Move over, fella.

Your Tatler is Catholic convert and though thoroughly catechized, maybe better than most (seven months by two gentlemen from Opus Dei), there are no doubt still gaps in his knowledge of Holy Church and her teachings. A case in point is an item in today’s Vatican News:

Pope on Confession: ‘Forgiveness is a human right’

“Forgiveness is a human right” which priests at the confessional should dispense by welcoming, listening to and accompanying penitents, thus helping contribute to a “spiritual ‘ecology’ of the world.”

“Forgiveness is a ‘right’ in the sense that God, in the Paschal Mystery of Christ, has given it in a total and irreversible way to every person willing to accept it, with a humble and repentant heart.”

Um, yes, no doubt, but is this something new? That priests should be understanding and listen to confessors while they’re in the box? Your Tatler sort of thought that’s a given. Good heavens, what will be next? That priests should offer absolution and penance?

Here are some more revelations from Christ’s Vicar on Earth:

By accompanying the penitent, the Pope pointed out, the confessor does not decide for the other, as he is not the master of the conscience of the other.

The confessor simply accompanies, with all the prudence, discernment and charity of which he is capable, the recognition of the truth and the will of God in the concrete experience of the penitent.  

Here, he said, one should distinguish between the seal of confession and the dialogue of spiritual accompaniment, which is also reserved, although in a different form.

Dear readers, do help your Tatler out, for he is harboring the most uncharitable notion about these nuggets of knowledge: that they are as shallow as a Rod McKuen poem or a David Haas hymn. Suggest a method this poor sinner might delve into the texts above and behold something more spiritually enlightening than the preparation instructions for a TV dinner. The first good soul to oblige will be gratefully rewarded with a free one-year subscription to the Taos Tatler, with an additional three months added if an explanation of “spiritual ecology” is also provided.

A depressed teenager is persuaded by “experts” to change her sex and pays for it with her life.

Note: this essay was published earlier and your sometimes technically challenged Tatler, with the assistance of WordPress, managed to delete a substantial part of it. With the help of recovered memory he has restored it, though it may not perfectly resemble what was lost.

Public schools in this country have been on a downward slide for over half a century. For a good number of those years it has simply been rising incompetence and declining standards and discipline; ever increasing spending per pupil with increasingly dismal results. As bad as that is, poor proficiency in math and English can be remedied and made right, provided parents are willing to take on what the schools can no longer do.

In the last few years though a far more ominous trend has appeared. Whereas before the problems with our schools were primarily the fault of incompetent teachers and their union protectors, now we are seeing a preponderance of peripheral staff, i.e., “professionals” with worthless graduate degrees, who have little regard for the welfare of their charges or the rights of their parents. Our schools today are not only ineffectual, but can actually be dangerous.

From The Epoch Times:

A grieving California mom says her severely depressed teen daughter was encouraged to leave her family, go into foster care, and begin taking cross-sex hormones before she developed unbearable pain and killed herself by laying down across the tracks in front of a train.

Abigail Martinez, 53, alleged school staff at Arcadia High School—without her knowledge or consent—encouraged her daughter, Yaeli, to join an LGBTQ club that met at the school during lunchtime.

She blames a school psychologist and other school staff, the Los Angeles County’s Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), a transgender student and her mother, and the LGBTQ club for “brainwashing” and coaching Yaeli on how to get hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery instead of recommending treatment for her depression.

“They were doing all this secretly,” Martinez said. “I didn’t even realize that my daughter was going to this club because they don’t report to you what they’re doing at school to keep them ‘safe’ from their parents, according to them.”

Not only was young Abigail the victim of malpractice by the the slew of organizations and agencies of the Los Angeles school system (and their like can be found in schools everywhere), but her mother was treated like a criminal for simply refusing to call her daughter by a male name and trying to stop the pumping of male hormones into the poor girl’s body. For this, she was accused of child abuse(!) and was only permitted to visit her daughter, now in foster care, for “one hour, one week under supervision,” permitting her sadistic tormentors to further their quackery undisturbed, until she could be tormented no longer. There is much more to this story and reading the whole thing, if you can stomach it, is highly recommended.

The nightmare described above is not uncommon in our public schools today, where basic skills are secondary to wokeness. The proponents of the latter are a vicious, driven lot, far more concerned with ideology than the learning of math or English. To drive the point home, look at the photo below of young Abigail Martinez and her adoring mother and consider what has been done to them: one has been murdered, the other has been put through living hell, from which she is never likely to recover.

Thus is the state of so many of our country’s public schools today. There never was a great need for them and since they now do more harm then good, they ought to be abolished and replaced with, by those who need them, vouchers with which parents may choose where and how their children are schooled. Not only will that result in a far better educated populace, it will save billions if not trillions of the public’s money.

A poem in free verse by Kamala Harris.

The significance of the passage of time, Right?
The significance of the passage of time.
So when you think of it, there is great Significance to the passage of time . . .
There is really great significance to the Passage of time.

Copyright 2024 Oxford University Press.

The real reason Kamala Harris’s staff is fleeing?

The estimable Roger Kimball recently wrote a think piece that he himself admits may be far fetched, but seems less so each day. In it he speculates Democratic leadership, desperate about the coming cataclysm in 2024, are scrambling to come up with ways to remove, before the election, the two mental cyphers that are the President and Vice President.

Ron Klain, the real president of the United States, plus his staff, are comfortably and firmly entrenched in their powerful jobs. They want to keep those jobs, so if Biden goes Harris must go too, for if she were to run for president in 2024 she would lose by an even bigger margin than Biden. Hence it behooves Klain to get rid of her first.

Which brings up the title of today’s little offering: there are now ten former members of Kamala Harris’s staff enjoying spending more time with their families. That their former boss is a harridan of the first rank and utterly ignorant on just about everything cannot be denied. Still, the jobs these former employees had were likely very well paid and could hardly have required much work; since when has the Vice President’s job been regarded as challenging? If the VP doesn’t have much to do, how much work is there for the staff? Regardless the unpleasantness of the boss, it just doesn’t add up so many of her staffers quitting quitting so soon.

No, your Tatler suspects the real reason so many top members of Kamala’s staff are bolting is they know or sense their boss will be out soon. They probably figure it’s better to flee now than to wait until their boss is brought down and they are brought down with her. No wonder they’re running for the door. Expect more to do similarly.

A pretty girl is like a melody.

They are indeed “laughing at us” (as no doubt their counterparts at CBS and ABC are) when making Lia Tomas, the shemale Ivy League swimmer, look more ladylike. It is not a laughing matter though, but another example of the transformation of this nation into a Stalinist woke republic, where laughter is banned, save for public shaming and executions.

While it might seem your Tatler is over reacting to a seeming peccadillo on the part of NBC, we must understand what is behind it. They did a digital makeover on the creature that is Lia Thomson in order to further a lie, that (s)he is a woman, despite having the obvious features of a man, e.g., powerful build, male genitalia, a lower speaking voice (a baritone, in your Tatler’s estimation) and, in this case, manly facial hair. NBC realized that and applied a digital depilatory to his face. Not yet satisfied, they also plucked his eyebrows, gave him daintier lips and generally made him into an adorable co-ed.

NBC’s mission is to persuade so-called “low-information voters,” i.e, those who get most of their news from television, a substantial number even today, to accept this creature as a woman. Studies show that this demographic is likelier to favorably judge political candidates by their looks. Lia Thomas is not a politician (yet), but a totem for the powerful forces in this country that want to destroy it by turning upside down all morals, logic and virtues that have been the hallmarks of Western Civilization.

Your Tatler was asked not long ago what would become of Lia Thomas after he’s moved on from college fame. He doesn’t have much to look forward to. Though an Ivy Leaguer and presumably possessing at least some brains, he doesn’t realize he is but a pawn of the radical left and once no longer useful to them, will be dumped. Just ask Cindy Sheehan.