Rod Dreher's Blog, page 206

Beggars Finding Bread

I was moved by this letter that came in from a reader this morning:

I want to offer you an apology.

Though I’ve been an admirer of your work for years, I have nevertheless harbored the suspicion that your defection from the Roman Catholic Church was due to “weakness” on your part and that at least some of your professed reasons for doing so were disingenuous. Being a cradle Catholic whose formative years in the faith were the felt and burlap 1970s, I was certain that, if I could weather that, I could weather anything.

I’m starting to think I was gravely wrong about that.

The last few years have been very rough for me as a Catholic. Between the continued water torture of the Scandal and the chaos and confusion sown by Pope Francis and his enablers, I regularly find myself wondering why I bother going to Mass each week. I used to be heavily involved in my parish’s life, along with my wife and children, but in the past couple of years we’ve slowly been absenting ourselves from everything except our weekly obligation — and that’s increasingly what attending Mass feels like, an obligation rather than a joyous occasion to give thanks and praise to the Lord.

I’m being worn down by the feeling that very few Catholics really believe in the faith anymore (or that what they say they believe isn’t even close to what the Church claims to teach). This feeling goes double for the clergy, who at their best are social workers in Roman collars and at their worst men actively seeking to undermine the traditions and beliefs of the Church.

I used to get angry at all this and fulminate against the stew of fecklessness and heresy that passes for Catholicism these days, but increasingly I can’t even be bothered to care. What’s the point? I can’t do anything on my own and whenever I’ve tried to enlist the aid of others I’ve been met with either Pollyannaish nonsense about the coming “springtime of renewal” or hostility at the very idea anything is wrong.

In all likelihood, I’m not going anywhere, at least not yet. I like to joke that I have no hope, a little faith, and less charity, but that’s not completely true. Beneath it all, I do retain a small hope that somehow God can make something glorious out of this mess. It’s hard to nourish that hope and I find it ever more plausible that there will eventually come a time when I simply fall away from the Church entirely. It saddens me to write those words and yet I know I’m not wrong in writing them.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying I was wrong to ever doubt your motives or the sincerity of your bidding farewell to Catholicism. I was also wrong to think I’d better withstand the winds of the coming storm. I was arrogant to think that and now I know it.

Apology unconditionally accepted! I am so grateful for the humility in this letter. I have received four or five e-mails like it over the past year, since the McCarrick news broke.

I feel absolutely no I-told-you-so triumphalism in the face of these admissions. I know very, very well how much pain lies behind them — that is, how much suffering a man has to go through to be able to make that realization, and to be able to articulate it.

You will not hear me saying, “Come on over to the Orthodox Church, where we don’t have these problems.” I am not aware of these problems within the Orthodox Church, and I hope we don’t have them. Certainly the ancient liturgy and the spiritual practices of Orthodoxy give one a strong place to stand and to be built up — something you sadly do not get in most Catholic parishes today. But nobody anywhere — not in the Orthodox Church, and not in any church on earth — should think that as a corporate body, they are immune to the sins and failings that have led the Catholic Church to such a crisis.

When I talk about what happened to me — losing my ability to believe as a Catholic after years of reporting on the scandal — I emphasize that I came into Orthodoxy as a different man. I was broken, profoundly broken. Once the pain of that break subsided, I was able to thank God for it, because I needed the intellectual arrogance in me with regard to religion to be broken. I needed to confront the aspects of my own character that pushed me to have such uncomplicated reverence for the church hierarchy. And I needed to work on my own repentance, and to try to become the kind of Christian who had the capacity, through the grace of God, to endure spiritual desolation — a spiritual desolation that is coming for all of us, whatever our church home, because these are the times in which we live.

When the reader writes:

I was also wrong to think I’d better withstand the winds of the coming storm. I was arrogant to think that and now I know it.

… I say that he has been granted a severe mercy. Now he will be better able to build the fortifications against the darkness coming upon all of us. As my friend Nathan, who is struggling with his wife against her demonic possession, under the close care of an exorcist, told me, there is no greater weapon against this darkness than to be humble, and to rely completely on Jesus Christ. What that means in concrete terms will differ with each of us, but it at least means that we should take nothing, absolutely nothing, for granted.

Yesterday, in Massachusetts, I heard the Anglican Bishop Emmanuel Maduwike preach about how we must establish and nurture a personal bond with Jesus Christ. I wish I had a copy of his sermon, because he did not sound at all like the kind of American Evangelical boilerplate, e.g., “Jesus, my personal savior.” In his words, and in their emphatic delivery, he spoke as if we were all lost on a stormy night, and the only way we would get through it is if we met Christ and held his arm with all our might, as he led. It was powerful. I think this is something very close to what Nathan was saying, though he articulated it in somewhat different language.

I want to say a word about this passage from the reader’s letter:

I can’t do anything on my own and whenever I’ve tried to enlist the aid of others I’ve been met with either Pollyannaish nonsense about the coming “springtime of renewal” or hostility at the very idea anything is wrong.

This is quite familiar to me. After dinner on Friday night in Massachusetts, I thanked Bishop James Hiles and Father Atwood Rice for a heavy, rather dark discussion about the spiritual state of things. I told them that nothing is more depressing to me than to be around Christians who believe that there’s nothing seriously wrong, or that there’s nothing wrong that more Republican victories at the polls can’t fix.

I was thinking back to my last year or so as a Catholic, and being at mass at a full parish in Dallas. The local newspaper, for the past few years, had been dropping bombshells on the Dallas diocese, about the sexual criminality of some of its priests, and the cover-ups by its bishops. I was reading this every day, and from time to time talking to people who had been victims of this criminality. The devastation within individuals and their families beggars belief. But very few lay Catholics seemed to care. I didn’t understand how every week the newspaper revealed to us that our house was burning down, but most everybody wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t take it anymore, at last.

In Massachusetts this past weekend, at the Festival of Faith where I spoke (along with a Catholic priest and a Lutheran theologian, as well as the Anglican bishop Muduwike), someone shared a story with me about a Catholic parish priest in New England who recently lamented that no one in his parish really believes any of it anymore. They come, in dwindling numbers, out of habit, but he can see no evidence that they take the faith seriously. I also met a Catholic laywoman who is in a parish like that, and who is thinking of going to an LCMS Lutheran parish instead, because she and her husband are desperate for spiritual life. They can see that the Lutherans have it, while her own Catholic parish is desolation.

I also met a man who left the Catholic Church after a lifetime of being there, and forty years of working for the Church in various capacities. He told me that he had been molested by a priest as a boy, and that one of his sons had also been molested by a priest. He said he has lost his marriage and most of his family over all of it. He also told me that he recently spent three hours being interviewed by an investigator for a state law enforcement agency — I’m not going to give more details here — in connection to an abuse ring they are uncovering. This one is within a very conservative Catholic institution, and it involves the suicide of a victim.

