Rod Dreher's Blog, page 551

Conservative Christian Life Abroad

A reader writes:

I live in New Zealand, a country where religion is completely washed out of political discourse and out of the public square all together. Our Human Rights Commission decided in favour of a transgender students rights to use the girls bathroom in the single sex girls school he/she attends last month. It was our first. You get the picture.

We have a state funded broadcaster called National Radio that I was listening to earlier this week. They were covering the Democratic convention and had a Democrat spokeswoman and a Republican observer / commentator.

The interviewer was enthusing about Hillary, as was the Democrat (as you would expect) and then they brought the Republican in and asked somewhat incredulously if he would be voting for Trump.

He equivocated a bit, and then said (and I paraphrase) “I am a conservative Christian, and I cannot bring myself to vote for a man who claims to have been a Christian for 70 years but has never once asked God for forgiveness.”

I enjoyed it because he unknowingly broke an important social taboo here in NZ by mentioning God on National Radio, and worse still, introduced the idea that we might need forgiveness from him on public radio! – it was the closest thing we get to an ‘evangelical moment’ from our public broadcaster, and it came totally out of ‘left field’ taking both the interviewer and the nation by surprise!

The interviewer quickly recovered and moved passed the awkward moment, but it was a reminder to me (if I needed it) just how different the religious and political landscape is in the USA compared to, well probably the rest of the Western world.

You may think conservative Christianity is in retreat (and it is) but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Voting for the ‘least worst option’ has become a way of life for conservative Christians here in New Zealand, and I suspect other parts of the Western world. I appreciate that even then you have very little to choose from, and voting for stability, albeit ideological fraught is ‘not nothing’ as you say.

Still, it would be hard to do.

I invite conservative Christian readers in other Western countries and continents (Europe, Canada, Australia, South America) to share here their experiences of what political life is like for their tribe. Tell us Americans what we have to, um, look forward to.

(Hey readers, I want to apologize to you if your comments have been caught in the spam filter. Uncle Chuckie told me his weren’t posting. I checked, and found about 10 or 12 of you regular commenters were losing comments in the spam filter. I restored them all, and you shouldn’t have problems. No idea why this happens. The J.D. Vance interview walloped our servers, so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Come To DC This Fall

I spent the fall semester of my senior year in college working in Washington on a political consultancy internship. It was the autumn of 1988, during the Bush-Dukakis race. It’s hard to describe what an exciting place Washington was during an election season — even a relatively dull race like the Bush-Dukakis contest.

The Trump-Clinton race is anything but dull. That’s why I strongly encourage younger readers to apply for a fall internship at TAC. The deadline is upon us. Here’s all the info you need to know about the job, including how to apply.

Ben Op Book Update

You readers have been very patient with me these past two weeks as I’ve been getting ready for our move to Baton Rouge, and facing this August 5 deadline to have the manuscript for The Benedict Option finalized. I have some news to share, and a favor to ask.

My publisher has decided to delay publication till March, for various reasons. This is good for me because it gives me another week or two to work on the manuscript. And I’ll need it, because my editor has asked me to add a chapter about Work in the Benedict Option. That is, she wants me to do some reporting to find out what conservative Christians who find themselves unable to work in their chosen professions because of the emerging social situation can do to support themselves, and each other.

A friend is a theologian at a Catholic college. What happens if the college loses its accreditation because it won’t submit to federal requirements on LGBT matters, out of religious conscience? He’s got advanced degrees in religion — what does he do for a living? And what can the community of orthodox Christians do to help him find meaningful work?

Another friend works in the finance industry. He is a devout Christian who doesn’t advertise that fact at work. But the atmosphere within his company is becoming such that he believes he will be forced to participate in pro-LGBT activities that have nothing to do with his job, but which are effectively used to weed out “bigots.” He has a reasonable fear that he will be fired or asked to resign eventually, or violate his conscience. What will he do if that happens? What can he do? What will the rest of us help him do?

What about small businesses?

What will faithful Christians do when whole fields or business areas are closed to them because of conscience issues? What does someone who wants to be a doctor do should the day come when medical school training requires them to learn to do abortions, and to participate in abortions?

All these questions are coming. I had put the Work and Economics chapter aside, because I didn’t have space for it, and the other chapters seemed more pressing. I’m glad that we’re going to make space for it.

But I need your help. Please post your ideas here or send them to me at rod – at – amconmag – dot -com . Please include as much detail as you can, including names and contacts. (Caleb Bernacchio, where y’at? I need you stat!) Please indicate in the subject line of your e-mail that you’re responding to this Ben Op Work bleg. I’m getting tons of e-mail now, and I can’t keep up with it. I don’t want to miss your e-mail.

Trump & Religious Conservatives

So, here we are in the cold light of day, after both parties’ conventions, and from my point of view as a religious conservative, I see nothing good.

