Freedom and the Family: The Family Crisis and the Future of Western Civilization

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/freedom-and-the-family-the-family-crisis-and-the-future-of-western-civilization.html

[..]
Zimmerman pointed out that the state views the family as a threat, eviscerates the family, co-opts its critics and sponsors family-hostile intellectuals, and demands supremacy over society in general and the family in particular. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, “the state helps to break it up.” The state constantly aspires to reduce the family to its instrument. “The state wishes to have only enough family power left as is needed to achieve the functions of government.” In the United States during the nineteenth century, “law piled on law, and government agency upon government agency” until by 1900“the state had become master of the family.” The result (in 1947!) is that “the family is now truly the agent, the slave, the handmaiden of the state.”

[..]
The Divorce Revolution

Some four decades ago, at the height of the sexual revolution, the Western world embarked on one of the boldest social experiments in its history. With little public discussion, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage as an enforceable contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family. Government can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Maggie Gallagher aptly titled her 1996 book The Abolition of Marriage.

The full implications of the “no-fault” revolution have never really been publicly debated. “The divorce laws…were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion,” writes Melanie Phillips. “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”[8]

The Meta-Crisis of Liberalism (Milbank,Pabst)

http://www.progressiveconservative.info/the-meta-crisis-of-liberalism.html
http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/john-milbank/10019-the-meta-crisis-of-liberalism

"The 2008 financial crash and inner-city riots across the West since the early 2000s revealed the limitations of the two liberalisms that have dominated Western politics for the past half-century: the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960s and the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980s. Both may have provided greater personal freedoms and individual opportunities, but both can now also be seen as arrogant, atomising and authoritarian. For, together they have served the interests of the administrative state and the unfettered market that have collusively brought about an unprecedented centralisation of power and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In consequence, a new, rootless oligarchy now combines impersonal technocracy with a manipulative populism, while holding in contempt the genuine priorities of most people.

Historically, each ‘face’ of liberalism seemed to be the opposite of the other. The liberal left appealed to the state in order to protect the people from the forces of market fundamentalism that the liberal right championed, while the liberal right defended conservative values of family and the nation against the multiculturalism and emancipation that the liberal left celebrated. But far from representing genuine alternatives to one another, the two liberalisms are mutually reinforcing in that they fuse economic-political individualism with bureaucratic-managerial collectivism and social-cultural atomisation – as Max Weber realised better than Karl Marx."

'Gay' Culture of Pederasty: The Story of Moira Greyland

http://askthebigot.com/2015/07/23/the-story-of-moira-greyland-guest-post/


"I was born into a family of famous gay pagan authors in the late Sixties. My mother was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and my father was Walter Breen. Between them, they wrote over 100 books: my mother wrote science fiction and fantasy (Mists of Avalon), and my father wrote books on numismatics: he was a coin expert.


What they did to me is a matter of unfortunate public record: suffice to say that both parents wanted me to be gay and were horrifed at my being female. My mother molested me from ages 3-12. The first time I remember my father doing anything especially violent to me I was five. Yes he raped me. I don’t like to think about it. If you want to know about his shenanigans with little girls, and you have a very strong stomach, you can google the Breendoggle, which was the scandal which ALMOST drummed him out of science fiction fandom." [..]


"...it is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING...What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial, and the sure knowledge (don’t think for a second that they DON’T know) that the only way to produce another homosexual is to provide a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be “ruined” by attraction to a girl." [..]


"Naturally my perspective is very uncomfortable to the liberal people I was raised with: I am “allowed” to be a victim of molestation by both parents, and “allowed” to be a victim of rather hideous violence. I am, incredibly, NOT ALLOWED to blame their homosexuality for their absolute willingness to accept all sex at all times between all people. But that is not going to slow me down one bit."

Is Meritocracy Just?

http://theprincetontory.com/main/is-meritocracy-just/
Professor James R. Stoner, Jr. / May 16, 2014

In 1958, English sociologist Michael Young published a clever little book called The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033, in which he imagined the long-term effect on society of according social goods on the basis of the principle of equality of opportunity as it was then understood.
[..]he imagines two things by 2033: (1) that society will be restratified, not on the basis of inheritance but of IQ, which his fictitious scientists show to be biologically hereditary; and (2) that there will be a rebellion of the lower classes, who, however, lack the intelligent leadership they once had, since all the best brains will have been co-opted by the system. He also supposes that clever rulers in the 2010s would be able to stave off rebellion by a statute equalizing everyone’s income but still rewarding the meritorious my means of all the amenities they need in order to optimize their productivity: ample vacation time, spacious living quarters and good meals, personal servants (what else could dull people do once effective machines had been invented?), travel, and so forth.

