Rod Dreher's Blog, page 506

The North Carolina Semi-Coup

This is insane:

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) on Friday signed legislation that will severely curtail the powers of his successor, Democratic Gov.-elect Roy Cooper.

The Republican-dominated state legislature passed several measures dramatically overhauling the governor’s power in an unexpected special session just weeks before McCrory leaves office. Democrats argued that the moves amounted to a power grab aimed at undermining Cooper even before he takes office.

At least 18 people were arrested during protests against the Republican maneuvers Friday at the state capitol in Raleigh.

The bill McCrory signed will limit the governor’s power to make appointments to certain state boards including the Board of Elections.

It would create state and county boards of elections with equal numbers of Democratic and Republican members. Until now, the governor appointed three of the five members of the state Board of Elections, and county boards were made up of two members of the governor’s party and one member of the other party.

And that’s not all. Read more.

Look, I am genuinely sorry Pat McCrory lost, but reacting this way to stop an opposition candidate who won a free and fair election is dirty. It may well be legal, but it’s shockingly dirty, and the state’s GOP lawmakers ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Where do they think this kind of thing will go? Forget about North Carolina itself. This is going to be a national thing. Nationally, Democrats are getting really excited about a Tea-Party-meets-Saul-Alinsky plan to stop Trump and the Congressional GOP by just about any means necessary. Here’s what the New Yorker says about it:

On Wednesday, around 7 p.m., a Google document entitled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” began making the rounds online. Its origin was the Twitter account of Ezra Levin, a thirty-one-year-old associate director at a national anti-poverty nonprofit, and self-described “Twitter novice,” who lives in D.C. and, until a few days ago, had roughly six hundred and fifty followers. His tweet’s simple message, “Please share w/ your friends to help fight Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, & corruption on their home turf,” belied three weeks of unpaid work by some three dozen mostly young progressives who had been collaborating on the document since the week of Thanksgiving.

The document, which you can read by clicking the link above (I suggest you do), is entirely devoted to throwing wrenches into the gears of Republican governance. More:

The document analyzes the strategic wisdom of the Tea Party, focussing on its local activism and emphasis on defense rather than offense. “We tried to be really clear in the document that, like it or not, the Tea Party really did have significant accomplishments—facing more difficult odds than we face today—and that it’s worth thinking about what parts of their strategy and tactics really enabled that,” Levin said. “We aimed to balance that acknowledgment by being very clear that we’re not endorsing the Tea Party’s horrible and petty scare tactics.”

Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and a former staffer for Senators Edward Kennedy and Harry Reid, told me that he was impressed that the document “urges people to play defensive baseball.” “I understand the need for a positive agenda, as do they,” he added. “But I think they’re correct in their assessment on copying some of the tactics of the Tea Party and trying to make Republicans feel pain or pay a price for some of the stuff they’re about to vote on.” He said that he planned to keep the document on his desktop and work with it in the future.

I read the whole document, and despaired — but probably not for the reason you think. I agree that the plan looks great. This is smart hardball politics. What makes me despair is the same reason the NC GOP’s behavior makes me despair: all of this is ultimately going to destroy our democracy.

Where did it start? With the Senate Democrats in the 1980s going all-out to destroy Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court? Maybe. If you’re a liberal, you no doubt have in mind a moment when the GOP started it. It doesn’t really matter. The truth is that there is no incentive on either side to stop. It’s not about fair play, respect for one’s opponents, or even the rule of law. It’s all about power: exercising it harshly, or preventing the other side from exercising it, no matter what.

Where does it stop? How does it stop? I’m serious. I write a lot in this space about the Jacobins on college campuses who demonize their opponents, silence them, and claim that extremism in the pursuit of social justice is no vice. Those people are not prepared to play by the rules of liberal democracy. Tell me, though: how does the NC GOP’s move differ in principle? The Other is such a monstrous enemy that they must be beaten down no matter what it takes. Just win. To be fair is to be weak.

And just what do these North Carolina Republicans think the Democrats are going to do when they take power again, as they are bound to sooner or later? What do any of these factionalists on the left or the right think is going to happen to them when they are once again on the bottom rung? Or do they think about it at all?

Dark days ahead for our country.

UPDATE: Reader William Dalton, who lives in NC, offers valuable perspective:

You don’t live in North Carolina. Believe me, the acts of the General Assembly in expanding and contracting the Governor’s powers, particularly when there is a change of governing power from one party to the other, has a long and pedigreed history. When Republicans captured the statehouse in 1972, for the first time in the century, the General Assembly, still controlled by Democrats, acted swiftly to take many of the Governor’s powers of appointment away from him and assign them to themselves or to other elected state officials whose offices remained in Democratic hands. And that was when the Governor of North Carolina had neither the power to veto legislation nor to succeed himself in office. Jim Holshouser was the most ineffective governor, probably of any state, in modern history. And that is just what the Democrats intended. This story was repeated, to a lesser degree, when power was more balanced, in 1984, when Jim Martin was elected. He had a veto, he could and successfully did, run to succeed himself. And Republicans even achieved a balance of power in the General Assembly during his term of office. But he did not have the number of patronage jobs to hand out that Jim Hunt had had before him (and then later would again when elected twice more after him).

Yes, Republicans are taking advantage of the power they have to redistribute government powers in ways to advantage themselves. But the people of North Carolina gave Republicans that kind of power when electing them to the General Assembly – all of whom were just returned in this same election which barely made Roy Cooper the new Governor. Cooper now has the same opportunity to succeed for himself and his party that Jim Martin did when he was elected in 1984. We’ll see what he does with it. But people won’t be impressed if all they see is Democrats continuing to act like political cry babies, a habit which that party seems to nurtured nationwide as well.

How The Left Overreached In Court

Sean Trende, on what the left has done over the last four years to attack and provoke religious conservatives:

Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions.

On Eugene Volokh’s legal blog, David Bernstein cites this as reason why religious conservatives, even those who may have been averse to Donald Trump, voted for Trump anyway. What’s more, there was this exchange in SCOTUS oral arguments in the Obergefell case, between Justice Alito and the government lawyer arguing for same-sex marriage:

Justice Samuel Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating.  So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­ sex marriage?

Solicitor General Verrilli: You know, I ­, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that.  I don’t deny that, Justice Alito.  It is ­­it is going to be an issue.

