- DADT.
- Not repeating, but rhyming.
- What relevance repugnance?
- Up-to-date ancients.
- Greece vs. America.
- Georgia’s gonna kill some guy who may not be guilty. (Yawn!)
- Diversity and diversity.
- Constitution Day.
- How’s he doing with Louis Farrakhan?
- Wimps.
1
The following is my official, well-thought-out public position on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: “_____”
Got that?
My military experience consists of:
- One year of Army ROTC in 1967-68
- Filing for conscientious objector status
- Withdrawing my request for conscientious objector status
- Re-filing for conscientious objector status
- Getting a “bad” number in the draft lottery (somewhere in the 60s out of 365)
- Meeting with my Draft Board
- Emptying bedpans in Peoria for two years.
Objectively, I have as much interest as anyone in a strong and able military, but subjectively, I’m unusually antiwar, I think.
I have no idea what promotes, and what undermines, “unit cohesion.” A conscientious objector opining on that subject makes a prima facie case for his own pompous presumptuousness.
I do not trust our politicians to care about such things more than they care about which way the electoral wind is blowing. I think top brass know what the White House and Capital Hill want to hear, just as Pat Robertson knows that guys with wives who suffer dementia want to hear “you have a right to be happy, bunky,” so I don’t care how many Generals or Admirals testify that our military preparedness will not (or will) suffer if we allow people with same-sex attraction to serve openly.
DADT having been repealed, I hope those who said its abolition is harmless were right, and weren’t just involved in politically correct social experimentation at the risk of an institution conventionally thought to protect national security.
If Chaplains end up pressured to compromise their beliefs, as seems likely, I’ll likely be filling in that blank.
2
Walter Russell Mead puts into some helpful perspective the Left’s panic attack (typified by Andrew Sullivan this time) about “Christianists” (or other epithets) taking over the benighted country.
Mead attributes this billboard to the KKK:
I, too, remember people fearing that King was a “Communist agitator,” and they weren’t KKK or even sympathizers. They may have been John Birch Society sympatizers. They certainly were fearful of the existing order being upturned, as are people in every age and every existing order.
Mead uses the billboard to illustrated how much things have improved. I think it could be used to tell the Left not to be such witch-hunters, breathlessly sharing that Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann was seen with someone who was seen with someone else who is credibly thought to have Theonomist/Dominionist/Rushdoonyite sympathies. That’s the J. Edgar Hoover/MLK era all over again, at least in rhyme.
Another Mead example is some 1950s and 60s Time magazine treatments of homosexuality. Do not click those links if you want to think Americans with same-sex attraction are living in a terribly hostile culture today.
If you want to go beyond breathless surface-skimming of “conservative Protestant” approaches to our public life, either to excoriate or excuse folks like Perry and Bachmann, you might want to check Darryl Hart’s offering today at Front Porch Republic.
3
In crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or . . . raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.
(Leon Kass, quoted in “A Return to Repugnance” HT Rick Garnett)
4
[I]s it not odd that the same people who dismiss the past as a mire of allegedly obsolete beliefs get excited at finding someone from that past who can be identified as their intellectual ancestor? Since when do avant-garde futurists care about membership in a time-hallowed historical tradition? If being innovative and keeping “up-to-date” is all-important, wouldn’t it be a let-down that your ideas aren’t so new as you thought?
5
Greece has debt about 12 times GDP, and the world is edgy. We have debt about 14 times GDP.
6
Dubious executions are getting to be so common that maybe the real “man bites dog” story would be one where some clearly guilty, murderous fiend is scheduled to die.
“For those who have the power to grant clemency but refuse, Lord hear our prayer.” (@UnvirtuousAbbey)
7
I’m skeptical of educational “Diversity®“
I love educational diversity, though, so the resuscitation of Antioch College (crazy lefties!) is welcome news and the death of Deep Springs (as a single-sex all male school that I’d never even heard of until now) is unwelcome.
8
Hmmm. Never noticed. First, that there is a “Constitution Day” September 16. Second, that it’s probably unconstitutional.
9
Other than losing the Catholic vote and the Jewish vote, Obama’s going great guns!
10
The Catholic Church of England and Wales has returned to Meatless Fridays. Wimps!
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 