Potpourri, 12/14/18

1

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon in a podcast recounted a professor at an Anglican divinity school complaining that much commentary on Pauline epistles focus disproportionately on the first halves, what God has done for us, to the neglect of the second halves, what we should now do.

2

Christian struggle against evil in this world is not, in its first instance, political or social, but ascetical.

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, commenting on Psalm 57 (Septuagint numbering)

3

Women’s magazines and news outlets depict women who vote Republican as deviants. Vogue headlined a postelection commentary “Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own Interests?” The Guardian asked: “Half of White Women Continue to Vote Republican. What’s Wrong with Them?” The latter article asserted that “white women vote for Republicans for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist.” Barbra Streisand claimed “a lot of women vote the way their husbands vote; they don’t believe enough in their own thoughts.” Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Madeleine Albright have all expressed similar sentiments in public.

…

Far-left activists next month march on Washington again under the banner “the Women’s March.” The media will present them as simply “women”—as if women with other views don’t exist.

Carrie Lukas

4

Peggy Noonan reports (among other things) some polling data that prove the worthlessness of some polls (such as “Four in 10 expect Mueller will find evidence of crimes, while just over half of those polled do not think they will be impeachable offenses.”), then settles in to her real point:

Politics is part theater, part showbiz, it’s always been emotional, but we’ve gotten too emotional, both parties. It’s too much about feelings and how moved you are. The balance is off. We have been electing magic ponies in our presidential contests, and we have done this while slighting qualities like experience, hard and concrete political accomplishment, even personal maturity. Barack Obama, whatever else he was, was a magic pony. Donald Trump too. Beto O’Rourke, who is so electrifying Democrats, also appears to be a magic pony.

Messrs. Obama and Trump represented a mood. They didn’t ask for or elicit rigorous judgment, they excited voters. Mr. Trump’s election was driven by a feeling of indignation and pushback: You elites treat me like a nobody in my own country, I’m about to show you who’s boss. His supporters didn’t consider it disqualifying that he’d never held office. They saw it as proof he wasn’t in the club and could turn things around. His ignorance was taken as authenticity. In this he was like Sarah Palin, another magic pony.

…

But sober judgment, serious accomplishment, deep knowledge and personal maturity are most important in our political leaders, because of the complexity of the problems we face. History will be confounded that at such a crucial time, trying to come up with a plan to address such issues as artificial intelligence and robotics and the future of work and a rising China and the stresses of the nuclear world, we kept choosing magic ponies and hoping for the best.

5

“There are some people in our party here who are just plain anti-Muslim,” said Tarrant County [TX] GOP chairman Darl Easton, who appointed Dr. Shafi to his post. “There are more than I expected there to be.”

Muslim GOP Leader Targeted by Party Activists in Texas.

That leader is a Pakistani immigrant surgeon, who came here before 1990. The kerfuffle reminds me of 1960, when JFK had to promise some Texans (history rhymes) that he was, in effect, American first, Roman Catholic second.

Even if Roman Catholicism or Islam entail some political positions at odds with American political and constitutional traditions, which I do not concede, it is part of America’s dubious genius so to “assimiliate” people that such entailments drop away.

Dare I suggest that Texas should worry more about its home-grown Independent Fundamental Baptists than about 53-year-old Muslim immigrant surgeons? Those IFBs seem to think that 14-year-old girls are temptresses agains whose wiles its male pastors are powerless. Sounds un-American to me.

But in the category of “probably not fake news,” the Wall Street Journal reports that pro-Kremlin activists want to bring back monarchy, perhaps with Vladimir Putin as Czar. I say it’s probably not fake because, heck, I know some American Orthodox converts who gratuitously hanker for a Czar/Tsar in Russia again.

Maybe Orthodox Christians shouldn’t be trusted to hold office in America? (It might be a blessing.)

6

A confused mother writes to The New York Times‘s advice column:

I’m the mother of an amazing teenage daughter. Our relationship is close, but recently things have gotten complicated. She came out to us as pansexual when she was 11. I was concerned about her labeling herself at such a young age and being bullied.

Came out as pansexual at age 11. Hoo boy. I’d bet cash money that this mother is not remotely worried about bullying; she was rightly worried that her daughter was weirdly and inappropriately sexualizing herself at a young age. But she can’t say that in her culture, because we are crazy people.

Rod Dreher. I’d take that bet for a modest amount, Rod, because we may be a crazier people than you recognize. Remember the little girls’ beauty pageants, with the girls all tarted up by their moms? The sexualization is just a public school thing.

Don’t miss Reader Zapollo in Dreher’s UPDATE.

7

Every once and a while, Caitlin Johnstone comes up with something that’s not expressly political. I like this poem. I can’t help it.