The man with whom I spoke said that he had reported the abuse of a boy to the local authorities at the time, but they did nothing — and he got fired from the church institution. Years went by, and the boy victim, as an adult, committed suicide — and left a note with lots of details about what had been done to him. It vindicated my interlocutor’s initial report to authorities, which is why the state police sought him out for an interview.

On Saturday, my interlocutor told me that the state police investigator said to him, at the end of the recent interview, that he did not understand the laypeople involved with that particular Catholic institution. The man quoted the detective saying, “They would rather sacrifice their own children” as long as they can keep getting what this particular Catholic institution provides. (I’m being deliberately obscure here; the man told me he expects the story to break nationally within a month, with indictments.)

This is human, all too human. I’m talking about the Church, but there are people who make false idols of the Nation and of the Family, for example, and will sacrifice their children to those idols rather than face down the fear of life without the psychological security that idol has given them.

This is the ultimate meaning of Dante’s Commedia: that anything on earth can become a personal god for us — our romantic partner, our king, our work, even the Church — and can lead to our damnation if we worship it instead of the living God. All things in this life are meant to be icons of God, things that point us to Him.

So, to the reader, I’m not going to tell you to walk away from the Roman Catholic Church. I am not going to tell you to remain there. If you want to know what I have found in the Orthodox Church, I will tell you (you have my e-mail address). I know that I have no authority at all to tell people which church they should belong to — not after having left my childhood Protestantism for Catholicism, and then that for Orthodoxy. Don’t read this as a matter of Rod Dreher’s spiritual indifferentism. I’m not indifferent: I have definite opinions about ecclesiology. But I also am aware that I have no credibility on that matter, and won’t even attempt to test it.

But to rely solely on ecclesial systems is a trap — a trap that intellectual Christians are particularly susceptible to. What I will say, based on my own experience, is that whether you stay Catholic or leave for another church, you need to establish a deep and abiding relationship to the living God, just like Bishop Maduwike said. There is no substitute for that. As you’ve read me say in this space many times, I thought my Catholic faith was safe because I had all the arguments for the faith down pat, and because I went to mass and confession regularly, and, to be honest, because as a conservative Catholic, I read the right books and magazines, and held all the right prejudices against liberal Catholics.

It’s not enough. 

No matter which church you go to, none of it will be enough to sustain you through what is coming, and what is already here. Bishop Maduwike shepherds an Anglican diocese of three million in Nigeria, which is a very religious country. Yet he said at the conference that they need the Benedict Option there — meaning a sustained and rigorous discipleship — to strengthen themselves against the acid of liquid modernity. He knows what’s coming, and is indeed already manifesting itself, even in Africa.

Finally, I want to speak to this part of the reader’s letter:

In all likelihood, I’m not going anywhere, at least not yet. I like to joke that I have no hope, a little faith, and less charity, but that’s not completely true. Beneath it all, I do retain a small hope that somehow God can make something glorious out of this mess. It’s hard to nourish that hope and I find it ever more plausible that there will eventually come a time when I simply fall away from the Church entirely. It saddens me to write those words and yet I know I’m not wrong in writing them.

It is a blessing that you know this about yourself. That you can foresee it as a possibility. Now you can act to change your life, to do whatever you must to keep this from happening. When I was in your position, though writhing in torture from all the anger and fear, and much closer to losing it all than you are now, I realized one day that the Truth that saves any of us is not a doctrine, but a Person — the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. If, for whatever brokenness within myself, and within the Catholic Church at this point in its history, I could not establish and sustain a living relationship with that Truth through Catholicism, then I had to reach Him by any means necessary. Because it wasn’t just me: it was my wife and children too, and their children.

My own painful experience made me think at length about how judgmental I had been to others who had fallen away from the Catholic faith. I too thought they were weak or disingenuous. And then it happened to me, despite fighting with everything I had to keep it from happening. God did bring good out of it for me, and renewal. There is hope. Whether you remain a Catholic or leave for another church, you, dear reader, are closer to the Kingdom now, in your humility and suffering, than you were before. It’s an extremely difficult thing to understand and to accept, but it’s true. My hard experience has verified the truth in the saying, “Christianity is just one beggar telling other beggars where he found bread.”

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A Festival Of Faith

Bishop Emmanuel Maduwike, preaching at St. Paul’s parish in Brockton, Mass.

I just got home from a weekend in Brockton, Mass., in exurban Boston. I was there for the Festival of Faith at St. Paul’s, a continuing Anglican parish under the leadership of Bishop James Hiles, the rector. I can’t say enough about the hospitality of the wonderful people of that parish. They made me feel so welcome. If you live in southern Massachusetts and are looking for a church home, go visit them. I’m not going to write long about it tonight, because I’m tired after all that flying and driving in from New Orleans, and I have a load of comments to approve before bedtime. If you’ve seen your comments disappear, please know that it’s not us — it’s Disqus. Problems with Disqus have grown worse and worse. We’re working on it.

I do want to tell you about the most extraordinary thing. One of the speakers at the weekend Benedict Option conference was Bishop Emmanuel Maduwike. the ordinary of the Anglican Diocese of Ikedure, in Nigeria. The bishop earlier read The Benedict Option, and gave a really interesting response to the book on Saturday. He noted that I’d written the book for the churches in the West … but he said Nigeria has great need for the Benedict Option too. This stunned me, because everything I had heard about the Nigerian Christian churches testifies to their great strength. And that is true — but, the bishop said, Nigerian young people are being swallowed up by Western popular culture coming to them primarily through smartphones.

“You look at our young today, and you don’t know if they’re Nigerian, or American or British,” he said, explaining that the same spirit of modernity that has dissolved so much of America’s Christianity is now starting to work on the faith in his country. He also said in later remarks that the prosperity gospel is big in Nigeria, and it is making Christians there forget about the importance of suffering in authentic Gospel Christianity. This is a big, big spiritual problem, he said.

We talked afterward, and I said that I would love to see a Nigerian writer author a book about what the Ben Op would look like adapted to Nigeria’s culture. Bishop Maduwike said that given the reality of the Internet, no Christian anywhere on earth can afford to think that their country and culture is safe from liquid modernity.

At dinner last night, Bishop Hiles disclosed to us that Bishop Maduwike’s wife Anuli had been kidnapped in August, and held for four days by thugs demanding ransom. The bishop had to pay to free his wife. According to a Nigerian paper, the criminals abducted Mrs. Maduwike because the bishop launched a book the week earlier, leading them to think that he had come into a pile of money. They released her unharmed after the ransom was paid.

