Rod Dreher's Blog, page 232

Spotting Doublethink In Ourselves

George Packer has a good review essay of a new book about the George Orwell novel 1984. Excerpt:

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.

Read the whole thing. 

He’s right about that. Packer is a liberal writing to liberals, but he’s telling a universal truth. In my interview last week with Sir Roger Scruton, who spoke to me for my new book project, I brought up Hannah Arendt’s line about the “terrifying negative solidarity” in pre-Nazi, pre-Communist Europe. It was the widespread belief that all the established parties were terrible and untrustworthy. Arendt goes on to say that in Europe between the wars, the destruction in Europe of a belief in hierarchy, in traditional values, and in ways of knowing, made it much easier for the masses to accept lies. People got to the point where they enjoyed the lies, because the lies hurt the people they wanted to see hurt.

From Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism:

I believe that this is true of many on both the Left and the Right today. We on the Right have become accustomed to Trump’s compulsive lies, and laugh them off as entertaining, or justified because he’s owning the libs. And, as Packer points out, progressives have a different way of making lies and half-truths acceptable to themselves, because these lies are ideologically satisfying. A lie you accept becomes a lie you forget.

Let me be clear: all of us are in grave danger because of this fact. If you read Arendt, you see that the pieces now are all falling into place for the coming of totalitarianism: the atomized and alienated masses, the discrediting of old political parties and institutions, widespread skepticism of traditional values and ways of seeing the world, and the pleasure people take in transgression.

With that background in mind, here’s what Roger Scruton told me last week:

The point is not simply that lies are being told, it’s that people are being conditioned to the point where they can’t make the distinction between truth and falsehood, so that the concept of truth is being marginalized. And that of course is something we’ve seen in social media, and President Trump is famously not innocent in this matter with all his fake news stuff. Truth is absolutely fundamental to what is wanted by those who rebelled against the system and that’s what Havel called the positive rebellion, one of living in truth. And he was consciously invoking Jan Hus, the slogan that “Truth will prevail,” pravda vitězi, and that is a very important concept for the Czechs all down the ages.

I think one can see that the search for truth is the fundamental point at which human beings finally resist totalitarianism. You can take away everything else but you can’t take away this: we will always know the difference within ourselves between the true and the false even though we can’t say it. Orwell felt that that wasn’t so, that if you were sent to Room 201 you’ll come out unable to make the distinction between truth and falsehood, but I think that this is absolutely fundamental to [Czech dissident Vaclav] Benda’s posture and [Czech dissident Vaclav] Havel’s in those days, that this is the one thing they can’t take away. They can obscure it and make it look as though something is true when it’s not true, but to take away the very distinction between the true and the false is not possible.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” said Orwell. That is the duty that is upon all of us. Every single one of us, whether we are on the Left or the Right. It’s hard. But once we stop looking for truth, and once we agree, if only within our own hearts, to live within a lie because it is more comforting that living in truth (as Solzhenitsyn and Havel both said that we must do), then we open ourselves up to totalitarianism.

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Izzy Folau’s Surprise Backers

Peter Singer — yes, that Peter Singer, the pro-gay, atheist philosopher — comes out in defense of Israel Folau. Excerpts:

If Rugby Australia had existed in the first century of the Christian era, and Paul had had enough talent to be a contracted player, Rugby Australia would presumably have ripped up his contract once his letter to the Corinthians became public. That makes it quite bizarre that Castle should have justified Folau’s dismissal by saying, “People need to feel safe and welcomed in our game regardless of their gender, race, background, religion, or sexuality.” Did she mean that you can feel welcomed in rugby, regardless of your religious beliefs, as long as you don’t express them in public? That looks a lot like telling homosexuals that they can do what they want in the privacy of their bedroom, but they must not show their affection in public because some people might find it offensive.

As this example shows – and as John Stuart Mill argued in his classic On Liberty – once we allow, as a ground for restricting someone’s freedom of speech or action, the claim that someone else has been offended by it, freedom is in grave danger of disappearing entirely. After all, it is very difficult to say anything significant to which no one could possibly take offense. Mill had in mind restrictions imposed by the state, but when employers dismiss employees who make controversial utterances, that is also a threat to freedom of expression – especially when the employer has a monopoly on the employment of workers with special skills, as Rugby Australia does.

More:

Rugby Australia would have a stronger basis for its decision if Folau’s post had expressed hatred toward homosexuals and could have been interpreted as an incitement to violence against them. But the post no more expresses hatred toward homosexuals than cigarette warnings express hatred toward smokers.

If that analogy seems implausible, that’s because you do not take Folau’s beliefs seriously. Granted, for anyone outside that particular faith, it’s hard to take such beliefs seriously. But try putting yourself in the position of someone with Folau’s beliefs. You see people on a path toward a terrible fate – much worse than getting lung cancer, because death will not release them from their agony – and they are blind to what awaits them. Wouldn’t you want to warn them, and give them the chance to avoid that awful fate? I assume that is what Folau believes he is doing. He even tells homosexuals that Jesus loves them, and calls on them to repent so that they can avoid burning in hell for eternity. That doesn’t sound like hate speech.

Read it all. 

Holly Lawford-Smith is a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne, and a radical feminist. An earlier Twitter account of hers was shut down by Twitter, and her current one is on some kind of Twitter caution, because she is critical of some aspects of transgender theory. This counts as “transphobia” in the eyes of the Woke Police. Check out her essay from a couple of weeks back, stating her “Radical Feminist Wish List”; traditional Christians like me would support a lot of it.

So, here’s what this radical lesbian feminist academic is now doing:

It turns out that Dr. Lawford-Smith, like Dr. Singer, is a real liberal. Bless them both.

I wrote yesterday about how Go Fund Me had booted Israel Folau because his attempt to raise money to pay for his legal case against Rugby Australia for destroying his career ran afoul of its wokeness. I mentioned also that there’s a move among the Woke to go after Folau’s wife, who is also a professional athlete, because she has publicly expressed support for her husband. Get this: in just 24 hours, the Australian Christian Lobby has raised $1.5 million for Folau’s legal defense — far more than he had raised on Go Fund Me! Take a look:

Donate here if you like.

It is thrilling that so many ordinary people are so fed up with the Woke Police that they are doing what they can to fight back — including donating to Folau. This is the same kind of thing that last month saw the conservative party in Australia returned to office in a shock election expected to be a Labour victory. Ordinary people get so sick of these bullies, and do not want to see them in power.

Fellow conservatives, let’s be thankful for allies like Peter Singer and Holly Lawford-Smith. And when we can support them, let’s not fail to do so, even though we strongly disagree with some of the things they believe in.

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Steve Dunleavy, RIP

They honest-to-God don’t make them like Steve Dunleavy anymore:

Steve Dunleavy, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking journalist who helped define The New York Post as a crime reporter, editor and premier columnist, died Monday at his home on Long Island. He was 81.

The cause was unknown.

“Steve Dunleavy was one of the greatest reporters of all time,” said Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Post.

“Whether competing with his own father in the famous Sydney, Australia, tabloid wars, or over the last 40 years in New York, Steve’s life story is littered with great scoops. He was much loved by both his colleagues and editors.”

“His passing is the end of a great era,” Murdoch added.

Over the course of his epic career, Dunleavy scored countless exclusives, including interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and confessed “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo. The rapist also posed in the nude for Dunleavy, who had smuggled a camera into prison for the story.

If they made Steve Dunleavy up, nobody would believe it. From a New Yorker profile of him from the year 2000, the essence of Dunleavy journalism:

The turning point came in 1977, when Piers Ackerman, another Australian recruit, learned that Elvis Presley’s former bodyguards might be willing to talk about his drug use in return for money. A fee of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was agreed upon, and Dunleavy flew out to California for a series of tell-all interviews. In just two months, he produced “Elvis: What Happened?,” a three-hundred-page book packed with salacious details about Presley’s private life. Serialization of the book in the Star began the very day before Presley was found dead at Graceland. “The circulation went from two million to three million in a week,” Ian Rae, a Fox News executive who was then editor of the Star, recalled. “We never looked back.’’ Dunleavy’s book became a best-seller, but he received only a flat fee of thirty thousand dollars, which he put toward the purchase of the house in Lido Beach. He wasn’t bitter. “Mate, I’ve never had a bad day in journalism in my life,” he said. “You win, you get drunk because you won. You lose, you get drunk because you lost.”

