"People Mover"

Absolutely love Sasquatch's guitar.



You're welcome.

Father Longenecker corrects Father Martin's slippery language

Father Martin is a pro-gay, liberal priest, and he has a large following among intellectual liberal Catholics. Some of his messaging I can sign onto 100%, e.g., be kind to everybody, don't judge people solely by their faults, etc. Other people communicate these things better and less jargonistically, but ok.

However by conflating terms that mean different things, Father Martin justifies behavior which the church teaches is sinful. Father Dwight Longenecker deals adeptly with this tendency in this article, especially in dealing with his recent assertion "Being gay isn't a sin," which he uses to scold Franklin Graham. Excerpt:

I should say that this post is not a comment on homosexuality per se. I have no opinion on that matter other than the teaching of the Sacred Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

What I would like to comment on is Fr Martin’s deceitful use of language.

First he says “Being gay is not a sin.” Yes. We all agree that experiencing same sex attraction is not a sin. I’m sure Franklin Graham also agrees with this. Fr Martin knows that we agree with him on this, but without saying so, he conflates “Being gay” with gay sexual activity. How do I know this? Because Fr Martin supports New Ways Ministry and one of their constant refrains is, “You can’t pretend to accept gay people if you do not accept the way they love.”

He knows “being gay” for the vast majority of his readers means “living gay.” He is quite content to use fuzzy language in order to blur the distinctions.

Second, he states the lie that God makes people gay. The genesis of the homosexual condition is, no doubt, complex and clearly many people who are attracted to people of the same sex truly believe they were born that way. While one ought to respect their feelings it is also true that their feelings do not match the facts.

This slipperiness is a major temptation for people who want the church to change 2,000+ years worth of tradition and teach that homosexual acts are not intrinsically wrong and not intrinsically disordered. The word gay is merely a jargonistic way to refer to someone who acts on homosexual desires. So they talk about people being born gay and "let's be loving toward gays" and skirt the issue of what said person does about their tendencies. If we bring up that people need to abstain from illicit sexual relations at this point we lose points in their minds because we brought up something unmentionable. We've taken the discussion into the gutter. We are the judgemental people who cannot be trusted to not be bigoted, so we can hardly teach catechism or religious education because who knows what might come out our mouths.

I have seen this over and over again among the little elites at the parish level who are at this point conditioned to not bring up any hot-button issue if it directly or indirectly touch sexual morality. Abortion, contraception, divorce suffer the same fate as homosexuality among the people dealing with religious formation and education. But anything political is 100% fair game, believe me. With regard to abortion: I remember a presentation about the 10 Commandments given by 8th graders. They were listing examples of sins which are a breach of the Fifth Commandment — "Thou shalt not murder," — and they mentioned bullying, littering and failing to recycle as ways to break this commandment, along with actually committing murder of another human. They did not mention abortion.

The refrain of New Ways which Father L. brings is is particularly problematic. "You can’t pretend to accept gay people if you do not accept the way they love." But the "way they love" is harmful, not just spiritually. I invite everyone to read about the spiritual and psychological dangers of homosexuality. I invite everyone who has a very, very strong stomach to read about the physical dangers — you have been warned. Saying that these acts are loving is neglecting an enormous impact from their behavior, i.e., the destruction of their own bodies, not to mention their souls.

Good for Father Longenecker for not being afraid to give Father Martin the moniker "Slippery Jim". It fits.

Jihadi training in the USA

Be aware of what is going on in the Islamic schools in our country. These students are singing about brutalizing non-muslims because they have no right to existence.



The Daily Caller asks why CNN ran so many articles about the Covington Students and none about this school which promotes bloodshed to the students. It is all because of what they love and what they hate—that's my attempt at an answer.

Archbishop Charles Chaput's response to Brian Sims's unseemly behavior

As a followup to my post from yesterday, we have a different response from Archbishop Chaput. Different firstly in that he refers to Brian Sims as having behavior "unbecoming of an elected official" and a "disregard for human decency" rather than as a "jackass", but more importantly also referring to people protesting this behavior as "people of good will" rather than a "subculture" with a martyr complex. (Nota bene: I really have no problem with the term "jackass" to describe Sims either.)

The archbishop invited prayerful participation in a rally May 10 at 11am outside of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Planned Parenthood, the same clinic at which state Rep. Brian Sims filmed himself aggressively questioning a woman praying the rosary across the street from a Planned Parenthood May 2.

In a series of livestreamed videos, Sims’ solicited viewers for the woman’s name and address and for the names and addresses of three teenagers praying at Planned Parenthood, saying in one video: “Let’s go protest out in front of her house and tell her what’s right for her body.”

“Who would have thought that an old white lady would be outside of a Planned Parenthood telling people what’s right for their bodies? Shame on you,” Sims said in the video.

Chaput said that there is “much bitter irony” in Sims’ claim to be a champion for the rights of all women while he “trampled on the rights of others and disgracefully shamed them in public.”

“Representative Sims spoke often of shame and there was plenty of that to be found in his actions, which demonstrated a complete disregard for civility and basic human decency,” Chaput said.

It's always good to see an official representative of my Church take a real leadership role against a blatant, obvious, public display of evil at work. Good for Archbishop Chaput.

The Mark Shea Chronicles: Volume 4

It has been a while since I posted, so I thought "hey, why not see what good ol' Mark Shea is up to?" I could post on his latest apology in which he eventually does at the end via a Latin sentence fragment ("So: mea maxima culpa."). But I have to confess my own culpa that I stopped reading after his call to crush right wing Christians "without mercy".

