Retired Indianopolis Elder Law attorney Phillip Price will set out, volcano (and God) willing, on a 500 mile hike in France and Spain, blogging merrily as he goes:
Join me on my Camino de Santiago (Way of St James). My journey begins April 28, 2010 departing from Indianapolis, IN. I start walking on April 30 in St Jean Pied de Port, France, cross through a mountain pass in the Pyrenees and walk westward to Santiago de Compostela, Spain about 497 miles of walking over 36 days.
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Oh, my! The saga continues! This is as more confusing as than the the Intelligent Design versus Evolution kerfuffle!
The weight of professional opinion seemed to me to have become that same-sex orientation was unchangeable.
So I had pretty much come to the conclusion that Christian people with exclusive same-sex attraction simply needed to gird themselves for life-long sexual abstinence, without even the hope of an abstinent bachelor or spinster (I know the former is neutral, the latter deprecatory in connotation – sorry) someday finding Mister or Miss Right. (I generally say “chastity” instead of “abstinence” when dealing with, say, teen sexuality of clients at Matrix Lifeline, because of chastity’s relatively positive connotation. But chastity outside Christian marriage means abstinence and repentance for lapses.)
I would not have urged a gay or lesbian Christian, in other words, to try to become heterosexual.
I might have encouraged them to consider a monastic vocation to get away from our hypersexualized culture and, for an Orthodox monastic, to engage in this ultimate battle against all the passions. But monastic vocation should not be undertaken toward the specific end of sexual reorientation, as if to say “I’ll be a monastic until I’m straight, and then I’ll laicize and marry.”
But here is a flawed column citing provocative information to the effect that I may have been wrong.
[T]he American College of Pediatricians … recently began a campaign to educate schools on sexual orientation and youth. “Facts About Youth” cites research that shows that over 85% of students with homosexual attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual identity as adults.
Okay, the American College of Pediatricians can be, as is being, faulted as a Christian front group impersonating the American Academy of Pediatrics. Point taken. But the American Psychiatric Association did not dispassionately de-list homosexuality as a disorder because of the great weight of scientific evidence. They did it for the same reason that the American Bar Association endorsed abortion – just before I resigned: a powerful lobby with an agenda mau-maued the APA (and the ABA). It’s hard to find neutrality on some subjects.
But what of these studies they cite?
If they exist, and are methodologically sound, they at least suggest that sexuality in youth is highly confused – perhaps even malleable. Mightn’t it be premature to tell conflicted adolescents that “you’re gay (or bi-); get used to it and celebrate it”? As long ago as Kinsey, there were claims that an astonishing proportion of people had experienced some same-sex encounter in their lives. And there are, after all, even adults who get sexually aroused by things like feet or underwear. Adolescent arousal by a member of the same sex may not mean much about one’s ultimate sexual destiny. (Would you think you were destined to get off with shoes forever if they turned you on?)
[There is a] growing body of research demonstrating that changing one’s sexual orientation is indeed possible.
Among those being ignored is Columbia University’s Dr. Robert Spitzer, whose 2003 landmark study was published in the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. To his surprise, Spitzer – who ironically spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 – found that the majority of his 200 subjects experienced significant change in their same-sex feelings through therapy and support groups: “Like most psychiatrists, I thought that homosexual behavior could only be resisted, and that no one could really change their sexual orientation. I now believe that to be false. Some people can and do change.”
If that’s not convincing enough, in 2009 the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality published a comprehensive overview of research, citing over 500 scientific studies spanning nearly 100 years of research that demonstrates change is possible. However, these facts aren’t being communicated to young people. What is being educated to our youth is based on political correctness, not sexual freedom.
Dr. Robert Spitzer has no known ax to grind, but is a fairly dramatic “conversion story.” NARTH may have an ax to grind; that’s not clear to me.
By all means stop the persecution of young people who have doubt about their sexuality or who have come out as gay or lesbian (or are harassed for other reasons, like Phoebe Prince), but let’s have a little retiscence about showing 13 year old boys how most safely to sodomize or be sodomized, and suchlike.
