Rod Dreher's Blog, page 183

Is US Orthodoxy Going Pro-Gay?

By now, it’s crystal clear that whenever theological liberals invite theological conservatives to “dialogue” about sexual ethics, what’s really being negotiated is the terms under which conservatives can be persuaded to surrender. If there is a dialogue to be had among Christians, it’s how best to proclaim and to help people live out the countercultural truth about sex and the body in these post-Christian, erotomaniacal times. That’s not the dialogue that interests theological liberals; “dialogue” is what they want up until the point where they hold power, in which case the dialogue is over, because the Holy Spirit has done something new in the church, and we cannot give bigotry any quarter.

There’s a liberal website called Orthodoxy In Dialogue, which is exactly what you think it is. A couple of weeks ago, there appeared a controversial essay from an Antiochian Orthodox priest in Wichita, which is known for being a conservative jurisdiction. In the essay, Father Aaron Warwick calls for the liberalization of Orthodox pastoral practice regarding homosexuality. An Orthodox reader e-mailed the piece to me, with real dismay. This paragraph from the Warwick essay caused me to do a double-take:

In reality, I believe we should also accept that, like most heterosexuals, most homosexuals will find lifelong abstinence to be impracticable. In such cases, it is my strong conviction that we should encourage homosexuals to find a lifelong partner. While I understand this offends the sensibility of many Orthodox Christians, I again point to how our Church has dealt with the sin of divorce and remarriage. Namely, we do not enforce the strict legal and scriptural injunctions of our Church; rather, we act in a pastoral manner, allowing people an opportunity to continue working out their salvation within the Church. We never ask a remarried individual to eventually, some day leave their new spouse so their sin will not persist. We simply recognize this person needs compassion and a chance to do as well as they possibly can. Furthermore, we realize that the best way to encourage this is for an individual to belong to some form of community that requires mutual submission and the restriction of one’s sexual life to focus on no more than one person.

The whole essay is right in line with the kind of misdirecting sophistry Father James Martin has perfected in the Catholic Church: claiming not to be challenging Church teaching, but merely adjusting the application of those teachings to fit new pastoral and cultural realities. This is a clever way to change the teaching of the Church without appearing to do what you are plainly doing. It seems to be working in the Catholic Church, under this pope. But could this kind of thing really be coming to Orthodoxy?

The Orthodox Church in the United States has become refuge to a number of former Protestants escaping the moral and theological collapse of Mainline churches on sexual issues (e.g., abortion, homosexuality, premarital chastity). Some of those former Protestants have become parish priests.  I can imagine that they are up in arms about this essay. But I don’t know that for a fact. Orthodoxy is very small in the US, and there’s not nearly the kind of coverage of its own internal debates in the media as there is with Catholicism and Protestantism, nor is there the kind of easily accessible coverage and commentary on Orthodox religion blogs. You have to go looking for this kind of thing. Longtime readers know that years ago, after a regrettable foray into Orthodox Church politics, I imposed a discipline on myself not to search out this stuff.

But sometimes it finds me, in some form. A reader sent me the Warwick piece to ask what I thought about it. It’s a perfectly fair question. It’s a public statement by an Orthodox priest on a controversial theological matter. Attention must be paid. My answer would be pretty predictable, but rather than lay out an argument that is familiar to regular readers, I asked an Orthodox priest I know (not my parish priest; I never ask him to give me material for my blog) to comment on Father Warwick’s essay. One thing I’m concerned about, so I told the priest, is whether or not sexual liberalism is gaining a foothold in the Orthodox clergy outside of the Fordham Orthodox circles, and some on seminary faculties. That priest agreed to respond if I didn’t use his name, a condition to which I agreed:

I was kind of shocked to see this from a priest of the Antiochian Archdiocese, if only because of the predominance in the ranks of their clergy of conservative former Evangelicals, many of whom became Orthodox at least partly because of the Church’s unshaking commitment to Biblical morality, and not least of which because of the well-known Arab aversion to sexual deviancy, an aversion that would seem to reflect the Levitical statement from God that sexual immorality vomits a nation out of its land. These two kinds of people make up the bulk of Antiochian clergy in North America.

That being said, the arguments made by Fr. Aaron Warwick here for a “pastoral” approach that pastors people into sin rather than away from it are shocking in their illiteracy of both the Bible and the rest of Orthodox tradition, not to mention what seems to be an ignorance about the pastoral practice of his brother priests. I, for one, absolutely do not look the other way when it comes to fornication between members of the opposite sex and disallow fornication between members of the same sex. Either war, fornication is a serious sin and requires refraining from communion while in an unrepentant state.

It may be that he knows clergy who do allow heterosexual fornication, but that doesn’t mean that we spread their pastoral failures to the whole Church. It means that they be expected to shape up and uphold the laws of God that have been reaffirmed again and again in Church history. And if they cannot do that, they have no business in the clergy and ought to be deposed.

Fr. Aaron’s argument turns on his analogy of second marriages for divorced people to allowing fornication with just one person of the same sex. Surely if we will let people sin by having a second marriage while their divorced spouse lives, then we can bless sin between homosexuals as well. But this is a misreading of the Scripture and Church practice. First, it is divorce that is a sin, not second marriage. Second marriage is certainly not ideal, but if it were a sin, then there would not be a church service blessing it. We don’t bless sin! We seek to be cured of it.

But let’s deal with this canard about second marriages by looking closely at the relevant Scripture:

Categorizing Christ’s teaching on divorce as a commandment that sex within a second marriage is adultery is, at best, misguided and misleading. Christ makes a brief statement in the form of a commentary on the Torah in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:31-32). Here He says that, though it had been said that whoever wanted to divorce his wife could simply give her a writ of divorce, that the man who divorces his wife for any reason other than sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Here there is an exception where a divorce is acceptable.

While it is technically the woman who commits adultery in Judaism of the time, Christ places the guilt for this sin on the man who divorced her. The emphasis in this brief statement is on the sinfulness of divorcing your wife. This statement is paralleled in Luke 16:18, but without the exception for sexual immorality, stating bluntly that the man who divorces his wife so that he can marry another commits adultery. The emphasis here, even in this brief statement, is clearly on the sinfulness of divorce, especially divorce with another wife in mind, not on the acceptability of second marriage or sexual relations within it.

This briefer text in Luke must also be read in the context of the more developed (though ultimately identical) statement later in Matthew (19:3-12). Christ is directly asked by the Pharisees about the acceptability of divorce, not second or third marriage. As segments of the Jewish community practiced polygamy until the tenth century, that certainly could have been a question, but would have been a separate one. Jesus says bluntly that divorce is unacceptable and is, by nature, a rebellion against the grace of God (Matt. 19:4-6). When asked about Moses requiring a writ, Christ replies that this was a condescension to their hardness of heart, but then in truth to divorce a wife, except for sexual immorality, and marry another is adultery (19:8-9). The disciples clearly understand that this is with reference to divorce, as they say nothing about remarriage, but question whether anyone should get married in the first place if they will not be able to ever divorce their wife (19:10). Christ’s interpretation of the Torah here is completely in keeping with that of the rest of the OT (cf. Mal. 2:14-16; Prov. 5:18; Ecc. 9:9).

Paul, on the other hand, directly addresses the issue of remarriage (1 Cor. 7:1-16). Just like Jesus, he forbids divorce (though with exceptions) and makes allowance for the weakness of the flesh (7:9). When a second marriage is permitted by a bishop for pastoral reasons, this reference from Paul, that it is better to marry than to burn with lust, is actually quoted in the rite of second marriage (toward the beginning).

Divorce is a sin. It is penanced by the Church. Second marriage is, in some cases of a hierarch’s discerning, the lesser of two evils going forward for the benefit of the salvation of all involved. When the mystery of holy matrimony is celebrated in the Church, the resulting marriage is licit. The sexual relations between husband and wife are undefiled and not sinful acts, because marital relations between a husband and his wife is not a sinful act (Heb. 13:4). To say that sex between a husband and wife joined in a second marriage is actually sinful is, in effect, to say that they are not really married, but it’s clear from the rite that the Church is saying they are married.

In this context, the contrast between Paul’s handling of this and another issue in the same context is telling. Any sexual relations between members of the same sex is not only prohibited in the strongest terms as an abomination (Lev. 18:22), it belongs to that class of sexual immorality which taints the land itself and brings God’s wrath upon not only those who participate in it, but those who abet it through silence and tolerance.

This includes especially the Church as assembly (Lev. 18:26-30). In 1 Corinthians, Paul deals with another detestable form of sexual immorality — incest as forbidden in Lev. 18:17. The contrast with his comments on remarriage could not be more stark. The person committing these acts must be removed from the congregation (1 Cor. 5:1-2). This man is to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that he might find repentance and be saved at the day of judgment (5:4). This is to be done publicly. He is to be purged from their midst (5:13). Their tolerance of his sexual sin is destroying the whole community. There simply is no parity between the way in which Christ and His apostles handle remarriage and the way in which they proscribe sexual immorality, including homosexual immorality.

So, all that said, it is really a shocking ignorance of both the Scriptures and Church history and practice to suggest that homosexuals fornicating only with one other person is at all equivalent to those who have sinned via divorce (and been penanced) and who are allowed to remarry for the sake of their salvation. Contrary to what Fr. Aaron says, limiting fornication to just one person does not make it not a sin. How would his wife feel if he decided to have an ongoing affair but promised that it would be only one other woman and not ten? And what about a pedophile who promises to limit himself to just one child?

What does it say that he is permitted to teach something so contrary to the Orthodox faith, and that there appear to be no repercussions for doing so? That makes no sense to me. I cannot understand how such a bold departure from Christian morality does not warrant immediate deposition from the priesthood or at least a public retraction and recanting of what he has written. Zero tolerance is the only policy here.

God help us. I am happy to say that every other Orthodox priest I’ve ever talked about this with treats fornication of any variety as sin. Sin is a disease, and God said in no uncertain terms that sexual sins in particular were ruinous to a society. He even says it was the reason that the Canaanites were vomited out of their land (Lev. 18:25-28), meaning that this dynamic is not just for those who hear the Torah or who live among Israel as Gentiles, but is written into the very fabric of creation itself.

The idea that people just can’t help themselves and so they have to be permitted and even encouraged to sin is to privilege human desire and make it the basis for morality — this has no basis in Christian tradition. It is also deeply insulting to those who struggle against their passions to bring every thought into subjection to Christ.

This is serious business, and we lead people into destruction and spiritual death when we suggest otherwise. We should not judge this as either “traditional” or “progressive,” and certainly not as “pastoral.” This is simply demonic. I really hope that something is done about priests who teach this way, and that it is done swiftly and publicly. We need that right now.

There you have it. The Orthodox Church cannot afford to give ground on this issue. We know exactly what is going to happen if it does.

UPDATE: Reader Eric LeFevre comments, quoting me to start:

“One thing I’m concerned about, so I told the priest, is whether or not sexual liberalism is gaining a foothold in the Orthodox clergy outside of the Fordham Orthodox circles, and some on seminary faculties.”

Rod: If this is the case, that Orthodox seminary faculties are promoting this, then the situation in the Orthodox Church is way more serious than you can imagine. The process takes time to play out, but Theological Liberalism follows a very specific formula when they go about conquering institutions.

1. Denominational elites become sympathetic to accommodating liberals. Note the elites might be the same as the upper leadership, but most of the time they are typically the decision-making elites within a bureaucracy. Oftentimes the leadership has no idea this process is even happening.

2. Denominational elites begin installing like-minded individuals within the church bureaucracy and seminaries. At this point, we hear calls for being a “big-tent denomination”.

3. With the seminaries firmly under their control, theological liberals begin sorting prospective pastors / priests. At this point, the vast majority of pastors, and nearly all of the laity are still committed to traditional orthodoxy, but those few liberals are given all of the prestigious pulpits and positions.

4. With key churches, seminaries, and the overall bureaucracy now under the control of liberals, the stench of decay begins to waft around. Theological liberals now begin to ask for “Pastoral sensitivity”, “Tolerance”, and say such things like, “I am firmly committed to the church, I just have a few questions about x, y and z. Can we not show some charity and be allow space for those who question?” Now is the time that the broader church becomes aware of what is happening, traditionalists begin forming parallel institutions and networks of like minded individuals.

5. Theological liberals now begin accusing traditionalists of being the “schismatics” and fomenting division within the church. The church is now divided between three distinct but overlapping factions: Liberals, Traditionalists, and Institutionalists. In most every example I have studied, the Institutionalists side with the Liberals, but there are exceptions.

6. Key doctrines are now openly questioned and what 30 years earlier would have been rank heresy is now promoted by the seminaries and taught to the next generation of pastors. At this point, a majority of pastors are now theological liberals and are basically lying to their congregations about what they really believe.

7. Last ditch efforts by traditionalists to discipline rank heresy are defeated, or the liberals merely offer a few sacrificial lambs. By now, the battle for the church is basically over and liberal ascendancy is secured. Battered and bloodied traditionalists either leave, or retreat to their redoubt parishes. But the seminaries are now overwhelming liberal, and traditionalists are systemically removed from their positions, so much for tolerance.

 

The post Is US Orthodoxy Going Pro-Gay? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Family, Memory, Power

This decade we just left was a revolutionary one for the LGBT movement, both in law and in culture — and, unavoidably, for the rest of us. In a short USA Today piece, Prof. Robert George and Ryan T. Anderson discuss the decade of loss for traditional family advocates, and implicitly forecast what’s ahead. George and Anderson observe that when the decade began, President Obama was still publicly insisting that he did not support same-sex marriage. Then he Grew In Office. Then came Obergefell. And here we are now, in World War T. Excerpts:

Same-sex marriage advocates told the public that they sought only the “freedom to marry.” Same-sex couples were already free to live as they chose, but legal recognition was about the definition of marriage for all of society. It was about affirmation — by the government and everyone else.

It’s unsurprising that once a campaign that used to cry “live and let live” prevailed, it began working to shut down Catholic adoption agencies and harass evangelical bakers and florists. This shows it was never really about “live and let live” — that was a merely tactical stance.

More:

While these were the early effects of redefinition, the more profound consequences will be to marriage itself. Law shapes culture; culture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effectively teaches that mothers and fathers are replaceable, that marriage is simply about consenting adult relationships, of whatever formation the parties happen to prefer. This undermines the truth that children deserve a mother and a father — one of each.

It also undercuts any reasonable justification for marital norms. After all, if marriage is about romantic connection, why require monogamy? There’s nothing magical about the number two, as defenders of “polyamory” point out. If marriage isn’t a conjugal union uniting a man and a woman as one flesh, why should it involve or imply sexual exclusivity? If it isn’t a comprehensive union inherently ordered to childbearing and rearing, why should it be pledged to permanence?

Not only to marital norms, but to childbearing. It is all about choice, and expressing individual preferences, not joining into the ancient dance that came before us, and that we are called to take part in, and teach to the young who come after us. It’s now about nothing but Self. And it is sterile. We have burned down the forest, created a desert, and call it paradise.

One more:

Nearly unthinkable a decade ago, certain medical professionals tell children experiencing gender dysphoria that they are trapped in the wrong body, even that their bodies are merely like Pop-Tarts foil packets, as one expert explained.

Some doctors now prescribe puberty-blocking drugs to otherwise healthy children struggling to accept their bodies. They prescribe cross-sex hormones for young teens to transform their bodies to align with their gender identities.

As part of a government grant-supported study, doctors even performed double mastectomies on adolescent girls — including two 13-year-olds.

These changes weren’t grassroots movements. They’ve come from people wielding political, economic and cultural power to advance sexual-liberationist ideology. The change has been top down — from Hollywood’s portrayal of LGBT characters to business executives boycotting states over religious-freedom laws. Having lost at the ballot box over and over — even in California — activists found new avenues: ideologically friendly courts, federal agencies, big corporations.

