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The following article, Op-Ed: Defending Traditional Marriage in Idaho, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. Guest post by Dorothy Moon, Idaho GOP Chairwoman January 31, 2025 — The Idaho House of Representatives has been steadfast in its efforts to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage, championing the rights of our state in a battle that dates back to the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015. This controversial Supreme Court … Continue reading Op-Ed: Defending Traditional Marriage in Idaho ...

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Just last week, President Trump fired a large number of inspectors general. He had done much the same thing in 2020, seeing them as a major source of the swamp fever that plagued his rookie administration. Taft weighed in on the Tenure of Office Act as well, ruling it unconstitutional, even though it had been long gone. In his reincarnated presidency and no longer a rookie, Trump has hit the ground running. He hasn’t waited years before addressing entrenched forces within his administration which he believes are ready to hobble him and slow his agenda any way they can. Trump can hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid a term in which far too much of his energy was drained to deal with endless investigations that resulted in not much more than draining his time and energy. Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, last week took a stand against the way the IGs were fired. Together with the ranking minority member, he wrote to the president to object, stating that there is statute law governing how IGs can be fired. They wrote: The law must be followed. The communication to Congress must contain more than just broad and vague statements; rather, it must include sufficient facts and details to assure Congress and the public that the termination is due to real concerns about the Inspector General’s ability to carry out their mission. This is a matter of public and congressional accountability and ensuring the public’s confidence in the Inspector General community, a sentiment shared more broadly by other Members of Congress. Grassley supported Trump strongly in this election. He has been a stalwart throughout the Biden years, doing his best to thwart the woke madness. But as a senior senator, he stands firm for the privileges of the Senate and the Legislative Branch and is willing to form a bi-partisan coalition to protect those privileges. Tensions between the three branches of the federal government are a design feature of our Constitution. The original government of independent America, set up under the Articles of Confederation, had only Congress and no administrative branch. It set up departments to take care of things like foreign affairs and these departments were answerable only to the Congress and served at its pleasure. The flawed Articles gave way to the Constitution, which took administrative power away from the legislature and gave it to the executive. Article Two begins by vesting the executive power in the president and gives no qualification to that power except that for some offices, his appointments require the advice and consent of the Senate. When the First Congress set about establishing the departments of the executive branch, its members saw that even though the Constitution clearly gives the president appointment powers, it says nothing about his power to get rid of officers. Congress had to make sense out of this omission as it debated the issues surrounding the form of this new executive branch. The results of their debate and deliberation is called by historians the Decision of 1789. What that decision was has been interpreted in following generations by the courts. The president’s power to fire was the target of the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. Congress and President Andrew Johnson were at loggerheads. Congress was controlled by Republicans intent on forcing the defeated Confederacy to accept not only the outlawing of slavery but also strong civil rights legislation. Johnson was a Democrat from Tennessee who Lincoln put on his 1864 ticket to appeal to those who supported the Union but were not enthused about expanded civil rights. Many were sure that were Lincoln to lose, his opponent, George McClellan, would have made peace with the Confederacy. Above all, Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union, and Johnson was an important part of branding his re-election effort as that of the National Union Party. With the war won but the nation deprived of Lincoln’s superb political skills by an assassin’s bullet, Congress and the new president began a struggle to the death. Johnson was deeply opposed to the policies of some of Lincoln’s Cabinet appointees. Johnson wanted those men gone. Congress tried to forestall this by passing the Tenure of Office Act, which declared that presidential appointees, even in the Executive Branch, should continue to serve in their office until a successor be appointed with the Senate’s advice and consent. What that meant was that if the Senate refused to consent to a new appointment, the old appointee would continue to serve until the end of the president’s term. Johnson saw the limit it would put on his power, believed it unconstitutional, and vetoed the bill. The House and Senate overrode that veto, passing the law. Johnson then fired the Secretary of War, and then the House impeached Johnson, seeing that breach of the Tenure Act as a high crime or misdemeanor. Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by a single vote. Though the struggle with Johnson was very much Republicans against Democrats, the Tenure of Office Act was also objected to by Republicans Ulysses Grant and James Garfield for the limits it imposed on their power. The issue was resolved during the presidency of the first Democrat to be elected to that office after the Civil War, Grover Cleveland. He successfully pushed for a repeal of the law, and it was taken off the books in 1887. To this point, the issue of the president’s power to fire had not been settled by a court decision. The Decision of 1789 was made by Congress; the Tenure of Office Act was made by Congress; a President in turn asserted what he felt his powers were under the Constitution on his own; and Congress in 1887 decided to negate its own assertion. The Supreme Court finally had its say in 1926 in the Myers case. The majority decision was written by the only man to serve as both Chief Magistrate and Chief Justice of the United States, William Howard Taft. Such service gave him a unique perspective. His decision was based largely on his understanding of the Decision of 1789, which he read, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, as agreeing that the Constitution gave the President full removal authority. He quoted at length the argument of James Madison, then a congressman, in the 1789 debate: Vest this [firing] power in the Senate jointly with the President, and you abolish at once that great principle of unity and responsibility in the Executive department which was intended for the security of liberty and the public good. If the President should possess alone the power of removal from office, those who are employed in the execution of the law will be in their proper situation, and the chain of dependence be preserved, the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest, will depend, as they ought, on the President, and the President on the community. Taft weighed in on the Tenure of Office Act as well, ruling it unconstitutional, even though it had been long gone. With this, he sought to bring all three branches of government to agree that the President’s power to dismiss executive branch officers is virtually unlimited. This recognizes something that is sometimes forgotten due to the genius of John Marshall, who so established the power of the Supreme Court in Marbury that we tend to think that the only branch that has a say in what the Constitution means is the Judiciary. Taft helped show that what the Congress had to say about how the Constitution in 1789 established ruling precedent. In his article on the Decision of !789, Saikrishna Prakash reminds us that presidents have weighed in on constitutional issues. The example of Lincoln in overruling the Supreme Court and asserting that the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus was his is the most powerful of the examples he lists. Taft’s ruling was contested by strong voices, both in his court (Brandeis and Holmes wrote dissenting opinions that proved influential) and beyond. A later SCOTUS decision, Humphrey’s Executor, seemed to walk back Taft’s decision, but the 2020 Seila Law decision strongly affirmed the President’s ability to fire someone even when Congress had passed a law severely limiting his ability to do so in this case. So what stands now is something extraordinary: the Supreme Court acknowledges an Executive power based on a decision made by Congress to affirm the power of the Executive Branch against its own. What a precedent this is! What makes our nation work is a devotion to an authority that transcends the power base of any one person or branch. It is a kind of musical sensibility to the harmony of the whole. Like music, it does not silence the voice of any instrument or singer, but it does require of every musician a dedication of their own genius to the genius of the whole ensemble. So today, we can see Trump’s assertion of his power and Senator Grassley’s counterpoint as two musical themes, which will at times be dissonant but will ultimately resolve harmoniously. Amidst all the chaos of the past decade, engendered largely by contemptuous dismissal of the Constitution in favor of woke ideology, this is refreshing. Instead of envisioning an America in which dissent must be dismissed, throttled, or even criminalized, we return from Jacobinism to something more humane, broader in conception, and truly inclusive in vision. This is the reappearance of a harmonious spirit capable of reviving a lively national consensus in which our differences challenge each other to rise higher, as we united our varied gifts in service of a united commonwealth. A resurrection of constitutionalism — and not a moment too soon! READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: With Trump’s Return, the Mullah’s Nazi Dreams Are Dead Rights, Responsibility, and the LA Wildfires   The post President Trump’s Extraordinary Firing of the IGs appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It may not be a surprise to hear a Catholic convert who was tutored by Dominicans quoting St. Thomas Aquinas. But certainly nobody had the Vice President of the United States publicly citing the Dominican saint and referring to his theology in Latin on their 2025 bingo card. But that’s exactly what happened last week. For generations, we have lived under the rule of those who … deride and despise the ordo amoris. In a Fox News interview, Vance addressed concerns raised by Christians—and especially by U.S. Catholic bishops—over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, particularly mass deportations. While Vance acknowledged that Christians have a moral obligation to treat others—including strangers and sojourners—with charity, he noted the “Christian concept” that charity must be rightly ordered, that it is, in fact, hierarchical. “You love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance explained. He further observed, “A lot of the far Left has completely inverted that.” The “Christian concept” Vance cited is called “ordo amoris” or the “order of love” and is well-grounded in Christian theology. Saints Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas both wrote extensively on the subject, hundreds of years apart. According to the saints, we have a higher obligation to love certain people based on our proximity to and relationship