Rod Dreher's Blog, page 230

You Must Learn To Love Queer Big Brother

In a NYT op-ed today titled “How To Defy The Catholic Church,” Margaret Renkl complains about the Catholic Archbishop of Indianapolis firing a Catholic school teacher for being in a same-sex marriage. Renkl discharges a line that tells you everything you need to know about the LGBT movement’s plans for dissidents, including those who want to run their religious institutions according to the teachings of their faith:

Love will never truly win until everyone stands up for it.

Where have I read something like that before? Ah, it was just yesterday:

He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:

“You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston — and remember, no lies; you know that I am always able to detect a lie — tell me, what are your true feelings toward Big Brother.”

“I hate him.”

“You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.”

I’m old enough to remember when “tolerance” was the word they used to describe what they were going for. It was always a lie. As O’Brien, the Inner Party member, tells captive Winston Smith, the power of the Party depends on identifying the eternal enemy in our midst, “the heretic, the enemy of society … so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.”

Says O’Brien:

“The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.”

This will not stop until every single one of us learns to love Big Brother’s queerness. I’m not joking. Margaret Renkl, The New York Times, and other Inner Party members will search out every enemy of society and persecute them until they too learn to love Queer Big Brother. Imagine a drag queen’s high heel stomping on your face, forever.

If you are the kind of religious or social conservative who thinks there can be a “live and let live” detente with these people, now is the time for you to disabuse yourself completely of this fallacy.

In his new column, Andrew Sullivan talks about a new poll showing that fewer members of Generation Z think positively about LGBTs. He believes that piggybacking transgenderism into the movement is the likely cause. Excerpt:

Even GLAAD, the culture police for the gay left, concedes that the transformation of the gay-rights movement into a trans movement steeped in critical gender theory in the past few years is likely the reason: “The younger generation was coming in contact with more LBGTQ people, particularly individuals who are non-binary and don’t identify simply as lesbian or gay.” GLAAD of course blames Trump, and social media, and vows to crack down ever more firmly on those who aren’t fully onboard with its agenda. The last thing GLAAD would do is ask itself if it is actually exacerbating the problem, and that the redefinition of almost everyone’s sex and gender to accommodate less than 1 percent of the population is why this resistance is happening.

Take a look at this video of a young student in Britain refusing to concede that there are more than two genders. The kid had been thrown out of class for stating his opinion. He is told he has to keep his opinion in his own home and to obey the school’s authority policy. Now imagine those who agree with the student that there are not 54 genders and never say it. Kids are not stupid. They know they are being propagandized. This poll suggests the backlash has arrived, and it will likely grow.

It’s happening among young straight women especially, women who were once bedrock supporters of gay rights: “Driving the dilution of acceptance are young women whose overall comfort levels plunged from 64 percent in 2017 to 52 percent in 2018.” Hmmm. Why do you think that could be? Did Trump do this all on his own? Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the increasing presence of biological males in their sports, restrooms, locker rooms, and other traditionally all-female spaces. Maybe it is being told that your biological sex is meaningless, that someone with a dick is no less a woman than you are, and that boys can have periods too. As for young men, they are becoming aware of how the feminist left regards them.

Read it all (it’s the second item in the column). I think Sullivan is onto the main reason this is true, though of course I wouldn’t rule out the data having been cooked to provide a rationale for GLAAD to raise more money to fight heretics. I do think, though, that anger over the totalitarian nature of the movement might be responsible for some of the backlash.

We just went through Pride Month, which from a propaganda perspective was like 30 consecutive May Days in the Soviet Union. LGBT has conquered all the high ground in this culture — but that is not enough. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. So now they’re going to take out after a Catholic archbishop in the Midwest who has the gall to insist that Catholic schools be run by Catholic principles — this, even though a number of Catholic educational institutions (like the University of Notre Dame) are fully woke on LGBT issues.

They’ve won! They’re just bouncing the rubble now. But bounce they will, because there can be no resistance. You must learn to love Queer Big Brother! And that requires hating all those who do not love him, until they capitulate.

I’m going later this morning to do a podcast interview, in which the (liberal) interviewer will ask me to explain why conservative Christians feel so besieged in this culture. Today’s NYT op-ed will be at the top of my list. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it has Renkl simply complained about what the archbishop did, in that typical whiny liberal way. It’s the way she phrased her objection — that until and unless everybody affirms homosexuality, love will not truly have won — that gives the totalitarian game away.

Within church polities, conservatives have to realize that unless they are fully orthodox, and uncompromisingly orthodox, they are going to be rolled by the pro-LGBT left, which will not stop. In the public square, religious conservatives have to make defending religious liberty their most important goal. Ordinary Republicans are useless. They don’t want to talk about this stuff, because they don’t want to upset the donor class, and don’t want to be called bigots in the media. You will remember my story about the 2015 meeting with key Christian GOP staffers on Capitol Hill, in which I asked them, post-Obergefell, what the party’s plans were for protecting religious liberty.

Silence. Total silence. 

And then came Trump. Yeah, he’s about as bad as they say he is — conservatives shouldn’t lie to themselves about this — but you know what? He and the judges he appoints are the only things standing between the Ministry Of Love and dissident Christian schools and institutions, who will increasingly have to endure the same progressive Two-Minute Hate that engulfed the innocent Covington Catholic schoolboys back in January. I wish that weren’t true — you have no idea how much — but it is true. As will be clear when the next Democratic president arrives (or standard-issue Republican), and the despotism of our cultural overlords tightens.

Love will never truly win until everyone stands up for it. That’s Moralistic Therapeutic Orwellianism!

UPDATE: Right after I posted this, a reader sent in this Atlantic essay from the gay journalist James Kirchick. Excerpts:

The end of gay rights does not mean the end of homophobia. As long as gay kids commit suicide at rates higher than their straight peers, as long as even one gay person is denied a job because of his sexual orientation, there will be a need for activism, education, and other efforts toward positive social change. But for the gay movement to persist in its current mode risks prolonging a culture war that no longer needs to be fought because one side—the gay side—has already prevailed.

