The following is a preview of an article I wrote for Renew America, likely to be published on Wednesday. While not properly addressing Catholicism, I think it may be of interest to readers here.
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On January 20th, Huffington Post published an article, The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think, by Johann Hari.
As Mr. Hari tells it, after experiencing firsthand the deleterious effects of drug addiction on individuals and families, he set out on a three year, 30,000 mile journey in search of answers to some very important questions:
How does one become an addict?
Why are so many people apparently unable to overcome their addictions?
And most importantly, how do we as a society help them return to wholeness?
According to Hari, what he discovered was nothing short of amazing, and based upon most of the reactions to his article that I’ve encountered, many of his readers seem to agree.
I’m not one of those readers; in fact, I’d say that his conclusions are fairly predictable.
Hari begins his article by illustrating the conventional wisdom as it relates to drug addiction:
Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means.
In his travels, however, he made discoveries that indicate that this isn’t entirely true.
“Almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it,” he writes.
To tell that story, Hari points, among other things, to research involving rats that were offered cocaine.
In one experiment, repeated many times over, a single rat was placed in a cage and provided with two bottles of water; one pure, the other laced with cocaine.
“Almost every time you run this experiment,” Hari tells us, “the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.”
Thus reinforced was the notion that chemical hooks are to blame for addiction.
Hari then introduces readers to the work of Bruce Alexander, a psychology professor who tried an alternative experiment.
Alexander introduced a group of rats (as opposed to a single rat) into an environment that he called Rat Park; described by Hari as “a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want.”
Rat Park’s inhabitants were also given a choice between pure water and cocaine laced water, but in this case, a surprising thing happened.
“The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water,” Hari reports. “They mostly shunned it.”
What’s more, when Dr. Alexander placed rats that by all appearances were helplessly addicted into Rat Park, an amazing thing happened:
“The [addicted] rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them.”
Hari then makes Professor Alexander’s conclusions his own, “Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.”
Hari argues that chemical hooks are but “a minor part of a much bigger picture” wherein those interested in exploring the causes and cures for drug addiction need look primarily at society itself.
According to Hari, “We will have to change a lot more than the drug war.”
“We will have to change ourselves,” he says, and that includes our attitude toward the decriminalization of illicit drugs and the people who use them.
So, what makes these conclusions so very predictable?
Johann Hari, as his article plainly indicates, is a political liberal who suffers with same sex attraction.
As such, he arguably brought to the discussion precisely the sort of biases and preconceived notions that all but guaranteed that he would ultimately determine that one’s “cage” – a euphemism for both individual families and society at large – shoulders much of the blame and responsibility for the plight of the addict.
You see, from at least 1973 on forward, when the APA (American Psychological Association) officially declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder (a change in class facilitated not by groundbreaking research, but rather by intimidation at the hands of gay activists – see essay by Dr. Jeffrey B. Satinover), practically any mention of the actual causes of, and various maladies associated with, same sex attraction has been strictly verboten in “polite” (read, politically correct) circles.
Those mental health professionals who, placing a premium on authentic compassion, dare to cite any of the well-designed studies that speak to the actual causes of homosexuality (to say nothing of potential treatment protocols) and the increased prevalence of substance abuse; depression, and attempted suicide that come with it, invite personal and professional retribution at the hands of LGBT activists and their politically correct allies in the media, academia and elsewhere.
That’s not to say that either Johann Hari, or the LGBT community at large, denies the fact that such maladies are indeed more prevalent among their ranks; on the contrary.
In a recent interview with the British media outlet, Pink News, Hari readily admitted as much; all but suggesting that he brought to his “journey-of-discovery” a predetermined desire for exactly the conclusions he ultimately reached.
According to the interviewer, Nick Duffy, “He [Johann Hari] also says a more radical view of drug addiction helps to explain its prevalence the gay community.”
“There’s a clear parallel,” Hari told Duffy. “Gay people are disproportionately likely to have traumatic childhoods, disproportionately likely to be rejected by their parents.”
