Oscar win casts clarity on disability notions

James Martin, centre, shares the joy of starring in an Oscar-winning film

When James Martin was born, his parents were told he would probably never speak. He has now made Oscars history. He is the first actor with Down Syndrome to star in an Academy Award winning film, An Irish Goodbye, which won best live action short film.

The Irish Times reported that following the ceremony, he and his costar Seamus O’Hara, along with the film’s writers and directors, sang the Belfast song I’ll Tell My Ma to reporters before heading to the Elton John after-show party.

“It doesn’t matter if you have Down syndrome, as long as you’re doing what you do,” Martin told the BBC. “I do what I can to be funny.”

Martin has been attending a drama group in Belfast for almost 20 years and recently brought in the BAFTA award he received after the same comedy film won best British short film.

Frances Nelson, who teaches the group for adults with learning disabilities, said she prefers to describe it as a class for “an amazing bunch of adults who have ability and do drama and come to socialise”.

Martin says he wants to return to his day jobs as a barista at Starbucks and chef at an Italian restaurant in Belfast.

As an ambassador for the learning disability charity, Mencap – which he thanked in his post-Oscar interviews – Martin has campaigned against EU funding cuts and potential job losses, the Times reports.

He is also a keen runner and has taken part in community ‘park runs’ with The Falcons, a group of young adults with learning difficulties.

Among his acting credits are lead roles in the BBC drama Ups and Downs, and a part in the ITV and Netflix drama Marcella.

“James is an amazing independent person with dreams,” Nelson added.

Martin's father, Ivan, who stayed at home while his mother went to the Oscars, described the accolade as an “amazing feat” and reflected on the challenges they faced when his son was born.

“I feel that ultimately, the person who said to me, ‘Look Mr Martin, you’re going to have to realise that James will probably never speak… ' And here we are. James not only speaks, but once he started speaking he hasn’t shut up since,” he told BBC Radio Ulster.

Asked what the Oscars win means for people with a disability, and those with Down Syndrome, Ivan told ITV: "He has spent his life pushing the envelope.

"People are very good at saying, 'You can't do this and you can't do that'... He's done it and he does it consistently."

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What mob rule says about our future

From The Blind Leading the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568.

With the sad mob rule on display this month in Australia and New Zealand in preventing a speaker on a hot public topic from having her say, and in depriving the right to hear of hundreds (or more) of others, more attention needs to be given to the growth of intolerance among the young.

A very apposite essay, therefore, is one delivered in Persuasion online magazine considering the implications of the disruption by law students at the elite Stanford University that prevented a federal judge speaking to a private group of law students at the university. Their action was condemned by the law school's dean who imposed special training for all students on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession”.

The essay, by Alex Morey, provides disheartening statistics on an increasingly apparent incomprehension as to the norms of dissent and the value of freedom of speech:

In 1969, Belgian economist—and self-described “revolutionary Marxist”—Ernest Mandel was denied a visa for a planned speaking tour to American universities on the grounds that deviations from his itinerary on a previous trip constituted “a flagrant abuse of the opportunities afforded him to express his views in this country.”

A group of American professors—determined to “engage him in a free and open academic exchange”—took Mandel’s case all the way to the Supreme Court. Though Mandel lost on a point related to immigration law, the case is now best remembered for Justice Thurgood Marshall’s impassioned, stirring dissent. “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin,” Marshall wrote. “The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is ‘the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.’”

Marshall’s “freedom to hear” is an arresting idea and a useful guide in making sense of the fracas at Stanford Law School earlier this month.