with them. “One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others,” Aquinas explained in his Summa Theologiae. He continued: We must, therefore, say that, even as regards the affection we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who loves, it must needs be that the affection of love increases in proportion to the nearness to one or the other of those principles. For … wherever we find a principle, order depends on relation to that principle. In other words, our exercise of charity must be ordered in a particular manner. Our families are to be loved before other people’s families, our neighbors are to be loved before strangers, our fellow Americans are to be loved before citizens of other nations. Aquinas wrote, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.” Of course, leftists often arrogantly (and not quite correctly) like to remind Christians who take a line such as Vance’s that Christ calls us to love all people, regardless of our relationship to them. While this is technically true, it does not actually contradict the principle of the ordo amoris. Take, for instance, former U.K. politician Rory Stewart, who derided Vance’s profession of longstanding Christian moral teaching as “less Christian and more pagan tribal.” The Vice President doubled down. “Just google ‘ordo amoris,’” he ordered Stewart. Vance went on, “Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?” Loving your own family does not necessarily come into conflict with loving the citizens of an impoverished Third-World nation, provided that everything is in its right order. However, when the citizen of the impoverished Third-World nation indiscriminately violates one’s laws and jeopardizes the well-being and safety of one’s family, then all is thrown into disorder. In such a case, loving one’s family and loving the Third-World immigrant do come into conflict — and the Christian has a moral obligation to love one’s family first. Furthermore, as Vance noted, a father has a greater responsibility to love his own children than to love other people’s children. Yes, of course, a good man can still look out for and take care of other people’s children, but not at the expense of his own. This very fact is written into our souls on the most instinctual levels. It’s why mothers and fathers do not hesitate to give up their lives for their own children, it is why we weep most when our own families are harmed, it is why men have put their lives on the line for their nations since just about the beginning of time. Vance went on to not only correct Stewart, but to shame him for deceptively manipulating Christian teaching so blatantly. “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.  This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years,” Vance said. He is not the first to make such an observation. In The Abolition of Man, Christian author and apologist C.S. Lewis not only made the case for taking the ordo amoris to heart, but predicted the moral corruption that would follow abrogating or ignoring the order of love: St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ordinate affections or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful. Is it any wonder, then, that so much of the propaganda promoting mass migration — and, indeed, all tenets of leftism, from transgenderism and same-sex “marriage” to abortion and pornography — relies almost entirely (I feel I might even be justified in simply saying “entirely”) on manipulated emotions? The denizens of the Western world are being trained and conditioned to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred not as they ought to, but as leftism demands. The ordo amoris demands love of one’s neighbor over love of nameless strangers from the Third World; so why not bombard the American voter with incessant images and videos of immigrants in cages or crying at the border wall? These nameless strangers will become, to him, his neighbor. In fact, he will see them more than his own neighbor. The ordo amoris demands the love of one’s countrymen over the men of other countries; so why not tell the American man that he has no country, that his nation is nothing more than an idea? What then could possibly differentiate him from the hordes of and masses gathering along the border that he no longer believes exists? The ordo amoris demands that one love those who share one’s blood, one’s creed, one’s nationhood; so why not tell the American that diversity is actually our strength? Why not beat him over the brow with this trite, nonsensical axiom for generations? He’ll get it eventually. For generations, we have lived under the rule of those who not only deride and despise the ordo amoris, if they are even aware of its existence, who not only openly and flagrantly abrogate and violate the principle of the ordo amoris, but those who sneeringly claim that such abrogation and violation is good and just. What a relief it is to once again have a national leader who not only understands but boldly proclaims the order which God has written in the hearts of men to govern love. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Vanquish or Die: The Choice Before the Catholic Church in America America’s Bishops Should Heed Church on Sovereignty The post The Vice President and the ‘Ordo Amoris’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Faithful Catholics have been saddened by the allegations — most recently suggested by Vice President JD Vance — that their Church has been complicit in creating the humanitarian crisis at the border. Vance pointed out that the Catholic Church has received over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants. Much of that money has been spent on providing transportation and housing for newly arrived illegal immigrants and helping to resettle them from the border to the interior of the country. This collaboration with the Democratic Party continues today as the federal government pays for most of the activities of Catholic Charities. I share Vance’s concern because Catholic Charities has been a long time recipient of our family’s philanthropic giving for decades.  