Phil Brennan
Wednesday, May 30, 2001

I beg to differ. God is not sitting up there waiting to hurl thunderbolts or other thoroughly unpleasant forms of divine retribution at his wayward children. To begin with, as Gertrude Stein once noted in another context, "There's no there there." For a there to be there, there has to be space in the hereafter, and any theologian worth his salt will tell you that there is neither time nor space in eternity - only the eternal "now" existing everywhere at once.

With that mysterious and unfathomable fact out of the way, we can now turn to the thunderbolt matter. God doesn't punish us for our sins. He doesn't have to – we take care of that all by ourselves.

All acts have consequences. Some are pleasant, as when we are rewarded for having done something worthwhile, and some are very unpleasant, as when we act against the laws of nature. For instance, when you put your hand in a fire, you get burned, or when you drink too much you get tipsy, and then suffer a hangover.

These are consequences. They are inevitable.

Now, I am aware that it is very politically incorrect, and quite unfashionable, to admit the existence of natural law. Robert Bork, for example, got burned at the stake for even mentioning it during his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate.

But one has to be totally pickled in the absurdity known as liberalism to believe that there is no such thing as natural law. To believe it one has to also believe that the Creator is a blithering idiot who fashioned the universe and everything in it, seen and unseen, without giving a thought to order, and then went gallivanting off to only He knows where, leaving chaos in His wake.

There is, as the old Baltimore catechism put it, "order and beauty" in the world, and order is another way of saying natural law.

So, how do we punish ourselves for our sins? With the consequences of our sins. Instead of hurling thunderbolts at us when we violate the natural law that holds, as medical science admits, that human life begins at conception, He allows us to suffer the consequences for having allowed some 40 million human lives to be snuffed out by Planned Parenthood and other such mass murderers.

In this case, the consequence is the culture of death which Pope John Paul II warned against at the very outset of his pontificate. Butchering babies in the sanctuary of their mother's wombs cheapens all human life. It's only a short step from there to euthanasia, and another short step toward kids mowing down kids in schoolyards.

Abortion has coarsened mankind and reduced it to beastliness. The sanctity of human life has been denied in the case of the unborn, and the result has been the increasing denial of the sanctity of all human life.

The United States today is under assault from a powerful campaign to legitimize if not glorify homosexuality. In schools across the nation, youngsters are being told that this unnatural vice is not only natural, but is also a desirable form of human sexuality. Lawmakers in America's cities, states and the national legislature are pressured by this enormously well-financed campaign to enact laws that view homosexuality as an acceptable alternative to heterosexuality - that men engaging in promiscuous sodomy are the moral equals of men and women living monogamously in the marital state.

This campaign, waged by about a mere 1 percent of the population, is succeeding all across the land. With official concurrence, schoolchildren at the most impressionable ages are being left open to propaganda and recruitment into the ranks of homosexuality. Try it, they are advised by the homosexual recruiters, who know full well that they are fomenting a habit their victims will be unable to shed.

Because they cannot propagate they must recruit, and the schools of America now offer fertile ground for recruitment.

One consequence has already stricken: AIDS. Millions of Africans are dying from this plague brought upon the world by homosexual behavior. In America, death from AIDS awaits tens of thousands of HIV victims now living on borrowed time.

It is the overwhelming guilt suffered by the majority of homosexuals that compels them to seek assurance from the normal world. That guilt brought on by the violation of natural law may be the worst consequence of all. History teaches us that every great empire, from Greece and Rome to 20th century Britain, has experienced rampant homosexuality within its population before it disintegrated.

Finally, there is the matter of the calculated destruction of the Constitution of the United States – the document that created the finest form of government in the history of mankind. That body of laws was firmly rooted in natural law. It took its inspiration from the laws of "Nature and Nature's God."

In repealing natural law, we are repealing the document upon which all our rights rest. We are repealing our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Ora Pro Nobis

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee, which won statehood for Alaska. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.