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Celebrating the Seven Cardinal Sins
One of my gay friends (“Chad”) posts repeated rainbow-colored memes and pictures on his Facebook feed, every day during “Pride Month.” He views gays as a civil rights group: Why should someone be treated differently simply because they were born differently? At first, I found it odd that Chad insisted on celebrating his pride in, well, in simply being born different. Nothing he accomplished, but just the way he was born. That seems like me spending a month every year celebrating my pride in being born with brown hair. I mean, brown hair is nice, but it seems like an inadequate reason for parades.
Anyway, after a while, it occurred to me that Chad’s celebration of pride could serve as a model for other holiday months. Perhaps we should have a celebratory month for each of the Seven Cardinal (Deadly) Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth. (Obviously, we would not celebrate The Seven Heavenly Virtues. That’s no fun.) Fortunately, the LGBTQQIP2SAA+ founding, um, fathers had the foresight to observe Pride Month in June, so each of the remaining six months of the year could be used to observe the six remaining Cardinal Sins. It works out so perfectly, I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence. This must have been the plan all along.
August will be fun – an entire month celebrating Lust! Woohoo! And I’m not sure exactly how some of our neighbors will observe the months celebrating Gluttony and Sloth. What, exactly, would they do differently? And, if I’m being brutally honest, I’m not sure what I would do differently in some of these months.
The Seven Cardinal Sins have always been commonplace in society. But they’ve moved beyond commonplace. Now they have become not just accepted but even admired in our society, to the point that we can have a month celebrating one of them and no one notices anything odd. You might think that somebody in their initial planning meetings might have said, “Hey, guys – er – people: You think maybe we should choose a different word? This is technically one of the Seven Cardinal Sins, ya know. This would be easy for some right-wing Christian hate-filled bigot to misinterpret and make a stink about it. How about, say, ‘confidence’ or something less potentially inflammatory?”
But we are a post-Christian society. Those in that meeting likely don’t know what the Cardinal Sins are, and it never occurred to them that Pride was one of them. Throughout history, religion has always been overlooked at times. Now it’s irrelevant. To many of us, anyway. So this concern probably never came up.
Imagine if I showed up to a Pride Parade, dressed in rainbow colors, carrying the following sign (with PRIDE in rainbow colors):
- Proverbs 16:18 – PRIDE goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
I think most people wouldn’t even understand my point. Although I’m fairly certain that any quote from the Bible would be met with hostility, whether they understood it or not. They don’t have to understand something to hate it. In fact, it’s much easier to hate something you don’t understand.
This is why I fear our new culture, which intentionally does not teach children about Judeo-Christian ethics, and teaches that Western Civilization in general (and America in particular) is evil. This lack of understanding enables people to hate that which has done so much good in the world. The leftist desire for power requires them to destroy other sources of authority. They destroy them at their peril.
Actually, they destroy them at everyone else’s peril, as well.
The Judeo-Christian ethic teaches that we are all God’s children and that we all have value. We are important to God. And He expects a lot from us. We do our best to please him, although we frequently fail. But God loves us despite our shortcomings, so we continue to try.
The fact that we are all God’s children helped lead to the concept of personal liberties, property rights, and the rule of law – not just for royalty, but even for lowly peasants. If God loves each of us, then we all have some value, and thus, some rights. All of us. Personal liberty is a wonderful thing.
But with personal liberty, comes personal responsibility. Liberty does not mean ‘just do whatever you want.’ Only a virtuous people can handle liberty, without disastrous consequences. There are external authorities on virtue, like God, for example. But what if we don’t care for some of His outdated opinions on virtue? Surely we can just agree amongst ourselves what virtue is. That way we can change it to suit our tastes, as times change.
This has not turned out well. Why even try to follow rules, if we can change the rules whenever we want? Plus, it makes no sense, unless there is no God.
If there is no God, then some will conclude that their existence has no deeper meaning beyond amusing themselves. Hunter S. Thompson could explain this better than I, but without the guardrails provided by an overseeing God, you can go from liberty to chaos to misery very, very quickly.
Unbridled liberty should lead to happiness. It really should. Believe me, I wish it did.
But it doesn’t. For whatever reasons, it just doesn’t. It creates a hole in your soul that can never be filled. There are a lot of reasons for this. Many books have been written about this, including the book quoted above. But regardless of what those reasons are, this is just the way it is. Aristotle had a point with his discussions of logos. Man’s Search for Meaning sounds simple, but it can be complex.
