Rod Dreher's Blog, page 137

Atlanta DA Scapegoating Cop

This is really not good:

The former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks after a DUI stop was charged with felony murder, aggravated assault and other offenses Wednesday, less than a week after the 27-year-old black man’s killing set off a new wave of protests against racism and police brutality.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard announced a total of 11 charges against Garrett Rolfe at an afternoon news conference in downtown Atlanta, calling Brooks’s killing unjustified and finding that Brooks posed no threat to Rolfe’s life during the incident.

From NPR:

Howard, the Fulton County district attorney, said during the press briefing that Brooks “never presented himself as a threat.”

“At the very beginning he was peacefully sleeping in his car, after he was awakened by the officer he was cooperative, and he was directed to move his car to another location. He calmly moved his car,” Howard said.

“Mr. Brooks never displayed any aggressive behavior,” he added.

That’s a flat-out lie. The video itself shows Brooks resisting arrest, scuffling with officers, stealing an officer’s taser, and firing at the officer while fleeing. Watch:

Besides, “felony murder”? Here, from FindLaw, are Georgia’s murder statutes:

What is Murder in Georgia?

When someone takes the life of another, regardless of intent or other details surrounding the incident, it is called a homicide. In Georgia, murder is the most severe type of homicide because it is planned and was done on purpose with some type evil intent. For example, a wife plans to kill her husband for months by poisoning his food or a gang member plans to assistance a rival by shooting into his house.

Felony Murder

In a “felony murder” situation, a death occurs during the commission of an “inherently dangerous felony.” Basically if you decide to rob a liquor store and accidentally kill the store clerk, then you will be guilty of felony murder. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend to shoot the clerk. The mere fact that you were committing a felony and killed someone can make you guilty of felony murder.

It would be extremely difficult to make a murder charge stick here. Nobody can possibly watch that video and think that Officer Rolfe planned in advance to kill Rayshard Brooks. But felony murder? What felony was Rolfe committing when he shot Brooks? According to the DA, the felony was “aggravated assault.” Here is the Georgia legal definition of aggravated assault.

So the DA will have to prove that a police officer struggling to apprehend a suspect who, in the act of resisting arrest, stole a taser and shot it at the officer while fleeing, committed felony assault while shooting at the suspect. By the way, I spoke to a police officer the other day who said that it is perfectly legitimate for an officer to fear that a taser shot could disable him and allow a suspect to seize his weapon. Unlikely here? Sure. But not at all unreasonable.

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, DA Howard not only did not wait for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry to be completed before announcing the charges, he did not even inform the GBI that he was going to do so.

Rolfe is going to walk, and he should walk, because there is no way that what he did was felony murder. The DA has overcharged him here. When Rolfe is acquitted, there will be more riots. Just you wait.

Why would the DA overcharge Rolfe? Well, DA Paul Howard is facing investigation for improperly funneling $140,000 from his non-profit to his wallet, as well as accusations of sexual harassment, and a challenge in the Democratic primary. It looks like he is using Rolfe to springboard himself back into office. Meanwhile, either his office will fail to convict Rolfe, or the conviction will be easily overturned on appeal, and the city of Atlanta will face more looting and burning.

Don’t misread me: I’m not saying that Rolfe should not have been charged with anything. I don’t know that; perhaps he should have been. But it is a huge stretch to call this felony murder, according to the clear meaning of the statute. Listen to the DA’s press announcement today. It’s possible that Rolfe should have been charged with something. But not felony murder.

I really do think you should watch that press conference. In it, the DA says that under the Atlanta police department’s policy, an officer cannot fire at a fleeing suspect unless he believes he faces a threat of “death or serious physical injury.” The DA then shows a blow-up of an image from the security camera footage, showing Brooks running away from Rolfe, and turning behind to fire his stolen taser at him. DA Howard makes a point of emphasizing that Brooks fired the taser prong above Rolfe’s head. The idea is that Rolfe wasn’t in danger of serious physical injury from the taser, because Brooks was aiming high.

This is silly. If you watch the video (linked above) you’ll see that the critical moments lasted two seconds or less. Rolfe saw that Brooks was pointing the taser at him, but as they both ran, he, Rolfe, was supposed to have appreciated that Rolfe was aiming high. Really?

In the next photograph — the moment the shot was fired — Brooks clearly had his back to Rolfe, and was, as we know, shot in the back. But these two still frames deceive. Below I’ve cued the security footage to the 3:55 mark. Brooks fires the taser at Rolfe at 3:58; Rolfe fires his pistol at Brooks at 3:59. (Do not watch this if you don’t want to see Brooks shot):

Rolfe’s law firm responded:

“The loss of life in any instance is tragic. However, Officer Rolfe’s actions were justified under O.C.G.A. §17-4-20 and O.C.G.A. §16-3-21. A peace officer may use deadly force to 1. arrest a suspected felon when he reasonably believes that the suspect poses an immediate threat of physical violence to the officer or others, 2. to protect himself and others from a life-threatening injury, and 3. to prevent the commission of a forcible felony. Mr. Brooks violently attacked two officers and disarmed one of them. When Mr. Brooks turned and pointed an object at Officer Rolfe, any officer would have reasonably believed that he intended to disarm, disable, or seriously injure him.”

You think a jury is not going to give a police officer the benefit of the doubt in this case? Do you really think that this is felony murder?

If police officers are going to be scapegoated by DAs trying to appease the mob, then people are going to cease being police officers. If I were on the Atlanta force, I would be looking for another job.

UPDATE: Of course by the time Rolfe’s trial happens, Howard will have been returned to office, providing he wins re-election this fall. So he’s good.

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The Sovietization Of American Culture

Here is a fantastic, must-read Tablet piece from historian Izabella Tabarovsky, on how what’s happening in America today is a lot like life in the Soviet Union. She begins by talking about how the culture of collective denunciation worked in the USSR. A thought criminal — someone like the novelist Boris Pasternak, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature — would not only be set upon by the state, but would also be torn apart by the mob. Tabarovsky says this is what happened to Bari Weiss at the hands of her New York Times colleagues. More:

All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends’ and families’ lives. It is impossible to read the chastising remarks of Soviet writers, for whom Pasternak had been a friend and a mentor, without a sense of deep shame. Shame over the perfidy and lack of decency on display. Shame at the misrepresentations and perversions of truth. Shame at the virtue signaling and the closing of rank. Shame over the momentary and, we now know, fleeting triumph of mediocrity over talent.

It is also impossible to read them without the nagging question: How would I have behaved in their shoes? Would I, too, have succumbed to the pressure? Would I, too, have betrayed, condemned, cast a stone? I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America.

Tabarovsky points out that it’s simply false to say that everybody who joined in the Soviet collective condemnations were ordered to do so by the commissars:

In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control—both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of “people of goodwill” (another Soviet cliché) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.

But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn’t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective.

In Soviet Russia, regarding Pasternak’s work, literary figures would say publicly that they had not read Pasternak’s work (because to see it would be to be defiled), but they disapproved of it anyway. More:

The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence. Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the “didn’t read, but disapprove” mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv’s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone.

Read it all. I’m serious. It’s that important. You can see why people like Tabarovsky have been warning for years that this is coming to us. Well, now it’s here in a big way, and it’s going to get much worse. Part of what makes this totalitarianism “soft” is that it is not imposed by a dictatorial government, but emerges from within institutions of liberal democratic society, and from social media. How are you going to cope with it? From my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies:

Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person. So says Mária Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet occupation. A communist court sentenced Wittner, then only twenty, to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

“Once I said to one of the guards in prison, ‘You are lying.’ For that alone, I was taken to trial again,” remembers the feisty Wittner. “The state prosecutor said to me, ‘Wittner, why did you accuse the guard of being a liar? Why didn’t you just say, ‘You’re not telling the truth’? I said, ‘It matters that we speak plainly.’”

For her insolence, Wittner was sent back to prison with extra punishments. She had to sleep on a wooden bed with no mattress and was given reduced rations. By the time her sentence was commuted and she was released, Wittner weighed scarcely one hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she insists that a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit.

“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells me as I sit at her table in suburban Budapest. “You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”

Under hard totalitarianism, dissenters like Wittner paid a hard price for their freedom, but the terms of the bargain were clear. Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.

Now is a time for choosing. If they don’t come for you today, they will come for you tomorrow. What will you say? What will you do? As Tabarovsky said, today in Russia, the kinds of writers who did not denounce Pasternak are now remembered and beloved. The herd of hacks who did are forgotten.

Let me emphasize: voting for Trump is not going to save anyone from this culture. Vote for Trump if you like, but you really and truly must divest yourself of the illusion that Trump or any Washington politician is going to protect you from this kind of thing. Trump is president now, and Republicans control the Senate, but cancel culture is still getting much worse. I’m not blaming the politicians, necessarily. I wish they had the guts to speak out with passion and conviction against it, but in our system, aside from some general regulatory pressure (e.g., what Sen. Hawley is talking about doing to Google), Congress is not going to dictate internal policies to corporations, universities, media outlets, and the like. There is no law, aside from libel laws, possibly, that is going to protect the Bari Weisses of the world from being cancelled. This is primarily a cultural fight. 

We have to fight it, no doubt, and if the State is not on your side, at least it’s better that it not be affirmatively on the side of the enemy. But as longtime readers know, I have been hollering for years that social and religious conservatives have badly misread the situation, and believed that law and politics were where the future was determined. If you read the updates to my post on the ideological pogrom being visited upon the head of Prof. Tomas Hudlicky, you’ll see that a STEM professor says that Hudlicky’s research career is now over, because after the mauling he has received, no source of research funding would grant it to him, for fear of being tarred as racist, sexist, anti-gay, etc. Just like that, this professor, who has become a world leader in an extremely difficult field of chemistry, is cancelled, all because he wrote something in a professional journal that questioned diversity dogmas.

