Rod Dreher's Blog, page 228

The Testimony Of John Burd

A brave Catholic named John Burd writes about Amazon’s decision to ban sale on its site of the works of the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the founder of “reintegrative therapy” — which is NOT the same thing as “conversion therapy,” and has nothing at all to do with the abusive tortures that the gay activist Sam Brinton claims (with great implausibility) he was subjected to in his youth.

Anyway, the letter:

I’m a current patient at the clinic founded by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts.  I’m 37, Catholic, and gay (or same-sex attracted, if you want to use the unwieldy but more orthodox terminology), and I started seeing a therapist at the clinic earlier this year.

I want to start by correcting something in your post, in which you wrote that Joseph Nicolosi “believed, rightly or wrongly, that homosexuality could be cured.”   I’m not a psychological professional myself, and I obviously do not speak for the clinic. But I have read Nicolosi’s books, and it would be more accurate to say that he believed homosexuality could be treated, not cured.  His conception of homosexuality is more akin to alcoholism than it is to a curable illness– it can be treated, and different people will experience different levels of healing. Some people may be freed of homosexuality completely.  Some will not. But even those of us who will never be freed can find help to diminish our attractions and manage the impact they have on our lives.

Again, I emphasize I speak only for my own understanding here– I don’t bring any authority to this beyond my own experience.  But I do want to share my experience. When I read Dr. Nicolosi’s books, it was like reading an intimate biography of myself. My relationships with other men, the failures I saw in myself compared to them, what I feared about them, the affirmation I wanted from them– they were all there on the page.  In Dr. Nicolosi’s theory of homosexuality, they were cause, much more than effect.

My reaction to this was deep humiliation– humiliation to see so much of my own brokenness laid bare on the page in stark clinical language.  But in that humiliation was hope. Maybe this man who saw me so clearly, without even knowing I existed, maybe he was right about what homosexuality is– at core, a misdirected drive to connect with men and masculinity, arising from a failure to do so in healthy ways.

I should clarify here, I was never “in the lifestyle.”  But I spent a long time wrestling with the nature of homosexuality as it relates to Christian anthropology.  I’m not sure how familiar you are with the “Side B Christians,” who argue that homosexual activity is wrong, but that homosexuality itself is a gift, but I can tell you that I wanted to believe that.  I wanted to believe God made me this way, that it was my identity, that it was good and natural, and not something wrong with me. But ultimately I could not reconcile those beliefs with what I have come to believe about the man God made me, and how my homosexual desires developed.

I think what is especially painful for those of us who struggle with this issue is that human sexuality really does run to the core of who we are as human beings.  It is unavoidably a part of our identity. And so to recognize that, in the language of the Catholic catechism, our desires are “objectively disordered” is to feel on a fundamental level that something is wrong with us.  My journey with homosexuality has been a painful process of letting go of the things that I wanted so much to believe, and accepting truths I wanted so much to reject. It has been essential in this process to understand that my identity is not in being gay.  It is in being a man made in the image and likeness of God.

So these are the issues I’m working through at the late Dr. Nicolosi’s clinic with an endlessly patient and compassionate therapist.  There is no aversion therapy, no shaming, no shocking of the testicles– though if I’m being honest, I sometimes think I’d prefer those to the work we actually do, recalling and resolving deeply painful emotional traumas related to my failures to connect with other men and my own masculine nature, overcoming long-held shame, and learning to connect in healthy ways.

I so often see and hear small-o orthodox Christians talk about this issue almost apologetically, like the Church’s teaching is vaguely embarrassing and mean-spirited.  Or they embrace the Father James Martins, who tell us that God loves us, which is the easy half of the truth. I want them to know that those of us who struggle with these issues deserve the truth, and we need the full truth– to share the truth is to share Christ, who is the Truth (John 14:6).  I suggest looking to the pro-life movement as a model. They start with the truth– the right to life, and the love of a mother for her child. And they walk with women in crisis. Many of us who struggle with these issues are lonely and ashamed. Please, walk with us. Accompany us.  We need you to. But do it in truth.

Rod, please feel free to share this letter on your blog.  I was going to ask you to leave my name off of it, but I have changed my mind.  I’m tired of Christians running scared from dissension from the LGBTQ ranks. They do not speak for me on this issue.  I speak for me.

Sincerely,

John Burd

That’s a courageous man, for sure.

Here is a link to the Reintegrative Therapy Association. Here is a short documentary about it the therapy:

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The Fellowship Of St. Columbanus

A reader writes, about the “Seminary Confidential” post, and the “Post-Graduation Fall From Christian Orthodoxy” post:

I recently read and deeply appreciated the two articles named in the title of this email, and they encouraged me to reach out to you.

Your articles resonated with much of my experience, particularly in graduate schools both in the US and UK. About two years ago some fellow conservative Catholics and I were talking about our frustrations with these growing trends in education, with what we felt were constraints on our ability to teach as a result of the ascendant orthodoxies, as well as a system which is more and more failing both its students and its teachers. We eventually had to face a difficult question, though: what we were going to do about our complaints?

We came to the conclusion that we needed to take radical steps. We have since been told that our plans strongly resemble your “Benedict Option,” though none of us had read your work at the time. Our idea is to found a monastic community on the ancient Irish model, with teaching as our primary charism.

We named our initiative The Fellowship of St Columbanus after the great Irish missionary who helped to re-convert Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and we are hoping to build a tuition-free, self-sustaining “teaching community” of Benedictine oblates. Our desire is to build this community in Appalachia, to reach its chronically underserved, and often publicly vilified, communities.

It is one of our guiding principles that sequestering education from the rest of life has lead to it being treated as a mere commodity to be bought and sold, tailored to the consumer’s preferences. We want to imitate the model of the early monastic schools, both in curriculum by following the Classical model developed by Boethius and Cassiodorus for use in those schools, and in the integration of students and teachers into a common rule of life, including work and prayer.

Despite the discouraging accounts that often come out of higher education, we think that there is reason to be hopeful. There are colleges and universities which continue to fight the good fight and promote a genuinely free exchange of ideas. When I reach out to fellow graduate students and even to faculty at universities here in the U.K. and back home in America, I find surprising amounts of support and encouragement. To promote such schools and ideas, we have even begun producing a little quarterly magazine, The Scholastic, to encourage a discussion of academic reform.

This summer I will defend my doctoral dissertation in divinity at an ancient British university, and then my wife, our toddler, and I will be moving to Appalachia. We are going there to speak to the bishops of some of the poorest and most underserved communities in the U.S., with the hope that they will allow us to establish a teaching community of Benedictine Oblates in the region.

I thought it might be an encouragement to you to know that, while the situation is dire, there is a generation of young academics who are fighting back. It seems that the walls have already been taken by a reckless foe, but we still think that memory and hope will go on in some mountain valley where the grass is green.

What encouraging news! May God bless their efforts — and may some of you readers who have the financial resources to help them reach out. If you write me, I can put you in touch with the author of this piece. I heard today from Giovanni Zennaro in Italy that a number of Italians, and even some Americans, had reached out to him after my post here about the nascent “family monastery” called Cascina San Benedetto. And, I’ve also been in touch with an American PhD student who is willing to take the lead in putting together a Ben Op website to make these connection. All to the good!

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As The Vatican Turns

OK, one last post before I go pack my bags. The Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi has a powerful piece of political and cultural analysis on the NYT’s op-ed page today, titled “How The Catholic Church Lost Italy.” It’s about Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and how despite being a bad Catholic by any objective standard, he has reinvented himself as a hero to many Italian Catholics by adopting nationalist positions and rhetoric — this, in contrast to the Pope and the Italian bishops. Salvini is head of the party now calling itself the League. Excerpts:

The League’s embrace of Christianity is a recent addition, however. In the years following its founding in the 1990s, the party was often in tension with the Vatican hierarchy: It largely took up a libertarian outlook on issues like family, abortion, end-of-life questions and religious freedom, rarely putting them at the core of its agenda.

And yet speaking in Milan a few days before the European Parliament election in May, Mr. Salvini invoked the names of the patron saints of Europe. “We entrust our destiny, our future and the peace and prosperity of our peoples to them,” he proclaimed, and then became more intimate. “Personally, I entrust Italy, my life and your lives to the immaculate heart of Mary, who I’m sure will lead us to victory,” he said, gripping a rosary in his right hand. When the League obtained more than 34 percent of the vote, becoming the leading political party in Italy, Mr. Salvini thanked “the one who is up there” and kissed the rosary during a news conference. A few days later, in a magazine interview, he expanded on his devotion to the Virgin Mary and announced his wish to walk the Way of Saint James, a popular pilgrimage route, one day.

