Brian Rainwater

“License, or “freedom for its own sake,” sounds much more like Justice Kennedy’s expression of American relativism. Commentators have long noted that this is just the difference between freedom directed (at a moral purpose) and freedom undirected — which more starkly shows the contrariety between the two terms. “Liberty” and “license” tend to sound more like synonyms. Once more, the universal recognition of the right to liberty is a necessary condition of the true republic.38 As stated in the introduction, republics are the one form of government rooted in Catholic Natural Law morality. When the true sense of liberty is absent, one should feel confident calling his country a republic in name only.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Neither the English Whigs nor the American founders could have waged revolution in 1688 or 1776 without secretly plagiarizing Catholic ideas. And this means that the American founding was unequivocally Catholic. Now how simple is that?”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Chapter 2 takes a look at the false, secular copy of subsidiarity operative in the U.S. Constitution, explaining why local rule eventually broke down in America. Prot-Enlight plagiarized and mongrelized this primary Catholic social principle; with it, Madison wound up establishing something opposite to liberty: license. The republican culture degenerates if it forgets the moral object of its freedom.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view that uniquely affirms it . . . or else to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after he sees that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with chapter 2’s subsidiarity, chapter 3’s popular morality, chapter 4’s humanism, chapter 5’s political economy, and chapter 6’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can affirm these things with any internal consistency.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome