Rod Dreher's Blog, page 223
July 23, 2019
Bonfire Of The Trannities
Sit down, my people, and read the craziest true story you will read this year or maybe even this decade.
It is written by a journalist named Kera Bolonik, who has made an extremely complicated story comprehensible, in the sense that she recalls a logical progression of events. Nothing else about it makes sense. It’s a story about a liberal Harvard Law professor who is a world-historical boob — and about how two grifters (a transwoman and his best friend) stole his house and used Title IX to further ruin his life.
In 2015, a mysterious young woman named Maria-Pia Shuman flirted with Prof. Bruce Hay in a Cambridge hardware store. Hay, who makes Pajama Boy come off like Vin Diesel. is married, but he and his wife, Jennifer Zacks, live together with their children as roommates, no longer lovers. What would a little fling with the sexy young woman hurt? Excerpt:
A few weeks later, she texted to say she was returning to Cambridge and wanted to see him. They met the next day at the Sheraton Commander and had sex. Almost as soon as it was over, Shuman’s mood shifted. She became dour, then angry, telling him she couldn’t abide his keeping their relationship a secret, nor what he says she referred to as his “continued attachment” to Zacks. She demanded he leave her. Hay was confounded. He wasn’t about to leave his partner of 28 years for a woman he’d slept with twice. He got dressed and left.
Later that day, Shuman contacted him to say she was open to discussing pursuing a relationship. When Hay demurred, she told him, in that case, she didn’t see any point in staying in touch.
But they would stay in touch. Over the next four years, the law professor would be drawn into a “campaign of fraud, extortion, and false accusations,” as one of his lawyers would later say in legal proceedings. At one point, Hay’s family would be left suddenly homeless. At another, owing to what his lawyer has described as the “weaponiz[ation] of the university’s Title IX machinery against Hay,” he would find himself indefinitely suspended from his job. He would accrue over $300,000 in legal bills with no end to the litigation in sight. “Maria-Pia and Mischa want money,” Hay told me last summer, “but only for the sake of squeezing it out of people — it’s the exertion of power.”
“Mischa,” by the way, is Mischa Haider, a male-to-female transgender Harvard physics student. It turns out that Maria-Pia moved in with Mischa Haider and her male boyfriend, and they decided to raise Maria-Pia’s children together as a throuple … and Prof. Hay, the mark, wanted in. More:
Hay’s relationship with the women could be intoxicating. Even in an international, liberal college town like Cambridge, Hay had never encountered anyone like them, “nearly perfect people” who were “bright and kind and sweet to their children and socially conscious,” and whose family composed a striking, distinctly modern portrait: Haider, a loquacious, impassioned Indian-Pakistani trans woman physicist, the mother of two children (who call her “Maman”) birthed by the sultry, soft-spoken French daughter of a major Jewish American songwriter (she’s called “Sumi”). (Haider’s boyfriend Klein, Hay later discovered, also helped raise the children, who refer to him as “Daddy.”)
Hay wanted both families to meet, certain that they could find a way to make peace. “I had this crazy idea that everyone could get along, that Jennifer would like them,” he says. He wouldn’t sacrifice his existing family, but he didn’t want to abandon the family he believed he was building with the women.
Read it all. Trust me. I’m not going to go further here, because to tell even just a piece of it without telling the whole story would not do it justice. You have to read to see what these insane grifters did to this moron and his innocent wife and kids. It really does read like Fatal Attraction meets a transgender Bonfire of the Vanities. Golden quote: “I just really hate the patriarchy, that’s it.”
Perfect:
This piece should be mandatory reading for conservatives. It’s virtually a parody of ivory tower liberalism. pic.twitter.com/kaVzURyGx1
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) July 23, 2019
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It really and truly is. I first learned about it from a gay reader, who sent me the link and said:
I read this and thought, “Dreher couldn’t have made this up in his worst nightmare.” I don’t know where to begin, but the story has it all–decadence in our elite institutions, erosion of due process, a bizarre transgender subplot, Modern Family-style living arrangements.
Exactly. You can’t keep crazypants liberals from blowing up their lives, but from a public policy point of view, the most important question raised by this story is: What is it going to take to get Title IX reform?
UPDATE: A couple of readers have sent me this incredibly bitter piece that Bruce Hay wrote for Salon.com right after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016. Look at this:
I am close to one of the victims of his operation, a transgender woman named Mischa Haider, whom I got to know during the course of her work on a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard. She’s an extraordinary polymath — gifted violinist, writer and novelist; fluent speaker of a half-dozen languages; math genius. And physicist. Her intellect would have made our brilliant Justice want to hide his head in a bag, to borrow his charming words from last year’s marriage equality ruling. Those who have any doubt about trans mothers should meet Mischa’s children.
More:
So that is Antonin Scalia’s contribution to physics. To drive a woman with a luminous mind from the study of quantum theory and statistical mechanics and condensed matter, and into the urgent project of safeguarding vulnerable people from the inhumanity he dedicated his life to spreading. An inhumanity that survives as his true legacy, safeguarded by deluded acolytes and admirers.
Scalia passed away in his sleep at a luxurious hunting lodge. He died as he lived, gun at hand, dreaming of killing helpless prey from a position of safety and comfort. May his successor on the Court have a loftier vision of law, and of life.
What a pluperfect jackass! Hard to feel too sorry for him, I gotta say.
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To The Left! Off The Cliff!
Jonathan Chait has a good piece on how the Democrats are losing their minds by trying to be centrist on things nobody really cares about, but rushing to the far left over things that would actually move votes. For example, nobody is going to vote for the Democrats because they want to return to the pre-Mitch McConnell standards for approving federal judges. But:
A new poll by NPR tests most of the ideas Democrats have debated so far. The party has a wide array of proposals that enjoy public support — a Medicare option for everybody, a $15 minimum wage, a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who are in the country illegally, a wealth tax, and other things. But several of the issues Democrats are running on poll badly. In particular, decriminalizing immigration laws, giving health-care subsidies to undocumented immigrants, and replacing private insurance with Medicare are ideas that sound bad to most Americans.
Progressives have waved away such objections by insisting people who have private insurance don’t like it and would be glad to be moved onto a public plan. “I was at a town hall and I said, ‘Who here loves their Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance?’ And not a single person raised their hand,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests. “People like their health care, they like their doctor, but I’d be interested in what the public polling on Aetna would look like.”