Nobody fired him. Nobody is going to bring charges against him. Prof. Hudlicky will not be sent to the gulag. But his career has come to a swift end because of the culture of collective condemnation. They don’t need a police state to get what they want. It’s all coming into existence under liberal technocratic democracy.

Solzhenitsyn was right: “There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” It’s here, and more is coming.

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Burning A Scientist At The Stake

A letter from a reader. I know his name and his institutional affiliation. He is who he says he is:

I just received tenure at a major university (I’m in the Mechanical Engineering department), and I can echo how Orwellian things are getting. In fact please keep my identity and university confidential if you happen to post this email on your blog. To list just a few examples of what is going down in academia:

1) A recent diversity event literally had a Powerpoint slide titled “Words not to say anymore.” Words included on this list were ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘white paper’ (a term academics use for preliminary proposals), and several more. So for example, if I were to say to a colleague “I’d like you to meet my wife,” I would now be committing wrong-think. My first thought was that it could come across as too heteronormative, but even this doesn’t make logical sense given that gay people can also get married now. Perhaps they just want to de-emphasize marriage in general? And apparently describing paper as being white is now part of systemic racism or something.

2) In 2015, I attended their first ever workshop entirely focused on gender identity training. They handed out a 6-page handout of all the new gender terminology. They also flat-out stated, as if it were an absolute fact, that all reality is relative to psychology and that biology is irrelevant. Also fun: they directly implied that anybody who still thinks gender dysphoria is a mental disorder is a backwards bigot. And my favorite: when I talked to the diversity staff afterward to express concerns about the thought-control, they replied that they were simply responding to “the emerging consensus on gender and would be screening all future faculty hires accordingly.” Chilling stuff.

3) You may not be aware that a major chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie, is in hot water for publishing an essay that committed wrong-think. In short, the author expressed concerns about affirmative action undermining meritocracy. I haven’t even read the essay, because within hours the journal pulled the link and now it is not even available. For those not in academia, it’s hard to explain how unprecedented this truly is. When a scientific article gets retracted, they always retain access to the original paper so people can see for themselves what the issues were. In other words, it is unheard of to completely remove all links to a retracted article; this is clearly motivated by an ideological panic. It gets better: two of their editors were suspended for simply publishing the essay and at least 16 of the journal’s advisory board members have resigned in protest. This seems to me a clear parallel to the furor over the recent NYT opinion piece by Tom Cotton. Now, I must emphasize that I cannot comment on the actual quality of the essay in question, as I cannot even find it. However, the simple fact that the journal is hiding the essay amidst an editorial mutiny speaks volumes to the current climate on race and affirmative action issues.

4) The Office of Inclusion and Diversity has made it clear that their ultimate goal is to have academia’s demographics identical to that of the state we live in. For example, they explicitly said that academia will be sexist until faculty are 50% female. Apparently, the basic fact that many women prefer to not work such highly stressful jobs so they can focus on raising their children must not be mentioned, a la Voldemort.

5) I am a member of the American Physical Society (APS). Unsurprisingly, last week we all received a newsletter from APS with a “Black Lives Matter” black banner. Perhaps more surprisingly, the banner included graphics of people protesting with signs stating “Shut down academia”, “Shut down STEM”, and “No justice, no peace”. Imagine that! A scientific society urging its members to shut down STEM and to end peace! My head spins as I watch scientists cut down the branch we all rest on.

What an e-mail! The writer goes on to emphasize that I cannot say his name or institutional affiliation, because he has a family to support, and can’t afford to be drive out of the field.

You think he’s paranoid? Well, read on. I looked into the situation he mentioned with Angewandte Chemie. Here is part of the “open letter” that the publisher of the journal wrote to “our community,” abasing himself for publishing wrongthink:

Strong action is of the utmost importance. Improving DE&I [Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion] at Angewandte Chemie will not stop here. As a journal and as a community, we must take an inward look at how we can meaningfully contribute to the dismantling of an often-biased academic system. Diversity only strengthens science, and inclusive science that reflects the world’s best thinking is our greatest hope for solving the problems facing society.

We’ll continue to share updates on our progress and welcome your involvement in helping us shape a more fair and inclusive system. We will take an active leadership role in becoming a beacon for DE&I. You have our promise that we will make significant strides forward.

Dr. Guido Herrmann

VP & Managing Director, Wiley-VCH

“Diversity only strengthens science” — ideological cant spoken like a man with a gun pointed at his head.

Chemistry World magazine reported on the controversy. Excerpt:

Brock University chemist Tomáš Hudlický’s piece was published on Thursday 4 June, as a reflection on Dieter Seebach’s 1990 review Organic synthesis – Where now?. Hudlický looks at eight factors that influence chemistry using a figure reproduced from his 2007 book The Way of Synthesis, published by Wiley. It purports to show that certain factors – such as information technology – can be either positive or negative, while others – like diversity – only exert a negative influence on the field.

Hudlický laments that diversity training has ‘influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate’s inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications’. He also claims that efforts to increase women’s participation in science – like Gordon Research Conferences’ power hour – ‘diminishes the contributions by men’. Hudlický also asserts that skills transfer can only occur successfully if there is ‘an unconditional submission of the apprentice to his/her master’.

If you read the whole Chemistry World piece, which doesn’t quote the Hudlicky paper, you would think that the scientist had committed a war crime. I’m serious — read the report. Academics are incandescently angry at him. But what, specifically, did he say? Canada’s National Post reported a bit more detail about the controversy:

Hudlicky’s essay, called “‘Organic synthesis — Where now?’ is 30 years old. A Reflection on the Current State of Affairs,” was intended to honour a scientific article written by Prof. Dieter Seebach, 83, three decades ago. While some of the essay is more technical, in surveying more recent trends in organic synthesis, Hudlicky also writes about “preferential” treatment given to women and minorities.

“In a social equilibrium, preferential treatment of one group leads to disadvantages for another,” Hudlicky writes. “The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.”

Hiring practices, he said, have reached the point where a candidate’s inclusion in a “preferred” social group might override his or her qualifications.

This is certainly true. In journalism, it has been standard hiring practice for decades to favor candidates who are less qualified on the merits, based on their sex or race. I’ve seen it happen a number of times. Journalism is one thing; science is another. What is incredible, really just mind-blowing, is that Hudlicky’s claim cannot be argued about. It cannot be contested. It is like Galileo saying the earth orbits the sun. It violates a core dogma.

Canadian columnist Barbara Kay apparently has seen the original paper. She writes in defense of Hudlicky:

Another point of contention: Hudlicky’s remarks on skills transference. He used the locutions of “masters and apprentices,” a nod to Hungarian-British polymath Michael Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowledge,” which can only be acquired by students working under, well, “masters,” as famously exemplified in the art of haute cuisine. Such relationships are demanding of apprentices, but produce high performance.

Unfortunately, in Hudlicky’s opinion, “many students are unwilling to submit to any level of hard work demanded by professors. The university does not support professors in this endeavor as it views students as financial assets, and hence protects them from any undue hardships that may be demanded by the ‘masters.’” Added to time constraints on professors, mentorship has diminished and with it the erosion of “the maintenance of standards and integrity of research.” A stern judgment, but obviously opinions based on years of empirical observation. Critics could voice disagreement; instead, they call for his career death.

Brock’s provost and VP, Greg Finn, hastened to situate himself at the head of the mob, brandishing a pitchfork in the form of an open letter to the Brock community. Hudlicky’s descriptions of the master-apprentice relationship, he said, “connote disrespect and subservience … [that] could be alarming to students.” And of course the obligatory accusation that Hudlicky’s observations “do not reflect the principles of inclusivity, diversity and equity included in the University’s mission, vision and values as approved by our Senate and Board of Trustees.” Ominously, Finn states, “further steps are being considered and developed.”

Alarming to students. Good grief.

More from the National Post:

Hudlicky, a Tier 1 Canada research chair in chemistry, refused to comment on Tuesday, saying it was on the advice of his faculty union.

However, he earlier told New York-based Retraction Watch that he was subject to a frightening witch-hunt.

“We are sliding back to Calvinism and burning at stakes. This is absurd,” he said. “I expressed my opinions and my words were totally taken out of context.”

Burning at stakes? No kidding! Science magazine blogger Derek Lowe compared the author of the paper to German science under the Nazis. Really, he did this:

I actually think meritocracy is an excellent thing, but if you just declare “meritocracy in place” as of this moment, you preserve an existing order that has treated a lot of people like second-class citizens and second-class scientists. Worse, it’s an order that has, over the many years, forced many of them unwillingly into those second ranks because the first ranks were closed off to them.

Which is wrong on the face of it, and counterproductive as well. The example is often brought up – as it should be – of what German science did to itself during the Nazi era, deliberately driving away an extraordinary array of intellectual talent. That’s an extreme example, but you can do the same thing more slowly and quietly by only allowing the “right” sorts of people access to what they need to develop their talents. There’s all sorts of room to argue about the most effective ways to address this situation – which has been going on for a long, long time and will not be fixed quickly – but starting off by decrying the current efforts to deal with the problems is not going to help anyone.

I would like to read the full Hudlicky essay. If anybody has it, e-mail me a copy. The hysterical moral panic in science over the paper, though, is incredibly discouraging to any honest person seeking a career in science. It’s totalitarian. It’s straight-up totalitarian. Get this: Prof. Hudlicky was born in 1949 in communist Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with his family to the US in 1968 to escape totalitarianism. And now look!

