Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich. He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man.

And now he’s dead. May God have mercy on his soul.

. . .

To see men become addicted to porn is to watch character formation in reverse. Their integrity and fidelity unwind before your eyes. They lie habitually to cover the extent of their habit, even when their wives are allegedly “open” and sexually liberated. After all, if she knew how much he watched or exactly what he looked at, even she would be shocked. The screen alone is never enough, the wife is never enough, and the addict so often seeks mistresses, prostitutes, or both.

Another family breaks. More lives fall into despair.

To see a man become addicted to porn is to watch character formation in reverse. All this is known. Everyone has seen it happen in their churches, in their neighborhoods, and in their families.

Hugh Hefner’s Legacy of Despair

Porn is part of the culture of death.

Hugh Hefner, America’s famous porn magnate, has died at the age of 91 at the Playboy Mansion. Throughout his life, he championed unfettered hedonism in every form: Abortion, the legalization of marijuana, the liberation of sex from love, and pornography were all causes he fought — with much success — to bring into the mainstream. Hefner himself was not single-handedly responsible for the massive social changes that rocked the Western world from the Sexual Revolution onwards, but he was easily the single most recognizable symbol of them all.

. . .

[T]he catastrophe of Hefner’s Sexual Revolution will be felt for generations: Fifty million pre-born children aborted, marriages smashed or abandoned, millions of children growing up in broken homes, rates of porn addiction that have crippled a generation of men, and a hypersexualized society that uses the bodies of girls and women to sell nearly every product on the market. The destruction and the carnage are nearly unfathomable.

Hugh Hefner has died, and we do not rejoice in his death. But as the old man breathed his last in the decaying Playboy Mansion where he lived his life of selfishness and greed, we can only mourn for the millions of broken lives and countless victims he leaves in his wake.

Hugh Hefner led many souls down the road to destruction

Those who persist in denying that the Church is engaged in a culture war, the combatants in which are aptly called the “culture of life” and the “culture of death,” might ponder this June blog post by my summer pastor in rural Québec, Father Tim Moyle:

Tonight I am preparing to celebrate a funeral for someone (let’s call him “H” to protect his privacy) who, while suffering from cancer, was admitted to hospital with an unrelated problem, a bladder infection. H’s family had him admitted to the hospital earlier in the week under the assumption that the doctors there would treat the infection and then he would be able to return home. To their shock and horror, they discovered that the attending physician had indeed made the decision NOT to treat the infection. When they demanded that he change his course of (in)action, he refused, stating that it would be better if H died of this infection now rather than let cancer take its course and kill him later. Despite their demands and pleadings, the doctor would not budge from his decision. In fact he deliberately hastened H’s end by ordering large amounts of morphine “to control pain” which resulted in his losing consciousness as his lungs filled up with fluid. In less than 24 hours, H was dead.

Let me tell you a bit about H. He was 63 years old. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters who are both currently working in universities toward their undergraduate degrees. We are not talking here about someone who was advanced in years and rapidly failing due to the exigencies of old age. We are talking about a man who was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We are talking about a man who still held onto hope that perhaps he might defy the odds long enough to see his daughters graduate. Evidently and tragically, in the eyes of the physician tasked with providing the care needed to beat back the infection, that hope was not worth pursuing.

Again, let me make this point abundantly clear: It was the express desire of both the patient and his spouse that the doctor treat the infection. This wish was ignored.

Canada’s vulnerability to the culture of death is exacerbated by Canada’s single-payer, i.e. state-funded and state-run, health care system. And the brutal fact is that it’s more “cost-effective” to euthanize patients than to treat secondary conditions that could turn lethal (like H’s infection) or to provide palliative end-of-life care.

. . .

But in Canada, a mature democracy, that utilitarian calculus among government bean-counters wouldn’t survive for long if a similar, cold calculus were not at work in the souls of too many citizens. And that is one reason why the Church must engage the culture war, not only in Canada but in the United States and throughout the West: to warm chilled souls and rebuild a civil society committed to human dignity.