Read it all.If you’re one of those people with a habit of saying, nobody has ever explained how all this is going to hurt heterosexual me, this is a good basic place to start. Morality is an ecology. This is the equivalent of injecting something into the groundwater. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it does affect everybody. People who say it doesn’t are lying — perhaps to themselves.

George and Anderson, and all of us who consider ourselves their allies, failed to stop this thing. But this failure ought to be judged as a loss in a war that was unwinnable. George and Anderson fought harder than almost anybody, and with real moral and intellectual excellence. But they, and their allies (I include myself in this number, though my contributions have been very modest compared to theirs), were the equivalent of the mythical Polish cavalry charging into the face of the Wehrmacht. (This didn’t actually happen, but it’s a powerful symbol nonetheless.) We trads were having to fight nothing less than modernity, with its valorization of the sovereign individual, its technocracy, its abandonment of God and transcendence, and an economic force (capitalism) that is both powered by these factors, and also magnifies them. It obliterates everything in its path.

The Marxist social anthropologist Paul Connerton talks here about how forgetting is essential to the development of capitalism:

Yes, this is brought about by the particular stage we’ve reached in modern capitalism. I think that it can be summarized quite simply by saying that there has been a movement from the production of goods to the production of services, in other words instead of consumer durables like cars and refrigerators, what you get is the production of services. One of the effects of this shift in the focus of production is the speeding up of the turnover time of capital, which helps the process of the production of profit. But of course a side effect of this is to speed up the experience of time, and by speeding up time to bring about situations where forgetting is enhanced. Forgetting is absolutely crucial to the operation of this kind of obsolescence and absolutely basic to the functioning of the market.

In his dense little book How Modernity Forgets, Connerton writes:


Connerton’s point is that we have created material conditions that make memory almost impossible. This is what defenders of marriage and family (and, importantly, religious tradition) were up against. I say “were” because our defeat is profound, and I see no realistic hope of victory in the short term. To forget the meaning and function of traditional marriage and family, and why living out that memory in our habits and in the legal and cultural structures of our civilization, is critically important to the frictionless functioning of capitalism. This is something that people on the Left and the Right today don’t see.

As regular readers know, and as I elaborate in my book The Benedict Option , I believe our task is to save what we can as this civilization collapses, and to try to provide a flotilla of arks aboard which our descendants can survive the Flood, and be present to re-found civilization when the long crisis passes. Contributing to this project, I think, will be the long-term value of the work George, Anderson, and their allies have done, courageously fighting the Long Defeat.

Make no mistake: We are well on our way to the dissolution of our civilization via the dissolution of the traditional family. The book to read is Carle Zimmerman’s Family And Civilization, which came out in the 1940s. Zimmerman, of Harvard’s sociology faculty, was one of the greats of sociology of the first half of the 20th century. His book is dated in some respects — he didn’t see the Baby Boom coming, for example; and, as a secularist, he believed that science and rationality could lead contemporary society to turn things around — but its core insights are still valid, and, as we have seen, prophetic. Allan C. Carlson writes a short primer in Zimmerman’s thought.

Basically, Zimmerman’s book is a sociological history of the family, and how family formation, and dissolution, has been inseparable from the rise and fall of civilization. In an essay published in the 2008 ISI reprint of Zimmerman’s book — a book that ought to be on every cultural conservative’s bookshelf — Stephen Baskerville writes:

Here again, political ideology is critical, since radical changes in the family almost always accompanied radical changes in the state. During both the French and Russian revolutions, “Divorce was established at the will of either party without the consent or even the knowledge of the other.” The same change evolved more gradually following the American Revolution and was exported to other Western democracies. We have enacted—again, without public debate or even awareness—the family legislation of the Jacobin and Bolshevik regimes.

This suggests a difference separating Greece and Rome from today. While their intellectual class adopted anti-family lifestyles, it did not have an anti-family ideology. While Zimmerman notes that “Greek and Roman mothers refused to stay home and raise children,” there was nothing so systematic as feminist ideology, now diversifying into gay rights, children’s rights, and more. This ideology is not simply corrosive of the family; it is consciously hostile to it. Further, it is almost entirely unchallenged. For the divorce machinery, unlike other aspects of the sexual agenda, provokes no organized opposition.

So perhaps in the end Zimmerman is correct that intellectuals are critical. It is they, whose Christian predecessors such as Augustine once led the revival of the family, who are not only the first to turn against it but the first to lose the knowledge of what the family is. And once they lose it, there is no one else to provide it. “When the ruling groups—those with prestige—abandon familism, there is simply no agency which can understand the situation or do anything to remedy it” (p. 188). That is why this book is of such enormous importance: It provides precisely the knowledge of the greatest crisis facing Western civilization today, of which our intellectuals have almost no clue.

Bottom line: we are going to have to suffer through this crisis of forgetting, a crisis that will last for decades, even centuries. Our task as traditionalists (cultural conservatives, Christians, Jews, Muslims, what have you) is to fight hard politically and culturally to create the structures within which the memory of family, and of God, can be sustained. I am thinking this morning of a German Catholic man I met in my European travels, who told me that he and his friends have accepted that the institutional Catholic Church will collapse in their lifetime. They are consciously making plans to preserve the faith by having big families, raising them intensely and joyfully in the faith and its traditions, and encouraging them to intermarry. This is their ark. This is their Benedict Option.

One way or the other, it is going to have to be ours. Over this past decade, we have collectively forgotten what marriage is, what family is, and we are well on our way to forgetting what men and women are. Our rich, technologically advanced culture has abolished Man. It is vital to get that understood, and to act. Milan Kundera, the exiled Czech novelist, once wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The power that those fighting for Man today is immense — more powerful, even, than what those who stood against Communism faced.

This is much on my mind today, as I am finishing up the chapter about Cultural Memory in my forthcoming book….

The post Family, Memory, Power appeared first on The American Conservative.

Goodbye To A Decade

So, we arrive at the final day of the decade 2010-2020. I think about where I was on December 31, 2009. My wife and three kids and I were either in our house in Dallas packing up for our January move to Philadelphia, or we were spending the last days in Starhill, Louisiana, with my family there, telling them goodbye before heading back up north, more than a day’s drive from them — meaning that we would see them far less than we had all gotten used to when we moved to Dallas from New York in 2003. When we told them goodbye back in 2009, everybody was a little concerned by my sister Ruthie’s persistent cough, but not that worried.

Six weeks into the new year, 2010, I stood in the bathroom of my apartment in Chestnut Hill, and heard my sobbing mother scream over the phone from the hospital, “Sister’s got cancer!” She lived with Stage Four lung cancer for nineteen months. I can’t say it often enough: she never smoked. But lung cancer got her anyway. She was 42.

 

After her death in September 2011, my wife and I decided to move with our kids to my hometown, to be with the family. We were able to make this move because The American Conservative, which hired me in the summer of 2011, generously agreed to allow me to work from south Louisiana. This magazine has been my home for nine years now, and what a great home it has been! Thanks to its editors, and to you readers, this blog has been getting over one million page views each month, and has been the genesis of three books, and one on the way.

Back in Louisiana, thanks to a December 29, 2011 David Brooks column — I owe that good man more than I can ever repay — I was offered a contract to write The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. (I should also say that my literary agent Gary Morris, with whom I have been since the early 2000s, and with whom I will always be, has been the best advocate that any writer could hope for.) The advance for the book allowed my wife and me, along with several other Orthodox converts in town, to start an Orthodox mission in West Feliciana Parish. It only lasted for three years — we did not attract enough converts to sustain it — but what a beautiful three years it was. Father Matthew Harrington and his family made an unforgettable impression on us all. Here is Father Matthew with my father, Ray Dreher, in the garden outside the church at a crawfish boil.