My sister, Marie Hopkins, served on the Board of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Hartford for 22 years, and when she died two years ago, our family asked that in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Hartford.  Likewise, when her husband died last September, our family asked again that friends and family donate to Catholic Charities. As a Catholic family, we had always believed in the mission of Catholic Charities to help families in need, provide support for women experiencing crisis pregnancies, facilitate adoption and foster parenting, feed the hungry and house the homeless — and welcome refugees fleeing persecution. Created in 1910, on the campus of Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Catholic Charities was launched to provide a centralized anti-poverty effort of individual parishes and dioceses in strengthening families and encouraging moral behavior as an important way to address poverty.  This noble goal began to change in the 1960s when Catholic Charities began to shift its focus from personal responsibility and individual behavior to blaming capitalism for poverty and crime. The Catholic agency began to look to the government’s emerging welfare state to solve all social problems. Catholic Charities Adopt Progressivism By 1972, the progressivism of Catholic Charities was codified in the Cadre Report which redefined the mission of Catholic Charities from one of direct service to the poor toward a more active role in addressing the root causes of poverty.   Unfortunately, the root causes of crime, poverty, homelessness, and family dysfunction came to be defined as capitalism itself and Catholic Charities began its advocacy role in collaboration with the Democrat Party.  While the 1972 Cadre Report is not available online, City Journal editor Brian Anderson described it in an extensively researched article titled “How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul.”  https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-catholic-charities-lost-its-soul In his article, Anderson described the Cadre Report as: the wild-eyed manifesto that invokes such radical sixties icons as Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Herbert Marcuse, and above all, the Marxist inspired Liberation Theology movement that equates Jesus with Che Guevara.  Ratified at Catholic Charities’ annual meeting in 1972, the so-called Cadre Study totally abandoned any stress on personal responsibility in relation to poverty and other social ills. Instead it painted America as an unjust numb country whose oppressive society and closed economy cause people to turn to crime or drugs or prostitution … individual acts of charity are useless.  We must instead unearth the root causes of poverty and oppression and radically reconstruct — humanize and transform — the social order to avert social upheaval.   This collaboration with the Democratic Party continues today as the federal government pays for most of the activities of Catholic Charities — and nearly all of the Democratic-driven refugee resettlement activity. More than two-thirds of the Catholic Charities budget today is provided by the federal government. Until JD Vance mentioned this, few in Congress appear to have noticed that Catholic Charities seemed to have become an arm of the Democratic Party. In 1996, then-Senator Rick Santorum brought some attention to Catholic Charities activities in an article he published in National Review titled “But Are They Catholic.” He suggested that some local chapters of Catholic Charities were advocating for activities counter to Catholic teachings — including abortion — but was told that like all government programs, these government funds come with restrictions.  Few — including our own family — seemed to pay much attention to Santorum’s concerns in 1996. Most probably believed that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops would never allow such a thing. Bishops Need to Wake Up We were wrong.  Today, the USCCB has the largest illegal immigrant resettlement agency in the world.  And although most Catholics would be pleased to know that their donations and their tax money was going to help resettle refugees fleeing persecution, most of us would not be pleased to know that Catholic Charities is actually helping illegal immigrants evade the laws of the United States. In a pamphlet entitled “Know Your Rights In an Encounter with ICE” Catholic Charities workers advise illegal immigrants to resist all attempts by ICE to interview them or search their homes. Catholic Charities also provide referrals for legal aid to illegal immigrants by providing the  Catholic Charities Hotline. In August, 2023, Kerry Alys Robinson was appointed the new female president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA.  One of her first actions was to travel to the border to visit the Catholic Charities agencies there.  But Robinson’s focus has been much more directed toward increasing the role of women in the Church, something she has advocated throughout her career. She was among a group of women who since 2007 have traveled to the Vatican to speak to cardinals there and to advocate for women in the Church. Out of the 168 local Catholic Charities agencies, 85 are led by female chief executives, and 70 percent of the full time staff members are women.  Robinson has also highlighted the work of the organization Catholic Women Preach, which invites theologically grounded women from all around the world to reflect on the Sunday scriptures.  In an interview Robinson lauded the contributions of women saying that “The more diverse and reflective of the people of God, the better our decisions are, the better our prayerful discernment, the better our prophetic voice.”  Today, President Trump and Vice President Vance are beginning to look closely at the role that all NGOs are playing in exacerbating the crisis at the border.  