8

From the Department of Denial Is Not A River In Egypt:

As for men and women with homosexual tendencies who have already made religious vows, Francis ordered them not to act upon their desires in any way: “It is better that they leave the priesthood or the consecrated life rather than live a double life.”

… [S]ome 80 percent of the victims of priestly sexual malfeasance have been male. And more than 95 percent of those boys haven’t been prepubescent children (whose predators have their own pathology) but adolescents past puberty and sexually mature in body if not in mind. In other words, the bulk of the entire unsavory enterprise concerned run-of-the-mill homosexual activity conducted under the cover of priestly reputation for holiness and a strikingly lopsided adult-teen power dynamic.

Charlotte Allen.

9

Saved for last, a news Dump-On-Trump.

Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex musters evidence that Donald Trump hasn’t even been good at promoting Trumpism, which, if true, would have to rank among the most abject of failures.

[T]his president leav[es] his constituency high and dry through political incompetence, behavioral incontinence, an inability to maintain a focus on anything, and an incapacity to think or act coherently.

Robert Merry, American Conservative. This is not an earth-shattering reversal, as the American Conservative has tended to the #NeverTrump side, but I thought it well-expressed.

I find Barr to be awful, but in a conventional way. So — Whitaker, the acting AG, I find to be awful in a norm-violating, Trump-administration type of way.

Ken White (a/k/a Popehat) in the All The Presidents Lawyers podcast of 12/10/18.

Many Never-Trumper Christians have acknowledged solid Federal Court nominees and a cooling of government hostility toward orthodox Christians (perhaps a better record on religious freedom overall, even, despite the rhetoric unmistakably targeting Muslim immigrants). Other Christians support Trump, period, full stop.

George Yancey has an instructive analogy for the supporters, in which analogy the Never-Trumpers will recognize their own concerns.

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“Paul, what do you mean???”

In the course of my opinionated life, I have from time to time disappointed people who thought I was their ally by exhibiting—I don’t what else to call it—sanity.

It probably was in the early 90s, for instance, when some of our local Religious Right leaders (who had some reasons to think I was their ally) went on the warpath against our local newspaper with the comic strips (of all things) as the focus.

Specifically, they objected that my beloved “For Better or Worse” (one of the most insightful and humane comic strips in my lifetime) had introduced a gay middle school boy into the strip’s cast of bit players. That was an outrage per se, whatever the lad did or didn’t do or say, and howsoever rarely he appeared at all.

In their war against it, they represented, as I recall, that X-thousand newspapers had decided not to run it, implying that they were dropping it because of the Great Subversion Of All That Is Right And Decent in Amurica (which wasn’t true; the count included all newspapers not running it, including those who never had).

As I say, I loved that strip, as did Mrs. Tipsy, so I responded in a letter to the editor that (a) they were effectively lying about the statistics with their half-truth about newspapers not running it, and (b) it’s just a comic strip, fer cryin’ out loud.

I think it was for that betrayal I got hit with an anonymous call wishing me an eternity in hell along with my 30 pieces of silver—a wish and an anonymity later rescinded, I must admit, though the experience was a wake-up call that left me unwilling to ally with them again.

[UPDATE: It was not for that betrayal. It was for my joining the call for resignation of a not-ready-for-primetime Christianish elected official, who kept stirring up controversy and recently had shot off an objectively anti-semitic email to a Jewish critic.]

That ole Religious Right spirit is alive and well today, but has been taken up by social justice warriors of the Left, who want Baby, It’s Cold Outside banished because she says “no” several times (he not getting her hat and coat at the first “no” is a per se distillation of All That Is Wrong And Rotten in Amerika) and speculates about what is in her drink.

They’re enjoying some success in their little crusade, and as someone who wants to put Mass back in Christmas, I would be churlish to deny them even an iota of grudging gratitude for reducing the rotation frequency of a seduction song during Advent.

And let it not be said that they’re without a sense of humor, albeit a grim one. One of them produced a Funny Or Die video of the song, choreographed as they (the dirty-minded neo-Puritans) see it.

I tip my hat to the New York Times for its story on the controversy, for the video link (with others, too, including one with Ricardo Montalban and another with Red Skelton) and for highlighting this comment to the story:

The “controversy” over this song is just plain silly. I remember Jerry Seinfeld was performing his comedy at a WH function. Paul McCartney was there and Jerry mentioned the song “I Saw Her Standing There.” Jerry quoted the lyrics “Well she was just seventeen….you know what I mean…” and Jerry looked at Paul and said “Paul, what do you mean???” Everyone including Paul laughed. I wonder if the radio stations will eventually ban “I Saw Her Standing There.”