 

The money from that book also allowed me to realize a dream: taking my family to Paris, my favorite city in all the world. It was there that I discovered the happiest place on earth, a little oyster bar called Huitrerie Régis, to which I have returned several times over the years. If I could choose a last meal on this earth, it would be two dozen raw oysters from this place, and a bottle of cold Muscadet — not the finest wine in the world, but it goes perfectly with raw oysters:

We rented an apartment and spent one month in the city in the autumn of 2012. It was not cheap, but that was money very well spent, for all the memories we made as a family. I have lots of lovely photos from that time, but it is my habit not to post pictures of my children. However, my son Matthew, who is now 20 years old, looks sufficiently different from how he looked then for me to break my rule to post this great shot. It was taken next to the Place St-Sulpice. He looks like a 12-year-old existentialist, staring into the abyss without consolation. In fact, he was tired of all the walking we had done that afternoon, and was miserably contemplating the rest of the trek back to our apartment. This is the Frenchiest thing ever, I think:

The book was published in the spring of 2013, to general acclaim. If you read it, you will know from the final two chapters that my return to Louisiana occasioned the surfacing of deep fault lines in the family — fault lines that, in the end, could neither be healed nor breached. That was an extremely hard lesson for me to learn. The stress of it all gave me chronic mononucleosis, which hit me hard for three years. Here’s a photo of my eyes — sunken and blackened — during that illness, to give you an idea of how sick I was. Never was I so grateful to have a job that allowed me to keep writing from my sick bed:

What began my healing was stumbling into the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. It was divine intervention. I’m confident of that. I was in a Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge one day, in the depths of my illness, when I pulled the Commedia off a shelf and began to read those immortal first lines:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood

For I had lost the straight path.

That’s me, I thought. I had believed that in returning to my home, I was completing a circle, creating harmony. In fact, I had entered a dark wood, and I did not know the way out. I took up Dante and read him, not with literary curiosity, but with the desperation of a lost soul who has found a map that just might get him out of the dark wood.

It worked. I wrote a book about it, How Dante Can Save Your Life, which is a practical testimony to how God’s healing grace can come to us through art and literature. Eventually I made a pilgrimage to Dante’s tomb in Ravenna, where I prostrated myself and thanked God for sending this 14th-century Tuscan poet into my life. And, when nobody there was around, I read Dante aloud:

 

The next year, in the spring of 2015, my Dante book appeared. As you can read in the paperback version, with its extra chapter, my father, who had entered home hospice care, and I were able to reconcile at a deep level. It was through God’s grace, and what He had taught me through Dante. I lived in the bedroom with my dying father during the last week of his life, nursing him, reading to him, and being with him as he drifted towards eternity. Here is my mother and me, comforting him in his last days. She is showing him a photo of his daughter Ruthie, telling him to be brave, that he will see Ruthie soon.

In 2013, some friends and I, under the guidance of Nancy Vinci, started a literary festival: Walker Percy Weekend. We thought it would be a one-off, but people really love it, and it’s still going strong. This past year, our speakers included David Brooks, J.D. Vance, and Walter Isaacson. Here’s Walker and Bunt’s daughter Mary Pratt, with me and James Fox-Smith, a co-founder:

And look who came to Walker Percy Weekend a couple of years ago: Jason Kenney, who went on to become the premier of Alberta, and who will probably be the Prime Minister of Canada one day. Come to drink whisky with us in St. Francisville, and good things will come to you!

That year, 2013, ended with sadness. My childhood friend Miriam Jeurissen died in Amsterdam from cancer, on Christmas Day. She was dear to me; I eulogized her here. Earlier in the year, when it became clear that she was not going to survive, I traveled to Amsterdam to spend some time with her, to tell her how much I loved her, and to say goodbye. Please, friends, if you find yourself in a similar position, get on the plane and go say goodbye. You will not regret it. Other than my sister, this was the first time someone my age, and that close to me, died. That kind of thing really is a turning point in one’s life. One feels one’s own mortality acutely. Look how beautiful and vital she was, even though she was only months from death:

 

In 2014, I had the gift of being able to work with the actor Wendell Pierce on his memoir of growing up in south Louisiana, The Wind In The Reeds. Wendell is an African-American liberal from New Orleans. I am a conservative white guy from the Feliciana hills. But we found common ground in our love for our native Louisiana. Working with Wendell, and getting to know his family story, was one of the great privileges of my life. I can’t urge you strongly enough to read this book (I see it’s only $4.99 on Kindle now). It is a fantastic story of how one of the great actors of our time was formed by a place and a people. And truly, Wendell is one of the kindest, most genuine men you can ever hope to meet. If you love his acting — he was Bunk in The Wire, and currently plays in Jack Ryan, and is winding down a highly praised performance as Willy Loman in the London revival of Death Of A Salesman — you’ll want to read this book. But even if you’ve never seen his work, but simply love New Orleans, read it. You’ll not regret it. As my own father lay dying, I read aloud to him the chapter, from the draft manuscript, about Wendell’s dad, and how he was denied the medals he had earned in World War II, because of racism. That chapter ends with that patriot, old and feeble but unbowed, finally receiving his due in a ceremony at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. I was crying so hard as I read it that I could barely speak. My father was also crying. The tragedy and the triumph of Amos Pierce — what a gift to us.

Also, when he received news that my father was not long for this world, Wendell stopped in an airport as he was headed overseas and recorded a message of encouragement for Daddy, which concluded with him (Wendell) saying the Our Father for my dad’s sake. It meant the world to a dying man. That’s the kind of man Wendell Pierce is.

Over this decade, Julie and I watched our three kids become teenagers, and, in Matt’s case, leave his teenage life for adulthood. I’m so proud of these kids I just don’t know what to say. Matt is applying his love for science and museums (he asked me to take him in 2017 to Munich to the Deutsches Museum, Europe’s greatest science museum, and I did) to university study, hoping to work one day in museum curation. Lucas, now 15 — his special trip when Dad turned 50 was to Siena, to the Palio) has learned to play guitar, and the bass guitar, and rocks hard in a band at Baton Rouge Music School. Nora, at 13, has become a devoted baker, and an aspiring journalist (her Dad’s 50th Birthday trip was to Washington DC, to visit NPR headquarters). Hard to believe that this new decade will be the one in which they all move out of the house, and into their own adult lives.

So: after my father’s passing, and the closing of our Orthodox mission, we moved thirty miles down the road to Baton Rouge. My wife took a job teaching in the wonderful classical Christian school where our kids attended, Sequitur Classical Academy. Besides, we wanted to be close to our new Orthodox parish, which was in Baton Rouge. I turned to working on my next book The Benedict Option, which turned out to be a professional breakthrough for me. The New Yorker did a profile of me, which included this arresting photo by Maud Schuyler Clay, taken in the Starhill Cemetery. It wasn’t the most flattering photo of me ever, but it was incredibly revealing: I have seen that same look on my late father’s place many times, always when he feels overwhelmed, and is trying to think was way through a threat:

The Benedict Option turned out to be popular, and has been translated into 11 languages. I have done lots and lots of traveling with that book — and that turned out to be the occasion of the greatest blessing of this past decade: the many new friends I have made in the US and in Europe. France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Germany, Russia — so many beautiful places, so many wonderful, faithful people. If I tried to post photos of them all, I would be here till midnight. I will let this image of Marco Sermarini, the Doge of the Benedict Option — here’s the first blog post I did about him and the Tipi Loschi — stand for all of them:

Here, by the way, is Bria Sandford, the editor of The Benedict Option, and me at the New York launch of the book. I’m holding the recipe for a cocktail T.K. Bloom invented for the occasion. Sorry the filter was apparently on when this was taken.:

Earlier this year, I signed a contract to write my next book, about the experiences of men and women who survived Communism, and who have warnings and wisdom to impart to us about soft totalitarianism threatening us now. I recently settled on a name for the book, but Bria, who is editing this one too, has to check with her team to see if it’s a go. I’ll let you know when I have the all clear. It will be published in September 2020. Reporting this book has taken me to several countries, and into the homes and stories of some incredibly brave people. I’m going to dedicated the book to a Catholic priest, Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who escaped the Gestapo in his native Croatia, hid in Slovakia, warned Slovak Catholics that Communism was coming, and prepared them, spiritually and otherwise, for resistance. Here I am in Bratislava, in front of a memorial to Father Kolakovic (d. circa 1985), with my Slovak friends Timo Krizka (left) and Juraj Sust (right), both of whom played key roles in helping me report this new book:

For me, perhaps the greatest gift I’ve received from my travels connected to my books is the assurance that we are not alone. Regular readers know that I toggle between gloom and joy, but that I spend perhaps more time in the world of melancholy than in the sunshine. It is always great to get out from behind the laptop, and meet men and women and their families, fellow Christians who see the world with clear eyes, and rejoice anyway. My reporting for this new book has taught me how critically important two things are for enduring hard times: faith and friendship. This past decade has been for me one of loss and disillusionment in big and lasting ways, and some sorrows from which I will likely never recover, but it has also been one of gift and revelation. You never know what’s just around the corner. Just today, I was shopping in the grocery store for a big dish I’m making tonight for guests, and I fell into conversation with the man who turns out to be the honorary consul of France for the Cajun part of Louisiana. He’s from Lyon, and he talked about sauces with such charm and passion that I was reminded of how much I love the French, and how many gifts I have received from that beautiful country.

