One of my family has sadly fallen head over heals in love with the zeitgeist, so much so that he will now own any opinion that does not come with a BBC imprimatur - nor reject any that does. He recently showed his frustration with my repeated references to the “secular asylum” by sarcastically remarking, “I almost wonder whether your word processor has an app to throw it randomly, at least once a paragraph?” I thought that was rather a splendid idea, and wondered if anyone knew where I could find such a thing.
In the late sixties, the seventies and eighties I was pro-actively involved in the pro-life movement; I built the largest local pro-life group in the UK and chaired it for twenty-five years. In the course of that work, I regularly organised, and chaired, public meetings. It was my practice when doing so to send invites to the local pro-abort organisations, who would obligingly turn up and heckle from the back of the hall. I would respond by addressing their leaders directly from the platform and inviting them to join me on the platform and use the microphone to make their case. Rather than lose face, they would usually take up the offer. When they had finished, I would ask the audience to put questions to them. Five minutes or so later, I, taking pity on their obvious discomfort, would reclaim the microphone. Then, as they descended from the platform, I would invite the audience to give them a round of applause for their courage.
Fast forward and compare that civilised and courteous exchange with today: just watch your average Question Time to understand what I mean. For example, could one imagine in one’s wildest dreams, Shami Chakrabarti, the current director of Liberty, a hard-Left pressure group that hides behind the façade of human rights (and hopes that we have forgotten that it once campaigned for legalised incest), treating her opponents with the sort of liberality I have just described? I have no particular axe to grind with Ms Chakrabarti, I’m sure this young lady, who unfortunately suffers from the disability of invariable looking as if she has cod-liver oil swilling round her back teeth, is a pleasant enough soul; I merely cite her as a sort of poster girl for the phenomena that I am describing. Just watch her leading a snarling pack of secular liberals that is set upon anyone who dares to question their latest dogma. Anyone brave enough to query, in the mildest possible terms, secular myths like global warming, or question, again in the mildest possible terms, whether two men addicted to using one another’s bottoms as masturbatory aids can in reality claim to be married, will be lucky to escape alive. There will be no attempt on the part of the secularists to argue their case rationally; the person daring to question their latest dogmas will simply be subjected to mob intimidation, and soon after will disappear from public view with a liberal fatwa on their heads. So the question is: why is the secular liberal seemingly compelled to be so manifestly illiberal. The answer is, somewhat like an onion, multi-layered.
A good priest explain it thus: a Catholic ought in theory to be intolerant because he is the custodian of revealed truth and consequently error is, or should be, deeply repugnant to him. He is tolerant in practice because he loves. The secularist should be tolerant in theory because he denies the possibility of absolute truth. He is intolerant in practice because he does not love.
This insight, whilst true, only takes us so far. Modern political life was conceived in the wombs of Masonic lodges and brought to birth in the French and American revolutions. The dogma at the core of that political reality is that Christ has no place in the public forum. But if Christ has no place in the public forum, Christ be not God. But Christ is God. Therefore the whole edifice that we call modernity is built upon a colossal lie. And a place where people live by colossal lies is by definition an asylum - and this particular asylum is quintessentially secular. Hence my repeated references to life in the secular asylum are dead accurate.
And the inmates of an asylum are inherently intolerant. In an asylum, if a man comes up to you and asserts that he is a horse or Napoleon Bonaparte or that he as just returned from Mars, the last thing you do is respond, “Oh no you’re not.” The reason you do not reply by asserting the truth is because doing so may very well spark a violent reaction. Scruples dictate that you should not confirm the delusion, so you move into small talk; the weather is usually a safe option.
Similarly, in today’s secular asylum, a man can invite me to meet his wife and then wheel out some hairy fellow. Again, I cannot say, “No that’s not your wife, that’s very obviously a bloke.” The reason is the same as in the asylum: I fear the violence that the truth may provoke. Yet again some fellow can have himself castrated and pumped full of artificial hormones to make his breast grow and insist that we call him Susan. Once more, one dare not point out, what is no more than the bleeding obvious, that he is actually a block who has been surgically and chemically mutilated, and that he is no more a woman than he is a horse, because to do so may provoke violence - so we discuss the weather.
