It is Christmas Eve. Tonight, if the weather holds up, I will be flying to my parents, place, and the blog could take a break. Mum is not averse to blogging or emails — but Christmas morning and afternoon is taken up with family time. I will neither blog nor exercise until I have dealt with the family.

In the meantime, I note that the commercial people have gone crazy (and retailers are happy) because the spend is up, and the credit cards exercise: yesterday I recycled a Stollen and Christmas cake to another family because we are going North and the food needs to be eaten: we like many families, have over catered (in my case over ordered, because I cannot do things like this)

My Russian teacakes are done. Christmas can come now. pic.twitter.com/05DbYTveN3

— Sunshine Mary (@SunshineMarySSM) December 23, 2013

@pukeko60 @SunshineMarySSM @AryaBlueBaby @alf1361 🙂 pic.twitter.com/T6VcPbxoOe

— Sis (@DelightfulSis) December 23, 2013

So before I pack and get going, I want to look at the passage for today. In it we see Joseph.

Matthew 1:18-25

¹⁸Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ²²All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ²³“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife,²⁵but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Let’s expand. If a woman is pregnant, she is not a virgin, or has not been chaste. It is possible to get pregnant if sperm is spilled on the perineum, but then you are not chaste or ignorant as to the marital act: and within marriage there should not be a virgin.

Mary was exceptional, as was Joseph. For Joseph believed that this girl had not been sleeping around, but had become impregnated by the spirit, so married her, taking on board the shame of a shotgun marriage, but then did not sleep with her.

In doing this Joseph showed exemplary self control. Many couples have entered the marital bed with the full knowledge of each other’s bodies: they have not waited, which is why I strongly advocate the Puritan practive of very short engagements once the betrothal contract is signed. But Joseph, who had a right, in fact a duty, to bed his wife, chose not to until Christ was born.

And both Mary and Joseph were exceptional people, who could live by faith, and keep their world. In this time, Joseph would have been told by his friends to dump her and Mary would have not been believed and probably offered a medical abortion. For this world assumes all are fallen, all want to fall, and that any attempt to reach for a higher standard is elitism and arrogance.

But Mary was carrying not an unusual event, but a miraculous one. Both of them knew that their child was to be blessed from the time of their birth. Both considered that they were among the legacy of faith stretching back to Moses’ mother. They bore the shame with pride, knowing that their saviour was to come.

And this is what we need to do. Consider for a second this comment from Mark Steyn, referring to the most recent complaint by GLAAD about some Christians who like shooting ducks and can quote scripture correctly.

In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us — that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court — but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

Up north, Ezra and I decided that, if they were going to “de-normalize” us, we’d “de-normalize” them. So we pushed back, and got the entire racket discredited and, eventually, the law repealed. It’s rough stuff, and exhausting, but the alternative is to let the control-freaks shrivel the bounds of public discourse remorselessly so that soon enough you lack even the words to mount an opposing argument. As this commenter to Mr Steorts noted, the point about unearthing two “derogatory” “puerile” yet weirdly prescient gags is that, pace Marx, these days comedy repeats as tragedy.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal.

We live by faith. We see the virgin birth as miraculous: not a preemie, nor the result of heavy petting gone wrong. But as it was written: a woman who had never known a man with child by the work of God. We should see that Joseph was also guided by the spirit, to wed Mary, to take on board the stigma and shame of her pregnancy, and to raise and provide for Jesus, the Christ. We accept there are miracles.

We may know that the sound of hooves generally means there are horses around, but that it may, very rarely, be a zebra. (Reverse this, of course, if you live in Africa). We accept there can be miracles, adn that God can intervene, even in the most hopeless situations.

But the left not only deny the existence of zebras, but de-normalize the word. They could not accept the reasons why Joseph or Mary did what they did — because of a dream? Because God told them to? Instead they want everything neatly tied in boxes that fit into their ideology, or tidily swept away.

Trouble is, humans are like that, and neither is God. The map is not the land, the ideology merely models the structure of society, and the facts on the ground always trump theory.

And when a true miracle occurs, we should rejoice. At Christmas we remember the greatest of these, far more than who made the most tasty morsels.