Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 3:39am

Please Sir, May I Have Another?

Zeta Male

 

 

A Georgetown student writes about his mugging:

 

Last weekend, my housemate and I were mugged at gunpoint while walking home from Dupont Circle. The entire incident lasted under a minute, as I was forced to the floor, handed over my phone and was patted down.

And yet, when a reporter asked whether I was surprised that this happened in Georgetown, I immediately answered: “Not at all.” It was so clear to me that we live in the most privileged neighborhood within a city that has historically been, and continues to be, harshly unequal. While we aren’t often confronted by this stark reality west of Rock Creek Park, the economic inequality is very real.

Year after year, Washington, D.C., is ranked among the most unequal cities in the country, with the wealthiest 5 percent earning an estimated 54 times more than the poorest 20 percent. According to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, just under 20 percent of D.C. residents live below the poverty line.

What has been most startling to me, even more so than the incident itself, have been the reactions I’ve gotten. I kept hearing “thugs,” “criminals” and “bad people.” While I understand why one might jump to that conclusion, I don’t think this is fair.

Not once did I consider our attackers to be “bad people.” I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay. They wanted my stuff, not me. While I don’t know what exactly they needed the money for, I do know that I’ve never once had to think about going out on a Saturday night to mug people. I had never before seen a gun, let alone known where to get one. The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.

 

Go here to read the rest.  This emasculated Zeta Male is a senior in the school of foreign service.  His surrender-immediately-and-blame-himself instincts makes him a natural for the Obama State Department.  The reaction of his readers is a healthy sign that he does not speak for all of his generation:

 

  1. Niko Kostas says:
  2. ” Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins. I can hardly blame them. The cards are all in our hands, and we’re not playing them.” That is a truly incredible statement. Victim-blaming at its worst. You are actually trying to justify the thugs who pointed a gun at you and robbed you. No; it’s not your fault you were mugged. You were mugged because a couple of thugs thought that they could get an easy payday and saw you as an easy target precisely because of your so-called “privilege”. I suppose if you were murdered you’d blame yourself for that, too. Pathetic.

  • I think there are many things wrong with your article, but I will only focus on one sentence: “I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me.”

    1) You were harmed by being compelled by force to lay down, defenseless.
    2) Armed robbery is an inherently dangerous felony. The gun could have gone off by accident, your friend could have resisted and been shot, police could have arrived and the thugs shoot you as a reaction to a new threat, or they could have shot the cops in an effort to flee. While I am extremely thankful you are okay, a person who purposefully places another human in a foreseeable position of death or grave bodily harm is a bad person.
    3) The objectively reasonable person would not trust a person with a gun to his head. E.g., how do you think the criminals would have responded to a single police officer who arrived without backup? Would they have shot her or submitted without a fight to her authority knowing it would lead them to spend many years in prison?

    • Yes Oliver, your friendly child muggers are the real victims and I’m not surprised that you are able to take that concept to the absurd because after all, you are a sociology major.

  • “I suppose if you were murdered you’d blame yourself for that, too.”

    Hard to do it when you’re dead.

    But your answer highlights a huge problem with this article, namely that if we justify a violent attack because of “lack of privilege”, why shouldn’t we justify other attacks?

    I don’t think that the author of the article would have the gall to tell “you deserved it, because you’re privileged” to another person who was a victim of armed robbery. Nor (at least I hope) would he justify other crimes with the “lack of privilege” excuse.

  1. John says:

    “When I walk around at 2 a.m., nobody looks at me suspiciously, and police don’t ask me questions. I wonder if our attackers could say the same.”

    I’m assuming you’re not robbing people at gunpoint at 2 a.m. That usually warrants some police suspicion.

    1. Alex says:
    2. It’s not too often that you see someone victim-blame himself.
    3. Even if violently mugging innocent bystanders really were the only way for these criminals to put food on their families’ tables (which it isn’t, and I’d bet that much or even all of the money they stole from you went to drugs or alcohol rather than towards helping starving oppressed children eat bread), that still doesn’t make it okay to mug anyone. Ever.
  • Does he victim blame rape victims as well?

    Sounds like he thinks women should get used to being raped, you know, look at themselves and their suggestive clothing.

  1. Chuck Fontaine says:

    Strong Stockholm syndrome.

