The Home Front

Bill Clinton Seemingly Blames Kamala Harris for Laken Riley’s Murder by Immigrant

This is What Elite Failure Looks Like by Oren Cass

The Constitution of the United States is always worth a fresh reading. Pay particular attention to Article I, Section 8, which enumerates the (only) powers of Congress. If something is not listed there, the strong presumption should be that Congress does not have the power to do it. Also take a look at the much-neglected 9th and 10th amendments.

Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death (affiliate link) by Fr. Robert Spitzer SJ. For a non-scientist (like me — Phil) the technical details are overwhelming. But the force of the arguments is compelling. All the scientific evidence points to the existence of God; it takes a special gift of “faith” to resist that conclusion.

How to Cook a Wolf (affiliate link) by M.F.K. Fisher

Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Join us in Washington DC for the Blessed Karl Conference!

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The Left lies about Amber Thurman’s death on a daily basis because abortion supporters want to create a screen to obscure serious inquiry into the dangers of chemical abortion, not only to the unborn but to the mother.

There is something most don’t realize: any claim about abortion and its safety simply cannot be verified.

States are not required to submit data about abortion use and consequences to the CDC, and what data are submitted are collected at and provided by the abortion facility — so you can imagine how reliable the data are.

When a woman is transported to the hospital (as happens far more than the public suspects), the ER is not required to report the reason for death or injury or trace it back to the clinic. You can read about this subject here, on the Guttmacher Institute site.

The Guttmacher Institute supplies information to the public about abortion; it was founded by Planned Parenthood and is funded by the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America. Everyone, including the pro-life movement, depends on their statistics — because there is no alternative and uniquely, no law requiring disinterested oversight of this medical procedure.

Abortion facilities claim their services are safe, and now the manufacturer and the FDA claim medical abortion, also known as chemical abortion, RU-486, mail-order abortion, and mifepristone/misoprostol, to be safe.

Whenever the topic of abortion comes up, the Left is sure to tell you that because of post-Dobbs legislation in some states, women are dying from lack of treatment of reproductive issues.

In particular, they cannot stop lying about what killed Amber Thurman. They claim she was killed because post-Dobbs Georgia’s restrictive laws made it so she couldn’t seek help after the chemical abortion of her twin babies.

This is an obvious lie, as has been shown over and over. The law didn’t and wouldn’t have led to her death, because it doesn’t restrict the help she needed. She didn’t get it because the hospital has a bad reputation and seems to have been incredibly negligent (and her family is suing them, suggesting they and their lawyers have a reasonable expectation, under the current law, for recourse).

The abortion pill works using mifepristone and/or misoprostol and sometimes methotrexate. These chemicals come with a “black box” warning — words in a black box that inform the user of severe consequences of their use.

Mifepristone is labeled with one of these “black boxes,” which are located right at the top of the patient information pamphlet. The January 2023 PIP by GenBioPro, available on the NLM Website, also includes a long list of side effects under Section 5, “Warnings and Precautions” and Sections 6, “Adverse Reactions,” including infection and sepsis (such as fatal septic shock), prolonged heavy bleeding (sometimes requiring a transfusion), missed ectopic pregnancy, anemia, immune system disorders, cardiac and vascular disorders, nausea, weakness, fever/chills, vomiting, headache, diarrhea, dizziness and even uterine rupture.

The April 2022 misoprostol PIP also features a “black box” which warns of the possibility of uterine rupture and birth defects if the medical abortion procedure fails. The list of side effects for misoprostol includes many of the same ones listed for mifepristone.

At first, this method was restricted to hospital administration and a two-week follow-up visit with the doctor to be sure all tissue had been expelled, lest the woman suffer sepsis and death. The risk is just that high. The chemicals also don’t terminate an ectopic pregnancy, so that ought to be checked at that point. After allowing it to be prescribed for home use, in 2021 the FDA dropped the requirement for the visit.

The narrative about Thurman is that she didn’t wait after being given the abortion pill at the clinic she visited. But the product works over the course of several days. Given the way clinics work and the low information women receive, she was probably sent home. In any case, she was left to deliver her twins on her own (that’s how it works!).

