Ending Stalinism in American Academies.

Todd Hartch reflects on his experience in coming out as a social conservative at Eastern Kentucky University:

We have watched, though, as our campuses veered farther and farther off course. Sexual license is now taken for granted. Mentions of abortion, homosexuality, and even bestiality hardly merit a second glance in our campus papers. Many students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue. Our colleagues now scoff even at the idea of truth, as if it were some quaint notion from the Middle Ages. Discipline after discipline has lost its mooring and drifted into irrelevance or outright idiocy.


Perhaps all this might be justified if students were somehow benefitting from this atmosphere of license and relativism. The opposite is the case. Most students, even at the best universities, have no passion, no love of learning. Focused on careers, at best, or, more often, on nothing at all, they approach texts that have changed the world as if they were being forced to read the dictionary. Faced with the results of painstaking research, they yawn and check their phones. They do less homework than American students have ever done before because professors have relaxed their requirements. The result is that, amazingly enough, students are bored in their modern Sodom.

And:

What is to be done?


Step one is to end Ostpolitik on campus. Holding our tongues might have allowed us to advance professionally but it has contributed to the near death of the American campus. Yes, progressives bear much of the blame for the stultifying sameness of contemporary academia, but we let them do what they wanted. It’s time to speak up. It is time to make a public case for truth, for human dignity, for academic standards, and for the joy of learning. I guarantee that students will not be bored when they see us defending the truth. (I should point out that speaking up is not a synonym for being rude.)

We need to go into this process knowing that the risks are real. We probably will be condemned by our colleagues, our students, and our administrations. I doubt that I’ll ever get used to hearing the kind of words I related at the beginning of this article or to reading that much of the Psychology Department believes that my ideas reflect the kind of obscurantism that one might find in theocratic Iran. Still, this experience of being criticized publicly is not as negative an experience as some might believe because it is balanced by the support one receives from those who were waiting for someone to speak up. In fact, it is through bold public discourse that we can best find our friends and allies.

And:

Step two is ecumenism. There are, of course, very real theological differences between, for instance, Catholics and Evangelicals. But there are large areas of agreement, such as marriage, abortion, the dignity of the human person, and the existence of truth, where we can cooperate. In this time of crisis we can put aside our disagreements to fight for the common good. The principles outlined in the Manhattan Declaration—life, marriage, and religious liberty—offer a strong basis for such ecumenical work.


Third, we need to dialogue with those most opposed to our ideas. Some professors and students will respond to our more visible presence on campus with anger and ridicule, but some will want to understand us. With this latter group we must make every effort to communicate clearly and to forge relationships of trust and respect. Most of our partners in dialogue, of course, will not change their minds. Many, however, will come to see that our views have a certain logic that they can respect. The discussion that I led in the EKU library had its dramatic moments, but I am looking forward to more such events for two reasons: first, it personalized “the other side” and made me see them more clearly as men and women struggling to find the truth; second, as weak as the truth may seem, it is inherently appealing. Being able to speak the truth, especially in an intimate setting, is worth our time and effort.

Fourth and finally, live in hope. Soviet Communism had the KGB, the Red Army, millions of party members, and a system of gulags to enforce its nefarious designs, yet it utterly dissolved during the course of a few years. Do not assume that the regime now dominating our campuses is any more substantial, any more permanent than the Soviet regime. Structures built on faulty foundations may look solid but are inherently unstable. The contemporary university, resting on relativism, multiculturalism, and rationalism, does not have a coherent account of its purpose because its most cherished notions are mutually contradictory. Despite the fears of many conservatives that it is unredeemable, the university is in fact ripe for criticism and reform. Ostpolitik, however, will not get us very far.

Washington Post decides grassroots Community Organizing is bad...

...if it is done by orthodox Catholic blogs.

According to Rachell Zoll at the Washington Post:

Catholic bloggers aim to purge dissenters

-- Pressure is on to change the Roman Catholic Church in America, but it's not coming from the usual liberal suspects. A new breed of theological conservatives has taken to blogs and YouTube to say the church isn't Catholic enough.


Enraged by dissent that they believe has gone unchecked for decades, and unafraid to say so in the starkest language, these activists are naming names and unsettling the church.

-In the Archdiocese of Boston, parishioners are dissecting the work of a top adviser to the cardinal for any hint of Marxist influence.