Humans are funny creatures.
We’d rather not think about that, however. We’re having a wonderful time. So we march in parades and try to enjoy the moment, while trying not to think about where we’re all going.
And trying not to wonder why we have this nagging feeling, way deep inside, that something is just not quite right. We don’t want to search for meaning. We just want to have fun. So if we’re having so much fun, why are we so miserable? What’s wrong? What’s missing?
“It must be someone else’s fault. Those people over there. With their Bibles and their churches and crap. Man, I hate them, and everything they stand for. Whatever the heck that is. We must destroy them. Then, we’ll finally be happy.”
Leftist control of our educational and religious institutions has been an incredible success for them. Their fostering of ignorance, hate, and intolerance has put into motion things which will be difficult to undo.
I don’t see how this ends well. I don’t think that the left will see that they’ve won until we’ve all lost.
NOTE: Credit for the colorfully modified quote from Proverbs above, and for part of the inspiration for this post, goes to the indispensable Babylon Bee.
This was also partially inspired by stories told to me by my two kids in college. Their descriptions of their friends’ fun-filled misery added a lot to this as well. Many of their friends are having so much fun that they need Prozac and weekly counseling sessions.
Published in General
Zafar doesn’t ambush us (generally) with stuff—for which I, as a middle-aged lady prone to vapors for real am grateful.
When God objected to the sons of God marrying the daughters of men in Genesis 6, who was presiding over all those weddings?
Were there weddings at all? When Sarah instructs Abraham to take Hagar as his second wife, there’s no mention of a Justice of the Peace or any other extra-familial authority.
When Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana, was the government involved? For that matter, did the Temple even send a priest?
That’s what I mean by human history—not the past 800 years or 400 years or whatever.
According to Wikipedia (for what that’s worth!)
“For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations. If two people claimed that they had exchanged marital vows—even without witnesses—the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married[citation needed].
Some states in the US hold that public cohabitation can be sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. Marriage license application records from government authorities are widely available starting from the mid-19th century. Some are available dating from the 17th century in colonial America.[2] Marriage licenses have been required since 1639 in Massachusetts, with their use gradually expanding to other jurisdictions.[3]
This, by the way, is not at all an argument that a mere few centuries (!?) give or take of Western history should be lightly cast aside. Obviously, the marriage of a man to a man or a woman to a woman is the largest of a number of major modern experiments in how “family” is to be understood. It is not clear how these are going to work out in the long run. It is difficult to overstate the evidence for the catastrophic failure of another of these experiments, that of the single-mother-supported-by-government.
I am less persuaded that allowing Bob to marry Ken (all other things being equal) has proven equally disastrous. Yes, of course, the activist mob has weaponized SSM as a way to go after Christians (not Muslims though!) and drive them out of the public square. Perhaps that was predictable, but in any case the Social Justice people seem quite happy to find other ways and reasons to harass Christian bakers (e.g. by asking for devil-worship-dildo cakes). It’s not really about the gays and lesbians, it’s about the Christians.
My hope was (and remains) that the rationale for legal recognition of that union would be that marriage makes Bob legally responsible for and duty-bound to Ken and vice versa; that Ken’s relatives and Bob’s relatives are likewise understood to be “in-laws” and therefore expected to provide a safety net for them in times of trouble and that if Bob and Ken either already have children from previous heterosexual relationships or adopt children (as we all know by now, Queen GrannyDude frowns on ART) that familial safety net will be available to the kids as well.
I have seen this work, in practical terms, even in the absence of legal recognition (including in my own family). As in the olden days, the “marriage” worked out as a private contract between families functioned without the blessing of the law.
Because I believe that in our present culture which, by and large, is both mostly secular and culturally diverse, and provides for so much mobility that marriages need to be recognized in law in order to function as we want and need them to. The families and the community are no longer really enough.
As with the torment of poor Jack Phillips, I think the real hazard is distinct from SSM. Legal marriage is already such a weakened institution, and the devil-worship-dildo-cake crowd doesn’t have to be gay or lesbian to be part of the problem. Meanwhile, I’d argue that Cato (to name one) is part of the solution…if there is to be a solution. Which I’m not at all convinced by.
And, again, I think an opportunity to shore marriage up a bit was missed when SCOTUS ended the discussion prematurely.
By the way, we don’t have to get into a whole SSM thing again! Though we had some pretty awesome, 600-comment discussions back in the day, didn’t we?
