Rod Dreher's Blog, page 564

Hungry For Socialism

Oh, socialism, is there anything you cannot do?:

With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

More:

Economists say years of economic mismanagement — worsened by low prices for oil, the nation’s main source of revenue — have shattered the food supply.

Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural center lie fallow for lack of fertilizers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories. Staples like corn and rice, once exported, now must be imported and arrive in amounts that do not meet the need.

In response, Mr. Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba.

Read the whole thing. Nine out of 10 Venezuelans say they do not have enough money to feed themselves.

Islam & The Benedict Option

Readers, I’ve got a very long flight today, and won’t be able to approve comments for some time. I want to share with you the transcript of an interview I did with a longtime reader of this blog who posts under the name “Jones.” I know his real name, and we’ve been corresponding for a while. He is a Pakistani-American lawyer of the Millennial generation, and a practicing believer in Islam. I think — I know — you will find a lot to mull over in his answers. I interviewed him as part of my research for my Benedict Option book — for the religion chapter, as I consider the question of Ben Op Christians finding common ground with Muslims and Orthodox Jews who are also resident aliens in this decadent post-Christian culture.

I mean, devout Muslims and Orthodox Jews would always be resident aliens here, in a sense, but increasingly, faithful small-o orthodox Christians will come to share their sense of being in this culture, but very much not of it. And in that we have an opportunity for fellowship, even mutual support. Here is the transcript, which I post with Jones’s permission:

How have cultural and political events in recent years changed your political views as an American Muslim (you were born and raised here, the son of immigrant parents from either India or Pakistan, right?)?

I was born in Pakistan, but came here when I was very young (less than one year).

Recent events in the United States have made me much more apprehensive about the future of Islam in America. I think Islam has a good, and even exciting, future in America, but recent years have made clear what sort of challenges we are going to face.

For many people on the right, including but not limited to the far right, the proposition that Muslims are an absolute enemy is a given; it no longer needs to be debated. And thanks to the Trump campaign, this contingent on the right has probably formed into an enduring force. Somewhere between 67% and 71% of Republicans support Trump’s ban on all Muslim immigration. 40% of Republicans, and 57% of conservative Republicans, believe that Muslims should be subject to more scrutiny than others merely because of their religion. Peter Beinart nicely sums up the situation on the right.

Meanwhile, as the Left starts asserting itself more and more as holders of a comprehensive ideology for governing all aspects of life, they are increasingly turning on Muslims, especially on the point where we most starkly conflict: sex and gender. A series of articles in The New York Times on Muslim women portends the future there, I think.

There are many different factions on the Right and Left, and only some of them hold strongly anti-Islam views. But those factions do exist, on both sides. I think Muslims are probably going to be treated as a political football, kicked around by both sides whenever it seems advantageous. That said, I was deeply heartened and even moved by the way the public, especially but not only liberals, reacted to Trump’s announcement of his Muslim ban. Even people like Dick Cheney were coming out of the woodworks to say that it was beyond the pale. Superficial politics aside, I believe that Americans at their heart are an open and inclusive people, perhaps more so than any other in the world. In many ways, you could say that there is no better place to be a Muslim—and more than once I have heard Muslims say just that.

In the mainstream debate, these issues often get discussed under the heading of “Islamophobia,” but I dislike the term and never use it myself. It’s disreputable as a debating tactic: it psychologizes the opponent, in a condescending way, and also fails to capture the essence of his view.

Why have I not mentioned any of the political issues that conservative Christians care about as a substantive matter, like gay rights, abortion, transgender rights, and so on? I think that Muslims are already at the end of the road that the Benedict Option leads down. In Islam, drinking alcohol is forbidden. But we all go to college and binge drinking is the primary—sometimes it seems like the exclusive—form of recreation there. In Islam fornication is forbidden. But in this society fornication is nearly universal, celebrated, and fiercely defended. I don’t think the idea of convincing our fellow citizens to think and behave like us even occurs to Muslims. Far more pressing is the question of whether we will be allowed to live the way we prefer to live, and to maintain our communities in relative peace. Therefore it’s much more urgent to try to prevent governments from banning mosques; to protect against massive intrusions against our civil rights through surveillance, illegal detention, and more; to allow schoolchildren to be taught about Islam; to reduce the rate at which Muslims are discriminated against in employment; etc.

What would you like Benedict Option Christians to know about Muslim Americans regarding these issues, given our mutual suspicion of each other, coming after 9/11?

Before I answer your question—

First, I don’t think the suspicion is mutual. I don’t think most Muslims bear any real hostility to Christians. To the contrary, I think they usually respect them, especially insofar as they adhere to traditional religious practices. Muslim Americans have respect for people who care about family, who live according to traditional values, who take care of their parents, who act and dress modestly, and who respect marriage. And the actual doctrines of Islam command respect for Christianity, recognizing the prophethood of Jesus and the virginal conception of Mary, after whom a whole chapter of the Qu’ran is named. In Islamic doctrine, Christians and Jews belong to the Ahl-al-Kitab, the People of the Book, who make up a privileged group.

I have to confess that my perspective is particular; it’s based on the part of the country that I live in. In truth, I very rarely interact with the kinds of conservative Christians your book (and blog) is aimed at. I live in the liberal Northeast, where practicing Christians are few and far in between. When we look around us, “Christianity” is not what we see. It’s true that, when I was growing up, my parents would distinguish between “us” and the people around us, who were different. What they meant is that “we” would not drink; we would not watch lewd things in TV and movies; we would not socialize casually with the opposite sex; we would go to the mosque, read the Qu’ran, pray, and fast. In short, Christianity was never the “other” for us in a practical sense; secularism was.