This Wall Street Journal article by Nicholas Tomaino goes over the reasons the story (as retailed by Tim Walz, Kamala Harris, and every pro-abortion activist or commentator in America) is a lie.

What pro-lifers have not quite internalized is that more is required than a defensive posture (“you are lying about Amber Thurman’s death”).

The lies are intended to prevent us from going on the offense and exposing the vast amounts of harm and mayhem blithely thrust on the indoctrinated women of our nation.

They know they are lying. In our focus on refuting these lies over and over, will we allow the noise to drown out the larger concern, the high probability mail-order abortion will cause great suffering?

We already know (thanks in large part to the work of David Daleiden) of the ways surgical abortion exploits women, especially minors. Imagine this exploitation put into pill form.

Coerced and forced abortions are already happening. And every time safety protocols are degraded, it becomes easier for an unsupportive partner, abuser, or trafficker to harm women, girls, and unborn children. [Go to the article for a plethora of recorded examples if your imagination falters.]

Mail-order abortion is the business model for the abortion industry’s future, and looks to be incredibly profitable. It would be tragic if we allowed “abortion magical thinking” — the premise of “just order this one weird pill! all your problems wiped away in the comfort of your home!” — to prevent us from exposing and emphasizing the extreme harm and trauma inflicted on women when they, perhaps unknowingly, swallow toxic chemicals in order to kill the unborn child.

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The Rape of Lucretia — Tarquinius Rapes Lucretia, from Scenes from Roman History Georg Pencz

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Vice Politics by Charles Fain Lehman in City Journal

American Carnage by Christopher Caldwell

Lepanto, a poem by G. K. Chesterton — you have a year to memorize it!

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

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An extraordinary statement from the world’s Orthodox leaders

A Light for Our Times: BLESSED KARL OF AUSTRIA Conference in Washington, D.C. | Oct. 18-20, 2024 (Phil will be speaking there and I will be attending!)

I keep promising to post our music credit! It’s Jazz Suite, Waltz No. 2 (Shostakovich) Mandolin & Manouche Guitar — it’s provided for use on a podcast etc. Not every musical piece is licensed to be used that way. You can find other versions, more orchestral — here’s a lovely one! Or search for the piece with the word mandolin.

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Corey DeAngelis, the man with the most effective voice for school choice and parental control of education, turns out to have been a gay porn actor. (You probably don’t want to know.)

What interests me about this story is not whether a cause, in this case, school choice and funding policies, can be right even if its proponents are hypocrites or have a terrible past, and it’s not about whether someone with a sketchy past can repent and work on the side of right (of course they can and should).

It’s about whether depraved acts can be okay for adults and not okay for kids. We need to figure this out, because our moral confusion is harming our children, even as we claim to be rescuing them.

Some things are good for adults, but not for children. Some book or movie themes are dark and children should be shielded from them; but they are not bad in themselves. We can follow Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina along her path to destruction through sin, but it’s not a story we want to tell children; it would deprive them of their peace, so important to their development. Some stories are dark through and through. Everyone should avoid them and their authors should be shunned until they change their ways.

Alcohol is acceptable for adults and not for children. A 200 lb. man can drink a few glasses of wine, but children shouldn’t be imbibing. And we ought to agree that drunkenness is not acceptable at any age.

Sex is good in marriage and not good outside of it; young children ought to be protected from knowledge about it and even when they are old enough to learn some facts about it, still need to be protected from exposure, so powerful is the appetite for it (which makes sense, because along with taking nourishment, reproduction is a primal force in any living thing). Some forms of sex are wrong and harm everyone, even if they are done in secret, because secretive things have a way of making themselves known; they never remain secret, nor kept in control.

Some things are just evil. There’s not a good side to them. Evil things, sinful things, bad things, don’t become acceptable once one is an adult.