When liberals say the only reason conservative Christians oppose gay marriage is prejudice, they have to overlook facts like, oh, that a very senior Justice Department lawyer concedes in Supreme Court oral argument that their churches, schools, and charities may be severely penalized for following their religious beliefs. It’s not paranoia when people really are out to get you. Bernstein writes:

In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.

Amen. Asking orthodox Christians to vote for a candidate whose party has been so explicitly and proudly hostile to their most important values and deepest interests was ridiculous. The left brought all this on itself.

But here’s the thing: Obergefell is the law of the land now. Eventually there will be a Democratic administration that will seek to Bob-Jones an orthodox Christian institution (that is, take away its federal tax exemption). Christians had better hope that there’s a SCOTUS majority that will side with religious liberty, and reverse the Court’s holding in Bob Jones vs. United States (1983). If not, we’re done for. We had better use these next four years of what we hope will be a reprieve to prepare for the long resistance.

Same Bar, Different Worlds

While in Washington this week, I talked about the election with a conservative friend who moves in Republican professional circles. We’re both from Southern states that went heavily for Trump, yet he was as ambivalent about the GOP standard-bearer as I was. I told him that even though I didn’t vote for Trump, it gave me guilty pleasure that so many of the people who look down on the kind of people who voted for Trump were left wailing and gnashing their teeth. And I told him that I had heard from two other conservative friends in other parts of the country who confessed the same thing.

He smiled and nodded.

“You should have seen all these elite Republicans here in DC this year,” he said. “They were pulling their hair out trying to figure out why people kept voting for Trump in the primaries. They literally could not understand it.”

I had to confess that it took me longer than it ought to have done to figure it out, given that I actually live in Louisiana. The bubble doesn’t just cover Washington, DC.

Yesterday afternoon, I had business that took me to a part of Baton Rouge that’s mostly white working class. It was just after two, and I hadn’t had lunch, so I stopped at a neighborhood bar and restaurant that I’d heard had good poboys. The lunch crowd had thinned out, but I decided to sit at the bar and order food.

While I was eating and reading, a man took the stool next to me. He ordered a whiskey from the lady bartender. Then he asked her to make it a double. Who orders a double whiskey at two in the afternoon? I thought, and glanced over at him.

He was white-haired, probably in his mid-50s and prematurely grey, had a bad haircut, a pot belly, and was wearing work clothes. As I ate, he struck up a cheerful conversation with a couple in late middle age on the other side of him. They were drinking too. They talked about work. Whiskey Guy runs a crew of drywallers. Business has been good this year, with the August floods and all. They agreed that it was a shame, but what are you gonna do.

“Where’d you go to school?” the man asked Whiskey Guy.

Whiskey Guy said the name of a Baton Rouge public school, and that he was in the Class of 1981. That answer startled me. I’ve heard that question asked in saloons and at parties many times over the years, as strangers get to know each other, but not since my college graduation have I heard it answered with the name of a high school. Until today.

My hearing is not so great — a hazard of having reviewed rock shows in my first job (I had tinnitis for two days after Van Halen) — so I couldn’t hear most of their conversation. But I did hear laughter. There was an old lady sitting at the end of the bar. She looked like my mother, but her hair was as dark brown and shiny as a new dining table. When the music stopped briefly, I heard her say to the three that her husband had died last year, and this year, she was going to Disney with her grandchildren.

“That’s so nice,” the lady bartender said. “I been about twenty times since I was little.”

Whiskey Guy ordered another double. “I cracked a tooth, and I gotta go to the dentist,” he told the bartender. “I can’t take a needle in my mouth.” They both laughed heartily. He knocked back the shot, paid his bill, said a hearty goodbye to his new friends, and walked out the door.

I finished my shrimp poboy and asked for my check. When I stood up to leave, I looked around the bar and thought: damn, do I live in a bubble, or what? I could have walked into any bar in professional Washington and had more to say to strangers there than I did to these folks — even though they were just like the people I grew up with. And there was no doubt that every one of these people were for Trump. The idea that they voted for Hillary Clinton was … unthinkable. More than that, in retrospect, I can’t see any of the Republican candidates walking into that bar and being able to strike up a conversation with those people as effectively as that Manhattan billionaire who lives in a penthouse.

It’s bizarre to consider, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. It’s hard to explain. I’m trying to explain it to myself.

 

****

On the way home, I swung by the library and picked up a book called Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s an oral history of life in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise. The book was translated into English and published earlier this year. I’m only 30 pages in, and it’s a stunner. Here’s a quote from one man:

I hate Gorbachev because he stole my Motherland. I treasure my Soviet passport like it’s my most precious possession. Yes, we stood in line for discolored chicken and rotting potatoes, but it was our Motherland. I loved it. You lived in a third world country with missiles, but for me, it was a great nation. The West has always seen Russia as an enemy, a looming threat. It’s a thorn in their side. Nobody wants a strong Russia, with or without the communists. The world sees us as a storehouse that they can raid for oil, natural gas, timber, and base metals. We trade our oil for underpants. But we used to be a civilization without rags and junk. The Soviet civilization! Someone felt the need to put an end to it. The CIA … We’re already being controlled by the Americans … They must have paid Gorbachev a tidy sum. Sooner or later, he’ll see his day in court. I just hope that that Judas lives to feel the brunt of his nation’s rage.

Here’s another series of quotes the author collected at a beer stand, where all kinds of people gather, and talk about what’s happened to their country. To be sure, there are plenty of people quoted in Alexievich’s book who hated communism, and aren’t sorry it’s gone. But listen to these voices:

— For me, it’s more of a concrete question: Where do I want to live, in a great country or a normal one?

— Russians need something to believe in … Something lofty and luminous. Empire and communism are ingrained in us. We seek out heroic ideals.

— I am so envious of the people who had an ideal to live up to! Today, we are living without one. I want a great Russia! I don’t remember it, but I know it existed.

