Why do you write so much about sexuality? Do you have an obsessive mind?
I write about sexuality because I can’t think of anything more fundamental to the ordering of society than the ordering of the family. If you don’t understand what sexuality has to do with the ordering of the family, there’s the problem.
You also write a lot about abortion. Isn’t it just one issue among many?
Do the numbers: That is like saying that one four Stalinist reigns of terror, five Holocausts, forty-one Hiroshimas, or seventy-six American civil wars would be just one issue among many. The fact that we can view it that way shows how blunt and coarsened our perceptions have become. Abortion is the great moral issue of our century.
Why do you write about “transhumanism”? Most people haven’t even heard of it.
No, but they will. As abortion is the great moral issue of the century now passing, what it is to be human will be the great moral issue of the next. The fog comes on little cat feet. When you hear people talk about “human enhancement” and “controlling human evolution,” watch out.
And God -- why do you write so much about Him? Can’t we be good without God?
How has that been working?
Be serious.
I am being serious. You don’t suppose the experiment has been successful, do you?
But why can’t we?
We cannot be good without God, first, because He Himself is our highest good, and we were made to be in friendship with Him; second, because even the lower goods end in spume and vexation unless we seek Him first; and third, because our thoughts, desires, and passions are still in disorder because of the first time we tried to do without Him.
Why do you write so much about coercion of conscience? Isn’t this the land of the free?
It used to be. The problem may be stated simply. People who uphold a faith that views man as the image of God, and conscience as His gift, have a reason to respect people who deny what they believe (even if, historically, they sometimes haven’t). But people who hold a secular creed that regards man as a hastily made-over ape, and conscience as an obstacle to their political programs, have no reason at all to respect people who deny what they believe. The view that religion should be suppressed by the government is already becoming respectable in academic and other totalitarian circles.
Why do you write so much about boring things like how we are losing our republic?
Because it bores people that we are losing our republic.
What?
Think about it.
Why do you write so much against liberalism? Doesn’t that make you seem partisan?
I can’t help that. Conservatism, of course, may be good or bad; it depends on what you are trying to conserve. But liberalism in our day has become evil. Where once it may have meant responsible liberty, now it means irresponsible coercion. Where once it may have meant helping the poor, now it means destroying their families and making them permanent clients of the state. Though even now it claims to speak for plain people, in fact it holds plain people in contempt.