Everyone around the table was shocked by the thought that someone as gentle as the bishop’s wife would have to suffer through such an ordeal (though it was a relief to learn that they had treated her kindly, because her husband is a prelate; there is some honor among Nigerian thieves, apparently). Bishop Maduwike explained that Nigeria suffers immensely from corruption, and that the kidnapping was just part of a spirit of criminality that oppresses the nation.

This morning, he preached at the parish’s service. I have never heard an African pastor give a sermon. It was quite a performance. That man can preach, let me tell you! He was throwing his body into it. The rhythms, the cadences of his delivery — it was hypnotic. I sat there in my chair riveted, thinking, “That is a powerful man of God.” At the end, he sang from the pulpit a simple hymn inviting the Holy Spirit into one’s heart. His wife Anuli, sitting in the congregation, burst into a gorgeous descant, following her husband’s melody. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen or heard.

What a blessing this weekend was! I also got to meet several longtime readers of this blog. I wish the festival could have lasted an extra day, so we could all have talked longer. I took the photo of Bishop and Mrs. Maduwike at the luncheon after services. What lovely people. What joy they brought to my heart. One day, I hope my travels take me to Africa, so I can worship with the Christians there.

 

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The Swamp In The White House

I don’t know if impeachment is the answer. I’m disinclined to think so, but I certainly don’t rule it out. There’s more than enough to justify an investigation. I am at a conference in Massachusetts today, and last night after dinner, I spent an hour or two reading the day’s impeachment news. It’s exhausting, and I am extremely discouraged that this is what we’re going to have to deal with every day for the next year, until the election.

Here’s the thing: the main reason we are having to do this is because Donald Trump is reckless to a shocking degree. One day after the Mueller Report failed to take him down, he gets on the phone with the Ukraine president and pops off like this. How hard is it to restrain yourself? I resent the hell out of Donald Trump for putting so many conservatives, especially Republican lawmakers, in the position of having to defend him over stupid, easily preventable missteps.

I genuinely don’t know what to think about him, and what should be done about all this. I guess that makes me a very small sliver of the American electorate, most of whom have made their minds up. Some of you readers chastise me because I’m too forgiving on Trump. Others chastise me because I’m not as supportive of him as you think I should be. I’m on record here as saying that despite his rottenness, I might vote for him anyway in 2020, on the principle of “Vote For The Crook, It’s Important”. I believe, however, that there has to be a bright red line. Would you vote for a confessed murderer for president? If not, then that’s one line. What would Trump have to do that would cause me to support his impeachment, or at least to vote against him for re-election — this, in spite of the very real and significant damage a Democratic president would do to causes (abortion, religious liberty) that mean a lot to me?

At this point, I don’t know. But I am sure I’m going to find out as the investigation goes forward.

The howls and cries of liberals who see no reason at all why anybody should support Trump in spite of himself fall on deaf ears. They don’t feel as strongly about religious liberty and the pro-life cause as I do, and therefore they don’t have an intuitive grasp of how disastrous a Democratic president would be, given how radical the party has become on those issues. If the situation were reversed, and a corrupt Democratic president was the only thing standing between a champion of the Religious Right taking office, and putting abortion and LGBT rights in jeopardy, they would know exactly how I feel.

The howls and cries of conservatives who see no reason at all why any conservative should abandon Trump fall … well, they don’t fall on deaf ears, because conservatives are my people. But I do have little patience for those who are willing to accept anything this White House says in defense of itself. This country has gone way too far in empowering the Executive — and this is something many conservatives were saying under George W. Bush. If Trump really has done what he is being accused of here, and he gets away with it, then we conservatives will have been responsible for a shocking de facto expansion of presidential powers. To say nothing about what we will have done to the integrity of our political movement.

Hear me: I’m not saying that we should climb aboard the impeachment train. It’s way too early for that. I am saying that it’s way too early to say that we will never climb aboard it. This morning I met a man about my age, a former Catholic who recognized me at the hotel breakfast, and who told me a very grim story about his own childhood molestation at the hands of a priest, and the molestation of his young son. It ended up destroying his family. He told me about a new scandal that will soon be uncovered; he was interviewed by police investigators over it. It involves a molestation cover-up, and a victim’s suicide. The man told me that after 40 years of being a Catholic, and working for the Church that whole time, he came to believe that the clergy and the hierarchy believe that protecting the institution is more important than truth, and the suffering of victims. He left the Catholic Church.

Coming back up to the room, I was thinking about the principle here of defending “our guys” at all costs. Donald Trump’s sins, offenses, and possibly crimes, are not as bad as molesting a child, heaven knows. But the principle is the same: if we throw all morality out for the sake of protecting our own, we will stand naked and condemned.

One more time: I am willing to put up with a degree of corruption by Trump to protect more important principles. But that cannot be an open-ended commitment. And if we conservatives are going to stand by the guy, we should at least be honest about who and what we are defending, and why. To that end, here’s a good Ramesh Ponnuru column about the lies many conservatives are telling ourselves to protect Trump. Excerpt:

The “whistleblower complaint” contains a lot of hearsay. That’s true, but the allegations are of sufficiently troubling acts as to be worth investigating.

Russiagate was a hoax, and the same people who spread it are yelling about this. Russia interfered in the 2016 election; the president has repeatedly denied that point; and top aides expressed their willingness to get election help from the Russian government. The idea that there was something worth looking into was no hoax, even if Robert Mueller was unable to show that Trump was involved in a criminal conspiracy.

The multiplicity of grounds Trump’s enemies have cited to call for impeachment shows they are just after him for partisan reasons. Partisanship is definitely playing a large role, just as Hamilton predicted. Note, though, that this defense of Trump is similar to one Hillary Clinton’s fans made over her emails: They’ve alleged one thing after another about her for decades, so why take this one seriously? It wasn’t wrong for Clinton’s defenders to point to Republican partisanship. But Clinton also had a history of ethical corner-cutting that kept leading to accusations, some of them justified and some of them unjustified. Trump seems to have a habit of confusing his interests with the country’s, and it too is leading to scandal after scandal.

Trump’s enemies are trying to annul an election; they can’t accept his legitimacy. Trump is the legitimate president, and some of his opponents have foolishly denied it. He was elected fair and square under the process our Constitution lays out. If he’s removed from office after an impeachment trial, he’ll have exited the presidency under another process the Constitution lays out. And Hillary Clinton won’t become president.

