Rod Dreher's Blog, page 231

Democrats: Open Borders 4-Evah

Andrew Sullivan’s column today is excellent from top to bottom; his lead item — slamming the Democrats for being in a “bubble” on immigration — is the best. Excerpts:

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. As climate change worsens, more will rush to claim it. All they have to do is show up.

Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained at the border making an asylum claim. This year, about a million Central Americans will have relocated to the U.S. on those grounds. To add to this, a big majority of the candidates in the Democratic debates also want to remove the grounds for detention at all, by repealing the 1929 law that made illegal entry a criminal offense and turning it into a civil one. And almost all of them said that if illegal immigrants do not commit a crime once they’re in the U.S., they should be allowed to become citizens.

How, I ask, is that not practically open borders? The answer I usually get is that all these millions will have to, at some point, go to court hearings and have their asylum cases adjudicated. The trouble with that argument is that only 44 percent actually turn up for their hearings; and those who do show up and whose claims nonetheless fail can simply walk out of the court and know they probably won’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

More:

I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?

I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide.

Read it all. 

Of course it’s political suicide!

Or is it? TAC’s Bob Merry says yes, the Dems are now an “open borders” party, but he also sounds a warning:

Opposition Republicans should resist the temptation to view this development as a sign that the Democrats are on a political suicide mission. The country remains unsettled, as it was at the beginning of the 2016 campaign, with large population segments believing America is slipping into progressive dysfunction. Further, millions of Americans have concluded that the nation’s ills are attributable largely to that man in the White House, President Donald Trump, despised by many as a man beneath the office he holds. For them the corrective is simple: expunge Trump.

And Democrats will enjoy an advantage this time around. They can make their case with words, whereas the incumbent president must make his case with action and performance. In the last presidential race, that advantage fell to Trump, and he exploited it effectively, helped along by President Barack Obama’s mildly unsuccessful second term and lingering systemic problems besetting the nation. If Trump can’t bring in a clearly successful first term, he won’t likely get a second one, and the New Democratic Party will take over.

My heart says that Sullivan is correct, but my head says, “Remember 2016, when you and all other Responsible Pundits thought that Trump was too extreme to be elected.” There is no doubt now that the Democratic Party is shockingly far to the left. If the Democrats win the White House, and take the Senate too, the floodgates of migration open, and the country is lost. The debates were enormously clarifying in that sense — and they helped Trump, because the best thing he has going for him (and maybe the only thing) is that for all his faults, he is not as ideologically crazy as the Democrats.

It’s worth remembering the candid speech former Tony Blair adviser Andrew Neather gave in 2009. Excerpts from the Telegraph‘s report:

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a “conspiracy” within Government to impose mass immigration for “cynical” political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

More:

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: “Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

“I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

The “deliberate policy”, from late 2000 until “at least February last year”, when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

Read it all. 

As Douglas Murray ventured in his great book The Strange Death Of Europe:

The activities of Roche and a few others in the 1997 Labour government backs up the idea that theirs was a deliberate policy of social transformation: a culture war being waged against the British people using immigrants as some kind of battering ram.

If you read Murray’s book — and I hope you will — you will see that he tells the ugly truth about Conservative Party politicians as well. They were part of the same elite that did not try to stop any of this, despite what it stood to do to Britain.

Prior to this week’s Democratic presidential debates, if you had said the Democrats were trying to pull an Andrew Neather-like maneuver, I might have thought it an exaggeration. Not anymore. Like I said, the debates were clarifying. This is a culture war, and the Democratic Party is trying to bring in the mercenaries.

 

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Christ With The Meek

I was deeply moved by this plea from Caitlin Flanagan to fellow Christians — particularly Evangelicals — to speak up for the suffering migrant children at the border. She begins by talking about how she became a Christian because her left-wing atheist parents sent her to Catholic school as a child. Excerpts:

But then: Blessed are the meek.

The children are meek. The ones told to comb out one another’s lice and go to sleep hungry on cold floors under bright lights; the ones who have no one—no one at all, save one another—to comfort them. So I was on sound territory there. But the Beatitudes come at you sideways sometimes, and that’s when you’re really in trouble. It occurred to me this morning that maybe as a Christian I’m also supposed to be meek. To be humble.

I never should have agreed to go to that school.

I humbly reach out to the only faction of Americans I know of who have the ear of the administration and who care about children: my brothers and sisters in Christ who attend evangelical churches. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a profound humanitarian crisis and that children are being forced to suffer in terrible ways. Maybe it was never supposed to be this way; maybe the system just got overwhelmed. But this is a disaster. Children are programmed to think that any separation from a parent or a caregiver is a life-or-death situation. I keep imagining one of these children having a dream that he’s home, with his mother and brothers and sisters, but then waking up to see he’s still in a terrible place. If evangelical Christians stood up for these children, things could change in the camps very quickly.

More:

Ever since the most recent round of reports on conditions in these camps came out, I’ve been waking up at night, thinking about the children and wondering what was going on at that moment. I know that while I lie in my warm bed, in my own home and with all my relatives accounted for, children are lying on those cold floors, desperate for their mother, and crying. At those moments, all I can do is think of the nuns at the School of the Madeleine, and how they believed that nothing—nothing at all—was beyond the reach of prayer. And so I lie there and do what millions of other Americans do when they think about these children and come up against the many brick walls keeping us from alleviating their plight: I pray for them.

We know exactly where Christ is, because he told us. He’s with the sick and the jailed and the hungry. He’s in those camps with those suffering children. And we need to be there, too.

Read it all.

She’s right about that. Whatever you think about our immigration policy, there can be no doubt at all that these children must not be made to suffer for the actions of their parents. Can’t we agree on that? I believe their parents are primarily to blame for putting them into this terrible situation, but that doesn’t give us the right to make the kids suffer. They need help.

De-politicize these children. I am fairly certain that most, maybe all, of these kids, and their parents, need to be sent back home. I could be wrong. But until that is worked out, the United States must stop at nothing to care for these little ones, to alleviate their discomfort and trauma. They did not choose this. If we compel them to suffer, the moral guilt will be on our heads, and stain our souls.

This is not a hard call, actually. Not for Christians. What to do overall about the border crisis — that’s a hard call, and in fact a series of hard calls. Moral grandstanding is repulsive.

