By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — It had been your dream to open an Italian restaurant in honor of your mother. You succeeded and everything went fine. Pleased customers spread the word and brought in more business for you.
One day you hired a new head cook who suggested more Italian dishes to add to the menu, which you thought was a good idea. Business increased again. Then the cook proposed that you expand your appeal further by offering people books to read while they ate. He could set up a few shelves of volumes by the front door. You doubted doing this but figured it wouldn’t hurt to humor him.
Every week, it seemed, he added some more books to the shelves. After a while, additional shelves began to displace diners’ tables. And the cook said he had to reduce the time he spent on meal preparation while he searched catalogs for books to order.
Before you knew it, you were losing customers and square footage to the expanding library. There was nothing wrong with books, but they were changing the nature of your business. You asked the cook to get focused back on his original job but he got a lawyer to take you to court over trying to censor reading material.
When you lost the case and appealed to a higher court, you got a judge appointed by Joe Biden. This judge awarded the cook the ownership of your business and gave you a stern lecture against trying to narrow people’s minds. You were lucky to avoid prison time.
Uh-oh, now there’s a state investigator at your door demanding to see if you can produce any records that prove your innocence.
In a way, does this little story sound like what happened to the United States that we knew not so long ago? It was a country that had drawn immigrants from cultures around the world but it had what would be a discernible Judeo-Christian character.
There was no requirement that U.S. citizens believe in the Holy Trinity, abstain from eating meat on Friday, recite thousands of Bible verses from memory or rest from labor between sundown on Friday and Saturday.
But there was a general social and cultural inclination about what the U.S. stood for and what it did not. There was a feeling God blessed and guided the nation and desired certain behavior.
Drag shows being thrust on little children not only were unlikely but unthinkable. Widespread permissive abortion as the key to U.S. freedom — and tax-paid at that — would be an abomination.
Constant focus on skin color and racial preference were scandals that had been discarded when the Ku Klux Klan lost its tight grip on the Democratic Party in the twentieth century.
Viewing marriage as a mere matter of convenience and no more than a possible option for couples would be a blow at the foundation of society. Children considered to be burdens on couples and a danger to planetary well-being were nutty ideas. Using the welfare system as an acceptable replacement to holding an available job would have been seen as an assault on moral character.
Substitutions started being made to the surroundings of daily life that at first may have sounded okay but had the effect of changing the nature and basis of society.
And within a few decades we went from the U.S. Supreme Court proclaiming that a simple nondenominational prayer in grade school was unacceptable to left-wing teachers propagandizing little kids while telling the kids not to inform their parents of what was going on.
In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this prayer from public school: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.”
If you want to pray, do it at home or at church. Well, okay, but when something is removed, something else comes in to fill that space. If a mild sentiment from the Bible was out, after a while the teachings of Planned Parenthood were in.
In higher grades, academic inquiry was replaced by left-wing theorizing that was presented as certitudes and unassailable mandates.
A hardworking society with a conscience that drew on classic teachings was replaced with some leaders who at first might seem to hold the same values but would grow to act with arrogance, fear and deception, whichever suited the moment.
The Wanderer asked two sources to comment on the way society has changed.
A Monstrous Entity
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer said: “People of traditionalist faith are, by the First Amendment and by natural right, supposed to enjoy the freedom to observe their beliefs without compulsion from the government.
“Today’s Left now wants to treat all sorts of practices that defy those beliefs as if they are not only the norm, but a norm to which everyone else must be forced to pay homage,” Hillyer said. “Never mind millennia of human history to the contrary, not to mention basic biology such as the fact that a woman cannot have Y chromosomes and a man cannot get pregnant.
“Any government that tramples the First Amendment and denies biology itself is a monstrous entity, and must not be abided,” he said.
Henry VIII Revisited
Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Virginia-based Catholic blog Les Femmes — The Truth, said: “The simple answer to why the Church fails to condemn depravities like the mutilation of children and gender insanity with the voice of Christ’s authority is the same as the failure of the English bishops to stand up to Henry VIII — fear, cowardice, and benefit.
“The Church in the U.S. enables human trafficking by their open-borders defense in order to rake in millions from the fed,” Kreitzer said. “They bend the knee to the left, literally like Bishop Seitz of El Paso bending the knee to BLM, who burned our cities and murdered people. What happened? The Pope called and thanked him. The scandal reeks!
