In Memoriam.
We are at war, if you have been paying attention. Many people have not and yet they have taken sides regardless of consciousness. "Forgive them for they know not what they do". The war is on a wide front and in many theatres of operation, and from the vantage points atop the Tavern we can look out over the destruction of souls close to the hedges and far afield. While the carnage in the middle east, and in very slightly lesser occurence in the streets of Europe and Scandinavia, shows all the hallmarks of historical physical asset destruction and death, the Moral war's destructiveness is seen at the level of the Family. The Family is the singular bedrock unit of society. Man and woman and children.
It is a Knight's job to fight, and there are fewer knights around these days. I am getting past it too. But I do allow the more vocal and active customers to bring the fight to the bars. For moral fights are more often through words, ideas and firmness of 'sound' mind. So today we were treated to several people talking about one such battle-front. An old Knight came in for mention.
Dale Ahlquist is an author, public speaker, Evangelical convert to Catholicism, and Catholic apologist. He has written, edited, or contributed to more than fifteen books on G. K. Chesterton, and it was about that great man that he came along to speak.
I am always pleased to have intellectually robust chaps in the Tavern. Even old Knights can learn.
But he was not alone. We had another Professor pop in for a pint. One I had not seen in here before. I shall come to him soon. Oh and there was mention of an actor fellow too.
Dale is the president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society. And Chesterton had things to say about Moral Warfare. He was fortunate that 'Gay Marriage' had not broken onto the battlefield in his day
G. K. Chesterton:
It’s Not Gay, and It’s Not Marriage
One of the pressing issues of Chesterton’s time was “birth control.” He not only objected to the idea, he objected to the very term because it meant the opposite of what it said. It meant no birth and no control. I can only imagine he would have the same objections about “gay marriage.”
The idea is wrong, but so is the name.
It is not gay and it is not marriage.
Back in his day, Gay meant happy, carefree. Gaity was fine. Now, of course, it is all about strutting down the streets dressed (?) like a loon, frightening the kiddies and dogs. It is now an emasculated word for emasculated men.Chesterton was so consistently right in his pronouncements and prophecies because he understood that anything that attacked the family was bad for society. That is why he spoke out against eugenics and contraception, against divorce and “free love” (another term he disliked because of its dishonesty), but also against wage slavery and compulsory state-sponsored education and mothers hiring other people to do what mothers were designed to do themselves. It is safe to say that Chesterton stood up against every trend and fad that plagues us today because every one of those trends and fads undermines the family.
Big Government tries to replace the family’s authority, and Big Business tries to replace the family’s autonomy. There is a constant commercial and cultural pressure on father, mother, and child. They are minimized and marginalized and, yes, mocked.
But as Chesterton says,
“This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed;
it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”
This latest attack on the family is neither the latest nor the worst. But it has a shock value to it, in spite of the process of de-sensitization that the information and entertainment industries have been putting us through the past several years. Those who have tried to speak out against the normalization of the abnormal have been met with “either slanging or silence,” as Chesterton was when he attempted to argue against the faddish philosophies that were promoted by the major newspapers in his day.
In 1926, he warned, “The next great heresy will be an attack on morality, especially sexual morality.”
His warning has gone unheeded, and sexual morality has decayed progressively. But let us remember that it began with birth control, which is an attempt to create sex for sex’s sake, changing the act of love into an act of selfishness. The promotion and acceptance of lifeless, barren, selfish sex has logically progressed to homosexuality.
Chesterton shows that the problem of homosexuality as an enemy of civilization is quite old.
In The Everlasting Man, he describes the nature-worship and “mere mythology” that produced a perversion among the Greeks. “Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man.” Any young man, he says, “who has the luck to grow up sane and simple” is naturally repulsed by homosexuality because “it is not true to human nature or to common sense.” He argues that if we attempt to act indifferent about it, we are fooling ourselves. It is “the illusion of familiarity,” when “a perversion become[s] a convention.”
In Heretics, Chesterton almost makes a prophecy of the misuse of the word “gay.” He writes of “the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion.” Carpe diem means “seize the day,” do whatever you want and don’t think about the consequences, live only for the moment.
“But the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people.”
There is a hopelessness as well as a haplessness to it. When sex is only a momentary pleasure, when it offers nothing beyond itself, it brings no fulfillment. It is literally lifeless. And as Chesterton writes in his book St. Francis of Assisi, the minute sex ceases to be a servant, it becomes a tyrant. This is perhaps the most profound analysis of the problem of homosexuals: they are slaves to sex. They are trying to “pervert the future and unmake the past.” They need to be set free.
