The Matt Walsh Show - Ep 256 - Speeding Down The Slippery Slope

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

Today on the show, we’ll discuss a horrific college course which seems to essentially be training pedophiles. Also, a man is falsely accused of sexual assault after stopping to help a stranded woman. Is this why chivalry is dying? And we’ll talk about the 7 dumbest pro-abortion arguments. Date: 05-09-19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Matt Wall Show, we'll talk about a horrific college course, which seems to essentially be training pedophiles. So we'll discuss that. Also, a man is falsely accused of sexual assault after stopping to help a stranded woman. Is this part of the reason why chivalry is dying in our society? And we'll talk about the seven dumbest pro-abortion arguments. There are a lot to choose from, but we'll talk about and try to debunk the seven dumbest today on the Matt Walsh show. I've often bragged that I am immune to poison ivy because I got a really bad case of it years ago and then I became immune. That's what I said. And so yesterday I was I was walking through the woods and I traips right through a whole patch of poison ivy because I'm immune to it.

Right. And anyway, fast forwarding to the end of the story, I'm not immune as it turns out. I have I have since discovered over the last day. I don't know. I got it into my head that that's it. Is that even a thing becoming immune to poisoned ivy? Somehow I got it into my head, and I would tell people that, and nobody ever corrected me. Why didn't anyone ever tell me?

He's like, no, that's not a thing. You're definitely not. No one ever did. So was everyone just playing along waiting for this moment? And if that's the case, then well played. Well played, everybody. But at the very least, I will say that I have suffered this poison ivy rash with quiet, quiet dignity in my house. I've only complained about it incessantly to everybody in this house and now

to the whole world. Other than that, I haven't complained about it at all. I've just been, I've been very stoic. And so I think in that way, I'm an example to everybody. Okay, we begin with just an unbelievable story, or maybe it's unfortunately very believable. I don't know. I'm reported yesterday in the Daily Wire. the report says, a professor presented a lesson to students at the University of North Texas titled Sexual Pleasure and Response in Infants. Big League Politics first reported last week. Moreover, as highlighted by the college fix on Friday, the textbook for the same course, Psychology and Sexual Behavior, suggests that students take field trips to preschools and elementary schools to observe students sexual interactions. This is real. This is an actual course at an actual

university in America. The lesson plan on sexuality and infants, which can be, which there's a link to it. If you go and look at this article, you can see the last plan. It's from the 13th edition of Our Sexuality. That's the course. The course is listed textbook, that's what our sexuality is. One section of the document, according to the fix, titled Teaching Ideas, suggests that instructors take students on a field trip to observe children possibly engaging in sexual interactions during recess hours. The textbook says, take the class to a local elementary school playground, or ask permission for a few of your students to attend various school playgrounds, preschools, or daycare centers, during recess to observe behaviors of children. Ask students to note interactions between same-sex

and mixed-sex groups. Which group was more frequent? Which behaviors were most frequent? What kind of touching did children engage in? What about teasing behaviors? Were there any overtly sexual interactions? What was the age range of children being observed? Have students write a report comparing their observations with information in the text? It's unclear if the parents of the young students potentially. So we don't know if when it says ask permission, who are we asking permission? The parents or the teacher, of course, whatever the case, it doesn't make it any better. One of the textbooks editors, Carla Bauer, was interviewed by the college fix.

And she said that she's, you know, one of the people responsible. for this, although she claims that the other editor of the textbook, who's now deceased, wrote the guide where the field trips were suggested. And so she tried to distance herself from that, as she didn't know anything about that. And if you're wondering what the course objectives are, the course objectives read as follows, number one, to describe human sexuality from historical and multicultural perspectives, to define, to define, to, to define major theoretical perspectives that influence the scientific study of human sexuality, to explain the significant research methodologies within disciplines, to examine the socially

constructed nature of sexual identities, to describe how sexuality overlaps with various social institutions, to recognize the changing nature of social norms. Okay. So a couple of things here. First of all, you've noticed that there really seems to be a movement afoot to normalize pedophilia. Yet we're always told that no such movement exists. You know, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Our eyes are fooling us. And we see stuff like this and we say, well, it looks like this is a normalization of pedophilia.

