Tea at Trianon: The Case for Patriarchy

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 11, 2021

The Case for Patriarchy

From Crisis:

In the recently-released book The Case for Patriarchy, Catholic writer and teacher Timothy J. Gordon boldly proclaims the “kingship of the social reign of Christ, King of the Patriarchy!” Gordon’s well-researched, deeply insightful work deconstructs feminism’s numerous nostrums that have upended modern life in the name of a false paradise of sexual egalitarianism.

Gordon traces the “sweeping diabolical disorientation” and “non-transgendered sexual dysphoria” afflicting the modern West to feminism. This “is none other than a Christian precursor to transgenderism. It, too, is based on the fallacy that men and women can mutually agree to swap roles.” He particularly condemns that “Western society’s men have been astoundingly swift in their shameless forfeiture of their vocational birthright to familial headship.”
This cataclysm has, for Gordon, its template in mankind’s Genesis fall in the Garden of Eden, where “Original Sin constitutes the first instance of ‘gender bending’ ever.” Adam was “passively watching and allowing human history to go off the rails” as the serpent seduced his wife, Eve. “Instead of lovingly protecting his wife from the fulsome dangers of the garden, he allowed her exposure, dialogue, and collusion against God,” Gordon admonishes.

By contrast, Gordon praises Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary, “Queen of Heaven,” as a female role model. “Ever instructive, the unimposing figure of the Virgin reminds us that she is the greatest of all saints precisely because she was such a perfectly obedient follower, not a leader,” he analyzes.

“Nature and nature’s God,” Gordon summarizes, leave “no reasonable argument against the moral and anthropological brute fact of Christian patriarchy.” “Christian anthropology and theology” show that “men are active, while women are passive” in their differing, respective natures. “The traditional Christian designation for this natural fact is ‘complementarity,’” he notes, a “sexual equality only in dignity and nothing else,” unlike feminist egalitarianism. (Read more.)