Singer Sinead O’Connor tears up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, October 3, 1992.
Back in 1992, I recall watching Saturday Night Live when musical guest Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. My initial reaction was to get upset. Given my frequent writings against the papacy and many denunciations of it as Antichrist, this may come as a bit of a surprise to regular readers of this blog. But remember, I’m speaking of an event from 31 years ago, and a lot has happened to change me in those ensuing years.
At the time, I was, as many people were then and still are today, under the mistaken impression that the pope was a representative of Christianity. I had barely begun to read reformed writers and had very flawed ideas of what Christianity was. Not having a reformed background, I took my cues on Christianity from the surrounding culture. And the surrounding culture said that Pope John Paul II was a Christian man, a heroic fighter against communism, and one of the big reasons the West had recently triumphed in the Cold War. Just two years earlier the world had witnessed the unthinkable when the Berlin Wall came down, and the press was full of glowing stories about the Polish Pope’s – Karol Józef Wojtyla, AKA Pope John Paul II was born in 1920 in Wadowice, Poland – role in bringing down communism.
US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the conclusion of the Investing in America tour at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 14, 2023. Kamala Harris appeared to make a blunder by describing plans to “reduce population” during her speech. SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice of the LORD thy God.
Deuteronomy 28:62
In a recent speech, Vice President Kamala Harris raised a few eyebrows when she said, “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.”
Wait, what? The Vice President wants to “reduce population” in the US? Well, no. At least according to the White House, who updated the transcript of Harris’s speech, substituting the word “pollution” for “population.”
Now we can all misspeak from time to time and not say what we intend to say. Maybe Harris really did mean to say “pollution” and not “population.” But here’s the thing, I don’t know that this is the case. Part of the problem is the neo-Malthusianism of the globalists, of which Kamala Harris is a prominent representative. These people have who have openly talked about the “problem” of overpopulation now for over fifty years. And given the open hostility and hatred the Biden Regime has shown to the American people – and I mean here, particularly white, conservative, Christian Americans – from its inception, it’s disturbing to hear such language coming from the mouth of a high government official.
Migrants cross into Slovenia, 2015 Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
When one surveys the Western world in 2023, he finds a most amazing phenomenon: with one exception, all the governments of the West express open hatred for their own people and are actively attempting to destroy them.
I covered this topic in my recent post “The Trouble with Scotland.” Here in America, the Biden Regime demonstrates its hatred for ordinary Americans in any number of ways, but perhaps in no way more dramatically than its treasonous border policies that have resulted in millions of illegal aliens pouring across our southern border with Mexico.
What is more, it doesn’t seem to matter at all what the people of the West actually want or whom they vote for. Just last year, newly elected Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who ran on a platform of immigration control, has seen migration across the Mediterranean double in the past nine months and recently granted work permits to 425k non-EU workers. The conservative government of Great Britain has done nothing to halt the flow of welfare migrants coming across the Channel.
I mentioned above that there is one exception to the migration madness that’s overtaken the West. That exception is a man I’ve mentioned before in this space, Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab: and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.
I bring this up because Edward’s view of Scotland, at least as depicted in the movie, seems to have been adopted by every government, every university, and every institution of any power in the Western world.
Except for Viktor Orban in Hungary, I cannot think of a single head of state in the West that is not openly working for the destruction of his own people. It’s an amazing phenomenon to behold and one that demands an explanation.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau is at war with the Canadian people. The trouble with Canada is that it’s full of Canadians. The current occupant of the White House (I do not call him president) has openly and repeatedly expressed his disdain for a large swath of the American people. The trouble with America, in Jesuit Joe’s opinion, is that it’s full of Americans. The seed was sown for recent Islamic riots in France by the French government’s policy of importing millions of Muslims into the country over the past several decades, such that Muslims now make up about 10% of the French population. In Great Britain, the government’s decades-old immigration policy has reduced London’s white British population to minority status, while the government shows no interest in stopping the illegal alien invasion coming across the English Channel. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government has attempted to destroy the nation’s farmers under the guise of fighting climate change. There are reports that Rutte’s government intended to take 3,000 farms and use the land to house migrant invaders. And speaking of Scotland, the new Scottish First Minister is a Muslim named Humza Yousaf. Imagine that. A Muslim ruling in the land of John Knox. Apparently, Scotland is no longer as full of Scots as it was in Edward’s day.