But really, this post on Facebook from yesterday is too good not to point out:

"As predicted, this one jackass is succeeding only in sparking a Panic du Jour from a subculture that loves lone jackasses like him because it gives them the chance to feel as though the Reign of Antichrist has dawned and they are martyrs. Sims needs to shut up or apply to Donald Trump as the Chair of Dems to Re-elect Trump in 2020."

First off, Shea calls the Pro-life movement represented by people like Abby Johnson, Lila Rose and Matt Walsh a "subculture". And one that is happy when a "lone jackass" (e.g., Dem. Rep. Brian Sims, whom Shea admits is awful) does something asinine so they have "the chance to feel as though...they are martyrs."

But when you look at the remarks these people made, they are saying nothing of the sort. There is no language of martyrdom, apocalypse or anti-Christs. On the contrary, the tweets are pretty mundane: "let’s organize a pro-life rally", "we will peacefully protest violence and bullying" and "my ticket is booked; see you there" are some of the responses from the pro-life leaders.

This Facebook post is an example of Mark Shea's standard strawdogging of the Pro-life movement against which he seems to be a Martin Luther nailing up his grievances again and again. This time he may be a bit off, though, when he refers to Sims as a "lone jackass". Just today we have another story about a feminist at UNC flipping out and attacking an abortion protester, punching him and shouting "This is not OK!"



That Daily Wire article provides a link to another article about an woman having her leg broken last month. That link, in turn, contains the video of Jordan Hunt, male, kicking a woman protesting abortion in Canada.



Oh, and here is another which I blogged last year by a university employee. This stuff happens all the time, and the attacks seem to be increasing. Certainly we have more reports of them than ever before. I've mentioned five here with very little effort.

Honestly, if school shootings happened as many times as threatening behavior and violence toward pro-life protesters, I would be much more sympathetic to the wild-eyed gun-control fanatics rushing to the mikes in their aftermath.

The fact is that you can't really call someone a lone wolf (or a "lone jackass") if they are part of a larger movement. These people are pretty united in their disdain for pro-lifers and their beliefs about the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy. It is fairly obvious that they feel justified in what they are doing and they do it in broad daylight with the cameras rolling. Considering the unity of their opinion on abortion and those who protest it can you really say these people are all acting alone?

If Brian Sims is a lone wolf/lone jackass when he calls for doxing girls who protest at abortion clinics on Twitter, who is he calling out to? Other lone wolves and lone jackasses who coincidentally share his hatred of pro-lifers? Mark Shea can lament these occurrences because they show pro-life activists in a good light and as victims of violence and show that pro-abortion activists are not all the eminently sensible people that he and his comrades in the mainstream press would like to believe they are. But with the evidence piling up, he is really hard-pressed to demonstrate there is no pattern and that these people have no connection to a larger movement.

Another Failed Summit

Msgr. Charles Pope analyzes the missed opportunity commonly called the "Vatican Clergy Abuse Summit". Excerpt:

Regarding the second point, the silence—even outright refusal to discuss—the clear connection between the sexual abuse crisis and active homosexuality in the priesthood is a severe blow to credibility. That Cardinal Blase Cupich, a key organizer of the summit, denies a causal relationship between homosexual clergy and the fact that more than 80 percent of the victims have been post-pubescent males is not credible to most Catholics. There is simply no logical basis for such a claim, except perhaps among LBGTQ ideologues.

What does Cardinal Cupich fear from the LBGTQ mafia? Everyone knows he is wrong about this. The connection is clear.

Another favorite

I really dig the bass line on this one. Anyone trying to get into Talk Talk should probably start out with Colour of Spring. You can sense the direction they were going from CoS, but you could also still dance to it.



In my experience, one fanbase who always "got" post-"It's My Life" Talk Talk were the deadheads. Of course, they can dance to anything.

Mark Hollis, 1955-2019

Paul Webb, Talk Talk's bassist, posts on instagram:

I am very shocked and saddened to hear the news of the passing of Mark Hollis. Musically he was a genius and it was a honour and a privilege to have been in a band with him. I have not seen Mark for many years, but like many musicians of our generation I have been profoundly influenced by his trailblazing musical ideas. He knew how to create depth of feeling with sound and space like no other. He was one of the greats, if not the greatest.

Guardian has something longer. Excerpt:

The success of The Colour of Spring meant that Talk Talk had a bigger budget to play with on the follow-up, Spirit of Eden (1988), but Hollis’s musical thinking was now geared towards Debussy, Erik Satie and Ornette Coleman rather than other pop or rock acts. Spirit of Eden, with its startling musical textures, sudden changes of pace and interludes of silence, was as much a modern classical album as a pop record. Though many critics hailed it as a masterpiece and it reached the UK Top 20, EMI were frustrated at its lack of commercial selling points. After months of legal wrangling, band and label parted company.

With the band now reduced to Hollis and Harris, with Friese-Greene producing and playing keyboards, Talk Talk’s final album Laughing Stock (1991) was released by Polydor’s Verve label, and pushed the musical envelope a little further (it began with 18 seconds of silence). Though sombre and uncompromising, it reached 26 in the UK, a reflection perhaps of the strange, lingering allure of pieces such as Taphead and Ascension Day.

In short, everyone hated Talk Talk's post-Colour of Spring direction except for the longhairs. I was in a band when Spirit of Eden came out. We were nowhere near the genius of Hollis et alia; we listened to Spirit several times a week. The lyrics for I Believe in You were sort of a Jesus-prayer like mantra. ("Spirit... How long... Spirit... How long...")



Rest in peace, sir.

"Rage on omnipotent"