Ep. 1255 - Bud Light Really Did This For Pride Month
BLM faces bankruptcy, a man feeds his “chest milk” to a poor baby, and yet another Republican accidentally enters the 2024 race.
Ep.1255
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According to news reports, Black Lives Matter is going bankrupt.
Despite having raised a whopping $90 million in just one year following the death of George Floyd, BLM is now reportedly $8.5 million in the hole and might have to shutter operations.
Which sounds great, except, like so many news stories, it isn't true.
The numbers are all true.
But the story is not true.
BLM is not going bankrupt.
It's just distributed all the money.
The founders got their mansions, the cronies got their payouts, the operatives milked corporate America for a ton of cash, and now it's likely to close up shop, which gives BLM the added benefit of closing its crooked books and reducing the scrutiny that it's currently under.
Black Lives Matter was never an institution for the long haul.
It was always just an opportunistic shakedown racket which has now dispersed its bribes to its network of gangsters and is now poised to disappear, just in time.
For the operatives to spin up a new scam to score cash for scaring citizens as we head into the next presidential election.
Right on time.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
We are moving into a brave new world, and actually there's a video going around from the Kardashians.
I've never watched an episode of the Kardashian show, but Khloe Kardashian gives a really important perspective on surrogacy, pregnancy and surrogacy, that is frankly It's more perceptive than even many pro-lifers have talked about.
So we'll get to that in just a second.
First though, speaking of these payoffs, Bud Light.
Poor Bud Light.
Down, what is it, 15 bill in market cap right now?
Bud Light apparently still has not learned its lesson.
Because Bud Light, according to reports, is still going to sponsor three Pride events.
Daily Wire reported on this yesterday.
Bud Light is listed as the sponsor of the Cincinnati Pride Parade, Planned Parenthood, and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which Trans' Little Kids are both also listed for that one.
In St.
Louis, where Trans Heiser Bush is headquartered, they are a presenting sponsor, the presenting sponsor, of the St.
Louis Pride Parade.
The Rainbow Sponsorship tier, which is below the Presenting Sponsor tier, requires $25,000 in donations to the LGBT LMNOP Gestapo.
So who knows how much Trans-Heiser Bush is paying there.
And then they're also listed as a Diamond Sponsor of Stonewall Columbus, which organizes and hosts the annual Columbus, Ohio Pride Parade.
It's not an accident.
It's not an oopsie-daisy.
It's not some rogue VP of marketing named Alyssa, whatever her name is, going rogue and, don't worry, we've put her on leave, so you normal people who don't want us to trans your kids, you can buy Bud Light again.
No.
This was a decision made from the top.
Not just the top of Bud Light.
The top of Trans-Heiser Busch, the top of AB InBev, because we know, I had a long Twitter thread about this the other day, that AB InBev is totally on board with ESG and with Garm and with all of the global multi-industry standards that say that these companies are going to back the pride movement and transgenderism and all the other sexual radicalism.
In a way, I feel bad for this marketing executive, Alyssa Hirshenfeld or something like that.
Because she took the fall for an issue that was obviously directed from the top down.
And so they haven't learned their lesson, which means that conservatives need to keep up the pressure.
This is working.
We have seriously damaged Bud Light.
We may have destroyed Bud Light permanently as the best-selling beer in America.
You're seeing this a little bit now with Target.
Target is getting slammed.
They're also losing a ton of money right now because Target decided to sell satanic designed transgender bathing suits where you can tuck men's body parts into women's bathing suits.
Pride merch for children, all sorts of stuff.
So conservatives are saying, okay, we're not shopping at Target anymore.
This is really damaging them.
Most momentum I've ever seen conservatives have heading into Pride Month, and so we've got to keep up the pressure.
Matt articulated this very well the other day, but it's been a motivation and a goal that we've been talking about for some months now, which is We need to make that rainbow flag absolutely toxic in corporate America and among politicians.
It has to be toxic.
The pride flag is at least as offensive to me as any other flag on earth.
It's not even just about the weird sex stuff.
Pride is the symbol of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
It is the queen of all vices.
It is the sin that made Satan fall like lightning from heaven and kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.
It is just pure evil, okay?
If you live your life according to pride, And all of the subsidiary sins and vices that go along with that, you're not going to flourish.
You're not going to have a good life.
And a society that exalts pride above every virtue, that makes a virtue out of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, is not going to be a good society.
And so, any establishment that is flying that flag out its window, you should not frequent that establishment.
Any politician who waves the pride flag as a matter of his campaign, you should not vote for that politician.
You should not donate a penny to that politician.
I know that I'm preaching to the choir, but we need a little bit of encouragement here, I think, because a lot of people thought, well, we can't boycott every company.
And sure, you can't boycott every company, but you can target, you can seriously damage the profit margins of companies that are embracing this stuff in a particular way.
We've done it.
A lot of people thought it wasn't possible, and then Bud Light lost a ton of market cap and then Target is in shambles and is scrambling to make sense of this.
The LGBT movement went too far over the past few years when they've tried to trans the kids.
His public opinion is overwhelmingly on our side.
We still have a decent amount of economic power.
The political class, at least in some corners of the right, is finally following suit.
Keep up that pressure.
That pride flag should be understood by everybody in this culture as being absolutely political poison.
The people who fly that flag in politics and corporate America should be made anathema.
We got to talk to each other about it.
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Speaking of the LGBT movement, I have seen the most disgusting story and most disturbing story that I have seen in at least a week, I don't know, at least this week.
We touched on it a little bit earlier, now more information is coming out of this from the Postmillennial.
A transgender mother appears to feed a newborn baby with a milky substance that he claims were secreted from his pecs, I don't know, from his chest, after injecting himself with a bunch of hormones.
This trans TikTok user who calls himself Naomi We played the clip earlier this week of him saying, I've taken enough poison that I can now secrete some kind of fluid from my chest and that makes me feel that I'm a real woman because I feel like I'm producing milk.
Now, this man has also come into possession of a baby, which is extremely disturbing.
And then this guy posted images of him feeding Whatever substance he has produced to this baby in a bottle.
Very, very disturbing.
This man, who I don't know what his real name is, he calls himself Naomi, he referred to this as a cow achievement, that he's been able to produce some substance that simulates milk.
And he's very pleased that he's now a mother, in his own words.
He calls this queer joy.
My political ideology is whatever can stop this.
That's my, I know that we've had a lot of political realignments in recent years.
We talk about the shifting grounds because politics always is, is principles applied to changing circumstances.
Okay, whatever, my team is whatever stops this.
Okay?
Now, the transgender movement is claiming that there's nothing wrong with this at all.
And what they're claiming is that men, at least in theory, could produce milk.
Men have at least a small amount of all of the tissue that is required to produce milk, and so if you inject a man with enough hormones, enough synthetic chemicals and poison, he can trick his body into thinking that he's a woman, at least to some degree, and he can produce a substance that at least resembles milk, and even though The scientific authorities have in no way signed off on the safety of this substance and have urged caution and said, no, this should not be given out to children.
We can at least kind of pretend that it's milk.
Don't you know?
Don't you know, you troglodyte conservatives, that men actually can lactate?
Yeah, sure, we got to inject him with a ton of poison to make that happen, but don't you know?
It can happen.
You guys clearly, you didn't take your science class.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's say That whatever milk-like substance is produced by this man injecting himself with hormones, let's say that it were basically considered safe for babies.
Let's say that.
We don't have a reason to believe that now, but let's say in the future we do figure that out.
Even still, looking at that picture, and if you're just listening to this show, you're lucky.
But for those of you who are looking at this guy, this guy with the purple wig on, who's mutilated his body, and then he's holding this baby, he's allowed to be in possession of this baby, and then he's feeding this baby this weird stuff that's come out of his chest.
We all know there's something wrong with that.
We all know, including and especially the transgender movement.
They all know there's something wrong.
They have mirrors, okay?
Even though they have defects of perception, they know.
We all know, okay?
And this is an important lesson in politics.
We have been told to eradicate every last prejudice that we've ever had.
by the political left.
Now, of course, the political left then just reinserts a whole bunch of new prejudices that are far less rational than the other ones.
But the whole project of modernity tells us that we need to be able to write a perfectly rational treatise for every single thing that we do.
But of course, no one can operate that way.
You can't wake up in the morning and say, hey, should I have a shot of espresso or a latte or a cup of drip coffee Hmm, I don't know.
Let me examine all of the pros and cons for each.
Let me write a long essay on which type of coffee is the best.
Let me see, should I have dark roast or blonde roast?
Well, let me, you would never get out of bed.
Should I use this toothpaste or that toothpaste?
Let me rationally analyze and give the perfect rational arguments for all of them.
We operate, very often, on instinct.
We operate on tradition.
We operate by habit.
We operate by prejudice.
Prejudice is a good thing.
There can be unjust prejudices, and so you want to make sure that you're using your reason and your will in a way that will give you a flourishing life in society.
But we need prejudice.
Prejudice is not necessarily a bad word.
In fact, most of the time, it's a very, very good word.
Because we just make judgments based on all sorts of reason, including something that the ethicist Leon Kass articulated very well, which is the wisdom of repugnance.
We look at that man.
Who's done all sorts of nasty things to his body, and has come into possession of a child in some way, and is injecting himself with all sorts of chemicals, and is recklessly endangering this child by giving the child untested fluid that makes him feel like he's more of a woman, which he is not, but might be very, very harmful for the child.
We just don't really know.
And we just know Without having to write any rational essay, that that is wrong, and should be discouraged, and obviously should be banned by law.
We all know it, and it's not a bad thing to say it.
You think the brave new world is in the future.
That's what I thought.
I thought the brave new world, oh, in the future, things are going to get really bad, that we're going to start living in a dystopia.
The future's already kind of here.
Isn't it?
That's already happening.
And maybe that's one eccentric weirdo guy.
And maybe we're seeing reports.
This was a really disturbing report.
100% lab-grown babies in five years.
This is out of The Guardian.
Japanese researchers are on the cusp of creating human eggs and sperm that can be grown in a fake womb.
Producing human sperm and eggs in the lab is known as in vitro gametogenesis.
It's already been achieved in mice.
Scientists say it's possible in humans in five years.
Meaning that you could take any kind of cell from any kind of people.
You take a skin cell from two dudes and create a baby.
And then have, through this artificial synthetic sperm and egg, make a baby who, in some cases, would have no parents.
Meaning, yes, maybe you get two dudes, or two chicks, or one dude, and who knows, coming in and using some of their cells to do it.
Or, you just make the baby on a computer.
You say, okay, this is the kind of sperm we're going to have, this is the kind of egg we're going to have, and you make a baby that doesn't have parents.
And this is being heralded as an exciting new breakthrough.
We're right on the cusp, five years away.
In other words, The headline is, scientists so excited, scientists looking forward to producing a human being with the intention of depriving that human being of a mother and a father for no other reason than to satisfy their own morbid curiosity and to make themselves into gods.
And we're supposed to celebrate this.
Since modernity kicked in, after the scientific revolution, after the enlightenment, There have been a lot of technological advancements, but there's been a complete collapse in ethics, theology, morality, and philosophy.
There's been a collapse.
We don't know anything anymore.
We don't know who we are.
We don't know what a man is.
We don't know what a woman is.
And that's a very dangerous combination.
That's very, very toxic because we end up in Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park is, in fact, In many ways about this problem.
It's also about big scary dinosaurs running around, but it's in many ways about this problem.
That's the deeper message, which is what will happen in society if we achieve technical knowledge such that we can do the sorts of things we've never been able to do before, but we lose the moral and philosophical and theological Wisdom to understand when we shouldn't do certain things and it's not just off in the future.
This kind of stuff is happening right now.
I've got to start watching the Kardashian show, I guess.
The only reality show I've ever really liked is Jersey Shore, because I just know those people.
I grew up with those kind of people.
And I've got to start watching the Kardashian show.
This was one of the most serious and nuanced discussions of the issue of surrogacy that I've seen anywhere on television, and it came from Khloe Kardashian.
Do you feel less connected?
Mm-hmm.
This is not easy.
I definitely buried my head in the sand during that pregnancy that I didn't digest what was happening.
And so I think when I went to the hospital, I really think that was the first time that really registered.
And it has nothing to do with the baby.
It's just, you're like, okay, we're having a baby.
And this is my son and I'm taking him home with me.
I definitely was in a state of shock, I think, from my entire experience in general.
Go, go, go, go, go.
Don't stop.
Don't stop.
I felt really guilty that, like, this woman just had my baby, and you're just... I take the baby, and then I go to another room, and you're sort of separated.
Like, I felt it's such a transactional experience, because it's not about him.
I wish someone was honest about surrogacy and the difference of it, but it doesn't mean it's bad or good.
It's still great.
Okay, and there it is right at the end.
That's the required endorsement of the sexual revolution and all this progressive insanity.
But the entire segment, the whole argument, says no, surrogacy is obviously terrible.
There's obviously something deeply wrong with this.
And here's why.
And here's how I felt it, and here's how I bet the surrogate mother felt it, and here's why it's so wrong for the baby, because procreation is supposed to be about the baby.
The only person to be said to have any real rights in that is the baby, is not us.
But I've had trouble connecting with my child now as a result of this.
I feel like I just discarded this woman.
I just rented this poor woman's womb, and I throw her out, and I take the baby.
It didn't occur to me that the natural process of pregnancy would get me prepared Physically and mentally and spiritually to have a baby.
I didn't have any of that.
I just drove to the hospital one day I just realized oh my goodness I'm having a baby and it's been so so hard and I wish people were honest about how terrible surrogacy is But I mean, it's great though But no, but it's really it's great though.
I know I have to say that because I'm a mainstream figure on television but It's not it's not great.
It's obviously wrong and I see why people People have been tempted to do it.
I see why all sorts of temptations exist.
People are tempted toward things that are bad because it seems like there's some goodness there, or because they feel a little bit desperate, or because they're constrained in their lives.
And so I get it.
I understand the temptation to surrogacy.
But good ends, the good end of having a baby, do not justify immoral means.
And when we engage in immoral means, I mean, you see this throughout the Old Testament.
Some of the greatest figures in the Old Testament start to cut corners and start to fall into temptations and start to say, oh well, I can't have a child with my wife or I'm going to have a child with her handmaid.
We're okay.
I can't get this victory that I want.
Okay, I'm going to cut a corner over here.
And it never works out.
Things begin to spiral out of control.
We are simply not smart enough to be able to account for all of the externalities, to account for all of the unintended consequences of these sorts of things.
We think we are.
We flatter ourselves in rationalist modernity that we can reason through every single little thing.
In fact, we're far less capable of reasoning through all of these consequences than human beings were even four or five hundred years ago.
We don't possess even the sophistication that people had then.
And then they had a much healthier dose of humility and recognized that it might seem fine on a sheet of paper to say, okay, I'm gonna rent this poor woman's womb, she's gonna deal with all the difficult parts of pregnancy, and then I'm gonna go pick up my baby at the baby store.
But gosh, it just seems so transactional.
And isn't there something deeper to human life than mere transaction?
Modernity, liberalism tells us That we're all basically just consumers.
We're all just economic creatures in a marketplace.
And I pay you for this, and you give me that good and service, and the left believes that, and even the right.
Large swaths of the right believe that.
But it's not true.
You can't just make every aspect of our lives into some economic transaction.
This is what the great conservative Edmund Burke warned about when he warned of the economists, sophisters, and calculators who had taken over the world.
These are not merely economic transactions, especially when we're talking about the relationship between a mother and her child.
Listen to Khloe Kardashian.
She makes a good argument.
These things are falling apart.
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You know, with Father's Day coming up, I've been thinking about how grateful I am that my father did not become a woman.
For all of his many accomplishments, the greatest accomplishment might be that he gave me my life, at least from my perspective, and he couldn't have done that if he had become a chick.
Without him, I wouldn't be here.
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That line still gets me when I read it.
And whoever the copywriter is certainly deserves a raise.
Speaking of technology, we're seeing election interference from big tech already.
And it's not Trump getting kicked off Twitter and it's not DeSantis getting kicked off YouTube or something.
It is my friend, Vivek Ramaswamy being kicked off of LinkedIn, which is, I have to say, the most Vivek social network to be kicked off of.
I've mentioned that Vivek and I know each other from college.
I was an undergraduate when he was at the law school.
We were in similar kind of clubs and organizations to one another.
At the time, we didn't know each other very well during college, but he had a reputation as being just very type A, very meticulous, very, very intelligent, very serious and ambitious and successful.
And he obviously has proven that.
