Rod Dreher's Blog, page 178

View From Your Table

New Orleans, Louisiana

Lunch with my pal at Casamento’s, the legendary New Orleans oyster bar on Magazine Street. It might have been my last-ever oyster meal, at least on oysters not from frigid North Atlantic waters. Why? Here’s what one of my Twitter followers said:

 

Well, hell. I take prescription reflux meds, and, after a three-year battle with chronic mononucleosis, am pretty sure I’m considered to be immunocompromised.

Multiple fasciotomy surgeries. Why, Dennis Jordan, why did you tell me this?! You might have saved my life, but still … my little oyster-loving Louisiana heart is broken.

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The Vox Party’s Fight For The Family

Here’s news from the fight in Spain against the coming totalitarianism. The Spanish daily El Pais gives background:

A policy from the far-right Spanish political party Vox is causing heated debate over education and the rights of children. Dubbed by Vox as the “parental pin,” the policy gives parents the right to stop their children from attending complementary workshops organized during school hours. The measure means that schools will need to ask for parents’ permission to give “talks, workshops or activities with an ideological or moral leaning against their convictions,” according to the text of policy. This includes talks on sex education and LGBTQ+ rights.

The debate over the policy broke out last week after Vox said that it would not support the budget in Spain’s south-eastern region of Murcia unless the parental veto was included in the educational program.

More:

Meanwhile, eight regional education ministers from the PSOE [Socialist Party] signed a document on Monday that accused Vox of using the parental veto to “break school harmony and the culture of dialogue to impose blind and uncritical authoritarianism.”

And:

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Correo, published on Sunday, Celaá [the Education Minister] said that a “homophobic family […] does not have the right to make their children homophobic as well.” “Parental authority cannot be confused with property,” she added.

Celaá’s claim that children are not the property of their parents was attacked by the leader of the [conservative, allied with Vox] PP, Pablo Casado, who linked the argument with communism.

“Are they telling me that we have families like in Cuba, that children belong to the revolution?” he said on Sunday. “Are we going to arrive at the point where children inform on their parents if they are not good revolutionaries?

That’s exactly what the left-wing Spanish government wants. You should know that calling Vox “far right” is standard practice in the European and US media. El Pais published a summary of the party’s main ideas. This is “far right”? Come on!

So, the other day, the Socialists’ parliamentary spokeswoman tweeted this accusation against Vox. I’ve screenshotted (screenshot?) it with a translation:

 

Hate! Of course. It’s always “hate.” To which the official Vox party Twitter account responded:

Lo que no soportamos es que os metais en nuestra casa y nos digais como tenemos que vivir y como tenemos que educar a nuestros hijos. Y menos aunque con dinero publico promovais la pederastia.

In English, that means:

What we can’t stand is for you to come into our house and tell us how we have to live and how we have to educate our children. And even less if you promote pederasty with public money.

I can’t embed the tweet because Twitter took it down, and suspended Vox’s account temporarily.

El Pais reports today on the kinds of programs that are being affected by the criticism from Vox and others, including Catholics and other Christians. One of them is Skolae, a radical sex-ed and gender ideology indoctrination program implemented by the government in the Spanish state of Navarra. No one is allowed to opt out. According to Skolae’s own document (in Spanish), the program includes:

It is necessary to reflect on the multi-causal nature of social phenomena and, as is evident, also of gender inequality. Angela Davis, for example, elaborates the concept of intersectionality in order to “understand the categories of race, gender and class as connected, intertwined and intertwined elements”. It is necessary to make visible the diverse categories that generate and reproduce inequality: race, gender, class, ethnicity or culture. The environment of the educational action is characterized by a progressive multiculturalism. The coeducative action must be a space to be aware of the different cultural variants of the sex-gender system. It is necessary to jointly know and analyze its implications in the society in which we live.

More:

It is especially important to ensure that inequality is seen as a social problem, not as a women’s problem, nor as a strictly individual problem. Students should be incorporated as subjects of the coeducational action, so that they question their masculinity, challenge its relations with violence against women, and get to know other egalitarian masculinities, masculinities that feel committed and comfortable in models of coexistence with empowered women, just as free as men. Methodological research should be strengthened to ensure that all students, not only those previously sensitized to equality, question the concept of hegemonic masculinity and subject to criticism the privileges of those they enjoy.

And check this out, their goals for children up to age six:

To make visible the diversity of bodies, all of them sexed and valued. Reflection on images of different sexual persons in masculine and/or feminine, different ages, cultures, functional diversity … Recognition of child sexuality from birth by decriminalizing the recognition and experience of this sexuality at school and in the family (sexual vigilance, erotic games, etc.).

Encourage dialogue and trust in communication about sexual issues both at school and in the family as a factor in the prevention of child abuse.

Erotic games for little kids. Here’s a screenshot of that page of the Skolae document:

This is insanity. And if you stand up against this to defend your family, you are denounced as “far right” and a purveyor of “hate.” And Twitter suspends your account.

If you don’t think the left in America is going to attempt this, sooner or later, you’re out of your mind. Wake up! This is exactly what the left-wing totalitarians of the Soviet bloc states did: destroyed parental rights for the sake of bringing the children under the control of the state’s ideologues. They didn’t do it to push gender ideology. The Soviets weren’t that crazy. No, that is our own special Western contribution to the destruction of society.

