The mainstream of American right wing thought is absolutely. What it means is that you are a part of a fringe ideology, which is pretty much inarguable with monarchism.
You misunderstand. I never said monarchism wasn't a fringe position. My complaint is that people like Dinesh D'Souza and Jonah Goldberg try to make monarchism into a left-wing ideology because they define the right wing in terms of classical liberalism.
Yes, I agree with you that mainstream conservatism in America is largely dominated by people who identify strongly with the classical liberal tradition. That's not controversial. What's controversial is that those people assume that monarchism is not only fringe, but a leftist ideology. Yes, I know that nobody here is saying that substantially, but that is what you are saying implicitly when you define libertarian anarchism as "the far right." And there are conservatives that will label all ideologies that reject the idea of limited government as "leftist."
Oh, of course, there is massive amounts of propaganda, laws, and efforts to bring down the family. Feminism is one of the major players here in the push to eliminate marriage, reduce child birth (at least among middle class whites), and to reduce the role of parents in their children’s lives.
Gays doing their own gay thing isn’t a major factor in the behavior of straight people. A straight couple isn’t going to get divorced or refrain from having kids because there is a gay couple across town.
Actually, gay people are the proxy warriors of the sexual revolutionary left. Here's how this works: if you can justify the permissibility of greater deviancies, this means you can justify the permissibility of lesser deviancies. Thus, if you can justify homosexuality as a legitimate form of romance (as opposed to a disorder, as per the natural law tradition), then you can justify lesser sexual deviancies like fornication.
Not to mention that homosexuals have shown themselves to be positive malcontents in their own right. Homosexuals have numerous problems with pedophilia (
most of the founders of the modern gay rights movements were pederasts or raped by a pederast at some point in their life), overwhelming promiscuous (Allan P. Bell and Martin S. Weinberg, 1978), prone to prone to use of illegal drugs (M. W. Ross, 1988), have high rates of mental health morbidity and suicide symptoms (
according to the CDC), and constitute about 63% of primary and secondary syphilis cases (
also according to the CDC).
If you question these negative aspects of the homosexual experience, then you are labeled a bigot. This is a strategy that homosexual activists like the authors of
After the Ball admit is part of a long-term propaganda campaign to change attitudes about homosexuality. And it's been very, very successful; so successful, in fact, that mainstream conservatives in America are parading drag queen story hour as one of the "blessings of liberty" that the Founding Fathers of America would've approved of (even though Thomas Jefferson, the most liberal of the Founding Fathers, thought castration was an acceptable punishment for homosexuality).
Here's the deal: I am not a libertarian. That should be clear. So you talking about "what two consenting adults do doesn't concern me" strikes me as irrelevant. These people are in public promoting their homosexuality, and they have only ramped up their rhetoric since getting what they supposedly wanted from
Obergefell. I believe this is proof that their actual problem isn't that they are persecuted by Christian society, but that there something wrong with them psychologically. Thomistic Natural Law and modern statistics about homosexuality seem to bear this out.
I don’t accept your idea of ends. Very often no end exists for a thing which exists in nature. Biological features do have ends, or sets of ends, in that they have an evolutionary purpose. Wings may have evolved to allow a bird to fly, but that doesn’t mean that a bird using its wing for something else, like pushing a twig into a next with it, is immoral or an abomination. In fact, the wing may well have many purposes which are secondary to its primary purpose.
So things have no purpose at all. A rock sits on the ground, it has no purpose until a human picks it up and decides on what might be done with it.
How ever you define the purpose of some biological feature, there is no morality attached to that purpose. Hair might be for keeping a person’s head warm, but there is no immorality in Rapunzel letting her hair be used for a rope. There is also nothing immoral about shaving ones head and using a hat for warmth or even letting ones head be cold. Morality and purpose are distinct ideas.
Using sexual organs for pleasure in no way undermines their use for procreation. In fact, one could reasonably argue that the ability of sexual organs to cause and/or experience pleasure are secondary purposes (to the degree they exist) of them.
It's amazing because pretty much everything you said was wrong. Just addressing the strawman of natural law ethics that you've constructed would take entire essays (and in fact, entire essays have been written about it; see
here).
Not to mention the philosophical implications of what you are arguing for... I mean, are you committed to David Hume's conception of causes as being "loose and separate," such that a rock crashing into a window would just as likely destroy the window as turn it into feathers? Are you committed to believing taking in nutrients and photosynthesizing is not good for a tree (since there's nothing inherently good about fulfilling natural ends, apparently)? I think, at a bare minimum, you should consider what you are actually arguing against and the ramifications of your position.
How is vagina sex between a husband and pregnant wife more conducive to procreation than anal sex? Imagine a scenario: there is a heterosexual husband and wife, they have children and believe in having more, the wife is pregnant and both feel like getting frisky. How is there a moral difference between anal sex and vagina sex? Neither can result in pregnancy. Neither undermines the ability of the wife to give birth or get pregnant again later.
