The Gospel Truth

Mr. Lincoln’s Dog

Presidential pets would make a fascinating study.

To my knowledge, there has never been a book about presidential canines.

Of course we have all heard snippets about Bill Clinton’s dog, Buddy and how the president had the temerity to neuter the poor pup.

The country would probably have been better served if Hillary had had her husband neutered instead of Buddy.

And you wonder why a dog is man’s best friend.

I remember my high school history teacher telling us about how President Franklin Roosevelt’s dog Fala had soiled the carpet in the Oval Office.

To date much is not known about President Obama’s dog, Bo or his children for that matter.

Personally I don’t know if the president is a closet Muslim as many contend., but I really think he acts more like a closet cat person.

But cats are kind of regal and isolated from the general population.

It would not be good politics to have a cat person in the White House.

Of course the most famous president dog was Richard Nixon’s Checkers.

Pundits even named one of Nixon’s most famous speeches, the Checkers Speech.

Abraham Lincoln was an outdoorsman, so I assume he had lots of dogs for hunting and fishing and the like.

However I am not aware of any specific dog that was special to him or one that roamed the dusty corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But I do know that a dog–call it a composite dog, like Mr. Obama’s biographical sweetheart, who now seems to have a real face and a real name, according to the recent Vanity Fair, was the subject of one of his best folksy stories.

That story has great application for today’s social milieu.

Lincoln is alleged to have asked many of his visitors who wanted significant change in something this question:

If you counted a dog’s tail as a leg, how many legs would that dog then have?

Many fumbled with this apparent riddle and jumped to the obvious answer–five!

Wrong, the president must have said.

Just because you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.

This is a great example of the Nominalism I wrote about in The Faces of God last week.

Every time I read about Obama’s idea of change, I have to think of what we call Gay Marriage.

Is it possible to have two men or two women in a sexual and emotional union without drastically altering the nature of the traditional idea of marriage?

Just what is a marriage?  What determines if a marriage really exists?

Is it just a marriage or union or true minds or are the bodies part of the equation?

In other words are the participants in a marriage merely fungible pegs on a wall that can be juggled around without creating an entirely different right?

In today’s nominalist society the ideas of William of Ockham who taught this thinking seem to dominate.

Churches and theologians used to answer these questions.

Now we get politicos and gay lobbyists mandating their own definitions for us to swallow.

Let me go to the nature of things.

Liberals hate such arguments because they bleed a rationality and a logic that contradicts many of their inner-most feelings.

Using the Garden of Eden as a starting point and even tough this Biblical story may be just an allegory, there is little if anything that does not positively measure up against real people in the real world, not some utopian Marxist self-construct.

In other words, it is basically an accurate accounting of the way people are.

Genesis spoke of Adam and Eve…not Steve.

One does not have to be familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body to know that men’s and women’s bodies are anatomically distinct.

In fact when joined together in the marital embrace, they fit perfectly.

Liberals will have a hard time understanding how Adam knew what to do without having had a sex education course but somehow he figured how to join with Eve in a marital embrace that consumated the first marriage.

There is no way that two men can complement each other’s bodies.

It is physically and morally impoossibly.

Men and men lack a certain obvious complementarity.

While they may complement each other emotionally, physically one usually has to pretend to  be the girl.

So the whole union is essentially built on a lie.

My friend, Joseph Sobran had written about this very subject, just before he died a few years ago.

He opined that even societies that tolerate sodomy have seldom if ever seen any reason to treat such unions as marriages.

He reiterated that the practical reason for marriage has always been the breeding and upbringing of children.

Sobran knew that the call for same-sex marriage could occur only in a society that already takes marriage very lightly.

He strongly felt that to homosexuals there was little til death do us part but more an expression of a romantic impulse, made with their fingers crossed.

While procreation is not the only reason for marriage but the traditional family has always been the founding block of civilization.

If one alters that it is just another weakening of the pillars upon which our entire way of life these past 2000 years had been resting.

Like Samson they seem intent on bringing down the entire institution.

Maybe that’s the point.

The gay lobby is being used, encouraged and funded so that they can bring down the institutions and the culture that has been mean to them over the last 1500 years.

Personally I think the gay and liberal attack on marriage is childish and arrogant.

For one small group to demand that the world change to accommodate their needs and count a dog’s tail as a leg is an absolute act of infantile moral and intellectual arrogance.

I once asked a nurse friend of mine why some people became gay.

(There is absolutely no creditable scientific research proving that people were just born that way.)

And she said that it was arrested development.

That’s an interesting term that means something to the effect that they just did not get the proper male/female balance from their parents.

Given the near collapse of the family, is it surprising that so many young people, especially boys grow up with a confused and even twisted concept of their own sexuality?

I think arrested development is recognizable in our society to the extent that it is a driving force that affects, not just gay people but millions of straights, especially our male children.

The Peter Pan Syndrome has become part of our culture.

Millions have moved back to their parents’ home to live because they made wrong choice in education and work habits.

Liberals are great at demanding things for people who have done nothing to deserve the rewards of life.

With all the false talk about the rich, not paying their fair share, nearly 50% of our citizens pay no income tax at all.

In fact they take out over a trillion dollars of the government’s largesse, just for voting Democratic.

How long can a society lasts when its creative and productive class are being saddled with more  and more financial demands?

Once we exceed the 50% mark the majority can take away most everything of what the productive has created and then the system will fall just as we are seeing in Europe–the Europe that liberals like our president want to imitate.

Benjamin Franklin lamented about freedom that once is was achieved, the real job is to keep and maintain it.

Stories like Mr. Lincoln’s dog go a long way in helping us recognize the multi-faceted threats to that liberty.

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