California now bans taxpayer-funded travel to any state that “authorizes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” a list that includes Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas. Who does that help? Not gay people in red states. But it does boost those political forces bent on convincing Americans that the gay-rights movement will only be satisfied once every individual citizen agrees with its precepts (a tough proposition in a religious country), and that gays will use strong-arm tactics to achieve this goal.

Trump’s promise to protect religious liberty from a hegemonic secular left is one of the major reasons why so many evangelical Christians supported a thrice-married sexual reprobate in 2016, and it lies at the heart of a recent debate among conservative intellectuals over whether they ought abandon civility altogether and, in the words of its instigator, “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” The illiberal queer left and the illiberal religious right exist in a mutually reinforcing, codependent relationship.

From a legal standpoint, the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect this to happen. For many of those whose political identities have been shaped by crusades against government discrimination and pervasive societal ignorance, victimhood is too essential an identity to be so easily discarded.

There are some idealistic religious conservatives who want to reverse gay rights, but I think that most of us recognize that our side has decisively lost this struggle, and need to come to a modus vivendi within a culture that affirms gay rights, and homosexuality broadly. This is not going to be permitted.

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Seminary Confidential

Last week, a student at one of the country’s top theological seminaries wrote to me about the institution. The student framed the letter not so much as a complaint about this particular seminary, but rather as a warning about the direction of Christianity via the pastors and theologians trained at prestigious places like this.

The student said in the original letter that the student knew in advance that this was a seminary that was likely to challenge the student’s orthodox Christian beliefs; that was one reason the student chose this institution: for the intellectual challenge. But the student did not anticipate that the situation there was as revolutionary as it is. I’ve looked at this seminary’s material online, and can tell you that there is nothing to indicate that conditions there are what this student says there are. But you can find online writing from those familiar with this seminary that supports what the student writes below.

The student is confident that very few ordinary Christians understand what’s happening at this level. I know the student’s name, and the seminary’s name, and asked the student to revise the letter to redact identifying details, for the student’s own protection.

Rod, I’ve been a longtime reader and fan of your work. Now that I am attending what is considered a “prestigious” American Protestant mainline divinity school/seminary, I felt that I should reach out and issue a report from the front.

I’m going to do my best to avoid the question of how Christians should be civically engaged. As important as that is, I’ll stick to the question of what is acceptable teaching within the church. While we aren’t necessarily called to impose morality on the wider world (rather we spread it through engagement and persuasion), the Bible is clear that we should be wary of – and do something about – the false teachers among us.

I chose my institution for the academic rigor and the opportunity to have difficult conversations with people who were not on my side of the spectrum. Oh Rod, how painfully naive I was… those conversations ended long before I arrived. In reality, I have to walk on eggshells to not out myself as a moral monster — for holding to biblical morality on a Christian campus. I have seen the future in the form of the arguments that the very far “Christian” left is developing. The average believer in the pews does not know what is coming.

I want to say at the outset that I write this out of genuine Christian concern for the universal church. I am not gazing down from the lofty heights of moral and doctrinal perfection; I am a sinner in need of God’s grace daily. It is hopefully a clear-eyed look at a world most won’t have the opportunity to experience first-hand, furthering a discussion about Christianity among fellow Christians. But enough of the preamble.

I’d love to say that the biggest issue is that divinity schools are not taking the Bible seriously. Every divinity school and seminary like mine have professors who don’t believe the resurrection happened, who teach future pastors Intro to New Testament and Systematic Theology. Even if they do believe in the resurrection, they easily cast off any other part of the Scriptures they dislike by denying the authorship of the Holy Spirit and then proclaiming the human authors were hopelessly blinded by the bigotries of their era. Unfortunately, this isn’t news.

I won’t spend any time on the things that are becoming de rigueur at all institutes of higher education, such as professors asking which pronouns each student identifies with on the first day of a new class, or the shocking sexual hedonism displayed by some of the future pastors of America.

Rather, I’d like to take a stab at defining the latest iteration of a battle for the identity of Christianity that has been raging for centuries now and why this latest version has a better chance of succeeding where the earlier coups failed.

Progressive Christians have woven a version of Christianity that dramatically diverges from the historic, orthodox faith. It’s a three-part harmony:

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. Nothing new here for people familiar with your work.

Second is the overwhelming triumph of critical theory and its offshoots, such as critical race theory, critical gender theory, etc. A primer for those who have mercifully been spared thus far:

Critical theory (CT) “in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be

distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating…influence” … (Horkheimer 1972, 246).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

CT identifies the primary dichotomy in life as oppressor and oppressed. 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. These are not just fields of study at secular universities – they are the latest and greatest in the world of Christian theology.

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).

Technically, critical theory is a form of academic analysis. Practically, it functions as a rival religion to Christianity. Instead of life’s main problem/solution being sin/grace, it is now

oppression/liberation. It creates a new system of sinners (oppressors) and saints (the “woke” or “allies”) and all the requisite devotional duties.

The third aspect is where the magic happens. Critical theory/individualism gets clothed in a Christian dress. It is social justice with a thin veneer of Jesus. The way it works is critical theory’s definition of love and justice gets read into biblical themes:

When Christians say God loves you, that now means God affirms and supports your feelings and identity, even when they contradict scriptural witness.

When Christians say love your neighbor, that now means affirming and supporting them regardless of biblical truth.

When Christians say God is just, that now means God is for dismantling oppressors (the systemic white, capitalistic, patriarchal heteronormative oppressors).

A miraculous transfiguration has occurred: Marxist (via CT) morality is now virtually unchallenged as the full realization of biblical love and justice. The new, CT morality isn’t merely good for progressive society – it’s godly.

Are there any practical effects of the “critical theory-ization” of Christian theology? You bet! From the mouths of professors and future pastors:

The Constitution is inherently a patriarchal, white supremacist document that is unsalvageable; we must do away with it and start anew.
Any support for biblical sexual morality is a nonstarter – supporting traditional biblical morality is oppressing Christians whose identities do not align with biblical morality.
Business owners – even after paying workers their freely-agreed-upon contractual wages — do not have a right to their profits; rather, workers have the right to all profits.
Multiple times I have heard evangelism – the Great Commission – referred to as “colonialism.”
The ideas of the fallenness of humans and Original Sin are harmful to psychological health and we must do away with those doctrines.
Since we are not inherently fallen, we can do away with the idea that Christ’s death and

resurrection were to atone for our sins. Such a doctrine is child abuse by a blood-thirsty God.
Jesus willfully went to his death not to defeat death and redeem humanity, but to show

solidarity with the world’s oppressed.

All of this in the name of Jesus, love, and justice.

And think of these as a sneak preview, not a list of greatest hits.

This represents the instrumentalization of Christianity to social justice ends. Routinely, the discussion of Christianity’s value comes down to “can Christianity help liberate me and others who share my identity from oppressors?” Christianity is not good because it is true; Christianity is adopted if it is useful.

And if all of this was not bad enough, there’s this:

Multiple times I have heard professors and graduate assistants, with a wink and a nod, telling seminarians that they don’t have to share everything they have learned when they sit for the ordination board and hiring committee, only what those boards and committees need to hear.

There is such a shockingly strong belief in the goodness of this mission that some level of conscious lying-through-omission is acceptable if it means getting into congregations that would otherwise never invite you to be their pastor. That way, you can slowly work them out of their old-fashioned bigotries.

Here’s the predicament: how can Christians argue against CT’s version of love and justice when progressive “Christians” are busily making sure CT’s love and justice is Christian love and justice?

In other words, disagreeing with the new CT morality isn’t just being a bigot, or an oppressor, or promoting hate on society’s terms – no, now you are going against Jesus’ command to love your neighbor. You are being a bad Christian, on par with those Christians who used the Bible to support slavery and apartheid.

How is the average Christian in the pews going to be able to respond to the issue when it is framed like that? Will they be able – or even have the opportunity before being shouted down – to say something like:

“I do support love and justice, I just disagree with the source of your vision of love and justice, which is Marxist critical theory and fundamentally conflicts with a Christian worldview.”

Odds are slim.

How is the average Christian going be able to witness to others? We have lost the ability to say that we “hate the sin but love the sinner.” If autonomous individualism means a person is what the person feels, then denying what the person feels is tantamount to denying the very person.

CT morality says denying what the person feels is oppressing them. You are actively harming them. It is thus impossible to respectfully disagree when it comes to issues of personal identity.

In the end, it might be difficult to come to any other conclusion that we now live in two incommensurable moral universes in this country (and the church). This is the idea that two groups do not share a fundamental philosophical foundation from which to have a rational discussion.

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, humans are fundamentally good and only corrupted by oppressive systems, and God should be conformed to our behavior.

Both cannot claim the mantle of Christianity.

In the long view, we’ve successfully fought off some of these attacks before. The problem this time around is that the battle has tilted away from us. In yesteryear, background culture held to traditional Christian values. Businesses weren’t actively promoting anti-Christian values. The internet and smartphones weren’t around reinforcing our omnipotent individual online existence and helping grease the gears of our hedonic consumption. There were traditional social, religious, and civil institutions that could hold the line.

This time around, the opposition is coming with the support of the surrounding culture. The opposition is buoyed by culture’s understanding that THEY have the moral high ground (even if that morality is based in Marxism, an ideology that was designed to take direct aim at Christianity).

Maybe all this stays in the divinity schools, seminaries, and churches of dying mainline congregations. After all, we’ve more or less won all the previous battles.

But maybe we won’t win this one.

As a church, we must think about civic life – how will we deal with corporate pressure on non-allies and pro-lifers, educate our children free from anti-Christian ideology, and protect our First Amendment rights in the public sphere? But if we don’t defend against the “critical theoryization” of our churches, we will lose our distinctive Christian witness from forces within, not from without.

The seminarian here is warning us that the Christian Left has colonized the institution — in this case, a leading one — and, crucially, the language of Christianity. It’s as if the Red Army had secretly taken over West Point. Keep in mind that this student is not saying that all seminaries are like this. That would be untrue, and silly. The student’s main point is that the student went in thinking he/she would be attending a liberal-ish Christian seminary, but discovered that the seminary was in truth anti-Christian — though it uses the same language as Christianity.

The sociologist Christian Smith identified Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as similarly parasitic on Christianity: a different religion that inhabits the same conceptual and linguistic forms of Christianity. This is something even worse. You might call it Moralistic Deistic Marxism. My correspondent’s point is that we are no longer talking about progressive Christianity vs. orthodox Christianity, but of rival religions.

Finally, the reader is talking about a Mainline Protestant seminary, but people from other Christian traditions can see similar things happening in the theological discourse within their own tribes. It might not have the institutional backing that it does in the Mainline, but it’s there.

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Churches As Sexual Revolution Battlefields

This just in from a reader:

Three very important but seriously under reported stories came out this weekend about Evangelical churches and their responses to LGBT issues. First the PCA (a supposedly conservative evangelical Calvinist denomination) adopted the Nashville Statement at their general assembly. Hurray, orthodoxy prevailed right? Except the vote was 803-541, or 60% to 40%. Which means that 40% of that church voted to deny their own church’s teaching on human sexuality. The same situation that caused the PCUSA to crumble will inevitably happen to the PCA, remember that the first vote on the LGBT agenda failed in the PCUSA by similar margins (298-221, 57% to 43%) circa 2006. Except the sexual revolutionaries kept bringing the issue up and the margins got closer and closer until in 2014 they succeeded. Given the status of Covenant Seminary and its open embrace of Revoice, I am not optimistic about the future of the PCA.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/june/pca-nashville-statement-lgbt-revoice-sbc-ecc-vote.html

Secondly, the Evangelical Covenant church voted to expel one of their leading congregations. By a 77% to 23% vote, the annual meeting expelled First Covenant Church of Minneapolis over this issue. While that should in theory be a victory, remember that once again, theological nihilists are in charge of training future pastors for their church. Compare that to the situation at the Mennonite Church USA which was in a similar situation. The church itself was largely conservative, but liberals were in charge of training their pastors. In the Mennonite Church USA, they also had a church that began promoting the sexual revolution and the general conference expelled said church. The revolutionaries continued behind the scenes, revised the church’s position and said congregation was welcomed back with open arms.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/minneapolis-pastor-and-church-expelled-over-gay-marriage

The last story is a bit older, but no less significant and much less talked about. The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) just completed its annual conference, and the forces of Sexual Revolution are on the march. There is now active organizations at all levels of the denomination seeking to “enlighten” the church on LGBTQ+ issues. Once again, given that theological nihilists are training pastors at their premier seminary, the future is not bright at that institution either.

https://www.theaquilareport.com/the-continuing-downgrade-in-the-christian-reformed-church/

You have three supposedly conservative churches that are about to crumble to the forces of secularism. For the last 40 years, the only institution that has withstood the secularist assault has been evangelical churches; they have proven themselves to be very tough nuts to crack. But even the hardest walnut will eventually crumble. I know that you are currently writing a book about the resistance the church provided to communism, but I will not lie here or engage in pointless flattery:

I do not see how this turns out well for the church in America.

This reader’s e-mail highlights precisely why, in the Benedict Option concept, I believe that the churches have to focus much more intensely on self-reform, and spiritual discipline. As I say in the book, I am not opposed to Christians being involved in politics — in fact, on the religious liberty question at least, it’s mandatory — but our first and by far more important battle is within our own churches and families.

Look at this:

Gospel: Be tough. Be free. Be hopeful. Homily for the Pre-Pride Mass at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. We keep our hands to the plow not only so we don’t lose our way, but so we don’t take our eyes off the horizon. #Pride2019 Video and text here: https://t.co/ndEBlTUPED pic.twitter.com/Kbd3teEl3K

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) June 30, 2019

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Here, from Father Martin’s Facebook page, is video and text of his homily today. Excerpt:

All the more reason to be like Jesus: that is, tough. And to, first of all, claim your rightful place in your church. Look, if you are a baptized Catholic and you are LGBT or are an LGBT parent or family member, you are as much a part of the church as the Pope, your local bishop, your pastor, or me. Root yourself in your baptism and claim your place in your church.

But make no mistake, Jesus is telling us: sometimes it’s going to be hard. Sometimes your family may misunderstand you, as Jesus’s family did. Sometimes you’ll feel unwelcome in places, as Jesus did in Samaria. Sometimes it won’t feel like you have a home, like Jesus felt when he had to sleep by the side of the road. Sometimes you’ll find that your friends disagree with you, as Jesus did when he told the disciples that revenge was not his way. But it’s all part of the journey. It’s part of being with him.

Throughout all this, Jesus invites you to be tough. Claim your place in your church. Be rooted in your baptism. Know that you are fully Catholic. You know, lately I’ve been hearing that it’s not enough for the Catholic church to be “welcoming” and “affirming” and “inclusive.” And I agree. Because those are the minimum. Instead, LGBT people should fully expect to participate in all the ministries in the church. Not just being welcomed and affirmed and included, but leading. But to do that you have to keep your hand to the plow and you have to be tough.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. Father Martin is an exceptionally good preacher. But what he’s preaching here is directly contrary to Scripture, and to the Catholic Magisterium. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York will not say a word. When I lived in NYC (1998-2003), and was a practicing Catholic, this same parish was a center of LGBT activism. Neither Cardinal O’Connor nor Cardinal Egan did a thing about it. You cannot expect the Catholic Church, certainly not under Pope Francis, to resist this stuff. Catholic priests and laity who do so are pretty much on their own.

In my own church, the OCA, we have internal battles over this. The OCA Cathedral in New York City, under its current pastoral leadership, is well known in Orthodox circles for being gay-affirming, as is the OCA Cathedral in Boston. Bishops in charge do nothing. This is not new. There is no church that is going to escape this challenge.

In The Benedict Option, I write:

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body

was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.

Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.

The Christian who lives in reality will not join his body to another’s outside the order God gives us. That means no sex outside the covenant through which a man and a woman seal their love exclusively through Christ. In orthodox Christian teaching, the two really do become “one flesh” in a way that transcends the symbolic.

If sex is made holy through the marriage covenant, then sex within marriage is an icon of Christ’s relationship with His people, the church. It reveals the miraculous, life-giving power of spiritual communion, which occurs when a man and a woman—and only a man and a woman—give themselves to each other. That marriage could be unsexed is a total novelty in the Christian theological tradition.

“The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts.

He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology—the ultimate end of man. “As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order. “Male and female he made them,” says Genesis, revealing that complementarity is written into the nature of reality.

Easy divorce stretches the sacred bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny complementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female. Everything in this debate (and many others between traditional Christianity and modernity) turns on how we answer the question: Is the natural world and its limits a given, or are we free to do with it whatever we desire?

To be sure, there never was a golden age in which Christians all lived up to their sexual ideals. The church has been dealing with sexual immorality in its own ranks since the beginning—and let’s be honest, some of the measures it has taken to combat it have been cruel and unjust.

The point, however, is that to the premodern Christian imagination, sex was filled with cosmic meaning in a way it no longer is. Paul admonished the Corinthians to “flee sexual immorality” because the body was a “temple of the Holy Spirit” and warned them that “you are not your own.” He was telling them that their bodies are sacred vessels that belonged to God, who, in Christ, “all things hold together.” Sexual autonomy, seemingly the most prized possession of the modern person, is not only morally wrong but a metaphysical falsehood.

These discussions are not easy. I encourage all small-o orthodox Christians to listen to this short address PCA teaching elder Greg Johnson, who is chaste but same-sex attracted, gave to the recent General Assembly. In it, he speaks out against the part of the Nashville Statement that forbids Christians from “adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception.” Johnson says that this is pastorally problematic (at the very least); he said his own embrace of self-sacrificing chastity began with accepting that his same-sex attraction was deeply rooted, and not going away. He affirms that the only Biblically faithful way to live as a same-sex-attracted Christian is chastely, but he does not believe that he should be required to deny that he is permanently marked by his attraction.

I’m not an Evangelical, so I genuinely don’t know how this works in Evangelical theology. Catholicism teaches (for now, anyway) that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered,” meaning that same-sex feelings cannot be reconciled with God’s design. The chaste gay Catholics I know accept this, and live by it. A dear Catholic friend who has been living chastely his entire life told me when he came out in his early 20s that it was important for him to acknowledge this aspect of himself, in part because the burden of fidelity was too much to carry alone. In his address to the General Assembly, Johnson says that the church doesn’t require paraplegics to deny their inability to walk, or sterile people to deny their infertility, so why does it require SSA Christians to deny their own disability?

I don’t understand it either — it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference — but I concede that this is my own problem, because I struggle to grasp the theological intricacies of this debate. Catholic writer Daniel Mattson has written a book in which he explains why he does not call himself “gay,” even though he is same-sex attracted, and lives chastely in obedience to the Catholic Church’s teaching. I bring this whole issue up not to settle the debate over homosexuality and identity — or to encourage a discussion about it in the comments section — but only to highlight how even within orthodox church circles, these discussions are extraordinarily painful, but necessary. Even if you think that Greg Johnson is philosophically and theologically mistaken, you can’t listen to his address without feeling compassion for the man.

And yet, let’s be clear: even Johnson declares that there is no way that a faithful Christian with same-sex attraction can act on it. His dispute with other Christians is not over the behavior expected of faithful Christians.

For Christians to say otherwise is an act of profound iconoclasm. It cannot be done without doing irreparable violence to the foundations of the faith. The churches have been dealing, and dealing badly, with the Sexual Revolution for decades. It is impossible to separate the LGBT issue from the broader subject of sexuality, including heterosexuality. Affirming gender ideology and homosexuality — affirming, as opposed to working out how to bear in charity with Christian brothers and sisters who are living with these disorders — is institutionalizing and making permanent the Sexual Revolution, and its anti-Christian dogmas concerning sex, human nature, and the family.

The stakes could not be higher. Christian orthodoxy has lost so much ground within the churches themselves. Gifted revolutionaries like Father Martin, for example, are honored within the Catholic Church, while bishops who are supposed to guard and defend orthodoxy turn gelatinous. This phenomenon is by no means limited to the Catholic Church; it is everywhere. If it hasn’t come to your church yet, just wait. There is no escape from the culture war. We Christians, we can win political battles, but if we lose this battle within our own ecclesial bodies, political victories will be in vain.

UPDATE: A PCA pastor e-mails to say the reader (whom I don’t know personally; he is not a “friend”) I quoted above significantly distorts what happened:

While there was a lot of debate over commending the Nashville Statement, and the numbers did come down to 60/40, this was far more complicated than your friend indicated. Many voted against it because of concerns over the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (who was behind the Statement, and has promoted what many believe to be pretty goofy views of male/female roles), because our own Westminster Confession is already quite clear about sexual sin (so, many argued, why would we need to hastily adopt a somewhat clunky and unnuanced statement, signed by oodles of Calvinist/evangelical celebrities, in order to “do/say something!”), because (fairly or unfairly) the NS statement has become somewhat radioactive in the broader evangelical world (ie, that it is considered by many to be harsh and unloving, at least in tone), and because it says nothing about how to care for those who struggle in these sins. I know multiple non-progressives (myself included) who voted against commending the NS.

Furthermore, right after this debate and vote the General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to commend the RPCNA (a small sister-denomination)’s study report on same-sex attraction/sin, which is entirely orthodox and biblical, though much longer and far more nuanced/pastoral, but without the (fair and unfair) “baggage” of the Nashville Statement.

Finally, Covenant Seminary has not “openly embraced” Revoice; in fact, in the months leading up to this week’s Assembly it has repeatedly issued multiple statements (some through its president) clearly and openly distancing itself from Revoice and its teaching. Your friend is simply wrong here.

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Antifa Beats Up Andy Ngo

https://t.co/B8Gh4KQxFS

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) June 29, 2019

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Andy Ngo is a Portland-based journalist (for Quillette) who has made it his business to document the violence and insanity of Antifa in his city. Today they got him. They beat him up and stole his camera equipment.

One gets the impression that Antifa rules Portland with the same impunity that the Ku Klux Klan ruled Birmingham in the 1960s. Do they actually have police in Portland? Do they have functioning government there?

A reporter for the Portland Oregonian recorded some footage of those masked cowards attacking Ngo:

First skirmish I’ve seen. Didn’t see how this started, but @MrAndyNgo got roughed up. pic.twitter.com/hDkfQchRhG

— Jim Ryan (@Jimryan015) June 29, 2019

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Ted Wheeler is the mayor of Portland, a city where the violent far left gets to beat people up with impunity. Why would people want to visit that city? Why would companies want to relocate there to do business?

UPDATE:

In the ER. pic.twitter.com/spe5N4nzVl

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) June 29, 2019

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NYT Publishes Pro-Doxxing Op-Ed

Things just got real on the op-ed page of The New York Times, which publishes this op-ed by a London-based “human rights” scholar named Kate Cronin-Furman. In it, she calls for doxxing those working in border detention. Money quote:

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos. These agents’ actions should be publicized, particularly in their home communities.

This is not an argument for doxxing — it’s about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about.

Of course it’s an argument for doxxing. What the hell does Kate Cronin-Furman think doxxing is? She says in the piece that what’s happening at the US-Mexico border is not on part with the Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust … but then writes as if US Customs and Border officials and employees are in the same moral ballpark as Auschwitz guards.

Seriously, read the whole thing. 

The Times has crossed an important line here. Do the editors and journalists of The New York Times, as well as Kate Cronin-Furman, want their names and faces and addresses made known as participants in doxxing for the sake of a political cause? Because that’s what they’re going to get — and they’re not going to have any moral defense. This is an extraordinarily irresponsible move by the Times, and very much a sign of what’s to come in the next year. The Times has lost all sense of perspective.

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Kamala Harris: The Racial Strife Candidate

As regular readers know, I thought California Sen. Kamala Harris was the clear winner in Thursday night’s Democratic debate. I don’t say that as a Harris fan, at all. Her attack on Joe Biden for having opposed school busing in the 1970s — when the court-ordered policy was very unpopular — was stone-cold cynical. I didn’t realize just how cynical until this today:

Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign hasn’t wasted any time capitalizing on the momentum from her strong debate performance Thursday night, which included a confrontation with former Vice President Joe Biden that quickly went viral.

By Friday morning, the website for her White House bid was already selling “That Little Girl Was Me” T-shirts, featuring a picture of a young Harris against a black backdrop, for $29.99 to $32.99.

The shirt went on sale not long after Thursday’s debate when Harris challenged former Biden on his comments about working with segregationist senators and his record on civil rights. In a moment that quickly went viral, she accused him of working with the lawmakers to oppose busing black students to schools attended by mostly white students.

“You also worked with them to oppose busing, and you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” she said to Biden on Thursday. “And she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

She had the t-shirts printed and ready to go. All she needed to do was to portray Joe Biden — Joe Biden! — as an integration opponent who bullies little black girls.

The blogger Education Realist explains why Kamala Harris’s self-narrative regarding busing and integration is a crock. He’s frustrated at conservative pundits who thought her “that little girl was me” moment was a solid body blow against Biden. I still disagree; I think that it was a great moment for her politically, as a candidate in the Democratic primaries, in that I suspect it will start to peel away Biden’s black support.

But I think that if she wins the nomination, it will turn out to be a huge liability for her. It’s hard for younger voters who weren’t alive at the time to grasp what a disaster forced busing turned out to be, and how much people — not just white people! — hated it. The Washington Post reported yesterday:

The year that Joe Biden entered the Senate, in 1973, Gallup asked Americans whether they thought busing children from one neighborhood to another was the best means of integrating the nation’s public schools.

Five percent of those surveyed said they favored that approach; broken into racial groups, 4 percent of whites and 9 percent of blacks said they supported busing.

Integration? Yes, a majority said. In principle.

But not if it meant compulsory busing.

The response illustrates the firm political footing on which Biden stood as a freshman lawmaker when he opposed government-mandated busing, a policy that roiled Wilmington, Del., and other major metropolitan areas in the 1970s.

The Post story goes on to say that even today, busing remains unpopular. Harris attempts to make opposition to busing the same as opposition to school integration, which it certainly is not. And now, according to Harris’s press secretary, the candidate is now in favor of busing:

Does Harris support busing for school integration right now?

— Steadman (@AsteadWesley) June 28, 2019

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Education Realist again:

Look, Americans who aren’t dealing with immigrants every day often don’t completely grasp what it’s like, and go squishy on things like border control or amnesty.

In contrast, they are entirely clear on the intrusive, invasive ways the federal government can “step in” to order schools. And they don’t like it one bit.

Go ahead, Kamala, you brave truth teller, you survivor of segregated Berkeley discrimination. Tell all those Dem voters how busing is what America’s schools need to achieve the necessary diversity. Tell them how you’ll appoint judges who’ll overrule Milliken, allow states to mandate integration across districts.

Tell white working class voters the Dems still need in order to win, all those rich white progressives who purport to love people of color so long as some other school is being integrated, not theirs. Tell low income African Americans to forget about those charter schools they like so much, because your great integration plan means they’ll be unnecessary. Trumpet your plans to mandate school systems like San Francisco, where racial quotas determine where and how far each child will be sent away from home. While you’re at it, explain how this system resulted in far more segregation.

Go ahead and tell people that your plan will end segregation as the government sorts populations based on race, just like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 planned all along.

But best of all, go tell Asians all about your great plans. Tell all those parents at those 80, 90% Asian public schools you plan to yank half of the kids out and send them into the inner cities with all sorts of poor black and Hispanic kids. Go ahead and tell Asian immigrants that they can’t cluster and dominate in certain schools, tested or otherwise.

… I don’t understand politics, I know, but for the life of me I don’t understand why every politician from Trump on down to dogcatcher isn’t tweeting about Harris’s plan. Then hound every other Dem candidate and force them to fight that battle for her. Harris will be oh so very popular.

“If you like your school, too bad. Democrats won’t let you keep it.”

If Joe Biden is smart, he will not be intimidated by Harris’s race-baiting, and will go after her on this. But among the enwokened Democratic primary electorate, I don’t know if an old white man like Biden can sustain an effective attack on a black woman on a racially-charged issue. We’ll see.

Now that Harris has declared, through her press secretary, that she favors forced busing, we all know what a Harris presidency would mean. And the fact that she was willing to tear into Joe Biden so cynically, using race as her stiletto, we also know something about the way she would govern as president. Advantage Trump.

UPDATE: Surprise! Politico reports that Team Kamala has been planning that ambush of Joe Biden for a while now. Excerpt:

But her opening first came last week when Biden offered nostalgic memories of a time when he worked with segregationist colleagues like Sens. James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, proponents of using states’ rights to slow walk civil rights legislation. Harris, whose sole experience with a full stage of competitors came during her Senate primary in 2016, prepped with a small team of aides in Washington and then in Miami. A senior strategist, Averell “Ace” Smith, imitated Sanders, while Biden was played by Harris’ national press secretary, Ian Sams.

While walking through her planned exchange with Biden over busing, Harris’ campaign planned for a variety of answers from him, from contrition to a more measured approach to the more forceful denial of the position that he ended up giving — a stance that was called out by fact-checkers as untrue given his past quotes rejecting the wisdom of busing.

Harris herself ended up settling on a line that within minutes would appear in social media memes and just a few hours later would be screen printed on t-shirts selling for $29 on her website: “That little girl was me,” she said, of her desegregated class.

“You replay the thing and it seems like she was having a conversation with him,” a Harris campaign official said in playing back the encounter. The point she drove home, the aide added, was “this was something that meant something to me.”

Under no scenario did they consider Biden offering her such a gift to conclude the exchange: “My time is up,” Biden said. “I’m sorry.”

She does not mess around.

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France Fries, Europe Roasts

A gauche carte des températures à 1500m prévues par GFS. A droite le cri de Munch.
Jamais vu ça en 15 que je regarde des cartes météo #canicule pic.twitter.com/RIJTXiCUh1

— Ruben H (@korben_meteo) June 20, 2019

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European readers, please tell the rest of us what the heat wave is like. What are you and your neighbors enduring?

This kind of heat is common for us in Louisiana, but then again, we have air conditioning.

CNN reports:

France recorded its highest-ever temperature on Friday as continental Europe continues to struggle with an intense heat wave.

The mercury reached 45.9 degrees Celsius (114.6 Fahrenheit) in Gallargues-le-Montueux in the Gard department in southern France, according to the French national weather service Météo-France.

This is 1.8 degrees higher than the previous record from 2003.

The hottest recorded temperature in Louisiana history was 114, back in 1936. So was hotter yesterday in France than it has ever been in Louisiana. Think about that. More CNN:

On Friday, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said, “Beyond this extreme episode and with climate change, there is one observation: these episodes are getting closer, the abnormal becomes the normal”.

“We must prevent the fact that it will be even worse in the coming years,” he added.

Earlier this week, Météo-France linked the country’s increasingly frequent heatwaves with greenhouse gas emissions, warning that without significant cuts to carbon emissions, heat waves could be stronger and last longer than in the past.

“With these temperatures going higher, our entire society must think about adapting to climate change. It’s the problem,” said French Health Minister Agnès Buzyn.

This is true. And to think that there are still people who deny that this is happening, or that human beings have anything to do with it. The five hottest summers in Europe, since 1500, all have occurred in this century. This is not a fluke.

Roger Scruton, who is a green conservative, has pointed out that this is not simply industry’s fault. Every one of us is bound up in it. Our modern way of life depends on dumping massive amounts of carbon into the environment. If we were really serious about turning things around, we would stop air travel, and cease to do all kinds of things that are fundamental to modern life. We are not going to do that. It’s not a conservative/liberal thing; it’s simply not going to happen because all of us would have to change our lives too radically. (Let’s not even think about China and India.) Therefore, we must adapt, and simultaneously work hard to come up with a technological solution to the problem of carbon in the atmosphere.

But even if all the carbon we put into the atmosphere declined to zero tomorrow, we will have to endure decades of climate change based on what we’ve already put into the atmosphere. This is the new normal for Europe, and for all of us. Civilizations will be shaken to their core by all this. Watch.

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Art Vs. Moralistic Therapeutic Barbarism

From George Orwell, 1984:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

If you’ve read the novel, you’ll remember that Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Information is to go back into the archives of newspapers and re-write them to make them conform to whatever the Party currently wants to have been true. It’s not far from that to what’s happening to an important piece of public art in San Francisco today — a work of art that, bizarrely, was painted by an actual Communist. From Bari Weiss’s op-ed column about the controversy, which involves “the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.”

More:

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

More about the New Deal-era mural by Victor Arnautoff, which offends because it depicts black slaves and a dead Indian, murdered by white settlers:

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

These contemporary leftist lunatics are destroying — not just covering up, but destroying — a historically significant example of explicitly left-wing art, for the sake of protecting the feelings of students, and vaporizing images (and thoughts) that might make them uncomfortable:

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

Read the whole thing. You’ve got to see the ending, to find out what Arnautoff went through in the 1950s, and to contrast that with what his work is suffering today, from the far left. Here’s a link to a video by San Francisco art historian Dewey Crumpler, a black man who, in the video, defends keeping the mural in place.

The school board is spending $600,000 to destroy a work of art. The mind boggles. If right-wingers were doing this because the mural was insufficiently reverent to George Washington, all left-wing Californians would see this idiotic iconoclasm for what it is. The religion of Social Justice is a thing of staggering stupidity and destructiveness. It is moralistic therapeutic barbarism. If you value art, literature, and freedom of thought and expression, you will fight hard to keep these people from coming to power within political and cultural institutions. It might be too late for California. But for the rest of us? We are creating a generation of sentimentalized Stalinists.

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Lawbreaking Bishop Blasts Borders

@BishopSeitz helping immigrants cross the border into cd. Juarez pic.twitter.com/2xpc7e7GBx

— Danielle K. Lagunas (@DanielleLagunas) June 28, 2019

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Watch the Diocese of El Paso’s news account of the event here. 

Here’s the Dallas Morning News account of the Catholic bishop of El Paso, Mark Seitz, breaking the law by escorting migrants into the US. Excerpt:

“Standing here at the U.S.-Mexico border, how do we begin to diagnose the soul of our country?” said the bishop. “A government and society which view fleeing children and families as threats. A government which treats children in U.S. custody worse than animals. A government and society who turn their backs on pregnant mothers, babies and families and make them wait in Ciudad Juarez without a thought to the crushing consequences on this challenged city. … This government and this society are not well.”

Refusing to obey laws they regard as unjust is a longstanding Christian tradition. Here’s a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, in which he quotes St. Augustine:

“One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’

“Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

I admire religious leaders who are willing to defy unjust laws. But I gotta ask:

Are borders unjust?

Are laws forbidding foreigners to come into the United States the same thing, morally, as laws forbidding black people to eat at the same lunch counters as whites?

It seems clear that Bishop Seitz is saying yes to both questions, and not just saying it, but putting it into action by helping migrants break the law. I find this appalling, to be frank, because borders are just. These migrants do not have a moral right to cross over into the United States. That is not to say that they should not be allowed to cross, eventually; it is to say that they do not have a moral right to do so, as Bishop Seitz asserts, and that the higher good nullifies US law. I dispute that.

However, if you support what Bishop Seitz did, then explain why the laws establishing and defending borders are unjust. It is true that not all laws are morally just — but why is the law by which the people of the United States determine who can enter the country, and under what conditions, morally indefensible? Perhaps you agree that borders are just, but believe that in this particular crisis, they should be ignored for the greater good. Why? What is the limiting principle?

Thought experiment: if everyone in El Paso who is unhappy with where they live (because they are poor, because it is unsafe, etc.) showed up at the bishop’s residence with their bags, and moved in, why would that be wrong? If the bishop complained, and they told him that he was “not well,” why would they be wrong, according to the same logic that the bishop uses to justify opening the borders to migrants?

There’s no question that the bishop is operating in the spirit of Pope Francis, who earlier this year condemned “fear” of immigrants as “irrational”. In May, Francis said that people who oppose migration might be “racist.”

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s popular deputy prime minister, has openly clashed with the Pope over the pontiff’s open borders exhortations — and has won the support of many Italian Catholics. If the US Catholic bishops make an issue of personal lawbreaking to erase the border, Donald Trump would surely win the support of many American Catholics if he blasted the bishops, who don’t exactly have the full faith and confidence of their flocks these days.

I welcome your comments, both supportive and critical of the bishop, but I caution you that I will not publish comments that espouse anti-Catholic bigotry.

UPDATE: Some of you are saying that Bishop Seitz did not break the law. He simply escorted the family across the border to turn themselves in to US authorities and apply for asylum. But the US policy now is to make these potential asylees wait in Mexico to be processed. The bishop opposes this, so he defied the law. From the Catholic news site Crux:

As tensions at the U.S.-Mexico border continue to mount, El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz successfully shepherded a group of migrants who had previously been denied asylum in the United States across the border on Thursday, describing their plight as “an affront to human rights and human dignity.”

The bishop spoke to Crux just hours after he crossed the Laredo International Bridge into Mexico: First to accompany migrants who had been returned from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez as part of the Remain in Mexico program, then to make a return voyage with seven new individuals seeking asylum. Seitz recalled it as both one of the most “joyful” and “heart wrenching” experiences in his time as bishop.

Read the whole story. Some of those the bishop brought back into the US had been denied asylum. There was a tense moment when the bishop and his party confronted border officials, who eventually let them into the country (because, I guess, they didn’t want to get into an argument with a Catholic bishop). This is lawbreaking. You might think it’s morally justified, but don’t deny that the bishop is helping these migrants defy the law. If you read the Crux story, you’ll see that Bishop Seitz also called Americans who disagree with him racist:

“We suffer from a life-threatening case of hardening of the heart. In a day when we prefer to think that prejudice and intolerance are problems of the past, we have found a new acceptable group to treat as less than human, to look down upon and to fear. And should they speak another language or are brown or black, well, it is that much easier to stigmatize them,” he continued.

Seitz labeled the policies as that of a “heart-sick government and society” and decried the “hopelessness” of migrants who are forced to watch their children suffer.

“Would we rather they die on the banks of the Rio Grande than trouble us with their presence?” he asked.

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A Note About Comments

Readers, I’ve had a number of e-mails from you asking if the comments have disappeared on the blog. No, they haven’t — but I can see why one might think so. Since we switched to the Disqus system, the comments appear farther down the page than they used to. Just scroll a bit more.

Second, approving the comments is more difficult on my end. Under the former system, I was able to isolate the comments made to my own posts. And I was able to approve them in chronological order. With Disqus, all of us at TAC have to see all the comments at once. I have to pick through them all to find the ones made to my own posts (our editorial policy is that I only approve, or reject, comments on my own posts). This takes more time and attention than in the old days, and sometimes I miss comments. Plus, they don’t appear in chronological order, though that is less of a problem for readers than it would have been under the old format.

Yeah, I don’t like Disqus either. But the old software was way too buggy and fragile.

Finally, I want to warn readers who feel compelled to post vulgar or abusive comments. For some reason, I’ve seen more of this since we went to Disqus, all coming from readers who have never posted before. If I see only one such comment, I simply delete it. But if I see a pattern, and/or if the single comment is sufficiently extreme (e.g., there were three vicious, filthy ones today about Pete Buttigieg), I will use the capability Disqus gives me to ban commenters. You should be aware that this does not ban them from my blog alone, but from posting anywhere on TAC. I don’t like to do this, but I have already done it several times since going to Disqus, and I won’t hesitate to take away your posting rights if you abuse them.

The rules for posting on my blog are fairly simple:

No racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise bigoted language. I recognize that some liberal readers consider particular ideas discussed here to be inherently bigoted. I draw that line in a different place than many liberals do, and I am willing to tolerate the airing of some opinions with which I strongly disagree. That said, I do not put up with rough language here. Aside from obvious rules (e.g., no racial slurs), I can’t give you neat, clean, universal rules that cover every occasion, but a good rule of thumb is: if you wouldn’t say it at a drinks party, around people you don’t know, don’t say it here.
Do not attack me or other people who post here personally. If you do, I won’t post your comment. If you keep doing it, I will ban you. It takes a constant effort to keep the discussions here lively, without allowing people to harangue or intimidate others. If you believe that I am permitting things I shouldn’t, please write to me privately (rod — at — amcon — mag).
Please don’t assume that because I approve a comment, that I agree with it.
I am personal friends with some public figures that some readers dislike intensely. I feel that I have a responsibility to you readers to allow you to criticize them strongly, even if what you say challenges my sense of loyalty to my friends. That said, I’m not going to publish comments that amount to nothing but ranting. You might not like that. Too bad.
If you think I have approved a comment that I should not have done, or if you think I have wrongly spiked your own comment, please write me to let me know (rod — at — amconmag — dot — com). I’ll reconsider. Sometimes the comment got hung up in the spam folder, and I can free it (happily, this happens far less often with Disqus than the old system).
These rules generally do not apply to Uncle Chuckie, who is above the law. I invite you to learn to appreciate this true eccentric, for whom I have a soft spot in my heart. Have you bought your Cosimano Chakra Radionic Box yet?

Uncle Chuckie, Our Malevolent Godfather

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