Rod Dreher's Blog, page 201

God Love Ye, Shay Bradley

Careful, this clip is slightly NSFW, but chances are your American co-workers won’t understand the word fookin’. Shay Bradley is — was — a funny guy:

Shay Bradley from Ireland died October 8, but at his funeral he came back to life. “Hello? Hello?” he said as his coffin was being lowered. “Let me out, it’s fucking dark in here!” He goes on, knocking from within the coffin, and then serenading his friends and family. Apparently, Bradley had always loved pranks, and pulled this last one on the day of his funeral.

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The Fight For Monica Arbery

Today’s New York Times had a big feature about Will Arbery and his amazing new play, Heroes Of The Fourth Turning (which is onstage in NYC through October 27 — tickets here, if any are left). The piece mentions First Things editor Rusty Reno having been seen in the audience at a recent performance:

Reno, who is friendly with Arbery’s parents, said that even just presenting anti-abortion and anti-L.G.B.T. views onstage without signposting those airing them as villains, or satirizing them, was “huge.”

“They disagree among themselves in profound ways,” Reno said of the characters, not all of whom admire President Trump. “But there’s no liberal reassuring the audience by correcting them.”

That’s true. Having read the play, I had no idea (until this story) that Will Arbery was not a mass-going Catholic anymore (he tells the reporter that he struggles with faith), nor a political conservative. To me, it’s a sign of his skill as an artist, and his empathy as a human being, to present his conservative Catholic characters as complex figures, not as figures of mockery.

And then there was this:

One person he drew on was his younger sister Monica, whose ordeal with chronic Lyme disease and experiences working in a home for underprivileged pregnant women inspired the character of Emily. (She opposes abortion, but her belief — hotly contested by Teresa — that someone who works for Planned Parenthood can still be a good person makes Emily the play’s closest thing to a liberal foil.)

I know the Arbery family a bit, and had completely forgotten that back in 2016, Will and his sister Julia set up a Go Fund Me for Monica, who was extremely sick and near death for a long time. The first post started like this:

My name’s Will, and my sister Monica has been sick for too long. She’s only 24 years old, and she wants to have a life. What she has done with her life so far has been remarkable —  she was a counselor and coordinator at a halfway house for pregnant underpriveleged women in Chicago. This felt like her life’s calling — but she had to leave it for yet another medical emergency in a string of medical emergencies. Over the years, the diagnosis has been hard to pin down: Crohns? Colitis? Endometriosis?At hospitals spanning the USA, there has not been a consensus. It seemingly never ends. Right now, she’s bedridden, emaciated, and more than anything, exhausted.

But now there’s a surgery that might be able to help: laparoscopic surgery. But in order to get that surgery, she first needs to get more healthy. And in order to get more healthy, she needs to stop stressing about her absurd medical debt.

I’m raising money because she’s flat broke, and she has nearly $20,000 in medical debt. With the new surgery coming up, she’s at her wit’s end about how to pay for this. She has very little energy, and she’s just trying to get better. Meanwhile, she’s having to worry about debt collectors calling her to receive payment from her hospital stays (weeks & months at a time), radiology, CT scans, X-rays, ER visits, and specialist doctor visits. The hospital stays and radiology cost the most, but all of it is eating at her.

The money will be used to pay off the debt directly and immediately, so that she’s no longer hounded by debt collectors and can focus on her health. The rest of the money will be used for her upcoming laparoscopic surgery, which hopefully will provide real answers for her. We need the funds as soon as possible.

Here is an update from the page from November 2016, written by Monica herself:

My doctor called me on Tuesday night and said I have the most advanced case of Lyme he has ever seen- I saw the chart, and it is literally off the charts. For real. The infection goes beyond the scope of the chart. With that, on a more difficult note, this means that I have one to four co-infections that are extremely dangerous, as my doctor has told me. We are not sure which ones yet. And, my white blood cell count is low and with this new finding, the likelihood of me contracting cancer is upwards of 80%. The co-infections and the Lyme bacteria (which I may have in addition to auto immune disease because I may have been bitten by a tick or gotten through a needle- it is spreading more like AIDS now) are so sneaky and painful and have begun to mutate my cells, which is why the cancer risk is so high. The small dose of chemo I was on was not enough to prevent this. Because of all of this, and because there is no advanced Lyme treatment center/ good preventative and active cancer center in Wyoming, I will need to leave the state ASAP and be admitted into a center that can give me daily IV infusions/oxygen, physical heart therapy (that doesn’t sound like a real thing) and laser therapy for the neurological damage and all the organ damage to try to save me from this. There is one in Newport Beach, California- and I’m waiting on a call from my doctor to let us know what the plan is. We are still waiting to hear back from them, but hopefully I’m admitted- I think I will be- and can fly this next week.

Before I got the call, dad told me that the Knights of Malta would like to give me a trip to Lourdes. I’ve always wanted to go, and I think, more than ever, now is the time. This has attacked all my organs- especially right now, my liver, my skin, my heart, and my brain. It is a strange, strange thing to be aware that your brain is declining. So I pray I can go to Lourdes and I have so much hope that my body could be healed there– and if it isn’t, that God will heal my soul. I am heartbroken, devastated, terrified, hopeful, peaceful- all at once. I think the whole family is. I have never responded to a diagnosis like this before. I didn’t know Lyme was so risky, I am angry we didn’t find it years ago, I am frustrated that we were doing the wrong treatment which has made things worse. But I am also deeply hopeful, and I believe I can be terrified and trust completely that this is and will be a good, good thing- at the same time.

I am thankful for all those who urged me to get tested for Lyme once again. And I urge anyone who is chronically ill to get tested with a GOOD test like iSpot. New studies are revealing more and more deeply troubling facts of Lyme and their malignant co-infections. Lyme and its co-infections can show up as M.S., Lupus, all auto immune diseases, ALS, fibromyalgia and so many more. It is possible to have a existing condition and then get Lyme, of course. But I think the reason we are so rattled and scared is because I have had Lyme possibly since I was 10 years old when a tick bit my scull in Wisconsin, and the symptoms can show up years later– so I have late term Lyme, and it is highly likely it has caused irreparable damage. We pray it hasn’t.

