Different Takes on the Overturn of Roe v. Wade

Bill Donohue comments in his latest press release that the vast majority did not support what the Roe and Casey decisions allowed, which was abortion through nine months with no restrictions." A viral TikTok video by someone named Michelle Rhodes expands on this point.

Basically the horrible awfulness of abortion has not only been tolerated by the left for 49 years, but it has been expanded, exported, celebrated, recommended for every women and every situation, it has been propagandized by the liberal media which never covers anything negative about abortion, and we could go on and on about it. The result is that the defenders of abortion are now unveiling themselves as the most vile, hateful, violent people in our country and they are burning down churches, threatening to assasinate justices and making asses of themselves in the streets upon the news of the overturn.

This can be juxtaposed with the completely different take which you will continually find on Mark Shea's Daily Stumble blog. The enemy, according to Shea, is the prolife movement which has "turned itself into a monomaniac heresy at war with almost the entire social teaching of the Church and using the unborn as human shields for all that." To support his take on Roe v. Wade's overturn being a mistake, he cherry-picks some statistics and quotes some mean, personal insults some idiot made to him. He rarely if ever points out that abortion is pretty singularly horrible, and that anything which steps toward eliminating the procedure should be applauded. The tactic is to assert that the left is right about literally everything else — guns, welfare, immigration, tax policy, environment — and then, weighing all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice toward prolifers, he finds them deficient. Ergo, the 6-3 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is forever tainted by those who worked hard to bring it about, and he just cannot be happy about it.

Or... I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe Shea is butthurt because he often predicted — as he did in this post — that this day would never come, insinuating that the "Right Wing Cult Leadership" would give "nothing in return" for the slavish loyalty of religious conservatives.

This is, of course, completely counter to the official position of the Church which can be read in this statement on the USCCB page.

“This is a historic day in the life of our country, one that stirs our thoughts, emotions and prayers. For nearly fifty years, America has enforced an unjust law that has permitted some to decide whether others can live or die; this policy has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of preborn children, generations that were denied the right to even be born.

“America was founded on the truth that all men and women are created equal, with God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This truth was grievously denied by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized and normalized the taking of innocent human life. We thank God today that the Court has now overturned this decision. We pray that our elected officials will now enact laws and policies that promote and protect the most vulnerable among us.

In fact, I received a link to this page in an email from the USCCB Marriage group on Friday, June 24. The USCCB is often said to be left of center and I generally think it is a bad idea to generalize about the Bishops since there are close to 200 of them in the United States and they obviously vary in their political ideas. Anyway, the subject of the email was "Praise God! Roe and Casey have been overturned!"

I am not sure in what universe a serious Catholic has to live to have a case of the sads about this news. Unless one puts being a committed leftist ahead of being Catholic.

The Daily Stumble goes beyond the normal level of cognitive dissonance

Atop Mark Shea's Facebook feed today we find this sensible and true assertion:

Jesus Christ is not here to put the stamp of approval on your political ideology.

Yet several minutes before this, he linked to this dainty morsel on his blog which I call The Daily Stumble. Excerpt:

The young man said to him, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell your guns and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young Gun Lover heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had a great arsenal.

And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a Gun Lover to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Gun Lover to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt 19:16–24)

Mark Shea admits that this is a paraphrase of what Jesus said to the rich man in Matthew 19. And I submit to you that this paraphrase is an attempt to have Jesus Christ put the stamp of approval on his political ideology "gun hurt people whole bunch so gun bad".

I would love to go up to anti-gun-Christ and mock him — which is ok since he is not the real Christ — by pointing out "hey, them liberals love theyself some fancy plug-in cars and proceeds from they car sale gonna feed a whole lot more po' people than from my gun, bruh".

I don't know anyone who loves guns, period. A gun is a tool that can be used for good or ill. People tend to get attached to things for many reasons. If you are holding onto your great grand-daddy's 30-30 for sentimental reasons, I would definitely sell it and buy someone for which you can buy cheaper and more common ammo. There's my free practical advice for the day.

Taken from an article titled "Lithium Mining and Its Impacts on the Environment" (https://www.techolac.com/business/lithium-mining-and-its-impacts-on-the-environment)

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.

The Mark Shea Chronicles: Volume 3

A new feature on this blog will be The Mark Shea Chronicles. I've been noting the interesting things said by Mr. Shea for years, but I will be counting this post as The Mark Shea Chronicles: Volume 1 and this recent post as The Mark Shea Chronicles Volume 2. That means the post you are reading is number 3.

These posts will feature a picture, the text in the picture and a link. If they are Facebook posts then they came by way of one of my many friends who can read his posts; I cannot because I am "banned". Banning of course doesn't really work. In fact, if you forbid a number of people from sitting at your lunch table you practically ensure that everything said at your table will become public. Shea has 5,000 followers on Facebook and most of his links are public, i.e., available to read for anyone with a Facebook account which has not yet been banned. So no one can credibly complain about anything private being shared.

