- How to cook a grass-fed steak
- Here’s to 10 years of repentance
- Blah! Blah! Blah! Vote for us!
- Skeet-shooting with the good china
There’s a teensy bit of controversy to come below, so let’s start pleasantly.
We’re coming into Farmer’s Market season in the midwest, and I’ll be tempted again to buy some grass-fed beef, which is much healthier than grain-fed but can present a cooking challenge. Brie Aronson from Polyface Farm gives a suggestion on how to cook a grass-fed New York Strip Steak – a suggestion not step of which is in my ordinary way of cooking steak.
On the culinary track still, Rod Dreher tipped me off to this delightful, tantalizing feature story on a New York City Spice store Therapist.
In early 2003 the United States was heading to war. You didn’t have to be particularly smart to realize that the rush to war was built on a lie. You didn’t have to be a student of foreign policy to realize that it had to do with maintaining U.S. hegemony in a part of the world that contained the oil to which we had become addicted. You did not have to be a literary scholar to realize that this war was also simply the retelling of an age-old tragedy about the overreach of power and the unquenchable thirst for vengeance.
Something told my wife and me that this war was being fought in our name. Something else told us it was being fought to maintain a petroleum-drenched lifestyle to which we had become accustomed. And so we started talking about turning away. We never talked about “repenting” of the path we were on, but we did talk about changing course.
And so we did …
(Robb Davis, A Long Repentance: A Decade of Turning Away from (a Part of) the American Dream)
The GOP is “evolving” as fast as it can on “certain social issues.” Former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman tries to lead:
What could be more conservative than support for more freedom and less government? And what freedom is more basic than the right to marry the person you love? Smaller, less intrusive government surely includes an individual deciding whom to marry. Allowing civil marriage for same-sex couples will cultivate community stability, encourage fidelity and commitment, and foster family values.
(Wall Street Journal, quoted by R.R. Reno at First Things)
Words, words, words! No real meaning, just an effort to sedate, mesmerize, seduce. I instantly and viscerally knew this was sophistry, but Reno did the heavy lifting for me on just how it’s sophistry, including this:
[G]ay marriage won’t just happen if government “gets out of the way.” It requires creating a new possibility that will not come to pass if traditional institutions and moral traditions are left alone. Government must intervene. Our moral traditions must be subjected to what activists think of as corrective surgery. With gay marriage we’re sure to get legislation redefining what it means to be a parent, and what it means to be a child, as is already the case in California. In the way of these redefinitions will come programs to “reeducate” John Q. Public to the “new realities.”
There is a whole emerging genre of Me Too! Conservative® arguments for same-sex marriage. Every one of them recycles liberal arguments, which is no surprise because the American governing coalition runs from liberal liberals to conservative liberals.
That Mehlman can argue with a straight face that redefining a prepolitical institution at the point of a gun, not to mention extending the newly-licensed lovers the fabled 1000+ benefits of marriage, is a “small government” proposal is a testimony to the contempt of the GOP for voters, the credulity of swing voters, or both.
(Conservative® is a wholly-owned trademark of the Republican Party. All rights reserved, but I used it anyway because I don’t give a hoot about the GOP any more.)
Elizabeth Scalia uproariously takes on the “Jesus never said anything about gay marriage” trope so favored of folks who are “shedding their principles like snake-skins” on the subject:
Of course, in chapter 10 of Mark’s Gospel Jesus states definitively that divorce cannot exist; these are his actual words, and they don’t matter a whit to our society, yet we must now glean our wisdom from the words Jesus did not say. The argument puts one in mind of a skit from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, in which comedienne Totie Fields, dressed as an enormous toddler, sang,
Nobody told me that I couldn’t paint the baby
I was just told not to paint the walls and floors
but nobody told me that I couldn’t paint the baby
so I did.For the five or six thousand years preceding the last fifty, no one needed an explicit pronouncement that marriage was an office involving opposite sexes because it seemed obvious. In the last half century, however, human sexual mechanisms have become utilized less for production and more for pleasure, and our national endorphin overdose has left us disoriented enough to argue that if Mom doesn’t say we can’t go skeet shooting with the good china, it must mean we can.
It is a puerile and pathetic argument, meant to guilt people into acquiescence, but since it is being entertained, we must ask whether it is true …
Scalia, who never drank the Protestant Kool-Aid, then discerns Jesus saying some things after all:
In Mark, Jesus denounces divorce and describes marriage as explicitly “male and female.” In Matthew’s Gospel he does the same, but he says something more:
But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.”
In Christ Jesus’ statement there is no judgment and no denigration of those who are “incapable of marriage”; it is a simple, respectful teaching, and it condemns no one. Is it too politically incorrect to wonder if Jesus is here speaking—with typical love and grace—of marriage as an office that is both exclusive and exclusionary? Jesus does not lie, and he seems to be suggesting that either through nature or nurture or religious inclination, there are humans who are as beloved as any others—equally, in the sight of God—but not meant to marry.
If you actually care about what Jesus did or didn’t say, and about what it mean – I’m not talking about just scripture trolling to buttress your opinion or to get a throw-away line – I’d recommend engaging and reflecting on her brief column. If you’re Bret Stephens, of the Conservative® Wall Street Journal, whose contribution to the Me Too! genre appeared the same day as Scalia’s, you might want to stay away lest you suffer a “Well, duh!” moment.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 