Radical Inclusion Isn't

I needed to get this one down in electronic prose so here we go.

Plenty of Catholics I know talk about variations on the theme of "radical inclusion." It means not being judgmental. It's all nonsense. What they're really doing is drawing a line at a different place than Saint Paul did in his Epistles.

St. Paul is the dude what talked about women being obedient and men keeping it in their pants. He's the one who expressly forbade homosexuality. Unwilling to say anything negative to the LGBTQWERTY crew, my progressive Catholic friends like to pretend they're accepting and inclusive. They aren't.

Each one of them would say that a grown man having sex with an 11-year-old girl was dead wrong, period, good night, that's all she wrote.

The problem is that while St. Paul can defend his position with logic, they cannot. This is the difficulty intrinsic to discarding tradition. All those old, white dudes dealt with the debate points we face today and they developed the Catechism through argumentation. You can throw it away if you like, but your Epicurean opponents will come at you with the same points that Augustine and Aquinas faced.

So an 11-year-old is off limits? Fair enough. How about a 17-year old? Are we good there? If so, what about someone who is 16 years and 51 weeks? 16 years and 50 weeks?

See how this works? They walk it back in fine increments and you realize you don't have a solid reason to draw the line anywhere.

St. Paul solved this problem with biology and Genesis. Babies come from the vaginal, sexual union of one man and one woman. Men, women and babies are all created in the image of God and have the spark of the divine within them. Both of those are solid foundational concepts. Niceness, inclusiveness and equity are not.

So our progressive Catholic friends find themselves having to re-fight the battles of the last 2000 years without the help of Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton or any of the other geniuses. They discarded those musty, old, white men because ... because ... because, well, they weren't inclusive. How hideous.

You threw away Augustine, Aquinas and Chesterton? Marvelous!

You're on your own, Jackson.