But: what to do about caring for these frightened and filthy children? Caitlin Flanagan is right: Christ is in those camps, with those little ones. As it is said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” (Hebrews 3:15)

 

 

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Kamala Harris’s Big Night

Did you watch the second Democratic debate tonight? It was better than last night’s. Here are the highlights, according to Self:

Kamala Harris won it going away. She was sharp, aggressive, and took chances (e.g., tearing into Joe Biden, and criticizing Barack Obama). She totally dominated the stage. It wasn’t even close. The only time she faltered was in her closing statement. Back in January, David Brooks wrote a column praising her strengths as a Democratic candidate. It was all on display tonight.
Joe Biden choked. He looked old, unfocused, and unprepared. He was the night’s big loser.
Bernie Sanders also seriously underperformed. He had the old Sanders fire, but it’s starting to sound ranty and stale.
Pete Buttigieg did well. He’s smart and calm without being soporific. He’s probably not going to be the nominee, but if Warren or Harris wins the nomination he’s going to be their vice presidential pick.
None of the other candidates on stage tonight are in the same league. Gillibrand is Tracy Flick, without the charisma. Swalwell was a dweeb. Hickenlooper and Bennet are wallpaper. Yang is a stunt candidate. And New Age authoress Marianne Williamson beamed in from the Planet Zork to slap Donald Trump across the face with her space glove:

The Democrats have gone off the left-wing deep end. They all favor decriminalizing being in this country illegally, and giving government-funded health care to illegal aliens. After watching last night’s debate, as well as tonight’s, you would reasonably conclude that the Democratic field cares far more about the well being of illegal immigrants than actual Americans. It’s absolutely bizarre. And tonight, Kamala Harris ripped Joe Biden up for having opposed — wait for it — school busing, one of the most unpopular policies of the 1970s. And Biden didn’t have a good comeback, either! Watch this. He surely couldn’t have foreseen being attacked for opposing busing, for heaven’s sake, but he has apparently been thinking that his association with Barack Obama would be sufficient to protect him from left-flank attacks on race. Kamala Harris put him on notice tonight that he’s vulnerable. The interesting thing is that Biden couldn’t muster a defense — against a candidate beating him up for having opposed busing! This would have been a perfect place for Biden to claim some centrist ground … but he choked. Of course, Harris might win the Democratic nomination by running on (I can’t believe I’m saying this in 2019) the glories of school busing, but boy, try running a general election campaign on that. Similarly, on immigration, Donald Trump is going to mop the floor with these open-borders mushheads.

As far as I can tell, this is now a five-way race: Biden, Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Buttigieg. If he has another debate like Wednesday night’s, Cory Booker could boost himself. Beto O’Rourke is fading fast.

I leave you with more New Age love from the Grand Mystic Royal Priestess of the Alibaba Temple of Zork, or Marin County, can’t figure out which:

marianne williamson was put on this earth solely as a role for tina fey to take on pic.twitter.com/DTFz5mKDbm

— katelyn (@noitskatelyn) June 28, 2019

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

UPDATE: Ur-#NeverTrumper David Brooks is dazed by how far left the Democrats are going. He says he could never vote for Trump, but that doesn’t meant he can bring himself to vote for a Democrat, given how far to the left they’re racing. Excerpts:

The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much dissent.

First, there is health care. When Warren and Kamala Harris raised their hands and said that they would eliminate employer-based health insurance, they made the most important gesture of the campaign so far. Over 70 percent of Americans with insurance through their employers are satisfied with their health plan. Warren, Harris and Sanders would take that away.

According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.

More:

Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.

Yep. Seems to me like the big winner from these first two nights of Democratic presidential debates is … Donald Trump.

UPDATE.2: Reader Jonah R., from the “Democrats Invite The World” comments thread:

I’ve written here before about how my affluent and formerly stable suburb, a “sanctuary county” in all but name, is now dealing with overcrowded schools, strained social services programs, overburdened law enforcement, and MS-13. County politicians are apportioning millions in tax money to pay for teenage gang interdiction programs and English-as-a-second-language classes, and they keep trying to find ways to give large amounts of taxpayer money to private groups that provide gratis legal services to illegal immigrants. Our taxes are going up, and in the future my wife and I may not be able to afford to retire in the community we call home. Maybe I’ll leave anyway, if my county and state continue to see me as nothing more than a wallet.

Our county is a one-party state with zero Republicans in elected office. And yet I talk to legal Hispanic immigrants; they tell me they’re not for open borders. Neither are immigrants from Africa, India, or Asia; they’re often the ones at county meetings protesting our county’s policies, because they came here through the tedious official process. Black people, who have the highest unemployment rate in our county, aren’t for it either. Among my neighbors and in my larger community, the only people I can find who favor these policies are affluent white people, whose identity is wrapped up in wokeness, who benefit from having cheap labor nearby, and who don’t have to send their kids to the overcrowded school with the round-the-clock police presence.

My conclusion, at least locally, is that support for Democratic immigration policies would waver if the Republicans had a less ridiculous national spokesman on these issues, but they might totally crumble if a prominent Democrat stopped worrying about being tainted by having something in common with Trump and just came out and articulated a policy that was sensible and restrictive without being anti-immigrant.

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Democrats Invite The World

Did you watch the Democratic debate on NBC last night? I did — and I’ll watch the second one tonight. One thing that jumped out at me was how unrestrainedly woke they all are — especially on the subject of immigration. I don’t think a single one of those candidates believe there should be any effective restraint at all on immigration. None.

The New York Times reports:

The debate, the first of two featuring 10 candidates each, underscored just how sharply Democrats have veered in a liberal direction since Mr. Trump’s election. On issues ranging from immigration and health care to gun control and foreign policy, they demonstrated that they were far more uneasy about being perceived as insufficiently progressive by primary voters than about inviting Republican attacks in the general election.

I’ll say. More:

Mr. Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, dominated the segment devoted to immigration, promoting his proposal to decriminalize illegal immigration — a policy that Ms. Warren has adopted in recent days and that Republicans have gleefully highlighted to argue that Democrats support open borders.

Turning to Mr. O’Rourke, whose unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid and presidential candidacy have overshadowed him, Mr. Castro asked his fellow Texan why he would not support making illegal immigration a civil offense.

“I just think it’s a mistake, Beto,” said Mr. Castro.

Mr. O’Rourke noted that he had introduced legislation in Congress to decriminalize “those seeking asylum” and said that he had unveiled a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

But Mr. Castro interjected that it was not sufficient to relieve only those seeking asylum from criminal penalty, because many of those charged for crossing the border illegally are “undocumented immigrants.”

Mr. Booker made clear that he sided with Mr. Castro on the question, an illustration of the party’s shifting center of gravity on perhaps the dominant issue of the Trump era.

Julian Castro is not going to be the Democratic nominee, but Elizabeth Warren might, and Cory Booker, who did well last night, might too. And they are de facto for open borders. Vox writes:

Decriminalizing migration isn’t exactly the same as opening the borders. People coming to the US without papers could still be deported if they were caught and taken before an immigration judge. But it would make unauthorized immigration purely a civil offense, instead of a criminal one.

The distinction matters a lot. Criminal prosecution of illegal entry was what gave the Trump administration the power to separate thousands of families in 2018. It referred thousands of parents for criminal prosecution for illegal entry — advertised as a “zero-tolerance” approach — and thus separated them from their children to send them to criminal custody.

Illegal entry has been a crime for 90 years, but only recently has prosecution for it become common

If you’re an unauthorized immigrant in the US, you’re committing a civil violation: being present in the US without a valid immigration status. That’s breaking a law, but it’s not a crime, in the same way that violating the speed limit isn’t a crime. If you’re arrested, you can be deported — a huge change to an immigrant’s life, but not technically a criminal punishment.

But if you cross the US/Mexico border between ports of entry without papers, you are committing a federal misdemeanor: illegal entry. And you can be jailed and fined in addition to getting deported.

Let’s not kid ourselves: this means open borders.