Removing a president for high crimes and misdemeanors is not something to be done lightly. There is plenty of room for debate over what counts as an impeachment-worthy offense. It may be wiser to leave a judgment of Trump’s conduct to the next election. But if Congress chooses to leave him in office, it shouldn’t be based on the weak arguments his defenders are currently making.

 

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Anti-Catholic Hate At Notre Dame

Shocking news from the University of Notre Dame:

Last Thursday, an unauthorized sign with the words, “There is Queer Blood on Homophobic Hands,” was placed outside DeBartolo Hall and widely shared across social media. The sign contained many articles from the Irish Rover and the Observer which reflect Catholic doctrine regarding human sexuality, implying that the authors of these were responsible for the deaths of “queer” people nationwide.

Most shockingly, the sign’s message was painted in blood red, and the names of the articles’ writers were all circled in blood-red paint, drawing hostile attention to individual members of the Notre Dame community. Among the names circled in red paint were those of current students, faculty, and alumni of the University.

The inflammatory sign was placed anonymously, and no one has yet to claim responsibility for it. Student government’s Director of Gender Relations, senior Anne Jarrett, publicly shared her support for the sign—or at least disappointment that it was taken down—tweeting that she swore at “someone [who] pushed down the anti homophobia art display.”

According to the student government website, the department which Jarrett leads “works to foster a healthy environment of communication and dialogue.” This description raises questions about whether this kind of accusatory display, which had palpably violent undertones, is what the student government sees as part of a healthy campus dialogue.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s what’s going on with Anne Jarrett (pronouns: they/them):

Listen I’m drunk I just wanna kiss women

— anne-marie ☭ (@profanniety) September 27, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Whoever put this sign up slandered others at Notre Dame, attacked free speech, and is clearly trying to incite violence against them with that kind of incendiary rhetoric and symbolism.

A line has been crossed. What is the university going to do about it?  Why on earth is Anne Jarrett leading a department that “works to foster a healthy environment of communication and dialogue” when she supports a display that grotesquely slanders others at Notre Dame as murderers?

I’ll update you as I find out.

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Bad Beer + Bad Journalism

You’re not going to believe this story. I’m not going to say it contains everything that’s wrong with journalism and corporate America today, but it’s getting there. From a column by Carol Hunter, executive editor of the Des Moines Register, about a story that really, really ticked off readers:

The Des Moines Register staff has heard from hundreds of people in the past few days upset over our handling of a story on Carson King, the 24-year-old whose Busch Light sign on ESPN’s “College GameDay” show launched more than a million dollars in donations to an Iowa children’s hospital.

We’ve listened with an open mind to everyone, but especially Iowans, the people who are our neighbors, who care as much as we do about our state and everyone who lives here.

And we hear you: You’re angry, you’re disappointed and you want us to understand that.

I want to be as transparent as possible about what we did and why, answer the questions you’ve raised and tell you what we’ve learned so far and what we’ll try to do better. For one, we’re revising our policies and practices, including those that did not uncover our own reporter’s past inappropriate social media postings. That reporter is no longer with the Register.

This King guy was an unlikely social media star. He held up a sign on ESPN asking people to send him money to buy more Busch Light. He got over a million dollars, which he donated to a children’s hospital. Anheuser-Busch made a big deal about it — but cut him loose when it was discovered that in 2012, when he was 16 years old, he tweeted a couple of racist things.

The Des Moines Register reported on the racist tweets in a big profile of King. According to the paper’s editor, they did not tell Anheuser-Busch about the tweets, and the beer maker (sorry, “beer” maker) dropped King of its own accord, before the story was published. Nevertheless, the story was published, and thanks to the newspaper, this young man whose crime was becoming an accidental social media star and raising a lot of money for a children’s hospital was outed as a teenage bigot.

King called a press conference and apologized for two obnoxious racist jokes he had tweeted when he was 16 years old. “Obviously I’ve made mistakes in my past; everyone has,” he told reporters. “And I really hope people see at this point in my life, I’m grown, I’m caring, I’m generous. I hope that’s what people focus on.”

Why did the newspaper do this? Why hold this poor guy up for community contempt over two things he tweeted when he was a 16-year-old? It’s wrong, and readers were right to drag the paper.

But get this: amid the controversy, the paper discovered that Aaron Calvin, the reporter who outed King as a teenage HATER, had himself tweeted offensive things when he was a teenager. According to the Washington Post:

Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.

By late Tuesday night, Calvin began deleting old tweets, and then locked his account early Wednesday morning after posting an apology.

And then the paper fired him! Which is just wrong. They shouldn’t have exposed the idiotic tweets of a 16 year old who, eight years later, was remorseful, and which had absolutely nothing to do with the good works that brought him fame. And they should not have fired the reporter. It is possible that the reporter went to his editors with the information he found, and they made the call to include the information in the newspaper, under his byline. It sounds like Carol Hunter and her team are scapegoating Aaron Calvin.

It was good to read in the Post account that not all Iowans are taking this cancel culture garbage from Anheuser-Busch and the Des Moines Register lying down:

Iowa-based Goldie’s Ice Cream Shoppe created a beer-flavored soft-serve. The ice cream shop originally planned to make a Busch Light-flavor, but changed course Wednesday and will instead use beer donated by Iowa’s Gezellig Brewing Company. Smokey Row Coffee, a local cafe, promised half-priced pumpkin spice lattes until Monday. DeWit Construction, which employs King’s brother, will still give $300 for every new roof installed during the fundraiser. Nearby in Illinois, Geneseo Brewing Co. announced plans for an “Iowa Legend” pilsner, taking back the label from Busch, which had planned to print the title below King’s face on its cans.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) also carried through with plans to declare Saturday “Carson King Day.” King plans to lead the “Hawkeye Wave” to children treated at the hospital at the University of Iowa football game scheduled for that day.

Good! Big Business and Big Media sandbagged this guy. They deserve public anger. This cancel culture won’t stop until companies and institutions are compelled to pay a price for cancelling people.

I’m just so very, very happy that Twitter and other forms of social media did not exist when I was in high school.

 

 

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Why Federal Judges Matter

Fantastic ruling from a federal judge in Michigan, restoring religious liberty rights to a Catholic adoption agency wrongly deprived of them by the state. Excerpt:

A Grand Rapids federal judge has halted a new state policy that bans state contracts with foster and adoption agencies that refuse to work with gay couples.

The state’s settlement and comments made by Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel about the policy prior to taking office show “that the state’s new position targets St. Vincent’s religious beliefs,” U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker wrote in his Thursday opinion.

More:

In his opinion, Jonker said Nessel “is at the very heart of the case” in part because of comments she made on the campaign trail in which she described supporters of the state’s prior policy as “hate mongers” and said she “could not justify using the state’s money” to defend “a law whose only purpose is discriminatory animus.”