[..]

Murray, in Coming Apart, tells of a vast class differential that has opened up in American society—for the sake of simplicity or to avoid charges that plagued his earlier work, he confines his evidence to white society—between (a) a new upper or upper-middle class elite, the top 20 percent of the population, whose wealth is based on “the increasing market value of brains,” whose ticket in is acceptance by the best colleges, who typically marry, when they (eventually) marry, another of their kind, and who live or want to live in the “superzips” around a few major cities; and (b) a new lower class, the bottom 30 percent, who live in what he calls “Fishtown,” who are no longer really a working class, only half of whom will ever form stable marriages, many of whom divorce, many of whom have kids outside marriage, many of whom are not in the labor force but on disability, more than half of whom do not attend church, and few of whom describe themselves as happy. Putting Young and Murray together, one sees a similar story of bifurcation, one under imagined socialism, one under a reawakened capitalism. And neither author sees this place as desirable.
[..]

Young does not, as I mentioned, anticipate the sexual revolution, which characterizes the chaos in the lower classes that Murray notes. The breakdown of the family, once an upper-class phenomenon for those who could afford divorce and alimony and psychiatrists, is now chronic among people who can afford none of these, eviscerating the stability that allowed the working class of an earlier era in America to attain a modest measure of wealth (home and car ownership, perhaps also a retirement pension) and a large measure of dignity. Cause and effect are hard to sort out here—has the absence of well-paying jobs killed the family, or has the absence of stable family life sent jobs to a more reliable workforce overseas?—but it stands in contrast to the general stability of family formation today among the high bourgeoisie. Is moral order, however belittled or condemned by elites, actually a benefit they used to share with working classes? Like the family, religion has suffered among the less well-off, and again cause and effect are unclear: Do people abandon traditional morals because they lose belief, or do they fall away from organized religion because their lives have become a mess? [see Mary Eberstadt]


The scorn for inheritance in modern meritocracy reveals small-mindedness about the good, for in fact many of the institutions of greatest wealth devote substantial effort to sharing their treasure with the less fortunate who might benefit from the good they harbor. What evidence is there that state bureaucracies, however meritocratic, are better stewards of our cultural legacy than self-governing institutions that assume responsibility for the things they love?

Moldbug:Is Journalism Official?

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-journalism-official.html

Readers may have noticed that, where most writers of my general ilk would refer to the mainstream media, I prefer to refer to the official press.
[..]
Of course, this is consistent with the Polygon hypothesis - that power in modern democracies belongs to those who manage public opinion.
[..]
We usually think of "independent journalism" as a consequence of freedom of speech. But perhaps it's easier to see it as just another form of civil service protection.

For example, the UK has something very close to a Department of Journalism. It's called the BBC. How different is the job of a BBC reporter from the job of a CNN reporter? Not very.
[..]
Don't you think it's slightly strange that this handful of basically-uneducated individuals essentially controls science? That, for example, they could have written up the Wegman report, and consigned global warming - rightly or wrongly - to the same category as cold fusion, N-rays and Hwang Woo-Suk?
[..]
Of course, if journalism is official, we have to be able to lustrate it. If you agree with me that this system is thoroughly pernicious, and that the State should not be managing the minds of its citizens, how do we get rid of it?
[..]
My conclusion is that people trust the Times - and the rest of the official press - not despite the fact that they're basically reading Pravda, but because of it.
[..]
Losing your faith in official journalism is an extremely large mental step. It's really in the category of giving up a religion. It creates an enormous set of questions which you thought were answered, and now suddenly are questions again. And it's very easy to get those questions wrong. To paraphrase Chesterton, when people stop believing in the Times, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Gay 'Marriage' and Fascism: John Milbank

NS: Another aspect of modern liberalism—and liberal religion—that you’ve been critical of is so-called sexual liberation. Why do you call this, which many people consider an advance of liberty, fascism?

JM: In one sense, the freeing of sex from the law has always been implied by Christianity; the 1960s’ “liberation” remains an event within Christian history. At the same time, what one saw here was a kind of democratization and commercialization of “bohemian” morals, which had themselves earlier been newly legitimated and normalized for an elite, as Phillip Blond has pointed out. The problem here is that self-pleasure can become either explicitly or tacitly a goal in itself. When the romantics earlier spoke of the importance of marriage being “free,” that seems to me nearer the mark, as a goal. Human fulfillment lies more in the direction of faithful love and inserting oneself in the continuity of generations. Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions. Fascism for me comes into the picture because I think (following Adorno, amongst others) that the gradual separation of sex from procreation is regarded naively if we do not realize that this is what the state wants. Covertly, it wants to secure “Malthusian” control over reproduction and to deal with the individual directly, rather than through the mediation of couples. Much of liberal feminism is actually, in practice, on the side of economic and political neoliberalism. It is too rarely noticed that sexual permissiveness has today become a kind of opiate that covertly reconciles people to the loss of other freedoms—both in relation to the state and to the workplace.