Another famous Dunleavy story — this one told to me shortly after I joined the Post in 1998:

On one occasion that has passed into tabloid legend, a group of reporters had gathered at Elaine’s, the media hangout on Second Avenue at Eighty-eighth Street. “It was midwinter, and there was snow everywhere,” George Gordon, a former correspondent for the London Daily Mail, recalled recently. “There was a young Australian journalist who had brought along his fiancée, an attractive Norwegian shipping heiress. She and Dunleavy got into a conversation. Eventually, somebody said, ‘Let’s go to a bar across the street,’ and we all went over. When we got there, everybody in the bar had flocked to this huge picture window. They were watching Dunleavy and the fiancée humping in the snow, arses going up and down. As we were watching, a snowplow came up the street and ran over Dunleavy’s foot. By this time, the entire bar was in uproarious laughter. Dunleavy limped in and rolled down his sock to reveal this big blackened limb. He was so loaded that it didn’t matter, but as the night wore on even he said there was something wrong. We called an ambulance, and he checked into a local hospital. He’d broken his foot.” Antics like this didn’t impress everybody. When somebody relayed the story of Dunleavy’s fracture to Pete Hamill, he replied, “I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

My favorite time in all my career were the four years I spent working for the New York Post. I’m not even kidding. Steve Dunleavy was part of that. The outrageous fun of it all! He was always immaculately turned out, and often pickled, but unfailingly courteous and matey. Whatever you thought of his columns, you had to work to dislike him personally. He really liked people. But he was a drunk, for sure. One morning I was walking through the office, near his desk, and I saw a group of paramedics working on him. I freaked out, but was calmed down by a colleague. “It happens,” he told me, shrugging.

Turns out that Dunleavy would sometimes come sleep off a bender in the office, and would be discovered unconscious under his desk. Paramedics would be called. He would be revived. Life would go on. The New Yorker piece talks about that too.

It was terribly sad, no question … but it was also part of the legend of Steve Dunleavy.

Here’s a story somebody at the Post told me. During the Son of Sam days, back in ’77, Dunleavy got a tip that one of the killer’s victims had been taken to a particular hospital. He dashed over, and found that he was the first journalist on the scene. He put on a doctor’s white coat, and told the police guarding that hall not to let any reporters through, under any circumstances. Thus did Steve Dunleavy get an exclusive with the family, while the competition cooled its heels in the waiting room.

Like Keith Richards, he lived on booze and cigarettes, and you didn’t think anything could kill him. Sadly, that wasn’t true. What a guy. The world is now a much less interesting place.

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Apostate Churches

It’s a common thing on the Right to point to loony-leftism in churches and go, “Ha-ha, look at the crazy people!” But this calls up a more serious response, because it’s not just some fringe parish, but an Anglican cathedral:

Rev. Bingo Allison? That would be the same ordained Anglican deacon who says here that he is a married father of three who aspires to ordination, and who recently celebrated this on his Tumblr, and who said there that Christian theology is “a fundmentally queer enterprise because it also challenges and deconstructs”:

How is a Christian church that gives disturbed people like this a platform of honor to spread their destructive theories not apostate? Rev. Bingo believes in teaching little children that there is no such thing as boys and girls — and Rev. Bingo believes that this is Christian. Does the clergy at the Newcastle Cathedral? Do they even believe in Christianity?

Then again, the Church of England is now drafting a liturgy to celebrate gender transition. What if a vicar refuses to participate in that sham? Will he be kicked out? Will he be considered apostate by the C of E, or just heretical?

Here is a video from the Newcastle Cathedral’s website introducing the Cathedral to the public. It’s a well done three-minute production, one that highlights the aesthetic beauty of the place, and invites people to come be part of the Cathedral community. Watch the entire thing. You know which two words you will not hear in it? “God” and “Jesus”:

Can you find the Christian God there? I’m not asking in a snarky or mean-spirited way. From evidence, it seems that the Newcastle Cathedral is a temple of a different religion. There are lots of Christian services there, and I am sincerely confident that they are beautiful (Anglican worship usually is). But to what extent is the God worshipped there related to the God of Christian Scripture and Christian Tradition?

In the Church of England, the “electoral roll” is a list of regular worshipers in a diocese over the age of 16. They have the right to vote in Church of England elections. The roll is renewed every six years; if you’re on it, and the six-year period comes around, you have to re-apply, or you’re dropped. Therefore, it’s a good measure of who is actually active in the Church. According to the Living Church, an Anglican magazine, the electoral roll in the Diocese of Newcastle dropped by about 25 percent from 2000 to 2016 (from 18,600 to 13,800).

We all know that Britain is thoroughly post-Christian now. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t Christians in Britain, but it means that the nation is no longer defined by its Christian commitment, however nominal. To be clear, some of the most committed and inspiring Christians I know are Anglicans. In fact, on my recent trip to England, it seems that the most vibrant Christians I met are somehow connected to the network of Holy Trinity Brompton, which does amazing evangelical work. My question is, at what point can one — must one — conclude that a church is apostate? What does that mean, given that HTB and the Newcastle cathedral are part of the same church, formally? What does it mean, for example, to say that you are an Anglican, but you will not attend services in the Newcastle cathedral because you regard it as apostate? Does that make sense?

Note well, I’m asking this in total sincerity. I’m trying to figure this out.

Consider what’s happening in the Catholic Church. The Vatican recently released its “working document” for the upcoming October synod of the bishops of the Amazon region. Steve Skojec at the traditionalist Catholic blog One Peter Five sounds the alarm:

But are our shepherds focused on reform? No! Perish the thought. They’re all in on a celibacy-destroying, religiously indifferent, pagan-promoting Amazon synod document that says totally un-Catholic things like “Love lived in any religion pleases God” (#39). And how about this gem, from #87*?

Indigenous rituals and ceremonies are essential for integral health since they integrate the different cycles of human life and nature. They create harmony and balance between human beings and the cosmos. They protect life against the evils that can be caused by both human beings and other living beings. They help to cure diseases that harm the environment, human life and other living beings.

So basically, “pagan magic is totally great you guys.”

What in the actual hell is wrong with these people? The martyrs who ministered to indigenous pagan populations around the world and died horrible deaths trying to save them from damnation must be ready to rise up from their graves.

The bottom line is this: we’re way, way, way past the point in time where we can take anyone seriously who is still trying to offer an orthodox reading on what’s happening. These are not men who are merely misguided; they are destroyers, who have come in hatred of our religion to remake it according to their own designs.

And though we can see this plainly, our hands are mostly tied. The Church ain’t a democracy. We laity can agitate, we can complain, we can hold accountable, and we can pray and do penance, but we cannot do a damned thing about all the damned things that are happening in our Holy Mother Church.

Read Skojec’s entire piece. 

Skojec’s anger is completely understandable. This official Vatican document endorses religious syncretism. This is a very, very big deal.

Almost 20 years ago, at a social event, I met an Evangelical who had been a missionary in rural Guatemala. He told me that when he arrived in the country, he decided to visit the local Catholic parish to get a feel for the area. That parish was administered by the Jesuits. He was shocked to walk into the worship service and to observe the priest in the front, saying mass, while in the back, a witch doctor was conducting some sort of pagan ritual. It turned out that the shaman did so with permission of the pastor, who was all about inculturation. The missionary told me that he understood at once why so many peasants were flocking to Evangelical churches.

Syncretism is not a joke. These shamans invoke actual malign spirits. Last year, I was talking with a Catholic priest who works in a heavily Hispanic region of the US. He told me that he has to spend a surprising amount of time going into the houses of his Hispanic flock, blessing the houses to rid them of poltergeist activity. He warns the people to stop dabbling in syncretistic practices, to stay out of the botánica, because they are calling forth malign spiritual powers that they don’t understand. They never listen, he said; the cycle is never-ending. This is a big part of Latin American and Caribbean Catholic culture.

The Catholic Church should be fighting it. Instead, the bishops of the Amazon region, in concert with the Vatican, are poised to embrace it.

What would it mean to call those churches “apostate”? If I were Catholic, you can bet that I would never, ever attend a parish where pagan rituals were permitted, or where the priest embraced and endorsed them, at all. I would consider that parish, and that pastor, to be apostate. Not just heretical, but apostate — as having left the Christian faith.

But an apostate pastor, or parish, is not the same thing as an apostate Church. Until now, it was easy to call out such a pastor or parish as having departed in a significant way, perhaps even to the point of apostasy, from Catholic truth. After Francis, though? If the Amazon synod affirms syncretism, would it be heretical, or apostate? And how far would the apostasy go? Where would the lines of demarcation be? Would it conceivably force a formal schism within Catholicism?

Again, I’m asking because I don’t know the answer. The times we’re in, though, require us to think hard about it. I’m eager to hear more from you readers, of all churches, who know more about ecclesiology and theology than I do.

UPDATE: A reader points to a liberal Presbyterian church in Cincinnati whose janitor dressed up like a woman and did Drag Queen Story Hour for children in a worship service the other day. Moral insanity. Naturally the local paper reported on it; I’m amazed, though, that they actually included a contrary view in the story.