Porn is completely and absolutely wrong for everyone. It’s always wrong. It’s not just wrong to have it in schools where young people can’t avoid it. It’s wrong for adults to justify taking part in it or even look at it, and it’s done incalculable harm to our society.

The problem right now with DeAngelis is that he seems to be drawing a line just there, between gay porn being bad for children and okay for adults.

It’s hard to say. This tweet is his statement about the revelations, after a period of silence:

As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal. Just like everyone else, I have made mistakes throughout my life, learned from those mistakes, used that as an opportunity to grow and tried to channel that experience into something positive. I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children. I will never stop fighting for what is right.

Opponents of the degradation of public schools are reluctant to inquire too deeply into the mind of their most effective champion; most are giving him a pass.

Well, Keri Smith, a writer on the lies of the Left, did challenge him:

None of us are a “victim” of our own poor choices, including me and including you. You are not a victim here. You chose to keep your gay porn past in the closet while you became the face of a movement working to end the sexualization of children and the exposure of children to sexually inappropriate indoctrination. You did so knowing that if this came out you could and would damage the credibility of that movement. You could have been honest up front about the mistakes of your old life, even without sharing specifics, and shown that you had a repentance and redemption experience, but you didn’t. I didn’t notice an apology in here to the parents or the anti-woke movement who aligned with you, unwittingly. Just an effort to claim victimhood. Redemption only ever follows repentance.

Smith implies in her last sentence her concern that DeAngelis has not actually repented of being involved in gay porn.

And I don’t see it in his tweet either. On the contrary.

Immediately following his tweet, the responses came pouring in. The ones from his allies affirmed him for his good work and attributed the revelations to the chaotic opposition he faces. Some opponents mock him for being a hypocrite and somehow use the revelation of his transgressions to assert their support for gay porn in schools.

In this midst of the uproar, DeAngelis retweeted a lot of the supportive messages, including this one:

Plenty of things are perfectly fine for consenting adults to enjoy but completely inappropriate for kids.

Plenty of things are perfectly fine for consenting adults, but gay porn is not one of them.

DeAngelis retweeting this opinion is why I question whether he repents of what he did before (and has amended his ways), or whether it’s just that he regrets being caught.

As Smith says, he must have known his past would come up, so why didn’t he meet it head on? Is it because he doesn’t repudiate his actions, as the retweet implies? (And spare me the “retweets don’t mean agreement — his retweets in that time frame were all from those who support him and his work.)

Or is he just confused, as so many are, about how to go about making things good? Does he just hope everyone will forget? Is he paralyzed by shame? In that case, we should help him by being very truthful.

Notice his explanation tweet doesn’t say forthrightly that gay porn is reprehensible and depraved. Is that because he’s still involved, whether in real life or in his mind and soul — still attached to his past? I say soul because sin leaves a stain. We have a right to know, just as a food company would have the right to know what the attitudes of a former poisoner are. If he’s the spokesman, it would be better for the movement not to find out that he’s still using or making gay or any other sort of porn, or thinks it’s okay for adults.

Part of the problem is we’ve become inured even to extreme evil like the videos he made. We are so worn down by our pornified society that we think opposing it sounds unrealistic. But those videos were evil and what’s more, inevitably involve children (directly — his porn involved teen boys and even a glimpse of it shows his main appeal being his youthful appearance. Joseph Sciambra has written about this and bravely tells the truth about the homosexual obsession having to do, ultimately, with a fear of death, a longing for youth, and the drive to find ever younger people as an object of the fetish).

If we’re being honest, we would acknowledge that as much as the corruption in schools has to do with a political agenda, it has to do probably even more with the immersion in porn of everyone involved. After all, if 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women admit to using porn within the span of a month, it’s likely that it’s a problem in our schools’ adult population.

We don’t want our children to smoke, but we also don’t want them exposed to second-hand smoke. Likewise and much more pressingly, we don’t want them exposed to the corruption of porn-users.