There is yet another issue at work, to recognise a lie, you must first believe in truth. But there’s the rub, for those in charge of the secular asylum no longer believe that there is such a thing as objective truth - except paradoxically they do believe that “there is no such thing as an objective truth” is an objective truth! Yet, if there is no such thing as objective truth, then the belief “that there is no such thing as an objective truth” is merely a dogma of their new secular religion, an article accepted on blind faith; and, like all dogmas, because it cannot be dispassionately argued, it must be imposed by intimidation and force.
If you are among the few who have managed to remain sane in the secular asylum, you see examples daily of this relativizing of truth all around you, indeed, there are so many that it is difficult to know where to start. The advance of an irrational intolerance in the secular asylum is now such that we have reached a tipping point from which it is difficult to see us turning back. I’ll give just a handful of up to date examples.
Example 1: recently the actress, Cynthia Nixon, was quoted as saying that for her being gay was a conscious choice. Nixon is “engaged” to a woman with whom she has been in a relationship for eight years. This remark, which she stood by when challenged, brought the gay rights movement and the secular liberal establishment down on her head like a ton of bricks. Why? Because it is not politically expedient for the secular liberal agenda for it to be “a choice”; note, whether it is true or not is no longer deemed relevant, truth is no longer even an issue. It is whether it serves the agenda - or not - of those who run the secular asylum that is now the only issue. Not one of the scores of talking heads who attacked Ms Nixon challenged the truth of her statement; they merely condemned her for letting the side down by telling the truth. “It wasn’t helpful,” would sum up most of the comments. Only in an asylum could truth be describes as “not helpful.”
Example 2: recently, somewhere in the north of England, three Moslem men were convicted of a hate crime and are currently looking at a prison sentence. Their crime was to distribute leaflets that argued that sodomy should be a crime and the penalty for it should be death. Now let me state up front that this is a view that I regard as quite definitely crackpot, but my sympathies are not the issue here. What is an issue is that the entire case against these men was built on lies, and, for the few sane men left in the secular asylum, obvious lies.
First we were solemnly informed that the gay community felt intimidated by these leaflets. No they didn’t! There was not a single gay man in the UK who took them even a teensy-weensy bit seriously. The only way one could be intimidated by them was if one believed that there was a possibility of the men persuading parliament to implement such a law, and no sane man believed that.
The second lie was told by the judge when he informed the accused that the law does not allow us to discriminate on ground of “sexual orientation”. Again not true, the law does nothing to prevent us discriminating against paedophiles for example, which is obviously just as much a “sexual orientation” as is homosexuality. Had these three men suggested that the penalty for convicted paedophiles should be a good flogging, their views, rightly I believe, would have been dismissed as idiotic, but there would have been no policeman fingering their collars.
Example 3: Pat Buchannan after ten years has been silenced as a political analyst at MSNBC because of a clamour from the left that to permit him continued access to the microphones would be dangerous and an outrage against public decency. What this actually meant is that he wasn’t routinely parroting the dogmas of their new secular religion, so he had been condemned by the Sanhedrin for blasphemy. The leaders of an organization that had self-certified itself as America’s leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people rent their garments and squealed that Buchanan’s “extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world.” His extremist ideas? - he believed, along with the vast majority of the human race, that anal copulating was “unnatural and immoral.”
On cue, Abe Foxman, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, a publicly funded hard-Left gang of Jewish bully boys, who has sought to have Pat censored for twenty-two years, piled in. Pat crime here was to have written that “America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the collective decision of Jews themselves.” What else explains the projected decline by 50 percent by 2050 of the Jewish population of America, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”? But, I forgot, truth in the secular asylum is not the issue. Silly me, I keep forgetting.
Example 4: A recent article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, argues that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed when it is born. The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”. Note: the values of a liberal society are presumed to include openness to publicly promoting murder, but we may not publicly suggest that anal copulating may be immoral - and my family member believes that we are not living in a secular asylum!
I am very reluctant to use the word “fascist” because it is one of those words so overused by the Left that it has been rendered meaningless, but I fail to see the big difference between the ideological Nazis who forces Jews to wear large yellow stars on their breast in public and the ideological secularists who closes down Catholic adoption agencies because we were not prepared to place vulnerable children with braces of sodomites. Indeed, on further reflection, faced with an option between walking around with a large yellow star pinned on my breast and placing a vulnerable child for whom I was responsible with a brace of sodomites, I’ll take the star any day.
In Britain today a good married couple can be turned down for adoption because the man confessed to enjoying an annual cigar on his birthday, while the same man, had he confessed to regularly using his best mates bottom as a masturbation aid, would have had a statutory right to adopt! Similarly, the same lunatics will deny a black child a home with a white couple on the grounds that the child may not cope well with this obvious incongruity in his life, yet will give the same child a hairy bloke for a “mum”, while assuring us that the child won’t notice the obvious incongruity.
The downsides of the belief that there is no such thing as objective truth, is all beliefs become mere dogmas. And what cannot be supported by reason or evidence, by its very nature, must be imposed by force. This is why both Communists and the Nazis were doomed inexorably to create Hells on earth; and our current secular masters of the universe are moving, indeed, are compelled to move, inexorably in the same direction. The closing down of Catholic adoption agencies will prove but the first of many draconian measures yet to come. Obama latest sally against Catholic institutions is but another stepping stone on the road to yet one more secular hell in a long line of secular hells. The direction in which we are moving is now obvious, only the speed of travel remains in contention.
Is there then no hope? Well, from the Catholic perspective there must always be hope. Has not the Church watched a thousand such asylums come and go; and outlived every one of them? The secularists are aware of this and that is why they fear and loath the Church. The Freemasons and homicidal lunatics behind the French Revolution were buried by Napoleon within fifteen years; the Communists, who believed that they were the future of the world, are now merely a project for “O” levels students; in Spain 75 years ago an unholy alliance of liberals, socialist, communists and anarchists murdered in cold blood some 15,000 innocent Catholics, yet before the decade was out, the perpetrators of this gruesome slaughter were facing the firing squads of the triumphant Nationalist army; the German Nazis, who boasted that their empire would last a thousand years, managed to barely clock up ten; so why should we assume that our latest condom waiving, depravity pimping, global warming myth peddling, Christophobic masters of the universe are going to fare much better than the last lot - or the lot before them?
It is obviously true that the emasculated post-Conciliar Church has been unable to put up the resistance that our forefathers in faith would have done, but even here things are stirring. Recently, several thousand young traditional French Catholics brought a blasphemous play to a halt in Paris. Where did these young people come from? - nothing in contemporary culture or the enfeebled post-Conciliar Church can even begin to explain their existence. In England, where Catholics have endured a forty year nightmare of dreary bog-standard post-Conciliar Modernists syndicating English sees, we now, against all the odds, have a genuine Catholic man on the see of Shrewsbury - and this just when many of us had given up hope of seeing such a marvel in our lifetime. Bishop Mark Davis’s appointment could well mark the beginning of the end for the effete, stomach turning, bromidic Warlock x Hume bloodline - we can but pray and fast. Whilst there no hard evidence that any of our English bishops are Masons, if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, one can hardly be faulted for wondering …
Ultimately, our hope is not of this world: Our Blessed Lady, when she appeared at Fatima, warned us of the coming triumph of what we may now call the dictatorship of relativism - but she also promised us that her Immaculate Heart would ultimately triumph. One would need to be a very foolish man indeed to distrust the word of the Queen of Heaven, for, although she is undoubtedly gentle and meek, she is also known to have some awesomely powerful friends.
