A modest proposal

From here:

Dress code policies have become a flashpoint in school districts in Ontario and the Maritimes in recent weeks.

Dozens of students at A.B. Lucas Secondary School in London, Ont., rallied Wednesday in support of Grade 12 student Laura Anderson, who was sent home earlier this week after wearing a loose-fitting, sleeveless top and ripped jeans to school.

An online petition said the school’s dress code is premised on the “outdated” notion that female students should “cover up” because they could distract male students.

“The sexualization of a teenage girl’s body is not her problem, it is the problem of those who choose to sexualize a 17-year-old’s body,” the petition said.

A culture that is infused with Christian values – as ours used to be even though its members may have frequently strayed from them – understands that modesty is, in and of itself, a virtue. Specifically in the case of women’s clothing, as St. Paul said:

 I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. 1 Tim 2:9-10

I would like to try that out on the girls in A.B. Lucas Secondary School if only to see how gustily they would laugh at the notion.

The sad truth is, Christianity and its understating of right, wrong, vice and virtue has not only been abandoned by Western civilization, it is actively ridiculed and suppressed so there can be no rights or wrongs in this mess only outdated notions.

Although, as the article goes on to note, there is at least one virtue left: experimenting with identity. Preferably immodestly:

“If you ask me, high school is not only a place of learning, but a place to experiment with identity.”

The Camp of the Saints

I read Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints in the late 1970s. It is the type of book that excites vigorous emotional opposition from liberal and leftist Westerners because it posits the idea that excessive immigration from the Third World could lead to the destruction of the West. The bookseller in the store where I ordered it was a weasel faced – not that I held that against him – self-appointed intellectual who didn’t want to sell me the book: he thought it would corrupt me. Alas, his fatherly concern came too late. It did lead me to ponder the truism that today’s book burners tend to be on the political left; that is only fitting, I suppose, since they think they know what is best for the rest of us.

Modern Britain is a testament to Raspail’s warnings; we in North America, as yet lacking much of the UK’s immigration nightmare, are probably going to do the job ourselves by aborting ourselves into extinction. The unfortunates that do survive will be secularised into despair over the meaninglessness of their existence, leading them to voluntarily hasten their departure from this vale of tears through euthanasia or suicide.

To my surprise, the book is seeing something of a revival. Here is a recent review of it:

All those engaged in the debate over illegal immigration should find Jean Raispail’s The Camp of the Saints a challenging summer read. Otto Scott calls it “one of the most famous of the underground books.” Lionel Shriver believes it is a “novel both prescient and appalling.” The book became so notorious that the December 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly investigated many of the questions it raised.

The Camp of the Saints was published first in 1973 in France as Le Camp des Saints. An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975. Since then, the book has been republished and described as a “controversial and politically incorrect novel,” and “a Fascist fantasy.”

[….]

The Camp of the Saints presents a reader with an alternate apocalypse from the one found in the Biblical book of Revelation. Even though Raspail’s title is taken from Revelation 20:9, “And they came up on the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints,” the book has very little to do with a biblical interpretation of events.

Instead, the title is a sarcastic reference that shows to the Western reader the end of the world in secular terms. In Raspail’s book, liberalism marches steadfastly to its demographic doom.

[….]

Jean Raspail’s vision in The Camp of the Saints is an imaginary one of how the secular order in the West may end. It is a vision seen through the right eye. According to Raspail, the West “has no soul left” and “it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.”

The secular world truly is in need of salvation, a salvation Jean Raspail believes Christian charity will prove itself powerless to effect. So, he warns us during our summer of immigration discontent, “The times will be cruel.”

Man jailed for leaving a pig’s head outside mosque

From the BBC:

A man has been jailed for three months for dumping a pig’s head outside a mosque in Berkshire.

Rory Rowbottom, from Thatcham, left the animal’s head at the mosque on Pound Street in Newbury on 23 October.

Rowbottom pleaded guilty to one count of racially aggravated harassment and a section 4 public order offence at Reading Magistrates’ Court.it’s every Westerner’s duty to loath his heritage

Ch Insp Lindsey Finch said his actions had left the community “distressed and horrified”.

Meanwhile, those who display Christ in urine and the Virgin Mary in elephant dung are treated with impunity because it’s every Westerner’s duty to loath his heritage; any expression of this loathing is art.

Extirpating God from Western civilisation

Atheists are continuing their crusade to expunge God from public life:

From here:

An atheist group is going to court to protest the presence of a six-foot tall statue of Jesus Christ on federal land, erected as a memorial for soldiers who died in World War II.

The lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin based Freedom From Religion Foundation, seeking to remove the religious memorial from a Montana ski resort, has been given a green light by U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen to move forward to trial.

What is still permitted is the displaying of images that are likely to offend Christians. This crucified Obama painting is on display at Bunker Hill Community College – partially funded by the government – and no-one has complained:

The fall of America

My apologies to Nero for the comparison, but it begs to be made: Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Obama golfed while embassies burned.

The Roman Empire took about four centuries to fully disintegrate: the second sack of Rome occurred in AD 455 and Nero fiddled in AD 64.

I don’t think we have that long to wait before America falls: it is spending and aborting itself to death far too enthusiastically to totter on for another 400 years.

What both Rome and the USA have in common at the beginning of their disintegration is leaders who were callously indifferent to their citizens. Obama and his admirers go one step further: they blame the values of their own country – free speech in this case – for the vile deeds of their country’s enemies.

How long before the barbarian hordes are sacking North American cities? No-one knows, of course, but it can’t be too long: Islamists are strenuously testing the resolve of America – and they are finding that there isn’t any.

From here:

Last week, after issuing a statement at the White House about the murder of the American ambassador in Libya, President Barack Obama hopped aboard Air Force One and headed for Vegas. At a campaign rally to cap off his day, he spoke about the murdered ambassador and went on to say, “We are the one indispensable power in the world. And if we are going to see peace and security for our children and our grandchildren, then that means that this generation of Americans has to lead.”

As embassy after embassy is attacked, the United States does not look like an indispensable power. And it does not look like it because it has largely dispensed with its leadership in the Middle East.

[…]

The ability of protesters to attack with impunity American embassies, and for it to be taken in campaign stride by America’s leaders, is a sign of a new day in the Middle East. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France extended their influence as custodians of the region. After the Second World War and the creation of the State of Israel, the United States took over as the protector — of Israel, and later of Egypt, of Kuwait, of Turkey and even of Afghanistan against the Soviets. That period is over, and a new era is being born. At the moment it is only a post-American order. Will it become an era dominated by militant Islam?

A new day begins with the dawn’s early light. It is already past dawn, but what the day will bring is unknown, and fearfully so.

Don’t Ask don’t Tell: The Next Generation

We all knew that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell wasn’t the end of the military’s ever onward march towards sexual enlightenment: soon it will be legal for soldiers to have sex with animals. Consensual sex, of course.

Churches will be able to offer liturgical solemnisation of human-beast partnerships as a generous pastoral response for those who seek to live in mutual love and faithfulness in a stable, long-term committed relationship with their camels.

From here:

The Senate on Thursday evening voted 93-7 to approve a defense authorization bill that includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, it also repeals the military ban on sex with animals–or bestiality.

On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee had unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

[…]

Former Army Col. Bob Maginnis said some military lawyers have indicated that bestiality may be prosecutable under another section of the military code of justice – the “catch-all” Article 134 for offenses against “good military order and discipline.”

But don’t count on that, he said.

“If we have a soldier who engages in sodomy with an animal – whether a government animal or a non-government animal – is it, in fact, a chargeable offense under the Uniform Code? I think that’s in question,” Maginnis told CNSNews.com.

The question is, will non-government animals still receive survivor benefits?

