The Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A reminder to that it is time to be the people that founded the country.

 

The Aerodrome: Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.: This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald Trump, which will go down as the most corrupt political era in U.S. h...

On the 250ths Anniversary of American Independence it'd do us well to recall that while the Revolution may have been lead by landed patricians, it was fought by landed yeoman.

It's a great misfortune to the country, or perhaps a timely reminder, of exactly how far we've fallen in that regard. We have, in the form of Donald J. Trump, a President, albeit an illegitimate one, who is the very symbol of what Americans rebelled against 250 years ago. This monumental palace coach should serve to remind us. 

Had Donald Trump been alive in 1776, he'd have been a Loyalist. 

At the end of the war he'd have been packed up to Canada to annoy the French, who at least would largely have not understood him.  Not, in his dementia, that we do either.

Washington on Blueskin.

George Washington owned his own mounts.  John Adams broke one of his own mounts as late as his 80s.  Taft kept a cow on the White House lawn.

Donald Trump flies back and forth to his golf resort in Florida on the American taxpayers dime.¹  And now, at the expense of some $400,000,000 taxpayer dollars, he's unveiled the new one, and gushes about its "luxury":

Boeing VC-25B Bridge. A shameful flying monument.

This blog was never intended to be political, but in the age of Donald Trump, which will go down as the most corrupt political era in U.S. history, it just can't be avoided.

The Federal Government, funded by the American taxpayers in the form of taxes, and by individuals and foreign governments in the form of loans, has taken delivery of one Boeing "VC-25B Bridge", a military conversion of a Boeing 747-8 originally built as a Boeing Business Jet.  The plane was delivered in 2012 to Qatar Amiri Flight and used by the House of Thani. In June 2023, it was delivered to Global Jet Isle of Man. The Qatari government gave it as a gift. . . if we assume governments really give gifts to other governments.  Poor little King Donny just wasn't happy with the existing Air Force One and given that he's in his last term he couldn't wait for new ones under construction to be completed.

After he leaves office, which given his advanced age and rapidly declining mental status is likely to be before his term expires, the airplane, which has cost the United States at least $400,000,000 in "upgrades" to make it work in its role as a royal coach for his majesty, will be transferred to his presidential library foundation.  Indeed, that will happen before his unfortunate illegitimate reign is over.

This is complete bullshit.

I've posted on this story, and this airplane, here before:

Air Force One.

Air Force One has been in the news a lot recently, and it  started before the Qatari proposal to give the United States, or Donald Trump (it isn't clear which) a luxury outfitted Boeing 747.

Technically "Air Force One" is a call sign, and merely denotes an airplane the Chief Executive is a passenger in.  If a President rode in an Air Force Cessna, that would be Air Force One.  But everyone knows that it refers to one of two Boeing VC-25s, militarized 747s, that are designated for the Presidents use.

RD-2

Interestingly, the first aircraft designated for Presidential use was a Navy airplane, an amphibious Douglas Dolphin RD-2 that was luxury outfitted for use by President Roosevelt.  It was used from 1933 to 1939, and obviously not for transglobal flight.  The President didn't really do extensive travel until World War Two.

Roosevelt's once used VC-54C.

In spite of concerns over commercial aviation being used to carry the President during the war, it was in fact used and it wasn 't until 1945 that a new designated Presidential aircraft was acquired, that being a  Secret Service reconfigured a Douglas C-54 Skymaster (VC-54C) which was named the Sacred Cow.  It contained a sleeping area, radiotelephone, and retractable battery-powered elevator to lift Roosevelt in his wheelchair. It's only use by Roosevelt was to fly the then dying President to Yalta.  Truman used it thereafter, but it was replaced by military DC-6 (VC-118) thereafter.

Truman's VC-118.

President Eisenhower, who of course knew planes well, to Lockheed C-121 Constellations, Columbine II and Columbine III. The Constellation was a very popular airplane at the time, and Douglas MacArthur also had one, that one spending many years after its service at the Natrona County International Airport on an abandoned runway.

Columbine II was the first Presidential aircraft to receive the designation Air Force One.

At the end of Eisenhower's Presidency Boeing 707s came in, in part because the Soviets were using a jet to transport their Premier.  707s remained through the Nixon era, giving good service in this role.

747s, as VC-25s, entered specialized manufacture for use as Air Force One during Reagan's administration, although the first one would enter service after that.  They've been used ever since.

These aren't normal 747s.  They are packed with communications and electronic warfare equipment in order to have combat survivability.  

Replacing the current two aircraft that are used as Air Force One is a topic that the Air Force started looking at quite a few years ago.  The 747 variant which the VC-25 isn't made anymore.  Production of 747s stopped in 2023 in favor of more modern aircraft.  Still, the airframe remains useful in this role, and after the Air Force started to look into options, updating a 747-8 appeared to be the best option.  Only Boeing was interested in the project anyway, and it will take a massive financial loss to do it.  

