By Irene F. Starkehaus -
As a result of society's increasing nonjudgement born of secular homogenization, it would seem that God has been recast in the role of Walt Disney – which is nearly perfect except that people are not ashamed to say that they went to Disney World and paid $200 to stand in line for three hours for a ride that lasted forty-five seconds.
Nevertheless, if you can get past the disgrace of being seen kneeling in the pews for sixty minutes once a week, God and the "It's a Small World" ride, these are pretty much the same thing now. Tame, obedient, not particularly demanding.
And isn't that part of the progressivist utopia that we've been racing toward during Barack Obama's presidency? That there will be a chicken in every pot being cooked by an undocumented worker, and that everyone goes to Heaven because John Boehner has personally met Lucifer and Lucifer couldn't even win the Republican nomination? What makes you think he's go any power over your immortal soul?
But God and Disney World are not the same thing, Ted Cruz is not Lucifer and we are about to learn what happens when the end results do not justify the relativism of voting for blowhards because the blowhards can win. The best thing we can hope for happens to be identical to the worst thing we can hope for, which is that Trump wins. It's like watching Marty McFly watching himself jump into the DeLorean and race headlong into the past in order to save the future. Very surreal.
The simple elegance in the design of our election system was that it was assumed free people would first love God with all their hearts, that they would try to keep His laws because of that love and that this love of would translate – albeit imperfectly – into a love of fellow citizens.
That was the contract that kept the country moving forward from its onset – that even when we disagreed on methods, we trusted that voters wanted the nation to remain free and to thrive in a way that met with God's approval. God's approval meant something to them because to them, God is actually real…as is His judgment.
Now that the culture is imbued with moral relativism, a love of God and, by extension, neighbor can't be presumed anymore. Sure, we trot out a couple of Corinthians every four years and marvel at how well they match the upholstery in our shiny McMansions, but does anyone care why the Corinthians are important, or are these just talking points bridging the gap between amnesty debates and a drive for expanded Common Core?
The most amazing effect of codified tolerance is that our attitudes have so drastically shifted that the only intolerable acts against society are loving God and obeying His laws, which are being systematically subordinated by the states. To paraphrase Chesterton, materialism drowns out rationalism and skepticism. It comes in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition. The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything else.
So we have come to an era where we can uphold that 40-year-old men with honest-to-goodness XY chromosomes should be allowed to piddle next to six-year-old girls because those men don lipstick and imagine that they have XX chromosomes too. We cannot uphold, however, that we exist because a creative being imagined us, and that we are bound to live by His very logical laws because we are His creations. That's too farfetched. That's the thinking of knuckle-dragging troglodytes and we certainly can't build a civil society on a fantasy.
Andrew Klavan – among other things – is a contributor of the Daily Wire and his recent discussions have been about his anguish over how to proceed during this 2016 Presidential Election. Klavan knows that he's facing the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, but he can't quite determine if the lesser evil is Hillary or Trump.
Here's audio from his recent podcast that lays out the five reasons that Andrew Klavan struggles to hold his nose and vote. FYI – If you're facing a time crunch, you'll want to skip ahead and start the audio at about 14:40, although listening from the beginning is well worth your time:
Just to recap – Five reasons that Andrew Klavan is struggling with his vote.
- Trump called for violence against protesters.
- He dithered when asked about David Duke and the KKK.
- He didn't condemn Trump supporters who sent anti-Semitic death threats to a journalist who wrote an unflattering article about him.
- He went after Ted Cruz's father and wife even though he says he believes that family members of candidates should be off limits.
- He consistently sings the praises of dictators.
Andrew Klavan concludes that these five aspects of the Trump campaign are organically evil and that the Republic will not survive evil. Mr. Klavan hesitates about what do with his vote because he's not sure if the aspects of the Clinton campaign are also organically evil or merely corrupt. Corruption is survivable.
We now return to one of my favorite themes, which is that politics and faith are the same thing – they center on the basic rights to be believed and to believe. Again, they are social contracts first with God and then with one another. Politics and faith cannot not detach from one other. Anyone who tells you that he is able to segregate his sense of morality from his sense of justice is either a sociopath who is lying to you, or he is otherwise disordered and is lying to himself.
For as long as I can remember, it has been the teaching of the Catholic faith that when you are faced with two candidates who both support intrinsically evil policies, you should dig deep to determine the lesser of two evils and vote for that person.
For those readers who are unfamiliar with the concept of intrinsic evil, here are the cliff notes:
If the end, called the moral object, is evil, then the act is intrinsically ordered toward evil and is termed intrinsically evil. Every knowingly chosen act with an evil object is an intrinsically evil act.
A person who intentionally chooses an intrinsically evil act, for a good intention, is choosing an act that is objectively morally disordered. The essential moral nature of an act is not determined by the purpose (the intended end) for which the act was chosen, but by the moral object. A good intention cannot change a moral object from evil to good.
Now I happen to agree with Klavan that Trump promotes intrinsic evil and that evil will kill the Republic. It is also my opinion that Hillary Clinton promotes the methodization of intrinsic evil in her own way and this is also not survivable. In keeping with Andrew Klavan's thesis, I will offer you five examples.
Hillary Clinton failed to protect our American Embassy in Libya and promoted a mischaracterization that the murder of our ambassador was a grassroots uprising over an offensive YouTube video in order to cover up an act of war. Clinton's willful mischaracterization resulted in the unlawful imprisonment of the person responsible for the video.
Hillary Clinton does not denounce the violence of Black Lives Matter.
Hillary Clinton said that a woman who accuses a man of sexual assault must be believed even though she headed up the Bimbo Eruption team that was in charge of assailing the character of women who accused her husband of sexual assault.
Hillary Clinton champions the murder of millions of unborn children through her support of Planned Parenthood. She continues to advocate for legislation that would make it even easier to murder unborn children.
She benefits from primary rules that systematically disenfranchise the supporters of her opponent by making their votes half as relevant as the super delegates who pledge to vote for her.
Those are just five examples of intrinsic evil at the hands of Hillary Clinton. As in the case of Donald Trump, I could go on filling space with all the evils that Hillary Clinton has promoted over the decades. There is little difference between Trump and Clinton except maybe that Trump wears orange better. Morally, conservatives have boxed ourselves into a corner and nothing good can come as a result of it. In retrospect we ought to have jumped to a third party the moment that RINOs began complaining that conservatives were holding them back. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. Now it is looking more and more like there is no sizeable difference between the evil and lesser evil, and we are left with the following five choices come this November:
Vote for evil and know that it will make no difference.
Vote for the other evil and know that it will make no difference.
Vote for a write-in and know that it will make no difference.
Vote for a third party and know that it will make no difference.
Sit this one out and know that it will make no difference.
These non-choices were brought to you through the generous support of our antiseptic, secular society – making all your options generic and pointless since 1913. However – and this is important, when someone tells you that you have to vote for Trump or you'll be responsible for the destruction of our way of life, you can rest assured that you aren't. Just vote your conscience and never look back.
