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Sept. 12, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:10
Ep. 413 - They’re Turning The Frickin’ Penguins Gay

A London aquarium took a penguin chick from her parents to be raised genderless by two lesbian birds. Then, three pieces of great news all in a row for the Trump administration, bad news for Democrats. And finally, the Mailbag! Date: 09-12-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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They're turning the frickin' penguins gay!
More specifically, they're turning the penguins transgender and then giving them gay penguin parents at an aquarium in London.
We will examine a brief history of the sexual revolution in the animal kingdom.
Then, three pieces of great news all in a row for the Trump administration.
Some bad news in the Democratic primary, especially for Joe Biden as we head into tonight's debate.
And finally, the mailbag.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
You know, I've been a little under the weather the past few days.
This has given me more of a gravelly voice.
And I wondered, I thought, Lord, why do I have this sickness on a very busy week?
Then I realized it was all so that I could perfect my Alex Jones voice for the biggest story of the day.
They are turning the frickin' penguins gay.
Can we get Alex Jones up here about the frogs?
Because I don't like gay people.
I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin' frogs gay!
Do you understand that?
Serious crap!
Forget the frogs.
They are turning the penguins gay.
A London aquarium has announced that two lesbian penguins are now going to raise a genderless penguin chick.
How is that possible?
You would maybe suggest there are a few problems with this.
One, penguins aren't lesbians.
And two, lesbians can't produce a child.
And three, despite gender ideology existing in the academy and in the mainstream media and in left-wing politics, in the human world, in the animal kingdom, our gender ideologies don't quite apply.
And the penguin will either be a male penguin or a female penguin.
None of that matters.
The way that this is happening is that the zookeepers or the aquarium keepers in London have identified two penguins who spend a lot of time together, both female.
They've called them lesbians.
They then took an egg from another penguin couple, taken it away from its parents, and then given it to these lesbian penguins.
And then they're going to raise the penguin without any of the stereotypes that Of the gendered penguin society.
I don't think there are really any stereotypes, and the whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense.
It also, before we get to the London Aquarium trying to defend this bizarre decision, I should point out What the left is actually doing here is ripping a child away from its parents and keeping it in a cage, which is the same thing that we've heard is the worst possible thing in the world for the past two years of the Trump administration.
There's nothing worse than taking a child away from its parents and keeping it in a cage, and yet that is exactly what the left is doing with this poor, would-be, genderless penguin and the lesbians at the London Aquarium.
That point is neither here nor there.
Here is a staff member of the London Aquarium Defending this decision and explaining how exactly a penguin can be raised without a gender.
What we wanted to do was to take the opportunity to raise the whole conversation with guests who come through to the aquarium just to raise that exact point.
That there is a difference between gender and sex.
And in terms of the way that we manage the colony at the aquarium, we wouldn't manage them differently based on whether they are females or males.
What we wanted to do with this chick was give guests an opportunity to meet that individual and learn about its personality without assigning it any sort of preconceived gender roles.
What gender roles are there in the penguin kingdom?
I mean all penguins wear tuxedos.
They don't even have gender roles in terms of their clothing.
They all wear the male clothing.
Again, neither here nor there.
Also, what makes you think that you can take away the gender roles, if there are gender roles, from the penguins?
You can't talk to the penguins.
You can't tell the penguins to behave a certain way.
You can't educate the penguins.
They're penguins.
They don't have higher intellect.
So many errors in what she said.
The big error that she begins with is that there is a difference between gender and sex.
This is what we have been told.
This is now being taught in first grade.
This is being taught all the way back in our public schooling and in the popular culture.
There is no difference between gender and sex.
The very fact that they make this statement so breathlessly shows you that they don't have a very good argument here.
For basically all of human history, there was sex.
What is your sex?
You can be either male or female, man or a woman.
Then in the popular use of the language about 50 years ago, the term gender was introduced to apply to human beings.
Gender never really applied to human beings before.
Gender is a grammatical term.
When you're learning a foreign language, you have gendered nouns, for instance, masculine and feminine.
Pizza ends in A, that's a feminine noun.
Gatto is a masculine noun, ends in an O. They applied this term to human beings to create the impression that there is a difference between sex and gender.
But there isn't any actual distinction.
You don't just have to take my word for it.
