love in light of romantic feelings that rise up in response to meeting a beautiful woman.  Here is how he works it out in pages 82-86.

Copyright © 2007 by P. A. Ritzer

Julie flooded back—from where she had been occupying a good deal of the area behind it—to the forefront of Tom’s mind. In truth, she had occupied the greater part of his mind for most of the time since he had first seen her, and had at least wafted around somewhere in the back or bottom of his mind when she had not been occupying the greater part. It was not as if he actively thought of her. He did not need to think of her. It was less voluntary than that. He would have had to think to keep her out. There was a naturalness to the way she flooded his mind. Thinking of her was a natural reaction to the stimulus of her, and that thought had a naturally sensual character to it. The natural scent of her hair and skin, subtly enhanced by perfume, again delighted his sense of smell, in memory, intoxicating his mind through that most evocative of the senses. Her slender, lithe figure and the way that she moved played upon him in a way that no dance or drama could or, for that matter, could any imaginable movement of even the most graceful of the creatures of land, sky, or sea. Again he saw her eyes and, starting with those portals open wide to him, again ventured upon that journey into her beauty. Again her rich silken hair rested against the side of his face, as it had when they had danced; again the softness of her cheek glided beneath the light brush of his hand; again her delicate hands lightly enclosed his own.

He chuckled at how she had immediately attracted him and at how she still had a sensual hold on his mind. She was not the first to so affect him, and he doubted that she would be the last. He knew, from experience, that her absence would allow time to continually diminish the superficial though pervasive place she presently held in his mind, and he knew that, in this case, absence was the most prudent policy.

To get involved with a girl like Julie would be to give himself over to insecurity, because, since they did not appear to share common values, she could just as easily be interested in any other man who suited her (and probably would be), and he in any other woman. Julie was pretty enough to demand as much commitment as the willing man could afford, however illicit. Her knowledge of her power over men as an object of desire, and the pleasure such power obviously gave her, would only add to the insecurity of the relationship, as it would keep her ever watchful for that future man, better than the rest, who, too, would fall prey to her beauty and her charms. Judging from what he had seen of her values, Tom knew that he would not be this ultimate man, and he wondered whether any man ever would be, before her beauty would gradually succumb to the cosmetic applications so evident, at the Lady Gay, upon the faces of older members of her occupation. Regardless, such insecurity in a relationship could well lead to possessiveness or, paradoxically, to its contrary, disregard. Possessiveness could eventually lead to anger and resentment, disregard to indifference.

Tom considered further the development of a relationship founded on such shallow footings. How many times had he seen a man fall “head over heels” for a woman, only to see him, after that relationship had ended (and the fellow had been all but broken in half), fall equally in love with another woman nothing like the last. Such a thing could not then be love, Tom maintained, but some baser attraction. Love, instead, elevates desire between a man and a woman to its proper place, in a way that sets the human apart from the horse or the cow. Love elevates that desire into a consciousness of the need for moral and practical compatibility, which does not allow one to fool oneself into believing that selfish obsession with another can be love. This special love between a man and a woman must then require something of reason, which sets the human apart from the beast, to elevate this desire. The human creature must let reason rule desire and let love rule reason for them to be properly directed. Such is required by the dignity appropriate to the rational creature.

Therefore, Tom would never have considered that it was love that kept Julie in his mind. He had seen some men—and not just the young fellows fresh away from home and under the influence of drink—make that mistake often enough. But Tom knew that any fellow who would believe that he was in love in such a case, or even in a case more involved though equally shallow, was missing something. Otherwise, how could a man feel similar romantic feelings for different women, very unlike each other and of very different minds from the man himself?

No, such could not be love but merely infatuation. Tom knew love, and he would not have elevated infatuation to that height. It was because he knew love that he was also wary of over-romanticizing love between a man and woman. Love was plainer than glamorized infatuation, and yet, more profoundly beautiful in its plainness. It had its share of hardship, hard work, and pain. Love had a nakedness about it, compared to which the nakedness of infatuation was but a woefully shallow imitation. The nakedness of love could not be satisfied by the merely sensual. The nakedness of love demanded far more because it was far more: because it was the complete exposure, the complete sharing, the complete gift of the self, not just of the body. (And, in truth, given that the body is an essential component of human nature, one could never truly share the body without, at least to some degree, sharing the self, licitly, to one’s benefit, or illicitly, to one’s detriment.) The nakedness of love demanded commitment, with all that that word denoted and connoted, and a commitment not just to the other, but to the Other, Who is the Source of all love, Who is Love itself.

This awareness, on Tom’s part, always brought him around to his belief that there must be far more than just the sensual attraction between a man and a woman before it is appropriate to move further into the sensual realm of the relationship. There must be something profound that puts the sensual in its proper place and elevates it. There must be a singular affinity between the minds and souls of the man and woman, an affinity that draws them toward the commitment of love. There it was again, commitment, an act of the will, an act of the will that is the gift of the self. That is love: an act of the will that is the gift of the self! The commitment of love, in this singular case, must be Matrimony, the only commitment that, as a sacrament, provides the grace for a man and woman to share the nakedness of the Garden of Eden while yet in a fallen world. The grace of the sacrament assures that, rather than become a selfish taking, the sensual intimacy can be a selfless giving: to spouse, to God, to the children thus begotten. Hence, the Sacrament of Matrimony is the only commitment worthy of the ultimate sensual intimacy, an intimacy through which a man and woman become one body and, as such, enjoy the profound privilege and responsibility of participating in and sharing in God’s creation of another human being. It is in this commitment of the Sacrament of Matrimony that a man and woman are most capable, by design, of accepting their responsibility to raise to adulthood the human beings created through their union.