The things most important to me this year — religious liberty, and the protection of life — are things Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are firmly, even militantly, against. Aside from their platform positions and HRC’s convention speech, take a look at these findings in the recent WikiLeaks document dump. Excerpt:

Leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee show efforts to arrange a meeting with a key NGO working to end religious liberty protections.

The emails were among thousands that surfaced on the website WikiLeaks July 22. The leak included emails to and from several DNC lead staffers during the period from January 2015 to May 25, 2016.

Two May 16 emails from DNC lead staffers, titled “Who do you want at the religious exemption research meeting?”, discuss a presentation from the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT advocacy group which has challenged religious freedom protections as harmful.

The emails follow up on an April 11 email from Mike Gehrke, vice president of the Benenson Strategy Group consulting firm, to DNC communications director Luis Miranda and Mark Paustenbach, the DNC’s deputy communications director and national press secretary.

Gehrke said his colleague Amy Levin has been working with the Movement Advancement Project “over the past couple years” to develop “messaging and creative executions around religious exemptions laws” such as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.

Religious Freedom Restoration Acts and other provisions have provided key protections for Catholics and other religious organizations against laws that would otherwise require them to violate their religious and moral beliefs.

This is not exactly news to people who have been following the religious liberty issue closely. Democrats see it as a code phrase for anti-gay bigotry, which they are determined to stamp out, no matter what. The Democratic Party is the enemy of religious conservatives. I wish it weren’t the case, but there’s no getting around it. Religious conservatives now find ourselves in the same relationship to the GOP as gays were to the Democrats in the Clinton era: they’re not really our friends, but they’re not our enemies either, so we’ll take what we can.

But … Trump? I am not going to recite again the litany of reasons why he is unacceptable to religious conservatives like me. You’ve heard it all before. Let it suffice to say that I don’t feel that I can vote for either one, but my mind is open to change. If I vote, I would vote for a lesser evil to stop a greater evil, and whichever way I decided on election day, I would be so disgusted with my vote that I would never tell a soul how I voted. That’s how strongly I feel about this.

Political scientist Carson Holloway has a good short piece at First Things talking about the death of Reaganism, and asking about the future of religious conservatives in politics. As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I’m in the final stages of finishing my book on the Benedict Option. A friend and reader of this blog who was kind enough to read the most recent draft of the book and offer critical commentary told me yesterday that he thinks the politics chapter is the best one. What I propose in it is nothing like anything on the table today, but I think it’s realistic. I’m not going to lay it out here, because hey, I want to save something for the book, and besides, it has very little to do with politics as statecraft — and therefore, is not relevant to the decision facing religious conservatives this fall.

Carson’s piece does, however. He says that there is no question that religious conservatism is a greatly diminished force in American public life, and that if religious conservatives want to have any hope at all of their (our) views being respected, and our interests being protected, in law and policy, we have to enter into some kind of coalition. Excerpts:

In judging whether to enter into such a political coalition, politically responsible and politically astute religious conservatives must ask themselves three questions. First, are the other issues and interests that go into the coalition themselves conducive to the common good? Second, are those other issues and interests friendly, or at least not hostile, to the core principles that religious conservatives cherish? Third, is the coalition politically viable—that is, can it wield enough political influence to win elections and shape public policy?

Holloway says — and I completely agree with him, that “an alliance with the left is out of the question, since the American left regards religious conservatism as a form of bigotry.”

Do not dismiss the seriousness of that point. If you want to know how traditional Christians are going to be treated in law and policy under Democratic rule, consider that they believe we are no different from racists. All of society is moving this way, of course, but Republicans more slowly than Democrats. More:

Accordingly, religious conservatives must ask themselves whether they can fruitfully and conscientiously enter into a political coalition such as Donald Trump is trying to build. That means asking the three questions identified above. Is there anything in the new populist nationalism that is intrinsically hostile to religious conservatism? Are its issues—its concerns about immigration, trade, and foreign policy—consistent with the common good? And does it plausibly point the way to the creation of a governing coalition in which religious conservatives might play a helpful role?

Religious conservatives have a responsibility to think through these questions without their minds being clouded by either nostalgia for Ronald Reagan or disdain for Donald Trump. Reagan should still be admired for his qualities as a statesman, even if Reaganism is no longer a viable political program. And the issues Trump has raised deserve careful consideration, even if one find’s Trump’s private life or his demeanor as a candidate troubling.

I let go of Reaganism a long time ago, because it really does have very little to do with the world we live in now, and the challenges facing us. Religious conservatives who allow their thinking to be conditioned by Reagan nostalgia are doing themselves no favors. He left office nearly 30 years ago! The world has changed. One big reason the GOP finds itself in the terrible mess it does with Trump is that the Republican establishment could not bring itself to think beyond Reaganism, which had degenerated into platitudes.