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Standing In A Prague Sunbeam

As regular readers know, I’m working on a book about what lessons we can learn from the experiences of those who lived under Eastern bloc communism, to help us identify and resist the soft totalitarianism quickly emerging here today. In my interviews so far, the most striking thing I’ve learned is the power of fellowship and small-group solidarity. Recently I read Sir Roger Scruton’s 2014 novel Notes From Underground, a love story set in Prague, in the final decade of Czech Communism. The narrator is Jan Reichl, a young man condemned to a marginal life because his parents had offended the regime, and Betka, the woman who draws him out of the shadows and into the world of dissidents. Scruton based the story on his extensive experience working with the Czech resistance.

In these passages, Jan describes the experience of going to a seminar held by Rudolf, a dissident professor, in his apartment. Intellectuals like Vaclav Benda held these events often, as a way of building community and keeping memory alive under repression (I wrote about this in The Benedict Option). Scruton writes in the novel:

He told me that I could join his seminar, and that they were reading the Two Studies of Masaryk by Patočka. It was one of the books that Mother had worked on, and which had been taken away from beneath her bed. I asked him how I could obtain a copy. He said it wasn’t necessary, that the relevant pages would be read aloud. And he added that there would be special seminars from time to time, with visitors from the West, who would inform us of the latest scholarship, and help us to remember.

“To remember what?” I asked.

He looked at me long and hard. “To remember what we are.”

More:

I was made to understand that anybody who was anybody in the life of the mind had been driven from the system, and that the “parallel polis” to which Rudolf belonged was the true place of refuge, the temple where ancestral gods kept vigil over our collective soul. Moreover, he implied, just by being washed up in this way on the shore of dissidence, deprived of all weapons and without the instruments of worldly success, you showed your superior title to the life of the mind. He swept the air as he spoke, including books, furniture, a few gloomy pictures, and the enigmatic Betka in his gesture, and emphasizing the impassable gap between the hope contained in this cluttered interior and the unending nothingness outside.

In the new kind of night, Rudolf read, into which the soldier goes without purpose, lies the reality of sacrifice, and in sacrifice an awareness of freedom. My own reality as a soul, whose nature is to care, is brought home to me; in the moment of sacrifice comes an intimation of the meaning that daylight had bleached away. In that moment I break out of the prison of the everyday, and there, in life at the apex, I experience the only form of polis which we may now attain, the “solidarity of the shattered.”

More:

He went on to compare us to those people in the ancient world whose city has been destroyed and who have been led away into slavery. No motive remains that will keep us to the path of honor and justice. We steal from each other, even what we love. We become scavengers. And when one of us shows that it need not be so, that he, for one, is prepared to make a sacrifice, there is suddenly joy and light and for a brief moment we remember what we were. And then we go back to captivity, for we have nothing else.

They were simple thoughts. But Rudolf linked them to such a wealth of philosophy and culture that I found myself shaking with desire for the path of truth and sacrifice that he described. He held my attention as the hand of eternity holds the apple of time, and I watched as the thin dust of humanity was blown across that apple and then polished away. My underground life, I saw, had been another form of selfishness and fragmentation. I had been avoiding even the fear that I should have been feeling, the fear that I saw all around me and which, had I opened my heart to it, would have saved my mother from her fate.

And this, about what it meant to Jan to be in the room with others who shared his beliefs:

Never since Dad’s death had there been guests in our apartment. I associated hospitality with the gatherings of apparatchiks, with their expensive leather coats and plump mistresses wrapped in fur. Hospitality belonged to the unapproachable world of them, where it signified not kindness or compassion but the insolence of privilege.

Yet, here before me was the vivid disproof of that: powerless people offering and receiving gifts. A new dimension of being was outlined before me in a dramatic tableau that invited me to change my life. Someone was talking next to me of a poem that ended with just those words — musíš změnit svůj život, you must change your life. The poem was by Rilke, whose Duino Elegies had found their way into Dad’s trunk, and the discussion of it spread like laughter through the gathering. I smiled at Rudolf, and then at Betka. I did not mind that the bread was stale or the cheese hard and acrid, with the texture of a toenail. That was the way we lived. I was standing in a sunbeam, and had lost all consciousness of the surrounding storm.

Discovering the integrating and inspiring power of community — that’s going to be one of the lessons I explore in the new book. What Scruton writes about here as fiction parallels what I’m learning from talking to those who lived it.

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Stonewall’s ‘Gift’

Sorry for another LGBT rights post today, but someone just sent this very important Washington Post essay to me, and hey, I’ve got to do my part for Pride Month.

Let’s back up a bit, all the way back to 2004 and thereabouts. Back then, people who couldn’t understand why people like me opposed same-sex marriage were in the habit of asking, “What does my gay neighbors’ marriage have to do with me?” People like me would patiently explain the legal consequences of gay marriage across any number of areas, and also explain the lines that would have to be crossed morally, philosophically, and culturally to normalize same-sex marriage.

Nobody cared. They would reply with, “Nobody has explained what my neighbors’ gay marriage has to do with me.” It was the kind of thing that had us banging our heads against the wall, because ordinary people just did not want to hear anything that contradicted what they wanted to believe. And certainly the news media did not want to hear anything that complicated their preferred narrative.

So here we are in 2019, five years after Obergefell. Gay marriage rights are secure in law and in popular culture. In the piece, gay rights activist and author Nathaniel Frank says that an effect of the movement has been to destroy taboos on sexual expression. It begins like this:

This month’s 50th anniversary of Stonewall, the Greenwich Village uprising that launched the modern LGBT movement, was always going to be complicated. What may seem like a straightforward chance to celebrate progress actually masks a fault line that has divided our movement since its start: whether our goal is equality or liberation, a fight for the right to be treated like everyone else or the freedom to be authentically ourselves. Do we seek belonging in the world as it is (including the military, marriage and parenting) or the chance to transform the world, by throwing off repressive norms, into a place where all of us — queer and non-queer alike — can be more free?

More:

The LGBT movement, including the push for marriage equality, has also helped upend repressive attitudes about sex, establishing nonmarital sex — and sexual behavior once thought perverse — as largely uncontroversial. (Last year, for instance, Teen Vogue posted a guide to anal sex.) Inherent in queer desire is the belief that sexual pleasure is a good in itself and need not be justified by reproductive ends, a principle enshrined in law by gay rights court decisions affirming that sex and marriage are not instruments for reproduction but expressions of individual liberty and dignity. Just as its loudest opponents feared, granting same-sex couples access to marriage has further aligned the hoary institution with sexual choice, helping sever the link between sex and diapers — at just the moment when abortion rights face their greatest test in a generation.

Stonewall’s legacy isn’t just about making queer people look more like everyone else. It’s also, perhaps more mutinously, about making everyone else look a bit more queer. The movement’s enduring celebration of difference, personal authenticity and norm-questioning has allowed straight people to recognize the closet that confines them, too — the outdated pressure to perform prescribed gender roles, inhibit certain emotions, conceal their true selves in a thousand ways — and to envision a way to step outside its walls. This is what Joe Biden was referring to when, as vice president, he thanked LGBT advocates for “freeing the soul of the American people.” It’s what Barack Obama meant when, on the day the high court handed down its marriage ruling, he said, “When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.”

With marriage equality secured, the transgender and nonbinary movements found voice and visibility, crashing into inevitable backlash but also driving successful new challenges to norms and helping people transcend what some insisted were the narrow dictates of gender.

And:

This was Stonewall’s gift to the world: the freedom to be — and express — our true selves even when we don’t conform to the norm. Our queer foremothers recognized what our nation’s founders understood: that equality and liberty are not in competition but are mutually reinforcing. It’s true that our fractious movement did not eliminate the nuclear family, or achieve radical inclusion for all, or replace marriage with a better institution (or with nothing at all); and certainly, our gains in equal treatment are fragile. Yet those gains are real and substantial and worth celebrating — and are, in their own way, revolutionary.

Emphases mine. Read the whole thing.

Understand what he’s saying here: Frank laments that the LGBT rights movement has not eliminated the nuclear family and marriage. He is glad that it has brought about Teen Vogue articles teaching teenage girls how to receive penises into their rectums. He glories in the fact that the movement is alienating an increasing number of people from their bodies, and leading them to mutilate their breasts and genitals with hormones and surgeries. And he concedes that people like me were right to say back in the day that gay marriage was going to de-nature marriage as a child-centered institution.

Frank makes clear what some of us have known for a long time: that for the last 25 years, LGBTs have been the Leninist vanguard of the Sexual Revolution. To an old-school Cassandra like me — one of the Cassandras who was mocked in the 2000s as a paranoid — this entire column reads like an I told you so, and a vindication of the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”). Not that it does a bit of good now.

