Tuesday, 9/11/18

Orthodoxy

1

As I’ve said before, it is my opinion that the collapse of religion is THE fundamental problem of Western Civilisation and without the restoration of religion we’re going nowhere. However unlike the Trads it is my opinion that an attempt to turn the clock back, and practice religion like it was practiced in the 1650’s is not going to work. Rather, the Christian religion is going to have to transform itself in someway if it is to successfully combat Modernity.

As for Christianity, Western Civilisation is really the civilisation built on basis of the Protestant and Catholic religions. Eastern Orthodoxy, while Christian is not of the West, and I would advise the Trads, those looking to turn the clock back to look at it, as it lacks the ability to change: It’s all tradition.

The Social Pathologist, a blog subtitled The Diseases of Modern Life as seen through the Secular Confessional.

I never really have comprehended the secularist case for the social importance of religion. I suppose it’s right, as secularists confessing it are making something of a declaration against interest. But whether I understand it or not, I appreciate people who don’t personally believe nevertheless giving Christianity its due.

So although I fault his word choice, “It’s all tradition” (we would say “it’s the faith once delivered to the Saints“), I especially appreciate his commendation of Orthodoxy to those not minded to (shudder) “innovate.”

We do consider “unchanging” a feature, not a bug.

I am skeptical, though, of the author’s claim that Protestantism is “a dying religion.” From “spiritual but not religious” to nuda scriptura, the desire to roll-your-own religion is powerful, and what earthly authority can pontificate that the rough beast, its hour come round at last, is not “Protestant,” strange fire and all?

When this somewhat wrong-headed fellow turns to Roman Cathoicism, I think he worth reading and considering, and that’s all I’m saying as I keep getting too deeply into the weeds of the current crisis in that tradition.

Shout-Out to an Adversary

2

I was unaware that a gay California legislator, who wants to outlaw “paid ‘conversion therapy,’ which purports to change a person’s sexual orientation,” pulled his own Bill at the last minute, though he had plenty of votes to pass it, because he seemed to think that the very vocal critics might be onto something and that he might make the Bill better (and, perhaps not incidentally, more resistant to First amendment challenge).

Perhaps the message is finally getting through: Wrongthink has some rights, and that it is justly embarrassing to pass a Bill, over objections of unconstitutionality, and then see it struck down as unconstitutional.

Kudos to Assemblyman Evan Low and to the Los Angeles Times for what reportedly was very fine coverage of the story.

SCOTUS

3

Not all California (or other) politicians are capable of the class Evan Low exhibited:

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, [Kamala Harris] demanded to know whether the judge thought the president could legally politicize the Justice Department, for example by prosecuting his political enemies while going easy on his friends. Senator Harris would know more than a little about that: She wasted a great deal of time and a fair sum of Californians’ tax dollars illegally using her position as attorney general of California to attempt to bully nonprofits into giving up their donors lists. It was a transparent effort to target them for harassment and retaliation. That little jihad ultimately was ruled an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment by the federal courts. Harris and her opposite number in New York State, Eric Schneiderman, did nothing but misuse their offices to harass their political rivals. (Well, in fairness, Schneiderman did take some time to beat women, if The New Yorker is to be believed, and resigned his office after three women accused him of abuse.) She misused her job like that was her job.

You know how this works: Liars think everybody is lying, cheaters think everybody else is a cheat, and self-serving political hacks who misuse their offices think that that’s just how the game is played, that everybody does it.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Caste System. He is absolutely right about abuse of the legal system for political purposes by Kamala Harris and Eric Schneiderman.

4

Whereas Trump is populist, intentionally divisive, anti-establishment, immoderate, and contemptuous of many of traditional norms of comity and civility, Kavanaugh is a product of the establishment, gets along with colleagues across the spectrum, respects precedent and plays by the rules. Any Republican president would have placed Kavanaugh on his short list. He has no associations with the Trump wing of the Republican Party. Trump nominated him in deference to the legal elite of the party, including the Federalist Society, many of whom are as concerned about Trump’s character and disposition as any Democrat.

The notion that any Trump nominee is illegitimate because he would shield Trump from hypothetical future subpoenas or prosecutions is belied by history. Nixon’s appointments voted against him in United States vs. Nixon, and Clinton’s appointments voted against him in Clinton vs. Jones. Kavanaugh has no closer relationship to Trump that those appointees did to the presidents who appointed them.