The U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has expressed concern about the President’s executive orders targeting immigration. El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz described President Trump’s orders as “contrary to the moral law” and promised to educate immigrant on their rights, provide legal services, and offer humanitarian aid. Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico called President Trump’s executive order “overly simplistic” solutions and emphasized the inherent dignity of every person. He also noted the positive impact on the economy and lower crime rates compared to native born citizens, a hotly contested viewpoint in the social sciences. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network condemned the President’s executive order and described them as a threat to foundational American values and Catholic principles.  Calling them “dehumanizing” the Network’s executive director said that the executive orders “threaten the very fabric of our society.” The truth is that the border crisis itself has threatened the very fabric of our society.  And although we are called as Catholics to “welcome the stranger,” our resources have become overwhelmed, and our cities can no longer provide the necessary shelter and assistance that these immigrants need.  It is time for a new solution and most people understand that. It is time that the bishops of the Catholic Church acknowledged this also. READ MORE from Anne Hendershott: Super Bowl Ad: We Know ‘He Gets Us’ but Others May Not Working-Class Whites Anxiously Losing Ground The post JD Vance Knows That Catholic Charities Has Lost Its Soul appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If there was one federal agency that I could dispose of, what would it be? Without ado: The Department of Education (DOE) as evidence for its abolition is overwhelming. If accountability and achievement are truly the goals, the DOE’s monopoly must end. The 2024 “Nation’s Report Card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trends exam — found that the average 13-year-old student’s math scores ranked the lowest in more than three decades. The number of high school seniors who did not read a single book on their own in the last year nearly quadrupled between 1976 and 2021-2022. Moreover, only 20 percent of students nationwide read proficiently, and four out of five are struggling to meet basic educational standards. Still not convinced? According to two international tests: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), American fourth graders scored 18 points lower in 2022-2023 than in 2019, the year before the COVID closures. Fourth graders delivered the lowest science scores since the TIMSS test was first administered in 1995, while eighth graders’ scores dropped by 27 points.  In all, 26 countries scored higher than Americans in math. Sweden kept their schools open during COVID-19 and ended remote learning in 2020 and moved ten slots above the U.S. The establishment of the DOE by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 was supposed to close the achievement gap. Instead, it has spent over $1 trillion with worse results ensuring that children stay academically, economically, and socially handicapped creating a legion of Democrats in its wake. The DOE budget for fiscal 2025 is $238 billion. The DOE is not just a Democrat gift to teachers’ unions. It is a Democrat gift to themselves. The Biden administration’s direction of the DOE focused on woke indoctrination, including mandating that transgender females be allowed to participate in girls’ sports.  DOE direction to schools often divides students up into “victim” or “oppressor” categories.  Too often, merit is suppressed and social and sexual pathologies infuse curricula, as teachers are removed from their disciplinary role. The teachers’ unions and special interest groups colluded to attack concerned parents opposed to Critical Race Theory and the sexualization of young students. Biden’s Department of Justice labeled those parents who spoke up at school board meetings “domestic terrorists.” The Southern Poverty Law Center branded them “anti-government extremists.” Before Elon Musk owned X, PayPal froze their accounts blocking them from a bounty of financial donations. Anti-American activists, debased teachers’ unions, and an army of bureaucrats have imposed lethal educational policies that threaten the very foundation of what makes America exceptional. The core subjects of math, reading, science, and history have been shelved in favor of contentious Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and gender identity agendas that target the most vulnerable among us — children. Besides leveraging tax dollars to force ideological curricula on the states, the DOE remains the lapdog of the National Education Association. President Ronald Reagan promised to shutter the DOE back in 1981, and in 1996 Republican candidate Bob Dole promised the same.  President Trump has said he wants to eliminate the department, but that move likely won’t happen as he does not have the needed legislative support. Education control and funding must be returned to the states and local communities who respond to citizen concerns more readily than the federal government ever will.  Public schools should be made to compete with alternatives such as charter schools, and education vouchers should be provided to parents in underperforming school districts, giving them the kind of choice wealthier families already enjoy. If this is impossible, perhaps the paradigm lies with that once army of Catholic nuns who accomplished so much with so very little. The educational-industrial complex that comprises the DOE needs to join Jim Crow in the ash heap of history.  The education of our children has become secondary to propping up teachers’ unions and woke educrats that have been failing our children for decades. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 highlights the only role the feds should play: “The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.” If accountability and achievement are truly the goals, the DOE’s monopoly must end. Abolishing the DOE is the necessary step in reforming the American education system and underscores how there must be consequences for abysmal results.  Returning education to the states emphasizes how parents are the stakeholders when educating their children — the next generation of American citizens and leaders. Education got us into this mess. Education can get us out. READ MORE from Greg Maresca: Chemical Abortion Enables Democrat Anti-Life Agenda Moore v. US: Income Tax’s Roe v. Wade The post K-12 Education is Failing: Abolish the DOE appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

