- Ideological Crossovers.
- Everything’s political, everything’s “culture wars.”
- SSM & ART.
- Poetry from the Fearmonger Shop.
- A dubious world record.
I’ve never understood how abortion became a partisan political issue. I’ve never considered myself a liberal, but it seems to me that defending the most powerless is an impeccably honorable aspiration, professed more often by liberals than conservatives (who tend to social Darwinism). Yet pro-life liberals, like Nat Hentoff, remained a curiosity.
Today, I don’t understand why New Urbanism is largely a liberal province, and why conservatives are all into Giantism, or so it seems. Indeed, it’s one reason why I’m clearly off-script with Movement Conservatism, and consider it as profoundly un-conservative and inhuman as the Democrat support of voluntary feticide.
But New Urbanism has its conservative curiosities, too. Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns is one, and he inteviewed another in this week’s Strong Town’s podcast, The Restless Urbanist, Edward W. Erfurth IV.
It seemed like the typical open-ended question for the local paper’s occasional Rapid Response feature: “What do you make of this week’s protest of and then run on Chick-fil-A, after the restaurant chain’s owner commented on support for traditional, one man/one woman marriages?”
By the time my evil twin was not-so-rapidly done, here’s what he said. Enjoy it now, since it may be too long and too blunt for publication:
The Mall was our Mecca, the economy our Switzerland, where weapons of culture war were laid aside, a cease-fire observed. Buying stuff was the glue that bound us together. We even passed non-discrimination laws to assure that everyone could enjoy the consumerist fun.
No more. In this corner, wearing the red, white and blue “traditional marriage” shorts: fornicators, voyeurs, porn addicts, adulterers, back door bandits, Lewinsky Maneuver fans, smugly “child free” pseudo-spouses and sundry serial monogamists, all very proud of being “straight.”
In the other corner, weighing in a little light in the loafers, wearing the blue and yellow “marriage equality” shorts, riding a Tsunami and wielding a wicked boycott, the GLBTetcetera set, arguing “hater, bigot, hater, bigot!” because a CEO said sincerely to a small Baptist publication what Obama said insincerely for most of the last four years.
Everything is political now. Everything is “culture war” now. But where’s the culture? Really? All we have is an economy, or what’s left of it, and we’re getting ready to Balkanize that.
Flannery O’Connor said it more or less like this: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens … Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?
(David Blankenhorn)
The connection between marriage and parenthood is not a vestige—it is a thriving expectation that those who get married will at least consider pursuing parenthood. Marriage is a celebration of two people’s union and the possibility of parenthood. And gay marriage entails not just social approval of gay love, but also social approval of the possibility of gay parenthood.
…
Because of this, many gay married couples that want to become parents will opt to use [Artificial Reproductive Technologies].
But there’s a big difference between ART and regular adoption. Donor-conception, unlike adoption, is a market where new humans are created to fulfill the demands of the adults that want them. “Commercially conceived” persons are deliberately denied a relationship with one or both of our biological parents. The tragic, primal wound ubiquitous in adoption literature is woven into every commercially conceived person’s life story.
Motherlessness and commodification of human life and the womb are concerning ….
(Alana S. Newman, daughter of a sperm donor)
Thursday’s Writer’s Almanac poem was pretty accessible. I think it may have been sponsored by The Fearmonger’s Shop, a Prairie Home Companion sponsor back in the day.
I don’t watch enough TV to have become adept with the dual controls, one for Comcast’s box, one for the TV. So as I moved from family room to kitchen last night, locking the cats in, and tried turning on the kitchen TV for Olympics, I wound up at something called Focus or the Focus channel or something.
I didn’t see the actual record being set, but I saw the improbable record-holder: a morbidly obese old bald guy. Of course, the event was hanging six-packs from his scrotum (they pixelated the video).
And the poor guy can’t find a corporate sponsor! Is there no justice in the world?
I think I’m turning it off again after Olympics. This, I guess, is the culture we’re warring over.
But I’ve got the first two seasons of Downton Abbey on the way from Pretty Good Goods. Some of my favorite people are crazy about it.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 