 

 

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bill bannon
bill bannon
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 6:22pm

. These comments are heartening. How can we connect these commenters to many a Catholic saccharine blog…but then …that connection would last but fleetingly.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 6:58pm

PS
The similar softie approach of Ferguson last night ( or the Governor ) mainly hurt black businesses according to Breitbart:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/25/Most-Businesses-Destroyed-in-Ferguson-Minority-Owned

bill bannon
bill bannon
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 7:23pm

PS2 and then I’ll go.
We must connect the above commenters with our Holy Father who ( am I paranoid?) sees the US as equivalent to Islamic State here at “America”:

http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/pope-would-never-close-door-talks-islamic-state

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 8:57pm

What was he smoking?! When he was mugged – or when he wrote this simpering article.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 9:20pm

Thank you bill b for the link
This part stood out to me :
“But there is another threat, too,” he said, the threat of “state terrorism,” when tensions rise and an individual nation decides on its own to strike, feeling it has “the right to massacre terrorists and with the terrorists many innocent people fall.”
Many innocent people fall!!
– More innocent people – are dying until ISIS is defeated. Dialogue will not bring a negotiated solution but would prolong the agony and increase the numbers of lives lost.
There is a distinction between Good and Evil and we are all – including the pope – called to judge rightly.
When a state fights back against terrorism the state is a terrorist?

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 9:51pm

Articles like this remind me of a vignette offered by the late Cathy Seipp 14 years ago.

2ND GRADE, OCTOBER. I wonder why my daughter, who learned basic addition and subtraction in first grade, now spends math time wrapping elastic bands around plastic sticks. I ask at a curriculum meeting why we can’t move on to more arithmetic. Another mom scolds me, her voice trailing off in reproach: “If we as parents are going to support progressive education . . . ” The two teachers in attendance look hurt; they’ve waited years for these textbooks, which are built around the dreaded new “fuzzy math.”

Later, my daughter’s teacher, who’s about to retire and so is willing to say anything, sighs and tells me it’s all part of a dumbed-down lesson plan designed to build up student self-esteem. “That’s where we are in the cycle right now,” she says. “I’ve been doing this so long I can see the same wheel just keep turning round and round.”

That’s where we are in the cycle (and this callow youth hasn’t got a clue).

bill bannon
bill bannon
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 9:54pm

Anzlyne,
I like Pope Francis as an associate pastor in a parish that needs someone warm and loquacious….but as Pope, it’s dawning on me that unless he issues something ex cathedra…all the ranks of angels are whispering to me in particular for my particular soul’s sake… ” turn him off like a radio “. I find no depth in his now predictable albeit scattered sayings and I find his insight into war shallow beyond shallow. I don’t think the thousands killed by Islamic State are real to him at all….the victims….the victims. I see no gravitas in him about them. It’s all words and not real to him. He’s a lovable chatter box. And the people who chose him are not about to pick much different after him. I may have to return to painting the ocean to forget him and all his thoughts which stay in you like an habenero pepper taken by mistake.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 10:26pm

The kind of thinking on display in the original essay is the reason why the good people of Ferguson can’t have nice things after last night.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Tuesday, November 25, AD 2014 11:27pm

Believe it or not, there is actually some scientific speculation that the widespread use of hormonal contraceptives by women, and their subsequent leakage/flushing into waterways and public water systems, might be having an effect on men… it’s already been linked to “intersexed” fish:

http://www.livescience.com/20532-birth-control-water-pollution.html

trackback
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 12:02am

[…] John P. Shimek In the Still of a Cold, Wintry Night – Lisa Shefferly-Gillay, Cthlc Stnd The Feminization of Man – Donald R. McClarey JD, TACatholic A Married Priest on Married Priests – Fr. Dwight […]

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 12:54am

Elaine, Elaine, [sigh}

Everbody knows it’s because of the Crab People

Pat
Pat
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 2:15am

Economic inequality causes young men to think of finding guns to use for obtaining Sat. night entertainment expense money. Privileged young men don’t do so; because they don’t have to? What a great fall civilization has taken when right and wrong, good and bad, lawful and illegal, natural and unnatural, and/or reward and punishment are homogenized by relativity. Maybe, after sophmoronic adolescence moves toward maturity, he’ll be mortified.

Pat
Pat
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 2:47am

“In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was OK.”
It was about the phone etc. , mr. foreign servant.
Two articles I saw today described how perception of evil is skewed by relativity.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/sensitivity-movement-desensitized-catholics-evil
The other, in the NCRegister, was about a ‘human rights’ activist leader getting arrested for pedophilia.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 2:56am

Pat wrote, “Economic inequality causes young men to think of finding guns to use for obtaining Sat. night entertainment expense money. Privileged young men don’t do so; because they don’t have to?”

There is a well-known logical distinction between necessary and sufficient causes. Lack of money is a necessary cause of mugging, but not a sufficient one.