It’s a Culture War, Stupid

Ozymandias

Most of you have probably heard or read the reports trumpeting the “eradication” of Down syndrome in Iceland). The problem is that what is being termed “eradicating” the “problem” actually means that those with Down syndrome are being put to death. The celebratory language is all too similar to the way we once spoke of wiping out malaria by killing infected mosquitoes. But of course children in the womb are not mosquitoes; they are human beings, love and willed by God. Imagine saying that we had eradicated malaria by killing every person who had it!

A low point in the article linked above comes at the end, when a proponent of aborting babies who likely have Down syndrome is quoted as saying,

“We don’t look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication … preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder—that’s so black and white. Life is gray.”

Well, pardon me for considering murder to be so black and white! One minute a heart is beating heart, the next minute it’s not. The “thing” that you ended is a human life. Calling such a child a “possible life” is scientifically dishonest. A beating heart does not exist in something that is possibly alive; he or she is alive. No linguistic gymnastics can legitimately describe the situation otherwise.

Further, “preventing suffering” by killing the patient is an illustration of the twisted logic of the culture of death. Death is the increasing being proposed as the solution to today’s problems. If you—or more perniciously, “we”—decide that your life is not worth living, we will kill you and call ourselves compassionate for doing so.

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that we veto the gift of God. Some of God’s gifts come in paradoxical packages; those with disabilities and special needs have much to teach us and many ways to bless us. Without them we may never reach our full humanity, which is meant to include compassion, humility, reverence, and respect. Not one of us is perfect. All of us have difficulties that require support from others. When we forget or reject this we lose an important aspect of our humanity: interdependence.

Iceland is not alone in this; much of the rest of the world has also refused to accept the disabled into our communities.

. . .

What about those who aborted their babies? We as a Church cannot avoid our responsibility to declare the dignity and worth of the disabled. More than ever, our world needs the Church’s testimony, for this 90% statistic is a startling one. But even as we witness to the dignity of the disabled and to the wrongness of abortion, we must also embrace those who chose abortion and now struggle with having made that decision. We are called to reconcile and to bring healing to all who have faced this crisis and fallen. Many were pressured and felt alone and afraid. We offer this embrace through confession and through healing ministries like Project Rachel, which offers counseling, spiritual direction, support groups, and prayer services. Even as the Church speaks out against abortion, she must also reconcile those who have fallen under the weight of these heavy issues.

Iceland Is Not Alone in “Freezing Out” the Disabled

Culture of Death

[O]ur present culture, which makes war on marriage and the family, is also making war on genuine manhood. In spite of its own braggadocio, modern culture doesn’t really make war on things such as “sexism” and the abuse of women and children because it encourages the machismo that turns men into abusers while simultaneously discouraging the familial and paternal responsibility that turns men into good husbands and fathers. Such a culture does not only make men miserable, it makes women and children miserable too—and all in the name of the pursuit of freedom and happiness! It’s all so pathetically funny. A tragedy that is also a divine comedy because it shows that virtue is the only way of getting to the happy ending.

Beyond Machismo to Manhood: The Challenge of Real Masculinity

Culture of death. Ozymandias

The founder of Planned Parenthood favored abortion as a tool for rooting out society’s ‘undesirables.’ Richard Spencer and his ilk do too.

. . .

[T]he alt-right tends to praise abortion for the same reasons that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, praised it: It helps to rid the country of “undesirables.”

Richard Spencer, the keynote speaker in Charlottesville and the central figure of the alt-right movement, finds abortion useful. He has explained that abortion will help to bring about his vision of an elite, white America: “The people who are having abortions are generally very often Black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” The people whom Spencer wants to reproduce, he says, “are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome.” It is only “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics,” he claims, “who use abortion as birth control.”

On this understanding, abortion is a form of eugenics, helping to shape the population to produce more desirables and fewer undesirables. This is why Spencer supports the practice — not because he believes that it is a moral good or that women are owed the right to choose, but because he views it as a morally neutral tool that improves the American gene pool by making it whiter and richer.

The Alt-Right Carries on Margaret Sanger’s Pro-Abortion Legacy

The alt-right is part of the culture of death.