So, let’s carry on into this next decade, with merry hearts and big appetites! Happy New Year! I invite you all to use the comments section to recall how the decade went for you.

Finally, I want to make mention of my little friend Roscoe, a foundling mutt who is reaching the end of his long happy life, and whose presence brings tenderness to my family’s days. No matter how sad or frustrated any of us might be, Roscoe somehow knows when one of us needs him to jump into our lap. I had no idea that a scrappy little hound could bring so many gifts into one’s life. I wish he would live forever:

The post Goodbye To A Decade appeared first on The American Conservative.

God And Kids At Yale

These are real pic.twitter.com/qL55aBJCDS

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 31, 2019

They sure are. Here’s the Yale Chaplain’s Office web page where you can find out more information about these activities. Screenshot:

Spend some time on the site, and you’ll see that the Yale Chaplain’s Office serves the spiritual needs of America’s young ruling elites by offering them interfaith dialogue, cookies and coloring, community service, coffee, hands-on local tourism, queers at prayer, and a bounce house.

Did somebody let New Atheists program the Yale chaplaincy to make religion look stupid, childish, and completely irrelevant? It’s like a pack of wily dogs deciding to greenlight that Cats movie to make everybody despise felines.

 

Leaving aside religion, I genuinely do not understand this. Why have a chaplaincy at all if this is all you can do? If you were Yale University, wouldn’t you be embarrassed that your undergraduates felt the need to go color, and eat cookies, and get in the bounce house? Imagine James Jesus Angleton going back for alumni weekend, and seeing that. I’m not kidding. I’m thinking of something a foreign friend of mine who did graduate study at Harvard last year told me about his Ivy League experience: that it was bizarre seeing how freakishly fragile the American students were. He said they were totally neurotic, and the professors treated them like … well, though my friend didn’t put it this way, they treated them like the kind of juveniles who would need to relax from the rigors of studying at one of the world’s most elite universities by going to eat snickerdoodles and color pictures of LGBT unicorns.

Nearly seven decades after Yale undergrad William F. Buckley published God And Man At Yale, decrying the institutional feebleness on the matter of Christianity, even though conceding its secularism, one doesn’t expect the Yale chaplaincy to be a hotbed of Bible studies and Eucharistic adoration, or rigorous devotional practices or intellectual inquiry of any religious tradition. But this?

What am I missing?

 

J.J. Angleton: Skull & Bones, not Bounce House

The post God And Kids At Yale appeared first on The American Conservative.

Sex, Money, Power

The Washington Post has another story up about the disgraced Bishop Michael Bransfield, late of Wheeling, West Virginia. Get this: the forcibly retired bishop spent $4.6 million to renovate his mansion, turning it into a luxury bachelor pad in which he slurped Cointreau and hit on sexy male priests and seminarians. From the story:

Nowhere did he spend more church money than on the turn-of-the-century mansion at 52 Elmwood Place in Wheeling, according to investigators.

What started as a modest renovation before Bransfield’s arrival in 2005 soon sprawled, at his insistence, into a costly undertaking, according to the construction manager, architect and four others involved in the project. By the time it was finished, the residence would feature a $20,000 dining room table, a master bath with a heated floor and a climate-controlled wine cellar that could store hundreds of bottles, they said.

“It was always, ‘this’ or ‘that’ is what the bishop wants,” said Jim Baller, who served as the construction manager during most of the renovation.

More:

Bransfield said he wanted a built-in bar modeled after the cocktail lounge in the Hollywood home of entertainer Bob Hope, Baller and two others involved in the renovation said. Bransfield had spoken at Hope’s funeral Mass in 2003 and remained close with Hope’s widow, Dolores, who provided interior decorating advice before her death in 2011.

The basement floor was excavated so the area behind the bar was three steps below grade, putting the person serving drinks at the same height as those who were seated. A person deeply involved in the work said Bransfield told him at the time that he liked to be able to “look directly into the eyes” of the people to whom he was serving drinks.

The story goes on to talk about how Bishop Bransfield would invite priests he was interested in sexually to watch TV with him in the bar, while he would drink Cointreau, a sugary orange liqueur, from a teacup until he got sloshy. One of my Twitter followers wanted to know, snarkily, if, having spent all that money, Bishop Bransfield had hot and cold Cointreau faucets installed.

The diocese, which entails one of the poorest states in America, offloaded the entire property for only $1.2 million, declining to list it publicly. Sounds from the Post story like they sold it to an insider, who got a fantastic deal.

The waste of money was not really what got Bransfield forced into retirement by the Vatican. It was his sexual harassment of priests and seminarians. But here’s the connection: the bishop was all-powerful, and nobody — not senior priests, not laymen — had the guts to stand up to this dirty old man. These poor low-level clergymen had to endure that drunken pervert’s advances, because he held power.

It’s the same story with former Cardinal Ted McCarrick: money, sex, and power. It shouldn’t surprise us that men who feel at liberty to waste other people’s money to satisfy their lust for luxury would grant themselves leave to take other people’s sexual dignity for the same purposes. If ever the full story is told about Vatican corruption, I am certain that we will learn that the nexus of sex and money at the summit of Church power explains it all. In fact, a priest friend overheard a well-connected Vatican insider respond, upon first hearing the McCarrick news, that the Uncle Ted case “could bring the whole thing crashing down.” My source didn’t know what “the whole thing” meant in this case. I think about that line, though, when I wonder why, after all this time, Pope Francis still hasn’t produced the promised thorough investigation of McCarrick.

I bring this up because of this thread by a Christian college professor I follow. She’s commenting on this NYT story on the pervasiveness on the Internet of sexualized images of children:

Here’s a link to the Lincoln Cottage piece; it’s about sexual abuse on the plantation. Enslaved black women had no protection from their white masters. Excerpts:

The particulars of a plantation and a movie studio are certainly different. Nonetheless, predatory behavior, whether in a field of cotton or at an afterhours party, retains an eerie echo across the eras. Perpetrators, then and now, have used economic coercion and physical force to subdue victims; they demonstrate a brazen entitlement to the bodies of others; and rely upon threats of retaliation and shame to silence victims.

Also prevalent in both the modern era and the past, has been the knowledge of bad actors being met with a lack of acknowledgement from society. What we today term “open secrets” were described by white Southerner Mary Chesnut in 1861 as “the thing we cannot name.” Chesnut continued by noting the delusion needed to ignore sexual misconduct: “[E]very lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think.”

Read the whole piece to get an idea of the pain and cruelty that enslaved black women suffered.

This evil outlasted slavery. Over two decades ago, my great-grandmother, long since passed, told me how hard it was for her when she and her husband moved into our small Southern town during the Great Depression. Times were so hard that she took a job as a telephone operator to help feed the family. Very few women worked outside them home back then. She told me that the upper-class women in town — the wives of doctors, lawyers, and the merchant class — looked down on her, and women like her, for their labor.

“But everybody knew that their husbands, all of them, had black women,” said my great-grandmother. She meant sexual partners. “Those wives knew it too, but they couldn’t say anything about it. They just had to live with it.”

My ancestor said this to highlight the hypocrisy of the well-off women, who, however much they “demeaned” themselves by working outside the home, at least had the blessing of husbands who didn’t have mistresses. In that Jim Crow society, though, for a white woman’s husband to have a black mistress was considered especially shameful.

I thought about that for a long time, though. No black woman in that town could have refused the sexual advances of a white man. She was powerless. And no black man could have defended his wife, his sister, or his neighbor from a rapey white man. It would have gotten him killed. Sexual abuse was a privilege white men had over black women — and, if you think about it, over their fathers, brothers, and husbands, who had to remain passive as their women were raped by the power-holders. It is possible, of course, that some of these black women really loved their white paramours. But how could you tell? It didn’t matter if they did or didn’t, they had to submit. The social order of the time commanded it.

This was not in slave times. This was fewer than a hundred years ago. Think too of how powerless children were back then — not just altar boys, but all children — if a male sexual predator (of whatever race) came after them. I’ve mentioned in this space in the past something a sex abuse victim in New York told me back in 2002: that as a Catholic schoolboy in the 1960s, a priest at his Catholic school in Queens raped him (he was 12). He went home and told his working-class mother. She slapped him and told him never again to say such terrible things about a priest. The hierarchy inside that woman’s head was such that the idea that a priest would molest a boy was unthinkable. The power that malicious clergy had in those days because of society’s prejudices was diabolical. And not just clergy — I can think of older people I have known personally who had to endure incest as children, because the social order under which they lived — particularly within the family, but also in general — could not bring itself to contemplate such violation. So those without power suffered quietly. And still do, in a different way.

When I came home from Russia last month, I was thinking about how moved I had been by that country, but also shaken up by it. How can a people that have been so traumatized by the 20th century recover? How long will it take? Can it ever be done? If you have ever known well someone who has suffered from severe trauma (sexual assault, child abuse, PTSD from war, etc.), you know that this is not something most people can easily put behind them. What about a society? A people? We have some experience treating trauma in individuals. Can this be done with entire societies?

Anyway, I just want to highlight Karen Swallow Prior’s point about sexual abuse of the powerless, including children, being an enduring part of human society. There is something in human nature that renders some people, especially men, unfit to hold and to exercise power. Not every power holder — and probably not most power holders — are abusers of any sort. But the experience of history ought to lead us to keep a keen watch on those to whom much has been given.

The post Sex, Money, Power appeared first on The American Conservative.

Conservatism, Inc: Managers Of Terminal Decline

It’s getting to the point where you really cannot make anything up. From the UK:

Proud dad Reuben Sharpe today tells how HE gave birth to a miracle baby in Britain’s most modern family.

The 39-year-old transitioned to a man 12 years ago.

But he still had maternal instincts and six years ago stopped taking testosterone in the hope of one day having a child.

And that dream came true when he and partner Jay had a bouncing baby.

Jay is non-binary – so does not identify as male or female.

The sperm donor was a trans woman… and even the DOCTOR was transgender.

And while a handful of other UK men have fallen pregnant after transitioning from a woman, Reuben and Jay are among the first couples to speak out about their remarkable journey.

Pictures and everything. Just one happy family. Two biological females, one presenting as a transman, the other, who had her breasts lopped off, as non-binary. And their baby … well, the newspaper story doesn’t state the sex of the child. Which I guess is how these weirdos want it.

I can hear the liberal caterwaul now: “How is that non-traditional family going to hurt yours, you bigot?” Well, let’s see.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Augusto del Noce, the Italian political philosopher, whose work has been introduced to the English-speaking world through the hard work of his translator, Prof. Carlo Lancellotti (see here). He’s a great follow on Twitter: @_CLancellotti . This morning on Twitter, Prof. Lancellotti highlighted this long essay in Tempi by Luca del Pozzo as the best recent summary he has seen of Del Noce’s thought and its meaning. The piece is in Italian, but if you browse with Chrome, it will give you a rough translation.

In these paragraph, which I’ve cleaned up a bit from the Google translation, Del Pozzo (and Del Noce) talk about the significance of the Sexual Revolution:

Therefore, the [Wilhelm] Reich buzzword adopted by the ’68ers was: sexual liberation. But this implied breaking down the repressive social institution par excellence, that is, the traditional monogamous family as the bearer of the idea of ​​tradition, that is, of an order of truth immutable to, precisely, betray , transmit, deliver from one generation to another. If in fact there is no order of immutable values ​​and meta-empirical truths, it follows that the family, appointed to transmit that order, no longer has reason to exist. The reason for such fury against the family is clear [says Del Noce]:

“The idea of ​​an indissoluble monogamous marriage and the correlatives (modesty, purity, continence) are linked to that of tradition which, in turn, as” betraying “is to deliver, presupposes that of an objective order of immutable and permanent truths … But if we separate the idea of ​​tradition from that of objective order, it must necessarily appear as the “past”, as “what is overcome”, as “the dead man who wants to suffocate the living”; as what must be denied in order to regain psychic balance. The idea of ​​indissoluble marriage must be replaced by free, renewable or soluble union at any time. We cannot speak of sexual perversions, indeed homosexual forms, male or female, must be considered as pure forms of love.”

To make this more clear: if there are no objective, transcendent truths, only human desires, then the traditional family can only be seen as an obstacle to be conquered for the sake of liberating those desires.  More from the Mirror story:

The couple are confident their family situation will be seen as normal as the baby grows up surrounded by like-minded people in their home town of Brighton. Jay says: “It’s about having the right kind of community around us so they are able to see different kinds of family set-ups.

“All we can do is try to be really open from the start with them and other people around us – give them the best chance.”

And although Reuben carried the baby this time, Jay would be open to doing so in the future. They plan to marry next year and are keen not to be boxed off into mum and dad roles.

This is how the memory of what it means to be a mother, a father, a child, and a family, is erased from our culture. The radicalism of this is without precedent in human history. I do not understand why we’re just taking this in passing. We are collectively destroying the only stable basis for human civilization — and we call it progress, and celebrate it in our mass media. And in England, where this trio lives, if you publicly deny that they are exactly who they claim to be, you could stand denounced by a court for possessing opinions “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

This is what that family in England has to do with you.

This cannot stand. Reality will eventually reassert itself. Family, like manhood and womanhood, is written into the fabric of our nature. But first, we have to endure an immense amount of destruction and suffering.

I am gobsmacked by the silence of most religious leaders, and conservative politicians, in the face of this revolution. If you won’t defend the family, you won’t defend civilization. These people, these professional conservatives, will not defend the traditional family, or even men-as-men, and women-as-women. Just like that, the family, man, and woman, all being erased, with barely a peep from the Right. And even more critically, they will not defend the few people who do take a risk to defend these permanent things. They are desperate to avoid being called bigots. They are content to proffer themselves as the more competent and restrained managers of our terminal decline.

Tucker Carlson recently gave a magnificent rant on the uselessness of conservative politicians in the face of our cultural collapse. Excerpts:

Carlson also said he does not hold anything personally against those places, like the Heritage Foundation or AEI or others, but that this issue exposes how there is nobody defending the speech rights of dissenters from the conventional wisdom or status quo.

“By the way, I have a million friends at Heritage and AEI and they’re super nice people there and I agree with them on most things,” Carlson said. “I’m not saying they’re the most evil people. I’m not saying they’re the main problem. I don’t want to overstate it. But what I am saying is they’re supposed to be looking out for our interests and protecting them, and they’re not. And by the way, who is? So, if you’re a conservative right now—or a whatever, I don’t even know what the word is—maybe that’s not the word. But if you’re not ‘with the program,’ if you don’t believe ‘diversity is our strength,’ and if you don’t repeat mindlessly the catechism and nod with bovine compliance, if you’re out of step with the ‘mainstream’ in public, who’s stepping up to protect your right to say what you think and think what you think and live in this country without being hurt? Like, who’s protecting you? The answer is nobody. The president is not protecting you, that’s for sure. The Congress is not protecting you. These think tanks aren’t protecting you. Who’s protecting you? Who’s on your side? I’m serious. I’m sensitive to this because I’m serious and I live in this world and you see someone step up and say something interesting and then have their lives taken away from them. They can’t talk in public and then they can’t have a job and they’re discredited and then what?”

