Rod Dreher's Blog, page 575

The Gifts of the Czechs

I’m finishing up both the politics chapter of the Benedict Option book and the speech I’m going to deliver at the Academy of Philosophy and Letters conference in suburban Baltimore this weekend. I think it’s still possible to do a late registration online. The whole conference is going to be about the Benedict Option, and there will be some pretty high-level conservative theorists present. Check out the link, and if you’re in the area, please come.

I’m going to give the keynote address Friday night, on the theme, “What Is The Benedict Option?” Because this is a political audience, I’m going to talk a lot about how much Benedict Option politics has to learn from the way Vaclav Havel and Czech dissidents resisted communism. Benedict Option politics are antipolitical politics, as Havel conceived them, though in a more explicitly Christian mode. I won’t go into details here. Come to the conference if you want to hear them, or wait for the Ben Op book to come out in the spring.

As part of my research, I read an essay by Rudolf Battek, a Czech sociologist and dissident. Here is an excerpt:

How much scope does an individual have in living his or her life? What choices does he or she have? When and how can he or she decide how far his or her own decisions, actions, and efforts to determine direction and meaning will reach, and what effect they will have?

In principle, there are two alternatives. The first is spiritual, which includes ethical postulates, sensitive creation, analytical and synthetic processes of learning and self-discovery in openness and progress, and the relevant concepts are: feeling, knowing, giving, learning, loving, believing. Second, by contrast, the consumer values (those having to do with consuming and maintaining one’s physical existence) include a preference for comfort, surplus, material wealth, and the relevant concepts are: having, getting, receiving, and using.

To build and direct one’s life exclusively in terms of consumer values leads to “microcosmic tragedy,” to “a loss of humanity.” Spiritual orientation is the only possible goal that satisfies the meaning of humanity in ways that are accessible to human beings. The defining forms of spiritual self-realization can be perceived in philosophy, culture or religion. Their basic presupposition is an immanent welling forth of truthfulness, ethical clarity, a widely conceived humanitas (the postulate of a genuine humanity) and, above all, a predisposition to truth and resistance to evil and lies. The combination of both (active and passive) leads to freedom. 

Ben Op politics are a politics that rejects “consumer values” in favor of spiritual values, and creating a space for those spiritual values to flourish. Havel held that conventional politics in his society (he called it “post-totalitarian,” for reasons too complicated to explain here) wouldn’t work because the system had lost all basis in spiritual values.

The post-totalitarian system, after all, is not the manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is something radically different: it is a complex, profound and long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation of society. To oppose it merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political line or program: it is a problem of life itself.

Havel’s “antipolitical politics” is a response that acknowledges the primary need to rebuild the pre-political basis for a decent life in the ruins left by modernity. Though he was not a religious believer, Havel warned in 1978 that the West and the Eastern bloc were captive to the same atheistic, materialistic spiritual malaise, and that we in the West were simply at another stage on the spectrum.

We Benedict Option Christian conservatives have a lot to learn from the Czech dissidents on how to “live in truth” (Havel) in a society and culture that demands that we lie. If you want to buy a used copy of the out-of-print book of Czech dissident essays I’ve been reading, go here. 

Postcards From The Other America

A reader who lives in a poor neighborhood writes:

“This past weekend, at the festival in Oklahoma, I talked to a Christian from the Midwest who said that many of his fellow middle-class Evangelicals have no idea what’s really going on in America.”

This is going on for most people who don’t live in the low rent apartments, or the messiness of multiethnic working class neighborhoods. I think things often get overstated in terms of malevolence versus neglect, but just how bad many peoples bad situations are isn’t even remotely grasped to many doing well. Lower middle class liberals with no kids who don’t have to really deal with the consequences of their feel good ideologies fuels the problem too.

At my house, what started as babysitting one kid after school, has now turned to a bunch of misfit 12 year olds congregating at my house every afternoon. They say they like it that they feel safe and that we don’t tolerate disrespectful behavior. The stories I hear of rape, molestation, drug abuse, family incarceration, lack of anyone who cares or disciplines them, and being loaded up on prescription drugs either by parents who think that’s the normal way of dealing with kids, or of their own volition when they inevitably cry out for attention, is heart breaking.

No amount of money is going to fix these problems, and you can’t just throw God at these people either. It’s a process. It’s like trying to teach feral cats to first trust you and then trying to train them to successfully live indoors. You can tell they “get it” that your house is different, but they don’t really get it. There’s a stability they want, but they don’t know how to internalize the conditions that lead to it, since they’ve never had it. Those who haven’t been in that chaos think these people are a lot closer to being good than they really are, and those who need the help deep down don’t really believe they’re worth it or have any hope so they sabotage themselves.

It’s going to take sustained effort, and looking at your own personal home life as a sort of mini Ben Op island for lack of a better term.

A different reader wrote:

Without giving too much away, I work every single day with dirt poor white and minority Americans living in the heartland. These are people “living off the government dole” so to speak. I know more about abject poverty, government dependence, drug abuse, drug overdoses and disintegrated family systems, and what these things do to people, than your average middle-class or upper-class American by far (I would call myself upper-middle-class). This is an extraordinarily difficult population to work with. You try to look past their unfortunate circumstances and their poor choices to retain some sense of their basic humanity. When you try to help them see the sense in making better choices in the hopes of improving their miserable lot in life even a little bit, a great many of them resist you at almost every turn. It’s like they’re stuck in a negative feedback loop. The more you try to help them avoid making more poor choices which will only dig them into a deeper hole, the more they think you’re looking down your nose at them and acting all uppity and superior–so they tell you to piss off. The more you try to help, the more they resent you for being a “privileged” person who’s in a position to help in the first place.

A genuine spirit of charity is now a thing to be scorned and spit on instead of welcomed. It’s a bit like cursing God for sending you a Savior instead of appointing you as one. It’s the most insane thing you can imagine. It defies the simplest definition of reason.

They accuse you of “not getting it” because you’re not offering the kind of “help” they expect, because you know what that kind of “help” has done to them. The more they push back and resist, the more frustrated and angry you become. You try to remind yourself that it’s not really their fault, because many of them have never known any other way of living since before they could crawl, but there comes a point at which you inevitably start to wonder if you’re wasting your time. You hate yourself for thinking that way, but you don’t want to burn yourself up trying to fix what you don’t have the power to fix. So you desperately start searching for little reminders of why you wanted to reach out to help these folks in the first place, and little clues that maybe–just maybe–you might be making a small difference in some way that’s hard for you to see. That’s all you can do because there are no big, miraculous success stories to feel happy about.

I’ve done what I do for something close to fifteen years. I don’t know if I have fifteen more in me.

Not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a wealthy, Blue State liberal friend, who said that it’s obvious to him that the only way to solve the problems of the poor is for the government to commit massive amounts of money, and flood the zone with experts to show the dysfunctional poor how to live. The dream never dies.

I never tire of citing this point made in a 1994 reported essay by Robert Kaplan:

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain [a huge slum in Ankara] the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

It has been over 20 years since Kaplan published those lines, and perhaps he would adjust his view. I don’t know. Still, I think his point is sound: a society that can tolerate material poverty without falling apart will thrive; those that cannot will not.

How you regenerate what has been lost, I don’t know. As Jones put it in another context:

Hey, most of the world lives in conditions that today’s well-off Americans find unthinkable. Therefore, another term for “apocalypse” is “regression to the mean.” What we are calling apocalypse is not all that surprising or unlikely. The world will keep going. But the world you are so fond of will be gone. And enormous numbers of people will be suffering. That’s a prospect that should give anyone pause.

I’ve lived (briefly) in the third world–not as some first world princeling on tour, but as one among equals. To me this should all be viewed as an unearned blessing, which means it would be sad but not surprising to see it go. Life will go on, but you should take care to distinguish between the better and worse forms of it.

I also think people underestimate the fragility of civilization. It’s very natural. But it’s a conservative’s job to remind them of its fragility. What do you think Germans in the late nineteenth century felt? They had reached the greatest heights of progress and civilization of any people on the earth up to that point. They were the most advanced, the most impressive, the most cultured, the most scientific. What do you think they would have said if someone told them that, in a few decades, they would introduce the world to the greatest depths of barbarism that it had ever seen?

TAC Readers Walk the Walk

I’m a big believer in praising community when I see it, whether that’s in eastern Oklahoma or southern Louisiana or—and how many authors have the privilege of saying this?—in the combox. The readers of this blog don’t just talk the talk (though you do that well, in emails and letters and comments alike). You participate. You’re working to build a better society, one parish dinner, one community outreach, one neighborhood festival, one box of cookies at a time. There’s no place on the Internet like this, and I’m grateful to be the steward of it.

You may know that yesterday The American Conservative kicked off our spring membership drive. We’re hoping to recruit 100 new members of TAC over the next two weeks, and I’d like to invite you to be one of them. Members of TAC do receive some special perks—a complimentary subscription or extension, plus invitations to meetups around the country and member-only content—but they also have the satisfaction of knowing they are directly making this community of readers possible.

As a nonprofit, TAC relies exclusively on the generosity and involvement of readers like you. That’s what makes this magazine the most interesting place to be on the right: unlike many other organizations that call themselves conservative, we don’t consider ourselves a paid-for propaganda sheet for a political party, nor do we mold our principles according to the whims of the deep-pocketed. Instead, we aim to be an honest, creative minority, and we invite our readers to be a part of what we do. Ultimately, it’s your support that keeps us going—and it’s also what helps us keep the lights on.

Becoming a member of TAC is a way of investing in a smarter, more practical future for American conservatism in general and for the religious right in particular. There has never been a more urgent and appropriate time to invest in this community. Please become a member of TAC by making your tax-deductible gift today.

Candace Payne, Ah LUV Yew!

Now this:

The story behind the unconfined joy.

I thought we could all use a little relief from the maximum heaviosity around here. You’re welcome.

The Right & The Unnecessariat

Reader KD writes:

If I had to diagnose the difference between “Conservatives” versus the “Alt-Right” set, your Conservative grows up in an intact nuclear family and attends church on a weekly basis in a community that is relatively ethnically homogeneous. Think Salt Lake City or small-town Kansas.

In contrast, the “Alt-Right” experience, I suspect, is a result of growing up in dysfunctional families in dying, de-Industrializing cities and towns, who, thanks to the gift of the diversity, gets the opportunity to get beaten up by children of all different creeds and colors, only to be told that he or she actually deserves to have his or her face stamped in due to some invisible and/or ancestral blood curse.

To put it differently, conservatism exists in those regions of the country relatively untouched by “Progress”, whereas the kind of punk rock rightist stance requires feminism, mass immigration, rising inequality, de-industrialization, rising suicide rates, secularism, and, of course, a thriving drug culture, to provoke a kind of political gag reflex.

I believe there is a divide on the right based on whether people grew up in the last bastions of a culture of life, or whether someone grew up in the center of the culture of death. Further, I suspect that the future belongs more to the Alt-Right than the conservatives, because it is a consequence of “Progress”, the more America “progresses”, the stronger the Alt-Right will grow.

I don’t think this is a good thing, it is probably a bad thing, but if one writes about politics, one has to look reality square in the face. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Life will ultimately triumph, but it may be messy in the interregnum.

Which brings to mind a fascinating piece from a couple of weeks ago that reader Leslie Fain brought to my attention today. It’s about what its author, “Anne Amnesia,” calls “The Unnecessariat.” Anne, who is a leftist, begins by saying she’s old enough to remember the AIDS crisis, and how the gay community mobilized in its face:

Mostly what I remember is the darkness- the world seemed apocalyptic. Everyone, at least in the gay men’s community, seemed to be sick, or dying, or taking care of someone else who was sick or dying, or else hurling themselves headlong into increasingly desperate and dramatic activism the like of which has hardly been seen since.

… For much of the 80’s, AIDS was killing thousands of people every year, and the official government response seemed to be: Who cares? Let the fags die.

More:

AIDS generated a response. Groups like GMHC and ACT-UP screamed against the dying of the light, almost before it was clear how much darkness was descending, but the gay men’s community in the 1970’s and 80’s was an actual community. They had bars, bathhouses, bookstores. They had landlords and carpools and support groups. They had urban meccas and rural oases. The word “community” is much abused now, used in journo-speak to mean “a group of people with one salient characteristic in common” like “banking community” or “jet-ski riding community” but the gay community at the time was the real deal: a dense network of reciprocal social and personal obligations and friendships, with second- and even third-degree connections given substantial heft.

