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C.S. Lewis’ classic book, The Abolition of Man, was first delivered as a series of lectures at King’s College in 1943. It was to serve as a warning. He noted:
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Almost 80 years later, the same problem rages:
1. Jordan Peterson Tweets Strong Defense of Masculinity
From The Daily Citizen:
Dr. Jordan Peterson wants the world to know that being a man is not toxic. And he doesn’t want us to settle for saying being a man is simply “good.” He takes it up a notch, telling his 2.5 million Twitter followers this week that being a man is “not okay; It’s necessary.”
In a culture where we have allowed the term “masculinity” to be improperly linked to the poisonous prefix “toxic” so they seem to be one word, it is worth noting when powerful voices speak up unapologetically in defense of manhood like Peterson has done.
Peterson simply invites us to look around civilization and “see all the buildings go up.” How did they get there?
Men built them because “men … do impossible things.” He adds it is men who are “working on the sewers; they’re up on the power lines in the storms and the rain.” Men “often literally…work themselves to death” in the service of others.
Dr. Peterson is precisely right.
2. Florida Court Allows Pro-Life Law To Go Into Effect, Mandating Mothers Wait 24 Hours Before They Abort Their Baby
From the Daily Wire:
A Florida trial court allowed a pro-life law to go into effect Friday mandating that abortion clinics and doctors require mothers to wait 24 hours before they abort their unborn baby.
Gainesville Woman Care had attempted to temporarily block the law to keep what proponents call mandatory “reflection periods” from going into effect.
“If you are going to describe abortion as medicine, then you have to have informed consent,” Carolyn McDonnell, staff counsel at Americans United For Life, told The Daily Wire in an interview. “Any medical procedure requires informed consent and reflection periods are a part of that.”
“For example, it takes 24 hours to terminate parental rights, three days to get a marriage license, and 20 days to get a divorce,” she said.
3. Mike Pence’s Visit to Campus Brings Out the Student Censors
From The Daily Citizen:
My, how times have changed when it comes to free speech on the nation’s campuses. When I was walking the Quad at the University of Illinois in the mid-1970s, we were just a few years removed from the anti-Vietnam war agitation that culminated with the Kent State shootings in 1970, and a couple years from witnessing the American Civil Liberties Union defend the right of some Nazi types to march and offer their especially provocative form of racism in the heavily Jewish, Chicago-area community of Skokie in 1978.
It seemed like the golden age of free speech, where anyone could be offended on any given day by some guy with a bullhorn on the sidewalk, but we all recognized instinctively what “free speech” entailed, and what was required of the listener, even the unwilling one.
Tolerance. Patience. Speak up if and when appropriate if we disagreed.
These days, however, as we’ve seen recently on the campus of Yale Law School and now on the University of Virginia, the student activists and leaders on campus are demanding that ideas and people they don’t agree with be censored, canceled and de-platformed.
4. Nine women and girls in Bucha pregnant after ‘systematic rape’ by Russian troops
From the NY Post:
Monstrous Russian troops “systematically raped” 25 Ukrainian girls and women as young as 14 after finding them hiding together in Bucha — leaving at least nine pregnant, according to the nation’s human rights commissioner.
Lyudmyla Denisova told the BBC that the victims — between the ages of 14 and 24 — were attacked after being found in “the basement of one house in Bucha,” the brutalized suburb of capital Kyiv where hundreds of bodies were later found in the street.
“Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children,” the human rights ombudsman told the broadcaster.
Some of the rapist troops even struck in public to send a warning to others watching, the officials said Tuesday.
5. Consumers Speak Out: Less Business for Disney
From The Daily Citizen:
When Tomorrowland opened in California’s Disneyland in 1955, it included attractions that focused on Walt Disney’s vision of what the future might hold – a Rocket to the Moon, Astro Jets, Monsanto Hall of Chemistry and the Hall of Aluminum Fame (I bet that was a rip-roaring adventure!).
Tomorrowland did not have any exhibits or rides that speculated on future potential changes in relational and sexual values. It’s doubtful that anything like our current brave new sexual world, with its panoply of broken relationships, “sexual orientations” and “gender identities,” ever even crossed Walt Disney’s mind.
It’s also doubtful that Walt envisioned a future where schools would teach children that they might identify as a boy, a girl, neither, both, genderqueer, or one of the hundreds of identities newly minted by gender activists.
It’s doubtful that he could have foreseen a future where schools would teach five-year-old children that there are myriad sexual orientations. Or that his company would support this instruction and oppose parental rights in education.