— I tried to talk about this with my students … They laughed in my face: “We don’t want to suffer. that’s not what our lives are about.” We haven’t understood a thing about the world we’d only recently been living in and yet we’re already living in a new one. An entire civilization lies rotting on the trash heap …

If you substituted “Americans” for “Russians,” “America” for “Russia,” and “democracy” for “communism,” these lines might have been spoken at a Trump rally this year. Unreasonable? OK, but that’s beside the point. In that Soviet oral history book, I just read a long transcript of a Communist Party member talking like this, at the same time recounting the horrible injustices and suffering communism inflicted on Russia. Her father was sent to the gulag, but came out and spent the rest of his life worshiping Stalin. She misses him and thinks him a hero. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s a profoundly human kind of agony. It’s the Grand Inquisitor’s case. Dostoevsky knew his people well. Dostoevsky knew all people well.

Whiskey Guy might have spoken an Americanized version of one of those anonymous Russian quotes above had I struck up a conversation with him. But I didn’t, because they had wi-fi at this bar, and I wasn’t reading a book, but looking at my laptop, reading news sites and blogs, and immersing myself in the words and ideas of people who live in Washington, New York City, London, Los Angeles… . I was sitting two feet away from this happy-go-lucky man who runs the drywall crew, but in the 15 minutes he sat next to me drinking whiskey in the afternoon and talking, I might as well have been sitting on a barstool in Georgetown. Same bar, different worlds.

And that is my own fault. He was gregarious, and would have talked to me had I reached out to him. But I wasn’t interested in him, or his work, or his kids, or his old high school, or anything about his life. I was more interested in what clever people were saying on the Internet — people who live in Washington, New York, London, Los Angeles … .

People like me, who didn’t see Trump coming.

One final thing: consider the last two paragraphs of a chapter from an essay Alan Ehrenhalt contributed to The Essential Civil Society Reader. It’s either excerpted from or based on his 1996 book The Lost City, about Chicago in the 1950s:

#MAGA didn’t come from nowhere.

Aleppo In Agony

Aleppo is this year’s Guernica. But is it Obama’s fault? This guy says yes:

With the help of a ruthless ally in Russian head of state Vladimir Putin, Assad has reportedly finally managed to subdue the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians along the way. Yet while mainstream media figures sound the alarm today, Assad’s human rights atrocities are half a decade old. The situation in Aleppo is in part the product of President Barack Obama’s failure to lead in preventing Assad from making human rights violations a habit.

Had President Obama kept his word to punish Assad should he use chemical weapons on civilians in August 2012, no power vacuum would exist for Putin or jihadist elements to exploit in Aleppo. With Assad gone, Syria could have begun its rehabilitation process years before the devastation occurring today.

That comment comes from a Breitbart writer. I think this is deeply unfair to the president. You will recall that Obama wanted to intervene after Assad used chemical weapons, but there wasn’t sufficient support for it in Congress. The picture in Syria didn’t get any clearer, nor did the resolve of Washington behind a strategy. A number of conservative writers (including this one) opposed Obama getting the US drawn into Syria, in part because the civil war there is, and was, so complex that we had no idea who we would be supporting. Assad is a butcher, no doubt about it. But if Assad had lost, we had no guarantee at all that the good guys would have prevailed, as opposed to Al Qaeda or ISIS. Hell, we didn’t even know who the good guys were, or if they even existed in that boiling cauldron of hatred.

Whether he did it from a position of strength or weakness, President Obama made a prudent decision. The United States cannot stop every atrocity. Russia has behaved barbarously in supporting Assad, no doubt about it, just as Assad has been monstrous. Was the alternative any better? David Quinn in the Irish Catholic writes:

For the vast majority of Irish people following the siege of Aleppo in the media, it a clear-cut case of the ‘good guys’ vs the ‘bad guys’. The good guys are the rebels. In our imagination, they are freedom-fighters who will turn Syria into a liberal, Western-style democracy if they win.

The bad guys are Assad and his Russian ally, Vladimir Putin.

In fact, it would be better to regard this conflict as ‘bad guys’ vs ‘bad guys’. It is a bit like Hitler vs Stalin, or Iraq vs Iran when those two countries were engaged in a long war back in the days of Saddam Hussein. It is a case of choosing the lesser of several evils and it can be hard to know who is the least of these evils.

Earlier this month, Quinn interviewed top Syrian clerics — Muslim, Orthodox Christian, and Melkite Catholic — who were part of a delegation of Syrian religious leaders and doctors visiting Ireland. Quinn:

I spoke to various members of the group, and that only made it more apparent how misguided it is to view the Syrian conflict as a fight between good and evil.

It also became apparent that the clerics, without actually saying so, are terrified of what a rebel victory would mean for their communities, especially the Christian communities because in Syria it is not only ISIS that savagely persecutes Christians and other religious minorities. Other rebel groups do the same.

In Aleppo, for example, one of the main rebel groups is Fateh al-Sham, formerly called Al-Nursa which is closely linked to Al-Qaeda. It has turned its guns on numerous Western-backed rebels groups during the conflict.

The Western-backed groups, like the Free Syrian Army are not powerful enough to win the civil war. That has been one of the problems. No group has been strong enough to win the conflict quickly. But no sane person would want Al-Nusra or ISIS to win, least of all Syria’s Christians.

So, this is the situation faced by Christians and others in Syria; they are having to choose the lesser evil all the time because there is no ‘good guy’ capable of winning the war. The absolute best we can hope for is a compromise settlement following peace talks.

What has happened to the city of Aleppo is a hideous tragedy. Because of Assad’s victory, helped by the Russians, Aleppo’s Christians may this year celebrate Christmas. Here is what Syrian Christians had to live with under Islamist rebel rule:

“It is like going back 1,000 years seeing the barbarity that Christians are having to live under. I think we are dealing with a group which makes Nazism pale in comparison and I think they have lost all respect for human life,” in 2015. “Crucifying these people is sending a message and they are using forms of killing which they believe have been sanctioned by Sharia law. For them what they are doing is perfectly normal and they don’t see a problem with it. It is that religious justification which is so appalling.”

“We are facing terrorist action in the whole geography of Syria,” Rev. Ibrahim Nseir, pastor of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon and the Presbyterian Church in Aleppo, told Fox News from the ISIS de-facto Syrian capital of Raqqa in May. “They are destroying our churches, killing and kidnapping Christians, stealing our homes and our businesses.”

