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Bai Macfarlane and John Farrell

Some of my readers are familiar with the very inside-Catholic-baseball question about whether a Catholic is required to get the permission of his or her bishop before filing for a civil divorce. The extensive discussion of my most recent article on Crisis convinces me that people are indeed interested in this topic.

To the best of my knowledge, two people are promoting this view. One is Bai Macfarlane, who has a website called Mary’s Advocates. The Ruth Institute includes this site among our Links we Like for the Reluctantly Divorced.

The other person is John Farrell. To the best of my knowledge, he has never been published anywhere other than his own blog and a Facebook page.

Permit me to say that if you are interested in this topic, follow Bai. Ignore John. And I do mean, ignore him.

This man is not helping his cause, if that cause is to persuade the bishops to implement canon law in the way that he believes is correct. In fact, he is actively harming that cause.

Where Bai patiently answers questions, John just repeats his one or two talking points. He is rude. As a Southerner, (admittedly, an adoptive Southerner, but an appreciative Southerner) saying someone is rude is no small matter. Compare Bai’s comportment in the comments section of my Crisis article, with John’s behavior on this thread.

I am no expert on canon law. I have said so repeatedly. I have told John this privately, and publicly. I am not going to make a pronouncement on this topic, as I am not qualified to do so. I am trying to keep an open mind, and listen to what people have to say. Bai is worth listening to. John’s noise-making makes it almost impossible to listen, or to even think clearly.

Please do not encourage this man. Especially if you want to help end the divorce culture, both inside the Catholic Church and in the wider culture.

But what about abusive marriages?

When people learn that I oppose no-fault divorce, some will say, “You have forgotten about abusive marriages.” When the Ruth Institute, the organization that I lead, describes itself as “The World’s Only Campaign to End Family Breakdown,” we hear again, “But what about abusive marriages?”

So, let me deal with this important issue. What about abusive marriages?

First off, let me assure you: I am certainly aware abusive marriages exist. I hear a lot of these stories. There are valid reasons why sometimes, spouses can, and should live separately. I am not opposed to separation in these cases. In some cases, a civil divorce can be justified, and even necessary.

The real question is this: who “broke” this family? Remember, I’m working to end family breakdown. In my opinion, the person throwing furniture through the wall, broke the family covenant. His wife has every right, and perhaps even a responsibility, to ask him to move out. If he refuses, she may need the help of (our admittedly dysfunctional) legal system. But make no mistake: she is not breaking up the family. He is.

Or what about this case? A woman becomes addicted to drugs. She spends all the family’s money, runs up credit card debts and acquires new lovers. Her husband may very well need to kick her out, sever all their financial dealings, and take steps to keep her away from the kids. He may need the help of the government to accomplish this. And yes, a divorce may be the only way to disentangle her from the family finances.

Who broke this family? The person who broke the covenant: the wife. The husband is protecting himself and his children.

I’m against the behavior that led to the family breakdown. I’m not against the innocent party doing what they need to do to protect themselves and their children. Yes, I’m so much against family breakdown that I want to see abusive behavior end.

I stated right up front that I am opposed to no-fault divorce. I stand by that. No-fault divorce was a radical restructuring of the institution of marriage. Under the no-fault regime, the State takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. The State not only allows, but actually assists, the least committed party to unilaterally ending the marriage.

Under a fault-based regime, an abused spouse could get a divorce. Abuse, adultery, abandonment, addiction: these were considered marital faults in virtually any jurisdiction. The person claiming a fault would have to offer evidence, to prove the faults had indeed occurred. But a fault-based divorce regime does not mean divorces never happened. Nor would a reintroduction of marital fault mean that “women would be trapped in abusive marriages.”

Under the no-fault divorce regime, the State pretends to be unable to discern an abusive marriage, from one that is not, or an offending party from an innocent party. The State then turns around and presumes to discern parenting plans, child support plans, and living arrangements of entire families. According to the State, no one has done anything wrong. Yet, the State assigns itself the right to send children for psychological evaluations, and to investigate all the family’s financial records.

It is true that the State does not use all this authority in every instance. This does not negate the fact that they still have that authority. No-fault divorce is a highly intrusive, privacy-invading legal structure.