Anyway, without further ado...

Text: One politician believed her relatives growing up and thought she had Native ancestry. She has never been forgiven for this trivial mistake by the MAGA morons and never will be. They will be telling this exhausting, boring Pocahontas wheeze of a mockery long after she is dead.

Meanwhile, the Cult Leader and his larval douchebag son and all the rest of them laugh wildly about genocide of Native peoples without the slightest qualms and know that by next week it will be forgotten in the torrent of lies, sadism, racism, and cruelty they pour out in an unceasing cataract while Both Sides imbeciles say, "Warren proves that Dems are just as racist. There's no moral difference at all."

Conservative white Christianists have destroyed Christian witness for a generation.

Link.

This is a very interesting post and, although the part about Elizabeth Warren actually believing she was more than 1,024th American Indian made me laugh, I really think things he writes like this need to be taken seriously. We find all sorts of things in this post which point to how questionable his judgement on policy matters has become, not to mention his language.

Mark Shea calls Warren's claim to be of "Native ancestry" a trivial mistake. Really? Have you ever thought about suggesting to, say, a leftist college professor that anything about race or ancestry is trivial? I'd be prepared to be shouted at if you want to have a go. Just check out the link wherein some Cherokee Prof states that all these Indian jokes "further marginalize Natives". Incidentally, the professor does not sound like she is defending Warren for inviting all this.

In the next paragraph we have the claim that people who dislike both political parties would state "Warren proves that Dems are just as racist." Uh, hello? After last week I am pretty sure anyone who dislikes Democrats would say "Virginia Governor Ralph Northram proves that Dems are just as racist." In fact, I've never heard Warren referred to as a racist so much as a liar and a rich freeloader.

Another point can be made about this reference to Both Sides imbeciles. There was a time around 10 or so years ago when Mark Shea proudly wore the garb of both-sides-are-awful pretty consistently. I think he had a broader base of respect at that time. At least he had more respect from me, most of my online friends, and commenters on this blog in particular.

Last note: An effective way which Mark Shea has found to completely destroy his credibility is by hurling, uh, colorful metaphors continually, showing his hatred for those whom he criticizes. In this post we have "Cult Leader and his larval douchebag son", and of course the always popular slur Christianists for co-religionists who disagree with him on public policy. It might be a good idea to collect all these terms and have a Year in Review issue of the Mark Shea Chronicles to list all the colorful insults. We may not even need to wait a whole year to get a plentiful harvest.

Mark Shea's Celebration of the Heroic Sanctity of the Leftwing Media

I know, that headline is really over the top, right? But one good hyperbole deserves another, and if "The Feast of the Holy Child Martyrs of Covington" isn't hyperbole, I don't know what is. No parent I know says "I don't mind if people assault, abuse, falsely accuse or threaten my child and his reputation; he's no saint." However I have seven children, none of whom are saints, and my job is to protect them from all these ills. Here's an excerpt from his laughable post:

The MSM got a story wrong and feel bad about it and are trying to atone by providing balance. All the major media have published hand-wringing, soul-searching articles poring over how they got it wrong and the dangers of rash judgment and so forth. The supposedly “smug” liberal media that always allegedly knows they are right and never allegedly listen to anybody outside their effete liberal bubble have spent the last week in minute self-examination and self-flagellation. That’s why the Today Show has Nick Sandmann on (but not Nathan Phillips).

Notice that he provides no links whatsoever. I, too, missed the "trying to atone by providing balance", as did most people I know. But balance is not required in this situation. What is required is complete and utter retraction of the story. You can see repentance in the attitudes of some pieces outside the MSM, such as this one in the Atlantic. But even Julie Zimmerman, while contrite, misses the larger point of this story with the starry-eyed deep-though "the truth is sometimes unknowable." That truism most certainly does not apply to this case.

In fact there is one truth which is dictating many of the main stream media's though processes at this moment, and that truth is the impending libel lawsuits. Here's a rewrite of Shea's MSM paragraph, free of charge, reflecting the way most Catholics and sensible people view the situation with the Main Stream Media with regard to Covington:

The MSM got a story horribly wrong because their initial rush to press was based on the impression that it made Trump supporters look bad. They now are worried that it hurt their credibility and are terrified of law suits. They've pretended to feel sorry for their bias via articles which allegedly represent their hand-wringing and soul-searching — as if they had a soul. When the name of libel expert Attorney L. Lin Wood was initially whispered, the usually smug, effete liberal media began a crash course in minute self-examination and self-flagellation. The Today Show avoided inviting Nathan Phillips on after they realized that providing more exposure of his lies and craziness would hurt rather than help their devastated credibility. But they did have Nick Sandmann on hoping he'd screw up (he's just a kid after all) and hurt his case; alas, he didn't.