Micha Elyi
Micha Elyi
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 3:03am

a vignette offered by the late Cathy Seipp 14 years ago.
2ND GRADE, OCTOBER. I wonder why my daughter, who learned basic addition and subtraction in first grade, now spends math time wrapping elastic bands around plastic sticks.
–Art Deco

Looking for some easy units, on a lark I once enrolled in a college math class intended for Education majors. On Day One, as the professor went over the course syllabus, a number of students began whining why did the class cover all this math because all they want to do is teach second grade. It wasn’t calculus. Rather, the course could charitably have been called Math Appreciation. It was the easiest A in my program that semester.

Needless to say, my superior math skills won me no dates.

Philip
Philip
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 4:57am

Pat.
Human rights leader getting arrested for pedophilia?
Thats like saying President Obama!
Both are a contradiction in terms.

When pedophilia becomes accepted social norms in this sick national arena, the good folk will take their concealed weapons and blast away the perverts to protect their sons and daughters.
Don’t think it’s too far out! The move to call pedophiles “minor attracted people” has begun in Germany. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of perverts.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 5:13am

In telling us that “Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people,’” Mr Friedfeld raises a fundamental problem in modern Moral Philosophy and none of his commentators have even tried to address it .
As Miss Anscombe explained in her 1958 article, “In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a “virtue.” This part of the subject-matter of ethics, is however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is – a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis – and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear.”
Fifty years on, we are not much further forward.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 7:36am

Elaine K.

More reason (if ever t’were needed!) to drink.more.beer.

All,

H. G. Wells saw this in The Time Machine. N.B. I refuse to be an eloi for any morlock skulking about.

James
James
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 8:19am

There is at least some common ground, here. It is quite likely that both the muggers and the victims are Democrats.

Karen
Karen
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 10:14am

Why did you call this “feminization?” You clearly think this person was cowardly, wrong, and probably immoral, but why would equate those things with being female? Why can’t you use an accurate description instead of stating that half the human race are cowardly dimwits?

Karen
Karen
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 1:12pm

Emasculation means making a man like a woman, which is apparently the worst thing that could ever happen.

Karl
Karl
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 1:51pm

Yes, Karen, it IS very bad!

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 3:44pm

“Emasculate” verb 1. to sterilize. Syn. geld, unman, mutilate. See castrate.
2. To weaken. Syn. soften, enervate, cripple, see weaken.

“Emasculation” noun. 1 castration, mutilation, eunuchization. See castration.

As used in, “After 36 years, the wife finally completed the emotional and psychological emasculation.”

A problem with some women is that certain individuals among women (e.g., the warden) cannot understand normal thinking.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 3:51pm

Washington, DC s***s. There, I said it. One of the happiest days of my life was the day I left after working there for almost six years.

Paul W Primavera
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 3:57pm

Karen said, “Emasculation means making a man like a woman, which is apparently the worst thing that could ever happen.”
.
No man should be either emasculated or feminized. Both are wrong for a man. A man by definition must be and should be masculine. For him to be feminine or to be emasculated is contrary to nature and intrinsically wrong.
.
Likewise women should not be masculinized as the current feminist movement so oxymoronically does to women. A women should be and must be feminine, but not masculine and certainly not feminist. Indeed, there is a vast difference between being feminine (as is my wife) and feminist (as are liberal progressive Democrats both male and female). And there is a vast difference between femininity which is to be extolled and feminism which is to be eradicated and swept into the trash bin of history.
.
Indeed, I had one liberal progressive male Democrat tell me he was proud to be a feminist. I have nothing but contempt for his kind, for truthfully I know not if they are male or female – perhaps neuter or androgynous?
.
Let a man be a man, and a woman be a woman. Vive la difference!

Thomas Sharpe
Thomas Sharpe
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 4:12pm

“Micha Elyi – with superior math skills”; – without exception, every young woman that was in my engineering classes in college was engaged by senior year-
Real men are not intimated by women with superior math skills.

Paul W Primavera
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 4:56pm

Thomas Sharpe writes, “Real men are not intimated by women with superior math skills.”
.
The best engineer with whom I have ever had the privilege of working was the Emergency Diesel Generator Engineer at a Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor. By accident of birth she was happily a woman, one of the most beautiful outside of my wife. Oh, we had some knock down, drag out fights about this, that and other technobabble thing involving Engineered Safeguards, drawing control, piping configuration and related things. But I respected that woman because she really knew her stuff. Often I would come into the plant at 5:30 am to go for my morning 10 K run and she would be driving in to go to work. She always left after I did, too. One day a stupid ass of a manager said something that left her in tears. I won’t go into details, but the overwhelming majority of us men despised him. She eventually left the plant and we never got an Emergency Diesel Generator Engineer half as good as her again.
.
A woman can be feminine – NOT feminist – and a damn good engineer – or mathematician or scientist (can anyone spell Madame Curie?).

