Obama Opens the Door for Ms. Manning

Who in world is Ms. Manning? Oh yeah, it’s Bradley Manning, who was convicted of giving thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks and then sentenced to 35 years in jail — basically a life sentence.

With our enlightened sensitivity to transgender issues, Manning was given a sex change operation in Leavenworth at taxpayers expense. He is now Chelsea Manning. Giving Manning some empathy, he did have a few suicide attempts in jail during the last year.

The prisoners at the military prison, although oppositional personalities — like many delinquent personalities — were still probably patriotic, and they harassed Manning for his traitorist activities. This harassment may have even increased after his sex change — to say nothing of the possible sexual harassment of a woman being among all those locked up young criminals, with their raging hormones.

This brings up to concept of “sin.” (“Oh, my God, here he goes again.”) As we have been discussing, one thing for sure in life is that there is such a phenomenon as sin. We can call this phenomenon by all sorts of different names: evil, anti-social behavior, ciminality, dysfunctional behavior, immorality, unethical behavior, illegal behavior, barbarism, and so on. However the phenomenon is the same. For instance, what term could you use to describe the jihadist in France who drove a truck into a crowd of innocent people and killed 89 of them?

Progressives and liberals are the biggest opponents of the concept of sin, but they are among the biggest critics of those who they see as committing sin, although they call the phenomenon by another name. For example, they see as the worse thing a person can do is be a racist or a bigot. Then there is those evil people who kill innocent civilians in war. And those “sinners” who commit sexual assault. And those “perverts” who discriminate against women. Call a rose by any name, but it is still a rose. The liberals are accusing these people of committing sin.

But how do we know what is right or wrong? Of course this could be — and has been — argued since the beginning of time. One way we can discern what is good and what is bad is by appealing to authentic authority — that is authority that has been proven to be helpful and generally true in the past.

Thus we can rely on court decisions, consensus among moral theologians, and historical leaders. Another thing we can do is appeal to the theology of proven authentic churches, for instance the Catholic Church — which has its theology based on the lives of saints and centuries of philosophical discussions.

Let’s appeal to the Church’s authority. What does it say about a man cutting off his penis and implementing a vagina-like mechanism, and then filling his body with female hormones?

Actually, I’m not sure what the Church says, but it probably says that this is a sin — a grave offense against God. And probably many of the other Christian denominations would agree.

Let’s take another example, abortion. The U.S. kills over one million unborn children a year, many at taxpayer expense. Could this be considered wrong? A sin? And if it is, could there be any long-term negative consequences?

Let’s go to one of the moral authorities again, the Catholic faith. One of the premises of this faith is that the great spiritual leaders may know more about spiritual reality than the ordinary sleps, like you and I.

For instance, what does Mother Theresa have to say about abortion? I met her once, when she was in DC. She didn’t look holy to me, or anything like our image of a saint. She looked to me like one tough cookie. She had taken the vow of poverty. She had been dealing with the poorest of the poor for over 50 years, largely taking people dying in the street and giving them a death with dignity. Towards the end of her life, she was going through a dark night of the soul and had serious doubts about her faith — like me: “How could a loving and powerful God allow suffering like this?”

When she got her Nobel Prize of Peace, in her speech she condemned abortion: “Once we allow a woman to kill her own child, anything is possible.” That is, there is no more moral lines.

Could the US having one million abortions a year result in an enervating of the American conscience, and thus allowing global warming, the killing of hundreds of species a year, the draining of the earth’s resources, and allowing a bigger gap between the top 1% and the lower 25%?

So what policies does Eddie propose?

We have a thesis of religious liberty. Americans are free to sin and commit evil, as long as it’s not against the law. An antithesis is that we commit a million abortions a year and we cut off men’s penis’ when they decide they are women. Since we all pay for this, all our hands are dirty.

What is the synthesis? Why not make it a private affair? Those who want to sin, let them sin, but let them pay for it? Thus the beautiful people could donate a part of their fortunes to set up private abortion clinics, where women could get free abortions, and they could set up private clinics to provide free sex changes.

Then the deplorables could go to church on Sunday with their conscience’s a little clearer.

Perhaps the spiritual life of American would be lifted a little higher.