I’m telling you, we are going to have to get used to being called “far right” and insulted by progressive politicians and institutional leaders, if we are going to protect the integrity of our families and our rights as parents, which exist prior to the state. In Budapest last year, I interviewed a couple who were raised under 1950s and 1960s communism. They told me that there was constant propaganda designed to make anybody who believed in religion or any kind of tradition ashamed of it, and of themselves. We are seeing the same thing happening right now in Spain.

It will not stay in Spain.

When I give my speech at the upcoming Rome conference on February 4, I am going to talk about the coming totalitarianism, and I am going to bring up the fight Vox and others are waging in Spain. This is literally straight out of the communist playbook, what these leftists are doing, all in the name of progress.

Follow Vox’s English Twitter feed here: @vox_party_news

The post The Vox Party’s Fight For The Family appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘You Cannot Imagine The Worst’

I had an e-mail exchange with a source for my upcoming book, who has become a friend. He is a scientist who was born and raised in a Soviet-bloc country, and immigrated to the US in his twenties. He wrote to tell me that he thinks I am entirely too optimistic when I say that I don’t anticipate harsh persecution of Christians and other dissenters. I reprint these excerpts of his words here with his permission:

I think that you, and most of Americans, deeply misunderstand human nature; what it really is capable of. That’s what I loved about Americans. Unbounded and unfounded optimism, always willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. No longer. I see pent-up hatred all around me. People are looking for an outlet to vent it. Both sides. Myself included.

… A Hidden Life — a movie I am certainly not going to see: Your description has already traumatized me beyond tolerable levels. From what you have described though, the ’judge’s glance at his own hands” was probably the strongest scene. It is a universal indictment. There will be a lot of glancing in the not too distant future. Think about it.

In the scene, the prisoner Franz Jägerstätter, his arms shackled, sits before a Nazi judge. He tells the judge that he is truly free. The judge sends him away, just before presiding over his sentence of death. After the prisoner walks away, the judge sits with his unbound hands on his lap, in the same position as Jägerstätter’s, and contemplates the invisible manacles.

My correspondent continues:

So what does it have to do with the Australia fires, you ask?

Contrary to the popular belief that a fraction of a degree temperature increase set the place ablaze, there is another explanation. For millennia the Aborigines have been practicing ritual bush burning. A while ago the practice was banned because of ecology concerns, environmental protection; to save some odd shrew from being upset. Dead wood accumulated. The whole place burned to the ground. (you can google for it)

We did the same thing to the culture. We banned ritual control burns. We allowed dead wood to accumulate. A single spark and the whole place will be ablaze. We will burn.

This is as rational an argument as I am capable of right now.

He concludes:

I think that you cannot imagine the worst because it looks so normal outside. One can be hauled to the gallows even when it’s sunny and warm. It’s hard to explain but when I look out and it’s all beautiful I always think about what it is trying to hide, what’s in store. As my long-ago girlfriend once pointed out, I am heavily damaged. I know.

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Class War As Culture War

Michael Lind has a new book, The New Class War, about which I’m hearing lots of great things. Here are excerpts from J.D. Vance’s review:

It’s an expansion of an essay he published in American Affairs, where he argues that Western democracies are undergoing a significant upheaval because Western elites have rebelled against the working and middle classes of their own countries. Those elites have invested in globalized labor arbitrage in China and other countries instead of building productivity in their own nations. In the process, they have created a labor market where working-class people have found it harder to find the kind of work that enables them to live the kinds of lives they want. And they have made a social world where the institutions—unions and churches, especially—that working class people rely on have been decimated. These two facts are related, of course: the decline of unions is, in part, a story of globalization decimating the American manufacturing sector.

In some ways, this is a story that many have heard before, but Lind explores it in new ways.

More:

I had long assumed that social liberalism’s marriage to the Democratic party was incidental. But Lind’s book has me asking: how is it possible that the best-educated, most well-connected people have increasingly adopted the same ideology? Why have both libertarian elites on the Right and neoliberal elites on the Left both adopted social commitments far more liberal than their voting bases? How did the most significant critic of Purdue Pharma, globalization, and financialization—Tucker Carlson—become the man most hated by the political movement that claims to stand for America’s working people?

The answer is simple: social liberalism is the ideology of the managerial class because it serves their economic interests. It’s Lindian class warfare pretending to be a conscience.

But the GOP is also problematic:

 Over the last few decades, the Republican Party increasingly has made an electoral trade: losing professional class suburban whites and gaining working and middle class (primarily) whites. Yet it has clung to economic libertarianism because that is the ideology of its own ruling class.

Read it all.

And, if you can get past the NYT paywall, read the meaningfully clueless review by Anand Giridharadas, an editor at large at Time. Excerpt:

Lind’s heart genuinely hurts for those shafted by oligarchy. But he is limited by conceptual blinders. And he seems to have an outdated (if widely shared) idea of who is a working-class person. When he thinks about what the oligarchy has done to America, he tends to think of white men as the principal victims. And when he begins to detail how these supporters of populism have been oppressed by the schoolteachers-to-billionaires overclass, things get really weird.

One way the elite functions, Lind says, is through the labeling of white-working-class prejudices as phobias — as in transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia. To call these things “phobias” is, he writes, “to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders.” Then, outlandishly, he takes it a step further. “If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.”