I also thank the grim-jawed and humor-impaired SJWs for reminding us that sometimes a naughty song is, in the end, just a song and not a condensed symbol of ultimate evil.

(Baby, It’s Cold Outside, by the way, was the “party song” of the composers, at a time when, in their social set, you didn’t go to a party without some act ready to perform.)

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Put Mass back in Christmas

In the late 1600’s in colonial Boston, the celebration of Christmas was against the law. Indeed, anyone evidencing the “spirit of Christmas” could be fined five shillings.

…

English Churches outside of the Catholic and Anglican were non-liturgical. The “feast” of Christmas was as absent as the “feast” of anything else. It was not part of their consciousness. Thus, the growth of a popular Christmas in the mid to late 19^th century took place outside the walls of the Church. It became a cultural holiday, with an emphasis on family and the home.

Surprisingly, Christmas is probably far more a part of Protestant Church life in America today than at any time in our history. But the echoes of cultural Christmas remain strong. When Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, Christianity in America revisits its conflicted past. It is not unusual to see Churches of a more Evangelical background cancelling Sunday services, deferring to Christmas as a “family” celebration. For liturgical Churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, etc.) such a practice seems scandalous in the extreme.

…

There are protests against the secular Christmas that say, “Put the Christ back in Christmas!” From a liturgical point of view I’ve wanted to add, “And put the Mass back in Christmas!” It is, after all, a feast of the Christian Church. Neither of these, however, will likely be dominant in a culture that once had little Christmas at all.

(Fr. Stephen Freeman)

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Clippings, 12/12/18

1

Many in the pro-life movement, of which I am passionately a part, will consider the Harvard Law-educated intellectual [Ben Shapiro] a huge get. Not me. Despite Shapiro’s star power and stature, I consider his appearance a serious mistake for the March, one that will move us even further from being understood as the broad-based human rights movement we need to embody in order to go from fringe to mainstream.

Shapiro’s appearance is an especially ominous sign after last year’s appearance via satellite TV of President Trump — the absolute nemesis of more left-leaning pro-lifers like myself.

…

It was bad enough to have the movement associated with Trump. On his year’s stage, will Shapiro read his show’s regular advertisements for the U.S. Conceal-Carry Association? How will the crowd react when he does his daily promotion of his “Leftist Tears: Hot or Cold” tumbler?

…

The set of all pro-lifers is huge, politically diverse, and, as I have argued in these pages, more representative of the views of people of color than of white people — especially white liberals.

Unfortunately, while the March features the occasional Democratic politician or openly liberal pro-life activist, the speakers’ list and political tone in recent years have become overwhelmingly Republican and conservative. Increasingly, and especially with Trump speaking last year, those who identity with a different political ideology have been alienated from the most important pro-life march in the country — as well as the most important annual pro-life strategic meetings that surround the March.

This alienation is among the factors pushing non-conservative pro-life organizations such as New Wave Feminists, Rehumanize International, Secular Pro-Life, Democrats for Life, Consistent Life, among others, to hold alternative events at the March. This is a disaster for a number of reasons, among them that the pro-life movement will never meet our goals unless we can be understood as a broad-based human rights movement — and not merely as a Republican or conservative constituency.

Charles Camosy.

2

PETA is all in on Twitter’s hate speech policy:

Calling someone a “pig” or a “dog,” PETA observed, is “supremacist and speciesist.” Additionally, using such language may have the effect of “normalizing violence against animals and desensitizing people to their suffering.” …

On December 4, PETA posted a tweet against using anti-animal language, using its new tagline “Bringing Home the Bagels Since 1980”! Bagels? That was in lieu of the more readily recognizable bacon, which PETA wants to help us remove from our language (“bring home the bacon”), along with all other animal products from our diets and lives as a whole.

PETA also wants us to change our language because, as the tweet stated, “Words matter, and as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves along with it. Here’s how to remove speciesism from your daily conversations.” To help us “Stop Using Anti-Animal Language,” PETA offered other substitutions …

The Twitterverse erupted in mockery and ridicule, at least according to the mainstream media. The next day USA Today ran the headline, “PETA ridiculed, criticized for comparing ‘speciesism’ with racism, homophobia and ableism.” The Washington Post said, “the Internet thinks they’re feeding a fed horse,” a poke at one of PETA’s suggested replacement phrases.

Mercatornet

3

[P]erhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about the fragmentation and personalization of Christianity — to describe America as a nation of Christian heretics, if you will, in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs. These figures cobble together pieces of the old orthodoxies, take out the inconvenient bits and pitch them to mass audiences that want part of the old-time religion but nothing too unsettling or challenging or ascetic. The result is a nation where Protestant awakenings have given way to post-Protestant wokeness, where Reinhold Niebuhr and Fulton Sheen have ceded pulpits to Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey, where the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left.