I could go on, but the pattern is clear. Western governments have abandoned the idea that they are the servants of the people and are instead attempting to destroy their own people.
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.
Leviticus 25:10
As we approach the 247th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’m moved once again to consider what a precious and rare commodity liberty is.
Throughout the course of human history, most people have lived under some form of lawless tyranny. Whether it was the pharaohs and kings of the ancient near east, the Caesars of Rome, the medieval popes, or the fascist and communist dictators of more recent times, the lot of most men in most places at most times is to have their rulers “lord it over them” as Jesus put it.
Given the long history of tyranny experienced by the human race, it’s worth asking why it is that we in the West have experienced such a long and blessed period of liberty. Growing up, I was taught that our constitutional republic was the product of the Enlightenment. It wasn’t until I was long out of school that I learned that the liberty that we historically have enjoyed as Americans was not the product of secular thought, but of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.
On May 30 of this year, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign released the following statement, “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
Trump continued, “My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries.” You can read Trump’s full statement here.
This is an excellent statement from Trump. A critic may raise the point that Trump talked about this as part of his 2016 campaign, but never pursued the issue seriously during his term in office. That’s a fair criticism, one that I share. But his inaction during his first term in office doesn’t negate the truth of what he said in his press release. Further, as far as I’m aware, no other current Republican candidate has made a statement on birthright citizenship reform.
Under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the children born on American soil to illegal aliens, birth tourists, foreign students, etc. are granted the status of American citizens, regardless of the citizenship or immigration status of their parents. In other words, it is foreigners, not the American people, who determine who becomes a citizen and who does not. This situation is entirely unacceptable to anyone who believes in the principles of Westphalian sovereignty established under the Peace of Westphalia, in which the nation-state was established as the highest form of government, where each nation-state was treated like a legal person in international law, and where the people of each nation-state could order their own internal affairs as it saw fit.
I’ve written on the issue of birthright citizenship (BRC) reform in the past, but it has been a while and the importance of the issue remains. For these reasons, I’ve decided to write a series on this topic. In this author’s opinion, reforming BRC to remove the nation-destroying incentives that encourage foreigners to violate American immigration law is the single most important legal step needed to end Rome’s illegal alien invasion of the United States. Note, I do not say that it’s the only legal step needed, but it is the most important one. It’s more important than building a wall, which was the primary immigration initiative of the first Trump administration. You could argue that reforming BRC is, in effect, a sort of internal, invisible, legal wall.
The logic of BRC reform is simple, if you remove a huge incentive for illegal immigration, you’re going to get less illegal immigration.
The first page of the U.S. Justice Department’s charging document against former U.S. President Donald Trump and his employee Waltine Nauta, charging Trump with 37 criminal counts, including charges of unauthorized retention of classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice after leaving the White House, is seen after being released by the Justice Department in Washington, U.S. June 9, 2023. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/File Photo
“The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
John Wycliffe
Americans are familiar with the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
What many Americans don’t know is that these words are not Lincoln’s own, but he was quoting John Wycliffe from the prologue of his English translation of the Bible.
Wycliffe, often called the Morningstar of the Reformation, lived and wrote at a time when the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility allied with Rome considered it subversive to translate the Scriptures into the common language of the people. Rome and its royalist supporters believed in a government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite and ruthlessly enforced this teaching. One of the ways of enforcing their tyranny was to keep the people ignorant of the Bible, feeding them instead on a diet of doctrinal fables dispensed by the Church of Rome.