There is nothing like that today for poor and working-class Americans who are dying in the suicide and drug-overdose epidemic. Anne compares that crisis to AIDS, and produces two maps of the US — one that shows suicide rates, and one that shows drug overdoses. There is an enormous amount of overlap. Anne lives in the Rust Belt, in the heart of the epidemic. She writes about hanging out in the Medical Examiner’s office:

The workers would tell jokes. To get these jokes you have to know that toxicology results take weeks to come back, but autopsies are typically done within a few days of death, so generally the coroners don’t know what drugs are on board when they cut up a body. First joke: any body with more than two tattoos is an opiate overdose (tattoos are virtually universal in the rural midwest). Second joke: the student residents will never recognize a normal lung (opiates kill by stopping the brain’s signal to breathe; the result is that fluid backs up in the lungs creating a distinctive soggy mess, also seen when brain signalling is interrupted by other causes, like a broken neck). Another joke: any obituary under fifty years and under fifty words is drug overdose or suicide. Are you laughing yet?

And yet this isn’t seen as a crisis, except by statisticians and public health workers. Unlike the AIDS crisis, there’s no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There’s no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There’s no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is “dirtybutts.” Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.

Anne calls people in her region the Unnecessariat. Why? This:

Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.

I don’t want to overquote the long essay, because I don’t want to discourage you from reading it. She talks about how middle-class and upper-class people look at these wrecks and think, “Well, I wouldn’t live like that, so I wouldn’t get into that kind of trouble.” But that’s blindness, she says. If you don’t believe it, please read my post from a while back on Sam Quinones’ great book of reportage, Dreamland, about the American opiate epidemic. Anybody who thinks it can’t happen to them or their families ought to read Dreamland. No, I take that back: everybody ought to read Dreamland. Excerpt from that post:

The book is full of sad stories, but the saddest is the tale of Russian Pentecostals in Portland, Oregon. Massive number of these persecuted Christians emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US, and settled mostly on the West Coast. They were religious, conservative, and strict churchgoers. But their kids went to school with other Americans, and came to see church life as boring and too restrictive. They tried OxyContin, and moved into heroin. Hundreds of these Russian Pentecostal kids became addicts. Their parents did not know what to do. In one family’s case:

Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit. … [T]heir American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth.

Think of it: these Pentecostals were better off in the USSR than in America, because American freedom led to extreme decadence.

This past weekend, there was a double murder in my normally quiet, peaceful rural parish. Five people have been arrested in connection with it; I believe they are all locals. Authorities don’t yet know the motive, but the words “remnants of a meth lab were found in a shed near [a victim’s] trailer” appeared in the initial newspaper report. The talk around town about this has made a lot of us middle-class people wonder what’s going on in our own parish that we don’t know about. This past weekend, at the festival in Oklahoma, I talked to a Christian from the Midwest who said that many of his fellow middle-class Evangelicals have no idea what’s really going on in America. We were talking about religion, culture, and what it means for the future of the family and religious liberty. But that statement could be applied far more broadly.

Anyway, back to Anne Amnesia. She continues:

If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump.

What does it mean, to see the world’s narrative retreat into the distance? To know that nothing more is expected of you, or your children, or of your children’s children, than to fade away quietly and let some other heroes take their place? One thing it means is: if someone says something about it publicly, you’re sure as hell going to perk up and listen.

Anne quotes from a letter she sent to a professor friend on the primary election day in her state. Though she took a Democratic ballot and voted for Sanders, she wrote, in part:

Let’s be honest- Clinton doesn’t give a sh*t about me. When Clinton talks about people hurt by the economy, she means you: elite-educated white-collar people with obvious career tracks who are having trouble with their bills and their 401k plans. That’s who boomed under the last president Clinton, especially the 401ks. Me, or the three guys fighting two nights ago over the Township mowing contract, we’re nothing. Clinton doesn’t have an economic plan for us. Nobody has an economic plan for us. There is no economic plan for us, ever. We keep driving trucks around and keep the margins above gas money and maybe take an odd job here or there, but essentially, we’re history and nobody seems to mind saying so.

And let me be honest again- Trump doesn’t have an economic plan for me either. What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose- but that’s the choice I’m facing, a lifetime of grueling poverty, or apocalypse.

Read the whole thing.  The entire blog — called More Crows Than Eagles — is lefty, apocalyptic, and provocative. The author writes in an earlier post:

I think that Trump, and his supporters, many of whom I live and work with, have clued into something similar to what IS are seeing: the US is not actually for real anymore.

Dmitri Orlov described the end of the Soviet Union as the lifting of a dream, a sudden realization that what was ludicrous was in fact powerless as well. How Trump wins is by recognizing this ludicrous unreality in the established “norms” of political behavior. The control system, the “donor class,” the “party [that] decides” are paper tigers, dreams, ridiculous. The US government is on equal footing with Apple- neither could “build a wall” across Mexico, or bomb another state into compliance, or “fix” the economy, and every claim to the contrary is both risible and, most likely, the loss leader for another round of extra-legal exploitation and entrapment. But hey, neither one can keep the bridges from falling down either, or maintain a reasonable life expectancy or low infant mortality rate. Trump is not a fascist or a clown, he simply gives the panopticon no more respect than it can actually command in the real world. Against this, the Clinton and other republican campaigns can manage only  a half-throated reassurance that rules and traditions aren’t bankrupt, should matter, and there’s nothing important behind the curtain. Those claims evaporate, USSR-like, with the first throw of a fist.

One more thing: today I spoke to a working-class friend, a hard-working woman with a good heart, who lives in Fishtown. I asked about her extended family, which I had heard was going through some rough times (infidelity, a family breaking apart over it, traumatized kids, rage, resentment, etc.). She said things were going pretty well, actually, in all that. Of course there is no way in hell things are going pretty well; all this just happened within the last few weeks. But then I thought: that family has been dealing with the breakdown of social and familial order for a very long time. They’ve gotten used to it. What would be a complete catastrophe for middle-class people like me is just another day for those folks.