If the loosening of sexual mores was a good thing, why do men and women, outside of their own marriages, spend so little time expressing gratitude or admiration for the opposite sex? Let’s suppose that you have two tribes, the Comanche and the Shoshone, and that before some particularly bloody battle, the Comanche used to say good things about the Shoshone, and the Shoshone used to say good things about the Comanche; and that they generally did so, though they did not always get along. Wouldn’t you conclude that the battle had poisoned their relations? Suppose the feminist insists that relations between men and women have never been better, because before she came into the world to enlighten us, all they did was quarrel and abuse whatever power the one had over the other. That’s absurd, but grant her the jaundiced view not only of history but of every single human culture that has ever existed and that exists even now, besides that of the feminist-influenced west. Fine; now we ask the feminist the obvious question. “If what you say is true, why don’t you spend most of your time expressing gratitude or admiration for men—for their accomplishments, their strengths, and their gifts to women? Why are you not in a tizzy of wonder? If your movement has sweetened everything, why are you so sour?” She is a walking and talking self-refutation.

Normal people want young people to get married, have children, and stay married. They may differ on what to do in the case of extremely difficult marriages, but at base they agree that marriage is a very good thing, and should neither be rare nor fragile nor subject to needless threats from without. Now, it is clear that in the aftermath of the sexual revolution marriage is in steep decline. Normal people would view that as at least worrisome and at worst calamitous. The question to ask, when the town sewer has backed up and water of dubious color is spurting out through everybody’s kitchen sink, is not, “How should we label our outhouses?” Anybody who would distract you from the main question, the pressing trouble, is either a fool or a knave. The question is, “How do we repair the town sewer?”

The question for us is, “What customs, and the laws that corroborate and promote them, give young men and women the best chance of getting married, bearing children within wedlock, staying married, and raising their children in a clean and sane household?” If, when the water is foul, somebody at your ear persists in asking about what to do with old paint or whether mixed-use zoning is a good thing, you will look at him as if he had lost his senses. “Now is not the time for that!” you would say. If he were at your ear saying that the new kind of water was really pretty good, and that only prejudice kept you from liking it, you would be sure that he had lost his senses, you would order him off the premises, and you would return to your task at hand.

Time for frank talk about the sewage, filth of the sexual revolution

The “sexual revolution” is part of the culture of death.

New Jersey became the third state in the nation to prohibit the sale of tobacco products to anyone under 21, Gov. Chris Christie announced Friday, saying, “no one should lose their life due to any addictive substance.”

New Jersey already had banned tobacco sales to anyone under 19. But the bill’s advocates pushed for a higher age pointing to studies that show youth who don’t take up smoking into their early 20s will never make it a habit.

Chris Christie just did something he says will save lives in N.J.

NJ joins 2 other states in raising the age to buy tobacco to 21: California and Hawaii

Meanwhile, in New Jersey if a pregnant girl under the age of 18, i.e., a minor, wants to have an abortion, that child is not required to involve their parents….

No parental notification required in California and Hawaii either….

Moral preening and the culture of death

Ozymandias

If you can’t see that our entire civilization is in crisis, then you are a wounded victim of the war. We are now engaged in the most serious war that the world has ever known. What follows is a three point checklist for understanding what is really at stake at the most critical period of human history:

To win any war, the three most necessary things to know are (1) that you are at war, (2) who your enemy is, and (3) what weapons or strategies can defeat him. You cannot win a war (1) if you simply sew peace on a battlefield, (2) if you fight civil wars against your allies, or (3) if you use the wrong weapons.

. . .

We’ve had prophets who warned us: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age; and Spengler, 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West, and Aldous Huxley, seventy years ago, in Brave New World, and C. S. Lewis, forty years ago, in The Abolition of Man, and above all our popes: Leo XIII and Pius IX and Pius X and above all John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the world, the greatest man of the worst century. He had even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan, who dared to call Them “the evil empire” : He called US: “the culture of death.” That’s our culture, and his, including Italy, with the lowest birth rate in the world, and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West’s abortion holocaust.

If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims then the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale.

But is not God forgiving?

He is, but the unrepentant refuse forgiveness. How can forgiveness be received by a moral relativist who denies that there is anything to forgive except a lack of self-esteem, nothing to judge but “judgmentalism?” How can a Pharisee or a pop psychologist be saved?

But is not God compassionate?

He is not compassionate to Moloch and Baal and Ashtaroth, and to Caananites who do their work, who “cause their children to walk through the fire.” Perhaps your God is—the God of your dreams, the God of your “religious preference” —but not the God revealed in the Bible.