Barbara Gordon
Barbara Gordon
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 10:30pm

I’m glad that DRM posted this idiots article. It not only provides more proof that liberalism is a mental disorder (in case you needed some,) but also it provides us with something we can be additionally thankful for tomorrow–this cream puff of the male species will not be sitting around the dinner table with us.

I had better not go any further into my thinking regarding this absolute nutty, brainwashed, warped pansy–I already have enough to repent of.

Phil Steinacker
Phil Steinacker
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 11:44pm

Karen,

Get a grip.

Pat
Pat
Wednesday, November 26, AD 2014 11:53pm

M P-S,
Necessary and Sufficient for distinguishing cause is good verbalization to hear – read.
Then, Miss Anscombe on explaining that an unjust man or act being bad requires the related justice explained or conceptualized as virtue; also, that to do so would require a philosophy of psychology to say what is ethical. Food for thought.

My mind’s framework (philosophy?) forms what I believe is the simplest way to see justice or its foe, whether for perspective or introspection, and it is absolutely necessary and sufficient for any hope for clarity of thought in or about this spinning world. The Lord’s Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer cover all concepts. Without these guides, we have the questionable and atrocious situation presented in this post. That these two guides are outlawed or reviled or untaught speaks volumes about the world not being much further forward. Christianity is a philosophy. Thanks – before I read that, it would only have been necessary and sufficient to have game of solitaire with coffee.

Karl
Karl
Thursday, November 27, AD 2014 3:48pm

In telling us that “Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people,’” Mr Friedfeld raises a fundamental problem in modern Moral Philosophy and none of his commentators have even tried to address it .
As Miss Anscombe explained in her 1958 article, “In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a “virtue.” This part of the subject-matter of ethics, is however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is – a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis – and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear.”
Fifty years on, we are not much further forward.

Necessary and Sufficient for distinguishing cause is good verbalization to hear – read.
Then, Miss Anscombe on explaining that an unjust man or act being bad requires the related justice explained or conceptualized as virtue; also, that to do so would require a philosophy of psychology to say what is ethical. Food for thought.
My mind’s framework (philosophy?) forms what I believe is the simplest way to see justice or its foe, whether for perspective or introspection, and it is absolutely necessary and sufficient for any hope for clarity of thought in or about this spinning world. The Lord’s Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer cover all concepts. Without these guides, we have the questionable and atrocious situation presented in this post. That these two guides are outlawed or reviled or untaught speaks volumes about the world not being much further forward. Christianity is a philosophy. Thanks – before I read that, it would only have been necessary and sufficient to have game of solitaire with coffee.

TWINS?

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, November 28, AD 2014 4:44am

Pat wrote, “The Lord’s Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer cover all concepts. Without these guides, we have the questionable and atrocious situation presented in this post”

St Thomas Aquinas famously tried to harmonize the Law concept of ethics (Divine command) with Aristotle’s Virtue concept of ethics (what is required for human “flourishing”) and this had been the basis of most Catholic thinking about Natural Law, based on pure reason, without recourse to Revalation.

Now, it is Aristotle himself who reminds us that Λόγοσ ούδέν κινεί – Reason moves nothing. Hume was simply following him, when he insisted that it is not judgment as such that sets us in motion, but our judgment on how to get or do something we want. I do not think St Augustine would have disagreed, for in his commentary on Galatians, he insists that “in acting we necessarily follow what gives us most pleasure” [Quod enim amplius nos delectat, secundum id operemur necesse est]

Elsewhere, St Augustine insists that “Men are not willing to do what is right either because the fact that it is right is hidden from them, or because it does not please them… It is from the grace of God, which helps the wills of man, that that which was hidden becomes known, and that which did not please become sweet [Ut autem innotescat quod latebat et suave fiat quod non delectabat, gratiae Dei est]” (On the Merits and Remission of Sins 2, 17, 26)

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, November 28, AD 2014 6:58am

In telling us that “Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people,’” Mr Friedfeld raises a fundamental problem in modern Moral Philosophy and none of his commentators have even tried to address it .

Because his commenters are not over-thinking his remarks and you are.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, November 28, AD 2014 11:59am

Art Deco wrote, “Because his commenters are not over-thinking his remarks and you are.”