Ross Douthat

4

Those people keep having kids and being happy and ignoring us. Don’t they read? They do read, but the wrong things! Why don’t they read what we suggest? Don’t credentials matter to them?

Smugness is most uncomfortable facing jolly fecundity.

John Mark Reynolds, quoting Salutation.

5

Talk about a twist: He sought the presidency, as so many others surely did, because it’s the ultimate validation. But it has given him his bitterest taste yet of rejection.

Frank Bruni

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Two clips, 12/11/18

1

Recently billboards have appeared along major U.S. freeways depicting Trump’s face and the quote from John 1 “And the Word became flesh.” Another saying on the billboards is “Make the gospel great again.” Predictably these billboards have raised concerns and questions. The Christians who sponsor the billboards have defended them, claiming that they do not equate Trump with Jesus Christ. But the billboards are what they are. Whatever the sponsor’s thoughts and intentions may be, the billboards scream out that Trump is “up there with Jesus” in terms of messiahship, saviorhood, worthiness of ultimate loyalty.

Again, whatever the billboards’ sponsors say, the billboards communicate a dangerous message and even the most die-hard Trump supporters must speak out against that message. I am not charging the billboards’ creators and sponsors with heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, or idolatry, but I will say the billboards’ message constitutes those. No amount of denial or defense can undo the message; the message is what it is.

Roger W. Olson

I hope that the sponsor, Make the Gospel Great Again, is a false flag operation (they’re not being campy about it—apart from the billboard itself), but the idolatrous echoes of 80 years ago, noted by Olson, prevent me being blasé about it.

2

A French reader e-mails Rod Dreher:

I told you in a previous email that after three centuries of an anomalous absence, anti-clericalism had finally arrived to America. Jenny Nagel proves me right and if things are going by the French textbook it’s only the beginning and Christians can expect the worse in years to come, without any possibility to answer in kind as the most vicious attacks will come from “protected minorities”. Being rubbished by despicable people is something French Catholics have had to live for two centuries, and American Christians will have to live it until either they regain control of the culture (unlikely at this stage) or stop being nice guys (and girls) and fight back. I know, that’s unlikely too – it hasn’t happened yet in France either.

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Potpourri, 12/11/18

1

The most common explanation for France’s gilets jaunes protests against fuel-tax hikes is that they arise from too little democracy … The opposite is true. The protests are happening because France has too much democracy. What it’s lacking is politics.

Mr. Macron’s political movement was born of the notion that France needed to become more democratic …

As Economist correspondent Sophie Pedder notes in her illuminating biography of the president, the premise is that as a numerical matter there are enough actual or potential winners from economic reform and globalization that a leader could cull those voters from the old parties and unite them under a new banner. It would then be possible to steamroll minority opposition.

…

[T]he widespread rioting in France shows the dangers of allowing a healthy dose of democracy to transmogrify into a brutal majoritarianism. Majority rule has its place, but it’s no way to knit together a diverse society …

… A center-right Republican Party under its failed 2017 candidate, François Fillon, would have effected some labor-law and civil-service reforms for which there is now broad support, but that party’s rural base would have precluded the green-energy follies that are sinking Mr. Macron.

The other word for this is “politics,” whose practitioners delicately trade interests and strike compromises to make majority rule more palatable to the minority.

Joseph Sternberg, Macron’s Warning to America’s Ascendant Left (WSJ, hyperlink and emphasis added)

This does, however, cut both ways. Trump and his supporters are playing a very dangerous game trying to force their kind of (invidious adjectives omitted) change with less than a “democratic” majority in 2016 and even a smaller minority now. (GOP offenses against good civic manners appear to have enough “legs” that I’m adding the category “democracy” today.)

Those coastal elites could punish the heartland, too, and not just politically. The heartland is lucky they haven’t figured out how to live without the food the breadbasket provides. (The GOP is misbehaving even worse in the states.)

It’s time for our incoming divided Congress to stop sheer pissing on each other and engage in frustrating, productive politics. (But I don’t know of a magic bullet for all the states except to hope for some constitutional theory to void the worst of the high-handedness.)

2

Cognate commentary:

Let us stipulate it’s foolish to pretend the market is without its costs. A 57-year-old General Motors worker in Ohio who will be laid off as his company expands production in Mexico may understandably balk at the argument that, in the larger scheme of things, it’s all for the best.

Yet the recent protests across France ought to remind us that market decisions aren’t the only ones that can make life difficult for those trying to get by on their paychecks …

Today, however, the crisis of good intentions is manifested most dramatically in the green movement, particularly in California … California now has the highest overall poverty rate in the nation … and suffers from a level of inequality “closer to that of Central American banana republics.”

