Rod Dreher's Blog, page 565

The Weight Of Home

I was thinking earlier today about Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. It’s the one in which the pilgrim Dante meets Ulysses (Odysseus), damned for using his silver tongue to lead his crew past forbidden boundaries, where they and their boat were swallowed by a whirlpool and died. His crew just wants to go back home to Ithaca to rest, but the poet Dante gives Ulysses a great little speech in which he rallies them to do his bidding. Ulysses portrays the journey as a noble quest, and says that undertaking satisfies what is most noble in the human spirit.

In truth, Ulysses just wants to go see what’s on the other side of the forbidden line, and tells his crew what they need to hear to convince them to join him in satisfying his curiosity. Hence his damnation.

That is a valid interpretation, but today I read an alternative view that is also compelling, and gave me a lot to think about (the Commedia works that way; there are layers and layers of meaning embedded within it). Writing in the Paris Review, Alexander Aciman focuses on the restlessness and dissatisfaction with Ithaca, his home, as the genesis of his doomed quest. If you read The Odyssey, you’ll know that the entire poem is about the long, diverting journey that Odysseus (Ulysses) makes back to his home after the Trojan War. Home — Ithaca — was his goal, but in Dante’s poem, Ulysses was not satisfied to rest there. Aciman understands Dante’s Ulysses in light of a poem by the modern poet C.P. Cavafy. Excerpt:

Cavafy tells Ulysses not to rush. Ithaca is home, but it isn’t; its real gift is that it isn’t where we are now—and every waypoint and every island that stands before Ithaca is part of what Ithaca has to offer. Dante’s Ulysses arrived home too soon, and asked too much of the tiny Greek isle. Dissatisfied, he took off again. Ithaca is a purpose but not a goal—Dante’s Ulysses lost his Ithaca when he arrived in Ithaca. The difference between Cavafy and Dante is that the former is speaking to a still-wandering hero, and the latter writes as a Ulysses who had already set off a second time.

Reading Cavafy beside Dante’s text is tragic—in this light, Cavafy’s poem is no longer a piece of advice, but a lament and a cautionary tale. We, too, may one day despair upon reaching Ithaca. What if, like Ulysses, we spent far too little time at sea, and we finally arrive at Ithaca only to find it has nothing left to offer?

But did Ulysses really spend far too little time at sea? Maybe he was simply incapable of being at home anywhere. Ulysses held up Ithaca as the fixed point he used as navigation — that is, the meaning of his journeys, and everything he saw, only made sense in light of his ultimate destination, Ithaca: home. Do you follow?

I do. All of the places I lived and visited in my younger life were made special in part because they contrasted with what I had been given by my home. Cavafy tells us that the gift of travel, of being Elsewhere, only makes sense because we come from somewhere else, and we long to return there. That is, even if we don’t want to return to our literal home, we do long for a place we can truly call home, a place of rest, of stillness, of permanence.

A Christian should read this eschatologically. That is, our pilgrim journey in the mortal life only makes sense if we believe that we are going to our true and only home in the afterlife. Or, to be more metaphysical about it, the goodness of this world is guaranteed by the next one, by transcendence. But we cannot storm heaven on our own power. In Dante, Ulysses’ sin included hubris; the captain wanted to get to heaven (or rather, its antechamber, the island mountain of Purgatory) on his own terms, not those ordained by God. Hence his damnation.

The Cavafy poem, in light of Canto 26, gave me something to think about with regard to my own troubled relationship with home (or, Home). If you read How Dante Can Save Your Life, you know the story, but bear with me here. I left home and returned too early, in my mid-20s, and left again. I returned later in life, after my sister died, and found to my shock that home was not what I expected. And this is my fault, in part, because I expected more of Ithaca than it could ever give.

Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t get back in my boat and set sail again, away from Ithaca. I stayed, not because I necessarily wanted to, or because it was easy, but because I had no choice. I couldn’t put my wife and kids through another move, and as difficult as it was, the struggle with my dad and others, I had a filial duty to be here with him until the end.

I wouldn’t have sailed to my damnation like Ulysses if I had left here. Or wouldn’t I have? I realized in retrospect, from a place of rest and healing, that if I had set sail again, I never would have set out on the inner quest necessary to mature. I never would have done battle with the hidden dragons lodged in the recesses of my own heart, I would never have been given the gift of spending the last week of my father’s life on earth at his bedside, and finding real and lasting peace — for me, the Grail. Had I not stayed unhappily in Ithaca, because that was my duty to my wife, children, and parents, I would have been at sea for the rest of my life … and would not have understood why.