On March 9, a group of Stanford law students shouted down Kyle Duncan, a Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge, as he tried to deliver remarks at a campus event hosted by the Federalist Society. Duncan’s rulings restricting access to abortion and implicating trans-rights have elicited harsh criticism, including from many at Stanford. In the lead-up to the Federalist Society event, signs were posted around campus accusing Duncan of delivering transphobic, homophobic, and racist rulings, and at the event itself, a crowd of several dozen protestors heckled Duncan relentlessly, forcing him eventually to give up on his prepared remarks. And in a uniquely troubling twist, Stanford Law’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, took over Duncan’s podium after he had asked for an administrator to help restore order and, in her remarks, openly questioned whether Stanford ought to rethink its existing free expression policies. “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Steinbach asked of the Federalist Society’s event. “Is this worth it?”

At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I direct our Campus Rights Advocacy work, we’ve spent more than 20 years pushing back against all manner of censorship from administrators. But the Stanford incident stood out as something new and different. For FIRE, it was a frightening coalescence of several trends within a particular strain of illiberalism that we’ve seen creep onto campuses and spread over the last decade. These appear rooted not in administrative overreach but in a desire by the students themselves for ideological and emotional safety. New in the last few years, and caught on video in all its brazenness at Stanford, is a growing penchant for using authoritarian tactics to obtain it.

Ten years ago, we saw the occasional “civility” initiative. Students who felt “unsafe” encountering ideas they disagreed with were asking faculty for in-class “trigger warnings” or demanding that speakers with unpopular views be disinvited. A few years later, we saw disinvitations dip and were briefly hopeful that students might be getting more tolerant. Not so. Potentially controversial speakers had simply stopped being invited at all. Now, with the widespread popularity of campus “equity” initiatives, calls for tolerance by means of intolerance have reached a fever pitch—of which the shoutdown at Stanford is a perfect illustration.

The essay goes on to examine the trend toward intolerance on campus and is worth reading in order to get a full picture of the likely nature of Western societies of the near future, if elites continue on their present track of blocking open discourse over important issues such as the welfare of women and children.

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The human truth of Ramadan

Susan Carland and Saara Sabbagh ... How can we train ourselves to long for what truly satisfies?

Ramadan, the month-long time for fasting, meditation, reflection, and prayer, has begun. What a treasury of wisdom concerning the human condition it delivers to a God-deficient and confused world!

Two Australians have undertaken to diary their experiences and insights as they observe the customary practices relating to worship, study of the Quran, eating habits, and time for prayer. 

Susan Carland, who is Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, and Saara Sabbagh, who is the Founder of Benevolence Australia, say Mohammad inspired the tradition by his own practice devoting time to "trying to distil the mysteries of the universe, compassion, and the knowledge of God".

Every Ramadan, adult Muslims are to abstain from all eating, drinking, and sex during daylight hours. This intense discipline is supposed to align us more closely to God. By controlling our most basic desires and thus be more fully in submission, we can be more in touch with the divine will. 

By emptying ourselves out — physically of food and spiritually of our attachment to anything that takes us away from God — we create the necessary space for the holy. Just as you cannot add to a full vessel, a soul full of itself has no room for God. A gap must be created.

The fasting may feel too hard, the inner labour too intense. It might leave us feeling as though we are gasping for air. But [...] it is precisely in those moments of lack of belief in ourselves that the emptying out is most required. When we say, “I can’t do it, God!” we are showing we are still placing too much stock in our own selves. We need to be emptied out to make room for more of the divine. True submission and the ego-self cannot exist in the same vessel.

Each Ramadan is different, and every Muslim experiences the month differently. But the struggle is the same: How can we orient our lives toward that which matters most? How can we train ourselves to long for what truly satisfies? How can we allow God to eclipse our egos?  

Participants of all the world's key religions will recognise the truth of those words. At this time also, Christians are observing Lent, the 40 days of fasting and self-denial undertaken as we prepare to celebrate God's gift of his divine son in death so that humanity might be restored to good standing with the loving Father. 

Such religious practices are increasingly in stark contrast with the way of the world, where the ego-drama reigns supreme and the pursuit of pleasure makes a mockery of the highest goals of freedom. 

As French novelist Leon Bloy (died 1917) so perceptively observed: 

The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.