Still, it’s worth reflecting that if Maggie Gallagher had published a column making the same claims in, say, 2006, the column and its author would have been denounced for fear-mongering and bigotry.

As I’ve said in this space many times, the gay marriage campaign succeeded so thoroughly and so rapidly in large part because it built on what heterosexuals had already come to believe was true about sex and marriage. Gay marriage was inevitable, because straights had already queered sex and marriage via the Sexual Revolution. Yet gay marriage was a Rubicon for our society because it took those radical shifts past the breaking point, and locked them in to law and culture. All that followed was predictable, and it was in fact predicted, not because anybody had a crystal ball, but because it made logical sense.

Once again, read this line from Nathaniel Frank:

Inherent in queer desire is the belief that sexual pleasure is a good in itself and [sex and marriage are] expressions of individual liberty and dignity.

Desire untethered from anything but individual will is a universal solvent of social bonds.

It has never been more important to affirm — and to affirm with our lives — the truth that the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton learned back in the 1980s, from a Polish Catholic woman:

And she brought home to me, then and subsequently, what is perhaps the most important truth conveyed by religion, and one that Monsignor Gilbey, incidentally, had built onto the foundations of his life — the truth that sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between, and that nothing matters more than customs, ceremonies and rites with which we lift the body above its material need and reshape it as soul.

Contra the Stonewall dogma, sexual pleasure is not a good in itself; it is either consecration or desecration. This is the divine wisdom that is the real gift to humanity — a liberating gift that Stonewall (and other decisive battles of the Sexual Revolution) stole from us.

(In fairness, I can easily imagine that there are some married gay couples who would affirm that, and who reject the sexual nominalism and voluntarism of the gay mainstream. But those fuddies are on the fringes of the LGBT movement, just as heterosexuals who affirm the consecration-or-desecration principle are increasingly on the fringes of the mainstream of this pornified culture.)

UPDATE: As usual, a reader chimed in to say that I’m “cherry-picking” extremists to make the movement look bad. These people never, ever quit. I can’t decide if they’re being cynical, or if they really are that naive. Reader Nate J. has their number. He says, in his comment:

I keep hearing that this “fringe” stuff doesn’t “represent most people” in the movement, and yet the movement continues to advance apace, remorselessly and with less ground for dissent.

If you don’t understand that today’s fringe is tomorrow’s mainstream, you’re being obtuse. You’re not even engaging with reality. Honestly, I don’t even understand why people like you spend so much time coming here to a conservative publication, reading (maybe) Rod’s culture war stuff and insisting that what he’s seeing with his lying eyes isn’t really happening. Frankly, it’s creepy, obsessive, and weirdly defensive over issues that supposedly, as you insist, do not even exist.

What really strikes me is that the left refuses to step up and claim its total cultural victory. You’ve gotten everything. A major, national publication can run an essay by a prominent gay author pondering how to push the LGBTQRSTUV bulldozer into the final crumbling pillars of norms and decency and order, and all you can do is live in your alternate reality. I suppose when you build an entire political ideology on the victimhood of identity politics, you have to present a permanent underdog image. You cannot let the world know that you are the dominant power.

UPDATE.2: USA Today reports the result of a new Harris Poll showing that Millennials are less comfortable interacting with LGBTs. It’s a remarkable piece of advocacy journalism, in that it’s a long story (by USAT standards) that not once questions the activist organizations’ narrative. Could it be that young people are sick of being beaten over the head with constant propaganda, and told that unless they enthusiastically affirm all of it, they’re nothing but bigots? Maybe that has something to do with it?

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Cascina San Benedetto: A Family Monastery

The great Cardinal Robert Sarah delivered a powerful address after visiting the burned remains of Notre Dame de Paris. In it, he said:

I am convinced that this civilization is living through its mortal hour. As once during the decline and fall of Rome, so today the elites care for nothing but increasing the luxury of their daily lives, and the people have been anaesthetized by every more vulgar entertainments.

As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West: behold the flames of barbarism threaten you! And who are these barbarians? The barbarians are those who hate human nature. The barbarians are those who trample the sacred under foot. The barbarians are those who despise and manipulate life and strive for “human enhancement”!

More:

I want to sound a cry of alarm that is also a cry of love and compassion for Europe and the West: A West that renounces its faith, history, and Christian roots is destined for scorn and death. It no longer resembles a beautiful cathedral founded on faith, but a senseless ruin!

Here’s the Benedict Option part:

We must find places where the virtues can flourish. It is time to rediscover the courage of non-conformism. Christians must create places where the air is breathable, or simply where the Christian life is possible. I call upon Christians to bravely open oases of freedom in the midst of the desert created by rampant profiteering. Indeed you must not be alone in the desert of a society without God. A Christian who stays alone is a Christian in danger! He will end up being devoured by the sharks of the market society. Christians must regroup in communities around their cathedrals: the houses of God. Our communities must put God in the center. At the center of our lives, our thoughts, our actions, our liturgies, and our cathedrals.

Amidst the avalanche of lies, we must be able to find places where truth is not only explained but experienced. In a word, we must live the Gospel: not merely thinking about it as a utopia, but living it in a concrete way. The Faith is like a fire, but it has to be burning in order to be transmitted to others. Watch over this sacred fire! Let it be your warmth in the heart of this winter of the West.

When a fire glows in the night, men slowly gather around it. This is our hope. This is our cathedral.

Read the whole thing. It’s the thunder of a prophet.

As you know, this is what I try to say in The Benedict Option, and in the talks I give about it. The book has been out for just over two years now, and I hear from readers now and again that it is beginning to bear fruit. A couple of years ago in Italy, I met two young Catholic friends, Giovanni Zennaro and Stefano Schileo at San Benedetto del Tronto. They told me they and their wives are interested in the Ben Op. Here’s a photo of us from back then, taken at Norcia:

With Giovanni and Stefano

Last year, I visited them at the home of Giovanni, his wife Alice, and their three children, in the countryside near Milan. Giovanni and his cherubic son Pietro greeted me with exactly the right drink:

I stayed with the Zennaros for a few days, prayed with them, and talked with them, the Schileos, and other faithful young Catholic families who are working together to build a real Benedict Option community. Here’s a shot I took of a local priest, Don Luigi, celebrating mass for them in the Zennaros’ home:

These families are not content to sit around reading my book and stirring speeches by prophetic cardinals, and hoping that somebody does something to help. They have been working hard to create something for themselves, and for others.

Today, I have very good news: these families’ common project, the Cascina San Benedetto, or “St. Benedict House,” has officially launched! Follow that link to read their Manifesto in Italian, English, and German. There is also a link where you can donate to help them purchase housing. These families are not wealthy, and are trusting in God to send them what they need.

Now that the Cascina project has been formally announced, Giovanni, a Benedictine oblate, agreed to answer some questions from me via e-mail. Here is our interview:

RD: The Benedict Option needs Christians to think creatively about ways we can construct communities and institutions within which we can live out the faith through hard times to come. Tell me how you and your friends are responding to this challenge?

GZ: Let me start by talking about my initial approach to the Benedict Option. I discovered your book in 2017, while I was completing my novitiate to become a Benedictine Oblate (lay member of the Order of St. Benedict). For me, it was a very happy discovery for two different reasons: not just because it offers useful insights to live the Christian faith in our post-Christian Western world, but also because it is inspired by St. Benedict and the Benedictine monks, the religious family I’m a member of.

At that time, my wife and I were starting to realize that our friendship with a couple of other families was taking a certain direction. During our usual Sunday meetings we were spontaneously adopting a kind of routine: the Holy Mass, the lunch together, a time dedicated to conversation, Vespers, the dinner. These very simple things turned into good regular practice. We felt the need to maintain and cultivate that practice.

Reading The Benedict Option was what made us wonder: why don’t we make this friendship stable? “Stable” stands for the Benedictine stabilitas loci. It means to choose a place and a community, considering them as the main tools for living a fully Christian life – not because a place or a community have value per se, but because being loyal to them helps one’s own Quaerere Deum (search for God).

We started talking about this with some wise friends, including some Benedictine monks from different Italian monasteries. Thanks to their guidance, we developed the idea of living together in the same place, as a group of families that share some material goods and a spiritual path, through a rule of prayer to be respected every day. That’s what you can read in the Acts of the Apostles about the first Christian community in Jerusalem (2:42-47), and that’s what the monks do in their monasteries.