Consider as well a statement offered by Pride Institute, a treatment center that caters specifically to LGBT patients:
It is generally held among researchers that GLBT persons are more likely to use alcohol and drugs than the general population and more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, as cited in the Center for Substance Abuse Treatments – A Provider’s Introduction to Substance Abuse Treatment for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Individuals, (2003). Twenty to twenty-five percent of gay men and lesbians are heavy alcohol users, compared to 3-10% of the heterosexual population, (CSAT, 2003).
As for what accounts for this threefold spike in the prevalence of substance abuse in the LGBT community, you’ll never guess where Pride Institute places the blame: society itself!
What factors contribute to the prevalence of chemical abuse among gays and lesbians, bisexual and transgendered individuals? … The society in which we live marginalizes the LGBT community. In fact, there is an everpresentness of possible oppression in LGBT people’s lives.
The entire “anti-bullying” movement (even if unbeknownst to many a feckless parent) is built upon the same fallacy; namely, that LGBT adolescents are at particularly high risk for depression and suicide, not due to any sort of resident mental disorder in the children themselves; but simply because society as a whole does not embrace their “orientation” and the sexual deviancy that goes along with it quite vigorously enough.
In all cases, LGBT activists are at pains to deny what research plainly indicates; namely, that homosexuality is in fact a psychological disorder in its own right, and the heightened risk of the various maladies that go with it (including substance abuse) is a result of the disorder itself; not the social setting in which the individual lives.
To the extent that Johann Hari embraces this denial, neither his discoveries nor his conclusions are especially surprising; on the contrary, they’re exactly what one should expect when the issue of substance abuse is framed within the confines of gay politics.
“For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts … we should have been singing love songs to them all along,” Hari states.
His conclusion, therefore, is that it’s time to end to the war on illicit drugs by making their use legal.
Certainly Johann Hari isn’t the first person to reach such a conclusion. In this case, however, his is an especially predictable one, coming as it does from a man who adheres to the tenets of the LGBT movement; the same that has openly declared war on traditional marriage via calls for the legalization of so-called “gay marriage.”
In both cases, pressure is exerted upon society at large to embrace, even within its juridical framework, that which is truly harmful to both families and society, while effectively deflecting attention away from the destructive behavior of the individual persons involved.
Much of what Johann Hari presents as evidence in support of his conclusions suggests that something in the drug addict’s life makes it difficult for him or her to make healthy connections with other human beings.
He chooses to view this situation, however, almost exclusively through the lens of the “it’s not you, it’s your cage” theory; with the cage being a metaphor for one’s surroundings, either familial or societal.
For example, in support of this notion, Hari calls our attention to hospital patients who are treated over a period of time with diamorphine, a medical-grade version of heroin (the street drug that his ex-boyfriend, to whom we are introduced near the end of the article, is addicted).
Hari points out that when the diamorphine is discontinued, it is rare for these patients to hit the streets in search of heroin upon discharge. Speaking of a hypothetical patient, he says, “She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.”
This seems plausible until one applies a bit of rational thought, and in many cases, personal experience, to the discussion.
Like me, I suspect that most readers are personally aware of individuals who, in spite of living squarely in the bosom of a family’s love (a “good cage,” in Hari’s parlance), still fell victim to drug addiction. Many readers also know, as do I, of similarly loved individuals for whom legitimately prescribed pain medication became a stepping stone to substance abuse.
In any event, according to Hari, the addict’s family simply needs to suck it up and deal with the manipulating, lying and stealing that is so typical of drug abusers:
When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention — tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction — and you may lose them altogether.
In this, one sees yet another hand-in-glove parallel between Hari’s conclusions and the ethos of the LGBT movement, which has long been keen on insisting that parents and other family members overcome their moral / religious aversion to sexual deviancy by welcoming, nay applauding, their gay relatives, their “partners” and their perverse activities under their very own roofs.
All of this said, Johann Hari does write well when he stresses the importance of human connections.
“Human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections,” he states. “It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can.”
He also does well to encourage clinical treatment for drug addicts designed to help them form bonds with other people and the broader society by helping them “reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma.”
Therein lies a thread of truth that committed LGBT activists dare not follow; leading them instead to embrace a sort of “have your cake and eat it too” proposition.
You see, on the one hand, Hari’s article proposes a cause-and-effect progression wherein trauma leads to difficulty in forming healthy human relationships, which leads to substance abuse, which calls for clinical treatment.
Fair enough.
On the other hand, however, his biases preclude him from recognizing a similar progression – the same confirmed by research – wherein trauma leads to difficulty in forming healthy human relationships, which leads to homosexuality, which often includes by no small coincidence an increase in the prevalence of substance abuse, all of which calls for clinical treatment.
Recall that Johann Hari himself, in his interview with Pink News, plainly acknowledges the link between trauma in one’s formative years and homosexuality, saying, “Gay people are disproportionately likely to have traumatic childhoods.”
This is just one of the many LGBT elephants in the room that just won’t go away; one that gay activists managed to squeeze the APA into ignoring right along with them.
All in all, Johann Hari’s article (and presumably the book that it’s promoting) contains some interesting observations and points worthy of consideration, but it also includes some specious reasoning that is reflective of the writer’s biases, with its conclusions as questionable as they are predictable.
Never heard of the Rat Park experiment, and wonder if it is repeatable.
I’m skeptical that one can rehabilitate rats in the manner described, and know from personal experience that human addicts are NOT effectively treated with “kindness.”
Ironically, addicts DO occasionally respond to a spiritual approach which resembles the Sacrament of Penance.
Dear Louie,
Thanks for this thought-provoking piece.
While not meaning to imply that the majority of scientists are always right; (thinking of evolution v/s intelligent design) maybe it wouldn’t be out of order to at least ask more questions about these “Rat Park” studies.
According to Wicki:
“Two major biology journals “Science” and “Nature” each rejected Alexander’s paper on the “Rat Park” experiment. A much smaller publication took it, and some later ones which appeared to confirm it. But nothing came of those either, and “Because of the study’s poor reception, Simon Fraser University withdrew its funding.”
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Herbert Kleber, director of the substance-abuse division of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University was asked what was wrong with “Rat Park”. “He suggested- Alexander may have distorted the data in the hope of provoking a public debate; and that the study had methodological flaws, though he did not specify.”
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The majority of scientists still seem to go by the theory that repeated exposure to drugs physiologically addicts people.
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One group discussing the whole issue, also raised the question of whether rats aren’t naturally immune to a large extent to some chemicals, which is why rat poisons have to be so strong–which would also change the meaning of the results, we assume. Something else to check out.
The only problem with this man’s hypothesis is that it isn’t true. He has no explanation for all the Hollywood celebrities who are straight, and addicted, and live in lavish cages. What about Elvis? He had a good relationship with his momma. He wasn’t gay. He had everything he wanted and died an addict. There are more like him than there are addicted LGBTs living in slums.
By the great essayist and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple:
Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy
In Romancing Opiates, distinguished cultural critic Theodore Dalrymple focuses his attention on one particular drug, heroin, though he also explores the nineteenth-century use of opium by such literary figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A psychiatrist at a large general hospital in a British slum, Dalrymple draws on his own personal experience and clinical observation of heroin addicts in order to support his iconoclastic approach to the problem of drugs and addiction. His brief and lucid book goes directly to its point in the first few pages: “Romancing Opiates seeks to expose the willful misconceptions, the lies and evasions, of the past two hundred years with regard to opiate addiction.” Dalrymple believes this strong, even strident, language is warranted because the general public’s “standard or received view of heroin addiction” is the result of “propaganda assiduously spread for many years by everyone who has concerned himself with the subject.”
Superb piece. I have have/have had relatives addicted to both illegal drugs and deviant sex and you are spot-on. Of course.
These studies overlook three key things causing the increases in both addiction and homosexuality, and you don’t need psychology — a dubious science in its modern form — to figure them out:
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1. The decline of Christian religious faith in America and almost all formerly Christian countries, including in the Catholic faith since Vatican II, as documented on this site.
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2. The massive, confiscatory welfare state that atomizes families with high taxes and welfare dependency, as well as the hideous “public” schools.
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3. Yes, conservatives, all the wars, which cost trillions to taxpayers while shattering families not only through casualties, but through normal military deployments far from home on the other side of America, or in foreign countries. The children of military families are particularly affected.
Good point, MR.
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“The good ‘cage’ saved them.”
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“It’s how we get our ‘satisfaction’. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can.” I would replace, ‘with anything we can’ to ‘we will connect to the whatever the world suggests we connect to next…’; which, these days, is not God or His Bride; Lord have mercy.
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In the Book of the Apocalypse, St John talks of the ‘authority of the scorpions’ (“and authority was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have authority…”) One exegesis is that he is speaking of anti-Christ ‘authority’; worldly, societal authority, that has no recourse to Christ = it is soul-destructive.
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JUSTICE is so important. We all know. We can so easiliy feel ‘beyond the pale’. So hard done by, by almost anything. We are humans. We have a ‘sense’ of Justice; but unless we submit to God’s Justice, we will be battered from left to right with worldy ideas of ‘justice’. If someone is ‘gay’, the world has a ‘justice’ system online, these days, to tell them how unjustified homophobia is rather than homosexuality.
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The world is satanically ‘self-assured’; hard-headedly, hard-heartedly determined to deny the laws of God; it is gleefully sure of itself and works every second to enforce this ‘glee/pride’ on the unsuspecting. But it is so tragically wrong.
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We have little understanding in post-Christian ‘society’ of all that Our Saviour bequeathed to us. Again and again we are told and showed that Justice, Godly Justice, is intrinsic to God Himself. But we have been trained to take little heed. Wherever we are, whatever we are up to we can, at any time, make an act of perfect contrition (and then confession if available – rare in these ‘times’). Charity comes only from Sanctifying Grace (Love of God above all Things). ‘Good works’ (that is to say, being a ‘kind’ person according to the times), therefore, outside of the will of God, is not Charity.
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‘He that earned wages have put them into a bag with holes ( = labour without sanctifying Grace).’ All must be done for God’s sake in one’s duties of state and life always accompanied by prayer; praying that God bless our Labours – if God does not bless what we do by His providence, all we do shall come to naught. Pray before all things. Pray God gives fruitfullness to our ‘good works’ which are useless without it. To fail in pray is to fail in one’s first obligation to God = worship. Pray in the morning; before and after meals; at night with examination and an act of contrition.
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We have been schooled by modernism to be utterly ignorant of the evil of sin. Our grandparents were far more intelligent than we with regards to it, and their grandparents more intelligent again. The war against Christ, against Christendom, has us living in somewhat of a new nadir of antichristness. With just a little humility, prayer and charity (true charity), we can remain free of the tyranny of the “CULTURE of satan” and his useful idiots.
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http://mhtseminary.libsyn.com/sermon-origin-of-septuagesima-by-bp-sanborn
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Hari says, ‘for a century now we have been singing war songs against the addict…’ I would hazard not a century, but millennia. And, ironically, in the 60’s, amidst all the antichrist hooplah, there were a few moments of true self-examination.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbLy1H-yZnU
Re: a ‘friend:
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http://www.stjoeyouth.com/pictures/St.%20Therese%20of%20Lisieux.bmp
If we step back from the addiction itself to ask why addicts continue to use/drink when it’s obvious to himself and everyone else that this is NOT a good thing, we find the core: the substance, for a short time, brings the user into a different reality.
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We can see, then, to experiment with rats is just silly. They have no emotional life, no unhappiness etc. They experience physical addiction, which is cured in days/hours when the substance is withdrawn. People can have this ‘cure’ too but once the physical addiction is gone, they are still faced with ‘life.’