This week, a terribly sad photograph of a father and young daughter, both drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande, was widely circulated. Beto O’Rourke (among others) blamed Donald Trump for their deaths. That’s a disgusting slander, though O’Rourke was by no means the only one doing it. According to the Washington Post, the man and his wife and daughter did not want to wait in line at the US-Mexico border, and decided to take their chances with the river. The Associated Press reports the same thing.

Many liberals are blaming the United States for these tragic deaths, because these economic migrants are not allowed to cross the border at will. This is crazy! Sohrab Ahmari writes in the NYPost:

To slow down the surge, President Trump limited the number of people who could apply for amnesty each day. Óscar Ramírez got frustrated waiting, his wife told reporters, which is why he tried to cross the river. Because of our broken asylum laws, putting one foot on American soil meant he would be allowed to stay.

Democrats argue that trying to meter the traffic at the border is heartless, that Trump should just let everyone in.

That happens with plenty of migrants. Such families are processed at one of our overwhelmed holding facilities. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls these “concentration camps,” and Democrats have been fighting among themselves about giving money to Trump to improve their conditions.

So no holding facility (say the Democrats). The migrants are waved in, given a court date for their asylum plea and sent . . . where?

Perhaps they show up for their hearing. Ramírez’s mother told El Diario de Hoy that he came to the US in search of more money. Understandable, except we don’t grant asylum for economic reasons. When migrants are rejected in court and deported, Democrats argue that the government is heartless. If they skip the hearing and live here illegally for years, perhaps decades, Dems believe ICE shouldn’t be able to find or prosecute them.

In short, there are no restrictions that are reasonable to the Democratic presidential front-runners. And to whether the US can absorb millions of mostly economic migrants into our economy and welfare systems, the objections are waved away.

It is true that Donald Trump has not established control over the US-Mexico border. It is true that he has done a poor job managing this crisis as a political matter. It is true that Trump’s hands are tied — there has to be a legislative fix.

But the most important truth is this: Democrats don’t want it. They want open borders. This could not be clearer. We elect a Democratic president in 2020, our porous border dissolves.

Today the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, said the Census Bureau can’t ask a question about citizenship status in the 2020 Census because there is evidence that Trump administration officials misled the public about why it wanted to insert that question into the Census. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberals in this ruling. I don’t understand this. I agree with Justice Alito:

“To put the point bluntly,” he wrote, “the federal judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”

How on earth can it be illegal for a government to try to find out whether or not people living within the nation’s boundaries are citizens? This is a politically consequential ruling, of course, because political power is apportioned on the basis of Census findings. California, for example, stands to gain more representatives in Congress because any non-citizen illegal aliens counted by the Census get folded into the overall count. In this way, states have an incentive to welcome illegal immigrants, because it boosts the states’ power in Washington.

David French, who is a lawyer, points out that the Trump administration’s politically maladroit handling of the situation led to this decision. That’s literally true, according to the Chief Justice’s opinion. This is another example of how the administration’s incompetence hurts its legitimate goals. That said, we still have a situation in which our government is not permitted to ask people living here if they are citizens or not.

I wish we had a more competent chief executive working on the border crisis. But look at the Democratic alternative, on stage last night and tonight in Miami.

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‘Unrestrained Male Sexual Desire Nearly Destroyed My Family’

A reader writes in response to Matt in VA’s post about the “Wild West” of male sexual desire, and today’s post about the wife and mother tossed aside when her husband decided he was a woman. The reader (who gave me permission to use this) says:

My family recently learned that my father-in-law, after years of feeling same-sex attraction, had escalated what had previously a pornography based issue into a series of short-term, internet-assisted, semi-anonymous, meet ups that had been going on for some time. The news couldn’t have come as more of a shock to us; prior to the revelation I would have described the family situation as one as close to what I would consider an ideal, loving, healthy one. The one upside in having so many aspects of one’s foundation shattered like this is that the reason we became aware of it was because my father-in-law came to us in a spirit of repentance, honesty and contrition, rather than having him be found out by accident or by someone else.

Unrestrained male sexual desire nearly destroyed my family (to be quite honest, it still might as we’re just going through the early stages of what it means for the rest of us to forgive him and for what he needs to do to come to grips with what he faces), and I firmly believe Matt is right about how he describes its effects on the wider culture. My wife and mother-in-law have had a harder time with coming to grips of how this could have happened than I have, not because I can relate to his particular attraction, but because if I ask myself the question “How would I react if the only real limitations on acting out my sexual desires were those limitations I had to erect on my own?”, the answer frankly terrifies me (as I imagine it would most men who are being honest with themselves).

Thankfully, unlike Jay/Joy in the other shared article, whose desires and personal struggles were met with a cheerleading section and calls to “be true to himself”, my father-in-law has been receiving help that challenges him to be honest but in a way that might help him to change his behavior and keep together the family he built over 30 years. Before and during the worst of what he went through, he experienced extreme stress and burnout that resulted in changing jobs and moving to a new city; many modern psychologists (both professional and armchair) would probably have told him that it was due to his externally presenting face not lining up with what he was dealing with internally, and the way to deal with it would have been to “come-out” with his true self and to neglect the bigots (his friends and family) who would have had a problem with it. While I agree there was a problem cause by his external/internal lives not being in harmony, to claim his internal self is his true self that he needs to be given priority is pure idiocracy, and it would have been a recipe for selfishness and pain. He confessed that he had trouble connecting with his new granddaughter at the time, not because he was living a lie, but because he was too focused on the next message he would share with some stranger.

I don’t know where my sharing goes from here, other than the continual removal of any and all limits to sexuality and a glorification of individual desires frustrates and frightens me. Thankfully our religious tradition (Evangelical) hasn’t fully bought in, and he was able to get a countering message from the sources he turned to there; for how much longer that’s the case God only knows. Thankfully he’s able to find psychological help that doesn’t just affirm his desires and can help him act in healthier ways; with the increased ban on “conversion therapy” (or anything that smells like it), how much longer will professionals be able to offer this type of service before the government or their governing bodies cracks down (I and everyone involved don’t consider the help he’s getting to be conversion therapy, changing his sexual attraction away from bisexuality isn’t the point, and whether that’s even possible I personally doubt. But given the way progressives discuss anyone not fully affirming and supportive, and the Law of Merited Impossibility, professional therapy to help people control and manage same-sex activities/attraction will probably be challenged if it is not being done already).

I see no peace on the horizon between the multitudes who would criticize my family for not being supportive of who he “really is”, “don’t you want him to be happy?”, “the real problem is repressed desires”, “I mean, I feel bad for your Mom getting cheated on, but really everyone will be better off if he’s true to himself” and those who say “there are things in life more important that how you decide to orgasm and our society needs to recognize that”. We have no shared conception of what human beings are, what our sexuality is for, and how to talk about it productively; this state of affairs will only last for so long, and in the meantime many people will be hurt.