We called our community life project “Cascina San Benedetto” (“St. Benedict House”; the word “Cascina” means a particular kind of country house, typical of northern Italy). A year ago we started spreading the first version of our manifesto, in order to ask friends and religious communities to pray for us. We recently published a new version of it, hoping that it will help us to collect the necessary funds to start. We need some money to buy and renovate the first apartments and some community spaces for prayer, school activity and meetings with other people interested in spending some of their time with us.

I visited you and your young family last year, and met the other families who want to be part of the Cascina. It really was beautiful, observing you all praying together, and feasting together. It seems like the most natural thing in the world, but in fact bringing together young Christian families who want to share lives saturated in prayer and worship is surprisingly difficult. Why?

Because we have lost the social habit of living in community. It seems to me that in the second half of the twentieth century the West completed the mental bourgeoisification process that began with the Industrial Revolution. The main aspiration of the single person and family — regardless of social class — has become self-fulfillment and individual well-being. We have lost the idea of a human community as the context in which the person is born and grows, suffers and rejoices, sharing with the other members the deeper aspects of his own life. Even Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. Faith has been reduced to one of the many values we try to maintain, rather than being the unique experience that gives taste and meaning to everything in life. Today we can clearly see that a faith of this kind, a practice that does not really affect our lives, can only survive for a few generations.

We live in a secularized society, imbued with relativism. Its teachings are often opposed to those of Jesus and the Church. I think it will be increasingly important for us Christians to practice particular ways of life, similar to the way of life of the first Christian communities. We will need places where faith is visibly expressed in every action of the everyday life. I mean a kind of oasis of faith — certainly not devoid of all our human contradictions and weaknesses — in which one can continuously regenerate oneself. This should also allow us to better live as true Christians in the world out there. “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?” (Matthew 5:13): we need — at least I think I need — places where we can keep ourselves “salty,” where we can continue to feel the typical taste of Christian life. If we don’t first keep that taste in ourselves, we won’t be able to offer it to the world.

Today the great solitude of people is generating new attempts of community belonging. Nonetheless, they usually start from important but partial aspects of life: an interest, a hobby, a particular social commitment, a value in which a person strongly believes. In this way, we create forms of coming together in which solitude is fought by being with other people, but without sharing the real drama of life, the big questions about the meaning of our existence. These are the questions that affect the religious sphere of the human being. I think we Christians have the task of practicing for ourselves a different way of being together, and we have to show it to the world. We must live as brothers and sisters not because we are very close friends or share the same interests, but because we all want to build the Kingdom of God and live a holy life to reach Paradise. I believe that this strong common purpose can allow people and families to live together. Just like in monasteries, this will be possible if prayer, and nothing else, is the foundation of all life.

If you all are able to launch the Cascina, how do you think the life together will change the adults? How will it change the children?

From a practical point of view, each family will continue to live its own life: as my wife often reminds me, we must not confuse a Christian community of families with a hippie commune. However, by living in the same place we can be faithful to some community prayer meetings during the day, especially by reciting the Liturgy of the Hours in the morning and in the evening. Sometimes the families will have lunch or dinner together, especially on weekends. We will welcome other people who want to spend time with us, in particular to pray: to make this possible, it would be nice to have a guest house soon.

I think that, at least in the beginning, each of us will keep his current job. Despite this, should we consider it useful, someone will give up all or part of their job to dedicate themselves to the education of children and the needs of the community.

Children’s lives will change because the children of each family will have more opportunities to be in contact with adults who believe what their parents believe, and to play with their children. We are not inventing anything: it is a way of life that until a recent past was normal for most families. We must consider that ours is a generation of immigrants. Even those who remained in Italy often moved from city to city to find a job, and many of those who changed city for their university studies did not return to live in their hometown. This is not a tragedy, but it is a phenomenon that has contributed to cutting our roots: there are many young families who live far from their relatives. This is our story and the story of many of our friends. Also for this reason we would like to live a daily familiar relationship with those who believe in what we believe.

You are thinking about starting a school at the Cascina. Why? How would this school be different from the others your children could attend?

We would like to start a small parental school – which is possible according to the Italian Constitution – to allow parents to be fully involved in the educational path of their children. Private Catholic schools would guarantee respect for freedom of education, meeting our desires and needs. Unfortunately, they are too expensive for families who have to send more than one child there, especially for many years.

And, it seems to me that many families, due to a lack of religious and cultural roots, don’t have a clear educational idea. They use school and every other possible activity to fill the time of children, with the illusion of being able to delegate their education to others. Consequently, the school itself becomes a service provider, rather than a tool for the educational role that belongs to the family. We want for our children to grow guided by people who tell them the truth. And the truth is that reality is beautiful and everything is a gift from God. We want them to be able to learn everything, from history to mathematics, in the light of the Christian faith and the teachings of the Catholic Church. We also think that educating small groups of children can promote personalized teaching for each student, enhancing their talents and attitudes.

You all work in Milan, but you want to start the Cascina in the countryside, where you and your wife Alice already live. Why is it important to you all to live in a rural area?

The area in which Alice and I live is still rich in farming and animal husbandry. Many of our neighbors work in the fields and stables. Here you can breathe a genuine air, and it’s easier to build new relationships than in the city. Looking around we see meadows and hills, instead of luminous signs and billboards. Silence still exists here. These are conditions that help the spiritual life. We can easily reach Milan every morning to go to work. Moreover, in the countryside the buildings have much more accessible prices.

If you all succeed in launching the Cascina, and everything goes well, what will it look like in 15 years?

OK, let’s try to use some imagination. In fifteen years, our older children will be twenty. Maybe they will be about to decide whether to accept or reject the model of life that we have chosen and proposed to them. Perhaps they will be considering whether to stay with us or go somewhere else. By then we will have understood if we have done a good job with them: we will see it not from the choice they will make, but from their freedom in choosing.

Maybe in fifteen years other young families will be added to the community, and we can help them by sharing our experience.

Finally, a dream: perhaps our choice of life will have attracted not only other families, but also some monks who will have built a monastery near our house. There’s a story behind this dream: some monks invited us to move near them – they live in an isolated town, many hours away from where we live now – and start our community life project next to their monastery. Having a daily relationship with the monks, participating in their liturgy and involving them in the education of our children would be the most beautiful thing, the best embodiment of our project. We’re also considering this possibility. It is extremely fascinating but very difficult, because we wouldn’t know how to make a living there. If we have to stay close to Milan, the city where we work, my dream is that the opposite can happen – that some monks will one day come close to us.

I often meet young people like you who want to do something like this, but don’t have the resources. I know you all aren’t rich. How are you going to afford to do this project?

If we fail to get some help, we will try to start with our resources anyway, even if they are very scarce. We would like to settle right away not only our apartments, but also some small community space for prayer, for school and for guests. If it must be a “monastery of families,” it must succeed in fulfilling the typical functions of the monastery: prayer, study, manual work, hospitality. This is why we are looking for financial support. The monasteries live on their own work and on what God provides them. We will do the same.

One final question: how countercultural is this idea for young Catholic families in today’s Italy? You are all in your 20s, maybe early 30s. What advice would you give to other Christians in Italy, as well as in the US and other countries, about doing a project like this?

Our idea is certainly countercultural in Italy, but not entirely new. Thank God, there are several other communities of Christian families, born in recent decades within specific ecclesial experiences or around particular social works. We are in contact with some of these communities, we can learn a lot from them. The peculiarity of Cascina San Benedetto is that we want to be inspired by the monastic model: our “social work” will be prayer.

I don’t know what advice I can give to other Christians who want to carry out similar projects. The only thing I can say is to pray a lot and try to always listen to the will of God: his projects will flourish, ours will die. We ourselves don’t know yet what the Lord intends to do with this great desire of ours.

Readers, if you want to help the Cascina San Benedetto project, or to learn more information about it, please visit the website. Here is a concrete example of engaged young Christian families who want nothing more than to serve God and to raise their kids in faithful community, making the Benedict Option real. Be encouraged! And help these practical visionaries if you can.

Cascina San Benedetto is exactly what I dreamed about in writing The Benedict Option. What a sign of hope for us all! Giovanni and the others have been thinking hard about this for a couple of years, praying about it, and doing serious work to make it happen. I’m sure he will be happy to share what he’s learned with you.

 

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The Mark Of The Woke

This is alarming:

#BREAKING: @gofundme has shut down Israel Folau’s campaign and will refund all donors. pic.twitter.com/w4AgIv6feL

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) June 24, 2019

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News story here.

Folau is the Australian rugby superstar who was kicked out of the sport after tweeting a verse of Scripture critical of homosexuality. (Folau is a Christian.) He has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit over his sacking, and was using GoFundMe to raise money to pay his lawyers.

But now Go Fund Me has said that thought criminals like Izzy Folau cannot use its platform to raise money to defend themselves in court. Think about that: they will not allow a person to ask for money to defend his rights in court if they disapprove of the cause.

Question for conservatives: If Go Fund Me were being used by a gay-rights plaintiff to raise money to fund his courtroom crusade against an institution, would you seek to have him deplatformed? I certainly would not.

However, I’m guessing few if any of us would object if Go Fund Me refused access to a neo-Nazi raising money for a white power rally. What’s interesting is that a Christian raising money to pay for the pursuit of a court action in a religious liberty case has the same moral status as a neo-Nazi or a Klansman — because Woke Capitalism identifies him as anti-gay, and that is a thing that you cannot be, for any reason whatsoever.

Now, Go Fund Me can run itself as it wishes. It’s a private company. And Folau, who is wealthy, can certainly be criticized for asking supporters to pay for his legal bills. All of that is beside the point. The point is that because of LGBT, traditional Christians and other social conservatives are being stigmatized, pushed to the margins, and not allowed to participate in ordinary economic life, unless they have the Mark of Wokeness upon their foreheads (so to speak).

Moreover, Folau’s wife, who is also a professional athlete (netball), is now facing calls to be booted from her own sport because she tweeted support for her husband. She’s a homophobe! Get her! Liz Ellis, one of the sport’s all-time greats, tweeted:

Yeah nah not good enough.

How about this:

There is no room for homophobia in our game. Anyone who is seen to support or endorse homophobia is not welcome. As much as I love watching ⁦@MariaFolau⁩ play netball I do not want my sport endorsing the views of her husband. pic.twitter.com/IR5jecVm6O

— Liz Ellis (@LizzyLegsEllis) June 23, 2019

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The sport was not “endorsing” the views of her husband. Maria Folau was. And now the Woke want to kick her out of the sport because of her religious views, and because she publicly supports the man to whom she is married.

Do you not see how sinister this is, this blacklisting?

If you don’t think they’re going to come for you eventually, you’re lying to yourself.

Last week, Facebook announced the forthcoming launch of Libra, its own cryptocurrency. This image below is fake, but you must know this is going to be a possibility:

The key thing to do now is to create and sustain cryptocurrency “banks” that can be trusted not to punish people for their religious, moral, and political views. The key thing is to set up alternative funding sources for when the Woke attempt to make it illegal for Deplorables to buy and sell and to participate in exchange without the Mark of the Woke.

More broadly, it is extremely important for traditional Christians (Jews, Muslims, others) who do not accept gender ideology and related iterations to understand what is coming for us. The power-holders really do hate us, and don’t believe we should have the right to participate in society. Almost every one of us will be forced to take a stand, sooner or later. Back in 2015, gay New York Times columnist Frank Bruni approvingly quoted a gay activist who said that Christians must be forced to abandon their beliefs on homosexuality. Not “persuaded to” — compelled to. In 2016, prominent Protestant ethicist David Gushee, who had recently endorsed gay rights, wrote this warning:

It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions.

Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.

He’s right about that. If Wokeness will destroy the career of one of a nation’s greatest athletes — a Pacific Islander whose status as an ethnic minority did not help him — there is nobody it will not destroy. And if it will come after the man’s wife simply for publicly supporting her husband, it won’t leave your spouse or children alone either.

This is the war we are in, and all the winsomeness in the world won’t help a soul. The Benedict Option is about building the resistance within individuals, families, and communities, so they will have the strength to stand up and bear the cost of fidelity. Make no mistake: there will be a cost.

You might not like Izzy Folau. You might not like the stand he took, or the way he took it. Fine. But if you don’t stand up for him and his wife, or at least understand that what they’re doing to him, they’re going to do to you if they have the chance, you are living in dangerous denial — and you aren’t going to be ready when the Eye of Woke Sauron focuses on you, your family, and your church.

Prepare!

UPDATE: 

If he’d just said that racists, sexists, abelists, transphobes, homophobes, deplorables & assorted bigots will burn in hell he woulda been fine https://t.co/QzFGKHTYNH

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) June 24, 2019

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The Sacred Mission To Destroy Normality

Here’s a story from them, an online LGBT magazine published by the magazine giant Condé Nast, in which the author argues against those who say that kink practitioners and those into BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) should be excluded from Pride parades because they’re too dark, especially for kids to see. Excerpt:

Those opposed to public representations of queer fetish culture treat it as a taboo and an inherent sexual risk to youth, but this both oversimplifies BDSM and underestimates the intellectual capacity of young LGBTQ+ people. “My understanding of BDSM is actually very far from sexual, because everything that I saw as a kid wasn’t sexualized to me,” says Sunny Hitching, a 19-year-old second generation queer who has attended San Francisco Pride and grew up with kinky, poly, queer parents. Sunny’s mother openly practiced both lifestyle and professional BDSM for most of their childhood, and while Hitchling considers themself to have had multiple parents, they say their most influential parents are their mom and their chosen stepdad Moo, a queer trans man who was formerly their mother’s 24/7 lifestyle submissive.

Moo, a queer trans man who was formerly their mother’s 24/7 lifestyle submissive. Okay. More:

Sunny feels their upbringing gave them a more comprehensive sexual education than most of their peers, as their parents would openly discuss subjects of sexuality, gender, and kink with them. When Sunny expressed interest in engaging in bondage and breathplay (erotic asphyxiation) with their longtime partner, their mother took the time to explain how to do it most safely.

“There’s a very big difference between people who want to spice things up and people who are literally part of a culture that has been here for decades,” Sunny says. “It’s traditions that are passed down and relationships that are built on trust and love and care. And if someone tries to tell me otherwise, I’m literally an example of that.”

Sunny was raised by these freaks, and as a teenager, taught by his/her mother how to choke and be choked for erotic pleasure. This is what Condé Nast wants to bring to the mainstream, in part for the cause of liberating children. Condé Nast isn’t some fringe outfit: it’s as big and as mainstream as magazine publishers get. 

CN also publishes Teen Vogue which, under the leadership of Phillip Picardi, a gay man who is now the editor-in-chief of Out, distinguished itself with articles like publishing consumer guides to vibrators, and graphic how-to articles about anal sex. For teenage girls. Picardi has moved on, but recently Teen Vogue published an essay by a physician making a moral and legal argument for prostitution — this, again, in a magazine for teenage girls.

If we lived in a sane society, this would not be possible — if not legally, then certainly not morally and (therefore) commercially. The idea of a mainstream digital magazine publishing articles teaching teenage girls how to have anal sex, and why they should aspire to become prostitutes, would be clearly seen as a threat to the common good. Similarly, a mainstream digital magazine that published articles arguing that people who torture and are tortured for sexual pleasure ought to be brought into the clear light of day and celebrated, in part because it is good for the children, would be widely condemned.

But that’s not how we roll in Weimar America. Here’s Condé Nast’s announcement of the launch of them:

Condé Nast today announced the launch of them, a next-generation community platform. them chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community. Acclaimed editor Phillip Picardi, digital editorial director of Teen Vogue and Allure, is the chief content officer of them. Additionally, launch partners of them include Burberry, Google, Lyft and GLAAD.

“There is a cultural revolution happening that is — as always — spearheaded by young people who believe in fighting for equality, and we want to create a space that’s reflective of this moment,” said Picardi. “We’re excited to showcase the voices and perspectives of people in the community, and prove through our storytelling that, by celebrating them, we’re really celebrating all of us.”

The editorial launch team of them is anchored by Meredith Talusan, who recently won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism, and agender media personality Tyler Ford, who was recently named to Dazed’s 100 visionary talents shaping youth culture in 2016. The Facebook and Instagram handles for them are launched in tandem.

“We’ve been reimagining our titles and creating new ones to more broadly reflect our culture today, and them is a perfect example of how we’re thinking differently about our audiences,” said Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast. “Phil has brilliant insight into how people are engaging with each other through the content they read and watch, and he has once again identified important and influential voices and stories to bring to the forefront.”

Phil Picardi, a man of “brilliant insight” who made his career in part by trying to convince teenage girls to live like gay men, is the media prince who goes from strength to strength in this decadent culture. He and his mission are supported by giants of Woke Capitalism like Google, Lyft, and Burberry. There is an incalculable amount of money and cultural power behind these campaigns.

All of them hate what is normal and good, and are determined to destroy it. And get this: there is no limiting principle on the Left. To be sure, some liberals — people I know, and some who read this blog — will draw a line at some of this. But I can’t think of any left-liberals with a meaningful voice in the public square who will say that this stuff is wicked, and should be rejected. None will say that nine-year-old drag queens are a demented idea, not something to be encouraged or celebrated. If Pete Buttigieg and his spouse had children, I doubt that they would want those kids to grow up with leather daddies or erotic chokers as role models — but would Buttigieg have the courage to see and to declare enemies to his Left? I doubt it.

HuffPo says that kids need to go to Pride parades to see the kink. Excerpt:

Politics have a prominent place in Pride, Rayside said, but “it is also about outrage,” a time when some in the community express this “in ways that confront normal sensibilities.”

The freedom to do so is embedded within LGBTQ+ culture and history. These expressions are the most colourful during the parade.

Bergman defended these elements and their right to exist at a kid-friendly event.

“First of all, nobody likes nakedness more than children,” Bergman said.

“On the list of things that I don’t want my children ever to be exposed to are: Compulsory heterosexuality, demonstrations of sexism, demonstrations of racism, demonstrations of ablism, violence. These are all way higher on the list than some homosexual’s tuchus.”

Putting on her sex therapist hat, Ren emphasized that Pride, from kink to nakedness, is an excellent opportunity for parents to do unbiased sex education. Bergman also pointed out that many children don’t even interpret most of what they’re seeing in a Pride parade as sexual, but rather as dress-up or fun.

“Children benefit from seeing people loving one another, from seeing diversity and inclusion. Children suffer from seeing violence and fear, hatred and divisiveness,” Ren said.

It seems that the only taboo left is pedophilia, but give it five years — the Desmond Is Amazing brigades are working hard to tear that wall down. 

Those who object to any of this are to be targeted and scapegoated as enemies of the nihilistic revolution. As Roger Scruton wrote in Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers Of The New Left:

Almost all the thinkers I have discussed in this book have adopted the same annihilating approach to their opponents as leftist parties in power. For the opponent is the class enemy. Should he put his head above the parapet in the culture wars he is not to be argued with, for he cannot utter truth … . Such an enemy is not to be the object of negotiation of compromise. Only after his final elimination from the social order will the truth be perceivable.

In order to drown the still small voice of disagreement communist parties have had recourse to ideology — a set of doctrines, for the most part doctrines of staggering imbecility, designed to close the avenues of intellectual enquiry. The purpose of ideology was not that people should believe it. On the contrary, the purpose was to make belief irrelevant, to rid the world of rational discussion in all areas where the Party had staked a claim. The idea of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was not supposed to describe a reality; it was supposed to bring enquiry to an end, so that reality could not be perceived.

What the editorial directors and staff of these publications, and the Woke Capitalists who fund them, want to achieve is closing off the ability to see moral reality, to see what is good, what is true, what is beautiful … what is normal. 

The ideology of staggering imbecility is “diversity and inclusivity,” which is the justification for opening the door to valorizing teenage prostitutes and high school porn stars (read Caitlin Flanagan’s recent account of the latter), bum-stickers, child drag queens, perverts parading down the street in bondage gear, and kinkster moms teaching their children how to be strangled by their partners for the sake of orgasm.

Honestly, people: what more do you need to see to grasp that our culture is in terminal velocity downwards, with seemingly no resources left to pull out of its death dive?

I mean, look: In Ireland, a Catholic primary school has decided to embrace the new world by allowing little boys to come to school dressed as little girls.

A Catholic school.

In Ireland. 

Eventually, even the most blind traditional Christians will see the desperate need for the Benedict Option among us. We are already seeing among some churches a vindication of Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” (Just the other day, I heard from an old friend whose family had been part of a well-known theologically conservative congregation that prided itself on being apolitical, but which is now speedily endorsing wokeness.)

Beyond the Benedict Option, though, I see in the rapid Weimarization of the American public square the coming showdown between the Sohrab Ahmari and David French schools of conservative thought.

To the extent I favor French’s view, it’s because I believe that liberal democracy is a precious achievement, not one to be surrendered easily. To the extent I favor Ahmari’s view — and I am much closer to Ahmari than to French on these questions — it’s that I am convinced that the pre-political conditions for supporting a healthy liberal democracy, or even a morally sane one, are either gone, or nearly gone. Roger Scruton, in his book How To Be A Conservative, writes:

… Burke argued that custom, tradition and “prejudice” [Note: Burke’s use of the word is not the same as the pejorative modern use — RD] are the preconditions of political order, that they contain wisdom that could never be put together by the deliberations of rational individuals, and that without them society would disintegrate into the “dust and powder of individuality.”

All such thoughts were issued as warnings. The freedom won through enlightenment, they implied, was a fragile and threatened thing. It depended upon a cultural base that it could not itself guarantee. Only if people are held together by stronger bonds than the bond of free choice can free choice be raised to the prominence that the new political order promised. And those stronger bonds are buried deep in the community, woven by custom, ceremony, language and religious need. Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.

The public order is destroying, and has very nearly destroyed, the culture on which political order is based. Besides which, things like the arguments for deep sexual perversion — e.g., torture for pleasure — as a source of pride and identity, and arguments for teenage prostitution as empowering — these things are evil. Really and truly evil. They cannot be tolerated by any society that wishes to survive.

How do we deal with this politically? Does liberal democracy have the resources to defeat these challenges to it? If you believe it does, you will side with French. If you doubt it, you will probably side with Ahmari. Either way, the fight is coming to all of us. The Benedict Option is not a withdrawal from the fight, but rather a recognition that the fight is broader and deeper than many of us think. The Benedict Option is situated within this observation by Roger Scruton, from Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands:

This does not mean that things have not changed for the worse. But if the problem is abundance, then are we to retreat from it, to a world in which we are once again in need? If the problem is the malleability of appetite, how are we to control it, and by what decrees? The fact is that we know the solution, and it is not a political one. We must change our lives. And to do this we need spiritual authority, the ability to make sacrifices, and the refusal to be degraded into the machines désirantes of Deleuze and Guattari. This changed way of life does not come from politics. It comes from religion and culture, and in particular from the God-imbued culture that the thinkers discussed in Chapter 7 wished to replace with a purely political way of seeing things.

That is, of course, only the first step towards an answer to all the many thinkers who have focused on idolatry, sensuality and materialism as the evils of our time – without using those words, however, since they are the natural words of the existing culture. I don’t deny that people are more lost in addictive pleasures now than once they were, that businesses are ever more devoted to the manufacture of destructive appetites, that kitsch and cliché have silted up the channels of communication as they were never silted up before. But those on the left who have noticed those facts – Adorno pre-eminently – have offered no solution save Utopia, for the very reason that the solution, if it exists, is not political. Of course, we can censor advertising and the media; we can regulate the distribution of commodities; we can, up to a point, direct public subsidies to the kind of art and music that refuses to be kitsch. But this won’t involve rejecting the ‘capitalist’ system, nor will it be effective if people have no spiritual resources that will help them to stand against their fallen nature. Without those resources all the complaints from the left are so many futile lamentations, exhortations to a revolution against original sin.

We have to recover and rebuild the spiritual resources that enable us to stand against our fallen nature, and against the culture of death all around us. We also need to fight politically to give our mediating institutions, within which we learn how to be citizens, the opportunity to exist. The dominant culture of all American institutions — media, art, entertainment, academia, law, military, even many churches — have all been captured by the enemies of the permanent things. It is vitally important to know this, and to act on that knowledge. The culture war is over, and we have lost; what remains to us, for now, is building the guerrilla resistance.

What is at stake is the family. What is at stake is man. As Pope Benedict XVI said:

The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

You cannot count on the Church being on your side, by the way.  We are in very, very dark times. As I wrote three years ago, we are one major economic crisis away from something extremely ugly taking over. We never, ever learn from history.

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Roger & Basia: A Love Story

Tonight I have been reading around in Gentle Regrets, a collection of Roger Scruton’s essays, looking for things he wrote about his time working with the anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe. I had forgotten about his exquisite essay called “Stealing From Churches,” which I had written about years ago on my old Beliefnet blog. Back then, I wrote that I described “Stealing From Churches” as “having the effect of turning on a lamp in a dark room, and seeing in their fullness things only perceptible before in outline.”

The heart of the essay is a sketch of two deeply humane Catholic believers who made an enormous impression on the atheist Scruton: a Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, an aristocratic Englishman and popular old-school priest, and Basia, a poor Polish philosophy student who had suffered. In the essay’s opening, Scruton writes poetically about being drawn to old and nearly abandoned French country churches as a young man. He opens by relating a sense of being a vandal in visiting churches as an unbeliever, as many tourists are:

Of course, they don’t steal the works of art, nor do they carry away the bones of the local martyr. Their thieving is of the spiritual kind. They take the fruit of pious giving, and empty it of religious sense. This theft of other people’s holiness creates more damage than physical violence. For it compels a community to see itself from outside, as an object of anthropological curiosity. Those holy icons that returned the believer’s gaze from a more heavenly region are suddenly demoted to the level of human inventions. Those once silent, God-filled spaces now sound with sacrilegious chatter, and what had been a place or recuperation, the interface between a community and its God, is translated to the realm of aesthetic values, so as to become unique, irreplaceable, and functionless. The tool that guaranteed a community’s lastingness, becomes a useless symbol of the everlasting.