Further in Shea's self-embarrassing article, he spews some stuff about David Hogg and his completely different circumstance where he actually put himself forward and used a tragedy for self-promotion. The situations are in fact so dissimilar you can hardly even accuse Shea of "whataboutism", which is what he is seemingly attempting.

Mark Shea being pretty much a hold-out on this clear-cut issue shouldn't be that surprising to anyone. He has been trending this way for three or four years. But it seems like he is still in the stage of his leftism which requires him to prove how loyal he is, so he's sticking to his guns even when they are completely empty. Burning his credibility on this issue is noteworthy and will go "down on his permanent record" so to speak. I can imagine a future scene: Mark will refer to a normal Catholic writer as a Francis-hating, rad-trad, MAGA-cult bully. My reply to the raised eyebrows of someone who has never heard of him will be "He is one of the people who not only believed that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a rapist on discredited evidence, but also believed that the Covington kids were guilty in the face of contrary evidence."

And that's all that needs to be said about him to provide an accurate estimate on the value of his work, unless and until he wakes up and rids himself the writhing hatred for people with different viewpoints. The saints are a minority. But not all minorities are holy. Some are just stubborn, pretentious and silly.

Starting the political prisoner clock for Mark Shea

Last night, Catholic writer Mark Shea predicted that the cult of President Donald Trump would love it if the President began taking political prisoners. "I wonder how long till Trump starts taking political prisoners? His cult would love it," were his actual words.

It's an interesting question. That is why I am starting a count up clock to see how long it will take for Donald Trump to begin holding people in prisons for their political beliefs. It only made sense to start this clock at President Trump's inauguration on January 20 of the year 2017 to make it fair on him. So far we are up to 579 days, 12 hours and some odd minutes.

With regard to his "cult", I'm not sure who is circumscribed by this description. Possibly he means Republicans in general who he claims are racists, and therefore being cult members is just a hop, skip and jump from that. I am not the member of any cults, though, even though I am a Republican. However I am not aware of being a racist, and subconscious racism is supposedly a thing, so it is possible that I am a cult member without realizing it.

Hmmmmm.... I wonder if you can have a mental disorder without realizing it.

UPDATE: (9/11/2018) Well, I decided in the spirit of Catholic fraternity I would remove the clock from the side-bar and just leave it here. In these days of turmoil I don't want to tout the asininity of fellow Catholics overly much.

Mark Shea's political prisoner clockCountup

Maybe Patheos needs better editors

Mark Shea writes a very early post today in which he accuses "Christianists" of being a number of things: enemies of God, enemies of America and ... 36 comments? Have a look:

Whoopsie!

The core sin of American conservatives–and above all American conservative, “prolife” Christianists–is Pride. They cannot accept the fact that they were simply flat-out wrong. They have told themselves for twenty years that they are the *Real* Christians, the *Real* Americans, the *Real* Heroes. They are better than all their neighbors, better than the Pope, better, above all, than the Most Horrible Human Being in America, Hillary Clinton. And in their blindness, they have become everything they hate: enemies of America, 36 Comments, and enemies of God in their sadistic cruelty to children at the border. They began with delusional fears of persecution over coffee cups and Target employees not wishing them “Merry Christmas”. They have ended as sadistic persecutors jailing babies, causing abortions, celebrating the murder by thirst... 

The "36 comments" link takes anyone who clicks on it to a comment page for another post. This was obviously a mistake, and I can understand how it can be made. He is on the west coast and the article is dated today, so this was done before 6am. He was obviously checking the comments from the other page and accidentally copied that link, or something like that. Then he pasted this in and never read it over. Or maybe he did read it and missed it. This is why, I've been told, editors are needed. You often don't see your own mistakes.

I don't have an editor, so I have to make do with my own proofreading. But I also take pride (my "core sin", I am told) in taking my time at my work and self-editing. Is it possible that Mark Shea rushes into his blogging with armfuls of invectives he needs to hurl at these straw men he calls Christianists and does very little in the way of thinking until he has finished spewing everything which comes to mind? Is it possible that people like me might find him compelling if he toned his writing down from a constant screech? Can a person really be this caustic before 6:00 in the morning?

Mark Shea was banned from Facebook for
three days for being sarcastic.

The answer is yes, of course. Not just caustic, but also sarcastic. When he writes things like "the Most Horrible Human Being in America, Hillary Clinton" it turns out that the robots working for Facebook shut that stuff down. This is why Mark was banned for three days, according to him, during which he made 7,500 words worth of progress on a book he's writing about the Nicene Creed. So that might get chalked up to God using something as imperfect as Facebook algorithms to accomplish His good purpose in the same way he uses something as imperfect as Donald Trump to lower the unemployment rate for working class people.