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For many reality is an unhappy state. This is life – reality – some good, some bad. The addict’s first drink/use takes away the unhappiness. But it comes back and rinse and repeat. There are as many kinds of addiction as there are addicts but the core is the same for all. Remember, the image of the poor young person, on the streets, selling his body for drug money is a false image. Most addicts get up and go to work every day, and get the laundry done, and get the kids off to school. This is the true picture of addiction.
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All the bandaid solutions, and there are dozens from talk therapy, to massive doses of vitamins, to naltrexone, baclofen, and antabuse – to luv, luv, luv, cannot take away the underlying refusal to embrace real life. Everything to diets, botox, yoga, TV, internet, fashion industry, beauty products, is specifically geared to take us away from reality.
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The only cure for this mess is to teach people that suffering is part of life, and MUST be borne.
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Then there is the elephant in the room: a billion dollar industry in addiction care. Any truth brought into this industry – that we must teach The Faith, and what reality is, will be fought tooth and nail.
I meant to say above, too, that we have been propagandized into thinking mostly about those dirty, nasty, scabby drug addicts to the exclusion of ordinary addictions which really point out the ‘I want…’ aspect of the whole thing. Warning: HARSHNESS ALERT
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The woman who can’t leave the house without her mascara. The type II diabetic who can’t give up bread so just pops another Metaformin. The single guy who hooks up every Friday and Saturday. The family who keeps busy 24/7 and never sits down for more than 1/2 hour at a time. Noise addicts, eye addicts who need images flashing, comfort addicts who always choose the softest material, book addicts who purchase and never read, talking addicts who never shut up.
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It really is harsh to call out these poor people (US!) as addicts but all of them (US!) are doing something that they want, as opposed to something that is good. All these things keep reality at bay even for just a little while.
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This is painfully obvious in NewChurch. We are addicted to ______, and yet we want it all – Holy Communion, acceptance, approval, luv, hugs, smiles, welcome….and Poor Francis believes that all this personal ‘experience’ adds up to The People of God writing ever-changing ‘dogma’.
“the substance, for a short time, brings the user into a different reality.”
Maybe they’re just trying to avoid the post-Vatican II reality.
To a Catholic Thinker et al,
Speaking of deviant sex, 100,000,000 (you read correctly – one hundred million!) copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey” have been sold. I think it is going to be a movie. Would the purchase of this book equal one hundred million mortal sins? I shudder at the thought. “By Thy Holy and Immaculate Conception, O Mary, make my body pure and my soul holy” should be our constant prayer. Lord, save us. We perish.
They use all this jargon to take deviancy seem acceptable, but gangs of homosexuals and (planned parenthood) sluts marching in the streets (pride parades) reminds me of the gangs encircling Lot’s house who wanted to rape the stranger to death and who did rape to death the Levite’s concubine in practically the same scenario in Judges 19.
From two days ago you can see these roaring lions that SHOULD be caged attacking parents peacefully protesting sexualizing their children in school (and police) here: “when they were pelted with bottles, firecrackers, and snowballs”:
http://carolynyeager.net/disgusting-sexual-deviants-attack-peaceful-german-parents-march-hamburg
From a year ago:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gay-activists-hurl-feces-at-german-parents-protesting-pro-gay-school-curric
Meanwhile, after homosexual ‘marriage’ (men kissing in McDonalds), the next item on the agenda is legalizing marijuana in all 50 states.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/23/mcdonalds-security-gay-kissing_n_6532834.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/02/obama-budget-dc-
marijuana_n_6599360.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/03/native-americans-marijuana_n_6599984.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/29/marijuana-industry-growth-charts_n_6565604.html
I’d looked at some interesting documentaries earlier that suggest that the AIDS scare may not be what it’s sold as. In fact it is measured differently depending on who you ask. A large argument made is that it’s not a result of HIV, but rather due to poor living conditions from lack of hygiene and drinking water and also the largest culprit being drug abuse.