Well, we do have polling on this. NPR’s data shows that letting people “choose between a national health insurance program or their own private health insurance” is a 70 percent issue, while a Medicare expansion “that replaces private health insurance” is a 41 percent issue. And that is without accounting either for the large tax increases that would be needed to finance it or the effect of a massive countermobilization by insurers and the entire medical industry. These risks are all the more difficult to fathom given the much safer alternative available to candidates: a Medicare expansion planthat could be financed exclusively by taxing the rich and which would leave employer insurance in place.
Despite these grim numbers, activists have pressured leading Democratic candidates to put themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. Just 27 percent of the public supports decriminalization of the border, and 33 percent favors the extension of health-insurance benefits to undocumented immigrants, yet during the second Democratic debate, the latter position was endorsed by every candidate onstage.
Read it all. Chait’s conclusion is that Democratic candidates would not be taking these broadly unpopular positions if they weren’t afraid of progressive activists’ influence in the primaries.
The situation going on in San Francisco with that George Washington mural painted by an actual Communist illustrates the problem within the Democratic Party. Politico reports that some Democrats (rightly) recognize that it’s crazy to paint over a New Deal-era work of art, in particular one that reflects a normative progressive talking point about US history, because its existence triggers progressive activists. More:
Democratic strategist Mike Semler — who has advised Senator Dianne Feinstein and who has taught public policy at Cal State University Sacramento — this weekend sent out an emergency email alert seeking support for an effort to back a ballot measure to save the mural. He said the effort, dubbed the Coalition to Protect Public Art, aims to solicit funds to initiate a ballot measure designed to protect this art, “and perhaps other New Deal art in San Francisco’’ which may also be targeted.
With their move, the school board is “saying we’re all going to jump in this ship together and paddle left,’’ says Semler. “This is Nancy Pelosi’s district. This is where Kamala Harris is from. Clearly, this is not San Francisco values.”
The presidential campaign of Senator Harris, and the Speaker‘s press office, did not respond to requests for comment Sunday.
The school board vote in June has set off a growing chorus of protest from Democrats — many in the political establishment — who say that the move to erase history is not only expensive folly, but could hand Trump fodder to suggest Democrats are out of touch with the mainstream headed toward 2020.
Of course they will! They are going to put Donald Trump in the position of defending an actual commie work of art (as I hope he will) from iconoclastic progressives. It’s telling that neither Kamala Harris nor Nancy Pelosi have spoken out on this. Sure, you don’t normally expect a state’s US Senator or a district’s member of Congress to take a position on a local school policy issue, but this, of course, is not merely a local school policy issue. This has huge symbolic resonance. Few voters are likely to care about the substance of the mural; many voters are going to hear, “The loony left wants to spend $600,000 to paint over a mural of George Washington!” — and they will be right.
I can remember being a smart-guy liberal college student back in the campaign of 1988, thinking, “That idiot Bush, going to a flag factory. Everybody’s going to see through that! My man Mike Dukakis has a twelve-point plan that blows that kind of cheap demagoguery away.” I was the idiot then. Symbols matter. One of the smartest guys in Ronald Reagan’s inner circle, image maker Michael Deaver, always used to make sure Reagan gave speeches in front of a backdrop of flags, when possible. His rationale was that when the speech was covered on the evening news, nobody would remember what the reporters said, but the image of the president in front of the flags would remain in their minds.
Something similar is going to happen next fall. Pete Buttigieg said the other day that Trump is going to call the Democrat nominee a “socialist” no matter who it is, and what the nominee proposes, so Dems ought to just stand for what they believe in. I see his point, but when Democrats really do endorse things that are unpopular, and upset people — like the militant left-wing iconoclasm on public monuments, which has now gone way beyond Confederate generals — they give center-right voters who are sick of Trump a reason to stick with him. He’s the devil they know.
An actual center-left Democrat could wipe the floor with Trump in 2020, but you watch: the party activists won’t allow it. And none of these candidates has the courage, or the convictions, to pull a Sister Souljah on the militant left within their ranks.
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Diversity ‘Loyalty Oaths’
Earlier today I wrote about an LGBT loyalty oath that physicians are invited to sign “voluntarily” (for now). A reader e-mails to say that the Diversity and Inclusion
loyalty oath phenomenon is more widespread than many of us think.
Check out this job for a “Sports Information Director” at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, a small branch campus in rural, extreme northern Pennsylvania:
CLASSIFICATION: Communications II WORKING TITLE: Sports Information Director DEPARTMENT: Athletics and Recreational Sports
The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford is seeking a Sports Information Director. This is a full-time, entry-level, 10-month position. The successful candidate should display ability to coordinate SID duties as illustrated by a strong work ethic, organizational skills, excellent written and computer skills, and the ability to interact professionally within the department, the campus, and all external constituents.
Requirements : Bachelor’s degree, master’s preferred, in communication, sports recreation/management or related discipline. Preference will be given to those with two or more years’ experience as an SID. Must be knowledgeable in StatCrew, Presto, InDesign, and web and video-editing software. Must have strong writing skills and be able to work nontraditional hours and travel when necessary.
Candidates must include writing samples – at least one game-day release and one feature story. Also include a separate statement describing a history of working with or demonstrating a commitment to addressing issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and/or other issues of underrepresented populations.
To apply go to www.join.pitt.edu . Choose Find Positions; Internal Applicants; Current Employees; Location, Bradford. Review of applications will begin immediately. Position open until filled.
Women and applicants from traditionally underrepresented populations are strongly encouraged to apply. Individuals with experience in a setting committed to multiculturalism and/or campus diversity are of particular interest. The University of Pittsburgh is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and values equality of opportunity, human dignity and diversity. EEO/AA/M/F/Vets/Disabled
The reader continues:
Essentially, this is a low-level job ($27k a year) requiring a person to do game-day write-ups for a small-college program, and probably do stuff like publish schedules and manage social media. It’s about as non-ideological as it can get. But look closer. Almost HALF the job description is given over to rigamarole about diversity and allyship. What are they afraid of? That someone will publish a calendar entry that says, “Don’t forget, the Panthers will be taking on their division rivals from Penn State DuBois at the fieldhouse tonight. Wear blue to show your Panther pride! Also, keep in mind that the Catholic Catechism views homosexual activity as fundamentally disordered! Go, Christendom!”