There’s a lyric from a song I love: ‘Is there a blanket of pain that I can wrap up in?’ I feel wrapped in that blanket of pain and fear and loss. I feel heavy as the world. I have never felt this way. I have never known such physical and spiritual pain. But I do know some things for sure, like theses things: that each time I have experienced loss or pain, it has just made room for something so much better than I can fathom, and I ultimately end up so deeply grateful for it. So I am grateful now, even as the fear and darkness seem to have won- I know they haven’t, I know they never will, and I will fight as hard as I can.

I’ve been reading through the updates from over the years, and have been just blown away by the suffering this poor young woman has had to endure. I’m going to go back and re-read the play, and the lines of the Emily character with this in mind.

Turns out that before he was a successful Off Broadway playwright, Will Arbery made this short movie for his sister’s Go Fund Me page, with his iPhone. This was filmed during the depths of her illness:

There hasn’t been a Go Fund Me update on Monica since 2018, but I just saw that she got married this past summer! Glory to God for all things! I checked with Will today to ask how his sister is doing. He says her health is much better, but she is about to undergo some serious bloodwork, and, like many newlyweds, is struggling financially. Her Go Fund Me page is still active, so if you are feeling compassionate, please send some love to Monica Arbery Corcoran.

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Bill Barr: Religious Liberty Warrior

Last week, US Attorney General William Barr gave an extraordinary speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame Law School. I have not been able to locate a transcript, and only found time to watch it this morning. Here’s a video of the entire thing. The speech itself begins at about the four-minute mark.

The AG begins by talking about the capacity for self-government, meaning not the form of administration of a liberal democracy, but the ability of individuals to master their own passions, and subject them to reason. Can we handle freedom? That, says Barr, is a question that preoccupied the Founders.

No society can exist without the capacity to restrain vice, he goes on to say. If you depend only on the government to do this, you get tyranny. (This, by the way, is what’s happening in China; many Chinese actually support the tyrannical Social Credit System, because communism destroyed civil society and social trust.) But, says Barr, licentiousness is another form of tyranny. People enslaved by their own appetites make community life impossible. (This, I would say, is what we are more endangered by in America today … and it will ultimately call forth tyranny, Chinese-style.)

Barr offers this quotation from Edmund Burke:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”

Why is religion a public good? Because, says Barr, it “trains people to want what is good.” It helps to frame a society’s moral culture, and instills moral discipline. No secular creed has emerged that can do what religion does, he says. And by casting religion out, we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality.

“What we call ‘values’ today are nothing more than mere sentimentality, drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity,” says the AG.

Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.

“This is not decay,” he said. “This is organized destruction.” He named secularists in academia, media, and elsewhere as figures who are not neutral at all, but have rather inculcated a kind of religiosity in their own project of destroying religion. They conduct their own inquisitions and excommunications for heresy.

Then Barr said something, almost in passing, that in truth deserves a lot more attention by religious and philosophical observers: that we have created a popular culture in which we the people are “too distracted” to take these questions seriously. Just last night, readers, I received an e-mail from one of you who said that “the really striking thing of our age is the complete anesthesia of religious questions.” That’s true. This, I think, is where I would push back against AG Barr somewhat. It’s not only that the secularists want to suppress religion; it’s also that many of us aren’t interested in religion in the first place. To be clear, religious questions — that is, questions of transcendence and ultimate truth — can’t be suppressed forever. But we seem to be doing a great job of avoiding them.

Anyway, back to the Barr speech. He says that we are in a time like the days of the early Church, when the Roman authorities weren’t content to leave Christians alone to pray in peace, but actually tried to force them to violate their beliefs.

Barr says in his talk that one of the most important aspects of religious liberty is the freedom to pass the faith on to your children. This is where the battle is joined — and, because the Trump administration supports “religious accommodation,” the real battles are happening at the state level. Ground Zero for the warfare is at the schools. Barr identifies three specific areas of conflict:

Content of public school curriculum. Meaning the implementation of an anti-traditional values curriculum without any opt-out for families. E.g., New Jersey, Illinois, and California law mandating LGBT curriculum. He cites a diktat by the Orange County (Calif.) board of education saying that parents cannot opt their kids out of LGBT training.
State policies designed to starve religious schools of generally available funds, to force religious people to put their kids into public schools.
Use of state laws to force religious schools to accept secular morality.

The Attorney General concluded by telling his Catholic audience that only by conversion of ourselves can we hope to transform society. He adds that Christians must have more emphasis on moral content in education. “Education is not vocational training,” he said. If we don’t pass on our faith and moral conviction to our children “in full vigor,” all is lost.

Finally, he exhorts lawyers to fight for religious liberty in the public square. He concludes with:

“I can assure you that as long as I am Attorney General, the Department of Justice will be at the forefront of this effort, ready to fight for the most cherished of all our American liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith.”

Let me simply say that as we religious conservatives are thinking about how to vote in the election next fall, we should ponder the fact that under Donald Trump, as awful as he is in so many ways, a man of William Barr’s convictions is heading up the Department of Justice. Thank God Bill Barr is there. It is inconceivable that any Democratic president would put a man like him in charge of the Justice Department. In fact, we are getting a good idea that a Democratic president would likely choose his precise opposite.

If religious liberty is the most important public issue to you — and, as a religious believer, should it not be? — then the Barr speech should be front to mind as you consider voting. The state cannot give us meaning, but it can maintain the spaces necessary for us to discover meaning. Or not. This is important. This is very, very important.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to AG Barr’s entire speech. 

UPDATE.2: Wow, wow, wow. Paul Krugman lost his mind over the speech. Seriously, read his column. It says very little about Bill Barr, and a lot about Paul Krugman. Excerpt:

Nonetheless, William Barr — again, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responsible for defending the Constitution — is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots, the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution. Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!