NS: Does this mean that the progress of feminism, as well as of sexual minorities, should be rolled back?

JM: What we need is not a return to former legal coercion and social ostracism in the sexual field, but a change in ethos, which will promote both relational fidelity and the encouragement of human creativity and participation in the workplace and in civil life. As part of this, I think it is important both to support gay civil partnerships and yet to oppose the idea of “gay marriage.” Many more gay people in Europe approve of this combination than do in the US.

Islam and the Left, Not Strange Bedfellows

http://billmuehlenberg.com/2013/05/30/islam-who-will-stand-up-for-women/

Pakistani former Muslim, Sabina James.

“Islam is not compatible with democracy and freedom of expression. That was understood in Europe, and thus you separated the church from the state. This caused Europe to continue its development while the Arabic / Muslim world is still stuck in the 7th century,” says Sabatina James.

“Because the Muslim world is ruled by holy books, it will never get anywhere, she believes. It is impossible to create a healthy society with rational individuals, when the moral idol is a 7th century warlord. An idol who even took a 9-year-old girl as his wife, and considered it his absolute, holy duty to kill ‘infidels’. ‘It might have been acceptable in the 7th century, but as it remains a demand to view Mohammed as the perfect human being – which lots of Muslims do – then it doesn’t work,’ says Sabatina James.”

Part of an interview with her is also worth sharing here:

In the Western world, the left used to fight for a secular society and was entirely opposed to religion. Nowadays they work with Islamists to introduce more Islam into society. What do you think causes this?

“My only explanation for this would be that it’s due to a minority complex. When the left has determined that a group constitutes a minority, it is constantly ‘exposed’. Minorities are considered flawless, everything they do wrong is considered to result from oppression by the majority.”

She concludes: “The Muslims are actually right, Westerners do not believe in anything. The lack of faith is making us weak, as individuals and as a society. We still have freedom of expression, but if it dies, all other human rights will disappear. Do not ever forget that.”

Planned Inhumanities: Obersturmgefell and Roe in Declension.

Obergefell brings Roe v. Wade to its climax because it completes the transformation of children into objects. For children will be forced to love gay adults who are not their parents. To Kennedy, gay adults have a right not to feel lonely, which includes the right to start families. In fact, he states that they have a right to “custody” and “birth certificates” (i.e., birth certificates falsified to include two same-sex parents and erase biological parents of the opposite sex). To satisfy the human right to dignity and to thwart the civil injustice of “loneliness,” children must be produced and provided to people who want them, whether or not those people conceived the child by making love.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/08/15422/

The Pity of Christ and Liberalism's Creation of Men Without Chests

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/the-pity-of-christ

Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in “The Great Liberal Death Wish”:

Not Bolshevism, which Stalin liquidated along with all the old Bolsheviks; not Nazism, which perished along with Hitler in his Berlin bunker; not Fascism, which was left hanging upside down, along with Mussolini and his mistress, from a lamp-post—none of these, history will record, was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization, but liberalism. A solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice, blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish.

New Triangular Trade in Human Tissue Out of Africa

"Bush-Bloomberg and both the gay and abortion lobbies are pounding Africa to push abortion and gay adoption, all combining in creepy global markets for stem cells, sperm, eggs, wombs and organs. Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign and The US State Department are the triangular trade brought back to life." [Robert Oscar Lopez]

http://www.westernjournalism.com/busted-a-gop-candidates-massive-connection-to-planned-parenthood-just-got-exposed/

“In 2010, Jeb was named one of the founding directors of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, established as a tax-exempt foundation to advance the vision of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.” 

That foundation announced a major partnership with Planned Parenthood-Global to train and equip abortion activists in pro-life countries, to the tune of $50 million:

In 2014, we started supporting local nonprofit organizations in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Uganda, and Nicaragua to advocate for better policies in their countries that will expand access to comprehensive reproductive health services. These organizations will receive technical assistance from Planned Parenthood Federation of America – Global Division to help augment their capacity for effective advocacy.

Guiding Questions Critical Study of Secularism in RE

Where did secularism come from?

What do its advocates and practitioners believe?

Why do they believe it?

Do their most cherished beliefs stand up to scrutiny?

How do they approach politics?

What are their prejudices?

Just what kind of people are these secularists?

Is secularism just another way for the people of wealth and fashion to maintain their prerogatives against religious appeals for righteousness?

Introduction The End of Secularism Hunter Baker (2009)