 

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Some Woman’s Husband, Some Kids’ Father

This is a powerful essay by a woman whose husband — the father of their three young children — decided that he was really a woman, and transitioned. It appeared in The Guardian in 2012. I bet the newspaper would not publish something like this today; it challenges the Narrative too strongly. What is most striking about this piece is the way her husband Tom’s entire personality changed once he decided that he had to transition. Excerpts:

Even before the obvious signs of maleness, Tom’s laughter disappeared from our lives. Overnight, it seemed, he stopped smiling. He no longer took pleasure in anything. He looked ill. He complained of fatigue, stomach ailments and dizziness. He lost his appetite and began to lose weight. But my sincere attempts to sympathise with him alternated with bewilderment and rage over the close, secret relationships he’d apparently formed with women confidantes, over his insistence that his urgent need to express his femininity outweighed every other concern.

“I have a medical condition,” he insisted. “A fatal condition that’s going to kill me unless I get treatment.”

Ah yes, if you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to die, and blood will be on your hands! More:

“Who decides the treatment?” I asked.

“I do!”

It was hard to understand the sudden dramatic change in a state of being he now claimed was lifelong. I tried to convince Tom that he was not a woman. When that failed, I tried to convince him that, for our children’s sake, he could believe he was a woman and still choose to live as a man.

For his part, Tom’s perspective was that if I loved him, I would accept that a transsexual has to do what a transsexual has to do – and sacrifice my own identity accordingly. When he wasn’t telling me that the person I thought I had known had never existed at all, he’d say it was a sign of my limitations that I couldn’t grasp the idea of same person, different package.

“After all,” he said blithely, “the changes I’m making are pretty superficial.”

“If they’re so superficial, why do you have to turn all our lives upside down for them?”

He didn’t seem the same. He didn’t act the same. His values seemed to change along with his personality.

“What if you knew that doing this would destroy one or all of the children?” I asked him. Ice cold, the man I had once thought a wonderful father replied, “I would do it anyway.”

Stone cold narcissist, right there. And he did this within a left-liberal culture that validated him, and cast his wife and children to the side as mere obstacles to his liberation:

Such moments packed a breathtaking array of meaning and emotion. All at once there was the pathos of witnessing a middle-aged man – the husband I loved and had admired – taking pleasure in gazing at the woman he evidently saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. His satisfaction with himself. His in-my-face “I’m going to do this and you have no choice but to accept it” attitude towards me. The painful fact that such moments represented his departure from our marriage and from the person he had been, and that I was forced to watch that departure not once but over and over again. The terrible feeling of intrusion into my space, my privacy. Like a rebellious teenager, he wanted me to know: you aren’t the only woman around here any more. He wanted me to know: absolutely nothing will be left to you. My basket had become a public receptacle marked All Women’s Things Go Here. Like womanhood itself, it was no longer my domain.

Tom found a circle of women to sympathise with, encourage and dress him. Once, he left his laptop open to a message from one of them that read, “Your wife has to accept losing you.” He reported that another had urged him to “Do it all quickly!”

From his cheerleaders I learned that in the new political correctness, female solidarity is out. A man in a dress is in. Among women who consider themselves feminists, a man who declares himself a transsexual trumps another woman any day. One of Tom’s supporters would eventually sum up this perspective most explicitly: “He’s a transsexual. Anything he does is what he needs to do.”

Read the whole thing. It’s very powerful.

The wife is Christine Benvenuto; here is a link to the memoir she wrote about this experience, from which the above essay was taken. Her ex-husband Jay now lives as Joy Ladin, and is celebrated as a brave pioneer.

This Pride Month, our media never tell us the stories of people like Christine Benvenuto and her children — those whose lives were shattered by men like Jay Ladin, following their dream. They are the collateral damage on the way to Utopia. Jay Ladin ought to be ashamed of himself for what he did to his wife and children, but of course he — a professor at Yeshiva — moves from strength to strength in this family-hating culture of ours.

What is so interesting to me about this story is the way Ladin changed almost overnight from being a normal person to being a selfish monster after he came out as trans. I saw a similar (though not remotely as consequential) change in a guy I had been good friends with in college — until he came out as gay.

When N. came out just after we all graduated in 1989, none of us, his circle of college friends, were surprised, and none of us abandoned or criticized him. In 1992, he had finished grad school, and was looking to get out of Baton Rouge. I had taken a job in Washington, and was preparing to move. He thought moving to Washington sounded like a good idea. I told him that I couldn’t afford on my salary to live by myself, and needed a roommate. We agreed that we would share a two-bedroom flat together. I would make the security deposit and pay the first month’s rent, and he would reimburse me after he got a job.

After we got to DC, he needed a computer to make his resume. I let him use mine. He got a job, finally, but always evaded me when I asked for his half of the security deposit.

Six months later, I came home from work to find the apartment emptied of N.’s things. He was gone, just like that. Turns out he had decided DC wasn’t working out, and had quietly arranged with some friends in Baton Rouge to come fetch him. He walked out owing me a fair amount of money. I still had six months on the lease, and was responsible for the rent. I went to the landlord, told her what happened, and asked to be released. She refused. Thankfully, I was able to find a new roommate after only a couple of months.

I found out shortly after N. flew the coop that he had taken advantage of my offer to let him use my computer to search through my e-mails and spread personal information he found there in his social circles. He justified it, I learned, because I was a Republican, and was becoming a Catholic. Therefore, the man who had been his friend for six years, and whose generosity made it possible for him to move to DC, was nothing more than a figure of fun and an enemy, because he was Republican and Christian.

He never apologized, much less offered to pay back what he stole from me. Sadly, N. died suddenly a few years after returning to Baton Rouge, from a freak medical condition.

I wish I could account for why N. flipped like that. He went from being a sweet guy, kind to everyone, and beloved by all, to being a bitchy, self-centered queen who construed his selfishness as virtue within the context of liberation. His new, gay self turned me, his friend, into an object of loathing — this, even though his homosexuality was not news to me, nor did it affect the way I cared about him, much less my willingness to help him get established in Washington. This new identity he took on was not simply a matter of the same N. we all knew and loved, except now he’s more honest about himself in public; it was a new person, one who valorized a kind of politicized vindictiveness. And — this is crucial — he surrounded himself with gay people and allies who reinforced his meanness. To them — some of whom knew me, and had been friendly with me — the fact that I was a political and religious conservative were the only facts that mattered, and they justified treating me like garbage.

Mind you, what N. did to me was not remotely on the same level as what Jay/Joy Ladin did to his wife and children. But it is at the far end of a spectrum.

To be clear, I am not claiming that this is how all LGBT people behave! In fact, one of the friends during that time who comforted me in my shock and anger at N.’s betrayals was (is) a lesbian who was just as appalled as I was by what N. had done. My point is simply that some people, when they switch sexual or gender identities, stop seeing and feeling responsible to other people, except to regard them as obstacles to giving them what they want. It’s as if they become possessed by a malicious spirit. I don’t understand it. But I recognize it, and I recognize that we live in a culture now that celebrates and rewards this malicious narcissism, and that regards the tragedy suffered by people like Christine Benvenuto and the Ladin children as politically inconvenient, therefore disposable. This culture throws the ex-wife and children right into the same trash bin as the so-called TERFs, whose concerns are not to be respected or considered, only denied, with as much hysteria and malice as possible.

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Falwell Jr: Liberty University’s Wrecking Ball

The Southern Baptist pastor Russell Moore is not everyone’s tall glass of iced tea. But good grief, take a look at this:

Who are you @drmoore ? Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue? I’m being serious. You’re nothing but an employee- a bureaucrat.

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) June 25, 2019

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Even by the sleazy standards we’ve come to expect from Falwell Jr., that’s scraping bottom. Falwell Jr. is not a pastor, as his late father was, but don’t forget that he is president of Liberty University, a Christian college. This is just gross and cheap. How is it even controversial among Christians to assert that “those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion”? I am pretty sure that I have a much stricter view of border enforcement than Russell Moore does, but he’s right about how we should treat human beings. Does Falwell Jr. believe that illegal migrants, especially children, should not be treated with dignity and compassion — even if we are going to send them back?

What kind of Christian says a thing like what Falwell did? “You have never made payroll, therefore you have no right to tell people that they should treat human beings with dignity and compassion”? That doesn’t even make sense. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, and it’s unworthy of a Christian. I say that as someone who does not believe these migrants should be let into the country in most cases. They don’t have a right to come here, but they don’t cease to be human beings who deserve to be treated as such, for God’s sake.

Falwell Jr. is also at the center of a burgeoning scandal involving a Miami cabana boy and nude photos of Mrs. Falwell. The Miami Herald reports:

Falwell, 57, who took over the mantle of Liberty University following the death of his father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., has denied the suggestion that in 2015 he sought help from [Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen, who told [actor Tom] Arnold in a surreptitiously taped conversation that he embarked on a mission to recover “personal” photographs involving the Falwells.

Cohen has acknowledged performing delicate chores for the future president of the United States, including paying off his alleged paramours with hush money — to prevent the release of embarrassing personal photographs in the past. In his only known interview about the subject, first reported by Reuters and BuzzFeed, Falwell denied the existence of photographs involving himself.

“This report is not accurate,” Falwell told the Todd Starnes radio show. “There are no compromising or embarrassing photos of me.”

Three photographs have been seen by the Herald, however. They are images not of Falwell, but of his wife in various stages of undress. It is not known who took the photographs or when they were taken, and the Herald was not given the photographs and therefore has not been able to authenticate them independently. Two of the photographs appear to have been taken at the Falwells’ farm in Virginia, and a third at the Cheeca Lodge.

The timing of Cohen’s alleged photo-recovery mission roughly preceded Falwell’s pivotal evangelical endorsement of Trump in the 2016 Republican primary, which Cohen says he helped engineer.

Read the whole thing. How on earth did the Miami Herald see boudoir shots of Mrs. Falwell? The Falwells went in with Cabana Boy on a multimillion-dollar investment in a swinging South Beach hostel. Why? What would the president of a conservative Christian university be doing investing in a hostel on the most carnal strip of land in North America? It’s mighty odd.

Be that as it may, Falwell is trashing the Liberty brand with his undisciplined mouth and obnoxious forays into partisan politics. You don’t have to share Russell Moore’s views on immigration to find it weird and offensive for a Christian university president to go after the pastor in that way. That anti-Moore tweet seems to have been a final straw for some people. I’ve been hearing from some readers at Liberty who tell me that they’re looking for a way out. They’re tired of putting up with this atmosphere, and worried about how Falwell’s antics are going to hurt their professional standing.

Last week, Brian Melton, a former Liberty U. history professor, wrote an essay alleging that the LU administration is abusive and corrupt. It has to do not with politics, not really, but with the way the administration treats faculty. Melton writes:

In the final tally, I most likely could have made ends meet on the new salary they were offering, but money wasn’t the central problem. The most important issue for me was character. I had to be able to rely on Liberty University to treat me and others fairly and honestly if I were to bank my family’s welfare on working for them. My own personal narrative aside, I knew of many other people treated worse than I was–a whole list of persons I liked and respected. If the last few years had taught me anything, it was that while there are still many excellent people to be found there, Liberty University as a whole was as shifty, dishonorable, unprincipled, and hypocritical a work environment as could be offered. I could not trust my family to them, and I increasingly found it hard to have my reputation associated with an organization that had proved itself so often without honor. (Yes, I’m old fashioned that way.)

More:

I arrived at LU in the Fall of 2003 to find an earnest, if humanly fallible university making its very best effort to transform itself into the Notre Dame of Evangelicalism. I left a financially successful behemoth where real ministry and Christian charity is carried out by earnest believers in spite of the effort and example of its upper administration to the contrary. Increasingly, LU is becoming more the Harvard of Evangelicalism than the Notre Dame (academic standards definitely not withstanding). It is a university where the original mission has been sacrificed in favor of a political agenda and a secular system of situational morality, Liberty falling to the right wing in counterpoint to Harvard’s left. Though the campus may be bigger and more beautiful than ever before, sadly, thanks to the trajectory of its current administration, its reflection of Christ is not.

This LU graduate, now a Harvard Law student, popped a gasket last month when Falwell Jr. awarded an honorary degree to conservative activist Charlie Kirk:

Look, any conservative Christian with a lick of sense has to know that in many American professions, being an out conservative Christian makes life tough. But people like Falwell Jr. make it so much harder than it needs to be, by being so nasty, obnoxious and … morally mediocre. When the first thing that comes to mind when people hear the words “Liberty University” is its trash-talking president — well, let’s just say that’s a severe reputational liability. If people like us (conservative Christians) are going to be hated, let us be hated for doing good and standing for what’s right, not for tawdry garbage like the things Falwell Jr. says and does.

Maybe things look different inside the Evangelical world, but I’m telling you, outside it, the only thing most people know about Liberty University is that it’s led by a hotheaded Trump acolyte. It’s striking how little responsibility Falwell seems to feel towards the faculty, students, and alumni of Liberty University. He’s wrecking their professional lives, and trashing the school’s reputation — and for what? Where is the Board of Trustees on this? Are they so intimidated by Falwell Jr., or so indifferent to the damage he’s causing to the university, that they’re just going to sit back and let it happen? In which case, what kind of stewards are they?

Jerry Falwell Jr. is not owning the libs here; he’s tearing down the university his father built. And for what? To get likes and retweets on Twitter, and a self-aggrandizing attaboy from Donald Trump? He’s 57 years old, for heaven’s sake! The people of Liberty University deserve much better.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. I have an Evangelical relative who is about to start her senior year of high school. Liberty is her dream school. She’s planning to apply in the fall. If she gets in, she will have to borrow money to pay for her entire education there. Four years at Liberty as an undergraduate — tuition, room, and board — would cost about $100,000. That would be a massive investment. I can’t see the sense in taking on that kind of debt for any undergraduate degree, anywhere, but especially not for one from a college whose unstable, bomb-throwing president is liable to keep saying things that damage the university’s reputation (and therefore devalue a Liberty degree). A university should be known for the quality of its teaching, its scholarship, and its graduates — not for the outrageousness of its president’s tweets, or semi-nude photos of his wife turning up in the hands of a Miami Herald reporter in connection with a suspicious investment in a cabana boy’s business.

Other conservative Christian colleges don’t have this problem. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it seems to me that Falwell Jr. led Liberty University for nearly a decade (he took over in 2007) without much scandal or controversy. Something happened around 2016. I wonder what?