It doesn’t require one to canonize Assad or Putin to give thanks for the defeat of ISIS and its allies. It is hard to feel joy, though, given the cost of that victory to innocent men, women, and children of all religions there. But President Obama did the right thing keeping the US out of it. Colin Freeman, writing in the Telegraph:

Yet for all the criticisms that Mr Obama was weak on foreign policy, or even lacked a policy at all, there was one principle that he rightly stuck to. Namely, that America had been involved quite enough in the Middle East, and that it was time to get out. Not just because it waved a red-white-and-blue rag to jihadists, or because America was fed up of losing sons to wars on the other side of the world. But because it was high time, especially after the chaos of Iraq, for the region to sort its own affairs out. To grow up, in effect, and to stop blaming others for its problems. Or, indeed blaming others when they tried to help.

UPDATE: Reader Turmarion posts this extremely helpful chart/guide to the conflict, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is from a Lebanese Christian family. Excerpt:

The way to analyze the situation is to look at the factions comparatively. You do not compare Assad’s regime to the Danish or Norwegian governments, but to the alternative.

…Assad father’s operatives blew up my house in Amioun when my grandfather, then MP, voted for Bashir. In Skin in the Game I discuss this as “acting against one’s interest” (the opposite of conflict of interest). So as a scientist and a humanist, I have been setting my grudge aside in considering the far, far, far, greater cancer of Salafism or Islamofascism.

… In the end I never imagined seeing the “left” siding with the AlQaeda of Sept 11, mourning the fighters of Aleppo and, aside from such independent journalists as Robert Fisk, spreading all manner of concoctions.

Read the chart; it’s important.

 

SJW Science

A reader forwards this e-mail. I’ve taken some info off the e-mail to protect privacy. It was sent to graduate faculty and students in relevant departments:

From: Lewis, Christopher H.

Subject: Critical Junctures: Call for Proposals

We write you in the hopes that you may distribute the attached Call for Proposals amongst your colleagues, so that they may submit a proposal to join us this spring at Critical Juncture: The Work of Art. Now in its fourth year at Emory University in Atlanta, CJ17 is scheduled for March 17-18, 2017, at the Emory Conference Center Hotel, conveniently located on our Clifton Road campus.

Critical Juncture is unique from every other conference one might attend in sociology, public health or gender studies—precisely because it brings together scholars from all these fields, pushing us to engage with each another, and learn new perspectives of salient issues that affect us all. As a completely graduate student-led conference, a signature of Critical Juncture is the inclusive atmosphere in which emerging scholars and activists can interact and learn together with renowned experts in their fields.

The Work of Art will explore how art works to defy, resist, and call attention to the particular injustices produced by the social construction of Disability, Race, Gender, and Sexuality. In past years, this conference has drawn participants from around the globe, and this year we will convene not just academics, but also artists and representatives of local and national social justice non-profit organizations. We invite you to consult the attached CFP, as well as our website, to learn more about this inspiring event.

It is so crucial, nay, CRITICAL for those of us who represent the intersectional worlds of arts, science and letters to come together and advocate for social progress. Will you join the fight, and help make Art work for us all?

–The CJ17 Organizing Committee

Stephanie Koziej (Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies)

C. Holly Lewis (Emory School of Medicine)

Sarah Lee (Goizueta School of Business)

Sam VanHorn (Bioethics, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies)

Dr. Angelika Bammer (Comparative Literature)

—

C. Holly Lewis MD, PhD Candidate

Department of Pediatrics, Hematology and Medical Oncology

Winship Cancer Institute | Emory University School of Medicine

Pronouns: They, them, theirs

Organizing Chairperson | Critical Juncture 2017: The Work of Art

They, them, theirs. The corruption of language facilitates the corruption of reality. And yeah, that’s what we want art to do: serve ideology. Art, propaganda, what’s the difference? /snark

You aren’t surprised that Social Justice Warriors are driving this nonsense out of the Women’s Studies Department, or the Comp Lit program. Business? Now that’s odd. But medicine? Really? The reader who sent this wrote, of C. Holly Lewis (aka Christopher Lewis):

The fact that someone who is about to get an MD AND a Ph.D. in medicine, who is clearly poised and positioning themselves (lol) for a career in government/administration, REFUSES TO ACCEPT THE BIOLOGICAL REALITY OF SEX and refers to the “social construction of… gender” isn’t just utterly terrifying, it is deeply and profoundly sad in ways I find difficult to express.

The thing that a lot of people are slow to understand is this culture war is no longer over different and clashing interpretations of reality. The culture war is over reality itself. And the SJWs are doing their best to bend medical science to their alternative reality.

Generation (Rated) X

Yesterday I posted something about the smutty erotic poetry of a young Canadian woman, Rupi Kaur, who has become quite popular with younger women and teen girls. A friend of mine’s 14-year-old relative asked for a copy of Kaur’s book Milk & Honey for Christmas. When the friend searched it out online and looked inside, she was shocked by the sexual content in it. It turns out that my friend’s young relative had no idea what was in the book, but had only seen it recommended on Instagram by a friend from Christian camp (!), and decided to put it on her Christmas list.

I posted about the book because it shocked me to learn that work like this is popular with teenage girls. In my day, it was Judy Blume, and boy, did we think we were racy then. I also posted a rave student review of the book from a high school newspaper in rural Hays, Kansas. The review gave no clue as to the explicit sexual content of the poetry. I wonder: is it just that unremarkable these days among teenagers?

A couple of folks on this blog said that Kaur’s book must not be that popular. After all, none of us have heard of it. Well, look at this story from The Guardian:

The “Instapoet” Rupi Kaur’s originally self-published collection Milk and Honey has sold more than half a million copies in the US and is into its 16th printing, according to its publisher.

Known as an Instapoet for the traction she gains online with her poetry that deals with violence, abuse and femininity, the collection was first self-published almost two years ago, in November 2014. It went on to top charts in North America and was snapped up by Andrews McMeel Publishing, which released its own edition in October that year.

“We thought it would sell well, but the momentum of sales that took off in March this year was very exciting, especially when the book hit the New York Times bestseller list,” said publisher and president Kirsty Melville. “We have sold over half a million copies and are currently in our 16th printing.” Melville added that on average, a strong-selling poetry book would sell less than 30,000 copies a year.

That is not just a breathtaking number for a book of poetry, but a breathtaking number for a book, period.

Kaur is also an tasteless exhibitionist:

The night out – which will mark Kaur’s 24th birthday – is rather fitting. This young poet from the suburbs of Toronto has fashioned a career out of forcing herself into places where she’s least expected; whether it’s the New York Times bestseller list or challenging social media to rethink how it sees menstruation.

