What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Broken Compasses
It is of the essence of liberalism that no moral system is better than any other since there are no fixed moral principles. There is no moral north pole and the moral compass spins as it will. The only liberal sin is judging someone else’s moral system, particularly theirs. From one point of view having no fixed morality can be advantageous for people who are addicted to pornography, homosexuality, easy divorce, abortion on demand, the desire to kill human life in embryonic stem cell research, or abuse of narcotics. On the other hand there are some drawbacks in not having a moral system with fixed principles and universal application. People with broken moral compasses are at a loss to recognize evil that engulfs them.
An obvious example is the blindness of the liberal ideologues in the 1930s and beyond. Very clever liberals such as George Bernard Shaw, Fabians Sidney J. Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb, and H. G. Wells very much admired the “Russian Experiment” with Communism right through the man-made famines, the show trials and summary executions perpetrated by Stalin. Liberals gave Stalin a wide berth for his killing because “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” Apart from endorsing the principle that the end justifies the means Stalin only broke eggs and never made omelets. Malcolm Muggeridge, who overcame an early belief in Communism by observing it in a dangerous journey through Russia, describes the admiration of liberals as “besotted adulation” once the Communism had hardened into an authoritarian terrorist regime. Muggeridge describes the fawning of liberals on Communism in spite of the evidence of brutal killings and suppression of human rights in these words:
In those days [the 1930s], Moscow was the Mecca for every liberal mind, whatever its particular complexion. They flocked in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbecue and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and the Webbs, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, and driveling dons; all utterly convinced that, under the aegis of the great Stalin, a new dawn was breaking in which the human race would at last be united in liberty, equality, and fraternity for evermore…. They were prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous; to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives.
Liberal journalists demonstrated equal moral stupidity. An example is Walter Duranty whose articles in the New York Times on Russia won a Pulitzer Prize, which some would like to have revoked. He convinced most of the world that the mass starvation of Ukrainian farmers and peasants engineered by Josef Stalin was simply anti-Communist propaganda. At the time Duranty was hailed as the dean of foreign correspondents whose reports were to be trusted absolutely. They actually convinced President Roosevelt to give official recognition to the Communists who seized power in Russia. Duranty described Russia as a workers’ paradise, as prosperous and peaceful, and as the vanguard of the future. There were no Gulags or secret trials of dissidents. The opposite was true. Another journalist of the same ilk was Ann Louise Strong who saw what was going on in the Soviet Union and, according to her own writings, wrestled with her conscience about disclosing the facts of the famine, but decided that the furtherance of Communism was more important. For morally stupid liberals lying is not evil if it produces results they find desirable. In this case both the goal and the means to achieve it were morally unworthy.
Liberals with broken moral compasses had no problem in betraying their country and becoming spies for the Soviet Union. Prime examples are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who turned over American atomic secrets to the Soviets that enabled them to threaten America with nuclear annihilation for the next fifty years. The liberals staunchly defended the Rosenbergs as innocent, but praise of the Rosenbergs by Nikita Khrushchev in his 1990 memoirs undercut their efforts. In 1995 Soviet cables that had been declassified indisputably identified Rosenberg as a spy. Betraying one’s country was acceptable behavior in liberal morality because they had a higher mission to promote, the brotherhood promised by Communism.
Contrast the broken compass of liberal morality with the objective morality of the popes based on the natural law. In 1878 when Lenin was 8 years old Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical condemning socialism and pronounced it evil because of its violation of the right of private property, part of the natural law. In 1937 when the Stalin terror was raging and liberals were falling all over themselves praising communism and suppressing all evidence of its evils Pius XI condemned atheistic communism by name. Had the teaching of these popes been heeded and Communism been resisted before it took control of Russia millions of people might have been saved in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. The liberals who promoted Communism in opposition to sound morality and by immoral means did not usher in a new age of brotherhood but the bloodiest, most tyrannical regime the world has ever known. But for liberal immorality and treachery the world might have been spared that.
The liberals are so obsessed with their ideology they have learned nothing from their previous adventures in pushing immoral causes. In our day many of them still promote Communism and insist that the system was not given a fair chance in Russia. They also promote immoral activities that are supposed to produce freedom and happiness. These include abortion, embryonic stem cell research, homosexuality and homosexual marriages. These goals are immoral and will be as unproductive in producing happiness as were their Communist adventures.
Abortion establishes the principle that troublesome human life can be eliminated at the whim of someone more powerful. That should scare everyone that may become unwanted because of physical or mental disability. Embryonic stem cell research will produce entire farms of human beings created for death so that their stem cells can be harvested. Embryonic stem cells have not cured anyone to date while adult stem cells whose acquisition is not beset with ethical problems have been producing cures. In embryonic stem cell research humanity has no more value than a fungus used to produce penicillin. Homosexuality shortens human life. Homosexuals who die of AIDS have median lifespans of 39. Those who die from other causes have median lifespans of 42. Married heterosexual males typically live to 75. Why would anyone encourage homosexuality as a lifestyle when it more of a death style? Approval of homosexual marriage will open the door to polygamy and even incest.
The liberal moral record on Communism should make their pronouncements on the positions taken above suspect. They have broken moral compasses. “Let them alone; they are blind guides (of the blind). If a blind person leads a blind person, both will fall into a pit.” (Matt. 15:14)
(Published October, 2003)
