Freeway: a device for getting people to drive further and further between places of less and less significance. (John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee and current Director of the Congress on the New Urbanism)
When I went through my two-year Confirmation Class 50+ years ago, our class got to go to a Synagogue and observe a Bar Mitzvah. It was kind of cool But when my older brother went through Confirmation, they came home with grins on their faces because they got to go to Purim, and they even got to keep a cheap metal Purim gragger. That was really cool.
Some day, after we’re risen from (likelier, crawled out of) the ashes of our failed cities, I propose that we institute a sort of urbanist Purim, where we extoll Jane Jacobs like Esther while giving Robert Moses the Haman treatment, complete with burning him in effigy.
Rod Dreher revisits J. Bottum’s SSM flip-flop, particularly troubled by one particular aspect of Bottum’s argument:
We are now at the point where, I believe, American Catholics should accept state recognition of same-sex marriage simply because they are Americans.
(Emphasis added)
Dreher evocatively titles this “America’s Good Servant, But God’s First?” Bottum writes for a living, so his phrasing presumably wasn’t accidental. Bottum has joined Justice Kennedy, professedly a Catholic, too, in vilifying his Church’s teaching as hateful (Kennedy) and un-American (Bottum).
We have now had three Supreme Court decisions — Romer (1996), Lawrence (2003), and Windsor (2013) — in which the Court has declared, each time with increasing force, that the only reason for laws disfavoring gays and lesbians is irrational hatred. It’s time put Arkes’ question again to small-o orthodox Christians and Jews: What would it take in this country—what would have to happen?—before serious Christians and Jews would recognize, at once, that a critical line has been crossed?
The allusion to Hadley Arkes is to his question in First Things’ notorious “The End of Democracy?” issue back in 1996. Having watched what was happening, I welcomed that issue as “prophetic” rather than “notorious.” Its extrapolations have held up very well.
The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.
(Introduction)
To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. “If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined,” the Court declared, “then so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.”
If the Court does not claim to act merely in its own name, but for the common good and the rule of law, how then should citizens regard the effort to link abortion with the legitimacy of the Court itself and thus, it would seem, with the legitimacy of our current political regime? We could put this in a different way by asking whether the Court—in laying down rules without authority to do so and then asking for obedience in the name of the common good—has acted ultra vires, beyond its constitutionally assigned powers.
(Russell Hittinger)
The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control. Only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas attempt to give the Constitution the meaning it had for those who adopted it. A majority of the court routinely enacts its own preference as the command of our basic document.
(Robert Bork)
There should be, by now, nothing startling in this pattern, for it has marked the ways of our courts and our politics over the past thirty years. The judges form a virtual concert to advance the interests of gay rights and other parts of the liberal agenda, and those who would resist these initiatives, even with the most modest measures, are branded as the aggressors and the zealots. Whether the issue has been abortion, or euthanasia, or “gay rights,” the courts have taken steps that were noticeable even at the time as novel and portentous. But these moves seemed to have struck no chord, no moral or religious nerve, running through the broad public. All of which must make us wonder whether we are indeed in post-Christian or post-religious America. But if these events have not set off alarms, it is even less likely that people would be sensitive to that subtler shift of power that runs to the root of the American regime itself: In one issue after another touching the moral ground of our common life, the power to legislate has been withdrawn from the people themselves, or the “consent of the governed,” and transferred by the judges to their own hands. And on this point, there has been no example more striking than the recent run of cases on “gay rights.”
(Hadley Arkes)
But prophets are often without honor, and some of First Things’ Board bailed out and even repudiated the magazine.
The Court has at times been highly solicitous of minorities being made to feel outsiders in their land. Well, I’m feeling very much like an outsider, and ironically it’s the Supreme Court’s own stupid, lying and vicious accusations of hatred that make me aware that I’m persona non grata.
I can only hope that when the time comes for the government to eliminate pests, it will decide that crucifixion should be my fate. That would be win-win: they’d consider it wonderfully demeaning, and I’d consider it an unmerited honor.
“They seem to be under the impression that there is this huge movement with the goal of forcing them to perform ceremonies that violate their freedom of religion,” said Justin Lee, executive director (sic) of the Gay Christian Network. “If anyone tried to force a church to perform a ceremony against their will, I would be the first person to stand up in that church’s defense.”
(Travis Loller, Associated Press. Emphasis added.)
Eric Rassbach is an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest legal group that defends the free expression rights of all faiths.
He said it is unlikely the government would try to force a pastor to perform a same-sex marriage, but churches that rent out their facilities to the general public could face problems if they refuse to rent to gay couples.
(Loller again. Emphasis added again.)
Do you see the loophole Justin Lee has left himself? No, a church shouldn’t be forced to perform a ceremony. Never! But a public accommodation certainly must not discriminate against gay people. Oh, no! That’s an entirely different matter!
I would not bet on Justin Lee leaping up to the defense of, say, a Baptist Church that will rent space so a Methodist minister can join a man and woman in holy matrimony but won’t rent space so a Unitarian Universalist can pretend to join two men in Gött Wie Heißt.
Be it noted that your humble scribe pointedly (if tacitly) predicted a public accommodation attack (churches that rent out their facilities cast as public accommodations for purposes of discrimination law) more than three years ago.
The web, in its splendid algorithmic insight, has decided I’d like to vacation where tall, well-hung guys play volleyball in speedos and also that I’d surely like to subscribe to “fitness” magazines full of buff guys.
Gotta stop reading Eve Tushnet, MudBloodCatholic and Sexual Authenticity – or just read what I find interesting and enjoy a good laugh.
* * * * *
“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 