Tea at Trianon: Playing Make-Believe

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

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Playing Make-Believe

From Crisis:

The transgender revolution has been invited into Baltimore Catholic high school sports teams and become etched into primary school handbooks. In the private high school athletic league, in which twelve all-girls Catholic schools participate, there is a new policy that has obliterated women’s competition. While running hills in her first cross-country meet this past weekend, my daughter could have been running alongside (and likely passed by) a few gender-confused boys.
Catholic all-girls high schools in Baltimore participate in the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland (IAAM), a league of 31 private schools. In 2019, the IAAM instituted a policy that allows biological males to participate in female sports. Because the policy was instituted just prior to Covid, many parents are just now discovering its contents, which state, in part:

On a league-wide basis, the IAAM’s policy permits students’ athletic participation in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity and that affords these students the privacy and confidentiality that all students expect from educational institutions.

“The most basic teaching of the Catholic Church—the biological sex of man and woman made in the image and likeness of God—is no longer agreed upon. By allowing such policies in our Catholic schools, we are cooperating with evil and confusing our youth,” said Christi Gaeng, a mother of three children who played sports and graduated from Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. She and her husband are concerned about sending their remaining two children to Catholic high schools. (Read more.)