Worse, it’s not a yes/no thing where you can say you support a document and be unclear about what it means to support it. It’s an OPEN ENDED question, where they are demanding that you supply your own statement of support. It’s a far more active and aggressive requirement, no? And for a person whose job it is to report basketball scores on the website?
Seriously. Look how much is SJW stuff versus “reporting basketball scores” stuff. Right now, males are under-represented at American colleges. How do you think they would react if you said you would focus your attention on addressing that under-representation? After all Pitt Bradford is 54 percent female versus 46 percent male. The state population average is 51-49. Sexism! Similarly, 81 percent of Pennsylvanians identify as white, while only 68 percent of students at Pitt Bradford identify as white. And still, this is how they go about hiring score reporters, who they apparently see as crucial to righting the wrong that women and minorities are not overrepresented enough on campus.
Also worth noting: A masters-preferred job in sports information at a state university, requiring two years of experience, will net you about $27k a year, travel and non traditional hours included. Forget the ally stuff: Don’t major in sports management. If you really like sports, be a plumber and watch sports on TV.
By the way, compelling professors to sign “diversity statements” is the new loyalty oath from the McCarthyite Left.
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No Traditional Christian Doctors Need Apply
From The Benedict Option:
The workplace is getting tougher for orthodox believers as America’s commitment to religious liberty weakens. Progressives sneer at claims of anti-Christian discrimination or persecution. Don’t you believe them. Most of the experts I talked to on this topic spoke openly only after I promised to withhold their identities. They’re frightened that their words today might cost them their careers tomorrow.
They’re not paranoid. While Christians may not be persecuted for their faith per se, they are already being targeted when they stand for what their faith entails, especially in matters of sexuality. As the LGBT agenda advances, broad interpretations of antidiscrimination laws are going to push traditional Christians increasingly out of the marketplace, and the corporate world will become hostile toward Christian bigots, considering them a danger to the working environment.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a powerful LGBT pressure group, publishes an annual Corporate Equality Index. In its 2016 report, over half of the top twenty U.S. companies in have a perfect score. To fail to score high is considered a serious problem within leading corporations.
Among the criteria the foundation used in its 2016 evaluations was that “senior management/executive performance measures include LGBT diversity metrics.” A company that wants to win the foundation’s seal of approval will have to show concrete proof that it is advancing the LGBT agenda in the workplace. The “ally” phenomenon—straight people publicly declaring themselves to be supporters of the LGBT agenda—is one way companies can both demonstrate progress to gay rights campaigners, as well as identify dissenters who may stand in the way of progress.
I have talked to a number of Christians, in fields as diverse as law, banking, and education, who face increasing pressure within their corporations and institutions to publicly declare themselves “allies” of LGBT colleagues. In some instances, employees are given the opportunity to wear special badges advertising their allyship. Naturally if one doesn’t wear the badge, she is likely to face questions from co-workers and even shunning.
These workers fear that this is soon going to serve as a de facto loyalty oath for Christian employees—and if they don’t sign it, so to speak, it will mean the end of their jobs and possibly even their careers. To sign the oath, they believe, would be the modern equivalent of burning a pinch of incense before a statue of Caesar.
It will be impossible in most places to get licenses to work without affirming sexual diversity dogma. For example, in 2016 the American Bar Association voted to add an “anti-harassment” rule to its Model Code of Conduct, one that if adopted by state bars would make it simply discussing issues having to do with homosexuality (among other things) impossible without risking professional sanction—unless one takes the progressive side of the argument.
Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.
Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal antidiscrimination statutes covering LGBTs will be not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.
“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.
Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”
David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.
“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”
Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, backers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.
Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.
“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”
Last night I received an e-mail from a Catholic physician. He wrote to share a pledge that physicians in his institution were invited (“invited”) to sign. It is based on the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association’s Provider Pledge. The physician writes:
This was presented as a voluntary endeavor, and solely for the purpose of identifying providers on the physician directory for patients. Signing this pledge, as well as completing several modules on our employee intranet, would entitle the physician to be designated as LGBT-competent/affirming for all patients to see online.
This, again, was presented as voluntary. Thankfully, I attended this meeting via web conference and did not have my reaction noted. Some of it is benign, like vowing to care for all patients regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. There are, however, specific issues with the pledge from a Catholic (Christian, etc.) perspective, despite more the moderate language used in our specific pledge.
I removed the specific language to protect the identity of the physician. One line, though, required physicians to affirm that they do not regard homosexuality as “sinful” — which would require rejecting Catholic teaching, and the teaching upheld by all small-o orthodox Christian churches, since the beginning. This is a total ideological bullying move. After all, no one asks doctors to affirm that they believe prostitution is morally sound, as a condition of offering medical care to prostitutes, or that drinking alcohol is morally neutral, as a condition of treating those who drink. No doctor or nurse withholds or modifies treatment of a sick person based on his moral judgment of that person. This is basic medical professionalism.
What these activists want is to make it impossible for any physician — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or otherwise — who have any moral qualms whatsoever about anything to do with LGBT, to be driven out of the profession. Notice how the physician who wrote to me describes how the person within his institution characterized signing the pledge, framing anyone who might object as an antisocial malcontent:
Regardless, our presenter summarized the pledge as one’s promise to “not be a jerk.”The presenter later repeated this peculiar summation when they asserted that if one wasn’t a “jerk” they would have no issues with this general program. Who knows how long jerks like me will be able to use the voluntary nature of this pledge drive to remain hidden.
I bring this to your attention as a general indicator of the current climate and confirmation of some predictions you’ve made in TBO and your blog.
It’s coming. Today it’s “voluntary,” but tomorrow they will be asking why you won’t sign the oath if you are truly willing to treat all patients equally. If you are not preparing for it, I’m sorry, but you’re a fool. Prepare to accept it, prepare to fight it, whatever — but know that Gushee is right: there is no place to hide. They drove out Dr. Allan Josephson, who for all we know is not even be religious, simply because he had some critical questions as a medical professional over the protocol for treating transgenders.
Here’s the GLMA Healthcare Equality Pledge. Excerpt:
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Benedict Option Kids’ Libraries?
A reader saw this post of mine about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the Great Awokening at US libraries, and wrote:
I’m wondering if there might soon be space for alternative libraries to pop up. Community or church run.
That’s a great idea, actually. It would be really hard to start and run a full-service library, but that wouldn’t actually be needed, would it? The problem is not in the books libraries provide to adults, but rather to children and minors. Why couldn’t churches within a specific community pool their resources and open a children’s library where parents didn’t have to worry about their children being propagandized by Wokeness — especially on gender and sexuality? Offer a wide range of quality books from all eras, curated according to traditional moral standards? It would be the kind of place where a mom or dad would feel completely comfortable allowing their kids to roam through the stacks in search of something new to read that’s not Pregnant Butch, which was recommended by a workshop leader at the American Library Association annual conference, and without having to put up with the sexual grooming pageant that is Drag Queen Story Hour.
In my city, we are avid users of our local library system, which so far has kept wokeness to a minimum. But then, I live in one of the most conservative cities of its size in the country. Even then, I know this isn’t going to last. If we lived in almost any other part of the US, we would have a big problem on our hands.
Why not let’s do this? Stocking and maintaining a Children’s Library would be a costly endeavor. Surely, though in bigger cities there are megachurches who have the resources to do this, especially if they pool them. Ask families of means to pay an annual user fee, if you like, but keep it free for poor and working-class people.
What do you think? Can we do this?
UPDATE: According to a reader who has had a lot of trouble trying to navigate her local library with her children, some people are already doing this. The reader writes:
I’ve learned that there is a very small but active renaissance of private children’s lending libraries, largely among the homeschool crowd. They’re often called “Living Books Libraries.” A list of some of them is right here. Your readers may be interested. This link offers a “start a library” DVD seminar from one of the older and most successful of the living libraries.
Churches! Moms, dads, let’s do this! Let’s not just complain about how toxic our public libraries have become; let’s create something new and beautiful for our kids.
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July 22, 2019
View From Your Table
Ludlow Castle, Shropshire, England
The reader writes:
Evening glass of wine in an apartment built into the walls of Ludlow Castle, once a home to Richard III, Edward V, Katharine of Aragon, and (later) to her daughter, Mary I, as well.
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Lee Dingle’s Shocking Death
The Dingle family. Father Lee was killed over the weekend in a freak beach accident
Lee Dingle died in a freak accident at the beach, in front of his children:
The husband of Raleigh Christian writer and activist Shannon Dingle died Friday after a wave sent him crashing onto the beach, hitting his head, his wife said on social media.
Lee Dingle was in the ocean playing with his children, Shannon Dingle wrote on Twitter and Facebook. WRAL reported the family was on Oak Island.
Lee Dingle is survived by his wife and six children by birth and adoption.
“My partner, my love, and my home died today after a freak accident,” Shannon Dingle wrote. “Lee was playing on the beach with three of our kids yesterday, and an intense wave hit him just right to slam his head into the sand and break his neck.
“Some heroes — including our kids — tried to save him, but it wouldn’t have mattered what they did,” she continued. “His body couldn’t recover from the initial injury.”
According to the Go Fund Me set up by a family friend:
Lee was playing on the beach with three of his kids, and an intense wave hit him just right to slam his head into the sand, break his neck, and make his throat swell so much his brain was deprived of oxygen for too long to recover. Some heroes — including his kids — tried to save him, but it wouldn’t have mattered what they did. His body couldn’t recover from the initial injury.
Shannon Dingle is a survivor of sex trafficking, and is active in the fight against it. Three of their children are siblings from Uganda that they adopted. They also adopted a little Taiwanese girl with cerebral palsy. Now Shannon Dingle will have to raise all six kids alone.
I normally don’t put Go Fund Me appeals on this blog, but in this case, I’m making an exception. I gave the Dingles a little something. Will you please consider doing so too? I don’t know this family, though Shannon Dingle is a friend of my friend Karen Swallow Prior. There are a million tragedies every day, but there’s something about this one that just rips your heart out. To die like that in front of your children, on a family vacation, and leave them all behind — it’s unimaginable, the shock of it. Nothing any of us can do can make up for this loss to that grieving wife and children, but at least we can help take away some of their anxieties about how they’re going to pay the bills.
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Radical Distrust Of Radicalized Institutions
The progressive journalist Jesse Singal asks a reasonable question:
I do not have strong feelings on this subject, except that it is clearly creepy to dress up kids in ways designed to show off their legs, but I’m just increasingly confused as to who these outlets believe their core audience to be, and why they choose the fights they choose https://t.co/tpyL5hTkqM
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 19, 2019
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He continues:
Here’s why this stuff matters to lots of us: because even mainstream progressives act like when it comes to LGBT issues, there are no enemies, barriers, or restraints to the left. When Good Morning America does a feature interview on lovable gay child mascot, drag queen Desmond Is Amazing, this stuff is not remotely niche anymore. The media behave like propagandists on all things LGBT. For example, NBC News — not Pink News, but NBC News — ran this week a completely uncritical story about a new trend: microdosing on hormones to achieve an androgynous look. Excerpt:
Marisa Rivas never felt comfortable living as a woman, but doesn’t identify as a man either.
Last year, Rivas, 30, a college admissions coordinator in Los Angeles, had a mastectomy. This year, Rivas started using gender-neutral “they” and “them” pronouns.
Then, at the end of June, Rivas went to the Los Angeles LGBT Center in West Hollywood to talk to a doctor about going on “low-dose” testosterone, known colloquially as “microdosing.” Rivas hopes to achieve a sharper jawline and a more androgynous physique without overtly masculine features like facial hair. The goal is an appearance that is not clearly male or female.
“I still want to be somewhere in the middle,” Rivas said.
Hormone microdosing is of growing interest to some nonbinary people like Rivas who want to masculinize or feminize their bodies in subtle ways. There is little research on the technique’s prevalence, but doctors who treat transgender and nonbinary people say the medical community should consider the needs of those who want to change their bodies without medically transitioning fully to the opposite gender.
It’s a long story, but at no point is the question ever asked: what are the healthy risks of this therapy? The only question is: How can the medical community more quickly give people the drugs they want to change their bodies as they desire?
I learned about this story from Jesse Singal, who is an actual professional science journalist.
Outlets have completely, completely given up on covering this like they would any other health or science subject. It’s just astounding how radical the journalistic shift has been. https://t.co/9XMKriFyuo
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 14, 2019
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Meanwhile, the nation’s librarians have been meeting to figure out how to queer your children’s reading. No, really:
The world’s largest library association’s annual conference this year featured more than 100 workshops with an “equity, diversity, and inclusion” theme, according to the American Library Association’s conference catalog. That included workshops with these titles (some shortened): “Creating Queer-Inclusive Elementary School Library Programming,” “Developing an Online Face for a Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection,” and “Telling Stories, Expanding Boundaries: Drag Queen Storytimes in Libraries.”
The ALA annual conference’s workshop selections also included “A Child’s Room to Choose: Encouraging Gender Identity and Expression in School and Public Libraries,” and “Are You Going to Tell My Parents?: The Minor’s Right to Privacy in the Library.” Politically charged talks and workshops like these formed at least one-third of the conference offerings, according to the ALA’s own description and a review of the conference catalog.
You know how many people attended that conference this year? 21,460. More:
The June 24 workshop on “Creating Queer-Inclusive Elementary
School Library Programming” discussed “ways to dismantle barriers” to such programs, including “crafting arguments,” “reviewing legislation,” and “listing talking points.” The description makes it clear that the workshop is not about only selecting books on this topic but also creating “services and programs.” Please note: The title says elementary school. That’s children younger than 13.
One of the presenters for this workshop, Lucy Santos Green, is the incoming chairwoman for the Educators of School Librarians section of the American Association of School Librarians. Let that one sink in. Then juxtapose it with the description of the workshop about underage children’s “privacy rights” from their parents, which “explore[d] positive and proactive ways that libraries can protect minors’ privacy and confidentiality” and insisted children “have a right to privacy and confidentiality in what they read and view in the library.”
At still another ALA conference workshop, participants brainstormed a list of book recommendations featuring “non-trad families,” which included the titles “My Brother’s Husband” and “Pregnant Butch.”
So, I wonder how Johnny’s dad the mill worker is going to feel when he learns that his son’s elementary school librarian recommended that the boy read Pregnant Butch — about a hypermasculine lesbian gestating — and strategized with the lad about how to keep his parents in the dark about his reading habits.
All these people, and this large organization that serves almost exclusively public institutions, clearly feel completely comfortable broadcasting their cheerful feelings about queer sex — and other extremely politicized and controversial subjects — in public. Have any of them ever stopped to think about how their decision to do so may contribute to some of the polarization, alienation, and anger Americans are experiencing towards each other currently?
Gang, can we please stop being idiots about this stuff? Can we recognize what’s going on here? Leading institutions in American society are casting aside all sense of professional judgment for the sake of mainstreaming this gender-ideology insanity, and related phenomena. Radical distrust of these institutions is the only sane response.
UPDATE: Libby Emmons reports on how DQSH is being used to groom kids:
The new trend of hosting “drag queen story hour” at children’s libraries has been touted as part of diversification efforts. The practice of librarians bringing drag queens to read to children has come under fire for sexualizing children. Librarians came to the defense of this programming, touting it as innocent and family oriented, but new photographs have emerged to belie that claim, of children obscenely draped over drag queens in a way that would be obviously disgusting if they were female beauty queens.
Such photos taken at a Drag Queen Story Hour event at St. John’s Library in Portland, Oregon circulated on Facebook. Parents complained about the event, showing the photos of children lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies.
The library had uploaded the photos to their Flickr feed, but they’re not available there anymore. Lifesite News archived them. Multnomah County Library took the photos down, without a word.
If the photos are innocent, showing inclusion and queer diversity, then why take them down? Even assuming these story hours were concocted with the best intentions, it seems crazy that librarians could be so blind to the reality that drag, as entertaining and culturally campy as it is for adult audiences, is not sex ed but sex entertainment, and not for kids.
More:
Take, for example, the drag story hours and associated events at the Brooklyn Public Library. “Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is just what it sounds like—drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores. DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” says a library writeup.
Associated events include makeup tutorials, like this one at the Brighton Beach branch: “Kids and teens are welcome to learn how to apply eye makeup in a fabulous way during this one-hour workshop with Drag Queen Story Hour. Participants will learn techniques for applying eye makeup and then have the opportunity to practice on themselves! All genders welcome. This workshop will: Provide a safe space for kids to express their gender however they like. Provide a positive queer role model and affirmation for teens of all genders and identities. Teach a skill that kids can learn and practice on their own. All makeup and supplies will be provided.”
Makeup tutorials, photos of kids laying atop grown men who are wearing sexualized female costumes, and encouraging gender fluidity gives truth to the lie that drag story hour isn’t about sexuality or sexualizing children. Children are drawn to sparkles and glitter, and using those things to make sexuality seem like mere play is nothing more than grooming kids to be sexual objects, not participants.
At the Multnomah County Library, St. John’s Branch, October 2018
UPDATE.2: A comment from a reader posting as “Anonymous Librarian”:
The American Library Association has been cutting edge progressive for as long I’ve been a librarian (over 20 years) and even before that the ALA was a byword for knee jerk liberalism — back when “knee jerk liberalism” was a byword. It long ago cast “aside all sense of professional judgment” whenever professional judgment conflicted with a progressive agenda. As a librarian I’ve had a ringside seat at this circus. The ALA reliably construes any and all Republican, conservative or right wing views as threats to its core values while ignoring or downplaying any actual challenges to free speech or access from the left.
I don’t know what a Ben Op for librarians looks like (although it’s not hard to imagine now that I think about it), but I’ve recently taken what steps I can to protect myself from my professional association. For instance, our family recently left our self styled affirming mainline church for a more conservative denomination in the same tradition. That’s not much protection, I guess, but if someday I get in trouble or work, or lose my job, because of my religious views, I would like, at least, be among those who share my views.
In spite of numerous declarations of devotion to diversity, inclusion, and free speech, I would never share any of my non progressive views with my colleagues unless I already knew that they were sympathetic. That’s no real burden to me personally, as I prefer to keep my views to myself, but still it’s a sad commentary for a profession that aims to “cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.” (The ALA “Library of Bill of Rights”)
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A Ben Op Sign Of Hope
Father Vincent Nagle celebrating mass for the Cascina San Benedetto group (Photo by Giovanni Zennaro)
I wrote earlier today about a loveless society. Here’s a countersign.
You might recall an interview I did with Giovanni Zennaro about the Cascina San Benedetto project. From that piece:
RD: The Benedict Option needs Christians to think creatively about ways we can construct communities and institutions within which we can live out the faith through hard times to come. Tell me how you and your friends are responding to this challenge?
GZ: Let me start by talking about my initial approach to the Benedict Option. I discovered your book in 2017, while I was completing my novitiate to become a Benedictine Oblate (lay member of the Order of St. Benedict). For me, it was a very happy discovery for two different reasons: not just because it offers useful insights to live the Christian faith in our post-Christian Western world, but also because it is inspired by St. Benedict and the Benedictine monks, the religious family I’m a member of.
At that time, my wife and I were starting to realize that our friendship with a couple of other families was taking a certain direction. During our usual Sunday meetings we were spontaneously adopting a kind of routine: the Holy Mass, the lunch together, a time dedicated to conversation, Vespers, the dinner. These very simple things turned into good regular practice. We felt the need to maintain and cultivate that practice.
Reading The Benedict Option was what made us wonder: why don’t we make this friendship stable? “Stable” stands for the Benedictine stabilitas loci. It means to choose a place and a community, considering them as the main tools for living a fully Christian life – not because a place or a community have value per se, but because being loyal to them helps one’s own Quaerere Deum(search for God).
We started talking about this with some wise friends, including some Benedictine monks from different Italian monasteries. Thanks to their guidance, we developed the idea of living together in the same place, as a group of families that share some material goods and a spiritual path, through a rule of prayer to be respected every day. That’s what you can read in the Acts of the Apostles about the first Christian community in Jerusalem (2:42-47), and that’s what the monks do in their monasteries.
We called our community life project “Cascina San Benedetto” (“St. Benedict House”; the word “Cascina” means a particular kind of country house, typical of northern Italy). A year ago we started spreading the first version of our manifesto, in order to ask friends and religious communities to pray for us. We recently published a new version of it, hoping that it will help us to collect the necessary funds to start. We need some money to buy and renovate the first apartments and some community spaces for prayer, school activity and meetings with other people interested in spending some of their time with us.
After publishing that interview, and an Italian website publishing an Italian translation of it, lots of people contacted Giovanni for more information about the Cascina project (read more about it in Italian, English, or German here, and find out how to reach Giovanni).
On Saturday, a big group (“40 people we don’t know,” said Giovanni, merrily) descended upon Giovanni and Alice’s apartment in the countryside northeast of Milan for a meeting to talk more seriously about establishing the community. Father Vincent Nagle, an American priest stationed in Milan, celebrated mass for them. I’m eager to hear more from Giovanni about how the discussions went, but I want to share the photo with you now, and to encourage all of you by the news from the Cascina. These are young Christian families who are taking the Benedict Option message seriously, and putting something together for themselves and their children.
Be of good cheer! The work is hard — I know exactly how hard, and for how long, Giovanni and his friends have been at this — but it’s starting to pay off.
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Our Loveless World
The other day, I watched Loveless, a 2017 Russian drama by Andrey Zvyagintsev, the same director who did the acclaimed film Leviathan. It is unavailable on Amazon or Netflix streaming, but a Pole I met raved about the movie so much that I went to my local library to check it out. I’m so glad I did. The movie has haunted me since I saw it. I didn’t realize it till the final scenes, but it’s an allegory about contemporary Russian society, which the director sees as suffering from an acute lack of love.
That sounds sentimental, but I assure you, it most definitely is not. Oh no, not this Russian movie, which is emotionally caustic. The film made me reflect on how its diagnosis of Russia today can be applied to the United States as well, and indeed to all modern societies. Loveless is a critique of social malaise in Russia, but its message is applicable to all advanced societies, I’d say. Let me explain. First, here’s the trailer:
When the drama opens, Boris and Zhenya, a middle-class couple, are fighting over their impending divorce. She has a rich older lover; he has a naive younger lover he has impregnated. They both despise each other, and are eager to go their separate ways. The problem is they have a 12-year-old son that neither of them wants, because he will get in the way of each of them having the life that they want. This fight is over who has to take the boy.
They think that he’s sleeping, and can’t hear them. In fact, he hears it all. His silent scream upon realizing how much he is unloved by his parents is seen here:
Alyosha, the boy, runs away, but it takes his utterly self-absorbed parents two days to realize it. Most of the drama consists of the search for Alyosha. You expect that the search will bring Boris and Zhenya closer together, but it doesn’t. In fact, it magnifies their worst qualities. They are both contemptible people, but they are not monsters, in the sense that they come across as freaks. By no means: they look and sound like normal people today.
Zhenya is obsessed with her smartphone. She is forever taking selfies, and other photos to curate her Instagram life. Except when she’s having sex with her lover, she can never quite be in the moment, because she’s always distracted by her phone, including photographing the moment to upload it to her social media accounts. Zhenya stands in a train car, absorbed in her phone … as are most of the people around her.
Boris is not addicted to his phone, but he’s got problems too. He lives as if life is a game in which the goal is self-preservation — to keep moving, staying one step ahead of reckoning. He works for a tech company whose owner is a strong Orthodox Christian who expects his employees to be family men and women. We see that within the company, employees engage in various ruses to keep up familial appearances, creating Potemkin villages for their corporate tsar.
When Alyosha disappears, the police are too overwhelmed and indifferent to offer much help. The couple engages the services of a squad of volunteers whose charitable work consists of searching for lost children in a thorough, professional way. At one point, the search team sends Boris and Zhenya to meet her mother, who lives three hours away, to see if Alyosha might have made his way to her place. The mother really is a monster, a ferocious rural babushka who stews in her spite, and curses her daughter, son-in-law, and missing grandson. Zhenya might be a sleek urban yuppie, but you can see where her inability to love comes from.
(Similarly, we see Boris’s future mother in law, who has a warm relationship with her daughter, giving the daughter tips on how to manipulate men. We get the message: this is a society that trains people to treat others as means to selfish ends; even the mother-daughter bond is poisoned by this ethic.)