You can ask them for this.
That leftists use to say that there's a difference.
Because you'll say, what is the difference between sex and gender?
They'll say, well, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.
But then they immediately contradict themselves when they say that people can be, for instance, females born in male bodies, women born in men's bodies.
Or they'll say, you know, that their brains are female, but the rest of their bodies are male.
If that is the case, then gender is not socially constructed.
Then gender is innate, just like biology, right?
If you were born as a man inside a woman's body or a woman inside a man's body, then it's not a social construction of gender.
They're both innate.
They're both with you from the beginning.
You didn't choose to be that way.
You were born this way.
Or, if you say that you have a male brain and a female body, or vice versa, then again, that's not socially constructed because the brain is biological.
That's physical matter.
So, any way you slice it, what they're trying to say is sex and gender are both biological, and sometimes what they're trying to say is sex and gender are both socially constructed, as in the case of when you hear these leftists say that you can have a biologically female penis or a biologically male uterus.
They can't reconcile this because they can't grant themselves the notion that there is such a thing as a metaphysical world or as a soul or as something that isn't just a matter.
So any way you slice it on their own arguments, there is no difference between sex and gender.
And I know that this is being taught everywhere.
The best way to confront this argument is just ask them, what's the difference?
And then when they say, well, one is socially constructed, you say, well, what if you're born this way?
If you're born this way, it's not socially constructed.
What if you have a male brain and a female body?
It will break down.
That argument breaks down.
This tells us quite a lot.
The reason I bring up the penguins, obviously, I don't really care about the sexual habits of penguins, but the way that we human beings treat sex in the animal kingdom tells us a lot about how we treat sex among penguins.
And this has been going on a long time.
And coincidentally, penguins, for some reason, are always the subjects we use, going back to the gay penguins, so-called, of the 1990s.
We'll get to that in one second.
Then we'll get to great news for the Trump administration.
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Back in the 90s, the late 90s, 1998 or so, we began to hear about two gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo, Roy and Silo.
They were the talk of the town.
The New York Times eventually started writing columns about them.
Especially by 2003-2004.
They titled one of the columns, one of the articles rather, The Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name.
They talked about how Roy and Silo were inseparable.
They had no interest in female penguins.
They had sex with each other.
I mean, a lot more than you ever wanted to know about these penguins.
All of a sudden, gay penguins started cropping up all over the place.
Everyone started seeing gay penguins.
They said, this is totally normal.
You see this throughout the whole animal kingdom.
They ended up at the Central Park Zoo taking an egg from another couple and giving it to Roy and Silo to raise.
And that penguin became Tango.
And then they said that Tango was a lesbian penguin and so on and so forth.
They burst out of the headlines, though, the following year, in 2005.
When Roy and Silo apparently broke up and Silo shacked up with a lady penguin, apparently nature won out in the end for Silo.
After that, even the New York Times admitted no one ever actually saw Roy and Silo have sex.
There's no evidence that they were actually a couple or anything like that.
The New York Times admitted they were anthropomorphizing.
They were reading into the penguins what we were seeing and what we wanted to see in our human society.
I think it's no coincidence that Roy and Silo magically appeared onto the scene as gay penguins the exact same year that Will& Grace premiered on network television.
And that premiere of Will& Grace was kind of a cultural marker of the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the American public consciousness and popular culture.
We then reflect that in the animal kingdom.
And we're seeing the same thing with gender ideology now.
But 20 years later, all of a sudden now we're seeing genderless penguins, transgender penguins.
And, of course, there's no such thing as a transgender penguin.
Because even by the own language of the left, right, you have your sex, which is natural, and then you have your gender identity, which is a matter of self-perception.
Penguins don't have self-perception.
I don't talk to penguins.
I can't really know their thoughts.
That's sort of the point.
Penguins don't have language.
We can't communicate with them.
Penguins do not have consciousness.
They do not have the higher intellect.
They do not have free will, which is what separates human beings from From animals.
We are simply superimposing our own new bizarre views on gender onto these animals.
You know, you need a higher intellect, as only humans have, in order to even come up with so irrational a concept as transgender ideology.
Even, you know, people make fun of Alex Jones, right?
Alex Jones said they're turning the frickin' frogs gay.
Can we just get that again?