So, with that background, let’s return to the reader comment that inspired all this: the claim that the difference between a “conservative” and a member of the “alt-right” has primarily to do with whether or not one is a rightist who lives in a world (state, county, neighborhood, family) that has not fallen apart, or not.

True? False? Discuss.

Note well, though: anybody who uses the word “cuckservative” or its variation is not going to see their comment posted. Whatever you say, say it thoughtfully, in the spirit of civil exchange.

UPDATE: I would add one more thing. An Alt-Rightist is someone who is post-Christian, if was Christian in the first place. This accounts for the racism and anti-Semitism you see in those circles. It’s not that no Christian has ever been racist or anti-Semitic before (alas). It’s that no Christian worthy of the name can be racist after slavery and Jim Crow, and no Christian worthy of the name can be anti-Semitic after Auschwitz. Ignorance is no longer an excuse, if it ever was. And no Christian principles can be appealed to as a counter to Alt-Right beliefs, because they by and large reject them. Of course I have strong Christian moral beliefs about these matters, but I also think they are true as a matter of sociological observation. Hence the saying, “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.”

LGBT Totalitarian Kitsch

Did you see that terrible, horrible, hatey-hatey-hate-hate thing the House Republicans did? The Hill tells all. Excerpt:

The House floor devolved into chaos and shouting on Thursday as a measure to ensure protections for members of the LGBT community narrowly failed to pass, after Republican leaders urged their members to change their votes.

Initially, it appeared Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) amendment had passed, as 217 “yes” votes piled up over 206 “no” votes when the clock ran out. The measure needed 213 votes to pass.

But it eventually failed, 212-213, after a number of Republican lawmakers changed their votes from “yes” to “no” after the clock had expired.

GOP leaders held the vote open as they pressured members to change sides. Infuriating Democrats, they let lawmakers switch their votes without walking to the well at the front of the chamber.

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” Democrats chanted as they watched the vote tally go from passage of Maloney’s amendment to narrow failure.

Twenty-nine Republicans voted for Maloney’s amendment to a spending bill for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction projects, along with all Democrats in the final roll call.

“This is one of the ugliest episodes I’ve experienced in my three-plus years as a member of this House,” Maloney, who is openly gay, said while offering his amendment.

Oh, clutch the pearls, it’s the Nuremberg Laws all over again. Do you know what the Russell Amendment actually does? Mike Berry writes elsewhere in The Hill:

This week, the House Rules Committee will consider the so-called Russell Amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a provision that would apply the religious exemption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to federal contractors. This is a necessary addition to the bill because it provides important protection for an often-overlooked contingent in our armed forces: military chaplains. In our armed forces, military commanders are responsible for providing essential religious support programs for our troops. Typically, commanders delegate the day-to-day operations of support programs to their military chaplains. And generally speaking, our chaplains have substantial discretion to supplement religious support programs via Department of Defense contractors and vendors.

Chaplains use diverse and varied contractors to help facilitate their ministerial services. For example, a chaplain may seek a vendor to provide ecclesiastical supplies such as communion wine or religious music for worship, and virtually everything in between. Historically, chaplains have been free to use vendors who meet their denomination’s religious standards with little or no government interference.

For example, a Muslim chaplain may request that a prospective religious support contractor—let’s say a Muslim vendor who supplies prayer rugs—adhere to Islam’s teachings on marriage. Likewise, a Catholic chaplain may request that a prospective ecclesiastical supplier comply with the Catholic Church’s teachings on the theology of the body. The government has historically protected chaplains’ rights to choose contractors who align with the chaplain’s denominational doctrine. But now, the historical respect and protection of our chaplains has come to an end.

In 2014, President Obama signed Executive Order (EO) 13672, which severely restricts and undermines our chaplains’ ability to choose vendors that align with their denomination’s religious eligibility criteria. EO 13672 forces all federal contractors and subcontractors to affirmatively state that they make employment decisions without regard to sexual orientation or gender identity. Non-complying contractors are declared ineligible to contract with the federal government. Notably, EO 13672 does not provide any religious exemptions.

Under EO 13672, the Muslim chaplain would be forced to use a vendor who disregards Islamic teaching on marriage, while the Catholic chaplain seeking ecclesiastical supplies must purchase from a vendor who ignores the church’s doctrine on sexuality.

What many may not realize is that all military chaplains are required to have the backing of an endorsing body. Any chaplain who runs afoul of the tenets and teachings of their endorser is likely to forfeit their endorsement, meaning they can no longer serve as a chaplain. EO 13672 thus places military chaplains between a rock and a hard place: cease seeking religious support or cease being a chaplain.

Not to mention the fact that it’s likely that chaplains in some religious traditions aren’t going to be able to find federally-approved (under the Obama executive order) suppliers for specific religious goods.

None of it matters. Anything that as much as inconveniences LGBTs and their allies, no matter how inconsequential, is intolerable. As the reader who sent me the story commented, “All I can say is hang on to your hats, because the sh*t-storm is about to begin.”

This is true. They aren’t going to bend on anything if they don’t absolutely have to. Religious liberty does not matter to them, no matter what they tell you.

That’s because the LGBT movement and its allies in the Democratic Party, Big Business, and the news media has taken American politics into the real of what Milan Kundera called “totalitarian kitsch.”

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set in Czechoslovakia under communism, Kundera writes:

[T] aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which sh*t is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch…

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements…

Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life…

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

More:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Many explicitly Christian movies today qualify as kitsch, as defined by Kundera. The ridiculous Tylenol commercial we talked about last week is a perfect example of LGBT commercial kitsch, à la Kundera.

At the Idea Of A Village festival, several people I talked to said that they are shocked by how many of their conservative Christian friends don’t understand what is happening right now, legally, socially, and culturally. In one way or another, they said that their friends and acquaintances are either in total denial, or they are bizarrely eager to join the Love Wins bandwagon. On this blog’s comments and in private e-mails to me, readers have said similar things, e.g., they’ve been shocked how so many people on their Facebook feeds, people you wouldn’t expect, have gone all in on pro-transgender locker room and bathroom policies.