Sin has consequences. Yet Chesterton always maintains that we must condemn the sin and not the sinner. And no one shows more compassion for the fallen than G.K. Chesterton. Of Oscar Wilde, whom he calls “the Chief of the Decadents,” he says that Wilde committed “a monstrous wrong” but also suffered monstrously for it, going to an awful prison, where he was forgotten by all the people who had earlier toasted his cavalier rebelliousness. “His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which your life and mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense one might call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation; it cancels out. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment.”
Chesterton referred to Wilde’s homosexual behavior as a “highly civilized” sin, something that was a worse affliction among the wealthy and cultured classes. It was a sin that was never a temptation for Chesterton, and he says that it is no great virtue for us never to commit a sin for which we are not tempted. That is another reason we must treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with compassion. We know our own sins and weaknesses well enough. Philo of Alexandria said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle.” But compassion must never compromise with evil. Chesterton points out that balance that our truth must not be pitiless, but neither can our pity be untruthful. Homosexuality is a disorder. It is contrary to order. Homosexual acts are sinful, that is, they are contrary to God’s order. They can never be normal. And worse yet, they can never even be even. As Chesterton’s great detective Father Brown says:
“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.”
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| Marriage is between a man and a woman. |
That is the order. And the Catholic Church teaches that it is a sacramental order, with divine implications. The world has made a mockery of marriage that has now culminated with homosexual unions.
But it was heterosexual men and women who paved the way to this decay. Divorce, which is an abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Contraception, another abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Abortion is still not normal, but it is legal.
The slippery slope. It is as old as humanity, or at least a from few days after humanity appeared in the Garden.Making homosexual “marriage” legal will not make it normal, but it will add to the confusion of the times. And it will add to the downward spiral of our civilization. But Chesterton’s prophecy remains: We will not be able to destroy the family. We will merely destroy ourselves by disregarding the family.
Gays themselves admit quite openly that same sex marriage is a lie.
Lesbian Activist’s Surprisingly Candid Speech:
Gay Marriage Fight Is a ‘Lie’ to Destroy MarriageA 2012 speech by Masha Gessen, an author and outspoken activist for the LGBT community, is just now going viral and it includes a theory that many supporters of traditional marriage have speculated about for years: The push for gay marriage has less to do with the right to marry – it is about diminishing and eventually destroying the institution of marriage and redefining the “traditional family.”
• “Gay marriage is a lie.”• “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there.”• “It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”
The other Prof. Ah yes. Prof Robert A. J. Gagnon spoke of a mate of his, one Dr. Nicolosi.
Dr. Nicolosi graduated from the New School for Social Research (M.A.) and received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles. He is licensed as a psychologist in California.
In 1980, he founded the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, California, and has served since then as Clinical Director. Although he works with a wide variety of clients, his specialty is the treatment of men who wish to diminish their same-sex attractions and develop their heterosexual potential.Dr. Nicolosi is one of three founding members--and former President--of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a 1,000-member professional association founded in 1992.A story told by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, which I recounted in my first book, nicely encapsulates
the difference between homosexual attraction and heterosexual attaction.
In a counseling session with a 35-year old man with same-sex attractions he asked the man to recount when he first thought that he might be "gay." He said: "'I recall the exact moment I knew I was gay. I was twelve years old and we were taking a shortcut to class. We were walking across the gym and through the locker room, and an older guy was coming out of the shower. He was wet and naked and I thought, Wow!' I asked the client to again tell me exactly what his experience was. He became very pensive. Then he answered, 'The feeling was, “Wow, I wish I was him."'"It is axiomatic that homosexual desire and behavior treats one’s own sex/gender as half intact in relation to persons of the same sex, not in relation to the other sex. It is as though a man were a man’s sexual counterpart or complement; or a woman a woman's complement.
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| Had something missing. |
The desire for homosexual relationships is a misguided attempt to repair the sense of something missing in one’s masculinity (if male) or femininity (if female).
Of course we have moved on a lot and now there is active encouragement of people to amplify their false sense rather than repair and heal it.This is the primary focus of reparative therapy. Whether or not same-sex attractions diminish and other-sex attractions emerge is secondary to, and a natural outgrowth of, the correction of this false sense of the sexual self.
Again Joseph Nicolosi: "“Biological factors indeed probably influence some people toward homosexuality—either genetic (inherited) factors that cause gender nonconformity, or prenatal-hormonal influences, especially in men, that may result in a low-masculinized brain…. Any factor—biological or social-environmental— that leads a male to feel less secure in his maleness has the potential to affect his gender identity and thus his sexual orientation.
But none of these factors mean that homosexuality is normal and a part of human design.