But is not the God of the Bible revealed most fully and finally in the New Testament rather than the Old? In sweet and gentle Jesus rather than wrathful and warlike Jehovah?

The opposition is heretical: the old Gnostic-Manichaean-Marcionite heresy, as immortal as the demons who inspired it. For “I and the Father are one.” The opposition between nice Jesus and nasty Jehovah denies the very essence of Christianity: Christ’s identity as the Son of God. Let’s remember our theology and our biology: like Father, like Son.

But is not God a lover rather than a warrior?

No, God is a lover who is a warrior. The question fails to understand what love is, what the love that God is, is. Love is at war with hate, betrayal, selfishness, and all love’s enemies. Love fights. Ask any parent. Yuppie-love, like puppy-love, may be merely “compassion” (the fashionable word today), but father-love and mother-love are war.

In fact, every page of the Bible bristles with spears, from Genesis 3 through Revelation 20. The road from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained is soaked in blood. At the very center of the story is a cross, a symbol of conflict if there ever was one. The theme of spiritual warfare is never absent in scripture, and never absent in the life and writings of a single saint. But it is never present in the religious education of any of my “Catholic” students at Boston College. Whenever I speak of it, they are stunned and silent, as if they have suddenly entered another world. They have. They have gone past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology-disguised-as-religion, into a world where they meet Christ the King, not Christ the Kitten.

Welcome back from the moon, kids.

Where is the culture of death coming from?

Here. America is the center of the culture of death. America is the world’s one and only cultural superpower.

If I haven’t shocked you yet, I will now. Do you know what Muslims call us? They call us “The Great Satan.” And do you know what I call them? I call them right.

How to Win the Culture War, by Peter Kreeft

Islam is a religion, not a race, and, what is more, it is thoroughly multiracial, with all races represented in its ranks. To oppose ISIS and seek appropriate measures to prevent the spread of its influence and power is no more racist or ‘Islamophobic’ than opposition to the terrorism of the IRA in the 1970s was racist or ‘celtophobic.’ Opposition to barbarism and the terrorism it practices is a mark of civilization, not racism.

. . .

Europeans have embraced the culture of death, contracepting themselves out of existence. Europe is not suffering from a population explosion but a population implosion. With a shrinking and aging population, unwilling to reproduce itself, immigration becomes a necessity. One cannot have a sustainable economy, still less a continually expanding economy, if the number of producers and consumers is shrinking. A culture which seeks self-gratification instead of the self-sacrifice needed to raise children is doomed to self-destruction. It has no future. It has no future for the plain and simple reason that it has no children. In this sense, it can truly be said that the future belongs to those who forsake selfishness for the selflessness of parenthood. The meek really do inherit the earth!

. . .

As one who subscribes to–nay, as one who submits to—the Permanent Things, I would say that the “West” is not synonymous with the Permanent Things, nor do the Permanent Things depend on the survival of the “West” for their permanence. On the contrary, the “West” is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things.

The Permanent Things are grounded in a reverence for God and for the Church that He established, and also in a reverence for the traditional family which is the bedrock of all healthy culture and the seed with which it plants itself into the future. When the love for God is gone and the family has been abandoned, there is no future. The secular fundamentalist “West” is decaying because it is decadent, and it is dying because it has embraced the culture of death.

What will be left when the secularist “West” is dead will be the Permanent Things. Christianity is alive and well, and thriving and growing, in Africa, Asia, China–and yes, even in resurrected embryonic form in Europe and other parts of the “West.” Europe and the “West” might be committing collective suicide, but Christendom is always new, as it is always old, because it is the Permanent Thing.

Is the West Lost Forever?

Ozymandias

“Human genetics can be summarized in this basic creed: In the beginning is the message, and the message is in life, and the message is life. And if the message is a human message, then the life is a human life….

“The enemies of life know that to destroy Christian civilization, they must first destroy the family at its weakest point—the child. And among the weakest, they must choose the least protected of all—the child who has never been seen; the child who is not yet known or loved in the usual meaning of the word; who has not yet seen the light of day, who cannot even cry out in distress.”

— Jerome Lejeune (discovered trisomy 21, the genetic defect that causes Down syndrome)

7 of History’s Most Brilliant Scientists People Forget Were Catholic