The aircraft that are being retrofitted for this role was built, originally, as a commercial airliner. The projected is a massive one, and the delivery date will be in 2027.

What the new Air Force Ones will look like.

Enter Qatar.

Qatar has offered to give the US (I guess) a luxury Boeing 747-8 for use as Air Force One until the other 747-8s are complete.  But here's the thing.  Boeing has been working on the complicated task fo converting the two existing 747-8s for this use for several years. After all, it's basically a combat aircraft.  All accepting the plane would do is give Boeing a third one to convert, which wouldn't be ready for years.

Trump is being childish about this, as he is about a lot of things.  He doesn't seem to grasp the nature of the aircraft, and likely a lot of other people don't as well.  In his case, this is inexcusable.  It's a combat airplane.

Frankly, it's a Cold War combat airplane.

Which gets to this.

The 747 was a big massive airliner in an era in which it was the queen of the sky. That era is over and airlines have moved on to more modern aircraft.  The world in which Ronald Reagan ordered 747s is gone as well.  It's still useful to have an aircraft that can be used in a global thermonuclear war, which is what it is, but that's not going to happen and it makes no sense to use it to go on weekend golfing trips to Florida.

But that's what Trump tends to use it for.

That raises an entire series of other questions, many of which have little to do with aircraft, but some of which do.  It's notable that other Presidents have used lighter aircraft for more mundane trips.  In November 1999, President Bill Clinton flew from Ankara, Turkey, to Cengiz Topel Naval Air Station outside Izmit, Turkey, aboard a marked C-20C.  In 2000, President Clinton flew to Pakistan aboard an unmarked Gulfstream III.  In 2003, President George W. Bush flew in the co-pilot seat of a Sea Control Squadron Thirty-Five (VS-35) S-3B Viking from Naval Air Station North Island, California to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with that latter obviously being an exception. Barack Obama used a Gulfstream C-37 variant on a personal trip in 2009.

Trump can use something else than a 747 for what he uses Air Force One for in almost every single instance.

Indeed, the entire topic brings up a lot of things about the risks of having an airplane like this, a luxury airliner inside, which is really a combat aircraft.  It makes it easy to forget what it really is, and it makes a President feel like an Emperor, which he is not.

So why am I doing it again?

Since May, 2025 Donald Trump has used the existing Air Force One to fly back and forth to his Florida golf home/resort, effectively using the airplane as a toy, repeatedly.  He's also used it for what are basically campaign trips.  He's launched an illegal war against Iran for which the Department of Defense now seeks $80,000,000,000 to cover, and which killed thirteen Americans and untold numbers of Iranians.  That war encouraged Israel to not only participate in it, or perhaps the other way around, but also to engage in an invasion of Lebanon.  He's spent something like $13,000,000 to Rhino Line the Washington D. C. reflecting pool, he's trying to build a massive ballroom that will ultimately cost the taxpayer one way or another, and he's trying to build a triumphal arch, making the United States the first country in the world to build an arch after getting solidly defeated in a war.

He's demented, and he acts like an emperor. This airplane is part of that delusion.

Truth be known, the entire Air Force One thing hasn't made sense for years.  Having some sort of aircraft available for Presidential use for Presidential work makes some limited sense. But most of what Trump uses the aircraft for could be achieved through commercial aviation.  Indeed, not one single trip Trump has taken could not have been accomplished that way.

And that's how this should be done.  Back when transpiration was by rail, the President didn't own a train.  When Trump goes over to the G7 to insult the Italian Prime Minister with his lunacy, that could be done by commercial air, and should be done that way.  And I mean commercial air, not chartered air.  The government could get him a ticket on a regularly scheduled flight.

And when he goes to Mar A Lago he can pay for his own ticket.

I know that the objections will be "oh my, it isn't safe".  That is, frankly, for the most part complete BS.  Trump could get a ticket on Ryan Air and be just as safe as anyone else. 

And if its a little less safe, that's a good thing.  One of the problems with the modern presidency is that the occupant of the White House is too insulated from the people he supposedly serves.  At one time the President shook the hands of all who lined up on New Years Day.  Not anymore.

If the President had to travel with the great unwashed masses maybe he'd be less of a lunatic.  Or maybe he'd just realize that its a real job.  

Anyway you look at it, Air Force One is a titanic waste of money.  The Air Force has aircraft.  If he needs to go, he can load up on a C5A with the equipment going wherever its going.  

And this waste of money is going to a Trump library just before Trump leaves office.

WTF?