The human truth of Ramadan and Lent is that we must clean out our inner clutter to leave space for God in our lives.  

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Jesus is God, as John's gospel makes clear

Graphic from FLY:D on Unsplash

The way John opens his gospel has extraordinary implications for us as to how we ought to live our lives for our personal benefit and in order to do justice to the nature of our existence.

The Gospel of John opens with the same three words that the book of Genesis opens with, "In the beginning".

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  – John 1:1

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  ‒ Genesis 1:1 

Genesis 1:1 says in the beginning, God. John 1:1 says in the beginning, the Word. John, in making this comparison, is simply saying that the Word, who was present at the creation, was God. The Word, a term that draws on the rich Jewish Wisdom literature, is God identified in a unique way as part of the godhead.

Therefore, the Word, as the Creator, is the one and same God of Genesis:

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

For us all, these important words to note:

In him was life, and that light was the light of men.

It's in the past tense because John is speaking of a historical figure, and John goes on to give us a clearer picture of this divine person referred to as the Word:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. – John 1:14

We know that the Word who became flesh is Jesus Christ. He is God who took on human flesh or human form. He did that as a way to reveal the Father, which John mentions just a few verses later.

"No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known." – John 1:18

Older translations of the Bible render "one and only" as "only begotten", and in the Nicene Creed Jesus is "begotten not made". However, Jesus is "generated" by the Father, so that "begotten" means having a "unique" relationship with the Father.    

In passing, for those who are already finding the doctrine of the Trinity ‒ Father , Son, and Holy Spirit as three divine persons who are the one God ‒ hard to take, here is one way of coming to terms with it all: 

In God we see the Father—the “being one” [pure being] and first principle of life in the Godhead; the Son—the “knowing one”, who is the Word who proceeds from the Father; and the Holy Spirit—the “willing one”—the bond of love between the Father and Son who proceeds as love from the Father and Son. These “three” do not “equal” one if we are trying to say 3=1 mathematically. These three are distinct realities, relationally speaking, just as my own being, knowing, and willing are three distinct realities in me. Yet, in both God and man these three relationally distinct realities subsist in one being. (Source)

Relating this to the truth about the source of creation that the poetic account of Genesis conveys, if we put together Genesis 1:1-2 – "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth [...] and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters" – and John 1:1 we see that God the Father was present, God the Son in the form of the Word, and also the Holy Spirit. God reveals who he is from the very beginning. 

To narrow the focus again: The Word existed before creation and outside time, as the International Bible Commentary states, but most importantly for us to understand, the Word is God.

To say that it was "a god", divine but not equal to God, misrepresents what is said of the Word become flesh in the rest of John's gospel (cf. 20:28 - "Thomas said to him, 'My Lord and my God!'"). Further, "a major concern of John is to profess and establish faith in the divinity of Jesus as God's unique and uniquely beloved Son (v1:18)". 

The Commentary goes on:

This notion of sonship draws attention to equality in nature, since a child is as truly human as are the parents. Jesus has the genes of God, so to speak, and is truly God (cf.10:33 –"We are not stoning you for any of these [miracles]," replied the Jews, "but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.")

Finally, to stress the point highlighted in  my introduction about our responsibility to ourselves to harken to the Word, we continue to John 1:4-5  – "In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness...":

In Genesis 1, light was the first of God's creatures, because the ancient world believed that light was the principle of life, which put to flight darkness or nonexistence. John 1:4 moves from creation  into the sphere of the moral authority of the Word.

As God, the Word is life and source of life; the life of the Word that dwells in each person and becomes their "light" of life, enlightening their consciences to distinguish between good and evil (cf. Romans 1:18-25*), where Paul speaks of this as innate [in each person] knowledge of God.

Verse 5 speaks of the struggle between the light and the darkness, not in the cosmic sense but in the ethical sense. The light "shines" (present tense), but the darkness "did not overcome" it (past tense). This light that is God, the light of truth, may be ignored, even suppressed, but it can never be put out. Darkness is the absence of light; it ceases to exist when light appears. 