This is because on LGBT issues, we have entered into the realm of totalitarian kitsch. The fact that it was not imposed on us unilaterally by an undemocratic, authoritarian government does not make it less totalitarian in its effects. It is now close to impossible to deny that there can be any complication, any complexity, any reason to dissent in the least way from what the LGBT movement demands.

I expect there to be the usual people complaining, “There he goes again, being alarmist.” Well, when things are alarming, alarmism is the right response. Understand that the desire for control is so great that the House of Representatives came thisclose to making it impossible for US military chaplains to get religious supplies from vendors that don’t fully buy in to the LGBT movement’s goals. If you think they intend to compromise in any way, you’re deluding yourself.

American middle-class people, especially Christians, are especially vulnerable to kitsch for a number of reasons, but in this particular case, because we are almost pathologically devoted to a form of optimism that requires us to deny … well, to deny sh*t. It’s as if the act of noticing that things are really going downhill, and that this is a problem we had better do something about — it’s as if that is somehow a moral failure, treason to the Power Of Positive Thinking.

Because if a man can’t use your teenage daughter’s locker room, Love Loses, and we cannot have that.

Sobriety and steadiness are important qualities to cultivate in these chaotic times. But there is an important difference between sobriety and steadiness on the one hand, and mindless surrender to totalitarian kitsch on the other.

 

New Ideas Of The Village

Where on earth to begin about my weekend at the Idea Of A Village conference, which the Catholic community in the middle of nowhere without wifi, dang it around rural eastern Oklahoma’s Clear Creek Abbey put on? I will start by pointing out the image you see above, of Mere Orthodoxy‘s Jake Meador and Your Working Boy enjoying homebrewed beer and grass-fed beef together, was a highlight of my weekend, and indeed my year. Jake and I have been corresponding for years, and he has turned the blog which he edits and helps write into a must-read for all informed orthodox Christians, especially those interested in the Benedict Option.

Jake graciously agreed to join me in talking to a group in the afternoon, in which both of us talked about ecumenism within the Benedict Option, and Jake focused on Evangelicalism and the Ben Op. I learned so much, and I’m not going to go into it here, because it’s going to be in the book. What I can happily report is that there were a surprising (to me) number of Evangelicals at the conference, and they were well-received. There is tremendous opportunity for all of us — Catholic, Evangelical, and Orthodox (yes, some of my pravoslavie tribe came, woohoo) — to work together. I have long believed that, but this weekend, I saw it in the flesh.

(I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s short book Life Together on the flight to Tulsa. It gave me some new insights and ideas about how to talk Ben Op in the language of Protestantism.)

A deeply frustrating mix-up on Saturday night kept me from interviewing Jake on camera about Evangelicalism and the Ben Op. He agreed to do it earlier in the day, but when I went looking for him near sunset, I couldn’t find him. I thought maybe he had to leave. So I went to see the Back 40 with Mike Lawless and Andrew Pudewa, two of the conference organizers and Catholic agrarian pioneers here. By the time we got back, Jake was still there, but there was no time to conduct an interview because Ralph Wood, John Nieto, and I had to get back to the abbey before the doors closed for the night. It was the only negative note on an otherwise terrific weekend, but it was a pretty big one.

But, as I said, it was a terrific weekend. Here’s a shot of Mike and Andrew on the Back 40, or whatever they call it:

Mike Lawless and Andrew Pudewa

Those guys moved out here from California with their families a few years ago (10 for the Lawlesses, seven for the Pudewas, if I remember correctly), to be near the abbey, whose traditionalist congregation is booming, and explore life as Catholic agrarians within a community united around the Latin mass. If you’re a homeschooler, you almost certainly know Andrew Pudewa, founder of the Institute For Excellence In Writing. IEW’s curricula is terrific, and has been a tremendous blessing to the Dreher family. Traveling is hard on my family, because it puts more work on Julie when I’m gone, so I have to be careful about which invitations I accept. This one was a no-brainer. If I hadn’t wanted to go anyway, Julie would have made me, out of gratitude for what Andrew’s work has meant to our family. I was gobsmacked by the size of IEW’s operation. They have a big headquarters near the abbey, and employ a number of their community there. It’s very, very impressive.

On Saturday morning, I had breakfast with my pal Lance Kinzer, who drove down from Kansas, and a Catholic homeschooling mom who flew in from Silicon Valley for the conference (hey my friend, I’m not mentioning your name because I want to protect your privacy; drop me a note if you want me to name you). My new California friend told us about homeschooling and living on a small income in one of the most expensive, secular places in America. I was genuinely stunned to hear her say that most of the homeschoolers in her area that she meets are Muslims, who want to keep their kids out of the public (and private, presumably) schools in the area because of the moral climate there. This fact added to the sense I’ve been getting from corresponding with and reading Jones, a Muslim reader of this blog, that we conservative Christians who take the Benedict Option are going to need to work harder to form friendships and alliances with American Muslims.

The day kicked off with a keynote address by me, laying out the basic case for the Benedict Option. Then the great literature scholar Ralph C. Wood of Baylor talked about why we need the Ben Op, and focused most of his remarks on Walker Percy’s Love In The Ruins. With the possible exception of Jake Meador, Ralph, a Baptist, is the most articulate and enthusiastic Evangelical supporter of the Ben Op. He is also a dear friend and a great man (though he would surely object to my saying so). If you have never heard Ralph speak, and you’re planning to come to Walker Percy Weekend on June 3-4 — tickets still available via the website! — you are in for a treat. Imagine a member of the Inklings who talked like a Texas Baptist preacher with a peppery sense of humor. That’s Ralph.

Ralph quoted Pope Benedict XVI — then Cardinal Ratzinger — from an interview he gave to journalist Peter Seewald, published in 1997 as Salt Of The Earth:

Perhaps the time has come to say farewell to the idea of traditionally Catholic cultures. Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church’s history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live in an intensive struggle against evil and [that] bring good into the world — that let God in.

The Church will, in the foreseeable future, no longer simply be the form of life for the whole society. … The church will be … more a minority Church; she will live in small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith. But precisely in this way she will, biblically speaking, become the salt of the earth again. In this upheaval, constancy — keeping what is essential to man from being destroyed — is once again more important, and the powers of preservation that can sustain [man] in his humanity are even more necessary.