Scruton then relates his role in an actual minor theft from a country church (of crystal cruets), and how it haunted him for years afterward. The real theft, though, was sacramental — his failed marriage to a Catholic woman, which broke him spiritually. He writes of his lesson as a spiritual thief: “Stay away from holiness, was the lesson. Stay away until you are sure it possesses you.”

Anyway, the profiles Scruton writes of those two very different Catholic believers illustrate what it is like to live one’s life devoted to the Good, and the Good in the person of Jesus Christ. It awed the philosopher Scruton, and humbled him. Here is a passage telling of his dinner with Msgr. Gilbey, who was 84 at the time:

On 1 August 1985, I had dinner with Alfred Gilbey in the Oxford and Cambridge Club (the kitchens in the Travellers’ being closed for the summer holiday). Here is what I wrote in my diary:

How strange the vision of his face as he talks, his eyes fast shut and ringed with folded flesh, his mouth closed and half smiling, his speech barely audible, as though addressed to another, invisible and immaterial presence. His soft slabs of cheek are encased by two symmetrical squares of wrinkles, which seem like deep-cut mouldings around monumental panels of marble. And the voice so rapid and so quiet, glancing off the surface of a thousand subjects, each of which seems to reach out and touch it, only to be left trembling and unfulfilled. He referred to a recent letter of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales to the Pope in Rome, lamenting the decline in their congregations, and calling for a teaching and a practice that would be more ‘relevant’ to the needs of today.

‘What an absurd demand — to be relevant! Was Christ relevant? To be relevant means to accept the standard of the world in which you are, and therefore to cease to aspire beyond it. Relevance is not merely an un-Christian but an anti-Christian ambition.’

It is hard to fault that argument; but also difficult to welcome its corollary, which is the vision of a Church enduring forever, but acknowledged only by a few old priests living in spiritual catacombs of their own devising, celebrating the rituals of a Church so truly universal that it has no living members. But that was another of his sayings, that all the best people are dead. Alfred went on to add that Christian charity is now entirely misunderstood, as a kind of collective effort to improve the world.

‘We are not asked to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man.’

He was dismissive of academic historians, saying that ‘any historian who makes history readable is suspect to those who can’t’. And he had some harsh words to say concerning the modern approach to education, as an ‘education for life’; such cliches awaken the old recusant instinct, which tells him that people might be entirely mistaken, especially in those beliefs that they take to be self-evident. ‘True education,’ he retorted, ‘is not for life, but for death.’ His aphoristic way of talking gains much from his soft, liquid voice, barely audible yet resounding nevertheless in the moral echo-chamber that invisibly surrounds him. He recounted anecdotes of his friend Archbishop David Mathew, who had described Pius XI as a ‘great believer in moderate rewards’, of his Cambridge days and of his long-standing connection with Trinity. He recalled an after-dinner silence in the combination room:

A to B: How is your wife?

Long pause.

B (slowly turning, with raised eyebrows): Compared to whom?

This dialogue neatly encapsulates the relation between the sexes, as Alfred conceives it.

He also told with great feeling an apocryphal story concerning the composition of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which, in this version of events, the artist composed over many decades, constantly searching the streets and alley-ways of Milan for the ideal types upon whom to model the twelve apostles, and having begun with the beautiful and innocent face of a young man whose expression seemed to capture all the grace, dignity and tender compassion of Jesus. After years of labour the apostles had all been assembled, representing in their carefully differentiated expressions the fine gradations of hope, resolution, weak­ness and despair. Only one remained and that was Judas, whose baseness no citizen of Milan seemed to wear on his face, and to whom Leonardo began to despair of giving the absolute lifelikeness that was vital to his conception. At last, in a mean alleyway, a dark figure, engaged in some whispered transaction, caught the painter’s eye. Recognizing in those fear-filled, treacherous glances the lineaments of Judas, Leonardo enticed him to the cenaculo with a gift of silver.

The figure, shifty, suspicious and huddled into himself, is pushed into a corner and told to sit. Looking up at last, and recognizing the painter and the tools of his trade, he says, ‘You have painted me before.’

‘Have I?’ asks the startled painter. ‘When?’

‘Oh, a long time ago.’

‘And for what purpose?’

Judas turns to the nearly completed fresco that is taking shape above them.

‘There I am,’ he says, and points to Christ.

The story is characteristic. Although Alfred’s anecdotes range far and wide, and contain a large streak of satire and even flippancy, there is a single point of reference in all of them, and that is not Catholicism or the Church or Christian civilization or any socially constructed thing, but Christ himself, in all his mystical completeness and simplicity.

This intense personal relation to the Redeemer rescued Monsignor Gilbey from worldliness, made him stand out like a visiting angel wherever he appeared, and in a strange way justified his impeccable turnout and polished manners. The maxim that ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ is often ridiculed, since it suggests the religion of the nursery, by which Nanny calls God to her aid. But the maxim is ridiculed only by those who have not seen what cleanliness and godliness have in common — namely, the maintenance of the human body as the soul’s earthly vessel and the sensory image of God. Hence it is not only in Protestant countries that the maxim is repeated; nor is it confined to Christian communities. The Muslims will tell you that an-nazaafa min al-imaan — cleanliness is like faith.

Basia was a student who fell in love with Scruton when he was in Poland, but who insisted that their relationship remain Platonic. She told him that she believed it was God’s desire for her to work for Scruton’s salvation, and for that reason, she had to remain chaste with him. (Though an atheist at the time, Scruton years later accepted the Christian faith as an Anglican.) He writes:

But then Basia was young, and her first need was to confess. I learned that the order in her soul was not innate but acquired, and acquired by swimming constantly against the current of sensual desire. She had visited England as an au pair to a Pakistani family, had been seduced by the husband, and had come back to Poland with his baby inside her. She had lived thereafter in the full consciousness of her body, knowing that it must be ruled and guided. She confessed to her unchastities with chaste and reverent words. And she brought home to me, then and subsequently, what is perhaps the most important truth conveyed by religion, and one that Monsignor Gilbey, incidentally, had built onto the foundations of his life — the truth that sex is either consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory between, and that nothing matters more than customs, ceremonies and rites with which we lift the body above its material need and reshape it as soul. In so far as this thought survives in our modernist culture, it is in some garbled version of the panegyrics of D.H. Lawrence. Basia phrased it in the pure, simple, liturgical language of her church, and showed through her emotion that she had re-made herself, so as one day to give herself entirely. Perhaps she should have been a nun; but it was too late for that. Now her first thought was to encounter the temptation that I presented, not to flee from it, but to vanquish it. For the crazy idea had also come into her head that she could help me to salvation.

“Surely there is no hope of that,” I said.

“Yes, I had thought this once — that there is no hope, that this salvation is a nonsense. And almost I committed a suicide. I was such a small shrinked person. But He did not accept. He hunted me, He found me, He was there in dark corner where I go to hide. And now you see, He gives me you for a rescue.”

This rescue took on a strange significance over the months that followed: it was to be a rescue not of her only, but of me too. Together we were to go in search of peace, and we would find it, since God wanted only this for us. Basia’s letters told an extraordinary story of her continual conversation with God. Every little detail of her life entered this conversation and was raised by it to a higher level, irradiated there by the light of her faith. She described her life as though it were a private song of praise: whether queueing for food, singing to her daughter, praying in church, studying logic, reading the poets, arguing, carousing or dancing with her friends, wandering in the deserted calm of the Polish countryside, learning the names of birds and flowers, she rejoiced. And she took me always with her in her thoughts, testing me against these things, and asking God to approve both me and her and to show us that we, like the world, were blessed.

Later in the essay:

We discussed the situation in Poland. Father Popieluszko had recently been murdered by the secret police, and Basia, like most Poles, saw him as a saint and a martyr. Nevertheless, she believed that the queues, shortages, privations, and the indignities of daily life under communism were so many opportunities for inner freedom. It was necessary to resist, of course; but the real fight was within you, to overcome the spirit of selfish calculation. The important thing, she said, was not to improve the world, but to improve yourself. That Basia, living in poverty in her communist prison, should repeat the words of Monsignor Gilbey in his London club, testified to the reality of the Church, as a unified spiritual entity, a corporate person whose members are, in St. Paul’s words, “members in Christ.”

This beautiful essay is worth the price of the book. 

Isn’t that true of us, in our time and place? That the real fight is within us, to overcome the spirit of selfish calculation.

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