Rod Dreher's Blog, page 209

Woke Doctors

You might remember the post here about “Moralistic Therapeutic Med School,” in which medical schools are starting to remove or relocate images of white men affiliated with the school who accomplished great things. This is about something related, but much more serious.

A reader who is a physician sent me this WSJ op-ed column the other day. He said that this is bad news for the medical profession. The author is Stanley Goldfarb, a former administrator at Penn’s medical school. Excerpts:

A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize “social justice” that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular.

These educators focus on eliminating health disparities and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is well-equipped to deal with cultural diversity, which are worthwhile goals. But teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science. The prospect of this “new,” politicized medical education should worry all Americans.

More:

The zeitgeist of sociology and social work have become the driving force in medical education. The goal of today’s educators is to produce legions of primary care physicians who engage in what is termed “population health.”

This fits perfectly with the current administrator-rich, policy-heavy, form-over-function approach at every level of American education. Theories of learning with virtually no experimental basis for their impact on society and professions now prevail. Students are taught in the tradition of educational theorist Étienne Wenger, who emphasized “communal learning” rather than individual mastery of crucial information.

Where will all this lead? Medical school bureaucracies have become bloated, as they have in every other sphere of education. Curricula will increasingly focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness. And so will many of your doctors in coming years.

Read the whole thing. At some point, reality will take its revenge, and the woke will be banished. But how much suffering will innocent people have to endure before it does? And how many people of faith will be deterred from seeking a medical career because the militant left has placed absurd barriers to keep out the politically incorrect.

This morning, on the drive to the airport (I’m on my way to New York City now), I heard a radio piece talking about the need for transgender health care, and how medical educators in Oregon are meeting it. There’s not yet a transcript available for the broadcast, but I can tell you that it begins with the reporter framing transgender surgery in a politically correct way — something like, “the patient had surgery to realign her body with her gender identity.” This, by the way, is an example of how the media re-engineers society by changing language. Later in the piece, a doctor says that in years past, people with gender dysphoria would typically have been referred for mental health treatment. Today, though, they get surgical intervention.

This is massively important! What if psychiatric treatment, or some adjacent treatment, is what is better for them than gender reassignment? What if that is what would restore them to health?

Here’s a little personal story that came to mind as I was listening to this piece.

The transgender person in the story says that he (a biological male presenting as female) always felt uncomfortable in his body. No doubt this is true. I think this accounts for the disproportionate number of autistic people among gender dysphorics. Autism is often accompanied by something called “sensory processing disorder.” Nobody knows why this is, but it is common.

As I learned about autism and sensory processing disorder in my own family, a number of things about myself became clear. I am confident that I would not meet the threshold for a formal autism spectrum diagnosis, but I am equally confident that I have many of the traits of people who are (and that includes a member of my family). In fact, the sensory stuff is fairly widespread in my family.

As a child, I had very strong legs. My father recalls me doing 400 deep knee bends when I was nine years old; he stopped me because he thought I would hurt myself. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not strengthen my upper body. I had poor muscle tone, and nothing could fix that. Decades later, I learned that this is something that people on the spectrum sometimes have.

I have never felt comfortable in my body, though I thought for most of my life this was simply neurosis. No, I have never had the faintest thought of gender dysphoria, but it manifested itself in something feeling … not right. Something hard to define. To be frank, one reason I drank so much in college — aside from the fact that LSU in the 1980s had a massive binge-drinking culture — was to overcome that sense of not-rightness, so I could talk to girls. The point is, when I read about officially-diagnosed autistic young people seeking sex changes because they say they don’t feel right in their bodies, I get that. I can’t pretend to know about that from a sexualized point of view, but that sense that things aren’t right is quite familiar to me. And it never goes away. You just have to learn how to cope with it. For me, it got better as I grew older.

I can remember in my childhood, how my mom had a big heart (still does), but was not particular physically affectionate. I couldn’t understand that at all, especially when our father was physically demonstrative. Once I started learning about autism and sensory processing a decade or so ago, and began to understand things about myself, and why I could be so prickly about ordinary bodily things, I understood her in a new way. This was almost certainly not an emotional disposition for her, but a neurological-sensory disorder. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but my mom and I are so much alike in so many ways that I think this is what was going on. It’s how it is with me. I can see this trait — sensory processing disorder — manifesting to some degree in most of my mom’s six grandchildren too.

I bring this up only to say that at least some of these young spectrum people who seek gender dysphoria treatment, including radical, irreversible steps (e.g., mastectomies, hormone treatment that arrests sexual maturity) could surely benefit from ordinary therapies to help them cope with their sensory issues. If I had known as a teenager and a young adult that what I was feeling in and about my body was due not to a character or psychological flaw, but probably due to neurobiology, it would have been much easier to manage it, and to learn how to live with it.

I’ve come to see, for example, the fact that I have unusual superpowers when it comes to taste and smell to be an advantage. This is why I love food and wine so much: I can experience aromas and flavors more intensely than most people. And I’ve stopped feeling so bad about my inability to tone my upper body, though I am also sure that I will never feel quite at home in my body (I have always been terrible at dancing and athletics; I can be a graceful writer, but in the flesh, am a shambling galoot). Fortunately for me, this is all relatively minor — discomforting, not tormenting. I wouldn’t judge the subjective experiences of spectrum people suffering from gender dysphoria.

My point here is simply this: for whatever cultural reasons, young people who report a serious disjunction between themselves and their bodies are being encouraged to express  and to affirm that disjunction in sexual ways — and now the medical profession is eager to confirm that concept. Often this results in permanent surgical or hormone-driven alteration to the body. Dr. Goldfarb’s column makes me afraid for those young people and their families, being driven by the popular culture and the culture of medicine into asking for life-changing procedures that will not actually cure them of their sense of alienation from their bodies, because it may not really be about gender.

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Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Short-order cook at the Baton Rouge Airport, to Self: “Baby, Imma put a lot of love into this biscuit.”

I love Louisiana people!

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That Helpful Kavanaugh Reminder

I remember where I was watching the last day of the Kavanaugh hearings last fall. I was not keen on his nomination. I didn’t oppose it, certainly, but he struck me as a standard-issue Republican nominee. No one to get excited over, certainly. 

And then the Democrats went to work, attempting to destroy the man based on unconfirmed, and unconfirmable, allegations, and his sex and ethnicity.

Here is a link to all of the things I wrote about that mob, and how it stunned me (and a lot of others) back to reality. In one of those posts, I wrote:

In my own case, this is what made me come down hard for Kavanaugh (absent any credible discovery of serious sexual misconduct): that he was clearly being railroaded by liberal politicians and media, in a way that is frankly McCarthyite. Except this time, instead of Reds, we have White Male Conservatives. People like me, and my friends and family. The last two weeks have brought forth from the Left a concerted attempt not to get to the truth about what happened 36 years ago, and how to deliberate responsibly in the face of uncertainty, but rather to brutalize and destroy a man and all those of his despised cultural and ideological class.

And in another, commenting on an immediately post-Kavanaugh Washington Post story that framed Republicans as unfairly exploiting Democrats’ behavior to their own benefit in the coming election:

Here’s the thing: though there is no question that the GOP, like Democrats, play to the anxieties of its base — this is normal politics — there really were, and are, mobs out to get conservatives.

Conservatives didn’t just imagine the anti-Kavanaugh protesters filling the halls of Congress, harassing GOP senators. Conservatives aren’t imagining campus mobs shouting down conservatives. Republican political consultants didn’t invent the mob at Middlebury College last year that chased Charles Murray off of campus, and physically injured a (liberal) professor who was his host. Nor did the GOP conjure the Yale mob that abused the Christakises over Halloween costumes in 2016.

And on and on. More to the point, Republicans did not invent the mob-like behavior of the news media in the Kavanaugh affair. In the last 24 hours, I’ve heard from three friends — two Democrats, and one anti-Republican independent — who have written to express profound concern about this political moment, and the behavior of the liberal mob. One of the Democrats — no fan of Trump or Kavanaugh — told me that her party has lost her over all this. The independent told me he hasn’t voted GOP in 30 years, but that may change this November, because of the “malice” (his word) on the left. And the third remains a devoted Democrat, but he is agonizing over the demons now taking over his political side, and worries if they can ever be reined in.

Look, Republicans do not have clean hands here. But it is breathtaking to observe how so many in the news media appear to assume that Republicans who are looking at the world as it actually is, and drawing conclusions from it, are acting in bad faith.

A few months later, in January, the media and members of the liberal commentariat did the same kind of thing with the Covington Catholic schoolboys. They were white male conservatives, therefore they must have been guilty. Pitchfork ’em and burn ’em! Remember the NYT op-ed titled “White Women, Come Get Your People,” that denounced white women who defended Kavanaugh as “gender traitors”? That and the attempted Kavanaugh professional lynching were the kind of events that remind you what’s at stake in our politics, despite the clown in the White House. If we return the Democrats to power, this is what we’ll get.

The Left can’t let Kavanaugh go. Over the weekend, The New York Times published an op-ed essay featuring a supposed new Kavanaugh revelation, taken from a new book by two of its reporter. The new accusation accuses him — framed as a privileged white guy — of having been at a drunken college party, and having had his penis towards a non-privileged Hispanic female present. Mollie Hemingway, who co-wrote a book about the Kavanaugh case, tore into the story when it first appeared, pointing out that the accuser is an old enemy of Kavanaugh’s, and that the alleged victim, Deborah Ramirez, refused to talk about the alleged incident, though several of her friends say she has no recollection of it.

How does Hemingway know this? Because it’s in the two NYT reporters’ book! 

But it is NOT in the Times’s story. The paper omitted this fact from its own published excerpt. The authors say that their “gut” tells them that Deborah Ramirez, the alleged victim, really was assaulted in this way by Kavanaugh, despite the fact that she will neither confirm nor deny it, and several friends told the reporters she can’t remember it. The Times published this “editor’s note” yesterday:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

That’s one hell of an omission from the original article, which went viral, by the way, without this vital information.

So, how did a couple of leading Democrats who aspire to replace Trump in the Oval Office respond to the Times piece?

I sat through those hearings. Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people. He was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice.

He must be impeached.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 15, 2019

Last year the Kavanaugh nomination was rammed through the Senate without a thorough examination of the allegations against him. Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing. Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 15, 2019

You regular readers know that I’m working on a book about the rise of what I call “soft totalitarianism” — and focusing on the testimonies of emigres to the West from the communist world, who see what’s happening here now, and who are raising their voices in alarm. (If you’re one of these people I haven’t yet talked to, e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and let’s talk.) The first person I talked to about this, back in 2015, told me that the way the Left will flat-out lie about you in an attempt to destroy you personally and professionally when you get in their way — that, for him, is a clear sign that we are turning into the kind of country from which he defected in the 1960s.

Eyes wide open, people. We perhaps should be grateful to the Times for reminding us of the stakes. Look: 

The Kavanaugh railroad is the most politically clarifying event in my life, and it is why, as the New York Times seems intent on reminding us, I will crawl over broken glass to vote for a guy I don’t particularly like next year. https://t.co/FEzhJSIrLj

— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) September 16, 2019

(Note to readers: I’m traveling this morning to NYC for Tuesday night’s TAC event at St. Agnes Church. 6 to 8 pm. Duncan Stroik, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Self will talk about the meaning of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, its destruction, and why it should be rebuilt. It’s all free — and MBD is buying the first round of drinks for errbody. Or so I hear.)

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Reims, France

Don’t forget to drink Champagne in Reims!