And yet we're always said, no, no, no, that's not happening. That's not happening. Well, I think this makes it pretty clear, doesn't it? and it's it's not although i started by calling this unbelievable um i don't mean that in a literal sense because it is very believable unfortunately because this is what happens when you begin to break down sexual boundaries gk chesterden talks about as i've i've mentioned this quote for him before um because it's so relevant to what we see going on in our culture especially

as it pertains to sexuality. And what he says is, you know, you're walking down the street and you come across a fence. You're not going to just tear down the fence without knowing why the fence is there and what it is meant to contain. Right? You're not going to just just, just announce that we need to take down this fence. First, you want to know why is that fence there? What purpose does it serve? Is it holding back some sort of, a rabid dog or something like that. I mean, there could be a lot of good reasons for a fence. Now, the point is, what we've done in our culture with sexual boundaries is we've just started tearing down fences without ever stopping to consider why those fences were there and what sorts

of rabid dogs they were trying to contain. And the other problem is, once you begin this project of tearing down sexual boundaries, it becomes really hard to erect them somewhere else. Once you've said, no, we're going to tear down this boundary and that one, right, this is all about social norms, where we're getting rid of all the social norms. Well, there are some things are social norms for a reason. And when a phrase like social norm becomes a dirty word, like it's a bad thing, it's a bad thing to uphold social norms.

Now, we need to tear down social norms just because they're norms. Well, it was a social norm in our society that pedophilia is wrong. That you don't sexualize children. That was a social norm. That's a good social norm. It's a norm for a reason. But once you start tearing down those fences and it becomes difficult to go somewhere else and rebuild a fence. And that's what's happening here.

And as part of this, so you have the tearing down of boundaries. What you also have is, I mean, just reading through the course objectives that I just read through, sex, sexuality, sex, sex, sex, there's this obsession with sex and sexuality. And in seeing everyone, all people as these inherently sexual beings, including children, and that's another thing that you find on the left is this upset. everything is seen in sexual terms. As much as they claim that, oh, my, my sex life is none of your business. Sex is a private thing. As much as they claim that, they actually believe the exact opposite. Now, I believe that, that your sex life is none of my business as long as you're not

abusing or raping and molesting anyone. But other than that, it is. I don't want to know. don't talk to me about it. You don't advertise it. You don't need to go marching down the street telling everybody. We don't need to know. That's how I feel about it.

The left, they claim that. They say that's none of your business. But then they go out in the street and they march and they announce it and they tell everybody. They advertise their sexuality. And this is where it ends up. The second thing to note here is, although I believe this is part of a movement in our society to normalize pedophilia, we also have to understand that this is not new.

This is the kind of research that Alfred Kinsey used to do in the early part of the 20th century. And Kinsey is considered a pioneer, a hero even to the left. Alfred Kinsey is the godfather of modern sex education. And modern sex education is based on his. his work. But he was a pervert and a deviant who studied the sexual responses of molested children. Very similar to what you just read here. He would have, Alfred Kinsey would have pedophiles rape children and record their experiences in like a journal. And then they would come in and they would have meetings with Kinsey where they would talk about their experiences raping children

and how the children responded to it. And Kinsey would study. these interactions. He never reported it to police. You didn't tell police about it. A pedophile would come to him and say, you know, I raped children. And Kinsey would say, okay, great, here's a notebook.

Next time you do it, make sure you take notes. Now, I'm not making that up. That's what Albert Kinsey would do. That's the kind of work, if we can call it that, that this psychopath did. And yet our public school sex education courses are based around his work. And this thing that I just read from this university in Texas, that's exactly the kind of thing that he would do.

And now we're seeing that come to the forefront again more explicitly. Just completely horrific. All right. Speaking of horrific, there's a story out of Australia. A man, 36-year-old man, was arrested, put in jail, charged with sexual assault after he stopped. to help a woman whose car was broken down and he stopped and helped her and then he was later accused of stalking her and assaulting her. The problem is that he did no such thing. He did stop to help her. He worked on her car for two hours apparently trying to help this woman who was stranded,

but he did not assault her and evidence, including security cameras, revealed and confirmed that he was innocent. So this guy performed this good deed going out of his way for a fellow human being and she turned around and accused him of rape. He spent some time in jail before he was finally cleared of charges. He lost his relationship. His name was was run through the mud all because he did this good thing for another person. There was, there's a quote from him. Let's see if I can find.