High levels of homosexual orientation among American Catholic priests have been an open secret for decades. Citing data by sociologist Paul Sullins, University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus noted in a 2021 Public Discourse article that, historically, homosexual orientation in the priesthood has been roughly four to five times higher than among the general population, which is staggering. However, as Regnerus notes (again citing Sullins), the share of American priests with homosexual orientation has begun to decline significantly, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, after rising in the 1980s. Clearly, younger priests are far more conservative on this issue than older ones. Regnerus own ongoing research, based on the 2021 Survey of American Catholic Priests, has generally supported this claim. According to Regnerus, “a self-identified homosexual orientation is notably more common among ordinations that occurred before the year 2000 — between 11 and 15 percent — than it is after 2000 (2–3 percent).” Regnerus notes that the same is true of respondents’ selection of the category “somewhere in between, but more on the homosexual side.” That response was given by 7–9 percent of respondents ordained before the year 2000, but among only 3.2–3.5 percent of those more recently ordained. What about priests’ views on homosexuality? Have the attitudes and beliefs about this changed along with professed orientation? It seems so. Here, changes toward the conservative Catholic position on homosexuality have been even more remarkable. According to Regnerus, “Among priests ordained before 1981, 34 percent responded ‘always’ to the question about homosexual behavior as sinful, and an additional 33 percent said ‘often.’” Regnerus reports that the “always” response “grows in a linear fashion up through the most recent cohort: 45 percent (1981–1990), 57 percent (1991–2000), 82 percent (2001–2010), and 89 percent among those ordained after 2010.” Also, a far higher number of priests today identify as heterosexual. For the pre-1980 group, the number was less than 60 percent. For those priests ordained after 2010, it was closer to 90 percent. What accounts for this sea change? Regnerus notes that at least one reason is the tightening of standards for admission to, and retention in, Catholic seminaries. He reports that that shifts are “in step with new scrutiny placed on sexual orientation during the ‘vocational discernment’ process, shorthand for the process in which Catholic men commence their seminary education, continue their studies, or leave the seminary altogether.” As Regnerus points out, this change in Catholic seminary admission and retention policy is consistent with remarks that had been made by Pope Benedict XVI (2005-13) about the rampant “homosexual cliques” in these seminaries, and their connection to declined standards in the formation of those training for the priesthood. It is also consistent with a 2005 document, approved by Benedict and reported by Aleteia, that “called for active homosexual candidates, those with ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies,’ or those who support ‘gay culture,’ not to be admitted to the seminary.” Loosening Catholic Standards for Priesthood? Given this, traditional Catholics can only hope that recent reports of Italian seminaries relaxing their standards on this issue (denied by the Church’s defenders) are unfounded and, if there is any substance to those reports, stillborn. Were such a change in policy to spread to the United States, we could see a reversal of the encouraging trends that Sullins and Regnerus note. For traditional Catholics, the massive shift on priestly identification with and support for homosexuality is a remarkable and positive development. Clearly, younger priests are far more conservative on this issue than older ones. And they are far less likely to have a homosexual, or mostly homosexual, orientation. This news has been underreported to say the least. In the Catholic Church, the trends are certainly not all toward sexual liberalism, particularly among new clergy. READ MORE from David Ayers: Explosion of Female Bisexuality Intimate Partner Violence In Lesbian Relationships The post Gay Catholic Priests in Decline appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The far-left Episcopal bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington (D.C.), Mariann Budde, directed predictably misguided left-wing remarks to newly inaugurated President Trump in a sermon at a now widely publicized interfaith “Service of Prayer for the Nation” held at the Washington National Cathedral the morning after Trump’s inauguration (Jan. 21). She focused on “unity” for most of her message, which she said is “not partisan.” Yet her message conveyed the opposite on both counts: It was neither unifying nor nonpartisan to anyone who doesn’t embrace her leftwing views, least of all to Trump. With the Trumps and Vances sitting in a front-row pew, she called on Trump at the end of her sermon “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” both “gay, lesbian, and transgender children … who fear for their lives” and children who “fear that their [illegal immigrant] parents will be taken away” (full text of prepared sermon here, with some variation in the live delivery). She was responding to Trump’s new executive order that defines “male” and “female” on the basis of objective reproductive cells (egg or sperm) rather than by subjective “gender identity,” and to an array of executive orders dealing with illegal immigration, including the deportation of many whom Biden intentionally let cross our southern border in the millions. The Leftist Track Record of Bishop Budde As indicated by her “plea” to Trump, Budde is a leftist who received her position as bishop in the leftist Episcopal denomination in part because of her leftist views. As regards abortion, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” this past March 31, she declared: “I … respect a woman’s right to choose … when to have an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.” She has long been intolerant of any who have not supported the “LGBTQ” agenda. In February 2021 Budde issued a public apology for allowing popular evangelical pastor Max Lucado to preach at National Cathedral, even though Budde had nothing to do with the invitation. Lucado’s grave offense was having written an article 17 years earlier in which he called homosexual practice a sin (Lucado may not even hold that position any longer; he has since withdrawn the article from the web). Ironically, what this means is that Jesus himself could not preach at National Cathedral, nor any of the apostles. So much for “unity.” So much for Jesus. Jesus’s Clear Espousal of a Two-Sexes Prerequisite for Sexual Relationships Don’t think that Jesus was opposed to homosexual practice and transgenderism? His Scripture (our Old Testament) clearly did. So too all Jews of his day and all Christians in the early church after his death. Furthermore, in the key Jesus “sex text” (Mark 10:2-12; parallel in Matthew 19:3-9), Jesus, quoting Genesis 1:27, depicted God’s intentional creation of a sexual binary (i.e., a male-female or man-woman prerequisite for sexual relations) as the foundation of all sexual ethics, the basis for limiting the number of persons in a sexual union to two persons, whether concurrently (no polygamy) or over time (no revolving door of divorce and remarriage). A more rigorous proponent of the logic behind God’s deliberate design of two (and only two) sexes did not exist in the ancient world. Moreover, Jesus certainly would have recoiled at any allowance for abortion, the taking of innocent and defenseless human life. Budde as a Leftist Heretic and a Virulent Trump Hater As a female who claims to be a faithful minister of the gospel while promoting the twin evils of abortion on the one hand and “gay, lesbian, and transgender” behavior on the other, Budde falls under the rubric of what the risen Christ called a “Jezebel” (Revelation 2:20, alluding to the pagan wife of King Ahab in 1 Kings 16 to 2 Kings 9). In rejecting the teaching of earthly Jesus and the apostolic witness to the Risen Christ, she is a heretic “bishop.” She does not carry the authority of Jesus Christ, whatever title she bears. Trump was accurate in calling Budde after the church service, on his Truth Social, “a Radical Left hard-line Trump hater.” In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a policeman, Budde complained bitterly about Trump on June 3, 2020, calling for him to be “replaced.” She blamed him for having police clear protestors from Lafayette Park on June 1, just moments before Trump walked across it to deliver a message, holding a Bible, in front of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. Rioters had set the church on fire the night before, damaging part of it. She expressed no concern over the fact that for the three days prior to Trump’s action (May 29-31) there were destructive and violent riots throughout D.C., including an attack on the White House that injured 60 Secret Service agents and forced the Trump family to be rushed to the White House underground bunker. Budde later offered the benediction at the closing of the second night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. The Error of Budde’s Appeal to Show Mercy to “Transgender Children” Budde’s plea that Trump “have mercy upon … gay, lesbian, and transgender children … who fear for their lives” is both exaggerated (Trump has done nothing to put their lives in jeopardy) and anti-mercy. Is it “mercy” to allow an impressionable child to be chemically castrated for life and to go through mutilation surgery? Or to be indoctrinated into the delusion that he or she is a sex at odds with the reproductive configuration of the body? It is manifestly not “mercy” but, functionally speaking, hate and child abuse. Budde contends that affirming homosexual desire or gender dysphoria is a matter of “honoring” their “inherent dignity.” It is the exact opposite: effacing, rather than enhancing, the image of God stamped on their God-ordained sex. The apostle Paul refers to it as a “dishonoring of the body” and the desire behind it as “dishonorable passions” (Romans 1:24, 26). In the overwhelming majority of cases, a child who is not given puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones will grow out of their gender dysphoria. Even the few that don’t grow out of it are still leading a life of self-delusion in rebellion against the Creator. There is a growing body of evidence that transitioning children to the other sex serves no good purpose. Nor is it merciful to promote coercive indoctrination of children and adults to accept the immorality of homosexual and transgender behavior, attenuating the civil liberties of those who are faithful to biology, conscience, and Scripture. The idea that there is a fixed number of homosexual and transgender persons in the world that is impervious to societal influences is a myth. The percentage of Generation Z persons who identify as “LGBT” (21 percent) is eight times as high as the percentage of Baby Boomers (2.6 percent). The percentage of 18-29-year-olds who identify as transgender (2 percent) is seven times greater than the percentage of 30-49-year-olds who so identify (0.3 percent). The Error of Budde’s Appeal to Show Mercy to Illegal Immigrants Budde contends that “the vast majority of [undocumented] immigrants are not criminals.” She seems not to realize that all those who enter this country illegally are criminals by definition. “Welcoming the stranger” has nothing to do with promoting illegal entrance into the country without vetting while those who follow immigration protocols must wait in line. In order to be fair, we couldn’t only show “mercy” to those who cheat by entering the country illegally, which is a form of fraud, while we say to law-abiding foreigners who apply legally that you have to go through a long and uncertain process, unless you want to cheat too and cross the border illegally. We would really have to say to the world: Anyone who wants can settle in the U.S. Of course, we can’t possibly take in all the world’s people who want to emigrate here without destroying the country. We can’t survive completely open borders. So why should those who break the law be rewarded with mercy but not the law-abiding? That doesn’t make sense even under the guise of “mercy.” We should welcome “the stranger” who abides by the laws of the land, but not those who start by violating that law. This is not about the validity of legal immigration, which no one denies, but about the invalid nature of illegal immigration. Trump is not even in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. Last December he indicated that he would support keeping in the country those included under Obama’s DACA proposal. The Biden administration’s promotion of unvetted illegal immigration was all part of an election cheating scam: Allow millions of persons to cross the southern border unvetted, persons who will be heavily dependent on government services and thus much more likely to vote Democratic; send illegal immigrants to swing states; thwart all efforts at voter verification by the states; and as soon as the votes in Congress are there, pass a sweeping and radical amnesty bill. Who cares what crimes will be committed or what financial burdens it may cause citizens? The important point, Democrats aver, is to win elections by any means necessary. Building One’s House on Sand: The Myth of the Liberal Jesus The scripture reading for her sermon was the conclusion of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 7:24-27, regarding the wise builder who builds his house on rock and the foolish builder who builds his house on sand. What little Budde did with the text, she did wrongly, using it to say what she wanted to say, not what the text actually says. She identified “unity that serves the common good” as “the solid rock … upon which to build a nation.” Yet Jesus was rather warning his followers that those who only “hear these words of mine” but “do not do them” will face cataclysmic judgment from God on the Day of Judgment. It is the last of a series of warnings in Matthew 7:13-27, which collectively narrows, rather than widens, the expanse of God’s mercy. Only “few” take “the road that leads to life” (Matthew 7:13-14). Not everyone who calls Jesus “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, much less still those who do not confess him as Lord. One must “bear good fruit” and “do the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 7:15-23). Yes, as Budde briefly notes, Jesus did talk elsewhere in the Sermon about loving one’s enemies, forgiving, and showing mercy. Yet none of this detracts from Jesus’s warnings that few will enter God’s kingdom. And, yes, “Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts.” Yet the exploitative tax collectors and sexually immoral sinners to whom he reached out were still called to repentance by Jesus as a precondition for the inheritance of God’s kingdom. Otherwise, they remained lost in their sins. The “liberal Jesus” myth that religious leftists tout is nowhere to be found in the Gospels. Jesus was more demanding in his ethics, not less so, as the first part of the Sermon makes clear (Matthew 5:17-48). That includes Jesus’s intensification of sexual ethics (Matthew 5:27-32). Jesus was not focused on establishing broad sociological or cultural unity (which, in any case, Budde’s rhetoric does little to promote) but on the necessity of devotion to himself as “Lord” and to his rigorous teachings (Matthew 10:37-39). Far from coming to bring unity, Jesus saw himself as bringing “a sword” and not “peace,” dividing even family members from each other (Matthew 10:34-37). There is nothing wrong about speaking “truth to power.” One of the three main functions of ancient Israel’s prophets was to make or break kings, holding the king to the values of the Tribal League. Mother Teresa spoke truth to power when she spoke at a Class Day ceremony at Harvard in 1982 and called abortion “the greatest evil.” The difference in the case of Budde is that she wasn’t speaking “truth” but rather heresy (regarding “transgender children”) and misinformation (regarding illegal immigration). READ MORE from Robert A. J. Gagnon: Stop the Gaslighting on Elon Musk’s Arm Gesture Trump’s Executive Order Ends ‘Trans’ Tyranny and Protects Females Robert A. J. Gagnon is a visiting scholar at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Miss., and has taught previously at Middlebury College, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Houston Christian University. He has degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A.), Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.), and Princeton Theological Seminary (Ph.D.). He has published a number of works, including The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Abingdon). The post Leftist Bishop Gets Her Bible Wrong: Falsely Attacked Trump at Inauguration Interfaith Service appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.