Barr said absolutely nothing about Darwin or evolution. Krugman is a poo-flinging monkey here. I invite you to read the entire Barr speech. It’s a standard defense of religion’s role in American life. It would have been unremarkable for any US Attorney General, Republican or Democrat, prior to 2008 to have given. But now, many on the Left have become so hateful of religion that Barr’s speech strikes the ears of people like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as the handiwork of a Cossack propagandist (” If that kind of talk doesn’t scare you, it should; it’s the language of witch hunts and pogroms”).

Krugman’s entire column was nothing but screaming-meemie insults. Again, please read the Barr speech, or watch it online. Krugman called it “fiery,” but it was nothing of the kind. It was sober. Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, in a paywalled column, marveled at how berserk some on the Left reacted to the speech.

Political ethicist and professional attention seeker Richard Painter tapped out a series of even more furious tweets, here calling the speech the latest episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” there suggesting Mr. Barr isn’t much of a Christian, here again saying Mr. Barr sounded like “vintage Goebbels.” Over at MSNBC, meanwhile, retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Joy Reid the attorney general is “Torquemada in a business suit,” a reference to the Spanish Inquisition’s grand inquisitor.

McGurn said:

Even those who strongly disagree with Mr. Barr ought to have found this an invitation for thoughtful and vigorous debate. But rather than engage, some imply there is something unseemly about an attorney general’s even speaking at a Catholic university. Given the hostility that holding such a conversation engenders on campuses today, perhaps America can count itself fortunate it still has a university where this can happen.

Carter Snead, the law professor who invited Mr. Barr, puts it this way: “At Notre Dame, we are not afraid to explore the hard questions about God, religion and America together in friendship, especially on those matters about which people strongly disagree.”

Mr. Barr’s argument has been echoed throughout American history: “Our Constitution was made for only for a moral and religious people” (John Adams). “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith” (Tocqueville). “In teaching this democratic faith to American children, we need the sustaining, buttressing aid of those great ethical religious teachings which are the heritage of our modern civilization. For ‘not upon strength nor upon power, but upon the spirit of God’ shall our democracy be founded” (FDR). And so on.

That’s the amazing thing about these Leftist’s reactions. Barr said nothing that isn’t part of the standard rhetoric of American civic religion. I don’t mean to put down the speech, which was very fine. As I watched the speech this morning, my strongest criticism of it was in response to this passage:

But what was the source of this internal controlling power? In a free Republic those restraints could not be handed down from above by philosopher kings.

Instead, social order must flow up from the people themselves – freely obeying the dictates of inwardly-possessed and commonly-shared moral values. And to control willful human beings, with and infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and manmade law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

As John Adams put it: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

As Father John Courtney Murray observed, the American tenet was not that:

“Free government is inevitable, only that it is possible, and that its possibility can be realized only when the people as a whole are inwardly governed by the recognized imperatives of the universal moral order.”

How does religion promote the moral discipline and virtue needed to support free government?

First, it gives us the right rules to live by. The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man. Those moral precepts start with the Two Great Commandments – to Love God with your whole heart, soul and mind; and to Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.

But they also include the guidance of Natural Law – a real, transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law – the Divine wisdom by which the whole Creation is ordered. The eternal law is impressed upon, and reflected in, all created things.

From the nature of things we can, through reason, experience, discern standards of right and wrong that exist independent of human will.

I happen to agree with Barr here, but my criticism has to do with his subsequent claim:

But religion helps teach, train, and habituate people to want what is good. It does not do this primarily by formal laws – that is, through coercion. It does this through moral education and by informing society’s informal rules – its customs and traditions which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages.

In other words, religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.

He is also correct here … but we have degenerated to a point in the West where we can’t even agree what is Good. How can religion habituate a people to “want what is good” when the people don’t even know what Good is?

As McGurn says, this is something we can and should debate. The debate comes from fundamental constitutional principles. But mention God, and people like Paul Krugman and Lawrence Wilkerson freak out.

This is all useful to know. It turns out that The New York Times also has up on its website now a column by a liberal Iowan named Robert Leonard, who says that many of the people of Iowa see those arrayed against Trump as crude despisers of people like them. He writes that the liberal mob setting on young Iowan Carson King (I wrote about that here) reinforces a powerful narrative:

To rural white conservatives, their culture is being rubbed out right before their eyes. Compared with that, Mr. Trump’s sins — Ukraine and all — are trivial, while the Democrats are unrepentant and persist in their wrongdoing.

So, yes, the dismal rural economy, brought on directly by the president’s actions, may prompt independents and some Republicans to vote for a Democrat, because they will see it in their economic interests to do so.

But most Republicans I know don’t vote in their economic self-interest. They vote in terms of what they perceive to be in their spiritual self-interest.

Which brings us back to the confluence of the Carson King brouhaha and the Trump impeachment narrative. For the conservatives here, they come from the same source, the media. Mr. King and Mr. Trump are both targets of a politically correct mob that is quick to judge and slow to forgive, so that the slightest deviation from an ever moving liberal moral standard can destroy a person’s career.

Carson King’s posts as a 16-year-old are nothing alongside Mr. Trump’s actions. But that doesn’t matter. Conservatives see the two cases as illustrating a pattern of misbehavior by liberals and the media.

You read or watch Bill Barr’s speech, and then you compare it to some of the hysterical reaction by our tumbril-pushing leftist elites, and you try to say with a straight face that religious liberty is not endangered by Democratic Party rule.

Meanwhile, Robert Francis O’Rourke is still at it. Now he’s saying that he would seek to take away the tax exemption of mosques, historically black colleges, and other institutions that declined to recognize same-sex marriage.

The way you practice your faith within your place of worship is your business. But when you are providing services in the public sphere—and you deny equal treatment under the law based on someone’s skin color or sexual orientation—then we have a problem. pic.twitter.com/kvE6XgjzjW

— Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 14, 2019

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Elizabeth Warren has said she wouldn’t go as far as Beto, which is good, I suppose, as she has a good chance of being the Democratic nominee. But make no mistake: she (as well as fellow Democratic senators Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris) have put forth an amendment to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that would strip that law of its mild protections offered to religious believers who dissent from the progressive views on LGBT and abortion.

