Thursday, 9/6/18

1

The sole reason that there are still secular laws on the books that prohibit and punish pedophilia is that Christianity came to dominate culture in the West through evangelization. The only reason that we have accepted homosexuality in culture and in law is the increasing de-Christianization of the culture in the West. As we become even more secularized (i.e., repaganized), pedophilia will soon be accepted, just as homosexuality, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia have already been embraced.

This is a massive, massive crisis in and for the Church because a deeply-embedded worldwide homosexual network among our priests, bishops, and cardinals is actively engaged in bringing about the full de-Christianization of the world by preying on boys between 12-18, literally recreating Greco-Roman sexual culture in our seminaries and dioceses. If you want to know what it was like in the sordid sexual days of ancient Greece and Rome, just read the Pennsylvania Report.

That’s a rather horrible irony, isn’t it? The very men most authoritatively charged with the evangelization of all the nations are full-steam ahead bringing about the devangelization of the nations. In doing so, these priests, bishops, and cardinals at the very heart of the Catholic Church are acting as willing agents of repaganization, undoing 2,000 years of Church History.

Benjamin Wiker, From a Moral-Historical Perspective, This Crisis is Worse Than You Realize (H/T Rod Dreher).

For some reason, my personal reaction to male homosexuality has always been “Meh.” Don’t ask me either to think fondly about it or to join those who vocally express revulsion for the characteristic acts.

Yes, I can explain why, from a Christian standpoint, homogenital acts are morally wrong. You can find my answer, ironically, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2357, which says it better than I could.

So I take seriously analyses like Wiker’s; they just don’t stir my blood. That’s probably a character defect.

Of more interest to me, on a person-to-person level, is that I believe that the moral law is, to a significant extent, so written on the heart that we can’t not know it. I’m interested in Romans 1:18-32 not to “slam” people in debate but to plead with them (preferably privately, where confusion about “personal dignity” is less likely to cloud thought) to forsake behavior that will trouble their consciences and draw them away from God. Since we ultimately are meant for union with God, behavior that draws us away is the most “massive, massive” mistake of all.

2

One of the first ways you can discern whether to dismiss a protester, pundit, or politician as a serious person is whether they pay any attention at all to The Handmaid’s Tale as some sort of allegory for our times. The president is a libertine philanderer who pays off porn stars and playmates, but somehow we’re about two steps from Gilead. Yet sure as the night follows day, the Handmaids showed up to Kavanaugh’s hearing ….

David French, The Democrats’ No Good, Frivolous, Ridiculous Day.

3

I guess Anonymous won’t make it into a Nike commercial “believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”

Mark W.

What the hell good did he expect this article to do, for the country? The author must have known it’d make Trump utterly wild and he’d quadruple down on hunting leakers and not trusting his advisors – so if the author really believes what he’s doing is necessary, why has he gone public knowing that this article will provoke Trump in such a way as to make this ‘management’ much harder?

“GR”

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Learning from leakers

(Don’t miss the update at the bottom.)

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Anonymous senior official in the Trump administration writing an editorial in the New York Times that’s quickly becoming a litmus test.

This column tells us nothing about President Pinball we didn’t already know, although some sycophants may have buried their knowledge awfully deep down inside.

But I’m encouraged that there may be more adults in the room than I thought (I knew there were a few), trying to serve the nation’s best interests. They think those interests don’t include the Constitutional crisis of a 25th Amendment coup d’etat, and I tend to agree. (Frankly, I recall hearing no good case for 25th Amendment removal of Trump — on balance, factoring the bad as well as the obvious good — though I’ve heard a lot of people venting about it.)

The grownups do not include, so far as I can tell, the Vichy Republicans of Congress, nor guys like Mike Braun, who wants to replace Joe Donnelly in the Senate. Braun literally promised to “back the President — every time” (my best recollection of audio, including the emphasis). I checked out of the Hotel Republifornia 13 years ago, but I still don’t want to live under the Democrats’ unchecked platform planks, so the GOP needs fixed for the sake of healthy two-party rivalry again some day.

That leads me reluctantly to hope for the GOP to get “a 2 x 4 up side the head” in November, ideally losing the House (which has the power to impeach) while keeping the Senate (which gives advice and consent on judicial nominees).

And that leads to a weird secondary hope.

I think we’re going to crash again, and everyone knows we’re due, by conventional measures, for a “correction” in the economy.