I just really, I want to hear the precision of his argument.
Because I don't like gay people.
I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!
Do you understand that?
Serious crap!
You know, people made fun of Alex Jones for saying that they're turning the frickin' frogs gay.
And it is true he didn't get that quite right.
But ironically, what nobody knows is the thing that he got wrong in his analysis is that he didn't go far enough.
It turns out they weren't turning the frickin' frogs gay.
They were turning the frickin' frogs transgender in a certain sense.
There were these chemicals in the water in the ponds in Connecticut that were turning the frogs, I guess you'd say, hermaphroditic.
They had both male and female reproductive cells.
So they had sperm and they had eggs in them.
It was something like one in eight frogs that were being investigated by Yale researchers, EPA-appointed Yale researchers in Connecticut.
So the irony here, and he'll never get credit for it, is that Alex Jones actually was sort of modest in his analysis of what was going on with the frogs, and he didn't go far enough.
But even in that case where you have these chemically-induced deformities in the frogs, even that is not Transgenderism.
It's a kind of strange biological quirk that's going on because of chemicals in the frogs.
But a concept such as transgenderism or homosexuality or whatever is essentially human.
You see that.
These concepts and the meaning that we impose on those and the way that that meaning changes over time as our culture reinterprets these ideas and comes to new understandings is human.
It's silly.
It's ridiculous.
It doesn't tell us about the penguins.
It doesn't tell us about the frogs.
It's pretty funny to think that we're talking about lesbian penguins and transgender frogs and all those things.
It doesn't tell us about the animals.
What it tells us is about the psyche of the zookeepers themselves and what it tells us is the We're good to go.
And let's get to much more important political news.
Huge three back-to-back wins for the White House and for Republicans.
And really bad timing because we have this big Democratic debate tonight.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Let's get on to some important political news here.
or Great news down at the southern border.
The wall is being built.
We have wall.
At least 60 miles of new wall currently being built.
We have proof of this from Customs and Border Protection.
That's the same Customs and Border Protection that just a month or two ago came out and said that not one inch of new wall has been built.
Now we have drone footage we can see with our own eyes.
We've got 60 miles of new wall being built, which is good.
I mean, that is...
Basically, about 10% of the currently existing wall.
We have about 650 miles or so of currently built wall.
And so, if you add another 60 to that, you're upwards near 10% of what already exists.
And they're looking forward to a lot more.
CBP said they expect to build 450 miles of wall before the year is out.
And you might say that sounds ambitious.
Yeah, it could be ambitious, though we did the math on this show about a week ago.
Between the new amount of money, I think it was $2.5 billion that Trump was able to get from the Pentagon because of that new Supreme Court ruling.
Between that and I think another $3.6 billion that Trump was able to get and to divert from other projects into building the wall.
If you look at the cost per mile, it looks as though Trump could get up to 900 some odd, even up to 1100 miles of wall total, which comes out to a total of about 450 new miles of wall.
It looks like they're actually on track for that.
This would be huge.
Huge with a Y, to use the President's word.
And what it shows you is not just the importance of sound immigration policy.
Not just the importance of persistence.
It shows you the importance of the judges.
We would not have gotten this wall if the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, that would have been a 7-2 decision, If Hillary Clinton had won that election and appointed left-wing judges in a 5-4, I guess it would have been a 6-3 decision probably, against Trump.
Well, I guess it wouldn't be against Trump.
There wouldn't be any decision in the first place.
They wouldn't be trying to build the wall because Hillary would be in charge of the government.
But even whenever you get to the next Republican president, we would have lost at the court because of the judges.
And if we lost at the court, that $2.5 billion goes away.
Who knows how many other judicial decisions would have gone away.
The courts mattered, and the courts mattered.
Therefore, the election mattered.
2016 had to get a Republican in there.
Not just on building the wall, but on immigration more broadly.
You know, there was a big decision came out from asylum today.
And a 7-2 decision from the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissenting.
The Supreme Court upheld the administration's ability to reduce the number of people seeking asylum at the southern border.
So right now, one of the big ways into the country is you've got economic migrants coming through.
Some of them have kids.
Many of them aren't even their own kids.
And they come through and they say, okay, we got caught.
We got pinched.
We are going to claim asylum in America.
We came from El Salvador, Honduras, or wherever, Guatemala, now we're going to claim asylum.
Except they don't really need asylum.
They're economic migrants.
What this new rule does, the White House said, if you leave your country because you're fleeing violence, and then you pass through another country, for instance, Mexico, without claiming asylum there first...
And you just try to get it in the United States.
You will be automatically rejected for your asylum claim because obviously you're not really seeking asylum.
You're seeking a way better life in America because America is way better than Mexico.
I don't even blame the people who are coming through who say, okay, I'm going to use a fake asylum claim or I'm going to skip over Mexico because I really want to end up in America.
I don't blame them.
I would probably do the same thing.
That's all fine.
The United States has a right to protect its own borders.
The citizens of the United States have a right to make our own laws.
We are a democratic republic.
We get to govern ourselves.
There are economic migrants coming up from Central and South America.
They're pursuing their interest.
Fine.
We have a national interest and we have something to protect.
And if we don't protect our country, there's no country to flee to in the first place.
This is a great rule coming out of the White House.
And...
It made it all the way up to the Supreme Court because of an interesting history at the courts.
So at the federal level, at the district court, an Obama-appointed federal judge, John Tygar, based in San Francisco, tells you everything you need to know, blocked the rule.
Tygar wrote, quote, While the public has a weighty interest in the efficient administration of the immigration laws at the border, it also has a substantial interest in ensuring that the statutes enacted by its representatives are not imperiled by executive fiat.
And he said that the rule stopping this new White House policy would vindicate the public's interest, which our existing immigration laws clearly articulate, in ensuring that we do not deliver aliens into the hands of their persecutors.
So basically what he said is, yeah, you want to enforce immigration law, but I don't want to, and so we're not going to let you do that.
Sure, yeah, we have laws about keeping foreign nationals out of our country and not letting them invade our country and not letting them cross into the border illegally.
Sure, we have that.
But we also have laws about asylum, so let's just forget all the first laws and we'll only have the second laws.
Now, you might be asking, how did it make it all the way up to the Supreme Court?
Because it first went to the Ninth District Court of Appeals, the most liberal court in the land, right?
Right?
Hmm, not so much anymore.
How did the most liberal court in the land stop being the most liberal court in the land?
We'll get to that in one second.
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So, district-level court, Obama-appointed judge, stops the Trump rule on asylum, then goes to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Bad news, right?
That's the most liberal court in the country.
Ninth Circuit actually tightened up Judge Tiger's decision and said that Judge Tiger's decision would only apply to Arizona and California, so it actually allowed the White House rule to work in New Mexico and Texas.
That's pretty interesting.
Ninth Circuit actually helped out the Trump administration.
Then it goes to the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court gave the White House permission to issue the rule nationwide.
This is all because of 2016.
This is all because Donald Trump got elected president.
The Ninth Circuit gave Trump a partial win, and then the Supreme Court gave Trump a hard, full win because of the 2016 election.
The Washington Post actually prophesied this in February.
They said, quote, Thanks to Trump, the liberal Ninth Circuit is no longer liberal.
That's what elections do.
And the people who vote in those elections and the candidates who run in those elections don't always get the credit for it because you just see the effect years later.
I mean, we're already three years after the 2016 election.
The judges matter.
Judges were a big issue in 2016.
The judges get lifetime appointments.
And now, so much of our lawmaking process has been outsourced to the courts.
It's been outsourced to not just the Supreme Court, but all the other courts too.
When Bush signed McCain-Feingold, the anti-First Amendment legislation about campaign finance in the early 2000s, he said it might be unconstitutional, but he was going to let the courts decide that.
It's not just the courts that have a duty to uphold the Constitution.
It's the executive and it's the legislature, too.
But they say, no, we don't want to deal with it.
We're going to put that on the courts.
So the courts now have become a hugely outsized, important aspect of our lawmaking process.
Some anti-Trump conservatives still say 2016 wasn't worth it.
Why?
Because Kavanaugh seems a little squishy.
You know, maybe he's good on administrative law, but he's not going to be as good on, say, Roe versus Wade.
That's the prediction.
Kennedy liked him too much.
He's one of Kennedy's hand-picked successors.
Gorsuch maybe is a little better.
Who knows?
But there are more courts in the country than the Supreme Court of the United States.
The vast majority of court decisions are made at the lower level.
And yesterday, cocaine Mitch McConnell confirmed his 150th judge since Trump's inauguration.
Way outpacing Barack Obama, who at this point in his presidency only had 94 judges confirmed in the same amount of time.
Elections matter.
You don't win by losing.
You don't win by losing.
Democrats want to pretend you win by losing.
That's the third piece of great news for the White House today.
In the most closely watched elections since the 2018 midterm elections, the GOP went two for two in North Carolina.
Big elections out of North Carolina.
Most important one was in North Carolina's 9th congressional district.
There was some alleged fraud there in 2018 that caused the state election board to actually call for a new election there.
In 2018, the Republican candidate got 905 more votes than the Democrat.
This week, the Republican Dan Bishop beat Democrat Dan McCready 51-49.
Not a huge win, but decisive.
Pretty clear who won that.
Two points is pretty good in elections.
Especially important is Dan Bishop is a conservative lightning rod.
He is the guy, when Obama started trying to make public schools all over the country let men go into the little girls' bathroom...
Dan Bishop was a guy who wrote the bathroom bills in North Carolina.
And he said, no, men have to use the men's room and women have to use the women's room.
And grown men can't go into the little girls' room.
And this was somehow controversial.
Here's Dan Bishop on his victory.
Tonight, the voters of North Carolina sent a message that shouldn't just be heard within the confines of the 9th District.
It should reverberate Across this country and in the halls of the Capitol.
The voters said no to the radical liberal policies being pushed by today's Democratic Party.
Tonight was the first step toward taking back the House of Representatives in 2020 to keep this country on a path of prosperity and strength.
He's looking ahead to 2020.
He's saying, look guys, we won.
They said we wouldn't win.
We won.
We won because the American people and our voters are fed up with the left's radical cultural narrative.
I mean, Dan Bishop is the bathroom bill guy.
That is a culture warrior.
That is a cultural issue.
And he still won.
The left was furious, but they can't concede elections.
Al Gore can't concede.
Hillary Clinton can't concede.
Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, John Ossoff, Beto O'Rourke.
None of them can admit that they lost.
They all pretend that they won.
And so, even though the Democrat, Dan McCready, lost, really, the way the left is playing it is they say, no, no, no, secretly he won.
New York Times, Mr.
Bishop's narrow victory over Dan McCready in a conservative district demonstrated warning signs for President Trump in 2020.
Warning signs that we'll win by two points?
Alright, works for me.
538.
On paper, it was Republicans who emerged victorious, going two for two in two separate congressional elections.
That's just on paper.
But let's see, what about in the fantasy world?
538 goes on.
There was also a silver lining for Democrats.
Their final vote margin in the Knights Marquis race was much bluer than the district's baseline partisanship.
Okay.
538 points out Trump won the district by 12 points in 2016.
Okay.
That was a presidential election year.
Republicans also won in the off year, 2018.
Republicans also won in the off-off year.
This wasn't a presidential year.
It wasn't even an off year.
It was like a random special election that was called.
We still won.
So what does this mean for 2020?
It means Democrats haven't learned any lessons.
Not terribly much has changed.
And if they're not going to change, then they can expect the same result as 2016.
Right?
So madness is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.
You're seeing this right now.
Big poll before we get to the mailbag.
Big poll out from economist YouGov that has Biden and Warren tied at 26%.
I tend not to care about national polls even when it's in the primary.
The only reason this one matters is because Biden's entire campaign is staked on so-called electability.
If Biden is no longer the top candidate, he has no argument to be elected.
It's it.
The campaign goes away, and that's what you're seeing here.
A new poll has Warren and Biden at 26%, Sanders at 16%, way down by 10 points.
Buttigieg and Harris at 6%, Booker and Yang at 2%, everyone else below that at 1%.
Very interesting poll numbers coming out before tonight's Democratic presidential debate.
Should be very interesting to see.
I think I'm going to go on Crowder's show tonight so you can catch me there during the debate, but I'll be tweeting throughout the rest of it.
And we will have a show tomorrow, so we'll get to that then.
Really bad news for Biden, who, by the way, if you believe the other polls, was the Democrats' best hope at beating President Trump.