And I’m not ruling out the possibility that some adults can change from gay to straight. It won’t upset my worldview if it proves false, but I may have closed my book prematurely.
This Wall Street Journal story blind-sided me this morning. I was unaware of this lawsuit.
On the one hand, the Boy Scouts have been roundly vilified, and even banned from city-owned buildings in gay-friendly cities, for expelling scouts who come out. Now an Oregon jury thinks they were too lenient about pedophile scoutmasters:
The jury found the national body 60% negligent for the abuse and the local council just 15% negligent, assessing economic damages of $840,000 and $210,000, respectively.
Deliberations on punitive damages—the plaintiff’s attorneys are asking for $25 million—resume here next week.
I know the connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is disputed, and denial of any connection seems very plausible to me.
But on 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.
By “just like you except …” extension, is it not imprudent to allow a gay adult male to be in charge as Scoutmaster of a bunch of sexually mature if young adolescent boys? (Note, however, that the plaintiff here was apparently 11 or 12 during the abuse, and likely pre-pubescent.) We had a local tragedy as a result of “out” gay Greg Ledbetter being put in charge of troubled adolescent boys (although he was caught later, elsewhere), and the politically correct line throughout was that the charges against him were not even plausible, but were cooked up by fanatical homophobes.
The national Boy Scout organization apparently tried to avoid such problems:
[T]he Portland case against the Boy Scouts drew national attention, in part because it was one of the very few times jurors have been allowed to review secret “perversion files” the Boy Scouts compiled against its own membership.
The national organization in the past has tried to keep those files out of court proceedings, but lost an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court last February that would have kept confidential its files on pedophiles dating back to 1964. During the trial, attorneys for the Boy Scouts argued that the files demonstrated the lengths Boy Scouts officials have gone to police their ranks and keep suspected pedophiles away from children.
Attorneys for the defendants declined to comment, citing the coming deliberation on punitive damages. The Boy Scouts of America issued a statement on its Web site denouncing the jury’s decision.
“We are gravely disappointed,” the scouting organization said. “We believe that the allegations made against our youth protection efforts are not valid. We intend to appeal.”
I’m imputing no political agenda to the Plaintiff in this case, but is this a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma for the Scouts? How can an organization the puts adults and kids together steer between the Scylla of phobia and the Charybdis of laxity?
There’s no explanation for the traffic spike today besides Doug Masson’s kind words at his blog. Welcome to you all.
I’ll see if I can come up with something new to say, but meanwhile those of you converging from the left coasts should like “Places not worth caring about” from last night. James Howard Kunstler posits, among other things, that if we keep building places not worth caring about, we’ll soon have a Country not worth caring about – a point on which there should be ample ground between thoughtful liberals and conservatives, I’d think. We’re embodied creatures, after all, and the space we inhabit affects us powerfully.
Like a lot of young men, I once thought I’d be an architect. I quickly learned that I did not have what it took, so I thought I’d be a homebuilder. I abandoned that for different reasons – heck, it was the 60s and early 70s and everything was unsettled – and eventually landed in the disreputable profession of law, having tired of making an honest living. [Note to self: locate smiley-face icon. Or winky-face.]
Doug described me as a true conservative, which I’ll take as high praise. Religiously, I went off the scale 13 years ago, embracing Eastern Orthodox Christianity – which it’s critics fault for not changing with the times. To that, I say, “Damn straight!” That’s as conservative as it gets religiously, though you’ll find some Obama bumper stickers in our parking lot on Sunday. Religious and political conservatism are not, except for perhaps a few issues, a package deal.
Back to places worth caring about. I’m Chairman of my Church Building Committee as we plan a new building that we intend to be very much worth caring about. Here’s a few thoughts I shared along with two key renderings. [Note to self: incorporate PayPal button for friendly Church Building Fund donations.]
