This Just In: Absurdities Around the Globe

Mr Reilly gathers idiotic tidbits of news for our edification, from the 'wokification' of NATO to the 'justifications' for treating children as things in IVF.

From Crisis

By Robert R. Reilly

From Paris to Wall Street to Milwaukee, the world is full of absurdities that defy common sense and reason.

We have a particularly rich offering of absurdities in this edition of “This Just In.”

At the opening of the Olympics, many were worried about the sewage level in the Seine River endangering Olympic aquatic contestants. How could anyone swim in that muck? Little did they know that the worst sewage would be floating on the Seine, not in it. Welcome to the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics.

Here’s the way the Associated Press characterized it: 

Paris didn’t just push the envelope. It did away with it entirely as it hammered home a message that freedom must know no bounds. A practically naked singer painted blue made thinly veiled references to his body parts. Blonde-bearded drag queen Piche crawled on all fours to the thumping beat of “Freed From Desire” by singer-songwriter Gala, who has long been a potent voice against homophobia. There were the beginnings of a menage à trois—the door was slammed on the camera before things got really steamy—and the tail end of an intimate embrace between two men who danced away, hugging and holding hands.

Defending this fiasco, homosexual Thomas Jolly, its artistic director, proclaimed that, “In France, we have the right to love each other, as we want and with who we want. In France, we have the right to believe or to not believe. In France, we have a lot of rights. Voilà.”

Voilà. I guess in France you also have the right to speak ungrammatically. The phrase in the first sentence—“with who we want”—should have been “with whom we want.” “Whom” is the object of the preposition “with.” This is the same error that President Joe Biden repeatedly made when he referred to the main issue concerning “homosexual marriage” as a matter of “who do you love?” It can’t be “who” because otherwise there would be two subjects without an object—which is the problem with homosexuals’ so-called “marriage.” If someone insists on using who in the subjective case it would be the equivalent of saying, “he loves he,” which is not a bad illustration of narcissistic solipsism.

Jolly said that the performance, widely denounced as anti-Christian, was meant to represent Greek gods during a banquet. Good grief! And why did the rest of the world, including the French bishops, think it was a blasphemous parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”? The answer is because they can read theatrical symbols, especially when they’re so obvious. How were we to know that the central figure was not a parody of Christ but the Greek god Dionysus? Jolly said because the jolly central figure was enjoying food and wine, of which Dionysus is the patron.

Jolly sounds as clueless about Dionysus as he probably is about Christ. He ought to read Euripides’ The Bacchae, which shows exactly how unsafe sex is when disconnected from the moral order. When Dionysus visits Thebes, he entices King Pentheus to view secretly the women dancing naked on the mountainside in Dionysian revelries. Because Pentheus succumbs to his desire to see “their wild obscenities,” he agrees to undergo the humiliation of dressing as a woman. 

Pentheus, the embodiment of the political order, capitulates to the irrational; as a result, the order of the city is toppled. Pentheus’ enslavement to his passions leads to the literal enslavement of his city. Jolly is good at depicting unhinged passions, but there is not even a hint that he understands the consequences and their causes in exactly what he celebrates. Why not make Jolly the ruler of a city—say, Paris?—and see what happens.

Olympic organizers should have known what they were getting. For the Paris Opera House, for instance, Jolly reimagined an operatic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that included waacking—a street dance that originated in Los Angeles gay clubs in the 1970s. One admirer commented, “his back catalogue of works and stated commitment to reflecting representation at the Olympics can only bode well for LGBTQ communities in France and further afield, hoping to see themselves reflected in the grandest of modern spectacles.” If they are like the way they were reflected, someone needs to break the mirror.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Mansion” section is where les hommes confus (a French phrase of my own confection; translated as the confused men) go to live. The latest is that billionaire Tom Ford “married journalist Richard Buckley in 2014, and the two had a son, Alexander John Barclay Ford, who is now 11.”

Translate this doublespeak back into reality and it reads, “Tom Ford did not marry journalist Richard Buckley, and the two did not have a son.” Why? Because in the real world, two men cannot marry each other since they both have the same kind of unit. Such a “marriage” could not be consummated. Neither could it spawn a son for the very same reason. Now, one of them may have “donated sperm” (there’s another name for this) to fecundate an available or hired female—in which case the donor and the female would be the father and mother of the boy. And as in all such matters, the question hangs in the air: Where’s mom? The “Mansion” section does not let us know, or even admit that there’s got to be one somewhere.

As I wrote in Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, 

Same-sex “families” with children are broken by definition because in no instance will both parents be present. Such “families” are made to be broken, or rather broken to be made, by design… This is a grotesque act of injustice to the children who are misused in this way for this purpose. They are deliberately denied the possibility of being with both parents. They are made rootless, or rather made to be rootless in the essential aspect of the missing parent—an intentionally truncated genealogy.

In another “Mansion” edition, a front-page story introduces us to Hy Conrad and his “husband,” Jeff Johnson. So, Hy must be the “wife.” I’m simply deducing this, since it is not explicitly stated by the WSJ. On an inside page, we meet Tom Nolf and Bruce Johnston, who is the “wife” in this iteration. Since the story is spread out over three pages, I admit to getting occasionally confused (not confu) when I discovered one Johnson who is a “husband” and, on an inside page, another Johnson (actually Johnston) who is a “wife.” For a moment, I feared that Johnson had figured out a way to marry himself. The “he loves he” problem.

On another frontier, those who publicly oppose IVF, (in vitro fertilization) as immoral are subjected to browbeating by those who have had children by this method. They declare that IVF is “pro-family and pro-life” because it produces children. We need to ask these beneficiaries how their other children are doing—the ones in the deep freezers awaiting implantations that will never happen for the simple reason that there are some 5 million of them across the United States. Exactly how “pro-life” is that? I suppose they could sheepishly explain that they keep paying the electricity bill. Isn’t that something? But the tougher question is how is freezing these tiny beings “pro-family”? What family will they ever be part of?

The late theologian and ethicist Paul Ramsey got it right when he explained to an undergraduate class back in the late 1970s (as reported in a WSJ letter to the editor by Jon Holmund) that IVF was morally unacceptable because the technology inherently separates the unitive and procreative functions of human sexuality. Try to get into an undergraduate class anywhere and teach this and you will be charged with threatening the students’ safe space.

A week ago, a demonstrator in front of the Supreme Court held a placard claiming, “Safe Abortion Is a Human Right!” Safe for whom? All the human beings involved? Well, hardly, since abortion ensures that half of them will be killed. Thus, it cannot be a “human right,” which, by definition, must inhere in all humans.

I have discovered that there is a group called Reproductive Justice Action—Milwaukee. At first, I wondered about the name of this group. Then I realized they had to interpose a word—in this case, Justice—between Reproductive and Action. Otherwise, well, we all know what Reproductive Action is. It’s the action that produces babies, like the ones this group would like to have aborted. They also announced that they oppose others who “stand…against safe and sustainable communities.” 

Don’t you need to reproduce to be sustainable? Otherwise, there’s nothing to sustain. Unless Americans undertake some reproductive action soon, our population, which is way under replacement level, will decline to the point of eclipse. All our military services, except the Marines, fell way short of their recruitment goals during the last few years. China, Russia, and Iran all look forward to a smaller U.S. military.

You’ll be relieved to know that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) issued a Summit Declaration at the end of its July meeting in Washington D.C.:

We are committed to integrating NATO’s ambitious Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Human Security agendas across all core tasks. Today we have endorsed an updated WPS Policy, which will enhance the integration of gender perspectives across all of NATO’s activities and structures, and advance gender equality within the Alliance, enabling NATO to respond better to broader security challenges.

Don’t you feel safer now with the integration of gender perspectives for our defense? But wait a minute. What about climate change, identified by both President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as the number one security threat facing the United States? Not to worry. The NATO document assures us that “we will continue integrating climate change considerations into all core tasks.” That’s a relief. Soon NATO will be telling us where to set our thermostats. 

Democrats in Congress have targeted a 151-year-old ban on mailing abortion items. The federal Comstock Act of 1873 is a criminal law prohibiting shipping abortion drugs or other items used in abortions. It was passed when the Republican Party had a majority in both houses. To understand the consistency here one must recall that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery in the 19th century. Likewise, the party opposed the Comstock Act, just as it is doing today. 

An alumna of Planned Parenthood’s Midwestern affiliate whined, “Well, gosh, what’s to stop these antiabortion extremists from trying to use Comstock to make it more difficult for women?” She misses the point that the Comstock Act makes it easier for women in the womb. They might actually survive their mother’s wish to kill them. In fact, The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” recommends that a new administration should enforce Comstock, something the Biden administration has refused to do. 

A week ago, Vice President Kamala Harris, in what may be her first campaign appearance, appeared on a drag queen show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, to stump for the cross-dresser vote. “Each day we are seeing our rights and freedoms under attack, including the right of everyone to be who they are, love who they love, openly and with pride,” she claimed. Here we go again with that pesky pronoun problem. “The right of everyone to… love who they love.” The sentence is a hash without “whom” preceding “they love.” 

Substantively, there is also a profound problem. A father, for instance, doesn’t need a right to love his daughter, but he certainly does not have a right to love her in a way that is not paternal. The same goes for avuncular love. An uncle does not have a right to love his niece in a way that is not avuncular. Should he believe otherwise, call the police or send him down the Seine River without a paddle. 

Wouldn’t Kamala Harris be more comfortable in Paris? She could codirect productions with Thomas Jolly.