Finally, some will ask, what about the Catholic Church’s annulment process? The annulment process is conceptually separate from discerning whether a marital fault has taken place. I realize this may sound harsh. But adultery or abuse has no direct bearing on whether the marriage was canonically valid in the first place.

The annulment process seeks evidence about the conditions surrounding the marriage itself. Did both parties freely consent? Were there any defects of form? Were both parties free to marry? Whether one or both became mentally ill or abusive or adulterous or anything else is not, strictly speaking relevant. If a person is too dangerous to live with, the couple can licitly live separately.

So why is annulment such a big deal in the Catholic Church? An annulment gives a person the Church’s permission to contract a Catholic marriage, just as a civil divorce grants a person permission to contract another civil marriage. But bear in mind: no one ever has to get married again.

This is why I am persuaded that abusive marriages do not present an exception to Jesus’ law of the indissolubility of marriage. Nor does the existence of abusive marriages dissuade me from my belief that family breakdown is something every decent person should work to end.

Breaking up a family in the absence of marital fault is unjust to the innocent parties, especially the children. And when abuse does take place, the person filing the divorce papers is not the person breaking up the family. The abuse that led to divorce is what needs to stop. Surely everyone can agree to that.

Originally published at Crisis on August 3, 2017

Mooch

I do not have the bandwidth to have an opinion on everything that comes out of the Trump Administration. I will say this: in the unlikely event that Anthony Scaramucci were ever a Facebook friend of mine, his foul mouthed rant to the New Yorker reporter would have gotten him unfriended in a hurry. That type of language is a sign of either a) an underdeveloped vocabulary or b) an undisciplined mind and mouth. Don’t need a guy like that for a friend. Wonder if he will serve the President and our country well…

Root for the Home Team: Dan Mattson’s new non-gay book

My friend Dan Mattson has written a truly Catholic, truly great book, called, “Why I don’t call myself gay.” Part memoir, part social commentary, part theological commentary, “Why I don’t call myself gay” is a great counter-weight to the numerous people in society, including sadly, many in the church, who tell young people to “come out.” The whole society tells young people that best way to deal with feelings of sexual attraction to the same sex is to “admit it: you’re gay.”

Dan shows that people who experience same sex attraction have other options. You need not declare yourself “gay,” live a sexually active life, and endorse the entire political agenda served up by the Gay wing of the Sexual Revolution.

A certain very public Jesuit has released a book justifying certain sexual sins. (I don’t want to mention either his name, or the name of his book.) I know many of my friends will want to express their disgust with this man, and disagreement with his views. May I make a respectful suggestion? Every time you mention the heresy, or the heretic, please mention this Dan Mattson, and “Why I don’t call myself gay.”

Catholic and Christian public intellectuals who toe the Sexual Revolutionary Party Line will get plenty of attention from the Main Stream Media. Dan Mattson will only get noticed if we notice him. Please give Dan Mattson more time at the microphone and heretical Jesuits less. Dan’s our guy. Let’s root for him. Let’s ignore the other guys whenever we decently do so.

And get the book.

If you have young people in your life who are telling you that they think they are “gay,” get this book for them. Read it together with them.

IN the meantime, read this story about Dan’s book, by my friend Doug Mainwaring.

Beauty and the Beast

My son and I saw the new Beauty and the Beast. It was lovely. Magical. Almost perfect.

This is the story everyone wants to hear: darkness and evil and selfishness transformed by love into light and good and self-surrender. Life and love conquer death and fear.

The ultimate Christian Story: Death does not get the last word.

This just happens to be the Christian story. That is why we never tire of hearing this story. It is hard-wired into our hearts, by our Creator. We were meant for love, for communion with others, for radical self-giving. The Nihilist Story that nothing really matters just doesn’t work for us. Nor does the Lone Wolf Story, that no one really needs anyone for anything.

What about the Beauty and the Beast “gay moment?” Interestingly enough, LeFou doesn’t really fit the Official Gay Storyline. He is unsure of his masculinity. By attaching himself to the hyper-masculine Gaston, he can reinforce his own sense of maleness.

But his attraction to Gaston does not do anything positive for him. In fact, it weakens him. LeFou lied for him. He acquiesced in an attempted murder. He participated in the mob violence. All along, he knows that he is doing wrong, but he stifles his conscience, all for the sake of pleasing Gaston. When Gaston finally throws him under the bus (actually, under the piano), LeFou has second thoughts. After he mentally ditches Gaston, he can fight for what he knows to be right.