If the US had to spend money on it, it should keep it.  This is appalling.  That should be addressed as soon as possible.  If there's a current way to address it, it just should be silently done.  Trump can leave office and his library, which frankly is a pointless thing in the first place, can buy a Revell model kit of a Boeing 747. This absurd flying castle can carry on in its existing role and join the two that are being built, or preferably at least one of those two contracts cancelled seeing as the US has this thing.

At that point, the signature on the under panel that Trump affixed yesterday can be fittingly modified, recalling World War Two nose art.  A realistic Trump nude torso doodle, a la Epstein, can be installed.  A fitting monument.

It's a gift form Qatar, an authoritarian, semi-constitutional hereditary emirate monarchy ruled by the House of Thani.  The Emir is the absolute authority.

Just the sort of government that King Donald can related to.  Apparently they could relate to him, or more likely, thought they could obtain some advantage by appealing to his pathetic vanity.

The plane will be transferred to his Presidential library before he leaves office.  What books would even appear in Donald Trump's library boggles the imagination.  He does not appear to be a well read man, or even really read anything.  Figures from his last administration related he had a hard time reading memos they gave him as he lost interest so rapidly.  He does not appear to be a smart man.²

And, current American worship of wealth aside, we shouldn't expect him to be.  What I've long suspected turns out to be true.  The wealthy are often stupid.

Does Being Rich Make You Stupid?

False consciousness goes upscale.

Billionaires Are Actually Less Intelligent Than Lower-Paid People New Study Shows

Does Having Too Much Money Make Us Stupid?

World’s Richest People May Actually Be Dumber Than Those Who Earn Less, Study Says

Luck and circumstance has plenty to do with it.

This actually doesn't surprise me at all.  The question is whether wealth makes you stupid, or encourages the breeding down of intelligence.  Either can be maintained.

It was Chesterton who noted that "AMONG the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."  There's something to that.  But beyond that, there's plenty of evolutionary evidence of the latter point.  Wild cattle are quite a bit smarter than domestic ones.  Wolves are smarter than dogs.  Wild turkeys are very smart birds whereas domestic ones, apparently are dumb as a post.

Cave drawing of an Aurochs.  Modern cows can be dicey, but aurochs wanted to kill you.

The question would be, of course, why this is true, and selective breeding by human beings largely explains it.  We'd rather not have a mean cow that seeks to break free, raising a gang of mean cows, and lay siege to the village.  Hunters and herdsmen like smart dogs, but bred to be fairly compliant. If you've ever owned a standard poodle, one of the oldest hunting breeds, you'll see how much of the wolf wasn't bread out of them, they think for themselves, we've worked a lot on dogs since then.  

French Poodle in the early 1900s. The coat may look weird but they're a hunting dog, and a German bred one.  Even now, the Puddle Dog has opinions on everything and isn't shy about giving you them. The only other modern hunting dog that rivals them that way is the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, another old breed..

It's a dangerous thing to say, and contrary to the thesis advanced by eugenicists, but there's pretty good evidence that people on average were getting smarter and smarter all along throughout human history, in very real terms, up until just recently.  Evolution was forcing it.  Some evolutionary biologist argue that the homo sapien sapien of our current era is demonstrably smarter than homo sapiens of, say, 100,000 years ago. . . or 50,000 years ago. . . or 10,000 years ago, or 5,000.³   And it makes some sense.

In a normal, i.e., not rich, environment a lot of things go into mate selection, oh heck let's say spouse selection other than what goes into attracting people, oh heck let's say men, to Only Fans.  Love has always been an aspect of it, but its interesting to note how even when I was a teen, teenagers selected dates on character, which included intelligence, more than anything else.  It's funny to think of now, but if a guy had a "pretty" girlfriend, he was just considered lucky, and a girl with brains and other positive characteristics would have a boyfriend who featured the same, irrespective of her looks. When the girl was good looking, it was just sort of like winning a bonus prize.  Purely good looking girls, if that's all they had going for them, weren't really sought out.  

  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

This remained true, I'd note, throughout my entire single life.  Maybe it's largely true now.

But with the wealthy, it's another matter.

Future Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith and her first husband, Billy Ray Smith.  She was 17  and he was 16 when she married.  He was cook.  She changed her image enormously after they divorced and ended up married to an octogenarian after being a Playboy Centerfold and Guess Jeans model. Do we think that late union was a marriage for love on either side?  She paid the price, of course, dying young.  Her first husband is still alive, but never speaks much.  He was apparently crushed by the death of their son, pictured here, when he was in his twenties.  He never remarried.

Donald Trump, who gives no evidence of being an intelligent man, has been married three times, with each spouse having a certain sort of look save for one.  Two have been Slavic beauties of a certain sort, which means they present a certain look that certain people regard as glamorous beauty.⁴. The second, Marla Maples, actually presents as pretty smart. That marriage lasted six years.⁵

The point here?