I know several people who have unfollowed Mark Shea on Facebook in recent times due to his constant table pounding about Christianists, which roughly translates to Christians who voted for Trump. His description of people with whom he disagrees vehemently on politics has become such a caricature that many of the traits are not even recognizable to those of us at which the moniker is obviously aimed. For example, no one I know ever became upset over people not wishing them a Merry Christmas. Many of us were concerned that employers were forbidding the saying of Merry Christmas (can't remember if Target was one—people in Ohio, we say what we feel like saying), but no one considered this to be "persecution". We do not bang our chests and chant "We are real heroes! We are real Americans!" We are not people who generally think ourselves as "better than our neighbors" or "better than the Pope", whatever that even might mean. Accusations that we are sadistic baby-jailers who "celebrate murder by thirst" only make us shake our heads and roll our eyes at this point.

Yes, "murder by thirst". That's what we "celebrate".

Note to people who didn't vote for Trump: when we Trump voters give each other that look and say or think those five words, we do not consider that a celebration. A celebration is when we sit down with family and friends, have food, fun, drinks and laughs and do not even think or talk about politics for the next three hours. We know how to do that. And by the way, we know how to shut up the loud mouth fan-boys on the right in these instances, and we do it instinctively, all. The. Time.

I titled this piece Maybe Patheos needs better editors. It is highly likely; they definitely need some better bloggers. This stuff is so tiresome.

Oh, yeah. What are "those five words", you were wondering?

"This is why Trump won."

Good Advice from Mark Shea

Commenter Nate thinks the quote he references is funny, and it is, considering the source is Mark Shea. But I think he would agree that it is very sound advice. Here is the pull quote from an article Me. Shea wrote in 2010:

"If somebody questions whether you know what you are talking about, you don’t deal with the question of whether you know what you are talking about. You simply say, “So! You want to make excuses for the murder of innocent people by religious bigots!” in the same tone you use to say, “You left your soiled underwear on my coffee table.” For, of course, at the end of the day, it will remain the case that some number of people (46 million? Several thousand?) were put to death… well, not by the Inquisition exactly but certainly by the secular authorities working with the Inquisition. So the story is close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and that’s all that matters. The idea is not so much accuracy as truthiness: the sense that you have righteously scored off bad guys. And if they are bad guys, then they don’t really deserve to be spoken of accurately, do they? They should have thought about that before they started killing off their millions, or however many it was. The point is: I am righteously angry and when I have righteousness on my side, I don’t need to know what I’m talking about so long as I land some good hard punches on the jaw of Evil.”

The full article is available here for context. But if the pull quote is a little too long for you, I shortened it even more in a nice meme/quote image, suitable for sharing. I suggest people posting it in your office, or maybe on the bulletin board at your parish for reasons which should be entirely obvious.

Pseudoknowledge is a good technical name for what Mark Shea is describing here back in 2010. However it never seemed to get a lot of traction as a descriptive word. Fortunately we have the perfect word to describe it in 2018:

Fake News.

Mark Shea Attributes Inner City Violence to Trump and the Ku Klux Klan

In a recent public post on Facebook, Catholic commentator Mark Shea used the euphemistic spelling of America as AmeriKKKa — indicative of the Ku Klux Klan — to make point about anti-immigrant, racial violence. To this remark, a commenter points out that the man of Mexican heritage was attacked by a black person.

"AmeriKKKa? The attackers were black."

I checked out the claim and discovered that the commenter was correct. This seems to be a good illustration of posting before you have fully thought through the implications of your assertions. I can type the words Trump's AmeriKKKa in about 2 seconds, Whereas watching the full video took me several minutes. It is possible that Mark Shea did not even watch the video which would explain why he imagined white Southerners committing the crime.

Furthermore we are informed that this is happening in the context of "Trump's America", (sorry, I got tired of misspelling my country) so we are asked to dutifully accept the assertion that this is one of the 4% of black females who voted for Trump. In the Willowbrook section of Los Angeles.

We have to buy that Brooklyn Bridge.

Once again, everything goes back to white racism for Mark Shea, and Republican white racism even when in the inner city a Mexican is beaten by blacks.

Donald Trump received a paltry 24% of the vote in Los Angeles.

Exposing your own thought process in this way would seem to indicate that you are unaware of your own prejudices to a degree which would make the man with the "beam" in his own eye blush.

This is Facebook activism, not sound reason or sensible commentary. Mark Shea is not a reliable guide on moral matters nor on Catholic matters. Period.

"Republicans are Racists"

Mark Shea thinks that if you are a Republican, you are probably a racist. Here is how he just phrased it on his Facebook page:

Mark Shea: "Know what you call a Republican who says 'Not every Republican is a racist' and who stays mum about all the racist Republicans in his party and does not rebuke or attack them on a daily basis? A racist."