Honored to introduce @realDonaldTrump at religious leader summit in NYC today! He did incredible job! @beckifalwell pic.twitter.com/e2eBSbQwb0

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) June 21, 2016

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UPDATE: Oh man, the Babylon Bee is all over that guy:

Upon hearing about the immigration crisis, Jerry Falwell, Jr. was touched. He “just had to get down there right away,” according to those close to the ostensibly Christian leader of a Christian university. Falwell’s mission was to survey the problem, see what the needs of the immigrants were, and then “kick around some Mexican kids just for fun.”

More:

“I’ll show you to come to God’s country!” Falwell yelled at one frightened immigrant child. “You’ve probably never even done payroll, ya little loser. Get over here and I’ll give you what you need: a swift kick in the pants, just like Jesus told us to do to strangers.”

“That’ll teach you to be an employee and not create any real businesses, ya little leech!” he yelled as the kid scrambled away.

Read it all. 

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The Wild West Of Male Sexual Desire

For years I have received compliments from readers on both the Left and the Right who love this blog’s comments section. David Brooks once told me that this blog’s commenters are the best on the Internet. Partly this is because I edit the comments to keep the trolls and the bomb-throwers off, but mostly it’s because this blog attracts really smart commenters. I don’t always agree with what y’all say, but I like for this blog and its comments section to serve as a catalyst for discussion and debate.

One of my favorite commenters is a man who writes as Matt in VA. I know his real name, where he lives, where he works, and so forth. He is an out gay man who is in a same-sex marriage, and is raising at least one child, perhaps more, with his partner. He is also a strong critic, from the Right, of establishment conservatism. Do I think he goes too far sometimes? Yes, I do. But I almost always learn from Matt. A national TV journalist once wrote me to ask Matt for an interview. I passed the request on to Matt, but Matt would risk his job if his real name and location were known.

I would rather him be here offering challenging commentary.

With that in mind, here’s something Matt posted the other day as a comment to my “Stonewall’s ‘Gift'” post:

Those of you who are saying this can’t go on, there will be a backlash, etc. etc.

It’s worth thinking about what happened just a few decades ago. The first open (more or less) gay communities, that formed and indeed visibly exploded after the Stonewall riots, during the seventies, created a sexual culture that led directly to the suffering and death of thousands. And it took many non-gay people along with it (think of the hemophiliacs.)

Why didn’t *that* lead to a huge backlash and a recognition on the part of heterosexuals that homosexuality needed to be stigmatized and the newly formed gay male enclaves that arose after gay liberation needed to be driven back underground?

Here we saw gay liberation lead directly to mass suffering and death! One would think this would be tailor-made to create the backlash that re-orients the culture back towards the traditional understanding of homosexuality as something shameful and unlawful.

And yet what actually happened? Gay rights grew more powerful, not less; the AIDS crisis resulted in stories that showed gay men as suffering victims who cared for and loved each other as they died in terribly tearjerking ways. Longtime Companion, Philadelphia, etc.

When I hear conservatives talk about how the Left will Go Too Far and there will be a backlash, I hear the same old Ideas Have Consequences (so my side will win, inevitably, of course it will, without me actually doing a thing) passive impotent mentality. The LGBTQ++ movement will go much further than we know, because it has no opposition, because none of the conservatives will apparently ever actually do anything to stop or oppose it.

Massive evils — for example, slavery — can go on for CENTURIES if nobody puts a stop to them. But American conservatives of the postwar era might as well not even exist, in terms of the direction of our culture. Child drag queens and toddler transitioning — you haven’t seen anything yet. This is all just getting started. This stuff is tame compared to some things that are out there, that I know about, that I have even seen with my own eyes.

In a note to that comment, I asked Matt to elaborate on what he mean by that last paragraph. He responded this morning with this:

Like what? I’ll give the same answer I’ve given before, I think: what Cormac McCarthy is writing about in Blood Meridian. When I read that book, I didn’t experience it as “here is the truth about how our nation came to be,” or “here is a depiction of the Bad Old Days before modernity,” or “this lies beneath the thin veneer of our civilization and we might one day find ourselves once again living this kind of life and dying this kind of death, if we’re not careful.” I experienced it as “this kind of thing is real, and is really happening, *right now*, but we look away, because it is intolerable to look at it.”

Gay male sexual culture contains within it a kind of Wild West, but not the kind you see in John Wayne Westerns. It is the kind of Wild West that Cormac McCarthy writes about.

To come out of the closet is to enter a social-cultural space in which the loudest and most committed and most aggressive voices are the ones constantly pushing the message that authentic/real/superior/just and true and equal homosexuality is about having casual unprotected anal sex + whatever variations or add-ons make your dick hard — and that this is the way to live your entire, decades-long (if you’re lucky, I suppose) adult life. This has always been true at least since Stonewall/1969; it is unquestionably well documented that the most vocal and committed gay men fought the hardest to keep the bathhouses open and attacked anybody who questioned promiscuous and dangerous sexual cultures even when HIV was a death sentence. If one is not into certain extremely dangerous sexual practices, fine, but you had better NOT try to “sex-shame” or be “sex-negative” or be “judgmental.” You had better NOT contest or criticize in any way the very loud voices whose agenda is “sex-positivity” and “de-stigmatizing”. These are the things to be normalized and centered and lionized; these are the things this culture is to be oriented around.

I am not trying to say or claim that all or most gay men are peddlers of this suicidal and murderous sexual “ethic” — I am only saying that the most vocal and most committed and most will-to-power gays are. One of the drums I bang on constantly is that it doesn’t really matter so much what a “majority” believes or values deep in their hearts — the public square is shaped by those who are most *committed* to seeing their vision of society realized and made hegemonic. And of course the gay men with the most poisonous and toxic sexual priorities are the most committed and vocal — these are people who value their sexual practices and choices more, much more, than they value their own lives or the lives of their sexual partners.

If you read the well-documented accounts of Gaetan Dugas in And the Band Played On, or the stories about Foucault — this type of gay man may not be the majority, but it is not an exceedingly uncommon type, and it is the type that is *committed* to seeing its vision of what homosexuality means or should look like realized and affirmed (think of Foucault’s influence.) If others say it is false to declare these kinds of people murderers, that we are talking about consensual choices, then I would say at best they are the equivalent of heroin or fentanyl dealers, and gay male sexual communities are the equivalents of urban communities where hard-drug dealers and their “values” are aggressively and relentlessly normalized. These are failed communities.

If one reads publications or websites that are specifically aimed at a gay male audience — every fifth article or story is about making the message crystal-clear that casual unprotected anal sex of any amount is not to be criticized or stigmatized or counter-signalled in any way, that people with HIV are *better* than people who don’t have it (because they are strong survivors, or noble victims of “homophobia,” etc.), that not using condoms makes a person more honest and more authentic and more open to experiences and more open-minded and more truly liberated and free, etc. I do not think it is unfair or an exaggeration to say that gay men from the moment they start to come out are mentally and culturally *groomed* to accept at least as a legitimate option (and preferably as an awesome and superior approach to sex) this mentality which is *designed* to enable those with the cruelest and most evil sexual impulses and desires. It is not unlike the pedophile’s approach, the desensitization and boundary-pushing and normalizing of what should not be normalized, the deliberate fostering of rot inside of other human beings.