6. Warner Bros Removes Gay Reference in Fantastic Beasts Film at China’s Request
From National Review:
Warner Brothers removed a reference to a gay relationship from the Chinese version of its latest Fantastic Beasts sequel at the Chinese Communist Party’s request, the movie studio confirmed Wednesday.
The six-second clip that was scrubbed from Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore alluded to a homosexual romantic relationship between benevolent wizard Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) and dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter cinematic universe.
The dialogue that Warner Bros. purged from the movie for Chinese audiences included two lines referencing the characters’ past love affair: “I was in love with you,” and “the summer Gellert and I fell in love,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“As a studio, we’re committed to safeguarding the integrity of every film we release, and that extends to circumstances that necessitate making nuanced cuts in order to respond sensitively to a variety of in-market factors,” a Warner Bros. spokesperson said in a statement. “Our hope is to release our features worldwide as released by their creators but historically we have faced small edits made in local markets. In the case of ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,’ a six-second cut was requested and Warner Bros. accepted those changes to comply with local requirements but the spirit of the film remains intact.”
7. STDs increased during COVID-19 pandemic’s first year, CDC report finds
From Fox News:
Cases of several sexually transmitted diseases rose during the first year of COVID-19 pandemic, according to a published report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released this week.
The number of reported cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and congenital syphilis surpassed 2019 levels, while chlamydia declined, according to a news release about the health report.
The federal health agency said the number of STD cases originally declined during the early months of the pandemic in 2020 – but re-surged later in the year.
“There were moments in 2020 when it felt like the world was standing still, but STDs weren’t. The unrelenting momentum of the STD epidemic continued even as STD prevention services were disrupted.” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, the director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, said in the CDC release.
8. Opioid overdose deaths among teens have skyrocketed due to fentanyl
From ABC News:
Opioid overdose deaths in adolescents rose far more rapidly than the general population between 2019 and 2021, according to a new study of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
The study found that deaths from opioid overdoses in teens ages 14 to 18 increased by 94% between 2019 and 2020 and by an additional 20% between 2020 and 2021.
One specific driver of these deaths was fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that the Drug Enforcement Administration says is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine.
The researchers, who hailed from multiple institutions, found that adolescent fentanyl-related overdose deaths leapt 350% over the study period. Overall, fentanyl was associated with 77% of adolescent overdose deaths in 2021.
RELATED:
Life Expectancy Drops By Two Years
From Reuters:
Life expectancy in the United States fell by nearly two years in 2020 to about 77 years amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the sharpest drop compared to 19 other high-income countries, according to a recent analysis.
Americans, on average, had a life expectancy of 76.99 years in 2020, down from 78.86 years in 2019, according to the study, which looked at national death and population counts in 2019 and 2020, as well as provisional data for 2021 to calculate mortality rate ratios.
9. Mel Gibson says ‘Father Stu’ highlights God’s power to redeem: ‘There’s a transformation needed in all of us’
From the Christian Post:
When Mel Gibson was first approached to play in “Father Stu,” a Mark Wahlberg film about a boxer-turned-priest, he was skeptical.
“It didn’t sound like it was going to work,” the 66-year-old Academy Award-winner told The Christian Post.
But after reading the script, Gibson said he was hooked.
“I read the screenplay and it made me laugh, and then it was emotionally very effective,” he said. “This one smelled good, and it looked good, and it was great, it was funny. It was a film that wasn’t preaching to the choir and it wasn’t over saccharin, and just had a lot of a big splash of reality in it.”
“Father Stu,” hitting theaters just ahead of Easter Sunday, is based on the true story of amateur boxer, Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg) who moves to Los Angeles dreaming of stardom. There, he meets a Catholic Sunday School teacher, Carmen, (Teresa Ruiz), and begins attending church in an effort to win her over. After surviving a terrible motorcycle accident, however, Stu begins to rethink his life.
10. What does “Maundy Thursday” mean?
From Aleteia:
In the English -speaking world, many call Holy Thursday “Maundy Thursday.”
What does that mean?
The word Maundy is related to the Latin word, “mandatum,” and is found in the liturgy during the washing of the feet.
Dom Prosper Gueranger explains this meaning in his Liturgical Year:
The Ceremony of the Washing of the Feet is also called the Mandatum, from the first word of the first Antiphon … Mandatum novum do vobis.
This antiphon is taken from the Gospel of John and repeats the words of Jesus to his Apostles.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
John 13:34
“Maundy Thursday” is then translated as “Commandment Thursday,” a reference to the “new commandment” Jesus proclaimed, focused on loving others as Jesus loves us.