-Bloggers are combing through campaign finance records to expose staff of Catholic agencies who donate to politicians who support abortion rights.

-RealCatholicTV.com, working from studios in suburban Detroit, is hunting for "traitorous" nuns, priests or bishops throughout the American church.

What do these people think they are doing?  It's not like they are targeting something really evil like a liberal journalist who appears on Fox News.

Thomas Peters, who runs the popular "AmericanPapist" blog, said fellow orthodox Catholics have embraced the Web because they feel they finally have a platform that can compete with well-established liberal Catholic publications, such as the National Catholic Reporter. (Some conservative bloggers call the paper "the National Catholic Destroyer.")


Peters, 25, considers himself on the more positive side of the orthodox Catholic blogosphere, although some targets of his commentary disagree.

He condemns the vitriol he sees online, and promotes a blog feature called "bishops with backbone," in praise of church leaders who rein in dissenters. He also added an online function to send thank you notes when leaders take tough stands, recently generating 500 letters in one day for Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis who refused Holy Communion to gay rights protesters at a recent Mass.

"All of these things that we say in public are meant for the best good of the church," said Peters. He began his blog several years ago and now works for the American Principles Project, a conservative advocacy group founded by Princeton University scholar Robert George.

The rise in lay conservative fervor comes at a time when the need for activism would seem less urgent. The U.S. hierarchy has seen a wave of retirements in recent years that has swept out leading liberals. The men taking their place are generally more traditional and willing to take a harder line against disobedient Catholics, from politicians to parishioners.

Notice the age of the "American Papist"?  Liberals are besides themselves about the fact that history didn't turn out the way it was supposed to.

Of course, it makes for another great double standard.  When liberalism is ascendant, conservatives should shut up because they are doomed to lose. When liberalism is in decline, conservatives should shut up because it doesn't matter.

The Return of the Blacklist - Leftist NPR Fires Pundit Juan Williams for Badthink Thoughtcrime.

Tolerance is all too often the space between breathing out one orthodoxy and inhaling another.

Juan Williams fired for his comment on the O'Reilly Factor that he is often uncomfortable on planes when he sees people in Muslim garb because of his knowledge that Muslims have been responsible for the terror attacks against Americans.  According to Big Journalism:

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”


Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

Dan Riehl offers the interesting observation that Williams was sacked so promptly because he is an African-American and his politically incorrect comments showed that he was "off the reservation" and breaking Leftist solidarity by giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

What Juan Williams did is very similar to why the Left hates Sarah Palin, other conservative women and conservative homosexuals. He played against the progressive stereotype of himself, revealing a balanced and too candid humanity within. For a moment, in essence, he became too real.


As he said, “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country."

Well, if Juan Williams is impacted by the behavior of Muslims, then progressives - and NPR is that, can't lecture white America that their concerns are based on hate, religious intolerance, bigotry or xenophobia. Juan Williams didn't drop his mask and reveal any Islamophobia last night on Fox. What he did was rip the mask off the tactics NPR and other progressives, including the liberal media, use to lecture America and prevent an honest discussion of the threat from Islam.

Michelle Malkin lists the many Leftists who called for Williams firing for his "thoughtcrime."
 
Hey, wasn't McCarthyism and "Blacklisting" supposed to be bad things?

It must be "George Orwell Monday."

Now for another George Orwell moment, go to this Big Government post and figure out what President Obama left out of his quotation from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

Here is the video of the speech.  Go to 22:30 and listen to President Obama's attempt at highflown rhetoric, the long pause, and the careful redaction of four words.



This video has only the relevant section of the speech.



Well, obviously, in our enlightened age which has no taboos, the only taboo is mentioning the, you know, Creator in public.

America needs to preserve its classic Protestant heritage...

...according to Archbishop Chaput:

One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.

Chaput discusses the Protestant tradition that permitted - actually required - Christian religious principles to influence American public policy:

The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:

We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.

The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.

The positive assessment of Puritanism came to an end in the 19th Century when the Puritans were reconceived as ignorant and dour bigots, a reconception that served one side of a cultural war, the side that ended up winning the war by 1960, although at the time that victory seemed like a very good thing from the Catholic perspective.

The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.


The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.

According to Chaput, we are now seeing a surprising consequence of the decline of the mainstream Protestantism that informed so much of American history:

If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.

Interesting.

Join the Counterculture - be orthodox.