There's a quote from him that is just so sad. but also kind of profound. And it sort of sums up where we are. He was interviewed about his experiences after finally being, after finally being vindicated. And he said, I always helped people all my life. And this was the first time a snake bit me. He said he'll probably never help again.

I don't want that to happen again. I'll probably never help again, is what he said. this is a guy who is a good Samaritan used to helping out his fellow human beings and now he's saying well never going to do that again i don't blame him i mean i certainly couldn't possibly blame him for that but i think you that's that's what we're finding now is uh you have a lot of otherwise chivalrous and good men who don't who are afraid of uh of of you know going out of their way putting themselves out there to help another person, especially a woman, because they don't want to be accused of anything. They don't want to be accused of being a sexist. They don't want to be

accused of it. And worst case scenario, they don't want to be accused with a situation like this. And that's yet another problem with, as I've pointed out many times, with something like the Me Too movement, with the hysteria that we found in the Me Too movement, is that it engenders suspicion between the sexes on both sides, where women begin to believe that every man is a potential rapist out to assault her, and men begin to believe that any woman could potentially falsely accuse him of something. And so you have this suspicion, and both groups kind of avoiding each other and trying not to be around each other. And that's not a healthy situation for society. So that's pretty terrible. All right.

So I wrote something yesterday that I wanted to go through here. As we talked about on the show yesterday, after that law in Georgia was passed, which makes abortion basically illegal after six weeks with exceptions. The left obviously reacted as you were expecting to react. And there was a woman on CNN. We played the clip of this woman, Christine Quinn, I believe, was her name, who was so overcome with anger that she became delusional. She started screaming about how unborn babies are not human beings. They're part of the woman's body. Now, I talk about why that's obviously a ridiculous and stupid argument.

Clearly, the unborn child is a human being. But that is one of the really stupid arguments that pro-aborts put forward. It's only one, though. There's a whole list of really bad, dumb pro-abortion arguments. I wrote something yesterday going through what I consider to be sort of the top. seven dumbest pro-abortion arguments. I thought I would do that here on the show as well. Go through them. So this is the top seven dumbest pro-abortion arguments, aside from the one about not being a human being. We already covered that. That's probably kind of the macdaddy of dumb arguments.

That probably would be number one. But putting that to the side, we'll go through the list, seven to one. So starting at number seven, dumb argument, you can't be against abortion unless you're willing to adopt unwanted babies. We've talked about this before. that's the argument. And of course, a great many pro-lifers do indeed adopt unwanted babies, but none of us can adopt all of them, and some of us can't adopt any of them. The fact that we are limited in our resources does not prove that we're hypocrites. And even if it did prove that, that in itself would not prove that our position is flawed, even if you could prove that we are hypocrites and we, you know, we should be out adopting babies and we're not, that doesn't mean

anything about what we're claiming, about the nature of abortion. But in any case, it doesn't make any sense, because if we can only oppose the murder of those who we are able and willing to personally care for and subsidize, that would mean that we cannot oppose the murder of almost anyone on earth because we can't care for and subsidize the vast, vast majority of people who currently live. There are 7 billion people on earth. You cannot care for all 7 billion. So if this is the standard, and you know, you or I can only feed and clothe of vanishingly small percentage of people on earth, then that would mean that we can only really care about the fate and oppose the murder of that very small percentage.

And that would mean that we have to remain silent about things like genocide and school shootings because, hey, we're not stepping up to care for those people. But that, of course, doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So that's a bad argument. Number six, no uterus, no opinion. Now, leftists, of course, can't really make this argument anymore because they also say that, you know, your possession of a uterus has nothing at all to do with your gender. It means nothing anyway. So they've already made that, they have neutralized that argument themselves. They've ruled

that argument out, which is probably for the best, because it's a dumb argument anyway. Abortion is a moral and legal issue. So we use our brains to sort through it, not our reproductive organs. So what the motto really should be is no brain, no opinion. Now, that's true. If you don't have a brain, then you shouldn't be voicing your opinion on this issue or the other, but I'm afraid that that might rule out a large portion of the pro-abortion side, so that's the problem there. Number five, you can't force a woman to reproduce. Now, I agree with that statement.