Substitute “Christian” for Catholic, and understand “Church” as the entire Body of Christ, Catholic and otherwise, and you will get why Ralph believes (as do I) that this prophetic insight of the former pope’s is so critically important.

Next, Abbot Philip Anderson of the Abbey gave a marvelous reflection before lunch. “If we wish to save the souls of our children, we have to make some decisions,” he said. “The ‘Idea of a Village’ and the Benedict Option speak to that.”

He said that if we do get a “new and quite different St. Benedict,” as Alasdair MacIntyre said we need, we won’t know it for hundreds of years. We should not despair if the masses of American Christians don’t take the Benedict Option at first. Said the abbot, in a phrase recalling Pope Benedict’s view, “It takes only a small amount of yeast to cause fermentation.”

He added, “The Benedict Option, at its heart, means leaving the ordinary ways of American society” and regrouping. Speaking of the remote rural community around the abbey, where life is pretty hard, the abbot said, “To come out here you really have to be looking for something more than comfort.” But what’s happening there is affecting people in remote places. The Abbot has evidence.

He’s right about that. The Clear Creek laity I talked to did not sugarcoat the difficulty of their lifestyle. Joked Mike Lawless, “Agrarianism means you work twice as hard for half the money.” It’s important not to be romantic or idealistic about agrarianism — that’s one of the lessons I learned this weekend. I didn’t talk to a single person who regretted the move, but nearly every one I talked to said this life was a lot harder than they anticipated. Me, I would last about five minutes living that kind of life, and I think very few of us are called to it. But I admire them immensely for the sacrifices they have made, and the community they have built (there are about 100-150 people there). And Abbot Philip is right in the broader sense, regarding the Benedict Option: to take it, you are going to have to be looking for something more than comfort.

The afternoon lecture was by John Nieto of Thomas Aquinas College. “The village is not sufficient for human happiness,” he said, “but it is necessary for human happiness.” By this he meant that living in a small, interdependent community — not isolated from each other — is important to human nature. Prof. Nieto said that both the political and cultural left and right in this country agree that man cannot be free until he achieves total dominance of nature. This is the seed of our doom and destruction: we are fighting against human nature. We are fighting against reality.

“Happiness is the fulfillment of human nature,” he said. “The village helps you see that.”

Then we had the afternoon sessions, and after that, homebrewed beer made in the community (the kölsch was my favorite, but all were special), and barbecue made from grass-fed beef raised right there in Clear Creek. And then, music and folk dancing. I had so many wonderful conversations with all kinds of people, some of which will go into the book (so don’t ask me to repeat them here). I want to note how good it was to spend time with Hank Reynolds, whose wife is “Professor Carol,” whose courses homeschooled kids can take online. “I think your son was in one of our classes,” Hank said. Really? I dunno. Julie is the headmistress of the Fort Awesomeshark Military Academy (what my son Matthew named our homeschool). When I was able to contact Julie online again, I asked her if that was true.

“Yes!!” she texted. “He took the Imperial Russia course. Professor Carol is awesome.

“Well, I met her husband Hank, and he gave me her Early Sacred Music course.”

Came the text: “NO WAY!!!!”

I’m here to tell you, potential education Ben Oppers: with people out there like Andrew Pudewa, and Hank and Carol Reynolds, there is so much richness, and so much support. Julie knows this world much, much better than I do, and I was really sorry that she couldn’t make this conference. I’m really nothing more than a publicizer; it’s people like her who are going to make this thing work.

On Sunday morning, I joined the community for High Mass in the abbey, as an observer (as an Orthodox Christian, I can’t take communion there) and as one who prayed with these brother and sister Christians. And then it was off to the airport, and home.

Again, I have far, far more material than I can share with you on this blog, because after all, I have a book to write. But look: be encouraged! You are not alone. Something is happening, and many of you readers will be a part of it. I’m grateful to Andrew Pudewa, Mike Lawless, Josh Martin, the Clear Creek Abbey, and all my hosts and new friends I made this past weekend.

One more thing. Look at this doorknob on the gift shop at the monastery:

That’s ironwork by George Carpenter, the blacksmith from the community. His work is all over the monastery, and it is something to behold.

Sunday Morning At The Abbey

View From My Table, Saturday night, Clear Creek Abbey (Photo by Rod Dreher)

Good morning! I’m still at Clear Creek Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in eastern Oklahoma, but I just now have wifi for the first time since Friday afternoon. We are in an exurb of the middle of nowhere. No cell phone service, no nothing. It has been quite the ascetic experience, let me tell you. (And, says my wife, good for me.)

The high mass is about to start, and I want to go observe and pray with the monks, so this will be short. After mass, it’s over to Tulsa to catch the flight home (my favorite journey). I have so much to tell you about what happened here this weekend at the Idea Of A Village conference, really exciting Benedict Option stuff. But I will tell all tomorrow — no time right now. Above is a view from the little desk in my guest room at the abbey, taken late last night, before I went to bed. I ate some crazy delicious chocolates a kind Baptist couple from Texas gave me, and my pal Lance Kinzer, a PCA Presbyterian from Olathe, Kansas, gave me a book of Scott Cairns poems, which I began reading last night, and was transported by. Thank you, friends! Perhaps the greater gift to me was the presence of Evangelicals like them (and there were more than a few) here at this conference in the shadow of a Roman Catholic abbey, and among a group that was predominantly Catholic. It revealed to me that the Ben Op really is an ecumenical project. I was so pleased and honored that my Evangelical friend Jake Meador was here from Nebraska, and agreed to share the stage, so to speak, with me for an afternoon talk, which we turned into a discussion of how to think through and embrace the Ben Op as an Evangelical — and how we Christians from Catholic and Orthodox traditions can communicate across ecclesial boundaries, teaching and learning from each other.

Again: more on this tomorrow. And I see that I have 240 comments to approve. When I get back to Starhill tonight, I’ll get on it. Thanks for your patience.