Again, I think of the passages in And the Band Played On (Randy Shilts was not afraid to tell the truth about gay men, and I often think that nobody like him and Andrew Holleran and pre-AIDS dementia Larry Kramer can exist anymore because gay men have become more politically banal and more propagandistic liars as we have become more bourgeois) about Gaetan Dugas: the way, when it is pointed out to him that he has AIDS, people are dying, and his lifestyle of flying from city to city to city to have as much unprotected anal sex as possible is surely going to kill more people — the way he says, just flatly, just emptily, that he is not going to stop f***ing, period, that somebody gave the disease to him so he doesn’t care who he gives it to — one feels, reading these passages, that a person like this is already dead. It is a culture of death, and it doesn’t matter if that hurts my feelings as a gay man or causes cognitive dissonance or affirms people who would put me back in the closet or in prison if they could. It is the truth whether I like it or not.

Two things are simultaneously true: I am not talking about all nor even most gay men, here; but at the same time, I am talking about many of the most committed and loud and determined gay men, the ones who put great effort into normalizing and promoting *their* priorities and making the community into something that satisfies *their* desires as much as possible. [Emphases mine — RD]

The constant refrain one hears from well-meaning liberals when this kind of thing is brought up is, “These are outliers, these are extremes, most people know that their gay brother or son or cousin or friend is a normal person.” But two other things are also simultaneously true: people are both nature *and* nurture — or, in this case, “nurture” is a horrible name for something that would be much better termed as “environment.” The debate over nature and nurture continues endlessly and will never be resolved because both play enormous roles in who people are, probably somewhere close to 50/50.

There is such a thing as “the homosexual” — people who just are that way and there’s nothing that can be done about it. I don’t think “nurture” or the environment or something happening made me gay, for example. But at the very same time, it is also true that sexuality and sexual desire is shaped and formed and pushed and pulled by the environment and by influences, that people are not, in fact, just born with X or Y sexual template, that it develops and changes and is formed over time.

We can see this very clearly with internet porn — it *does* change people’s sexuality, it desensitizes, it bombards and overwhelms, it has the sort of paradoxical effect of making many men effectively impotent in the real world, with a real partner, and it develops fetishes and extreme sexual tastes by stoking and nurturing hungers and paraphilias and by developing the need for more, more, more, more graphic, more lurid, more debased, etc. So with gay male communities — when the dominant voices in the environment are the most degraded and debased, it changes and shapes large numbers of people, it can affect nearly everybody to at least some degree.

The fact that one has a desire is no guide at all in answering the question of whether that desire should be indulged or not. And at least with male sexuality, desire is perfectly capable of being evil, even purely evil–both starting out that way, and becoming that way. Something that I have always thought — though this may be unfair and may be a gay man’s limited and distorted understanding of the other sex — but I have always thought that the feminist idea that “Rape is not a crime of passion or lust but a crime of power” is truly a woman’s idea and says something about *women* more than anything else. Because I do not understand the idea that passion and lust cannot themselves be about power and violence. This feminist claim assumes the (to me) obviously false idea that sexual desire itself cannot be about power and control and violence. Here’s a link to a list of “rape myths” that gives a great example of how wrong and stupid this idea of rape is: https://socialsciences.exet…

To me, this document is a completely ideological and false accounting of what sexuality is/can be, motivated by political reasons, and in terms of gay male sexuality, it is completely useless and untrue. There is no line or divide between lust/passion/desire and power/violence/rape; there is no separating these things out from one another.

Male sexual desire and lust is such that to say “only within consenting adults” is to put up no guardrail whatsoever. Consenting adults are capable of “consenting” in the heat of the moment, or at certain points over a lifetime of degraded and relentless mental and cultural grooming, to raping and being raped, to risking death to oneself or one’s sexual partners, to deliberately infecting others and/or deliberately, even fetishistically, exposing oneself to infection with anything and everything; to mutilating one’s body or somebody else’s body — to anything. To foster and normalize and promote an adult lifetime of “uninhibited” promiscuous multipartner sex is effectively to throw “consent” out the window. It cannot be done. People are human beings, they are not superhuman or machines, and you *will* break down in spots, in places, over time, you *will* find that your will fails you, that the evil part of you (and we all have that within us that is evil, all of us, somewhere) overwhelms you in some places. It is just *false* that rape cannot be a crime of lust or passion. Lust or passion or desire can be ANYTHING. And among gay men, this can become horrifyingly clear, I believe precisely because gay male sexual culture is a kind of Wild West in which people are treated — and treat themselves — as bloodily and heedlessly and callously as the characters in a Cormac McCarthy novel are about murdering whole villages, dashing babies’ brains out, cutting men’s throats, and all the rest of it. I had something of the same feeling when reading “I, Claudius” by Graves, for that matter; this is not a different world, this Roman world in which morality is nothing and power is everything; this world exists, today, and you can see it if you look.

The comment-reply from Dukeboy01 here, I believe it. “You regular folks out there have no idea the level of deviance lurking below the surface.” [Dukeboy01 is a veteran police detective; I know his real name — RD]. It does not have to be the case that all or most or the majority of gay men are this way or act this way for it to be true that this stuff exists and is real and there *is* something about gay male sexual communities that I believe creates an environment in which numerous people are essentially culturally groomed to destroy themselves and others. And we do not, I mean gay men do not, police ourselves at all, not at all. It does not matter how much I might want this not to be true. It is true, and it is a very serious problem. (And of course it in fact hurts gay men most of all.)

The Salo Forum [an alt-right website — RD] take on gay male sexuality is more true and honest than the views of millions of well-meaning and genuinely kind liberals, and the traditional Christian understanding of the nature of desire is the truth whereas liberalism’s understanding, or at least consumerist liberalism’s understanding of it, is false. No matter how much I might want a society and a world that gives me, and has given me, the undreamed-of and almost unthinkable (from a historical perspective) privilege of marrying a man and raising a child and having my cake and eating it too, if that society and that privilege can only be realized in a world that does not face the truth about what desire and sexuality are capable of being and what kinds of cultural and moral toxic waste it may in fact be the nature of gay male sexual communities to produce, it will not work and it will fail. I do not say that this *must* be so, that it is already written, but I fear that it is so.

Are we living in a sexualized version of Cormac McCarthy’s dystopia, but are too politically correct to see it? Is Matt in VA wrong — or is he telling inconvenient truths?

Let the conversation begin. I remind you that I know Matt in VA’s real name, where he lives, and where he works. He is who he presents himself as here.

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Taylor Swift Punches Down

Have you seen the new Taylor Swift video? She takes a bold, courageous stance in favor of LGBT rights, and against the drooling mobs of orthographically challenged Red State bigots. Taylor and her cool LGBT friends have taken over a trailer park — get it! Ha ha!

More:

See, according to leading pop star Taylor Swift (estimated net worth: $320 million), redneck white people are not only anti-gay, but their religion is stupid, and they can’t spell. Oh, my ribs hurt from laughing, I tell you what.

But seriously: this is what you call “punching down.” There is no easier target in the world for a pop star worth $320 million than anti-gay working-class and rural white Christians. I imagine Taylor Swift thinks herself brave.

