Chris Ferrara – “Conservatives” Surrendered The Only Ground That Mattered

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – We were discussing the Obergefell decision, imposing gay marriage on the 50 states, and this is a classic example of why we can’t really look forward to any encouraging developments in the new year with respect to any kind of conservative restoration in America.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We’ll bring the concluding guest for 2015, Chris Ferrara, with us here live from Richmond, Virginia.  Merry Christmas and Merry New Year to you, Chris Ferrara.  How you doing?

Chris Ferrara:  Merry Christmas to you, Mike.  Not so sure about the New Year.

Mike:  Why are you not so sure –

Ferrara:  What an honor to ring out the old year on the Mike Church Show.

Mike:  Thank you very much.  I appreciate you honoring me with your presence.  Why do you think that 2016 is not going to be a merry new year?

Ferrara:  We’re looking at the end of conservatism in America, not that America ever really experienced a true political conservatism, rooted in objective standards of morality.  We were discussing the Obergefell decision, imposing gay marriage on the 50 states, and this is a classic example of why we can’t really look forward to any encouraging developments in the new year with respect to any kind of conservative restoration in America.

If you look at the Obergefell case, it’s a case study in the faux conservatism that passes for true conservatism among judicial so-called conservatives in this country.  The argument of the dissenters boils down to a complaint about separation of powers.  There was no objection in principle to the idea that two men should be able to marry each other, two women should be able to marry each other.  You know what’s coming next: three people should be able to marry each other or whatever.  The only objection the dissenters voices was one based in the separation of powers.  Let the people decide this, they said.  They had no objection in principle to gay marriage.  Here the courts, conservatives, are being inconsistent.

By that I mean, if you look at the decision of the court in Loving v Virginia, the miscegenation decision, in 1967, at that time the Supreme Court confronted a scenario in which a number of Southern states still had on their books laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races, specifically between blacks and whites.  The Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute on the basis that marriage is a fundamental right.  The problem is that the conservatives of today don’t really quibble with Loving v Virginia.  They recognize that marriage is a fundamental right.  On what basis do they recognize it?  This is the problem.  The only basis – and we’ve hammered on this repeatedly on your show – the only basis for these questions to be decided, and they are preeminently moral questions, is some objective standard of morality.  Where do we find that?  Ultimately we find it in the revealed truth about the moral law.  We find it in the Ten Commandments.

If you look at the Bible, the Bible has no ban on miscegenation.  The Bible does not condemn marriage between the races.  The Bible does condemn sodomy and does prescribe that marriage is between a man and a woman for life, and Jesus Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament.  In scripture, in the moral law, we find a consistent way to approach questions of rights.  Conservatives are not being consistent.  They uphold the Loving v Virginia decision.  Why I don’t know.  Apparently just because it’s a precedent.  But then they object when the court tries to find new rights based on a shifting majority consensus.  The problem with conservatives today is that they’re not true conservatives because their decisions are not rooted in any unvarying moral standard.

Mike:  Bingo!  That’s right.  We spent the first two hours of the show – it sounds like you were listening.

Ferrara:  No, I actually wasn’t.

Mike:  I covered this.  As a matter of fact, my challenge to “conservatives” for 2016, I’ll read it to you.  Resolution: Reclaim the term “conservative” from the war-hawk thugs who have stolen it.  I don’t limit my criticism or my invective at just the war hawks.  Contained in the war hawks are the allegedly pro-life conservatives that don’t have any problem with laying to waste entire villages in the Middle East if there might be a “terrorist” lurking there.  Damn all the property damage.  Damn all the collateral damage, as they like to call it.  As is properly termed, all the death of the noncombatants means absolutely nothing to these people but they’re “pro-life.”

Ferrara:  They’re pro-life in the American sense, pro-life with exception.  In other words, no abortion unless you really find yourself in a difficult situation, and then, of course, you can kill your child.  There’s always a couple of exceptions in there.  This is another example of faux conservatism.  The real issue is a moral issue.  The dissenters refuse to recognize that.  The liberals do recognize it in their perverted way, and they impose their morality on the rest of us while the conservatives run from the field of moral combat.

That’s the problem underlying Obergefell and conservatism in general in America today.  It lacks a moral standard.  The liberals, of course, have their perverted moral standard.  They tell us what they think is right.  Ironically, the Supreme Court here is doing nothing more – in the Obergefell case – than recognizing the wave of change, as they like to call it, sweeping across America.  When the consolidated 14 cases came before the Supreme Court in Obergefell, there were already 37 states that had legalized gay marriage.  Already a preponderance of the states had said that gay marriage is embraced within the fundamental right to marriage.  On what ground do the conservatives stand, skewing all morality, to contest that?  They have no ground on which to stand, so all they can do is complain about a violation of the separation of powers.  Whoop-de-doo.

Mike:  Now we’re faced with a situation – this is why I say the Obergefell decision is the biggest story of the year of 2015.  Like Roe v Wade for the culture of death, it’ll be the gift that keeps on giving the whole year long.  It’ll give in 2016.  It’ll give in 2017.  If we’re still around after the 100-year anniversary of Fatima, it’ll give in 2018.  It’ll give in 2019, again, if we’re still around.  Just like Roe, they’ll continue going to the well.  Although the serpent of North America is starting to run out of perversions that can be normalized.  The list of human perversions that can be normalized or that have yet to be normalized by Americans and by Western civilization, that’s one thing to give thanks for this year.  That list has gotten shorter.  In other words, I guess with the animals and multiple partners and then in unconventional orifices, I don’t know what else to pervert is left.

Ferrara:  The problem, of course, is that the conservatives have no problem in principle with the normalization of perversions, no matter how abominable, so long as some kind of electoral majority is the one that’s doing the normalizing.  That’s not a principled opposition.  Again, that’s just resort to an argument about division of powers.  Let the people do it.  We have no problem with the destruction of the moral order as long as 50 percent plus one of the appropriate electorate has approved it.

Of course, what they are doing there is playing by the rules of the liberal game, which our entire Western civilization has been doing for more than 250 years.  It’s like trying to walk up a down escalator.  You’re never going to get anywhere.  You’re just going to go down a little bit slower if you try to walk up.  That’s what’s happening with each of these decisions.  The conservatives give ground to the liberals who have a moral vision.  Conservatives lacking a moral vision are in continual retreat.  All they can do is point to the people.  By the way, the people were already behind the court, the vast majority of them anyway, which is why when the Obergefell case was decided, the vast majority of states had already legalized gay marriage.  The only way out of this situation, you’ve said it again and again on this show, is a moral and spiritual revolution.  Failing that, it’s over.

Mike:  The revolution, I think, is going to be, unlike the cliché from the 1960s, “the revolution is going to be televised.”  I don’t know that it’s going to be televised.  I do know, I believe anyways, that it’s also going to happen and occur at the same time as there is a revolution in a political realignment.  This is going to happen in Europe.  The Europeans think they can stop it.  They’re not going to be able to stop it.  Caledonia is going to secede from Spain at some point in time, especially if socialist Spain tries to force feed them Muslim refugees.  Caledonia is out; they’re going to go.  Scotland is ultimately going to break off from the UK.  It won’t be because of that.  It’s because young Scottish socialists think they’re getting shafted by older Scottish socialists, and they want their fair share of socialism.  This is going to happen all over.  In the country that you have talked about many times on this show, Hungary, it’s already occurred.  Hungary doesn’t want anything.  If the EU tries to force Hungary to accept refugees or to admit practicing orthodox Muslims into their midst, Hungary is going to drop out of the EU.

Pat Buchanan wrote about this, our traditional Latin Mass Catholic friend, earlier this week.  He sees the whole thing in Europe falling apart.  For the first time since I’ve been reading Pat, he kind of makes the jump over to North America where he says: And we’re not far behind it.  What force, other than – this is what I fear but my fear must be tempered by.  I fear that there will be a revolution.  It’ll be a republican revolution.  There will be either enclaves or entire parts of states, regions if you will, that will decide: We see the future.  We see the future as you guys are trying to force it on us.  We don’t want anything about it.  Since you won’t let us govern ourselves, we’re just going to start ignoring you.  If you want to call that secession, call it what you will.  When that happens, the American federal government will either have to act like the Soviet federal government or the German federal government.

People forget that the Germanic states as they were were governed – Germany was a union of sorts.  We think of countries today – you’re the one that taught me this and researching this – as always being these giant blobs of land that were called countries.  That’s just not the case.  Italy was made up of – you know this far better than I.  How many hundreds upon hundreds of different little counties or regions or what have you – the modern super-state, my point, is a recent development.

Ferrara:  The scholar I cite, a Stanford University law professor, notes that liberalism has employed cartography, the science of drawing maps with exact boundaries, to create little worlds over which the modern state system exercises its authority.  The previous model of sovereignty was one where a sovereign would exercise sovereignty over a given people.  It would not be strict boundary lines.  There was no such thing as a border crossing.  That way, the modern state system was unable to exercise the kind of authority it has today unless and until it was able to create these containers for its sovereignty within which it was absolutely dominant.  This new model of the strictly limited borders of nation-states has facilitated the conquest of the modern state system over local autonomy.

In America, I don’t see any potential for a successful, violent resistance to this regime.  It is simply too well-armed.  You indicated in your comments passive non-cooperation might be the way to go.  Any regime will collapse if its subjects massively, across the board, simply refuse to cooperate.  You can only arrest and shoot so many people.  It’s only the violent confrontation that gives the nation-state points of opposition that it can crush by force.  Massive non-cooperative, passively, by the population at large, is something that the nation-state of modernity is not equipped to handle.  Any regime will collapse if people simply refuse to cooperate with it any longer.  That’s the only way out.  There’s another way out, though.  A good friend of mine commented – when a large asteroid closely approached the Earth a few years back, he sent me an email.  The email was very simple: Too bad it missed.  That’s one way to resolve the problem.

Mike:  I’m not quite that nihilistic or cynical that I want to be struck by an asteroid.

Ferrara:  It’s a thought to consider.  When you look at the book of the apocalypse, you see the image of the flaming mountain landing in the ocean.  That suggests to me some sort of impact with the planet at some point in the history of this world.  You’re reading all these articles now about how we don’t know about certain undetected asteroids that could be upon us in a few days.  It’s something to consider.

Mike:  By the by, my big Christmas gift this year was a very nice, pretty powerful telescope.  Mrs. Church asked me: What do you want for Christmas?  I thought to myself: If you’re actually going to run around and talk about classical liberal education and the Trivium and Quadrivium and all that sort of stuff, maybe you ought to actually practice it.  Astronomy actually being one of the classic liberal arts studies – as a boy I had a telescope and loved astronomy.  I thought I’d pick up astronomy again.  If I find the asteroid that’s coming to bring St. John’s book of the apocalypse to fruition, I’ll name it Ferrara C1.

Ferrara:  If you spot that killer asteroid, make sure you break the story immediately on Mike Church’s radio show.

Mike:  I will.

Ferrara:  That’s the ultimate solution.  Obviously it’s not something we should hope for.  Although, from the eternal perspective, it would solve a lot of problems.  Let’s remember, our destiny is eternal.  Nothing concentrates the mind so quickly as the idea that one’s death is imminent.  In a way, as perverse as it sounds, the approach of something like a planet-killer asteroid could be the best thing spiritually for countless millions and millions of people.  It would get them to consider their eternal destiny and maybe they would fall to their knees.  I would join them and beg God’s mercy and forgiveness.

Mike:  They’d have to admit visibilium omnium et invisibilium, of all things seen and unseen.  The scientific types don’t believe in the unseen, even though they believe in justice; they can’t see it.  They believe in the intellect; can’t see it.  They believe in honor; can’t see it.  You could take this exercise as far as you need to.  I would leave you with this for 2015.  Thank you for all the guest appearances that you made here this year and all the times you took time out of your day to stop by and to be on the show.  Hopefully next week, I’m hoping that next Tuesday you and I can do Darwin Was Wrong Part III.  I’ll give you plenty of time to put all that stuff together so we can pick up where we left off.  The Modern Wrong World Made Right is one of the shows we’re going to do here on the Crusade Channel, which I think is as crusadery as crusade gets.

Ferrara:  I’d be happy to help you dismantle the greatest hoax in the history of science.

Mike:  We are going to dismantle it.  We already set it up with the first two episodes.  We’re going to continue to dismantle it.  I was reading from Professor George Panichas, who wrote in Modern Age: The Conservative Journal, back in 2006, under the heading of “Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism.”  He was talking about what I was talking about earlier, which is how conservatism doesn’t mean anything unless you’re trying to sell a book or a radio channel or television show or radio show or whatever.  It’s a marketing term now.  It doesn’t have any of its charm or the beauty that it used to have.  Panichas was actually channeling Richard Weaver from the 1930s.  Weaver said the age of nominalism is here.  It’s not coming, it’s here.  If we don’t get ahold of it right now, there are going to be awful, unimaginable moral consequences.  Of course, Weaver was correct.  In his long essay – you talked about conservatism, and talk about Darwinism being a hoax.  What about the hoax of modern Republican Party conservatism?  That’s a hoax, too, isn’t it?

Ferrara:  Of course it is.  That’s the theme of many of my appearances on your show, that America does not have an authentic conservatism, which can only be that conservatism rooted in objective and eternal moral values.  There’s only one source of those ultimately.  It’s the revelation of God himself to his creations.  We as creatures of God are bound by his law.  Until conservatives in America begin to recite once again the divine imperatives as the basis for their political positions, they aren’t conservatives and will never be conservatives.  They’ll just be another stripe of liberal playing by the liberal game and losing every time.

Mike:  Here is the conclusion of Panichas’s piece.

[reading]

Towards the end of his chapter on “Democracy and Standards,” Irving Babbitt writes: “The unit to which all things must be finally referred is not the state of humanity or any other abstraction, but the man of character. Compared with this ultimate reality, every other reality is only a shadow in the mist.” And towards the end of his chapter, “Argument by Definition,” in The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), Weaver offers us these words: “The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences….as a set of definitions which are struggling to get themselves defined in the real world.” No two statements, so astonishingly contiguous in their ethical criticism and ethical vision, can better inspire us for the task of restoring and renewing the meaning and the complexion of conservatism.

In the pursuit of this task we must bear in mind that our conservatism is ultimately the moral exemplification of our conservatorship; that the conservative as conservator guards against violations of our reverent traditions and legacy, and is, in fine, a preserver, a keeper, a custodian of sacred things and signs and texts, sub specie aeternitatis. Only when we perceive and accept the meaning of conservatism in this venerable context will we begin to allay the confusion of this word—and the confusions of our time.

[end reading]

Ferrara:  Absolutely right.  The keyword in that entire presentation you just made is “essences.”  This is a universe of divinely-established essences which determine the natures and destinies of all things, above all man.  This is called the eternal law, God’s plan for all of the universe, and every aspect of it, and every element of it, and every human being within it.  When you get to the concept of essences, you reach the foundation of morality established by God in the very nature of things, including human nature above all, with man and his rational and immortal soul.  If you depart from those foundations, you’re adrift on the sea of liberalism, the stormy sea in which we are tempest tossed right now.  The conservatives along with the liberals, all of them basically, liberals on the same ship which is leaking water from every part and is sinking as we sit aboard.

Mike:  We’ve got a couple new oarsmen on board.  We’re trying to hire a new captain.  We’re trying to set a new course.  We’ve got the sextant out.  We’ve at least identified the star that we need to set the sextant to.  We’ve even got some tar that we’re going to try to patch some of the old holes up in the old girl and see if we can keep her afloat.  With that, my friend, I say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you.  Who would have thunk a year ago you and I would be having a conversation on the eve of the eve of New Year’s Eve and it wouldn’t be on the old station in the old country?

Ferrara:  In a way you could see it coming.  I’m sorry it happened that way, but, as you know, when God closes one door, another door opens to an even bigger opportunity.  I think that’s what we’re seeing here.  I’m looking forward to the new year and helping you out with your new network, spreading the truth as far as you . . .

End Mike Church Show Transcript