By the way, Ralph Wood was a knockout here, lecturing in part on Walker Percy and “Love In The Ruins” in connection with the Benedict Option. He’s going to be talking Dostoevsky and Percy at the Walker Percy Weekend in two weeks (and Matthew Sitman will be in town to talk about “Love In The Ruins” and our political craziness), so if you haven’t bought your tickets yet, please do — there are still some left. Jake Meador and Ralph Wood are the most articulate and enthusiastic proponents of the Ben Op among Evangelicals, and it is a delight to hear them and to learn from them. Ralph told the crowd yesterday that “Love In The Ruins” is a novel one needs to read to understand the disorders of our time, and what makes the Ben Op necessary. And he was very funny talking about it. If you come to the Walker Percy Weekend, you might seek Ralph out and talk to him about it. Oh, and we’ve definitely added a screening of the great new Wendell Berry documentary “The Seer” for Friday afternoon of the festival, so there’s one more reason for you to come. Walker Percy and Wendell Berry, plus boiled crawfish, beer, and bourbon — how can you stand to miss it? You can’t.

Finally, before I go off to pray, here’s a photo of Mike Lawless, who, with his family, was the original settler of the Catholic agrarian community here (they moved here from San Diego). This morning, he made me a cup of “bulletproof coffee,” which I was very reluctant to try (the thought made me queasy, given that the thing is full of butter), but which, I have to admit, was pretty dang good. Mike was one of the local folks who made me feel so welcome here, and to him and to all the others in the village around Clear Creek Abbey, I am so grateful.

Photo by Rod Dreher

Come On, Dreher, Get Happy

Here’s a great blog entry by reader Megan von Bergen, who is sympathetic to the Benedict Option, but with a strong caveat. Excerpt:

As a single woman, I live largely without a genuine community. My work and church offer activities for me to be involved in, but attending a Christian concert or watching a videotaped women’s Bible study is not actually authentic community. I have caring, encouraging parents and family members, but they live nine hours and more away by car. The idea of fellow believers coming together to work, to eat, perhaps to linger over a deep conversation and a glass of wine and through this community to encourage and renew each other in the faith is one that seems encouraging to me. I imagine it strikes other people in the same way.

I also find the idea of withdrawing, at least partially, from the culture wars attractive. Don’t get me wrong; I believe that we Christians should be involved in our culture. But changing the culture, which usually involves changing the law, or at least preserving it, is often a substitute for the much more difficult process of changing our hearts to be like Christ. We forget that holiness cannot be brought about through legal means, and in any case, we are less to be concerned about their holiness, and more about our own.

OK, so what’s the problem?

My problem is with the tone: fear.

In fact, the posts seem to stoke fear. The post on feminism warns of looming “catastrophe” and threatens that children will “never be able to form stable families” (emphasis mine); the one on transgender school bathrooms compares the schools to a “python slowly squeezing the life out of” students. Notice the panicky quality of these words, the sense of the dramatic and apocalyptic. Not every word is Dreher’s (the post on schools was a letter from one of his readers), but their place on the blog guarantees that those who read about the BenOp, and consider following it, are increasingly being urged to fear what is happening in the culture.

And yet fear is not who we are as Christians.

Read the whole thing.

I really appreciate this critique. In fact, Yuval Levin, in his important new book The Fractured Republic, makes a similar one:

Prophesying total meltdown is not the way to draw people’s attention to this failure to flourish. The problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.

Social conservatives must therefore make a positive case, not just a negative one. Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative: to the vast and beautifully “yes” for the sake of which an occasional narrow but insistent “no” is required. We can do this with arguments up to a point, but ultimately, the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive. Especially when we are in no position to enforce or enact our ideals as national norms, social conservatives need to emphasize and prioritize such modeling of alternatives – illustrating the possibility of a more appealing form of modern life by living it.

… But what social conservatives ‘have’ is a vision of the good life and a deep conviction that it would be good for everyone – and therefore ought to be shared and made available as widely as possible. Approaching the larger society defensively is hardly the way to make the truths and advantages of social conservatism apparent to our fellow citizens.

I hear Yuval, and I hear Megan. I thoroughly concede their point, and will do my best to keep it front to mind as I write the Benedict Option book. Let me say a couple of things, though.

1. People who meet me are often surprised by how laid-back and funny I am, versus the guy who writes this blog. And in turn, that surprises me, but by now it shouldn’t. I don’t deliberately hype anything on this blog for clicks. I genuinely am alarmed by the state of the culture, and want to shake up other conservatives, to make them realize what’s going on, and the urgent need to do something about it. But I can compartmentalize. It drives my wife crazy that I can lie in bed at night reading a book about doom and gloom, then turn the light off and go to sleep peacefully. That’s just how I roll.

2. That said, I am a jolly pessimist by nature, and I can’t fake otherwise in the Benedict Option book. So I will have to let happy Ben Oppers speak for the cause. When you meet Ben Oppers like the Tipiloschi, and encounter the joy of living out a traditional Christian life in community, you know in your bones that it can be done. My natural pessimism can’t hold a candle to the fighting ebullience of Marco Sermarini (or a Leah Libresco). So I will extol him and those like him to the moon, because they are the icons of the Benedict Option you want to follow.

Speaking of, I am about to head to the airport for a Benedict Option conference this weekend at Clear Creek Abbey. I’ll get to meet some folks I’ve been in touch with for years, including the great Evangelical Ben Opper Jake Meador, who runs the indispensable Mere Orthodoxy blog.

As I will be traveling most of today, please be patient with my approving comments.

Tylenol Promotes Transgenderism

 

Check this out:

A reader writes:

I’m a bit shocked at how fast things seem to be moving… tonight I was watching a video on Youtube, and the ad before it started was a Tylenol ad, promoting gay marriage and transgenderism. Tylenol! What the *&^%^ does Tylenol have to do with any of that? Where do I sign up for the Resistance?

That above must be the video she’s talking about. It’s an astonishing piece of propaganda. This is how you change things. Notice that it is not coming from a gay activist group, or the government; it is coming from a major American corporation whose products are in nearly every home in the country.