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A good number of homosexual men take drugs. Either from depression and their own problems, but also there are certain drugs and stimulants necessary to engage in homosexual acts. Reading descriptions of it is gross, but basically homosexual ‘intercourse’ for men can be very painful and hurts a lot, not to mention a good deal of such activity involves sadomasochism inherently and physical abuse. The drugs help to deal with that. So a grand number of homosexual men are also drug abusers, not solely due to depression or un-acceptance, but beause actually engaging in that behavior is extraordinarily physically painful that they require narcotics to get them through it.
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More can be said including that the numbers of actual AIDS in countries like Africa is set to a different scale which would not register as AIDs here. Also that our sex-obsessed NGOs don’t take into account that immune systems are affected by a variety of things such as contaminated drinking water, lack of food, lack of medicine for other health problems etc. But no! All this is ignored and the AIDS epidemic is blamed solely on sex, and thus instead of solving the real problems, instead money is spent on condoms, abortions, sterilizations etc. all which do absolutely nothing to curb the ‘AIDS epidemic.’ Some suspect that the LGBT lobbies have poisoned the AIDS discourse to make it about the HIV and sex rather than the prime cause of poor living conditions so that the AIDS phenomenon can cover a greater percentage of Africa and they can turn around and claim that AIDS is not a homosexual problem but affects heterosexual sex too. They make AIDS about sex and claim there’s no difference between heterosexual and homosexuals in terms of risk, the point to Africa. Why? Because the vast number of heterosexuals in developed nations don’t suffer from the disproportionate problems of AIDS like homosexuals do, and this is chiefly tied to drug abuse on the parts of those who do. Whether from sharing needles or the drugs themselves taking a toll on the body’s immune system. It is also why homosexual men are also more affected more than homosexual women. But they then turn around and argue that given the vast majority of AIDS cases in Africa, of course so many people can’t be homosexuals, thus they argue that homosexuality is not the problem.
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Thy’d be right in that it is not the homosexual sex that is the direct cause, but the homosexual lifestyle itself engenders a greater proportion to turn to drugs, either because of the depression and anxiety of trauma, or because particularly for men, drugs might be necessary for them to even deal with the pain and torture of the ‘sex’ they engage in. They are victims continuing to victimize each other. Combine that with promiscuity and STDs and other diseases and you can see how exposed their immune systems would be to succumbing to Aids.
Dear Barbara,
Your comments here about the role of human emotion in this battle, and those of some others regarding the role of our Faith and Grace, seem well-founded.
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We recently did some research through “wicki” on acclaimed actor/director Seymour Hoffman, whose death was ruled “accidental” from “acute mixed drug intoxication, including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines and amphetamine”. It was said he rarely spoke about his private life or beliefs, telling the press: “The less you know about me the more interesting it will be to watch me do what I do”. But he made an exception for a 2006 interview with 60 Minutes, revealing heavy drug and alcohol abuse until age 22, while at N.Y.U., where he used “anything I could get my hands on. I liked it all.”
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After graduation in 1989, he entered a drug rehab. program, and remained sober for the next 23 years. When he suddenly started using heroin again in 2013, he admitted himself to drug rehab again for 10 days, and friends thought he had gotten it completely under control once again. But on Feb. 2, 2014, at age 46, one of them found him dead, in the bathroom of his apartment in Manhattan, with a syringe still stuck in his arm. A funeral was held at St. Ignatius Loyola Church 5 days later, “attended by many of his former co-stars”. No reasons were said to be known for his sudden return to drugs.
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But keeping in mind what you noted above, we see that his biography also records: “For the last 14 years of his life, he was in a “relationship” with a costume designer he met in a movie he directed. They lived in N.Y.City, and by 2013, had a son(age 12) and two daughters (9) and (7). He and his “partner” had separated in the fall of 2013, a few months before his death.”
Dear Barbara,
Amen. And one way to detect it is to take a look at what you tend to “run home to” for comfort when those bigger disturbances come along.
