Author: readerjohn

I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West. There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.

Jesus, loser

I think Christian Smith pretty well described Moralistic Therapeutic Deism when he coined the term, but Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon’s definition is now my favorite:

The function of Church in society is to keep spiritually healthy and morally upright those who are pursuing the American Dream.

But according to Luke, the Gospel is to leave all things and embrace the cross daily.

Could anything be more opposed to the cross of Christ than a life dedicated to the quest for personal prosperity? … What Jesus warns this man about is a life in which he loves God with his whole heart, loves his neighbor as himself, and goes about making as much money as he can … Wealth itself so easily becomes idolatrous.

If wealth is the mark of success, then think about it: Who are the failures? Who are the “losers”? …

Can any philosophy be more at odds with the cross of Christ than the [social Darwinist] survival of the fittest? The cross is the absolute answer to Darwin, just as the absolute answer to Nietszche and the will to power. The cross stands against all of that.

The basic floor of the cross of Calvary is that Jesus did not survive. He died as a poor man who had nothing to show for his life. He left no bank account. He was a loser. As he died, he was obliged to leave the care of his widowed mother to another poor man. By every standard recognized in the money market, Jesus was a failure. A poor man who died a poor man.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Woke for what purpose?

David Brooks nails it, though it stings:

In an older frame of mind, you try to perceive the size of a problem objectively, and then you propose a solution, which might either be radical or moderate, conservative or liberal. You were judged primarily by the nature of your proposal.

But wokeness jams together the perceiving and the proposing. In fact, wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation — how woke you are to what is wrong — than what exactly you plan to do about it. To be woke is to understand the full injustice.

There is no measure or moderation to wokeness. It’s always good to be more woke. It’s always good to see injustice in maximalist terms. To point to any mitigating factors in the environment is to be naïve, childish, a co-opted part of the status quo.

…

These days we think of wokeness as a left-wing phenomenon. But it is an iron law of politics that every mental habit conservatives fault in liberals is one they also practice themselves.

(David Brooks, The Problem with Wokeness)

It seems to be my role in life to try to “awoken” people, from the conservative side, to the problems conservatives see, especially in the culture and in religious freedom. I’d be a lousy legislator because I’m weak on solutions. (Hmmmm. Is that what’s behind some of our polarization?) I know people who’ve made pretty good livings being even more woke (or it’s conservative counterpart) than me.

But I’ve begun reading, apropos of one of my longest-standing concerns, Charles C. Camosy’s Beyond the Abortion Wars, which is premised on there being wider-spread disagreement (“agreement” — “disagreement” was a Freudian slip of the fingers) than the warring sides seem to think. I’m skeptical (of course — it’s a reflex), but I’ll try to remember to share a bit if, despite myself, I think there’s much merit in his argument.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Greengrocers, incense and such

This story/parable, of which I learned through Rod Dreher several years ago, remains one of the most powerful and timely (maybe timeless) I know:

Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power — and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs.

Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity. Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth” — and it’s going to cost him plenty.

…

Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system — but he has preserved his humanity. And that, says Havel, is a far more important accomplishment than whether this party or that politician holds power…

(Rod Dreher, quoting Vaclav Havel) I suggest the possibility of it being “timeless” because I suspect that every society needs some rituals, however informal, to bind its members together. The governors of those societies don’t care what you believe so long as you enact the rituals.

It is this, and more than this, that I’m referring to when I categorize a blog as “Pinch of incense,” for offering the “pinch of incense” imperils not just humanity, but eternity:

And there the chief of the police, Herod, and his father, Nicetas, met [Polycarp] and transferred him to their carriage, and tried to persuade him, as they sat beside him, saying, “What harm is there to say `Lord Caesar,’ and to offer incense and all that sort of thing, and to save yourself?”

At first he did not answer them. But when they persisted, he said, “I am not going to do what you advise me.”

Then when they failed to persuade him, they uttered dire threats and made him get out with such speed that in dismounting from the carriage he bruised his shin. But without turning around, as though nothing had happened, he proceeded swiftly, and was led into the arena, there being such a tumult in the arena that no one could be heard. But as Polycarp was entering the arena, a voice from heaven came to him, saying, “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man. No one saw the one speaking, but those of our people who were present heard the voice.

[…] But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you. Curse Christ.”

Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

(The martyrdom of Polycarp, circa 155 A. D.)

Today’s problematic “Workers of the World, Unite!,” today’s pinch of incense, today’s culture-binding rituals, are related to gay pride: pride flags in the window, hosting pride crossfit events and such, baking wedding cakes, observing rules that mandate use of your auditor’s preferred pronouns — you know, trifles like that. (It’s also pledging allegiance to the flag, standing for the national anthem and such — which I’m cussed enough to resist, but which I don’t fault others for observing. )

Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop is our Polycarp, Jordan Peterson our dissident greengrocer (and Peterson is expecting secular martyrdom). Both are among my heroes.

If you think I’m making a big deal out of nothing, then I think you’re part of the problem, and need to reflect more carefully on the eventuality — to you and to your countrymen or fellow believers who dissent, and who will have your pusillanimity thrown in their faces.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

A pornographic response to porn

Kudos to the Times‘ Maggie Jones for highlighting the issue [of teen exposure to online pornography], but if this were a math assignment she would only get partial credit. She’s guessed the correct answer without quite understanding what makes it so. The Times piece seems to imply that pornography is hurting our children by showing them the wrong kind of sex—male dominated, aggressive, overwhelmingly straight, and featuring bodies that conform to outmoded beauty standards (which is to say, beauty standards). The unarticulated subtext is that if only children were watching some “woke” version of pornography, the issue wouldn’t be so alarming. It’s a response almost as crass as the subject it explores, an anemic reaction to an issue that’s more than an isolated contemporary technological predicament: it’s emblematic of the deeper operating logic of contemporary society as a whole. Simply put, it was a pornographic response to pornography.

(Scott Beauchamps, The Pornification of Everything) Beauchamps also discusses the anthropology of philosopher Byung-Chul Han, of whom I had not previously heard.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Aggregator: What does Masterpiece Cakeshop portend?

Social conservatives continue poring over the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision to discern what it is:

  1. A punt, pure and simple. Only this and nothing more.
  2. A punt with deliberate hints of better things to come.
  3. A punt with deliberate hints of worse things to come.
  4. A punt with inadvertent hints of better things to come.
  5. A punt with inadvertent hints of worse things to come.
  6. Something else.

Herewith an aggregation, with more substance at the end.

  1. David French, attorney, both immediately and later in rebuttal of his less sanguine colleague. I don’t disagree with French lightly, but I’m quite skeptical of his second, third and fourth points in the second piece.
  2. Andrew McCarthy, that less sanguine colleague, who alone in this pack is okay with Justice Scalia’s rewriting of free exercise jurisprudence.
  3. Rod Dreher, stunned and grateful that we won, no matter how small.
  4. Erin Manning, who intuits some things so simple that only an intellectual (or a lawyer) could miss them (have we really expanded basic, fundamental human rights and needs to include wedding cake? Seriously?).
  5. Robert P. George, who discerns at least a clear principle that you don’t have to leave your religion at home when you go to work.
  6. Darel E. Paul (“Only profound naïveté can spin the majority decision as a victory for religious liberty.”).
  7. Hadley Arkes, who gives a law-savvy but essentially philosophical critique on the whole gang, the 7 as well as the 2, as relativists.

My favorite I’ve held back until now. R.R. Reno is no lawyer but has penetrated the tectonic shifts that may be taking place as “anti-discrimination” tries to grow in foreign soil as the putatively oppressed have now become elites engaged in punching down. (Caveat: Reno’s short article may be so allusive that it will “go over your head” if you haven’t been immersed in these issues for some time already. I can’t tell because I have been immersed, particularly since Chai Feldblum said that in almost every clash between gay rights and religious freedom, gay rights should win.)

And Marc Randazza, who I think is an irascible libertarian of some sort rather than a conservative, takes a scatological swipe at Jack Phillips but then correctly affirms that Phillips should have won on substantive grounds, with no dithering about petty anti-Christian Colorado Civil Rights Commissioners.

That was my preferred outcome, and one easily enough justified if we didn’t have Justices so tainted by knee-jerk progressivism that they refuse to acknowledge the reasonableness of the belief that a wedding cake symbolizes that a real wedding has occurred, a real marriage begun, and the one needn’t be a bigot to question that in the case of two men or two women “marrying.” Indeed, in Chestertonian terms, those justices are the real bigots:

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Masterpiece Cakeshop

Some fairly preliminary thoughts on today’s Supreme Court decision.

Religious liberty advocates got the opinion they wanted. Unfortunately, it was a concurrence by Justice Thomas with Justice Gorsuch joining. More on that in a moment.

Justice Kennedy’s much narrower majority opinion is a disappointment not only because it’s not what my side (or the other) was hoping for but because it dodged the core issues with some hand-waving that I view as disingenuous.

The free speech aspect of this case is difficult, for few persons who have seen a beautiful wedding cake might have thought of its creation as an exercise of protected speech.

That’s uncommonly stupid even for Anthony Kennedy. Few people who watch a Irish ethnic pride parade in Boston, or people watching a lewd dance, or people watching flag-burning, or any number of other things, will think they’re watching exercises of free speech. So what?

One of the difficulties in this case is that the parties disagree as to the extent of the baker’s refusal to provide service.

It’s true that the parties disagreed, but their disagreement was about nuances that needn’t be resolved as the core issue was resolved. As justice Thomas points out in his concurrence, the Colorado Courts resolved that question sufficiently to permit a ringing decision on free speech grounds:

The Court does not address this claim because it has some uncertainties about the record.  See  ante, at 2.  Specifically, the parties dispute whether Phillips refused to create a custom wedding cake for the individual respondents, or whether he refused to sell them any wedding cake (includ­ing a premade one). But the Colorado Court of Appeals resolved this factual dispute in Phillips’ favor.  The court described his conduct as a refusal to “design and create a cake to celebrate [a] same-sex wedding …

Even after describing his conduct this way, the Court of Appeals concluded that Phillips’ conduct was not expres­sive and was not protected speech. It reasoned that an outside observer would think that Phillips was merely complying with Colorado’s public-accommodations law, not expressing a message, and that Phillips could post a disclaimer to that effect.  This reasoning flouts bedrock prin­ciples of our free-speech jurisprudence and would justify virtually any law that compels individuals to speak. It should not pass without comment.

(Emphasis added) And comment he does.

Of course, conduct does not qualify as protected speech simply because “the person engaging in [it] intends thereby to express an idea.” United States v. O’Brien, 391 U. S. 367, 376 (1968). To determine whether conduct is suffi­ciently expressive, the Court asks whether it was “intended to be communicative” and, “in context, would reasonably be understood by the viewer to be communicative.” Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U. S. 288, 294 (1984). But a “ ‘particularized message’ ” is not required, or else the freedom of speech “would never reach the unquestionably shielded painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schöenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll.” Hurley, 515 U. S., at 569.
…
The conduct that the Colorado Court of Appeals ascribed to Phillips—creating and designing custom wedding cakes—is expressive. Phillips considers himself an artist. The logo for Masterpiece Cakeshop is an artist’s paint palate with a paintbrush and baker’s whisk. Behind the counter Phillips has a picture that depicts him as an artist painting on a canvas. Phillips takes exceptional care with each cake that he creates—sketching the design out on paper, choosing the color scheme, creating the frosting and decorations, baking and sculpting the cake, decorating it, and delivering it to the wedding. Examples of his crea­tions can be seen on Masterpiece’s website. See http://masterpiececakes.com/wedding-cakes (as last visited June 1, 2018).
Phillips is an active participant in the wedding celebra­tion. He sits down with each couple for a consultation before he creates their custom wedding cake. He discusses their preferences, their personalities, and the details of their wedding to ensure that each cake reflects the couple who ordered it. In addition to creating and delivering the cake—a focal point of the wedding celebration—Phillips sometimes stays and interacts with the guests at the wedding. And the guests often recognize his creations and seek his bakery out afterward. Phillips also sees the inherent symbolism in wedding cakes. To him, a wedding cake inherently communicates that “a wedding has oc­curred, a marriage has begun, and the couple should be celebrated.” App. 162. Wedding cakes do, in fact, communicate this message. A tradition from Victorian England that made its way to America after the Civil War, “[w]edding cakes are so packed with symbolism that it is hard to know where to begin.” M. Krondl, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert 321 (2011 (Krondl); see also ibid. (explaining the symbol­ism behind the color, texture, flavor, and cutting of the cake). If an average person walked into a room and saw a white, multi-tiered cake, he would immediately know that he had stumbled upon a wedding. The cake is “so stand­ardised and inevitable a part of getting married that few ever think to question it.” Charsley, Interpretation and Custom: The Case of the Wedding Cake, 22 Man 93, 95 (1987). Almost no wedding, no matter how spartan, is missing the cake. See id., at 98. “A whole series of events expected in the context of a wedding would be impossible without it: an essential photograph, the cutting, the toast, and the distribution of both cake and favours at the wed­ding and afterwards.” Ibid. Although the cake is eventu­ally eaten, that is not its primary purpose. See id., at 95 (“It is not unusual to hear people declaring that they do not like wedding cake, meaning that they do not like to eat it. This includes people who are, without question, having such cakes for their weddings”); id., at 97 (“Nothing is made of the eating itself ”); Krondl 320–321 (explaining that wedding cakes have long been described as “inedi­ble”). The cake’s purpose is to mark the beginning of a new marriage and to celebrate the couple.
…
Ac­cording to the individual respondents, Colorado can com­pel Phillips’ speech to prevent him from “ ‘denigrat[ing] the dignity’ ” of same-sex couples, “ ‘assert[ing] [their] inferiority,’ ” and subjecting them to “ ‘humiliation, frustration, and embarrassment.’” Brief for Respondents Craig et al. 39 (quoting J. E. B. v. Alabama ex rel. T. B., 511 U. S. 127, 142 (1994); Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241, 292 (1964) (Goldberg, J., concurring)). These justifications are completely foreign to our free-speech jurisprudence.

(Emphasis added)

That the court could not muster a 5-4 majority for such an opinion, but relied on a couple of technicalities (so to speak — nobody thought the fairness of the proceedings was the core issue in the case) I fear as a bad omen.

But omen’s are just omens. I thankfully could be wrong. David French is more upbeat.

Both sides surely will be mining the opinions in the abstract and, all too soon, in the context of another case akin to this. I only hope they will leave Jack Phillips alone now, but the way this was decided, he’s at risk of targeting as soon as he resumes offering wedding cakes to those who are actually entering into real marriages.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Tighten up, now

I would like to call attention to the Religion News Service report that was posted with this headline: “Employees quit American Bible Society over sex and marriage rules.” The overture is quite strong:

(RNS) — One of the oldest nonprofit organizations dedicated to distributing Bibles around the world will soon require all employees to adhere to orthodox Christian beliefs and heed a conservative code of sexual ethics.

Employees are resigning in protest of the new policy, which will effectively prohibit sexually active LGBT people and couples in cohabitating relationships from working for the American Bible Society. But the organization stands by it as a measure intended to bring “unity and clarity.”

The key word in that lede is “orthodox,” with a small “o.” It would have been possible, I guess, to have used phrases such as “ancient Christian beliefs” or even “traditional Christian beliefs.” Both would have been accurate in terms of history. In this context, the use of “conservative” is fine, since there are “liberal” churches that have modernized their doctrines on these subjects.

However, strange things start happening soon after that strong, factual opening, Note, for example, the end of this paragraph:

The American Bible Society, founded 202 years ago to publish, distribute and translate the Bible, presented its “Affirmation of Biblical Community” to employees in December. It requires employees to “refrain from sexual contact outside the marriage covenant,” which it defined as man and wife.

Now, let’s be clear. It is accurate to state that the American Bible Society document defines “marriage covenant” in this manner. However, the implication is that there is something unique or controversial about that doctrine – as opposed to it being a restatement of 2,000 years of basic Christian moral theology

…

It is … crucial to note why the American Bible Society, and many other religious groups, are putting these kinds of doctrinal specifics into print. They aren’t doing this because they want to do so, they are taking this step because of emerging legal realities.

The roots of these decisions can be found in recent government actions and court decisions (think HHS mandates) requiring religious nonprofits to be much more specific about the doctrines that define their voluntary associations. In other words, there are now solid legal reasons for being more candid, as a defense strategy when being sued by those who oppose these doctrines.This story isn’t going away. So be careful out there.

(Terry Mattingly, emphasis added)

Let me put this another way: When organizations like the American Bible Society find that an employee is cohabiting or sexually active with members of the same sex, if they dismiss or otherwise discipline them, they don’t want the employee, sincerely or disingenuously, claiming that they had no idea that doing so violated a general rule that employees are to conduct their lives outside of work “consistently with Biblical morality” or some such general, umbrella standard.

There’s nothing new about this. For twenty centuries now, the Church has defined its teachings more rigorously when some sort of challenge arose to what previously had been, if not universally understood, at least not openly defied and disputed. From Arian heresy through iconoclastic heresy, that’s the background of the Ecumenical Councils of the undivided church.

The only thing that’s changed, it seems to me, is that tens of thousands of denominations and parachurch groups are going to have to do this one-by-one now, the clear and visible unity of the church having been blurred and obscured beyond possibility of an ecumenical council that all would recognize as binding.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Phobias coming all-too-soon

Occasionally, someone writes something very good, but with deep flaws. Such, it seems to me, is Joseph Pearce’s Does Love Have No Boundaries? at the Imaginative Conservative.

I listened to Pearce for several hours in January at the Eighth Day Symposium, and he rose considerably in my previously neutral estimation as a result.

But having provided a link to the original, and having given Pearce his props, I’m going to be presumptuous enough now to bowdlerize him to elide both the flaws I perceive and the parts that intrigue me without yet convincing me, leaving only that with which I agree.

Caveat emptor. Pearce is smarter and/or more mentally disciplined than I.

There are liars; there are damned liars; and there are those who peach evil in the name of love. Take, for instance, the mantra that love has no boundaries, which is one of the soundbites of the homosexist lobby. As with John Lennon’s mantra that all we need is love, it is difficult to argue with a sentiment that seems to make so much sense. Of course we all need love. We wither and decay in its absence. And, at first glance, it’s difficult to argue with the claim that love has no boundaries. …

The irony is, however, that the homosexists are neither liars, nor indeed damned liars, when they claim that love has no boundaries. They really believe that it is true. They are, however, preaching evil in the name of love because the “love” of which they speak is not really love at all. It is something entirely different. What they call “love” is … sexual attraction. It might indeed be true that sexual attraction has no boundaries. It is entirely possible that one’s passions and feelings can become so corrupt that we can be sexually attracted to all sorts of people and things … [I]f we’re going to be true to the mantra that love has no boundaries, why should we accept the boundaries imposed by age or species? If it’s all about sexual attraction and the gratification of our sexual desires, why should we temper those desires on the grounds of ancient taboos against sex with children or animals? If we recoil in horror at the thought of such things, aren’t we guilty of bigotry? Worse still, are we not guilty of some sort of psychological pathology? Are we not “pedophobic” or “bestophobic”? Should we not be getting in touch with the pedophile or the bestial within ourselves so that we can be liberated from our hang-ups?

Although this line of reasoning will no doubt be dismissed by some as going too far, being nothing more than the rhetorical use of the reductio ad absurdum to make a point, we should be aware of where the logic of the “no boundaries” philosophy actually leads. Previous generations would have thought it unthinkable that the demand for sexual “liberation” would lead to the legalization of infanticide. It would have been inconceivable to our grandparents that governments would condone the killing of babies so that people could fornicate freely. It would have been inconceivable to our parents that governments would destroy the very institution of marriage so that homosexuals could have equal rights. One day, if the “no boundaries” tyranny is not resisted, our own children will live with the reality of legalized pedophilia which we might find inconceivable.

….

(Emphasis added)

For the proposition “love knows no boundaries,” Pearce’s reductio is 100% apt, and screams of “he just compared gays to child molesters and sheep-sleepers!” are either hysterical or deliberate efforts to change the subject.

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

(Philip K. Dick)

The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.