That hope may be fading very fast as the Trump administration is getting lots and lots of We'll get to the mailbag in a second first.
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First question from Ashley.
What do you see as happening to the Trump presidency when he leaves office?
I fear that establishment Republicans will throw his policies under the bus.
Well, very specifically speaking...
What I see happening to the Trump presidency when he leaves office is that it will no longer be the Trump presidency.
I guess that's sort of a truism.
This is important because the stuff that we spend all the time talking about with the Trump administration is his personality, and that will be gone.
Only he can do that.
Do you remember in 2016 Marco Rubio tried to do that?
He tried to be Trump, do a Rickles routine down in Florida about his small hands.
Doesn't work.
Only Trump can do that.
He's an American original.
He's a once-in-a-lifetime pop culture star.
And an A-list celebrity, too.
So that is going to go away.
As for the policies, President Trump has done an incredible thing.
I tend to be of the opinion that Ann Coulter is.
There's a bit of a divide on the right.
Some people think that the American people voted for Trump because of his personality, despite his policies.
Some people think that we voted for Trump because of his policies, or...
Because of his policies, despite his personality.
Does that make sense?
Some people hate the tweets, but they like what he's doing.
Some people hate what he's doing or don't care about what he's doing, but they really like the tweets.
I very much believe we elected Trump on substance.
He presented something that the other candidates did not.
The other candidates were trying to resurrect the dead bodies of all the great conservative heroes of the 80s.
Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr., who helped construct really the whole post-war conservative movement.
All of these guys.
We were basically trying to just reanimate their corpses, dig them up from the grave, and then just say the same slogans that they said as though we were still fighting the Cold War and it were, you know, the 90s and the 2000s had never happened.
And Trump comes along and he just gets rid of that because he wasn't really an ideological, you know, Brooks Brothers wearing typical college conservative type.
He's his own guy.
He's just his own man.
He's an American original.
And so he cleared a lot of that away and opened the door on questions like trade, for instance.
It had become, for a very short period of time, really just the 80s through the early 2000s, It became conservative gospel that we had to have unfettered free trade and globalization.
This had never been a conservative position.
Russell Kirk, in one of the seminal conservative works, The Conservative Mind, says free trade is terrible for conservatism.
Conservatives hate it.
The Republican Party was founded against free trade, was founded on tariffs.
Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest country in the world.
By the way, not an argument for tariffs, not an argument against free trade.
What it's an argument against is this kind of rigid ideological attachment to economic policies and foreign policies of the 1980s that were inextricably tied to the Soviet Union.
Now the Soviet Union's gone, we finally woke up and realized, hey, wait a second, there is a downside to globalization.
Hey, wait a second.
Maybe we shouldn't export all of our manufacturing and have it all be overseas.
Hey, wait a second.
Maybe we should care about blue, blue collar workers.
Hey, wait a second.
Hey, wait a second.
Maybe we are being taken advantage of on trade deals.
Maybe our NATO allies should start actually paying for their own militaries rather than just criticize us all the time and wait for big daddy America to come in and protect them.
Hey, wait a second.
Maybe Russia isn't the greatest threat when you consider China.
Maybe China isn't our greatest ally and Russia our greatest enemy.
He shook all of that up.
That ain't going nowhere.
It is important that we remember those lessons.
I think we will because he exposed and ossified dead Republican establishment for what it is, not having answers, not having appeal.
And the wise politicians who follow in Trump's wake after Trump leaves the White House are going to get that and they're going to keep it up.
From Michael.
Michael, I'd like to start getting into great classic novels.
Where do you suggest I start?
Which do you think are among the best of all time?
Funny you're asking me this rather than Clavin because I actually don't read a lot of novels.
I much prefer reading philosophy and theology and nonfiction.
I like reading history a lot.
So I'm not the best guy to go to.
Though actually, in a weird way, maybe I am because you want to start getting into this reading...
I'm sort of an avatar of that.
You know, I've read some of the great works, but it's not like Drew, who's read every single book that's ever been written.
I would begin with my favorite novel.
Coincidentally, it's actually his favorite novel, too.
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
It's a wonderful novel about an axe murderer, and you'll think that he's writing about you and your soul.
That's a wonderful novel.
What other novels do I really like?
I like a lot of Italian novels.