Michael W. McConnell. Eugene Volokh concurs.

5

I think I saw just once a passing reference to SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high opinion of Merrick Garland, the Obama nominee whose “seat” the Republicans “stole” as the common trope has it.

Walter Olson confirms that it’s true and explains why the reference was fleeting.

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

6

Beyond wanting to restore its place as Asia’s dominant nation, China is seeking to become the most powerful and influential country in the world. Moreover, its economic success is allowing its authoritarian political system and mixed economic system to become a model for other countries. For the first time in decades, there is a worldwide debate about the best form of government and economic system.

Michael Morel. The authoritarianism of China’s government should not be underestimated. Two chilling stories, here and here.

Miscellany

7

Daniel Drezner satirizes the Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed.

Are major social media biased against conservatives?

I think maybe they are, functionally if not ideologically. But government regulation to eradicate bias is a cure worse than the disease.

That’s all I wanted to say.

I feel rather sorry for any prominent person named “T.J. McCarrick” even if the disgraced Cardinal‘s middle initial is “E.”

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Political Potpourri, 9/10/18

The Good

1

Heather Mac Donald, in “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture,” notes that, “as of early 2018, 79 judges had issued rulings against schools’ rape trial procedures” adopted in conformity with the Obama administration’s dictates.

…

She says a 2006 University of Virginia survey found “that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped” …

Mac Donald notes that campus sexual-assault policies often assign “wildly asymmetrical responsibilities and liabilities.” In campuses’ alcohol-saturated hookup culture, men are assigned the Victorian role as guardians of frail females’ virtue: If he and she are drunk, she typically is absolved of agency and he is accountable for both of their behaviors. Yet, contradictorily, a core tenet of academic progressivism is that the differences between men and women are not innate, they are “socially constructed,” having nothing to do with biology. Never mind various cultures’ centuries of experience with laws and courtship rituals developed to tame the male libido.

George Will, defending Besty DeVos’s revision of Department of Education rules on handling of campus sexual assault complaints — which have been widely mischaracterized so egregiously that “bad faith” is almost the only explanation.

2

I asked the senator from Kentucky if his record on judicial appointments, including the decision to hold open the seat vacated after Scalia’s untimely death in February 2016 until after the presidential election was the most important part of his legacy as a senator. “I think it’s the most consequential series of things that I’ve done that have the longest impact on the country,” he answered. “In the legislative process,” he continued, “there’s not much you can do all by yourself. The one thing the majority leader can do that no one else can do is the schedule, what you will do or what you will not do. I think the decision not to fill the Scalia vacancy was the most consequential decision of my career. And I think the follow-up on that, to not only fill the Supreme Court vacancies, but put in place men and women [on the federal courts of appeals] who believe that the job is to interpret the law into as many places as we can, particularly at the circuit court level, for as long as we’re in the majority is the most important thing I will have been involved in in my career.”

Hugh Hewitt, Mitch McConnell has saved the Constitution.

For the record:

I’m deeply ambivalent about the precedent of sitting on a SCOTUS nominee without hearings. It doesn’t pass a smell test even if it’s not unlawful.
But I’m grateful for the quality of Trump’s judicial nominees and that their judicial philosophies* are more congruent with my own than Merrick Garland’s presumably** is.
“Saved the Constitution” is hyperbole, but the stakes were high, and the tendency to see SCOTUS nominees as having “an agenda” is a sad symptom of the how the court is perceived, with some justification.

3

The truth is that “settled law” is just a euphemism that jurists and legal scholars use to refer to Supreme Court precedent that is indeed binding – but only until a majority of the justices decide that it should be overruled. In the 2003 e-mail, Kavanaugh was largely right to say that the Supreme Court “can always overrule its precedent.” And that’s a good thing. The Supreme Court needs to have the power to overturn flawed constitutional precedent, as this is usually the only way to correct wrong constitutional decisions, short of using the extraordinarily difficult amendment process.

…

Few people, particularly on the left, pine for the return of Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 case in which a narrow majority upheld the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws. The Court eventually overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which has since become something of an iconic decision.

Ilya Somin (emphasis added). Somin doesn’t mention boring but binding precedent upholding anti-sodomy laws years before Bowers v. Hardwick:

The first challenge to a sodomy law to reach the U.S. Supreme court was Doe v. Commonwealth Attorney of Richmond in 1976. That case challenged Virginia’s sodomy law as a violation of the right to privacy. For technical reasons, the Supreme Court was required to consider the appeal of this decision upholding the law (in most circumstances, the Court only hears cases it selects). Although the Court accepted neither written nor oral arguments, its memorandum upholding the law is its first decision in a sodomy challenge.

ACLU, Getting Rid of Sodomy Laws. The one sentence summary affirmation was binding authority, and it meant in effect that there wasn’t enough merit to the case against sodomy laws to waste any time explaining why.

My own position long was that all jurisdictions should repeal sodomy laws, but I couldn’t find an acceptable constitutional rationale (a free-floating right of privacy just doesn’t cut it for me) for striking them down.

The Bad

4

Jay Sekulow, tried to argue to Robert Mueller that Trump could not be asked to give an interview because he is a compulsive liar. They literally explained to Mueller how they conducted a mock interview with Trump, and he was so unable to tell the truth that they considered him mentally disqualified from testifying:

Jay Sekulow went to Mueller’s office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn’t possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

“He just made something up. That’s his nature,” Dowd said to Mueller.

It seems somehow unfair to let somebody remain on the job as president because he’s such a compulsive liar he can’t be allowed to testify under oath.

Jonathan Chait

5

Publicity is bad when it attracts the dogged scrutiny of a special counsel along the lines of Robert S. Mueller III. The man isn’t perfect. But he is deeply experienced and impervious to distractions. Trump has loosed a rabid and foaming Rudolph W. Giuliani on Mueller, to no more effect than a Pekingese yipping at a Greyhound bus. With his patrician wealth, his Bronze Star and his sterling résumé, Mueller neither wants nor fears anything Trump can bring.

On the other hand, Mueller has obtained certain things that, I’d wager, lie at or near the root of Trump’s mania. No, not the sordid details of a porn-star payoff. Trump has been known to spill dirt on himself to the tabloids just to stroke his own ego. He could be the emoji for shamelessness.

I’m talking about Trump’s bank records , turned over last year by Deutsche Bank, which also coughed up $630 million in fines in 2017 to settle charges of participating in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme. And I’m talking about the immunized testimony of Trump’s longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg . If anyone knows the details of money (Russian or otherwise, licit or not) moving through Trump’s privately held businesses, it’s this guy. And I’m talking about Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, the ones he has been so determined to keep private, which Mueller almost certainly possesses .

This is the forest, I’ll bet, from which the president’s increasingly nutty behavior is being shaken.

David Von Drehle. Von Drehle also speculates that Jared Kushiner wrote The Anonymous Op-Ed, as even Jared and Ivanka need an exit strategy.

6

In nations that have known the horror of dictatorship or foreign occupation, there are often long traditions of what Poland’s national poet once called “patriotic treason” …

In occupied countries, large public events can spontaneously take on political overtones, too …

I am listing all these distant foreign events because at the moment they have strange echoes in Washington. Sen. John McCain’s funeral felt like one of those spontaneous political events. As in a dictatorship, people spoke in code: President Trump’s name was not mentioned, yet everybody understood that praise for McCain, a symbol of the dying values of the old Republican Party, was also criticism of the authoritarian populist in the White House …

There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state ….

Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.

Anne Applebaum, Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country. This rang very true to me.

Elsewhere

7

In the wake of reports about his predecessor’s systematically harassing seminarians in a beach house, Cardinal Wuerl suggested that it was nothing that couldn’t be solved with more vacation time.

… Wuerl has announced a six-week “season of healing.” No penitence, no accountability. Just an announcement that in six weeks, he expects his image to be rehabbed, and everyone else will have to move on. You weren’t healed during my season of healing? That’s on you, bub. As for me, it’s time for another retreat with the lads.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Footnote

* I say “philosophies” in the plural because Brett Kavanaugh says he is an “originalist” while others insist he’s a “textualist.”

** I say “presumably” because we never got the hearings that would have identified his reportedly moderate philosophy.

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Observations on Orthodoxy

The Eastern Orthodox Church might be called a little stingy in its acknowledging of anyone as a theologian. Strictly speaking, our church recognizes but three—just three saints whose names include that epithet. They are Saint John the Theologian (also called John the Evangelist), Saint Gregory the Theologian (also called Gregory of Nazianzus, and one of the Cappadocian Fathers), and Saint Symeon the New Theologian. As it happens, each of these men wrote their theologies in poetry, highlighting to some degree the rabbinic understanding that true theology is always parabolic, as the One of whom we speak extends beyond comprehension, irreducible.

…

One of the discoveries that led me finally to embrace the eastern church was its disposition toward biblical scripture. The church of my youth approached the scriptures as if they were both knowable and reducible to proposition; each verse was approached as a fixed utterance, dictated, word by word, by God to certain men; the scriptures were understood to be God’s words precisely, and they were understood to be the revelation, as such. On the other hand, Orthodoxy observes that what God revealed to these men was but a glimpse of himself, and that those men thereafter employed their own words to offer up what might be better understood as a witness to the revelation. That is to say, these writers beheld a mystical vision, and sought to share it by whatever means they could muster. What we make of their textual witness is, of course, another matter.

Poet Scott Cairns, in Image Journal.

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Saturday, 9/8/18

1

07stephensWeb-superJumbo

Where do I buy the hat on the left?

Bret Stephens continues his open letter to big-bucks politial donor targets:

The next time you meet a candidate asking for your money, start the conversation with two questions. First: “When did you last change your mind on a significant political, economic or social issue, and why?” Second (if the candidate is already in politics): “When did you vote with the other side?”

…

In person, many of you are nuanced, balanced and sane in your overall political outlook, irrespective of whether you lean left or right. The problem is that you tend to care mainly about specific policy outcomes — killing the Iran deal, say, or acting on climate — and you’re willing to swallow your misgivings about the other stuff, like Donald Trump’s character or the Democrats’ Sandernista tendencies.

Sacrificed in the bargain is much concern about the tone of campaigns, the rules of politics, the process of policymaking, and ordinary considerations of collegiality and respect.

Let me ask you to think hard about the increasing cost of that bargain. A president who rages like King Lear on the heath because an op-ed in The Times was mean to him. Senate Democrats who cheerfully turn a Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a carnival show while they audition for the Democratic nomination. The collapse of regular order. The vanishing filibuster. The constant threat of government shutdowns. The ceaseless campaign that always comes at the expense of governance. The administrative state on which we increasingly rely to run things because elected officials can’t. The rush to the exits by the more honorable public servants.

This is the politics of maximum polarization and total paralysis, waged with the intensity of the Battle of the Somme and yielding about as much ground. Right now, you’re contributing to this. Stop.

There’s an alternative. Split more of your money between the parties. Fund candidates with proven or potential cross-party appeal. Help out politicians with scores below 100 percent from the N.R.A. or the Sierra Club. Set up a PAC — call it SanePAC or NotNutsPAC — to help candidates facing primary challenges from the further-right or further-left. Expand the reach of purple America at the expense of deep red or deep blue.

I, a Trimmer, endorse this message. I’d add that part of “the cost of the bargain” is bullshit “gotcha” attempts that make the Newspaper of Record look crypto-Resistant.

2

Almost all the excellent reporting of the last year and a half has also been fed by constant distress signals from within the White House, where grown-ups have had to contend with a psychologically disturbed, delusional, and hugely ignorant president, who has no capacity or willingness to learn.

…

Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.

Andrew Sullivan

I can’t endorse much of what Sullivan wrote this week beyond these snippets.

3

Conservatives have long derided “activist” judges who, they argued, issued sweeping social policy without a popular mandate or widespread support. Such protestations helped propel a movement. They might do well to heed their own warnings.

Joshua Zeitz, concluding Why Conservatives Should Beware a Roe v. Wade Repeal. I only came across this because John Fea, who I’ve been following for a month or so, fell for it.

First, any “lack of popular mandate or widespread support” has little if nothing to do with conservative laments about liberal judicial activism. That is a straw man, pure and simple.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

As for the rest, maybe I’m jaded by having spent too much time “in the trenches,” but it strikes me as targeted at a squishy and ignorant set of fence-straddlers. Zeitz’s con goes like this:

The pro-abortion side won the battle in Roe v. Wade but suffered the grievous wound of overreach (which is true).
Public sentiment is somewhat more pro-abortion now than in 1973 (which I’ll take as true for sake of argument).
If conservatives overreach, they, too, could suffer the wound of overreach (which is garbled in its elaboration).

John Fea actually fell for the fallacy that reversal or overruling (not “repeal,” as in Zeitz’s title) of Roe would make abortion virtually illegal (“one can only imagine the strength of the counter-reaction should a conservative court all but criminalize …”).

Reversal of Roe would, in the overwhelmingly likeliest case, return the abortion issue to state legislatures, where the response would vary from complete bans on abortion (which would be widely ignored in “hard cases” after the signing photos were taken) to complete legality with public funding (can you say “California”?).

A vanishly unlikely theory would actually read an abortion ban into the 14th Amendment. The theory argues, in effect, that exploding understanding of fetal development and our early criminal abortion laws were contemporaneous with the 14th Amendment; so contemporaries, if asked, would have said “Why yes, now that you mention it, I guess fetuses are constitutional ‘persons’.” I’m not sure whether anyone is actually advancing this theory in any legal cases. I became aware of it from a third-tier law journal. I hope it’s recognized as “a bridge too far” invitation to conservative judicial activism.

Since neither Roe nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey was well-reasoned or highly principled (Casey effectively replaced Roe with a rationale that is even more patently mockable), I would be personally gratified by the restoration of some constitutional equilibrium through reversing that line of cases.

That reversal would, indeed, be followed by something approaching 50 fierce state legislative debates. The results in most states would be compromises that neither side liked. But that’s where the issue belongs, I believe.

Now: all that having been said, I have been persuaded that a likelier result than any reversal of Roe/Casey is continued chipping away.

It is, after all, not really within the control of “conservatives” — or of Donald Trump, despite campaign bloviating about what his nominees would do — whether bad “progressive” precedents from 45 years back stand or fall.

The Supreme Court, in whose control it is, does not disregard factors like a bad precedent having nevertheless become woven into the social fabric, or a reversal, howsoever well-reasoned, reinforcing the lamentable perception that the Courts are really just super-legislatures.

I’m betting nothing I can’t afford to lose on overruling of Roe in my lifetime.

4

Congressional G.O.P. Agenda Quietly Falls Into Place Even as Trump Steals the Spotlight. Very misleading headline if one thinks an agenda for Congress is more than confirming POTUS’s judicial nominees. There is no GOP congressional agenda revealed in this story.

5

Perhaps most concerning, Judge Kavanaugh seems to have trouble remembering certain important facts about his years of service to Republican administrations. More than once this week, he testified in a way that appeared to directly contradict evidence in the record.

For example, he testified that Roe v. Wade is “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court.” But he said essentially the opposite in a 2003 email leaked to The Times. “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” he wrote then.

Judge Kavanaugh’s backers in the Senate brushed this off by pointing out that his 2003 statement was factually correct. They’re right, which means that his testimony this week was both disingenuous and meaningless.

If the New York Times submitted this drivel as part of a resumé for a “Fact-Checking” position, I wouldn’t give them an interview.

6

Here’s a quote, via the Telegraph, from the prosecutor in the trial where Karen White admitted two indecent assaults against female prisoners:

“The defendant would stand very close to [the victim], touch her arm and wink at her. Her penis was erect and sticking out of the top of her trousers.”

I swear, I wasn’t going to pass along Rod Dreher’s story of tragic stupidity in the Anglosphere, but the Prosecutor’s remark toward the end was irresistibly classic trans gibberish.

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Friday, 9/7/18

1

Evelyn Waugh’s gently satirical Scott-King’s Modern Europe follows the declining career of a classics teacher at Granchester, a fictional English public school. Granchester is “entirely respectable” but in need of a bit of modernizing, at least in the opinion of its pragmatic headmaster, who is attuned to consumer demands. The story ends with a poignant conversation between Scott-King and the headmaster:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

Richard Gamble, To Be Unfit for the Modern World.

2

Midway through Revelation, John sees a pantomime of the Gospel’s beginning, enacted in the sky (Rev. 12). There’s a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with twelve stars, laboring to bring a boy into the world. Near her is a dragon, ready to devour the infant …

We’ve seen plenty of sea monsters over the past few centuries, from the de-Christianization purge of the French Revolution to the personality cult of today’s North Korea. Even cuddly liberal house pets can turn into monsters. But oppressive political regimes aren’t the only threat. The dragon always calls monsters from the sea and monsters from the land, monsters of the state and monsters of the church.

Easy examples come to mind: Compromised German churches under the Nazis; Orthodox priests double-timing as KGB agents. But there are land beasts closer to home: Churches that support the fascism of the new sexual regime and persecute traditionalists; churches that cheer on every American war without asking whether it’s just or unjust; churches that serve as court prophets of humanistic internationalism; churches that serve as court prophets of humanistic nationalism.

Revelation unmasks the satanic monsters that lurk behind the veil of power, and it reminds us that sea monsters are never alone. Whenever a thuggish state tramples on the faithful, there will be thuggish pseudo-saints nearby, piously cheering it on.

Peter J. Leithart

3

Any discussion of the family must presuppose that it can be defined. That definition until recent times has always been accepted to be the natural or traditional family. It’s not possible to talk about alternative families, different kinds of families without first having a primary model.

Family First (New Zealand) board member Bruce Logan, quoted by Carolyn Moynihan.

Family First faces loss of charitable status because it advocates for the traditional family, whereas New Zealand now has thrown open “family,” which means that Family First advocates (drum roll) discriminaaaaaation! How could that possibly be a permissible charitable purpose.

QED

4

Someone wrote the other day:

Unlike the many, many online commentators who are extremely performative in their iconoclasm (yet somehow always managing to comfort the powerful), [Fredrik] deBoer is truly orthogonal to established ideologies.

That packs in quite a lot, and it seems like a good description of why many folks want to encounter deBoer.

Thursday, he did it again, in self-care is just another set of expectations you’ll never realize. It defies my summarization, but it seems to me that we’d miss a lot if we thought only about self-care when we read it. It applies to more than that, as I assume he intended.

5

We sang many hymns together. For the most part, our hymns served collectively to frame what would prove to be the centerpiece of our Sunday services: the sermon that—I now recognize—replaced centuries-old liturgical worship with something akin to a classroom whose lessons were punctuated by a soundtrack.

The hymns employed within that frame, by and large, fell into two categories: preparation for the sermon and altar call. Most were sentimental and didactic, speaking to the choir—as it were—while pretending to speak to God. That is also how most of our public prayer worked—with the pastor overtly addressing God while more pointedly admonishing the flock.

In any case, one hymn stood profoundly apart from the others, as it seemed to me more like prayer than any other utterance we made; it was, moreover, a prayer that I found myself praying as I sang the words. That hymn, “Be Thou My Vision,” therefore has always moved me.

Poet Scott Cairns, in Image Journal.

6

Deneen said he lead at Notre Dame a class on the idea of utopia, from ancient days until now. At the end, he polled the class to ask them which society of those he presented would they least want to live in, and which they would most want to live in. They all said 1984 is the one they wouldn’t want to live in. But which would they choose? A handful chose the world Wendell Berry presents in Hannah Coulter. But about half the class said Brave New World.

“It was stunning that they saw it as a utopia,” Deneen said. “That’s liberalism succeeding, and that’s liberalism failing.”

Rod Dreher (emphasis in original).

Notre Dame (My emphasis).

This came to mind as I read Nicholas Zinos, Erotic Love and the Totalitarian State, which agrees with me that Huxley got sex in dystopia better than Orwell, and who introduced me to One Evening in 2217, a 1906 classic available as part of a collection of Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction, in English translation.

I find Brave New World scarily prophetic — so far, more so every time I read it.

7

It is perfectly necessary and routine for hired and appointed officials to give advice that runs contrary to a president’s wishes and instincts. It is perfectly legitimate to try to guard any president against his worst defects of judgment and character, and such stories are the stuff of all White House memoirs. And it is necessary for advisers and attorneys to warn a president about the constitutional and moral limits that should restrain his ambitions.

What is disturbing about the Times op-ed author is that he or she admits not to doing the above, but to actively subverting the agenda of the president on policy questions that were hotly debated and thrashed out publicly in the campaign, questions on which this adviser’s side arguably lost the popular debate.

…

And yet, one shouldn’t feel too bad for Trump. It is President Trump’s inability to hire and staff his campaign and his administration with competent and ethical people willing and able to translate the ideologically heterodox promises of his campaign into workable policy that gives this resistance staying power, and that constantly humiliates him in the press. Trump has not hired enough of the best people. He’s hired too many self-flatterers, grifters, and people who proudly identify with the swamp. If he can’t get out of his own way, no one else will either.

Kevin D. Williamson

8

If you prick him, does he not explode? If you stroke him, does he not purr?

…

The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things.

Michael Gerson, We are a superpower run by a simpleton.

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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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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

3

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

6

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

7

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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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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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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