In other words, he becomes a truly manly man. He doesn’t need Gaston. At the end of the film, he is dancing with women, along with every other man in the castle.

Is it really a gay moment” in the last scene when he momentarily gets partnered with a man? Or is it reversion to heterosexuality when LeFou dances happily with women in the bulk of the scene? More importantly, what is this even doing in the movie? It adds nothing to the theme of self-giving love.

Director Bill Condon paid obeisance to the Big Gay Activist Machine, by hinting about the “exclusively gay moment,” to “the UK’s best-selling gay magazine.”

But was it enough? Of course not. Nothing is ever enough for the Activists. Cracked and Polygon panned it. USA Today called it “queerbaiting:” promising just enough to get gays into the theaters, but not nearly enough.

As David Horowitz has said in another context, for the true revolutionary, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

The Disney people allowed themselves to paint a mustache on their Mona Lisa of a film, in order to placate the Activists, who, in the end, were not satisfied. I wonder how the Gay Artists who worked on Beauty and the Beast actually felt about it. I seriously doubt that everyone who is same sex attracted puts activism ahead of art.

Yes, a viewer could blink and miss these moments in the theater. When the DVD comes out, and parents watch it endlessly, how will the “gay moments” hold up? All the rest of this live-action remake could be watched again and again, without losing its beauty or magic. But the gratuitous gay scenes will be boring the second time you see them. They are the gay equivalent of a juvenile fart joke.

A Friendly Amendment to “The Benedict Option”

No mention of Pope St. John Paul II: That’s odd.

Dreher’s chapter on the Sexual Revolution neglects both John Paul II and contraception. That struck me as odd.

St. John Paul wrote volumes, literally, on the human sexuality. Michael Waldstein, the editor of the second edition of Male and Female He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, goes so far as to say that this work is JPII’s response to Cartesian mind-body dualism. I agree with him.

Dreher liberally quotes Wendell Berry, who speaks eloquently on gender complementarity, but who can’t figure out the problem with genderless marriage. But no mention of JPII. That is just: odd.

Relentless propaganda for the Sexual Revolution

Along with neglecting the person of JPII, Dreher neglects the issue of contraception. The government and the major cultural elites have engaged in near-constant promotion of the contraceptive ideology: everyone is entitled to unlimited, child-free, care-free, costless sex. Without this ideology, the distortions of sexualty Dreher rightly decries would not be even remotely plausible. Perhaps these two omissions are related. He quotes Michael Hanby, in the chapter on technology. I know for a fact that Hanby understands the connection between technology, contraception and modernity. How could Dreher overlook this point?

So here is my friendly amendment to the Benedict Option. Dreher includes many suggestions for Benedict Option communities. Here are a few additional suggestions for a counter-cultural Christian sexual lifestyle. First, for young people of child-bearing age:

Throw away your condoms, your diaphrams and your pills. (But don’t flush them down the toilet: its probably not good for the environment.)
Go to your doctor and ask him or her to remove your IUD or the implants from your arms.
Ladies, begin charting your cycle. It is completely harmless, and you will know your body very well before you get married.
Young married couples, go take a good Natural Family Planning class. Learn to cooperate with God, and with your body. I don’t care which method: Billings, the Sympto-Thermal Method, or any other fertility awarenss method. The right method for you, is the one that you will use regularly and comfortably.

For old people like me who are past child-bearing age, you can help the young families in your community:

Support them in getting married at a reasonable age, in their mid-twenties, rather than insisting they wait until they have a Masters degree and their student loans paid off. That may mean:
Help them avoid college debt in the first place.
Help them with babysitting, transportation, and other necessary chores, if they have kids while they are still in school or in the early stages of their careers.
Help them with low-cost housing.
Be pro-active in seeing what things would improve the quality of
The true counter-cultural radical.

their family lives. We got recruited this past weekend, to do yard clean-up for a family expecting their 7th child. By “we” I mean me, my husband and our 28 year-old son. We were recruited by a couple in their 30’s, who observed the situation, and moved into action. We try to say “yes” as often as possible to these requests.
Above all, tell them how much you enjoyed your parenting years, and how the kids will be grown before you know it, and how you wish you could have had more kids.