More:

“Conservatives need to—I’ll tell you this, I’ve lived in D.C. since 1985, okay? And I’ve been a right-winger the whole time, so I know a lot about this world, okay? I’m not guessing, I have personal knowledge about it,” Carlson said. “But increasingly they [conservatives] are very good at whining about how biased everyone is against them, which is a very unattractive quality I think. When my children whine and complain about how biased people are against them, I tell them to be quiet. I don’t like that. It’s not good for you to whine and engage in self-pity. But what they [conservatives] are not good at is setting their own terms. They let the left set the terms. So some leftwing activist group will show up and say ‘you’re no longer allowed to say X.’ I don’t know what it is, just pick something. Out with ‘the Orient,’ in with ‘Asia.’ Maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s not okay. Maybe it’s a good change, or maybe it’s a bad change. But the fact is they [the left] decide unilaterally what the changes are and then everyone else kind of has to go along with it. There’s no vote. It’s like the left decides what you’re allowed to say. Conservatives, the institutions, have found themselves in this position where they’re like trustees in a prison, where they’re carrying out the orders of the warden. The warden in this case is like the institutional left. Why are we doing this? Why are we playing along? It’s especially, it’s almost like the left is trying to see how ludicrous they can make it. You send out a tweet saying ‘men can menstruate too.’ Anyone who laughs is punished. When that happens, they’re challenging us. They’re basically saying ‘we can make you,’ this is 1984, this is Winston Smith, ‘we can make you say this. And then we can make you believe it. Watch us.’ ‘Repeat after me: Men can menstruate too.’ Then after a while you’re like ‘yeah, men can menstruate too, for sure.’ That’s when you’re a zombie. That’s when your soul is gone. That’s when they’re fully in charge of you. You’re just hunk of flesh, and you’re like a ventriloquist dummy at that point. That’s what happens.”

Yep.

UPDATE: Father Jim Sichko, commissioned by Pope Francis as a full-time “papal missionary for mercy,” has blocked me from reading his tweets, but a reader posted this one from him in the comments section:

UPDATE.2: Let me clarify that Tucker Carlson’s jeremiad was not aimed specifically at silence in the face of anti-family trends, but of the general unwillingness of professional conservatives to take controversial stands. I should say that one luminous exception to this is Ryan T. Anderson at the Heritage Foundation, who does fantastic and courageous work on sex, gender, the family, and religious liberty.

UPDATE.3: Leszek Kolakowski, in his essay “Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie,” writes of “the great ambition of totalitarianism — the total possession and control of human memory.” It is unattainable, he says, because “the power of words over reality cannot be unlimited since, fortunately, reality imposes its own unalterable conditions.” But “it can achieve its goals only if it succeeds in eliminating the resistance of both natural and mental reality, in other words, in cancelling reality altogether.”

That man had a baby is a phrase that attempt to cancel natural and mental reality. It will work for a while, but not forever, because 2 + 2 does not equal 5.

The post Conservatism, Inc: Managers Of Terminal Decline appeared first on The American Conservative.

Who Is Going After American Jews?

I’ve been offline most of today (Sunday), and … that was a smart move. Going onto Twitter and seeing some left-wingers blaming Donald Trump for the anti-Semitic violence in the New York area is infuriating. Look what Seth Mandel found:

Incredible ghoulishness. pic.twitter.com/8ll7UvHAJa

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) December 29, 2019

A scan of Twitter — I don’t recommend doing this — finds a shocking number of tweets by people, including left-wing Jews — blaming Donald Trump and white supremacy for the latest spate of anti-Semitic attacks in the US, which have been centered around New York, and focused particularly on Orthodox Jews, who are the most identifiable as Jews because of their distinct mode of dress. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Jewish newspaper The Forward, is fed up with this kind of thing. After citing numerous examples of the anti-Semitic assaults over the last two years, she writes:

Almost as horrifying as the attacks themselves is the seeming inability of those whose job it is to protect the vulnerable to figure out what is causing them, or how to stop it from happening over and over.

After the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Shabbat that killed 11 people last year, and another fatal shooting at a shul in Poway, California six months later, one often heard that the great threat to Jews – even the only threat – comes from white supremacy. Conventional wisdom said it was the political right, and the right’s avatar in the White House, that was to blame for the rising levels of hate against Jews.

But the majority of the perpetrators of the Brooklyn attacks, and the suspects in Jersey City — who were killed in a shootout with the police — and now Monsey, were not white, leaving many at a loss about how to explain it or even talk about it. There is little evidence that these attacks are ideologically motivated, at least in terms of the ideologies of hate we are most familiar with.

And therein lies the trouble with talking about the violent attacks against Orthodox Jews: At a time when ideology seems to rein supreme in the chattering and political classes, the return of pogroms to Jewish life on American soil transcends ideology. In the fight against anti-Semitism, you don’t get to easily blame your traditional enemies — which, in the age of Trump, is a non-starter for most people.

Of course, the rise in anti-Semitism is not incidental to the times we live in. While the Brooklyn attackers are, at least according to demographic trends, extremely unlikely to be Trump supporters, our president, who has a penchant for anti-Semitic tropes, is a conspiracy theorist, and anti-Semitism often manifests as a conspiracy theory about secretive Jewish power.

You can see here that she dances around the unspeakable truth. Interestingly, back in January, she wrote a column criticizing Jews for being too hard on black leaders over anti-Semitism. 

Seth J. Frantzman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, is more blunt. Excerpts:

Hatred of Jews spans the white supremacist far right and the black supremacist far right and milieus in between. The difference is that society condemns and confronts comments by the white supremacists. Even with white supremacists, after the Poway and Pittsburgh attacks, we did not delve deeply into the wider community of hate online. “We got our man,” in finding the perpetrator, and that was enough. When dealing with the wider world of antisemitism in the US, that crosses racial lines, it is more difficult to confront. In the US, since it is difficult to accept that minorities might also be racist, the elephant in the room of black antisemitism is not mentioned. Too often, African American officials make openly antisemitic statements without fear of reaction. A school board member attacked “brutes of the Jewish community” after the Jersey City attack.

More:

[It] appears that there is a deep antisemitic milieu not dissimilar to the way white supremacist antisemitism spreads online and among communities, fueling hatred of Jews among other American minority groups, specifically some black Americans. This antisemitism has been around for decades, gaining strength in the 1990s as Jews began to be blamed for the slave trade.

This trend in black antisemitism isn’t entirely unknown. It is discussed here and there, usually with excuses. For instance The Forward ran an article claiming that while “White antisemites are motivated by a hatred of Jews and a desire  for power, black anti-Semites are motivated by anger over gentrification, police brutality and slavery.” The article claimed that Jews “like all white people, part of the racist system that keeps black people under the foot of society.” This is the way a Jewish newspaper explained hatred of Jews. It defined Jews as “white” and gave credence to the idea that antisemitism is motivated by “police brutality and slavery.” This is a window into a very real worldview that openly says Jews are behind police brutality and slavery and gentrification.  In New York the police have stepped up their presence after attacks, but even that has been condemned as sending too many police to a neighborhood of “people of color.” Now Jews will be blamed for the police presence too instead of someone struggling against the violent antisemitism and inter-racial marches of solidarity against it.

And:

A review of the discussion about the New York City attacks reveals an America that has trouble adjusting to and describing antisemitism when it comes from unexpected perpetrators. This is partly because the general view of racism in the US is that racism is not just about racism but about power. That is why in the US people look for racism in “white privilege” and the way racist views can be perpetuated even through code words and social settings and institutions. Confronted with the idea that minority groups are also racist, such as Hispanics using the n-word, there is a struggle to come to grips with how to define and confront. With the Jewish community there has been an agenda to argue over its relative “whiteness” and insofar as Jews are then removed from the intersectional agenda of minority groups fighting white privilege, Jews become either a separate category or part of the oppressive majority. This is odd but it is part of a wider agenda to assert that Zionism is racism and Jews are somehow linked to far-right groups through Israel and Israel is a modern apartheid colonialist structure. These ideas didn’t inform the Jersey City killings, but they are part of the milieu that informs those who might excuse the attacks.