My only experiences with Christians have been in the university setting, where we Muslims would very often organize and cooperate with Christians and Jews to hold interfaith programming. My sense had always been that there was great respect and cooperation between people of different faith groups. I only realized later that this might have something to do with the highly liberal setting of the university.

Anyway, those were the expectations I brought with me when I first encountered your blog. I had started to discern that conservative Christians were among the few people around who lived like we did. I felt completely on my own in trying to figure out how to live according to traditional values in this society, so discovering that Christians were thinking about these same questions was very exciting to me—and it was a great source of moral comfort. Thus I always had a sense that Muslims and conservative Christians had common cause. Ironically, it was only after reading your blog that I started to appreciate how many Christians felt hostility toward Islam, as Christians. You could say I had a naive view until then.

What do I want Benedict Option Christians to know?

By far my most important message is: get to know us. Before you decide that you know who Muslims are and what they are about, go out and find actual Muslims and talk to them. Ask them about their lives, their communities, and their faiths. Visit a mosque and listen to the sermons for yourself. If you approach in good faith and with an open mind, I am certain that you will receive a warm welcome.

Do you think that, say, the average Manhattanite has a positive impression of conservative Christians? Do you think they view you the way you view yourself? If not, then why is that? If all I knew about Christians came from reading The New York Times and the Huffington Post, would I have an accurate sense of who Christians really are, what they are really like, what they really stand for? Probably not.

In a similar vein, I was educated at liberal institutions where the consensus was that “conservative thought” was an oxymoron. I decided that I owed it to myself to find out whether that was actually true. And if I wanted, I could have stopped after looking at the major conservative media outlets, which merely confirmed all of my worst impressions. If you want to find bad people and bad ideas, those are always out there, in any group. What you find will often be shaped by the spirit in which you seek.

I think the importance of abstract beliefs is overstated. The most important thing is to look at how people actually live. The truth is that the vast majority of Muslim Americans live by the same values that you do. If you spend time with them, you might be surprised at how much you find in common. That has certainly been my experience in dealing with Christians. Much of the essential work of any religion is in teaching its adherents how to be good people, capable of forming and living in good families and communities. As our respective traditions teach us, that work is hard enough. And I think Muslims and Christians share far more in common in their vision of the good life than either of us do with the secular mainstream.

I would say to people that if you accept Rod’s vision of where our country stands and where it is headed, then you have to conclude that the greatest threat to our well-being is a secular mainstream that is increasingly hostile to any religious ideas whatsoever, and certainly to the traditional core of the Abrahamic faiths. In the face of such an assault, it would be foolish for Muslims and Christians to let themselves be played against one another. We are likely to need all the help we can get in maintaining an America that hews close to its long, proud history of religious tolerance and liberty.

What’s more, our communities may have a great deal to learn from one another. Muslims may be able to teach you new things, just as I have learned a great deal from listening to Christians. We have to look for guidance and support in whatever forms we can find them.

After learning more about Christianity, I realized that there is another potential source of great confusion Christians might have regarding Islam. Islam in America is far less organized and coherent than Christianity. Most people pray at mosques that are little more than a bunch of people in the same area gathering together to pray. There is no formal hierarchy in Islam. Anyone who wants to get up and put themselves forth as an imam can do so. Being an imam is very different from being a priest: in many places, different members of the community perform the function every week. I have never been to an American mosque with a formal membership. If I want to pray at a particular mosque I simply walk in the door.

In short, there are no great national councils debating the minutiae of theology and deciding what policy stances to take, as I gather there are in Christianity. Moreover, American Islam is very diverse—there are Arabs from several countries, Egyptians, Pakistanis and Indians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Malaysians, African-Americans, Iranians, and more. There is little interaction or coherence between these groups thus far. Most of these groups speak completely different languages. Many people seem to conflate Muslims and Arabs, but only 20% of Muslims in the world are Arab.

I encourage people to learn more about Islam by looking to scrupulously neutral, authoritative academic sources. Don’t put the cart of ideology before the horse of understanding. It would also help to know the basics of Western foreign policy in the Middle East in the postcolonial period to the present, to understand a little bit about where Muslims are coming from politically.

I like this passage from a post on your blog, quoting someone else:

Ironically, I am reminded at this point of a criticism the late New Left intellectual, Edward Said, made of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. Said’s point was simple: At the local level, where people live next to each other, where they speak to each other, where they have to make their communities work because perpetual street fighting is not an option, the situation is always more complicated and hopeful than a collision of ideologies. Indeed, I might add to Said’s thoughts this paraphrase of something George Orwell said in another context: It is much harder to hate a man when you have looked into his eyes and seen that he too is a human being as you are.

How do you think about your own future as a Muslim lawyer, and perhaps as a husband and father in the United States, with regard to the social and moral environment, and the status of religious liberty? In that regard, do you think Christians and Muslims in this country need each other? And if so, what practical ways can we begin the engagement? What I’m thinking here is that US liberals think of themselves as allies of Muslims against conservatives, especially conservative Christians, but that is about a millimeter deep; most are not going to stand up for Muslims when it means choosing them over LGBTs and sexual liberty more generally. Right now, whether they realize it or not, Muslims are used by them as a way to beat up on conservatives. On the other hand, US conservatives, especially Christians, think of American Muslims warily at best, and as the enemy at worst. But is that the right way to see things? 

To be a practicing Muslim in this society is to be constantly rowing against the tide. Observing my faith is my personal moral responsibility, and not anyone else’s. But there is no doubt in my mind that environment affects how hard it is. And it’s easy to end up resenting the society around you when it feels needlessly hard.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if this is a valid complaint: living a life of faith is never easy, and these kinds of obstacles often provide an important moral clarity. It’s common in Muslim circles to observe that American Muslims are often more committed practitioners of their religion than those “back home,” because you have no choice but to take personal responsibility for your faith. In these respects, the lives we live already resemble the ones that you envision for Christians after the Benedict Option.

In any case, it is not national politics, but this day-to-day struggle to stay true to faith that will decide the future of our religions in America. We reject materialist hedonism in favor of an ethos of moral self-discipline. We reject the cult of the autonomous individual in favor of fidelity to family and community. In these respects, there is a great deal of overlap in what Christians and Muslims want from modern society. We both confront a society that adheres to an increasingly aggressive and comprehensive secular materialism. And we both have an interest in preventing that ideology from unduly burdening our communities’ way of life.

When it comes to raising children, the problems become even more acute. A central task for any value system is to transmit its values to the next generation. This is where environment becomes really important. The one thing most crucial to intergenerational transmission is the formation of new families and the preservation of marriage. I probably don’t need to belabor the reasons why we face unprecedented challenges in this area. It may be a life and death issue for all of us. Traditionalists of nearly all cultures in nearly all times and places used to share a few basic understandings in this area. Now, in America it’s only a small number of traditionalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews that hew to those understandings.

I’ve been surprised by how quickly Muslims are adapting to contemporary America. What worries me is not that we will fail to adapt, but that the next generation will precipitately abandon or minimize any feature of Islam that is not cut to the measure of contemporary liberalism. All the young Muslims I know are educated in American universities, and in my eyes too many of them are eager to shear away the aspects of their faith that don’t fit neatly with current liberal attitudes. It’s as if they take the unerring truth of contemporary liberalism completely for granted. How long can such an amputated faith last?

I worry that the ranks of nominal Muslims will swell, and that the truth and beauty of the Islam that I love so much will fade from view. Much of what’s valuable about Islam to me is not how compatible it is with modern life, but how it challenges modern life on behalf of higher and deeper things. If we fail to hold on to these things, not only Muslims, but other Americans as well will suffer, having lost the opportunity to learn some things that only we can teach. I want us to occupy the middle ground, learning from the best of Western culture while preserving the essence of the Muslim way of life.

I don’t want to deny the differences between Christianity and Islam, nor am I asking you to endorse our theology. What we should both want is that America return to its best traditions of pluralistic liberalism. The American conception of liberty is that adherents of all religions should be able to freely exercise their faiths, and that the “free and open encounters” that result will be our best guide toward the truth. I was aghast when, not long after studying the Constitution’s Religion Clauses in law school, I saw The New York Times putting the term “religious liberty” in scare quotes every time it was used. The liberalism of the U.S. Constitution dictates that the state must be scrupulously neutral between competing worldviews and ways of life, equally protecting the rights of all.

Christianity and Islam are different, but in the eyes of atheists all religions are essentially the same: ungrounded superstitions standing in the way of social progress. If you are right, and the numbers of authentic Christians are rapidly dwindling, then neither of us can afford to go it alone. Adherents of different faiths should band together to defend the classical liberal compromise.

Right now, the movement for religious liberty is viewed as an opportunistic guise for the re-assertion of Christian domination. It would greatly enhance the credibility of Christians interested in religious liberty if they stood up for adherents of all faiths. And Muslims face many of the most severe, outright challenges to their ability to freely exercise religion: whether it is being under suspicion of terrorism for any outward display of faith, being pulled off of an airplane for speaking Arabic, having our mosques and even restaurants under extensive, multi-year surveillance that yields no actionable intelligence, nationwide movements to prevent the building of mosques, being subject to arbitrary detention and torture without due process, etc.

In practice, I think Ben Op Christians should try to find and reach out to local Muslim communities. Hold events together, serve the poor together. I have no doubt that Muslims would welcome such outreach. Of course I think Muslims should do the same, and have been personally involved in numerous interfaith efforts. I think the most valuable thing would be for us to develop personal relationships with each other. Recognizing and appreciating our common humanity is the first step, and I have faith that everything else will follow naturally from that.

Speaking for myself, I am rooting for Ben Op Christianity to succeed. I would much rather there be strong, functional Christian communities in the United States than that we all descend together into the morass of materialist hedonism. I personally regard the Christian tradition as a great source of spiritual insight, having been moved many times by Bach’s Mass in B Minor and the St. John’s Passion. I also revere the tradition of Western humanism, and my studies have taught me that it would be difficult to extricate this tradition from the background of Christian culture. If you tried to tell me that I, as a Muslim, cannot benefit or learn from these traditions, I would simply ignore you and keep going. I also think that America is destined to play an important role in global Islam. America might be the site of a world-historical turning point, a rich theological dialogue that has not been possible for centuries. There are things that are possible here that possible nowhere else. Who knows what the fruits of cooperation could be? Why don’t we just try and see?

[End of interview]

Note From Rod: I want to give my deep thanks to Jones for answering these questions at length, thereby giving me more than I hoped for. I want to also thank him and this blog’s other regular Muslim commenters, Alexander Valenzuela and “Mohammed,” who reads us in Iran. Their comments, both publicly and in private e-mails, have been challenging and edifying, and have opened my mind to things I had not considered before.

Obama Administration Edits Reality

Is it just me, or is this outrageous?:

In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that on Monday, the FBI will release edited transcripts of the 911 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter to the police during his rampage.

Here’s the relevant portion of the Meet The Press transcript:

LORETTA LYNCH: What we’re announcing tomorrow is that the FBI is releasing a partial transcript of the killer’s calls with law enforcement, from inside the club. These are the calls with the Orlando PD negotiating team, who he was, where he was… that will be coming out tomorrow and I’ll be headed to Orlando on Tuesday.

CHUCK TODD: Including the hostage negotiation part of this?

LYNCH: Yes, it will be primarily a partial transcript of his calls with the hostage negotiators.

CHUCK TODD: You say partial, what’s being left out?

LYNCH: What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of alleigance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.

CHUCK TODD: We’re not going to hear him talk about those things?

LYNCH: We will hear him talk about some of those things, but we are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance and that. It will not be audio, it will be a printed transcript. But it will begin to capture the back and forth between him and the negotiators, we’re trying to get as much information about this investigation out as possible. As you know, because the killer is dead, we have a bit more leeway there and we will be producing that information tomorrow.

This is the worst single-shooter mass killing in US history, and the federal government is trying to edit out the killer’s actual words for the sake of manipulating public reaction. What moral right does the government have to do this? It’s almost certain that the Obama administration doesn’t want the public to be inflamed by Mateen’s crediting his rampage to Islam. I understand not wanting to inflame anti-Muslim bigotry, especially when we have the spectacle of a US presidential candidate calling for profiling Muslims, but as a general rule, the government ought to have a very high bar to clear before hiding relevant information about a high-profile crime, especially a terrorist atrocity, from the public.

This kind of thing makes me even more determined that Congress vote to compel the administration to declassify those 28 pages of the 9/11 Report, disclosing Saudi involvement in the plot. The Bush administration put those 28 pages off limits for supposed national security reasons, a policy that has continued under Obama.

Obviously the 9/11 Report is an incomparably bigger deal than the Mateen transcript, but the principle — the US government reserving the right to manipulate public reaction to terror facts for the sake of achieving political goals — is the same.

Not releasing the full transcript allows The New York Times editorial page and others on the left who wish to maintain the fiction that the Orlando rampage is really the fault of Republicans and conservative Christians to continue with their smear campaign. It’s at a time like this you really wish Christopher Hitchens was still around to hammer away at the Orwellian character of this phenomenon.

Divinity

Praline3001/Flickr

My grandmother died this afternoon. It was a mercy. She was in her late 80s, and had been in a nursing home suffering from dementia and other ailments for years. I went to see her yesterday for what I knew would be the last time. She was in a coma. There was nothing to say except prayers. The time I saw her before that was in the hospital a couple of months ago, when we didn’t think she was going to make it. She wasn’t sure who I was, but she begged me to take her back home to Starhill. She said she would rather go to Hell than back to that nursing home.

The home was not a bad place. She just was tired of being there. I don’t blame her.

My grandmother — she was my mom’s mom — was not particularly close to Ruthie and me. It was a complicated family story, and a sad one. But neither was there any hostility. I was cleaning the church in Starhill when Mama called me from the nursing home in an eastern suburb of Baton Rouge with the news. I prayed for my grandmother, and finished my work. There will be a baby boy’s baptism tomorrow in Starhill, and I’m standing godfather. Life moves on.

Driving home from church, I passed by the Starhill Cemetery, where my grandmother will be laid to rest next week, next to my grandfather and her daughter, my Aunt Julia, who died of cancer at age 42, just like my sister did. My grandmother — Uncle Jimmy’s sister — was a plain country lady who had a hard life. Burying a daughter was the worst of it, no doubt, but not the whole of it.

When I was a kid, the only reason why we would come down Audubon Lane is to go visit her and my grandfather. Not too many people lived on Audubon Lane in those days. That has changed a lot in 50 years. Now I’m one of the people who live along Audubon Lane. The house where my grandparents made their home has been swallowed up by trees. Life moves on.

Driving up Audubon Lane this afternoon, praying for my grandmother’s soul, and thinking about my happiest memory of her, I remembered her divinity. Have you ever heard of divinity? Here’s a recipe. It’s a traditional Southern candy made from sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, pecans, and egg whites. If fudge were made out of clouds, it would be divinity. I can’t remember the last time I had it. Does anybody make divinity anymore?

My grandmother made it from time to time when I was little. I can remember sitting on a stool in her kitchen once when I was very small, maybe five years old, watching her dropping the hot, sticky nuggets of divinity onto wax paper spread out on the table. Before long they would be cool enough to eat. Nothing else tasted like divinity. It was so pillowy and sweet. Back then, I was too little to know what the word “divinity” meant; to my ears, it sounded magical. It was what that impossibly delicious candy Mawmaw made was called. Divinity was the candy, and the candy was divinity, and Mawmaw made it, nobody else.

Divinity.

Divinity is traditionally snow white (see the photo above), but my grandmother sometimes added a little food coloring to her batches, which made them turn out in bright pastels. Decades later, when I first saw Wayne Thiebaud’s gorgeous paintings of cakes, pies, and meringues, I was instantly captivated by them, for reasons I have never been able to explain. Today I learned why. They reminded me of Mawmaw’s divinity.

I remember where I was the first time I saw her pastel divinity. She brought it over to our house in a repurposed fruitcake tin, lined with wax paper. She knew Ruthie and I loved divinity. When I opened the tin, instead of the usual white candy, there they were, pink, pale green, sky blue, lemon yellow. It was breathtaking, as if someone had given us a box full of colored Christmas tree lights that you could eat, and that tasted sweet in a way that nothing else tasted sweet. If you drank a sip of Coke after eating a piece of divinity, it foamed up in your mouth (the egg whites), and nothing else did that but divinity.

The next time Mawmaw made her pastel divinity, I was sitting on that stool, watching her push chunks of wet divinity off of one spoon onto another, onto the wax paper. By the time she finished, she had covered half the dining table with rows and rows of pastel divinity candies, cooling into stiff peaks and whorls, mesmerizing a little boy with their colors, their shapes, the harmonies and lines, and the promise that if put one in my mouth, the taste would infuse me with the same bright candied pleasure. They were just like a Wayne Thiebaud painting, I now realize, but you could eat them, and they were created not by a famous artist, but by my grandmother, a simple country lady who had a hard life. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that she made beautiful candy that no one else made, and that as a little boy, this candy made me as happy as anything else did.

The kitchen where she produced these nuggets of pure joy disappeared into the woods a long time ago. And now she is gone too, delivered at last from her many agonies, gone home, finally, like she wanted.

Helen Fletcher Howard died today. Once upon a time she colored my world with divinity.

Trans Tyranny In Tacoma

Take a look at this clip, or as much of it as you can stand. You can’t see the audience (the camera was stationary, focused on the speakers), but boy, can you hear them. The reader who sent it says:

I hope you will take a look at this video when you get a chance. It records incredible footage of a panel discussion recorded yesterday in Tacoma, WA, where a fight is brewing over Initial 1515, the Just Want Privacy Campaign, which seeks to overturn the HRC law that says biological men can undress and shower next to females in all public and private places based solely upon gender identity in Washington State.

The women panelists are hectored, screamed at continuously, and basically harassed by the trans activists in the audience. I have never seen anything this uncivil and shocking at a public event — including college campus “trigger” events with Milo.

It’s hard to watch the first half hour or so, but women endure. They are so brave! This is a disheartening video, but also ultimately inspiring because of the bravery and encurance of the women on stage.

We have three weeks to gather 300K signatures here in Washington. If we can get 1515 on the ballot, I believe this video will be the best advertisement for the initiative — better than anything money can buy.

This is pure, uncut Social Justice Warriorism. You need to watch at least some of this, to see the kind of bullying people face for simply daring to stand up, peaceably, to the LGBT juggernaut. I don’t take a position on this initiative, because to do so could violate TAC’s not-for-profit status, but I very much take a position on the danger to democracy of unhinged mobs shouting down speakers. It is absolutely intolerable, and any polity that allows a mob to treat its peaceful citizens this way, no matter what their cause, is well on its way to tyranny.

The Law School Trap

Noam Scheiber writes in The New York Times:

By most measures, John Acosta is a law school success story. He graduated from Valparaiso University Law School — a well-established regional school here in northwestern Indiana — in the top third of his class this past December, a semester ahead of schedule. He passed the bar exam on his first try in February.

Mr. Acosta, 39, is also a scrupulous networker who persuaded a former longtime prosecutor to join him in starting a defense and family law firm. A police officer for 11 years in Georgia, Mr. Acosta has a rare ability to get inside the head of a cop that should be of more than passing interest to would-be clients.

“I think John’s going to do fine,” said Andrew Lucas, a partner at the firm where Mr. Acosta rents office space. “He’s got other life skills that are attractive to people running into problems.”

Yet in financial terms, there is almost no way for Mr. Acosta to climb out of the crater he dug for himself in law school, when he borrowed over $200,000. The government will eventually forgive the loan — in 25 years — if he’s unable to repay it, as is likely on his small-town lawyer’s salary. But the Internal Revenue Service will probably treat the forgiven amount as income, leaving him what could easily be a $70,000 tax bill on the eve of retirement, and possibly much higher.

Mr. Acosta is just one of tens of thousands of recent law school graduates caught up in a broad transformation of the legal profession. While demand for other white-collar jobs has grown substantially since the start of the recession, law firms and corporations are finding they can make do with far fewer in-house lawyers than before.

Read the whole thing. I knew things were not great for law school grads these days, but damn, not that bad. It’s almost like they were holders of journalism degrees, or something.

UPDATE: Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School cries foul, and provides evidence that actual peer-reviewed studies find that for most people, law school still makes financial sense.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Your comments section keeps messing up on my tablet so I wanted to email this…

I graduated from a third tier law school in 2012 in the bottom ten of my class. Not ten percent, bottom ten. There were no plum job offers for me, obviously. And my student debt upon graduation was easily in the $200,000 range. If it wasn’t for income -based repayment I would’ve explored bankruptcy years ago. (NB: Student loans are virtually impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.)

But here’s the funny thing…I did pass the bar on my first try, and I got an entry level job in an industry where my law license is definitely an advantage. I work 40 hours a week, enjoy full benefits, and get two weeks paid vacation plus accrued sick time. And four years out of law school I make a salary that’s right around where it is for the rest of my classmates.

The vast majority of my classmates (~75%) had to hang out their own shingle right after graduation and become solo practitioners. They hit the ground running doing DUIs and divorces for 80 hours a week. For the most part they’re doing the same thing four years later, unless they got lucky and caught a personal injury case or two (if you can call that luck). Even the small handful of students who got big law firm jobs don’t enjoy the benefits or normal work hours that I do.

The worst story I know of was a classmate who graduated in the top 10% of my class and had to take a job and the mall and donate plasma to make ends meet. That’s the extreme case, but I know several classmates who bartend and substitute teach just to pay the bills.

I would do it all over again for the sole reason that I met my wife. But for the 99% of students who dream of an upper-middle class lifestyle or becoming the next Jack McCoy, they’re falling for a lie.

Department Of Defense Diversity

A reader who works for the Department of Defense, reacting to my post from earlier today about the State Department’s instructing Fulbright scholars in gender ideology, says this memo was sent around this morning to thousands of employees of that particular agency:

This [meeting] will focus on the importance of being able to move from tolerance and acceptance to embracing diversity. We have all observed and been on the receiving end of each of these different levels of human interaction. We can state with absolute certainty the distinction between being tolerated and being embraced, for instance. There are confidence impacts. There are social impacts. There are mission impacts. The panel for this Coffee and Conversations will talk about the importance of embracing each other, regardless of our differences. [emphasis mine] They will also share experiences and insights into where they have seen this done well and where they have seen it done wrong.

The reader adds:

The announcement then goes on to list the panelists and remarks that they will join together “in discussing how we can be better champions of diversity and help create a more inclusive workplace.”

The proselytizing goes well-beyond the State Department.

It used to be that you were being asked to tolerate, which I think most of us, whatever our personal view on homosexuality and transgenderism, can agree is a reasonable request, especially in the workplace. Now you are being strongly nudged by your employer to affirm, or embrace. Notice the language in the memo, which implies that if you don’t affirm, then you are harming the mission (= doing a subpar job). You know what happens to people who harm the mission.

I’ve written before about a Christian friend who works at a senior level within a major corporation. He has ignored many company-wide prompts from the Human Resources department urging employees to declare themselves LGBT “allies,” because he believes having to make that declaration would violate his conscience. He fears the day when his superiors come to him and tell him that his failure to positively affirm his allyship means he creates a risk for a hostile work environment, and they fire him.

Well, the Defense Department is now laying the groundwork for the same thing among its employees. Think that’s alarmist? Let’s say that you are a religious believer and Pentagon employee and are perfectly prepared to be tolerant, but cannot “embrace,” or affirm, homosexuality or transgenderism. How would you feel receiving a memo from your supervisors telling you that refusing to “embrace diversity” — and we know what that is code for — amounts to creating negative “mission impact”? How secure would you feel that your employment would not eventually depend on violating your religious conscience?

The reader adds that as this is Gay Pride Month, there’s an endless loop of LGBT history and progress playing on TV screens in all the lobbies. And:

A friend of mine is keeping track of the number of emails we get regarding various events for the month (or just outright propaganda), and I think we’re in the dozens.

So, if embracing and affirming (as distinct from mere tolerating) is seen by the Pentagon as necessary for maximal “mission impact,” will it also be the case that armed US combatants have to assent in the same way as part of their mission? Call this alarmist if you like, but the handwriting is on the wall. At some point, this kind of thing will be the pinch of incense that Christians will be required to burn if they want to serve in the military, even in a civilian capacity.

Relatedly, two retired US Army officers, both Christians (one an Orthodox priest), have called for Christian resistance if Congress and the president decide to compel young American women to register for the draft. Excerpt:

If the U.S. Congress and President Obama collude this year to require all young women in America to register with Selective Service, there will be no need to wait for an exigency that might compel the federal government to reinstate the military draft. The moral abasement of the U.S. armed forces would, in principle, already be complete. With that scenario in view, we propose that traditional Christians consider an uncharacteristically radical, proactive course of action.

As retired U.S. military officers, we recall with great joy the opportunity to serve our fellow Americans by responding, freely and without reservation, to the call to military duty. During our respective careers each of us had a distinct role in the adjudication of requests of soldiers or sailors to be discharged from military service as “conscientious objectors”—one as a chaplain tasked with ascertaining the sincerity and moral consistency of each applicant’s convictions, and one as a commanding officer to forward up the chain of command his decision for or against an applicant’s claim. The criterion for CO status is straightforward: “A firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief.”

If our federal government mandates that young women, without exception, register with Selective Service against their will, with a foreseeable possibility of conscription into the profession of arms, there will be fresh justification for conscientious objection—on both moral and religious grounds—by men as well as women to refuse to bear arms in a military force opposed to the divine and natural order of creation itself. For the sake of moral integrity, and for the providential welfare of this “one nation under God,” we are dedicated to stand with such women and men. And we earnestly appeal to all Christian authorities to acknowledge the enormity of this national crisis and to take the same stand.

Very, very quickly, traditional Christians are going to have to rethink, and rethink radically, their relationship with the State. You can do it now or you can do it later, but you’re going to have to do it.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I can tell you as a government employee the LGBTQ appreciation is across the entire spectrum of agencies and offices this month.

There have been numerous speakers and events in nearly every building I have walked into in DC. This stuff is literally everywhere. The walls are covered with propaganda posters and affirmations, etc. It’s unavoidable.

And of course, it is all loaded with assumptions, and no one dares question whether:

1.) Any of those assumptions are worthy of questioning

2). If they government should be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least) on a month’s worth of “pride” materials and expenses, to say nothing of the time an expense of all the employees actually attending these events during the workday (on the public dime)?

At the same time, I can also tell you “iteration” with or “commitment” to diversity is not part of many government agencies annual employee reviews. In other words, you can be negatively reviewed for [failing to do] precisely what you are talking about.

There is an entire industry of consultants brought into to run these things, set them up and proffer what must be done. The HR departments are hook, line and sinker all for this, as HR always is. Bathrooms in many federal buildings have also already been changed.

Millions Of Catholic Bastards

No, I have not become an Ulsterman. The headline is the implication of Pope Francis’s astonishing words at a press conference. [UPDATE: Not really; see below. — RD]The only major public figure who has less discipline in speaking is Donald Trump. Excerpts:

Pope Francis said Thursday that the great majority of sacramental marriages today are not valid, because couples do not enter into them with a proper understanding of permanence and commitment.

“We live in a culture of the provisional,” the Pope said in impromptu remarks June 16. After addressing the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress, he held a question-and-answer session.

A layman asked about the “crisis of marriage” and how Catholics can help educate youth in love, help them learn about sacramental marriage, and help them overcome “their resistance, delusions and fears.”

The Pope answered from his own experience.

“I heard a bishop say some months ago that he met a boy that had finished his university studies, and said ‘I want to become a priest, but only for 10 years.’ It’s the culture of the provisional. And this happens everywhere, also in priestly life, in religious life,” he said.

“It’s provisional, and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Because they say “yes, for the rest of my life!” but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know.”

Just to be clear: the pope is saying that the “great majority” of people married inside the Catholic Church are not really married, because one or both spouses entered into the marriage covenant without the right intentions.

This is the Pope talking.

And it’s not going over well. Here’s part of a tweetstorm from Ross Douthat:

15/ From a Catholic perspective, the West’s obvious problem is too few marriages, not too many invalid ones.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 17, 2016

16/ And responding to this problem by arguing that the marriages we *do* have are mostly null is a weird and un-Catholic counsel of despair.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 17, 2016

17/ My secular friends’ marriages are (well, mostly) real. My Catholic friends’ marriages are real. I’m sorry the Holy Father disagrees.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 17, 2016

Reuters reports:

Edward Peters, a U.S. canon lawyer who has been an adviser to the Vatican, wrote that the pope’s words were “very bad” because they could spur couples in difficult marriages to “give up now” instead of trying to overcome problems.

The Catholic Church teaches that a marriage can be ended only by death or an annulment — a Church ruling it was not valid in the first place because it lacked prerequisites such as free will and psychological maturity.

“The crisis of marriage is due to the fact that people don’t know what the sacrament is, the beauty of the sacrament, they don’t know that it is indissoluble, that it is for your entire life,” the pope said.

“There are girls and boys who have purity and a great love, but they are few,” he said, adding that many young people had a materialistic and superficial approach to their wedding day, such as an obsession with choosing the right gown, the right church and the right restaurant.

He said the Church needed better marriage preparation programs.

Conservatives also chided Francis for saying at the same meeting that priests should not pressure couples who were co-habitating if they were not ready to get married. He said the priests should “let fidelity ripen”.

That’s right, kids: the Pope says it may be a better idea for you to keep shacking up.

Reuters also reports that in the official transcript of the Pope’s remarks, the Vatican changed the words “great majority of our marriages” to “some of our marriages”.

In 2014, Benedict Nguyen, a canon lawyer, gave an interview to the National Catholic Register about conditions for marriage annulments. Excerpt:

However, the third category of grounds for annulment — and the most involved processes for tribunals — are marriages involving consent, where one or both of the spouses did not intend to embrace all the goods of marriage: permanence, exclusivity or openness to children, for example.

“There’s plenty of people out there who believe in divorce, but they say, ‘Oh, but that’s not going to happen to us.’ Well, that’s presumably a valid marriage with valid consent,” he said. “But if somebody says, ‘I believe in divorce and in terminating this marriage if it comes to that,’ well, that casts some serious doubts on the consent.”

This would seem to indicate that Catholics who enter a marriage believing that if it doesn’t work out, they can always divorce, are in fact not validly married in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But is it true that the “great majority” of Catholics married today stood before God and made their marriage vows thinking that it might not last forever? How would the Pope know? Why would make such a sweeping pronouncement, being Pope and all? Why would he encourage Catholics living together outside of marriage to remain that way for a while longer?

Catholic readers, help me out here.

(UPDATE: I know that children resulting from a marriage later annulled as invalid are not, canonically speaking, illegitimate. I even looked it up before I posted this morning. The headline was too delicious to pass up using. But I should have indicated in the initial post that I knew it wasn’t literally true — even though I have never, even in my Catholic days, been able to understand why it isn’t true, as a matter of logic. — RD)

They don’t make popes like they used to, alas. I miss this guy:

Papist/Flickr

UPDATE: Matthew Schmitz highlights the weirdness of what Francis said:

What about people with less [theological] education, who haven’t staged performances of The Jeweler’s Shop, read Heart of the World, or participated in a Theology of the Body discussion group? The poorly educated and the poor are unlikely to have the time or ability to get up to speed on sacramental theology. If the sincere exchange of vows doesn’t make their marriage valid, what does? Must all sacramentally valid marriages resemble my friends’, beginning only after a few years of theological study, during a Mass set to music by Mozart?

Even in the United States, where 60 percent of all annulments are handed out, only 28 percent of Catholic marriages end in divorce. By the pope’s strange reckoning, a great number of Catholic marriages that last for life are shams.

Catholic theologians may object to this view, but they’re not the ones targeted by it. According to Francis, their marriages are probably valid, while those entered into by the rest of us probably aren’t.

Will You Miss Garrison Keillor?

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Garrison Keillor, the creator and star of A Prairie Home Companion, is retiring from the show he’s been at the center of for decades. I read the news when it was announced, and thought about how I haven’t listened to PHC in years. I used to be a big fan, but there came a point — I can’t say when — at which Keillor and his show just ran out of gas. Guy Noir, the Lives of the Cowboys, even the tales of Lake Wobegon — all of them had the air of an old, battered recliner, the worn thin covering of which the springs had burst through, deflating the thing.

The link above will take you to a NYT profile of Keillor at the end of his PHC career. Part of it asks the question: Did Garrison Keillor stay too long? Excerpt:

There is debate about whether Mr. Keillor should have exited a while ago. His weekly radio audience peaked 10 years ago, at 4.1 million, and has since dropped to 3.2 million. While that does not include listeners on Sirius XM, or the show’s three million monthly digital requests, many stations have dropped their Sunday repeat broadcast of his show.

“Prairie Home” captured a time, before tweets and Facebook posts, when people talked more over fence posts and pots of coffee but nowadays feels increasingly removed from many listeners’ lives.

“A lot of the conversation has been: ‘Did Garrison wait too long? Should Garrison have done this years ago?’” said Eric Nuzum, former vice president for programming at NPR. “The problem of ‘Prairie Home Companion’ is it’s part of public radio’s past, not their future,” Mr. Nuzum said. (American Public Media distributes “Prairie Home”; NPR member stations air programs from APM as well as from other distributors.)

That’s still a huge audience. Creatively, he was spent a long time ago. But then, the Rolling Stones have been for decades, but they still fill stadiums. Still, they’re a nostalgia act by now, and so is Keillor.

The profile is worth reading because it reveals what a weird, misanthropic guy Keillor is. Excerpts:

Margaret Moos Pick, Mr. Keillor’s early producer and former longtime girlfriend, said his Lake Wobegon monologues put him into something like a state of hypnosis. In them, he could lose himself.

“I don’t think he’s necessarily a happy man,” Mr. Angell [Roger Angell, his editor at The New Yorker] said, “But the time he is happy is when he is doing his monologue.”

More:

Curiously, Mr. Keillor has always found it difficult spending so much time with the strong, good-looking, above average people of Lake Wobegon, which he based on his relatives, past and present.

In “The Keillor Reader” (2014), he complained bitterly about “their industriousness, their infernal humility, their schoolmarmish sincerity, their earnest interest in you, their clichés falling like clockwork — it can be tiring to be around.”

Speaking on his porch, Mr. Keillor said of Lake Wobegonians, i.e., his relatives, “I am frustrated by them in real life.” They were too controlled by good manners, he said, and “have a very hard time breaking through.”

So why devote so much of his professional life ruminating about them? “It’s the people I think I know,” he replied.

Will he miss them, and the weekly jolt of the show?

“No,” he replied. “No.”

I was disabused of my illusions about Garrison Keillor when I read his 2004 nonfiction book Homegrown Democrat. Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon Days was one of my favorite books of the early 1990s, and I thought I was going to read a book extolling liberal politics, written in the same avuncular, down-home spirit.

Boy, was I wrong. Homegrown Democrat is dark, bitter, and biting. Everybody knows Garrison Keillor is a liberal, but it was a shock to realize that underneath his genial, humane public radio persona, he’s a small, spiteful man. I didn’t see it coming. It was like sitting down at the Chatterbox Cafe over a piece of rhubarb pie, and discovering with the first bite that they spiked the thing with vinegar.

Anyway, I hope he finds peace and happiness in his retirement, and I thank him for the happy memories.

Missionaries For Post-Christian America

The Fulbright scholarships are prestigious awards, funded by Congress, to hundreds of US academics and others to provide opportunities for study abroad. It is administered by the US State Department. A reader recently underwent a short course preparing incoming Fulbright scholars for their overseas deployment. He is going to study in a developing country. He tells me he was shocked by the instruction in gender ideology his group was put through as part of their briefing. They were instructed, he said to think about how they can be “an ally” to sexual minorities abroad.

He reports that his group sat through a speech about how backwards most foreign cultures are on sex and gender, and how they would all be ambassadors for cultural change in those benighted societies. Said the reader, “Any sensitivity toward differing cultural norms was couched entirely in pragmatic terms, relating, for example, to personal safety.”

He is a scholar with extensive experience living in the developing world, and this offended him. “The truly insane part, as I see it, is that this is a cultural exchange program. Ostensibly we are supposed to be fostering mutual understanding. [But] the message was clear: we are the tip of the spear of American cultural imperialism, and we are going to change these backwards traditional cultures whether they like it or not.”

He sent images of the handouts he and his fellow Fulbright scholars received. For example:

And:

And this:

What any of this has to do with going to work as a scholar in foreign countries around the world is not clear to me. I am told that the gender ideology component is a new feature of Fulbright prep, and was not there as recently as 2014. Writes the reader:

While the Fulbright program has a lot of stakeholders, including foreign governments and private nonprofits, it gets about 60% of its funding from Congress via the State Department, and it is managed overall by one of the Bureaus at State, which has its seal on the program schedule. They’re careful to keep pointing out that we (as grantees) are not employees of State per se, but even so this is de facto a program being funded and administered by the federal government. Social justice gender identity ideology is now the official policy of the U.S. government, and receiving indoctrination in it is now mandatory for people receiving the most prestigious—Congressionally funded—foreign research grant in the US.

He’s right that it’s official US government foreign policy under Obama; see this publication by the State Department.

In this 2012 interview, Tara Sonenshine, then the Undersecretary of State in charge of public diplomacy, explained the new policies under the Obama Administration. Excerpt:

NCRM QUESTION: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made “people to people diplomacy” a top priority. And she pronounced that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights”. How do you see doing your job in support of these strategies and principles with the LGBT community both here in the US and abroad?

ANSWER: Using social media and personal engagement can amplify messages. U.S. Embassies and consulates worldwide are declaring support for the human rights of LGBT people through innovative public diplomacy, including: publishing op-eds; speaking on radio programs; using social media; hosting film screenings and performances; hosting panel discussions and round tables; and actively participating in local events. The Department supported this outreach by posting approximately 100 articles, texts, and transcripts amplifying remarks by senior administration officials and important events related to LGBT.

In addition, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) is poised to issue two new policies to advance LGBT rights: (1) the ECA Bureau-wide diversity statement-which lists groups of underrepresented individuals encouraged to participate in its exchange programs-is about to expand to include LGBT persons; and (2) the Fulbright scholars program will begin offering the same benefits to committed same-sex partners that are currently being offered to other dependents. ECA exchange programs offer LGBT persons who work on LGBT-related issues from around the world opportunities to meet and collaborate with their American professional counterparts. In particular, the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), has already brought groups to the United States focusing on issues important to the LGBT community and has planned future projects on LGBT-related topics. Other IVLPs already incorporate meetings with LGBT advocacy groups on programs that cover human rights, civic participation and gender issues.

According to the official requirements for Fulbright applicants for both teaching positions, have to provide statements answering these questions (among others):

What experiences have prepared you to teach in this country? Experiences that indicate your collegiality, adaptability, cultural sensitivity, ability to serve as a cultural ambassador.
How you will adapt your materials to the culture and language of the host country?

So now the Fulbright scholars, though not formally State Department employees or agents, are being prepared by our government and encouraged to go to foreign countries as Social Justice Warriors “cultural ambassadors” of gender ideology, via “people to people diplomacy.” Some forms of cultural imperialism are laudable, it seems.

Will Fulbright scholars do this? Who knows? But this is what the State Department now wants them to be prepared to do: aid in the fight against heterosexism, transphobia, and the rest around the world. Our government wants them to be missionaries for post-Christian America, apostles of liquid modernity.