But keeping up the ruse took a lot of effort. Access to the Word of God had to be forbidden. For if people learned what the Bible actually taught and compared it to what Rome said the Bible taught, Rome’s lies would be exposed and her government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite would be in danger of overthrow.
President Joe Biden speaks at a Pride Month celebration on the South Lawn of the White House, Saturday, June 10, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18
If nothing else, Pride Month goes to show that the judge of all the earth is not lacking a sense of humor. In 1999, Bill Clinton declared June “Pride Month” in commemoration of the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. The Stonewall riots were a response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. And yet the Word of God tells us that “Pride goeth before destruction.” This certainly seems to be the case for America in 2023.
To give you a sense of how far America has come, and not in a good way, since 1969 regarding the public acceptance of homosexuality, I’ll refer you to an article in Britannica that notes, “In 1969 the solicitation of homosexual relations was an illegal act in New York City (and indeed virtually all other urban centres). Think about that, In the space of about 50 years, well within living memory, America has gone from a nation where homosexual activity was criminal – even in New York City! – to something like a new Sodom and Gomorrah, where open sodomy not only is tolerated but is even celebrated. And even more than celebrated, its tenants are now imposed from the top down on students and employees. When the rainbow flag is run up the flagpole, we’re all expected to salute, sometimes literally, and woe that that person who refuses.
An old saying from Stalinist Russia was “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!” Something like that spirit now exists in America when it comes to Pride Month and the other forced celebrations of sodomy that are the rituals of the new state religion. Perhaps the most surprisingly eager celebrants of sodomy, at least to me, are the corporations. When I was growing up, business was viewed as a bedrock of conservatism. There was no time for radical politics. There were books to be kept and production targets to hit. But that’s not the case today.
John Robbins reported in his 1996 essay “Rebuilding American Freedom in the Twenty-First Century” about how IBM was pushing homosexual ideology on its managers. This was nearly thirty years ago. Today, corporate execs cannot fall over themselves fast enough to show their LGBTQ bona fides. Just last week, a friend sent me a Pride Month message from a company I used to work for. Mind you, this company is headquartered, not in some nutty progressive coastal city, but in the Midwest, the heartland of America. “Celebrating our PRIDE in 2023,” is the title of the message, which drones on with the usual corporate boilerplate about “diversity” and the importance of promoting “inclusion and acceptance” for the “LGBTQ+ community.”
My first thought was that I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. I do not care to be a part of a company that openly promotes gross immorality. Of course, corporate America’s never-be-the-first-one-to-stop-clapping promotion of the immoral homosexual agenda has put many Christians in the position of having to decide where to work and shop. Nearly every business of any size in the U.S. has been absorbed into the sodomite borg. CEOs are scared to death to be seen as unsupportive of sodomy. As a result, whether they personally believe the rubbish themselves, they think it wise to act as if they did and foist the evil LGBTQ agenda on their employees. When I worked for this particular company, I recall having to endure HR videos, one of which featured some guy in a blue dress complaining about how people would make unkind comments to him because he was a guy wearing a blue dress. The message was, you’re supposed to think some guy wearing a blue dress is perfectly normal. And if you don’t think that’s perfectly normal, you’re the problem!
I doubt seriously the corporate big wheels who promote videos of men in blue dresses think they’re doing evil. “Why, it’s just good business,” they probably say to themselves. But that, it seems to me, is evidence of a heart that loves money, and the love of money – not money, but the LOVE of money – is the root of all sorts of evil, as Jesus himself taught. And yet, promoting evil is exactly what they do when they agree to promote the homosexual agenda. These CEOs will have to give an account of themselves to God for this, and I do not want to be in their position.