It would be horrific to force women to reproduce. Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with abortion, though, because a woman does not reproduce when she gives birth in the hospital. Reproduction occurs at conception. So when a baby is born, that is not an act of reproduction. Reproduction has already happened. It is the product of that reproduction. The thing that has been reproduced, that is what's being born.

So the question isn't, should women be required to reproduce? Obviously, they shouldn't. The question is, should a woman be allowed to purposely kill that which has already been produced? And the answer to that is no. Number four, pro-lifers want to control women's bodies, right? We hear this all the time. Well, of course, the body that's directly in dispute is not the woman's. It's the child's.

It's true that the woman uses her body to sustain the child's body, but that's just as much the case after birth as it is before. I use my body to care for my born children. I use my body to do that. I use my body to clothe them, provide for them, feed them. I mean, whatever I do for my kids or for anyone else, I'm using my body to do it. Because I am my body. I can't do it any other way.

I can't just sit back and with the power of my brain make things move around. I'm not Professor X in X-Men. So I have to do that. Everything I do for my kids, I use my body to do. What's more, the law requires me to do those things for my kids, to care for them, provide for them. which means the law requires me to use my body to do those things. I'm not allowed to claim bodily autonomy and then just cease all parental activities. If I did that, my body and myself altogether, we would all go to jail if I did that.

Now, does that mean that the laws against neglect and endangerment control my body? maybe in a very weird and indirect sense, but the point of the laws certainly is not to control my body. The point of the law is to protect children. And so the point of making abortion illegal is not to control women's bodies, but to protect children. That's the point.

Number three, this is a classic. Pro-lifers are only pro-birth, right? They don't care about babies after they're born. Once again, this is irrelevant, even if it's true, but it isn't true. Our whole point is that there's no difference between a baby inside the womb and a baby outside of the womb. We cherish them both. So if we didn't care about babies outside the womb, then we wouldn't be constantly insisting that a child inside the womb is just like a child outside the womb. Now, follow the logic here.

What we're saying is a child inside the womb is like a child outside the womb. therefore the child inside the womb should be treated with value and dignity. This line of reasoning clearly indicates that we think that children outside of the womb have value and dignity. Our whole case is, that's sort of the lynchpin of our entire case. Also, of course, pro-lifers are exceedingly charitable. We give to people in need all the time. And if you're going to make this claim about pro-lifers don't care about kids after birth,

you have to come forward with some sort of data, some information to prove that. Prove, for instance, that pro-lifers don't give the charity and don't help the less fortunate. Again, even if you could prove that, that would not prove anything about abortion, but you can't even prove that. So this is an argument that is not only irrelevant and stupid, but fabricated out of thin air. number two um the pro-life movement is just a bunch of men bossing women around you know pro-lifers or a bunch of men this clearly is is once again irrelevant um because either the pro-life position is wrong or it's right and if it's right it would still be right even if men were the only ones arguing for it but men are not the only ones far from it the pro-life movement is run

predominantly by women. It's mostly women working at pregnancy centers. It's mostly women at the March for Life. It's mostly women praying outside of abortion clinics. And so it's the idea that the pro-life movement is some sort of male-dominated thing is, once again, completely baseless. Number one, and this is, maybe this is the biggest one of all, even more than unborn babies aren't human. women have the right to choose, the right to choose. Yeah, we hear that phrase so often that we take it for granted,

but it actually is a concept without meaning, without content. It doesn't mean anything. Do women have the right to choose? No. Of course they don't. Your right to make a choice depends entirely on the nature of the nature of of the choice. Now, physically, you can choose to do whatever you want within the laws of physics, but legally, there are hundreds upon hundreds of things you cannot choose to do. You can't choose

arson or rape or theft or tax evasion or burglary or vandalism. You can't choose murder either unless your victim happens to be still inside the womb. But when someone insists that women have the right to choose, you know, That statement, the right to choose, is an absolute universal statement. I have the right to choose. But of course, in an absolute and universal way, nobody has that right. Because that would mean that you have the right to choose to do literally anything you want to do. You have the right to make any choice at all, which of course you don't.