Like I said, all this is clarifying.

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Democrats Vs. Traditional Christians

Here’s a revealing anecdote, via the Daily Mail:

The one issue Hillary and Chelsea don’t appear to agree on entirely is transgender self-identification.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, journalist Decca Aitkenhead asked the Clintons if someone with a beard and a penis can ever be a woman, to which Chelsea replied emphatically, ‘Yes.’

However, as Aitkenhead describes it, Hillary looked ‘uneasy’, and blamed generational gaps for being less accepting.

‘Errr. I’m just learning about this,’ Hillary responded. ‘It’s a very big generational discussion, because this is not something I grew up with or ever saw. It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to understand what it means to be defining yourself differently.’

Chelsea Clinton is 39 years old, and was raised in Washington and New York. She and her husband and children live in Manhattan. Plainly she has absorbed the lightning-fast cultural changes that have occurred in her lifetime. I would not be the least bit surprised if she affirmed Beto O’Rourke’s view that churches, religious schools, and charities that acted on their opposition to LGBT rights should lose tax-exempt status.

Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, its presidential candidates have to run in the United States of America, not Manhattan.

Pete Buttigieg this morning said that Beto went too far. His comments are somewhat reassuring, though he began by saying that “anti-discrimination law should apply to all institutions.” How does he reconcile that with the rest of his statement? And does he think that only explicitly religious institutions should receive a pass?

In the Democratic televised debate coming up on Tuesday, every one of the candidates should be forced to declare themselves, and to explain their decision, one way or the other. Writing in the Atlantic, law professor John Inazu said the Dems are going to regret what Beto said. Excerpt:

O’Rourke’s comments mark the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has overtly endorsed stripping the tax-exempt status of religious organizations who hold conservative views about marriage and sexuality. This feels very much like the candidate Obama’s “cling to guns and religion” comment at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser that became first an attack line used by Hillary Clinton and then a well-worn conservative talking point that the would-be president was aloof and out of touch with small-town America. But more troubling than the rhetoric is where it leads. And for that, let me offer three suggestions to people with skill sets I lack: one for pollsters, one for journalists, and one for policy analysts.

First, pollsters should ask voters about O’Rourke’s comments and the issue of tax-exempt status, both now and in the exit polls for the 2020 presidential election. We can be certain this issue will be used in Republican political ads, especially in congressional districts that Obama won in 2012, but that Trump won in 2016. And I suspect this issue and O’Rourke’s framing of it will lead to increased turnout of evangelicals in states that matter to Democrats, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. O’Rourke’s comment may quickly fall out of the national news cycle, but it won’t be forgotten among churches, religious organizations, and religious voters. And if the Democrats lose in 2020, this issue and their handling of it will likely be a contributing factor. That will be true regardless of who the eventual Republican or Democratic candidates are.

Second, journalists should ask O’Rourke and every other Democratic candidate how this policy position would affect conservative black churches, mosques and other Islamic organizations, and orthodox Jewish communities, among others. It is difficult to understand how Democratic candidates can be “for” these communities—advocating tolerance along the way—if they are actively lobbying to put them out of business.

Third, policy analysts should assess the damage O’Rourke’s proposal would cause to the charitable sector. O’Rourke’s stance—if played out to its end—would decimate the charitable sector. It is certainly the case that massive amounts of government funding flow through religious charitable organizations in the form of grants and tax exemptions. But anyone who thinks this is simply a pass-through that can be redirected to government providers or newly established charitable networks that better conform to Democratic orthodoxies is naive to the realities of the charitable sector.

Inazu goes on to point out that liberals — even really smart ones, like Harvard’s Robert Putnam — often greatly underestimate the role churches and religious charities play in fighting poverty and doing disaster relief. I can well imagine that for liberals who don’t know any church folks, “conservative churches” are nothing more than local version of Trump cheerleader Robert Jeffress’s Baptodome in Dallas. (And for the record, Jeffress’s church, whether or not you approve of its pastor’s politics, does a lot of charitable work.)

And by the way, guess how much Mr. and Mrs. Beto O’Rourke donated to charity this year? A whopping $1,166, or about 0.3 percent of their income. 

More:

The O’Rourkes reported an adjusted gross income of $366,455 in 2017, the most recent year made available by the campaign, and gave only $1,166 to charity. The two years before, the couple gave even less: $857 in 2016 and $867 in 2015.

Over the ten years of tax returns released by O’Rourke, only one year showed giving that rose above $2,000. That was 2013 when the O’Rourke’s gave $12,900 to a variety of charities. With an adjusted gross income of $301,092 that year, the larger gift boosted the percentage donated to nearly 4.3% of their income. But none of the other years, going back to 2008, show charitable giving over 1% of their income.

CNN reports that Americans on average give two percent of their annual income to charity. Most conservative religious believers I know tithe around ten percent to their church, or church-related charities. If the poor are depending on liberal Catholic Beto O’Rourke for charitable contributions, they’re going to go hungry.

Anyway, Beto is not going to be president, but Elizabeth Warren might. I would like to reacquaint you with her contempt for religious conservatives. Nota bene: disagreement is not the same thing as contempt. One expects a liberal Democrat to oppose the views of a religious conservative on same-sex marriage. What this response demonstrated was mockery and spite:

That answer went viral. The media loved it too.

But ask yourself this. What if a religiously conservative GOP presidential candidate were asked this version of the question: “Senator, I believe that marriage should be between two people who love each other, regardless of their sex. What is your response?” And what if that religious conservative said, “I’m going to assume that the questioner is a woman, and I’m going to say, ‘You just haven’t met the right man yet — if you can find one to look at you, bless your heart.'”

That is the exact parallel to what Elizabeth Warren said, to the guffaws and applause of people in the room, and the cheers of many in the media. Had a Republican said such a thing, the pile-on and beatdown would have been endless, and that Republican would have deserved strong criticism. I don’t at all agree with the pro-gay marriage position, but those Americans who do believe in it, both gay and straight, deserve respect from our leaders, not mockery.