Let’s set aside Trump’s character for the sake of this thought experiment proposed by Holloway. Mind you, I’m thinking through all this in public. I don’t know the answers. Let’s think through it together.

1. Is there anything in the new populist nationalism that is intrinsically hostile to religious conservatism?

Yes, but mostly no. To the extent that the New Populist Nationalism (NPN) rejects wars to spread democracy abroad, I find that consonant with a traditionalist understanding of religion and how it works. In fact, as we have seen with Obama, and as we will see with Hillary, wherever American governmental influence expands in the Third World, so does liberal ideologies bent on undermining traditional religious and moral belief in those countries. If the NPN will stop the State Department from exporting secular liberalism and the Sexual Revolution abroad, it will actually help religious conservatism, generally speaking.

But I find the white nationalist aspects of NPN to be deeply undermining of Christian conservatism. Christianity is not White People At Prayer. To the extent NPN defines America as Us = White People, Them = Non-White People, then yes, it does undermine traditional Christianity.

2. Are its issues—its concerns about immigration, trade, and foreign policy—consistent with the common good?

I think so. I see no intrinsic problem with NPN’s stances on these issues. NPN might be wrong on any of these issues, but I don’t see that their position one way or the other has to do with religious conservatism. I happen to think more favorably about NPN’s general positions on these issues than many of my religious conservative friends, but that’s for reasons not related to religious conservatism. If I were a political neoconservative, that would complicate matters. But I’m not.



3. And does it plausibly point the way to the creation of a governing coalition in which religious conservatives might play a helpful role?

I wish I thought it did, but I’m very skeptical. If there were more to the movement than Trump, this would be a more live question. Trump is not one of us, and doesn’t understand us. That is clear. But unlike Hillary, he is not actively hostile to us. Even before Trump, the GOP was fast moving away from us. If Marco Rubio were the nominee right now, or even Ted Cruz, the days in which religious conservatives played a helpful role in the right-of-center coalition are numbered, and in fact may have come to an end already. This is because Big Business funds the GOP, and Big Business is opposed to religious conservatism and religious liberty. Period. The end. The Indiana RFRA collapse and all that followed is all you need to know. And, as I’ve told you before, meeting with key Christian conservatives on Capitol Hill last fall, I learned that the GOP has no legislative plans to protect religious liberty. Things may have changed since then, but I’m telling you, we aren’t going to get anything we want out of the Republicans going forward. The best we can hope for is that the inevitable will be delayed.

The core problem is that we are the Out Group now. I mean, we always were, but we really are now. And if you know the slightest thing about the emerging demographic picture in America, you know that religious conservatism is over as a meaningful political force. The only reason for Republicans to support us is because it’s the right thing to do. Even at the state level, GOP legislators are getting hammered hard on the religious liberty issue by lobbyists for industry. That’s where it hurts.

So, here’s where I stand regarding the election this fall, as a religious conservative:

