TFP’s crimson capes and banners bring pageantry to events like the 2016 March for Marriage (Photo: Peter Montgomery / Right Wing Watch)
Tradition, Family and Property, the right-wing Catholic group whose red-caped activists are regularly a very visible presence at Religious Right gatherings, says we’re “committing suicide”.
By Peter Montgomery / 11.21.2018
Tradition, Family and Property, the right-wing Catholic group whose red-caped activists are regularly a very visible presence at Religious Right gatherings, includes in its Crusade Magazine an interview with the author of a TFP-published book, “Islam and the Suicide of the West: The Origin, Doctrine, and Goals of Islam.”
The author, Luiz Solimeo, argues that the West is committing suicide by admitting “masses of Muslim immigrants and ‘refugees.’” Unlike 19th and 20th Century immigrants to the U.S., who sought to assimilate and contribute to the local culture, Solimeo says, current Muslim immigrants in Europe “want to destroy this civilization and impose their own doctrine and sharia law on the world.”
In a commentary posted on TFP’s website the same day as the Solimeo interview, John Horvat, the head of the U.S. arm of TFP, decries “the postmodern mania for diversity.” Horvat argues that the phrase inscribed on American money—e pluribus unum, or “out of many, one”—is in jeopardy because there’s not enough of an “unum” to hold us together.
The solution is a return to the ideas of human dignity as expressed in “Christian civilization”:
The American order only makes sense if it rests upon the many solid principles and ideas inherited from Western Christian civilization. Defense of human dignity is only possible by resorting to a rich treasury of many Christian traditions, morals and standards that buttress true dignity. American culture can only be called culture when it is based on a unified canon of many works and literature that helps America define itself. …
What is needed now is a powerful new unum around which a pluribus might form. And that unum must involve a return to the well-spring of Christian civilization. A return to an order governed by God’s Providence is the only thing powerful enough to make America e pluribus unum again.
Horvat’s book “Return to Order” expressed nostalgia for the Catholic feudalism of medieval Europe and called for a return to an “organic Christian society.”
TFP actively opposes the advance of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. In 2013, it linked tornadoes in Illinois to the state’s approval of a marriage equality bill. A few years ago it railed against the presence of gay Republican group GOProud at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying “How can GOProud consider itself conservative when it directly opposes the work of social conservative activists and contributes to America’s moral ruin, through the weakening of the family – the first and fundamental building block of society?”
Originally published by Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way, a program of Open Society Foundations, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.