Ray Bradbury’s 1962 dark fantasy horror story Something Wicked This Way Comes is well worth the read. It’s an American classic that explores the true nature of evil.

A traveling carnival comes to a small Midwestern town one October led by the malevolent “Mr. Dark” who is able to grant anyone’s most secret desires. Once the wish is granted, the individual becomes enslaved to the carnival’s proprietor.

Among the many classic lines in Bradbury’s novel is offered at the story’s denouement when Charles Halloway fights the powers of evil hand-to-hand alongside his son William and the boy’s good friend Jim Nightshade. To explain why evil is consumed by hatred, Mr. Halloway tells his son, “Good, to evil, seems evil.”

Good’s principle weapon, which evil cannot replicate, is love.

Evil, and those who propagate it, such as fundamentalist atheists and militant secularists, have a seemingly infinite capacity for rationalized hatred. Evil, as Mr. Bradbury pointed out, thinks it’s virtuous. It believes its unjust actions are “justified.” To the wicked, logical and moral consistency are irrelevant. The ends justify the means. Fair play is a sign of weakness. Kindness and compassion are negligible. Civil and human rights apply only to those who are likeminded. Forgiveness is a myth. To those given to wickedness, justice means, “I’m right and to Hell with the rest.”

As you can see, evil is the warped, mirrored image of good. But, like anything we can see in a mirror, it’s not real and only an illusion―it’s a parody of the reality that is God.

In his On the Holy Trinity, St. Augustine of Hippo describes evil as the “absence of good.” (Latin: privatio boni) in the same way that darkness is not a thing in and of itself but rather the absence of light. Augustine repeats this idea in his The City of God, (XI, chapter 9,) when he writes, “For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil.’”

In contemporary America, the enemies of the Sons and Daughters of Light cowardly fight us by perverting goodness and subverting the law against us. It’s a bloodless and merciless “lawfare” they wage perhaps to give the illusion they are “civilized” or perhaps they hope to attack us stealthily and anonymously. But, as the devout Catholic Savoyard philosopher Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre (1753–1821) reminds us, “Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.” That is, those who reject God’s moral order and His selfless sacrifices, are destroyed by their own hubris.

Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union has, once again, filed papers with the intent to sue the state of Michigan over its law protecting the moral conscience of faith-based foster care and adoption agencies.

In 2015, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed a law which exempts faith-based child placement agencies from providing services that conflict with their professed religious values and beliefs.

A lesbian couple, who “seemingly” didn’t realize that Catholic adoption agencies have values different from the ones to which they subscribe and, refusing to go to a more homosexual-friendly adoption agency, got into a snit and left in a huff when they were told that their relationship wasn’t conducive or sufficiently loving to raising emotionally and spiritually healthy children.

And so, the loving couple turned, of course, to the ACLU, to fight their immoral battle for them. Such love these homosexuals have for each other! All relevant sociological and psychological data points to the fact that lesbians’ relationships are extremely fragile and, in all European countries are twice as likely to break up as are male homosexual relationships, which in turn are similarly frail when compared to married, religiously-oriented heterosexual couples.

It might be argued that people aren’t statistics and that just became one belongs to a statistical cohort where certain trends and behaviors are accurate, apparent and valid, it doesn’t mean that they will act true to form. However, this is irrelevant sophistry because children aren’t chess pieces or widgets or some other theoretical construct―they are living human beings and all human beings have the right to have two loving parents of the opposite gender like the ones which produced them originally.

These lesbians, like all extremists, have convinced themselves they have the “right to be right”―an imaginary “truthiness” in which an idea or assertion is judged by intuition and emotional appeal rather than by the careful and objective intellectual examination of evidence, logic and scientific and historical facts. Irrational people appeal to emotions rather than to logic or morality. This allows them to pick and choose to whom they deign to bestow similar rights. This self-blindness allows them to treat their opponents as if they were less than human and to ignore their own moral and logical inconsistencies.

Such is the nature of evil.

These lesbians could have gone to any other child placement agencies in Michigan but they refused to for the sake of deep pockets. The ACLU is on record for constantly denying Catholics their Constitutionally-protected religious liberties and their right to their own morality and freedom of conscious. As with its long war against Catholic hospitals, the goal of the ACLU is to either force faith-based institutions to violate their religious teachings or to drive them out of human services completely.

They hope to make the Faithful irrelevant and, to do so, they need to make us out as the “enemy.”

As to the Left’s misguided attempt at destroying us, they will succeed only in hurting the needy children, often from poor, abusive situations, in our care. The ACLU’s agenda is driven not by concern for people in need, but by a determination to advance its pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage, pro-euthanasia, pro-transsexualism, pro-death and anti-Christian ideology at all costs. 

The ACLU extremists have had a long campaign of anti-Catholic bigotry. This current permutation won’t be their last attack on family life or on religious faith in public life. We must be ever-vigilant and make sure we keep an eye on their sources of finances. This is a battle before which God has placed before us two choices―life and death, between His blessing and His curse, and He calls heaven and earth to witness the choice we make. For the sake of our children, we must choose life. (Deuteronomy 30:19)