Given all that, Tom believed that it should follow, then, that a man should test his attraction to a woman for that affinity that draws a man and a woman into the Sacrament of Matrimony. He should do so because the attraction could lead to union, and union to procreation. The procreative result of this union is another human being, another material and spiritual creature with the capacity of union with the Infinite. Thus, the union of man and woman must command a most profound respect and commitment, because the procreation and upbringing of the product of that union, a child with a supernatural destiny, must carry a most profound responsibility.

He knew that no such affinity could exist between Julie and him. And yet she remained in his mind. He saw again the lose strands of her hair around her pretty ear and against her graceful neck. He saw again those long lashes and looked into those dark eyes. And again he knew that he could have been lost in those eyes, and that, past a certain point, he could have dissolved into her and enjoyed great pleasure in doing so, but for some little guide in him, a guide that could reach out and offer him the opportunity to return to shore from those waters into which he had begun to wade. Ah, but for this guide, conscience, what the contemporary Briton John Henry Newman would call “the aboriginal vicar of Christ.” Yes, but for this guide, what further evil might be introduced into this world under the guise of pleasure.

In this way, Tom’s mind examined the reality of the day against revealed truths and personal conclusions. That examination was part of a river of analytical thought that flowed through his mind seemingly involuntarily and almost incessantly. This flow of analytical thought was something Tom took for granted: he knew no other way.

“Hmph,” Tom sighed out loud, in a kind of muffled chuckle. “All this from dancin’ with a dancehall girl,” he thought.

But he knew it was more than that. All human relationships have a beginning, and how and why they begin determine to greater and lesser degrees how and where they proceed. Julie may not have technically been a cyprian, like some of the dancehall girls, but she saw no problem with accepting pay to show her affections. And Tom knew that once a person decided that her affections were for sale, the object of those affections would be the highest bidder, whether the bid was in money or some other variety of tender.

Nevertheless, though he had thus disposed of this potential relationship, it was the nature of Tom’s mind that, no matter what other thoughts ran through it, thoughts of Julie drifted around behind them and, often enough, advanced to the front, until he fell off to sleep.

 

 

Not Tough Enough for Hell

Copyright © 2011 by P. A. Ritzer

8 December 2011

Remember some of those old movies, war movies or cowboy movies, where some character in the film played by John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Lee Marvin says something along the lines of: “I’ll see you in hell.” The impression conveyed is that this guy is so bad and so tough that he knows he is damned for doing his own thing without regard for the constraints of society or, in a broader sense, morality, and that he knows he will spend the rest of eternity in hell, and that he intends to do so with all the carefree rebellion that has characterized his earthly life. Immediately on hearing the words, I would feel the character’s proud bravado melt away before the reality of hell and would think, “Man, you ain’t tough enough.”

Consider the reality: one of the most powerful beings God ever created, turned from good to evil, from Lucifer to Satan, ruling a world of fire, burning with hate and every kind of malice. Works of the imagination like the Star-Wars-Dark-Side-of-the-Force Emperor and Darth Vader and all his other followers are but child’s play before this reality. In such a place, the devil-may-care tough guy is but the devil’s plaything for tortures unimaginable in this life.

And something else about hell struck me a few years ago while practicing the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. During the meditation on hell, I was overwhelmed by a realization I had not considered before: a person will experience hell in body as well as soul. It should have been obvious. Wherever we are going, heaven or hell, we are ultimately going in body and soul. Human nature is physical and spiritual; we have a body and a soul. Our souls do not just inhabit our bodies to be released from them in death.

(A little note here: I think IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed may be one of the best films ever made, but there is a problem with the theology, as there is with other Hollywood treatments of the subject. Clarence would not have become an angel after he died. He would have become a bodiless soul until the last judgment. Human beings cannot become angels. They have different natures: angels are pure spirit; humans are spirit and matter. So, no human being can be your guardian angel, contrary to what is often claimed in the popular culture: good Samaritan maybe, but not guardian angel. The good news is that we each have a guardian angel, and we ought to be mindful of our guardian angels and grateful to and for them.)

The separation of body and soul at death is unnatural. It was not meant to be. It resulted from original sin. Thus, at death, body and soul do separate, but they will be reunited at the last judgment, and wherever we are going, we are going body and soul. Ignoring this or wishing it away does not change the reality. (Even Jesus suffered the separation of his body from his soul at death, but each remained united to his divine person.) Somehow I had never given much consideration to the body part of the equation, but in my meditation it hit me full force. For some reason the idea of experiencing hell in the body struck me as especially horrifying. Imagine, in hell one would be imprisoned with the most evil human beings that ever lived. And the most powerfully evil creature in God’s creation would be the warden, and his minions the guards. Imagine the physical vulnerability. No place of safety, nowhere to hide. I need say no more, except that you would have to add in the incalculable spiritual suffering. Meditate on that. Then ask yourself: are you tough enough? You might consider that John Wayne was baptized on his deathbed.