I'm not thinking that a lot of the super rich determine their mates the way regular people do.  I don't think "is he/she a good helpmate?" or "do we have the same interests, faiths, worldview?", or to be really old school, "can this guy/gal help me around the farm?" has gone into it much.  Rather, they often seem to be chosen on looser characteristics that might more resemble how oriental potentates chose concubines for the harem, i.e., looks.

When Arab raiders stole Irish women, after all, smart as those women tend to be, they weren't marketing them on "look at this ginger. . . she's really got the brains!"

Now, a person can take this too far, but we live in a rich society.  The richest of us may in fact be stupider than the rest of us, or a lot of us.  And we collectively, just like a placid cow in the field, may be starting to get dumber overall.

We live in a materially very wealthy culture.  Even the average impoverished American is wealthier than many thought to be well off in former eras. And to add to that, the decay in morality, brought about by material wealth, which has allowed us to focus only on ourselves, has developed a self centered sexual culture that contributes to this.

Put another way, as one female observer seriously noted:

But its not making people happier.  People know something is wrong.

Gallup informs us that most Americans believe in the "American Dream", whatever that is, but that a very high percentage believe its unobtainable.

American Dream Endures as U.S. Approaches 250 Years

That's because it is unobtainable.

The American Dream has been defined in various ways.  I think it might be best defined in the film The Best Years Of Our Lives.

In that film there's a moment when discharged sergeant Fred Derry gives a loan to a discharged Navy vet who is a tenant farmer.  He wants to buy his own farm.  He knows he can do it.

That's the best description of the American Dream I've ever seen.

The real dream is to own your own.  And at the time of the American Revolution, most did. That's what had brought them to the country.

I don't know what they teach the young now, but when I was growing up it was a lot of crap about how people came over for freedom, mostly freedom of religion.

Yeah, some did, sort of. The best example might be the Puritans on the Mayflower, who were seeking freedom to worship in their own way and to tell everyone else in the world how they were supposed to do it.  If you were in a Puritan community you were worshipping with them or getting punished, severely.

Only about 1/3d of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans.  The rest were likely members of the Church of England which itself was less than 100 years separated from the Catholic Church, and even less separated from the Prayer Book Rebellion.⁶ Point is, those passengers, who were all part of the group that put in as they were out of beer, didn't come for religious freedom.

They came for land.

Land is, and was, independent.  People knew then, and they knew now, that land was independence, freedom, and a decent life worth living.  If you could obtain, as Chesterton would later put it, "three acres and a cow", or more likely 40, and a mule, you had it made.  You were not rich.  You were not poor. You were your own family.

Land is what caused Englishmen to risk their lives in 1607 to come to a new continent, or Frenchmen to come to it in 1608, or Spanish to come to it in 1565.  Here they could get it, at some cost, but a none the less obtainable one.  In Europe, they could not.  And if not all came as farmers, tradesmen who came, came because they could open their own shops, essentially operating on the same ideal.  Those who couldn't muster up the cash for transit indentured themselves to do so which, in spite of latter day white apologist, was not slavery.  It was a temporary means of getting started, in some ways like apprenticeships or joining the service operates for many today.

We cannot say that it was universally benign. That would be a lie. The land in fact already belonged to somebody else, the native inhabitants, whose claims were excused due to their rotational agricultural practices and low population density. But that doesn't change the basic fact.  It was land, not "freedom" of any type that drew the immigrant.

By moving, they freed themselves from some landowning overlord and made themselves independent farmers.  That dream lasted all the way up until the mid 20th Century in some fashion.  While it remains alive today, the truth is that the reality it of it is as dead, yielded to the bloated interests of the rich.  The largest landowner in the US today is billionaire sports and real estate mogul Stan Kroenke, who owns land in Wyoming.  Mom and pop shops have yielded to the nightmare created by Sam Walton.  

People who think the American dream is alive are largely fooling themselves.

Nonetheless, a dream is a dream, and revolutions are based on dreams.

The American Revolution was based on a landowning dream.  It wasn't, frankly necessarily wholly admirable.  The Intolerable Acts included, in a very real sense, the sense that the Crown was going to restrict the right of expanding countrymen's families to settle new lands, and they were right. The fear also was that the Crown would restrict economic activity in the Colonies for revenue purposes, and that was partially correct.  Common Sense and the like aside, a real cause of the Revolution was the native sense that the free right to settle land, and engage in small free enterprise, was the only thing that separated American Colonist form the English and European masses.

They were right, if not necessarily morally right.