But this is how the Senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard professor regards religious conservatives. Believe me, it is useful to get that learned. This was one of those Covington Catholic moments, when the latent contempt liberal elites have for social and religious conservatives comes right to the surface.

Warren’s views on same-sex marriage are popular; nearly two out of three Americans support it. That number is going to rise as older Americans, those least likely to oppose it, die off. Transgender is still a divisive category. Strong majorities of Americans favor allowing transgender soldiers to serve in the military, but the question of trans bathroom use remains divisive. The fact that an older liberal feminist like Hillary Clinton has problems with it, and that her 39-year-old daughter not only supports it, but shows anger at her mom not embracing it, is telling.

My sense is that the national media are going to have a huge blind spot on covering the political implications of the clash between LGBT rights and religious liberty. Again, if a religiously conservative presidential candidate — Sen. Josh Hawley, maybe — had given the same kind of response that Warren did, it would be widely perceived as a gaffe. If she’s the Democratic nominee, I doubt Elizabeth Warren stands to win too many votes of religious conservatives. But what her contempt for religious conservatives who have not embraced LGBT rights to the extent that she has will energize religious conservatives to vote against her.

And believe me, a non-trivial number of religious conservatives are sick and tired of Donald Trump, and are open to voting against him, or at least withholding their votes. I heard a speech that the Southern Baptist pastor Russell Moore delivered on Friday evening. It did not mention politics at all, and certainly not Trump, but it was a sermon about power, faith, and responsibility. As one of the nine religious conservatives left in America who don’t know what they’re going to do at the ballot box in 2020, it challenged me deeply in my thinking. Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke have made the cost of standing against Trump, or not standing up for him in the ballot box, significantly higher.

We will see what the other Democrats have to say about this issue on Tuesday night — provided that the moderators ask them about it.

 

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Trump Mass (Media) Shooting Clip

What is wrong with this country?

A video depicting a macabre scene of a fake President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting members of the news media and his political opponents was shown at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, according to footage obtained by The New York Times.

Several of Mr. Trump’s top surrogates — including his son Donald Trump Jr., his former spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis — were scheduled to speak at the three-day conference, which was held by a pro-Trump group, American Priority, at Trump National Doral Miami. Ms. Sanders and a person close Mr. Trump’s son said on Sunday that they did not see the video at the conference.

The video, which includes the logo for Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, comprises a series of internet memes. The most violent clip shows Mr. Trump’s head superimposed on the body of a man opening fire inside the “Church of Fake News” on parishioners who have the faces of his critics or the logos of media organizations superimposed on their bodies. It appears to be an edited scene of a church massacre from the 2014 dark comedy film “Kingsman: The Secret Service.”

More information here at the NYT, which broke the story.

I wrestled over whether or not to post the video, and decided I should do so if I’m going to comment on it. The Times wrote about the thing without making it possible to see and to judge for yourself. Here it is.

It’s horrifying. I don’t buy it when liberals roll their eyes when conservatives object to the extreme content of some rock and rap songs, and in the same way, I’m not going to take seriously the Trump supporters who say some version of, “It’s just a joke.”

You don’t joke about mass shootings. Not in a country that has them with some regularity. This has to be a strong taboo. I often write about how biased the US media are, but none of its sins and failings justify this kind of thing. Donald Trump is not directly responsible for this, but he encourages it all the time. Now, some of his supporters, at an event held in support of him, and at one of his properties, aired a humor video in which he commits lethal, gruesome violence on the media and his political opponents, including President Barack Obama.

He could denounce it, say that it’s not funny, that it crosses a line that should not be crossed in public discourse, not even in an attempt to be funny. He won’t do that, though.

There are many mass shooting events, sadly, but here are some recent ones involving houses of worship and, in one case, a newspaper. White supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers a few years back. Then there was the 2017 mass shooting in a Texas church in which 26 people lost their lives; it was motivated not by politics, but by a domestic dispute. Last year we had the anti-Semite kill 11 people in the Pittsburgh synagogue — a shooting that was motivated by his white nationalism and Jew-hatred, but not by Trump, whom he had criticized as insufficiently racist. Also last year, a local lunatic invaded a Maryland newsroom and killed five people before cops took him in. That wasn’t a political act either; the nut had a long-running feud with the paper.

Here’s a link to the website for the Miami event. It looks like a standard #MAGAworld conference. The organizer told the Times that the video was screened as part of a “meme exhibit.” This screenshot from the online festival schedule must be what he was talking about:

Again: these are not things to joke about. When the left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin allowed herself to be photographed with a mock-up of Donald Trump’s severed head, people went nuts — understandably! — and she paid a professional price for it. Some things are beyond the pale. In this clip made by a Trump supporters, the president not only “kills” abstract representations of media organizations, but images of real people — politicians and celebrities — who are critics of Trump.

Do we need to see a “fun” clip in which the President of the United States kills his predecessor?

Here’s what I don’t get. There are some Evangelical leaders — including Jeffress, Graham, Falwell Jr., and others — who have access to the president. Why don’t they ever call him out over things like this? Trump’s campaign didn’t produce this vile video, but the culture his rhetoric creates trafficks in stuff like this.

Now, you might ask, where did the material for this satirical political video that everybody is denouncing come from? Well, it’s a scene from the 2015 Kingsman: The Secret Service movie, in which secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) shoots up a church full of racist congregants. The pastor says from the pulpit:

And I say to you, bear witness! Watch the news. Watch the news. AIDS! Floods! The blood of the innocent, spilled! And yet, there are those who doubt this is the wrath of God. Our filthy government condones sodomy, divorce, abortion! And yet, some still doubt this is the work of the antichrist! You do not have to be a Jew, a ni*ger, a whore or an atheistic, science-loving evolution spouter… Jew, ni*ger, fag lovers, and the devil is burning them for all eternity.

