Trump’s State of the Union address was a remarkable affair, from what highlights I could glean. Ebullient, optimistic, confident – all in the very room where the soon-to-be-declared failed impeachment process was held. For this writer, what was most significant was the declaration, whatever Jefferson mean by his ‘wall of separation of Church and State’ in his 1802 address in Dallas, America was a Christian nation. Two centuries on, here are Trump’s words:.
My administration is also defending religious liberty, and that includes the constitutional right to pray in public schools…in America, we don’t punish prayer. We don’t tear down crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. We don’t muzzle preachers and pastors…In America, we celebrate faith. We cherish religion. We lift our voices in prayer, and we raise our sights to the glory of God.
He also condemned the attempt to impose socialism in America, in part via the imposition of universal health care, with, we may imply, its host of enforced evils (abortion, contraception and, soon, euthanasia).
Yet we have conservative commentators dismissing Trump, with one recent column strangely triangulating him with Justin Trudeau and Bill Clinton – under some vague rubric of what to do with a leader who is ‘not good’. How does he know whether Trump is a good man, or not? He’s doing a lot more for the cause of good than almost all other career politicians combined. Whatever one thinks of the current President, his flaws are not in the same league as the principled evil of the latter two, who – to give but one example – seem never to have met an abortion they didn’t like.
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, sitting right behind Trump, tore up her copy of his address as soon as he had finished. To paraphrase the Bard, petulance and bad grace, thy name is Pelosi.
While on the theme of petulance, teachers and educators – all publicly funded, with generous salaries, unheard-of benefits, long vacation periods, summers off, gold-plated retirement packages which they can cash in while still in their prime fifties – are walking the picket line across Ontario, demanding, yes, more money, along with more funding, smaller class sizes, and on it goes.
Just for the record: The Church has condemned any monopoly on education, and has taught in no uncertain terms that parents have a right to an education of their choice, a choice which must be realizable in the concrete. This universal, publicly-funded system -and we may include the inaptly-named ‘Catholic’ system here – removes that choice ‘in the concrete’ – for we all have to pay for it – and, to my mind, has got to go. Whither and where are the religious orders who taught our forebears’ children for the love of God and the desire for eternity? Who produced a better ‘final product’ – that is, a truly, integrally and wholly educated child – is a question I will leave for the reader. Ponder such options as Wayside Academy in Peterborough, Divine Mercy School in Saint John, and Mary Mother of God in Toronto, all struggling for funding and working under far more adverse conditions than the mollycoddled minions of the public system. There is a reason homeschooling and private schooling, for all their hardships – are on the rise. They are even becoming a near-necessity, as things descend from the farcical to the tragic.
The results of the poll on euthanasia are troubling, with most respondents wanting to expand the criteria for which physicians are allowed to murder you, including the vague and nebulous notion of ‘mental illness’. Who isn’t ‘mentally ill’ now and again, agitated, troubled, rejected, down-in-the-dumps, spiritually bereft? The three physicians recently acquitted in Belgium for offing a perfectly healthy 32-year-old woman who was ‘depressed’, but whose sisters claimed had just been jilted by a boyfriend.
I must confess that I didn’t fill in the questionnaire, as a number of the questions presumed support for MAiD, and I’ve had it up to here with Trudeaupian arrogance (see above), and am not going to sign my John Hancock to anything that presumes support for murder-suicide. Should people wait ten or twenty days to have themselves lethally injected? How about none of the above, and that needle you may shove…in the box for disposable hazards.
Ah, well, one must keep some form of one’s sense of humour for the absurd, right up to the end, while maintaining the seriousness of it all.
God has all things in hand, but He requires our hands and feet as well, in that notion of subsidiarity. So fight, dear reader, for your right, to live, to breath, in the truth, and nothing but.