Category: Critical Issues

Critical Issues

The Banned Books Scam

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

“Banned Book Week” is September 18-24, and my local public library (the Morse Institute Library) has let its freak flag fly and got out ahead of the curve by starting its promotion early. The display was promptly praised on a local Facepalm™ group, where it received an overwhelmingly (though not entirely) positive response. I had to admit to finding it rather embarrassing. “Freedom is reading a banned book” sounds like the philosophical musings of an over-indulged 14-year old planning a coup out at the vacation house to overthrow the patriarc...

Critical Issues

The alleged rape is real, but it is the rape of sexuality itself

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Quote of the Day for Saturday, September 12th, 2013: Pete Jermann, writing on-line last week for Crisis Magazine, anticipates that the new school year will see the resurgence of the phony “college rape crisis” narrative that became de rigeur of late, especially last year. Except that Jermann sees that it is not phony at all, but simply a disordered expression of a genuine response to violation, but a violation that encompasses (and implicates!) the entirety of modern “sexual” culture:   The crisis is not in the competing true/false allegations of th...

Critical Issues

The weakness of it is not due to the argument itself but to the condition of the hearer

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Published on cnsnews.com last Friday, the Rev. Marcel Guarnizo provides a lengthy response to Bill O’Reilly’s recent dismissal of “Bible thumping” in the public square over the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, including the following comments on the incompatibility of the type of law involved in establishing such a legal fiction with a constitutional order per se: O’Reilly fails to make clear distinctions. For example, on the issue of religion in the public square, his claim that theological arguments are unacceptable in the public square is meant ...

Critical Issues

Not so much a cultural revolution, as it is a mop-up job

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Thanks to a link provided by Operation Rescue Boston’s Bill Cotter in a recent newsletter email, I recently came across an article by John Jalsevac at LifeSiteNews.com, which I consider the most insightful piece of short literature I have read on the cultural phenomenon of gay marriage, recognizing not only the problem the concept presents, but also acknowledging the very thin grounds modern (i.e. liberalized) “conservatives” have to stand on in resisting the expansion of the modern notion of marriage to include gays: But an honest look at the cultural l...

Critical Issues

Alan Keyes Schools a Journalist on the Distinction Between Principles and Particulars

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Alas, how different the world might be today if that 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race had turned out differently: The video provider labels this “A strong argument against gay marriage”, though I would be inclined to call it something like “A simple elucidation of the fundamental error of gay marriage”. For what it’s worth, Alan Keyes is the only presidential candidate I’ve ever donated money to (in the 2000 election), though I very well may have donated to Rick Santorum this year if he had been the GOP nominee. I love the look on Obama’s face when they cu...

Critical Issues

Forced Abortions & Sterilizations in Massachusetts?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Occasionally, I read or hear about something so stunning that I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience, watching from a detached vantage point as the world unfurls strangely in front of me. Yesterday afternoon, I had one of those experiences. I was at work, pausing to check the headlines, weather and traffic, when I saw the surreal headline: “Massachusetts Appeals Court rules that judge was wrong to order mentally ill woman to have an abortion and to then be sterilized”. Forced abortions and sterilizations in Massachusetts? Granted, the court-ord...

Critical Issues

Same-sex marriage violates the right of the family to protection by society and the state

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 5th, 2012. Douglas Farrow, from an outstanding piece in the new (and terrific-looking) issue of Touchstone, entitled Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage? Nail-head, meet hammer: [W]e should observe also that when a family of some description is founded by a same-sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent-child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect. It deprives the child, whether in the same way that divorce does or in some more innovative technological way, of its prima facie right to i...

Critical Issues

A Final Note on Hvistendahl’s Incoherence

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Prior to my summer blogging hiatus, I had posted a couple of entries on some responses to Mara Hvistendahl’s recent book on the social consequences of widespread sex-selection abortions in Asia. I ended up requesting the book from my local public library, and checked it out in mid-July. I couldn’t get past the prologue; it was dreadful. As Hvistendahl laid out her project in the prologue, it was hard not to detect something like a sadness for a great hope gone bad; a belief that abortion should have been not just a means for individual women to “gain con...

Critical Issues

The tragedy is that they’re dead

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Quote of the Day for June 27th, 2011: The New York Times’ Ross Douthat’s take on the Mara Hvistendahl book I posted on last Wednesday: This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime th...

Critical Issues

‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011: Jonathan Last, in a review published at the Wall Street Journal Online of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, a recent book by feminist Mara Hvistendahl: Ms. Hvistendahl is particularly worried that the "right wing" or the "Christian right"—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself. She believes that something must be done about the purposeful abo...