Commenting on this review on Twitter, Ross Douthat said

This review is a reminder of the remarkable difficulty that very smart people have in recognizing social liberalism, the ideology embraced by many of the West’s most powerful people for multiple generations, as an ideology of power.https://t.co/36vIgXsLai

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) January 17, 2020

I have Lind’s book on my bedside table to read when I have more time. I am working hard against a fast-approaching deadline for the manuscript for my next book. Last night I was working on a chapter about the weaponization of the ideal of Progress by the left in our time. Under communism, everything that challenged the Party’s view was deemed as against Progress, which was both inevitable (under Marx’s view of history), but also something that the Party had to make sure was achieved with minimal friction from regressive and backward elements. A Hungarian man I interviewed told me that in his 1950s and 1960s youth, state propaganda relentlessly stigmatized everything traditional about Hungarian life as backwards. “They tried to make us all ashamed,” he said. In this way, communist regimes monopolized and weaponized something that all people in modernity have accepted as essential to modern life: the idea that the present is better than the past, and the future will be better than the present.

It’s easy to see how our own progressives have done the same thing, and institutionalized it as they have captured centers of power in our culture. To be against whatever social liberals demand today is to be regressive, shamefully so. It’s not simply a matter of being old-fashioned. As under communism, conservatives and traditionalists are not simply fuddy-duddys, but rather Enemies of the People. The lack of universal happiness today is the fault of those who resist Progress. If only we can cancel them, justice and harmony will prevail. It is astonishing how much Social Justice Warrior cancel culture, including the polite version within academia and corporations, mirrors what the Soviets and their lackeys did.

It is exactly a form of class warfare, and one of its strategies is pretending that it is not that at all. I bring all this up because late last night, when I took a break from my writing, I found on my Twitter feed this review, by Park MacDougald, of the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age Of Entitlement. MacDougald’s review made me think that the book might have some insight to offer about the weaponization of Progress. Here’s why (from MacDougald):

Caldwell’s concern is less legalistic and has more to do with how “civil rights ideology… became, most unexpectedly, the model for an entire new system of constantly churning political reform.” He argues that the act and its subsequent expansions provided a blueprint, a moral rationale, and a legal toolkit for ambitious and frequently unpopular social engineering projects, justified in the name of an ever-proliferating suite of rights and operating outside the bounds of traditional democratic and constitutional legitimacy. “The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emerging idea of fairness against old traditions,” he writes.

So, I bought the book, and stupidly began reading it at 12:20 a.m. I carried on for two hours, until I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and dove back in when I woke up. I’ll be finishing it shortly, and will have a separate post about it tomorrow, most likely. (Man, is he ever hard on Ronald Reagan, portraying him as a Harold Hill type.) But I want to say here that Caldwell, though he might not have put it quite this way (or he might; I’m not finished yet) is exactly right that the weaponization of Progress in the hands of the left has come through its taking the civil rights paradigm and applying it to every social conflict it can. If it can successfully frame a conflict as a matter of civil rights, it’s game over. The power of the Civil Rights Movement in our national mythology is like kryptonite on anyone who challenges its invocation.

I first sensed this fifteen or so years ago, when nobody — and I mean nobody — paid attention to the quite reasonable arguments that certain conservatives made explaining how homosexuality and race were two different things, indeed two different kinds of things. Why didn’t people want to argue about this? Because if it could be established that whatever the validity of rights claims by gays and lesbians might be, they couldn’t be accurately or legitimately piggybacked onto black civil rights, then the gay rights movement would lose its most powerful political and rhetorical weapon.

I will address this more completely when I finish the Caldwell book. MacDougald says Caldwell says the only way this warfare against the deplorables and other non-progressives can be turned is to repeal civil rights law. If true, the fact that this is unthinkable by almost everybody shows how deeply unlikely anyone who stands in the way of the progressives’ Grand March is to avoid being trampled. In what I’ve read of the book so far, Caldwell clearly acknowledges that black Americans were treated horribly, and had every right to demand change. He does not fault them for that at all; from what I’ve read, he despises the way the civil rights paradigm has been the universal weapon used by liberals to subdue their opponents, however absurd the claims. We are now facing court cases in which civil rights are invoked by liberals to recognize the rights of biological males who present as female to compete in athletics against biological women, and so forth. And all respectable opinion thinks this is perfectly sound, and those who disagree are the contemporary equivalent of Bull Connor.

You see what I mean by the weaponization of Progress. This is class war as culture war. I’ll leave you with this plus ça change quote from Caldwell’s book. It was the reflection of a left-wing activist about his time as a student radical:

On the one hand, we were angry about the war, about racism, about the countless vicious acts we saw around us. But on the other hand, we viewed America as one great wasteland, a big, monstrous, mechanized, air-conditioned desert, a place without roots or feeling. We saw the main problem, really, as: THE PEOPLE — the ways they thought and acted towards each other. We imagined a great American desert, populated by millions of similar, crass, beer-drinking grains of sand, living in a wasteland of identical suburban no-places. What did this imagined “great pig-sty of TV watchers” correspond to in real life? As “middle class” students we learned that this was the working class — the “racist, insensitive people.”

That appeared in 1969. The deplorables, they shall always be with us. The 1960s and 1970s changing of the landscape of political conflict from economics to culture gave liberal elites reason to hate the lower classes without feeling guilty about it. Construing social and political conflict as a rehash of the Civil Rights Movement allows them to claim the highest of America’s moral high ground, and from that lofty perch dump chamber pot content onto all the backwards people below — who, if they knew what was good for them, would be ashamed of themselves, and recognize that they deserve it. That’s what our news and entertainment media are for — to convince them to be ashamed of themselves.

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Encouraging Whitefield Through The Storm

This morning I heard from a parent source at Whitefield Academy, the Rainbow Cake Girl school, saying that one of the teachers in the school is pregnant. “Some sicko worm climbed out from underneath his rock to post on her social media page that he hopes she and her baby dies.”

