Got two more books in the mail: “The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism” by Allan Chase, and “The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy” by Enrique T. Rueda. My reading list keeps growing and growing.
The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
A review of The Legacy of Malthus on Kirkus Reviews, verbatim in the one long paragraph as it appears online:
“It is Allan Chase’s thesis that the legacy of the Industrial Revolution has been to elevate old-fashioned “”gut racism”” into the pseudoscience of eugenics. From Spencer and Malthus and Galton through Shockley, Jensen, and Herrnstein, an elite of demented aristocrats, benighted liberals, and pompous academicians has perpetuated the belief that bad genes cause pauperism, poor brains, pellagra, or prostitution. The remedy: sterilize the unfit and render not one cent to charity. Chase’s monumental demolition project takes the villains in turn, quotes them at length, and then assails them with facts as they were known then or appear now. The result is a huge tome, essentially successful, but burdened with excessive repetition and the kind of righteous prose Chase so often demonstrates in The Enemy. (Chief culprits are often referred to by their full Christian names, accompanied by a rich epithet; if a villain is related by blood, marriage, or friendship to some other celebrity, this too is mentioned, leaving the reader to wonder whether he means guilt by association or a refutation of genetic linkage!) But the tide of information and sanity is clearly on Chase’s side. His excellent presentation of the counterarguments and population studies that give the lie to the Jensenites in the IQ controversy as well as his final chapters on recent studies of genetic/environmental interaction at the cellular level win the day. His “”modest proposal”” that the state of Mississippi be chosen for all-out social and public health programs to see what several generations of good nutrition, preventive health measures, enrichment programs, and environmental health reduction would do to medical and psychological measurements is challenging. He is also to be congratulated for naming names–like Margaret Sanger, William McDougall, and other distinguished figures who paid homage to the eugenics cant and encouraged, directly or indirectly, Immigration Restriction Laws, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. With some cutting and much less sermonizing, this very fine and useful book would have been a gem.” (Used with permission from Kirkus Reviews Online.)
The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy
Here’s an article by Connie Marshner, the wife of Dr. William Marshner, one of the founders of Christendom College: We Told You So — The Catholic Homosexual Network 20 Years Later. This same article appears in the Question and Answer section on EWTN. Below are a few paragraphs quoted. In light of recent events it seems worth re-reading, or, as in my case, reading for the first time. There is so much I didn’t know. Better late than never, I guess.
In the book, Fr. Rueda detailed — with meticulous footnotes — what, already then, was the growing network of “support groups,” counseling referrals, newsletters, and organizations of homosexuals and pro-homosexuals in the churches of the United States, including the Catholic Church. The network was particularly effective within the Catholic Church: at one point in the late ’70s, a key staffer at the Office of Public Affairs and Information of the U. S. Catholic Conference/National Conference of Catholic Bishops was a leader of the Washington, D.C., homosexual movement as well as president of Dignity, the pressure group which seeks to force the Catholic Church to relate to homosexuals according to the tenets of the homosexual ideology.
The name of the fair city of Boston appears frequently in Fr. Rueda’s pages, giving it the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (an interesting coincidence in light of subsequent developments). Also interesting to note is that one Fr. Paul Shanley attended the NAMBLA convention in Boston, supposedly on behalf of the then-Cardinal Archbishop, Medeiros.
In the early days of “gay liberation,” 1972, a National Coalition of Gay Organizations adopted a “Gay Rights Platform.” This list of demands included one to repeal all laws governing the age of sexual consent — a matter of some obvious concern to pederasts.
“Homosexuality is no sicker than heterosexuality,” proclaimed the Third Number of the NAMBLA Journal. “What is sick is society’s efforts to supress [sic] and persecute it.”
In those days, every type of sexual activity was considered equally deserving of “liberation.” As pederast theoretician David Thorstad proclaimed it in the pages of Boston’s Gay Community News in January, 1979: “We should present ourselves not merely as defenders of our own personal rights to privacy and sexual expression, but as the champions of the right of all persons — regardless of age — to engage in the sexuality of their choice. We must recognize homosexual behavior for what it is — a natural potential of the human animal.”
By 1998, Thorstad was blasting the gay movement because it had “retreated from its vision of sexual liberation, in favor of integration and assimilation into existing social and political structures … increasingly sought to marginalize even demonize cross-generational love.”
Translation: The tacticians who won the internal battles, and therefore prevailed, realized that “We are everywhere” was a slogan that could sell. “Man/boy love” wouldn’t sell. Call it an “incremental” strategy, if you will.
It is going to be a long, long struggle to re-establish in mainstream Catholic culture an understanding and acceptance of what the Catechism teaches on homosexual acts — namely, that they are intrinsically disordered, and under no circumstances can be approved, while at the same time men and women who have homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity.
From Connie Marshner’s article which is a good read in its entirety. Link to the PDF.
Will be returning to reading Laudato Si soon. Have been spending a lot of time on Twitter instead of blogging or reading, ever since the Planned Parenthood “Human Capital” videos were posted. If you haven’t seen them yet, I highly recommend that you do, but not right before you sit down to dinner or right after you eat. Not unless you have a really strong stomach or as cold and callous as the PP employees munching away while talking about–no, I’ll just let you see it for yourself.
Notes
*Permission to quote the Kirkus review: “However, you may occasionally distribute a copy or a portion of a review from the Website in electronic or non-electronic form, including, without limitation, on weblogs, newsgroups, Twitter or other social media, without charge, if you include all copyright and other proprietary rights notices in the same form in which the notices appear in the Service and the phrase ‘Used with permission from Kirkus Reviews Online.'”
Catholic Heart and Mind 