A Czech émigré is responsible for Live Not By Lies, my forthcoming book about soft totalitarianism. Here are the opening lines of the book:

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.

Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the United States, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.

What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

They were right. They are right. You watch: this is going to prove to be a civilizational catastrophe. Where can a scientist go now to do research free of ideological chains? Two years ago, Dr. Hudlicky received a top honor at Prague’s Charles University, honoring his lifetime achievements in chemistry. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he had to return to his homeland to finish his scientific career in freedom?

And to think that liberals today believe that fundamentalist Christians are the real enemy of science and technology. It’s cultural leftists within the institutions of the profession who are destroying free thought and the conditions under which science thrives. Look at what has happened to Hudlicky, whose writing is so dangerous that nobody can be allowed to see it, ever, lest they lose their souls. What chaps me is the self-righteousness you see among journalists, scientists, and others in these professions, who consider themselves to be dedicated to fearless truth-telling. The opposite is the case.

Serious question to academic readers, especially in STEM: why should anyone enter the field when it is falling under the shadow of political thought control?

 

 

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Medicalizing Racism

From an editorial in the new issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (no link available):

By looking through a racially impervious lens, clinicians neglect the life experiences and historical inequities that shape patients and disease processes. They may inadvertently feed the robust structural racism that influences access to care, quality of care, and resultant health disparities. At times, we fail to make even the simplest efforts: for instance, even though Covid-19 disproportionately affects black Americans, when physicians describing its manifestations have presented images of dermatologic effects, black skin has not been included. The “Covid toes” have all been pink and white.

Racist photos of Covid toes? Who knew? More:

In the review of systems, we query patients about exposure to toxicants, but we never ask about one of the most dangerous toxicants: racism. The work of David Williams details the morbidity and risk of death related to perceived discrimination. Discrimination and racism as social determinants of health act through biologic transduction pathways to promote subclinical cerebrovascular disease, accelerate aging, and impede vascular and renal function, producing disproportionate burdens of disease on black Americans and other minority populations.

More:

As the vulnerability and inadequacy of our health care system are once again exposed, it is also time to reconceive that system, including the development of its workforce. Our actions must be driven by the data highlighting inequity in medical school admission and graduation rates, the dearth of black medical faculty, and the low grant-funding success rates for black biomedical researchers. We must also acknowledge past injustices and the persistent pain experienced by minority trainees and faculty, by listening and openly discussing racism and its health effects on rounds and at conferences and by broadening medical school curricula to include cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and upstander training to equip students with advocacy tools to assist their patients and colleagues. Direct action to eliminate persistent health disparities obliges us to redouble our demands for a system that recognizes health care as a human right, providing an avenue to health equity for all.

Although effecting such fundamental transformation may feel impossible, the energy, idealism, and visions of young people have long fueled movements for change. Martin Luther King, Jr., was 26 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott and 34 when he delivered his powerful “I have a dream” oration. If we blend our voices with those of the newest members of our profession to advocate for the most vulnerable and to reinvigorate every aspect of their care, perhaps we can use our current public health crisis as a catalyst to, as Reverend Al Sharpton put it, “turn this moment into a movement.”

It quotes Rev. Al, so you know it must be Science.

Seriously, though, this makes me skeptical. Nobody can doubt that the stress that people who live in a society in which they have been historically discriminated against is bound to have physiological effects. Note, though, that David Williams talks about “perceived discrimination.” That is, the subjective impression of discrimination that a black patient has. Notice how the authors of the editorial (all physicians) elide from the perception of discrimination to describing the medical system as deformed by “robust structural racism.” That’s a terrible indictment. Is it true?

Here’s a detailed piece from NBC News about why there are so few black men in medicine. Turns out that there are fewer black men training to be doctors today than in 1978. Why are there so few? Excerpt:

Dr. Louis Sullivan, president emeritus and founding dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine and the secretary of health under President George H.W. Bush, believes that history plays a big role in the current shortage of male African-American physicians.

“Blacks, and especially black males, have always been underrepresented in medicine,” Sullivan told NBC News. “This stems from slavery and legally enforced segregation.”

But, he added, “cost is as much an issue as anything. Given that many black men come from low-income families,” the cost of attending medical school “is too high a burden to put on their families.”

Makes sense, but how many males from low-income white families go to medical school, or even think that it’s possible for them to become a doctor? Does the New England Journal of Medicine consider this to be a problem within the medical profession that stems from prejudice, such that the profession should engage in programs to repair the disparity? I’m not asking rhetorically; I really would like to know. Or are black kids the only  impoverished youth who merit the concern of medical reformers?

There’s no doubt that slavery and segregation put black men historically behind in the professions, but in what sense can you blame “robust structural racism” in medicine today for this? Again, I’m asking straightforwardly. This is such a broad claim. It seems to me likely that ideologues within the medical profession are using the George Floyd moment to medicalize issues that are social and political, and to justify it as merely a medical intervention.

I am sensitized to this because of a long conversation I had with a physician in reporting Live Not By Lies. Here’s what I write in the book about it:

A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

What I didn’t include in the final manuscript is this quote from our interview:

One of the most important questions in medicine now is what is the definition of normal. What is the definition of health – as opposed to wellness, which is about your subjective feeling of how you’re doing. Bad things die. No matter how much wellness you can report, if you are incapable of functioning, you’re going to die.

He elaborated on that point, explaining to me that the activist left within the medical profession are wrongly imposing radical subjectivity into medicine, for the sake of achieving political goals. This is bound to affect the quality of care, he said. As a physician, you cannot be heard to oppose any of this, or you risk being denounced as a bigot. The doctor only spoke with me after multiple assurances that I would not identify him, or give any hint of where he works. His Soviet background prepared him well for the kind of mind games one has to play to stay employed within a highly politicized profession.

Let me be clear: I don’t doubt that the experience of discrimination, perceived and actual, can have and does have a deleterious physiological impact on black people in this society. And I don’t doubt either that black people can exhibit particular physiological phenomena due to their genetic make-up, just like any other people. We should not be surprised by this, given what we know about human evolution.

That said, this editorial seems to be an example of activists using a crisis to advance a political agenda within the profession, in the same sense that Harvard Medical School last year removed portraits of distinguished faculty and alumni from its history, on the grounds that there were too many white men among them. One neurobiologist told NPR last year:

As she travels around the country to give lectures and attend conferences at scientific institutions, she constantly encounters lobbies, conference rooms, passageways, and lecture halls that are decorated with portraits of white men.

“It just sends the message, every day when you walk by it, that science consists of old white men,” says Vosshall. “I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?'”

Sexism! Racism! Those photographs are a threat to the health of non-whites and women!

More from that story:

At Yale School of Medicine, for example, one main building’s hallways feature 55 portraits: three women and 52 men. They’re all white.

“I don’t necessarily always have a reaction. But then there are times when you’re having a really bad day — someone says something racist to you, or you’re struggling with feeling like you belong in the space — and then you see all those photos and it kind of reinforces whatever you might have been feeling at the time,” says Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a medical student at Yale.

He grew up reading Harry Potter books, and in that fictional world, portraits can talk to the characters. “If this was Harry Potter,” he muses, “if they could speak, what would they even say to me? Everywhere you study, there’s a big portrait somewhere of someone kind of staring you down.”

I’m sorry, but what? You feel oppressed by pictures that might talk to you and say something that hurts your feelings? So the portraits have to go so you can feel calmer? This is bizarre. But you see where I’m going with this, right? How can we tell the difference between unjust discrimination that can and should be fought, and left-wing activists within the profession medicalize their political views as a strategy of asserting and exercising power.

If you’re in the medical field, let me know what you think in the comments.

The post Medicalizing Racism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hawley: GOP Shafted Religious Right

Sen. Josh Hawley gave what I think will be remembered as a landmark speech today on the Senate floor, about the Bostock decision. Here are excerpts:

I have to say I agree with the news reports that have said that this is truly a seismic decision. It is truly a historic decision.

It is truly a historic piece of legislation.

This piece of legislation changes the scope of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It changes the meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It changes the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, you might well argue it is one of the most significant and far reaching updates to that historic piece of legislation since it was adopted all of those years ago.

Make no mistake: this decision, this piece of legislation, will have effects that range from employment law to sports to churches. There’s only one problem with this piece of legislation: it was issued by a court, not by a legislature.

More:

This decision, and the majority who wrote it, represents the end of something. It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it. After Bostock, that effort, as it has existed up to now, is over. I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism and originalism in order to reach such a decision—an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law—then textualism and originalism and all of those phrases don’t mean much at all.

And if those are the things that we’ve been fighting for—it’s what I thought we had been fighting for, those of us who call ourselves legal conservatives—if we’ve been fighting for originalism and textualism, and this is the result of that, then I have to say it turns out we haven’t been fighting for very much.

Or maybe we’ve been fighting for quite a lot, but it’s been exactly the opposite of what we thought we were fighting for.

More:

The legal conservative project has always depended on one group of people in particular in order to carry the weight of the votes to actually support this out in public, to get out there and make it possible electorally. And those are religious conservatives. I am one myself. Evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Jews: let’s be honest, they’re the ones who have been the core of the legal conservative effort.

You sitting down? You’d better be. Hawley lets loose straight fire:

If this case makes anything clear, it is that the bargain that has been offered to religious conservatives for years now is a bad one. It’s time to reject it.

The bargain has never been explicitly articulated, but religious conservatives know what it is. The bargain is that you go along with the party establishment, you support their policies and priorities—or at least keep your mouth shut about it—and, in return, the establishment will put some judges on the bench who supposedly will protect your constitutional rights to freedom of worship, to freedom of exercise. That’s what we’ve been told for years now.