It seems that by purpose idea that the priest would be the biggest sinner, for he has completely forsaken the purpose of his reproductive organs while the kinky couple has merely used them in a slightly different way which doesn’t interfere with the supposed end.
Where some faculty F is natural to a rational agent A and by nature exists for the sake of some end E (and exists in A precisely so that A might pursue E), then it is metaphysically impossible for it to be good for A to use F in a manner contrary to E. That's the formula by which teleological natural law ethics works.
Anal sex is always wrong by this. There is no context in which it isn't a misuse of the sexual faculty. This attempt to analogize anal sex with vaginal sex between a woman who is already pregnant or otherwise cannot become pregnant fails because in the latter case, those circumstances are accidents; there's nothing in the nature of the act itself that is contrary to natural law. The woman's sterility or pregnancy is an accidental feature of the act, not something intrinsic to it. Intrinsically, the act is open to procreation and brings unity between a married man and woman. In contrast, anal sex may bring unity, but it is by its very nature not open to procreation. To quote E. Michael Jones: "the anus is not a sex organ!"
On celibacy: There is nothing immoral about not using some faculty F because this argument applies to misuses.
Not using some faculty F doesn't constitute a misuse. So priestly celibacy, forsaking the good of marriage to pursue a higher religious calling, is not immoral in the slightest. If you wish to pursue this line of reasoning, you'll have to prove (as some Protestants vainly try to) that all human beings are obligated to get married and have children.
I will not elaborate further on this in this thread. If you are curious and want to know more, please DM me. I do not wish to derail this thread any further.
Yeah, Roman Catholicism wagging its finger at people and telling them it's wrong not to procreate - while out of the other side of its mouth extolling complete celibacy as something spiritually superior?
The underlying reason for the doublethink is historical. Many of the late-classical "church fathers" whose views influenced medieval Latin thinking came from a cultural background in which any form of physical pleasure was considered evil, simply because it was physical not spiritual. So a couple having "fun" together simply because they enjoyed, well, "doing it"? Bad, bad, bad!
But since if nobody reproduced the human race would die out, and then the oh-so-spiritual people would have no one to mooch off, they realized they had to make a concession: okay, alright, have sex in order to make babies, otherwise it's bad!
Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas comes along and dresses it up in clever Aristotelian arguments. But that was all basically rationalization.
And none of it is even remotely Biblical.
In condemning priestly celibacy as unbiblical, you seem to be unaware of the Bible verses by Our Lord and Saint Paul praising celibacy (1 Cor. 7:32-38, Matthew 19:12). No doubt you will probably interpret those verses to mean something different. However, given the indeterminacy of language, we will not be able to agree on interpretation until we go beyond text and appeal to something extra-biblical, like the Church Fathers. That you put them in scare quotes suggests you believe yourself to be a wiser and more thoughtful Christian than they, or that you don't think they are the founders of the church. That's a bit arrogant, I suppose, but nothing out of the ordinary for a modernist. I am interested in hearing how you fixing the problems of
Sola Scriptura, in particular:
- How one can use Scripture alone to tell you what counts as Scripture.
- How Scripture alone can tell you how best to interpret Scripture.
- How Scripture alone can give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture and applying it to new circumstances.
I am not doing this to be hateful to Protestants. I know some very intelligent and persuasive Protestants over the years that have led to me to seriously reconsider my Catholicism. But what I notice from them is that they, to a man, appeal to the Church Fathers (especially the pre-Nicean ones) in their arguments.
In my opinion, when you condemn Catholicism generally and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular as "unbiblical," when you attribute the position of Gnostics (the people who actually did think procreation was evil) to the late classical church fathers who roundly condemned them, when you dismiss Thomism as being an Aristotelianized, post-hoc justification for Catholic dogma, you are demonstrating a decided lack of charity. A sin against charity is a mortal sin, and I strongly suggest you pray to God to set you straight.
If you wish to argue with me, I suggest you DM me. I won't turn this thread into another religious debate.
How many times does this have to be explained?
Left wing and right wing are not defined as dichotomous positions. What is not one does not become axiomatically become the other. That form of thinking is endemic within the global left wing and is purposefully done to associate completely unrelated ideologies with one another so that an attack on one becomes an attack on both. Which is both logically erroneous and
As I have posted multiple times, I fundamentally reject that structure for the left/right structure. There are ideologies and positions that fall outside of the left/right spectrum for any given country. Thus, just because they are rejected by one side or the other, does not inherently make them become part of the other.
Monarchism, of any stripe, in the context of American politics is such a position. The American left wing, defined by western progressive ideals and technocratic libertine passions, rejects Monarchism. The American right wing, defined by classical liberalism, dual federalism, and Constitutionalism, also reject it.
The right-left dichotomy is reflective of some deeper reality though. We do know that there are a group of people that want to destroy what's left of Western Christendom and there are people who want to preserve some aspect of it. We know there are people who value order above all and people who value freedom and equality above all.
I have no problem with you calling monarchists "fringe," because they are. I have a problem with you defining right-wing in terms of classical liberalism, which you are doing when you claim libertarian anarchism is far right.