Shortly after taking office, Nessel agreed to change state policy so contracts with agencies that refused to work with gay couples would be terminated.

“All of this supports a strong inference that St. Vincent was targeted based on its religious belief, and that it was defendant Nessel who targeted it,” wrote Jonker, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush.

More:

The case revolves not around whether same-sex couples can be great parents, Jonker wrote, but around “whether St. Vincent may continue to do this work and still profess and promote the traditional Catholic belief that marriage as ordained by God is for one man and one woman.”

Without state contacts, St. Vincent would be forced to close its doors, the agency argued. Further, other adoption agencies are available to gay couples seeking a child.

As of mid-February, St. Vincent and Bethany [two Christian adoption agencies barred by the state regulations] were responsible for nearly 10% of the more than 13,000 children under state supervision.

Got that? Around 90 percent of the state’s adoptions are through agencies that adopt out to same-sex couples. The State of Michigan attempted to destroy the work of these two Christian agencies, out of anti-Christian animus. It wasn’t about giving gay couples the right to adopt; it was about making sure that no adoption agency administered according to Christian principles could operate at all. The state’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, comes across as an anti-Christian bigot.

From the text of the ruling:

The State Defendants seek dismissal of Defendant Nessel from the case. They contend that she is simply the State’s chief legal counsel, is not responsible for Michigan’s change in policy, and does not belong in the case. The record undercuts the claim. Based on the record to date, Defendant Nessel is at the very heart of the case. She referred to proponents of the 2015 law as hate-mongers” and said the only purpose of the 2015 law was “discriminatory animus.” She described the 2015 law as “indefensible” during her campaign. These statements raise a strong inference of a hostility toward a religious viewpoint. Based on the present record, she was also a pivotal player in the State’s total reversal of position in the Dumont litigation. It was her assessment of risk that led the State to move from defending St. Vincent’s position to abandoning it in the first month of her term – and this despite the 2015 law, the language of the contracts, and well- established practice. All of this supports a strong inference that St. Vincent was targeted based on its religious belief, and that it was Defendant Nessel who targeted it. See Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm’n, 138 S. Ct. 1719, 1729-31 (2018) (detailing disparaging statements of government decision-makers regarding particular religious beliefs and emphasizing the “State’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint”). On this record, dismissal of Defendant Nessel from the case is not warranted.

As we have now started a national battle royal over the presidency, it is good to be reminded why it really matters to vote for Republican presidential and Senate candidates. As the country grows more and more anti-Christian — see here for more — federal judges who care about First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty are going to be our last lines of defense from bigoted Democratic officeholders.

UPDATE: Libertarian columnist Megan McArdle pointed out a couple of weeks ago why conservatives fear the illiberal left. Excerpt:

 If you’d told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant evangelical Christian bakers might be legally required to cater gay weddings, I would have rolled my eyes at such hysterical conservative propaganda. Post–Obergefell v. Hodges, the default left-wing position seems to be that you cannot shun gay weddings and continue to own a bakery, or work as a tech CEO.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union went after Catholic hospitals for refusing to provide abortions, and companies have threatened to boycott states that sided with conservatives in the conflict between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty.

So it’s not unreasonable for social conservatives to worry about a more European or Canadian future, in which nurses are told to supervise abortions or stop being nurses, doctors are forced to refer patients for abortion or euthanasia, and religious schools are told to give up either the religion or the school.

You can believe that French-ism is superior to Ahmari-ism in principle and practice, while also recognizing its utter dependence on a good-faith negotiating partner. For the center-right to hammer out a peace the religious right can live with, it needs a counterpart on the left that can stand up to its illiberal flanks and deliver a deal.

Social conservatives may despise Donald Trump, but only a Republican president and a Republican Senate will deliver federal judges who will stand up the the illiberal left. That’s a fact.

UPDATE.2: Here’s how fanatical AG Nessel is. She sees “theocracy” looming in a Trump-administration regulation designed to protect Catholic hospitals from having to perform abortions, sex-change operations, or participate in assisted suicide. In a statement, the AG said:

“This display of contempt for the doctrine of separation between church and state is alarming and terrifying,” said Nessel. “According to our federal government, healthcare providers, from doctors to clerical staff, can decide who deserves medical care ranging from the most routine check-ups to lifesaving medical treatment – all based upon the purported religious, moral, or ethical beliefs of the provider. Healthcare treatment should be dictated by approved medical standards and a patient’s decisions about the type of care he or she wishes to receive, not the personal beliefs of those who hold themselves out as medical professionals. The imposition of this rule catapults our nation further toward America devolving into a virtual theocracy.”

Note that the Trump administration was not outlawing these medical practices. It was only saying that hospitals can’t be forced to do them over conscience objections. That the fanatical Nurse Nessel cannot abide.

Did you see the news earlier this month that an appeals court in California allowed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital to go forward? A female-to-male transsexual demanded that the hospital give her a hysterectomy as part of her adventure in transitioning. The hospital does not sterilize people except in conditions when it’s “medically necessary.” Despite the fact that the Catholic hospital arranged for the surgery to take place at another hospital within 72 hours, the patient wants to sue the hospital, to rub its nose in its alleged bigotry. And the California judges allowed the suit to go forward.

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Trans: The Sexual Revolution Turns Totalitarian

A reader writes about using the Duolingo app to help her kids with their Latin:

We are a homeschooling Catholic family, and, like many other traditionally-minded Catholics, we were excited to see that Duolingo is now offering Latin lessons (we’ve done three years of Memoria Press but are doing Spanish this year and wanted to use Duolingo to keep up our Latin skills). Anyhow, I don’t know if you’ve ever used Duolingo, but you have to complete lessons on certain topics before you can advance to the next level. I began the unit about the family this morning and have now hit a roadblock.

Why?

Because two of the sentences you have to translate from Latin to English are:

“Femina uxorem habet” and “Maritus maritum habet” (which translate as “The woman has a wife” and “The husband has a husband.”

I can’t advance until I complete these sentences. And I won’t. I’ve been filling the translation boxes first with admonitions and then with gobbledygook.

Done.

You can hardly escape this stuff. Even in Latin tutorials, they’re advocating for the Sexual Revolution. One aspect of totalitarianism is that it insists that everything that exists must be politicized. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins Of Totalitarianism, writes about the “chess for chess’s sake” problem in the Soviet Union. In the early Stalinist period, some chess masters resisted the state’s attempt to infuse chess with Bolshevik propaganda. They said that chess should be played and enjoyed for its own sake. The Soviet-appointed head of the national chess federation said to the contrary, that all things must be politicized, and understood in light of the Revolution.