Understanding human weaknesses, faults, failures and proclivities, what is 'normal', healthy and whole, is essential. The experiences of individuals and their families is grist for the mill of understanding.Further, none of them prove that homosexuality is inevitable … or … unchangeable.... Reparative theory holds that the origin of SSA is in unmet emotional and identification needs with the same sex" (Shame and Attachment Loss [Intervarsity, 2009], 18, 23).Homosexual attraction is at odds with creation design and therefore it is not a kindness to encourage sexual gratification of that desire. Neither is it an occasion for those without such attractions to be derisive but rather an occasion to address the genuine need arising from it.
Update. In Memoriam.
March 14, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a psychologist and a pioneer of “reparative therapy” to help people overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, died March 9 at age 70 from complications resulting from the flu.Nicolosi, a devout Catholic and the co-founder of NARTH (now the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice), leaves behind wife Linda and their son, Joe Jr. People from all over the world have written memorial tributes to him, with some thanking him for helping them overcome sexual identification problems or to understand the nature of homosexuality. A family funeral services for Nicolosi will be held Wednesday.
In a field fraught with ambiguous terminology (e.g., “sexual orientation”), escalating — even fanatical — LGBT opposition, media cynicism and misreporting, Nicolosi persevered. His counter-cultural message of “If gay doesn’t define you, you don’t have to be gay,” was outrageous and “hateful” to intolerant homosexual militants, but it brought hope to people of faith and others struggling with unwanted homosexual desires.“Joe worked in a profession that has lost its intellectual integrity,” wrote his wife and professional partner Linda Ames Nicolosi. “Gay activists have such a stranglehold on psychology that no one dares defy them. Joe, however, did defy them. And I thank him for his courage.”
We heard of another fellow, an actor. Rupert Everett. A homosexual. His view, too, has some credibility.
Rupert Everett: 'There's nothing worse than gay parents'
Rupert Everett has spoken out against gay parents and said he “can’t think of anything worse” than two men bringing up a child together.
The star of the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love blazed a trail for gay actors when he came out as homosexual 20 years ago.
However, he has been criticised by gay rights groups after giving an interview in which he decried same-sex couples who have children.
The 53-year-old told the Sunday Times Magazine that his mother Sara had met his boyfriend but “still wishes I had a wife and kids.”
“She thinks children need a father and a mother and I agree with her,” he said.
Or perverted parents of either or both sexes, as my good friend Moira is able to point out.“I can’t think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads.
“Some people might not agree with that. Fine! That’s just my opinion.
“I’m not speaking on behalf of the gay community. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m part of any ‘community’.
“The only community I belong to is humanity and we’ve got too many children on the planet, so it’s good not to have more.”
Campaigners claimed his remarks were reminiscent of those who oppose same-sex marriages.Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the campaign group Stonewall, said: "Rupert should get out a little bit more to see the facts for himself.“There is absolutely no evidence that the kids of gay parents suffer in the way they are being brought up or in how they develop."Everett also told how his family’s military background, which included his father serving as an Army Major, meant “some things were simply not talked about”.His comments were part of a feature in which his mother was interviewed as well.Mrs Everett, 77, told how she knew her son was gay from when he turned 18, and described her desire for him to have children.“In the past, I have said that I wish Rupert was straight and, I probably still feel that,” she said. “I’d like him to have a pretty wife.“I’d like him to have children. He’s so good with children. He’d make a wonderful father.“But I also think a child needs a mummy and a daddy. I’ve told him that and he takes it very well. He doesn’t get angry with me. He just smiles.”
One might have some sympathy for homosexuals. One might think that they need 'help'. They do. Just as many other heterosexuals do. But as we all have 'Free Will' and one must wait for their change of heart and mind. Dr Nicolosi's clinic welcomes those who acknowledge that they 'have a problem'.Their comments were likely to cause rancour with gay couples with children such as Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish, who have a one-year-old son, Zachary.
It is not the first time Everett has attracted controversy over interviews. In 2008, he apologised after calling soldiers “wimps” in The Sunday Telegraph.
Publicising his film The Victorian Sex Explorer in which he played Sir Richard Burton, he said: “In Burton's day they were itching to get into the fray. Now it is the opposite. They are always whining about the dangers of being killed. Oh my God, they are such wimps now!”
He has also previously spoken of his treatment after making his sexuality public, urging actors not to come out for fear of losing work.
In 2009, he said his admission had damaged his career and his work had been limited since the revelation.
Their Problem has become a serious threat to the bedrock of our society. And it is not accident. No 'natural' development.
Mental illness used to be a problem to be cured. OK, it was not done well, as we knew and still know so little. But our society is embracing mental illness, not to provide help, or the 'freedom' it claims, but licence.
It has a direct and damaging effect on the Family.
Those whom the gods would destroy they first send mad.
A society that encourages it will fall.
Whence gaity then?
Drink deep.
Rest in Peace, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi. May Perpetual Light shine upon him.
Pax
I just find it so distasteful, I hardly run posts on it for that reason.
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