I think it is because, whilst they have an inarticulate moral sense, they really cannot explain, to themselves or to anyone else, “how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one,” or, at least, not in a way that would stand up to a minute’s scruitiny.
Mr Friedfeld obviously cannot do so and one doubts if his attackers could.

Now, nonsense in the intellect reinforces corruption in the will; that is why the failure is by no means trivial.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Friday, November 28, AD 2014 6:31pm

Was it Chesterton or Belloc who said, “A gentleman should not leave home without a penknife and a revolver?” Perhaps it was another but still good advice. No one should “Trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me”. We’ve come a long way…..down.

Lady Feliz
Lady Feliz
Tuesday, December 2, AD 2014 1:33am

Viewpoints like yours are the reason Catholic Church pews become emptier every year. Let me introduce you to a man named Jesus, who rather famously tells his followers to “turn the other cheek” and “if a man strikes you on your left cheek, offer him your right cheek.” Maybe you never heard of him, or read a book called “The Bible”? You should check it out sometime.

Pathetic.

WSquared
WSquared
Tuesday, December 2, AD 2014 3:10pm

Lady Feliz, you misread “turn the other cheek.” Turning the other cheek does not mean bending over and giving the other person your backside to kick. Moreover, even when the Lord was dying on the Cross, NEVER did He ever say “through My Fault, through My Fault, through My Most Grievous Fault,” but “forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do!” Christ forgave what was wrong; he never denied others’ wrongdoing, subsequently blaming Himself for it. Perhaps you should take your own advice about reading Scripture.

Moreover, you can’t just read Scripture merely on the surface: “turning the other cheek” has more to do with standing one’s ground and mirroring back another person’s sin and violence, thereby calling the person to repentance. During Jesus’s time, to give someone your other cheek would have the effect of being slapped with the back of the person’s hand. Only the underhanded strike with the back of the hand. What you are indicating by giving the person your other cheek is how shameful that person’s action actually is. For example: a white man once confronted Archbishop Desmond Tutu, telling him to get off the sidewalk, because he “didn’t make way for baboons.” Tutu stepped aside for the man and said, “yes, but I do!”

Christ– High Priest, Prophet, and King– doesn’t like doormats. You know why? Because He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and doormats can’t stand up for Truth. Moral relativism, by contrast, likes doormats.

Mr. McClarey, perhaps you might want to write on the cultural tendency to effeminize Jesus Christ into some wishy-washy marshmallow, next.

Andi
Andi
Tuesday, December 2, AD 2014 4:05pm

Why is the the “feminization of men”? Really, you need to make it a women’s issue that these men blame themselves for getting mugged? That’s not even victim blaming that’s blaming an entire gender because you don’t like what someone of your own is saying. Stop blaming women for men’s short comings!

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, December 2, AD 2014 4:36pm

Caution, WSquared: Mac likely will get in big-time trouble with the warrior women if he uses the word “effeminize.” A more acceptable word would be “emasculate.”

I agree. Christ did not instruct His disciples to BOHICA: “Bend over here it comes again.”

The all-encompassing justice/peace meme is based on a skewed, out-of-context reading of Matthew’s (only Matthew wrote about it) “final judgment” parable. Earlier in his Gospel, Matthew relates how Jesus defines who are His brothers. Jesus tells us His brother is anyone that does what God, His Father, wants him to do. Otherwise, Christ’s religion/teachings would enable or endorse bad behavior, formerly known as “sin.” Nothing could be further from the Truth.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Tuesday, December 2, AD 2014 10:18pm

Dear Lady Feliz: It appears your comments, “Viewpoints like yours are the reason Catholic Church pews become emptier every year.” ….Pathetic”, are directed at me. Perhaps, you rashly judge me. I say perhaps, so as not to judge you. Yes, I have heard of Jesus, the Bible, and the Church which has assured me that Jesus Christ is true God and true (not faux) Man. It was Chesterton, a manly man, who understood that Our Lord is no pacifist. “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.” Mt 10:34 We have a duty to protect our selves and others from harm. That is why the policeman (whose lot is not a happy one) carries a weapon. That is why we maintain the national defense with men at arms. The point of this discussion is the loss of virility, a word of the same Latin root as virtue. I think Our Lord’s meaning in regard to the sword versus peace, is that the Gospel will be opposed by those who choose evil. We are not called to acquiesce to evil but to oppose it, even if it may mean doing so at risk to, or loss of, life. If anything is emptying our pews, it is mealy-mouthed mixed messaging that mingles political correctness with Gospel Truth.

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