I won’t tell you how the movie ends, of course, but I will say that it didn’t dawn on me until the final scenes that I was watching not just a domestic drama, about the disintegration of a family, but a political allegory about the disintegration of a society. The final shot (see above) depicts an isolated Zhenya, isolated on a treadmill in the winter, wearing a national training suit from the Sochi Winter Olympics, with the name of her country spelled in English, going nowhere, but trying to look good for the West all the same.
I’ve been thinking about this movie all weekend, but it came sharply to mind yesterday when I was transcribing an interview I did in Warsaw with Pawel Skibinski, one of Poland’s top historians. He said:
A strong family is necessary for any community. If you want to have a strong society, you have to have a strong family first. It is no coincidence that those who want to destroy society attack the family first.
And:
If one agrees that one is both an individual and a member of society, then one realizes that one has obligations to the community. If that disappears, then society will fall apart. Any sense of love will disappear, because society is based on love.
There you have it. The disintegration of the family in Loveless is a metaphor for the collapse of society.
Loveless takes place against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The director seems to be saying in this film that this terrible war is going on there, causing innocent people to suffer, and Russians are simply sitting at home, consuming it all on television, indifferent to the pain of the Ukrainians, and their own responsibility (the Russians’, I mean) to do what they can to stop the war. There are also small flourishes of revelation throughout the movie. In a brief aside in a fancy restaurant, we see a beautiful young woman giving her phone number out to a man who flirts with her on her way back to the table with her date. There is no loyalty here to anyone else, or any higher good. Even in the corporate empire ruled by the unseen Orthodox Christian CEO, he’s more interested that people look virtuous than that they be virtuous. In other words, when he surveys his company, he wants to see himself reflected back … not unlike Zhenya and her smartphone.
The only sign of hope — of ordered, sacrificial love — is the squad of searchers, who do what they do for no reward. They do it out of love of neighbor.
This is a movie about Russia, but the same movie could be made about contemporary America. Take a look at this new Derek Thompson article from The Atlantic. Excerpts:
In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.
Cities were once a place for families of all classes. The “basic custom” of the American city, wrote the urbanist Sam Bass Warner, was a “commitment to familialism.” Today’s cities, however, are decidedly not for children, or for families who want children. As the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark put it, they are “entertainment machines” for the young, rich, and mostly childless. And this development has crucial implications—not only for the future of American cities, but also for the future of the U.S. economy and American politics.
This is Zhenya and Boris. Yes, by movie’s end, Boris has sired two children, but it’s clear that this is not out of his desire to be a father, but out of his own carelessness.
Anyway, I was thinking yesterday about our president, and this garbage:
I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country. They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 21, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I don’t think Donald Trump is capable of loving anything but himself. Seriously, do you really think he loves America? There is nothing about the man’s persona or his politics that suggests love, as distinct from total self-interest. He is driven instead by resentment, and by stoking it in others.
Here’s the thing: do you really think the politics of the Gang of Four are driven by anything we might call love? I don’t. I don’t see this on the Left at all. It’s all resentment.
And hey, I get that. Resentment is the only kind of politics that gets anybody anywhere today. Progressive resentment is invisible to most people on the Left, because they think they are just Good People who hate Bad People — people like me. I have a friend in a major coastal city who e-mailed last night. He’s a pro-life Catholic who is gay but chaste out of religious conviction. In one of his social circles the other day, a couple of guys who only know him via their shared love of a particular sport began spouting off on how Christians who are against abortion and full LGBT rights are disgusting people who are not fit for decent company, and ought to be driven out of the state, like New York’s Gov. Cuomo said. These people had no idea that they were talking about their friend. Now, he doesn’t know what to do. Should he come out to them as a chaste gay pro-life conservative Catholic, or just walk away?
Those guys think they’re all about #LoveWins, but they’re not. For them, love is simply a matter of hating the right people with enough passion.
When it comes to politics, I think this is true of all of us, myself included. Yesterday I was listening to an NPR radio show in which an educated white liberal interviewed an educated black liberal, and the black guy went on and on about how much whites hate blacks. It was so tortured, the black guy’s rationale, that I listened to it just to see where he was going with it. I finally turned off the radio because it made me mad. This was a man who was plainly talking himself into hating white people, or at least in justifying the hatred he already had, and making it into a virtue. And this liberal white interviewer was just eating it up, never once challenging his narrative.
It’s not hard to imagine liberals seeing the same thing in the right-wing media.
What makes it difficult is that there is so much going on today that one really should be outraged about. Take that creepy transgender guy who has filed a human rights grievance against a salon owner in Canada for being unwilling to wax his testicles (I wrote about it here.) It’s outrageous on its face, but what makes it more than a tabloid goof is that this transwoman, Jessica Yaniv, is only taking the accepted gender ideology to its logical conclusion. Yes, Jessica Yaniv has a penis and testicles, but Jessica Yaniv says that he is a woman, and demands to be treated as a woman would — and that includes having his groin waxed in a woman’s salon. It’s disgusting and misogynistic … but given the premises of gender ideology, why is it wrong?
Jessica Yaniv is the perfect avatar of our age: a self-obsessed person who wants what he wants, and doesn’t care who he has to destroy to get it. What makes him a progressive avatar is that he does what he does under the guise of transgender liberation, which is a cause embraced by all right-thinking people in the media, academia, corporate America, and the Democratic Party. But the utter selfishness is common to all today.
I do not love Jessica Yaniv. Jessica Yaniv is my enemy. I despise what people like him are doing to the common culture. The Democratic Party has embraced the kind of ideology that powers the Jessica Yanivs, and that would force female salon owners to wax Jessica Yaniv’s testicles as surely as it would force Christian bakers to bake a gay couple’s wedding cake. I’m supposed to respond to their aggressive contempt for people like me — aggressive in the sense that it wouldn’t be simply feelings on their part, but actions — without contempt? If the choice is between a contemptible and contempt-filled politician — Donald Trump — and a Democrat whose hatreds include people like me, and our interests, then why shouldn’t I side with the politician who, whatever his sins, doesn’t despise and seek to harm my tribe?
You see where this is going. A progressive could say the same thing.
And yet, Jesus, who in my belief was and is God, commands his followers to love our enemies. I can’t allow myself to despise anybody. But what does this mean? Consider that if anybody had the right to hate his persecutors, it was Martin Luther King. But on Christmas Eve, 1967, King delivered a sermon in which he talked about how interrelated we all are, and how if we remain loveless, we will die. He said:
Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.
King went on:
There are three words for “love” in the Greek New Testament; one is the word eros. Eros is a sort of esthetic, romantic love. Plato used to talk about it a great deal in his dialogues, the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. And there is and can always be something beautiful about eros, even in its expressions of romance. Some of the most beautiful love in all of the world has been expressed this way.
Then the Greek language talks about philos, which is another word for love, and philos is a kind of intimate love between personal friends. This is the kind of love you have for those people that you get along with well, and those whom you like on this level you love because you are loved.
Then the Greek language has another word for love, and that is the word agape. Agape is more than romantic love, it is more than friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. Agape is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Theologians would say that it is the love of God operating in the human heart. When you rise to love on this level, you love all men not because you like them, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loves them. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your enemies.” And I’m happy that he didn’t say, “Like your enemies,” because there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like. Liking is an affectionate emotion, and I can’t like anybody who would bomb my home. I can’t like anybody who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them. I can’t like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill toward all men. And I think this is where we are, as a people, in our struggle for racial justice. We can’t ever give up. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship. We must never let up in our determination to remove every vestige of segregation and discrimination from our nation, but we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege to love.
I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say:
“We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you. But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
If there is to be peace on earth and goodwill toward men, we must finally believe in the ultimate morality of the universe, and believe that all reality hinges on moral foundations. Something must remind us of this as we once again stand in the Christmas season and think of the Easter season simultaneously, for the two somehow go together. Christ came to show us the way. Men love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified Him, and there on Good Friday on the Cross it was still dark, but then Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth-crushed earth will rise again. Easter justifies Carlyle in saying, “No lie can live forever.” And so this is our faith, as we continue to hope for peace on earth and goodwill toward men: let us know that in the process we have cosmic companionship.
Do to us what you will and we will still love you.
For King, these weren’t mere words. This was Christian witness at its fiercest.
I do not see anything like that in the words of Donald Trump, or the words of his most fervent supporters, not even his supporters among Christian leaders. I do not see anything like that in the words of the Democrats, or the words of their most fervent supporters, nor even their supporters among Christian leaders.
If I’m honest, I don’t really see that in my own heart.
King was no sentimentalist. His charity (from caritas, the Latin word for agape) was hard, and enduring. He paid for it with his life. Nobody fought harder against that particular evil of his time than did MLK. Yet he did not fight it with hatred. Is America today even capable of producing a leader like King, or are we too far gone?
The Christian must fear God more than he fears man. If we defeat the powers of this world, but we don’t have caritas, then what are we in God’s eyes? Satan took Jesus to a mountaintop, and offered him all the power in the world (for Satan is the Prince of this World), in exchange for worshiping him. Jesus told him to go away, because it is written that “You shall worship the Lord your God and only Him shall you serve.”
If you don’t think this has direct application to how a Christian should see politics, then you are unwilling to see what is right in front of your face.
Don’t get me wrong: Progressives who are not Christians don’t have a way out either. Many of them are willing to achieve power by means of hatred, because they are just as convinced that they would use it for good.
What would a contemporary American politician of either the left or the right be like if he or she embodied caritas in the service of civitas, to the extent that it’s realistically possible for any politician in this fallen world to embody caritas? I’m not asking rhetorically. I’d really like to know. In former days, we at least shared a common vision of what caritas in politics might look like. It’s hard to see that we still do.
In Loveless, there is a building sense of violent apocalypse. The more I think about this movie, and its deeper message, the more it feels that we too are preparing ourselves for something. Both left and right are working themselves up to violence. I don’t know what the spark will be — an economic crash? a political murder? — and maybe there won’t be a spark. But the lovelessness that Zyyagintsev identifies in Russian society is also with us, and it is the bone-dry tinder for a conflagration.
One more thing. In my interview with Prof. Skibinski, the historian, we talked about something that the late Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski wrote, to the effect of members of a society losing a shared faith in a transcendent source of value — God, most commonly — would lead to the dissolution of that society. Why? Because there would be nothing left to restrain the individual human will. I told my interview subject that in my interviews with people who had resisted Communism, I keep hearing the same thing: that you have to believe in something greater than yourself, or you will not be able to withstand the pressures of the society that wishes to destroy you. For Christian dissidents, it was their faith in God. For nonbelievers like Vaclav Havel, it was in a sense of human decency and liberty. But it had to be something greater than yourself, and your self interest. It had to be something that inspired you to be willing to suffer privation for the sake of a greater good.
From Prof. Skibinski’s reply:
Consider the metaphor of a kite. It’s in a kite’s nature to soar in the sky as high as it can, but it’s only possible if it is moored to a human on the ground by a string. It the string is cut, the kite will fall to the ground and be destroyed. It’s the same situation with humans. Humans are designed for higher things, to be free, yes, but in a higher sense. But to achieve this freedom that’s in our nature, we have to recognize our limits. The problem of contemporary society, and consumerism, is that everybody forgets about these limits. They think they can do anything they want.
If we lose our love for God, our unrestrained passions will cause us to lose our love for each other. Though it is not a religious movie, we see this in Loveless. Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago that the old folks used to say that the Bolshevik catastrophe came upon Russia because men had forgotten God. That seemed like a quaint peasant conclusion to draw, said Solzhenitsyn, but after suffering through the gulag, he learned the truth of that conclusion in his bones.
So, I fear, will we all. You and me both. And we will be responsible, because we knew, or should have known.
UPDATE: I was just going over my notes on Hannah Arendt’s book on totalitarianism. She notes that the European generation that gave itself over to Nazism was enamored of transgression (“They read not Darwin, but the Marquis de Sade”), and was re-enacting the annihilating trauma of World War I. Arendt writes:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. … The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.
What jumped out at me in reviewing these notes is Arendt’s claim that the politics of postwar Germany had its roots in the psychological shattering of German society in the war. This is hardly a novel observation, but encountering it just now, after thinking about the political and social criticism in Loveless, made me wonder to what extent our politics today, in the US, are a result of atomization and abandonment of post-1960s children. Thoughts?
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