… [T]he upward mobility of any family that isn’t part of Hollywood or Silicon Valley or doesn’t already own their own home is being killed by the state’s climate regime.

…

So maybe what’s going on in France isn’t as foreign as it may seem. When a once-thriving manufacturing town loses jobs to China, we hear all about the crisis of capitalism. But when progressives squeeze the American worker with high taxes, green agendas and failed government programs, where are the headlines about the crisis of good intentions?

William McGurn, The Crisis of Good Intentions (WSJ)

3

[T]he elite globalist consensus [is] that China can be China and India can be India but Europe can be turned into a repository for anyone in the world who can get there ….

Scott McConnell.

The elite consensus is personified by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, with “open society” including open borders. It is against this vision that elite media’s villain du jour, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, pushes back. My sympathies, guardedly (I have no crystal ball, after all), are with Orban, though I do not see Soros as consciously evil, as some seem to.

I’m actually more sympathetic with the anti-immigration right in Europe than I am with the anti-immigration American right.

The common factor is wealthy destinations who need (some) immigrants to replace the children they’re not bearing, in order to maintain a simulacrum of normalcy as their traditional populations die off.

But while the people coming north to North America are mostly Christians of some sort, those coming north to Europe include many Muslims, who will be harder to assimilate than Christian refugees.

Plus, our idiotic American subversion of (or warfare against) middle east “strong men” leaders has contributed mightily to the breakdown of public order that facilitates persecution of Christians by their Muslim neighbors, driving them northward.

Will Europe die for our sins?

4

After agreeing that religious arguments should not be front and center in debates about transgenderism, a caution for those who think science is unequivocally on the side of the sexual binary:

There are solid scientific reasons to resist the claim that biological males and females who consider themselves to be of the other gender, and who demand that everyone else recognize that, should be accommodated. Unfortunately, science itself is being coopted by the cultural revolution. The authoritative science magazine Nature published an editorial in October strongly denouncing a reported initiative by the Department of HHS to define male and female by biological characteristics. The editorial takes the line that people ought to be defined by the gender they choose. Nature is a very big deal.

We should by no means assume that science is immune from politicization. In the Soviet Union, as in our own materialist order, Science is considered to be the greatest authority. Science was corrupted by the communists as a matter of course, made to serve the revolution’s ends. The same thing is happening here.

Rod Dreher.

5

[T]here are good Catholics and bad Catholics and … the [New York] Times team gets to decide who is who.

Terry Mattingly, Tale of two New York Times stories: Seeking links in ultimate anti-Pope Francis conspiracy (Get Religion)

6

Now, a story you may not want to know about. I’ll introduce it elliptically, since this is a family blog (or something):

“My dad asked me if I were allowed to wear pants, if I would do it. I said, ‘I don’t know’ — as a kid you’re terrified — I don’t know. He said, ‘Because you can’t tell me right now, that means you are not a Christian. You are not going to heaven because a Christian would never hesitate at that question.’ ”

— Leah Elliott, Indiana

…

“I was nursing, but the pastor outlawed nursing. No women were allowed to nurse because it kept them from church. I went to the bathroom to cry, and I’m getting engorged — you have to nurse, you get in a lot of pain if you don’t. I’m in the bathroom, and the nursery worker came into the stall with me. I think I was just grabbing toilet paper to blow my nose, she barged in and said, ‘The devil wants you to miss this sermon that’s happening right now. You get back in there.’ ”

— Kara Blocker, Oregon

…

“I have so few memories of my cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles that it scares me. We were allowed to see them about once a year, until the church decided that the ‘good church members’ shouldn’t fellowship with their non-believing relatives. We were pretty much cut off after that. My grandparents still don’t understand why we were withheld from them.”

— Anonymous, Ohio

Former independent fundamental Baptists share their stories, part of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram series on clergy sexual (mostly) abuse in “Independent Fundamental Baptist” churches.

As I was growing up, some fundamentalist (who probably knew my father from the Gideons) made sure that our family always had a subscription to Sword of the Lord, a very explicitly and unapologetically fundamentalist tabloid out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. My parents were unenthusiastic about it, but didn’t seem to think it fit only for the bottom of the bird cage. As a teenager and college student, I generally read each issue for entertainment.

Pastor Jack Hybels of Hammond, Indiana was one of Publisher John R. Rice‘s favorites, and he fits prominently in this hot-off-the-presses series both as the father of one of the chief IFB perverts, Dave Hybels, and as proprietor of a reliable refuge (his Hammond Church) for IFB pastors who needed to be—ahem!—rotated out of their current role due to—ahem! again—accusations by some of the many brazen 14-year-old tarts that kept seducing defenseless IFB pastors.

When I was a young Evangelical, I was quite obsessed with cults — you know, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, (Herbert W. Armstrong’s) Worldwide Church of God, maybe even the Seventh Day Adventists. Though I knew from the Sword of the Lord that these IFB-types were fundamentalists and thus disreputable (they thought we were to be shunned, too; it was reciprocal), I never would have though of Independent Fundamental Baptists as a cult that would shelter perverts in the pulpit.

My bad. The problem is too widespread in this denomination-in-disguise to pretend that “Independent” is more than a legal fiction, that the unthinkability of police reports isn’t symptomatic of a sick system, or that the pastoral reassignments are not all too familiar.

I must henceforth think of IFB churches as cults.

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“Hate Crimes”

Why am I uneasy with hate crimes laws? Partly, or perhaps entirely, because I have a presumption against new laws, particularly ones that empower prosecutors to engage in public preening. A new law doesn’t, or shouldn’t, “sound like a good idea” without a demonstration of need.

All I’m getting from my State Senator in support of a hate crimes Bill is fallacious reasons (e.g., “It’s 2018, for Pete’s sake!”) and junior-high-school-level conformism (“We’re one of only X states that doesn’t have a hate crimes law yet.”)

Yeah. So what? So. Freakin’. What.

Seriously.

All I want is a convincing demonstration of why, say, a hate battery is worse than battery committed out of sheer cussedness, or because committing a battery is required to become a made man in your gang? Is that too much to ask?

But I warn you: that Cummins Engine, Eli Lilly and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce want (or may want) a hate crimes law is of no moment whatever to my mind. Heck, the same people who argue for hate crimes laws will be the first to tell you that corporations should not be throwing their economic weight around for political purposes. “Citizens United! Bah! Humbug!”

Granted, hate is often sinful, even very sinful. (No, it’s not always sinful; Proverbs 6:16 gives us a list of what God hates) But I don’t see anyone arguing that pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger or sloth should be aggravating circumstances.

I think there may be some convincing demonstration available, but I’ve not been sold yet.

While we’re at it, what’s the threshold frequency of bad behavior for criminalization? One incident?

I’m thinking of the guy who slipped into bed with his roommate’s girlfriend, who, shall we say, welcomed another round, albeit under a false impression about the identity of her playmate.

A cad. A real cad. I hope the roommate roughed him up. And if his behavior had fit the statutory definition of rape, I wouldn’t have lamented his conviction.

But it didn’t..

Should the rape definition be changed? Are we going to see an epidemic of impersonation rapes if we don’t change the law? How much time should the legislature spend on a Bill which may neither prevent nor punish a single occurrence for as long as the amended law is on the books?

Maybe you think I’ve picked some bad examples. Maybe you’re right. But could we have a little serious-mindedness before we load up the legal codes with more and more laws? They don’t all increase our well-being, let alone our freedom, y’know.

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Emollients (I hope)

1

I would find it more convincing that Trump is “shaking up his administration,” as the press reports every day or two, if they’d first report the deep complacency that needs roiling. (I just haven’t noticed that on my own.)

2

Peggy Noonan thinks Bush I should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize, and she, ever the speech writer, wished for more articulation of what he was doing:

[The collapse of Communism] was a crucial event in the history of the West, and its meaning needed stating by the American president. There was much to be lauded, from the hard-won unity of the West to Russia’s decision to move bravely toward new ways. Much could be said without triumphalism.

It is a delicate question, in statecraft as in life, when to speak and when not to. George Bush thought it was enough to do it, not say it, as the eulogists asserted. He trusted the people to infer his reasoning from his actions. (This was his approach on his tax increase, also.) But in the end, to me, leadership is persuasion and honest argument: This is my thinking. I ask you to see it my way.

Something deeply admirable, though: No modern president now considers silence to be an option, ever. It is moving to remember one who did, who trusted the people to perceive and understand his actions. Who respected them that much.

Peggy Noonan (emphasis added)

3

[L]ook at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.

Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan lays out the religious fervor of both the Trumpistas and the Social Justice warriors. Of the latter, he notes, “A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke.

But I never expected much from secular progressives, so I’m going to focus on his indictment of Evangelical Trumpistas:

Their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith.
They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal.
They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country.
They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ.
They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made.
Because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion.

His conclusion: “The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.”

If that is true, we who still hold those fading truths can thank God that Trump is always shaking up his crypto-complacent administration rather than brewing up some Kool-Aid.

(I think it was Ross Douthat who said “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait ’till you see the irreligious right.” On Sullivan’s reading, it might be “post-Christian Right” or even “post-Christian politics” generally. But I like Douthat’s version better, nevertheless granting Sullivan’s point about our incorrigible religiosity.)