In today’s New York Post, David Harsanyi writes about Fall, a new sci-fi novel that

envisions a future United States split between the violent, gun-toting, uneducated, cross-burning religious fanatics of bullet-ridden “Ameristan” and the peaceful, educated, secular denizens of the nation’s Blue enclaves, where decorum and truth always prevail.

Harsanyi mentions a much-discussed new study, called “The Perception Gap,” that discusses the difference between what Americans believe, and what those unlike them think they believe. Interestingly, the segment of the US population that is most accurate at assessing the views of other Americans are the “politically disengaged” — those who don’t judge their neighbors through politically motivated reasoning. (Harsanyi notes that the study assumes that liberal positions are mainstream.)

Harsanyi points out that contrary to the view put forth by Stephenson in his novel (i.e., that educated liberals understand conservatives well), the study finds that the more educated progressives become, the less accurate is their understanding of conservatives. Harsanyi:

“This effect is so strong,” the study’s authors note, “that Democrats without a high-school ­diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree.”

This trend is less surprising when we learn that the more educated Democrats are, the less likely they are to be friendly with anyone who doesn’t share their worldview. Those with a postgraduate degree, in fact, are 50% more likely to say that “almost all” of their friends share their views than Americans with only a high school diploma.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with associating with people who see the world as they do — we have plenty of room in the United States, after all. The problem is that, despite their close-mindedness, these elites are the ones who become the technocrats who write our policies, the politicians who govern us, the teachers who claim to educate us and the activists who attempt to coerce us to adopt their values.

It is the educated elite, people clustered in centers and industries of power — not the populist voters scattered across the country — who are driving our polarization.

It isn’t merely about a disparity in perception, as the study notes, but a fundamental ignorance about the religious and philosophical viewpoints of social conservatives and working-class Americans. This condescension is palpable in the often-oblivious media coverage of Red America, which oscillates in tone from zoological study to outright mockery.

Read the whole thing. Especially you, filthy rich Miss Taylor Swift.

It is not unheard of in history for a self-isolated elite to fail to understand the polity in which they live, and to provoke a reaction that destroys them, or at least destroys their power structures. The historian Barbara Tuchman, in her pop history book The March Of Folly, said that these aspects recur in elites who don’t understand how vulnerable they are:

Obliviousness to the growing disaffection of those outside their bubble
Primacy of self-aggrandizement
The illusion that they are invulnerable

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting take on the class politics of the video. Excerpt:

So the Beautiful People are aggrieved, we gather, at the hate? But turn the sound off and what you’ll see is the people who have everything, all the beauty and all the fun, all the cake, all the colors even, and their total contempt for those who have nothing, not even teeth. Talk about ugly. It’s an amazing statement, particularly so because Taylor Swift’s teeth are so spectacularly perfect, beautiful.

I mean this reaction to poverty is not even mocking, or laughing. The have-nots hate the haves just for being themselves, glorious, glossy and rich; thus the haves needn’t, and won’t, even acknowledge that the have-nots exist, those gap-toothed ignorant peasants in their gross marabou-free clothes. They need to shut up, control themselves. Calm down.

 

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Right, They’re Degenerates, But For The Left

Detail from Guardian story. If I revealed the entire photo, it would probably not be safe for work (Guardian screengrab)

As you may have heard, the president of Brazil is a far-right figure, Jair Bolsonaro, who has strongly and repeatedly criticized homosexuals. In this piece — be careful clicking on it, because some of the images may be NSFW — The Guardian, the center-left British newspaper, writes sympathetically about a pornographic artist collective that is protesting Bolsonaro with “queer art.” Excerpts:

“Queer people have been afraid since the president was elected,” says Paulx Castello. “He has been demonising us from the start – but this was different. Here we were personally under attack.” The artist, who has a mohican, is now instantly recognisable to most Brazilians. In March, he featured in a sexually explicit video that was tweeted by Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right president. The 40-second clip, filmed at a gay street party during the São Paulo carnival, showed Castello standing on a taxi shelter, exposing his backside and being urinated on.

“I don’t feel comfortable showing it,” Bolsonaro told his 3.5 million followers, “but we have to expose the truth so the population are aware of their priorities. This is what Brazilian carnival street parties have turned into.” The next day, the far-right leader stayed on the offensive, tweeting: “What is a golden shower?”

In their first interview since Bolsonaro’s attack, Castello and Jeffe, the other man in the video, say their actions – which were captured on a mobile phone and posted to Twitter by an anonymous user – were actually part of a three-hour guerrilla performance by a six-person art collective. They take the name Ediy, which means “arse” in Pajubá, Brazilian Portuguese gay slang.

“We want to perform in public places,” Jeffe says. “Places where this sort of thing is not expected. We refer to it as ‘hacking the imagination’. But there is a context to the performance that the president’s video removed.” Walking through the crowds, they would intermittently stop to interact with each other, their gestures alternating between sensual dance and sexual acts. In the video, Castello twerks for the crowd with his finger in his anus. Urination features heavily in the rest of the work.

Urination features heavily in the rest of the work. Wow, just like with Nureyev! More:

Yet, despite the dangers, the artists have returned to performance. Last month, the group – some naked, some dressed as animals or in PVC – performed at Esponja, an arts space in central São Paulo before an audience of 70 people. A woman battered a naked man with a dildo strapped to her knee. Two other members of the collective tore off a man’s clothes with their teeth. Much of the event was broadcast live via a pornography website.

Their work is certainly provocative but it is also steeped in theory: they cite Judith Butler’s gender studies and the Spanish philosopher Paul B Preciado’s writing on identity as inspiration. On sale were DIY publications with such titles as The Cis Gender Does Not Exist and Hate Towards Straights.

Well, that’s a relief. They’re not just common street perverts. They’ve got theory behind them.

Read the whole thing. 

Remind me again why Bolsonaro is so wrong? Look, I’m prepared to believe that he’s a dangerous demagogue, but everything about this Guardian story makes me sympathetic to Bolsonaro, not these so-called artists.

These clowns remind me of the crackpot artist collective Voina, who protested against Putin protege Dmitri Medvedev in 2008 by having ritual group sex in a Moscow museum. They really think this kind of thing hurts the right-wing politicians they target. I can’t comprehend why. I honestly can’t.

Here’s the thing: the Guardian wants you to read its piece and think well of these brave, radical, sex-positive artists speaking out against the right-wing authoritarian president of Brazil. But if you read the story and think ill of them, well, then you are guilty of taking a fringe group of wack jobs and elevating them beyond what they observe, so you can justify your homophobia. Or something.

In short, this is how it works: these loons are only a big deal if you sympathize with them politically. If you don’t, then they are nobodies, and you are a bad person for thinking otherwise (even though they’ve been ballyhooed in one of the biggest and most important newspapers in Britain, the voice of the UK’s cultural establishment).

Similarly, the Brazilian pornsters are degenerates, but for the left (YouTube screengrab)

I think this is a version of progressive doublethink described here by George Packer, in his Atlantic essay on a new book about Orwell:

We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote. In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. It’s not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they don’t say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.

 

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