Poll reveals that Canadians believe Western and Muslim societies are irreconcilable

From here:

A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

The survey of 1,500 Canadians, conducted over three days last week for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, showed 56% of respondents see Western and Muslim societies locked in an unending ideological struggle, while about 33% — just one-third of the population — held out hope that the conflict will eventually be overcome.

Obviously not many politicians or Anglican clergy were included in the poll.

 

The offense of the Cross

From here:

An electrician faces the sack for displaying a small palm cross on the dashboard of his company van.

Former soldier Colin Atkinson has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing by the giant housing association where he has been employed for 15 years because he refuses to remove the symbol.

Mr Atkinson, a regular worshipper at church, said: ‘The treatment of Christians in this country is becoming diabolical…but I will stand up for my faith.’

Throughout his time at work, he has had an 8in-long cross made from woven palm leaves attached to the dashboard shelf below his windscreen without receiving a single complaint.

But his bosses at publicly funded Wakefield and District Housing (WDH) in West Yorkshire – the fifth-biggest housing organisation in England – have demanded he remove the cross on the grounds it may offend people or suggest the organisation is Christian. Mr Atkinson’s union representative said he faces a full disciplinary hearing next month for gross misconduct, which could result in dismissal.

As you can see, the cross is so conspicuous and, after all, there is nothing quite so damaging to an organisation’s reputation than the insidious allegation that it might be “Christian”; the mere act of writing that makes me want to disinfect my keyboard. I’m surprised that Atkinson wasn’t charge with sedition – or, at the very least, a public order offence.

Parents jailed for removing their children from sex education class

As Western societies increasingly expunge Christianity from public life, so they increasingly foist compulsory aberrant sexuality on their children. It sounds like an application of Rom 1:24-25: God’s ultimate punishment is to give people what they think they want: in this case, unbridled deviant sexuality, ultimately causing them to bring about their own extinction through fruitless copulating with members of their own sex and – and if that is insufficient, rampant abortion.

Rowan Williams, friend of axe murderers

The UK does not allow prisoners to vote, a tragedy that probably doesn’t bother most law abiding citizens since prisoners would undoubtedly vote for anyone who promises to go easy on criminals.

Most law abiding citizens other than Rowan Williams, that is, who, in his never ending exertions to distance himself from normal people, has put his foot – perhaps both feet – in his remarkably capacious mouth by supporting a prisoner’s “right” to vote.

From here:

Williams said that the civic status of a prisoner should not be “put in cold storage” while they are inside. “The notion that in some sense, not the civic liberties, but the civic status of a prisoner is in cold storage when custody takes over is one of the roots of a whole range of issues around the rights of prisoners,” he said in remarks published by the Prison Reform Trust.

“If we lose sight of the notion of the prisoner as citizen, any number of things follow from that, and indeed are following from that. The prisoner as citizen is somebody who can … expect that penal custody will be something that contributes to, rather than takes away, their capacity to act as a citizen in other circumstances,” said the archbishop.

“Thus issues around restoration, around responsibility, around developing concepts of empathy and mutuality are all part of what seems to me to be a reasonable working out of what it is to regard the prisoner as a citizen.”

John Hirst, who chopped up his landlady with an axe before managing to develop much of a concept of empathy, is, needless to say, most appreciative of Rowan’s support and is boasting about it:

The Archbishop of Canterbury today said prisoners should get the vote, backing an axe killer whose campaign has been endorsed by European courts.

John Hirst, who hacked his landlady to death, yesterday boasted that he was on the verge of forcing the Government to ‘wave the white flag of surrender’, as MPs prepare to vote on the move tomorrow.

As usual Rowan sacrifices common sense to tangled Rowanesque distinctions; in this case between civic liberties and civic status, both of which – even if there is a distinction – are forfeited the moment you start hacking your landlady to death with an axe.

Rowan Williams should re-read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: in it, Raskolnikov, an axe murderer, didn’t receive redemption through insisting on his right to vote, but by confessing his crime, repenting, accepting his punishment in Siberia and being spiritually reborn in Christ.