In the “Elevator Pitch” genre, Rod Dreher opens a thread on “Why You Should Come To My Church.” His Church happens to be mine. I don’t mean his parish is my parish. I mean his Church is mine, too:
So, a person should attend my church because it teaches the truth about who Jesus is and who you are, and how you can attain unity with God. And it not only teaches this, it provides the means for the healing of your soul, through prayer, fasting, and the sacraments. You can see and hear and smell the presence of God through beauty there. That more or less sounds like what a lot of churches do, and you’ll find faithful Christians in those churches, but there’s something so … other about Orthodoxy, especially in its emphasis on the mystical, that breaks through the everydayness of the framework through which we American Christians experience God. Orthodoxy is exotic to Americans, but you can trust it because it represents the unbroken experience of the Christians of the East, dating back to the early Church — and it is the lived experience of hundreds of millions of Christians today. You are going to find a lot more stability in this church than in others; at its best, Orthodox worship and teaching is a profound sign of contradiction to the modern age, and the American way. Alas, you’ll find just as many sinners, but we’re working on our salvation together, and could use your help.
Wait, that’s too long. How about:
You should come to my church because you’re dying, and we can show you life.
As I write, there are 49 responses.
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Your U.S. Department of Sick Jokes Claiming to Be Justice at work:
The Obama administration’s Justice Department has pressured a California school district into allowing an incoming high school freshman who is anatomically female but identifies as a boy to use the restroom and changing facilities assigned to her preferred sex, rather than her biological sex.
Her family filed a federal discrimination lawsuit after the school district twice refused to allow the girl to sleep in a room with boys without a chaperone.
The Obama administration pressured the school district to allow the girl to use the boys’ facilities, saying in a letter that failure to do so constitutes sexual discrimination against “students who do not conform to sex stereotypes.”
Under a new agreement, every transgender student in the district will have full access to the opposite sex’s changing rooms and sleeping quarters during school trips.
(Lifesite News, quoted by Rod Dreher) You no doubt are feeling much safer and more secure now on account of this swift and decisive blow for transsexualism”
Gender dysphoria is no doubt very distressing for the sufferer therefrom. But the Department of Justice bullying a school district into greeting it with straight face, open arms, and revised policy manuals is an outrage.
Do you think some boys might just have some issues with peeing in front of this girl who thinks she’s a boy? What are their rights? Or vice-versa? Isn’t it just a matter of time before one of these “boys” turns up pregnant after sharing a tent with other boys, or one of the “girls” has a cat-that-ate-the-canary look in the morning coming out of another girl’s tent?
Are there any majority-type rights at all that won’t be trumped by exotic sexual disorders? What gives?!
Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy suggests that Obama won the 2012 election by violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act:
It’s widely agreed that Mitt Romney lost the race because the President’s base turned out in surprisingly large numbers, thanks in large part to the Obama campaign’s effective use of technology. That much we already knew. But now, thanks to Dan Balz’s “Collision 2012,” we’re beginning to learn exactly how the campaign used technology. And, as Michael Vatis, an alumnus of the Clinton Justice Department, persuasively argues, its key tactic was violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Here’s how the tactic apparently worked. Obama supporters logged on to both a campaign network and their Facebook account, allowing the campaign to search their Facebook network for likely Obama voters whom the campaign believed to be unmotivated or unregistered. Those voters would then get tailored messages from their Facebook friends urging them to register and turn out.
It’s clever. It’s the future. And it’s a violation of the CFAA. Facebook doesn’t let users share access to their accounts, and anything Facebook doesn’t authorize is very likely a federal crime. (Because Facebook is limiting access to information, not just use of information, the conduct was very likely criminal even under the more limited construction of the CFAA adopted in the Ninth Circuit.)
The Obama campaign doesn’t seem to have been deterred by the possibility that it was violating federal law. I can think of at least four reasons why that might be. Three of them are scandals.
I hope your appetite is properly whetted for the taste of blood because this opening salvo is my favorite in what, sadly, became a series (rather than a knockout punch) because other people, clearly Baker’s inferiors on this, weighed in to say “Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute, Baker!”
Killjoys!
I got home a little late last night and immediately joined my wife on the screened porch. Ready to go clean up and get into pajamas, I checked e-mail one last time. “Good news! Your package has been delivered at 7:18.” Went to the front door, opened it, and there were my flannel pajamas for next winter, back ordered since February.
Whoever would have imagined the kind of technology behind that? It’s even stranger than having a Russian daughter-in-law.
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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 