There's one called The Betrothed by Manzoni.
That's a great novel.
It's called I Promessi Sposi in Italian.
Very good.
Sort of conservative novel.
I love, let's see, Wuthering Heights.
I like that if you want a little more romance in your day.
I'll have to think on this a little bit more.
But start with Crime and Punishment.
Start with Dostoyevsky, some of the Russians.
I think that'll, it's a good way in for people who like non-fiction because they're dealing with such meaty philosophical questions.
From Scotty.
Protestant friend of yours here, I'm not against the idea of purgatory because it does seem to fulfill some theological questions that some struggle with.
Have you come across biblical evidence for purgatory?
Yes.
Here is some evidence from Psalm 66.
Thou didst let men ride over our heads.
We went through fire and through water, yet thou hast brought us forth to a spacious place.
Now, in the view of Origen and St.
Ambrose, this was an evidence of purgatory, the imagery of the fire.
So it is a fire.
It is a cleansing and a punishment.
But it is a fire that actually cleanses you and allows you to go into the spacious place.
From Isaiah...
This was a citation good enough for St.
Augustine in the City of God.
Isaiah writes, Here you have the spirit of judgment, the spirit of burning.
What is that judgment?
What is that burning?
This is purgatorial language.
Then you have in 2 Maccabees, which is a book that Martin Luther took out of the Bible, but At least the Catholics and the Orthodox still like it.
And even some of the church fathers who didn't like what are called the deuterocanonical books that many Protestant denominations have taken out of the Bible, even they liked the books, or many of the books, in so much as they were good reading for catechumens and people entering the faith.
They just didn't think they should be included in the canon of the Bible itself.
But in 2 Maccabees, you see pretty clear evidence of it.
For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.
But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought.
Therefore he made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin.
So you've got these people who have died in a certain sin.
And yet, we on earth are praying for the dead, that there is hope for them in heaven.
I mean, this is a clear description of purgatory.
This series of verses was good enough for Origen, St.
Irenaeus, St.
Ambrose, St.
Augustine, and St.
Jerome, who all viewed this as a description of purgatory.
Then in the Gospels themselves, you have Matthew 5.22.
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.
Whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, you fool, or raka, shall be liable to the hell of fire.
So, what you have here are different kinds of judgment, different levels of judgment, different levels of liability.
Also in Matthew chapter 5, You will never get out till you have paid the last penny.
So you will get out.
You're in this sort of spiritual prison.
You will get out, but you must pay the last penny.
This is a very purgatorial language.
Also in Matthew chapter 12, whoever says a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age of come.
Different sorts of things.
In the age to come, these are different sorts of sins.
And then this is probably the clearest description of it among those of us who believe in purgatory, from 1 Corinthians, from St.
Paul.
For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man's work will become manifest.
For the day will disclose it because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.
If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.
If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire." This makes certain people who deny our participation in the divine scheme and those who deny the existence of purgatory and those who deny the particular judgment,
this makes them very uncomfortable because here you have the language of work, here you have the language of Burning up, and here you have the language of being saved, but only as through fire.
So, to me, to this layperson who is not a great theologian, who is not really even a competent apologist, it seems to me that...
The scriptural evidence for purgatory is overwhelming, and there is a great tradition of our understanding of purgatory, and of course, scripture tells us to listen to the tradition, to listen to what we have been told as well.
So even that, even non-scriptural tradition is a scriptural tradition, and so it seems to me that the case for purgatory is quite sound, and the case against purgatory is pretty weak.
Let's try to take one more question from Candice.
Is it true that your wife is a doctor?
So funny you ask that, Candice.
My wife is a doctor.
Dr.
Sweet Little Elisa got her PhD last week.
She is a doctor.
Now, I should clarify, she's not a physician.
She's a doctor.
So doctor is a Latin word.
It means teacher.
Doctor comes from the Latin verb docere.
She now has her PhD, her doctorate, and then she may teach because she's in the academy.
So she's a doctor.
Some people get this confused, you know, with like surgeons and physicians and stuff.
But anyway, my wife...
Is a doctor.
Yes, indeed.
That's our show.
We'll be back tomorrow after the debate.
Enjoy it tonight.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
Because I don't like gay people.
I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay.
Do you understand that?
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