“Yet there was, of course, in the failure of priests and pastors to live up to their own teaching, nothing new. ‘We are all naturally prone to hypocrisy.’ So Calvin had acknowledged. The flesh was weak. That change – and it was one that had occurred with a startling rapidity – was the readiness of people to accept that the exacting ideals of Christian sexual morality might not be ideals at all. That sexual desires were natural, and therefore good, and that the coming of Christianity had been like a blast of grey breath on the world, had long been a conviction popular with the more aristocratic class of free thinker. ‘Our religions, our manners and customs may easily and indeed must perforce deceive us,’ as the Marquis de Sade had put it, ‘whilst we shall certainly never be misled by the voice of Nature.’ This, over the course of the 1960s, had become a manifesto shared by millions. The summer of love had been a celebration of body as well as of spirit. ‘Make love, not war, the hippies urged. To many, it had seemed that two thousand years of neurosis and self-hatred were being banished upon the weaving of flowers in the hair. Desires natural to men and women, long kept in check, had at last been restored to freedom. Once again, the moving of the phallus in the bright womb of the world was praised as something precious: as ‘the victory of yes and love’. One music journalist, writing in San Francisco as 1967 turned to fall, had cast America as a stagnant swamp suddenly brought to life by the shimmering through its waters of a god. Ralph Gleason, the founder of Rolling Stone, most successful of all the many magazines inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s, had identified its spirit of sexual freedom with that of classical Greece. Society, he had declared, was being ‘deeply stirred by Dionysiac currents’. The ancient gods were back. Except that the freedom to fuck when and as one liked had tended to be, in antiquity, the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: all had been habitual rapists.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

In my latest National Post column I call on Parliament to rein in the overweening pride and overreaching presumptions of Canada’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.

“Frequently personal domestic hang ups were part of the conferences [“frequent long conferences on organizational problems”]. An organizer’s working schedule is so continuous that time is meaningless; meetings and caucuses drag endlessly into the early morning hours; any schedule is marked by constant unexpected unscheduled meetings; work pursues an organizer into his or her home, so that either he is on the phone or there are people dropping in. The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tensions, the hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy. Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love relationships who understand and are committed to the work, and are real sources of strength to the organizer.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“If you particularly want it [a post] to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“There are diverse attitudes to babies in public spaces, and many efforts to formulate the rules for manners and etiquette without annoying anyone too much.... Many of the troublesome examples arise from people who are annoyed by babies, but should really just mind their own business and deal with it. But other examples reveal a crude overconfidence in parents about the behaviour of their child, an inflated sense of how cute their baby seems to other adults. At worst, this is an entitled sanctimony that verges on rude cluelessness…. So what that squinty-eyed view of babies in public boils down to is this. It’s not that you shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because it’s wrong in principle to bring babies to public events. It’s a more subtle point. You shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because you are being annoying, right here and now, just you, specifically you. And let’s be clear. No one can blame the baby. The parent is the annoyance. This is not the time to share your views on child development theory, knowing that social media will back you up. These are beside the point. Junior’s being a pest, which at least for the time being means you’re being a pest.”

Joseph Brean in National Post Sept. 9, 2025 [summarizing the squinty-eyed views of etiquette expert Elaine Swann]

“Where there are no men, be thou a man.”

“Rabbi Hillel” quoted as 1st of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].

“Birth Control is an oily optimistic euphemism for something totally different; as if we were to call assassination or massacre Life-Control.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)