I remember the first time that happened to me. I was at the New York Post, and had written a column that was in some way critical of something LGBTs wanted. A self-identified gay man e-mailed me, put his name on the e-mail, and said that he hoped my newborn child died of AIDS. That was the first time I had ever dealt with that kind of hatred. It unsettled me all day. I wouldn’t wish a thing like that on my worst enemy. That their child die? This man not only did so, but he was so proud of it he signed his name to it.

Like I said, that was the first time I had to deal with something like that. It wasn’t the last, not by far. I quickly developed dinosaur-thick skin. This poor young teacher has likely never dealt with anything like this. I can easily imagine her shock and grief. I regret to say: get used to it. This is the world we live in. Yes, certain gay people and their allies can behave this way, but this kind of savage cruelty knows no demographic barriers. David French and his family (which includes an adopted African child) received countless demonically hateful e-mails from Trump supporters over his public opposition to the president.

The existence of social media offers daily evidence against the claim that humanity is basically good.

I received this letter from a reader, which he has given me permission to post:

Your recent articles on the Whitefield Academy have caused me to revisit some experiences that I had a few years ago when I was targeted for online attacks by two different groups of gay men and their allies.  These attacks occurred because I had publicly argued against the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples and because I made arguments defending the importance of freedom of conscience.  My experiences were nowhere near as bad as what the leaders and teachers at the Whitefield Academy are experiencing right now, but I still found them to be traumatic enough.  I can only begin to imagine what it is like to be targeted by an outrage mob on the scale that you are describing.

During the first time that I was targeted, I was surprised to find that many of my friends actually agreed with the bullies, and even my friends who thought that the bullies were wrong were afraid to say anything against them.  The second incident occurred when I saw someone else who was being attacked in a similar way to what I had experienced and I spoke up to defend them, so I had at least one ally in that exchange.

In retrospect, the first set of attacks were excruciating to endure because I felt completely isolated.  I was able to cope with the second set of attacks a little more easily because there was one other person involved who agreed with me and who provided a touchstone to remind me that not everyone else in the world had gone mad.  All in all, the experience emphasized the truthfulness of Ecclesiastes 4:12 in my mind:

“Though one may be overpowered,

two can defend themselves.

A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”

Your articles on the Whitefield Academy may provide a similar touchstone for the leaders and teachers who are being attacked there if they know about what you have been writing.  Have you reached out to them through your contacts there to make sure that they know that at least one blogger is sharing their story truthfully?

Moreover, how would you recommend that people like myself could encourage the Christians at the Whitefield Academy who are being attacked?  Could you set up a blog article asking people to offer encouragement and then moderate the comments below that article so that only encouraging messages to the targeted people would be allowed to be posted?  Or could you collect encouraging emails to the targeted people from your readers and then relay them for us?  (It probably would not be prudent to just share their contact information directly, because that could result in them receiving even more hate mail than what they are already getting.)

I am tired of watching the LGBT lobby isolate individual Christian organizations and then pick them off at their leisure because we don’t stand together and defend each other.  We need to begin to support each other better if we are going to survive the cultural storm that is coming with our faith intact.

I have not been in contact with teachers or staff there. But if any of you want to write words of encouragement to them in the comments, be my guest. As per the readers’ wish, I will only approve encouraging comments.

UPDATE: Sorry, I have not been as strict as I ought to have been on the comments policy. Only encouraging comments, please.

UPDATE.2: A reader sent me a copy of a comment he left here that was marked as spam and deleted. I told him that that was bizarre, because I remember approving that comment earlier. Well, I looked for it in the spam folder, and there it was — along with about 20 other comments that I had approved earlier. There were a lot from Fran Macadam, in particular. I can’t explain why this is happening — there was nothing wrong with any of those comments, and again, I had approved them. Disqus is terrible.

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Bill McClay’s Land Of Hope

Readers, I have breaking news about a friend who is also a national treasure, and I’m not kidding. Here’s the press release just out from ISI, shared exclusively with this blog:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), an organization that teaches college students core conservative principles, today announced the winner of the 2020 Conservative Book of the Year award: historian Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. This annual award recognizes a thoughtful book that contributes to the rich debate about important conservative ideas. An outside panel of eight judges—including bestselling authors Amity Shlaes and Angelo Codevilla—chose McClay’s book from among six outstanding finalists. McClay will be honored at ISI’s Conservative Book of the Year award dinner on March 28 in St. Louis. He will receive ISI’s Paolucci Book Award as well as a $10,000 cash prize.

ISI president Charlie Copeland said: “The Conservative Book of the Year judges have made a fine choice. Land of Hope is the antidote to anti-American narratives like Howard Zinn’s influential A People’s History of the United States. But that does not mean McClay’s book offers its own propaganda to counter Zinn’s. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal may have said it best when he called Land of Hope ‘the most balanced, nuanced history of the United States I have read in the past fifty years.’ The message in Land of Hope is exactly what our divided country needs.”

Copeland added: “The Conservative Book of the Year award is especially important now. Conservatives are being ‘deplatformed’ everywhere, from college campuses to Twitter. And mainstream book awards like the Pulitzer and the National Book Award might as well post signs that say, ‘NO CONSERVATIVES NEED APPLY.’ In such a heated climate, it is crucial to celebrate thoughtful conservatives like Professor McClay for their outstanding work.”