Read it all.

Jew hatred is a hideous problem coming from extremists on both the Left and the Right. But as usual with the American media, it can’t talk about acts of hatred that violate the basic left-wing narrative that holds whites and “whiteness” responsible. Here’s a bog-standard turdlet of idiocy by a widely-published freelancer:

The suggestion that the Jewish left is unconcerned with attacks on American Jews is grotesque. We’re trying to rid the country of our gravest threat—Republican lawmakers.

— Elon Green (@elongreen) December 29, 2019

Earlier this year, writing in The Bulwark, Cathy Young explored the undeniable fact that anti-Semitism finds a home on both the Left and the Right.  I don’t agree with everything she writes. To be specific, the case of George Soros is a difficult one, because though Soros certainly receives anti-Semitic criticism, there’s a lot of legitimate criticism of his activism that has nothing to do with his being Jewish, and that is labeled anti-Semitic as a way of delegitimizing the criticism. That said, she’s right here:

In both cases, there are plenty of people who point fingers only at the other side while using their camp’s Jewish-friendly position, whether it’s support for Israel or support for strong civil rights safeguards, as a shield. In both cases, the label should be used carefully to avoid crying wolf or stifling legitimate debate.

I feel pretty certain that we are

a) going to have a lot of public discussion about the rise in violent anti-Semitism in this country, and

b) very little of that discussion is going to be honest or useful.

Then again, we live in a culture in which stating the belief that to be a male or a female is at its core a matter of genetics is enough to get you fired or made a pariah. When getting to the truth of an issue requires having to violate the strictures of identity politics, you may be sure that the truth will remain safely obscured behind walls of cant and sentimentality.

The post Who Is Going After American Jews? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Magic Blanket

You’re going to laugh at this. My wife and kids gave me a weighted blanket for Christmas. I have long known that I have sensory issues. For people like me, weighted blankets are supposed to give a better night’s sleep. Why? There’s science behind that. 

My oldest kid has sensory issues too, more serious than mine. We found this out when he was only seven or eight. My wife learned some techniques to help him get focused when he was sensorily overwhelmed. One of them worked on me, to an amazing degree. Once in those days we were in an IKEA in Dallas, and my wife noticed something wrong with me. I had a slight headache, and was feeling sleepy, and slightly disoriented. I thought maybe I was getting sick.

“Hold still,” she said to me. Then she came up behind me, threw her arms around me, and squeezed me tightly (but not too tightly), for about 12 seconds.

When she let me go, it was like she had given me an injection of something. Suddenly that blurry, logy feeling I had was gone. I mean gone.

“What did you do?!” I asked.

She told me she applied a therapeutic technique she had been taught for helping our kid. Temple Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum (sensory disorders usually accompany this) uses a “hug machine” that she invented to apply deep pressure to herself. She has written about how deep pressure has been documented by scientists to calm people with sensory disorders.

This is the same theory behind weighted blankets. My sensory issues aren’t that serious, so I didn’t really think too hard about weighted blankets. I bought one a couple of years ago, but it was too heavy, and unpleasant to use, so I got rid of it right away. And that was that.

This one — a non-cheap Sharper Image model my wife bought at CVS for half-price in the days just before Christmas — is perfect. It’s 20 pounds, which is slightly less than is recommended for someone of my size (one pound of blanket for every ten pounds of you), but just perfect. I’ve been using it since Christmas night, and I have been sleeping like a rock. Waking up every morning feeling totally refreshed.

Because I got up so early this morning, and was feeling a little sensorily undone after lunch for some reason, I decided I would get under the blanket to do some writing before the LSU game this afternoon. After about 15 minutes under the thing, I began to feel very calm … and decided to catch a little nap before kickoff.

I woke up four hours later, in a dark house. The third quarter was nearly over. I’m telling you, I was zonked. And thought I regret that I didn’t get to see the Tigers stomp OU in the first 3/4 of the game, I’m really excited to have discovered such a powerful tool to help me sleep. In fact, I didn’t know how bad my sleeping really was until getting this blanket. It affects me with almost the power of a sleeping pill.

The body is a weird thing. And the Force is strong with this blanket. I don’t know if there’s something about the way this particular blanket is constructed — again, it’s a Sharper Image model — or if this is something you could get with any blanket, but man, for someone who struggles to sleep, this thing has been worth every penny my wife paid for it.

 

The post The Magic Blanket appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Like The Hide Of A Gator’

Terrific piece by Chuck Culpepper of The Washington Post, about the deep ‘Down The Bayou’ accent of LSU head football coach Ed Orgeron. He’s from Soud Lafoosh. Excerpt:

“He is just the embodiment of what ‘Down The Bayou’ means,” said Ian McNulty, the food writer for the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, and the author of a book, “Louisiana Rambles: Exploring America’s Cajun and Creole Heartland.” “‘Down The Bayou’ is not a place. It’s not a sense of direction. It’s not something to which you give people driving directions. It’s sense of place and a sense of bearing. … Somebody’s character is ‘Down The Bayou.’ It means deeply rooted, way out there, deep in Louisiana. It’s not a vector point. It’s a mind-set. It’s a framework for identity. ‘Down The Bayou’ is who somebody is, or what something is.”

In Orgeron’s voice, McNulty said, a listener might detect “incredible warmth, but you also feel this power behind it, this strength.” He likens it to a bear both cuddly and physically capable of dislodging your limbs. He said: “In that voice you can hear a defiance against the wind. You can hear a voice that shouts against the wind, that’s going to do things his way. It’s a big voice, but it’s not a scary voice. Firm, but it’s not harsh. It’s weathered. Callused, but not without tenderness. You know he could lift up a 55-gallon oil drum on the derrick if he had to. He also could brush back a newborn baby’s hair.”

Read it all.

You like my purple and gold Coach O Christmas ornaments? My friend Kevin makes them — order yours here. You know you’re going to want them for your tree next year.

McNulty says the texture of Coach O’s voice is like “the hide of the gator.” Which is the perfect description. I feel that Coach O is the kind of man who wakes up each and every morning, and his first thought is, with complete earnestness,”How ’bout dem Tigahs!”

The post ‘Like The Hide Of A Gator’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump Vs. The Generals

This is going around Twitter now. It’s an excerpt from a short Business Insider piece based on the new Peter Bergen book: Trump And His Generals: The Cost Of Chaos:

“I’ve heard plenty of ideas from a lot of people, but I want to hear it from the people on the ground,” Trump said at a press conference at the time.

One day after the meeting, Trump was said to have met with senior U.S. military officials in the Situation Room at the White House. In the meeting, Trump said the U.S. service members he spoke with “knew a lot more than you generals” and added that “we’re losing” in Afghanistan.

Trump also compared the senior military leaders with a consultant from a Manhattan restaurant from the late 1980s. Instead of heeding the advice of an overpaid consultant who merely suggested expanding a kitchen for renovations, Trump argued that it would have been more prudent, and cheaper, to solicit the advice of waiters from a restaurant.

One of the first groups of Afghanistan veterans to speak with Trump were U.S. Navy SEALs who spoke critically of the war.

“It’s unwinnable. NATO’s a joke. Nobody knows what they’re doing,” the SEALs told Trump, according to Bergen’s book. “We don’t fight to win. The morale is terrible. It’s totally corrupt.”

If true, this is impressive on Trump’s part. Two weeks ago, Trump announced the planned withdrawal of 4,000 US troops from Afghanistan. He is said to want all American soldiers out by the 2020 election. Good. We have been beaten there. There is no shame in knowing that you’ve been beaten. The shame is sending American soldiers to suffer wounds and to die because senior military and civilian officials can’t admit that they were wrong.

The post Trump Vs. The Generals appeared first on The American Conservative.