Sometimes a person can want to be forgiven and accepted, and people of good faith must forgive. But if that person has taken on leadership in a movement, then those of good faith have a duty to protect the movement — in this case, against the Left in its pursuit of imposing its perverted mores on our children. We are justified in asking for accountability. Acceptance isn’t a given, especially where repentance is not unambiguous. Sometimes, acceptance is cynical. Is it that the person is instrumental to the success of the political project? Then how altruistic is the forgiveness?

This Reason piece on his firing by his primary employer, the American Federation for Children, begins by asserting, “[DeAngelis] is being punished for a regretted incident from his distant past that has nothing to do with his current job.” Well, the incident doesn’t have nothing to do with his current job. We may be wanting innocence for our children, but we are not innocents ourselves! Surely we can trace the line between his past and advocacy for children, especially where he himself seems not clear about how far behind it is. Let’s not check our common sense in at the door.

The article states towards the end, “There is no tension between DeAngelis's decision, a decade ago, to appear in a gay pornographic film, and his current work calling for more freedom in education.” But there is tension between his gay porn past and his currently sketchy stance on that past.

The main thing is that no, we can’t accept the notion that porn, gay or otherwise, is fine among adults but not fine with children, nor can we deny there can be a fairly broad opportunity opened up by such an assumption for undermining the cause, both by means of criticism by the opposition and by compromise in the mission.

One person’s supportive tweet said in part, “I’d trust him more with my kids than I would the School of Education faculty of my alma mater.”

Though the point about the educators is well taken, I would not trust him with my kids. I’m not even sure I want to trust him with the movement. I’m asking for better categories, better principles, in handling this revelation and assessing what our response to him or to anyone in his position ought to be.

His apparent lack of understanding, of self-reckoning, about the depravity of his actions — at least, his lack of communicating what his understanding is, amounting as it does to one tweet and some retweets — is not good for us as we fight to protect our children… and it’s not good for Corey DeAngelis.

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San Diego diocese bans homeschool groups on parish properties, proclaims zero toleration of the choice to homeschool, against Church teaching

Cardinal McElroy’s statement on Synodality, professing limitless toleration for marginal groups

Did Amber Thurman die as a result of a restrictive abortion law (strong protection for the unborn) or from legal abortion?

Mifepristone (“abortion pill/chemical abortion”) is dangerous

Leninthink by Gary Saul Morson — lies are a feature of the murderous ideology

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The Imminent Russia-US War by Christopher Caldwell

A Just-War Perspective on the War in Ukraine by Phil Lawler

Governor Newsom signs bills to combat deepfake election content

Hustler vs. Falwell

The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy (affiliate links)

Hillbilly Elegy

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Build Back Better

Late-Term Abortion and Infanticide Fact Check by Leila

From our bookshelf, in the Literacy Project: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, by Albert O. Hirschman, Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

The School for Housewives, Leila’s new publication! It’s based very loosely on the Reykjavik School of Housewives — have you ever watched this film?

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A book that helped me (Leila) understand how revelatory nature is: Vestige of Eden, Image of Eternity: Common Experience, the Hierarchy of Being, and Modern Science by Daniel Toma, biologist at the University of Minnesota (affiliate link)

Harris tax and spending proposals: What we know by Joseph Lawler and Zach Halaschak

Movie: Arrival

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From the Archives: The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood by Justin Dyer.

It is telling, Conklin notes, that, throughout the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and despite the numerous changes great and small that were made to the document, no one ever disputed the initial inclusion of “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right alongside the rights of life and liberty.

The ‘Tell’ in Zuckerberg’s Letter to Congress by Philip Hamburger

Mr. Zuckerberg (and surely his lawyers) thus admits both the pressure and the social-media censorship but carefully keeps the two apart. The aim, presumably, is to avoid having Meta treated as a state actor for purposes of the First Amendment and then being held liable for damages.

Treatise on the Love of God by St. Francis de Sales, translated by Rev. John Ryan. This is the translation I have and used to write my talk. If the recording becomes available, I will post it. The book (two volumes) seems to be out of print. I don’t know if other translations retain the earthiness of St. Francis’ descriptions of the baby nursing at his mother’s breast as an image of the love of God. ~ Leila

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