Leo McKinstry explains why he is betraying his Ulster Protestant roots by joining the "Roman church":

More pertinent, however, is that my conversion also runs counter to the spirit of our times in modern Britain, for we now live in an aggressively secular, anti-Christian country, where the Catholic Church is seen as outmoded, reactionary, irrelevant and superstitious.


This anti-Catholic mood has been at its most palpable in the run-up to Pope Benedict's state visit this week, much of it led by militant atheists who, in the name of tolerance, have become utterly intolerant of manifestations of traditional Christian faith.

Indeed, I have been struck in recent months by the similarity between anti-Papal feeling in Britain today and the sectarianism that I saw all around me in Northern Ireland.

Yesterday the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Grand Old Man of Ulster Protestantism, announced he will lead a demonstration against Pope Benedict's visit to Glasgow, but his actions are no different from the noisy army of frenzied secularists.

One group, called 'Protest the Pope', is organising a major protest rally in London, under the slogan 'No! The Pope Is Not Welcome!', words that could have been drawn up by the Orange Order.

Richard Dawkins, the atheistic, best-selling author, has described the Pope as 'a leering old villain in a frock', heading 'an evil, corrupt organisation whose character he fits like a glove'.

And:

Yet the present antagonism towards the Catholic faith goes far deeper than merely a reaction to child abuse.


The fact is that Catholicism is completely out of tune with the progressive, politically correct spirit of our age, with its fashionable emphasis on moral relativism, multi-culturalism and self-gratification.

The leaders of our civic culture cannot bear the thought that there is an alternative to their state-dominated, anti-family, diversity-fixated vision of the world.

So they work themselves into a frenzy about the Catholic Church's opposition to indiscriminate condom distribution in Africa, one commentator even claiming the Pope is responsible for 'the deaths of millions of Africans from HIV/Aids'.

But this ignores not only the heroic work done in the third world by Catholic volunteers, but also the reality that those communities' primitive cultural mores are largely responsible for the spread of Aids. In fact, the Catholic ideal of restraint has often done more good than all the trendy sex awareness campaigns.

There is a tremendous hypocrisy about all this anti-Catholic feeling.

While raging against Christianity, too many civic leaders are only too happy to appease militant Islam - far more anti-gay and misogynistic than Catholicism - because of their notion that, in their Marxist hierarchy of victimhood, Muslims are an oppressed minority in need of support.

So they end up in the bizarre position of banning crucifixes and prayers from public institutions, while colluding with the spread of Sharia law.

But I am drawn to Catholicism precisely because it is a bulwark in defence of Christian civilisation against the destructive, secularist challenge.

Oikophobia - "What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites."

The clip where MSNBC lectured Pastor Jones like an 8 year old has sparked a nerve.  The typical response is something like "yes, he's a nutjob, but *jeez* what did MSNBC think it was doing?"

James Taranto is usually very good on this pop-sociology kind of thing.  A couple of weeks ago, he offered this diagnosis of the left as suffering from "oikophobia."  Taranto started with the keen observations of Charles Krauthammer, who observed that the Left's knee-jerk reaction of treating everyone who disagrees with them as uncultured boobs:

Krauthammer portrays this as a cynical game: "Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. . . . What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument."


But this has its limits as a political strategy. Krauthammer writes that "the Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November," and no one will credit him for boldness in that prediction. Some may disagree with his reckoning as to the reason for that likely loss: that "a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them."

But can anyone argue that a show of contempt is a winning political strategy? The question answers itself and implies that the contempt is genuine.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

Taranto then turns to former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich's pop psychological profile of New Yorkers who don't want a mosque built near "Ground Zero" as motivated by a childish fear of "the Other."

So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.


And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions. Americans in fact are a very tolerant people. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious backlash against Muslims. What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites.

The Ground Zero mosque is an affront to the sensibilities of ordinary Americans. "The center's association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence," as the Associated Press has reported. That Americans would find this offensive is a matter of simple common sense. The liberal elites cannot comprehend common sense, and, incredibly, they think that's a virtue. After all, common sense is so common.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Back in the 2004 election, I spoke to a liberal friend of mine.  She had moved to Florida. Thinking that I was one of the "elites," she shared with me her disgust for Floridians and Southerners who were uneducated, unwashed, racist rubes in her view.  I suggested to her that if she were in foreign country she would never speak about the unique cultural traditions and customs with the same lack of charity.  The cognitive dissonance didn't phase her - the ignorance and prejudices of foreign cultures were somehow better than the ignorance and prejudice of non-liberal Americans.

Don't Burn the Koran - Burn the National Catholic Reporter...

...and some books by Hans Kung!

Acts of the Apostasy reports:

A little-known central Kansas Catholic blogger has announced that he will burn a copy of the National Catholic Reporter on his front lawn on Monday September 13, the Memorial of St John Chrysostom.


Renfrew Dachs, who blogs at 'Orthodachs Review', announced on Labor Day his intention to set fire to the most recent issue of the left-leaning paper. As he wrote on his blog:

"It is time to expose this publication for what it is. It is a heterodox publication that is trying to masquerade as a Catholic publication, seeking to deceive many within the Church."
 
Dachs' blog and Facebook page, which combined boasts all of 50 followers, has been inundated with hits and friend requests since his statement. He says that the split between supporters and detractors is fairly even.


"I've had people tell me they're coming to attend the burning. A bunch have mailed me copies of the National Catholic Reporter, along with some back issues of Commonweal and America, so I expect a pretty large fire Monday. I've also received a number of nasty emails, too. They're not death threats - pretty much just folks telling me to stop being judgmental, or that I'll harm the environment by increasing my carbon footprint, with all that smoke and stuff."

Dachs said he chose the memorial of St John Chrysostom for this event because the revered Doctor of the Church, whose name means 'Golden Mouth', defended Church teachings throughout his life. "The stuff the NCR publishes, on the total opposite spectrum of what he taught, of what the Church teaches," Dachs said. "Reiki, women priests, gay marriage? I think St John would get in their grill over those positions, so I thought it kinda appropriate."

To be ecumenical, perhaps he should toss in "Bondage of the Will" and "The Institutes."

And, yes, it's obviously a parody.


Dachs' intended action has drawn its fair share of criticism. The editorial staff at the NCR published a scathing column, which said in part: "It is regrettable that a blogger in central Kansas, with a blog with fewer than 50 followers, can make this outrageous and distrustful, disgraceful plan and get the world's attention, and yet we can't even get a link to the Huffington Post."

Backstory.

Here is an article on the background of Kenneth Howell, the University of Illinois professor fired - or put on leave - for daring to teach Natural Law to an offended student.

Interesting biography.  The callow student could learn a lot from this man.

Great Quotes.

The Weekly Standard offers these quotes from Marine General James Mattis, who was selected this week to head CENTCOM:

Mattis is extraordinarily well-read and well-spoken, but he’s also willing to be direct and blunt on occasion. The Scrapbook has enjoyed some of the Mattisisms that have been circulating since the announcement of his pick, and thought you would too:

♦ Speaking to tribal leaders in Iraq: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f— with me, I’ll kill you all.”

♦ Convincing an Iraqi that the United States wouldn’t cut and run: “I said I am never going to leave. I told him I had found a little piece of property down on the Euphrates River and I was going to have a retirement home built there. I did that because I wanted to disabuse him of any sense that he could wait me out.”
 
♦ Advice to soldiers and Marines: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

Cool Graph.

Steve Sailer has this interesting chart that correlates political viewpoint and voter turnout with cable viewership.

Formerly Catholic Notre Dame refuses to publish a column stating Catholic teachings on homosexuality

Here's the column by Notre Dame professor Charles E. Rice.  The column consists of quoting the Catechism and then stating some non-controversial - from a Catholic standpoing - observatiosn about Catholic doctrine.

The university's student newspaper Editor in Chief refused to run the column because of "space limitations" - which Professor Rice refutes - and because the Editor in Chief wanted to make the column part of a point/counterpoint column, as in Catholic teaching versus Non-Catholic teaching, in a newspaper run by students at a ostensibly Catholic university.

The Editor refers to the "Mobile Party Comic incident", which apparently involved a student cartoon submitted to another Notre Dame newspaper that started with the observation about the quickest way to turn a fruit into a vegetable.  That kind of Beavis and Butthead level of humor had to do with Professor Rice's column and everything to do with treating anyone who dissents from the notion that homosexuality is perfectly alright is akin to a Brown Shirt no matter how temperate and reasoned their position may be.