What happens next? Well, you can watch the clip online. Here’s a bit from an analysis of the movie that focuses on how the scene was choreographed:

In a little under four minutes, Harry kills nearly 40 people, some of whom are killed in quick and obvious ways (like shooting them in the head), others of whom are killed in impromptu and gruesome ways (like breaking a wooden rod in half and then stabbing a guy in the chest with it).

The scene is supposed to give the viewer catharsis over bigoted Christers getting what they supposedly deserve. Let me say to you that if you found that cinematic depiction of a church massacre entertaining, because it showed people who believe and say terrible things being shot to death, then you have less grounds than you think for condemning the Trumpkin who used the same scene to create this clip.

I know many of you are going to accuse me of being overly sensitive to this. But it feels like we are getting closer and closer to serious acts of deadly political violence in this country. We should not habituate our imaginations to it. Just a few years ago, the idea that a video depicting the POTUS committing mass murder of media organizations and his political and pop cultural opponents would be played at a conference of his supporters — well, it would have been unthinkable. And there it was this weekend.

Think about how twisted that is. Think about what we are getting used to.

POTUS knifes Rosie O’Donnell in parody video shown by pro-Trump activists at an event at one of his properties

 

 

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Deputy Junior Was The Law

Deputy Junior “Buck” Merritt and his faithful hound Bullet

My cousin up in St. Francisville sent me last night this wonderful reminder of our youth. It’s a photo of a local man named Junior Merritt, who sometimes went by the name of “Buck”. I imagine poor Junior has died by now. I think at some point in the 1990s he was no longer able to care for himself, and was institutionalized. But for a long time, he was a beloved member of the St. Francisville community.

Junior was mentally disabled, but he was sweet-natured and harmless. He spent his days pedaling his bike around town, making sure things were kept steady. He fancied himself a sheriff’s deputy. He wore his cowboy hat, and as you can see, installed a CB radio, and flashing lights, on his three-wheeled bike, and a 12-volt battery to power it. His faithful hound dog followed him all around town.

Years ago, before they built a bridge, there used to be a car ferry that would take people across the Mississippi from the ferry landing near St. Francisville to Pointe Coupee Parish on the other side. A tank truck carrying fuel would meet the ferry on the West Feliciana side, and gas the boat back up. Once, the tank truck driver sat high up in his rig, waiting on the boat to make the return journey from the other side of the river.

“Tome in, tank twuck! Tome in tank twuck!” squawked the voice on the radio. “You taint dit on dat fewwy.”

You can’t get on that ferry. It was Junior calling. He had a serious speech impediment. The driver, who wasn’t from our town and who didn’t know Junior, responded by saying that he wasn’t planning to ride on the boat, just refuel it.

A minute or so passes.

“Tome in, tank twuck! Tome in tank twuck!” says the voice again. “You taint dit on dat fewwy.”

Annoyed — and we know this story because the truck driver later told it at Ricky’s Audubon lounge — the driver made the same reply.

As the ferry made its approach to dock on the West Feliciana side, Deputy Junior tried one more time. “Tome in, tank twuck! Tome in tank twuck! You taint dit on dat fewwy.”

This time the driver was ticked. “Man, where are you anyway?!” he radioed.

“I’m thittin’ wight here beside you,” said Deputy Junior. The truck driver looked down from his window and spotted Junior and Bullet below.

The local sheriff’s department had given Junior a badge just to be nice, but they had to take it away when he tried to take two Canadian tourists into custody at the Piggly Wiggly. My mom saw him in the store once with his beat-up old acoustic guitar, which he didn’t know how to play, banging away on it and serenading a customer with a tongue-twisted version of “You Are My Sunshine.”

Later in his life, Junior developed a dependence on beer, and the police told all the merchants in town not to sell it to him. Junior figured out that if he cycled the gravel road that runs by the river out to the country, news of his liquor sales ban would probably not have reached the rural merchants. Once he went missing, and the sheriff’s department found him pie-eyed out on the river road, having crashed his bike pedaling back from a beer run to Starhill, and injured himself. When the ambulance came, he fought like hell until the paramedics agreed to let his hound dog ride with him.

Like I said, I imagine ol’ Junior is no longer with us. It didn’t occur to me until I grew up and moved away what an extraordinary person he was, and more to the point, what an extraordinary thing it was that we lived in a community that accommodated him, and even cared for him in a gentle way. The sheriff giving him the dignity of believing that he played a key role in keeping the peace in town. All the local folks giving him the dignity of believing the same, listening to his serenades, and thanking him for what he did for us all. I remember as a child many times hearing my mother encourage him when we were out in town, and he came over to say hello. That’s just how everybody was with Junior. And later in his life, when he had a drinking problem, the community working gently to make it impossible for him to buy booze — not locking him up in jail, but rather finding a kind way to protect him.

Come to think of it, for many years the assistant manager of one of the grocery stores in town — a man I worked for as a teenager there — was a trusty who would check out at day’s end and go sleep in the town jail. Charlie had a drinking problem — once I found a pint of Seagram’s in the tank of the employee toilet at work — and had gotten in trouble with the law a lot for public drunkenness. I didn’t know this as a kid, but all the adults in town knew about it, as I found out later. But he wasn’t a bad drunk, and wasn’t always drunk, either. In fact, he was a good employee at the grocery store, dependable, hard-working, polite, and always gentle. He just had a problem. His boss knew about it, and so did the chief of police. They worked out a system where Charlie, who, by the way, was black, could do his job and support his family, but pay his debt to society by spending nights in jail. I bet that wouldn’t happen today. There would be too much legal liability if something went wrong. But that’s how it was in the 1970s and 1980s in our little town. Junior patrolling the parking lots on his bike, Charlie stacking produce in the IGA (and sneaking off to the toilet for a nip every now and then), and everybody treating them with respect and compassion, because why not?

What a town, what an era. Let me ask you readers who grew up in small towns: did you have folks like Deputy Junior around? How did people treat them?