He sold a company for a ton of money.
He attended the top law school in the country, at least when he was there.
It seems to have gone downhill since then.
And now he's running for president.
He's a best-selling author.
Very impressive guy.
I just love the idea that, for Vivek, his kind of doom-scrolling in his free time is that he's just on LinkedIn.
Very professional, responsible social media app.
And he was kicked off, allegedly, for spreading misinformation.
Here's why he was kicked off.
I was a bit surprised to get an email noting that my LinkedIn account had been shut down.
I wondered why, because actually a number of friends texted me saying they follow me on LinkedIn, that's how they keep up, they weren't able to find me anymore.
And so when I had my team get in touch with LinkedIn, here's the response that we got.
I'm not kidding, I'm reading from this.
Apparently my third strike was to say this.
The climate agenda is a lie.
Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.
Those were my three strikes that got me censored on LinkedIn.
Now, it's kind of funny, and LinkedIn doesn't matter, obviously, as much as Twitter or Google or YouTube or Facebook.
Though, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, so we're talking about a very big company.
And it shows you, okay, they think they can go after Vivek right now because he doesn't have as much name recognition, and so they'll get less pushback than if they went after Trump or DeSantis.
Okay, it's just this one... Think about how early we are in the race, though, and already you're seeing these kinds of shenanigans.
To me, LinkedIn going after Vivek this way is a little warning shot.
It's a little test shot in the race to see what happens now.
We have new candidates in the race.
Mike Pence has long been rumored to be interested in entering the race.
Pence has not said that he's running.
But he kind of got scooped by CNN here in that CNN released word that he is going to participate in a CNN presidential town hall.
A little awkward that they made that announcement before he announced that he's running for president.
Presumably, though, if you participate in a CNN town hall, you are running for president.
Mike Pence has gone now on other networks, and he's started to begin the process of crafting a message for his campaign.
Here is Mike Pence going after Ron DeSantis on Fox Business.
I just don't believe it's in the interest of the people of any state for a government to essentially go after a business that they disagreed with on a political issue.
I disagree with Florida moving against Walt Disney.
I disagree with California moving against Walgreens because they're going to obey the law about abortifacients in some 20 states, so they're going to cancel a $120 million project.
Look, at the end of the day, the business of America is business.
And I'm not terribly surprised to see Disney canceling a billion-dollar contract.
That's only going to harm people in the Orlando and Florida area.
And it's one more reason why, as a limited-government conservative, I've said for months now that I think both sides ought to stand down, take the victory for parents' rights in the legislature, and move on.
So this message is probably not going to resonate with a lot of people, at least not right now.
The GOP base seems to be pretty eager for an aggressive response to the cultural war that the libs have been waging, especially when we're talking about Disney down in Florida or Bud Light or Target or any of these other companies.
And Mike Pence is offering a Fairly contrarian argument here.
He's saying, look, the business of America is business.
That's a line from Calvin Coolidge.
He's saying, the business of America is business.
We don't really want to antagonize business too much.
We want to be social conservatives.
We want to defend our values.
But we don't want to just pummel these businesses into the ground, you know.
And Ron DeSantis, he went too far here.
This is a message that To some degree is being put forward by President Trump.
The difference is that Trump is such a belligerent cultural figure that he somewhat, probably uniquely, can make both of those arguments at the same time.
Out of the one side of his mouth, he can say Mexicans are rapists and murderers and we've got to deport everybody.
And then out of the other side, he can say, all right, we need to make a deal and bring temperature down a little bit.
And the other candidates are falling down on one side or the other.
So DeSantis is falling down very much on the we're gonna pummel Disney into the ground side of things.
And Mike Pence here is trying to carve out a new space for himself in the race.
And he's saying, look, I'm the pro-business guy.
I'm the Calvin Coolidge Republican.
I am the return to normalcy.
That's his argument.
And it's a little bit of a long shot argument right now, just judging from where the GOP base is.
But I think it's not the craziest idea for a campaign in that you've got Trump running as Trump.
You've got DeSantis running as Trump 2.0.
So they're both running in the Trump lane, which is a kind of old right, anti-globalism, to some degree anti-free trade, Pat Buchanan kind of right wing.
Then you've got Vivek.
He's the outsider candidate.
Then you've got Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.
They're running a little bit more of a centrist moderate campaign.
And Mike Pence is going to run on a return to normalcy.
People are going to mock it.
He's not doing great in the polls right now.
Joe Biden, however, ran the return to normalcy campaign.
And the return to normalcy campaign worked out relatively well for him, along with the institutional advantages that the Democrats had.
All of that said, though, Before we get into mailbag, Quinnipiac poll is out.
Trump is absolutely destroying this primary right now.
And I know it's early, and we've just got these new candidates into the race.
Even within the last week, we've seen the entrance of Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, and it would seem Mike Pence.
But it is not even close.
So Quinnipiac, which is a fairly well-respected polling outlet, they say that in May, Trump is at 56%.
DeSantis is at 25%.
None of the other candidates are even close.
That means that Trump is up 31 points over DeSantis, and that's from the Quinnipiac poll.
You've seen this reflected in other polls with even wider margins sometimes.
Now, the reason that number matters is that it's going in the right direction for Trump.
In March, Trump was only up 14 points on DeSantis.
It was 47 to 33.
Back in February, Trump was only up 6 points on DeSantis.
So now, maybe that DeSantis is officially in the race, maybe this will give him a big move to be able to weaken Trump, and then that'll benefit all of the other candidates.
But as of right now, This is far and away Trump's race to lose.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Buck Frunch, what a name, who says, with the economy in shambles, boycotting has never been easier.
It's true!
That's very true.
When the economy is very shaky and you've got hyperinflation and you've got wages stagnating and you've got 7% interest rates so people can't afford to buy a new home or move or do much of anything, that is a great time to boycott companies because people don't really have the money to go shop at these companies. that is a great time to boycott companies because people Anyway, we've now arrived at my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag.
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Take it away.
Hello, Michael.
I'd firstly like to start off by saying I'm a huge fan of the show.
Good work.
But my question is on the subject of pride and it being a sin.
I definitely agree that pride is a sin.
However, when it comes to talking about being proud of, say, your achievements, or if you are a parent and you're proud of your child's achievements, like say your child painted something, That's quite beautiful.
And you were proud of your child for that work of art.
Would that be the same type of pride?
Would that still be a sin?
Or what I would say to that in my head kind of right now is no, it is not.
But perhaps pride is not the word to use there.
I just would like to know what your thoughts on that are.
Thank you.
Really good question, and in part this confusion is caused by the limitations of language, especially the English language here, because we use the same word pride to mean a number of different things that are somewhat related but are distinct.
Pride is excessive love of oneself and one's own qualities and achievements.
So pride is necessarily excessive.
There is a proper kind of love of oneself without which we cannot love our neighbor properly because we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves.
If you hate yourself, you're going to hate your neighbor.
That's not going to be good for anybody.
There is a proper love of one's achievements and characteristics and family and nation.
Right?
When you say, I'm proud to be an American, you're not saying I'm embracing the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
You're saying that I love my country.
And the love of country, patriotism, is an extension of filial piety, which is totally proper.
So that's all perfectly fine.
But it's the excessiveness.
And if there's one word that I could use to describe Pride Month and the Pride Movement, it would probably be excessive.
Decadent would be another word as well.
But having a proper love of yourself and your country and your kids and whatever, that's all perfectly fine.
The trick here, and I'm not the first to say it, is not to think less of yourself, it's to think of yourself less.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
This is Dave, DBunion6 in your chat.
As this non-Catholic's favorite Catholic, I was wondering if you could maybe either clarify or expand upon something you've said previously regarding, I believe you've called it, the so-called exception passage in Matthew 5.32.
I don't presume to know what Bible translation that you might read out of.
I'm going to take a guess that maybe you use the Douay rhymes.
But I say to you that whosoever shall put away his wife, accepting the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery.
From the Vulgate, from which that is, my understanding, translated, I'll probably be pronouncing these wrongs, but it's excepta fornicationis.
My point would be, it appears that Jesus is giving some exception here, so I was wondering if that is not because of adultery or fornication, what it is that you would view as the exception.
So, thank you for all that you do, all you guys and everybody at The Daily Wire, and God bless, and I look forward to hearing your answer.
Thank you.
Really, really good question.
So, what this refers to is the Acceptive Clause in the Gospel of St.
Matthew, where Christ says, what God has joined, let no man separate.
Yes, Moses told you divorce was okay in some cases, but I'm telling you from the beginning it was not so.
And when men and women come together in marriage, they become one flesh and they shouldn't separate.
And in the Gospel of St.
Matthew, it says, except for Pornia, except for fornication, or unchastity, or sometimes it's translated as adultery, or this, that.
Sexual immorality.
Okay.
In recent centuries, some Protestants have looked at this clause and said, okay, this means that divorce is okay in some circumstances.
That is not the understanding of historical Christianity.
Obviously, the Catholic Church, or the Eastern Orthodox, or some Protestants too.
So, the question that I would begin with here Is not, why do you Catholics hold to, and I'm not accusing you of doing this, I think you're obviously very open-minded on this question, but some people, I think, will look at this question and say, ha ha, see, there's the exception, good.
Why do you Catholics deny that exception, or Eastern Orthodox, or traditional kind of Christians, why do you deny that exception?
See, there's my excuse to be able to get a divorce.
I wouldn't look at it that way.
I would begin with just this question, huh.
Why is there that acceptive clause there?
Where does that come from?
Why did Christians not think this meant that you could get divorced for the vast majority of the history of Christianity?
Why in some recent centuries have people seized upon that?
Where does that come from?
When you look at that context, then you have to look at the other Gospels, too.
There are parallel passages in the Gospel of St.
Mark and the Gospel of St.
Luke, and yet those other Gospels do not include the Acceptive Clause.
It just says, what God has joined, let no man separate.
Okay.
In the writing of St.
Paul in the Epistles, 1 Corinthians and Letter to the Romans, you don't see this Acceptive Clause.
It just says, no, you can't get divorced.
Don't put away your wife.
Don't do it.
Don't split up.
So why is it just here in the Gospel of St.
Matthew?
I don't know for sure.
No one really knows for sure.
But some explanations for that have been that St.
Matthew is writing for a primarily Jewish audience.
Mark and Luke writing for the broader Greco-Roman world.
And you might think this is even stranger because those pagans are a little bit looser about sexual things, so why would this not include the Acceptive Clause here?
And one explanation that seems at least plausible, if not likely to me, is that the reason here That's one explanation for it.
is that it gets to a controversy between the school of Hillel and I forget the name of the other school in ancient Judaism, which is over exactly what the grounds for divorce could be.
And so the acceptive clause would be a way to sidestep this controversy, whether divorce was okay in all cases or only okay in the case of fornication, to say, okay, I'm putting that question aside for a second here and telling you about what marriage is broadly.
That's one explanation for it.
Another explanation for it could be that the gospel of Sema, Matthew is writing for this audience that would have understood matters of marriage in this particular way, with this particular kind of language.
And then more broadly, and I think this applies especially today and has been understood by Christianity for 2,000 years, is that it is making clear that a marriage is only a marriage if it's valid.
unchastity, porneia, adultery that will render a marriage null because the marriage couldn't have been valid in the first place.
Namely, if someone is already married and then marries again, can that husband and second Well, yes, but they weren't validly married in the first place.
And you see this happen often in the modern world, actually, that someone could be secretly hiding a wife or something like that, or could have withheld something from the spouse before marriage that would have rendered the marriage null.
So when Christ says in the Gospel of St.
Matthew, any man who divorces his wife, except for adultery, or except for fornication or porneia, makes his wife an adulteress, That is literally true, because what we're saying, what our Lord would be saying is, she's already an adulteress, or you're already an adultery.
You're already committing adultery in this case.
So it's very precise technical language.
Those are, I don't know, that's like three possible explanations for it.
But this isn't just a way to kind of weasel out of the question or anything like that.
I think that the people who defend the Acceptive Clause, one, have to explain why it wasn't accepted for Well over a millennium, you know, for many centuries after a millennium.
But then also I think they have to explain the parallel passage in Mark, the parallel passage in Luke, 1 Corinthians, and Romans.
I think they have to explain the overwhelming majority of the evidence in the scripture which say, which says that divorce is no bueno.
And I think that the traditional explanation is just more persuasive.
Okay, next one.
Hey Smokey Mike, it's Daily Grinch here with a quick question for you about our Second Amendment rights.
So according to the Second Amendment, we have the right to a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
So regarding the Second Amendment, My question is, how do states believe that they can infringe upon our rights and make gun laws restricting those rights, when in Article 6, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution, that establishes the Supremacy Clause, which says federal laws and amendments take precedence over the state laws.
I just don't see how states believe that they can infringe upon our Second Amendment rights and make these just outrageous laws restricting our gun ownership.
Love to hear your answer.
Because we're not governed by an old piece of parchment is the problem, but just the reality, and no state really is.
So that old piece of parchment has to be embodied and institutionalized in tradition and in state law and in institutions and in practices.
And so that creates a disconnect between the capital C Constitution, which supposedly governs our country, and the lowercase C Constitution that we embody every single day.
And the lowercase C Constitution In many ways, violates the Capital C Constitution, and we've just all kind of accommodated that, because that's the way governments go.
So why do they do it?
Because they can.
And we can complain about it, but that's the way that states have always acted, and so it's incumbent upon us to just try to fix the lowercase C Constitution.
One, to bring it in closer alignment with the Capital C Constitution, and two, more broadly, just to make it better and more conducive to flourishing.
Okay, next question.
Hey, Michael.
Love the show.
Long time watcher here.
Thank you for everything you do.
So my name's David.
I'm 25, and I'm a homosexual.
Not a practicing one.
I mean, I'm Jewish, so of course I won't be getting married.
You know, if I were bisexual, I could just marry a woman, but I'm not, so I don't want to do that to some poor lady who deserves someone who's attracted to her.
So, my question for you is, how can I live a fulfilling and meaningful life knowing that I will never have a marriage and I'll never start a family of my own?
Thanks again.
Really good question.
Sorry that you're dealing with this difficulty.
Many people are dealing with it, though, and you seem to have a good head on your shoulders and you're, you know, really viewing this through your reason and trying to bring your will in accord with your reason.
I wouldn't totally write off marriage in that I agree it would be wrong to deceive a woman and pretend you're really attracted to her when in fact you're not.
But if you could be somewhat honest about this issue and you say, look, I have this issue of sexual attraction but life is about more than physical attraction and I want a family and I want to live a more traditional life and I want kids and all the rest of it.
Could you accept me, you know, to a woman?
I don't know, maybe a woman could do that.
It'd be a hard sell, there's no question about it, but maybe you could do that.
And then two, on this issue, you're Jewish, so I can't give you really sophisticated religious advice here because I just don't know really how this works in Judaism.
But the Christian view of things is that you don't need to get married to have a totally fulfilling life and that you can consecrate yourself in your singlehood to God.
And people can do that in religious life.
You know, you could become a nun or a priest or a brother, something like that, and say, look, maybe I'm not attracted to women, but I'm going to be a celibate, and I'm just going to sublimate my desires straight to God, who's the source and summon of all of our desire.
Or you don't need to join a religious order.
You could just consecrate your singlehood and say, okay, I'm going to live a single life.
One thing I would recommend, though, is I would recommend that.
I would recommend, obviously, grounding all of your desire and purpose in God.
I would also recommend being very involved in your community.
We live in an age in which people are all feeling isolated and alienated from society, and community has broken down.
And this is bad for everybody, but it's especially bad for people who are not going to get married, who are not going to have kids.
It's especially bad for people who Don't fit into this very cookie cutter kind of idea of what life is that has taken hold, especially in modernity.
So I'd recommend, you know, your political animal, your social animal.
You've got to be around people, even if that means you're not around a wife.
But I think you have multiple options available to you.
And the modern left wants to say that, well, if you don't just pursue all of your sexual desires, you know, whatever they may be and however they may change, then you're going to live a terrible life of repression and sadness.
But that obviously is not true, and I think that you're more likely to live a life of sadness if you If you don't follow your reason, you know.
Some people, through their reason, will conclude, well, this heterodox thing that I want to do is acceptable and good.
And they're probably wrong about that, but at least, you know, they're honestly following their lights.
But you're a little different.
You're saying, no, this is how I want to behave, and how I want to live, and my appetites are telling me differently.
Well, okay.
Pursue the reason, because the reason is supposed to mediate between the lower will and the divine reason.