It was the latter that catapulted Kaur into headlines in 2015. After Instagram banned a photo, published as part of a university assignment, showing Kaur lying in bed with her pyjamas and sheets stained with a small amount of menstrual blood, Kaur fought back. She pointed out the hypocrisy of being censored by a site that readily publishes photos of underage girls who are “objectified” and “pornified”. Followers flocked to her, cheering her on as she added, “I will not apologise for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but not be okay with a small leak.”

Kaur is a Sikh-Punjabi Canadian immigrant feminist, so she’s really got the full package. There will probably be entire college literature courses built around the poetry of Rupi Kaur. In fact, we’re almost there, says a story that calls Kaur “the voice of her generation”:

Within three days, Kaur gained 150,000 Instagram followers. (Her total count, at press time, is 722,000.) But she wasn’t exactly a social-media cipher before that: she had already amassed a solid 35,000 followers, thanks to frequent posts of her highly regrammable poems, as well as dogged promotion of the writing workshops she facilitated and the panels she took part in at campuses like New York’s Columbia University. When she agreed to speaking engagements in San Francisco or London, Kaur would order a box of her books to be sent to the organizer’s house so she could sell them after the event. She wrote on airplanes and at 5 a.m. in hotel rooms, pushing out more poems, which led to further sales on Amazon and caught the attention of her American publisher. “My entire life, everyone has referred to me as a workaholic,” says Rakhi Mutta, Kaur’s manager. “Then I met Rupi, and it was the first time in my life I was inspired by someone’s hustle.”

“Pushing out more poems.” Right. This one-woman poetry factory even illustrates her own work. For example, this from Milk & Honey (which I’ll put below the jump so as not to offend):

Well, gosh. See, this shows you how out of it I am. A decade ago, Caitlin Flanagan wrote about teen sexuality and teen literature in The Atlantic. In this excerpt, she writes about re-reading Judy Blume’s 1970 girl-lit blockbuster Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for the first time since her own 1970s childhood:

Reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for the first time in thirty years meant realizing anew that the world of my childhood is as distant and unrecoverable as that of the Etruscans. Margaret and I were young during a time when little girls dreamed of getting the courage to ask their mothers for training bras, attended carefully supervised dances, eagerly wore clothes that the modern preteen would sooner die than put on. (“Should I wear my velvet?” Margaret asks her mother when she learns she’s been invited to a boy-girl supper party. “It’s your best,” her mother replies.) In Margaret’s world the boys can’t be counted on to maintain a grown-up demeanor for these events: they disappoint the girls by stomping on their toes during a PTA-sponsored square dance; at the supper party they throw their sports coats in a pile and shoot mustard at the ceiling through drinking straws. But it is also the boys who are responsible for introducing the first glimmerings of sex to the group. When a boy suggests that they turn off the light and play Guess Who—”the boys line up on one side and the girls on the other and then when I yell Go the boys run to the girls’ side and try to guess who’s who by the way they feel”—the girls put on the brakes immediately. (“‘No, thank you,’ Gretchen said. ‘That’s disgusting!'”) The girls agree to a game of Spin the Bottle, however, and that night Margaret gets her first thrilling, fleeting kiss. The novel ends in triumph: three drops of blood on Margaret’s underpants, discovered the day of the sixth-grade farewell party, mean that she has left childhood behind.

Today, that book seems like a portrait of surrey-with-the-fringe-on-top innocence. Read the whole Flanagan article, if you can stomach it. It helps explain why the editor of the high school newspaper said nothing in her review about the explicit sexual content of Milk & Honey: kids like her have been rolling in this filth for so long they don’t even notice it. In fact, she writes, of drawings like the one you see above:

Accompanying the poems are little drawings by the author to further emphasize the message the poem is trying to convey. The style of the drawings is so cute and is so fitting for the way the poems are written. The cohesiveness of the entire book is so eloquent and lovely.

So cute. So fitting. This critical judgment delivered by a high school girl in Hays, Kansas.

Benedict Option, people. Benedict Option. This culture is not our own, and never should be.

The Madness Of Globalism

For some reason, The Browser links to this short piece by one Branko Milanovic, who asks: “How best to achieve such a decrease in inequality between people?” He answers:

Economic theory, common sense and simulation exercises clearly show that it can be best done by allowing free movement of people.

Ah, but if you’re Branko Milanovic, an economist and specialist on inequality, you’re wondering about a Gallup finding showing that if freedom of movement were absolute, some countries “could lose up to 90 percent of their populations,” and therefore “may cease to exist.” Get this:

So, what?—it could be asked. If Chad, Liberia and Mauritania cease to exist because everybody wants to move to Italy and France, why should one be concerned: people have freely chosen to be better off in Italy and France, and that’s all there is to that. But then, it could be asked, would not disappearance of countries also mean disappearance of distinct cultures, languages and religions? Yes, but if people do not care about these cultures, languages and religions, why should they be maintained?

Destroying the variety of human traditions is not costless, and I can see that one might believe that maintaining variety of languages and cultures is not less important that maintaining variety of the flora and fauna in the world, but I wonder who needs to bear the cost of that. Should people in Mali be forced to live in Mali because somebody in London thinks that some variety of human existence would be lost if they all came to England?

He’s got this all backwards. Don’t the English, the Italians, and the French who already happen to be living in England, Italy, and France have a say here? Should people in England, France, and Italy be forced to lose their country and its culture because tens of millions of Third World people prefer to leave their miserable countries and move to countries where the people who have been living there for many centuries have made a much better place for themselves to live?

It’s really quite bizarre that the views of the people whose countries would be overrun by foreigners who don’t share their history or culture don’t factor into this economist’s analysis. The natives would lose their nation as a nation. I don’t particularly care if Mali or Mauritania cease to exist as nations because all the Malians and Mauritanians have left for Europe. I don’t blame others for caring, mind you, but I don’t. But I very much care if Britain, France, or Italy ceases to exist in anything like their present form because they have been overwhelmed by invaders from very different cultures. It tells us something important, most likely, that this university economist didn’t think to be concerned about what the invaded stand to lose if his dream of the free and uninhibited movement of peoples were to come true.