So when someone says women have the right to choose, what they really mean is they mean it in a very limited sense. They mean specifically, in their mind, that a woman has the right to choose to end the life of her child before the child emerges from the birth canal. So they put it forward as an absolute unqualified statement, but it actually is a very qualified statement

because they are talking about one particular choice that they believe a woman should be able to make. But if that choice to kill a child is defensible and ethical, it's not defensible and ethical just because it's a choice. The fact that it's a choice is irrelevant. The question with abortion is not whether a woman can choose, but whether an unborn human has a moral claim to existence and personhood. Now, if he doesn't, then a woman can choose abortion. If he does have that claim, then the choice of abortion belongs to the same category as the choice of murder or child molestation. Then that would be a choice that, yeah, physically you can do, but you have no moral right to do it, and you shouldn't therefore have a legal right to do it either.

Now, you'll notice something. You know, gun rights activists will talk about their right to bear arms, but they never talk about the right to shoot, right? Gun rights activists aren't going to go around saying, I have the right to shoot. They have the right to bear arms, but their right to discharge those arms depends quite significantly on why the arms are being discharged and in what context and at what target. So no, you don't have the right to shoot, generally speaking. You have the right to bear the arms, but as far as shooting them, that really is very qualified. It really depends on why and where and in what direction you're shooting. And a choice is like that.

Your right to choose is contingent, not absolute. So to defend a choice on the basis that it is a choice, is very stupid. All of these arguments are very stupid, but the pro-abortion side, of course, doesn't have any other sort of argument at its disposal, unfortunately. All right, we'll go to, yeah, we'll go to emails, Matt Wallshow at gmail.com, Matt wallshow at gmail.com. This is from Isaac says, hey, Matt, you said something yesterday that I'm not sure I agree with, in that you said that loving oneself is a byproduct of loving others. But doesn't scripture say otherwise in that you need to love others as much as you love yourself,

the second greatest commandment? There's a saying that's a bit of a spinoff of that commandment, which is you grace others as much as you grace yourself. And don't people who struggle with self-hatred also struggle with loving others as a result. Love your show and you're down to earth and say it as it is approach. Yeah, well, I think that there's a misunderstanding, Isaac, about that. verse in scripture where it says love others, you know, as you love yourself. Jesus there is not saying that your, you know, that self-love is the foundational love and that you should calibrate

your love for other people based on how much you happen to love yourself. That's not what Jesus is saying. What he's saying is, I think more just pretty simple, that you, you know, you look out for your own interests. And in a similar way, you know, you know, you look out for your own interests. And in a similar way, you should consider other people's interests to be like your own. Thomas Aquinas says, to love is to will the good of the other. Well, you kind of naturally will the good for yourself. You want what is good for yourself. You may have some wrong ideas about what's good,

but to the extent that you understand what's good, you want that for yourself, right? Well, what Jesus is saying is, yeah, do the same for other people too. want what is best for others and try to help them achieve what is best. That's the point. And so you want what's best for yourself, really regardless of how you happen to feel about yourself. You may be feeling kind of down about yourself. You may be struggling with your self-image or whatever, but you still want what's best for

yourself. Unless you get to the point of total self-loathing where you're at the, you know, where you're, you know, at the point of being almost suicidal. Well, now that, of course, would be someone who doesn't want what's best for themselves. And that is bad. I mean, I'm not advocating self-loathing.

Obviously, we don't want to hate ourselves. We shouldn't hate anyone, including ourselves. But the point is, we can't hold other people hostage according to our own emotions, where we're saying, you know, how I treat you is going to depend entirely on how I happen to be feeling. And there are a lot of people who operate that way in relationships, and it's deadly for a relationship. And that is not what Jesus is saying. And by the way, keep in mind, that's the

second greatest commandment. What was the first greatest? First greatest was love God. So that's the first thing. The foundational love is not the love for yourself or the love for your neighbor, the foundational love is your love for God. And through that love, that love becomes sort of the fountain from which our love for ourselves and for other people sort of springs. So that's the way that I would look at it. But I do still believe that if you're struggling with self-image, if you're feeling down about yourself, whatever the case may be, I think The best remedy for that is not to sit around trying to conjure good feelings about yourself. The best remedy is to focus on loving other people and loving God.