Gay women are okay just the way gay men are okay and you’re okay and I’m okay (sound like a book title, er somethin’). People are people. Glorious and fallen. Wonderful and terrible.
I’m not here to argue against people with same-sex attraction. I’m here to argue against the culture normalizing the behavior and equalizing unequal things. That is, the most distinguishing difference between the gay couple type and the straight couple type is the (lack of) procreative potential, which bears with it enormous responsibilities and the good of societal recognition of such.
Distinctions matter, but not so much to leftists who desire a leveling effect on all things, which ultimately leads to chaos out of order. Anytime you’re agreeing with the Left…
Right. I’m just saying that anal sex doesn’t really enter into things. (Okay, you’re right Chesty! Everything sounds…y’know…) I haven’t seen any articles claiming that the health risks are somehow less when a woman is on the receiving end?
One could, in theory at least, have vigorous public debates about any/all the following:
1.) the (bad) health effects of anal sex
2.) the end of marriage as a socially-sanctioned arena for sexual activity
3.) regulating or outlawing Assisted Reproductive Technology
4.) the importance of replicating, to the extent possible, the roles of “mom” and “dad” when circumstances have deprived a child of one or more actual parent (for example, my kids!).
5.) the importance of marriage not as a validator of emotion but arbiter and recognizer of duties. As Phil says, quite correctly in my view, the government should have no interest in what you feel for each other, only what you can be expected to do for each other, and who
gets stuck with the other’s junkinherits property when a person dies.These get brought into discussions of SSM, but are in fact independent of SSM.
In my view, it’s a bad strategy to link them, because —for example— the question of whether it’s immoral to deliberately create babies in ways that sever them from their biological roots gets subsumed into and masked by “you just hate gay people” when in fact one might object whether the parents are gay or straight.
It doesn’t matter who is presiding. It matters who is enforcing. Both marriage and inheritance. Take a moment to google “code of hammurabi marriage” to see what I mean by “from the beginning of written history”. Keep in mind that government enforces private contracts, today as then, according to rules it establishes about valid contracts.
This is true when government is a simple extended family, a single tribe of interconnected families, ethnic coalitions of tribes, a feudal or monarchical system, or some variation on the modern nation-state.
That “citation needed” is a tip to what that’s worth. But even as shown it buttresses my point. The key is that government (historically) isn’t interested in enforcing marriage contracts that are detrimental to itself, or indirectly, detrimental to the society it controls. That is a very new creation.
And don’t let anyone hand-wave away the importance of reproduction and child-rearing to society.
This and the abortion debate are just the lastest issues that highlight just how well the Supreme Court ends discussions.
Have you asked them why they don’t want you dominating the public square any more?
Or at least less than you currently do? (They might see glass half full while you see it as half empty? Perspective, right?)
I’ve seen lots of made up answers that are variations on ‘they hate us because we’re so beautiful’ but what reason do they actually have? It’s not going to be as complimentary, but it will have the virtue of being real.
Is it an iteration of the basic theme that Ataturk played out in Turkey with Muslim institutions there?
Indeed, reproduction and child-rearing are society.
SCOTUS ends discussions much the same way the US ended several wars – leaving factions split right down the middle, angry, and ready to do each other violence.
Amen.
Indeed. They get sucked into the discussion in order to lay claim to the governmental benefits, monetary and contractual, previously attached only to traditional marriage. Benefits whose historical purpose was to promote the fertility society needs to survive.
@thereticulator
That’s part of the satire.
Its prevalence among heterosexuals is a direct result of porn-culture (visual stimulation), especially among women.
The pleasure in anal for the recipient is the stimulation of the prostate (else cattle prods wouldn’t be a thing). Women do not have prostates, so it is all the damage without the pleasure. They do it because the guys think it looks hot or she’s on the rag (or other problem preventing/limiting proper sex) and he’s impatient.
It isn’t driven from any kind of a healthy place, either from a religious or secular view, unless we want to say social pressure on women to harm themselves while satisfying a male’s pleasure is a good thing.
@philturmel – please don’t take my failure to respond further to you as anything other than disgust. I’ve just been down the SSM road sooo many times on Ricochet that 1) I know where an interchange with someone like you will go, and 2) if you care what I think (and I’m sure you don’t) you can find it elsewhere.
I used to think it had something to do with actual “legitimate grievances,” Zafar, but I truly don’t buy it any longer. I think it’s a human madness, a passion that detatches from whatever might originally have inspired it and becomes an end in itself. All causes become merely excuses: the feminism isn’t actually about me, the anti-racism isn’t actually about POCs, and the Islamophilia and homophilia isn’t about you.