So it is with the Sexual Revolution. Not even Latin lessons can be neutral.

But by now, same-sex marriage is old hat. The same flood-the-zone cultural re-education strategy that gay rights advocates used is now deployed to conquer any and all resistance to something much more radical than homosexuality: transgenderism.

The children’s toymaker Mattel has just announced a “gender-neutral” doll. More:

Mattel’s Barbie dolls represented the traditional female image, and preteens embraced the hairstyles, thick eyelashes and spike heels that came with her. But now, Mattel is introducing dolls that let kids form the gender expression of the toy themselves. The doll is fully gender neutral and can be accessorized to be a boy, a girl, neither or both.

The company released six dolls with different skin tones, hair and clothes, calling the doll line Creatable World. Mattel said that it aims to reflect and celebrate “the positive impact of inclusivity.”

“This line allows all kids to express themselves freely, which is why it resonates so strongly with them,” said Kim Culmone, senior vice president of Mattel fashion doll design. “We’re hopeful Creatable World will encourage people to think more broadly about how all kids can benefit from doll play.”

Of course this is all about colonizing the minds of children and compelling them to accept this berserk gender ideology at normative. This is a leading children’s toymaker contributing to the psychological breakdown of children.

Douglas Murray’s blockbuster new book The Madness Of Crowds ends with a powerful chapter on the transgender movement. Murray, who is openly gay, discusses how the trans movement has become a juggernaut that silences anyone who dissents. He writes:

Everywhere the feeling is the same. Among the crowd madnesses we are going through at the moment, trans has become like a battering ram — as though perhaps it is the last thing needed to break down some great patriarchal wall.

He talks about how parents are being deceived by schools, in accordance with official policies designed to “support” children who believe they are trans. And he talks about how among medical authorities, parents are warned that to object or question in any way what their trans-seeking children want is to set their kids up for suicide. Murray writes:

The problem with the choice being presented this way — in the most catastrophizing light possible — is that it leaves no room for discussion or dissent. Instead, the moment that a child says they think they may be of the opposite sex, they must be greeted only with acceptance and from then on only with a set of life-changing steps which an increasingly body of professionals appear to want to encourage with as little pushback as possible.

His trans chapter is sympathetic to the challenges faced by people with gender dysphoria. His objection is not to the phenomenon, but to the ideological bullying around the topic. There is only one approved opinion, and anyone who doesn’t share it (and doesn’t stay silent) faces personal and professional destruction.

Darel E. Paul’s book From Tolerance To Equality tells the story about how gay rights won by first conquering elite culture, then spreading outward. He ponders at the end whether or not trans can follow the same script successfully:

Is gender identity simply a logical extension of sexual orientation? In some ways, the answer is clearly “yes.” Their social constructions have been very similar. Both sexual orientation and gender identity advanced in America thanks to essentialist arguments. The assertion of being “born this way” has carried a great deal of cultural and political freight. This has been aided by building atop the country’s cultural core of radical individualism and the sacred self, nowhere better expressed than in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 1992 majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right  to define one’s own existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

But transgenderism is not like homosexuality, says Paul, in several ways. For one, it doesn’t resonate with the experiences of ordinary Americans, as homosexuality does. For another, it is problematic with relation to feminism (a fact that trans advocates strenuously try to suppress).

[T]ransgenderism is not simply another useful stick with which to beat religious conservatives. It is a radical challenge to all external forms of authority and thus to the social and cultural foundation of elite rule itself. Transgenderism is the most radical form of individualism yet produced by the Sexual Revolution. Gender identity is self-authenticating in a far more extreme fashion than sexual orientation has ever been. … The legal authority of doctors and parents crumbles as gender identity becomes self-defined.

Paul goes on:

The rapid normalization of transgenderism among elites is a symptom of a larger crisis. Elites are failing to exercise authority. Meritocracy’s promise is deference to the superior technical knowledge of elites in exchange for efficient and effective social outcomes. Increasing numbers of Americans see that project as a failure. The evidence is all around. Confidence in all institutions — whether the state, the professions, or big business — drags along near forty-year lows.

I think this is an underappreciated point. Believe what you want to believe about Ukrainian diplomacy, health care policy, immigration, and so forth. There is almost nothing more fundamental to a society than the way it regards males and females. Does it not trouble you even a little bit that we can’t have a public discussion about transgenderism beyond talking about whether it’s one of the greatest things in history, or absolutely the greatest thing in history? Douglas Murray tells horrific stories about how feminists and others have been smashed by trans campaigners and their allies, simply for raising uncomfortable questions, or objecting to trans claims.

There’s something extremely sinister going on here, and it’s not just the totalitarian silencing of debate. It’s creepy things like Drag Queen Story Hour, and Mattel’s training children to normalize genderfluidity through playing with certain toys. Elite culture is massively screwing up a generation of children, and our political, business, academic, and cultural leadership is making it happen.

The Republican Party is almost useless here, because none of them will stand up openly for common sense. But I’ll take almost over what the Democrats offer. All the Democratic presidential candidates, and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, support the Equality Act, which writes transgender ideology into federal law. The Republicans do not. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s about the only thing ordinary people have left to protect them from the state forcing this ideology onto them.

People who wonder why Christian conservatives, and other social conservatives, are not willing to give Trump up despite his awful behavior in office ought to stop and think about this. The Democratic Party is on record supporting a federal law that declares sex is whatever an individual claims it to be. This law would have serious consequences. It would mean that the Sexual Revolution (cleverly characterized by Michael Hanby as the technological revolution applied to the body) has at last become a totalitarian project.

The left has created a world in which physicians and schoolteachers conspire against parents to jack their children up with hormones and prepare them to mutilate their bodies in a vain effort to become the opposite sex. For those on the left who have already accepted the ideology, this is a righteous cause. For those who have not, and who see it as their responsibility to protect their children from this madness, it’s difficult to see why Trump’s personal corruption is a greater threat to the social order than this.

Paul says that transgenderism is a crisis of elite authority. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but he’s got a point: when the top leadership in America — political, corporate, academic, media, cultural — all tells you that men can become women and vice versa, just by an act of the will, and works to mandate the acceptance of this perverse ideology, and even catechize children in its precepts … well, to hell with the elites. They’ve lost their minds, and their moral authority.

UPDATE: Reader Nate J.:

I don’t think it can be overstated just how much meaning this woke BS provides to a generation devoid of meaning (as a recent post of yours showed).

I went to school with a girl who now believes herself to be a man by virtue of pumping herself full of testosterone and mutilating her breasts. Throughout school she was a female. Throughout post-secondary, she was a female. She married a heterosexual man and was a “wife”. She was a female for the first ~30 years of her life and, given her marriage, a heterosexual one.