Just focus on loving outwardly rather than inwardly. And I think if you do that, you're going to find that you start to feel better too. When you really focus on, you know, you say, I want to put this aside, I'm just going to go play with my kids, spend some time with my kids, focus on loving them, being with them. and I'm not going to think about myself. And in the midst of doing that, of kind of losing yourself in that moment of being with someone else that you love, you may stop for a second and realize,

oh, wait a second, I'm actually feeling pretty good about myself right now. And the moment that you realize that, don't dwell on it, just say, okay, that's great, put it to the side, focus back on other people. I think the more we focus on how we feel about ourselves, the worst we end up feeling.

That's the point. We end up kind of caving in on ourselves because we're so inwardly focused. I think we should be more outwardly focused, and that was the whole point I was trying to make there. This is from Jamie, says, Hi, Matt, I love your show. Agreed with almost everything you say.

I have a question, though, about homosexuality. C.S. Lewis says that he can't judge gay people because he's never struggled with that issue himself. It seems like a lot of Christians like to condemn the sins that they've never been tempted to commit. Meanwhile, they say nothing about the sins they do struggle with. What do you think about C.S. Lewis's attitude. I know you're a big fan of his.

Hi, Jimmy. I am a big fan of C.S. Lewis, and I'm familiar with the passage you're referring to, though it doesn't say exactly that. Here's what he says. This is from Surprised by Joy, I believe. He says, I have said the sin in question, homosexuality, is one of the two, gambling as the other, which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I have never met in battle. So that's not the same thing as saying, I can't judge. Rather, what he's saying, is he has no real insight into that struggle because he's never experienced it, and it's rather easy for him to rail against it because it is, as he says, an enemy that he's never met in battle, so it's easy for him. And I think we can and should still stand in opposition to all sin, including the ones that we've never been tempted to commit ourselves. And I don't think C.S. Lewis would disagree with that. But I agree that there is a tendency among Christians and among all people to focus on the sins of others. That's what the whole, you know, split splinter in your brother's eye, beam in your own eye.

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Service is not available in all areas. He without sin, throw the first stone. All of that in the gospel, that's what all that is about. Jesus spends a lot of time on this concept. So here's how I look at it. Every bad thing that you've ever done, and we've all done bad things, right? So every bad thing you've ever done,

you've done because two factors converged, desire and opportunity. You did the bad thing because you had the desire to do it and you had the opportunity to do it. Desire and opportunity. We know what desire means. Opportunity, in this case, means not only the chance to do it physically, but the ability to do it in our minds without consequence. That's what opportunity means. So we've all told lies, right?

We've all told lies. Well, why did we tell those lies? We told the lie because we wanted to, because we thought that we would get something out of it, and because we encountered a situation where we believed we could tell the lie and get away with it. And oftentimes we find out, in retrospect, we were wrong about that, but still, that's why we did it. So here's the point. You don't deserve credit for not doing things which you've never had the desire and opportunity to do in the first place. think about all the bad things you haven't done. Think of the worst kinds of things. Murder, for instance. Why haven't you murdered anyone, assuming you haven't? Well, you might say, oh, I've never murdered anyone because it's wrong.

But is that really why you haven't done it? No, you haven't done it because you never wanted to. You've never once been seriously tempted to kill someone, and that's why you haven't done it. Now, it's true that it's wrong, and you're aware. of that fact. But you've never been in a situation where the only thing stopping you from killing someone is that you know it's wrong. The thing that stops you from killing someone every day and every moment of your life is that you just, it's not in the cards. You've never had that temptation. So the first sort of damn that holds us back from committing a particular sin

is that we don't want to commit that sin. That's the number one thing that stops us. from doing most of the bad things we don't do. The second dam, not as strong as the first, especially if the first breaks, is opportunity. So there may be a really bad thing that we want to do, but then, so that damn breaks, but then we have that second one holding there of, well, we don't have the opportunity to do it.

