European Democracy In Action, Good And Hard

And: A Day Of Wonder In Valencia, the City Of St. Vincent, Protomartyr of Spain

Selfie spot outside European Parliament in Brussels

The European Court of Justice today has ruled that Hungary must allow its children to be queered (if by “queered” you mean exposed to gender ideology and homosexuality). The ruling overturns a 2021 Hungarian law that banned media and information about transgenderism and homosexuality directed at minors. From the ruling:

… the criterion of the portrayal or promotion of deviation from the self-identity corresponding to the sex assigned at birth, of gender reassignment, or of homosexuality are based on the premiss that any portrayal or promotion of that kind, whatever its specific content, is such as to be detrimental to the best interests of the child. Such an approach reveals a preference for certain identities and sexual orientations to the detriment of others, which are stigmatised as a result, which is incompatible with the requirements flowing, in a society in which pluralism prevails, from the prohibition on discrimination based on sex or sexual orientation. … [T]he restrictions at issue do not appear to be justified under any circumstances by, inter alia, the objective of promoting the best interests of the child.

How about that: in Europe, a country’s democratically-elected leaders have no right to prohibit pro-LGBT messaging and material aimed at children. According to the European Court of Justice, the “best interests of the child” include being taught in kindergarten that women can have penises.

Further in the court’s reasoning:

The aspects of the amending law targeting content which portrays or promotes deviation from the self-identity corresponding to the sex assigned at birth, gender reassignment, or homosexuality constitute a coordinated series of discriminatory measures which are in breach, in a way that is both manifest and particularly serious, of the rights of non-cisgender persons – including transgender persons – or non-heterosexual persons, as well as the values of respect for human dignity, equality and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.

The anthropology of liberalism mandates that there is no such thing as sexual normativity, and that you accept the idea that one’s sex is “assigned at birth.” You are not allowed to disagree, at least not in law and public policy, in the European Union. Democracy in action!

Meanwhile, more Democracy In Action™ from Hungary’s incoming prime minister:

Think about that: the new prime minister is threatening a wholesale, instant replacement of the president and the court system. If this were happening in any other European democracy, people would be screaming bloody murder. But extremism in the punishment of Viktor Orban is no vice, I guess.

They said Orban was a dictator. Well.

As I have said here, Peter Magyar ran on backing Orban’s positions on Ukraine and on migration (in fact, he was a bit to the right of Orban). I think it will soon become clear that he just said what he needed to say to get elected. I hope I’m wrong, but there’s no way Magyar is going to get all that money from Brussels unless he gives them what they want.

So: in Europe, you must allow your children to be queered, even if your democratically elected parliamentary representatives don’t want it. It’s the law.

In his new book, The Desecration of Man: How The Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Carl Trueman writes about all this “democracy” as a form of deep transgression. Excerpts:

When, in May 2023, the European Parliament was host to artwork depicting a queer Jesus surrounded by disciples wearing BDSM gear, there can be no question about the attitudes of the cultural officer class toward traditional religion. It considers traditional moral attitudes to be not only outdated but also ripe for transgression as a means of defining the values of modern Europe.

Trueman points out how what you think about the nature of reality determines the kinds of laws you will have. The European Court of Justice decision today illustrates that. You must have laws that believe there is no connection between biology and male or female sex. That connection does not exist in the minds of European elites. Here, Trueman highlights the political meaning of the Sexual Revolution:

Sex is now something we are before it is something we do. We might summarize this by saying that the sexual revolution took place against the background of fundamental changes in what it means to be human. The turn to expressive individualism in Western culture set the inner space of feelings and desires in general at the core of personal identity. And in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexual desire came to dominate the understanding of that inner space. … The most important feelings that modern men and women consider themselves to have are sexual ones. What the Freudian move does is make sexual desire and sexual expression key to what it means to be a fulfilled—an authentic—human being. And that helps us to understand another central element of the sexual revolution: its political nature.

A Day Of Wonder In Valencia

As you know, I’m on book tour in Spain this week. I didn’t have time to get this newsletter out before catching an early train to Valencia. On the way, I wrote a big piece for The Free Press on Amazon.com cancelling The Camp of the Saints. I pitched it last night before bed, and they accepted the pitch, asking me to make sure the piece was there when they got to the office in NYC on Tuesday morning. Well, I woke up Tuesday to find that Amazon had relented. Great news!

But I wrote a piece anyway about the meaning of the book, and how one needs to read it to understand what’s really happening in Europe today, if only in terms of the forces moving nationalist politics. I’ll publish it here if they turn it down now.

Anyway, what a great day in Valencia, the ancient Roman city on the Mediterranean!

My handler Ignacio, from Encuentro Books, and I checked into the hotel in the central part of town, then met up at 2 p.m. for lunch (it’s Spain, eating lunch at 2pm ain’t no thang). Paella is the famous dish of this city, so we repaired to a nice paella restaurant that a professor had recommended to us. We were met first by a priest, Padre Juan Alberto Ballester, an extraordinary man. Then came Guillermo Gomez-Ferrer, a professor of art and ethics at the University of Valencia, and co-author, with his historian wife Catalina Martín Lloris, of a book about the holy chalice at the city’s cathedral, more on which in a moment.