"On a daily basis", people. Let's go! You have your marching orders, just try not to goose-step.
So what is being asserted is that registering as a Republican obligates one to be an activist of sorts who, not only "rebukes" and "attacks" Republican racists, but does so on a daily basis. The assertion also assumes either that every Republican knows a Republican racist, or that we really need to dredge up this guy's name all the time. Letting alone the fact that historically the Democrats have been the slave-holders and comprise the majority of the white southern Jim Crow/segregation mafia, this is simply crazy talk. Surely there are many weaknesses which characterize the Democrats, but I would laugh at anyone who made this assertion about them or any political party.

I don't know any racist Republicans personally, but under Mark Shea's definition, every Republican I know is racist. Because the only people I know going around telling the faults of others on a daily basis are liberal Democrats. Q.E.D.

Looking at something else in the news currently, no one expects Democrats to call out #MeToo offenders like Bill Clinton for their sins on a daily basis, or they too should be considered philanderers. No serious person would say that actors and other Hollywood personnel must call out sex offenders like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey or Bill Cosby on a daily basis or else then they too are sex offenders. That would be a mixture of moral equivalency and guilt by association that any honest partisan would have to admit was unfair.

I'm not sure why Mark Shea has gone so crazy in his political beliefs over the last two or three years. Perhaps he has breathed too long the illogic of what people are calling the New Pro-life Movement, but is really just a reheat of the "seamless garment" left-overs from the nineties. This theory states that for a person to be truly pro-life he or she is compelled to accept and promote a number of other policy positions commonly associated with the left. You must be opposed to the death penalty, object to strong border security, and favor a so-called "single-payer" health-care system among other socialistic causes to be part of the New, True, Blue Pro-life belief system, otherwise you are just a "cafeteria pro-lifer" of sorts in the mind of these New Puritans.

Where did this absurd idea come from? Many believe is was mainly constructed to give Catholics an excuse to vote Democrat. You could basically answer the people who said "Don't vote for Democrats; they're not pro-life," with "Basically no one is pro-life, because, you know, the death penalty and health-care and torture and stuff." Don't snort; it works. But wherever it came from, what it leads to is the sort of of totalistic necessitarian thinking that the left loves to impose on the other side, but never on itself. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.... You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules," wrote Saul Alinsky. Yes, he wrote "enemy" and "kill" not "opponent" and "defeat". Thinking on the left is fundamentalist and apocalyptic with language to match.

Shea's preferred word for pro-lifers and others who don't buy into his left-leaning politics is Christianist, a term coined by the extremely paranoid Andrew Sullivan who was preaching back in 2009 that because gays were being persecuted in Uganda they would soon be herded into gas chambers by religious zealots in America. Now we have gay marriage. So... that didn't happen.

Another possibility for the decline in his reasoning ability and increased shrillness is that less people are listening to him than previously used to. He might feel like he has been left behind in the sphere of wordsmith intellectualism and has not become as successful as others. Recently he penned a piece attacking Catholic think-tanker Austin Ruse accusing him of all manner of things, justly or unjustly—I'm not really interested. But he threw in what Ruse's annual salary is along with the accusations. That seems to me to be telling of what ails the run-of-the-mill Patheos blogger.

And really it is well that he is criticizing successful Catholics and using the Sullivaneque word Christianist in his writings, because they have become so wild-eyed, so self-righteous and so bombastic with regard to his co-religionists that it only seems like a matter of time before he hires a private priest and retreats to a Catholic bunker. That would seem to be the prescription if things are really as bad as he says. Yet I often ask myself if he really believes his own allegations. Whatever the reason that Mr. Shea is so unhinged toward conservatives, his vitriol— in which one can detect the resounding echo of the pronounced verdict "deplorable"—is one of the reasons why people voted for Trump and why Jordan Peterson is so popular right now. We've had enough of the "repent and roll-over" rhetoric. If you are going to criticize me, I want to hear something solid.

Andy Nowicki asks a lot of good questions about Mark Shea

Andy Nowicki, with whom I have sparred numerous times (and with whom I have agreed numerous times), has posted a great video about Mark Shea and his ostensible derangement. I advise watching and listening to the entire thing.



Mark Shea definitely has some Trump Derangement going on now. Like Nowicki points out, this has been going on for a long time before Trump came into power. But it seems like Trump has given people like Shea a pretty huge target as a filthy rich philandering Republican it should be admitted.

I believe that the "dark energy" Nowicki mentions is simply the glamour of the left. The people who have become Shea followers in recent times are all on the left, and his beliefs mostly follow modern leftist orthodoxy.

(Nota bene: This is a real guy named Andy Nowicki, not me. Yes; I know we look alike.)

"I HAVE AN UNCLE WITH AN INNER EAR CONDITION"

Nailed it.