We’ve hired a Charleston, SC designer to lead in the design of an Orthodox temple and site to cherish for centuries. His sensibility is New Urbanist, but we’ll be building at 43N and 225 just west of Battle Ground, on 8 acres currently supporting corn or soybeans.
As important as the temple itself – which will even have real plaster walls to receive iconography in the future – is the site plan, creating a fitting sense of both invitation and separation, with a courtyard that will serve a fairly important purpose at “Orthodox Easter.” The idea is not alien to the points Kunstler is making about urban spaces in “Places not worth caring about.”
Again: welcome, visitors/newcomers.
In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.
And argue it he does, with passion in the greatest tirade I can recall ever watching. Take 19:48 to watch it yourself and see if you can keep from laughing – and agreeing. (Oh yeah: watch it with your earbuds or after the kiddies are down for the night.)
“Suburbia – Advanced Mutation” and “What’s Really Going On Here?” look too much like the postwar excrescences in my hometown. I used to think it was my town that was the problem, but most of the stuff built since World War II – i.e., most of the stuff built in my lifetime – is not worth caring about.
Since Roe v. Wade was imposed on us by the Supremes 37 years ago, there has been a pervasive “abortion distortion factor”:
The “Abortion distortion factor” is that phenomenon whereby when established rules of law encounter the abortion right, the established rule is bent to accomodate the abortion right.
(Bopp, James, in A Passion for Justice – A Pro-life Review of 1987 and a Look ahead to 1988, at page 80) That factor has been huge in most Supreme Court appointment battles since 1980 – generally couched in code words and litmus tests that fooled no observant observer.
The successor for Justice Stevens may face a significantly different constellation of questions, centering on “Obamacare” partly because that issue works to the benefit of the Republicans though so pervasive is the Abortion Distortion Factor that it won’t be entirely out of play:
Another set of questions could prove embarrassing for Democrats who have lauded Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade for creating a right to privacy that includes contraception and abortion. “How can the freedom to make such choices with your doctor be protected and not freedom to choose a hip replacement or a Caesarean section?” asks former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in The Wall Street Journal. “Either your body is protected from government interference or it’s not.”
McCaughey also notes that in 2006 the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon ruled that the federal government couldn’t set standards for doctors to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients under Oregon’s death with dignity act. So does the Constitution empower the feds to regulate non-lethal drugs in contravention of other state laws?
Such questions may not persuade an Obama nominee to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. But they can raise politically damaging issues in a high-visibility forum at a time when Democrats would like to move beyond health care and talk about jobs and financial regulation. Stevens apparently timed his retirement to secure the confirmation of a congenial successor — but some Democrats probably wish that he had quit a year ago, when they had more Senate votes and fewer unpopular policies.
(This posting may be of limited interest to non-Orthodox readers.)
I just discovered a new Orthodox blog that looks somewhat promising, Koinonia. The owner/host has completed a very manageable 3-part series, Barbarians at the Gate, where he takes to task not the barbarians (he just identifies them fairly trenchantly), but the indifference or capitulation of the Orthodox Church to those barbarians. Part of his solution is that we cease and desist from bashing Western Culture and get down to the work of transforming it.
Our alliance with barbarism has happened because we have rejected the Christian roots of Western culture in a misguided effort to (1) keep the Church Greek (or Russian, or Arab, or Serbian) or (2) to distinguish “True Orthodoxy” from “false Catholicism” or (3) because, like Frank Schaeffer, we are simply cultural-despisers who have found that the Orthodox tradition is a convenient cudgel with which to continue waging our political or cultural battles. Whatever the reason, this amounts to a refusal to engage in any meaningful way with the cultural marketplace of ideas. As a result, it leaves the public square utterly naked – even as we moan and complain about it privately. Worse, it makes us the tools by which Nietzsche could proclaim that God was a non-factor (“dead”) in modern life. Itputs us in a position where we not only fail America – to be salt and light for our neighbor and our country – but also Christ and ourselves.