4

As much as Trump’s defenders may want to minimize “process crimes,” it remains a fact that the last two articles of impeachment drafted against American presidents featured clear evidence of, yes, process crimes. Process crimes are still crimes. It is an enduring feature of political corruption that politicians will lie about things that aren’t illegal but are politically or personally embarrassing — and when they lie under oath or cause others to lie under oath they violate the law.

David French

Objectively, Trump is in a heap’o’trouble.
Somehow, though, he brazens his way through so far. (See item 3.)

5

Trump, I suspect, isn’t unfunny. He’s anti-funny. Humor humanizes. It uncorks, unstuffs, informalizes. Used well, it puts people at ease. Trump’s method is the opposite: He wants people ill at ease. Doing so preserves his capacity to wound, his sense of superiority, his distance. Good jokes highlight the ridiculous. Trump’s jokes merely ridicule. They are caustics, not emollients.

… This is an angry age, in which Trump’s critics also simmer in rage, ridicule, self-importance, self-pity — and hatred, too. They think they’re reproaching the president. Increasingly they reflect him. [Alan] Simpson’s message contains a warning to us all.

Bret Stephens, A Presidency Without Humor.

That’s an important warning, but our humor should not leave history wondering if we were complacent. No, we’re still pretty shaken up.

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Clippings, 12/7/18

1

Republicans tax churches to help pay for big corporate giveaway.

You would be forgiven for thinking this is a headline from the Onion or the fantasy of some left-wing website. But it’s exactly what happened in the big corporate tax cut the GOP passed last year.

Now … embarrassed leaders … are trying to fix a provision that is a monument to both their carelessness and their hypocrisy.

The authors of the measure apparently didn’t even understand what they were doing — or that’s their alibi to faith groups now. It’s not much of a defense …

At stake is a provision in the $1.5trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that directed not-for-profits of all kinds — houses of worship but also, for example, universities, museums and orchestras — to pay a 21 percent tax on certain fringe benefits for their employees, such as parking and meals.

…

GOP leaders have told representatives of religious organizations that they had no intention of taxing them. They were focused on what they saw as liberal bastions in the third sector: universities, foundations and the like.

But this excuse only makes the story worse. It shows how slipshod the architects of this tax bill were, and it demonstrates their deeply partisan motives. After all, limiting the state and local deduction raises taxes far more on middle-class and well-off taxpayers in Democratic states than on their counterparts in Republican states. No wonder blue states such as California, New Jersey and New York evicted so many House Republicans last month.

E.J. Dionne Jr..

This delightful egg-on-their-partisan-faces story doesn’t quite add up. It’s awfully hard to imagine the religious lobbying groups themselves not noticing this unintended consequence. But I have no better story.

2

This points to the idea that, on another level, our present crisis is really one of consciousness. When faith suddenly “drops out,” an abscess forms in our self-perception. We find that faith isn’t so much something we “have,” but something that shapes and even creates the “I” we inhabit.

Losing faith doesn’t mean that the propositions of faith no longer make sense to us—that Jesus is the Son of God, or that Mary is the immaculate virgin mother of God. Losing faith means that these propositions no longer help to form our perspectives on other propositions: e.g., that belief in divine causes is more sane than reductive materialism, or that the Church is a culturally important, even indispensable institution.

Andrew M. Haines, How to Understand the Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis.

I skipped over this when I first saw it, figuring (wrongly) that it was another “Ya just gotta believe because only the Catholic Church has the precious and life-giving body and blood of Christ” apologetic. But then Rod Dreher quoted part of all of what I’ve now quoted, which I thought evokes the faith part of an integrated life—and how a loss of faith really is a personal crisis, as it entails dis-integration.

3

Do you think [Trump] has kept his promises? Has he achieved his goals?

No.

He hasn’t?

No. His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn’t done any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I’ve come to believe that Trump’s role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don’t think he’s capable. I don’t think he’s capable of sustained focus. I don’t think he understands the system. I don’t think the Congress is on his side. I don’t think his own agencies support him. He’s not going to do that.

Tucker Carlson, of all people, being interviewed by the Swiss weekly Weltwoche (emphasis added). H/T Rod Dreher.

Watching our President sulking into George H.W. Bush’s funeral at the National Cathedral, holding Melania’s hand (“to watch grown men cry” as he once put it) and perfunctorily shaking hands with the Obamas, I was struck again at what a total clod he is, lacking almost completely all “social graces.” He make me look like Fred Astaire.

But my countrymen elected him, and even if I were to hide behind the mythical “popular vote,” a big chunk of my countrymen preferred him.

4

The media does not believe that Christians can be hated in the same way as other groups. Media members may have been sympathetic to Christians as individuals but are very hesitant to say that they are victims of hate. This may explain why church shootings are rarely described as a hate crime unless the church is black ….