Holding up a mirror to Planned Parenthood

I'm very busy today, but I feel like this post is necessary to read and assimilate for everyone concerned with the fighting the moral war we've been fighting since Eve bit the apple. It's especially important for all Christians and other Pro-life people upon the release of the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress to agree that the undercover work they do is good and just and justified. Here's the meat of it:

Here are just a few of the implications of verbal pacifism. On that theory, the following activities would be intrinsically evil, just like using child suicide bombers against the Nazis — and it would be better to die, and let millions of others be tortured, raped or killed, rather than engage in them. In fact, doing any one of them would be a sin sufficient to damn one’s soul to hell:

• Deceiving the Pharaoh who wished to kill all the newborn male Hebrews — as the midwives did in Exodus 1:15-21. (The Bible tells us that “God dealt well with the midwives.”)
• Deceiving priest-hunters by using assumed names, as Jesuit missionaries did when they ministered in Reformation England, and St. Miguel Pro did in Mexico in the 1920s.
• Deceiving the Nazis to rescue Jews from the gas chambers, as Oskar Schindler did.
• Distributing false baptismal certificates so that Jews could pass as Gentiles and escape extermination, as John XXIII did during World War II.
• Using false documents and false statements in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, like the conspirators working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were aided by Pope Pius XII (who passed their messages via Vatican couriers).
• Deceiving the brutal dictators who hoped to hunt down and torture leftist priests, as Pope Francis did while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
• Posing as a child in online forums in order to catch child porn distributors and pedophiles, as police routinely do — having found it the only effective means of capturing such predators.
• Pretending to be an Islamist, in order to infiltrate terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and ISIS, as CIA operatives do.
• Misleading criminal suspects about the evidence you have, as police do to obtain truthful confessions without coercion.
• Infiltrating an abortion business like Planned Parenthood to see if they are breaking laws about statutory rape and organ trafficking, as Live Action and the Center for Medical Progress did.

Any moral philosophy that claims that all these activities are intrinsically evil has got some explaining to do. By insisting on premises that yield such repugnant conclusions, and claiming that the only alternative is a crass and unprincipled pragmatism, verbal pacifists are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

I was so glad to see clarity provided on the morality of some types of trickery that I sent an email to the author. Here's an abbreviated form of the email:

Excellent work, John! I honestly don't know what Mark Shea's deal is. What is really going on here is that people are holding up a MIRROR to the face of Planned Parenthood, they're looking in, seeing the ugliness and saying "YEP. THAT'S ME. THAT'S US. WE *OWN* IT, WE'RE PROUD OF IT." Picasso said something like "art is a lie which helps us see the truth". Well, what CMP does is ARTWORK.

Here's a few other points I've thought of in the past to counter Shea's absurdity and obsession:

• Acts 5:7-9: St. Peter dissimulates and sets up Sapphira for the Holy Spirit to whack her. So... St. Peter tempted her to sin?
• I Kings 3:24-28: King Solomon tricks a hooker into revealing that she is not the mother, and that she's OK with murdering an innocent child.

These events are held up in sacred scripture as truly right and just. And of course there are many other examples from scripture and elsewhere in history.

The second example is particularly apropos to CMP — they are basically being Solomon in the modern day.

Keep up the good work.

Mark Shea on the Benedict Option

Since my friend Joseph is always bringing up the somewhat relevant Catholic author Mark Shea, I thought I should check out what Mark Shea recently had to say about the Benedict Option:

Instead of withdrawal from the world, how about sharing the fruits of prayer and contemplation with the world? God did not so love the world that he hunkered down in Fortress Katolicus seeking the perfect liturgy, scrutinizing people for heresy, and repelling everybody who sought him as an invader.

The world is to be loved, not feared or worshiped. Father Dominic got this.

Seriously. Who at this point hears Benedict Option and doesn't think "bunker"? If the so-called Benedict Option was truly a strategic withdrawal then no one would even know about it as I've said before. Conceding defeat in the war of ideas isn't strategic. How can you even purport to be a standard-bearer for Burkean ideals and leave the fight?

Shea and I disagree on many things and his reflexive moral equivalency in the political sphere is tiresome, but we agree (along with Tom) that the so-called Benedict Option isn't to be considered either because it isn't really Christian or it doesn't really exist. Or... maybe a bit of both.

Scratching my head about Mark Shea

Reading Mark Shea's post supporting universal handgun registration in Washington (which, by the way, passed) sort of left me scratching my head about his stance on firearms and the imposition of gun control on the populace. I guess this incident immediately came to mind with the famous Facebook banner we immortalized in this post several years ago.

I wouldn't even bring it up; even if he just stated, "Hey, I'm for gun control," I'd probably shrug it off. But vitriolic accusations like "threadbare lies and sophistries of the gun cult" and prayers like "May God break the power of the NRA and the gun cult" clash with the factual claims and measured arguments which the NRA presented against the ballot issue.