I can honestly say that a lot of us Baby Boomers wish we had more kids. We were full participants in the Sexual Revolution. We didn’t figure out that we were being bamboozled until it was too late.

(If you’d like to share your story, consider contributing to our Tell Ruth the Truth blog. We’re always on the look-out for honest, heart-felt tales that will encourage the young to stay the course, and to discourage them from buying the lies of our toxic sexual culture.)

Christian sexual morality is good news for everyone, male or female, gay or straight, young or old. And, Dreher correctly observes, getting sex right is the key to rebuilding a truly Christian civilization.

Dr J on “The Benedict Option”

I just finished reading the Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. I also recently read and reviewed Tony Esolen’s new book, Out of the Ashes, which is in my opinion, the better book of this genre. Dreher’s book has generated an enormous amount of attention. But if you only have time to read one book, read Esolen’s book.

I am not clear on whether the Benedict Option is:

a quietistic retreat from politics, or
a strategic retreat to live to fight another day, or
a joyful embrace of the full Christian life because it is the life most worth living, no matter what may be going on in the World.

I’m not sure whether Dreher himself is clear. Option #3 was certainly the motivation of the original St. Benedict, and his many sons and daughters down to this day. And, Tony Esolen is definitely an option #3 guy.

What makes The Benedict Option worth reading:

Its argument is explicitly Christian. No more making arguments that are accessible only to “public reasons.”
Dreher argues that Christianity is good, and deserves to survive. In fact, the World needs for faithful Christians to keep the Christian message alive, because the World is not doing well without it.
Dreher has many practical suggestions for maintaining and building a Christian identity, in the face of an increasingly hostile World.

Having said all that, I do have a couple of problems with this book, and with Dreher’s writing in general.

First, he sometimes acts as if he is the only guy who has ever thought of these things. This is an annoyance, but not a super-serious problem. He says: “One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics and the culture would take care of itself.” (pg 81) Who ever thought that?

West Coast Walk for Life or One Walk LA 2016 (That looks like a red Stanford jacket in the foreground. I happen to know there are active Students for Life groups at both Berkeley and Stanford!)

Further on, he makes this remarkable claim (without a footnote, mind you): “Fundamental abortion rights remain solidly in place, and Gallup numbers from the Roe v Wade era until today have not meaningfully changed.” (pg 82).

That’s odd. The millenial generation opposes abortion and favors its restriction more than older generations, even if Millenials do not self-identify as “pro-life.” The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute breathlessly reports that states have enacted over 1,000 abortion restrictions in the past 5 years. This doesn’t sound like complete political failure to me. Nor does it sound like a complete failure of cultural engagement. On the contrary, it sounds like successful involvement in both arenas.

“Fundamental abortion rights remain solidly in place” because the Supreme Court has repeatedly circled the wagons around said “rights.”

I know very well the frustration of having Courts overturn social conservative measures that were duly enacted by voters. I was a spokeswoman for Proposition 8. I lived through that whole drama, of winning the election (quite decisively, thank you very much) and then watching courts overturn it on one flimsy pretext after another.

I sympathize with Dreher’s frustration. But enacting measures and then having the courts repeatedly overturn them is not an argument against politics per se. Nor is it an argument that we have done politics badly.

It may mean we need a new strategy. But I do think we owe it to the people who have knocked themselves out in the public square to acknowledge their efforts. We should not dismiss them so casually as Dreher appears to do in the passage I quoted and in other places.

The evacuation at Dunkirk, June 1940. The Allies came back 4 years later on D-Day to defeat the Nazis.

This brings me to my biggest complaint about The Benedict Option. He keeps saying: “We lost.” This bugs me. A lot. For several reasons.

It is one thing to say that a particular political effort failed. It is another to say “we lost,” as if there is no longer anything left to do but hunker down and accept permanent dhimmitude.
It is one thing to say that our strategies are not working, and that we need to try something else. I get that. In fact, I have myself advocated strategic retreat for the purpose of regrouping. But that is not the same thing as saying, “we lost,” as if the battle is over.
Finally,and most importantly, the cause of Truth is never decisively lost. It cannot be. We have a responsibility to continue to speak the Truth, love the Truth and live the Truth, no matter what the outcome may be. I would call this the Solzhenitsyn Option, or the Václav Havel Option.