What’s more, if I had not had my eyes on the true Ithaca — Paradise, unity with God — I would not have had the strength and sense of purpose to endure the trials of repatriation to the mortal Ithaca. I am working on a book now that, like all my books, is really about Ithaca. It has nothing at all to do with Louisiana, or me, but it’s about Ithaca. I get that now. I get what Cavafy means in the final lines of his poem:

And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.

As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience,

you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

 

 

 

Debating Orlando’s Meaning

I’m one of four contributors to today’s NYT Room For Debate feature. The topic:

But is it fair to say that people share any blame for Saturday night’s attack because they oppose L.G.B.T. equality for religious reasons? And while the media is focused on the role that Muslim anti-gay rhetoric may have played in this slaughter, do conservative Christians need to accept greater civil rights for L.G.B.T people in order to create a less hurtful atmosphere in the United States?

From my contribution:

Whatever made the radical Muslim Omar Mateen murder 49 innocents, connecting that atrocity to Christians (and Republicans) is shameless opportunism. It renders reasoned debate impossible, and turns cultural politics into a crusade against infidels.

Waving a blood-soaked rainbow flag to rally anti-Christian scapegoating for political advantage is repulsive and dangerous. But to holy warriors, restraint looks like cowardice and acknowledging moral complexity denies the narcotic pleasures of ardent purity.

This won’t end well. Wars of religion never do.

From Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly:

I believe I’m called to engage those with whom I disagree, including L.G.B.T. advocates, sit down with them, if possible, and when feasible, work toward the common good without compromising our core principles.

But as a Christian, I don’t have the luxury or authority to slice and dice (though some try) and adhere to only those passages of the Bible that are culturally acceptable. From beginning to end, I believe the Bible is the infallible word of God and I accept it in whole, not in part. As such, I believe the Bible is clear that homosexuality is a sin.

Does that mean I condemn gay people because of their sin? Of course not. I’m a sinner, too. But as a Christian, I’m a recipient of the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, who I believe died for my sins.

From Christian LGBT advocate Julie Rodgers, who is lesbian:

It’s no surprise, then, that subtle disdain for L.G.B.T. people would eventually be expressed more overtly. In the case of the shooting at Pulse in Orlando, it was devastating. The Christians I know were grieved by the massacre and they want to know how to help. The best thing they can do is repent for the ways they’ve helped create a culture that devalues L.G.B.T. people made in the image of God, and then begin to tell a better story about us in their circles. If everyone grew up hearing that God delights in gay people and we have gifts to nourish our communities, I do not think we would be targeted for violence or discrimination.

From liberal Evangelical theologian David Gushee:

A typical evangelical in the United States today has moved to a rejection of such hate speech or of any violence toward L.G.B.T. people, but not to a place of acceptance of gay marriages, or of L.G.B.T. people in religious leadership. Hateful statements obviously create a threatening environment for L.G.B.T. people, but even polite half-acceptance leaves L.G.B.T. people in a demeaning second-class position.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing. It gives a pretty good snapshot of the chasm between us. What I see here is irreconcilable differences, regrettably.

Daly and I both condemn the violence, but insist that orthodox Christians cannot change our theology to fit the times. And we assert that it is wrong to demonize us for the actions of this Muslim terrorist.

Rodgers insists that somehow, conservative Christian rejection of homosexuality is connected to the Orlando mass murder. It’s pretty clear that nothing will satisfy her short of Christians giving up their theological convictions on homosexuality. Gushee doesn’t even make an argument, but simply goes on record with sympathy for LGBTs, and none for his fellow Evangelicals, expressing skepticism of their claim that the advance of gay rights comes at the loss of religious liberty.

Somehow, we have to live together. Somehow.

Note that both Daly and I recognize that it’s wrong to treat gay people cruelly. Daly says, “People are not an issue to be solved; they’re to be loved and cared for in grace and truth.” But Gushee and Rodgers concede nothing to their fellow believers.

Gushee and Rodgers’ side has the upper hand in this culture, and will likely have it for the rest of our lives. I believe they will use every lever possible to punish Christians for holding to Christian orthodoxy, and they will have the full weight of the law, academia, the media, the political establishment behind them. That’s not fearmongering; it’s just a fact. The challenge ahead for orthodox Christians is to stand firm in the truth without yielding to the temptation to hate.

Trump Campaign Dumpster Fire

Look, even people who think Donald Trump has good ideas and will make America great again have to admit that their boy is his own worst enemy. He’s going to take the Republican Party down with him, too. From Politico:

While Trump had promised Priebus that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation. It’s unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later.

This is a big deal. Hillary Clinton is expected to raise over a billion dollars.

Talking Points Memo has more, in the wake of Trump’s disastrous new poll numbers:

But it’s not just specific proposals that are costing Trump general election support. It’s the whole way he goes about campaigning, or as Usher put it, his tendency to be “reactive” rather than exhibit message discipline.

“The biggest issue for him is not only is he reluctant to change the topic from ones that are weak for him, he doesn’t really care to change the topic, he would rather litigate everything,” Usher said.

His penchant for personal insults, tirades, and derogatory language never seemed to hurt him in the primary election. His polling numbers actually went up after he attacked Sen. John McCain’s record as a prisoner of war and after he hurled a whole litany of slurs at Fox News host Megyn Kelly, including one about “blood coming out of her wherever.”

Since claiming the top of the GOP ticket, Trump kicked off a similar cycle of controversy by launching a racially-tinged smear campaign against a federal judge. In this week’s Bloomberg poll, 55 percent of likely voters said Trump’s claims about the judge bothered them “a lot” and only 26 percent said they were bothered not at all by the claims.

“It’s not just that it bothers them, but that it bothers them a lot, so that’s actually higher than the 51 percent who were bothered by the Muslim ban,” Selzer said.

Trump’s gonna Trump, no matter what. No way that guy’s going to learn how to be a different person now. Josh Marshall is onto something about how Trump’s slide in the polls is entirely self-inflicted:

What’s most telling about this is that so little has been due to bad luck or news events out of Trump’s control. With the partial exception of the release of the Trump University documents, it’s been almost entirely from Trump himself. A month ago Republican elected officials were unenthusiastically but resolutely rallying around Trump. Since then they’ve slowly been reduced to a public and political version of a family dealing with a hopeless addict or a degenerate gambler. They keep saying, insisting he’ll change, only to have him provide more evidence he can’t, won’t and has no intention to. Their very indulgence seems to prompt more unbridled behavior.

The disgraceful way Trump handled the hours after the Orlando atrocity seems to have confirmed for many Republicans that Trump will never change or pivot or whatever other phrase we’re now using. It’s not an act. It’s him. How this couldn’t have been clear months ago is a topic for the psychology of denial and wishful thinking. But now it seems clear.

More:

The question is how long this can last. Pretty much daily, major Republican leaders don’t just disagree with Trump but denounce him in pretty round terms, even as they remain at least nominal endorsers of his candidacy and accept him as the leader of their party. That is entirely unprecedented in modern American political history.

It’s incredible when you think about it for more than two seconds. If you’re a Republican, you wake up in the morning not knowing what your party’s presumptive presidential candidate is going to say, except that it’s likely to be inflammatory and crazy.

And it’s only June!

It’s always important to read Scott Adams’s blog, because he seems to understand the method behind Trump’s madness better than the rest of us. For example:

As I have said several times in this blog, Trump often uses confirmation bias in his influence. He creates a mental framework for us to view our world and then waits for future events to fill in the details.

For example:

1. Trump knew his “Crooked Hillary” nickname would be reinforced by a continuous trickle of new revelations about Clinton’s misdeeds. We will hear more about Clinton’s email scandal, and more about foreign money buying influence, for example. True or not, the allegations will fit the “crooked” label and reinforce it.

2. Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” label was also a trap for confirmation bias. Every time you heard Cruz say something that you doubted, the Lyin’ Ted label jumped into your head.

3. Trump knew there would be more radical Islamic terror attacks either here or abroad before election day. Every attack makes Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigration from selected countries seem more reasonable and more prescient.

One of the reasons this form of persuasion is so effective is that it allows people to talk themselves into your point of view over time. People don’t like it when you try to change their minds in person, and almost everyone will resist such an attempt. But if people believe they are evolving in their own thinking – totally independently – they give themselves permission to change.

But Trump’s poll numbers are going to have to pick up to make this theory plausible. Who knows, maybe it will happen. If, as a Trump-hating friend of mine suggested the other day, ISIS will launch a bloody fall campaign of terrorism that will turn the American people to Trump, well, all bets are off.

Still, Trump supporters need to step out of the hive and take a good look at how their candidate is sabotaging his own campaign, and making it more likely that Hillary Clinton will be elected. As soon as I post this, I’ll have readers blaming me for aiding and abetting Hillary’s campaign by criticizing Trump. That’s exactly the kind of mindset that causes Trump never to check himself.

Queers vs. Conservative Christians

I had a conversation yesterday with a Catholic millennial friend. She brought up this blog, and made and observation that I often hear from friends who both know me personally and who read this blog: that there’s a big gap between who I am in person (friendly, funny, relaxed) and the way I come across on this blog (grumpy, aggrieved, fearful).

I told her I know it’s a problem, and a big part of it is in the nature of writing a blog that comments mostly on news events, especially having to do with religion and culture. It’s a distorting lens through which to see me, but I can’t blame people, because this is my public face. If I wrote mostly about the things that made me happy, which is to say, the things that I talk about whenever I’m offline and hanging out with friends, this would be a boring blog. I’m able to compartmentalize easily, and leave work at work, so to speak, but I have no right to expect my readers to do that.

At one point we started talking about the awful identity politics that has emerged out of the Orlando atrocity, and then we started talking about gays vs. Christians in general.

“My queer friends think you’re a bigot,” she said. “They don’t know you, but I do, and I understand the whole context of your comments. But if somebody only read your blog posts as a one-off, it sounds like something a bigot would say.”

I told her that I regretted that, but in my long experience writing about this issue, I have discovered that there is no way to defend the orthodox Christian teaching in a way that most gay folks find acceptable, even if they disagree. In other words, simply holding the orthodox Christian teaching about homosexuality (and sexuality in general, from which it cannot be separated) is evidence of bigotry, in their eyes.

“Look at Zack Ford’s response to Russell Moore’s Orlando column,” I said. “You could not possibly be more generous and compassionate from an orthodox Christian perspective than Russell was, but it still wasn’t enough. Zack Ford demanded that he give up his convictions or be thought indecent. And that’s not something an orthodox Christian can do.”

My friend, who is straight, said that I had to understand the position of pain that gay people come from. Society has made a lot of progress away from hatred and abuse, she said, but this is still very new, and very incomplete.

“In college, we had to put together a fundraising drive for a gay friend of ours who had come out to his parents, who cut him off from college tuition,” she said. “Not only that, but they refused to sign the papers that would let him get student aid to make up for the loss.”

“Besides,” she added, “gay people are afraid of ending up like Matthew Shepard. That’s not a fear straight people have. So when the worst thing straight people have to worry about is being forced to bake a cake, it really looks horrible.” [Note: I know that the Matthew Shepard case is much murkier than it seemed at first, and that it may not have been gay-bashing at all. Insofar as he is a symbol of gay-bashing, the point still stands. — RD]

I conceded her points, but added that what the cake situation symbolizes is much more serious than she makes it out to be.

“People have lost their businesses and had to pay big fines over that kind of thing. That’s not nothing,” I said. “And what about Brendan Eich? He was kicked out of the company he founded.”

“You should see my e-mail inbox,” I continued. “It’s filled with letters from Christian and conservative academics who are genuinely terrified for their belief about homosexuality to be discovered, and in some cases for it to be known among their colleagues that they’re Christian. They’re afraid for their jobs, their reputations, and their careers. That’s not losing your life, but it’s still a very big deal.”

I told my friend that I’ve spent most of my life in newsrooms where, as a conservative Christian, I was very much the minority. Over and over I saw how casually people scorned Christians in their language, and how hatred of Christians that was not considered to be hatred by those holding the opinion skewed coverage. The ideological and epistemic bubble of newsrooms around issues having to do with the intersection of religion and, well, anything, but especially issues of sexuality, is opaque and impermeable. And when you see the way the news media portray Christians, especially on LGBT issues, you see the depth of that bias, and you know it has an effect.

“For most of my professional life, I have lived in a world where gays and lesbians were not stigmatized but valorized,” I said, “and conservative Christians were openly treated as the enemy. I heard an editor once defend biased coverage of the same-sex marriage issue by comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan.”

I believe what you’re saying about the gay perspective, I told her, and I know that the environment I’ve worked in has been so pro-gay and socially liberal, and especially hostile towards conservative Christians, that it has probably made it more difficult for me to fully appreciate how things look from the LGBT side. But that works both ways. It very often seems to me that gays and their allies see conservative Christians as nothing but haters who deserve no consideration as fellow human beings, and deserve every bad thing that happens to us as our comeuppance for having beliefs they hate.

“Consider this,” she said in reply. “That both things can be true at the same time. That gays and lesbians really do have reason to fear discrimination and worse, and that conservative Christians really do have reason to fear discrimination and losing their livelihoods.”

That sounds right to me, I told my friend. But how do LGBTs and conservative Christians move past that, while still being true to our convictions?

We didn’t have time to get into it on the phone, nor would either of us have had a solution, I’m guessing. Besides, neither of us are gay, so anything we said would have been skewed.

Let me put it to the room, though: how do we move past the irreconcilable differences, and recognize the humanity of each other even as we strongly disagree. Are there ways we can be more fair to each other and stay true to ourselves and our sacred beliefs. Can we make a place for each other, or are we doomed to fight forever?

Wherever you come down on the issue, note well that I will only publish constructive comments. If you only want to complain and moan about how hateful the other side is, and say that your side’s feelings are more important than the other side’s, I’m not going to publish your comment. Let’s try to make this thread different from every other one on this topic, shall we?

UPDATE: Gang, I’m serious about not posting things that are full of ardent griping about what the Other Side should do. It won’t kill you to try to be constructive. If you really believe that there’s nothing we can do, I’ll post that comment, but don’t be shrill about it, because that ruins a thread. I strongly, strongly urge you, in your comments, to include a suggestion for what your own side could do to be more respectful, understanding, or accommodating.

Peak Identity Politics Reached

When I watched this clip of a Mizzou Black Lives Matter activist chastising white people gathered at an Orlando memorial for not being as quick to come to BLM events, I thought we surely had reached a peak on the heartless narcissism of identity politics:

But I was wrong! The absolute nadir, the ne plus ultra of hateful identity politics, were these tweets by a white Chicago feminist lawyer. It has since been deleted, but it was captured by plenty of Twitter commenters. It has a profanity in it, so I’ve put it below the jump to protect the delicate. As preparation, check out

this screenshot from her Tumblr:

Here’s what she tweeted, as captured by Twitter user Jeff Spross. Make sure you’re sitting down:

That’s it I’m getting the hell off Twitter. pic.twitter.com/CrqFnvskNr

— Jeff Spross (@jeffspross) June 16, 2016

Yep, eviscerating those who deserve it. Like a toddler eaten by an alligator and the father injured trying to pry the gator’s mouth open to save his son. Did I mention that this woman is a lawyer? As if you couldn’t tell.

Religious Liberty Includes Muslims Too

Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore knocks it out of the park when a fellow pastor asks him why on earth Christians should not oppose letting Muslims build mosques. It’s only a 2 1/2 minute clip, but it’s astonishing. The reader who sent that to me, a Catholic, writes:

This is amazing!. Why don’t more Christians—including Catholic bishops—learn how to speak this way?

I don’t fully agree with Moore on immigration, but he really is becoming the spokesman for many of us conservative, orthodox Christians in America. I can’t think of a single other figure from any tradition who comes close.

In Praise Of Bohemian Conservatives

Ted McAllister speaks for me, and no doubt for other Kirkians. Excerpts:

[Materialism] is an intoxicating form of anti-intellectualism that parades as hard-headed rationalism. It is a close cousin to Christian Fundamentalism since both seek to reduce complex things to a simple, declaratory, unambiguous “fact.” Each of these intellectual habits seeks something certain, unambiguous, so as to get the intellectual assurance that eliminates the need for a spiritual journey that would encounter more mysteries than uncover certain answers.

And here we discover the essential aesthetic difference between bohemian conservatives and the intellectual and moral simplifiers: conservatives find the most profound meaning in mysteries. The goal is not to solve mysteries, but to enter into them fully and to see what wonders our dim faculties might apprehend. Across a room, a conservative might spy a sack of rapidly degenerating amino acids, but rather than thinking of the elements that make up the body he sees, he wonders about this creature’s past, its network of relationships, its relationship with books. The conservative might wonder if this creature could be his love someday—and when he wonders this he is fully aware that the creature before him is not “just” a sack of rapidly degenerating amino acids. During the love affair that may follow, the conservative might read all manner of books on attraction, on chemical changes in the brain that make lovers altogether crazed humans, and he may come to see that the experience of love has connections to evolved mechanisms of selection, but he will never allow the various parts of the explanation become sufficient—for his experience teaches him that love is a mystery—painful and glorious.

More:

At the risk of approaching a definition, a bohemian conservative believes humans ought to appreciate, live amidst, and even love the eccentric particularity of physical nature, of distinctive persons, of local culture, of odd traditions that reach back before memory, and more generally of the person rooted in time and place–a historical expression as unique as the proverbial snowflake. The bohemian conservative appreciates less the abstract beauty of the woman on the billboard and more the peculiar beauty of the woman who works at the diner. The bohemian conservative does not love the individualist as much as the eccentric person who is rooted in cultural soil unprocessed by sanitizing consumerism. The bohemian conservative admires the unique and peculiar over the abstracted perfection of a universal form.

The person, understood as a being rooted in history, culture, and tradition, is not any one thing. He isn’t defined by the composition of his body. He isn’t defined by his individual experiences. He isn’t defined by his accomplishments, or failings, or abilities, or limitations. The complexity of his person, as contextualized in a living culture, allows him to think of himself as physical and spiritual, as an individual and part of a group, as living in the flux of existence that is nonetheless situated in the timelessness of reality.

Read it all. 

Man, somebody ought to write a book. Oh, wait…

‘A Land Of Jerking Knees’

After reading a Washington Post story making fun of Donald Trump’s penchant for fast food, Terry Teachout despairs for his country:

Note the transition from “some people” to “us.” As in: Not our kind, dearie. After which come the sneers. I’m no fan of Donald Trump—that’s putting it very, very mildly—but I also know that of such sneers are revolutions made.

This “news” story is, in its minor but nonetheless revealing way, illustrative of the condition that now increasingly prevails in American society, which is that those who disagree no longer have anything to say to each other. Fact-based argument has been replaced by reflexive contempt. Nor should this be in any way surprising. In a totally polarized political environment, persuasion is no longer possible: we believe what we believe, and nothing matters but class and power. We are well on the way to becoming a land of jerking knees.

Never before have I felt so strongly that Americans are talking past instead of to one another. It is, I fear, our future and our fate—which is why I have come to believe that I will live to see Red and Blue America negotiate a “soft disunion.” No, there won’t be a second civil war. I can’t imagine the citizens of Blue America waging a shooting war over much of anything, least of all continued union with people whom they disdain. (Red America is a different story.) But the gap that separates the two Americas has grown so deep and wide that I find it increasingly difficult to imagine their caring to function as a single nation for very much longer. If I’m right, then I expect that they will ultimately find a more or less polite way to stop doing so.

Read the whole thing.  I know just what he means, and so do you. But what form will this “soft disunion” take, if we have one? It’s hard for me to imagine how that would actually work. But it’s true that a people who hate each other won’t stay together forever (though the long, slow, agonizing death of Belgium is a counterargument to this thesis). The constitutional crisis will be precipitated when one of the states refuses to follow a lawful order by President Trump (California) or President Clinton (Texas).

Pay attention to what Teachout says about sneering at Trump’s fast-food habit. It’s a mouse-that-roared kind of thing. Though I don’t share Trump’s food habits, I don’t see them as morally culpable. But food habits are big class markers in this culture, and Trump supporters aren’t wrong to see sneering at Trump’s Filet-o-fish passion as a proxy for sneering at them.

As I wrote earlier, the editorial board of The New York Times, in its lead editorial today, smears the blood of the Orlando dead on Republicans and (implicitly) on all others who oppose certain laws favored by LGBT advocates. I don’t think they’re being cynical. They really believe this. They think I, and people like me, are indirectly responsible for a radical Muslim rageaholic and closet case mass-murdering gay people. If the left really believes that, then they aren’t going to stop until they’ve crushed us, because we’re not just wrong, but evil. 

Would you want to share a country with such “evil” people, unless you could render them as dhimmis? Conversely, would you want to share a country with people — especially powerful people in media, politics, industry, and academia — who think you are evil because you believe in and practice orthodox Christianity?

I don’t, and I’m a RINO squish with Blue State tastes but Red State religion. I have no problem sharing a country with people who think I am wrong, but should be tolerated. I strive to grant them the same courtesy. But increasingly, that is not the country I live in. I don’t know what to do about that, and am not interested in thinking about what could be done about it.

But some people, somewhere, are thinking about it. And sooner or later, we are going to hear from them.

It is said that America is a nation built on an idea, not a tribe. If that is true, then it follows that an idea can be falsified. The game we’re playing now is for very high stakes.

Religious War and the Martyrs of Orlando

You knew this editorial was coming. Excerpts:

As the funerals are held for those who perished on Sunday, lawmakers who have actively championed discriminatory laws and policies, and those who have quietly enabled them with votes, should force themselves to read the obituaries and look at the photos. The 49 people killed in Orlando were victims of a terrorist attack. But they also need to be remembered as casualties of a society where hate has deep roots.

A fanatical Muslim closet case, son of Afghan immigrants, and registered Democrat, a wife-beater who, according to many people who dealt with him, was filled with rage and bigotry towards blacks and others, and who, according to eyewitnesses, spent the last hour of his life holding people hostage and ranting about the US bombing Afghanistan — this villain slaughters 49 gay people … and the New York Times finds a way to condemn Republican politicians for it.

Ian Tuttle explains why this kind of thing is making functional politics impossible. Excerpts:

we see that invocation of “hate” has become a way of dismissing opponents by suggesting that their beliefs are beyond the reach of reason. You can’t debate someone who hates, because hatred precludes thought; it’s in the bones. If Republicans are motivated by “hate,” then they are not legitimate political actors, because political life cannot be predicated on irrationality. Reason is our common ground.

But if opposition to same-sex marriage, to transgender laws, and so forth are arguable positions, if those beliefs are rationally defensible, if they are amenable to debate by reasonable people, then opponents cannot be dismissed, and counterarguments are necessary. Needless to say, this is a far more precarious position for people such as Zack Ford: They may lose the debate. Better not to have to debate at all.

Arguments against same-sex marriage and many of the Left’s pet causes exist, though. The work of Robbie George and Ryan Anderson and many others — whether or not they are persuasive — cannot simply be dismissed. Yet doing so has been the preferred course, because it’s easier than engaging those arguments.

This should be disturbing to anyone dedicated to a functional political life. The reduction of political beliefs to emotional impulses makes living together impossible; all that’s left are permanent tribal clashes. When the possibility of consensus, which depends on persuasion, is abandoned, because one side decides that the other is beyond persuading, the only recourse is force. As it applies to the contemporary Left, that should sound more than a little familiar.

Read the whole thing.

It’s emerging that the best way to understand the Orlando aftermath in terms of cultural politics is as a religious war.

This occurred to me last night after reading a gay commenter refer to the Pulse as a “sacred space.” Think about it: using religious language to sanctify a bar. And if it was a sacred space, then all the dead inside are martyrs. Who killed them? An infidel, defined as someone who doesn’t dogmatically assent to the LGBT/NYT belief that there is nothing the least bit problematic about homosexuality and transgenderism, and that everything on the LGBT political agenda must be granted.

Was Omar Mateen a hater? No question. He didn’t target random Americans, but gays. He hated homosexuals. But as we have seen, his personal story and motivations suggest that he was a dark, demonized, complicated man. He was known to many for his at times uncontrollable rage and obsessive behavior. He is said to have beaten his first wife. He pledged allegiance to ISIS, and, as I said, ranted about the US bombing of Afghanistan as he held Pulse patrons hostage. And it is fairly obvious that he was either gay, or struggling with homosexual desires.

Like I said, a complicated man.

But religious crusaders don’t do complicated. It compromises the purity of the narrative that drives them into battle. If the struggle for gay rights has taken on the qualities of a religious war, then that explains why people like Zack Ford spurn expressions of sympathy from religious conservatives like Russell Moore. No matter how much love and solidarity he expresses towards the suffering in Orlando and those who mourn, he is tainted by the impurity of his beliefs. That also explains gay CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper’s bizarre inquisition of a Florida politician, putting the hot poker in over her failure to tweet support on the High Holy Month of Gay Pride.

It is, of course, perfectly fine to think ill of a politician for opposing a cause you support. But that does not account for the weirdly personal, obsessive quality of Cooper’s animus towards the politician. I was thinking this morning about how bizarre it is to hold a politician’s failure to tweet Gay Pride enthusiasm is evidence of her anti-gay hatred, and went back to social anthropologist Paul Connerton’s book How Societies Remember. His general point is that the stories that social groups keep alive across generations are those that they imbue with a sacred quality, and to which the group relates to with religious reverence (whether or not the stories are strictly religious). Excerpt:

For rites are felt by those who observe them to be obligatory, even if not unconditionally so, and the interference with acts that are endowed with ritual value is always felt to be an intolerable injury inflicted by one person or groups upon another. We may suppose the beliefs someone else holds sacred to be merely fantastic, but it can never be a light matter to demand that their actual expression be violated. And conversely, people resist being forced to pay lip-service to an alien set of rites, incompatible with their own vision of the “truth”, because to enact a rite is always, in some sense, to assent to its meaning. To make patriots insult their flag or to force pagans to receive baptism is to violate them.

And there is our answer. For Anderson Cooper, and no doubt for millions of LGBT Americans and their allies, a politician’s failure to express support for Gay Pride on Twitter is a violation of the ritual communal celebration of Gay Pride. Any expression of solidarity with the LGBT community or offers to help them in this crisis are taken as ritually impure. That politician, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, sounds like a real piece of work: a Sarah Palin-style “family values” Republican who is twice divorced, and who shacked up with her last boyfriend. But her messy personal life no more speaks to whether or not gays and lesbians should have the right to marry than it would if she had advocated for gay marriage rights. It could be that for all her sins, it would still violate Bondi’s conscience to be forced to assent to an “alien set of rites” that is Gay Pride.

This is why the issue is intractable. Many social conservatives see gay rights as primarily a political and a cultural cause, one that gays have largely won, both in law (with Obergefell) and in the culture. We try to argue on political grounds, and get nowhere.

