In his syndicated column today, conservative activist Pat Buchanan defends Russian president Vladimir Putin’s persecution of gay people and political prosecution of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, saying that Putin is just “trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.”
Buchanan suggests that the United States would be better off under such a regime. “If we seek to build a Good Society by traditional Catholic and Christian standards, why should not homosexual propaganda be treated the same as racist or anti-Semitic propaganda?” he asks.
Our moral and cultural elites have put Putin on notice: Get in step with us on homosexual rights — or we may just boycott your Sochi games.
What this reveals is the distance America has traveled, morally and culturally, in a few short years, and our amnesia about who we Americans once were, and what it is we once believed.
Only yesterday, homosexual sodomy, which Thomas Jefferson said should be treated like rape, was outlawed in many states and same-sex marriage was regarded as an absurdity.
Was that America we grew up in really like Nazi Germany?
In the Catholic schools this writer attended, pornography — let alone homosexual propaganda — would get one expelled.
Was this really just like Kristallnacht?
As Father Regis Scanlon writes in Crisis Magazine, in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated Catholic doctrine that homosexuality is a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” an “objective disorder.” That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral remains Catholic teaching.
Thus, if we seek to build a Good Society by traditional Catholic and Christian standards, why should not homosexual propaganda be treated the same as racist or anti-Semitic propaganda?
We can no longer even agree on what is good and evil.
…
The Post weeps for the “young women of the persecuted rock band Pussy Riot,” who engaged in half-naked obscene acts on the high altar of Moscow’s most sacred cathedral.
Had these women crayoned swastikas on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., would the Post have been so sympathetic?
Putin suggested the ladies try the same stunt in Mecca.
…
Putin is trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.
“The adoption of Christianity,” declared Putin, “became a turning point in the fate of our fatherland, made it an inseparable part of the Christian civilization and helped turn it into one of the largest world powers.”
Anyone ever heard anything like that from the Post, the Times or Barack Hussein Obama?
(Emphases are mine.)
