By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In the early 1970s, when I was working as a musician in Los Angeles, a song came on the radio that was so good that I actually pulled off the freeway, found a phone booth, and called the station to ask about it.
“We’ve been playing it for a week,” the gal admonished me. “Everybody’s playing it.”
“Well, I hadn’t heard it yet.”
“Where are you from,” she asked.
“Indiana.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “they won’t get it out there for a month.”
Welcome to California as America’s future. But is it still the Golden State? Recent events indicate otherwise.
The natural disasters are bad enough. Fires are raging in wine country and beyond, with suspected arsonists either in custody or on the run. Bishop Robert Vasa’s Santa Rosa chancery has been turned into an evacuation center. Dozens of people have died. None of them knew when they woke up that they would be meeting Jesus that day.
Then there are moral disasters. Black coals burning in the libido of powerful movie moguls. Hollywood as sewer has given way to Hollywood as brothel filled with aspiring stars serving as captive sex servants.
Now, since Socrates we’ve known that the corruption of the base appetites quickly leads to the corruption of the Libido Dominandi, the love of power. That’s the badge Augustine pinned on the City of Man, whose leader is Satan. And the blending of the loves for sex, money, and power with the desire for fame and glory (Superbia Vitae, 1 John 2:16) corrupts absolutely. Intentionally. By design.
But more sophisticated corruption also abounds. Dark embers of vile bigotry. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) has announced she will run for reelection next year. That no doubt means she intends to keep bashing Catholics from her powerful seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee until the age of 90.
Catholic judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett can wear Feinstein’s carefully calculated barb — “The dogma lives loudly within you” — as a badge of honor; for Feinstein, it screams as an indelible stain of bigotry.
And the stain is spreading, sinking in, and killing people. So many people, in fact, that California is tired of tracking down and prosecuting perpetrators of murder-by-sex.
What?
That’s right. As of this month, in California it will no longer be a felony for a carrier of the AIDS virus intentionally to infect another person.
Oh come on! Why would anybody ever do that?
In 1991, young Kimberly Ann Bergalis testified before Congress from a wheelchair, advocating stricter limits on medical practitioners known to carry the AIDS virus. “AIDS is a terrible disease that we must take seriously. I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m being made to suffer like this. My life has been taken away. Please enact legislation so other patients and health-care providers don’t have to go through the hell that I have. Thank you.”
Miss Bergalis had been infected by her dentist, David Acer, an active homosexual who later admitted that he had had 150 sexual partners within the past year. Nonetheless, Acer deliberately treated patients after being diagnosed with HIV. Sentiment around the Bergalis case focused on Acer’s hateful desire to avenge his own deadly infection by intentionally injecting his patients with it (five of them were later diagnosed with the same specific strain of AIDS as Acer’s).
Bergalis’ testimony was brief, her voice weak; she died later that year, on December 8, 1991. Reasonable people consider her a murder victim, but Acer was beyond earthly justice, having died in 1990.
Yes, people do deliberately “do that.” And in the logic of California’s Democrat political leadership, it shouldn’t be a felony, because if it were, active sodomites would not “seek testing.”
A wise priest once marveled how AIDS had been magically transformed from the “Gay Plague” endangering others to a “civil rights issue” that depicted those infected with AIDS as “victims,” rather than dangers to public health. In California — always ahead of the rest of us! — those “victims” are now free to infect, and kill, other “victims” under the law.
It Only Gets Worse
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” — Prometheus: Longfellow’s Masque of Pandora.
For California, October seems to be the cruelest month. Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminarian, has just signed the “Gender Recognition Act” to make it easier for people to change gender on state identification and birth certificates, while establishing a “nonbinary” designation.
But as Donoso Cortes once observed, Satan doesn’t like it when we coast; he wants to drive us ever deeper into the fiery brine. So Gov. Brown also signed legislation requiring California health-care workers to use a senior transgender patient’s “preferred name or pronouns”; if they “willfully and repeatedly” decline to do so, they could face punishments ranging from a fine to jail time.
How cute; the “elderly” today, tomorrow everybody. On California college campuses, it is already considered “offensive” not to call a man a woman if that’s what he wants to be called. College dorm room doors feature a card with the student’s name, hometown, major — and yes, “preferred name or pronouns.” Flub it repeatedly (“Let’s see, is she a ‘he,’ or a ‘zhe,’ or a ‘they,’ or….”) and you’re sitting by the side of the road, waiting for an appointment with the Gender Equity Officer.
While all this important stuff is being shoved down California throats, little details keep escaping attention. In Los Angeles County, home of Hollywood, the percentage of residents lacking basic prose literacy skills was 20 percent in 1992, and rose to 33 percent in 2003. If that trend has continued to the present (in fact, it has likely increased), today over half of Angelinos cannot write a simple sentence. But they’d darned well know whether you’re a “Zhey” or a “Zhe,” or it’s jail time.
How about “You-all”? Sorry, No-Go: “Cultural appropriation. Offensively Southern.”
California Bishops
To The Rescue?
On July 1, 2015, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, 45, shot and killed Katy Steinle as she walked arm-in-arm with her father along a San Francisco sidewalk. San Francisco has been a “Sanctuary City” since 1989, and Lopez Sanchez, who had been convicted of seven felonies and been deported five times, admitted he had been drawn there because of its sanctuary status.
The USCCB has ardently supported “Sanctuary Cities,” rejecting President Trump’s attempts to apprehend criminals like Lopez-Sanchez before they kill again. In fact, most American bishops encourage illegal aliens to break the law, at least tacitly.
So while San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone offered his “deepest condolences to Kathryn’s family and friends,” he insisted that “Steinle’s death should not be used as a justification to malign immigrants in the U.S. He urged local and federal officials not to ‘punish all immigrants for the transgressions of a small minority’,” reported the Los Angeles Times.
Well, on October 5, Gov. Brown signed SB 54, declaring California a sanctuary state. California Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Republican and prospective candidate for governor, criticized the legislation. “Sanctuary state policies, by their very nature, are contrary to being a nation of laws, he wrote. “As a nation of laws, we cannot pick and choose which ones we’ll obey.”
Allen then recounted facts on immigration which our bishops rarely mention. “According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, undocumented immigrants are just 3.5 percent of the U.S. population but account for 37.6 percent of federal sentences and 13.6 percent of all criminal offenders nationwide. Illegal immigrants comprise 12 percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences, and 16 percent of drug trafficking sentences. An estimated 650 unauthorized migrant criminal offenders are released into California’s communities every month in violation of transfer requests into federal custody. During its last two-and-a-half years, the Obama Administration released 86,000 illegal immigrants who committed over 231,000 crimes.”
Speaking of which, on October 17, Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, 29, an illegal alien and the subject of an ICE detainer request, was arrested on suspicion of felony arson in connection with the Santa Rosa and Sonoma County fires.
On August 23, 2017, Bishop Jaime Soto, Sacramento, president of the California Catholic Conference of Bishops, issued a statement indicating that “California bishops support SB 54.”
The California nightmare continues, and California’s Catholic bishops are in the lead. Will it become America’s nightmare as well?
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