So please God, if it’s coming soon, let it come a few weeks before November 6, not after, to wipe the undue smirks off Republican faces and to swing some voters away.

UPDATE:

Rarely have I so quickly rued anything I’ve written as I’ve rued this.

I complain about people overlooking unintended (but foreseeable) consequences when they act in government, but this anonymous OpEd carries a huge payload. Just a few of many comments that have made me sheepish.

What the hell good did he expect this article to do, for the country? The author must have known it’d make Trump utterly wild and he’d quadruple down on hunting leakers and not trusting his advisors – so if the author really believes what he’s doing is necessary, why has he gone public knowing that this article will provoke Trump in such a way as to make this ‘management’ much harder?

“GR”

Unfortunately, staffing was always going to be a major headache for Trump, or anyone with a policy platform different from the beltway uniparty globalist consensus (such as Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ron/Rand Paul, Ralph Nader, or even, I suspect, Bernie Sanders). The intersection of the Venn diagram circles of people remotely plausible to hold all these government positions and who could get through the Senate and who are ideologically on board with Trump’s agenda is very narrow. People have no idea how many people a President has to appoint, to say nothing of all the civil service and career military in government.

“Noah172”

So I do take comfort that there are adults in the room, but I’m thinking the Anonymous OpEd was pretty juvenile in the sense that an impulsive arson at the Reichstag might be.

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My blog overfloweth

Oh dear! So much that’s shareable today!

The Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal

1

Nike reportedly is facing a boycott for an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, who famously “took the knee” during the NFL’s repulsive and gratuitous pre-game patriotic frenzies.

Kaepernick

We’ll see if Nike actually believes in something, “even if it means sacrificing everything.” Nike has set itself up nicely to illustrate how “courage” no less than “patriotism” can be insincerely weaponized for commercial purposes.

Contrast:

Viganò

2

Ross Douthat … in a twitter thread which noted, among other things,

One of the striking things about the Hebrew Bible is that it’s the record of a people that makes extraordinary claims for itself — that their tribal god is the Only God, that they are His chosen people, that all nations will eventually worship him, etc.

And they buttress those claims with an extensive history in which they are … terrible. Morally terrible, politically impotent, constantly apostasizing, ignoring their prophets, the works.

Basically the Hebrew Bible says: “Hi, we’re the true chosen people of God, and to prove it let us tell a long series of stories about how our patriarchs were sinners, our kings were even worse, and we failed God completely time and time again.”

The best king of Israel, the awesome all-conquering one, is a philanderer and murderer. The second-best one, the temple-builder, becomes an idol-worshiper. And about the rest, the less said the better.

Pace certain evangelicals-for-Trump and certain RC churchmen, this is not an argument for tolerating ugliness in service of some higher good. God and His prophet deal very harshly w/David when he kills Uriah, and the attitude of the prophets throughout is horror at Israel’s sins.

But for all their horror the prophets never doubt that Israel is the elect, the chosen people, God’s intended bride. And if the Old Testament is supposed to be a revelation with big implications for the new covenant, for the Christian church, that part is important.

Eve Tushnet quoting, obviously, Ross Douthat.

Trump & the Vichy Republicans

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News:

Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff.

(Another damned Tweet by our Tweeter-in-Chief, who thinks an Attorney General is a wingman.)

News analysis by Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos:

His tweet over the holiday weekend chastising Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, for the Justice Department’s recent indictments of two Republican congressmen because it could cost the party seats in November crossed lines that even he had not yet breached, asserting that specific continuing criminal prosecutions should be decided on the basis of partisan advantage.
“I think it was appalling,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, another Republican, told reporters asking on Tuesday about the tweet. “It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable.”
Over nearly 20 months in office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly castigated the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for investigating his associates and not investigating his enemies. He has threatened time and again to fire Mr. Sessions because his recusal from the Russia investigation meant that he could not protect the president from the inquiry.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion would have been a major scandal under any other president, veterans of past administrations said. “His interference in an ongoing criminal investigation may be the single most shocking thing he’s done as president,” said Walter E. Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general under President Bill Clinton.
Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who has been among the president’s most outspoken critics in his own party, had the same reaction. “Those who study this kind of thing say it’s a lot more evidence for abuse of power or obstruction,” he said. “I just know it’s not healthy for the institutions of government to have the president want to use the Department of Justice that way.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, likewise criticized the president’s comments. “I’m looking at them just as you are looking at them,” she told reporters. “I thought that yesterday’s comments were not appropriate and they upset me.”

I agree with Walter Dellinger. If Trump is impeached, I hope his browbeating of law enforcement people for doing their jobs is prominent among the charges.

4

Ross Douthat imagines the defense theme of the Vichy Republicans in the court of public opinion:

Yes, they would say, the president is erratic, dangerous, unfit and bigoted. But notwithstanding certain columnist fantasies you can’t impeach somebody for all that — or for pretending to be a dictator on Twitter, for that matter. And by the standards of any normal presidency we still have him contained.

Sure, the trade wars are bad, but every president launches at least one dumb trade war. We stopped the child migrant business, his other immigration moves are just stepped-up enforcement of the law, we’ve stepped back from the brink (however bizarrely) with the North Koreans, we’re still sanctioning the Russians.

Meanwhile he’s nominated the most establishment Republican jurist possible to the Supreme Court, and we won’t even let him fire his own attorney general, let alone Bob Mueller.

Look, we’re not enabling an American Putin here. We’re just babysitting the most impotent chief executive we’ll ever see, and locking in some good judges before the Democrats sweep us out.

5

I have given my qualified approval to President Trump’s defense of religious freedom. The qualification is that he hasn’t shown any solicitude for the religious freedom of anyone other than Evangelical Protestants (though we other Christians collect crumbs from their State Dinner Table).

Here’s someone else’s expression of one instance of where Trump has been bad on religious freedom.

Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearings

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Ben Sasse Conducts a Two-Minute Master Class in American Civics

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Democrats Open Contentious Hearings With Attack on ‘Partisan’ Kavanaugh

When the New York Times puts in scare-quotes “partisan” as a description of a Republican Supreme Court nominee, I think it’s a sign that the Democrats beslimed themselves pretty good yesterday.

Is Steve Bannon fit for polite company?

8

A Venn diagram showing New Yorker readers and Trump fans would contain two circles miles apart. The folks in the New Yorker circle are far more likely to believe that Trump is a nascent despot than to believe that he is anything like a normal president. Nor are they likely to change their minds simply by spending an hour in the physical presence of Bannon.

…

Left-leaning cultural arbiters became too skillful with their weapon of choice, mastering those institutions so completely that certain kinds of progressivism became not merely normal, but mandatory. But by leaving less and less room for dissenters, the hegemons created a counter-tribe of outsiders who reject their authority as vehemently as they exert it. And thus, for the same reasons that the beliefs of New Yorker readers are in no danger from Steve Bannon, the views of Trump fans are entirely safe from David Remnick.

What’s left is a kind of ceremonial cleansing of the sacred city, a mighty labor to make sure that the two circles on the Venn diagram never, ever come into contact. There’s something admirable about uncompromising ethical purity, but also something rather dangerous. For it means that outside your circle, there’s an entirely different normal. And if you abdicate any influence over that alternate normality, while rigorously expelling your own heretics, you may one day awake to find that your impeccably maintained ring of truth has been swamped by that other normal, now grown entirely beyond your control.

Megan McArdle

9

I agree with those who think that he should never have been invited. Steve Bannon keeps failing in his various projects to overthrow the establishment or create a political mass movement. Were it not for the lavish media attention he still gets, he’d be a classic coffee-house revolutionary, regaling strangers about how he came “this close” to ruling and how, with a little help from you, he can get the revolution restarted. But because he provides relatively good quotes and calls back journalists, the mainstream media have an investment in keeping him more relevant that he really is. He was fired by Trump, defenestrated by Breitbart and the Mercers, and lives on largely as a useful prop for the media he claims to despise.

Jonah Goldberg

10

New Yorker, editor David Remnick, explaining why he had extended, and then quickly rescinded, an invitation to former presidential adviser Stephen K. Bannon to be interviewed on a public stage.

…

[I]t’s worth considering what Remnick’s disinvitation has actually achieved. Here’s my list:

It has kept Bannon’s name prominently in the news, no doubt to his considerable delight. It has turned a nativist bigot into a victim of liberal censorship. It has lent credence to the belief that journalists are, as Bannon said of Remnick, “gutless.” It has corroborated the view that the news media is a collection of left-wing group thinkers who, if they aren’t quite peddling “fake news,” are mainly interested in advancing only their own truths. It has kept readers of The New Yorker locked in their usual echo chamber. It has strengthened the belief that vulnerable institutions can be hounded into submitting to the irascible (and unappeasable) demands of social media mobs. Above all, it has foreclosed an opportunity to submit Bannon to the kind of probing examination that Remnick had initially promised, and that is journalism at its best.

The next time we journalists demand “courage” of the politicians, let’s first take care to prove that we know what the word means, and to exhibit some courage ourselves.

Bret Stephens

As Rod Dreher points out, The Economist did it better.

Miscellany

11

John McCain, well aware of his impending death, orchestrated a Resistance Funeral.

It’s currently obligatory to overlook his flaws as well as to remember his virtues, and I’ll not breach my obligation just yet. Indeed, I expect canonization forthwith.

But what I didn’t expect is hectoring pundits posing “WWJMD” criticisms every time Republicans do something deemed insufficiently bipartisan.

12

If you consider yourself a sane conservative, I’d suggest you bookmark the US edition of the Spectator. It’s pretty lively, with some voices other than the usual suspects.

It was there, for instance, that I learned that:

The Pussy Church of Modern Witchcraft (PCMW) in Maryland has just been afforded Tax Exempt Status by the IRS, which recognised it as a legitimate place of worship, or rather a ‘place of lesbian faith’. Serving a lesbian-feminist congregation, the PCMW is described on its website as, ‘a congregation of female-born, lesbian-led Women devoted to the liberation of Women and Girls from the oppression we face based on our sex.’

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Tuesday Tidbits, 9/4/18

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Douthat: … [I]t will be interesting to watch Obama on the campaign trail, since he’s distinguished himself thus far as the most Zen of all prominent Democrats about the Trump phenomenon: The sheer, deliberate normalcy of his post-presidential conduct has been an interesting counterpoint to the prominent Democrats determined to reject anything that smacks of “normalizing” in our Trumpian times …

Bruni: … Obama is something akin to but slightly different from the road not taken. He’s the boulevard sorely missed … He’s the opposite of the boy who cried wolf. He’s the man who communed with his inner lamb. And voters may well be in the mood for something soft and fleecy right about now.

Douthat: But my general take on this election is that it’s really Trump vs. Trump. By which I mean, whether the Democrats can turn their advantage into a rout will depend on something beyond their control — the president’s own conduct in September and October, which could be worth a few extra points to Democrats if it’s manic and authoritarian and kooky, and a few extra points to Republicans if it’s (relatively) restrained. What do you think of that framing?

Bruni: Will Trump’s conduct be a central factor? Yes, yes and yes. A few weeks ago, I talked extensively on background with a prominent Republican strategist who’s involved in the party’s efforts this fall, and he made the point that the party can find the right messaging, get all of its candidates in line, deploy the right amount of money to the right races — all of that — and then be utterly foiled by a presidential temper tantrum in the final week. The strategist noted that there’s one person in the party who can never, ever be expected to swallow his pride, suppress his emotions and follow a prudent script, and that’s the party’s leader, one Donald J. Trump.

Ross Douthat in dialog with Frank Bruni.

2

[T]he Reformation never was necessary, though much needed to be reformed back then. As it turned out, the Reformation didn’t reform what needed to be reformed. Instead, it reformulated Christian beliefs and fashioning a new religion, Protestantism.

D.G. Hart. Full disclosure: This is cherry-picked from a longer blog, of which it is not representative. The blog — on the departure from Catholicism of Damon Linker and matters related thereto — is interesting in its own right.

Linker, by the way, appears to have gone into hiding — okay, maybe just on vacation — after renouncing his Roman Catholic faith eight days ago. I hope he’s well.

3

I follow Seth Godin’s blog, though I’m retired, because he occasionally comes up with a gem like First, Fast and Correct.

4

Ms. Heng isn’t your father’s GOP nominee. In 1983 her parents arrived in the U.S. as penniless refugees from communist Cambodia. She grew up working after school at the little grocery store in Fresno that her family still runs.

A product of Fresno’s public schools, Ms. Heng was valedictorian at Sunnyside High School. She then got her bachelor’s degree from Stanford, where she became student body president. She helped start a string of T-Mobile stores with her brother, earned a master’s in business administration from Yale, and worked for Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She also served on the Trump inaugural committee.

It seems her time spent running a business with her brothers was what drove her into politics. She found the combination of state and federal regulation overbearing. “Instead of focusing on jobs, we were focusing on government regulations,” she told the Fresno Bee. Today she is running as a strong fiscal and deregulatory conservative.

William McGurn, An Ocasio-Cortez for the GOP? (extolling Elizabeth Heng of California’s 16th Congressional District)

How do you say “I am not a crook” in church Latin?

Rod Dreher on the Viganò letter and the Pope’s response so far.

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Kavanaugh hearings

Forget the breathless and endless speculation about how judicial nominees will rule on this or that hot-button “issue.” Judicial “agendas” are not the way courts work in theory, and since it’s a good theory it predicts judicial behavior most of the time.

I saved for last (in a fairly short blog) some wry comments on the hearing process itself.

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No Court with Chief Justice John Roberts as the swing vote is going to overturn precedents willy-nilly, even if an originalist interpretation of the Constitution suggests that it should. The Court has other things to consider, such as how deeply precedents have become embedded in law and social practice.

… The real reason Democrats are furious about a Court with five conservatives is that it may no longer be an engine of progressive policy. If liberals want to guarantee a minimum income or a right to suicide, they will have to persuade voters and pass it democratically. No longer will five or six Justices be able to find such rights in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Constitution.

Wall Street Journal editorial.

You really could drop “with Chief Justice John Roberts as the swing vote.”

2

A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case—it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opening statement at her confirmation hearings in 1993, via David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman in the Wall Street Journal.

They continue:

Judges are appointed to exercise the “judicial power.” As per the Constitution, this involves deciding specific “cases” or “controversies”—that is, concrete disputes involving real facts, as opposed to abstract questions of law. Judging, in turn, entails the application of law to the facts of a particular case. The facts matter greatly: The way in which the circumstances of a given case can be distinguished from one in the past or one in the future is often what creates the basis for a legal rule, because it is that distinction that becomes legally material.

Judges don’t decide cases in a vacuum or through divine inspiration. They do it in the crucible of adversarial testing. Appellate judges read the parties’ briefs. They hear the lawyers’ arguments. They review the precedents and the factual record. Then they piece it all together, rendering a decision that, in Justice Ginsburg’s formulation, “should turn on those facts and the governing law, stated and explained in light of the particular arguments the parties or their representatives present.” Opining on a legal question divorced from the context of a particular case is not judging at all. It is speculation, a guess as to what the right rule might be.

In that sense, a senatorial demand that a nominee take one side or the other on a given “issue” is futile. Who is to say which of any number of possible factual circumstances might be relevant when, because there is no case, there are no facts? How can anyone judge the correctness of an argument when, because there are no parties, no one has argued for or against it? Answering at all would be deceptive.

… A nominee’s advance commitment to decide a question a certain way is incompatible with the appearance of fairness and impartiality that gives the law its legitimacy.

(Emphasis added)

This is the best explanation of the difference between judging and legislating that can recall ever having read. Re-read Nominee Ginsburg’s admirable summary now and see how apt it is.

(Has it really been 25 years since Ginsburg’s confirmation?! Not possible!)

3

Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni on the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings:

Douthat: They are an extensive exercise in senatorial grandstanding, defensible only on the grounds that days and days of stupefying boredom might somehow prompt a judicial nominee to break down, Colonel Jessup-style, and scream, “You’re goddamn right I’m going to overturn Roe v. Wade!” But Brett Kavanaugh was genetically engineered by mad scientists working in the Federalist Society’s basement to never, ever, break down ….

Bruni: These hearings are also about the 2020 presidential election. It’s worth noting that at least three potential Democratic presidential contenders — Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — will get to ask Kavanaugh questions. Which means that they won’t really be asking questions per se. They’ll be swept up in an audition, a preen-a-thon, “American Idol: Democratic Nominee Edition.” For those who want to skip it, I can give you an oxymoronic advance recap: Kavanaugh dodges question; Klobuchar delivers rousing soliloquy; Kavanaugh punts; Booker wows the room with fierce words; Kavanaugh sidesteps; Harris’s voice rises high.

Douthat: If one of them can get Kavanaugh to lose his cool, that senator will be the Democratic nominee by default — though really, I half expect Michael Avenatti to crash the hearings and try to effect a citizen’s arrest of Kavanaugh, at which point he’ll be handed the Democratic nomination by acclamation.

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Jesus said to them “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.” Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. (Mark 6:4-5)

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Right-wing discriminators

This week’s GetReligion podcast, How did investigating McCarrick turn into a right-wing thing?, brought back unpleasant memories.

The New York Times broke the story of the McCarrick scandal, a scandal about a charismatic, but retired, U.S. Cardinal’s sexual predations (should any reader have been living in a cave, or should this blog turn up in an internet WayBack Machine some century hence).

The story was “newsworthy” until Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò steered it in a direction that made Pope Francis look bad. Now the newsworthy story in some quarters is the Vast Viganò Right-Wing Conspiracy against the current Pope, who is styled a “reformer” with all that connotes.

I’ve been here before — the place where truth or falsity is irrelevant because … Tribe.

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Decades ago, a City Councilman in my hometown introduced an amendment to add sexual orientation as a protected class in our Human Relations Ordinance (a pretty weak and ineffectual thing, really, but the symbolism was big). The Councilman was acting, it was reported, in the wake of his son “coming out.”

There was a fierce debate over the amendment. My City Council patiently pretended to listen to concerns — I’ll give them that; no odious limits on public comments — before they passed it. The press, of course, supported it.

A few years later, that “out” son was accused of spiriting two adolescent boys away from the home for troubled boys where he was employed as a counselor, and sodomizing them in his parents’ Rec Room. He seemed to make a habit of it, taking them one at a time.

The accusers were savaged in the press and public opinion despite, whether their stories were true or false, the scandal that this self-acknowledged homosexual, one Greg Ledbetter, was employed as a fox to guard the henhouse of the Cary Home for troubled boys.

If you want to know where press bias is shown, think “story selection,” not “spin.” The “news” was that some adolescent pawns had been incited to accuse the poster boy of a progressive ordinance, not that a young man who lusted after young men had been given sexual access to a whole house full of already-troubled young men.

Go figure. No, on second thought, don’t bother.

When the lads recanted their stories, the press did a victory dance and reminded everyone how cruel we right-wing conspirators had been to the Ledbetter Family and young Greg, even mysteriously finding some way to force these lads into telling a cock-and-bull story.

Greg Ledbetter is now in prison in Wisconsin for buggering ten adolescent boys there. In the Wisconsin investigation, videos were found of his sodomizing the two accusers who had recanted their (true) charges. And they found scrapbooks on how, with the help of his enablers, he avoided a reckoning here.

I’ve written here, here and here about the Greg Ledbetter affair should you be interested. My role was one of the right-wing conspirators. I never opined that the charges against Ledbetter were true, but I found them basically plausible, and Ledbetter’s employment in a job where he could gain sexual access to troubled boys absolutely appalling. As I once put it:

[O]n the theory that “we’re just like you except that we prefer the same sex,” I consult my own feelings (especially when I was a younger adult) about sexually mature adolescent girls. Hmmm. It seems to me that it would be highly imprudent to put a young straight guy in a position where he could finagle sexual access to nubile female charges.

Nobody in any position of authority ever publicly admitted that the homosexual orientation of a young male applicant, for a job involving unsupervised access to trouble adolescent males, was a relevant factor, perhaps even disqualifying. In fact, in every local jurisdiction in my county, we still have ordinances categorically forbidding discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation, with no qualification that it be “invidious” discrimination, nor any nod toward sexual orientation being relevant to at least a few jobs.

I can only hope that we have scofflaws in positions of hiring authority for those jobs, and that our Human Relations Commissions are not too packed with ideologues to wink at non-invidious discrimination.

“Discrimination” in the sense of “treating differently” should be the beginning of a conversation or analysis, not a “conversation-stopper.” But it’s not so. At the mention (“but that would be discriminaaaaaaation!”) eyes glaze over and visages turn fierce.

We’ll never begin to reduce sexual predation of adolescents until we wise up that allowing adults, especially young ones, unsupervised access to adolescents of the sex they prefer is not an enlightened progressive policy but a vice indistinguishable in practical effect from turning a Russian Roulette gun on the kids — but with two or three chambers loaded, not just one.

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The semi-discerning have been noting that the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Church these days involves ephebophilia, not pedophilia. I’ve fallen into that myself, and I might yet again.

But I think that “ephebophilia” is not quite right, either. I don’t think the problem is any version of chronophilia, “sexual attraction limited to individuals of particular age ranges” (emphasis added).

The problem of priests molesting adolescent males is an epiphenomenon of homosexual priests. Period. Full stop.

Consider that carefully. 100% of the abusers are male, and 81% of their victims are underage males. What kind of men systematically abuse boys and male teens?

Our liberal media does not want to answer that question, for obvious reasons. They have their agenda, and the flourishing of the Catholic Church is not on it.

Eric Mader

Some day, the refusal of homophiles (i.e., all major cultural institutions) to admit the nexus between unchaste homosexual priests and predation on adolescent boys will be seen as a terrible ideological sin (pas d’ennemi au gauche) that enabled continued predation.

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Monday Mélange 9/3/18

1

The narrator provides us with one final parcel of information that he has learned about Bartleby, a rumor he has heard that before the young man entered his employ, he worked in the dead letter office in Washington, D.C.:

Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

James Gardner, in a “Masterpiece” review of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener.

2

[E]ven a silent and secluded Benedict sends a message. Italian friends have told me that The Benedict Option has become for many in Italy a refuge from the Francis stuff. I find that discouraging, to be honest, because I did not write the book with an anti-Francis agenda in mind, and don’t want it to be taken as anti-Francis. Nevertheless, Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, a major Francis mouthpiece, and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago have both publicly denounced the book and the idea as counter to Pope Francis’s vision, so what can I say? My book is certainly infused with the spirit of Ratzinger, who I think of as the second Benedict of the Benedict Option.

An interesting blog of Rod Dreher, drawing parallels between the first Benedict’s retreat from a “dangerous and godless gulf” and the reported motivation behind Benedict XVI’s resignation — the loss of a Vatican battle over cracking down on the likes of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

However his resignation came about, there’s reason for hope in his continued relevance:

Years ago, when I was in college, I read Thomas Merton’s great autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. In it, Merton, who wrote it as a new Trappist monk, talked about the World War II years, and said that maybe the entire world was held together by the prayers of monks hidden away in monasteries.

3

Since the authorities announced on Aug. 22 that Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a farmworker from Mexico, was charged with first-degree murder in her death, politicians and pundits have used the arrest to push for stronger immigration laws.

In a column in The Des Moines Register on Saturday, her father, Rob Tibbetts, encouraged the debate on immigration. “But,” he added, “do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist.”

The Register on Friday published a column by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., in which he blamed Democrats for Ms. Tibbetts’s death and said claims that conservatives and Republicans were politicizing her death were “absurd.”

Melissa Gomez, New York Times.

You might as well ask bears not to shit in the woods, Mr. Tibbetts. And that steaming pile? “Fake news!” “Absurd.”

4

Oh, the horror!

Rolling Stone accuses the Education Secretary of ‘listening to the men’s rights groups she’s met with’.

Cockburn at Spectator USA.

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Facepalm du jour

It seems to me that very often talking about homosexuality has mainly been a way of not talking about other things that need talking about.

It was not the invention of the birth-control pill, or the adoption of no-fault divorce, that hollowed out marriage: It was that we became the sort of people who desired those things. We became — Western civilization became — the kids who flunked the test in the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, unable to resist immediate gratification and, having stripped ourselves of the cultural basis for understanding the distinction, unable to tell the difference between pleasure and happiness.

Hence the sex dolls.

… Imagine, if you can — with charity, if you can — the state of a man in a silicon brothel paying to have sex (a simulacrum of sex) with an inanimate object. The act indicates a profound alienation not only from ordinary healthy sexual expression but from humanity ….

Kevin D. Williamson, The Psalmist and the Sex Doll (emphasis added).

There’s a tendency to focus on the most horrible or stupid stunts of one’s ideological adversaries, and I asked myself if that wasn’t what Williamson was doing here.

I think not. There really is a kind of enthusiasm for the idea of orgasm-at-will with a simulacrum of another person — a similacrum that will never be out of sorts or complicate one’s life unduly. The sexy dolls have been around a while, but many people have enthused here and there over the idea of taking those sexy doll and roboticizing them.

And I have no reason to think that the enthusiasts are all ideological adversaries in conventional political terms, either. Indeed, I can imagine some Christianish “incels” thinking sex dolls and amorous robots are, literally, a Godsend to satisfy one’s “needs” without fornication.

I may be overdue for another rant on the difference between non-fornication and chastity.

That it is a fairly marginal phenomenon (so far) does not mean that it tells us nothing about the decadence of society more broadly.

(The Psalmist in the title, by the way, is the late Leonard Cohen.)

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Saturday Sundries 9/1/18

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Postmodern theory may be the most loathed concept ever to have emerged from academia. Developed within literature and philosophy departments in the 1970s, it supposedly told us that facts were debatable, that individual perspectives mattered most, that shared meaning was an illusion and that universal truth was a myth.

The right quickly identified these notions as a danger to the very foundations of society and spent decades flogging the university lefties who promoted them …

Later, centrists and liberals searching for a culprit behind the ascent of Donald Trump and the war on fact that surrounds him joined the conservative crusade …

These challenges to postmodern theory did identify an important crisis: Losing a shared vocabulary for the world’s problems, for the way we relate to one another and for current events may be the greatest threat to American society …

Yet these problems were exactly what worried postmodern theorists. Their project was an attempt to understand why people had begun to interpret material facts so differently ….

Aaron Hanlon, Postmodernism didn’t cause Trump. It explains him.

Hanlon is easy to excerpt, since each paragraph seems to be structured Thesis/Illustations. I disagree with some of the illustrations, but appreciate a refresher on postmodernism which “wasn’t a thing” yet during my formal education.

2

We know that many conservatives voted for Trump because he promised to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court. We also know that Trump ran away with the evangelical Christian vote.

But one must ask these men and women of the cloth: Is it really more important to hope for a Supreme Court that might reverse (or, more realistically, erode) Roe v. Wade than it is to have a president of whom we can be proud? In whom we can trust to be thoughtful, honest and impervious to every little slight?

… Trump was surely serious when he spoke about the darkness that would descend upon the land if Republicans lose the House. One would have thought he was speaking of the Islamic State or the Taliban, not fellow Americans with a different point of view. Even stranger, he mentioned violence in the context of antifa, a loose group of anti-fascists militant in their protest of the white supremacists who have celebrated Trump’s presidency as a giant step for white mankind.

Kathleen Parker

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Sundries 8/31/18

1

The fetish we have developed for focusing on how small we are vis-a-vis really big things, a la Stephen Hawking and others (“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies”) has a history and, furthermore, it is completely and utterly arbitrary when one could write a similar sentence about the comparative sizes of, say, a cell nucleus and a quark, or hypothesize on the intelligent life and modes of travel that exist on a particle (unobserved as of yet) the size of a yoctometer.

I have an Ivy educated gardener friend who, when I mention the biodynamic farmers who plant according to the position of the moon, the stars, and signs, lets out a big guffaw. But I tease him back by saying that, for a much larger mind and frame of reference and consciousness, the space between Sirius the Dog Star and our little cucumber seeds seems no bigger than the distance between a cell wall and a nucleus.

…

The Russian polymath Pavel Floresnki, in his study of icons, showed that perspective in art was not, as so many think, “discovered” in the Renaissance. Many of the laws of perspective had been used in stage sets in Ancient Greece but, apart from that, were apparently found quite uninteresting. Iconographers, instead, aware of their tools but more conscious of how they used space in their attempts to portray a higher reality, ’wrote’ one-dimensional Icons that transformed the space around them. They had a different and, to them, nobler goal in mind.

When you look at something only in terms of how it can serve you, you might be able to control it, but you also might not, in fact, be seeing that thing accurately.

…

[Jordan] Peterson, references the great observation from The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions:

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

Michael J. Sauter. 10 minutes to read Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and the Problem of Bigness, but one could chew it all day. It’s befitting that it appeared at the newly-redesigned Front Porch Republic website, where the tagline remains “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

Small is Beautiful, y’all.

2

Shame is not the same as guilt – or perhaps it would be better to say that there are several kinds of shame.

To hide one’s sins from others really is the shame of guilt. But to practice modesty is the shame of innocence.

Even as to the shame of guilt, a distinction must be made. One might conceal his sins to escape the punishment he deserves. But he might also conceal them to spare others exposure to his taint.

I wouldn’t condemn a man for that.

J Budziszewski. I look forward to few things in my RSS feed more than another entry by Budziszewski in his Underground Thomist blog.

3

It is said by some that God has no boundaries regarding us, that He is God and may do with us (and to us) whatever He wills. This, of course, is true in an abstract sense. However, it is not true of God as He has made Himself known in Christ. Christ is a God who “asks.” He is the God who allows a freedom so great that it can kill Him.

… It is the love of God that surrounds us and calls us to be His friends. It seeks us, face to face, even searching for us when we hide. But it is a love that stands weakly at the border of our freedom, and waits for our invitation.

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

4

For the first time, a … non-Christian will lead this group that thinks government is too involved in religion.

Washington Post headline on Rachel Laser being named executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Millions beg to differ with “first non-Christian” on some sort of “No True Scotsman” theory.

5

Tossing, hiding or being shunned for ‘stinky’ school lunches: 8 Canadians on the ethnic food they were embarrassed to eat in class. Via Sameer Vasta and micro.blog.

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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.