A large number, maybe most, revolutions since that time, and some before it, have been based on the same cause. The French Revolution was not, and it remains a global oddball.  The Russian Revolution, failed as it was, is such an example, however, as was the Russian Revolution of 1905.  The Chinese Revolution of 1911, and the Chinese Civil War, both failed examples, also were.  The Mexican Revolution, also a failed revolution, very much was.

The Mexican Revolution provides, in fact, an excellent example.  Through every phase, from 1911 onwards, the rich landed class fought back, and when defeat arrived, they stepped aside and regrouped.  It kept the Revolution from really being successful.  Indeed, of all the revolutions we have noted, only the American Revolution was really successful.

But the success it created is dead.  Today,. we have the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks and other 1%ers that control the economy, and which some like Jonah Goldberg even feel we should celebrate (as to Musk).

Well, no.

Time for a second American revolution.

Not, we might note, one with guns.  Indeed, that would inevitably be not only immoral, but outright moronic, lead by people festooned with Second Amendment tattoos while advocating outright fascism.

No, something more radical than that, a revolution at the ballot box.

It's time to end the moronic celebration of a "free market system" that isn't free in any sense.  Corporate Capitalist are shoving pablum down the throats of the electorate while pocking the largess. Large-scale corporatism needs to end.

And so too does a weird millennialism appropriations of public lands by people like Deseret Mike Lee and pathetic fellow travelers like John Barrasso and Harriet Hageman.

A revolution can be had at the ballot box.  It won't happen all at once, but if started now the two party system can be ended, and the creation of wealth for the wealthy can be as well.  Remote land ownership, something the colonist came here to escape, can be as well.

It won't happen as long as people don't think.  But they need to think now.  At some point they will, and if we don't take on the yoke of this burden now, when the plow ox bulks, it'll be bad.

Footnotes

1.  Donald Trump is such a WASP, with the adherence to the "P", that he's converted some property in Washington D.C. to become a golf course and is putting in courses on some military bases.

Put in shooting ranges or something.  Not something that fat old white guys play.

2. The fact that Trump is a Wharton graduate is really a slam at the Ivy League. Yes, they have some great schools, but the system they operate in really has graduated some failures.  Pete Hegseth provides such an example.  

Wharton owes the country an apology, and I say that as somebody who has a relative that graduated from there. The fact that Trump graduated is appalling. The fact that Chuck Gray is their product is as well.

3.  Some theologians have speculated that there was a point with our species when God converted us from just a smart hominid into what we are in the Divine Plan, with an immortal soul. The speculation is that it was the moment language arrived, and there's some archeological and biological evidence that moment was in fact sudden and radical.  

4. Frankly, Trump spouses 1 and 3 really aren't bombshells.  Melania is more properly characterized as "handsome".

5.  We can't really speculate on the smarts of 1 and particularly 3.  Melania is hard to figure as she's never obtained a really good command of English.  None the less, people who admire her, are frankly doing so willfully.

6. Recusant Catholics are estimated to be less than 5% of the English population at the time, which means that were likely to probably have actually been 10 to 15%.  Today, more Catholics attend weekly services in the UK than the established church.  Recently one Anglican convert in the UK described her transition as "going Full Fat Catholicism"

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 1. How the barbarians took over the city.

 As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city.

Robert Cardinal Sarah

Alaric entering Athens, 395.

On August 6, 1979, Newsweek came out with a surprising cover depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill.  The caption was "Where Have All The Heroes Gone".  I can remember laying on the couch in the living room looking at the issue.  I would have been about fifteen.

That was right about the time the nation was getting ready to see Carter square off against Reagan, and if the author of that article thought the choices were uninspiring, I have to wonder what he'd think now.

Anyhow, in reading about the contest between Reagan and Carter I was compelled to ask my father, "What's the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?", trying to figure out what it was, and what I was, in that context.  I'm actually surprised, in looking back, that I was asking this question at that age, as in my mind, this was earlier.  And in fact I may very well be remembering this inaccurate, as to when I asked this question and what brought it about.

I do recall his answer.  He informed me that "the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats".

It was an interesting answer.  He didn't say that the Republicans were conservative or that the Democrats were not.  He said the Republicans were more conservative than the Democrats, implying that they were sort of in the middle.

I decided at the ripe old age of 12, or so, that I was more conservative, and therefore I was a Republican.

When I registered to vote six years later, I in fact registered as a Republican, which is what I thought I likely was.  It didn't last a real long time, however, as by age 20, I was registering as a Democrat.

Conservation was the reason why.  Even by my late teens I as clearly a conservationist, and I teetered on the edge of, and crossed into, environmentalism.  While I didn't see myself being on the political left, those around me did. I recall one friend of mine in junior college, who had known me since high school, remarking in a conversation about the Vietnam War protests that if I'd been college age at that time, I'd be in the protesters, a comment that really surprised me as I was in the National Guard at the time, and I was a defense hawk, part of the reason I'd originally registered as a Republican.  The now late mother of a friend of mine loaned me The Monkey Wrench Gang on the basis that I'd like it, and while I was surprised by that when I read the cover about a group of fictional who were basically environmental terrorists, I in fact did like the 1975 Edward Abby novel.  It probably didn't hurt that I had a crush on the daughter of that lender, the sister of one of my friends, and that entire family were obviously environmentally centered, eccentric, Democrats.

It wasn't a facade, however.  I wasn't a DINO, if there is such a thing.  Going through my undergraduate years and through law school, and into at least my first decade of practicing law, I remained a Democrat.  It was rural issues that did it.  The Democrats were for preserving the wilderness, at a time that the Reagan Republicans never saw a tree they didn't want to cut down.  The Democrats were for keeping Wyoming's wildlife a public resource when a Republican legislature wanted to give it to landowners in a bill, I'd note, that our current Congressman's father promoted.  The Republicans always saw wild lands as something to be exploited, the Democrats normally saw them as something to be preserved.

Ultimately I left the Democratic Party for the Republicans as I couldn't stomach being in a party that embraced death so closely.  I wasn't alone.  Really significant Wyoming Democrats, like Ray Hunkins, who had campaigned as Democrats, left the party and became Republican politicians.  The overall impact was a good one, however, for the state's GOP.  It took a party that was already highly independent and frankly middle of the road on most things, and made it more so.  It was a Wyoming Party.

Those days are dead and gone.

It's hard to describe where we are politically in this country today, and that's in no small part because it's hard to explain where we are culturally.  The absolute insanity of social movements in the Western World, unleashed since the annus horbillus of 1968, but with roots dating back at least to the 1790s, has created as sort of cultural hellscape which now, very late in the day, average people are reacting to, but reacting in way that expresses their ignorance of their own culture and existential nature.  It's been a long time in the making.

Some thirty years ago I was at a not very well done bachelor's party, no not one of that type, that I hosted for a friend getting married. At the party was a young man who had just been admitted to a university in New York.  He was pretty impressed with getting into it, and had already taken up calling New York City, "the city", even though he knew just about as little about NYC as I did.

At the party he raised the question of whether the United States was existentially a liberal, or conservative, nation.  In thinking about it there in my late 20s, when I was somewhat more liberal than I am now, I thought the country basically existentially liberal.

I'm not certain that I think that now.  But then, back then, in the late 1980s, being liberal didn't mean I had to pretend that biological truths weren't just that, truths.

Educated people, including educated conservatives like me, as that's basically what I am, are to a large extent baffled by the phenomenon of Donald Trump.  How, we wonder, could anyone vote for a person like him, particularly after he attempted a coup to overthrow the 2020 election?

The Judicial Coup of 2015 has everything to do with that, as we warned that it would, in 2015.

Why Americans, irrespective of position, ought to cringe over Obergefell

Yes, we warned what was in store:

The common wisdom right now is that the public will now accept this, where it hadn't.  I doubt it will, and already those who appeared defeated are beginning to resist and rally, with proposals that will have to be taken seriously in short order.  A real reaction is likely to be a massive level of contempt for a Court which was already not particularly well liked by much of the nation, and which now shows itself capable of acting in a Napoleonic fashion

And we warned about it more than once.

We educated people, including we social conservatives, had acclimated ourselves to accepting that an unelected body of jurist could decree social liberality on the society, and everyone had to accept it.  To a large extent, frankly, we grew comfortable with being conservatives of varying stripes, but not getting much of what we wanted.

Obergefell was clearly a bridge too far, and it was right from the beginning.  And what liberals promised, that "this would never mean", very rapidly turned out to be a whopping lie.

The Supreme Court tries a bit to mop up a dog's breakfast. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell

The line from Kennedy to Trump. . and from democracy to the reeducation camp. Judicial blunderng and its impact.

The contempt that's come for evolutionary biology and basic nature out of the American left, and indeed, the European left, since 2015 has been epic.  But it didn't start in 2015.  It started well before, with major events marking the path.  May 9, 1960, the entire year of 1968, 1969, 1973.  What marked it all, during the very period in which the left embraced everything in nature outside of ourselves, was the rejection of our natures.  We didn't see ourselves as men in nature any longer, but like gods, outside of it.

What the left apparently they didn't grasp is that no matter what the educated conservative "establishment elite" was willing to accept, the rank and file, instinctively conservative middle, wasn't, and isn't, once things went too far.

For we brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.

If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.

Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.

1 Timothy, Chapter 6.

At the same time, however, a combination of two of the oldest malevolent forces in the world had already united to make any reaction abhorrent.  Ignorance had combined with greed.