Neither candidate is good for religious conservatives. It’s only a matter of which one is less bad.
The best we can hope for from Trump is that his judicial nominees and administrative appoints might not think we’re nasty bigots who need to be crushed. Trump cannot be counted on to advance our interests, only to keep those that despise us more or less at bay. I say “more or less” because Trump is so mercurial.
Hillary is not mercurial. A Hillary presidency would guarantee the rapid advancement of abortion rights, gay rights, and the contraction of the religious liberties we depend on.
Neither one would be for the common good, in my judgment, but Trump’s thin skin and lack of principle rattles me to the core as a conservative. There is no sense of stability in that guy. I don’t look forward to waking up every day wondering what the president has said next, and what the fallout could be, both domestically and internationally.
Because of her principles, Hillary is more likely to get us into a war. That’s one view. Another is: because of his character and lack of self-discipline, Trump is more likely to get us into a war. Which one is more dangerous? I honestly don’t know.
I had a long conversation with a black friend in Baton Rouge this morning, about the race situation in the city. He lives in the neighborhood not far from where Sterling was shot. It’s a violent place, he said. He also said the feeling on the streets is that if that cop who shot Sterling walks, people are ready to fight. It worries him a lot. Me, I’m thinking that with Trump in the White House, a bad situation across the US is going to get worse. Even if Trump is right about this or that particular incident, he is so provocative and incendiary that he’s going to blow it up instead of defuse it, because that’s his way. So while I am certain that Hillary will be worse on the specific issues I care about as a religious conservative, I also believe Trump will be worse for social peace and cohesion. That’s important too. That’s really important. When I look at Donald Trump, I see not one bit of love towards neighbor, or charity towards anybody. The thing is, I don’t see it in Hillary either, but she’s a lot more in control of herself about it, which is not nothing in such a volatile situation as we find ourselves in as a nation.
My attitude until now has been that I cannot bring myself to vote for either one. I genuinely believe that we religious conservatives are a spent force in politics as statecraft, and will have to massively rethink our position. I do not believe that we can disengage from the public square. Rather, we have to think creatively, and change the terms of our engagement. If a religious conservative I know votes for Trump, I will regret that, but I won’t necessarily blame them. Same if they vote Hillary. But I leave open the possibility that one of these two candidates will do something so terrible this fall that I feel compelled to vote for the other, either to protect my interests (in which case, vote for Trump) or to protect the common good (in which case, vote for Hillary). The thing is, I don’t see my interests (pro-life, pro-religious liberty) as contradicting the common good, but rather as part of the common good. Trump would have to convince me that he’s a clear and present danger to the national security or basic civil peace of the nation for me to vote against him. To get me to vote for him, Trump would have to prove to me that as bad as he is, it’s better to take a chance on him than to go with the devil we know.
As a conservative, I am deeply suspicious of the “Let’s blow it up and see what happens next, because it can’t get any worse than this” line, which I’m hearing from some Trump supporters. Oh yeah? It can always get a lot worse. On the other hand, the neoliberal order can’t keep going like this, and shouldn’t. The idea of four more years of the same stuff, even if it were from a GOP president, is enervating. In many ways this feels like the late 1970s, when people were just fed up with the stagnancy of our politics and our economy. That’s why they took a chance on Reagan. But Trump is no Reagan.
Bottom line: there are no good options for religious conservatives this fall, and no bad options either. There are only terrible options. As I said, my inclination is to wash my hands of the whole thing, but I’m going to try to do what Carson Holloway says, and think through this more clearly. What he’s really saying is that religious conservatives have to decide if they can stand to do a deal with Trump. I have good friends whose views I respect on both sides of the issue. My stance now is no, we cannot make that deal. But I am open to persuasion.
But hey, religious conservative, understand this: whether you vote for Trump or not, you had better get it straight in your mind that it’s over for us in mainstream politics. It really is. We will still vote (and we should), and we will still take an interest — an active one, I hope — in public affairs. Henceforth, though, we will be voting defensively, for the candidates that are least likely to throw us under the bus. Any Christian leader who tells you we can bring back the old days when our kind had real influence among the Republican Party is trying to pick your pocket for a donation. In April 2015, when Republican Gov. Mike Pence of the red state of Indiana and Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of the red state of Arkansas chose Big Business over the mildest expression of protecting religious liberty, that told you exactly where the GOP was going, and who it was leaving behind.

That’s where my thinking is this morning. What about you?

Hillary Speech Live Blog

Hi everybody, I’m going to liveblog Hillary Clinton’s speech. I’m in a weird position. I don’t have wifi yet in my house (coming on Friday!) and the nearby coffeeshops close early. So I’m in a nearby gym. They have CNN on mute, but I’m following the audio feed online. It’s delayed by about 40 seconds for some reason. I’m going to put a timestamp on my rolling posts here, in Central time, but they won’t be accurate. Just letting you know. I’ll approve your comments as fast as I can.

9:18 — I like Ross Douthat’s pre-speech comment. People are saying that HRC can’t top Obama’s optimism last night. Ross says she shouldn’t try to, but instead should go a little dark. Excerpts:

The cold reality of American politics in the year 2016 is that most people don’t seem to share President Obama’s sweeping optimism about the country’s future. When Ronald Reagan gave his own “morning in America” ad in 1984, half the country was satisfied with the country’s direction. Today the same number, from Gallup’s polling, is 17 percent.

This isn’t just a Trumpista phenomenon, and it isn’t just a reaction to Trump’s rise. Fear of his demagogy may have pushed the “wrong track” numbers somewhat higher, but a general dissatisfaction with the American trajectory has been a hallmark of the Obama era. The last time more than 40 percent of Americans said the country was on the right track was a month after the president’s re-election, and the wrong track number was stuck above 60 percent well before Trump’s primary-season ascent.

More:

True, electing Trump to deal with these problems seems far more likely hasten any unraveling than to reverse it. But President Obama and his party, in the course of defending his legacy this week, have struggled to acknowledge the legitimacy of American anxiety, the depth of disappointment and discontent.

If there’s anything that Hillary Clinton can try to do that Obama did not, it’s to show that she understands these fears as something more than atavism or paranoia, to promise something more than just a continuation of this administration’s approach to leadership, to demonstrate that she’s prepared to lead a country that many, many people feel is somehow out of joint.

9:28 I’ve not been able to watch the convention this week, but I have to say, these images of Hillary coming onto stage to start her speech are really powerful. She looks genuinely overwhelmed by what’s happening to her — very human. The mood set by these images and the music is such a stunning contrast to the Trump speech. Really a lot of energy here. Very, very well staged.

9:31: But boy, does Bubba look old and worn out.

9:36 Nice lines making peace with Bernie.

9:38 — “We are stronger together.” Leaving aside how divisive the Democrats have been, as a rhetorical strategy, she’s doing a good job drawing a strong contrast between herself and Trump. It’s striking — it’s really striking — how things have changed. It’s the Democratic Party talking about optimism and faith in America now. Wow.

9:45 — You know, of course, that I find this kind of rhetoric grating, especially coming from a liberal Democrat, and especially coming from a liberal Democrat as divisive as HRC. But the image she’s creating for herself, and the contrast with Trump, is winning.

“Don’t believe anyone who says ‘I alone can fix it.'” Isn’t he forgetting troops, nurses, firefighters, teachers, et al.? she says. This is good stuff, making Trump out to seem selfish, unpatriotic, a strongman in the making.

9:48: Again, talking rhetorical effect, not policy, this is so much more attractive than Trump’s affect. How in the hell did the Republicans allow Hillary Clinton — Hillary Clinton! — to be in the position to come across as Reaganesque?!

9:51: Powerful contrasts with Trump. HRC talking about how her mother suffered as a poor girl, and how a teacher helped her, resonates with me. That’s exactly what happened to my mom. Look, I cannot imagine voting for a social radical like Hillary, but this speech makes her incomparably more attractive than Trump. It’s killing the conservative in me that this is happening. The Republican Party is dead at the national level.

9:55 — The thing is, I’m much more of a nationalist than a globalist. HRC is a total globalist. This speech is not really who she is. If the Republicans had a candidate this year who was a nationalist, but who seemed confident and normal, not a blustering bully, they would beat her. She’s owning the middle. The suburbs are going to go for her if she keeps this up through the fall. Saying she’s going to be a president for all Americans, even those who don’t vote for her, is potent, and is another strong contrast with Trump. Do I believe her? Not at all! But it doesn’t matter. Image is everything. Michael Deaver had this all figured out in the early 1980s, serving Reagan.

10:02 —

Clinton's white garb reflects her transformation into an even more powerful wizard, a la Gandalf.

— Jeffrey Young (@JeffYoung) July 29, 2016

10:03 — “I believe that Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again.” Oh, please! The Goldman Sachs candidate? The one paid skrillions for giving Wall Street speeches?

10:06 — When HRC starts talking about what she believes, that’s when reality kicks in. Militant liberalism, delivered by a hectorer. That’s the Hillary we know. How very, very lucky she is that her opponent is even more painful to listen to than she is.

10:08 — College tuition free for the middle class? I know that’s something Bernie pushed on her, but good grief, they’re going to spend us into oblivion if given the chance. Great line about Trump ignoring his debts, though.

10:09 — I wonder how many people at home know how bloody rich the Clintons have become since the left office. This economic populism of hers is phony. She’s the Davos candidate. She really is.

10:11 —

Hillary Clinton calls for overturning of 'Citizens United,' which overruled gov't censorship of a film critical of…Hillary Clinton.

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 29, 2016

10:12: I think this is good stuff, pointing out how Trump screwed over working people, and how Trump’s a hypocrite on having his branded stuff made overseas. But I’ve gotta say, when Hillary descended from her boffo opening to Democratic boilerplate, she lost a lot of steam.

10:15:

Foreign policy section of speech includes nothing about anything Clinton did as SoS. It's telling that she doesn't cite her own record

— Daniel Larison (@DanielLarison) July 29, 2016

10:16 — This speech is turning into a Democratic kitchen sink. Losing focus.

10:18 — Good point. Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person:

Trump licenses his name for stuff made elsewhere because American manufacturing is expensive & high-quality, and Trump's a downscale brand.

— Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson) July 29, 2016

10:18: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” She should say this every time she gives a speech. This is the thing that scares people about Trump. OK, it’s what scares me most about Trump.

10:22: I agree with her strongly about what a cruel pig Trump can be with his language. “Here’s the sad truth: there is no other Donald Trump. This is it.” Good line.

10:25 — This.

Trump allows Hillary to say, essentially, "Sure, there's 100 things you don't like about me. But, come on, really?" Value of this: it's true

— alexmassie (@alexmassie) July 29, 2016

10:27: Not a great speech, but a solid one, and I think she helped herself with this speech. Strong contrast with Trump. Listening to this as a conservative was incredibly depressing, for the reason Alex Massie identifies. Who would have thought that the Republicans would have allowed Hillary Clinton to occupy the sensible, sane middle in American politics? I’m not talking policy; she’s going to be the most left-wing president America has ever had, and she is going to be a very divisive president too. But she is likely to be the next president because come on, really.

I need a drink. Of hemlock. Over and out, folks. I’ll be back online in the morning.

Cheering For Abortion

Because I’m in the middle of a move, and rushing like mad to finish my next book by the August 5 deadline, I have been very fortunate not to have had the opportunity to watch the Democratic National Convention this week, and to have learned about it only by reading accounts when I have free moments. What I was able to watch last week of the Trumptastic GOP convention was hard enough to take, but as the GOP is the conservative party (or so I read), I felt obliged. The Democrats? No.

I really don’t know how I would have reacted had I seen the ghoulish speeches from Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, whose organization harvests unborn baby parts and sells them, and NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue. Follow that link to Hogue’s brief speech. There’s a video embedded, and you can see her, around the 40-second mark, talking about her own abortion. The Democratic crowd cheers her when she first mentions having aborted her unborn child!

They cheered for abortion.

Honestly, I can understand perfectly well people who believe that abortion is a necessary evil that must be protected under law. I don’t agree with them, but I can see where they’re coming from. They see abortion as a tragedy.

But people who cheer abortion, and are proud of it? That is morally grotesque. And Tim Kaine, a Roman Catholic, is running as a vice presidential nominee for a party of people who cheer the extermination of unborn children in the womb.

Donald Trump won’t do a thing to stop or limit abortion. We know this. But whatever their sins, and they are many, Republicans don’t cheer for abortion. And please don’t insult my intelligence by saying that Democrats want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” No party that cheers for abortion wants it to be rare. Hillary Clinton and the party she represents are hardcore abortion extremists. There’s no escaping that.

What a country we have become. Donald Trump’s supporters cheer when he praises torture, Hillary Clinton’s supporters cheer when her surrogates praise abortion. The culture of death rules us. We have chosen this.

Freddie Gray’s Fate

Freddie Gray did not sever his own spine in the back of that Baltimore police van. But no police officer who held him in custody will face legal penalty for what happened to Gray. From the NYT:

The state’s attorney here dropped all remaining charges Wednesday against three city police officers awaiting trial in the death of Freddie Gray, closing the book on one of the most closely watched police prosecutions in the nation without a single conviction — and few answers about precisely how the young man died.

More:

The exchanges showed that even in a majority-black city, with a black mayor and a black prosecutor, there are no easy answers to questions involving race and policing. The case featured a black victim and had a black judge. And three of the six officers are black, as is the defense lawyer who spoke on their behalf Wednesday.

No easy answers? Well, NYT columnist Charles Blow has found one:

No one need ask me anymore about how to heal the racial divide in America. No one need inquire about the path forward beyond racial strife. You will not be put at ease by my response.

… I deserve to be angry. I deserve to survey the system that thrusts so many officers and black and brown people into contact in the first place, and be disgusted. I deserve to examine the biases that are exposed in officer/citizen encounters, and be disgusted. I deserve to take account of an utterly racially biased criminal justice system, and be disgusted.

America’s streets are filled with cries of “black lives matter,” and America continues to insist through its actions in these cases that they don’t, that that is a lamentation of hopeful ideals rather than a recitation of a national reality.

As Steve Sailer points out:

Black district attorney, black mayor, black judge, black cops, black corpse, black rioters, black Attorney General, black President … white people to blame.

To be fair to Blow, he didn’t say explicitly that it’s white people’s fault, but that’s a fair reading of Blow’s lede. And you know, I am somewhat sympathetic to him. Was nobody to blame for Freddie Gray’s death? Nobody?

Maybe the prosecutor overcharged the cops. This matters a lot. The police officers might have been guilty of something, but the prosecutors were unable to prove their case. I don’t know, but it’s possible. Remember how certain people were that Michael Brown was an innocent victim of a trigger-happy white cop, but a careful Justice Department investigation proved that narrative false, and showed that the police officer had behaved reasonably, given that Brown had tried to grab his gun?

This week I was talking to a friend with a law enforcement background who has been a strong critic of the way police have been handling these situations. He surprised me, though, by saying that he would be surprised if either of the two Baton Rouge police officers in the Alton Sterling shooting face charges. He took me through the events we all saw on the video, step by step, and explained why everything the police did was defensible and reasonable. The only thing he would have seen them do differently, he said, is to have taken out their sticks to try to subdue Sterling instead of tackling him.

The important things to keep in mind, said my friend, is that those officers were summoned on a gun call — that is, they had been told that the suspect was armed. Sterling refused their lawful orders when they arrived on the scene. They tased him, but he still did not comply. That’s when they tackled him.

This explanation of why the officers likely won’t face charges is exactly what my friend told me. Excerpt:

Sterling appears to be offering passive non-compliance to the officers during what we’ve seen of the encounter up until this point. He’s clearly refusing to listen to either officer, but he did not try to run away or throw punches. He clearly starts offering resistance, however when the officers attempted to gain control over his arms. The “taser” officer is clearly working very hard and having to use both arms to try to bring Sterling’s left arm under control.

Of very real importance is the fact that we can’t see Sterling’s right arm, due to a combination of the low-quality camera, shaky camerawork, and the camera angle/position of Sterling in relation to the front bumper, which he’s right up against and perhaps slighting under. The “tackle” officer can barely be seen as he seeks control of Sterling’s body and right arm.

Please keep in mind that officers tend to key on two things: overall suspect demeanor and their hands. Sterling is clearly non-compliant, his passive non-compliance is now turning into active resistance.

“Tackle” officer is still mostly obscured as he seeks to control Sterling’s right arm. “Taser” officer has managed to pin Sterling’s left arm under his knees. Sterling continues trying to raise his head and upper body as he resists. One of the officers, presumably, “Tackle,” yells, “He’s got a gun!”

“Taser,” who has Sterling’s left arm pinned under his knees, immediately grabs his gun as shown in the screen capture above. He then points the gun at Sterling’s chest in an awkward but reasonable effective retention position where he can fire the gun, but where Sterling can’t easily jostle or control it, as shown below.

One of the officers—it’s impossible to tell which—yells a warning. “Hey bra! You f*cking move, I swear to God.” It’s clearly a warning that the officers, who have their guns on Sterling, who is now known to be armed and actively resisting arrest, and are preparing to use them if he doesn’t immediately comply with officer commands.

Sterling does not obviously move at this moment,but we then hear the first shot fired and our cameraperson once again yanks the camera away.

There are more shots, then yelling inside the car from people who are incredulous that the just saw the shooting before the video ends.

A firearm was then recovered from Sterling’s body, who was dead at the scene.

Read the whole thing, and notice especially the video in higher resolution showing that when the cops had him down, Sterling’s right arm was still free and at his side. Sterling’s pistol was in his right pocket.

The fact of the matter is that if Alton Sterling had done what the police ordered him to when they arrived, he would almost certainly be alive today.



Baton Rouge authorities wisely turned the investigation over to federal authorities, and will decide whether or not to file charges against the officers based on what the feds find. If there is no cause for charges, there will no doubt be loud and passionate voices saying justice has not been done. It appears — appears — that they will be wrong.

Still, Freddie Gray died violently while in police custody, and nobody will be made to answer for it. Why is that? It cannot be racism, because half the cops involved are black, and everybody involved in the prosecution and adjudication are black.

Christian Parents Are The Problem

Carl Trueman, in praising Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, R.R. Reno’s new book (which deserves it!), hits on something important I found in doing research for the Benedict Option book:

[P]arents need to teach their children that church is vital. But these are parents who have been shaped in the broader culture of psychology, hedonism, and anti-authoritarianism. I still remember the words of Archbishop Chaput in the 2014 Erasmus Lecture: Young people have abandoned the Roman Catholic Church because their parents’ generation never taught them that it was important in the first place. Chaput also commented that the most vigorous opposition to catechesis in parochial schools in Philadelphia comes from the parents. Parents must care about church and faith before they will influence their children to do the same.

You should read that entire Erasmus Lecture. Here’s the passage Trueman’s referring to:

But the biggest failure, the biggest sadness, of so many people of my ­generation, including parents, educators, and leaders in the Church, is our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place.

We can blame this on the confusion of the times. We can blame it on our own mistakes in pedagogy. But the real reason faith doesn’t matter to so many of our young adults and teens is that—too often—it didn’t really matter to us. Not enough to shape our lives. Not enough for us to suffer for it.

I know there are tens of thousands of exceptions to this, but it is still true. A man can’t give what he doesn’t have. If we want to change the culture of a nation, we need to begin by taking a hard look at the thing we call our own faith. If we don’t radiate the love of God with passion and courage in the example of our daily lives, nobody else will—least of all the young people who see us most clearly and know us most intimately. The theme of this essay is “strangers in a strange land.” But the real problem in America today isn’t that we believers are foreigners. It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.

This is so, so true. I cannot tell you the number of people I’ve talked to — pastors and Christian teachers — who have told me, usually on background (meaning they don’t want to be quoted), that the biggest problem they face is parents. Parents who want their children to be Christian, but not if they (the parents) have to sacrifice in any way greater than writing a tuition check, and not if being a Christian interferes with the plans the parents have for the way the family lives, and the life they have mapped out for their children.