LGBTs, though, seem to relate to their cause as more like a religious movement. And religious movements cannot be questioned by those who do not accept their dogmas. To LGBTs, the fact that conservative Christians cannot in good conscience assent to their cause and its rituals is evidence of their evil. To argue on political grounds with wicked people is to grant your opponents moral standing that they don’t deserve. To do so therefore may be felt as weakening one’s resolve, and indeed failing to keep faith with the martyrs.

The New York Times‘s attempt to smear the blood of the Orlando dead onto Republican politicians who have at various levels opposed gay marriage and/or transgender bathroom rights laws, should be seen as a religious act, a cursing of sorts, an anathematization, a disfellowshipping. When conservative Christian leader Russell Moore reached out to gays and lesbians in the aftermath of Orlando to express sorrow and solidarity, he was affirming our common humanity as prior to other divisions between us. But again, those sentiments, however genuinely felt by Moore et al., are taken as ritually impure. When gay activist Zack Ford refused those sentiments, and said that until Moore and those like him actually changed their views to fully affirm LGBTs, their sympathies are worthless.

This is a very dangerous position to take in a pluralistic democracy. Yet it’s one we see more and more on the cultural Left, which is quick to define as “hate” any thought, speech, or action with which it disagrees. Again, if you regard this as a fundamentally religious act — on campus, for example, casting out infidels for the sake of keeping the community pure — it makes much more sense.

But it also renders the conflict irresolvable. The religious crusader cannot abide the existence of the infidel. He must be either stamped out or made into a dhimmi, a second-class citizen fully aware of his inferiority and outcast state. This, to be fair, is how gays for many years saw Christians’ attitudes toward them and their quest for rights. In fact, as gay activist and law professor Chai Feldblum has argued for over a decade, when it comes to religious liberty and gay rights, it really is a zero-sum game when it comes to the law.

But does it have to be that way in culture and in civil society? I don’t think so. If we are going to keep the peace, we have to keep our eyes trained on our common humanity, and realize that it is prior to any other division. Doing this requires us to restrain our rhetoric, and to stop being so quick to demonize those who disagree as motivated by hatred, saving instead that powerful word for those who unambiguously are motivated by the kind of hatred that all decent people condemn — cretins like Omar Mateen.

I am not hopeful. The rhetoric of religious righteousness and purity is too emotionally powerful. An ardent feeling of purity, a sense that you are fighting not just opponents, but infidels, feels too good. When the most powerful newspaper in the world implicates Republican politicians (and by association any conservative who supports their views on LGBT rights) in what it regards as the martyrdom of 49 dead gays and lesbians at the hands of an Islamic terrorist, an important line has been crossed in the culture war.

You don’t tolerate murderers or accomplices to murder. You vanquish them. The Left is not going to call a truce. It’s going to pursue this jihad till the infidel is converted or humiliated and rendered powerless. Because that’s how wars of religion go.

Those who cannot capitulate without violating their religious conscience need to understand this phenomenon as primarily religious, not political, moral, or merely cultural. The crusaders hold all the high ground in American culture, especially in media. Conservative Christians should condemn the murders in Orlando, and they should condemn all acts of violence and dehumanization against LGBTs, even if that condemnation is refused. For Christians, gays and lesbians, like all human beings, however broken every single one of us is, are made in the image of God — and that fact doesn’t change if gays and lesbians hate us and refuse our expressions of sorrow and solidarity. Nevertheless, it is important for Christian conservatives to grasp the nature of this aspect of the culture war, and why all the winsomeness in the world will avail us nothing.

World’s Worst Person Failed To Tweet

Watch that creepy video in which CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who is gay, interviews Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. This was part of an interview about the Orlando killing, but in the five minute clip above, Cooper grills her about her past opposition to same-sex marriage.

One can understand why gay people in Florida do not hold Bondi in esteem, and Bondi does not exactly cover herself in glory defending her actions. But he lays into her for five long minutes. What this has to do with the AG’s office’s response to the Orlando massacre is beyond me. Cooper is grandstanding, making this weirdly personal, even obsessive. There is nothing that Bondi can say that will satisfy him, other than, “I repent, please forgive me for my apostasy.”

Reader Edward Hamilton noticed the same thing I did:

The most telling moment is where Cooper castigates her for Tweeting insufficiently frequently about gay pride. Insufficient Tweeting! How can she even look herself in the mirror each morning, with so much blood on her hands? Luckily, she reassures him that she’s up to quota now on her rainbow Tweets.

Shorter version: Here’s a pinch of incense, here’s the bust of Caesar. You know what you have to do.

Cooper’s moral preening in this interview is one of the most unprofessional things I’ve ever seen a journalist do.