UPDATE: Fr. Chadwick responds below. I will leave this article up in order to provide the necessary context.
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Yesterday, I missed a curious sentence in the first paragraph of Fr. Chadwick's response to my 8-28 article, "Catholicism, Liturgy and Manliness."
It reads,
It is easy to come up with caricatures of the idea through bogus military orders in the Confederate states in America and modern cowboys with their small artillery in wait for some future conflict.
Now that, fair readers, is in all probability a cheap shot taken at yours truly, The Embryo Parson. Fr. Chadwick not only reads this blog, but he is a Facebook friend, and through both sources has likely gleaned the following about me:
1) I come from a long line of Southrons, the vast majority of whom fought on the side of the Confederacy during Mr. Lincoln's War. My half-Cherokee great-grandfather James Southerland was one of those ancestors. After the war, he joined United Confederate Veterans, an association of soldiers formed shortly after the war to honor the service of those soldiers who survived that conflict and those who did not. The successor organization to the UCV is the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an association of descendants of those who were non-commissioned soldiers in the War Between the States. A similar organization, Military Order of the Stars and Bars, honors the service of commissioned soldiers. I have been open on my Facebook page about my membership in the SCV, and recently I posted something about an officer in North Carolina to whom I am quite possibly related. I noted that if I was able to confirm my relation, I'd be eligible to join MOS&B.
It seems Fr. Chadwick has mistaken these historal organizations for "military orders". They are no more so than are the Sons of the American Revolution. Nor do the "Confederate states in America" (sic) exist anymore, except in the minds of the most extreme Neo-Confederates. The Confederacy was formed in 1860 and was destroyed in 1865, something that was lamented by Lord Acton and other Englishmen at the time, by the way;
2) I have also been vocal about the right to keep and bear arms, about the fact that there is almost certainly a "future conflict" coming to both North America and Europe, and about the role the RKBA will play here in the states when it comes. I happen to have made a meager scholarly contribution to the body of legal scholarship supporting what has been called the "standard model" of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which model was more or less recently affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in the Heller and McDonald decisions. Hoplophobic critics of the "standard model" sometimes refer to it as the "insurrectionist" reading of the Second Amendment, but in so doing they simply shoot themselves in the foot, if you'll excuse the pun, for all the constitutional history of the right to keep and bear arms -- a history that finds its origin in English (ahem!) common law -- is supportive of the proposition that the right to arms is guaranteed, in large part, to enable the civilian populace to effectively wage "future conflicts" in a 4th-Generation-style insurrection. Fr. Chadwick may wish to join millions of his countrymen and American liberal-lefties in eschewing such a proposition, but the historical and constitutional facts speak for themselves.
3) It goes without saying that I myself own a number of small arms for this very political purpose. My rifle of choice is the Colt LE-6920 M4, a carbine version of the evil, dreaded AR-15.
All of the foregoing, in Fr. Chadwick's overactive mind, makes me a "cowboy." Now, it's to be expected that someone who "detest(s) the notion of 'muscular Christianity'” will likely join the liberal-lefties in using the term "cowboy" as a pejorative term. For such people, the cowboy's virility, independence, willingness to suffer all that the particular line of work dishes out, and his noble code of honor are apparently things to be held in contempt. But I for one will accept being in even some remote way identified as the "cowboy", even though I am nowhere near as manly as he. Chadwick should take a trip out West sometime. I would be glad to introduce him to some real cowboys up in Wyoming. I think he'd receive quite the education. ;>)
Now, having written all this I suppose I could be wrong about the meaning of Fr. Chadwick's words, but if I am he is more than welcome to disabuse me of this interpretation, and I will accordingly delete this blog article post-haste. If he does not, however, then he stands duly corrected here about Confederate history organizations, what a "cowboy truly is, and the reason why Americans (including many cowboys!) have long been fans of Colt firearms.
Moreover, I will more than look forward to commenting (again) on whatever "caricatures" he may choose to "come up with". ;>)