People like to spout a lot of babble about the settlement of North America, and the United States, that is just that.  People imagine that hardworking benighted immigrants came in and built a new land out of the sweat of their brows.  Yes, there's an element of truth in that, but the larger truth is that they were massively assisted by their governments, which removed the native population by force at public expense, and then sold or gave the land to the settlers for no value or grossly undervalue.  It's impossible to look at what occured and not regard it as deeply immoral, and claims to the opposite as deeply hypocritical. When Wyoming politicians today proudly declare that they're fourth generation Wyoming rancher who built their enterprises from nothing but their own hard work, they're deluding themselves.  Their ancestors were, as a rule, dirt poor people who benefitted from what was effectively a government hand out, in part, and in part from a program that made that possible by what today would be regarded as ethnic genocide.

There's really no two ways about it.

Nonetheless, in being honest about it, we can also be honest about the fact that the beneficiaries of those programs did not have in mind killing people.  

They also largely didn't have in mind getting rich.

The goal was to have a family, and provide for it.

We recently spent a lot of time on our companion blog looking at the laws and social conditions prior to the fateful legislature of 1977.  Those laws were geared towards that end.  And, prior to the 1970s, the laws in the country largely were.  Laws  on "domestic" topics were geared towards the preservation of the family and the protection of children.

And before Ronald Reagan, the tax structure and the structure of the Federal Government was aimed at regulating excessive accumulation of wealth and reigning in big business. It was widely held, and correctly, that people needed protection against large business and that vast accumulation of wealth could result in the wealthy paying their own way.  The wealthy were not worshiped, and big business was not seen as the little man's friend.  

A figure like Donald Trump was not regarded as admirable.

Reagan came in and changed that, selling the public the lie that as the wealthy got wealthier everyone else did as well.  It made some sense, until you thought it out.  And to a certain degree its true, as the wealthier a society becomes, the wealthier everyone in it is.  But it only goes so far, and it didn't go nearly as far as its backers claimed.  Moreover, the advance of technology, accelerated by World War Two and the Cold War, marched on irrespective of tinkering with the tax rates, and that is likely what made the reason difference.

Something that didn't withstand the tinkering was the assault on education.  The Great Depression, followed by World War Two, followed by the Cold War, had emphasized the need for science and engineering like nothing else.  World War Two, in turn, flooded universities with servicemen after the war, making college educations common.  But with Reagan came a reduction in support for science and engineering.  University remained important, but degrees suffered value erosion.  Degrees like law, which could be societally beneficial, or destructive, evolved towards the latter, as a Reagan era emphasis on greed set in.

Just as societal structures started to break down due to the battering rams of the left, therefore, they were replaced by a lack of education and an emphasis that everything was about money.  It was not a combined intentional attack.  The left would not have made everything about money, and the right would not have broken down societal structures, but the combined assault of both had that effect.  This left an American, and Western, culture with no existential values and nothing to measure individual self-worth other than economic success.  Like the concurrent assault of Germanic, Slavic, and Eastern tribes in the Middle Ages, the damage on the American metaphorical Rome was too much to bear.

Rome, of course, had the Church. And as Rome fell, the Church stepped in, preserving what was worthwhile of the existing culture, and educating the Barbarians.  The United States is not, however, Imperial Rome.  When Rome fell, which was over time, the Roman culture could look towards the Church and realize that it held existential truths Roman civilization did not.  As the American culture falls today, it has instead the adulterated American Civil Religion, a light and reduced content variant of original strict Protestant sects that reflected the product of the Reformation.  And people retain their native instincts, although not in a restrained or educated fashion.

This has left the reeling street level populist reacting against things they know are wrong, but mixing them with ignorance and confusion.  That it's absurd that some claim there are more than two genders is self-evident, and wrong, and that steps like Chloe's law must be taken to combat it is apparent.  What is not is that this depraved state of affairs stems from one that divorced sex from marriage, or the concept that marriage is natural, and not a set of highly advanced sexual dates which allow for discarded partners.  Hence, you have some railing against sexual mutilation, who practice chemical sterilization, or who are serial polygamists themselves.

And the substitution of money as the supreme value over family remains in the same class, with some seriously believing, as some have asserted since the 1980s, that God basically endorses their occupations as surely he must.  It can't be the case, they think, that their occupations could do harm. Therefore, you have those who, like James Watt, can't grasp the thought that natural resources must be conserved, and that this is conservative, let alone that there are things that are being economically exploited which may very well destroy the ability for us to exist.  In their heart of hearts there are those on the populist right who believe that the use of fossil fuels is Divinely sanctioned, just as there are those on the left who believe that altering our psychological and physical natures is some sort of existential, if not Devine, right.