And so in some sense, the targeting of a Christian baker isn’t really about Christianity, whatever its sins. The harassment of Jack Phillips is motivated by the same strange, nihilistic mob-mind that led Oberlin students and faculty to attempt to drive Gibson’s bakery out of business, or that goes berserk over a smiling teenaged boy; the same lunacy that drives supposedly civilized and certainly not “marginalized” people like Peter Fonda to publicly call for horrifying violence against a woman (Sarah Sanders) and a child (Barron Trump).
As with all abusive behavior, the motive is opportunity. “Injustice” is an excuse for jettisoning reason and restraint. The target is chosen according to his/her perceived vulnerability, and the reward is an apparently intoxicating sense of self-righteous power.
I am weirdly reminded of a flock of chickens who, upon glimpsing weakness in a sick or injured hen, will that will turn on her and, relentlessly, senselessly peck her to death.
As Dave Rubin says “they’ll come for you, too.”
A gay friend of mine takes a similar view. He told me that he used to think the gay rights movement was about gay rights. But now that trans-sexuals and other gender variants have become so popular, he feels that gays have been abandoned by those who used to champion their cause. He now doesn’t think it was ever about gay rights.
He doesn’t think they were trying to help him, or anyone else. They were trying to hurt someone. And when a more effective weapon became available, they dropped him and picked it up.
He can be a bit cynical sometimes (How could he not be – he is a human resources director, Lord help him.), and he told me this just when trans-sexuals were starting to become popular. I thought he was over-reacting a bit, and I told him so. He helpfully pointed out that I had no idea what the %$#& I was talking about.
Perhaps he was right.
Oftentimes it’s a mistake to paint with too broad a brush. The “gay rights” movement is pretty large and has a fairly lengthy history. What exactly it is depends on who you’re talking about and when. I’ve made contributions to it, both financially and as a volunteer lawyer, over the years primarily in the areas of anti-bullying in schools and marriage equality. Maybe I just lack self-awareness but in my mind those contributions were very much gay rights focused an not at all about some “will to power.” I think we more or less won both fights and the world is a better place for both of them. But then again, I walked away after the missions were accomplished. I do know some people in the movement who are just leftists, who’s only real interest is in finding a cudgel they can grab to force themselves into a position to run everything.
I’m not sure if I should do this but it reminded me of an email I recently wrote and I’m going to copy/paste it here. A little context:
Here goes:
“Brian, I refrained from interjecting earlier because I know you have a history with Ted, but he told me to go ahead, so here goes.
Candidly, we don’t necessarily share all of Lambda’s priorities. We’ve been donors in the past and may be in the future, because there’ve been equality issues for LGBT people – like marriage equality – that we wanted to make a contribution to. I was even a cooperating attorney in a case a number of years ago. It’s work I’m very proud of and it’s work that I know Lambda is still touting its success in.
But neither of us is on the left, and neither of us is a partisan democrat. We’re both basically libertarians which means that in addition to being committed to equality for gay people (and I’ll start speaking just for myself as to some specifics) I think religious liberty – even for people I disagree with – is an important value. I remember a very unproductive discussion I had with Jim Bennett about that issue a few years ago and I still think he, and Lambda, are in the wrong not to accept a “live an let live” approach to wedding service providers, etc. I’m also not necessarily sure that one size fits all bathroom policies dictated from Washington DC are the best way to ensure that the needs of transgender people are respectfully accommodated across the country.
And as someone with a long on and off history with Lambda, I’m also concerned that Lambda strays from issues particular to gay people entirely and just becomes part of the organized left sometimes, when there isn’t an organizing issue like marriage equality to focus on. I’ve seen pitches related to things like preserving abortion rights, and the Affordable Care Act over the years. Important? Maybe? Gay rights issues? No.
Your email trying to raise money based on a supposed “onslaught” from the current president seems to come from that place. It’s not about equality. It’s just #resistance fundraising based on demonizing a politician you don’t support. It does nothing to advance equality. It just divides. Martin Luther King’s genius was in his instinct to appeal to the better natures of his opponents, not in his ability to demonize them. He wouldn’t be remembered as he is if he’d gone the latter route. So we’re going to pass at this point. And for your own success in this new position, I’d encourage you to remember that not everybody in your audience will necessarily be in lockstep with you all the time, and often those people who differ will have considered, deeply felt, and intelligible reasons for their views.