Almost every single day now, her social media feed contains some post about how some big, bad conservative government somewhere is ATTACKING LGBTQ RIGHTS! or some particularly condescending web comic “explaining” how the latest made-up progressive buzzword works (I think the other day it was about “deadnaming” or some such nonsense) or about her life as a “gay man” in a “gay marriage”. That last bit always struck me as somewhat bizarre given society’s insistence on the fixed nature of sexuality. Presumably, the husband was blissfully unaware that he was, in fact, a gay man for the first 5 or 6 years of his marriage.

As I started to pay attention to the content of the things being posted, and especially the tone, it became clear how much meaning they find in these memes and web comics and news stories that make them feel like part of the #resistance. Both of them are socially awkward and, having gone to school with one of them, unpopular types. I can say with some confidence that both are likely on the autism spectrum. Since the hormones have begun, this woman’s story of transitioning to male has garnered her attention and acceptance like you wouldn’t believe, at least at the superficial level of social media validation.

The content that gets posted sometimes has a strong whiff of hero fantasy to it–you know, like when you’re in the shower and you “win” an argument against some non-existent opponent in your head. Except they put it out there publicly, these condescending and combative rebukes against opponents they have never seen or experienced (and, thanks to the culture of fear and self-censorship that exists around any criticism of contemporary gender ideology, they never will).

At once, they are bold heroes and humble martyrs. They are the oppressed, but members of the “in” crowd for once. You can see where the totalitarian impulse comes from. This is where they get their meaning from. Their political agenda absolutely must win–and must win totally–because what else is there? Exerting this cultural power has to make them happy because they were promised it would. There is always this insecurity, this resistance to just settling in and living a “normal” life as they now have every ability to do.

The agenda has to be pushed another step further in order for them to stay in a constant state of angst, half-way between victim and hero. Mere comfortable existence is not enough. For people who just wanted to “live and let live” or be “comfortable in their own bodies”, I just don’t see it. Nobody truly at peace would obsess about his or her identity this much.

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Cardinal Sarah’s Benedict Option

The Catholic Cardinal Robert Sarah has released a new book, titled The Day Is Now Far Spent. He gave an interview to Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register, in which he said some very Benedict Option things. Excerpts:

The title [of the Cardinal’s new book] is dark, but it is realistic.Truly we see the whole of Western civilization crumbling. In 1978, the philosopher John Senior published the book The Death of Christian Culture. Like the Romans of the fourth century, we see the barbarians take power. But this time, the barbarians are not coming from outside to attack the cities. The barbarians are inside. They are those individuals who refuse their own human nature, who are ashamed to be limited creatures, who want to think of themselves as demiurges without fathers and without heritage. That’s the real barbarity. On the contrary, civilized man is proud and happy to be an heir.

We convinced our contemporaries that in order to be free, we must not depend on anyone. This is a tragic mistake. Westerners are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of the person. However, civilized man is fundamentally an heir; he receives a history, a religion, a language, a culture, a name, a family.

Refusing to join a network of dependency, inheritance and filiation condemns us to enter the naked jungle of competition from a self-sufficient economy. Because he refuses to accept himself as an heir, man condemns himself to the hell of liberal globalization, where individual interests clash without any other law than that of profit at all costs.

However, the title of my book also contains the light of hope because it is taken from the petition of the disciples of Emmaus in the Gospel of Luke: “Stay with us, Lord, for it is nearly evening” (24:29). We know that Jesus will eventually manifest himself.

Our first reason for hope is therefore God himself. He will never abandon us! We firmly believe in his promise. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Holy Catholic Church. She will always be the Ark of Salvation. There will always be enough light for the one who seeks the truth with a pure heart.

Even as everything seems to be in the process of being destroyed, we see the luminous seeds of rebirth emerging. I would like to mention the hidden saints who carry the Church, in particular, the faithful religious who put God at the center of their lives every day. Monasteries are islands of hope. It seems that the vitality of the Church has taken refuge there, as if they were oases in the middle of the desert — but also, Catholic families who concretely live the Gospel of life, while the world scorns them.

Christian parents are the hidden heroes of our time, the martyrs of our century. Finally, I want to pay tribute to so many faithful and anonymous priests who have made the sacrifice at the altar the center and meaning of their lives. By offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass daily with reverence and love, they carry the Church without knowing it.

More:

The West was at the root of the crisis. It is up to it to implement the antidote. To do this, we must start from the experience of the monasteries. They are places where God is simply and concretely at the center of life. God is the Life of man’s life. Without God, man resembles a huge and majestic river that would have cut itself off from its source. Sooner or later, this river will dry up and die permanently.

We must create places where virtues can flourish. It is time to regain the courage of non-conformism. Christians must have the strength to form oases where the air is breathable, where, quite simply, Christian life is possible.

I call on Christians to open oases of gratuitousness in the desert of triumphant profitability. Yes, you cannot be alone in the desert of society without God. A Christian who remains alone is a Christian in danger. He will eventually be devoured by the sharks of the trading society.

Christians must gather in communities around their churches. They must rediscover the vital importance of an intense, continuous and persevering life of prayer. A man who does not pray looks like a seriously ill man who suffers from total paralysis of the arms, legs, and has lost the use of speech, hearing, sight. … This man is cut off from all essential relationships. He is a dead man. To renew our relationship with God is to breathe, to live fully.

We must create places where the heart and mind can breathe, where the soul can turn to God in a very concrete way. Our communities must put God at the center of our lives, our liturgies and our churches.

In the avalanche of lies, one must be able to find places where the truth is not only explained but experienced. It is simply a question of living the Gospel! Not to think of it as a utopia, but to experience it in a concrete way.

Read the whole thing.

If you’re in the Boston area, come out to hear me and some other Christians discuss the Benedict Option on Saturday at the Festival of Faith at St. Paul’s, Brockton. More information, including registration information, is here.

And, if you haven’t yet, please buy my book, The Benedict Option. With each passing season, it’s becoming a more vital guide to understanding our times, and what we Christians should do.

I would like to mention today, as an aside (but a related one), that today is the 75th birthday of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. He will be submitting his resignation letter to the Vatican, as canon law requires of all bishops upon reaching this milestone. I congratulate him on his birthday, though I regret that he will now be moving into retirement. Pope Francis doesn’t have to accept his resignation, but given Chaput’s conservatism, there’s no doubt that the pontiff will. It says something about the politics of the Catholic Church now that Chaput is retiring from a traditionally cardinatial see without a red hat. I hope that when he does at last leave office — the Philly-based Catholic journalist Rocco Palmo says that the new archbishop will be named around the first of 2020 — that Archbishop Chaput continues to speak out on issues of concern to the Church and the world.

