Tea at Trianon: Calling Indecency By Its True Name

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

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Calling Indecency By Its True Name

From Homefront Crusade:

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the renaming of the ship, USNS Harvey Milk, which was named after the famous, proud homosexual. The replenishment oiler was named during the Obama administration in 2016. There is no shortage of articles condemning Hegseth for this move, in which writers laud a so-called “gay icon” while pointing to “our nation’s values” as if sodomy wasn’t a capital crime throughout most of the nation at its founding. They speak esoterically about values, but it would be incredibly difficult to make homosexuality into an “American value” within the framework of an honest history.
Harvey Milk was not a man whom we can remember for an array of public contributions despite a struggle with same-sex attraction. Rather, he is known principally for his attractions, which he acted to normalize and encourage. As is common to the point of stereotype, he was attracted to boys, and had at least one “relationship” with a 16-year-old boy while Milk was in his mid-30s. Pederasty seems inseparable from homosexuality, and tragically, is so often how they reproduce—they cannot beget, so instead they groom. The fact that Milk was murdered does not make his efforts praiseworthy, nor his cause moral.
A common objection to rebranding the ship with a decent name is one of apathy, which is to say, “why bother?” It’s a complacency that comes from how it is easier to resign oneself to how things are than to deal with the logistics and fallout of fixing them. That’s often how the slippery slope effect takes place culturally and politically. It’s a type of normalcy bias that makes people immune from seeing the danger in one’s current circumstances (because catastrophe hasn’t yet happened). We know it is an error because history is full of examples in which decadent societies met their collapse. (Read more.)