Abortion, Pederasty, Child Murder Share The Same Roots

by Frank Morriss

Who can doubt the blood-red tide has been loosed in this very time of history, drowning the ceremony of innocence, as the poet Yeats foresaw? It is doubtful that even that prescient genius could have told us the literalness of that prophecy's fulfillment.

Child after child is seized by that blood flow — carried away, violated, slain — and though there is momentary outcry and alarm, and tears by parents, and a flurry of activity by law enforcement, nothing seems sufficient against the tide. Worse, few seem to consider the cause, and most seem merely shocked and bewildered, or seek answers from sociologists or penologists or psychologists. After all, the word evil (until very recently) was some time ago banned from serious discussion. Few teachers of America's youths would risk discussing evil as a causative reality. It was left to fiction, where evil was given weight, but only figuratively, for the plot.

When a most evil proposition appeared among us via law and judicial ruling — that idea that it was a mother's right to dispose of innocent life in her womb and a doctor's right to conspire with her in that evil — no discussion, not a word, phrase, or sentence, not a jot or tittle was put on the public record as to the fact that slaughtering unborn innocents is evil in action. A few public voices were heard saying this was unworthy of decent society, but such voices were silenced by the lie that abortion was demanded in the name of reproductive "rights" of the woman, a lie even in the phrasing, as if abortion had something to do with the exercise of reproductive power, rather than with the unwanted result of the use of such power. Lie followed by murder to cover it up, and the public forced to accept that in the name of "freedom," thus undermining the responsibility of the free creature. Evil thereby corroded the good of freedom, denying it as something ennobling humans and distinguishing them from the brutes who are slaves to their instincts. That wedded freedom to evil violence.

It is not unreasonable to attribute the seeming rise of pederasty with its disgusting abuse of innocence to this public acceptance of the worst kind of abuse, the actual rape and murder of children, destruction first of their innocence, then of their life. Abortion, pederasty, child murder — all are interwoven in today's denial that some things are evil in their essence and their exercise, calling for the strongest form of retributive justice, since no other sort of recompense or compensation can match the horrible damage done to parents, society — and most of all the children violated.

Rather than that pro-active sort of indignation, this treatment of children as objects of lust is even defended in certain quarters as a healthy development in appreciation of human sexuality. A recent book seriously defended exposure to sex for very young children at the hands of adults. This is done in the name of modern scientific sex "studies," some of which were in fact the work of perverts. Indeed, we are finding many in the area of child study, child counseling, childcare actually indulged in certain vices and activities that supposedly they were studying and analyzing. But modern society draws back from calling them perverts — as it does regarding homosexual practitioners — because the new scholars, sexologists, and even theologians have convinced today's world that there is no such thing as perversion. All enjoyment of sex is normal, no matter how achieved - by same-sex contact, by sexual contact with the very young, by pain inflicted on self or partners, by pornography, often produced in the course of child abuse and the degradation of women.

If all sexual enjoyment is good, then nothing is unnatural or perverted. Thus has the blood-red tide drowning the ceremony of (that is, honor paid to) innocence been loosed. The dam of restraint has been dynamited by those who wish to justify lust as good rather than evil, useful rather than destructive, normal rather than perverted.

There have been voices of warning. Solzhenitsyn's, in his Nobel Prize lecture, was one of them and is worth quoting at some length:

"[Caveman emotion elevated into a theoretical principle] keeps drumming into our hearts that there are no stable and universal concepts of justice and good, that all values are fluid, that they change, and that this means one must always act as suits one's party. . . Violence, continually less restrained by the confines of a legality established over the course of many generations, strides brazenly and victoriously through the whole world, unconcerned with the fact its sterility has already been manifested and proven many times in history. Nor is it merely brute force that triumphs but its trumpeted justification also: The whole world is being flooded with the crude conviction that force can do everything and righteousness and innocence nothing."

Elsewhere in his talk, Solzhenitsyn was certainly speaking about a surrender to evil when he said that the "spirit of Munich" dominated the 20th century:

"The frightened, civilized world found nothing better than concessions and smiles to counterpose to the sudden renewed assault of bare-fanged barbarism."

All of this can be applied to the current reaction (or actually non-reaction) to physical, educational, immoral assaults on the young, mistreatment of them allowed in the name of certain freedoms — of expression, opinion, and, yes, unrestricted enjoyment of sex. The law stands by helplessly as so-called artists and entertainers corrupt our children with praise of the "good" (meaning unrestrained) life. This tolerance supposedly is demanded by the Constitution and its "freedom from," never considering the purpose of freedom, or the fact that such freedom has dissolved into license.