Then there’s our political class, in particular, the Biden Regime. Just yesterday, Biden held a picnic in celebration of “Pride Month” on the south lawn of the White House. At the gathering, he told the crowd that his administration has their back and would work to counter “callous” and “cynical” bills in Republican-led states. Apparently, this is a reference to a number of states that recently passed laws against the mutilation of children at the hands of the medical establishment. Joe thinks this is terrible and, according to the New York Times, has appointed an official within the Department of Education “who will monitor and address the growing number of local bans on books with references to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Put differently, the Biden Regime wants to force kids in public schools to endure gay pornography as classroom reading material. That’s a long way from “see Spot run.” And I thought it was outrageous that I had to suffer through an HR video getting lectured by some dude in a blue dress! The Biden Regime is truly demonic and is seeking to corrupt the most vulnerable among us with the most vile of sins. May the Lord grant Christian parents the eyes to see that public schools are not the place for their children.
Worth mentioning too is the role of the Roman Catholic Church in promoting sodomy, especially the Jesuits. Prominent Jesuit James Martin asks the question “Can Catholics celebrate Pride Monty” and answers the question “Yes.” That’s not a surprise. In fact, I’d be surprised if a Jesuit were to come to any other conclusion. And although the Roman Church-State officially holds that sodomy is a sin, Rome has historically been one of the greatest promoters of this sin. Here’s what Luther had to say,
More remarkable yet, in the same bull they decided that a cardinal should not keep as many boys in the future. However, Pope Leo commanded that this be deleted; otherwise it would have been spread throughout the whole world how openly and shamelessly the pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy. I do not wish to mention the pope, but since the knaves will not repent, but condemn the gospel, blaspheme and revile God’s word, and excuse their vices, they, in turn, will have to take a whiff of their own terrible filth. This vice is so prevalent among them that recently a pope caused his own death by means of this sin and vice. In fact, he died on the spot. All right now, you popes, cardinals, papists, spiritual lords, keep on persecuting God’s word and defending your doctrine and your churches!
Luther’s Works Volume 47, p.38
Doubtless, the sort of filth Luther describes was going on before he wrote, just as without question industrial scale sodomy has Rome has continued to be a feature – not a bug, but a feature – of Rome right up to the present day as recent headlines continue to attest.
But there is some good news in all this unrelenting homosexual propaganda. Beginning with last year’s slap-down of Disney for its attempt to interfere in Florida’s rather mild law prohibiting schools from spreading homosexual propaganda, several other companies have recently paid the price for promoting sodomy. Bud Light’s parent company and Target are two such examples. Several states have passed laws against transitioning minors, enough so that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – HRC is one of the biggest drivers of the corporate sodomite agenda – issued a “State of Emergency.” The sodomites at HRC simply cannot tolerate state governments passing laws that accord with the Word of God and feels threatened by it. The fact that HRC is concerned shows that perhaps American Christians have had enough and are beginning to effectively fight back
Joe Biden blames you for the raft of gun violence in America and not his own destructive policies.
Jesuit Joe was up to his old tricks late last week, this time proclaiming his love for “commonsense gun reform.”
So what does Joe consider “commonsense” (sic) gun reform? He tells us.
Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
Strengthen background checks
Enact safe storage laws and red flag laws
Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability
Address the mental health crisis deepened by the trauma of gun violence
It’s tempting to ask Joe how he knows these things are “commonsense,” but I doubt he’d be able to give a coherent reason. At any rate, let’s do a quick run-through of his proposals.
Ban Assault Weapons
What is an assault weapon? Joe doesn’t tell us and neither do the other gun banners. I say gun banners because that is what they want to do: legally bar Americans from owning firearms. Don’t think for a minute that this is just about “assault weapons,” whatever those are, and not about the Second Amendment more broadly.
They’re coming for your handguns, your shotguns, and your 22 rifles as well.
Same with the term “high-capacity magazine.” What does Biden consider a high-capacity magazine? I guess we’ll find out. My guess is that ultimately, Biden would consider anything greater than zero to be a high-capacity magazine.
Lux Lucet 