It’s not only parents. It’s crappy formation in both churches and religious schools. But parents are the prime religious educators of our children. We have to do better. If we don’t do our job, the chain will be broken more completely than any other failure to pass on the faith. Psychological researcher Judith Rich Harris says it only takes one generation to lose a habit or a belief that has been in the family for generations. On the up side, it also takes only one generation to restore something. But mothers and fathers have to care, really care, and care sacrificially. The family is the nucleus of society, and if it does not carry within it a living faith, there will be no such thing as a Christian society.

(By the way, I’m on the last chapter of the Ben Op book revision. That will go out by noon today, then I have to go to St. Francisville to help Julie do some last-minute moving. Tomorrow begins the third — and, I think, final — revision of the book. It looks like I will make the August 5 deadline after all. Thanks for your patience with the light posting here, and for my being slow to approve comments. Man comes to install wifi at my new place in the morning. Let joy be unconfined!)

Pope: ‘All Religions Want Peace’

Pope Francis gotta Pope-Francis:

Pope Francis said Wednesday the world was at war but argued that religion was not the cause, as he arrived in Poland a day after jihadists murdered a priest in France.

“We must not be afraid to say the truth, the world is at war because it has lost peace,” the pontiff told journalists aboard a flight from the Rome to Krakow.

“When I speak of war I speak of wars over interests, money, resources, not religion. All religions want peace, it’s the others who want war.”

This is absurd. No, it’s not absurd: this is a lie. It may not be a conscious lie — I presume it isn’t; he’s the Pope, after all — but it is a dangerous untruth. He is misleading the Christian people. One shouldn’t expect the Pope to speak like King Jan Sobieski, the “savior of Christendom” from the Ottoman invaders at Vienna. But I hope that some of the fighting Polish monarchs contemporary descendants have a few words with Francis in Poland this week.

Jean Raspail, a traditionalist French Catholic, has the number of Pope Francis and religious leaders like him, who out of their mindless, see-no-evil “compassion” open the door for horror. The martyr Père Jacques Hymel was slaughtered like an animal at mass yesterday by two Muslims shouting “Allahu akbar,” yet the Bishop of Rome is afraid to speak the truth, even as he pretends otherwise.

Trump Has A Point On Russia Hack

Evergreen headline: ‘Media Freaking Out Over Trump Statement.’ Today, as ever, it’s valid:

Donald J. Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, essentially sanctioning a foreign power’s cyberspying of a secretary of state’s correspondence.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Mr. Trump’s call was an extraordinary moment at a time when Russia is being accused of meddling in the U.S. presidential election. His comments came amid questions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, which researchers have concluded was likely the work of two Russian intelligence agencies.

Shocking? Sure. But Trump’s statement draws a bead on how completely reckless Secretary of State Clinton was with her private e-mail server. I am quite sure that Russia already has those e-mails, and will see to it that any juicy items in them will be released at opportune times in the fall campaign.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much of The Americans, but I am also not particularly outraged by this behavior. I wish Russia hadn’t done it, but come on, we would do the same thing to them if we had the chance. In 2014, the Russians intercepted a phone call between senior US diplomat Victoria Nuland and another American diplomat, in which they discussed American efforts behind the scenes to influence Ukrainian politics in an anti-Moscow direction. Here’s a transcript of that discussion. None of this should surprise us. In fact, I would be surprised to learn that hackers in the employ of the CIA and the NSA are not doing the same thing to the Russians right now.

Should Americans care that Putin is trying to influence the US presidential election? Yeah, I guess. I don’t like the thought of any foreign government meddling in our national politics. But we do it to other countries all the time. This is how the game is played. I think it’s a more important issue that the Democratic candidate was so careless with top-secret communications that she left herself open to hackers working for the Russians, the Chinese, and any other foreign government. It’s sheer, reckless incompetence. And if there’s anything we know about the Clintons, it’s that they’re reckless.

My colleague Noah Millman says in his post pretty much everything I say here about this fiasco, except he thinks it’s outrageous that Trump failed to denounce Russia for interfering in US affairs. All things considered, I greatly wish Trump had done as Noah wishes he had done. Does it really need pointing out that Trump is also reckless as hell? But after Trump talked about his penis size in a GOP presidential candidate’s debate, I ceased to be shocked by anything that comes out of that short-fingered vulgarian’s mouth.

Please don’t “whatabout” me regarding Trump. I believe he is a menace. But the fact that he is a menace does not obviate the fact that HRC is too. Trump’s outrageous statement today only confirms that. There is almost certainly no question but that the Russians have those e-mails already. The only questions are what’s in them, and when are the Russians going to drop that particular propaganda bomb.

UPDATE: This:

Just want to point out that Donald Trump got Hillary's deleted emails to the top of the front page of the New York Times site this morning.

— Aaron G. (@AJG_LA) July 27, 2016

And:

Trump is awful & his Russia ties are worrisome but this is completely overwrought. It was a joke to make a point. https://t.co/lmLmznZZxd

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) July 27, 2016