Another one from France, this one taken by Fred, this blog’s Paris bureau chief. It’s a limoncello & Prosecco cocktail, enjoyed on the rooftop at the Foundation Louis Vuitton, in Paris:

Paris, France

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The Exorcist As Family Allegory

Here’s a really interesting piece from Quillette about William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist as a cautionary tale about the damage done from the family’s dissolution. The author, Kevin Mims, ties it to Mary Eberstadt’s important and provocative new book Primal Screams: How The Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. 

Mims notes that Eberstadt doesn’t mention Blatty’s early Seventies blockbuster, but that it’s highly relevant to her thesis. Mims:

Those who have never read the novel, or are familiar only with its 1973 cinematic incarnation, probably believe the book to be a potboiler about demonic possession. But it is also an allegorical warning about the importance of the traditional family unit and the devastation wrought when it breaks down. Curiously, this aspect of the novel went largely unnoticed by the book’s earliest reviewers.

Back in 1971, the advent of no-fault divorce laws in the United States was seen in liberal circles as an unalloyed benefit for society. Thus, the book critics for most of the mainstream publications that bothered to review The Exorcist—Time, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc.—treated the book as either a modern day pastiche of Poe and Mary Shelley, or else as a traditional story of the battle between Good and Evil. What’s odd about this is that Blatty made no effort to hide his social conservatism. You don’t have to be a postmodern literary detective to find it in the subtext. Blatty was not a subtle writer, and he set his message out on the page for all to see, although very few have ever remarked upon it.

I’ve never read the novel, but saw the film about 20 years ago. The scariest movie I’ve ever watched. I would not watch it again. Interestingly, I had always assumed that because the Catholic Church condemned it when it was released that The Exorcist was an anti-Catholic movie. Nothing could be further from the truth! Blatty was a bad Catholic as a younger man (Mims recounts this), but became more faithful as he aged. The movie is a deeply Catholic film — though it is as terrifying as you imagine. If you haven’t seen it or read the novel, it’s about the possession of an adolescent girl, Regan, who begins to suffer after her father Howard abandons the family. Her mother Chris, a successful actress, seeks psychiatric help for Regan, but in the end turns to an exorcist in desperation.

Mims writes:

Although Howard never makes an appearance in the novel (we hear a few words from him but never see him), The Exorcist, a book about fatherlessness, is filled with fathers. The most prominent of these is Father Damien Karras, a psychiatrist and Jesuit priest who teaches at Georgetown. Chris turns to him in desperation when she begins to suspect that Regan might be possessed by a demon. The priest, who has no experience with exorcism, tries for a long time to convince himself that psychiatry holds the answer to Regan’s problems, instead. Karras has been scarred by his own fatherlessness. He grew up with only one parent, his impoverished mother. They were almost incestuously close, and when, much later, his mother lost her mind and Father Karras had her committed to Bellevue sanitarium, she saw it as a betrayal. The look on her face as she was locked into her padded cell haunts Karras throughout the book. His life, Blatty implies, as well as that of his mother, would almost certainly have been better had he not been fatherless.

Mims talks about how unhappy Blatty’s own fatherless childhood was, and how Blatty was himself a poor example of a husband and father. But there was something deep inside Blatty that intuited the spirit of the times, and prompted his literary response:

Clearly, he wasn’t anybody’s idea of a family-values conservative. But if his id was in charge of his Hollywood playboy lifestyle, his superego seems to have been firmly in control of his literary imagination as he cranked out The Exorcist over nine months.

Notwithstanding the Church’s reflexive condemnation, The Exorcist is a deeply religious novel in which Catholic priests play the most heroic roles, martyring themselves to save the life of a little girl who isn’t even Catholic.

Read Mims’s entire article. I hope it sparks you to buy Eberstadt’s book, which is not not not a typical social-conservative condemnation of the Sexual Revolution, but in fact a profoundly insightful work of sociologically-informed cultural criticism about sex, family, and identity.

A Millennial friend of mine told me recently that she’s become somewhat alienated from her friends, who are full of advice about how difficult situations with her husband and children are a sign that she should get rid of them — that is, leave her husband, put her kids in day care, stuff like that. The willingness of people in her generation, she told me, to find any kind of personal suffering or sacrifice to be intolerable grieves her. My friend said she and her husband are having normal struggles with marriage and kids, but her (female) friends believe that her personal sense of well-being should be the most important thing of all. My friend is a believing Christian, and knows they’re wrong, but it frightens her for the world her own young children will inherit. She says there is little to nothing in the culture around her to support family formation and stability. It’s all about liberating the individual from any obligations or ties that inhibit personal liberty and happiness.

This is our culture today. As I wrote in an afterword for Eberstadt’s book, the only real way I see to fight it is to immerse oneself in countercultural communities and practices that provide resistance to this destructive narrative and the forces it unleashes. That is going to be the Church, for all its faults and failings. I hadn’t thought of it this way until reading Mims’s essay, but the Church is exactly where one would go to take refuge from these demonic forces.

I’ve done research in the past on the phenomenon of demon possession, and it does seem to be tied closely to intense childhood trauma, especially in the family — sexual trauma in particular. There is something about trauma that cracks the psyche; sometimes, that crack is big enough for evil spirits to come in. It is certainly not the case that everyone who experiences childhood trauma become possessed! (Actual possession is rare.) But as Mims points out, The Exorcist can be read as an allegory for the fury, chaos, and destruction that emerges when the family structure that forms us, and give us a sense of order, wholeness, and meaning, fall apart — or to be precise, are torn down by human selfishness and spite. You don’t have to believe in God, or in demonic possession, to grasp Blatty’s core point — which, as Mims indicates, is also Mary Eberstadt’s point.

When Sohrab Ahmari refers to Drag Queen Story Hour, whose organizers explicitly intend to break down sexual identity in children, as “demonic,” I believe this is what he’s getting at. And he’s right.

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Brexit For Americans

In the third item of his Friday column, Andrew Sullivan offers a pretty strong explainer on the psychological politics of Brexit, to help Americans understand it by analogy. He says that it’s frustrating to read about Brexit in the US media, because they never seem to explain to Americans why Brexit happened in the first place. They simply assume that it’s foolish and bad. Well, says Sullivan — who says he would have voted against Brexit — consider what it would have meant in American terms with this thought experiment:

The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973. Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.

How many Americans would support this? How many votes would a candidate for president get if he or she proposed it? The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government. It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetime. The U.K. has no control over immigration from 27 other countries in Europe, and its less regulated economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the country, transforming its culture and stressing its hospitals, schools and transportation system. Its courts ultimately have to answer to the European Court. Most aspects of its economy are governed by rules set in Brussels. It cannot independently negotiate any aspect of its own trade agreements. I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

Well, if you put it that way, Brexit is a no-brainer, at least to me. I cannot imagine non-elite Americans  accepting such a loss of sovereignty.

I get the same feeling reading US media coverage of the politics of European populism, both in western and central Europe. So much of the coverage takes for granted that the only reasons anybody votes for populist parties is racism or nativism. When you actually go there and talk to ordinary people — at least this has been my experience, in both western and central Europe — the picture gets a lot more complicated.

Earlier this week in Vienna, I met some Austrians in a cafe, and fell into a conversation about Hungarian PM Viktor Orban’s relationship with media in his own country. I told my Austrian interlocutor that I found the Hungarian government’s approach to media (for example) pretty troubling. He said yes, he understands, but what Americans usually don’t understand is how completely left-wing European media are.

You think this is true in America, he said, and it is, but not nearly to the extent that it is in Europe. Most countries have some form of state media, and its directors are political appointees. They are uniformly leftist. Even right-of-center governments typically don’t even bother trying to put their own people into politically appointed positions, because there are almost no conservative journalists in Europe, period. The Austrian explained that media culture there is not only dominated by the Left, but is wholly leftist.

The Austrian told me he wasn’t defending what the Orban government does, but only trying to help me understand why it’s not as alarming to many Europeans as Americans think it should be. If you are on the political or cultural right in Europe, he said, you know that you have next to no hope that your side will receive accurate and balanced coverage, in part because the European media don’t understand how uniformly leftist they are. In other words, they think that they are nonpartisan truth tellers, but right-of-center Europeans will tell you otherwise.

I had not thought about it from that point of view. To be clear, it doesn’t make what the illiberal ruling party in Hungary is doing right — from what I’ve been able to discern, its Fidesz-supported media law really is pretty awful — but it does make one realize that the story is more complicated than we in the US are likely to realize. (As a matter of fact, the first, and longest, item in Sullivan’s column is about how The New York Times has traded in old-fashioned liberalism for militant progressive activism.)

If you are any kind of religious or social conservative, you know well that you have little chance of being covered fairly, or at all, by the American media, given its liberal convictions. I think we have much more to worry about from the state restricting the media than we do from media bias, but to borrow a line from Sullivan, it’s not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

I would like to ask conservative European readers — Hungarians and otherwise — to come up with a Sullivan-like analogy to help us Americans understand what the media environment is like where you live.

 

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The Annoying Part Of The First Amendment

Aided by a large charitable donation, Tulane University is opening a First Amendment law clinic. More:

The clinic is launching with a $1 million gift from the Stanton Foundation, an organization created by former CBS News President Frank Stanton, a founding figure of modern broadcast news. The foundation supports innovation in civics and U.S. history education.

Students will work under the supervision of faculty members in representing clients seeking to defend their rights to a free press, to free speech, to petition and to assemble, Meyer said. In accordance with the guidelines of the foundation, it will not handle religious liberty cases, he said.

Hypocrites. They want the First Amendment, but not the religious liberty part. Look, it’s the Stanton Foundation’s money, and it can do whatever it wants with it. But spare me the civic do-gooder First Amendment claptrap.

 

 

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The Progressive Dystopia Of NYC Schools

You have to read this long Atlantic piece by George Packer, in which he describes the disillusioning of him and his wife — good urban liberals — by the militant wokeness that overtook the New York City public schools that their children attended (and that their son still attends). The piece begins with Packer recounting the insane competition among the rich and connected to get their kids into private schools. The Packers ultimately opted out of that, and searched for a good progressive public school for their son (and later, their daughter).

They found an ethnically diverse one that satisfied them, though it was not without its challenges. All seemed relatively well. Until five years ago:

Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

I cannot even begin to do justice to the destructive insanity Social Justice ideology brought to this school. I’ll let this one example from Packer’s story stand for all of them. It began when a little girl in second grade began to identify as a male, and demanded to use the boy’s restroom.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals.

Yesterday, talking about Drag Queen Story Hour, I explained how and why it’s a “condensed symbol” of the progressive-led sexual radicalization of our society, even at the level of little children. Degenderizing the toilets at a public elementary school is another.

Like I said, that’s only one thing that happened at Packer’s kid’s school. Read the whole thing. It gets crazier and crazier, as identity politics comes to control not only that school, but the entire NYC public school system. The authoritarianism and radicalism of progressive ideology has destroyed what schools are supposed to be, and, in the liberal writer’s anxious view, are kicking the supports out from underneath liberal democracy.

Is there anything that the new woke progressivism touches that it doesn’t destroy? If it weren’t for the fact that one of the parents at that school is a nationally known journalist with a prominent platform, would any of us know what a disaster the militant left has made of the nation’s largest school system, all because of identity politics?

Seriously, read it. It’s a warning.

UPDATE: A great comment from reader Mr. Squires:

I am a product of NYC public schools and even though I live in DC now, I’m disgusted by what DeBlasio, Carranza, and the Grievance Industrial Complex in education are doing to the school system. My parents came here from the Caribbean and were fortunate enough to get me into a gifted program (another thing those two are trying to destroy)–a foundation that laid the path for a solid K-12 education. The worst part of this story is that it’s not just a New York problem. The same militant wokeness can be seen in DC’s government and public charter schools. You see it in the desperate push for “diversity” above achievement, as if black kids need white classmates more than quality schools. I don’t know how the Left can see a black girl in 12th grade at an all-black high school as being subjected to the evil forces of segregation but celebrate her acceptance into Spelman College or Howard University as an opportunity for a culturally-enriching education experience.

The biggest threat, however, is in the curriculum. For example, the DC Educators for Social Justice supports the early education curriculum includes having pre-schoolers watch a video from I am Jazz and teaches THREE YEAR OLDS the meaning of “non-binary” and “transgender”. And here’s the thing, this ideology is smuggled in through the front door during Black Lives Matter at Schools Week. Most people think of BLM as being against police violence directed at African Americans but the words “police” and “brutality” don’t appear once in any of their 13 principles. You know what else doesn’t? “Father”, “husband”, or “son”. In fact, here’s the text of BLM’s “Black Villages” principle:

“We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”

Is this what anybody thinks of when they hear the proverb about taking a village to raise a child? And does anyone think that the biggest problem in the black community is TOO MANY nuclear families? This stuff is desperately wicked. And not a single person I’ve talked to about it (and there have been many, lol) even knew that BLM had 13 principles, let alone their content. I fear for the state of public education in our country, especially in large urban school districts. I finally see why many Christians have such deep skepticism of “government schools”. And in cities like NYC and DC where the majority of black students are doing math and English below grade level, why does anyone think a second of school time should be spent reading A is For Activist? What good is teaching Jamal to be a protestor if he has to go to Brad to write his signs?

Lastly, I’d like to say thank you. This blog introduced me to classical Christian education and I am trying to pay off debt and save to put our kids in a CCE school close by. Our oldest is in what seems to be a social justice-neutral public charter school but I see private and homeschooling as the only ways to provide our children with the Christ-honoring education they need.

UPDATE.2: Another good comment from Another Dave:

I have 2 kids in the NYC school system, and although his experiences are certainly reflective of certain schools in certain neighborhoods, it does not match my experience thus far.

First let me say, Carranza is detestable, and many folks, both in the system and outside of it, are pushing back hard against him and his cabal of wreckers. Unfortunately, he will do real damage before his day is done.

DeBlasio and Carranza are exactly the type of disruptive midwits one gets when one votes for “progressive” candidates. They are incapable of either true leadership or true innovation. All they know how to do is ridicule, castigate and then spend millions on pet projects that produce no genuine results.

That being said, much of what this writer experienced is a result of his own poor choices, filtered through his insatiable, upper middle class desire to virtue signal and strike all the right poses.

Our son, now in 5th grade, took the state exams in 3rd and 4th, and did exceptionally well with only the preparation given in class, and home review with Mom and Dad, which was extensive, but not overwhelming. Although no kid loves testing, he was not unduly stressed, and we didn’t add to it, despite knowing his scores would determine placement in the admittedly competitive middle school application process.

He attends a blue ribbon school, and our experience so far has been great.

I am not exaggerating when I say that in a school with approximately 500 students, about 75% of the kids have at least one parent that is a physician, although frequently both parents are. The school is mostly white and Asian, but many of the white kids are either Jewish or Israeli, or have parents from Europe, both East and West. Many kids are from China or India.

The parents at this school are driven, high achieving people who would never tolerate a curriculum that didn’t focus heavily on test prep and the basics, however watered down Common Core has made the basics, and that aspect has been frustrating, but not insurmountable. The kids respond by consistently producing some of the best scores in the city and state.

The parents also contribute both time and money, making this school one of those “public privates” the author of the article mentions.

No one makes any excuses about doing what is best for their child, and no one would let their political stance interfere with their child’s ability to learn.

The author of the article, while obviously well meaning, has allowed his avowed principles to interfere in making good choices, ultimately placing his kids in underperforming schools with activist staff, thus creating stress and drama where none was needed.

I’m familiar with the type of schools he’s referring to, and quite frankly, they suck. It’s like a day care center for adolescents, with many kids barely capable of reading and writing proficiently well into third grade. These types of schools are well known and easily avoided.

The author is the type of guy to vote for a DeBlasio, and then wring his hands endlessly of over all the destruction this woke Godzilla unleashes.

He reaped what he sowed, and then some. Many liberals are now waking up to what their passive alliance with the left has created.

All of this is to say that the problems highlighted are real, and no one should rest while bigoted maniacs like Carranza are at the wheel, but motivated parents can provide an excellent education for their kids through the NYC public school system if they do their homework and stop virtue signaling. There are great teachers and excellent schools all over the city.

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Adventures In Christian Grift

Did you see Brandon Ambrosino’s deeply reported Politico piece on Jerry Falwell Jr.’s empire at Liberty University? 

If not, you should. It’s about how Falwell Jr. runs the Christian college as a family fief, a de facto dictatorship, and a vehicle to enrich the family’s coffers, even at the expense of the university’s mission and reputation. The piece once again forces the question: where on earth is the university’s board of trustees? They remind me of a colorful phrase of my late father, who was once a farmer:  “useless as teats on a boar.”

Well, apparently some of them are speaking to Ambrosino. From the piece:

But these new revelations speak to rising discontent with Falwell’s stewardship. The people interviewed for this article include members of Liberty’s board of trustees, senior university officials, and rank-and-file staff members who work closely with Falwell. They are reluctant to speak out—there’s no organized, open dissent to Falwell on campus—but they said they see it as necessary to save Liberty University and the values it once stood for. They said they believe in the Christian tradition and in the conservative politics at the heart of Liberty’s mission.

Most of the long story is about business shenanigans that appear to violate, or come close to violating, the university’s tax-exempt status, and certainly are at odds with the school’s Christian mission. But the juiciest stuff has to do with Jerry Jr.’s life as a player. Ambrosino got his hands on 2014 shots of Jerry Jr., his wife Becki, their son Trey and Trey’s wife partying at a Miami nightclub. Ambrosino writes:

According to several people with direct knowledge of the situation, Falwell—the president of a conservative Christian college that frowns upon co-ed dancing (Liberty students can receive demerits if seen doing it) and prohibits alcohol use (for which students can be expelled)—was angry that photos of him clubbing made it up online. To remedy the situation, multiple Liberty staffers said Falwell went to John Gauger, whom they characterized as his “IT guy,” and asked him to downgrade the photos’ prominence on Google searches. Gauger did not respond to requests for comment.

Jerry Jr. denied to Ambrosino that the photos were real, and claimed that his image had been photoshopped. The photographer who snapped them was so incensed by the claim that he released more of them the next day. 

And there’s this:

In May 2019, Reuters reported that Cohen helped Falwell contain the fallout from some racy “personal” photos.Later that month, Falwell took to Todd Starnes’ radio talk show to rebut the claims.

“This report is not accurate,” Falwell said. “There are no compromising or embarrassing photos of me.”

Members of Falwell’s inner circle took note of the phrasing.

“If you read how Jerry is framing his response, you can see he is being very selective,” one of Falwell’s confidants said. Racy photos do exist, but at least some of the photos are of his wife, Becki, as the Miami Herald confirmed in June.

Longtime Liberty officials close to Falwell told me the university president has shown or texted his male confidants—including at least one employee who worked for him at Liberty—photos of his wife in provocative and sexual poses.

At Liberty, Falwell is “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” in the words of one Liberty official—a characterization multiple current and former university officials and employees interviewed for this story support. In a car ride about a decade ago with a senior university official who has since left Liberty, “all he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort,” this former official recalled. Falwell did not respond to questions about this incident.

More than simply talking with employees about his wife in a sexual manner, on at least one occasion, Falwell shared a photo of his wife wearing what appeared to be a French maid costume, according to a longtime Liberty employee with firsthand knowledge of the image and the fallout that followed.

Ewgh. If you think Politico is just making this stuff up, let me assure you that charges like this don’t make it into print unless they’ve been lawyered to death. That doesn’t mean that they’re true, but it does mean that Ambrosino and his editors almost certainly had to prove to the publication’s lawyers that these allegations could withstand a court challenge. If you’ve ever had to deal as a writer with your newspaper or magazine’s lawyers — I have — you know that they are a very conservative (not necessarily in the political sense) bunch who try to rein their clients in to reduce their potential legal exposure. Again, the fact that Politico published these allegations do not make them true, but it does show that the magazine is so confident in their factual accuracy that they are prepared to face down a very wealthy plaintiff in a libel suit, if it comes to that. That’s not nothing.

Read the whole thing. The final paragraphs are harsh. You should know, if you don’t already, that unlike his father, Jerry Jr. is not a preacher. But he is the head of an Evangelical Christian university. So, here:

One source pointed to a tweet Jerry Falwell Jr. sent out in June 2019 criticizing David Platt, an evangelical Virginia pastor who apologized for welcoming Trump to his church. “I only want to lead us with God’s Word in a way that transcends political party and position, heals the hurts of racial division and injustice, and honors every man and woman made in the image of God,” Platt said. “Sorry to be crude,” wrote Falwell in a since-deleted tweet, “but pastors like [David Platt] need to grow a pair.”

After Falwell came under criticism for his tweet about Platt, he responded to critics with a two-part Twitter thread, which, in the words of one current high-ranking Liberty official, “a lot of people found troubling.”

“I have never been a minister,” Falwell tweeted. “UVA-trained lawyer and commercial real estate developer for 20 yrs. Univ president for last 12 years-student body tripled to 100000+/endowment from 0 to $2 billion and $1.6B new construction in those 12 years. The faculty, students and campus pastor @davidnasser of @LibertyU are the ones who keep LU strong spiritually as the best Christian univ in the world. While I am proud to be a conservative Christian, my job is to keep LU successful academically, financially and in athletics.”

To those who worked for Liberty under the late Rev. Falwell, the sentiment appeared to signal a serious departure from his father’s legacy. “Bragging about business success and washing his hands of any responsibility for spiritual life at the university—that was frankly a pretty Trumpian line of commentary,” said one former university official with longstanding ties to both Liberty and the Falwell family.

Jerry Jr. says he has asked the FBI to investigate whether employees who leaked his e-mails to journalists broke the law. He’s not denying their content, so I guess that’s all he has left — that, and claiming that he’s being targeted from within because he’s a defender of Donald Trump.

Today, Reuters reported on a new leak of Jerry Jr. e-mails to Liberty U. employees. Excerpts:

As he complains of being targeted by critics, Reuters has found that Falwell himself was disparaging Liberty students, staff and parents for years in emails to Liberty administrators.

The several dozen emails reviewed by Reuters span nearly a decade-long period starting in 2008. In the emails, Falwell insults some Liberty students, calling them “social misfits.” In others, he blasts faculty members and senior Liberty staff:

-Ronald Sones, then the dean of the engineering school, was “a bag of hot air” who “couldn’t spell the word ‘profit,’” Falwell wrote in 2011. Sones is no longer the dean and could not be reached for comment.

-Richard Hinkley, the campus police chief, was “a half-wit and easy to manipulate” and shouldn’t be allowed to speak publicly. Hinkley could not be reached for comment.

-Of Kevin Keys, then Liberty’s associate athletics director, Falwell wrote in 2012: “Only get Kevin involved in something if you want it not to work.” Contacted by Reuters, Keys said: “I don’t know anything about that and I would prefer not to comment.”

More:

The selection of emails provides a glimpse of the management style Falwell employs to run the nonprofit Christian university, which reports $2.8 billion in assets. Several of the emails take a derogatory tone toward Liberty parents, students, and other university officials.

In one 2012 email, Falwell dismisses Liberty parents who begged the school not to move their kids from on-campus dorms to off-campus housing in the middle of their freshman year when Liberty sought to raze some dorms to build new ones.

In response to one mother’s letter expressing concern for how the move could affect her daughter, emails show, a top Liberty administrator sent a reassuring letter. Falwell struck a less sympathetic tone. “Tell them, if they keep complaining, we’ll tear them down over Thanksgiving break!” Falwell wrote to Liberty officials.

Who wants their kid to attend a Christian (!) college under the stewardship of a creep like that? How can you be president of a Christian university, but then claim that you have nothing to do with its spiritual quality? Falwell Jr. may not be a pastor, but he is unquestionably a Christian leader. Seems to me that the board of directors ought to be doing more to defend the university than speaking without attribution to reporters, and leaking e-mails.

Meanwhile, in other Religious Leaders Behaving Badly, the Washington Post has a new piece up about the lush life of former Bishop Michael Bransfield of Wheeling, W. Va. It begins like this:

It was billed as a holy journey, a pilgrimage with West Virginia Bishop Michael J. Bransfield to “pray, sing and worship” at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. Catholics from remote areas of one of the nation’s poorest states paid up to $190 for seats on overnight buses and hotel rooms.

Unknown to the worshipers, Bransfield traveled another way. He hired a private jet and, after a 33-minute flight, took a limousine from the airport. The church picked up his $6,769 travel bill.

That trip in September 2017 was emblematic of the secret history of Bransfield’s lavish travel. He spent millions of dollars from his diocese on trips in the United States and abroad, records show, while many of his parishioners struggled to find work, feed their families and educate their children.

 Pope Francis has said bishops should live modestly. During his 13 years as the leader of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, Bransfield took nearly 150 trips on private jets and some 200 limousine rides, a Washington Post investigation found. He stayed at exclusive hotels in Washington, Rome, Paris, London and the Caribbean.

Last year, Bransfield stayed a week in the penthouse of a legendary Palm Beach, Fla., hotel, at a cost of $9,336. He hired a chauffeur to drive him around Washington for a day at a cost of $1,383. And he spent $12,386 for a jet to fly him from the Jersey Shore to a meeting with the pope’s ambassador in the nation’s capital.

You have to read the whole thing. This Bransfield is extravagantly corrupt — and the diocese’s own investigation (the source of the Post‘s report) documents it with receipts. His reputation from his lengthy tenure at the Basilica in DC was that of a player, and not just in matters of luxury. Matthew B. O’Brien’s powerful, detailed First Things piece back in April, detailing the corruption at the Papal Foundation involving then-cardinal Ted McCarrick, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and Bishop Bransfield, explains how sexual corruption is tied up with financial corruption in the Catholic hierarchy. Along these very same lines, one prominent Catholic layperson who worked at a very high level within the Church (though not with Bransfield) told me earlier this year that they had never imagined that there was such a close connection between sexual and financial corruption until they took a job working closely with the hierarchy.

It’s about the sex and the money. It was like that with Bishop Bransfield, it seems, and in a different way, it might be about that with Jerry Falwell Jr. Though no one has alleged that he has committed adultery, the weird photo thing with his wife (supposedly photos of her in a position unbefitting the wife of a conservative Christian university president), and this allegation that Jerry Jr. brags in the workplace about his sexual prowess, indicates profound moral and spiritual disorder.

How can the churches, and church institutions, minister to the world when they cannot clean up their own messes, and hold their own leaders accountable? It’s a more than fair question. It’s also a necessary one.

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Penguins For Penguins’ Sake

The story of the gender-neutral Gentoo penguin chick at the London aquarium, is the kind of weapons-grade liberal bullsh*t that is entirely characteristic of our time. The lefty loonies in charge of a scientific institution have decided to use animal biology to make a statement about social engineering. As I was passing through Heathrow airport yesterday, I read in one of the English papers — I think it was the Times, though I see that their story is behind a paywall now — someone from the aquarium quoted as saying the institution wants the baby penguin, who has not yet been named, to help child visitors realize that they don’t have to be limited to whatever gender society “assigns” them.

Incidentally, the supposedly gender-neutral penguin chick is being raised by a lesbian penguin couple (“Come with meeeee, lesbian penguin…”). As you can see if you follow that link, and watch the straight-faced Sky News interview with an aquarium employee, this entire stunt is a put-up job by the institution to advance left-wing cultural politics, especially among children. We’re all laughing at stupid crap like this … well, not all of us: an English actor has branded Piers Morgan as a “transphobic” terrorist for making fun of it:

This ain’t funny, it’s transphobic. Can we stop mocking gender identities and help normalise it? We need to be accepting and break the stigma. People are gonna be terrified into keeping quiet and aren’t going to be comfortable in their own bodies because of comments like these. https://t.co/lQJ1QGGBNm

— James Moore (@jamesmooreactor) September 11, 2019

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Whatever. Anyway, look: this kind of thing is a punchline, but I kind of agree with James Moore. It may be idiotic, but it ain’t funny, in that this is part of a never-ending progressive campaign to deconstruct the human personality around sex.

People — including conservatives like David French — love to make fun of Sohrab Ahmari for getting wound up about Drag Queen Story Hour, but it’s the same kind of thing: a communal institution advancing socially destructive progressive cultural politics in ways that appear trivial, but really aren’t.

It’s true that DQSHs aren’t the end of the world. Why is Ahmari so triggered by them, then? (And for the record, I share his views.) Because they are a condensed symbol of totalitarian aspect of progressive cultural politics. Here’s what I mean. In the Soviet Union in the early Stalinist years, some members of the Soviet chess community complained that chess was becoming politicized. The cry went up that chess should be left alone, that “chess for chess’s sake” ought to be the rule. The head of the chess institution responded by saying that it’s naive to believe that chess can be apolitical. Everything is political, is part of the struggle.

In her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt says that the “chess for chess’s sake” problem is a sign of totalitarianism. Why? Because it’s a signal that a society is becoming so politicized that not even chess can escape forced ideologization by authorities.

Not even animals at the zoo.

Not even children’s libraries.

So what’s the ideology? From the “about” page at the Drag Queen Story Hour site:

DQSH is explicitly not about mere entertainment. It is intentionally designed to inspire children to identify as queer and genderfluid, and to “present as they wish.” 

Similarly, the ideological content of this stupid penguin stunt is intentionally to provoke children into doubting their gender identity. The American Library Association, the professional guild of librarians, is militantly behind this stuff.

You can’t go to the zoo or to the library with your kids without being confronted by this radical gender ideology. David French has an important point when he points out that Sohrab Ahmari doesn’t have a clear answer about what, exactly, he wants government to do about Drag Queen Story Hour. French, an experienced religious liberty litigator, writes that to abandon “viewpoint neutrality” to stop DQSH would mean disaster for Christians, who maintain access to public spaces despite being hated by many administrators, precisely because of the First Amendment’s viewpoint neutrality. This is why even though my heart is completely with Ahmari in the Ahmari-French dispute, I can’t fully endorse him over French because I fear that abandoning First Amendment jurisprudence in an increasingly anti-Christian culture would make any local victories over things like DQSH Pyrrhic ones.

I’ll be writing about that in a different post. In this one, I simply want to point out that Ahmari is not at all wrong to point to things like DQSH — and, should he so desire, to the London aquarium’s abolition of penguins-for-penguins’-sake —  as a more serious threat to the moral order than people think.

Ever notice how progressives are never, ever satisfied with the status quo on sexual politics? How they are always finding new things to “queer”? Well, if you think Ahmari is a screaming-meemie on the DQSH topic, I have bad news for you. Hannah Arendt points out that another element of the totalitarian — something that both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks engaged in  — is to keep everything in constant motion. Authoritarian regimes only want a monopoly on state power. Totalitarian regimes want to control everything — and this is not something that can be done solely through state power. This can be accomplished only by intimidating people from within, “by a movement that is constantly kept in motion: namely, the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life.” In the DQSH context, it amounts to bringing radical sexual politics even to children’s reading hours at public libraries, and bringing opprobrium on those who criticize it.

The point is not the library events. The point is to destroy traditional sexual identities in children during their formative years by normalizing transgressive sexuality. The First Amendment is one means; mass media and popular culture is another. Ask yourself: how did we get to the point where at public libraries across America, transvestites appear to read to child audience books that encourage the children to embrace queer identities — and this is considered perfectly normal, even good (and those who disagree keep their mouths shut for fear of being condemned as bigots)?

Again, Hannah Arendt, from The Origins Of Totalitarianism:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents. … What common sense and ‘normal people’ refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

To update Arendt for our situation: What normal people refuse to believe is that goofy things like Drag Queen Story Hour and gender-neutral zoo animals are intermediate steps on the way to a soft-totalitarian society in which normality is stigmatized, even forbidden. In Europe last week, I heard about a seminary in which seminarians could publicly deny the existence of God, and that would mean no impediment to ordination, but publicly criticizing homosexuality or transgenderism would cause instant dismissal. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is this is possible, and therefore sit like inert lumps when the impossible becomes reality.

To conclude: things like DQSH and gender-neutral penguin chicks are what the anthropologist Mary Douglas called “condensed symbols” — practices that stand for an entire worldview. Reader Raskolnik had a great comment here a few years ago using Douglas’s term to explain why conservative Christians tend to be triggered by things like this, and not about things that are a more serious threat to the moral health of this society, like pornography (which Raskolnik says that he too is more worried about). He wrote, in part:

[Douglas] used the example of fasting on Fridays, which the Bog Irish (generally lowerclass Irish Catholics living in England) persisted in doing, despite the fact that their better-educated, generally-upperclass clergy kept telling them to give to the poor or do something else that better fit with secular humanist mores instead. Her point was that the Bog Irish kept fasting, not due to obdurate traditionalism, or some misplaced faith in the “magical” effectiveness of the practice, but because it functioned as a “condensed symbol”: fasting on Fridays was a shorthand way of signifying connection to the past, to one’s identity as Irish, as well as to a less secularized (or completely non-secular) vision of what religious practice was all about. It acquired an outsized importance because it connected systems of meaning.

I bring up the notion of “condensed symbol” because I think that’s the best way to understand what’s going in (what you perceive to be) the “freakout” about homosexuality. The freakout isn’t about homosexuality per se, it’s about the secular world shoving its idea of sexual morality down the throats of orthodox Christians. If you haven’t read Rod’s piece Sex After Christianity, you really should, and if you haven’t, I think you should be able to connect the dots between the Christian cosmology of sex and the Christian opposition to same-sex marriage as a “condensed symbol” of Christian resistance to secularism writ large.

Both Drag Queen Story Hour and Gentoo the Gender-Neutral Penguin are condensed symbols of a worldview that sees sexual identity as at the core of the human person, and that says that identity should be fluid, governed only by the individual’s will; and further, that this sexual radicalism should be taught to small children in public institutions.

It is a separate question as to whether or not it is practical or wise to use the mechanism of the state to combat this. But the meaning of this cultural assault on normality ought to be completely clear to anyone, Christian or otherwise, who has a sense of moral awareness.

I cannot believe that I have written an entire post invoking Hannah Arendt to explain why people really should care about some ridiculous stunt by wokesters running an aquarium. But these are the times in which we live. Everything is possible. The liberal within people (even many conservatives) rationalizes that it’s only about storybooks and baby birds, what’s the big deal? Haha, those right-wingers think that baby penguin is gonna turn children into drag queens! I’ve told you what the big deal is. The Left knows that it’s a big deal, which is why they’re always doing things like this, while at the same time pretending that these things are basically harmless. They understand how cultural politics works; conservatives are basically cowards and suckers when it comes to this stuff.

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