John 20:30-31 states why this gospel was written:  

... that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

[[[[[[[[[[  

* Where God responds to "all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them", through the wonders of nature, our existence, and the sustaining of all that exists with laws that maintain cosmic order.

💢 For an explanation of the Trinity, go here 

💢 For a discussion on the Word at the beginning, go here for a worthwhile article 

💢 The International Bible Commentary, William R Farmer (ed), Liturgical Press, Collegeville,1998; on John's gospel: Teresa Okure. 

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The elite's mangled mindset

Image: Santiago Manuel De la Colina

A professor at a top US law school comments on the state of mind of elite legal and academic circles: 

The sad thing is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.

A teacher at another US law school:

We live in a culture that is now largely post-rational, post-modern, and post-law. Power and emotions drive issues in a way that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

Source

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Transgenderism, transvestites and truth

The congregation gathers

Transgenderism is a doctrine of those who adhere to a secular religion where the human rights gained through the development of Christian insights have become distorted under the influence of a world view that elevates to the supreme good both individual desire and the belief that pleasure is the central principle of life. Under this ideology, power reigns over truth, which destroys the family and the stability of society.

Michael Knowles is an American activist on cultural issues. He spoke at an event this month where his  exchange with a student was fruitful in eliciting how to attack transgenderism is not to attack those who identify as one of the opposite sex. His comments at another speaking engagement this month drew criticism that he wanted to eradicate those who do identify as one of the opposite sex. What he said, however, was this: "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level."

Further, the distinction he makes is clear in this exchange:

Student: You talk about transgenderism, which you refer to as an ideology. But … the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, they don’t view it as that. They specifically don’t see transgenderism. They refer to gender identity disorder, which is the psychopathology.

Michael Knowles: But I’m not talking about gender identity disorder. I’m talking about transgenderism. Which is an ideology.

Student: That’s not my question, so I’m not going to get into that.

Knowles: I just wanted to correct your premise.

Student: But gender affirming care is what you would encompass in transgenderism. But gender affirming care is also towards the treatment…

Knowles: Gender affirming care is when you tell a confused boy that he’s really a boy, not a girl. Gender denying care is what the ideologues are pushing forward now, which tells sexually confused boys that they need to chop off their genitals.

Student: Would you consider drag queens a consequence of transgenderism?

Knowles: No, no. Drag queens, transvestitism… All these kinds of eccentricities have existed through all of human history. … The ideology [is] that a man really can become a woman and a woman really can become a man, and that men who identify as women are entitled to the public rights that women are entitled to. That is very different than a man … dressing as a woman for the giggles of patrons at a seedy bar or something like that. That doesn’t threaten to destroy all of society, but the denial of sexual identity and the obliteration of women’s private spaces and rights, that does threaten to upend our entire culture.

See the exchange on Twitter here.

A question of immense interest to this blog ‒ Is the following stance accepted today?:  “Where truth goes, I will go, and where truth is I will be, and nothing but death shall divide me and the truth.”

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Why human arrogance?

Arizona snow storm incident March, 2023

Arrogance can be found in many places today, and is a feeling that we are in total control of our lives and our destinies. But events that happen in all our lives constantly remind us just how fragile and contingent our existence really is.

Frank Doyle SJ

Gender ideology runs into reality

Here are useful resources for those seeking clarity as to why gender ideology is so catastrophic for society's well-being: 

Organizations that count

• Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM)

• Sex Matters

• Reality's Last Stand

• Parents Defending Education

• Transgender Trend

• Genspect

• Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)

• Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF)

• Women’s Declaration International

• LGB Alliance

• Fair Play for Women

• Counterweight

• The Free Speech Union

• Heterodox Academy

Don Quixote at death’s door

“Blessed be Almighty God, who has shown me such goodness. In truth his mercies are boundless, and the sins of men can neither limit them nor keep them back!”