If all this seems opportunistic, writes Ferraresi, that’s because Church leadership under Francis has surrendered the Church’s natural position in Italian politics (which, note well, is very different from what we’re used to in America). Ferraresi writes:

But for some believers, the Francis model has simply been disorienting. The Vatican is now sending ambiguous messages on issues that were considered crucial only a few years ago. Many Catholic voters complain the church is not vocal enough in condemning abortion and L.G.B.T. rights, and upholding Italy’s Christian identity, while it emphasizes immigration, social justice and environmental issues.

Mr. Salvini is targeting Italian Catholics who either are refusing to follow the new path or just miss the days in which the church offered straightforward political guidance. In doing so, he has followed the lead of other right-wing European leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, politicians in countries with large Catholic populations who present themselves as champions of a Christianity under siege.

Mr. Salvini is a parody of a religious leader. His theology is virtually nonexistent; his motives are doubtful. His blatant appropriations of Christian slogans are clumsy; in his mouth, even the most solemn of Pope Benedict’s quotes sound like they came out of a fortune cookie. And yet, his message has been effective among Catholics because he has occupied a space that the church left unguarded.

Read the whole thing.  Ferraresi’s point is that not only are Francis and the Italian bishops pushing a very unpopular immigration line, but they also have more or less abandoned the field on abortion and LGBT. Into this gap steps Salvini, to the horror of Church leadership.

Meanwhile, Francis has done something that has left some of this blog’s Catholic readers in deep shock: given away some relics of St. Peter to the (Orthodox) Ecumenical Patriarch. More:

Archbishop Job of Telmessos, who headed the official delegation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, said that after the papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on June 29, Pope Francis invited him to accompany him to the tomb of St. Peter under the main altar.

The archbishop said that after the two prayed together at St. Peter’s tomb, the Pope told him he had a “gift for the Church of Constantinople.” The Pope invited the archbishop to accompany him to the Apostolic Palace. There, in the private chapel of the popes, Francis took the reliquary and gave it to Archbishop Job.

“When we entered the chapel,” the Orthodox archbishop said, “Pope Francis explained to me that Pope Paul VI wanted to keep a part of the relics of St. Peter from the Vatican Basilica in his private chapel.”

Pope Francis told him: “I no longer live in the Apostolic Palace, I never use this chapel, I never [celebrate] Holy Mass here, and we have St. Peter’s relics in the basilica itself, so it will be better if they will be kept in Constantinople.”

“This is my gift to the Church of Constantinople,” the Pope added, as he handed over the relics. “Please take this reliquary and give it to my brother Patriarch Bartholomew.”

“This gift is not from me, it is a gift from God,” he said.

Admitting to being somewhat taken aback by the Pope’s decision, Archbishop Job said: “This is an extraordinary and unexpected event that we did not expect. The relics of the Holy Apostle Peter were always kept in Rome where they were the purpose of pilgrimages.”

“The Orthodox Church has never asked for them since they never belonged to the Church of Constantinople,” the archbishop added. “This time, we do not speak of a return of relics to their original place. This time, the relics are being presented as a gift. This prophetic gesture is another huge step on the path to concrete unity.”

As an Orthodox Christian, I suppose that I am grateful that an Orthodox patriarch now has relics of St. Peter, also venerated by us, in the Orthodox Church’s possession. Note well that these aren’t all of the Petrine relics, just some of them. Most of them remain buried under St. Peter’s Basilica.

But I have to say that no Orthodox patriarch would ever even think about surrendering such relics to the Church of Rome. It’s hard to think of a parallel case from the Orthodox side — an Eastern saint who holds the symbolic power in the Eastern church that St. Peter has in the Roman church. It does feel strange to me that the relics of St. Peter aren’t all gathered in Rome. I very much don’t share the alarm of this Catholic reader who wrote to me, but if I were Catholic, not Orthodox, I probably would:

Really breathtaking. I am cut to the quick, actually choked up. To watch this man, step by step, as if by demonic design, drain away the special graces and prerogatives of our Church is becoming unbearable. Month after month. Synod after synod.

“I no longer live in the Apostolic Palace, I never use this chapel…”

In short: “I.” The man thinks it all belongs to him.

Yes, I believe the Orthodox Church is fully valid and true. Nonetheless, and I think you would agree, the relics should not move: they should not be in Istanbul. Period.

What are we going to do? As a Catholic who lives in Taiwan, where people I love are under constant threat from communist China, watching this man forge ahead with a deal handing his Chinese bishops over to Xi Jinping’s government was sickening. The very government that has reinstated the persecution and torture of Christians we last saw during the Mao era. Against the pleas of Cardinal Zen, the liberals and homoclerics in Team Francis threw the Chinese Church under the bus.

I need not reiterate the countless instances of doctrinal slide. It is never ending. This man who thinks he can rewrite lines in the Lord’s Prayer.

But giving away Peter’s relics—it is a gestural summing up of the whole flippant circus that is FrancisChurch (TM).

Millions of faithful Catholics, who see what is happening, they want to wait out this papacy, praying for a more papal leader in Francis’ successor. It is I suppose what we must do. Nonetheless the situation keeps going from bad to worse. We are witnessing what should be literally impossible: the Vatican in schism from the Catholic Church.

In other news, the WaPo reports that lay Catholics in the Diocese of Wheeling, W. Va., wrote for years to higher-ups — including Archbishop Vigano, the pope’s ambassador in Washington — to complain about the reckless spending of their bishop, the now-disgraced Michael Bransfield. Excerpt:

In March 2013, Pennington, who had earlier written to Lori, sent Viganò a short letter about “the life of luxury, self-centeredness, & abuse of power by Bishop Michael Bransfield, Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia.”

“To verify my facts, below is a news article from the Charleston, Gazette (WV) outlining the beginning of a ‘spending spree,’ ” she wrote.

The article’s headline reads: “Renovations to Bishop’s House Top $1 Million.”

“West Virginia’s Catholic diocese has spent well over $1 million this year on renovations to houses for Bishop Michael Bransfield, including the addition of a 13-foot-long sunken bar and a 100-square-foot wine cellar,” says the article’s first sentence.

In May, Viganò received a blunt but less detailed letter from Joanna Brown, a parishioner at Our Lady of Fatima Church.

“Bishop Bransfield has been enjoying a self-indulgent lifestyle,” Brown wrote in a letter that was copied to two other clerics in Rome. “I want to know why this is being allowed when Pope Francis is preaching the opposite.”

In a letter that same month sent to Viganò and copied to cardinals in Rome, parishioners Robert and Virginia Hickman echoed Brown’s complaint.

“There are so many ‘stories’ about the lifestyle of the hierarchy of our Diocese that one should investigate for themselves to verify facts,” the Hickmans wrote. “Your inquiry and review of all matters in the DIOCESE OF WHEELING/CHARLESTON would be a blessing for all parishioners.”

In July 2013, during the flurry of letters, Viganò joined Bransfield in Mount Hope, W.Va., to celebrate Mass at a jamboree attended by 10,000 Boy Scouts. Viganò told The Post that he had been stranded at an airport in Charlotte on his way to the event and called Bransfield to let him know. Bransfield sent a chartered jet to pick him up.

Church documents and flight records show a seven-seat Learjet was dispatched to pick up Viganò in North Carolina, flying him 35 minutes to Charleston, W.Va. The flight cost the diocese $7,687, church financial records show.

Viganò said in a statement to The Post that he had no reason to suspect the private jet travel was improper. He said he assumed “a generous benefactor” had paid for the jet, citing Bransfield’s role as president of a nonprofit group that raises millions of dollars from prominent laypeople, the Papal Foundation.

“Given these facts, there was no reason for me to investigate or report anything to the Vatican,” Viganò said.

Maybe so. Or maybe this was just business as usual with the episcopal leadership class. But jeez, Bransfield. Reminds of of the Bishop Of Bling — ‘memba him? — who failed upwards after Pope Francis booted him out of his German see for spending $43 million on renovating his house. Guess where he is now? According to Crux’s John Allen:

In “The Simpsons,” the annual Halloween episodes are known for their spoofs of the supernatural. Back in 1993, one of my favorites featured a vision of Hell, where the legendarily donut-loving Homer has been assigned to the “Ironic Punishment Division.” He’s tethered to a chair as a machine force-feeds him pastry after pastry.

(Homer appears delighted, mumbling “more please!” after each mouthful, leading a frustrated demon to say: “I don’t understand it … James Coco went mad in 15 minutes!”)

I thought of that episode this week, speaking to a visiting clergyman who was astonished to discover that German Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van-Elst – better known to the world as the “Bling Bishop,” whose exuberant spending in the Diocese of Limburg in 2013 caused such a furor that he was granted a “sabbatical” by the newly-elected Pope Francis – is actually now a Vatican official.

My cleric friend recently attended a meeting in the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, where Tebartz-van-Elst led the discussion. He said he spent a few minutes trying to figure out where he’d heard the name before, until realization dawned: “My God, he’s the bishop of bling!”

Welcome to the “Ironic Employment Division” in Pope Francis’s Vatican.

Allen writes about other prelates who failed at their jobs, but received positions in the Curia, including an accused Argentine sex abuser whom Francis promoted to Vatican service to get him out of Argentina. And this:

Another fitting for-instance is Monsignor Dario Edoardo Viganò, who was forced to resign as the Vatican’s communications czar in March 2018 after attempting to pass off a doctored letter by Pope emeritus Benedict XVI as the real thing and getting caught. For presiding over such a PR fiasco, Francis moved Viganò to a different post – not as prefect of the Dicastery for Communications but its “assessor,” meaning to this day he’s still in a position to shape the communications operation.

Further back in time, there’s Monsignor Mario Salvatore Battista Ricca, who was confirmed by Francis as prelate of the Vatican Bank in 2013 despite revelations in the Italian media that during his previous service as a papal diplomat in Uruguay, he’d been involved in a couple of scandalous situations involving homosexual activity – one in which Battista Ricca was apparently beaten up after leaving a gay bar, and another in which he was trapped in an elevator at the papal embassy in Montevideo with a young man and had to be rescued by the fire department.

Despite that, Francis confirmed Battista Ricca in a sensitive post at an institution which, at the time, was also trying to shake off a well-earned reputation for scandal.

Read it all.

Finally, Archbishop Vigano — brother of Mons. Dario Vigano — says that Pope Francis is ignoring serious, documented allegations of sexual abuse against one of his Curial allies. Excerpts:

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former papal ambassador who has accused Pope Francis of covering up sex abuse, has stated that the Vatican’s third most powerful prelate, Archbishop Peña Parra, was never given an “open and thorough investigation” for troubling accusations of sex abuse that date back decades. Archbishop Viganò said the high-ranking prelate was not investigated despite the existence of what he calls a “terrifying dossier” sent to Pope Francis that gives names and dates regarding his alleged misbehavior.

Archbishop Viganò told the Washington Post in an unpublished section of an interview that was recently obtained and published by LifeSiteNews that Pope Francis “essentially ignored” the dossier on Archbishop Peña Parra while appointing the Venezuelan to a top position in the Vatican.

Viganò states that one accusation, involving Peña Parra seducing two candidates for the seminary in 1990, was reported by the alleged victims’ parents to the police, and the veracity of the accusations were confirmed in writing to the Secretariat of State by both the rector of the major seminary and by seminary’s spiritual director. Viganò told the Post that “I have seen these documents with my own eyes,” and the documentation as well as that of other accusations should still be on file in the Holy See, “if it has not been destroyed.”

More, including names and details, all of which is checkable:

Although the accusations were “grave,” writes Viganò, “not only was Peña Parra not required to face them, he was allowed to continue in the diplomatic service of the Holy See” – an accusation that would apply to the curia of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. Viganò considers the case of Peña Parra to be so bad that it “might even be a scandal surpassing that of McCarrick,” and notes that the archbishop is a close associate of the scandal-ridden Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, and the cardinal’s now-disgraced former auxiliary bishop, Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, having formed a strong friendship with the latter while serving in the apostolic nunciature in Honduras from 2003 to 2007.

Viganò writes that these accusations were reported to the Secretariat of State in 2002 by the then apostolic nuncio in Venezuela, Archbishop André Dupuy, and they have remained on file both in Venezuela and in the Vatican ever since, accessible to high officials of the Holy See. Viganò names “the Cardinals Secretaries of State Sodano, Bertone, and Parolin and the Substitutes Sandri, Filoni, and Becciu,” among those with access to the information, “if it has not been destroyed.”

Read the whole thing. 

Consider why a bad Catholic like Matteo Salvini has more credibility in the eyes of many Italian Catholics than the Pope and his episcopal team.

 

 

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Cultural Marxism: Enemy Of Real Marxism?

This is not the kind of letter you get every day. I’m not using the reader’s name here, but he included it in the post:

I read your recent article, “Seminary Confidential”, which was shared by a couple of my facebook friends. I have some familiarity with your work and I agree with a lot of it. I would like to offer a different perspective from that of your other readers.

Because, you see, I am a Marxist.

And the reason I need to speak up is because the same cancer that is eating away at you is also eating away at us. Time and time again I see conservative sources that I respect talking about Marxism in the same breath as (to use some quotes from your student correspondent):

“First, they fully bought into the primacy of the autonomous individual. You are untethered from all social and biological relationships and constraints that you do not willfully choose. Anything you feel is good and should be celebrated by society. You are unbounded by any moral constraint except the consent of other autonomous individuals.”

“It has been applied to gender, to sexuality, to race, even to colonialism. It has given us the fields of Queer Theory, Postcolonialism, and Whiteness Studies, among others.”

“You can see how nicely CT dovetails with autonomous individualism: you are morally excellent if you embrace all your identities and liberate yourself and others from the shackles of the oppressors (systemic white, capitalistic, patriarchal heteronormativity).”

“One group says that truth exists, humans are sinful, our actions must be conformed to God, and that society and systems help us obtain those ends. The other says that truth either doesn’t exist or is dependent on the subjective experience of the individual…”

This… is Marxism? Radical subjectivist individualism… is Marxism? Believing that there is no truth, that subjective individual experiences are the measure of all things, that you (an individual) should “embrace all your identities” and “liberate yourself” – all this is Marxism? A system of thought which denies objective reality and proclaims the individual will as supreme arbiter of the universe, being regarded as not just compatible with Marxism, but as *being* Marxism, somehow! O, how far we have fallen.

It is of course true that Critical Theory originates from Marxism, and that all these ideas were indeed promoted at first by thinkers who began as Marxists. But only in the same sense that Mormonism originates from Christianity and was created by a man who began as a Christian.

Marxism is a philosophy rooted in materialism, indeed even radical materialism. The original 19th century Marxists were, as you know, roundly criticized and caricatured as historical determinists. They believed that human society operates according to certain laws as immutable as the laws of physics, and furthermore that they had discovered what those laws were. Later Marxists (including myself) seriously doubt the claim that we have actually *discovered* all those laws, but you can’t really be any kind of Marxist without believing that those laws *exist*, that we know at least a few of them at least to some extent, and that, in principle, all of them can eventually be discovered.

Marxism is compatible with a lot of things — I’m certainly not one of those people who deny the label of “Marxist” to those who disagree with me — but radical subjectivist individualism is almost the precise polar opposite of Marxist philosophy. The whole point of Marx is that the machine of human society and history operates a certain way regardless of what you think or feel, that “matter determines consciousness” and not the other way around, and that everything that happens in society (including oppression) has ultimately economic causes.

Marxism doesn’t validate anyone’s feelings. Marxism says that your feelings are determined by the objective material conditions of your life.

Now the reason I am insisting on this is because the Critical Theory that you see taking over Christianity has taken over our movement first, and drove it into the ground. It is not Marxism, although it may be considered a parasite upon Marxism. It does originate from among us — it began with a group of Marxists (the Frankfurt School) trying to answer the question of why no communist revolutions happened in the West, and their answer was that subjective individual experiences are more powerful than traditional Marxism believed. A few decades later this evolved into the view that subjective individual experiences are all-powerful and objective material conditions are irrelevant.

In other words, it basically evolved into the view that Marxism was wrong about everything (they wouldn’t necessarily put it this way, but this is what it actually implies). And this view took over the Western left some time between the 1960s and the end of the Cold War. Cheered on, I might add, by those on the right who were all too eager to promote anything that was critical of traditional Marxism.

This had political consequences. Oppression — which was originally defined by Marxism as an objective economic phenomenon, where some people get less wealth than they justly deserve and others get more than they justly deserve — became re-defined as a matter of subjective experience. Now, to be oppressed simply meant to *feel* oppressed. This led to a retreat from practical political thinking. You can redistribute wealth, but you can’t redistribute feelings. All you can do is tell the people responsible for the bad feelings that they should feel guilty about their privilege. So here we are today, with a left-wing political culture more interested in telling white male college students to feel bad than in actually improving the material conditions of the working class. It’s a disaster.

Inequality — objective, economic, material inequality — is higher than at any point since the 1920s. Global corporations are stronger than ever. By any objective metric of success, we are losing. Badly. Consumerism, individualism and hedonism are winning, but by some strange alchemy people on both the right and the left have come to believe that a pro-gay ad campaign by a multinational corporation represents a triumph for “the left” or for “Marxism”.

So this Marxist wishes you godspeed in your fight against radical subjectivist individualism. You are not fighting us, but rather a common enemy that defeated us first. We may not have much in common in our worldviews, but one thing we DO have in common is a belief in the primacy of objective reality over subjective experience.

Also, attacking religion was the worst mistake we ever made. We foolishly believed that, in the absence of faith in an afterlife, people would turn to working altruistically to build paradise on Earth. In fact, it turns out that they become selfish hedonists instead, and they care less, not more, about improving general human life on Earth. I wish we could ask for your forgiveness collectively, but I can only ask it for myself. Your side has always been right about the importance of faith and family to a healthy community (which is something we want as well). Capitalism, on the other hand, is your enemy as much as it is ours.

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Amos Pierce, American Hero

The Left, man. The Left:

Charlottesville, Virginia, will no longer celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday as an official city holiday and instead will observe a day recognizing the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans.

The city council voted Monday night to scrap the decades-old April 13 holiday honoring the slave-holding president and Founding Father. Charlottesville will now mark Liberation and Freedom Day on March 3, the day U.S. Army forces arrived in the city in 1865.

When they came after symbols of the Confederacy — a move I generally supported — some on the Right said, “You think they’re going to stop there? The Founders are next.” And now that is coming true — in the city that has long been synonymous with Jefferson!

Until now, we Americans have been able to celebrate Jefferson and his legacy, despite his slave-owning, because we recognized that the profound moral flaws of this great man do not obviate the facts of his world-historical accomplishment as an architect of the American republic. Even though I personally have some reservations about that founding, and the arch-rationalist Jefferson’s role in it, there can be no doubt of his greatness, and the pietas that all American patriots owe to his memory. Jefferson was great in spite of holding slaves. What he achieved laid the groundwork, in later generations, for the emancipation of slaves, and for a more just union — a task that remains for every generation of Americans, for as long as there is an America.

But now even Jefferson is becoming a villain. Jefferson! And worse, in his own town. 

This happened on the same week that Nike withdrew a Colonial-era flag-themed sneaker because Woke superstar Colin Kaepernick said it reminded him of slavery. It’s pretty clear what’s coming: that to be on the Right Side Of History, we are all going to have to despise the American founding and its founders. Meantime, almost all the Democratic Party’s presidential contenders have declared themselves de facto to be for open borders. It’s politically insane. They’re just handing all this stuff to Donald Trump.

I can hear the squawking from liberals now: How can you blame the entire Left for this? How can you actually believe that a corporation’s decision about a shoe, and a city council’s decision about a local holiday, matters? Nike has a right to do what it did, and so does the Charlottesville city council! Anyway, what about this terrible thing Trump did, and this one, and the other one? Et cetera.

I have to chuckle. This is profoundly ignorant of how ordinary people think. Don’t you people get it? Little things like this are part of a developing narrative, one that emerges from the actions of people like campus activists, media and academic figures, city councils, and Woke Capitalists in corporate boardrooms. The narrative is this: the American nation is illegitimate, the American nation is wicked at its roots, America is loathsome. If we are going to dissolve this old, bad America, and replace it with something better, then we are going to need to start by teaching her people to hate her through and through. Meanwhile, let’s open the borders to let in a better class of future American. 

Attacking figures like Jefferson, and symbols like the Colonial-era flag — again, not the Confederate flag, but a Colonial-era flag — make it clear that what’s under assault now by the Social Justice Warriors — not fringe campus hotheads, but institutionalists like senior corporate executives and city council members — is the symbolic core of America herself. Not Southern secessionists who fought to preserve slavery, but the Founders and the Founding. These symbols are as close as the secular realm gets to sacred. Elementary psychology says that you do not profane what is sacred to a tribe, unless you want war.

Politics today are primarily identity politics. That’s just a fact. You can’t be indifferent to the power of symbolism and identity. There is not a Central Committee for Left-Liberalism in America that decided the Colonial-era American flag was to be spited. But it happened this week, in accordance with the wishes of a crusading left-wing celebrity. And not a single leading politician of the Democratic Party spoke up against it. Maybe they and their handlers didn’t think it was worth mentioning. Boy, are they wrong. I know conservatives who went out this week and bought version of that “Betsy Ross flag” to fly today, to affirm pride in the Founding in the face of Woke Corporate assault (and by the way, conservatives: if you aren’t learning to despise Big Business, it’s time to start paying attention). In this way, the Left is handing over to Donald Trump what ought to be a symbol of American unity and pride in country.

It’s crazy to think about, but here we are: America is led now by an irritable, unstable, incompetent, corrupt narcissist, a man of many deep faults — but at least he doesn’t hate his country, its history, its ancestral religion and its traditions, and at least he doesn’t want to open the borders to allow a wave of foreigners to remake it.

This is how the Left is going to fire up those who already support Trump, and drive many who can’t stand him to vote for him anyway, solely to protect the country from the party and the people who despise what she is.

I hate that America is going this way, and that the fashionable Left is handing old-fashioned patriotism over to the Right, and to Donald Trump. Because I’m a patriot, or try to be, I don’t want this for my country. I want Left and Right to be able to have our arguments, but to do so as Americans.

What this country needs right now is the voice of Amos Pierce.

He’s the 94-year-old father of the African-American actor Wendell Pierce. He’s a decorated veteran of World War II, and to my mind, one of the greatest living Americans. Why one of the greatest? Read this passage from Wendell’s great memoir The Wind In The Reeds to discover who Amos Pierce is, and what he means to his son, and to this country. I’m getting tears in my eyes now just thinking about that dear man. No kidding, whenever I get down on my country, I always think about Mr. Amos, and how he had to suffer so much from this country under segregation, but how he never, ever stopped loving her. In this excerpt from the book, Wendell is talking about a WWII-era campaign to encourage black Americans to support the war effort:

Black newspapers around the country took up the cause and carried its banner throughout the war years. Of course the promise of the Double V Campaign was only half fulfilled. America won the war for democracy abroad, but refused to embrace it and prosecute it at home. Yet African Americans did not give up hope. They still believed in America, and wanted white Americans to believe in her too. The same faith in this nation’s promise would animate the civil rights movement. In 1957, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would give a Christmas sermon in which he paid respect to the Double V Campaign, using the same rhetoric that would ultimately prevail in the war for the hearts and minds of America and its future:

Do to us what you will and we will still love you . . . . 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, but 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 appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

In Dr. King’s soaring words, I can hear the testimony of my family. Burn our cars to teach us a lesson, nearly lynch our men for loving your women, piss on our children in church, steal our money and our right to vote, throw our broken bodies into an unmarked plantation grave, send us to a foreign land to fight and die for you, but deny us the medals we earned sacrificing for this nation—and we will not stop loving America. But we will win our freedom with a victory against the enemies—from within.

This was not sentimentality for my father. This was reality. I’ll never forget the lesson he taught me as a boy, the night he took me to a boxing match at the Municipal Auditorium. Daddy hates cigarette smoking, but he wanted to see the fights, so he sat miserably with my brother and me in the uppermost part of the bleachers, surrounded by a billowing cloud of smoke, waiting for the matches to begin. This was the late sixties or early seventies, when the Black Power movement was in full swing. That ethos demanded that when the national anthem was played, black people protested by refusing to stand in respect.

That night at the Municipal Auditorium, the national anthem began to sound over the PA system, signaling that the fights would soon begin. Everyone stood, except some brothers sitting in the next row down from us. They looked up at my father and said, “Aw, Pops, sit down.”

“Don’t touch me, man,” growled my dad.

“Sit down! Sit down!” they kept on.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I fought for that flag. You can sit down. I fought for you to have that right. But I fought for that flag too, and I’m going to stand.”

Then one of the brothers leveled his eyes at Daddy and said, “No, you need to sit down.” He started pulling on my father’s pants leg.

That was it. “You touch me one more time,” my father roared, “and I’m going to kick you in your fucking teeth.”

The radical wiseass turned around and minded his own business. That was a demonstration of black power that the brother hadn’t expected.

Like my father, my uncle L. H. Edwards fought for the American flag—his war was Vietnam—and came home to face discrimination as well. Uncle L.H. was a far angrier and a politically more extreme man than my father, but no matter how mad he was at what America had done to him and his people, his faith in America’s ideals and his loyalty to that flag did not waver. Like his son Louis says, “My father might have put on a dashiki, but he was going to wear it while he waved that flag.”

“You have to understand, my father was an officer,” Louis says. “He was so proud of that. He believed that there was no military in this world greater than the U.S. military, and you had better speak to him with respect because of it. He might have sung the black national anthem, but he wasn’t going to fly the flag of any African country, or any other nation but our own.”

Amos Pierce had been awarded some medals for his World War II service in the Pacific. But when he was discharged stateside, a white officer processing his discharge said that the documentation must be a lie, because no nigger could have won those medals. Amos Pierce carried the burden of that grievous insult back into civilian life with him. He never told his sons about it, in part because he did not want them to grow up despising the country that had done their father such an injustice.

Wendell found out only in the 2000s about his father having been cheated out of medals by a racist white officer. Here, from The Wind In The Reeds, he picks up the story of how he, as a son, worked to right that wrong:

Those brave black soldiers, Amos Pierce and L.H. Edwards, taught me about true patriotism. This land was their land, too. It was made for them, same as everybody else. They never forgot it, and they weren’t going to let their fellow Americans forget it. Their patriotism said, “America is a great country, but we’re going to keep fighting to make it greater.”

In 2009, I did my small part in this long struggle to make our country a more perfect union when I contacted WWL-TV reporter Bill Capo in New Orleans and asked him to help me get Daddy his medals. I couldn’t let that injustice stand, not after all Amos Pierce had done for me and for his country. I explained what happened and Bill started looking into it. He contacted U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, a fellow New Orleanian, who put her staff to work researching the issue.

What they found is that Corporal Pierce had not been awarded two medals, as he believed, but rather six of them. There was a Bronze Service Star, an Asiatic Pacific Campaign medal, a World War II Victory medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Meritorious Unit Commendation, and a Good Conduct medal, along with an honorable service lapel pin.

Working with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, we arranged a special ceremony on Armed Forces Day, 2009, to present my father, then eighty-four, with his country’s thanks and honors. True, they were half a century late, but it’s never too late to do the right thing.

Major General Hunt Downer of the Louisiana National Guard spoke warmly of my father, telling the audience that we must never forget the debt of gratitude we owe to the Greatest Generation. Museum board president Gordon “Nick” Mueller added, “We would not have won World War II without the African Americans, the Native Americans, the Hispanics, the Japanese Americans.”

My brother Ron rose to speak, fighting back tears. He told the audience that our father “truly believed in the American dream, and he bought into it. And when he would tell us that we could do anything, he wasn’t just spouting words, he meant it.” (Ron said later that the event was surreal for him. “Here I was in the presence of a real-life American war hero, and it was my father—and I had no idea about it.”)

When my turn came to speak, I was as emotional as Ron was. My heart was bursting with love and pride in Daddy and all his comrades in arms. “It’s a great honor to stand here today,” I said. “But it’s not just for us. It is for all the men and women who couldn’t live to see this honor, and receive the honors they received, but still had love and faith for this great nation.”

Tee stood with us, at Daddy’s side. I hoped that my oldest brother, Stacey, who had died of heart disease a decade earlier, could in some way share that moment of triumph with our family.

Then it was time to give Daddy his medals. His face beaming, Daddy made his way with his walker to the stage. I stood at his side, holding the six medals in my hand, while Ron pinned them on the left breast of Daddy’s pin-striped suit. Tee looked on, cradling the box the medals came in.

Later on, his chest laden with colorful ribbons and bronze medals, Daddy told WWL-TV that he felt like General MacArthur. For us, it was enough that he was U.S. Army Corporal Amos Pierce, Jr., war hero. His family had always known it, but now the whole world did. America had finally lived up to the promises it made to a young black man who crossed the ocean and walked through fire and thunder for her. America had finally kept faith with an old black man who, despite everything, had taught his sons to believe in this great nation.

Whenever I hear people say, “So many people died for our freedom,” I say yes, you’re right—but I’m not thinking of battlefields alone. I’m also thinking of bayous and creeks and rivers where so many African Americans died, or endured the murders of their beloved husbands, sons, and fathers, at the hands of their fellow Americans who would never answer for their crimes in a court of law. And I’m thinking of the busy city streets and the lonesome country roads where so many black folk risked their lives—and in some cases, gave their lives—for the cause of liberty and justice for all Americans. There is blood on the ballot box, and it is the blood of black soldiers who fought for America—whether or not they ever wore the uniform.

They loved the country that persecuted them and treated them like the enemy. To me, that is a vision of supreme patriotism. It’s like my father always said to my brothers and me, every time we would see a triumph of American ideals: “See, that’s why I fought for that flag!”

Amos Pierce never stopped fighting for that flag, and never stopped loving it, either. On the day he finally received his medals, he said nothing at the formal ceremony, but at the gala afterward, he decided that he wanted to offer a few words to the crowd.

He hobbled over to the microphone and, despite his hearing loss, spoke with ringing clarity.

“I want you all to remember those who didn’t come back, I want to dedicate this night to them,” he said. “So many who fought didn’t even have a chance to live their lives. I was given that chance, as difficult as my life has been.”

Daddy thanked the audience for the honor, saying he was not bitter for having been denied the medals for so long. He was simply grateful to have them now.

“We’ve come so far as a country,” he continued. “I’ve realized now a lot of what we were fighting for.”

And then he paused. It took all of his strength to stand as erect as possible at the podium. He saluted crisply, and said, “God bless America.”

That’s when I lost it. For someone not to be debilitated by pain and anger and embarrassment after all he had been through; who fought for this country when this country didn’t love him and wouldn’t fight for him; to come back from war and still have to fight for the right to vote and the right to go into any establishment he wanted to—that made me think of the vow he made to me as a child: “No matter what, son, I will never abandon you.”

I have never known a greater man than that old soldier on the night he received his due.

That. Is. Greatness. I read that story from Wendell’s book to my own father, as he lay on his deathbed. I couldn’t get through it without choking up. I looked up at my dad to apologize, and saw that he was crying too.

Because we are all family — an American family.

On this Fourth Of July, I choose to remember Amos Pierce as a great American, and an example of supreme patriotism. Whatever happens in the political realm, I hope the Democratic Party, and American left-liberals in general, will claim, or re-claim, the patriotism of men like Amos Pierce. We need that. We desperately need that. As I said, when I myself despair of this country, and the way that it’s going, I think of the towering example of Amos Pierce, and his faith in the American dream. When I saw Wendell a couple of weeks ago in London, where he’s starring in a revival of Death Of A Salesman, the hottest theater ticket in the city, we talked about his dad, who still lives in the modest New Orleans brick house he bought in the 1950s, and where he raised his boys.

I strongly urge you to read The Wind In The Reeds. It’s a memoir of an American family, their struggles, and their triumphs. It’s not a sentimental book by any stretch, and the pain that the family had to endure under Jim Crow will break your heart and boil your blood. In the end, though, this book will make you proud to be an American, and teach you about why the story of black people in America is, and must be, our story, collectively, as Americans.

It is a tragedy — seriously — that the loudest and most influential voices on the American Left today don’t even know about men like Amos Pierce, and allow his story, and the testimony of his patriotism, to fall by the wayside. Democrats are not going to defeat draft-dodging Donald Trump with Colin Kaepernick, a snowflake superstar athlete who can’t bear the horror of a sneaker with a Colonial flag on the heel. They are going to defeat Donald Trump with Amos Pierce, a man who fought a real war for a country that treated him like a second-class citizen, and tried to shame him when he came home … but who never gave up believing in her, and her promise. Could you do what Amos Pierce did? I couldn’t. He is a great man, a patriot that we should all admire.

And he is a Democrat. More than that, Amos Pierce is an American. Think of him, and pray for him, on this Fourth of July. We need him. We really do.

Watch this clip from the PBS News Hour four years back to meet Amos Pierce, via his son Wendell:

I’ll be traveling to Poland later today, folks, but I’ll be approving comments as I can, from the Atlanta airport, and then when I get to Warsaw. God bless America, and God bless you!

UPDATE: Bret Stephens says that the left has lost the spirit of 1776, and has become possessed by the spirit of 1789. Excerpt:

Six years ago, Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second term under five immense American flags, including the circular 13-star variety of Betsy Ross’s famous design. But Colin Kaepernick objected when Nike, the company that pays him millions per year to be a brand ambassador, emblazoned the flag on the back of a shoe, on the view that it was connected to the era of American slavery, sources told The Wall Street Journal. Nike capitulated almost immediately.

The story has resonated widely not because it’s outrageous, but because it’s predictable. It’s a similar story with Mayim Bialik’s cringing apology for her alleged “victim-blaming” in the Harvey Weinstein saga, or Adidas pulling a sneaker it had designed for Black History Month because it was white, or the firing of Google engineer James Damore because he wrote a memo that offended corporate orthodoxies.

If the House of York had fallen to the Lancastrians as quickly as corporate and academic America has capitulated to Woke culture, the War of the Roses would have been over in a week.

I’m writing this column on the eve of July 4. But the country I’m describing each year seems to feel the spirit of 1776 less and the spirit of 1789 more. “Armed with the ‘truth,’ Jacobins could brand any individuals who dared to disagree with them traitors or fanatics,” historian Susan Dunn wrote of the French Revolution. “Any distinction between their own political adversaries and the people’s ‘enemies’ was obliterated.”

Read the column — it features a photo of Obama giving his Second Inaugural address, under the Betsy Ross flag. Now many on the Left think that flag is intolerably racist.

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The Saint And The ‘Witch’

I’m leaving tomorrow evening for Poland. In preparation, I’ve been reading George Weigel’s great biography of St. John Paul II. Here’s a minor passage, but one that shows what a great pastor young Father Karol Wojtyla was. Here, in Weigel’s words, are five themes from Fr. Wojtyla’s 1954 retreat for students:

There was no dividing life up into the serious and the frivolous, the true and the unimportant. The contemporary tendency to fragment life, or to reduce the question fo truth to a secondary issue, had to be resisted. “The method of the Kingdom of God is the method of truth.” Because of that “man must be prepared to agree with reality in its totality.”

Christianity was not for the sacristy and the sanctuary alone, nor was it an abstraction. “The Kingdom of God proclaimed by Christ is not merely theory … but a call to action.”

Jesus Christ was not God pretending to be man; Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God entered fully into the drama of the human condition. “One man experienced the might of the holiness of God: Jesus Christ. He bore the weight of man’s guilt and stood bearing the ballast before God. The awareness of sin on the one hand and of the holiness of God on the other drew Him to sacrifice Himself and to union with God. This explains the mystery of the garden of Gethsemane and of Golgotha. … “

Love is not “fulfilling” oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.

The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

You are great, [Wojtyla] told his young people, because you are God’s creation. Anyone who tries to pull you below that standard is demeaning you. Asked why Father Wojtyla was so attractive to young people, Teresa Malecka answered, simply, “He is a good man.” His capacity to convince others of their capacity for goodness was a part of that magnetism.

You don’t have to be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to recognize the truth and the nobility in these teachings — and their relevance for us today.

Contrast that to the messaging, visual and lyrical, in the new Miley Cyrus video, released on Wednesday. It’s called “Mother’s Daughter” — and Cyrus’s mother, who has to be one of the world’s worst parents, actually appears in it. The video is NSFW. It’s evil, straight up — and it has already been viewed over 8 million times. Sample lyrics:

Hallelujah, I’m a freak

I’m a freak, hallelujah

Every day of the week I’ma do ya

Like I want to

I’m a Nile crocodile, a piranha

Oh my God, she got the power

Oh, look at her, she got the power

So-so, so don’t f*ck with my freedom

I came back to get me some

I’m nasty, I’m evil

Must be something in the water or that I’m my mother’s daughter

Don’t f*ck with my freedom

I came back to get me some

I’m nasty, I’m evil

Must be something in the water or that I’m my mother’s daughter

In the clip, Cyrus wears a latex suit with metal “teeth” over her vagina. Watch:

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live… “ — Deuteronomy 30:19.

The choices in front of us are becoming increasingly stark, aren’t they?

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Eddie Gallagher’s Acquittal

Eddie Gallagher (center) (Fox News screenshot)

Back in May, I mentioned here the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was facing a military trial for first-degree murder and attempted murder. Citing public information that was part of the government’s case, I condemned Gallagher for his “sadism” (though of course I did not say whether I thought he was guilty of the charges; I had no idea).

This week, the military jury acquitted Gallagher of the charges, in part because during the trial, another Navy SEAL testified that he, not Gallagher, was guilty of having killed the Iraqi in question. David French writes about the case:

I also spoke to individuals with deep knowledge of Gallagher’s case, and I had an immediate thought: He may not need a pardon. The individuals I spoke to pointed to flaws in the prosecution’s case. Evidence that Gallagher sniped civilians was nonexistent. The evidence showed that rather than killing the ISIS prisoner, Gallagher had tried to save his life. And the claims against him were brought by SEALs who resented his leadership and were acting out of a vendetta against him.

Then, during the trial, something unexpected happened. Another SEAL testified that he was the real killer. SEAL medic Corey Scott told the stunned courtroom that he’d killed the prisoner as an act of mercy, believing that otherwise the man would’ve been tortured and killed by Iraqi forces. It was the kind of moment you see on television, not in real court cases, and it infuriated prosecutors. They claimed “that in six different interviews with Navy investigators, [Scott] had never hinted that he had suffocated the captive. They said he changed his story after receiving the grant of immunity.”

The jury of five Marines, one Naval officer, and one SEAL deliberated for roughly eight hours before finding Gallagher not guilty on every count but one — the charge of taking a picture with the dead ISIS terrorist. Gallagher had not contested that charge, and given his extended pretrial detention, he’s not likely to face any additional jail time for it. He may still face administrative punishment from the Navy, but he will almost certainly go free.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that the trial verdict proves Gallagher’s virtue as a SEAL, but that wasn’t the question at issue in the case. Instead, it was yet another example of the reality that cases that can seem compelling at first glance often collapse under scrutiny.

Gallagher may or may not be a sadist — that contention was not at issue in the trial — but as French rightly points out, what looked like a strong case that he had committed war crimes fell apart under scrutiny. While it’s true that I didn’t pronounce on the merits of the charges, I wish I had not been so quick to assume the testimony about Gallagher’s sadism were true. I apologize for that. I was wrong. I thank David French, once a JAG lawyer, for making an important point about not rushing to judgment.

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Amazon.com Surrenders To The Homintern

Which books can you buy at Amazon.com?

Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.

The pro-Stalin works of Stalin apologist Grover Furr, an American academic who argues in books and in lectures (see this video clip) that Stalin killed nobody, and committed no crimes. (Between 7-10 million Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens died in the Stalin-engineered famine called the Holodomor alone).

A history of Communism by the white supremacist David Duke.

The SS Leadership Guide, translated from the original German.

A highly influential text by the Islamist radical Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, which calls on Muslims to wage relentless global jihad against non-Muslims and insufficiently radical Muslims, until the entire world is under radical Islamic rule.

You can buy

Do you know what you cannot buy? The works of the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi. From NBC News:

Amazon has removed English-language books by a man largely considered “the father of conversion therapy” from its site following mounting pressure from LGBTQ activists.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the now-shuttered Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic, as well as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), authored several how-to guides directed to parents of LGBTQ youth, including “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.” His books are some of the most well-known works about conversion therapy, the pseudoscientific practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

“I would say many survivors of conversion therapy could trace their trauma to Nicolosi,” Sam Brinton, head of advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project and a survivor of conversion therapy, told NBC News. “His work lent credibility under the guise of ‘science’ to conversion therapy, even though the practice has been disputed and discredited as dangerous and harmful by medical experts.”

Do you see what’s happening? Amazon.com now bans the sale of works of an author that LGBT activists find offensive. Woke capitalism at its finest. Where does this stop?

Now that LGBT activists have shown that they can prevail upon Woke Capitalists to blacklist an author, will they come after other writers who offend them? Why shouldn’t they? What’s the limiting principle here?

You can buy the work of Dr. Joseph Goebbels on Amazon.com, but not the work of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi!

Want to claim that Nicolosi’s work is unscientific? That’s a sham excuse. Amazon.com also sells books about healing through crystal therapy.  And why not? Crystal therapy is sheer quackery, but that has nothing to do with whether or not a bookseller ought to sell it.

It is only a matter of time before LGBT activists start attacking any book that contradicts their ideology — because now Amazon has shown that it will knuckle under. You don’t have to agree with Nicolosi’s theories to be alarmed at what Amazon has done here. I find every book in my list above repulsive, but I would defend Amazon selling each one.

These people, these activists, are totalitarian. They are trying to control via pressure on Woke Capitalists what people are allowed to read. People acting on the theories of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Mao Zedong massacred over 100 million people in the 20th century — and you can buy titles by Marx, Lenin, and Mao on Amazon.com. The Nazis killed over 6 million in the Holocaust, and were chiefly responsible for a world war that killed millions more — yet you can buy the works of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on Amazon.com.

But not Dr. Joseph Nicolosi.

Why are Nicolosi’s ideas more dangerous than those of Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Goebbels, Qutb, and David Duke? So dangerous, in fact, that Amazon, which is by far the most powerful force in global book sales and publishing, has decided that it must unperson Nicolosi?

What is it going to take to wake people up to the power these LGBT activist fanatics assert over freedom of speech and inquiry? Where does it stop, their censorship?

What is it going to take to wake up Congress to the power that Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and other media and publishing giants have over discourse? Nine out of 10 e-books sold come from Amazon. Forty-two percent of hardcover books sold come through Amazon. Back in 2013, I was one of the many Hachette authors who felt the sole of Amazon’s boot on book sales when it radically slowed down sales of Hachette titles in order to force the publisher to agree to its terms. I’m telling you, allowing a single retailer to have so much power over book sales is dangerous — especially now that we see that this mega-retailer can be pushed by Social Justice Warriors into cancelling an author’s works.

Again, you don’t have to agree with the theories of Joseph Nicolosi to recognize that an important line has been crossed here. In the eyes of the world’s largest bookseller, Joseph Nicolosi is more dangerous than Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and Marx, because the Homintern says so.

UPDATE: I get it if people outside the publishing business don’t grasp the power of Amazon over publishing. Amazon does not have a monopoly on book sales, but rather operates as a monopsony, defined as “a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers.” If Amazon decides that it will not sell books by a particular author, then that author will not have a career. Period. No publisher can afford to alienate Amazon. Look, I love Amazon, and use it all the time, but it is dangerous for a single retailer to have so much power over book publishing. Not many people are going to stand up for the late Dr. Nicolosi, but it ought to unnerve all readers that Amazon trusts its readership so much that it is willing to sell books authored by murderous tyrants, bloodthirsty religious fanatics, and stone-cold racists … but not a psychology book by a deceased Catholic psychotherapist from California who believed, rightly or wrongly, that homosexuality could be cured.

Why is Joseph Nicolosi a greater threat to the common good than Hitler, Mao, or David Duke? That Amazon has made that decision, and has decided to de-list Nicolosi’s books, is chilling, especially given Amazon’s monopsony power over the publishing market. And you don’t have to be a Nicolosi supporter to see that.

UPDATE: Theologian Denny Burk is not a fan of Nicolosi’s theories, but he understands what’s at stake:

The Amazon ban and the suggested legislation to ban conversion therapy [aren’t] limited to Joseph Nicolosi’s teachings. This ban defines any attempt to change one’s sexual desires as “conversion therapy.” Well guess what? That means that every single Christian who believes that that God’s grace changes sexual sinners would be implicated by this ban and by such legislation.

What Amazon has done is really chilling. They have now set the precedent for banning Christian teaching about sexuality from the books that they sell on their platform. Just to be clear again. I am not saying that Nicolosi’s books are in any way “Christian teaching.” I’m saying that orthodox Christianity has always taught that Jesus both saves and sanctifies sinners—meaning that the gospel helps us to change, even in our wayward sexual desires. To the outside world, that may sound like “conversation therapy.” To those of us who are orthodox Christians, it sounds like the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

What that means is that Christianity long been on a collision course with the new secular orthodoxy on sexuality. It means that we may have our books banned from Amazon. I myself have two that would have to be excluded if Amazon were to apply its content guidelines to my books as they have to Nicolosi’s. And I wouldn’t be alone.

The sexual revolutionaries used to ask us, “How does my gay marriage harm you?” Well, this is how. They have gone from “live and let live” to “affirm our sexual immorality, or we will tar and feather you as causing the deaths of gay people.” It is a calumny and a lie, but that is where we are.

UPDATE.2: Is Sam Brinton telling the truth about his conversion therapy? There are serious inconsistencies in his story. He claims, in lurid detail, that he was tortured in this therapy for years, but can’t remember the name of the doctor — or whether it was a doctor at all (versus a “religious therapist”).

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How We Get Woke Seminaries

A theologically conservative reader writes this remarkable letter about the “Seminary Confidential” post:

As a graduate of [a major Protestant seminary, I have read your recent pieces on seminary education with great interest.  I do think that the issue is somewhat more nuanced and difficult than a simple binary between orthodoxy and post-modern Marxist critical theory.  There are a number of currents that undermine the education of seminarians, even at academically well regarded and relatively conservative schools like [mine]. Here are three:

The bias toward “vocational” training: What is the role of any seminary?  To train pastors to administer churches, do pastoral care, oversee outreach programs and the like?  Are we preparing them to do a job?  Are they technocrats of the church?  Or are they being spiritually formed, led to take the first steps in the path of wisdom, to delve the depths of scripture, to think theologically such that they can bring the wisdom and learning of the past to form the present, to instruct the people in the ways of God, what we might broadly call orthodox teaching, to pray, and to guide their congregations to authentic Christian action?  If most seminaries are like [mine], the bias is increasingly toward vocation.  Even when it was not, the bias was toward learning and instruction with little in the way of active “formation.”  Often, pastors would come to churches full of knowledge and idea about how to make the church “vibrant” but spiritually stunted.  This weakness makes them vulnerable.

Further, they are less spiritual leaders than they are technocrats.  They read the scripture methodologically and technocratically and write sermons the same way, with top methods and techniques for public speaking.  They run churches programmatically and administratively using all the best tools of management science.  Even when orthodox, how many of our clerics are truly “spiritual” leaders?  Many are good people, generally orthodox, but work to build churches with the “yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees” than they do with the power that was at work in the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000.  If there is a lacunae in our churches today it is in the area of “formation.”  We no longer disciple each other.  This is in many ways what I see as the core message of the Benedict Option: a call to the task of discipling.

The belief that the people in the pews can’t handle the kind of academic questions the professors wrestle with: In seminary, you are taught to read the scriptures using “literary criticism” and a host of other “criticisms.”  These are meant to help uncover the true and intended meaning of the text.  It is the old issue of hermeneutics.  For all the good things that critical methods have brought to scripture, they inevitably lead to a posture where the “critic” stands over and in judgement of the text.  It is taken apart and analyzed.  You don’t have to believe anything to approach the scriptures “critically.”

I will say, that like your seminarian who went to a liberal seminary to be challenged, I value many of my liberal commentaries because they make me think about the text.  But it is always playing with fire and one has to know the truth firmly to take away any “treasures of the Egyptians” from liberal commentaries and liberal theologians.  In my younger years I liked the feeling of being one of the smart set asking the “real” questions.  Now, I see the danger, and am glad I survived with my faith in tact.  Many do not.  Many pastors are working in congregational ministry saying the right things but you know they really don’t believe any of it.  And the sad truth is that many lost their faith in seminary.  I know them.  They are friends and former colleagues.

But the danger of this approach is to separate the seminarian from the congregant.  We are taught that we get past simple readings of the scripture to really understand what the text is saying.  The same in terms of theology.  We use the methods and ask the questions that the congregants are afraid to use and to ask.  They just want a simple faith.  We have been tasked with asking the deeper questions.  Far too many pastors carry around this attitude, that we understand the deeper truths that congregants, bless their hearts, just are not ready to confront.  It is a short journey it is from a posture of “asking difficult questions” to one of “wokeness.”  You become one of the “few” who truly have seen the light and understand the true intent of the gospel.  The price you pay for your “superiority” is that you carry around of bucket of corrosive, faith destroying questions for which you have no answers.

The Scriptures themselves: Even 20 years ago when I went through seminary, it was an already old and established notion that the unique message of the Gospel of Luke, for example, was to highlight Jesus’ concern for the poor and to underscore their special status in God’s eyes.   The Song of Mary is but one of hundreds of passages in which God is described at thwarting the aspirations of the “proud” or the “rich” and lifting up and healing the “poor”, “lowly,” “oppressed,” and “broken-hearted.”  Then there is the foundational story of the Exodus, God’s people being led out of Egypt.  There is no getting around these texts in confronting social-critical theory.

Unfortunately, the western church’s attachment to the social attitudes of bourgeois capitalism, its devotion to the free-market (the notion that millions of people making millions of choices have to be trusted to make choices unrestrained by any government interference because the highest moral value is the “freedom of choice”, never mind that the people making those choices are sinful and in need of redemption), and its devotion to the bootstrap “pull up your socks” “rags to riches” foundation myths of the whole western project have seriously undermined it moral credibility, even when you take into account the generous giving of western Christians.

Because we have not done the work of engaging our consumerist, market based society with the truths of scripture, we have left the door open for the whole biblical message of “compassion” and “justice” to be stolen from us from within by those wielding social critical theory as their weapon.  It is not hard to read scripture selectively and then ignore, downplay or rationalize passages that undermine the message.  Christians have been doing that for 2000 years to justify this or that movement.  Now traditional orthodox Christians, discovering that the mantle of “compassion” has been stolen from them from within, can be characterized as hateful bigots, uncaring and lacking in compassion.  Combined with a leadership that believes itself as superior to the laity in that they ask the “tough questions” it seems only natural for them to see it as their task to liberate and free the laity from their ignorant hatred and bigotry and teach them the “true” compassion and love of Jesus.

If there is an area of urgent need in our churches, it is that we must recover the mantle of orthodox “compassion.”  We need to fight the fight to show the errors of social critical theory, to get in and take back these scriptures and frame in thought, feeling and practice what true Christ-like compassion is, what it truly means to free the oppressed and to stand with the poor and the marginalized.  We need to get out of our bourgeois living rooms and get our hands dirty and not hide our “talent” in the ground, but put it at risk.  Otherwise we might find that even what we have will be taken from us.

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The Border Squalor

The Inspector General finds disgusting and inhumane conditions at the US Southern border. Excerpts:

Overcrowded, squalid conditions are more widespread at migrant centers along the southern border than initially revealed, the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog said Tuesday. Its report describes standing-room-only cells, children without showers and hot meals, and detainees clamoring desperately for release.

The findings by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General were released as House Democrats detailed their own findings at migrant holding centers and pressed the agency to answer for the mistreatment not only of migrants but also of their own colleagues, who have been threatened on social media.

In June, inspectors from the department visited five facilities in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and found children had few spare clothes and no laundry facilities. Many migrants were given only wet wipes to clean themselves and bologna sandwiches to eat, causing constipation and other health problems, according to the report. Children at two of the five facilities in the area were not given hot meals until inspectors arrived.

Overcrowding was so severe that when the agency’s internal inspectors visited some of the facilities, migrants banged on cells and pressed notes to windows begging for help.

“At one facility, some single adults were held in standing-room-only conditions for a week, and at another, some single adults were held more than a month in overcrowded cells,” according to the report, which built off an initial inquiry by the inspector general in May that described similar conditions in facilities in El Paso.

This is awful, no doubt about it. And those Republicans who have denied this aspect of the crisis are contradicted by the IG’s report. More:

But the government’s own report backed up the Democrats’ descriptions. The facilities were built for the short-term stay of adults expected to be quickly deported. Central American children, who under immigration law cannot be immediately deported back to their origin country, are supposed to be moved to facilities managed by the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours. Single adults are supposed to be moved to facilities built for longer-term detention managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“These are not facilities that are designed to hold people for more than three days,” said Representative Will Hurd of Texas, the only Republican representing a border district. “You shouldn’t be holding anybody in these facilities for more than that.”

But Department of Homeland Security officials have said other facilities are full as well. To deter migration to the border, the department recently threatened to start nationwide raids to deport undocumented families, which President Trump said will begin after July 4.

An ICE spokesman also said on Tuesday that the agency was issuing fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars to unauthorized immigrants who refused to comply with deportation orders.

Here’s the thing: the reason the US Government is not prepared, in terms of having facilities, to deal with this migrant wave is that it has never had to deal with something like this before. Something Must Be Done to end these terrible conditions on the border — I agree! But I don’t think the Democrats will be pleased until and unless ICE releases all these people into the general population. We all know they will disappear and will never come back for detention hearings.

I feel strongly that the humane treatment of migrant children must be the No. 1 priority at the border. I would like to know how the government can resolve these inhumane conditions for all migrants without releasing them. I’m seriously asking: what are the possibilities?

After that, though, can we give a thought to exactly who is responsible for trying to get into a United States whose normal border channels are full? Do the migrants themselves — a significant number of whom are now from Africa! — bear any responsibility for putting themselves in this situation? Many of them quite understandably want a better life for themselves and their families, and are willing to take their chances at the US border. Yes, the US has a legal responsibility to do better by these people, even if we are ultimately going to send them back home. But no one foresaw this human tsunami, and we aren’t prepared for it, not in terms of infrastructure or in terms of the legal mechanism we need to process these asylum claims.

Why do Democrats and immigration proponents believe that these people who are trying to get into the US bear no moral responsibility for putting themselves and their children into the awful situation at the border? This is not to say that they deserve to be treated this way, these migrants, but it is to say that this horrible, impossible-to-quickly-resolve situation was caused by the migrants themselves, most of whom are using the asylum claim as a way of trying to make a better life for themselves in the US.

I am glad that the OIG and the Democrats are exposing terrible conditions at the border. The government has to do better. That said, a solution that requires instantly allowing these migrants to pass into the general population is intolerable, and will only encourage more. For heaven’s sake, we’re now dealing with Africans coming into the US via the asylum route through Mexico. They’re making fools of us.

Judging by their presidential candidates, the Democrats have become an open-borders party. The plight of the migrants forces the entire national political leadership class to come to terms with a problem that it has been unable, or unwilling, to solve for many years.

I’ve been watching and reading some of the most recent coverage of the crisis. It is important, I think, that the unspoken assumption of all of it is that the migrants have a right to be here. Outside of explicitly conservative media, I have not seen the issue considered from the angle of competing rights — that is, whether the American people, through their elected representatives, have a right to turn these migrants away. The baseline assumption seems to be that of course they have a right to be here.

Frankly, I have no animosity at all towards those migrants. If I had to live in their countries, and I saw an opportunity to get across the border into the US with my family by exploiting asylum law, I would do it.

But.

Does a nation have the right to control its borders? Does it have the right to determine who, from outside the nation, gets to live within its territory? Does it have a responsibility to those who already live there, and their future generations, to manage the inflow of immigrants wisely? Yes to all three questions.

Open borders means the dissolution of the nation as a meaningful concept. Our basic obligations as human beings require us to treat these distressed people with compassion. But compassion for suffering foreigners does not require signing on to a national suicide pact. As global warming will make more of these regions uninhabitable in the years and decades to come, the industrialized nations need to start making long-range plans now for dealing with the challenges compassionately but also sensibly.

UPDATE: He said it, I didn’t — but he’s right. From the WaPo:

On Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said he would “virtually eliminate immigration detention” by executive order. During last week’s debate, presidential candidate Julián Castro proposed decriminalizing illegal border crossings — a position other Democrats in the race rapidly adopted.

Others in the party are urging caution, saying the push toward decriminalization risks playing into Trump’s hands.

“That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” said Jeh Johnson, who ran the Department of Homeland Security during President Barack Obama’s second term. “That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”

The Democratic Party is the open borders party. It just is. No denying it.

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