Twixt us and Gilead

Planned Parenthood has a weird and repulsive ad campaign in New York City. I know that ads seldom try to make the point that “our X is superior to the others,” but this ad’s subliminal messaging really is strange. The explicit message is so explicit that it’s NSFW.

I learned of it, of course, from Rod Dreher, who is sort of like God: not a progressive stupidity can befall without our brother in Baton Rouge learning of it. (I think a host of angels feeds stories to him.)

Rod’s best line in his story was this:

You’d have to be a complete idiot to give money to Planned Parenthood on the grounds that the only thing standing between you and Gilead is Planned Parenthood.

But I cherish this item as well for the many great comments.

I’ll mention again that Dreher’s commenters are among the best on the internet, doubtless related to Rod moderating them (which must be a Hurculean task unless the trolls and bots have mostly given up by now).

Samples:

I think this ad campaign provides a spot-on answer to the Fermi Paradox.

Lord Karth

… There’s no condom in the world that will keep a jealous man from battering the woman he’s currently using as a human sex toy …

Erin Manning

… A previous comment correctly noted that PP is an upper- and middle-class phenomenon ideally aimed at the poor. Of course the poor are the big losers in the Sexual Revolution, and PP is the Second Estate’s idea of damage control for the Third Estate.

Rod, you ignorant bigot, don’t you know Planned Parenthood also provides medical screenings for women and children.

Bastiat

“Who anywhere is opposing that?”

Well there’s the proposed Incel-Socon-Houellebeckian Dhimmi grand alliance to issue a free wife and prayer mat with every fedora purchase.

Some_wag

I don’t know if they had a particular bogeyman they wished to conjure or if they simply wanted to present themselves as fighting tyranny, but either way, the Evil Oppressor they’re fighting is reality. Sexually transmitted diseases and unintentional pregnancies are not just oppressive social constructs.

Joachim

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

The mind that dare not speak its name

I have a healthy respect for Albert Mohler, but sooner or later a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Christian will disagree. Mohler:

Christians need to remember that the sufficiency of scripture gives us a comprehensive worldview that equips us to wrestle with even the most challenging ethical dilemmas of our time.

Responding to the Transgender Moment (around 56:31)

That claim was part of his postscript to an interview with Roman Catholic Ryan T. Anderson, who relies heavily on natural law. Mohler’s last three guests have been Catholics. And he had just recommended Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally, for Christians, saying “this book is a very good source, a very good place, to begin thinking through some of these issues.”

Methinks Mohler is a bit double-minded about “the sufficiency of scripture” — and the mind that dare not speak its name at a Southern Baptist Seminary is the mind that gives me my healthy respect for Mohler. (If all he was going to do was stretch scripture, pretending that it is the source of the worldview he has gained by reading and thinking more widely, he wouldn’t be worth bothering with.)

I do wish, however, that Mohler and Anderson had discussed how actual birth anomalies — objectively present and testable, the exceptions that test the rule of sexual dimorphism — would play out in these debates.

I do not think those “hard cases” are where the action is on trasgenderism, but their existence is often an effective rhetorical tool, and with only 24 hours in a day, and with other issues than sexuality to interest me, I haven’t yet nailed down the fallacy in their invocation.

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

‘Zat all you got?

Brett Kavanaugh participated in an aggressive investigation of Bill Clinton under Ken Starr in his late 20s or early 30s.
He thereafter served in Dubya’s White House and gained a much greater appreciation of the weighty duties of the office (and what, perhaps, Bill Clinton could have done had he not been besieged legally).
So in 2009, when a Democrat was President (and he decidedly was not in the White House), Kavanaugh published a Law Review article suggesting that Congress should pass a law exempting the President from personal legal distractions until he leaves office.
So Brett Kavanaugh’s change of mind on this issue is not a cynical effort to endear him to Donald Trump, and the chance that he thinks Judges may exempt the President without Congressional legislation is very slim.

The New York Times Daily podcast Wednesday was very disappointing on these matters, only once mentioning the 2009 date of the law review article, not noting that Barack Obama was then President, and generally hinting at a convenient and politically ambitious conversion.

Seriously, Times: Is that all you’ve got?

UPDATE: No, it’s not all the Left has. It took me about 10 seconds to decide that deleting this blog entry, upon learning the followng salient fact, would be dishonest, as I’ve tried to be an honest broker with my ideological cards on the table.

From that Law Review Article:

Even in the absence of congressionally conferred immunity, a serious constitutional question exists regarding whether a President can be criminally indicted and tried while in office.

Expect to hear that quoted back during confirmation hearings. Expect also to hear that it was a footnote acknowledgement, not a principal argument.

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Will Kavanaugh butcher the sacred cow?

I think it was Nina Totenburg who on NPR Tuesday evening was incredulously challenging a Trump spokesman on the claim that President Trump didn’t ask SCOTUS nominee Kavanaugh about abortion — because Trump said on the campaign trail that he would appoint pro-life justices. As the spokesman pointed out, he also promised that there would be no litmus test and that he provided a list, later expanded, of people from whom he would nominate.

Here’s the solution of Totenburg’s clumsy effort at setting up a trick box:

There are no secret handshakes or pass-codes. Trump and Kavanaugh are (or will be) telling the truth when they deny discussing abortion. Get over it.
Trump (or, likelier, his advisers on judicial matters) are just quite confident that the people on his list are going to be hostile to the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence because it’s a hot, steaming mess, lacking firm roots in the Constitution. The people on the list revere the Constitution and will be disinclined, all else being equal, to ignore hot steaming messes that sully the Constitution by the pretext that it, the Constitution, and not errant justices, created the mess.
Notably, Democrat Chuck Schumer has declared his certainty — and horror — about how Kavanaugh would decide abortion cases (presumably starting with Kavanaugh’s constitutional reverence and following the trail from there, though Schumer would never admit that the one follows the other logically).
Democrat Presidents are similarly confident, without actually asking, that their nominees are not going to be overly troubled by the legal messiness of the status quo. Their party has a rather latitudinarian view about the importance of the Constitution’s original public meaning, plus some theories on how we can never know that meaning, and (double-plus) it reveres the sexual revolution. Q.E.D.
Trump was and is a bullshitter. Any correspondence between what he promises and what he does is, generally, coincidental. His judicial nominees from that list have been a happy exception, as he has hewed to the list of nominees from which he promised to pick. (Okay: Schumer’s a bullshitter, too, though definitely a minor-leaguer compared to President MAGA.)

A Kafkaesque part of the prescribed ritual combat will be invocations or deprecations of “Roe v. Wade.” It’s weird because Roe finally succumbed to its birth defects (helped along by a thousand cuts from Law Journal articles, left, right and center) in 1992, with Anthony Kennedy and company quietly interring it and trotting out the new rationale for continuing a liberal abortion regime: No more trimesters or such; the test of a law is whether it creates an “undue burden” on access to abortion, because “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” (Damn! How could I have missed that?!)

Roe is dead. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But if you take away the totemistic invocation of Roe, the Senate might be struck dumb(er).

And therein lies the dilemma that will produce some sordid theater over the coming months.

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

In pursuit, but barely

As I told you previously the more I see how other societies (d)evolve, the more I’m glad to be French, at least for now. But is that really “other” societies, or just some of them? The Sexual Revolution, the LGBT cult and other niceties were mostly born in the Anglosphere and that’s where they are most virulent …

I understand that you’re clinging to your “secularization = Sexual Revolution” thesis and it certainly has some merit, but you can’t deny that France, for instance, is much more secularized than the United States and as much as the UK and yet is much more conservative on social matters — just check our abortion laws or the resistance to the LGBT agenda. Same goes for Eastern Europe. I think thus there is something rotten in the Anglosphere….

As Del Noce pointed out, Wilhelm Reich was brilliantly prescient when he identified America (and the English-speaking more generally) as the culture where the sexual revolution would triumph most thoroughly.

In hindsight, the reason is obvious: the sexual revolution is a philosophical by-product of scientistic positivism (the denial that anything, including sexuality, has a symbolic-sacramental value) and extreme “bourgeois happiness” utilitarianism (faith that happiness can be reached without any reference to the transcendent). Both trends were and are far more advanced in countries with a Puritan-empiricist-utilitarian cultural tradition like the UK and the USA. The results show.

Rod Dreher, updating a bit of gender madness from the U.K. with comments by a French reader and by Carlo Lancellotti, who has been hitting the nail on the head quite a bit lately. (Emphasis added)

I don’t think these comments are off the mark when it comes to the Anglosphere nexus with the craziest parts of the sexual revolution and LGBetc. stuff. Which means, as Rod says:

I think this is a point worth pondering. So I am going to ponder it, and invite others to think of it too, and add their thoughts. My instinct tells me it has something to do with the radical individualism of the Anglosphere.

But if we get no further than picking “scientistic positivism,” “bourgeois happiness utilitarianism” or “radical individualism” out of the police lineup, we’ll not have gotten very far.

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving.

If you promise, deliver

[John] McAdams, a professor of political science, wrote on his personal blog, Marquette Warrior, about a recorded interaction in which a graduate student philosophy instructor told her student that his opinions opposing gay marriage “are not appropriate.”

A month later, without presenting him with any formal charges, Marquette suspended McAdams, cancelled his classes, and banned him from campus. The college later insinuated that McAdams violated a harassment policy, and that his punishments stemmed from his naming the instructor in his blog post and linking to her own, publicly available, blog.

“As FIRE has argued since the beginning, Marquette was wrong to fire John McAdams simply for criticizing a graduate student instructor who unilaterally decided that a matter of political interest was no longer up for debate by students,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “This ruling rightly demonstrates that when a university promises academic freedom, it is required to deliver.”

…

Though Marquette is a private, Roman Catholic institution not bound by the First Amendment, the university promises faculty “the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms,” and it explicitly guarantees that “dismissal will not be used to restrain faculty members in their exercise of academic freedom or other rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.”

Press Release by FIRE. From their computers to God’s ear — and the ears of other university administrators:

“Administrators cannot simply decide that they do not like the results of certain faculty speech, and then work backwards to find a justification for firing them,” said Ari Cohn, director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program. “The court’s decision recognized that allowing a university to do so is incompatible with any meaningful understanding of academic freedom. Colleges and universities across the country that are facing calls to discipline faculty members for their online speech should pay attention to today’s decision.”

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving.

The circular express

When I was a Calvinist, I took comfort that the elect would persevere, and attain salvation. This is the “P” in the TULIP acrostic for the five points of Calvinism: Perseverance of the Saints, frequently dumbed down to “Eternal Security.”

Of course, there was the pesky little problem of apparent saints who openly and spectacularly apostatized. To those instances, one could respond either:

“They’re still saved because you can’t lose your salvation.” That answer, with its dubious consistency, tended to antinomianism (which meant was much beloved by testosterone-crazed adolescent Calvinist boys — I am not making that up).
“They never were elect in the first place, of course.” That answer tends to collapse the whole airtight Calvinist edifice. It collapses into uncertainty and circularity about whether the seemingly-elect truly are elect, including the person trying to parse the possibilities.

“Some ‘security’! If I’m saved, I’ll always be saved, but damned if I know whether I’m saved! Thanks for nuthin’!”

That tiptoe into an edge of Calvinism is preface to today’s debates between affirmation-seeking transgenderism activists and sober clinicians who want to avoid hasty surgical and hormonal interventions in adolescent bodies and minds — interventions that will make it hard for an adolescent with transgender ideations to “desist,” as many do, reverting to feeling comfortable in their own skin (and sex).

Or maybe many don’t. Maybe the desisters were false positives.

Oh, dear!

Desistance has been at the center of the transgender advocates’ fight to have transgender identity publicly accepted as an urgent medical condition. At the same time, these same advocates have pressured clinicians to remove the stigma of its psychiatric diagnosis in order to create a social acceptance of the idea that “gender” is truly biological and that “sex” is a social construct. Stunningly anti-scientific rhetoric like this is taking as its hostage the bodies and lives of children in order to prove the point that children are “born transgender.” This assertion is a self-fulfilling prophecy involving a domino effect of parents and clinicians who are effectively engaging in Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP).

…

Transgender discourse advances the notion of the “true transgender” by accepting all the signs of gender non-conformity as unmistakable signs of being transgender—at least until they cease. Then, suddenly, people like Tannehill dismiss the child’s gender non-conformity, claiming that these trans-identifying children were never really transgender in the first place.

Julia Vigo, The Myth of the “Desistance Myth” (italics added)

So, there it is:

If you’re transgender/elect, you won’t desist/apostatize.
If you desist/apostatize, you weren’t truly transgender/elect.

“Any questions about the urgent necessity of immediate surgical and hormonal interventions in trans teens? … Yes, you, the hater/heretic in the back row. What’s your stupid, phony question?”

* * * * *

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

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

(Philip K. Dick)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Where I glean stuff.

Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving.

Encore!

This morning, I read an outstanding Rod Dreher blog that used the passing phrase “conscientious objector in the culture war.”

More than eight years ago, I wrote a long blog with almost exactly that phrase as its title, bearing this preface:

This may be the most controversial and polemical thing I’ve posted. I’ll tell you in advance, and in conclusion, that I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it. Your mileage may vary.

Well, Dreher prompted me to find it and re-read it, and I would no longer endorse that preface:

I have written much more controversial and polemical things since then.
While “dogmatic” may not be the right word, the blog — almost every word of it — now reflects well-settled convictions, tested by eight years and buttressed (especially point 3) by the election of Donald Trump.

Everything else, I’d still endorse, So I’m indulging myself by re-publishing myself — a rare step that I don’t intend to repeat often.

* * * * *

One of the minor irritants in my life is Franky Schaeffer. I’ll go long spells without thinking of him, and then I get a catalogue from his publishing company, or maybe he pops up in the news (having once again found limelight). And I seethe.

But lots of people love limelight. Why does he, of all people, irritate me? Probably because his life is so parallel to mine, through all the twists and turns.

Evangelical: Check.
Produced the movie Whatever Happened to the Human Race; watched the movie as a turning point.
Now Orthodox: Check.
Religious Right activist: Check.
No longer Religious Right activist: Check.
60-something years old: Check.

But he’s too strident and angry. He’s sort of a Christian James Howard Kunstler (another approximate contemporary of mine) but without Kunstler’s ubiquitous F-Bombs. Kunstler acknowledges that his speeches are a form of theater (listen to Kunstlercast #103 here); I think that’s true of Schaeffer, too, though he’d probably deny it.

I sense, too, that my reasons for dropping out of the culture wars are different than Schaeffer’s. I sense that partly because he seemingly just changed sides, now inveighing against his former friends, writing screeds, kiss and tell books, dubious fiction (his Calvin Becker fiction trilogy was quite calculatedly ambiguous about the extent to which it was autobiographical), paranoid apologies for Barack Obama, and sucking up to media personages who call him things like “a former leader of the anti-choice movement.” (They just love to get some sound-bites from an angry ex-whatever.)

But I really dropped out because:

The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms.
I suspect that the strident tactics make most things worse rather than better.
I don’t really trust my former allies.
I don’t really trust the candidates we’re supposed to vote for.
I still don’t trust my former adversaries.
If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas.
Maybe I’m just a worn out old hippie pacifist.

1. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms. We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.

Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it. But I’m convinced, to take just one Culture War example, that we won’t stop abortion until we change the toxic combination of unchastity and avarice that gets women pregnant and then justifies aborting the innocent child to maintain prosperity (greater or lesser).

The Right is not with us on that. Fox Radio recently aired an ad, between Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, for an online service for married men seeking adulterous affairs. (I didn’t hear it, but read about it from someone who didn’t note the incongruity of this appearing on a putatively conservative news source.)

Whaddya think? I’m betting that the ad wasn’t there for the 13 liberals who were eavesdropping on Fox that day, but for the red-meat, red state regulars.

TownHall.com syndicated columnist pages every day have ads for “conservative” slogan t-shirts draped on attractive young lasses, selling conservative politics, like everything else, with sex. Today there’s a sexy avatar for some video game, too. It’s all a racket.

This could as well go under the caption “I don’t really trust my former allies.” But on present terms I think the idiocy of modern pseudo-conservatives belongs in this “unwinnable” category, if only because their position on the sexual side of the culture wars seems to be “anything goes, so long as it’s not gay.” That’s a losing position long-term as well as being a sign of untrustworthiness.

2. The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.

Whichever side of the Culture Wars you’re on, think about the fundraising letters you get. Are you edified by their tone? Do you appreciate the sober, educational emphasis? Do you find yourself walking away with something of substance to ruminate on?

If so, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)

The groups who used to send me fairly sober letters have gone strident. The groups that used to send me strident letters are now frothing at the mouth. And I’m sure the other side is doing the same. Shrill is the new green.

I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.

[Update: We now teeter on the brink of civil war. I had no idea it would get so bad so fast. I commend Better Angels]

3. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms, too, because there’s darned little difference between the two sides on some of the deep presuppositions.

They’re both, ironically, secular. One side is secular because they don’t believe in any divine rules. You know which side I’m talking about. (Hint)

The other side – my side – is mostly secular because they functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules. They “honor” Him by keeping his rules – sort of the way a rank amateur “paints” by number. That’s why I don’t really trust them. The tranformative significance of the Incarnation: God the Son, Who took on our flesh forever – qui sedes ad dexteram patrem (who sits at the right hand of the Father) in resurrected human flesh – is lost on them. God is up to something more than commandment monitoring and forgiving transgression of the commandments. The incarnation changes everything. [Update: The seeds in this paragraph have grown into my episodic forays into the realism/nominalism distinction and explicit scorn for sub-Christian anthropology.]

“Love God and do as you will” would strike them as modern relativism. They’re very anti-relativist. Except on Ecclesiology. Then they’re apt to utter Babbitry like “Isn’t it swell that there’s a church for every taste!”

At the other end from the relativist “conservatives,” there’s a Protestant Church in my home town that produces a disproportionate share of Religious Right activists. Several of them have been elected to public office. But they’re theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If they had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for one of those 18 capital offenses for the icons in my home prayer corner. [Update: One of their ideologues brought disgrace upon himself and his wife via their religious “covenant” without a marriage license. I must spare you details of the breakup.]

“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of …” the folks I encountered who dreamed of kingdoms, feigned righteousness, broke promises, shot off their mouths, tried to set fires, escaped the edge of euphemisms …. (Cf. Hebrews 11:32-34) These are the folks with whom I’d be a “co-belligerent” (Francis Schaeffer’s coinage to distinguish temporary and unreliable political friends from reliable “allies”) were I to continue in the culture wars. And they outnumber many-fold any well-formed Christians of historical and liturgical bent.

We Orthodox have been here before. After the attempted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence (see also here), the Orthodox decided they’d risk rule by Sultan over rule by Pope.

That is not a throw-away line: I’m not so sure a secularist regime would be worse than what Christian Reconstructionists would bring upon me and my fellow Orthodox Christians that I’m willing to be bedfellows with Recontructionists.

4. In the current terms of the Culture War, the highest form of involvement, other than sending money in response to strident or frenzied letters, is to vote for Republicans. Any Republican.

In 2000 and 2004, it was Dubya. He was, we were told, a good Evangelical Christian. He cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. He talked about America walking humbly in the foreign policy world.

Then 9-11 came, and he turned into a fierce Commander In Chief. And, oddly, Imam-In-Chief, as he assured us that “true Islam is a religion of peace.” (Well I’m glad he cleared that up!)

And then came, too, the second inaugural, when he declare as U.S. policy the eradication of tyranny from the world and the planting of democracy. If you don’t understand how delusional that is, read it again: eradicating tyranny from the world. As national policy.

Many Religious Right figures in 2008 backed Mitt Romney, Mormon and heir of a 50s moderate Republican, George Romney. Mitt was, deep down, one of us – despite his left-leaning administration as governor of Massachusetts – they assured us. Now they’re pushing Sarah Palin, about whom I’ll not say much except that I do not now support her and see no sign that she has the goods to gain my support later. (I don’t even think she’s all that “hot,” for whatever that’s worth.)

I’m not gonna play Charlie Brown the placekicker to the GOP’s Lucy Van Pelt any more.

[Update: Do I really need to belabor how right I was?]

5. I still believe pretty much what I believed before on what makes for good living and a just society. I’ve even kept a hand in the debates by writing letters to the editor on a few hot-button issues. Those letters are far less demonizing of the opposition than the sort of letters I used to write. But I check the online comboxes and see that the other side has no lack of equally-but-oppositely mad partisans of its own, leveling vitriolic attacks on me, no matter how reasoned my argument, just because I reach conclusions they don’t like.

But even at more elite levels than smalltown cyberpaper comboxes, I’m still convinced that the other side is untrustworthy. One occasionally will catch one of them committing candor, as has Chai Felblum of Georgetown law school. Imagine a constitutional case with this issue:

Whether the inferred right to marry a member of the same sex, which is inferred from the right to engage in homosexual sodomy, which is inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from penumbra of he 4th, 9th, 10th, 14th and other consitutional amendments, is of sufficient constitutional gravity to warrant compromise of the explicit constitutional command against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

Chai Feldblum would answer “yes.” I’m not making up her response (though I did make up the highly tendentious – but brutally accurate – faux issue statement). I appreciate her candor.

But her candor tells me that there’s no home for me in the left where Frank Schaeffer has seemingly pitched his tent.

The Orthodox Wedding service includes, for just one example, “grant unto these Your servants …a peaceful life, length of days, chastity, love for one another in a bond of peace, offspring long‑lived, fair fame by reason of their children, and a crown of glory that does not fade away.” You can’t pray that with integrity over a same-sex coupling, whatever you might think of it otherwise.

So while the Chai Feldblums of the world might not smash my icons like the Reconstructionists, they’ll soon enough take away my Church’s tax exemption, or otherwise put on the squeeze, because they’ll consider us a hate group for continuing the two-millennia-long practice of connecting marriage to procreation.

6. If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas of life. I was reminded Sunday how diverse my parish is. We have Romanians and Russians who were born, or even came of age, under communism. We have Greeks who think that 2nd Amendment mania is barbaric (in at least one case with justification that I can’t gainsay – a family member gunned down in cold blood by someone who went postal). We have young people and middle-aged academics who lean left. We have demographically unknown visitors most Sundays. I have something to learn from some of them.

Just as I don’t want someone to ask me “why are you here since you’re not Greek?,” I don’t want people of Right-leaning disposition to come up to me at Church and make some dismissive remark, which they assume I’ll find hilarious or profound, about a Left-leaning idea that may be held by another parishioner within earshot. I don’t want there to be ethnic, racial, socio-economic or political barriers to people. Political trash talk about trifles at Church is apt to drive people away though we have a faith in common and should be together on Sunday.

7. Maybe I should try a bit more empathy. Maybe I’m not angry because, unlike Frank Schaeffer, I have a day job, with a comfortable living, and don’t have to raise a fuss to sell my newest book. Maybe a brain or personality disorder prompted Franky to call Barack Obama’s election “miraculous” and to prophesy epochal political healing on Obama’s watch.

Maybe Frank’s suburban Boston parish (I think he’s in Brookline, Michael Dukakis‘ hometown) has a leftist litmus test and he caved in. Or maybe he’s rebelling against his upbringing in neutral Switzerland as I declare myself a Swiss-like neutral in the Culture Wars.

Or maybe I’m not angry, by and large, because I’m a child of the 60s, a former Conscientious Objector to conventional war, and now old enough that I’m kind of tired of fighting of all sorts – worn out, if you will. Maybe we really need young, testosterone-crazed Christian guys (and gals crazed by whatever crazes women) who still are eager for a fight. I see my role as one to ask questions of any such young hotheads from the perspective six decades gives. Such as the ones implied by what I’ve just written.

[Note: The rest of this is dated or refers to a blog template I no longer use.] So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).

I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.

Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).

My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.

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I heartily recommend the Dreher blog I opened with as a complement to this.

What I miss these days

After Obama’s opening remarks, CEO Eric Schmidt — who would later endorse Obama and campaign for him — joined him on stage to lead a long and wide-ranging Q&A. While much of the discussion focused on predictable subjects, in the closing minutes Obama addressed a less obvious issue: the need to use technology and information to break through people’s ill-founded opinions. He said that as president he wouldn’t allow “special interests” to dominate public discourse, for instance in debates about health care reform, because his administration would reply with “data and facts.” He added, jokingly, that “if they start running ‘Harry and Louise’ ads, I’ll run my own ads, or I’ll send out something on YouTube. I’m president and I’ll be able to — I’ll let them know what the facts are.”

But then, joking aside, he focused squarely on the need for government to use technology to correct what he saw as a well-meaning but too often ignorant public:

You know, one of the things that you learn when you’re traveling and running for president is, the American people at their core are a decent people. There’s a generosity of spirit there, and there’s common sense there, but it’s not tapped. And mainly people — they’re just misinformed, or they are too busy, they’re trying to get their kids to school, they’re working, they just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out all the information that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.

And that’s what we have to return to: a government where the American people trust the information they’re getting. And I’m really looking forward to doing that, because I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and science and feedback — everything that allows you to do what you do, that’s what we should be doing in our government. [Crowd applauds.]

I want people in technology, I want innovators and engineers and scientists like yourselves, I want you helping us make policy — based on facts! Based on reason!

The moment is captured perfectly in Steven Levy’s book In the Plex, where he writes of Obama: “He thought like a Googler.”

Obama then invoked the famous apocryphal line of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Obama finished his speech by pointing to the crucial role that Google could play in a politics based on facts:

And part of the problem that we’re having … is, we constantly have a contest where facts don’t matter, and I want to restore that sense of decisions being based on facts to the White House. And I think that many of you can help me, so I want you to be involved.

Adam J. White, Google.gov, The New Atlantis.

This quote is not remotely representative of the whole long article (which I commend to those hardier than me or with even more time on their hands), but it evoked in me a nostalgia for Barack Obama, who for all his flaws (I particularly rued his tone-deafness on religious liberty) had a temperament that I miss terribly these days.

But lest it be thought that I have nothing good to say about Donald Trump, I note that one of my blog categories has fallen into disuse: “Zombie Reaganism,” my epithet for the prevailing Republican political posture for a decade or so.

Trump has cured the GOP of that, though I fear his cure is worse than the disease.

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

(Philip K. Dick)

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

(Sir James Fitzjames Stephen)

Place. Limits. Liberty.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Re-ordering desire

“How has your experience as an LGBT+ person been a unique source of blessing in your life?,” she asked. The responses may humble you.

Okay, that click-baity paragraph (hyperlink deleted) is an artifact of when I thought this would be a Micro.blog entry, whereas it turned out more fitting for here.

“She” is Bridget Eileen, author of the blog “Meditations of a Traveling Nun.” She’s Evangelical, but the responses she got, recounted in God’s Unique Blessings in the LGBT+ Experience of Christians are notably ecumenical, focusing on improved interpersonal relationships and friendships.

Catholic Eve Tushnet writes what could be a fitting synthesis:

We’re constantly being told that same-sex sexual desire is disordered, which I accept, as I accept all that is taught by Holy Mother Church. But when people … try to tell you how to order your desires, they always try to get you to keep the expression of desire the same, but change the object. This is the “become straight” option, if “option” is the word I want. There is another way for desire to become ordered: same object, different expression. People who long for same-sex love and intimacy should maybe be encouraged to learn how to do that, since it is good, and holy, and beautiful.

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I also blog short items at Micro.blog .

I first tasted actual worship in the Orthodox Church, in the Divine Liturgy. Prior to that heart-opening experience, my time in the churches of my youth felt more like attending a classroom accompanied by hymns. I suppose it was a matter of emphasis; whereas the other traditions limited their scope to, say, the renewing of the mind, as in thinking better thoughts, orthodox Services attend to the renewing of the nous, scouring clean that “intellective aptitude of the heart“ – as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware described it – and reconnecting the sin-severed constituents of the human person.

Poet Scott Cairns in Praxis, Volume 17, Issue 3, hyperlink added.