I was told two years ago that the picture is a still-frame from an independent film which Mr. Shea was in back in 2012. It appears that he, like many other Hollywood types who point guns at the camera, remains reality-challenged about their proper use.

Mark Shea Uses JFK Assassination Anniversary to Judge Baby Boomers

Actually, it's the comments which are more illuminating.

Hat tip to Erin "Amen" Manning, namesake half of Rod Dreher's Evans-Manning award for civil commentary.

Top Tips for the Faithful!

Hey, faithful Catholics!  Here's a top tip: if your favorite Catholic "apologist" posts this sort of photo on his public Facebook profile (emphasis on public):

you may want to reconsider whose ideas about Catholicism you should be taking seriously.

As an addendum: if you are a "communications" dude for the ne plus ultra of conservative American bishops -- like, say, Bishop Loverde of the Arlington, VA diocese -- you just might have better things to do than publicly scold a priest for calling out said Catholic "apologist".  After all, conservative bishops have much, much more pressing things to think about.  Don't they? At least, that's most what Catholics believe when they donate to the Bishop's Appeal...

Finally, our last top tip for the day: If you are frequenting a Catholic "portal" that is rife with Catholic bloggers vociferously defending their Catholic "blogbrother" who publicly online poses behind a gun ... that just might be a portal to nowhere.  Or worse.

Another example of a strange habit

A reader pointed out this post on Mark Shea's blog to me. I read through it, looked at the comments and sort of rolled my eyes. Then this comment by a commenter named Esther caught one of my eyes mid-roll:

Do you know that when you now google “Perry Lorenzo,” two of the top four results are blog posts speculating about his sex life and eternal destiny in relationship to that sex life?

I’m sure his family is thrilled.

Good job, Mark.

Mark, I really think you should do an examination of conscience about this whole series of posts. They weren’t about Mr. Lorenzo. They were about you, and some bizarre desire to present your views on another person’s private and spiritual life matter as if the world should care what you think. In matters like these, I try to put myself in another person’s place. If my Mom died tonight, what would I think of a popular blogger taking her life and death, making them the center of several posts without my permission, and inviting the world to contemplate her flaws and sins for days on end?

Finally: it is not a Catholic thing to do to speculate on a person’s eternal destiny. It strikes me, actually, as a very Protestant thing – “Are you saved?” “If you died tonight….” To focus in on the congregation in front of you, picking out the saints and the sinners. If you reflect on the witness of the saints and great spiritual teachers, you don’t see that happening. That is not the language, nor the discourse. After a person dies, in particular, it’s not the Catholic Way to speculate in anyway on a person’s eternal destiny – it is the Catholic Way to pray for them, in hope. Period.

I know you are being hailed for this post far and wide, but I think it was a terrible, puzzling and even scandalous mistake, and an invasion of a deceased man’s privacy – not to speak of the privacy of the living, including his partner.

This more or less nailed my biggest problem with all these recent posts. It seems like a strange habit which some writer's possess, this opportunistic culling of information about a recently deceased person, especially material of a primarily speculative nature. Maybe a writer has a desire to be a biographer, but not enough ambition to write about someone famous. So they opt to be a hagiographer of someone personally known by them. The facetious line "I’m sure his family is thrilled" sums up a good enough reason to stay out of this business.

Mark Shea brags about his latest raise

This would be sort of funny if it weren't a grown man leaving the comment. The comment was left yesterday by Mark Shea on a blog called Coalition for Fog which was highly critical of Shea's positions but which had been shut down about 3 years ago.

Wow. Hard to believe it's been four years! And here the Coalition for Fog sits like the rusting hulk of the Bismarck on the floor of the blogospheric ocean. Good times! Good times!

Just thought I'd drop in and invite you all to celebrate the raise I got from Patheos since my traffic is going up. Salud!

Maybe somebody will find this site in a century or so when they are researching the self-destruction of American conservatism. I'll leave this note, sort of like a small commemorative plaque.

Mark Shea

Whenever I have good fortune, like a raise, I generally share my good fortune with my friends, not with those whom I dislike. I really wouldn't see the point of that, nor would most people, I imagine. Just a peek into a man's mind who's always raving about how he's just trying to bear witness to Jesus.

In case you missed Mark Shea's comments

I blogged a few days back on Joe Hippolito's FPM piece entitled A Catholic Writer’s Propaganda For Iran. The Catholic writer mentioned is Mark Shea who must have read both Joe's article and my blog post because he showed up in my comment box to exercise his 1st amendment rights which are universally respected here.