Sometimes it’s God and THEN the escape, which can give us the illusion we’re not in that trap. Growing in holiness requires continuous monitoring. 🙂 🙂
The ego can never be satisfied. No matter how much we have, it wants more. Enough is a little more than what one has. The ego has no permanent existence we die ! We are feel good addicts, hoping to wring our happiness from the world, food, drink, drugs, sex, money, power, love, etc . The quest to feel good ultimately is what makes us feel bad. The ego has legitimate satisfactions. ie. a job well done, a well deserved promotion. figuring out a difficult problem. making someone else’s day. We should identify with what is eternal and permanent, i.e. our souls, the kingdom of heaven & happiness lies within.
Dear ock,
You give the same advice as the writers in our favorite book: 🙂 🙂
(Col. 3: 1-5)
Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above; where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God: Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth. For you are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ shall appear, who is your life, then you also shall appear with him in glory. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, lust, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is the service of idols.
Indignus, thank you for the Biblical version of my post !!!
Dear salvemur
“Satanically self-assured” That’s one to remember. Brings so many pictures to mind of people in the news over the last 50 years–especially the pro-abort crowd. Also closer to home, unfortunately. BTW like your friend, Therese.
She’s one who reminds us to pray for all souls. A stationary missionary.
🙂 🙂
Dear ock
Our pleasure.. Thanks for providing the incentive . 🙂 🙂
All good stuff. Trouble is all the ‘pie in the sky,’ aka our reward in Heaven is soooooooooo darned far in the future!!!! Whereas that glass of wine, or toke is right here to hand.!!!!
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I guess it’s all about allowing the intellect to inform the will BEFORE the hand reaches out. Hard to do with Faith, very, very hard without.
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To get back to Louie’s headline for this piece: yes, there is a very clear link between addiction and how we view it, and the same sex attraction onslaught. We must not be denied any of our desires, no matter how terrible the outcome. Clean needles for addicts with lots of luv, instead of removing them from the source (or the source from them), and showing them how to live with ‘bad stuff happens.’ We as a society used to know how to do these things. Remember the good old days when we could take mentally ill people off the street and put them into a safe place – safe for them, and for us? Then help them as best we could?
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Those who suffer from same sex attraction (I refuse to use their terminology) must be treated like the mentally ill people they truly are – yes, with compassion but also with psychiatric care until they are able to control their actions. This will also stop them from corrupting and perverting our children.
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Freedom, liberty, rights, and all that crap have no place in this debate. As we here know, there are more important concepts that take first place.
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We have ‘medical’ marijuana here in Canada, doled out by our Nanny State, we also have legal prostitution, (and our so-called law is so subtle, you can sell sex, but you can’t buy it!). We have NO abortion law so any woman can kill her baby right up to the second before it exits the womb naturally, and we allow those who suffer from same sex attraction to attempt marriage – this is what freedom brings.
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I think I will have TWO glasses of wine with dinner tonight. How about you?
Hello: Re the Missionaries of Truth: Fr Leen had this to say about the Saints: “There have been individual men and women who have given a whole-hearted trial to Christianity and have not found it wanting. In their hands it has been a complete and triumphant success. These persons are known as saints…the Saints accepted Christianity whole-heartedly. In their case there was no failure. They became exactly what Christianity guaranteed to make them…they became transfigured with a transfiguration symbolised by that of Christ on the Mount…[diffusing] the of rays the divinity.”
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Thank God for the Saints!
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Have you seen the latest Remant TV on the ‘Meaning of Life’ interview? Stephan Fry, who recently married his boyfriend, publicly and satanically-self-assuredly mocked God (given that there is no middle ground we are always either satanically self-assured or humbly-holy). In the clip Cardinal Pell denies the truth of Adam, Eve and the Fall, dismissing it publicly as ‘myth’. The ‘shepherds’ are scattered. Bergoglio, like Pell, recoils from Truth. He recently ignored/denied True Revelation when he was asked why there is suffering – he did not tell the world about original sin or personal sin, the Fall or the devil or demons etc. No…his world-wide proclaimation on ‘suffering’ was – why is there suffering? No one knows! It occured to me that if the ‘pope’ denies or ignores all Revelation on such a crucial question, why should we expect the likes of Hari or Fry to land anywhere but nowhere?