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Trump Is The Deep State

The whistleblower complaint is now public. It’s very serious stuff. It’s backed up by the notes released yesterday by the White House, too. Here’s something that jumped out at me:

If this is true, that is evidence of a cover-up. Not necessarily a criminal cover-up, but a cover-up all the same. The officials, including the lawyers, likely knew that Donald Trump had probably broken federal election law, and were trying to hide the evidence.

There is no doubt now that this must be investigated thoroughly by Congress.

There has been a lot of talk for years on the Right about the “Deep State” — the unaccountable bureaucracy that supposedly really runs the US Government, and that will do its best to undermine Donald Trump. Let us suppose that the Deep State really exists. Wouldn’t it be a terrible abuse of its power if the Deep State tried to strongarm a foreign head of state to use his power to interfere in the US presidential election to favor a particular candidate? Let’s say agents of the Deep State attempted to extort a favor from a foreign leader, tying much-needed US assistance to his willingness to launch an investigation into Donald Trump’s business dealings. Wouldn’t we all know how dirty that was? Wouldn’t Republicans be baying at the moon for justice?

Of course. Don’t lie to yourself. Of course we on the Right would be doing that — and we would be correct to!

There is substantial evidence that President Trump betrayed the national security interests of the United States by using the power of his office to compel a foreign head of state to investigate Trump’s chief political rival in an upcoming election. That is an abuse of power, straight up. If the so-called Deep State were doing this on behalf of Joe Biden, we would know exactly what we were looking at.

This does not mean that impeachment is the appropriate remedy. Noah Rothman writes about the risks to the Democrats. Excerpt:

So what happens if Trump is impeached by the House, acquitted in the Senate and re-elected nonetheless next November? Impeachment will remain a remedy for presidential misconduct only in theory. In practice, that constitutional maneuver will have been neutralized for all but the gravest and most unequivocal episodes of mismanagement. Democrats, sensing that the strike against Trump backfired, will have lost the ultimate instrument of deterrence. Vindicated at the polls, the president’s conduct is certain to be even more reckless. And unless you count the power of subpoena and theatrical committee hearings as a check on the presidency, Trump will be unleashed like never before, imbued with a sense of invulnerability.

You can see why the party’s leadership in the House was keen to avoid this outcome. Democrats will make significant sacrifices in pursuit of the president’s impeachment, and the risks are serious.

Rothman goes on to say that if Trump has done what he appears to have done, then he deserves to lose re-election. Still, let’s recognize that Rothman’s scenario is true, in this sense: If Trump is impeached, survives it, and wins re-election, the next four years will be grim, as the president will have concluded that he is invulnerable.

I wrote yesterday about why many of us on the Right might conclude that even though Trump might be a crook, it might yet be important to vote for him. Tl;dr: because the Democratic Party represents a more serious, more consequential form of moral disorder than the president’s crookedness.

But let me take the other side here, for the sake of argument. Doing what Trump appears to have done is far, far more serious than having sex with an intern in the Oval Office and lying under oath. If conservatives are willing to overlook this behavior in Trump, and, if it is substantiated, not deliver any serious consequences for it, then we really will have unleashed him in a second term to be as reckless as he wants to be. What will he do with that power? Should any president, left or right, have that kind of de facto power? Many of us on the Right have for years complained about the imbalance of power between Congress and the increasingly powerful executive branch. If the allegations against Trump are substantiated, and Congress — which is to say, ultimately, the Republicans in the Senate — will not hold the executive accountable for extorting domestic political favors from a foreign head of state using the power of the presidency, then they will be guilty of having created conditions in which tyranny can flourish.

And if we — yeah, me too — are so afraid of the Democratic Party in power that we support Trump even if these charges are proved, then I don’t see how we avoid this moral stain, and responsibility for whatever follows.

Think about it: if Trump really did do what it looks like he did, and doesn’t have to pay a price for it, and gets re-elected, what is he likely to do in his second term? We already know that he has no moral compass. He will have learned that Congress will not hold him responsible, and if he wins re-election, neither will a majority of the American people.

The thing to keep in mind is that none of this had to happen. Donald Trump brought all of this onto himself (along with Rudy Giuliani). There was no reason for Trump and Giuliani to go rooting around in Ukraine, looking for dirt related to the 2016 election (Hillary lost!), and to use against Biden. Hunter Biden’s sleazy business dealings are certainly a fair issue in the 2020 race, should Joe Biden get the nomination, but the potential payoff from finding dirt in Ukraine would not remotely be worth the risks. Yet Trump did it anyway, because he goes with his gut, and has no moral sense. He has put his party and his voters in the position of having to defend the indefensible, over and over. He’s corrupting us all.

Last weekend I wrote about a situation in my neighborhood, in which a beleaguered 60-year-old woman lives with her mentally ill, violent, abusive son, a 6’5″ man in his twenties. It’s a nightmare for her, but she persists in it, because she’s too afraid of the alternatives (e.g., for him, jail or homelessness). That poor woman is a symbol of conservatives under Trump.

One more thing: if Trump is impeached, and if he is re-elected, I don’t know what happens to this country. I really don’t. If I were a Democrat, and that happened, I would lose a lot of faith in this country and its people. I’m not a Democrat, or a liberal, but I would lose a lot of faith in this country, if that happened (even if I participated in it by voting for Trump, or withholding my vote).

But then, if Democrats take over, given their beliefs and policies on issues that matter deeply to me, I would also lose a lot of faith in this country. I see no good future for us as a nation, no matter what.

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Emma’s Exorcism

For those who have been following the story of “Emma” and her struggle with demonic possession, I have a special request to pass on from her husband “Nathan”. At 11 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday (9/26), Emma will meet once again with her exorcist for deliverance prayer. This has been a very difficult and eventful week for Emma on that front, and for Nathan and their children. Nathan asks that readers of this blog who pray will join him at 11 am Eastern for intercessory prayer for Emma, who will be entering the fight, along with her priest-exorcist, at that moment.

I don’t know how long the session will last. I plan to pray for an hour. I’ll let you know how things went when I hear from Nathan.

If you don’t pray, or if you think this is all nonsense, I ask you in charity to refrain from mockery. A wife and mother is suffering in ways that the rest of us will never see, and can scarcely comprehend. I’ve seen glimpses of it with my own eyes, as you know. It’s terrifying. The stories Nathan has told me about what he and his wife have endured during this ordeal are devastating. There is nothing funny about this. If you cannot join them in prayer for deliverance, then at least pray for her healing from this scourge, or send wishes for her healing by whatever means seems appropriate to you.

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