We Christians cannot continue doing our ordinary occupations in our accustomed manner. What will come after the Modern World shakes itself apart? And what will Christians contribute? Dreher has done a great service in inducing so many people to be part of this all-important discussion.

Why Do I Let Him Treat Me Like This?

Questions to ask yourself, before you file the papers….

I hear from many people in various stages of divorce: pre-divorce, post-divorce, going-through-the-middle of divorce, reluctantly divorced people who would like to stay married, people leaving abusive situations that would have qualified for divorce under the strictest definition of “fault.”

One question I hear again and again from people in troubled marriages, before or after divorce: “Why do I let him or her treat me this way?” It is a good question. Closely related to “Why do I always pick such losers?”

May I make a respectful suggestion? Wherever you may be in the divorce process, take the time to answer questions like these. The answer to “Why do I let him treat me like this” may help you understand how you behave in many, many relationships, not just in your marriage. The answer to “Why do I always pick such losers?” may help you avoid picking other losers in the future.

You are going to be part of your own life, no matter what happens to this marriage.

And may I suggest: ask yourself these questions before you divorce. You may discover something about yourself that will allow you to improve the situation.

“The Upper Class is Communist”

“By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave, the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?”

Henry Luce, the founding publisher of Time magazine, asked this question of Whittaker Chambers at a private dinner. This was during the period when Chambers was testifying that Alger Hiss was part of an extensive network of Soviet spies inside the US government in the 1940’s. “All the best people,” inside and outside of the government, supported Alger Hiss. Meanwhile, Whittaker Chambers received cards and letters of support from ordinary people of modest means from across the country.

Chambers reports that a “witty European whom I shall call Smetena” replied to Luce’s question:

“You don’t understand the class structure of American society or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are communists.” *

Today, we could modify this statement slightly and say: “The poor are Democrats. The working class are Republicans. The Elites are advocates of Moral Relativism. ” Or “The Elites are advocates of Multi-culturalism.” Or “The Elites are advocates of “the Sexual Revolution.”

What do all these ideologies have in common? They are all totalitarian ideologies.

Communism is a fantasy ideology that says that we can have prosperity and justice without private property and with government control of the entire economy. It cannot be done. But “All the Best People” were absolutely convinced that attempting it was a moral duty. The attempt to do the impossible empowered the State to an unimaginable degree.

Billionaire investor George Soros: financier of Totalitarian Fantasy Ideologies around the world.

Moral Relativism is a fantasy ideology that makes the truth-claim that there is no such thing as truth: there is only “truth” which is socially constructed. This belief system leads directly to the Law of the Strongest, since it short-circuits any appeal to truth, reason or evidence. This allows the People in Power to label anyone they dislike, or anyone who hinders their agenda du jour as bigots.

Multi-culturalism is a subset of Moral Relativism. It is a fantasy ideology that claims to be unable to detect any differences among cultures. Ditto for empowering those who already have power.

The Sexual Revolution is a fantasy ideology that says that a good and decent society should separate sex from babies and both from marriage and that all differences between men and women are socially constructed. Ditto that this ideology is impossible to implement. But, this belief system leads to the destruction of the most basic human bonds. This destruction allows Elites to move into the legitimate sphere of the family, take it over and refashion it at will.

The motto of the Davos power elites of the world.

In short, Elites like these ideologies because they empower those who already have power: economic, political or cultural power. By contrast, the institutions of self-government allow people with minimal power to nonetheless rule their own lives. This is why the Elites prefer court rulings to elections, mass society to localized society, mass media to personal participation and a highly regulated global economy to small scale enterpreneurs.

*(Quotation from Witness by Whittaker Chambers, pp. 539-540.)

Take our Poll on our Go to Confession Campaign

Hi Friends,

The Ruth Institute has been running a “Go to Confession” billboard campaign here in Lake Charles. It has spilled over into some interviews with Catholic media, and some Facebook chatter.

Mardi Gras, not just a day, but a whole season in Cajun country.

Anyhow, I am interested in knowing how people react to the 3 billboards we have created. Here are the images, along with links to the pages with explanations:

And finally,

So take our poll: