Rod Dreher's Blog, page 563
June 23, 2016
The Evil, Evil Anabaptists
Did you know that Anabaptists were a mob of murderers? This is news to me. Anabaptists are pacifists, right? What do they have to do with the Orlando massacre carried out by a gay Muslim radical? Mennonite SJW Jay (Jennifer) Yoder squints real hard to explain why she sees her co-religionists as basically monsters. Excerpts:
What we found was the violence of the recent MC USA convention in Kansas City. What we found was decades-long firings and shunnings and shamings. What we found was a whispered history of rape, of suicide, of addiction, of Mennonites dying secretly in their homes of AIDs, their wives by their bedsides. What we found was forcing queer people of color to deny one piece of their identity so that they could be tokenized for another. What we found was preaching peace while ignoring violence and accountability. What we found was passing resolutions acknowledging that treating queer folks as less than full members of our Mennonite community results in us being targeted for sexual violence while *simultaneously* passing a resolution denying us full membership in the community.
Most of the times I don’t tell the hardest parts of my story publicly. Most of the time what I want you to know is that I’m whole and I’m happy and I’m not your sad broken queer story to be used.
Here’s what I want you to know today. We are dying, and you are killing us. We are dying, and you are killing us. We are dying, and you are killing us.
God forgive you. I’m not ready to.
Wow, did you know that Mennonites beat up queer Mennonites at the church’s annual convention last year? Did you know that they kill gay Mennonites? Well, if by “kill” you mean “refused to give the LGBT lobby within the church exactly what they want,” then it was basically the Holocaust. Here’s what happened:
Delegates attending the annual conference voted to approve a “forbearance” measure, a new part of the church platform acknowledging that there is not currently a consensus within the church on issues of human sexuality. The forbearance encourages dialogue, discussion, and prayer. Yet delegates also affirmed membership guidelines that effectively shut the door on the church allowing same-sex unions, with a moratorium on further discussion for four more years. The forbearance was supposed to be a nod towards the church progressives, with the membership guidelines a bone for the conservatives.
Got that? The church meeting said no same-sex marriages now, absent a consensus, but we’ll keep talking about it. Lord have mercy, it’s pretty much the Wannsee Conference, innit?
Honestly, aren’t people getting sick and tired of these hysterics? This is objectively deranged, as well as morally disgusting: to accuse your fellow church members of being guilty of murder because they won’t give you what you want. And The Mennonite magazine gave Yoder space to slander her opponents within the church.
Any community or institution that grants extremists like Yoder space to be taken seriously with berserker slanders like this is drinking poison. Here’s a piece from a piece Yoder wrote in advance of the conference last year that did not go her way. Excerpt:
Let’s create brave spaces of shared vulnerability, of shared accountability here together, in Kansas together, and let us cultivate a practice of creating brave spaces, spaces where we can model accountability, transparency, truthtelling, and brave nonviolent action. In other words, let us model the beloved community alternative to the violent structures of MC USA.
Who talks that way? This is SJW cant. It is a mark of our times that protesters and activists press their case by making highly emotional assertions of their own sanctity, and then asserting, with equal hysteria, their opponents’ evil. Sooner or later, I hope, reasonable adults in all kinds of institutions and communities will marginalize these drama-queen bullies, and refuse to be intimidated by this nonsense. Let the Jennifer Yoders of the world fall out and spontaneously combust, if that’s their choice. The rest of us can’t reward such emotional theatrics.
June 22, 2016
Campus Comes To Congress
I’m halfway around the world right now, and just checking in on news from back home. I see that Congressional Democrats are beclowning themselves:
Democrats, led by civil rights icon John Lewis, took control of the chamber Wednesday morning demanding a vote on gun control legislation. But Republicans are resisting, saying they don’t want to give in to such protest tactics.
The tension exploded onto the floor just after 10 p.m. ET when Republican Speaker Paul Ryan gaveled the chamber into order to hold a procedural vote on an unrelated matter. An extraordinary scene unfolded as throngs of Democrats — some holding signs with the names of victims of gun violence — remained in the House well chanting “no bill, no break” and “shame shame shame.” They also sang the protest anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
What cheap, disgusting theatrics. More:
Such displays would normally be prohibited but Ryan, sensitive to the attention being paid to the sit-in, declined to enforce the traditional order in the House.
A Democratic sit-in on the House floor demanding votes on gun-control legislation led to a remarkable scene of pandemonium on Wednesday night as Speaker Paul D. Ryan was shouted down when he tried to regain control.
Democrats pressed against the podium, waving signs with shooting victims’ names and chanting “No bill! No break!” as Mr. Ryan repeatedly banged his gavel in an attempt to restore order.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives was shouted down by Democratic Congressman as he attempted to regain control of the House of Representatives. Actual US Congressmen behaving like a bunch of giddy Oberlin undergraduates.
They had better not give in. Look, on gun control matters, I am generally — generally — more sympathetic to Democrats than to Republicans. But this mob insurrection on the House floor is profoundly unsettling. I have not looked closely at the legislation, so it is entirely possible that I might support the Democratic proposal. But to attempt to get one’s way by showing utter contempt for rules of the House? No. No, no, no. Their passion does not justify their behavior.
This country is in trouble.
21 Questions With Barronelle Stutzman
This is amazing. Barronelle Stutzman is the Washington florist sued by a gay man, a friend and client of almost a decade, who was outraged by her refusal to do the flowers for his same-sex wedding. Whatever you think you know about her case, I bet you don’t know a lot of things in that short three-minute video.
#BlackLivesMatter’s Cry For Help
The truth comes out at last, courtesy of Black Lives Matter:
It is with pain and heartache that the Black Lives Matter Network extends love, light, protection, and abundance to our family in Orlando, Florida. We love you. Black people are a diverse community, and though the hate-filled rhetoric of the conservative right is currently trying to pit us against our kin — we will always stand with all the parts of ourselves. Today, Queer, Latinx, and Muslim family, we lift you up.
Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. Those who seek to profit from our deaths hope we will forget who our real enemy is, and blame Muslim communities instead.
But we will never forget.
In case you didn’t notice, Omar Mateen, an Afghani-American radical gay Muslim registered as a Democrat, was really a right-wing, gay-hating, white conservative. No, Black Lives Matter isn’t crazy at all. Why would you say so? More:
Until these systems are defeated, until anti-Blackness no longer fuels anti-Muslim and anti-queer and trans bigotry, exploitation, and exclusion — we can never be truly free.
Nope, perfectly sane. By no means is this a foaming expectoration from a bunch of racist far-left crackpots.
Seriously, though. Seriously. How is it that people so given over to ideological derangement command such admiration from the media and others on the cultural heights? Who decided that to prove you really cared about black lives, you had to embrace this movement? I’m not asking rhetorically; I would love to know. You can’t just overlook these malicious Jacobin lies. To my knowledge, this is crazier than anything Donald Trump has ever said — and that takes some doing, for sure.
Imagine that white right-wing extremist Tim McVeigh blows up the Murrah Building, but some conservative group says the real criminals are black gay liberals. Anybody who said that would be instantly ridiculed, and never taken seriously again by any morally sane person. Somehow, I doubt that will happen with these sacred monsters.
June 21, 2016
Falwell, Fallen
Literally a framed pic on the wall of the candidate and a porn star, as a major evangelical leader endorses him. pic.twitter.com/ErYG57zcFb
— Nathan Lino (@nathanlino) June 21, 2016
‘Knowing Is Too Hard’
A reader e-mails about the “What? Trans? Here?” post. His e-mail was so startling I decided to give it its own separate post. I have edited it slightly to protect privacy:
I just got back from [state] visiting my in-laws and my wife’s childhood friends and we just had this exact same experience.
My wife’s friends do well. The husband is a union guy and makes more money than I do. I like him, but he’s what the progressives might consider to be… a problem. He has three kids, the oldest being a girl going into seventh grade. After a few beers he says things like, “Look. I’m OK with anything just as long as they ain’t gay. And no black guys.”
See what I mean?
Well, we were talking school stuff and the mom very casually drops the news that there is a trans kid at the seventh grader’s school. My wife and the mom went to school with the mother of the trans kid. I guess she was weird and “goth” and all the rest. They agreed that if the trans thing have been a thing back then, this mom would have been the most likely person to declare. Fair or not, I don’t know. But there it is.
At any rate, my wife’s friend sort of just mentioned that this girl came out as trans. Let’s say her name was Mary. Well, my wife’s friend sees her at a park this summer and says, “Hi, Mary.” And the former Mary very testily replied, “I am not Mary. I am Mark now.”
My wife’s friend and her union husband sort of rolled their eyes and looked mystified but left it at that. I was surprised. The “no black guys, and no gay” dad seemed to be taking it in stride. So I said, “So where is this kid showering?”
They said: “Huh?”
I said, “Where is this kid going to shower? You know the kid gets to shower wherever he/she says or the school district will lose their federal money.”
They looked at me like I had two heads.
The mom said, “I think that the school told the kid to shower in a faculty locker room and they were OK with that.”
I let her know that this will be fine as long as another kid doesn’t push it further than that. Because others have tried it and lost. And their school will lose, too. Still, they seemed to be OK with it mostly because you know, I guess … who’s it hurting?
Until I said, “Well, yeah. The parents of that kid aren’t nuts. You throw a biological girl into a boys locker room and something bad will happen fast. The problem is going to be when there’s a biological boy who wants to shower with your kid.”
The dad looked like I hit him with a pipe wrench. “No,” he said. “That ain’t happening.”
I said sure it is. The Obama administration’s advisory says it is.
I told him about the MTF trans kid in Alaska who medaled at the state competition. I am telling you that this guy looked actively wounded. Like I was lying to him or something.
He said he couldn’t believe it. I said haven’t you heard about this and that and the other thing? He had heard of all those things but he just … never thought there would be a penis in the girls locker room. He is still having trouble believing it.
This is not a religious family. I have never, ever known them to go to church of any kind for any reason. Neither does anyone in their extended families.
It’s not like this is a huge secret. They honestly just don’t want to know. Because knowing is too hard.
And again, this is a guy who WILL police the family in terms of the kids being gay. He WILL make his views on race known to his kids. It’s not like he’s not willing to go out on a limb or say unpopular things, many of which I disagree with.
He can’t even compute the trans stuff. Even though there is one at their school. He just sits there saying, “No.”
I don’t know what they do if it hits. I bet they just live with it. I doubt they can afford a religious high school. The cheapest one in their area is like $21,000 a year. Their kids will think it’s normal, and their dad’s objections will get filed away with his retrograde views on race.
They honestly just don’t want to know. Because knowing is too hard. This is true. This is profoundly true. If priests and pastors are not speaking clearly and directly to their congregations about this, they are failing them.
Evangelicals Split On Trump
Even as the huge gathering in Manhattan was being prayed over by prominent televangelist Franklin Graham and moderated by former Gov. Mike Huckabee, other religious conservatives were using the gathering as a chance to speak out against Trump. One called Tuesday “a day of mourning.”
The morning event with as many as 1,000 social conservative leaders — mostly evangelical — started at 10:15 a.m. and ends at midday. There is not a vote or endorsement coming at the end, and participants say they are coming with open minds. But polls show that a majority of white evangelicals — and social conservatives in particular — are leaning toward Trump. The question is how greatly.
Erick Erickson laid into his fellow Evangelicals prior to the meeting. Excerpt:
Donald Trump is meeting with a bunch of evangelicals today, including a bunch of the prosperity gospel con artists, which is more than fitting. This comes on the heels of Ralph Reed attacking Christians for standing on their convictions against Trump. Reed called it the sin of pride. Ralph Reed actually should keep his mouth shut about Christians who stand on their convictions. If Ralph spent more time sending Republicans to church instead of sending the church into the GOP, perhaps he would not have gotten in bed with Jack Abramoff where, among other things, he fought against improving the standards of Chinese women in the Northern Marianas Islands who “were subject to forced abortions” and “were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.”
David French, another Evangelical piles on:
Access to power is a powerful drug, and there are quite a few Evangelical leaders nursing an addiction. It must be especially hard to kick the habit for those whose fortunes are on the decline. There’s a reason why Trump’s surrogates mainly represent a traveling band of the has-beens and “almost-weres”: He’s their last, best hope for relevance. But others will hold their nose and cling to him, genuinely convinced that all of his faults are outweighed — just barely — by his (kinda sorta) promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. Trump’s so mendacious that one can measure his lies by the minute, but in this case they’ll believe he’s telling the truth. Because they want to believe.
This is a grave mistake. American Evangelical Christianity does not exist for the purpose of placing one or two decent judges on the Supreme Court. It — along with its Catholic and Orthodox counterparts — represents the body of Christ on this earth. It is a flawed vessel, to be sure, but its moral witness is still of incalculable worth.
I’ll update this post as reaction from those who were inside the closed-door meeting comes out. Here’s the first one I’ve seen:
Just got back from Trump’s “conversation” with Evangelicals. No mention of Jesus.
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) June 21, 2016
UPDATE:
If you wondered why younger, theological, gospel-centered evangelicals reacted neg to the old guard Religious Right, well, now you know.
— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 21, 2016
UPDATE.2: Matthew Lee Anderson (who wasn’t there):
There is a unity which we must seek, and a unity we cannot allow. The capitulation of the Religious Right is now complete. It is a tragically comic ending to a movement that has done far, far more harm than good.
What? Trans? Here?
A friend of mine who does religious liberty litigation said to me recently that she’s often stunned by how unaware ordinary people are about what’s going on in the courts, and the serious, mounting threats to religious liberty. I concurred — and it’s not just religious liberty. Things are moving very fast on the LGBT front. People all over aren’t thinking about what’s going to hit them. Take for example what’s going on in Louisiana:
As state and federal leaders feud over whether transgender students should be able to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity, public educators in Louisiana say they are just beginning to grapple with an issue that is brand new to many of them.
Hollis Milton, superintendent for West Feliciana Parish and president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, said he cannot recall a time during his six years as a superintendent educating any transgender students in his small 2,100-student district north of Baton Rouge. And it’s not something he and his fellow superintendents had been talking about.
“I don’t remember having a single conversation about this,” Milton said. “This just came out of nowhere.”
The Obama administration is prepared to hold back $1.1 billion from our cash-strapped state if we don’t let transgendered students use the bathroom and locker room of their choice.
Imagine my surprise when Your Working Boy appeared in this story, from the Baton Rouge Advocate:
Louisiana School for Math, Science, and The Arts in Natchitoches, a high school for academically gifted students who live on campus, has enrolled a handful of transgender students in the past few years.
“It’s never been an issue for us, and we’ve always been able to accommodate students,” said Patrick Widhalm, LSMSA’s executive director.
Sure, but that’s not the point. The point is whether or not your previous accommodations will be considered sufficient by the Title IX enforcers if the trans student requests to live in an opposite-sex dorm. More:
But as the Obama administration’s position on the bathroom issue became national news last month, one prominent alum, Rod Dreher, a writer for American Conservative magazine, brought up the school in an online piece called “Transgender Dorm Daze.”
In his post, which sparked a testy online debate among school alumni, Dreher singled out a current transgender student, noting that student could insist on moving into the boy’s dorm and, according to the Obama administration, the school would have to comply.
“A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?” Dreher wrote.
Widhalm said so far transgender students have remained with their original roommates and haven’t sought to change dorms. He said that the school is careful on the front end in how it matches up students and forges good relationships with parents from the get-go.
The words “so far” are doing a lot of the work there. More:
“We try to be pretty upfront with parents when they are going through orientation at the school,” Widhalm said.
Dreher’s concerns are overstated, he said.
“I respect Rod Dreher a great deal, but I think there has to be counterbalance to what he said,” Widhalm said.
All of the transgender students have lived in the girls dorm, where students live in suites with three rooms to one bathroom. The boys dorm, by contrast, has much larger group bathrooms.
Widhalm expects this will become even less of an issue after a new modern dorm is built, which is likely to start construction in 2017.
Hmm. I like Pat Widhalm, whom I’ve known for years, but I don’t see how my concerns are “overstated,” nor do I see what the “counterbalance” to what I said might be. If the Obama guidelines stand up in court, and a biological girl who claims to be a transgender boy asks to live in the boy’s dorm, claiming she’s a boy, the school will have to accommodate her request or be in violation of Title IX.
I don’t fault the school for this. I fault Obama for this, for putting this and other schools in a terrible position. And I don’t see what difference a new dorm would make. You’re still going to have the same problem: must a biological girl who identifies as a boy be allowed to live in the boy’s dorm if she requests it, or biological male who identifies as female, etc.? Remember, these are all minors.
Hollis Milton, quoted in the story, is the head of my local public schools. I don’t blame him for being caught up short on this stuff. You can’t imagine that it would be an issue in a small town like ours. Until all of a sudden, it is. If somebody had told you five years ago that whether or not the federal government could or should force schools to let transgender teenage boys use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms was about to become a national issue, you wouldn’t have believed it.
One of these days, it’s coming to your town. My religious liberty lawyer friend said in a lot of states, people are complacent, thinking these things only happen far away. They’re going to be in for a very rude shock before too much longer, said the lawyer.
If you feel like your state doesn’t really have to worry about this stuff, you are very wrong. You had better have a plan for when it comes to your kid’s school.
UPDATE: I should have pointed out that the Advocate report states something factually untrue about my blog post. It says I singled out a trans high school student. I did no such thing, and could not have done any such thing, because I don’t know any of their names. Here’s what I actually wrote in that blog post:
My alma mater is a public boarding school for gifted and talented high school students. There are several self-declared transgenders studying there now, including a female-to-male genderfluid girl (meaning she is a male or female, depending on her whim). According to the new federal directive, not only is the school prohibited from telling these students’ parents about their children’s behavior without the children’s permission, but if one of these minors decides that he or she wants to live in the opposite sex’s dorm, the school has no choice but to permit it.
A biological female living in a dorm full of underage teenage boys. What could possibly go wrong?
If I had named a high school kid, that would have been outrageous and morally indefensible. But I did no such thing.
Trump Is Nearly Broke
Well, this is news. From NPR:
His poll numbers are sinking. His TV blitz is nowhere to be seen. Big donors aren’t flocking to him.
And if Donald Trump needed more tangible evidence of problems in his campaign, it’s in reports filed Monday at the Federal Election Commission.
As of the end of May, Trump’s campaign account held just $1.3 million compared to Clinton’s $42 million. Ben Carson, whose bid for the GOP nomination ended in early March, had $1.8 million in his campaign fund. Many Republican senators facing tough re-election fights this fall have considerably more money on hand than their party’s presumptive nominee for president.
More:
Clinton’s campaign is capitalizing on the financial disparity. Her campaign now has hundreds of field staffers across the country who are busy organizing voters while Trump’s organization has yet to crack 100 paid employees.
Oh, and look at this from New York magazine:
And he paid $35,000 in advertising to a mystery firm called “Draper Sterling,” which might ring a bell for Mad Men fans and which may or may not actually exist.
This is going to be a political catastrophe we will tell our grandkids we lived to see.
June 20, 2016
Progressive Religion, Orthodox Religion
Richard Rodriguez is a gay California Catholic, and a very fine writer, even when I disagree with him (such as in this entry). His reaction to the Orlando massacre captures the core difference between left and right among the religious, and why we will never be able to agree on some things:
Here is the plain and dangerous truth facing the cosmopolitan world: In the opinion of many millions of Jews and Christians and Muslims, the Abrahamic God of the desert is a homophobe.
More:
The desert religions of Abraham — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — were shaped by an encounter with a God who revealed himself within an ecology of almost lunar desolation. In such a place, the call to belief was tribal, not individualistic. Sexuality was an expression of faith to increase the tribe. Allegiance to God and to one’s ancestors was fulfilled by giving birth.
You see the logic: According to the holy writ of Abrahamic religion, God says gay sex is wrong. But we believe, in God, and we believe gay sex is not morally wrong. Therefore, God believes gay sex is not wrong.
And he explains away a very deeply ingrained teaching of Abrahamic religion — one that, at least in Judaism and Christianity (I don’t know Islam well enough to say) by asserting that we’re more advanced than those desert savages.
This is not reasoning. This is rationalization.
The orthodox approach to revealed religion is to accept it as a statement of reality, and go from there. Of course these teachings always get sorted through an interpretive community, whose judgments are considered authoritative. What doesn’t happen, though, is that one gets to decide on the attributes of divinity based on what one wishes God were like. Otherwise it’s self-worship.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m taking a long flight today (I wrote this post on Sunday and scheduled it), and am not going to be able to approve most comments till much later. I will not approve comments on this thread that are debating homosexuality, either from a progressive or orthodox point of view. So please don’t waste your time writing one.
What I do want us to talk about is hermeneutics, which is to say, the way texts are interpreted. To oversimplify, progressives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what man says about God, while conservatives believe religion primarily (but not exclusively) concerns what God says about man.
The lines are not clearly drawn, and can’t be. Doctrine and theology does change, even under conservatives, while progressives really do take some religious truths as axiomatic. The crucial difference, as I see it, is that conservatives (or, if you prefer as I do, the small-o orthodox) believe that there is an objective, real, transcendent order that exists outside of us and prior to us, and truth claims are usually claims about it, and how we must relate to it. Any changes in what has been received or thought must be accomplished through a valid authorities within the interpretive community. If the authorities try to stretch the tradition too far too fast, they risk schism.
Progressives generally believe that the individual is allowed to decide for himself what constitutes religious truth — something an orthodox believer cannot do, even if he wants to.
Here’s how it shakes out with Richard Rodriguez’s claims. He obviously believes that the Christian prohibition against homosexuality is a relic of a primitive stage of religious development, and says nothing about the nature of God. Me, I would genuinely like to believe that Christians are free to decide what they like about homosexuality. It would make my gay friends think better of me, and it would make my professional life easier in many ways. But as a matter of intellectual integrity, I can’t rationalize away the prohibition within Christianity (nor can I rationalize away Biblical ethics binding heterosexual conduct).
I often think that progressive Christians judge us orthodox Christians to be bigots because they assume that we read Scripture and relate to Tradition in the same way that they do. For orthodox believers, Scripture and Tradition are like maps; if you don’t follow them, you won’t get where you are supposed to go. Maps are only a representation of the real world, it is true, but we have to hew as close to what we have been given as we can. The one thing we cannot do is redraw the map to make it take us where we wish to go, because we judge it to be a more pleasant place.
The orthodox says: “We can’t diverge too far from this map, or we’ll get lost.”
The progressive says: “What? That map is way out of date. We’ll redraw it. It was just somebody’s opinion. We know better now.”
The orthodox says: “What’s ‘better’? You have no way of knowing if your new coordinates are accurate. How do you know if they correspond to reality?”
The progressive says: “Huh?”
This is why we cannot resolve things between us.
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