George Yancey, stating one of the conclusions from his new book about media bias, based on an “audit study” of media.

5

“If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal?” (From the New York Times obituary of iconoclast Dr. Lisa Schwartz)

6

Today is my late father’s 99th birthday (yes, he became 22 the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor) and events have converged to make it a propitious day for me to finally and officially retire from the practice of law by signing an “Affidavit or Retirement” and sending it in to the Admission and Discipline Office—which I shall do within the hour.

My pseudonym here has worn thin, but I see no need to out myself completely. All my opinions have been my own, with none of them censored or cleared in advance with my law partners. By the same token, I’ve imposed no self-censorship for the sake of protecting the firm my Dad founded, either.

There are, indeed, a few opinions I hold that just aren’t spoken in polite society. I’ve spoken a few of them anyway, if I thought it was important enough. Others I’ve held back because it wasn’t worth the fallout. Those instinctive rules of thumb, too, will continue.

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Eulogies that sting

I was cool toward the Presidency of George H.W. Bush and I still am. Add to that my personal lacuna about role of ritual and ceremony, and I was left blind-sided by all the (seemingly disproportionate) fuss over George Herbert Walker Bush’s death.

Ross Douthat plausibly explained why there was so much admiration and grief, so I watched some of the news coverage of the funeral—the big one at the Washington National Cathedral—after its conclusion.

I and my wife both were struck by how the eulogies celebrated virtues so lacking in Donald Trump, who sat there enduring the eulogies with some combination of boredom and—we may hope, mayn’t we?—salutary self-reproach.

We were by no means the only ones to note that, my daily survey of punditry reveals.

Trump’s name was mentioned not once by the four eulogists at Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday. But their words were an implicit rebuke of everything Trump is. They spoke of what made Bush a great leader, which are the very traits that, by their absence, make Trump so woefully inadequate.

…

Trump, for whom no cause is greater than self, must have struggled to sit through 90 minutes of something that was not all about him. Rather, it was all about what he is not.

Meacham, putting Bush’s leadership in the style of George Washington and both Roosevelts, recalled how he “spoke with those big, strong hands” (was he trolling Trump?) and stood against totalitarianism and blind partisanship. “And on his watch, a wall fell in Berlin, a dictator’s aggression did not stand, and doors across America opened to those with disabilities,” Meacham said — in front of a president who would build a wall, who winks at dictators and who publicly mocked a journalist’s disability.

Bush’s life code, Meacham said, began with “tell the truth” and “don’t blame people.” The truth-challenged, finger-pointing president could only listen.

Dana Milbank. This is why the world needs wordsmiths.

[T]he Bushes have gone out of their way this week to appear gracious toward Trump, notwithstanding his repeated snubs of Jeb “Low Energy” Bush. Then again, all that well-bred graciousness might have been exactly the point, a brilliant act of Waspy revenge. For more than two hours, the visibly uncomfortable forty-fifth President had to listen to Bush extolled in terms that would never be applied to him. “Best instincts,” not “worst impulses.” “Kinder.” “Gentler.” “Courageous.” “Principled.” “Gentlemanly.”

Trump had to sit there knowing that every statement praising Bush’s decency and modesty and courage would be taken as an implicit rebuke of him …

Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, brought an acute understanding of Washington’s foibles, and a reputation for lancing humor, to the task of remembering his friend. “Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic,” Simpson observed, to knowing laughs. Later in his talk, standing at a lectern placed just a few feet in front of Trump, Simpson quoted his mother in observing that “hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.” Trump, a man of seething hatreds, stared at him with arms folded. Meanwhile, Simpson observed of Bush, “He never hated anyone.”

Trump appeared grim-faced throughout much of the ordeal. He didn’t read along with the prayers or sing along with the hymns. He refused to shake hands with or acknowledge any of his predecessors or their wives, except Barack and Michelle Obama, a snub that was made all the more apparent when George W. Bush, upon entering the Cathedral a short time later, stopped to greet the Trumps, Obamas, Clintons, and Carters, before taking his seat in a front-row pew to bid farewell to his father.

It was the first time that Trump had been in the same room as the Obamas and the Clintons and the Bushes since his Inaugural Address, on January 20, 2017, when he had spoken of “American carnage.” At the time, Bush had reportedly told Hillary Clinton, Trump’s defeated 2016 opponent, “That was some weird shit.” Almost two years later, it seems even weirder. But here we are, at a state funeral, where the big relief is a two-hour news cycle in which the President can’t tweet.

Susan Glasser, New Yorker

As I say, we can hope that this penetrated his narcissistic, shriveled soul. There haven’t been any Tweetstorms since, have there?

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.