WICHITA, KS, August 8, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Author and Catholic Answers Live radio host Patrick Coffin was one of the main speakers at the 14th annual Mid-West Catholic Family Conference over the weekend. Some 3,000 Catholics, including children of all ages, were awed by the professional magic tricks performed by Coffin for the crowd, swelling the convention center in Wichita from Friday to its conclusion on Sunday.
Coffin, author of Sex au Naturel opened the conference with an unscripted on-stage back and forth with Tim Staples, the well-known director of evangelization at Catholic Answers. In the exchange, Coffin demonstrated the quick-witted style, which characterizes his on-air personality and his responses to the tough questions of life and family.
LifeSiteNews.com sat down with Coffin to ask about the magic of defending life and family in today’s world.
Coffin began by noting that at its foundation, Catholic Answers was about defending Catholicism from Protestant arguments, but that today, “we have a lot more in common with zealous evangelical Christians inside the larger culture war.”
Now, he said, “our main targets are confused Catholics living in the hangover of the mushy Catholicism lite of the 1970s, and indifferentists who say, 'If there was a Jesus and He died for my sins… meh.'”
LSN: How do you convincingly defend life to an abortion supporter if you only have 30 seconds?
Coffin: I like asking the question, “When did you start being you?”
Keep subtracting 60-second increments, and you get to the moment you were born – the very arbitrary time in which your mode of eating and breathing changed. Keep subtracting 60-second increments; you will never encounter a moment when you were a reptile, a feline, or bovine.
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Humanity begins at the fusion of sperm and egg. You enjoyed a 7-9 month relationship of dependency that was more biologically united.
But a baby after birth is 100 percent as dependent on Mama as one before birth. The difference is time, oxygen, and charm.
LSN: How do you answer the charge of being a “hater” for the Catholic teaching against homosexuality, or same-sex “marriage”?
Coffin: As the homosexualist movement gains more legal teeth in the culture it becomes more and more important when engaging with them on that topic.
And it’s their fetish not ours. They do want to pick a fight. They are itching for a fight on it.
You’re not going to successfully shed the hater logo, because it’s theirs; it has nothing to do with us. They need us to be haters because they have no arguments. They have demagoguery. They have slogans, because they’re trying to make a fortress around their own bad consciences.
I think NARTH and groups like that, especially their insights into the role of the father are very important, because they're speaking the language of family of origin, and that resonates with everyone irrespective of faith. When the father wound is identified as a major cause and a factor that’s when you have common ground. They may still be angry and call you a hater, but you’ve planted an enormous seed that appeals to the Bible are just not going to have.
LSN: How should parents respond when their teens come home from school where they’ve been taught that opposition to same-sex “marriage” is discriminatory?
Coffin: After complaining to the school board and principal about the social engineering, I believe it’s important to be Socratic.
How are we hating? In what way are we being unjust? In what way are we discriminating? And just put it back in their lap.
They’ve built a house of straw. This is propaganda not education.
That can segue into a conversation about complimentarity, the fact that two men can never have the unity a man and a woman can have, and just look at the way the body is designed as a symbol of the inner psychological compatibility.
LSN: What’s with the magic?
Coffin: Magic is a low-rent miracle that is completely fabricated. Magic is an entertaining way of evoking awe and giving people a mental change up.
I spent some time debunking psychics and mediums, who I regard as 99 percent fraudulent and maybe one percent Satanic.