 

Your Favorite Bookstore

Warren and Chris Farha of Eighth Day Books in Wichita

Late this morning, I spent a rewarding hour inside Kramerbooks, an independent bookstore just off Dupont Circle. It became a favorite place of mine when I lived in DC over two decades ago. Even if I’m not in a book-buying mood, I always browse in Kramer’s when I’m in DC and have the time.

As it happened, I did buy a couple of titles as Christmas presents, books I had never seen anywhere before. I only stopped myself from buying more because my small carry-on bag was full. But even if I had found nothing, it still would have been a blissful way to spend an hour. A couple of years ago, my bibliophile daughter Nora, standing at the railing looking out over the first floor of our local Barnes & Noble, said, “Dad, it feels so comfortable here, around all these books.” Yes, it does. It always does.

This morning’s diversion reminded me to post this lovely NYT piece in which the paper asks seven writers around the world to say a few words about their favorite bookstore. Here’s the entry from Pamela Paul, who edits the Times book review:

Just walking into Hatchards, London’s oldest bookseller and “by appointment royal booksellers to Her Majesty the Queen,” feels like a privilege. Situated off Piccadilly Circus, Hatchards offers a refuge from the hubbub of commercial London, even though it’s now owned by the megachain Waterstones.

Though the store has been remodeled several times, it retains an Old World feel and a determinedly British cast, with wooden banistered staircases and a carpet bearing the design of a book spine published by Hatchards in the Victorian era. Walls display quotes such as this one, from Kingsley Amis: “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” Not surprisingly, writers adore Hatchards, with John le Carré, Ruth Rendell and Antonia Fraser among its loyal fans.

Yes, Hatchards has an unabashedly clubby feel, but it’s one that recognizes all readers as members. Everyone here is a book person, from the cashiers to the floor managers, and the displays feel especially welcoming to bookish types. Themed tables are labeled by quotes rather than categories. A table on contemporary politics, for example, bears a quote from Lord Acton: “History is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul.”

The stock is at once comprehensive and well curated. Primacy of place goes to books by and about lords and dames of English letters such as Winston Churchill, George Orwell and Muriel Spark. One table offers books purely on birding. In Britain, publishers are more widely recognized for their taste and style, and Hatchards allows this to shine through with tables displaying an entire season from the tiny Pushkin Press, “Frightfully Fabulous Fabers” and the full Penguin Books Great Ideas series.

This may make the atmosphere sound snooty; it’s not. A lively table is dedicated to drinking, and the crime selection is vast; one display label reads “In the library, with the revolver.” P.G. Wodehouse gets his own shelf, as does Roald Dahl. The children’s section is a happy place complete with stuffed Gruffalos and pages from The Daily Prophet. One is grateful to be let in and to feel at home.

Next time I’m in London, I know where I’m headed. Read the entire piece. 

Longtime readers know that my favorite bookstore in all the world is Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas. Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote about it last year:

It’s hard to convey what an amazing bookstore this is. Imagine that Tolkien and Lewis were curating the place, with the Orthodox Philip Sherrard twisting their arms — hard. James K.A. Smith and I stood next to each other by a shelf tonight just marveling that such a place even exists in this fallen world. This whole underground Christian scene in Wichita, composed of alt-Orthodox, Catholics, and Evangelicals, seems to be centered around this bookstore and The Ladder next door. And I was thinking man, what I wouldn’t give for a place like this where I live. I’m seriously thinking about roadtripping to Wichita with the family this summer just to hang with these great people and be in the orbit of Eighth Day Books.

I’m just the kind of person who gets that excited about a bookstore, is all. But damn, what Warren Farha has created here is a great American institution. I’m serious about that. This is what book lovers hope that all bookstores will be like: eclectic, idiosyncratic, and radiant with the conviction that the people who own this thing have a vision that was not decided by algorithms from corporate headquarters.

I hope you’re planning to go to the Eighth Day Institute symposium from January 12-14, 2017, in Wichita. If you’re not yet decided, let me sweeten the pot by telling you that Eighth Day Books is a destination not to be missed. Bring an extra bag for all the books you’ll be bringing home. I’m serious.

Readers, I invite you to share your thoughts about your favorite bookstore.

Notes From Washington

Please forgive my sparse posting over the last day or so. I’m in Washington for an editorial meeting at TAC. It was a short, last-minute trip, and I’ll be headed back to the Great State after the meeting is over this afternoon. But I have had some great conversations here, some of which I want to share with you, because they touch on themes we talk about a lot on this blog.

Had drinks with A., who, in early middle age, is becoming more socially conservative, and is even thinking of formally converting to Catholicism. She told me that as she gets older, she realizes that so much of what makes a free society work depends on certain shared beliefs and customs. The fragmentation of our society — we talked about this happening in a number of areas — and gaming out where this is likely to go, has compelled her to consider more seriously the attraction she has long had to religion, but never really acted on.

***

“I have so many friends who are into polyamory,” said B., over dinner. “Not me, but lots of people, mostly non-religious. They see it as normal.”

“This is a thing?” I asked.

“Oh, very much so,” she said. “I guess they don’t want to tie themselves down. Some of them are married.”

B. is an Ivy-educated Millennial.

“Did you ever read the novel The Ice Storm, or see the movie?” I said.

“No.”

“It’s about swinger culture in the early ’70s, pretty much told from the point of view of the kids. That’s how I remember it, anyway. It’s devastating. And here we are, repeating it.”

***

I walk back from dinner through downtown Washington, from Chinatown to my hotel on Dupont Circle. It was a long walk, and my back hurt, but I needed it. I walked these streets in my mid-twenties, and thought I was in a kind of paradise. Now it seems so foreign to me, and unattractive. I’m not sure why.

Then I think of my late sister Ruthie, and the work she did in tiny West Feliciana Parish, and the life she had there. Surely there are people all over this city who long for what Ruthie had, but who couldn’t bring themselves to leave the proximity to power that comes with life in Washington.

I used to be swept up in that romance, back in the early 1990s, when I lived here. Here I was, in the Most Important City In The World, participating in its life. I thought as I walked about the young pastor here who told me back in 2012 about how much sadness and frustration he has to deal with among his congregation of ambitious young professionals.

He brought up the story of one young woman he had been counseling for some time. She had two advanced degrees, and was working her way up the meritocracy. Yet she was miserable, utterly miserable, and she didn’t understand why. Hadn’t she done everything that was supposed to make for a happy life? Why wasn’t she happy?

“The truth is, she wants to be married and to have a family,” said the pastor. “I’ve been working with her long enough to know that that is her heart’s desire. But she’s not ready to hear that yet. Everything about the culture that formed her, and everything about the culture she lives in here in Washington, tells her that would mean failure.”

On the other hand, I know plenty of good people doing good and important work in Washington. If it’s true that people can screw themselves up royally with a bad case of Potomac fever, it’s also true that reflexive hatred of Washington is both unfair and unattractive. Somebody’s got to govern us. For me, life used to be here, and isn’t anymore. I decided I was glad I had Washington in my twenties, and am grateful that I don’t have it anymore.

By the time I made it back to my hotel, I realized how stupid it was to take that long walk, given the situation with my back and neck from the car accident last week. Fortunately, they make meds for that. A fifty-year-old body is not the same as a twenty-five-year-old body. So that’s one measurement of the distance between the man I was when Washington was fresh and the staleness I find here now.

***

I repeat B.’s story about polyamory to C., another Millennial friend, a single Christian guy who works in politics.

“She’s right,” he said. “It’s a big thing with my generation. You’d be surprised who’s into it.”

But not with C., a Millennial who is a Hill staffer, and a practicing orthodox Catholic. He’s well educated, faithful, pessimistic about the future of our nation and culture, and, of course, interested in the Benedict Option. We talk about the sexual mores of the Millennials. He went to an elite college on the East Coast, and spent six years abroad working on his graduate degree. When he came back a few years ago, he was shocked by how much looser sexual mores were than when he left (“And they were pretty loose then,” he said.)

He knows a lot about finance, and sees a dark future ahead for the country, owing to structural inequalities. He’s also pessimistic about the ability of our society to be resilient in the face of the challenges ahead, because of the loss of a shared culture, and of the Christian faith. When his time on the Hill ends, D. hopes to do something that helps build up a Christian countercultural resistance.

I suggest that the Benedict Option really needs people like him for the practical work of institution-building. I tell him about how hard, or even impossible, it will be for orthodox Christians to work in certain professions in the near future (something with which he agrees, based on his experience in elite professional circles). We need to be building businesses of our own that can employ members of our community, I say.

We also need help building up classical Christian schools. There are some educational visionaries working in these fields, but what’s needed are finance people and others who can make them more viable economically, and also make them accessible to people of all incomes, insofar as that is possible. It’s a big challenge.

“You’re talking about educational entrepreneurship,” he says.

“Yeah.”

I promise to put him in touch with some smart Ben Op people working in this area.

“What you’ll find in The Benedict Option,” I say, meaning the forthcoming book, “is a book that gives some answers, but as much as anything else, tries to compel Christians to understand the reality we’re living in now, and that we’re going to be living in for the foreseeable future. I want the book to inspire serious conversations among Christians in a variety of fields, so that we can figure out together what to do.”

We’re living in a time like no other in our experience, I tell him. We can’t be part of this dying order, insofar as we can’t in good conscience assent to its morals, mores, and practices. This is going to become more and more obvious, very soon.

I tell him about a friend of mine whose 14-year-old relative asked for a book of poetry called Milk & Honey for Christmas. It’s the No. 1 seller on Amazon in women’s poetry. It has 1,218 reviews, as astonishing number, most of them raves. I know this because my friend went to Amazon to buy the book for her relative, and used the Look Inside feature to read some of the poems before buying.

Here is a screen shot of one of the pages in this book:

This is typical of the book. There’s also a drawing by the author showing a woman with her legs splayed open, inviting sex. When my friend asked the ninth-grader why she wanted a book of smutty poems for Christmas, the ninth-grader was shocked and embarrassed. She had no idea what was in the book. One of her little friends from Christian camp (!) had posted a rave review to Instagram, which made her want to read it.

After hearing this story, I googled to find high school newspaper reviews of the book, if any, to see what high school girls were saying about it. I found this review by the editor of The Guidon, the student newspaper at Hays High School (wherever that is). An excerpt:

I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys poetry, needs solace, or is just looking for an introspective read. The admirable honesty of the words offers insight to anyone who picks it up—there’s so much to gain by reading these poems and really nothing to lose.

There is absolutely no indication in this review of the dark sexual content of the poetry. None. This is what counts as mainstream literature among high school girls these days, I guess.

I share this story with D., who is soon to marry, and who will be starting a family. This is the culture you will be sending your kids into, I say. We have to do much better by them. We can’t do it alone; we need each other.

He says he’s ready to go. “Welcome to the resistance,” I said. We shook hands.

***

After coffee, I went down the street to Kramerbooks, the great bookstore off Dupont Circle. There I browsed through Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s a collection of fragments from interviews she did with contemporary Russians in post-Soviet Russia. This quote, from an unnamed Russian, jumped out at me, for a reason that will be obvious:



“I am so envious of the people who had an ideal to live up to. Today, we are living without one. I want a great Russia! I don’t remember it, but I know it existed.”

If you don’t sense something very close to that sentiment in America today, despite our wealth, you aren’t paying attention.

‘Tenderness Leads To The Gas Chamber’

“In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness.  And tenderness leads to the gas chamber,” said Flannery O’Connor. Her point was that sentimentality cannot restrain the darker forces in human nature. Which brings us to the Catholic bishops of eastern Canada.

They recently published a pastoral document indicating how, in their opinion, Catholics who commit suicide voluntarily, through doctor-assisted euthanasia (which is now legal there), should be treated by the Church. The full document is downloadable here. It is a masterpiece of Francis-speak. The document can be summed up like this: “Yes, euthanasia is strictly forbidden by the Catholic Church, but we know that some people are going to choose it anyway, so we intend to offer them all the sacraments to help them along the way, because who are we to judge?”

Here are some passages from the document. This is the opening paragraph:

In our Catholic tradition we often refer to the Church as our Mother. We perceive her as a mother who lovingly accompanies us throughout life, and who especially wishes to support and guide us when we are faced with difficult situations and decisions. It is from this perspective that we, the Bishops of the Atlantic Episcopal Assembly, wish to share with you this pastoral reflection on medical assistance in dying.

Come sit on Mama’s lap and let her tell you how she’s going to help you kill yourself. More:

Medical assistance in dying is a highly complex and intensely emotional issue which profoundly affects all of us. It makes us aware that some people have become convinced that, at a certain point, there is no longer any “value” in their lives, because their suffering has become unbearable or they cannot function as they once did or they feel a burden to their family and society. People with such a conviction or in such circumstances deserve our compassionate response and respect, for it is our belief that a person’s value arises from the inherent dignity we have as human beings and not from how well we function.

True enough — but watch those weasel words “highly complex and intensely emotional”. They are not meant to clarify but to obscure. More:

The example of Jesus shows us that pastoral care takes place in the midst of difficult situations, and that it involves listening closely to those who are suffering and accompanying them on the journey of their life situation.

Pope Francis also calls us to practice this “art of accompaniment”, removing our “sandals” before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Ex 3:5). The Holy Father writes that this accompaniment must be steady and reassuring, reflecting our closeness and our compassionate gaze which heals, liberates and encourages growth in the Christian life (Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel, no. 169). He says that to accompany requires prudence, understanding, patience and docility to the Spirit. He focuses on the need to practice the art of listening which requires the opening of one’s heart to a closeness which can lead to genuine spiritual encounter (Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel, no. 171). Pope Francis reminds us that the one who accompanies others must realize that each person’s situation before God and his/her life of grace are mysteries which no one can fully know from without. Consequently, we must not make judgements about people’s responsibility and culpability (Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel, no. 172).

See what they’re doing there? Invoking the compassion of Jesus and the counsel of humility and mercy of Pope Francis to lay the “who-am-I-to-judge” groundwork. But wait, doesn’t the Catholic Church teach that suicide is a grave moral wrong? The bishops knew you would say that:

Especially within the context of the Church’s teaching on suicide, this pastoral approach of accompaniment is extremely important in our contact with, and ministry to, those who are suffering intensely and who are considering asking for medical assistance in dying. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches us that God is the sovereign Master of life. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of (CCC, no. 2280). The Catechism teaches that suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate one’s life (CCC, no. 2281). However, the Catechism also notes that “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide” (CCC, no. 2282). Such circumstances can sometimes lead persons to so grave a feeling of desperation and hopelessness that they can no longer see the value in continuing to live, this desperation and hopelessness diminishing their responsibility for their actions. Only attentive pastoral accompaniment can bring us to an understanding of the circumstances that could lead a person to consider medical assistance in dying.

This is diabolical. They’re saying, “Yes, we know, the church says it’s wrong, but in certain instances, it can be right, because circumstances may “diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.” What this teaching of the Church intends to do is to encourage hope for the soul of the suicide, that God may not hold him responsible for the great sin he has committed — a sin from which there can be no repentance. It does not justify euthanasia. But, having made a hole big enough to pilot a supertanker through, the Canadian bishops deliver the real goods:

The Sacrament of Penance is for the forgiveness of past sins, not the ones that have yet to be committed, and yet the Catechism reminds us that by ways known to God alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance (CCC, no. 2283). The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick is for strengthening and accompanying someone in a vulnerable and suffering state. It presupposes one’s desire to follow Christ even in his passion, suffering and death; it is an expression of trust and dependence on God in difficult circumstances (CCC, no. 1520-3). The reception of Holy Communion as one approaches the end of this life can assist a person in growing in their union with Christ. This last Communion, called Viaticum, has a particular significance and importance as the seed of eternal life and the power of resurrection (CCC, no. 1524). As for the Church’s funeral rites, there are a number of possibilities available. However, in discerning the type of celebration most pastorally appropriate to the particular situation, there should always be dialogue with the persons concerned which is caring, sensitive and open. The decree of promulgation of the Order of Funerals states that: “By means of the funeral rites it has been the practice of the Church, as a tender mother, not simply to commend the dead to God but also to raise high the hope of its children and give witness to its own faith in the future resurrection of the baptized with Christ” (Prot. No. 720/69).

As people of faith, and ministers of God’s grace, we are called to entrust everyone, whatever their decisions may be, to the mercy of God. To one and all we wish to say that the pastoral care of souls cannot be reduced to norms for the reception of the sacraments or the celebration of funeral rites. Persons, and their families, who may be considering euthanasia or assisted suicide and who request the ministry of the Church need to be accompanied with dialogue and compassionate prayerful support. The fruit of such a pastoral encounter will shed light on complex pastoral situations and will indicate the most appropriate action to be taken including whether or not the celebration of sacraments is proper.

There’s more in the bishops’ statement, but that’s the heart of it. Notice how they have proposed something monstrously anti-Christian by slathering it with buttercream icing of tender verbiage. From the pen of these bishops, Bergoglian “who am I to judge?” tenderness leads to the euthanist’s needle. That’s not Church as Mother; that’s Church as Mommie Dearest.

Fortunately, there is at least one morally sane Catholic bishop in Canada: the mighty Fred Henry, the Bishop of Calgary, who addresses the assisted suicide issue with straightforward, muscular prose, and lays out Catholic moral teaching with great clarity. Excerpt:

For Catholics, in order to receive the sacraments, one must have the proper disposition. The deepest meaning of receiving sacraments is that man entrusts himself to God’s loving mercy. Consciously and freely choosing euthanasia or assisted suicide implies that one is not entrusting oneself to God’s mercy, but is rather controlling the conclusion of one’s own life. Such a position is incompatible with the surrender to God’s loving mercy and it denies, so to speak, the strength that is inherent in the sacraments. Through the sacraments one participates in the suffering, the death and the Resurrection of Jesus and in the unconditional “yes” He spoke to His Father.

From this perspective, it is impossible to comply with a request for the sacraments when someone has planned to end his life or to have it ended actively. Such a person does not have the proper disposition.

Euthanasia and physician assisted suicide are not a “solution” to suffering, but an elimination of the suffering human being. It is therefore the confirmation of despair, of the overwhelming feeling that all suffering can only end when the human person himself ceases to be. If the pastoral caregiver were to support the request for euthanasia, he would be capitulating to despair, which is contrary to the hope alive within him which he wants to proclaim. If the Church’s minister were out of a false of compassion accede to such a request it would constitute an enormous situation of scandal and denial of the truth, “You shall not kill.”