We were told that we’re supposed to shut up while the party establishment focuses more on cutting taxes and handing out favors for corporations, multinational corporations who don’t share our values, who will not stand up for American principles, who were only too happy to ship American jobs overseas. But we’re supposed to say nothing about that. We’re supposed to keep our mouths shut because maybe we’ll get a judge out of the deal. That was the implicit bargain.

We’re supposed to keep our mouths shut while the party establishment opens borders, while the party establishment pursues ruinous trade policies.

We’re supposed to keep our mouths shut while those at the upper end of the income bracket get all of the attention. While working families and college students and those who don’t want to go to college but can’t get a good job, while they get what? What attention?

Workers? Children? What about parents looking for help with the cost of raising children? Looking for help with the culture in which they have to raise children? Looking for help with the communities, rebuilding the communities in which they must carry out their family life?

What about college students trying to find an education that isn’t ruinously expensive and then figure out some way to pay back that enormous debt? What about those who don’t have a college degree and don’t want one, but would like to get a good job? What about them?

No, we’re supposed to stay quiet about all of that, and more, because there may be pro-Constitution, religious liberty judges. Except for that there aren’t. Except for that these judges don’t follow the Constitution. Except for these judges invoke “textualism” and “originalism” in order to reach their preferred outcome.

Sen. Hawley, himself a lawyer and former Attorney General of Missouri, says now is not the time for religious conservatives to sit down and shut up, but just the opposite. Read it all. Or, watch it on YouTube.

This is a game-changing speech. This speech is a call for religious conservatives to break away from the old way of doing political business — and, I hope, from the old leadership that has gotten very fat and happy networking with the GOP establishment over the years.

Notice how Hawley does not simply talk about social issues, but ties the de facto social liberalism of the GOP political and legal establishment to its willingness to deliver for big corporations and wealthy donors. A number of ordinary Christian conservatives have been voting for a long, long time against their economic values and class interests because our religious and moral values really do mean more to us than wealth. Some leftist commentators have laughed at us as suckers being taken for a ride by Republicans, and have done so in large part because they think that economics ought to matter more to us than social values. I’m actually proud to place standing up for the lives of the unborn, for the traditional family, and for religious liberty at the center of my politics, even when I’ve had to grit my teeth and vote for the party of Wall Street and foreign wars (not that the Democrats were a hell of a lot better on those issues, but they were better than the GOP).

I did it for judges. I did it because I can see plainly how powerful the judiciary has become. I could see that the US is becoming post-Christian, and that the kinds of things that I believe are increasingly held in contempt by cultural elites. In recent years, I’ve done it because I have believed that a conservative federal judiciary is going to be the last line of meaningful defense for social and religious conservatives, especially because politicians in the Republican Party are often too cowardly to stand and defend our beliefs and interests.

And now this.

What was it all for? All the trust we had in the Republican Party, and in the elite leadership of activist groups to deliver — what was it for?

For a conservative justice to rewrite the Constitution to declare that men are women and women are men, if they say so, and if you disagree, you are on the same moral and legal level as a racist?

No. It has to stop.

In this speech, Josh Hawley has made explicit the connections between class, culture, economics, and law in the Republican Party. This is heresy to the old guard. Good! Nail this speech to the doors of every Republican senator and political consultant, and every Christian Right lobbyist in Washington. Donald Trump ran on something like this, but he hasn’t known how to use power, and has not lived up to his potential. (A friend says, “He ran like Pat Buchanan, but he’s governed like Paul Ryan.”) But at least Trump fractured the foundation of the party. After this speech by Hawley today, I can see the Republican Party’s populist future becoming clearer. A day after the most depressing day for religious and social conservatives in a very long time, a day when the truth of who really matters in the Republican Party became painfully clear, it is a welcome surprise to be given some reason to hope.

UPDATE: Former president of the Southern Baptist Convention:

For those among us who put an inordinate amount of your hope in the political process think on this—14 of the last 18 SCOTUS appointments have come from Republican Presidents—what good has that done the conservative movement especially this past week?

— O S Hawkins (@OSHawkins) June 16, 2020

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Letter From A Campus Revolution

I have already told my children not to consider careers in journalism or academia, because over the course of their lifetimes, they will not be free in either field. It’s this kind of thing that makes me so pessimistic. An academic writes me this morning to say, “I’m telling you, what’s going on on campuses right now is a whole new level of bad, and it’s going to get worse, of that I have no doubt.”

Here is his letter, which I use with his permission. I know his name and his institutional affiliation. Trust me when I say that this is not Oberlin or MacAlester, or some other lefty liberal arts college where you might expect this kind of thing. This is a school that a lot of uninformed people would regard as “safe”:

No one likes it when dire predictions come true. For years the leftists on our campus have operated largely as Fabians: they thought the structure was corrupt, but they figured they could effect the changes from within it. They had many successes, but each success brought with it an appetite for more. They were waiting for the moment when the revolution that had taken place at the level of culture could take place at the level of administrative control. This is their moment. This is when the very nature of the institutions change, not so much in terms of their structures, which they’ll largely maintain, but in terms of their animating principles. For colleges such as mine this means the replacement of Christianity with the religion of anti-racism.

It did not take our president long after the death of George Floyd to issue a statement asseverating definitively that Floyd’s death was “an act of racism,” despite the fact that he couldn’t possibly know if this was true. He also expressed his “deep grief” and how “heart-broken” he was, as if Floyd were his own child. He did this in part because, like any sane person, he was horrified both by Floyd’s death and by the specter of racism, and in part because he was getting enormous pressure (no pun intended) put on him by faculty and alumni.

Since then, even though it’s summer, things have gotten worse. The president has issued more statements expressing his hurt and committing college resources to “combat racism,” even though college campuses are the least racist places in America. We’ve been having townhall meetings where people can tell their stories of oppression, and express their fear about how much danger they’re in because some people won’t bow to their gods. All these townhall meetings include calls to action that become increasingly heavy-handed.

A couple of years ago, under the radar, the administration issued a new policy that anyone involved in a hire had to undergo implicit bias training. When I told my dean that I found the idea of implicit bias training to be faulty at both a philosophical and social science level, and a serious threat to academic freedom and so would not participate, he replied “That’s too bad, because you won’t be participating in any searches, and frankly you make valuable contributions on those.”

These are the constant little deals, compromises, calculations, and prudential decisions you have to make when you don’t worship at the altar of anti-racism. Some of my conservative colleagues and I have for years been calling this “the green grocer effect”: at what point do you take the sign down? The problem is that at no point do you get told you have to put the sign in your window: it’s all incremental. Each little battle requires a weighing of costs and benefits, and at some point the sign is in your window and you realize that you’re the one who put it there. That’s part of what makes this so pernicious, and why a soft totalitarianism may be more difficult to fight than a hard one is.

Anti-racism has become the established religion of the realm. The usual suspects have emerged to the forefront. They’ve organized public displays of piety that, for all their sincerity, are annoyingly theatrical and performative. Now we are being threatened with mandatory consciousness-raising sessions, a massive increase in the scarce institutional resources going to “Equity and Inclusion” offices, where the half-educated exercise their reign of ressentiment, compulsory participation in “book clubs” that deal with race issues (and at which no heterodoxy will be tolerated), and the redoing of teaching evaluation forms that identify racial sensitivity in the classroom as evaluative criteria. Merit increases already are, and increasingly will be, determined by how vigorously one worships, by ones ideological piety. In other words: church attendance and acts of worship are mandatory.

I’ve strongly considered retaining a lawyer to help me figure out what I should and should not do in order to maintain my position in the inevitable wrongful dismissal suit. Sadly, the courts will be the place where much of this is sorted out, for the only thing that can keep these colleges in line is their bottom line. So if they have to pay out for wrongful dismissals, or if donors decide they’ve had enough (a prospect less likely in the age of woke capitalism), the colleges might actually turn the ratchet in the other direction for a change. But I’m not optimistic.

In the meantime, I have younger colleagues who are completely stressed about all this. They rightly suspect they are going to be compelled to do things that violate the tenets of academic and disciplinary freedom, including mandating course readings (which is already taking place in certain quarters), setting aside a percentage of every course to discuss race issues (good luck chemistry profs), and of course all sorts of training sessions. Merit increases, promotion, and tenure already are and will continue to be tied to compliance on these matters (actually, compliance is probably not enough; you need to be enthusiastic about these measures). These younger colleagues are already wondering whether they should get out before they are forced out. Where will they go? I have no idea, for it’s not as if corporations are particularly friendly places. It’s almost as if someone predicted four years ago that there will be no place to hide.

Data indicate that white liberals are well to the left of blacks on race issues, and they are the ones agitating on campus. If the Kavanaugh hearings were the moment when academic culture throughly infiltrated our legal and political systems, the Floyd protests were the moment where it infected the whole culture. You fight injustice with injustice. You fight irrationality with irrationality. You fight bigotry with bigotry. Power is the sole coinage of the realm, but you have to put a moralizing cloak on it. There is no academic leader out there, to my knowledge, who is willing to acknowledge any nuance, complexity, or role for dissent in our fraught moment.

I’ve been in this profession for 30 years, and I’ve seen battles come and go, but this moment is different. It’s perilous in ways I’ve not witnessed. Never before has Solzhenitsyn’s advice to “live not by lies” meant more or carried more severe consequences. In the past I could dismiss threats as temporary aberrations, trendy winds that would blow over leaving the core of the enterprise intact. I no longer believe that. This is not the same. The religious zealots would rather burn the whole thing to the ground then to leave one spot of impurity. But that’s what it really is: it’s all a purification ritual, a cleansing fire and on the other side, salvation. The victims who fuel the fire will be unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

The professor added that this is not only what’s happening at his institution. It’s going on all over.

UPDATE: I was just thinking, when Live Not By Lies comes out in the fall, the natural thing to do would to be to visit campuses. But the kinds of campuses who need to hear the message are the kinds of campuses that would never host me, not with this message. We need to work out some way for me to be hosted by local churches that don’t mind being hated by the woke. E-mail me with ideas.

UPDATE.2: A reader comments:

Rod, I am someone with whom you have spoken who is a professor at a major public university, and I write here under a pseudonym in the spirit of self-protection. The professor in the letter sent to you is right on target. Those of us who are academics live in a supercharged era of mass hysteria and intimidation that is reminiscent of the McCarthy and Red Scare eras. Universities are imposing thought codes on professors and students, and those who do not adhere to the thought codes are subjected to ostracism (at best) and employment sanctions (at worst). The idea that a senior professor who would not accept implicit bias training would be shut out of university search committees is stunning and offensive. At my university I am seeing administrator after administrator make statements that can only be interpreted to mean that the university will be engaging is racial discrimination against disfavored groups. Moreover, university administrators are cowering in fear over the latest demands from black faculty and students, and the result is that universities are making promises that are unreasonable and discriminatory.

The bottom line is that the professor whose letter you quote has a very accurate picture of what is going on in most or all institutions of higher education, and this is having a major detrimental effect on the core missions of colleges and universities around the country.

UPDATE.2: Reader Hewey:

I can say that this reflects what I am seeing in the “evangelical” university where I teach. This one in the upper Midwest. Cutbacks all around layoffs due to Covid, but expansion of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and a whole new host of new training programs being rolled out, including how we white people are shot through with “unconscious racism.” I won’t be here much longer.

I am confident that most Evangelical colleges will go the way of most Catholic colleges, which is to say, fully, or almost-fully, woke.

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The Revolution In Black & Brown

The Chicago Sun-Times beclowns itself trying to be woker-than-thou. Look:

To our readers:

On Monday, we joined the growing list of news organizations around the country that have opted to capitalize Black when using the word to describe a culture, ethnicity or community of people. We made this decision after engaging in dialogues with people inside and outside our newsroom and company, including readers and employees.

We also instructed our journalists that in the event the terms Black and Brown are used together to collectively describe a group, we will capitalize the “B” in both words, such as “Black and Brown communities.”

Our decision puts Black on the same level as Hispanic, Latino, Asian, African American and other descriptors.

We also told our journalists to continue to lowercase the “w” in white.

Our decision to capitalize Black is an acknowledgment of the long-standing inequities that have existed in our country, and the unique role that Black art and culture have played in our society. Cultural trends among white people, e.g. Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc., are much more disparate, which was a key factor in our decision not to capitalize white.

We’re hopeful that you, our readers, will understand — and appreciate — this distinction.

Nykia Wright, CEO

Chris Fusco, Executive Editor

Reaction includes:

This leaves two rough choices for how to think about our society.

1) All racial groups, including whites, share an essence that deeply defines them.

2) Though group identity can be important, no individual’s essence is defined by being white or brown or black.

I prefer 2).

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) June 16, 2020

Voilà: https://t.co/ONzYqTnNA4

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

Religious Conservatism’s Potemkin Power

Longtime readers will remember the story I’ve told here several times. It was the fall of 2015, several months after the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. I met privately with some key GOP House and Senate staffers, and asked them what the Republicans were planning legislatively to protect religious liberty in the post-Obergefell environment.

The answer: nothing. No plans at all. Not on their agenda.

I was genuinely stunned. I remember walking across the plaza on the east side of the Capitol after that meeting, thinking, We really are on our own. 

Over the following years, I would hear from people involved in Republican politics on social issues reports that the national Republicans did not want to deal with the gay rights issue. They were either not smart enough to speak articulate a socially conservative position with clarity and conviction, or, as I believe, they lacked the courage to do so — especially given that most deep-pocketed Republican donors are liberals on the issue. Something I heard often from those closer to the political process than I: The Republicans are afraid to be called bigots. 

If you’ve been with me for a few years, you know that I have never argued that Obergefell could be overturned. For a long time, both on this blog and in my 2017 book The Benedict Option, I have argued that gay rights are an increasingly popular cause. What Republicans might have done is come up with a classical liberal case for enacting substantial religious liberty protections. But they didn’t. Most of them said little or nothing. Most said little or nothing when the trans movement began its march through the institutions, including the US military. The Democrats, to their credit, know what they believe on LGBT issues, and don’t have any hesitation standing up for it.

The Republicans? Please.

Look, I get it. It’s a really hard issue. You don’t have a majority of the public with you. And you probably have gay friends that you don’t want to see hurt. I know I do. Personally, I would have been fine with a bill protecting gay and lesbian employees from being fired, as long as there were a strong exemption for religious organizations. You can fairly blame me for not using my little platform here to push for that, not that it would have done much good. But let’s be honest: there was no leadership among the national Republicans. At least President Trump was willing to take the heat for a transgender military ban. But even he, and Republican politicians who supported him, did not articulate why they believe what they do.

If they can’t or won’t talk about these things substantively, it’s no wonder that people think it must be what Justice Anthony Kennedy once called “irrational animus.”

So. Today, a 6-3 majority of the US Supreme Court handed social conservatives a stunning loss. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Great White-Haired Rationale for religious conservatives sticking with Trump despite everything, wrote the majority opinion. What do Trump and Senate Republicans have to say about the decision?

They’re cool with it, man. From Politico:

The Democratic Senate’s 2013 passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was the last serious effort in the Senate at legislating on LGBTQ issues and just four GOP senators that supported that bill remain in office. The Republican Senate has shied away from taking up the matter, a reflection of divisions in the GOP over how — or whether to — address the issue.

“It’s the law of the land. And it probably makes uniform what a lot of states have already done. And probably negates Congress’s necessity for acting,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who ran the Senate Judiciary Committee during Gorsuch’s confirmation. He said he was not disappointed by Gorsuch’s decision. Besides Gorsuch, Chief Justice John Roberts also joined the court’s Democrat-appointed justices in the 6-3 ruling.

Of course he wasn’t disappointed! Gorsuch and Roberts did all the heavy lifting for the Senate Republicans! More:

Even those that disagreed with the court’s decision took far more issue with the process than the substance. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said no one should lose their job on the basis of sexual orientation but that he wished the “decision would have been reached by Congress rather than the court.”

“The court is legislating what they think is good policy. And that, to me though, that’s really not their role. I mean I don’t particularly care about their views on policy,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a former Supreme Court clerk. “The right answer is ‘over to Congress’ to do something about it.”

Yes, and I suppose the Senate refusing to take up ENDA is “doing something about it” by not doing anything about it. But where was the GOP leadership explaining why ENDA wasn’t necessary?

(For the record, Politico says that Sen. Ted Cruz criticized today’s decision. But it sounds like he is pretty lonely.)

Again, I ask you: what, from a social conservative viewpoint, is the function of the Republican Party? Maybe:

to separate conservative Christians from their money and their votes
to dose Deplorables anxious about cultural decline with the Pill of Murti-Bing, a drug that induces a sense of happiness and blind obedience

What else?

I’ve heard a lot of despair today from my social and religious conservative friends. None of them see any point in showing up to vote this fall. A lot can change between now and then, but they feel, and I feel, that we don’t ask for much … and that’s what the Republican Party delivers.

That’s not entirely fair, I admit. But on a day like today, on an issue as big as this one, when the US Supreme Court, with two conservative justices voting the with majority, redefines the meaning of “sex” in federal civil rights law — we see with great clarity the powerlessness of social and religious conservatism in this country, the fecklessness of the Republican Party, and the vacuity of religious authority in post-Christian America.

It is a kind of apocalypse — an unveiling. We have had a lot of those this year, haven’t we?

Early this morning, I received a long letter from a reader who strongly objected to my “Douthat’s Choice” post, in which I endorsed Ross Douthat’s view that conservative voters faced a decision over whether or not re-electing Trump would be worse in the long run for conservatism. The reader strenuously, and at length, argued that Douthat and I were wrong. I get lots of e-mail every day, and can’t possibly answer it all. But this reader really put a lot of time into his letter, and though I wasn’t persuaded, I decided that if I found the time today, I would answer him.

Before I could get to it, he sent a follow-up letter, that said simply:

UPDATE: Some conservative Evangelicals who work at Evangelical institutions (they told me their names and affiliations) have reached out to me tonight after reading this. Their collective view: this is a real moment in which we can see the slow-motion collapse of conservative Evangelicalism. What I’m hearing from them (not all from the same person; I’m just going to summarize):

Trumpy Evangelicals have stayed quiet because they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that their man appointed a Supreme Court justice who ruled against conservative Christian interests in such an important case.

The culture of conservative Evangelicalism is dispositionally optimistic. This means that Evangelicals can’t bring themselves to admit that things are as bad as they really are.

Quote: “The people who say ‘Don’t look fearful because fear is not Christian’ are the people who end up reconciling themselves to the rules and goal lines of liberalism.”

Quote: “The chief sin of Evangelical elites is respectability. The chief sin of bourgeois Evangelicalism is comfort. The chief sin of Evangelicalism in America is cowardice. We’re not racists, darn it. We’re a bunch of theologically illiterate cowards.”

What do you Catholics think? The head of the US Catholic Bishops Conference said today that he was “concerned.” Yeah, that’s about what one expects.

UPDATE.2: This comment from the reader Red Brick resonates with me, though I was never excited by Trump:

I was wrong about Trump and the GOP as well.

As I stand here today a Southern Christian I watch as all (not some) of the statues of our civil war dead are pulled down by mobs and gutless politicians. Jefferson statues are being pulled down as we speak and Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers to soon follow. Rioting in our streets goes unpunished…some of it a straight up Racist pogrom against white people (and GOP senators like Mitt Romney are marching with the mobs). The internationalist wars continue. Mass illegal immigration continues along with the legal immigration of 1 million foreign people a year, taking jobs millions of Americans desperately need. Wall St is being bailed out while the great small business massacre is taking place. The Supreme Court continues to enshrine and expand the sexual revolution in all areas and the writing is on the wall for Christian colleges and schools.

The GOP has conserved nothing. Taxes breaks for the 1% is all they care about.

I am done. I am spiritually and emotionally exhausted at being a supporter of a party like the GOP.

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SCOTUS Routs Conservatives, Again

Massively important news:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory.

The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex”— applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this decision, and the size of the loss to religious and social conservatives. SCOTUS, the highest legal authority in the land, has declared that homosexuality and transgenderism are like race. If you disagree, you are on the side of Klansmen, in effect. This is not just the opinion of Democratic lawmakers, or columnists at The New York Times. This is now the law of the land. And it became the law of the land thanks to two Republican justices, Roberts and Gorsuch, who were loyal to their class in the clutch.

I have heard an argument that Roberts joined the majority in order to retain the right to assign the opinion. If Roberts had joined the other three in the losing dissent, Justice Ginsburg would have written the majority opinion, which would have looked different from what Gorsuch wrote. In other words, the chief justice made a strategic move to protect as much religious liberty as he could in the face of a conservative loss. The logic is: better a 6-3 decision with a conservative justice writing for the majority than a 5-4 decision with a liberal justice doing so. This may be the case; I don’t know. Keep it in mind, though; Roberts might not be the villain many of us social conservatives think he is.

Gorsuch, though? Gosh, President Trump, thank you. You really came through there. I’m being sarcastic, of course. The last reason, though, why religious conservatives should grit their teeth and vote for Trump anyway has now been blasted to smithereens by this decision written by a Trump justice. And not just a Trump justice, but the paradigmatic Trump justice, the man whose place on the Supreme Court was meant to justify religious conservatives turning a blind eye to Trump’s many other failures. This is what “but Gorsuch” means. Those words are like ashes in the mouth today.

I am unsure what today’s ruling means regarding the religious liberty of churches and religious schools. I will update this post when I hear from people who are in a position to say. Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said:

But how these doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII are questions for future cases too. Harris Funeral Homes did unsuccessfully pursue a RFRA-based defense in the proceedings below. In its certiorari petition, however, the company declined to seek review of that adverse decision, and no other religious liberty claim is now  before us. So while other employers in other cases may raise free exercise arguments that merit careful consideration, none of the employers before us today represent in this Court that compliance with Title VII will infringe their own religious liberties in any way.

So, the decision appears to affect only “secular” employment, and not religious institutions. This was not a religious liberty case. Title VII does have religious exemptions. There will, of course, be legal challenges in other areas. Why wouldn’t there be? If SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) discrimination is illegal in employment, why wouldn’t it be illegal in churches and religious institutions?

I was just on a press call with John Bursch of Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented one of the losing plaintiffs in one of the SCOTUS cases at issue in today’s decision. Bursch points out that religious liberty is still very much in play, and will be at issue in future cases. But what SCOTUS has done today is to redefine “sex” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity.” Because of that, he said, “there is no end in sight to that kind of litigation” — meaning litigation challenging institutional practices that depend on the older definition (e.g., keeping male-to-female transsexuals out of female locker rooms).

I asked if there were implications in today’s ruling for the tax-exempt status of religious organizations, based on the Bob Jones ruling in the 1980s. In that case, SCOTUS declared that the IRS could strip a religious organization of its tax-exempt status if it affirmed policies that discriminated on the basis of race, as Bob Jones University did back then. Bursch said he was confident that the Trump administration would not seek to alter IRS policy, and that if it did, that the courts would uphold religious liberty. I agree with him that Trump wouldn’t use IRS policy to go after churches and religious schools, but I see no reason at all why a Biden administration wouldn’t. I don’t know how the courts would rule if this was challenged in court, but given how SOGI is de facto becoming equivalent to race in Supreme Court jurisprudence, I don’t see why we should have confidence that religious liberty would be protected in the face of civil rights claims.

To my religious conservative readers who thought The Benedict Option was overblown: What is it going to take to wake you up to the reality around us? From the book:

 The storm clouds have been gathering for decades, but most of us believers have operated under the illusion that they would blow over. The breakdown of the natural family, the loss of traditional moral values, and the fragmenting of communities—we were troubled by these developments but believed they were reversible and didn’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong with our approach to faith. Our religious leaders told us that strengthening the levees of law and politics would keep the flood of secularism at bay. The sense one had was: There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed by continuing to do what Christians have been doing for decades—especially voting for Republicans.

Today we can see that we’ve lost on every front and that the swift and relentless currents of secularism have overwhelmed our flimsy barriers. Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government, and the culture has turned powerfully against traditional Christians. We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve.

The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been slowly but steadily happening for years. The US Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of religious conservatism. It was the moment that the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the 1960s, came to an end. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable prejudice—and in a growing number of cases, punishable. The public square has been lost.

On this day, the US Supreme Court, with two conservative justices voting with the liberal majority, has redefined “sex” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” for employment purposes. If you think it’s going to stop there, you’re mad. More from The Benedict Option:

Politics, as the saying goes, is downstream from culture. Because we on the Christian Right lost the culture war, we lost political power. Our days as a formidable force in American national politics are over.

Does that mean we have no role to play in party politics? Not at all. We remain citizens, after all, and we ought to be committed to working for the common good. But conservative Christians have to undertake a fundamental rethinking of the goals of Christian politics.

For the past thirty years or so, many of us believed that we could turn back the tide of aggressive 1960s liberalism by voting for conservative Republicans. White Evangelicals and Catholic “Reagan Democrats” came together to support GOP candidates who vowed to back socially conservative legislation, and to nominate conservative justices to the US Supreme Court.

The results were decidedly mixed on the legislative and judicial front, but the verdict on the overall political strategy is clear: we failed. Fundamental abortion rights remain solidly in place, and Gallup poll numbers from the Roe v. Wade era until today have not meaningfully changed. The traditional marriage and family model has not been protected in law or in custom, and because of that, courts are poised to impose dramatic rollbacks of religious liberty, for the sake of anti-discrimination.

Again: today’s ruling does not have direct religious liberty implications, but you would have to be a very, very naive person to think that religious liberty is not going to come under intense attack in the courts, in part because of this. Besides which, understand now that under SCOTUS’s new ruling, the owner of a health club must allow male-to-female transgenders, even those who still have male genitals, have free reign of the women’s locker room. The only places that (for now) can resist this order within the law are religious health clubs, if such a thing exists — say, a YMCA that was actually religious.

In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito listed the many areas of public life that stand to be affected by today’s ruling. I’m going to summarize them briefly, using quotes from Alito’s dissent:

Bathrooms and locker rooms. According to Alito, the logic of the court’s ruling obviates rules keeping transgenders out of the bathroom or locker room they prefer to use. Alito wrote: “The Court may wish to avoid this subject, but it is a matter of concern to many people who are reticent about disrobing or using toilet facilities in the presence of individuals whom they regard as members of the opposite sex. For some, this may simply be a question of modesty, but for others, there is more at stake. For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse, the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm.”

Schools and colleges. Alito: “A similar issue has arisen under Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination by any elementary or secondary school and any college or university that receives federal financial assistance. In 2016, a Department of Justice advisory warned that barring a student from a bathroom assigned to individuals of the gender with which the student identifies constitutes unlawful sex discrimination, and some lower court decisions have agreed.” So now that sex has been redefined by SCOTUS to include SOGI, schools and colleges that receive federal funds may be forced to comply.

Women’s sports. Alito: “Another issue that may come up under both Title VII and Title IX is the right of a transgender individual to participate on a sports team or in an athletic competition previously reserved for members of one biological sex. This issue has already arisen under Title IX, where it threatens to undermine one of that law’s major achievements, giving young women an equal opportunity to participate in sports. The effect of the Court’s reasoning may be to force young women to compete against students who have a very significant biological advantage, including students who have the size and strength of a male but identify as female and students who are taking male hormones in order to transition from female to male.”

Housing. Alito: “The Court’s decision may lead to Title IX cases against any college that resists assigning students of the opposite biological sex as roommates. A provision of Title IX, 20 U. S. C. §1686, allows schools to maintain “separate living facilities for the different sexes,” but it may be argued that a student’s ‘sex’ is the gender with which the student identifies.50 Similar claims may be brought under the Fair Housing Act. See 42 U. S. C. §3604.”

Employment by religious organizations. Alito: “Briefs filed by a wide range of religious groups––Christian, Jewish, and Muslim––express deep concern that the position now adopted by the Court ‘will trigger open conflict with faith-based employment practices of numerous churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious institutions.’ They argue that ‘[r]eligious organizations need employees who actually live the faith,’ and that compelling a religious organization to employ individuals whose conduct flouts the tenets of the organization’s faith forces the group to communicate an objectionable message.This problem is perhaps most acute when it comes to the employment of teachers. A school’s standards for its faculty ‘communicate a particular way of life to its students,’ and a ‘violation by the faculty of those precepts’ may undermine the school’s ‘moral teaching.’ Thus, if a religious school teaches that sex outside marriage and sex reassignment procedures are immoral, the message may be lost if the school employs a teacher who is in a same-sex relationship or has undergone or is undergoing sex reassignment. Yet today’s decision may lead to Title VII claims by such teachers and applicants for employment. At least some teachers and applicants for teaching positions may be blocked from recovering on such claims by the ‘ministerial exception’ recognized in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 565 U. S. 171 (2012). Two cases now pending before the Court present the question whether teachers who provide religious instruction can be considered to be ‘ministers.’ But even if teachers with those responsibilities qualify, what about other very visible school employees who may not qualify for the ministerial exception? Provisions of Title VII provide exemptions for certain religious organizations and schools ‘with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on’ of the ‘activities’ of the organization or school, but the scope of these provisions is disputed, and as interpreted by some lower courts, they provide only narrow protection.”

Healthcare. Alito: “Healthcare benefits may emerge as an intense battleground under the Court’s holding. Transgender employees have brought suit under Title VII to challenge employer-provided health insurance plans that do not cover costly sex reassignment surgery. Similar claims have been brought under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which broadly prohibits sex discrimination in the provision of healthcare. … Such claims present difficult religious liberty issues because some employers and healthcare providers have strong religious objections to sex reassignment procedures, and therefore requiring them to pay for or to perform these procedures will have a severe impact on their ability to honor their deeply held religious beliefs.”

Freedom of speech. Alito: “The Court’s decision may even affect the way employers address their employees and the way teachers and school officials address students. Under established English usage, two sets of sex-specific singular personal pronouns are used to refer to someone in the third person (he, him, and his for males; she, her, and hers for females). But several different sets of gender-neutral pronouns have now been created and are preferred by some individuals who do not identify as falling into either of the two traditional categories. Some jurisdictions, such as New York City, have ordinances making the failure to use an individual’s preferred pronoun a punishable offense, and some colleges have similar rules. After today’s decision, plaintiffs may claim that the failure to use their preferred pronoun violates one of the federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination. The Court’s decision may also pressure employers to suppress any statements by employees expressing disapproval

of same-sex relationships and sex reassignment procedures. Employers are already imposing such restrictions voluntarily, and after today’s decisions employers will fear that allowing employees to express their religious views on these subjects may give rise to Title VII harassment claims.”

Constitutional claims. Alito: “Finally, despite the important differences between the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII, the Court’s decision may exert a gravitational pull in constitutional cases. Under our precedents, the Equal Protection Clause prohibits sex-based discrimination unless a ‘heightened’ standard of review is met. By equating discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity with discrimination because of sex, theCourt’s decision will be cited as a ground for subjecting all three forms of discrimination to the same exacting standard of review.”

Justice Alito concludes:

Under this logic, today’s decision may have effects that extend well beyond the domain of federal antidiscrimination statutes. Although the Court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long. The entire Federal Judiciary will be

mired for years in disputes about the reach of the Court’s reasoning.

In The Benedict Option, I talk about the importance of building and patronizing Christian businesses, and using creative ways to protect ourselves economically. For now, there are still ways to do this. Hear me, though: stop thinking that voting Republican is sufficient to protect us! It is not. We have a lot of work to do among ourselves, in our own communities, to prepare ourselves to withstand what’s here, and what’s coming.

As I say in the book (and as critics who have never read the book keep missing), there is no safe place to hide from what’s coming. What we have to do is figure out ways to ride it out. The Benedict Option is primarily about building robust, resilient Christian communities that form its members to know what the Truth is, and to be prepared to suffer for it. Watch, if you haven’t, Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life. It’s the Benedict Option. Franz Jägerstätter could not escape the Nazis, but when they came to his little village, because of his Catholic formation, he knew that they were Antichrist, and he knew that he could not bend the knee to them. So it must be with us.

Here is the deeper meaning of today’s ruling. In his response to today’s ruling, the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore writes:

That this case is not well-known in the American public, not much a part of the ongoing “culture wars,” might cause one to think that this is an unimportant case, but this would be the wrong conclusion. The precedents set here will have major implications going forward on how the public meaning of words at the time laws are passed should mean for how they are interpreted in the future. This will mean that legislators actually won’t know what they are voting to pass—because words might change cultural meaning dramatically between the time of passage and some future court case.

The ruling also will have seismic implications for religious liberty, setting off potentially years of lawsuits and court struggles, about what this means, for example, for religious organizations with religious convictions about the meaning of sex and sexuality. This will mean not only that this is just the beginning of the legal discussion at this point, but also that Congress must clarify precisely what they intended, or intend now, in laws that protect women from unjust discrimination—laws that now are to be applied much more broadly.

But, beyond that, there are other considerations for the church. This Supreme Court decision should hardly be surprising, given how much has changed culturally on the meanings of sex and sexuality. That the “sexual revolution” is supported here by both “conservatives” and “progressives” on the court should also be of little surprise to those who have watched developments in each of these ideological corners of American life.

Whatever the legal and legislative challenges posed by this decision, they are hardly the most important considerations. What is most important is for the church to see where a biblical vision of sexuality and family is out of step with the direction of American culture. For 2,000 years, the Christian tradition, rooted in the Bible, has taught that human beings are limited by our createdness. We are not self-created, nor are we self-determining beings. God has created us, from the beginning, male and female—a concept articulated at the very onset of the biblical canon (Gen. 1:27) and reaffirmed by our Lord Jesus (Mk. 10:6). That’s because this creation order is not arbitrary but is intended to point beyond itself to the mystery of the gospel (Eph. 5:32). Here the church has stood, and will stand.

That will mean teaching the next generation of Christians why such distinctions are good, and not endlessly elastic. We do that by rejecting both a spirit of the age that would erase created distinctions between men and women and those that would exaggerate them into stereotypes not revealed in Scripture. This will mean also that we train up our children to see how such are matters rooted not in cultural mores but in the gospel itself. And it will mean that we provide not just teaching but models.

His point about how the new ideology changes the meaning of words is a point I address in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents. Here is a passage about Prof. Pawel Skibinski, head of the John Paul II Museum in Warsaw:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

“They had social spaces where the real meaning of words was preserved,” he says. “For me, it’s less important to argue with such a view of the world”—progressivism, he means—“than to describe reality as it is. For example, our task is to show people what a normal, monogamous family looks like.”

To paraphrase Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

Language is a human construct. It changes through time. What the Supreme Court has done today is ordered a change in the definition of “sex.” True, this was being changed already within the culture, but now the High Court decisively came down on the side of the radicals. This is now what “sex” means in America, according to the Supreme Court. This is the ideological abuse of language. Christian resistance requires creating social spaces where the real meaning of words is preserved! 

How many churches and congregations are even aware of this? “Voter guides” aren’t going to make a bit of difference. Christian readers, do not expect bishops, priests, and pastors to lead a meaningful resistance. Some will — find them, and rally to them, but understand that the real resistance is going to have to happen at the local level.

We are all going to have to do what Father Tomislav Kolakovic and his disciples in 1940s Slovakia did. From Live Not By Lies:

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

More:

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

The other day, a Slovak academic named Blanka Kudlacova sent me an academic paper she recently authored in which she discusses in detail the work that Father Kolakovic and the Family did, and how that was all carried out in the second generation of disciples. Excerpt:

Krčméry and Jukl started to work with university students in the way they had learned from Kolakovič. They established small communities at every university in Bratislava. Small communities consisted of 7 to 12 students, who used to meet regularly on a weekly or two-weekly basis in private flats or houses. At first, they were established in Bratislava and were organised according to individual universities, faculties and years. At the end of the 1970s, a network of circles was created: leaders of the circles started to meet based on university affiliation and each university had one leader in charge. They had a so-called «central» (central meeting, orig. centrálka) once a month. The «centrals» had a spiritual, methodical and organisational character and were established due to the need of cooperation of persons working with university students. At first, Vladimír Jukl and later František Mikloško were at the head of the «central» and they were followed by Peter Murdza. It used to begin with a collective prayer followed by experience sharing and problem solving related to work with university students and was concluded by information sharing. Inclusion of new university students in communities or establishment of new communities were also part of the agenda. Everything was based on personal relationships and mutual trust.

This is the main avenue of resistance open to us now: cultural and religious. Time for serious orthodox Christian leaders to stop pretending. The courts might give social and religious conservatives a decision we like from time to time, but they will not be a bulwark.

Last night before bed, I read this essay by my friend David French, in which he criticizes “fearful Christians” like me and readers of this blog. I had the tab open to respond to it today. French wrote:

Christian liberty is largely secure, yet Christian fear is harming the Christian witness and damaging the culture of the nation we love.

A moment’s historical reflection should demonstrate that few political and legal movements have been more successful in the last 40 years than Christian conservatism. Through a combination of activism and litigation, Christian conservatives have not only achieved veto power over the electoral fortunes of one of America’s two great political parties, they’ve erected a veritable thicket of laws that protect religious expression in public (and even private) spheres.

More:

Sullivan is correct that intolerance is very real, but he’s wrong that present conditions are “very reminiscent of totalitarian states.” There is a substantial difference between state censorship—enforced at gunpoint—and the professional and social intolerance that dominates illiberal institutions. The East German Stasi would leave your body in a ditch. That’s a different universe of oppression compared to the harms woke America inflicts on its victims today..

Yet excessive fear reigns. My friend Rod Dreher’s influential blog has become a clearing-house for frightened Christian professionals to (anonymously) express their deep fears. Comment after comment will begin with the notation that the authors feels they can’t identify themselves:

“I am a full professor in the humanities at a major private university. Everyone on this blog would likely recognize my name if I published it here.”

“From a reader I know personally, and who correctly says she cannot identify herself: ‘Very few of us have practical freedom of speech anymore. Sure, the constitution lets us say it, but what good is that if it gets us mobbed?’”

I get correspondence like this all the time. And expressions of fear like this aren’t all that new. I’ll never forget the professor who spoke to me in whispers about his faith lest anyone overhear and threaten his tenure bid. I remember an extraordinary case in Georgia where the university Christian community remained largely silent as a fellow believer faced racism, rape threats, and death threats for defending religious freedom on campus.

As a matter of law, Christians are free. As a matter of fact, in many contexts across the country, Christians are afraid—and many of the people who are most in the grips of fear are those individuals who have thoughtful and reasonable things to say.

Read it all. 

I like and respect David. Let nobody deny his courage in the public arena. I’m serious about that. I agree with him that Christians cannot be silent, that we have to be willing to be criticized, and even suffer for our faith. The most important chapter in Live Not By Lies is the chapter on suffering as Christian witness. But I read David’s essay as way more optimistic than facts warrant. There really is a difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a mindset before it is anything else. Totalitarianism is the idea that there is no area of life that is free from politics — and that also means cultural politics. I don’t believe that we will have a Woke Stasi in this country. But I also believe we won’t need one for the progressive radicals to achieve what they want to do. Justice Alito said in his dissent today that the ruling raises the question of whether employers will force employees to keep quiet regarding their opinions critical of homosexuality and transgenderism. Might you lose your job over your private social media posts affirming what your church teaches? Yes, you might — and you might have no recourse.

So yes, I completely agree with David that Christians should be more bold … but let’s not downplay how much they (we) are going to be made to suffer under the new and emerging cultural and legal regime. Go back and re-read my interview with the pseudonymous Prof. Kingsfield from 2014, in which the elite law professor, a closeted Christian, predicted what was to come.These parts jump out at me today:

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is.”

“If I were a priest or pastor, I don’t know what I would advise people about what to say and what not to say in public about their faith,” Kingsfield said.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.

“Gays have legitimately said that it’s a big deal to have laws and a culture in which they have been forced to lie about who they are, which is what you do when you put them in the position of not being able to be open about their sexuality,” Kingsfield said.

“‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ forced them to segment off a part of their lives in a way that was wrong. What they don’t realize today is that the very same criticism they had about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ can be applied to what is happening now to Christians: you can do what you like in private, but don’t bring who you are into the public square, or you can be punished for it.”

More:

When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

That last bit came to mind in a phone conversation I had today with my friend Tim Schultz of 1st Amendment Partnership, a religious liberty lobbying organization in Washington. Tim told me that an unappreciated factor in these decisions is that the Supreme Court justices are the products of elite culture, and live within elite culture. Tim said, “The Supreme Court exists in elite culture. The higher the price there is to pay for being a conservative in elite cultural circles, the harder it is for them to render opinions that social conservatives like.”

On social issues, SCOTUS exists to enact the elite consensus. That’s just how it works. This is straight James Davison Hunter: elite culture and elite networks are the deciding factor in the direction of any culture.

Tim says, of today’s decision:

“It’s absolutely devastating to the worldview to some conservatives that the courts are going to be giving us social conservative victory after social conservative victory. … That view has been utterly defenestrated by today’s decision.”

Tim adds that there are still some significant legal questions around SOGI and religious liberty left for the courts to decide. Plus, politics still matters. It matters who runs the executive branch, including naming Supreme Court justices. It matters what Congress says. It just does not matter as much as social conservatives have been telling themselves.

Tim Schultz has been part of a controversial (on the Right) movement seeking to engage with LGBT rights advocates to work out some kind of legislative compromise. He and his colleagues have been criticized by some conservatives as being too accommodating to the other side, for proposing to cede too much territory. Today, Tim told me that this stunning defeat in the High Court for social conservatives ought to compel radical rethinking on the Right. “Should we re-energize around strategies that brought us to this point, or should we re-engage differently?” he asks.

Everything has to be on the table again regarding legal and political strategies. But look, can we on the religious Right please stop placing so much confidence in law and politics? Can we be honest with ourselves about what is actually happening in this country? Can we be honest with ourselves about how utterly unprepared the churches are for it? If you are a Christian who has dismissed the Benedict Option, what is it going to take for you to engage seriously with it?

I’ll end with this comment from Damon Linker, whose powerful column about the political meaning of the ruling for the Right I find to be incontestable. He writes:

If you’re a conservative primarily concerned about free speech, economic liberty, and gun rights, there is much to love about the Roberts court. If you believe in expansive readings of executive power, there is a lot to cheer for in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. But if you care about sexual morality and issues wrapped up with it? Forty years of loyalty to the conservative movement and Republican Party has delivered exactly nothing.

There’s no way this won’t do further damage to Trump’s already foundering re-election prospects. Why should social conservatives show up to vote for a president and a party that repeatedly raises their hopes and then dashes them? Why should they continue to give the president a pass on his morally appalling words and deeds when they’re left with nothing to show for it?

Today’s ruling could only have been possible in post-Christian America, an America that no longer believes what the Bible teaches us about the human person, about maleness and femaleness. I see today Gallup has released results of a poll showing that there has been a record collapse of pride in America, even among Republicans. That could mean a lot of things, but traditional Christians should realize at least this: we are exiles in this land, and had better adjust our conduct and our aspirations to reflect that new reality.

One last word, a lesson I learned from researching Live Not By Lies: no matter what, Christians cannot afford to feel sorry for themselves. Under the hard totalitarianism of Soviet power, Christians were thrown into prison, and some were tortured. Yet the wiser ones — people like Silvester Krcmery — understood that if they ever gave in to self-pity, they would lose the ability to be faithful, and to resist. The media and the progressives are going to gaslight religious conservatives, claiming that this is not that big a deal. It is a big deal. But self-pity is a strategy of self-sabotage.

UPDATE: A gay reader and regular commenter asked me if I would favor a law prohibiting Bostock, the Georgia plaintiff, for being fired over his homosexuality. I am pretty sure I would have. The particular circumstances around his firing strike me as quite unjust. I am having trouble coming up with a single case, outside of working for a religious institution, in which an employee’s homosexuality should be legitimate grounds for firing them. This is how I thought about the Texas anti-sodomy law that was overturned by Lawrence (2003): that it was an unjust law that ought to have been overturned by legislative action, and that the grounds on which it was overturned by SCOTUS were harmful (for the reasons Justice Scalia gave). Similarly, SCOTUS changing the plain meaning of “sex” in civil rights law to fit the current definition is quite nuts.

The gay reader’s question clarified my response to the Bostock ruling, though. Most of my negative feeling about it has to do with transgenderism, which is not the same thing, or the same kind of thing, as homosexuality.

UPDATE.2: In Sarah Pulliam Bailey’s story in the Washington Post, Douglas Laycock, one of the country’s top religious liberty scholars, delivers some grim news to religious conservatives:

Monday’s decision could kill those legislative efforts, said Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.

“This will end all legislative bargaining over religious liberty in the gay-rights context,” Laycock wrote in an email. “There is no longer a deal to be had in which Congress passes a gay-rights law with religious exemptions; the religious side has nothing left to offer.”

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Douthat’s Choice

A “Sophie’s Choice,” from the William Styron novel and subsequent film version, is a difficult decision one has to make in which neither outcome is obviously worse than the other. A Douthat’s Choice is the miserable option facing conservative voters this fall. In his Sunday column, Ross Douthat writes about the “heads they win, tails we lose” situation for the Right. Excerpts:

Now we are in the retreat-from-Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together — pandemic, recession, mass protests — and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968-ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct.

In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump’s presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self-protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post-2020 liberalism might become.

This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right’s erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench.

Douthat talks about the specific things that US conservatism desperately needs to offer America, and that Trump conspicuously fails to produce. More:

What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won’t continue at this pace through 2024. But it’s likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump — and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.

Read it all. You really should, for the details.

If Douthat is right (and I think he is), conservative voters can either:

Vote for Trump, and keep the Democrats out of the White House for four more years, but watch the GOP and organized conservatism turn into a zombie freakshow of impotent crankery; or
Vote for Biden (or withhold your vote from Trump), and watch the Democrats fill the federal government with wokesters, but clear Trump out of the way of those up-and-comers in the GOP who have the desire and the skills to build a real alternative to the Democrats in time for 2022 and 2024.

The way I’ve framed the choice indicates my sympathies, obviously. There are no good options for us conservatives this fall, only two very bad ones. Most two-term presidents struggle to have a successful second term. Given how poorly Trump has performed this year, given the extreme crises he has faced, it is hard to conceive that a second Trump term would be anything but a washout.

Did y’all see the clips of Trump’s low-energy speech at West Point over the weekend, the one in which he couldn’t lift a glass of water to his lips with his right hand? The one in which he sort of toddled off the stage, taking baby steps? Four more years of this weakness and confusion, and the Right will be sunk so deep it will take ages to climb out.

A lot can happen between now and November, but at this point, it is hard to see this exhausted and exhausting president making a case for putting up with him for four more years. I am very well aware of how terrible it will be for conservatives if these Democrats, on fire with wokeness, take over the White House. Joe Biden is a kindly old man who personally doesn’t seem to pose a threat, but the thousands of staffers throughout the federal bureaucracy will be on fire to de-Trumpify the government. But conservatives have to think strategically. It’s not like the Right is seeking a second term for a successful president at the peak of his power and faculties. Last week the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apologized for having taken part in that Lafayette Park photo op. You want to risk that the country would face a war with a military that doesn’t have confidence in the Commander in Chief? The wheels are coming off.

Of course the wheels are coming off the country too. A case could be made that the Democrats would be tied down with civil unrest, rising crime, and a bad economy for Biden’s term, and would overreach on wokeness. All the Republicans would have to do is come up with a real populist — and not a return to GOP business as usual — who doesn’t alienate women and independents. Whatever happens, it’s likely that the 2024 election is going to be the real realignment one — that is, the one that sets the terms for the next political era.

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