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Mortal Kombat Against Beijing’s Agents

De-arrest in progress shared today via WhatsApp #HKprotests pic.twitter.com/V3Dq3uUC4E

— Illegally Assembled Paddy (香港) (@HighlandPaddyHK) October 13, 2019

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To interpret the video, this is a scene of some anti-Beijing protesters freeing one of their comrades from a police officer. Notice the flying kick.

These brave young people are the forces that Apple, the NBA, and other woke American corporate giants are siding against, to align with tyranny. Just for the record.

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Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Rainforest

‘Memba how we all laughed last week at the liberal Presbyterian divine who led his seminary class to confess their sins to houseplants?

Well, here’s news from the Catholic Church’s Amazon Synod:

Catholics should admit their crimes against nature in confession, according to one prelate at the Vatican’s ongoing summit for the Amazon region.

“The ecological situation today is a motive for division, but people cannot but take into consideration the importance the environment has for us,” said Archbishop Pedro Brito Guimarães, of Palmas, Brazil, on Friday. “Ecological sins. It’s a new word for us, also for the Church, but people don’t confess the sins we commit against nature.”

Guimarães’s words came during the daily press conference for the Oct. 6-27 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon.

Everybody done lost they damn minds. That’s my considered conclusion.

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Beto Vs. Religious Liberty

I missed the CNN Townhall among Democratic candidates last night, focusing on LGBT issues. It went well, apparently:

I’ve said this before: the progressive has no principled reason to oppose this, only the strategic consideration that it’s not the right time. And, as is apparent, that objection is getting weaker by the day. https://t.co/hM8hTmu7UW

— Brandon McGinley (@brandonmcg) October 11, 2019

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Every one of my progressive friends: Nobody wants to do that

Beto: Hell yes we’re going to do that. https://t.co/Ncix2Vl0Jk

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 11, 2019

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Liberals will say, “Don’t worry about it. Beto is scraping the bottom of the polls. What he says doesn’t really matter.” Huh. Don’t you believe it. If this belief isn’t already held by all the Democratic candidates now, it will be. As Brandon McGinley says, there really is no principled reason to resist it, given what the Democrats already believe about the sanctity of homosexuality and transgenderism. Haven’t we all lived long enough now to recognize that the Law of Merited Impossibility — “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it” — is as irrefutable as the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

It appears that CNN’s Chris Cuomo is abasing himself this morning for an unintentional blasphemy:

PLEASE READ: When Sen. Harris said her pronouns were she her and her’s, I said mine too. I should not have. I apologize. I am an ally of the LGBTQ community, and I am sorry because I am committed to helping us achieve equality. Thank you for watching our townhall.

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) October 11, 2019

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Burn the cishet patriarch, and savor the sweet incense of combusting whiteness!

Even at this late date, we hear from many liberals that orthodox Christians are “obsessed” with homosexuality. They can’t grasp why, aside from bigotry, that we are so concerned about the issue. It’s largely because the march of LGBT ideology to conquer our culture tramples over the rights of orthodox/traditionalist religious people, and indeed of anybody who objects to whatever claim LGBTs make.

It’s not just Christians. A reader this morning sent this:

Not sure how plugged-in you are to tech world, but Stack Exchange, a giant Q&A resource for programmers, has just implemented a new policy on the use of preferred gender pronouns for its members:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes?cb=1

Notice especially items 9 and 11:

Q9: Do I have to use pronouns I’m unfamiliar or uncomfortable with (e.g., neopronouns like xe, zir, ne… )?

Yes, if those are stated by the individual.

Q11: If I’m uncomfortable with a particular pronoun, can I just avoid using it?

We are asking everyone to use all stated pronouns as you would naturally write. Explicitly avoiding using someone’s pronouns because you are uncomfortable is a way of refusing to recognize their identity and is a violation of the Code of Conduct.

Active affirmation is thus now a requirement to participate on Stack Exchange. This article has a score of -370, indicating general discontent, but that probably doesn’t mean much — programmers are an ornery bunch under the best of circumstances.

You cannot simply be tolerant. You must affirm, or you, as a programmer, cannot participate on a key resource for your profession. Whatever crazy thing genderqueer programmers demand to be called, you must do it. There is no option. You cannot even use their given name as a way to avoid the bizarre pronoun. The programmers — programmers! — will be policing language closely.

You may not be a Christian, or any kind of religious believer, but if you don’t see the transgender movement as a threat to your job and livelihood, you have your head in the sand.

What Beto O’Rourke said last night is a perfect example of why many orthodox Christians who despise Donald Trump will vote for him anyway. The survival of our institutions depends on keeping the Democrats out of the White House (and Congress) for as long as we can. Commenting on Beto’s remark, Denny Burk is a theologian and a pastor. He points out what’s at stake:

Christian readers, take this seriously! You may reckon, in the end, that Trump is such a danger that getting rid of him is a more important task than protecting religious liberty. If that is what you believe, then make that conclusion with clear eyes about what you are opening the door to for traditional churches and religious institutions.

By the way, I don’t think Denny Burk is right about this being unconstitutional. I believe that a Democratic president could take away the tax-exempt status from “bigot” churches and religious institutions by executive order. The Supreme Court in 1983 ruled that the IRS has the right to remove tax-exempt status from a religious institution to achieve public policy goals. Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status because of its racially discriminatory policy forbidding white and black students from dating. The fundamentalist school believed that interracial dating was unbiblical. For that, the IRS wanted to take away its tax-exempt status — and SCOTUS upheld it. The Court ruled that Bob Jones University could maintain its own policies, but it did not have the right to hold tax-exempt status.

(By the way, BJU dropped its discriminatory policy in 2000, and regained its nonprofit tax status in 2017.)

There is no reason that the IRS in a Democratic administration could not do that to churches and religious institutions that discriminated against LGBTs. No reason. It’s entirely a matter of executive will.