People, feast your eyes on this paella we four men had for lunch:

That’s Padre gazing upon it. We were living in wonder, for sure!

After lunch, we walked over to the Valencia cathedral, a massive, mostly Mediterranean Gothic pile whose history reflects the messy history of the church in this city, which was founded as a Roman colony in the year 138 BC. One of the names of the church is the Cathedral of the Holy Chalice — a reference to an extraordinary relic that might be the actual cup Jesus used at the Last Supper. A priest of the cathedral, whose name I didn’t get, but who showed us around, taking us into places most people can’t go, let me get up close for a photo of the chalice, which is kept high up over an altar in a side chapel. From a distance, it looks like metal, but here’s what it looks like up close:

Only the cup itself is original; the gold is all a medieval addition. Prof. Gomez-Ferrer explained to me the thesis he and his wife present in their book (available only in Spanish, but also as an e-book). Basically, here’s the claim, based on 25 years of research.

This chalice’s existence is massively documented through history, going back to Jerusalem. They cannot prove that this was the cup used by Jesus, but they say it was kept in Jerusalem in the 4th century Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Constantine, in a collection with other relics of the Passion.

The chalice is made of agate, a translucent stone, not glass or wood. This tells us that it was a cup used by a Jewish family in Jerusalem. Stone cups were preferred by particularly observant families for reasons of ritual purity. The authors theorize that this cup was likely used in a Passover seder, and belonged to a family of means.

There is a wealth of historic documentation tracing this particular cup from Jerusalem to Spain, through Egypt. Prof. Gomez-Ferrer stressed that these are not mythical or apocryphal claims, but based on concrete historical records (including the discovery of ancient documents in Cairo in 2015). Further, he claims that no other relic in Christendom has as much historical backing. Again, it cannot be conclusively demonstrated that this was the actual “holy grail” (the professor recoils at the use of that term, saying that’s a matter of Arthurian legend), but it can be shown that this is a Jewish seder cup from 1st century Jerusalem, and that it was collected with other relics from Christ’s Passion. Beyond that, we can only speculate.

The priest of the cathedral led us into an area off-limits to visitors: the Treasury where relics were kept safely. Above the narrow entrance hall is this opening in the ceiling, through which boiling oil could be poured on invaders below:

There is also a thick gate that can be instantly dropped from the ceiling to block trespassers. Inside the chamber, there is a metal staircase leading up to the high room where the boiling-oil guy and the gate-releasing guy were. The original staircase was wooden, allowing the relic-guards to push it away once they were safely in the upper room:

Here is a recessed area in a wall of the small upper room, in which the cathedral kept a spine from the Crown of Thorns, which had been given to the Valencia archbishop by St. Louis, King of France (1214-1270). Notice the 14th century fresco around it:

Back in the nave, we saw the first Renaissance art in Spain. How did it get here? Well, the awful Borgia pope Alexander VI was from this city, and sent Italian artists here in 1482 to adorn the dome of the cathedral. Incredibly, this and other images were only discovered in 2004 during a restoration. They had been concealed for 300 years by a false ceiling! Look:

Here is the hand and forearm of St. Vincent, the first martyr of Spain:

He was a deacon who was tortured to death in the Diocletian persecution. The Romans stretched him on the rack, tore his flesh with iron hooks, roasted him on a red-hot gridiron, denied him food, and imprisoned him in a dungeon whose floor was strewn with pottery shards so he couldn’t lie down to sleep. And still, Vincent refused to renounce his faith, hand over Scriptures for burning, or sacrifice to pagan gods! His body finally expired from all the tortures.

The angry Roman governor, Dacian, had Vincent’s body thrown into a charnel pit, expecting wild animals to eat it. But they wouldn’t touch it. Then he had the body put into a sack and thrown into the sea. God sent a dream to a pious Christian woman of the city, which showed her where to find his body washed ashore. She located it, and, with other terrified Christians of the city, buried it secretly. When Constantine’s conversion legalized Christianity, the church in the city gave him a proper burial.

Before visiting the ruins of an underground 6th century Visigothic burial chamber, we were joined by Jorge Mira, a 19-year-old university student and parishioner of Padre’s.

Jorge Mira and Padre J.A. Ballester

Padre was sent a few years ago to Jorge’s village, which had not had a full-time priest in ten years. The congregation consisted of a handful of elderly women. Padre told me that he read The Benedict Option, and that it gave him inspiration for how to serve the parish. Soon, people started coming — including young people like Jorge. Jorge told me that before meeting Padre, he knew nothing about Christianity, like most of his generation in Spain. Now he is on fire for God, and is so thankful for Padre’s ministry and example. Jorge also told me that the parish he attends near his university is full of young people eager for the faith. Man, I tell you, it made me so happy to spend the day with these brothers in Christ!

On to Barcelona tomorrow. I’ll check in with y’all from there.