Sex, Economy . . .

I recently received an e-mail from a prominent African-American Church leader who asked me to pray that her Dad's name would not be "pimped" by those who would distort her father's message of love, forgiveness, and non-violent Christian commitment!

When I first read it, I obviously PRAYED!!!

But, then after praying, I thought to myself how much "sex" is a type of 'transaction . . .'

According to the Judeo-Christian (and in a similar Abrahamic vein, the Islamic) monotheistic Tradition, sex is literally the joining together of husband and wife in holy matrimony. Sex is for pleasure to be sure, but more importantly, sex is for child-rearing!

In the Second Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae (1965) http://www.ewtn.com/library/councils/v2relfre.htm, the right for Catholic Christians to raise their children in a spirit of religious freedom, and free from state control is intrinsic to human dignity itself.

But, unless one spends tons of money to send a child to private school, the state time and time again has over-stepped the boundaries of true religious freedom. Children are taught to use condoms. Children are required to accept homosexuality as a normative lifestyle. Children are even doped full of ritalin for an entire host of artificially-constructed "mental illnesses," mental illnesses that apparently never even existed until the late twentieth century and when the drug companies of the U.S. foresaw a HUGE financial pay-off!

Truly, as Catholic moral philosopher (at the University of Notre Dame), Alasdair MacIntyre prophetically highlighted at the end of his epic treatise After Virtue, the Dark Ages of post-modernity are well upon us and it will only be through morally coherent, robust Aristotelian centers of Virtue that the Church (or anyone else . . .) can survive the onslaught against human dignity!

Barack Obama's first week following the election was marked by his assault upon life-in-the-womb.

Genocide occurs in the Sudan, yet the Bush-Cheney era was more concerned about Sadaam's oil profits than they were TRUE human rights abuses!!

The only choice for Christians, whether we are Sojourners Liberal Evangelical-Catholics (like myself . . .) or hard-liners like Richard John Neuhaus (Editor of First Things . . .) is to both discover and highlight those communities of Natural Law Aristotelian Virtue that respect the human person, foster an independent spirit (i.e. free of state-totalitarian G.O.P. control!), and also welcome children!

I, thus pledge, along with folks like Jim Wallis, Neuhaus, Stanley Hauerwas, Mike Baxter, et al to embody a different Kingdom than the capitalistic, consumer-profit-at-all-costs of the Republikaaners, and also different from the self-mutilating "suicide/abortion cult" of the Demokraats, a political party that on the one hand saved the U.S.A. from its slide towards "torture-ridden fascist Ideology," but also sought refuge in the worn out cliches of the Political Left that equate true womanhood somehow with the supposed right to murder one's babies!!! No, Barack, Hillary and the rest of you infanticide-fanatics, True Womanhood is centered in Jesus the Messiah, and modelled upon his mother, the Divine Theotokos, the head of the communion of saints, Mary.

In the Name of Jesus the Messiah and through the most blessed intercession of His mother, the Virgin Mary! --Rob