Analyst's note:  We all benefit from a review of Allen West's Valentine's Day message and the response of our friend and colleague David R. Gillie. 

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Valentine’s Day and the defense of marriage

by Allen West

Lt. Col. Allen B. West is a retired Army Lt. Col., one-term Congressman, and Real American at heart

Happy Valentines Day to all of America’s sweethearts, especially mine: Angela, Aubrey, Austen, and Wangying Lin. I also want to send a heavenly Valentine’s Day wish to my mom, Elizabeth Thomas West. She’s there with her special lifelong Valentine my dad, Herman Sr.

Today guys try to get themselves out of the “doghouse” and retailers and marketers capitalize. I do have to ask a question though, what do men get on Valentine’s Day? I know, if you act right and bought the right gift, you get peace of mind.

But you might be surprised to know the true story of Valentine’s Day. Father Frank O’Gara of Whitefriars Street Church in Dublin, Ireland, explained the following to CBN.com.

Valentine was a Roman Priest at a time when Emperor Claudius was actively persecuting the church. Claudius also had an edict that prohibited the marriage of young people based on the idea that unmarried soldiers fought better than married soldiers, because married soldiers might be afraid of what might happen to them or their wives or families if they died.

Valentine lived in a very permissive society in which polygamy was quite popular, yet the Christian faith was attracting more and more followers. Valentine encouraged them to marry within the Christian church – which he had to do secretly because of the edict.

Valentine was eventually caught, imprisoned and tortured for performing marriage ceremonies against the command of Emperor Claudius. Legends exist surrounding Valentine’s actions while in prison. A man called Asterius, who was to judge Valentine, had a blind daughter. Supposedly, Valentine prayed with and healed the young girl with such astonishing effect that Asterius himself became Christian as a result.

In 269 AD, Valentine was sentenced to a three-part execution of beating, stoning, and finally decapitation. Legend has it the last words he wrote were in a note to Asterius’ daughter signed, “from your Valentine” thereby inspiring romantic missives to this day.

Valentine was persecuted because of his stand for marriage, between one man and one woman. History has a way of repeating itself.

“What Valentine means to me as a priest,” explains Father O’Gara, “is that there comes a time where you have to lay your life upon the line for what you believe. And with the power of the Holy Spirit we can do that — even to the point of death.”

So the true meaning of Valentine’s Day is rooted in the Christian faith and the stand for Christian marriage between one man and one woman. And for St. Valentine, it was based upon this verse, John 15:13 (NIV), “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

So today, when you write “to my Valentine,” remember the saint, the man — Jesus Christ — who inspired Valentine and inspires us still today.

Read more at http://allenbwest.com/2014/02/valentines-day-defense-marriage/#mtuuMOKxXikP4KYe.99

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Colonel West!

Thank you for your moving and instructive article.

Of course, love has always required courage. Ask anyone who has stood through hard days and tearful nights by a wayward child, with unyielding firmness and unflagging tenderness. Ask anyone who has watched his Bride and Companion die slowly, who has wrestled with God for her, and who has struggled to know how to uphold her in faith, and word, and deed until the end.

He who does not love someone or something worthy of love cannot know courage. Rashness or cruelty he can and may know, but never courage.

In such days as ours, it increasingly requires a rare and special species of courage to stand— modestly, but firmly—against the onslaught of antinomianism in league with lawless power that is bold to call Good Evil and Evil Good,[1] to call Lust Love, and Love Delusion, to call Sodomy Marriage, and Marriage Oppression, and is breathless to bend our knees, too, to the lies.

The courage to tell the truth—in the face of such a remorseless tide of lies, and  the soon-to-be-torrent of legal and political persecution now just beginning to flow after it—is now, as always, the sine qua non of the Defense of Freedom.

None said it with a more deathless luminosity than our Lord, who promised, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”[2]

In our day, God gave us that most beautiful of Christian Patriots, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose supreme mission, it seemed, was to recast for our view again and again[3] the symbiotic relationship between Tyranny and the Lie, and between the refusal to lie and the beginnings of liberation.

"When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: 'I am violence. Run away, make way for me—I will crush you.' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally—since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies—all loyalty lies in that.

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.

This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism."[4]

In the Darkness that so often describes our Noonday, we are sorely and frequently tempted—at least I am—to despair, to imagine that the Triumphant Evil that confronts us is inequitably more daunting than that which must have confronted Christians and Patriots in an easier, brighter day. By reminding me of the story of the origin of Valentine’s Day that I learned in First Grade (My, has school changed!), your article reminds me that my occasional despair is not only unwarranted, but foolishly self-indulgent. Thank you for the refresher in St. Valentine’s courageous, faithful love.

On no front in our own day’s War between Good and Evil, Liberty and Bondage, does the battle rage more consequentially than on the front between the Truth and Lies about Love and Marriage. On no front, sadly, does there appear so much dispiriting and fateful cowardice on all hands.

Thank you, Sir, for standing in the gap. Thank you for your humble, faithful, Lover’s Courage. And may God bless your wife and daughters on this St. Valentine’s Day.

David R. Gillie,
CDR, USN
Adjunct Professor, American Military University
Lecturer in American Civics

[1] Isaiah 5:20.
[2] John 8:32.
[3] In his Nobel Lecture, in his historical novels, and, most unforgettably, in his “Live Not By Lies.”
[4] Aleksandr Solzhenitsn, “Live Not By Lies,” in From Under the Rubble, Zurich.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Solzhenitsyn-Reader-Essential-1947-2005/dp/1935191551

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Related reading:

The Family: A Proclamation to the World

The Home: A Refuge and Sanctuary