At this point, until Notre Dame reigns its the anti-Catholic tendencies, it has forfeited the goodwill it has previously enjoyed with the Catholic community.

I guess I'll file this under "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible."


I'll be honest, I don't know what to do with this one. Pornography seems to be "protected speech" for purposes of the "right to free speech" but in Australia it now seems to be illegal to be a small-breasted porn star.

Wouldn't the fact that small breasted porn stars are a precursor to pedophilia also establish a link to pornography in general and other social dysfunctions, kind of like conservatives (and feminists) have been saying since the First Amendment revolution of the '50s, which would then permit the further regulation of porn?


Maybe it needs to be filed under "the Talmud of Secular Humanism."

"The redneck eschatology in 'American Pie'"

The Paragraph Farmer does a compare and contrast on "American Pie" versus "Imagine."

A National Discussion

It's ironic that my former friend was interested in having a "national discussion" about how religion oppresses women, but maybe what we need is a national discussion about freedom of conscience and whether the State has the right to limit freedom of conscience depending on who is in power.


K-Lo at NRO has these observations:

In some respects, Martha Coakley actually deserves points for honesty. “Religious freedom” appears to have a limited value for her, as it had a limited value for those in the Massachusetts statehouse who voted for — and voted down the exemption amendment — the bill that would mandate that all Bay State hospitals provide emergency contraception to rape victims. As it does for senators and congressmen who insist that taxpayers should be funding abortion as part of their “comprehensive” health-care legislation in memoriam to Ted Kennedy. But at least she admits it.

Martha Coakley is effectively saying that faithful Catholics can’t work in emergency rooms, whether in public or Catholic hospitals. She is saying that faithful Catholics cannot be pharmacists. And it is, of course, not just Catholics this thinking affects. She is saying that “do no harm” is out the window in the age of Roe v. Wade. She is saying what the U.S. Senate just said: that an American should not have the freedom to choose whether or not his tax dollars will fund abortions. They will be so used, consciences be damned.

Whether or not Bay Staters realize it, the issues they’re grappling with now are national issues of conscience, ones in which the very concept of freedom is up for debate and, even, sale.

The religious freedom guaranteed in the American Founding made possible Mother Joseph’s enduring contributions to American civic life. Martha Coakley’s “No Catholics Need Apply” mindset represents a genuine threat to American freedom — and not just the religious kind.

An ecumenical moment

This article by a Baptist news source is pretty encouraging in that it identifies a motivation for the gay marriage as being anti-catholic bigotry and anti-baptist bigotry AND AT THE SAME TIME doesn't excuse the anti-catholic bigotry on the grounds that Catholics are idol-worshipping apostates.


We are so past the 17th Century when we can put our traditional hatreds behind us and be loathed by the Powers That Be together. That is a really encouraging sign that the 17th Century can end sometime during our lifetimes, and let me offer an apology for destroying Magdeburg. Our bad.

Now, if the 1960s would only during our lifetimes.

My former friend, the "lefty" San Francisco lawyer, perfectly captured the ethos of secular war on religion by not giving a "damn" why the people she loathed believed what they believe. Not a particularly healthy attitude for the body politic of a pluralistic society in the slightest.

But to our Baptist brothers, a hearty shout-out. We'll be leaving the light on for you... in the catacombs.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Screw how people dress - this really deserves an application of "cultural imperialism."

This Steve Sailer post on the rise of human sacrifice in Uganda and the fact that the Ugandans have an "anti-sacrifice task force" makes me reflect (a) not all religions are equal and (b) how close we are to "the primitive."

Further from Facebook

Karen's response:

"I don't actually have all day to debate this, but I do think I should point out that I have not purported to equate the Catholic Church with fundamentalist Islam's imposition of the burqa on women, not to mention a host of other rules that limit the rights of women to realize their full potential. They do have common elements, but the consequences to a woman in not being able to say Mass vs. a woman who ventures outside her home unaccompanied by a male relative are vastly different. They are different in degree, but they both derive from a common rationalization, and both involve what I believe is a fundamental perversion of religious doctrine. They are not, however, equal, and it's nonsense to attribute that view from my earlier comments. To the extent you actively avoid trying to understand the mechanisms that some people use to repress other groups of people by the argument that every situation is different, you miss the opportunity to understand root causes and thus to address them.


BTW, I grew up Catholic, and to be honest, I don't give a damn what doctrinal reason the Church relies on for continuing to exclude women from the priesthood. I've voted with my feet (and wallet) on that issue.

Finally, with respect to your last question, it suffices to say that there are some "customs" that are so abhorrent (slavery, anyone?) that no culture ought to tolerate them. I'm perfectly comfortable to say that it isn't cultural imperialism to advocate for human rights. "

I'm posting my response here to take any discussion off Facebook

Karen,

I don’t intend to have you debate all day, but one of the rare pleasures of life is the intellectual give-and-take that comes from discussing different perspectives. I probably have more experience in this than most, having been in more than my share of “combox debates.” I’m also certain that there has never been a time where I haven’t come out of the discussion learning something, even if it is where my views are weak.

I leave the tweeting of political or religious emotions to the massus damnatum.

On reflection, as someone with an abiding interest in history, what sets my teeth on edge about the Kristoff column is its shallow appeal to the prejudices of his presumed readers. Thus, everyone knows that religion oppresses women and that Islam is particularly noxious in that regard, but if you move from the “common sense for common folks” approach, you find that the issue is far more complex. For example, the single most common form of hatred, violence and oppression of women throughout human history has been female infanticide. The anthropologist Marvin Harris points out that cases of “accidental overlaying” in early 20th Century America had a female cull rate that approximated the cull rate of male and females in cattle herds. Nonetheless, despite the universality of female infanticide in his culture, and in human cultures generally, Mohammed preached against female infanticide in Sura 81 and promised that the victims of this hideous crime would have justice. For that matter, what about the inclusion of women in the Umma and in the fact that female Muslims share the experience of equality before God signified by the pilgrimage to Mecca?

In other words, Mohammed may have to stand as a revolutionary feminist in some ways since he challenged a conventional social practice on the grounds of the female’s right to justice and essential equality before God.

Thus, is it fair to talk about “common grounds” for the oppression of women in “religion” – and specifically Islam – as repressive of women in light of these facts, which I suspect that Kristoff has never heard of?

I’m willing to say that the issue is complicated, that there are social and religious practices that cut the other way, but unless we are looking for the cheap emotional thrill of seeing the things we despise calumnied – and who doesn’t get a frisson of schadenfreude when our faith is vindicated? - we ought not to take the easy way out of knocking down strawmen. I say this, by the way, even though I don’t hold a brief for Islam.

Undoubtedly, where Islam fell down in further elevating the status of women was its retention of polygamy. The single most important development for the status of women was the institution of life-time companionate monogamous marriage with strict rules against divorce. Even in this day and age, we know how divorce generally disadvantages women relative to men. Thus, it seems obvious that the cultural customs that permitted men to divorce women (as in Judaism) or for men to have multiple wives (as in Islam) clearly put women in a weak and easily threatened state in such marriages. So, Jesus also looks like someone who took a radical position in the name of the essential equality of women and in the development of a custom that would have immediate and long-term payoffs with respect to recognizing the equal nature of males and females. (St. Paul, likewise, deserves kudos relative to his explicit imposition of express obligations on the husband relative to his wife.) These men probably deserve kudos for being uber-feminist, particularly when compared with the anti-women alternative of Gnosticism, which denied that women could be saved as women, and is, ironically, is a favorite of feminist liberals like Elaine Pagels.

History and humanity are complicated, and when we judge the failings of the cultures of our ancestors, we ought to have a little humility in light of our own failings. After all, we have managed to re-establish a form of female infanticide through the use of sex selection and abortion, which is evidenced best in officially atheist China with its surplus of 30 million excess males. Future generations may point to “abortion on demand” as the single most anti-female development of the 20th Century. I don’t know that for certain, of course, but if I take the long-view that doesn’t seem unreasonable.

I didn’t know that you were “raised Catholic.” As a cradle Catholic myself, I know two things. The first thing I know is that people who were raised Catholic are tremendously ignorant of the faith they were raised in, largely as a result of the dismal state of Catechesis after 1965. The other thing I know is that when someone says “I was raised Catholic”, the next thing they are going to say are going to be the wildest form of misunderstanding that they managed to invent when they were 10 years old, and I say this as someone who has debated anti-catholic former Catholic Protestants and anti-catholic former Catholic atheists. So, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that you don’t know what “altus Christi” means, or how that idea is central to two-thousand years of Catholic theology, and has nothing to do with the “oppression of women” and everything to do with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation by which the supernatural and natural worlds were brought together as a historical, empirical fact, but that really means that you have no basis for making the statement that the burqa and the male-only priesthood “derive from a common rationalization.” They clearly don’t, although you are certainly free to believe they do in light of the feminist doctrine that everything is about power and male subjection of women. All I am trying to do is offer interesting reasons for why this statement is not so obviously true.

I share your intuition about slavery and if Obama wanted to lead a crusade against slavery, I would sound like a bagpipe. But what about things like a low tax policy, the right to contract, due process and other Western ideas about the just society? I also think we also have to reflect on the fact that it is the fact that we are exporting our Western views about the just society – merely as a by-product of globalization - that is a primary cause of Islamic terror against the West. That may be a war worth having, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that our war against the burqa is cost-free.

On further reflection, it seems obvious that it is cultural imperialism to advocate for human rights. By definition - well, the traditional leftist definition - imposing one's view of the good society on someone else is "imperialism."  Now, it might be the case that it is justified cultural imperialism, but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim that it is not "cultural imperialism" when it happens to be a cultural form that we really like.

Also, I really appreciated the opportunity to write about Sura 81 and female infanticide.  That's been a factoid, I've been waiting to share for 30 years.

Update: 


I've also been defriended.

It's a pity that some folks have such a brittle approach to differences of opinion. I tend to view such differences as vital to living a good life. Other people feel very threatened by the thought that there are some who disagree with them.

Facebook Discussion

Nicholas Kristoff's column on "Religion and Women" generated this discussion.

I dismissed Kristoff's column, which generated this response:

Give me a break. I don't think anyone is equating American religious practices with honor killings or genital mutilation. They are, however, quite appropriately drawing the conclusion that organized religion has been used repeatedly over the centuries -- continuing to today -- to treat women as second class citizens. That second-class ... See Morecitizenship means different things in different cultures. In fundamentalist Islam, it means wearing full body coverings and being forbidden to go outside unaccompanied by an adult male relative, being foreclosed from getting an education, etc. In the Catholic church, it means not being permitted to say Mass (when the church allows male pedophiles the honor). The global repression of women takes different forms in different societies, but it happens everywhere, and religion is often used as the pretext for it. That's it.

This isn't dime-a-dozen stuff, either. It may be the subject of common discussion in some religious organizations in the US, but I haven't heard about it and I know for sure it isn't talked about much in the Catholic church. Moreover, even expressing the view in this country that religion may have been distorted for the purpose of repressing one group or another usually generates massive backlash, which has the effect of chilling speech about it. So I disagree with your dismissive reaction to this; I think it's a discussion worth having on a national and international stage, and am glad to see a man writing about it (because, by the way, women are dismissed as "whiny" or "bitchy" when they point these things out.)

My response:

I am dismissive of it because I read this kind of thing all the time, and by many men (and by women who have not been not dismissed as "whiny" or "bitchy.") That might be because I've been involved in litigating this particular culture war on behalf of dissident Protestant churches who have felt the wrath of their liberal denominations for "going off the reservation" on liberal Christian pieties. If you're interested, I can provide you with the cases I've been involved in, where a mainstream Protestant denomination has retaliated against a local congregation because it had dissented from the denomination's liberal orthodoxy, which is nicely adumbrated by Kristoff's column.

Perhaps there should be a national discussion on the issue, but I've noticed - again because of my work - that the media and churches aren't really interested in having such a discussion. Part of the reason is probably that having such a discussion would require liberal Christians to acknowledge that their project has been an unmitigated disaster. All of the denominations that have adopted a liberal theology, such as that advocated by Carter and Kristoff, have suffered real declines in membership over the last 40 years of amounts in excess of 50%. Why that should be the case is something worth discussing, but that fact - maybe the single most important sociological fact of the last 30 years - passes under the radar.

I personally think that the decline of mainstream Protestantism may have tragic consequences on American society. America has always relied on non-state voluntary associations to organize itself, and, traditionally, mainstream Protestantism has been the primary form of such organization. America, which is presently fairly atomistic, may lose an essential element that promotes cohesiveness if the Protestant denominations are replaced by the mega-church that has no national institutional structure.

Also, your response indicates why I'm dismissive of Kristoff's column. You tell me that no one is equating Baptists with Muslem honor killers - although that is exactly what Jimmy Carter did - but then you equate the Catholic male-only priesthood with the Islamic Burqas. Is that intellectually fair? Are those things really comparable? Isn't the reason for making that equation to tar Catholicism theology with the atavistic chauvinistism found in some Islamic cultures?

As food for thought, I'd ask if you understand, within its own theology, why Catholicism insists on a male priesthood? Do you understand what role a priest plays within Catholic liturgy? Have you heard the term "altus christi" before? If you have not, then might it be the case that there is an apples to oranges comparison being made?

We might also ask whether Burquas play a comparable role to that of "altus christi" in Catholic theology. We might notice that the tradition of wearing Burquas doesn't seem to be a part of Islamic theology since the custom of wearing or not wearing Burquas varies from Islamic country to country.

We might also note the public dimension of the two practices, one religious and the other customary. While no one is required to be Catholic - and, so, if someone dissents from Catholic teaching, they have an easy option, which does not generally involve a loss of social status (and in the case of people of my grandparents' generation, could actually involve an increase of social status) - the wearing of Burquas has a clear public social dimension, which may be enforced by real public sanctions, ranging from ostracism to public bearings (in Saudi Arabia.) [As far as I know, no one really thinks that the male-only priesthood puts anyone at risk of a public beating.]

These are honestly interesting questions, but I don't think we get at them by simply smearing them with the brush of "religion" or "feminism." The devil - and the solution - is in the details.

I am curious, though, and please accept this as an honest question. Typically, liberalism views globalization, colonialization and cultural imperialism with disfavor. How does it square such sentiments - which may be entirely well-founded - with what seems (to me, at least) to be a kind of cultural imperialism, viz telling the inhabitants of, say, Pakistan that their cultural tradition of wearing burquas is retrogressive and wrong in our enlightened Western view? How different is that from Bush's project of exporting democracy (which, again, is intended to be provocative in the sense of eliciting a discussion rather than a reaction)?

I think those are fair points and the last raises a fair question.

If anyone has a contribution to make, particularly on the last point, namely whether it is a form of "cultural imperialism" to make Islamic countries toe the Western line on things like the Burqa, let me know.

Blowback: How Pederasty became Uncool Again

Mary Eberstadt at First Things explains the unlikely phenomenon of the connection between anti-catholic liberals taking the high ground led to the freshening of the moral sense against pedophilia.:

After documenting the trend toward a social sanctioning of sex-with-children, Eberstadt notes how Roman Polanski was tossed to the wolves, which is particularly odd since his crime was given a slap on the wrist back in the 1970s.  She then connects the dots:

In a fascinating bit of moral jujitsu, the scandals helped in a second way to repair the preexisting public consensus against sex with minors. Naturally enough, throughout the scandals and beyond, the spectacle of priests committing crimes proved irresistible to the people who already hate the Catholic Church. Also attracted by the fray were other, more refined souls who simply wish the Church ill as a matter of habit because they want it to conform more to what they mean by Catholic. And so, throughout the scandals, both subsets of Church detractors—non-Catholic anti-Catholics and anti-Church-hierarchy Catholics—took every opportunity to excoriate the institution and claim the moral high ground for themselves.


There was plenty of high ground for them to claim. Some Church officials stupidly played ostrich about the scandals. Others formally or informally cooperated in the evil of the crimes. With so much blame to go around, critics from all directions could hardly be faulted for turning the scandals into an opportunity to air every other grievance they harbored about Christianity—most especially, about its traditional teachings on sexual morality.

Yet this hate-fest on the Catholic Church in the name of the priest–boy scandals, rollicking though it was for some, came with blowback: It prospectively cast all those enlightened people into a new role as defenders of the young and innocent. In other words, it logically created a whole new class of anti-pederasts. And since the Church’s harshest critics are, generally speaking, the same sort of enlightened folks from whom pedophilia chic had floated up, there lurked in all of this a contradiction. After all, one could either point to the grave moral wrong of what the offending priests had done— or one could minimize the suffering of the victims, as apologists for pedophilia had been doing before the scandals broke. But one could not plausibly do both any more, at least not in public. And so, in a way that could not have been predicted, but that is obviously all to the good, the priest scandals made it impossible to take that kinder, gentler look at the question of sex with youngsters that some salonistes of a few years back had been venturing.

Good can can come from evil.