In fact, I want to make sure no one missed these comments, so I've reprinted them here. Here's the first one:

And EWTN/NCR has the bulging file of deranged rants from Joe [Hippolito], screaming at them about how the Church is damned by God, JPII is in hell, everybody Joe hates needs to be put to death with extreme prejudice and go to hell, nuking Muslims and Japanese is the will of God, Jesus loves capital punishment and pre-emptive war, the bishops are all going to hell, as well as many of NCR's writes (especially Yr Obdt Svt) and all his other helpful contributions to Catholic political thought over the years. I'm sure they will be on the edge of their seats listening to your appeal that they heed his wisdom. :)

Note the smiley at the end. Kind of a nice touch.

Second: Um, Joe has never had a blog. He parasitically lives off the blogs of others. If, by "doing things to people" you mean "not allowing rude wahoos on my blog" that's true. If you mean I never allow disagreements on my blog, you are either illiterate, stupid, or a liar, Jonathan.

On the other hand, I've never suggested that people who disagree with me should be murdered or prayed for their death and damnation. Joe's done that multiple times with me. Enjoy your bedfellow.

"Enjoy your bedfellow." Should we laugh at this remark? I did when I read it. Even if Mr. Shea does have some claim against Mr. Hippolito we can note something instructive here. He fills his cup of scorn and derision so abundantly that it overflows and we are all invited to take a swig.

Third: I'm not a paragon of virtue. I commit the same sins as you, Kathleen (whose writing is, after all, suffused with mockery, humiliation of others, and epithets). My point is not that I am a paragon of virtue. It is that Joe's hatred of both the Church and me is legendary throughout St. Blog's and that the editors at NCR are not unaware of it, since he has subjected them to it for years. So failure to acknowledge that little detail as Pauli makes the preposterous case for the sobriety of Joe's libel is a non-starter.

OK, I have to respond seriously to the charge that I made a "preposterous case for the sobriety of Joe's libel". Words mean something, words like sobriety and libel, and if Mark doesn't think Joe's article is accurate then he can explain why, providing examples. In fact, I'm sure he has done that on his blog, but I'll let someone else verify that. Nevertheless, libel denotes deliberate untruthfulness, or at least some type of vicious deviation from the facts, neither of which can be seen in Joe's article.

For example, referring to Rick Santorum as a "Murderer for Jesus" or referring to Santorum and Romney as "aspiring war criminals" can both be called vile attacks and distortions by just about anyone in the mainstream of America. Lines describing conservatives as possessing "deathless neoconservative faith in the Immaculate Conception of the State of Israel and its preservation from all sin, both original and actual" can easily be used as evidence for Joe's position that Mark Shea is at best a "curmudgeon who shoots from the hip and fails to understand the implications of his ideas" and at worst a "bigoted fanatic".

Now as far as sobriety goes, that's a judgement call, and I see nothing about the article which resembles a drunken rant. If Joe ranted at another time and another place without sobriety that is not relevant to my point and the point of Joe's article. It's normal and likely that past heated rhetoric may weaken his perceived reliability. But it's also a good idea to take someone's reasoned criticism presented thoughtfully according to its own merits. The only people who belabor every past lapse of an individual would be "rigorism maximumists". Wow, I just came up with that phrase! Am I clever or what?

Fourth: Jonathan (and Pauli):

You are welcome to post. However, you have to obey the rules. You're in my comboxes on my suffrage as guests. Disagreement is fine (as even a cursory read of my comboxes shows). Just be polite and honest.

I wonder what my wife is making for dinner tonight... Dang! tonight's PSR, too... And that flooring guy left a message, hope it's a low quote. Oh, that totally reminds me of something else....

Again, here's a link to his blog.

Fifth: This is Kathleen *R------*, correct?

And you seriously assert that nothing you've had to say about Rod Dreher is mocking, or aimed to humiliate, or chock full of epithets? Not to mention suffused with naked contempt for the guy?

Reeeeeeally?

Well, I suppose we'll just have to disagree about that.

No argument that I'm a terrible witness to the faith. But I'm all I've got and Jesus says to bear witness to him, so I try. Are you saying I shouldn't try? Or are you merely saying that it's worse that I do a bad job of witnessing to the faith than that Joe is actively trying to destroy the Church while urging mass murder.

Curious priorities.

"Joe is actively trying to destroy the Church while urging mass murder." Gee, didn't realize that. Maybe we should rethink our bedfellowship with Joe. I mean that has got to be worse than actively trying to destroy the Church while advocating a local, organic diet.

I'm not going to take a lot of time defending Kathleen because she can do so pretty adequately. I imagine her reading this blog on her smartphone in the checkout line and commenting with her right thumb while the left hand packs the groceries. I do think that she is a fairly normal woman in that if you once called her a "witch queen" she might not have an entirely warm attitude toward you.

I know I mentioned the 1st amendment earlier, so I should add that 2nd amendment rights are also respected on my blog. I'll let people shoot themselves in the foot whenever they are moved to do so. And as many times.