This sort of thing has put us in the untenable position we now find ourselves it.

It ought to be possible, in other words, for a thoughtful conservative to oppose infanticide, genocide, and ecocide.  That is, it ought to be perfectly possible to oppose abortion, gender mutilation, Russian aggression in Ukraine while supporting conservation and indeed be concerned about the environment. That would, in fact, be thoughtful conservatism.

There's no need, and indeed no sense whatsoever, in feeling that because you are worried about gender disorder, that you need to support Putin in Ukraine, or hail a serial polygamist as somebody who presents as a modern Cyrus the Great.

But where to go from here, especially for a thoughtful conservative.

It's clear at this point that neither the modern Republican Party or Democratic Party are going to do anything to solve this. They are both too far corrupted in an existential sense. The Democratic Party is virtually at war with Human Nature and the Devine, while the GOP is at war with intelligence, Science and thought.  Between the two parties, the Democrats have revived a belief in democracy they lost in 1973, however, whereas the Republicans view everyone who doesn't agree with their Caudillo as a class enemy.

The populists know that something is deeply amiss with the assault on human nature. The progressives know that there's something deeply wrong with the assault on science and nature.  Progressives sense that a worship of money is wrong, whereas the Republicans are outright worshiping it.  Populists sense that a worship of yourself as a demigod is perverse, but only embrace that up to the point that it's not personally inconvenient.

National Conservatives and their fellow travelers claim they're the answer.  C. C. Peckhold, a university professor who seems to be in this camp, gives about as good of a justification of this as can be given in an episode of Catholic Answers live that's well worth listing to, but also  a little disturbing in some ways as well.  Like Patrick Dineen, he's big on "order".

What he seems to be missing, in so far as that interview goes, is that corporate capitalism has imposed its own order.  He regards "liberalism", as in the classic meaning of this word, to be the problem, and seeks a "post liberal order", and is one of the contributors to the Post Liberal Podcast whose blog we've linked in our companion site as its interesting.  What they miss, however, is that what they are seeking is effete, which to a large degree is what took down "post liberalism", by which them mean the pre liberal ancient regime, and that it was also corrupt, as concentration of order encourages corruptness.  Indeed, that's what we have now, to a degree, concentrated in capitalism.

Only in a Distributist Agrarianism, by whatever name, is the solution to this found.

Lex Anteinternet: What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Lex Anteinternet: What if the Western World is the "special case"?: 

What if the Western World is the "special case"?

Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village.  Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.

Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".

"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.

We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures.  This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings. 

I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.

For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.¹

The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world.  That just isn't the case in this instance.

A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing.  Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true.  That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.

In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing.  Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization.  And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.

We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again.  Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time.  Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.

This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.

Food is a good example.

Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat.  In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations.  Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad.  People took measures they normally wouldn't.

Not everyone did, however.

At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't.  People would starve instead.

Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight.  Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things.  Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.  

As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:

Sergeant Chillum:  Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.

Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?

Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.

This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one.  Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight.  No culture in a state of nature does.

When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people.  When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.

So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.

Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.

Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand.  While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families.  Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well.  Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.

In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio.  Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time.  A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days.  Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.

Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours.  Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game.  There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.

Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:

Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.

Emperor Haile Selassie

Married men, take your wives.  Not married?  Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.

It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true.  Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable.  War provides a pretty good example again.

Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known.  If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder.  Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.  

Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war.  This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.

Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt.  That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go.  Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.

Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time.  The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers.  However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.

So too are much of our current living patters.

Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.

And that's deeply unnatural.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours.  And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses.  In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.

It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:

Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches.  But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated.  What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life.  AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours.  They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.

Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like.  Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor.  Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.

By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s.  Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars.  Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed.  Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period.  The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.

Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice.  Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating.  When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did.  Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.

Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.

Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses.  This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it.  That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured.  While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak.  Secretaries and assistants.  Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses.  One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.

There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature.  Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife".  I've even heard a person refer to herself that way.  Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.

Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.

In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none.  As we earlier posted:

Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.¹ And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?

We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear.  We should be looking at how it comes about.

Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.

Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this.  Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks.  It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.

Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .

The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated.  It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual.  It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual.  Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.

Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies.  It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy.  A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will.  As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution.  Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.

It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class.  In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy.  In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.

English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason.  Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease".  Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender.  Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school.  Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to.  Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.

It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.

In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally.  But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis.  People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.

Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution.  We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one.  While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost.  The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating.  Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.

None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.

But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about.  And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.

All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.

And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.

But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in  Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything.  This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.

The evidence supports the contrary.

Which gets us back to our original point.  African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have.  But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.

And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle.  Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about.  We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.

Footnotes:

1.  Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed.  My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.

When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has.  Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change.  The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage.  In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.

Related Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.