ISI received more than 130 nominations for the 2020 Conservative Book of the Year award. In addition to McClay’s book, the finalists for the award included:

• Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

• Samuel Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

• Ted V. McAllister and Bruce Frohnen, Coming Home: Reclaiming America’s Conservative Soul

• Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity

• George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility

The Conservative Book of the Year award has been in place for well over a decade. Notable past winners include Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, Bradley J. Birzer’s Russell Kirk: American Conservative, and Richard Brookhiser’s Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln.

For more information, please visit bookaward.isi.org.

Watch Bill talk about his book at this Washington lecture from last year:

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A Gay Man’s Advice To Ghetto Christians

Here’s a quirky post from one of my favorite commenters, Brian in Brooklyn, an out, married gay man who is a practicing Buddhist. He said in a comment on another thread that Christians who feel like they are being driven into the closet today have a lot to learn from how the gay community lived when they were ghettoized and closeted. I mentioned in response that it would be really interesting to learn what gays had to say to conservative Christians in terms of advice for how to live and thrive as an outcast minority, but I can’t imagine gay folks wanting Christians to know these things. Well, Brian proved me wrong. He posted this as a comment. I thought it was really interesting, and wanted to share it with you as a post:

The queer world I grew up in was a thick community. I can share what I experienced:

1. Have your own businesses: after 5:00 p.m. on Friday, I was almost always in gay-owned/operated/friendly establishments until Monday at 9:00 a.m.(and often on weekday evenings as well). For books: A Different Light and The Oscar Wilde Bookshop (people laughed when I said that Barnes & Noble and other bookstores creating gay/lesbian sections would mean the end of these stores, but that is what occurred). For refreshments: The Pink Teacup (which I was just barely able to experience with my husband). For socializing: any number of bars/dance clubs/the Center. Also, casual l get-togethers in friends’ homes. Not always the cocktail parties of gay legend (but sometimes), but book clubs, board game nights, and sports gatherings (yes, we do exist, and I so want Andy Reid finally to win a Super Bowl though, of course, he is facing the only NFC team I have ever loved–since when John Brodie was QB).

2. Enjoy invisibility: I used to love taking people around different neighborhoods and noticing how oblivious they were to the queer life bubbling just underneath the surface. Afterwards I would tell them about everything they had missed–that queer life flourished in places and ways they never imagined.

3. Accept limitations: this will be a hard one. I knew when I came out that I was putting a cap on career and social advancement–it was impossible not to know it. I just could not imagine any other way to live (well I could, but I found it unacceptable). I knew gays who were closeted and successful, and also miserable in their lives. In my world they were known as bitter queens. Maybe your equivalent will be bitter biblists?

I lost promotions and other career opportunities–and even a job once–because I was openly gay, but I learned to live frugally and very much within my means (same dumpy apartment for 30 years preceded by seven years in an even dumpier one). Of course, such a lifestyle is much harder with children and/or if a person lives in tenant-hostile communities. But not-havingness has to become a way of life. I knew I was forsaking many perks, but being open and not lying my way through life was deeply important to me.

4. Love living your truth: You will have the same advantage I had as a Buddhist–a commitment to living according to a particular religious ethic. With more success than not (I had great and patient teachers), I was able to live without regret. From my teenage years, I always loved Edith Piaf’s declaration “Je ne regrette rien,” [“I regret nothing”] and it became my mantra. In this way, not-havingness was not an issue, since the havingness of my Buddhist ethos was a much richer gift (I also unattached rather than repressed or struggled with, so that was a great help as well).

5. Be fierce and fabulous without being aggrieved: when I came out, I would tell friends that I had the advantage of being able to have sex without worrying about getting someone pregnant (this was pre-AIDS). Whatever gay life offered, I would make the argument that it was better than what was on offer in the more acclaimed/privileged/rewarding heteronormative world. And then I stopped giving any credence to desires not in line with who I was and my values.

6. Work toward geographic density: The Village. Castro Street. Boystown. Today, many of the most vulnerable queers are those who live in areas with a low queer population (excepting those who assimilate/closet themselves). I know/hear about many queers in the Midwest–especially older ones–who are farmers and other land-based folk who love their communities, but have little support as they age and/or when their is a crisis. Going coastal is not an option for them, and they are facing increasing problems as society is confronted with the first large cohort of senior queers.

7. Study and memorize show tunes so that whatever happens, you have a lyric at hand when necessary. There is never a wrong time for an eleven o’clock number.

What a lovely, humane list — and a practical one. Thanks, Brian, that was generous. I bet queer Buddhist you and right-wing Orthodox Christian me would be good neighbors. I don’t know any show tunes, but I’ll make you great bourbon drinks, and you can sing whatever you like.

I would like to keep the list going in the comments, both from gay folks and Christians alike. If you’re just going to trash Brian and other gay people, or trash Christians, keep your comments to yourself, because I won’t post them.

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Hate Doesn’t Win, But It Scores

A person in Louisville connected to the Whitefield Academy e-mails with more details about what has happened to the school and its personnel since the gay kid with the long list of disciplinary issues was dismissed the other day (I wrote about it here):

The Head of School, [name], has received death threats against his home, his person, his family, and of course his place of work, as has the High School principal [name]. The school itself has received, via social media and the mail, threats of harm, danger, murder, mayhem, attack, and destruction. There was a threat for teachers to watch themselves in the parking lot getting into their cars, that they would be targets. One teacher was actually attacked unsuccessfully (perhaps the only real intention of the perp was to scare her) by a close call from a car feigning a sideswipe while she was getting in. Highview Church has been threatened as well.

I’m keeping this reader’s name out of it, though he gave me permission to use this material. He’s not on staff at the school, but he is in a position to know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t need to draw this kind of hatred onto himself.

Can you imagine being a teacher at a Christian school, and seeing a car barreling down on you, swerving at the last minute, just to scare you, because of hatred? That’s happening at Whitefield. All from the #LoveWins crowd. Christians who stand against them, no matter how peaceably, have to be prepared for this. Don’t fear, but be ready, and prepared to act. This is not a game. You can be quite sure that the mainstream media, which first publicized the half-truth of why this kid was dismissed from the school, will not come back to report on all the death threats and threats of violence being made against the school. It doesn’t fit the Narrative.

Let’s go back to this 2015 piece about “Professor Kingsfield,” the pseudonym of an elite law professor, whose name is known to me, commenting on the future for traditional Christians after the Memories Pizza horror. You’ll recall that Memories Pizza was the small-town Indiana pizza parlor mobbed by haters after its owners told a TV reporter that they would not cater a gay wedding. My piece appeared about a month before the Obergefell ruling. I identified Kingsfield as a closeted Christian in an elite law school. From that 2015 piece:

Kingsfield said we are going to have to watch closely the way the law breaks regarding gender identity and transgenderism. If the courts accept the theory that gender is a social construct — and there is a long line of legal theory and jurisprudence that says that it is — then the field of antidiscrimination law is bound to be expanded to cover, for example, people with penises who consider themselves women. The law, in other words, will compel citizens to live as if this were true — and religious liberty will, in general, be no fallback. This may well happen.

What about the big issue that is on the minds of many Christians who pay attention to this fight: the tax-exempt status of churches and religious organizations? Will they be Bob Jones’d over gay rights?

Kingsfield said that this is too deeply embedded in American thought and law to be at serious risk right now, but gay rights proponents will probably push to tie the tax exemption on charities with how closely integrated they are within churches. The closer schools and charities are tied to churches, especially in their hiring, the greater protection they will enjoy.

The accreditation issue is going to be a much stickier wicket. Accreditation is tied to things like the acceptance of financial aid, and the ability to get into graduate schools.

“There was a professor at Penn last year who wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Educationcalling for the end of accrediting religious colleges and universities,” Kingsfield said. “It was a Richard Dawkins kind of thing, just crazy. The fact that someone taking a position this hostile felt very comfortable putting this in the Chronicle tells me that there’s a non-trivial number of professors willing to believe this.”

Gordon College has faced pressure from a regional accrediting authority over its adherence to traditional Christian sexual morals re: gay rights.

“Accreditation is critical to being admitted to law schools and medical schools,” Kingsfield said. “College accreditation will matter for some purposes of sports, federal aid, and for the ability to be admitted by top graduate schools. Ghettoization for Christians could be the result.”

“In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure. There’s a question among Christian law professors right now: do you write about these issues and risk tenure? This really does distort your scholarship. Christianity could make a distinct contribution to legal discussions, but it’s simply too risky to say what you really think.”

The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.

“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

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.

More:

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops, where does that leave us?” he said [Note: Indiana’s Catholic bishops declined to stand up for the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act law — RD]. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

Read the whole thing. This was five years ago. Longtime readers will recall that right after Memories Pizza, I received a call from a man who said that his elderly mother, who had spent six years of her youth in a communist prison as a Catholic prisoner of conscience, told him that what happened to Memories Pizza is the kind of thing that happened when communism took over her country. Specifically, mob action against individuals the state deemed to be class enemies. That was what made me start asking immigrants to the US from former communist countries if they were starting to see things happening here that reminded them of what they had left behind.

Yes, I heard, over and over. And now, I will have a book coming out in September, filled with advice from Christians who endured communism, telling us today what to watch out for, and how to deal with it.

I am going to dedicate the book to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic. I bring him up a lot here, but I really can’t talk about him enough. He was a real prophet. When he arrived in the Slovak region of Czechoslovakia in 1943, escaping the Gestapo in his native Croatia, Father Kolakovic began to organize cells of young Slovak Catholics. He foretold that communism was eventually going to be imposed on the nation, and that would mean persecution for the Church. He knew that the state would clamp down hard on the clergy, and that if the life of the church was to continue, it would depend greatly on an educated, well-formed, courageous laity. The cells he formed, and the networks, came together to pray, to study the Bible, to hear lectures, and to learn the art of resistance (e.g., he taught them how to handle an interrogation).

Five years after the priest began forming these cells, Czechoslovakia became a communist dictatorship. The Church was put in a vise grip. But thanks to the work that Father Kolakovic and his disciples had done, the Slovak Catholics were ready.

I don’t believe that we will face that kind of persecution. But there is an incredible amount of hate in this country, and it is being stoked by activists on the Left, and a sympathetic media. Who can say for sure what is coming next, or how soon it will arrive? I was a bit startled to re-read the Kingsfield quote about the importance of forming “those subterranean, catacomb networks.” Yes. When Father Kolakovic began his work, lots of priests and even bishops at the time looked upon him as an alarmist. But it all came down on them hard and fast.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Martin, beginning by quoting me:

I don’t believe that we will face that kind of persecution.

Rod, Every time you record the ever-escalating violence against traditionalist Christians in the U.S., you keep repeating this mantra. Are you just trying to avoid “scaring the horses” here?

Let me tell you what is happening now. When I was in university, and for many years afterwards, I obsessively studied the Nazi and Communist periods, to try to understand how a country like Germany, which produced Schiller, Beethoven, Goethe and Brahms, could descend into such madness.

One of the things I did was to watch as many Nazi propaganda films as I possibly could, to figure out how Goebbels, Streicher, et al., managed to condition the German people to first accept, then participate in, atrocities against Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other Slavic peoples. They did it via a series of films demonizing Jews in particular. The most notorious of these films was Jud Süß (Suess the Jew), which had a radicalizing effect upon young Germans in particular. Thus by the time war broke out, the German people were desensitized and conditioned to wage a war of extermination.

As for the current sequence of events, the following passage (by a German philologist) from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free expresses the escalating series of events quite well:

You see, .. one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

We are watching a rerun of the “old movies” of the 20th Century. I am firmly convinced that, once the loony Left gets into power, that Nazi and Communist levels of persecution and extermination will take place. Don’t believe me? Then read this: “I’ll Straight Up Get Armed”: Second Bernie Organizer Loves Gulags

These people mean what they say and they will ultimately do what they say.

Well, I say that because I genuinely don’t believe that it will get that bad — I could be wrong! — but also because I don’t want to feed into people’s sense that if it’s not as bad as it was under communism, then it’s nothing to worry about. It can get plenty bad without being like the Soviet Union and its satellites.

The post Hate Doesn’t Win, But It Scores appeared first on The American Conservative.

In Oregon, A Confederation Of Dunces

A reader who is a member of the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators passes along an e-mail from the Mothership. You aren’t going to believe what concerns the Oregon school administrative class now. On second thought, you certainly will!:

Dear COSA members,

A little over a year ago, I received an email from one of our aspiring administrators, Alesia Valdez. She asked a simple question: “Has the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators ever thought about changing the name of the organization?”

Alesia pointed out that the words “confederation” and “confederate” have historically racist associations, and wondered if it was time for COSA to update its name – to move away from a name that many would consider “outdated, offensive or racist,” and instead toward a name that would better represent the values that COSA and our members hold around “equity, diversity, inclusion and culturally-responsive practices.”

I contacted Alesia and let her know two things – first, that I appreciated her request and that I was taking it seriously, and, second, that a name change would require amending our Constitution and Bylaws through a process that would include consultation and engagement with the COSA Board of Directors and all COSA members.

After I received Alesia’s email, I sought out a number of the leaders of color in our organization to get their perspectives. Many told me that the “Confederation” in our organization’s name had been a barrier to their participation in our association and that they agreed the name should be changed.

I took Alesia’s request to the next meetings of the COSA Board of Directors and the COSA Equity Advisory Board, and together we developed a process for considering Constitution and Bylaws amendments to change the name of the organization.

In September, the COSA Board appointed a bylaws review committee and tasked them with bringing any draft amendments to the COSA Board meeting in December. The committee took a holistic view and recommended language that will strengthen and modernize our governing documents while also better reflecting the work that we do as an organization. The Board considered the draft amendments and voted unanimously to move them forward in the process. In addition to changing the “C” in COSA to “Coalition,” these amendments also include technical updates to reflect more current practice, such as updated anti-discrimination language. New additions also include specifically naming the COSA Equity Advisory Board as an official COSA committee with representation on the COSA Board of Directors, and new language acknowledging that students are at the center of our members’ work.

Here are the next steps in the process:

The draft Constitution and Bylaws amendments are attached today for your review and comment.

Beginning today, we are opening a comment period for members to provide their feedback and input. Feedback will be accepted through the close of business on March 16. To provide feedback, click this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/cosaby...

The Board will review and consider member feedback and comments and consider approving proposed bylaws at its April meeting.

Pending Board approval, COSA members will vote on the proposed Constitution and Bylaws at the COSA Annual Conference in Seaside.

I want you to know that I appreciate Alesia’s question and all the conversations I have had with our members to date. I also want to thank the members of the COSA Board and the COSA Equity Advisory Board for their leadership and careful consideration.

COSA is a large and diverse organization with members operating not just in different school district settings, but in different political contexts. I know that members may have varying opinions about the significance of changing the name of our organization. But after several months of conversation with school and district leaders, I believe that these proposed changes are significant and meaningful and will result in COSA’s becoming a more inclusive and welcoming organization.

I encourage you to contact me personally if you would like to discuss further.

Sincerely,

Craig

Craig Hawkins

Executive Director

On behalf of the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, I would like to register my faux-operatic disgust at these progressive nitwits. Afraid of the word “confederation.” Not “confederacy,” which is itself a perfectly normal Latinate word, but “confederation.” Because there are people of color in it who actually say, presumably with a straight face, that they felt unwelcome in the organization because of the word “confederation.”

Honestly, Oregon school administrators. Honestly. Y’all need some proper theology and geometry. It probably wouldn’t hurt you to come down to Mardi Gras to chill the heck out.

UPDATE: A Twitter follower of mine says this is even worse than we thought. “COSA” is only one letter away from “CSA”.

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Cultural Marxism’s Liturgical Language

Last night I was reading a short book by the French historian Alain Besançon in which he takes stock of the meaning of Nazism and Communism, in part by comparing the two totalitarianisms. This paragraph jumped out at me:

The psychological state of the militant is distinguished by his fanatical investment in the system. This central vision reorganizes his entire intellectual and perceptual field, all the way to the periphery. Language is transformed: it is no longer used to communicate or express, but to conceal a contrived continuity between the system and reality. Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world. It is a liturgical language for which every utterance points to its speaker’s adherence to the system, and it summons the interlocutor to adhere as well. Code words thus constitute threats and figures of power.

The “liturgical language” of intersectionality and Social Justice is familiar to many of us. I was thinking in particular about federal judge Kyle Duncan’s ruling the other day in which he refused a request by a trans prisoner to call him by his preferred female pronoun. The judge noted several problems with the request, and ended by saying he would not involve the federal courts in causing the kind of legal and procedural mess that would logically follow from adopting this practice. Among yappy others, the WaPo’s Ruth Marcus whined about the ruling in print, (tl;dr: “Kyle Duncan is MEAN!”), but the caravan rolls on.

Anyway, I thought about the ruling in light of Besançon’s paragraph. Marcus et al. frame this as merely a matter of courtesy, but as Duncan shows, it is not that at all. He doesn’t get into the morals or the metaphysics of the matter — he’s a federal judge, and that wouldn’t be appropriate — but rather relies on arguments based in legal procedure to deny the request. But of course there is a moral, and a metaphysical, dimension to this thing, and Besançon touches on it.

The trans movement and its allies — most especially in the news media — are changing language for the sake of concealing a contrived continuity between the trans person’s self-perception and reality. “Ideological language is charged with the magical role of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world” — that is precisely what is happening here, in the pronoun war. Marcus faults the judge for being discourteous, but most people understand that questions of law cannot turn on sentimentality. What Marcus really hates is the judge’s refusal adopt the discourse that would signal his adherence to the system that she has already accepted. Pronouns, as she uses them, are threats, and figures of power.

Ask Jon Caldara. The popular libertarian Denver Post columnist was fired recently; he believes that it’s for refusing to get woke on pronouns. From an interview he did with an alternative Denver paper:

In retrospect, Caldara thinks the seeds for his sacking were sown by a January 3 offering in which he argued that the AP Stylebook — the Associated Press guide used by many media outlets to determine which words and phrases are appropriate or to be avoided — promotes a progressive bias.

“The AP has updated its style to say that gender is no longer binary and thus declared a winner in this divisive debate,” he wrote. “They ruled that, ‘Not all people fall under one of two categories for sex and gender.’ It’s admirable that reporters want to be compassionate to transgender individuals and those transitioning, as we all should be. But AP reporters first have a duty to the truth, or so they say. There are only two sexes, identified by an XX or XY chromosome. That is the very definition of binary. The AP ruling it isn’t so doesn’t change science. It’s a premeditative attempt to change culture and policy. It’s activism.”

More:

These assertions shouldn’t be interpreted as anti-trans, Caldara insists: “I’m not a moralist in any way, shape or form. I’m very libertarian. I want people to do their own thing. I don’t care what bathroom you use, and I think people’s lives should be respected. But in the same way, I believe there are two genders that are two sexes. You can identify in as many ways as you like, but when I say that, it seems to cause a problem.”

The editorial page editor who fired him has not specified why she let him go. Caldara claims that she told him his column was the most popular one at the paper. I am confident that Caldara’s guess about the reason for his dismissal is accurate. It is hard for people who do not or who have not worked in the mainstream media to understand how militant they are about such things. I loved working for newspapers, but I know that I will never again be hired at a newspaper, owing to my lack of wokeness on certain issues. I have been out of newsrooms for a decade now, so perhaps I’m mistaken — I welcome correction from readers who are still working in newsrooms — but I would doubt that any journalism school graduate could get a journalism job if he or she did not adopt the liturgical language of gender theory. In other words, unless he or she was willing to be in some sense a propagandist, and participate in the lie.

Besançon judges Communism more insidious than Nazism because unlike Nazism, which is entirely about power, communism appeals to justice and virtue. It therefore deceived many more, and therefore spread farther, and wrought more destruction. Unlike Nazism, communism had a moral core, but it embraced and glorified immoral means to achieve what it claimed was a moral end. It used familiar moral language, but hollowed it out to make the words refer to something very different. It disguises evil as good. Besançon:

The majority of mankind honors the idea that certain behaviors are true and good because they correspond to what we know of the structure of the universe. Communism, which conceived of another universe, derived its morality from that. This is why communism challenged not only the precepts, but also their foundation: the natural world. Although I said previously that communist morality was based on nature and history, this in fact was not true: it was baed on a super-nature that never existed and on a history devoid of truth.

Communism brought nothing but ruin. Besançon again:

Violent action against nature fails and soon transforms itself into the destruction of nature, and with it, humanity.

Destroying the gender binary is destroying perhaps the most fundamental fact of human biology — a fact upon which the future of our species depends. This violence against language is more deeply violence against nature — and we will all pay the price someday. The worst sufferers will be those poor souls who have mutilated their bodies and ruined their lives by giving themselves over to this ideology. You know who really won’t suffer, though? Those most responsible for advocating and mainstreaming this pathology. Ask yourself: was there ever a reckoning for the communists who destroyed Russia and the countries of Eastern and Central Europe? No, because as a properly resentful Besançon notes, They Meant Well. When it comes to the Left, good intentions excuse everything, the result being that we learn nothing. Besançon writes, “Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.”

From The Guardian:

What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. “The point is that younger people weren’t around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union,” she says. “We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we’re going through now. Think of what’s happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn’t supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation.”

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism’s renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

They have forgotten. They have forgotten because we in the older generations have allowed them to forget. And because we too have forgotten the terrible danger of committing radical violence against nature in the name of ideological idealism. This time, we tell ourselves, it will be different.

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