The problem, though, is once the first damn breaks and the only thing stopping you is that you don't have the opportunity to do it, then eventually you'll find an opportunity. Think about a guy, an unfaithful man in an unhappy marriage who is a candidate for adultery. He would like to commit adultery. He would like to be with another woman, but he just has never found an opportunity where he thinks he could do it and get away with it. Well, then in that case, opportunity is what's stopping him. But most likely, eventually he'll find an opportunity for himself because that's what people end up doing. And then what happens? Okay, so let's say you want to do the bad thing, you have the opportunity to do it. Now, what's the only thing that can stop you now? Okay,

now this is where morality and virtue come into play. They didn't really come into play before, because it didn't really matter because you didn't want to do the thing anyway. Now, the last and final, the fail-safe is morality and virtue. And that's going to be the only thing that prevents you from doing that thing. Because you want to do it, you have the opportunity. Now you need to call on morality and virtue. I think C.S. Lewis's point is that if on any particular sin, you've never, you know, faced those raging waters. You've never been under that waterfall. You've never felt the force of that water or both of those dams break.

And the only thing stopping you from drowning in that sin is just your own moral discipline. C.S. Lewis is saying, if you've never been through that on any particular issue, then you have no right to feel morally superior because it's not your morals that prevented you from doing it. It's not your morals that saved you from drowning. Your morals didn't come into play. What we need to do is think, what happens when I do have the desire and opportunity to do a bad thing? Even if they're just little things. I think for a lot of us, if we're honest, we have to admit that pretty much whenever we really want to do something and we have the chance to do it, we do it.

whatever it is. And these may be small things most of the time. I think a lot of us have maybe never, or almost never, made a real moral decision in our lives. I think there are a lot of us who have never really committed a moral act. Not all of us, but I think for many of us, every bad thing we haven't done is because we just so happen to never want to do that thing. And every good thing that we've done, it's because we happen to want to do it.

We project the appearance of living a moral life, but really we're only living according to our desires. And the problem is, it's only by accident then that we aren't committing the most heinous sins. It's just an accident of circumstance that we happen to not want to do those things. What happens when we wake up one day and we find that we really do want to do one of those things? We have gotten into the habit of living according to our desire, of living according to desire and opportunity. And once you go down that road, you're on the same road as murderers and rapists and everyone. I mean, you may not be as far down the road as them, but those are people who are living according to their desires. And their desires happen to be heinous.

You're living according to your desires too, which are a little bit less heinous. But unless you learn to resist doing bad things, even when you have the desire and opportunity to do them, then you're just going to drift down and end up over there in that vicinity eventually. unless you die first. I think that's kind of what C.S. Lewis is getting at. And so what should we do? I think we have to get accustomed to acting against our desires and against opportunity. And that means not committing the quote-unquote little sins.

That's why the little sins are so important. because most of us are only ever tempted to the quote-unquote little sins. And so you have to get accustomed to resisting those temptations. And on the other hand, too, when it comes to virtue, it's sort of the inverse, where we have to get accustomed to doing good things even when we really don't want to do them. And when we won't gain much from doing them. and when we can't do so without sacrifice and inconvenience. So kind of the subverting of desire and opportunity,

I think we need to get ourselves accustomed to doing that. And that's part of what, you know, just is just one example, but that's part of what fasting and those sorts of things are about. You know, one of the points of fasting is, yeah, I mean, I want to eat, I can eat. In this case, there's nothing wrong with eating. It's not an immoral thing.

But I'm kind of training myself. This is moral training. Or I'm training myself to not do something that I want to do. And that's just a basic ability that we have to be able to develop within ourselves. And I think a lot of us just do not have that ability. because we have never once refrained from doing something we really wanted to do. All right. So there's that.

And we'll leave it there. Tomorrow, just to remind you, we will be in Philadelphia for the pro-life rally against bullying. 1144 Locust Street, if I remember the address correctly, 11 a.m. in Philadelphia, there's going to be a big group of us there, and it's going to be a great event, so I hope it to see you there. and if not, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Godspeed. Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Claven, host of the Andrew Claven show.

So now the Democrats are going to put on a show. It's the impeachment and constitutional crisis show, except without a real impeachment or a real constitutional crisis because they need a show to replace the reality they've lost. That's on the Andrew Claven show. I'm Andrew Claven.