“I remember the years after Humanae Vitae when dissenters like Charlie Curran attacked the Church from within promoting contraception, which leads directly to abortion. They raged and the response from Church authorities was crickets,” she said.
“It’s the same today. Sinful silence from the Church about real problems as evidenced by the upcoming synod and its blather about ‘dialogue’ and ‘accompaniment’ with those embracing grievous evils,” Kreitzer said. “Not a word about real problems in the Church. So, what must the laity do?
“When those with authority fail to do the right thing, those without the authority must speak. Joan of Arc and Thomas More spoke truth to power while Church authorities enabled evil,” Kreitzer said. “It’s up to us, the laity. We must do all we can to defend the faith and speak the truth while supporting clergy who have the courage to be true shepherds. Our goal? Saving souls!”
Meanwhile, left-wing extremist Democrat Katie Hobbs, the specially anointed radical pro-abortion governor of Arizona, continues to stumble along her clueless way when she’s not vetoing dozens more commonsense bills from the Republican-majority state legislature.
Phil Boas, a more conservative columnist at the pro-Hobbs, Phoenix-based Arizona Republic, took a look at Hobbs puffing herself up as if she needs to demand that the state’s utility companies assure her that they plan to keep providing power to Arizonans during this sizzling summer.
Who knows, maybe they’d planned to just turn off the lights and go river rafting somewhere if she didn’t throw her weight around.
On July 24 Boas posted that Hobbs sent the utilities a letter demanding that they inform her of their “action plans for protecting Arizonans during this unprecedented heat wave.”
And then Hobbs went on social media to pat herself on the back in front of the entire state for her bold foresight.
Boas said that being prepared is what the utilities are expected to do. “The governor’s memo and tweet make her look like the drum major who jumped in front of the parade. Three weeks too late,” he said.
Reporter Howard Fischer, of Capital Media Services, also was interested in Hobbs’ grandstanding — why she thought the utilities had to explain themselves to her. On July 25 Fischer posted: “Gov. Katie Hobbs is demanding utilities tell her how they’re prepared for record heat even though she has no legal authority to do so….“Only thing is, most utilities are subject — and answer — to only the Arizona Corporation Commission, the constitutionally created agency that regulates the activities and rates of electric companies,” Fischer wrote.
Boas and Fischer didn’t raise the following possibility: Maybe Hobbs was worried that abortion clinics might shut down at night during a thunderstorm — wouldn’t she like them to run around the clock? — and the staff couldn’t see where to dump the buckets of blood and “tissue” they keep filling up.
On another topic, an Arizona Republic news story on July 26 noted that Hobbs had yet to fill any of the vacancies she created five months ago when she fired the entire board of a state commission that works with officials in Mexico. Arizonans who’d been on the board and reapplied for it still hadn’t been told where they stood, the Republic said.
“The Democratic governor’s house-cleaning of the 31-member commission board — done by surprise and via a Friday afternoon email in February — sent shockwaves through the business community in Arizona,” the newspaper said, adding:
“The commission, which has existed in some form for more than six decades, is a way that Arizona leaders and business representatives meet to exchange ideas to advance economic growth and find solutions to shared problems with Sonora, the Mexican state that borders Arizona, and Mexico as a whole.”
The Republic said it requested public records on March 3 — which are required to be available — to illuminate Hobbs’ staffers’ thinking on this, but there still had been no response, nor an explanation for the long delay.
Another uncomfortable topic for the Hobbs administration was noted when The Republic posted on July 26: “A Saudi Arabian company at the center of controversy over leases allowing it to pump groundwater under state land recently hired a new lobbyist: The business partner of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ top campaign adviser.”
Hobbs and her fellow pro-abortion Democrat extremist Kris Mayes, the specially anointed Arizona attorney general, take about every opportunity they can to lecture Arizonans about which laws and moral standards matter and which should be ignored. They resemble kindred Dem extremists around the nation, from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to Joe Biden.
A Coming Civil War?
What their behavior is stirring up was noted in an opinion article by former Donald Trump White House official Peter Navarro, posted July 25 at The Washington Times.
Navarro wrote: “The Democratic activists and strategists now driving this nation toward a second civil war have neither justice nor righteousness on their side. Instead, they are attempting to trample on our religions, disarm us, and impose all manner of ‘woke’ social, cultural, and economic changes that are far outside the bounds of America’s traditions, traditional values and constitutional roots.”
He added: “Do you not understand that the longer you engage in your assaults on American families and values, the more likely a new civil war becomes?”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress