Category: Jeremiad

The Mayor’s Amicus Brief

The Mayor across the river has signed onto a brief supporting same-sex marriage. Mayor Beyond River (R, not D) says:

It’s not only how my community feels, but it’s also how I feel personally … A lot of our population has shown that they’re supportive of marriage rights and believe in the age old doctrine of love being love.

(Emphasis added)

This is approximately the intellectual depth one expects from a Mayor on whose new Batman ankle tattoo (I’m not making this up) the local press ran a fawning “aw, the Mayor’s a regular guy like us” piece recently. (Be it noted that he cannot even make the train run on time.)

Okay, enough mockery of Mayor Airhead.

For the record, love is not love and that brain dead même is not “age old doctrine.”

By such idiocy reasoning, we could as well argue that “Daddy loves Sissy, so why shouldn’t they do coitus?” as argue for same-sex marriage. (“OMG! He just compared gay love to child molesting!” No, he just showed where lying platitudes lead.)

Loves are different and the appropriate expressions of those loves differ:

  • Love of husband and wife
  • Love of parent and child
  • Love of brother and sister (family)
  • Love of co-religionist
  • Love of country
  • Love of community
  • Love of neighbor
  • Love of mankind generally
  • The love of Mayor Beyond River for the Supreme Court
  • Etc.

If you’re still seething that “OMG! He just compared gay love to child molesting!” read that list again. Is coitus the appropriate expression of each of those loves? Then in what sense is it true that “love is love”?

Socrates understood … that a reform cannot be achieved by a well-intentioned leader who recruits his followers from the very people whose moral confusion is the cause of the disorder.

(Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle) It also can’t be achieve by a confused people electing equally confused leaders. But where are the leaders who can think halfway clearly? Where are the voters?

The heirs of the civilization of the West who now run our major institutions have rejected residual Christianity and traditional elite culture, and their emphasis on cultural diversity negates the importance of shared history. Nonetheless, they want to maintain public life, and extend its principles to more and more settings, while at the same time depriving it of substantive cultural content and making it ever more completely technological and utilitarian. The project is to be based on a common faith in science and human rights, common acceptance of institutions like the European Union and the United Nations, ever greater reliance on market and bureaucracy in place of traditional arrangements such as family and religion, and a common historical narrative having to do with the progressive global advance of freedom, equality, and enlightenment.

The project can’t be successful. A diverse inclusive multicultural society can’t have free, active, and intelligent public life, because the principles, habits, and loyalties people are expected to have in common are too few and too abstract. They don’t take enough into account or speak to enough aspects of human life to permit free and intelligent discussion of public affairs. Current discussions of public issues related to the family provide an obvious example. It is now criminal in some Western countries to assert that some ways of organizing sexual life are better than others. If that is so, how can family life be discussed intelligently?

(James Kalb, emphasis added) So “Shut up, he explained” is the ban thoughtful voters are under. Thank God for the lawless internet.

If I were inclined to instrumentalize religion (I’m not – instrumentalizing religion is one of my biggest bugaboos), Roman Catholicism’s natural law emphasis would be make it attractive.

But they’ve never claimed exclusive rights to natural law. They’ve explicitly put it in the public domain. And for that great gift, I’m grateful.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

On refusing to take “yes” for an answer

[W]hether the top marginal federal income-tax rate is 39.5 percent or 34 percent, life will go on. Life goes on, except when it doesn’t. I never went through any naturalization ceremony — if I wasn’t an American the minute before I was born, I don’t see how I became one the minute after. If I’m to live under a government that considers my life nothing more than an accounting entry, then there are any number of states that might claim my allegiance. The Swiss at least know how to keep a proper ledger.

The House of Representatives and its Republican leadership had a chance to take a vote on the question of extending the protection of our nation’s laws to people like me, at least to some of us. The bill was, strangely enough, essentially identical to one the House had already passed. I do not expect that, even had it passed, the bill would have become law. Senate Democrats would have filibustered it, and though that filibuster might have been overcome, President Obama, who should know better, would have vetoed the bill. But it would have been something to have the House of Representatives at least take the vote on the question. I could respect the “No” voters, in a way. At least they’re willing to say what they think. But pulling the bill because Renee Ellmers and Jackie Walorski don’t have the guts or the principle to vote one way or the other? That is — let us all acknowledge the plain fact — cowardice. Ellmers told her voters she planned to vote for the bill at the very moment she was maneuvering to escape doing so.

This is especially shameful considering that the vast majority of voters support the provisions in the bill. This bill was not a problem for Republicans, but for a handful of House members. Majorities of men support these changes, as do majorities of women—for that matter, only 17 percent of the people who describe themselves as “pro-choice” support the current anything-goes abortion regime. On a question that really matters, the House of Representatives had a rare chance to take “Yes” for an answer.

I can only conclude that that was not the answer you want.

(Kevin D. Williamson on the Stupid Party spiking a major prolife Bill on the very day of the national March for Life in D.C.)

Note that Jackie Walorski had Right to Life endorsement. I supported Michelle Bachman for her first Congressional run (i.e., her attempt to prove The Peter Principle) because Feminists for Life affiliate Susan B. Anthony List endorsed her eagerly.

Do you wonder why I’m politically burnt out on this issue, about which I still care a great deal?

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Soma Today: Giving Tuesday

It’ “Giving Tuesday,” the day when our civil religion prescribes a token pause in our buying crap so we can resume shopping tomorrow with our consciences suitably whitewashed.

I don’t think it will work for me. I’ve been looking at the family budget, wondering “how can we be spending that much?” and then “how in heaven’s name can a family of four live on 80 hours of $7.25 per hour minimum wage by two workers – mom and dad both?”

There’s talk of a “living wage,” which is “the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their needs that are considered to be basic” and a click or two up from subsistence. It’s thought to be sorta kinda progressive.

But it’s time for a periodic reminder of the idea of a “family wage,” which is “a wage that is sufficient to raise a family” as distinct from a living wage. It is advocated by the Great Reactionary Oppressor, the Roman Catholic Church, or so I and some Catholic intellectuals read it. The current status quo is supported by business interests, politicians, and sundry others who profit from it in sundry ways:

Be it remembered, however, that once upon a time, in a land far, far away spiritually, it was not thought that universal participation in the money-paid workforce was a thing ardently to be desired. Indeed, the “Family Wage” was the progressive desiderata for a time, and I consider it a mark of our gullibility and collective amnesia that we now pine for a “living wage” and think that life is incomplete without the goods shit we can buy if we – Whoa! What a great idea! – pool two or more living wages under one roof. Look! Kim Kardashian! Chaz Bono! American Idol! Shiny! (HT Mark Shea)

The beast feeds itself. Mrs. Jones goes to work, the first on her block to do so. Before the Jones kids have become notably delinquent, the Joneses have compiled an admirable pile of goods shit we could buy if Mrs. Tipsy would go to work, too. And then the next family down the block follows suit, and before too long, nobody feels they can survive on a single wage. And maybe they really can’t (unless the Missus aggressively gardens, cans and freezes, and what kind of middle-class family still does that?! It’s barbaric!) because the extra worker supply has driven down wages.

And retirement savings? Out of the question! What say we just keep on working? Life is meaningless without a nice paycheck anyway.

(Your Humble Scribe) Remember how Dubya admonished us to get out and shop, to show the terrorists they could not beat the indomitable American spirit? How pathetic we’ve become!

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Oh! How we love the poor children of backward lands!

I couldn’t help myself. I heard about the Nobel Peace Prize recipients, but couldn’t stop thinking about something else.

The Nobel laureates were chosen for their work to assure the right of children (and of girls in particular in one case) to an education. And we Oooh! and Aaah! and Coo and inveigh against those barbarians who put children to work, or marry them off to old goats at age eleven, and how enlightened we are to celebrate their liberators with one of the world’s topmost honors.

Meanwhile, closer to home, children increasingly become commodities to be

  • gestated in rented wombs, where they may be
  • inseminated by designer sperm donors,
  • purchased to adorn our empty and sterile lives, and
  • aborted by contractual stipulation if they’re “defective” goods.

Then we tart up our little girls starting around age ten or so, and get them (and now, their boyfriends, too!) their Gardasil shots. But no old goats for our daughters (at least until they’re 16). And our notion of “education” for our designer babies is “college or career readiness,” not a humane and rounded life.

So we’re civilized and they’re barbarians because we prostitute our daughters to males closer to their age and start our wage slavery ten or fifteen years later?

If anyone made an effective case that this is barbarianism, too, and that children have rights to be born free, to be raised by biological parents wherever possible, to know the heritage of those biological parents, and to have actual childhoods instead of vicarious re-enactments of how we dream our adolescence could have been, he or she would surely be branded a bigot – if not shot in the head.

So kudos to the heroes and heroines of the International Children’s Rights Institute (and a tip-o-the-hat to Matthew Dugandzic). May they irritate, and indict, and expose hypocrisy, and rip the curtain back to expose child and surrogate quasi-slavery, until there’s no mistake that some of the world’s barbarians have advanced degrees, with homes on Beacon Street or in Santa Barbara, or condos in Manhattan or Michigan Avenue, and firm control of the levers of Official, Sanctioned public opinion.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.