Friday, May 17, 2013

Random Thoughts

-- Bl. Pope John Paul II was often criticized for having cranked out more canonizations than all his predecessors combined.  Yet this week, Pope Francis outdid them all in a single stroke by canonizing the 813 Martyrs of Otranto, who died on August 14, 1480.  Let the standard-issue, '70's-style liberal Catholics with the "COEXIST" bumper stickers spelled out in religious symbols take note of the fact that Pope Francis, who they hope will usher in the Age of Aquarius, has raised to the altar 813 men who were put to the sword because they refused to convert to Islam.

-- And the canonization of the Martyrs of Otranto is indeed timely in an age when the world is increasingly hostile to persons with religious, and especially Catholic, convictions.  Not even children are safe: a tsunami of sewage bears down on them from all directions during all their waking hours, from the media, from the culture at large, from schools, both secular and religious.  The primary aim of many schools is apparently not to educate children, but to stamp out the faith that their parents try to instill and crank out docile little sexualized atheist footsoldiers.  That is why the Church should consider lowering the age at which the Sacrament of Confirmation is administered.  This Sacrament confers precisely the grace that children need to resist the unholy pressures exerted on them even by persons in authority over them.  Perhaps infant Confirmation should be universally adopted in the Latin Rite, even as it is done in the Eastern rites.

-- Arch-abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been convicted, among other things of three counts of murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter.  In order to avoid the death penalty, he waived his appeals in exchange for a recommendation of fixed life (without parole).  Unable any longer to ignore the story, and in an extraordinary display of chutzpah, the abortion lobby spins it into a cautionary tale against the abrogation of Roe v. Wade.  We are solemnly warned (e.g., by Harry Reid, the creepy Senate Majority Leader from Nevada) that Gosnell provides an example of the sort of back-alley butchery we would get if we again made abortion illegal.  Yet we had been equally solemnly promised that if we legalized abortion, that would be the end of coat-hanger abortionists like Gosnell, whose house of horrors emerged at a time when abortion on demand has been enshrined as a constitutional right for decades.

-- As I have previously made the case in this space, we should seriously think about restricting the franchise to persons who own property.  This is not unprecedented, nor is it on a par with conditioning the right to vote on some arbitrary factor like race.  There is a logic to giving the vote to property owners, because they are the ones who pay for government.  A great evil would be removed from society if those who do not pay taxes were prevented from voting themselves largess out of the pockets of those who do pay taxes.  And, by the way, if owning property were required to be able to vote, I myself would be disenfranchised.

-- For the 37th time tonight, the House of Representatives voted to "repeal" Obamacare.  This has no chance of surviving in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and everybody knows it.  Yet the House, with its power of the purse-strings, really could kill Obamacare, by the simple expedient of de-funding it.  That it does not do this proves it is not serious about getting rid of Obamacare.

-- The Obama administration's line on its burgeoning scandals is, in essence, that the scandals are the work of rogue operatives and Obama is too out-of-touch and too ignorant to have known what has been going on on his watch.  The idea was considered laughable that Ronald Reagan did not know about the Iran-Contra affair, yet we are being propped up to believe that Barack Obama did not know about the massive corruption of his own administration until he read about it in the papers.

-- The IRS scandal proves, not that the IRS has rogue employees, but that the entire agency itself is rogue, and needs to be abolished.  

-- And speaking of the IRS, it is the IRS, with its famous bedside manner, that is slated to administer Obamacare.  That should keep anybody with a brain awake at night.

-- At any rate, there is still pistachio almond ice cream from Baskin Robbins, topped with hot fudge.  Even better than booze.  At least until the Obama administration gets around to abolishing ice cream, on Obamacare grounds.  But then, maybe the abolition of ice cream is what it would take to get people to wake up to the fact that the Obama administration is the thing that really needs abolishing.

2 comments:

  1. This is a very good post (of course yours are always good).
    What really tickles me is Pope Francis canonizing those who were martyred for not embracing Islam. I can hear the PC crowd shrieking already.

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  2. There is a lot to think about in your post. I am happy about two things; Pope Francis' message to the world by canonizing the Martyrs of Otranto and that we can still enjoy ice cream! God will have the last word on all of this stuff happening.

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