Fr. Robert Barron does this up nicely. It’s about the ability to see something as one thing, not another, in effect to love a sinner (he does not speak of sin) while deploring the sin:

What strikes me so often as I listen to the public conversation regarding moral issues is the incapacity of so many to make the right distinctions.

Some of the muddiest water surrounds the concepts of love/ hate and tolerance/intolerance. In the spirit of Sokolowski, I would like to make what I hope are some clarifying differentiations.

He does so, along the way noting the phlosophical roots of this inability (low in his column):

Once the sense that there is objective good and evil has been attenuated [reduced to not much at
all], as it largely has been in our society, the only categories we have left are psychological [I’d specify
emotional] ones. And this…

Meanwhile, following yesterday’s Matthew 8, we have today’s verses 8 and following, and the Gadarene swine, who paid a high price for being too close to demons. (Were sent tumbling into the sea, where they perished.)

Lesson here for us all. Whatever we mean by demons, the farther away the better.

The Donald of Oak Park, its senator in Springfield, where he’s high in the ranks of the Ruling Party and is smooth-as-silk boss of Oak Park’s Democratic Party organization, took to the podium at Oak Park’s Carleton Hotel on a glorious day in late June of 2013 for his annual report to the Business and Civic Council. 

It was time to explain things to bankers, business owners and operators, and other issues-aware citizen consumers and taxpayers with skin in the game to varying degrees and/or psychic income from allegedly progressive political victories and enactments.

The state was in a state of turmoil, confusion, and all-around hyperactivity. The two legislative chambers were at odds over a pension solution. The governor, a one-time gadfly with Oak Park roots, was soon to cut off legislators’ pay checks to punish them for inactivity.

For the Donald, however, it was what-me-worry time. “The…

— Oct 2113 gathering of eagles, Julian Middle School, concluded —

A panel of students were given the floor as yet another quizzer of the legislators. The meeting became a middle-school version of show and tell. The first question, a good one if not something for which the legislature has direct responsibility (did the students know that?), was about the high cost of college.

The Oak Park senator punted: Legislators are aware of the problem and are working on it.

Sen. Lightford referred to MAP (Monetary Award Program) grants, the state’s financial aid program for “neediest” students attending Illinois colleges, according to a state site, but not explaining that, assuming her audience recognized the term.

Rep. Lilly offered a remarkable claim: “I passed legislation for grants for junior college,” adding an equally remarkable suggestion: “I’d like to put on the table, [we should] get parents involved. We need to…