See? I told you that in addition to being a creationist, Ken Ham is also one of those far right culture warriors.

During the conference, I spoke on the state of the nation and said that we are observing Romans chapter 1 playing out in the USA right now. I have heard many people say that if America keeps murdering children in their mother’s wombs (over 50 million babies since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973) and eliminating God from the culture (as by and large has been done in public schools and in the culture as a whole with the removal of crosses, nativity scenes and Ten Commandment displays from public places), then God will judge this nation. Well, I suggest that America is already under judgment, and a sign of this judgment is the increasing homosexual behavior (and the “gay” marriage issue) in the nation, reflecting that God is turning the culture over (as Romans 1:24 and Romans 1:26 describe).

I also declared at last week’s conference that the state of the nation actually reflects the state of the church. Frankly, I believe it is largely the church’s fault that the culture, from a Christian perspective, is collapsing and is coming under judgment. For example, there is so much rampant compromise in the church with its increasing acceptance of millions of years and evolution. This has led to generations of children in our church doubting and subsequently disbelieving the Bible. Today, two-thirds of them are walking away from the church by the time they reach college age. It only takes one generation to lose a culture, and we are seeing this happen before our very eyes.

The church is not influencing the culture in America as it once did. That is mostly due to the fact that the culture has invaded much of the church. Much of the church’s “salt” has become contaminated. And we know what God’s Word says about such contamination: it destroys.

But it’s not just happening in America! Our Western nations—once dominated by Christian thinking—are embracing sinful acts, such as abortion and homosexual behavior, and is now calling these evils “good.”

If you want to know where America will be in the not-too-distant future, look at the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. The churches there are largely spiritually dead (though I rejoice in the small pockets of Christian life there). All across Europe, countless church buildings have been turned into stores, nightclubs, temples, etc. Sadly, America is on the same path.

Happily, America is on the same path. But right now he and Pastor Phelps and every tinpot preacher with a load of hate to deliver sound a lot alike, don’t they?

You can understand why they cling to something as gallingly stupid as young earth creationism: they see it as all of a piece, that the eternal salvation of their children and grandchildren is dependent on not just accepting the liberal Christian view that belief in the divinity of an ancient Jewish carpenter is necessary to appease an omnipotent and rather wrathful cosmic father. Think about it: that’s a rather petty and trivial thing to hang such an essential gift upon, so there must be more. And the more that they’ve accepted is the costly sacrifice of giving up science, hating gay people, forcing their women into domestic servitude, and demanding non-stop official public piety.

Of course, I can’t help but notice that most of the people forced to make the sacrifices are not the family patriarchs.

But this is also why it is not enough to just educate people about evolution. For most people, science is just this hard, boring thing that they take for granted that someone else will do; they aren’t going to be at all impressed with accusations that they’ve abandoned science or even common human decency. They are serving an almighty LORD. They believe they have the biggest, baddest, strongest, most demanding boss of them all.

The teaching of evolution in the schools is just one tiny symptom of the real problem, and that’s why I argue that to defeat this one aspect that annoys me personally and directly, we need to confront and diminish the nasty head of the beast: religion. Tear it down, and then we’ll be able to pursue real knowledge unfettered.

And as a wonderful glorious additional bonus, we also get greater equality and a reduction of prejudice. I have no illusions that eliminating religion will lead to paradise, though — more like, eliminating religion will knock down one more major barrier to progress.

I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.

This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.

Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.

Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers^*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.

It didn’t happen.

Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.

Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.

A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.

Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.

How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?

And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.

So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?

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^*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.