The trans movement has captured the Democratic Party. The gay journalist Andy Ngo draws attention to the lies and general derangement of these activists, drawing on last night’s CNN Townhall:

Exhibit: A transsexual woman stole a microphone and went on a tirade last night during CNN’s LGBT presidential town hall. pic.twitter.com/5zmIPBvGGr

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 11, 2019

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Exhibit: Person at CNN/HRC LGBT town hall says it is an act of “violence” after her name is mispronounced. pic.twitter.com/mLSFXj8fSq

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 11, 2019

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We all need to understand that these people are driving the Democratic Party. You watch: not a single Democratic candidate will ever tell these activists no. They own the media too; see how quickly Chris Cuomo denounced himself for making a petty, lame joke.

To be clear, we don’t know how all the Democrat candidates would come down on removing tax-exempt status from dissenting churches and religious organizations. They must be asked, and asked again until we get a clear answer. Personally, though, I have no doubt at all that every single one of them would do this if they thought it wouldn’t cost them too much politically. Christians need to understand that as America secularizes, and as those who still call themselves Christian accept anti-biblical views on LGBT, it will increasingly become possible for a future president to impose this punishment on churches and religious organizations without paying a significant political price.

Only a couple of years ago, I was talking to a religious liberty lawyer about tax exemption and the LGBT movement. He told me that yes, it’s a looming challenge, but it wouldn’t be a clear and present danger for many years to come, in his reckoning. Well, on October 10, 2019, a Democratic presidential candidate stood on live national television and said, without any ambiguity, that he would do this as a matter of justice — and the audience cheered.

“The Overton Window shifted last night,” an Evangelical theologian friend texted. He’s right. Signs of the times, people. Signs of the times.

This morning I’m at the Touchstone conference on the Benedict Option this morning. Speaker John Yocum mentioned in his speech this morning Father Alexander Men, a brave Russian Orthodox priest, murdered in 1990, who preached Christ amid the persecution of the Soviet Union. Yocum said that Father Alexander organized small groups of believers — cells was the word Yocum used — to strengthen the Church under persecution. I had not realized that about Father Alexander. When I am in Russia in a few weeks, I think I will be meeting with one of Father Alexander’s disciples. I will want to know more about this.

I bring this up in connection with the Ben Op to highlight the fact that the Ben Op is something we have to do now not only to strengthen our faith in this dechristianizing (and increasingly anti-Christian) culture, but also to prepare ourselves for holding the believing community together as hardship increases. The day is likely to come when faithful churches, religious schools, and other religious institutions, lose their tax exempt status over their fidelity to the Bible’s teachings. For many churches, this is going to mean losing their buildings. That will be a blow. We need to get ready for it — and we need to do what we can to reduce our exposure.

Here’s what I mean: some people will say to me, “What are you going to do when the state won’t let you have your Benedict Option schools, huh?!” As if persecution by the state would negate the Ben Op! In fact, we will need the Ben Op more than ever under persecution! In my book, I highlight what the Benda family did to build and hold together community under Czech communist persecution. This year, I’ve learned about what the Jesuit Father Tomislav Kolakovic did in the 1940s to prepare Catholics in Slovakia for the coming Communist persecution. At the core of it was building intense small fellowships — cells — of believers who trained spiritually and otherwise for resilience under persecution. After the mention of the Orthodox Father Alexander Men’s leadership in Soviet Russia, I want to know more about him.

Readers, something is coming. As Denny Burk said, one of the two political parties in the US is arraying itself against churches that remain faithful to the Bible’s sexual teaching. And, we should not expect that the other party will always defend us.

Prepare. 

UPDATE: Reader James comments:

You forgot the 9-year-old transgender ‘boy’ CNN had on to ask a question of Elizabeth Warren—she and the audience all applauded the ‘boy’ while his mother stood next to him beaming over their affirmation of her child abuse.

What a grotesque sight. Honestly, I am SO SICK of Trump and his arrogance, corruption, ignorance, bombast, recklessness, pigheadedness, etc. But then I saw all the perversion of morality and sanity on the stage last night, and I was reminded why I have to hold my nose and vote for Trump in 2020. Nice job, Dems! You are SHAMEFUL.

UPDATE.2:

2009: How is my gay marriage going to hurt you? We just want marriage equality.

2019: We want the tax exempt status of the churches, charities, and colleges revoked for your failure to change your views on gay marriage: https://t.co/5pTQDJGUnF

— Ed Stetzer (@edstetzer) October 11, 2019

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UPDATE.3: Readers have pointed out that the Bob Jones decision applied not to churches, but to religious schools. So churches would likely have a legal defense if a Democratic administration tried this. But the whole issue is very fluid. For example, the Obama administration expanded Title IX to cover LGBT; some Christian colleges applied for an exemption, but not all, and some gay activists pushed hard for no religious exemptions. The Trump administration rescinded that rule. Nobody believes that this issue is settled.

Keep in mind too that O’Rourke was not simply talking about churches. He was talking about religious colleges and charities also.

I hope in the days to come, journalists pin down the other Democratic presidential candidates to get them on the record about whether they agree with O’Rourke on this — and if not, why not.

In other town hall news, watch this answer from Elizabeth Warren:

Elizabeth Warren was asked how she would respond to a person who says that marriage is “between one man and one woman”

“I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I will say, then just marry one woman. … Assuming you can find one,” Warren said. #EqualityTownHall pic.twitter.com/RAuVqch7Ls

— CNN (@CNN) October 11, 2019

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Ha ha, that’s funny. But notice that she did not answer the question. She just mocked the religious belief of the hypothetical questioner, and implied that the reason someone would believe that is because they are a weirdo who can’t find a mate.

The contempt this woman has for traditional Christians could hardly be more clear. Last night’s Town Hall was a clarifying moment, like the Kavanaugh hearings and the Covington Catholic spectacle. They really do despise us, these leading figures on the Left.

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The Greatest Wisconsinite

Prior to yesterday, I would have reckoned that the Greatest Wisconsonite would have been either Uncle Chuckie or Siarlys Jenkins. But last night at the Touchstone conference in suburban Chicago, a reader named Eric Seaberg brought Self a 12-pack of the delicious Spotted Cow beer, which one can only buy in Wisconsin.

Therefore, Eric Seaberg is demonstrably the Greatest Wisconsinite. Above, photographic proof.

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