May 12, 2021
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«Abortion is an act that decisively realizes liberalism within the family. It is not necessary that a child actually be killed. To even consider the child as a licitly kill-able being means that the family is always constituted as a whim of the powerful — of the parents within their rights. That a woman “chooses” to truly love her child does not challenge this mechanism because her love is construed as private and voluntaristic and so as politically meaningless, even if it is, in fact, real love. To say, in one breath, “I love you” and “it would have been permissible for me to kill you at an earlier stage” is simply to re-describe love as subordinate to power: “Insofar as I didn’t exercise my power to kill you, I can love you.” This is how abortion, like child-sacrifice before it, allows for the obviously irrepressible love of parents for their children without challenging the power of the sovereign. All love becomes State-allowed love. All living people become survivors of a self-interested violence that is always being managed by the State.»
— Marc Barnes & Andrew Willard Jones: “What Abortion Means”
«The Catholic Church, for its part, has always taught that “an unjust law is no law at all,” and can therefore be disobeyed by individuals and ignored by judges. This indicates that there is a justice higher than human law, a fact everyone knows as children and are gradually habituated into disbelieving as adults, when it provides a handy excuse for heartlessness: “I’m sorry I have to evict you, but that’s the law; I know minimum wage is unjust, but if you want change, take it up with the State; I know abortion is murder, but how could I deny a person what they are granted by law?” (It is a mark of liberalism that what it sees as evil and unjustified within the family—a father doubling down on his own bad, violent law on the basis of precedent—it sees as “best practices” for the adult individual living under the state.)»
— Marc Barnes: “Judges Without Justice: What Liberalism Means for ACB”
«Liberal categories are constructed categories which have usually been violently enforced against the hard-won categories of Christian thought. An obvious example of this has been the definition of the category of "marriage." No one would deny that the Christian definition has been supplanted by a liberal one, a sacrament replaced with a contract. This is not some unique replacement. Rather, within liberalism, all personal relationships are ultimately substituted for contractual ones. They are replaced because contractual relationships can be governed by a State, while personal relationships, because they are unique, cannot be unilaterally governed. Liberalism's deconstruction of Christian categories has very little to do with truth or falsehood. Rather, the motivation has been to cull power into the hands of princes, to produce a fundamentally manageable and governable people who can be understood at a glance.»
— Marc Barnes: “Reconstructing Catholicism”
“Liberalism is a true philosophy of the nations. Its founding presupposition is that men are individuals, rather than social; that politics is a contentious negotiation of the desires of one’s own individual will over and against the individual will of another; that the world is a field of scarce resources destined to belong to individuals as their private property; that human nature is to pursue one’s own self-interest; that State power is the ability to restrain others’ violence by the threat of one’s own violence, which is viewed, as a result, as the only legitimate violence within a society.
The family is a revelation of the profound limitations of liberalism. The idea that a father and his daughter are two individuals in competition is silly. The idea that the goods between a husband and wife are pieces of private property negotiated between them is simply to understand marriage as a prolonged divorce, which is stupid. The idea that a mother maximizes her self-interest in giving birth is laughable. And it would be obscene to believe that the punishment, discipline, and policing that occurs between grandparents, aunts, uncles and the various children of the family is, in fact, a participation in the legitimate violence of the State.”
— Marc Barnes & Andrew Willard Jones: “What Abortion Means”
«For instance, a report from the New York Times argued, in its usual pandering style, “America stress-bought all the baby chickens,” and the Associated Press, not to be outdone, told us that “In chaotic times, gardening becomes therapy.” Our press has uncovered the sordid secret that when people are worried about the production of food, they begin to produce their own. There is an argument here; a knife worth sharpening. The plague has revealed what has been the case for a few hundred years, that we have built a society in which the poor and the middle-class are dependent on the wealthy for their material survival; in which the basic features of a free peasantry — productive land ownership, communal interdependence, and an intellectual formation in non-capital-intensive skills — has been exchanged for the basic features of slavery — debt-driven wage-work for those who own the means, not merely of industrial production, but of the production of the food, drink, shelter, and skills necessary for material survival. We depend on potatoes appearing in the grocery store, through the machinations of commercial farming, available for our money to buy, in order to live. Having seen those strangely empty shelves, we have turned to grow them ourselves. This is obviously the first step any re-establishment of a peasantry out of a mass society must make. Lauding this small, hapless attempt and encouraging it to endure would be the role of a truly revolutionary press.»
— Marc Barnes: “Do Not Go Unchanged”
«Liberalism is unique among heresies. Most heresies press for some erroneous position within the "field" of Christianity. Liberalism presses for an erroneous claim about the very nature of the field. Thus, for the liberal, intellectual debate takes place in an a-historical, non-ideological, theologically ambivalent, neutral "public square." Religion may be a voice "within the public square" but the public square itself is secular beyond reproach. Theologians like David L. Schindler and those associated with the “radical orthodoxy” movement (Milbank, Pickstock, et al.) tend to argue that the very claim that the public square is ahistorical is itself a historical claim, one that most of history would disagree with. Likewise, the claim that the public square is theologically ambivalent is itself a theological claim…»
— Marc Barnes: “Reconstructing Catholicism”