…
The spiritual genius of the Orthodox Church has always been the ability of the Church to take on and transform the dominate culture. This means that just as Jesus was the authentic Jew among Jews, the Church has been – in turn – authentically Greek among the Greeks, and authentically Russian among the Russians, so too we must be authentically American among the Americans. While have rarely done this perfectly, we have largely done this without sacrificing the Gospel or the communion of the various local or ethnic churches.
Is there any reason, other than sloth or despair, why we think we cannot do this in America as well?
It hit a nerve. My posts in the short life of this blog have been relatively heavy on culture-bashing. I bash because I really do care – like an inarticulate father who doesn’t know what to do with a sick child except to yell.
Part of the challenge in Barbarians at the Gate is that there are people outside the Church with whom we can and must make common cause. He suggests, among a handrul, the Catholic Church.
I suggest that James Davidson Hunter, author (coiner?) of the influential Culture Wars in the 90s, is also one with whom we can make common cause. I highly commend this paper he gave at Trinity Forum 8 years ago. That “briefing” finally has grown to a book of the same title. I am greatly looking forward to reading it (if I can moderate my blogging long enough to fit it in).
Davidson’s main points from the briefing eight years ago:
Another with whom we can make common cause is Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, who has been inspiring me for several decades now. I think we have some examples to emulate as well from the folks at Front Porch Republic.
The work at hand is not revolution, but the slow permeation of salt and the absorption of light. We need to be about it sooner rather than later.
Michael Cook notes and ruminates on what I hope is an eccentric call to try Pope Benedict XVI for crimes against humanity in connection with the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal, and then segués into other who then should be there:
Tu quoque, the argument that because you did it too, I’m not guilty, must be the worst of all arguments. But anyone with the facts acknowledges that the Catholic Church’s problems are no worse than those of other organisations, and they are probably a good deal better. A reporter for yesterday’s issue of Newsweek had the bright idea of asking insurance companies whether the Catholic Church paid higher premiums because its employees were a greater risk. The answer was No – and it never had. “We don’t see vast difference in the incidence rate between one denomination and another,” said an insurer. “It’s pretty even across the denominations.”
Cook then notes in moderate detail the secular intellectual defense, in the name of liberating children’s sexuality, of lowering age of consent laws – proposals that make me think “I don’t want this intellectual around any child; there’s more going on here than disinterested philanthropy.”
Putting the Pope in the dock would spark a world-wide debate about paedophilia. Why is it so difficult to police? What is there about our views on sex which encourages it? Should we wind back our hypersexualised culture?
All the indicators are that the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is winding down now as the Pope and bishops get tougher and priests have clearer views on authentic Christian sexuality. But no one is preparing for the coming paedophilia crisis when the oversexed teens of 2010 are 34 and believe they should still have fun with 14-year-olds.
* * *
From the Department of Bombast at the Wall Street Journal, an inflated warning that the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens “gives President Obama a chance to lay the groundwork for a future liberal Supreme Court majority.”
Not even with this Senate will Obama slide through in an election year anyone to the left of Justice Stevens. He is, after all, “The Supreme Court … liberal standard-bearer,” as the Journal’s own subheadline has it. Others writing about Stevens’ retirement more aptly note the irony that any nominee could easily be to Stevens’ right.
Justice Stevens was particularly infuriating not only on religion cases, larding his opinions with secularist code, but on the disregard for religion in other cases. Robert Nagel summarized some of the case against Stevens in Justice Stevens’ Religion Problem. In a school voucher case:
[I]n four different places in an opinion barely five paragraphs long, Justice Stevens used the word “indoctrination” as a synonym for religious education. Stevens asserted that the voucher program was being used to pay for “the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children.” He surmised that an educational emergency might provide a motivation for parents to “accept religious indoctrination [of their children] that they otherwise would have avoided.” He decried the fact that “the vast majority” of voucher recipients chose to receive “religious indoctrination at state expense.” And he depicted the voucher program as a governmental choice “to pay for religious indoctrination.”
As striking as it is, this use of the word “indoctrination” does not necessarily indicate hostility to religion. Like the words “sectarian” and “fundamentalist,” which have appeared with disturbing regularity in Supreme Court opinions, “indoctrinate” has a literal meaning that is not pejorative. It can, of course, mean simply to instruct or to teach. But, needless to say, like those other words, it has more sinister connotations. Given the common association of the word “indoctrinate” with totalitarian methods, there might be at least a “slight suspicion” that Justice Stevens did not use the term in its neutral sense, especially since he nowhere refers to public school indoctrination. In any event, the duty to determine whether Justice Stevens’ official positions reflect animosity to religion arose well before the voucher case.
It can be traced back as early as 1990, when the religion clause expert Douglas Laycock noted that under Stevens’ constitutional decisions religion is “subject to all the burdens of government, but entitled to few of the benefits.” Laycock charged that the apparent explanation for this combination of legal positions was hostility to religion. Laycock’s hypothesis ripened into full-blown suspicion by June 2000 when Justice Stevens took the position that the free speech rights of the Boy Scouts were not violated by a state law requiring them to employ an avowed homosexual as an assistant scoutmaster. In the course of his dissent, Stevens offered his opinion about the source of what he termed “prejudices” against homosexuality. He wrote, “Like equally atavistic opinions about certain racial groups, these roots have been nourished by sectarian doctrine.” Whatever he might have meant later by using the word “indoctrination,” there is no question what “prejudices” and “atavistic” mean. The passage is, as Michael Stokes Paulsen of the Minnesota Law School put it, a “slander, disparaging the good faith . . . of any religious worldview—such as those of [some] Christians, Jews, and Muslims—that adheres to traditional views of sexual morality.”
…
Even decisions that as a formal matter have little to do with religion take on a different coloration when Stevens’ apparent scorn for some religions is factored in. On February 26 of this year, for instance, eight members of the Court ruled that the federal racketeering statute (popularly known as RICO) did not apply to the efforts of the Pro-Life Action Network to shut down various abortion clinics. The rather straightforward reasoning was that, unlike the members of organized crime who are typical objects of RICO prosecutions, the antiabortion protestors did not obtain anyone else’s property for their own use. Since the crime of extortion requires that the offender obtain someone else’s property, the pro-life protests could not be prosecuted under RICO. Even pro-abortion rights advocates like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed. Only Justice Stevens dissented. He claimed that “even when an extortionist has not taken possession of the property that the victim has relinquished, she has nonetheless ‘obtained’ that property if she has used violence to force her victim to abandon it.” On the basis of this thin reed Stevens was willing to impose on protestors acting out of profound religious convictions the same draconian punishments that are ordinarily imposed on gangsters.
* * *
Over at TownHall.com and elsewhere in the world of “Movement Conservatism,” Chicken Littles are practicing precision, coordinated vapors over the inference that the U.S. will not commit nuclear genocide in response to chemical, electromagnetic or other non-nuclear attacks. For instance, the mercenary Dick Morris. As Daniel Larison puts it, “quite insane.”
* * *
Thomas Merton wrote that “when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.” Though O’Connor herself would surely have scoffed at such praise, she is among a bare handful of American writers, modern or otherwise, of whom such a thing might plausibly be said.
But her reputation rests in part on a persistent misunderstanding. Unlike most of the other major American novelists of the 20th century, O’Connor wrote not as a more or less secular humanist but as a believer, a rigorously orthodox Roman Catholic. Her fiction was permeated with religious language and symbolism, and its underlying intent was in many cases specifically spiritual. Yet most of O’Connor’s early critics failed to grasp her intentions, and even now many younger readers are ignorant of the true meaning of her work.
So Terry Teachout concludes his introduction to a lengthy book review of Brad Gootch’s biography of O’Connor.
O’Connor, to her credit, took the homespun beliefs of her fellow Southerners with the utmost seriousness. Even more surprisingly, she regarded them with exceptional imaginative sympathy, seeking to portray in her fiction the sometimes bizarre ways in which spiritual enthusiasm manifested itself in the lives of people who, lacking an orthodoxy to guide them, were forced to re-create the forms of religion from scratch. As she explained in a 1959 letter:
“The religion of the South is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I as a Catholic find painful and touching and grimly comic. It’s full of unconscious pride that lands them in all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments. They have nothing to correct their practical heresies and so they work them out dramatically.”
Her sympathy, she added, arose from the fact that “I accept the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and judgment that they do.”
(Emphasis added)
Her sympathy for do-it-yourself Christianity may be what makes her work more enduring than things like the Steve Martin movie Leap of Faith, which leavens cynicism with a touch of ambiguous sentimentality. Teachout asks whether O’Connor will endure only by being misunderstood as a satirist rather than a sympathizer writing grotesqueries. I don’t know, but her deep, pervasive Christian faith is well out of the closet for decades now, and her reputation continues to grow.
There’s too many good, smart people blogging and too few running for office.
Daniel Larison, to whose blog I just resumed subscribing, has several items in the last week on the incoherence of “movement conservatism” – i.e., the fake conservatism of the current G.O.P., Fox TV, TownHall.com, etc..
In The “Republican Obama” Syndrome on April 6, he writes, in the context of Movement Conservative Hosanna’s for some neophyte named Marco Rubio, about a paradox:
Obama causes a very strange reaction in Republicans. On the one hand, they want to regard him as a joke and an incompetent, but they also desperately want to find someone who can imitate his appeal and success, and so it is almost as if they go out of their way to anoint whatever young politician they come across as their new hero and then disregard all of the person’s liabilities by saying, “Well, he’s no more inexperienced than Obama was” or “She’s still better than Obama!” It is an odd mix of contempt for Obama mixed with admiration for Obama’s success and an even stranger need to outdo him in the categories that originally caused them to view Obama so poorly.
In Hawks Are Just Embarrassing Themselves on April 7, he deconstructs a particular hawkish comment (about Obama’s supposed contribution to “a startling period of auto-emasculation” in nuclear policy) and thus reveals a common genre of attack on Obama:
“The substance of Obama’s positions is unchanged from the previous administration, but it is imperative that I make him appear as a weak buffoon, so I will simply invent a complaint about entirely superficial appearances that mean nothing.”
[The author of the lame hawkish comment] is just one among many conservatives thrown into apoplexy by basically nothing.
One Republican Obama critic actually lamented that “Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex.” Really?! And that’s bad?!
On a roll, on Thursday Larison questions in The Triumph of Ideology the claim that the conservative mind has closed by denying that the “Movement Conservative” mind was ever open.
The conservative mind of the sort described by Kirk is one that is both grounded in principle and also very capable of critical thinking and self-criticism, but what I think we have seen in recent years is not much the closing of such a mind as its replacement by an ideological mentality that is basically hostile to a conservative mind …
Where conservative intellectuals once had to prove themselves by the strength of their arguments, they could now increasingly get along by repeating not much more than slogans and audience-pleasing half-truths …
The creation of the conservative media as an “alternative” to mainstream media gave way to conservative media as a near-complete substitute for their conservative audience. At one point, there was a desire, which I think was partly very genuine, for greater fairness to the conservative perspective, but this soon morphed into the need to construct a parallel universe of news and commentary untainted by outsiders …
[T]he supposed radical reactionary extremists [so labeled by Movement Conservatives] were actually the far, far more reasonable ones who were not advocating all of the things that have become so important to movement conservatives: aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in “time of war” ….
I’m not keen on Obama (and neither is Larison), but give me some criticisms that aren’t brain-dead sound bites, for gosh sake!
One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.
(Deterrence and Disamarmament, April 8, again by Larison – emphasis added).
I’ve been reading for the first time Russell Kirk’s classic, The Conservative Mind (alluded to by Larison), and I am struck by the extent to which today’s putative conservatives are not true conservatives, but hawkish and cynical statists. Having lost the “evil empire” in 1989, they keep looking for enemies we supposedly can and must eradicate, and dissing the Democrats for insufficient eradicatory zeal.
Do you think I exaggerate? Are you going to fling 9-11 at me?
My take on 9-11 and terrorism, after more than a little vacillation, is “if there’s no solution, there’s no ‘problem.'” Problems have solutions. Terrorism has no solution and thus is not a problem. Terrorism instead is an evil, a dark mystery with which we must live for the foreseeable future – taking reasonable precautions, of course, but stopping short of “aggressive war, reckless power projection, expansion of state surveillance and detention, exaggeration of the nature and scope of foreign threats, and absolute deference to the executive in ‘time of war.’”
In 1972, I voted for McGovern over the patently-crooked Nixon. Having absorbed in subsequent years the radical change wrought in the Democrat party that year (I’m thinking of blogging on that change), I’m not sure I could do something like that again. Not that I slavishly follow its endorsements, but Indiana Right to Life announced this week a blanket policy of endorsing no Democrats in 2010. My first reaction was negative, but it’s a decently-thought-out position:
Whereas the Democratic Party officially endorses the right to unrestricted abortion on demand; and
Whereas Democratic leadership continues aggressively to advance federal policies that undermine the right to life of unborn children; and
Whereas Congressman Brad Ellsworth, Congressman Baron Hill, and Congressman Joe Donnelly betrayed the trust of pro-life Hoosiers by voting for the pro-abortion federal health care reform bill; and
Whereas the Democratic caucus in the Indiana House, under the leadership of Speaker Pat Bauer, continues to block all legislation aimed at limiting, restricting, and reducing abortions in the state of Indiana; and
Whereas candidates of the Democratic Party are responsible for the policies and actions of the party and its leadership;
Be it resolved that the Indiana Right to Life Political Action Committee will grant no endorsements to any Democratic candidates for any public office.
Still, Republicans: give me a credible choice! Voting for McCain was the hardest Presidential vote I’ve cast since 1972. I’m beginning to understand people who stay home muttering “to hell with them all.”
I’ve long been fascinated by the academic idea of “myth” as roughly “the stories by which we live our lives.” In that sense, a myth can be true – indeed, one would hope we’d live according to truth, not delusion.
As Wikipedia says in its opening paragraph on mythology:
…The term “myth” is often used colloquially to refer to a false story; however, the academic use of the term generally does not pass judgment on its truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a religious narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term “myth” in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story...
It was in this academic sense that C.S. Lewis wrote of myth becoming fact in the incarnation of Christ.
There was a time in my life when myth becoming fact would have sounded like gibberish – arrestingly expressed, but gibberish. I know this to a certainty, though I discovered Lewis in college, because I remember branding a new faculty member in my evangelical Protestant boarding high school as “liberal” because he spoke of certain fiction (probably Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner) as being “true.” “Truth” was “fact” – like in the Bible – I knew deep in my bones.
How I could believe that when Christ said “I am the … truth” is beyond me. (It’s obligatory, it seems, for former Evangelicals to call their upbringing “fundamentalist,” but this is one intellectual roadblock I had that seems to warrant the equation of evangelicalism and fundamentalism – at least as expressed at my boarding school.)
One such true myth by which we refuse to live is the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair mythically is about scapegoating and bigotry, with the bending of the rule of law thrown in for good measure. (Oh my! People do still hear about Dreyfus, don’t they? It’s not a myth if they don’t.)
I say we “refuse to live by it because of interment of Japanese during World War II and the interment of suspected bad guys at Guantanamo Bay even today. Sometimes, wrongful convictions through prosecutorial misconduct generally is the phenomenon writ small.
There is a review of a newish book on the Dreyfus affair at the Financial Times which may be of interest. I had forgotten how long the scandal echoed loudly in France, and I had no idea that it may have influenced Theodore Herzl to found modern Zionism.
I have tended to admire France, grudgingly (I was treated as haughtily there as any other American), for marching to its own drummer, but the record clearly is not all admirable.
Then again, what history is all admirable? Even modern Israel is writing chapters that, G*d willing, they will some day rue.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 