I’m sort of sorry to miss Bon Foster. I’ve gone many years and I know we will have many friends there. But we’re going to pass this year.
All the best,
Michael”
I think it was about gay rights for a lot of people—me, to name one— just as feminism was about women’s rights. I know that my life is very different than it might have been had my ancestresses not agitated for the right to vote, and for expanded opportunities for women. Despite the claims of the fourth wave (or are we on the fifth by now?) domestic violence and rape are far less common now than they were when I was young: those are very positive changes.
That’s what makes this tricky—and makes me sympathize with Zafar even if I disagree with him: There were and no doubt remain bona fide correctible human injustices (as opposed to the cosmic kind); situations in which the trade offs that would be required to remove existing obstacles from our fellow citizens’ pursuit of happiness could be made without unreasonable sacrifice. There are differences of opinion (not spiteful, not “fragile”) about what counts as a reasonable sacrifice. That’s a conversation we can have (and do, here at Ricochet, all the time). In general, the American way is to give everyone a chance to make their best case, and then we vote.
That isn’t what the harassment of Jack Phillips, or the attempted stomping of Gibson’s Bakery (et al, et al) is all about. The Social Justice left would —in a heartbeat—turn and harass and stomp you, Zafar, if for whatever reason you found yourself in their crosshairs. And you would be shown no more mercy than Phillips or the Gibsons.
I’m not offended by your attitude or non-participation or even your disgust. When publicly discussing a hot topic with committed opposition, my aim is that passers-by get the complete picture. I’m well aware that my points about the long-term future of our free society are likely incomprehensible to or irrelevant to the 3%. As for (2), I don’t avoid you on Ricochet, and from what I’ve read, I believe this is the only topic where I disagree with you. In other words, I do care what you think.
Very good point.
I would love to know how that email was received, internally, at their organization. Very interesting process – thanks for taking the time to share that.
Your point about Martin Luther King is a good way to point out your differences with their tactics.
It was received very respectfully. We’ve had a continuing exchange of ideas about hot button issues. I don’t kid myself into thinking I’ve changed any minds but I’ve had a civil discussion about issues where we differ. I’m honestly not sure why I’ve been received that way but I can think of any number of reasons starting with Brian’s history with Ted, and moving through the tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours I’ve given them over the years, and moving on to the number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances I have in their orbit, including other Lambda personnel, board members, cooperating attorneys, donors, etc. In short, I’ve earned certain amount of credibility with them. As a gay, married man with that history, they can’t easily write me off as a “hater” and it probably wouldn’t be in their interest to. I’m not sure you’d get the reception I got although it’s hard to say for sure. I don’t know Brian personally and he may just honestly be someone who’s open to considering other points of view.
In any event, we’ve been trying to schedule a get together with him and his husband socially. I hope that works out. In my experience the best antidote to the tendency to demonize – whether over political differences, sexuality, race, or anything else – is face to face contact. We very rarely hate the people we know. We hate the caricatures we have in our minds of people we don’t know.
Amen.
Gay marriage is legal in all fifty states, mainstream society is cool with homosexuals and the Republican President thinks that gays are wonderful awesome people if they vote for him. The Gay rights movement has pretty much succeeded in America. So all of those gay rights organizations now find themselves without as much of a purpose as they used to so they decided to focus on the T of LBGT. In a similar fashion, the Souther Poverty Law Center now just goes around and says that everyone is racist in order to get more money.
That is a definite problem. Once you build out these organizations, people become dependent on them and it becomes necessary to perpetuate them to keep people employed, even if the initial mission has been accomplished. I definitely think there’s quite a bit of that in the gay rights movement and in other parts of the left, though I doubt it’s unheard of on the right either. It’s in the nature of advocacy groups.
“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.” — Christopher Hitchens
Candidate for Ricochet Quote of the Day post.
Where on earth to you find this stuff?
I was trying to find a quotation where some atheist said that he preferred champagne to dishwater but he didn’t know if the universe did. So I read a list of quotes about champagne and our old buddy Hitch showed up. It started with an essay I’m writing about comparative theology and it ended up about the but. I think that’s a simile for the internet or something.
Agree, agree!
I’m not sure that’s an actual Hitchens quote. A couple months(?) ago, dailycaller had a video parody of Firing Line with three excellent impressionists doing Buckley, Hitchens, and AOC. Well, Buckley and Hitchens were performed well, but AOC is sort of a parody herself. I tried to find it and couldn’t, but it was hilarious for a bit.