Not too many months before Solzhenitsyn's address, the late Fr. Vincent Micelli, S.J., wrote this:

"Part of the explanation for this unchecked indulgence in cruelty, morbidity, and perversion is due to liberal atheists who, pressing ahead with their false ideas of freedom, come to the defense of man's unreasonable expressions of free love, free violence, free looting of property, free drugs, freedom to subvert society or to drop out of all social responsibility.

"Thus, such men have succeeded through the courts in attaining legal approval for many types of immoral conduct — divorce as a relief from marriage, abortion as liberation from the unwanted child, contraceptive services as a protection against pregnancy, homosexuality for consenting adults."

Today we have "progressed" even beyond these degrading "freedoms" with the assertion and resulting consideration that sex may be imposed on children in the name of freedom, whereas it is merely a service to the perverted lusts of sexual predators. It is no wonder that assaults and murders of children seem today to be epidemic.

As alarmed as some may be, few are willing to accept that what is involved is a war no less than that being waged against terrorism — the war of evil against goodness that the innocence of children reflects. Evil in this war gives no quarter to either the innocence or helplessness of children. Egged on by a sense of safety because of a modern false compassion regarding punishment of crime there is made a sort of nod to irresponsibility for lust or even acceptance of lust as natural so that predators dare to take children from their bedrooms, lure them openly via cybernetic "chat rooms," abuse them in schools or even churches.

Is what sexual predators do to children very far beyond what is done to children in the name of their right to know their "sexuality"? Hasn't sex "education" long past graduated into education in sexual practice? If "safe sex" is taught children, as it is, and very early, might this not be considered precedent for "safe lust" imposed upon children, who are terrified into silence by threats or shame, or in some cases silenced by murder.

With the victory already conceded to unrestricted sex, sex for one's own purpose unaccountable to society or law when done in private (or now even in public view with means provided by new technology), something may be said similar to an adage about treason never prospering. It can now be said, "Sexual abuse never prospers, because when it prospers, none care to call it abuse." Saying sex needs restraints, moral or legal, today is considered treason against progress, modern scientific discovery, the rights of the individual, and psychological health, particularly of the male. Thus indignation even when our children are raped and murdered is muted.

What moral values based on the existence of evil in opposition to good do average Americans learn? Such is not taught in public schools. In most colleges and universities, the very idea that there is evil, other than as literary or cultural fiction, is scoffed at, and no assertion by any student of its existence and power would be well received. That leaves Protestant fundamentalists, who get a "biblical" notion of evil without means of applying it reasonably, and Catholics.

Catholics have a long tradition and discipline concerning evil, and up to very recently weren't hesitant to apply those restraints to sexual behavior. But the new theologies so prevalent and accepted after Vatican II badly diluted such understandings. The new "openness" to human sexuality invaded and dominated Catholic thought in various areas. liberal Catholics bought into the necessary, and therefore moral, use of contraception. Secular sexology was melded with, or in some degree replaced, traditional ideas about sexual morality. Sexologists with no moral values whatever spoke to meetings of Catholics, proposing immoralities that were challenged by few present, certainly not by prelates or priests anxious not to be considered old-fashioned.

Moral relativists like Fathers Schillebeeckx and Curran were popular lecturers and writers. Journalists, most supremely and absolutely secular and liberal, pushed the reputations of these modernist theoreticians. Thus in America, at least, what had once been a barrier to sexual libertinism — Catholic teaching and thought — was so softened that it was porous to indecencies of the worst and most dangerous sort.

There is a price for such moral and intellectual treason. And today it is being paid by the most innocent and helpless humans — children in the womb, innocent babes, and wonderfully innocent children. That is a terrible price for us to tolerate in the name of liberal and "progressive" understandings. It's time to stop all this tolerant, compassionate "understanding," and to demand and push for a social change to a more honest, realistic, and traditional understanding of good and bad in regard to sex. The safety of our children, the dignity of sex, the loveliness of youth, the honor of women outweigh all the claims of some imagined need for openness to new understandings about sex.

If we are not willing to move in that direction, then we cannot escape involvement in the vicious depravity that is despoiling our children and destroying the decency of our society. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee — which is to say, don't blame merely the criminal in a society that disregards evil; blame those who make up such a society and are compliant to it.

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