A reader in the comments thread put me on to a blog called 4thWaveNow, which describes itself as an online community for parents and others skeptical of the child/teen trans trend. Here is a harrowing story by a social work professor whose autistic teenage daughter has transitioned to male, and is having a hell of a tough time. The professor had no problem with her daughter being a lesbian, which she believes her daughter in fact is. But this is something else. Notice especially the role the media played in preparing this girl to accept the trans narrative. Excerpts:

My daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, as am I, is now 19 years old. She had felt (and told others) that she was a lesbian most of her life. When she was 16, she began watching a TV show called “Degrassi,” which featured an FtoM character. After a few weeks, she announced that she was not actually a butch lesbian, as she had previously said, but was in fact trans. She started attending a local PFLAG meeting, where she met many trans people, including a number of FtoM trans teenagers who were raving about a certain “gender therapist.” Although the APA recommends a minimum of one year of “gender counseling” before surgery, this gender therapist (whom I consented to, before really understanding what I was doing) gave my daughter the go-ahead to have a bilateral mastectomy after only two sessions. This gender specialist never reviewed any of the Special Ed records or spoke to my daughter’s previous therapist, who had known her for a decade. And, crucially, she never asked my daughter, “Might you be a lesbian?”

The gender therapist (whom I believe has an unholy financial alliance with the surgeon) gave my daughter (then 18 and one day) the go-ahead for the $30,000 surgery (covered for all university employees and their families where I work). My daughter is now on testosterone (which she clearly is unable to evaluate the risks and consequences of).

To give you some sense of my daughter’s level of understanding of what it means to transition, she told me recently that she believes that the testosterone “will grow her a penis.” I had to break the news to her that, although this is the mythology in the PFLAG meetings (where a number of the other young trans people are also autistic), this is not the case.

She has been taken advantage of. Healthy organs were amputated. This is insurance fraud, poor clinical practice, a violation of APA standards, unethical and unjust. It is a crime not just against women, but particularly against disabled women. So many of these young women who are “transitioning” are also autistic.

More:

You mention that your daughter previously considered herself a lesbian, and this changed when she started watching the TV program “Degrassi.” Was that the only thing that influenced her to claim a trans identity? Was there anything else?

Other than Degrassi, the PFLAG meetings–which are now the cult of trans–sealed her fate. There were no young lesbians there. In fact, there are very few young lesbians left–they are all transitioning. If she had been able to have a lesbian relationship prior to transitioning I believe that things would have transpired differently. I attempted to get her in a support group for young lesbians when she was 12, but was informed that because of liability insurance reasons,  she was not welcome until age 18. By that time it was too late.

And:

In recent years, activists have agitated for disabled people to be treated as having the same “agency” to make medical decisions as non-disabled people. In fact, when anyone brings up concerns about young people with autism being questioned about their transgender identity, they are accused of “ableism.” Do you have any thoughts about this?

Yes, I agree–anyone asking for critical thinking about these issues with autistics is accused of ableism and transphobia. This is often an effective silencing tactic. I have found no allies in the autism community. Instead, there is a vilification of anyone daring to ask questions about these issues, including the evidence of MtoF physical, sexual and psychological violence against women. Women who publicly question receive death threats, threats to rape us and our children, burn us to death with gasoline, decapitate us, and so on. This all coming from people who claim they are our “sisters.”

Given that your daughter was recently hospitalized for health issues related to her use of testosterone, have you found any medical professionals who are willing to speak up about this?

I have found no health professionals willing to go on the record against this. Everyone is afraid of professional suicide and threats of violence. I am standing alone.

My daughter’s latest hospitalization has been described by doctors as due to “absorption issues.” She now has a full beard but still has her period. The testosterone is wreaking true havoc on her system.

Read the whole thing. 

Erin Manning writes:

We are in the first stage of what I call (with apologies to Kubler-Ross) the five stages of progressive indoctrination on the transgender issues: denial. Here’s how all five look; I expect our country will hit stage 2 within a year or so, and the rest within a ten-year timeline (and that’s being generous):

1. Denial. “No transgender man has ever attacked a woman in a bathroom or private space, and no sexual pervert has ever pretended to be a woman or taken advantage of open bathroom laws to attack women!”

2. Anger. “Why are you bringing up links to stories showing that women have in fact been attacked in these situations? You don’t really care about women–you’re just bigots.”

3. Bargaining: “Okay, so open bathroom and private area laws might make women less safe. So what? These incidents are still really rare. Transgender rights are more important than some tiny handful of women who might have to deal with a creep in the bathroom every now and then. Women are tough; you can handle it.”

4. Defensiveness: “No, we’re not happy that the rates of attacks on women in private spaces have risen since open bathroom (etc.) laws passed. But let’s not make the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy. There are other reasons why women are being attacked in bathrooms and private areas. Maybe women just need to put their cellphones and cosmetics away and pay attention to their surroundings when they use public bathrooms or locker rooms. If you want total safety, stay home!”

5. Historical revision: “Women have *always* been unsafe in public bathrooms and changing areas. It’s just the nature of those spaces that they’re not terribly safe, like dimly lighted stairwells and streets in bad neighborhoods. History shows us that women have always carried personal weapons such as long hatpins (back in Grandma’s day) or mace whenever they couldn’t avoid using a public bathroom or changing room. Of course, a lot of it is panic. Fewer women were attacked in bathrooms or changing rooms last year, 2020, than any time in the last three years, showing that the new, 2019 public safety measures such as camera drones are working (and, yes, it’s unfortunate that someone hacked a fitness center’s drone camera and put the video stream of women getting into their bathing suits on the Internet, but the courts agreed that the women in question weren’t actually harmed, and we all know that inmates and others do better when they have access to mild forms of free pornography like this anyway, so what’s the big deal?). Besides, this is old news. The real question is why public schools are being so bigoted about not accommodating the bathroom needs of transpecies kindergartners. Playground sandboxes are not made unsanitary because one five-year-old nongendered human/kitten has to pee in it once a day! Xe probably cleans up better than most of xem classmates…”

Yes. And propaganda like the Tylenol ad is destroying the natural family by radically undermining our ability to comprehend it. And if you dissent, you are an Enemy Of The People. A friend of mine who defected from the East bloc during the Cold War writes to say:

Reading articles and listening to TV commentators, I feel I am back in my youth, in communist, totally intolerant Hungary, where character assassination was the norm, and the writers were just lying. Terrible. I am very pessimistic.

I know a lot of you think I’m hysterical about this stuff, and alarmist. But it’s really happening, and it’s happening fast, and its taking a lot of people with the tide. The activists have captured the institutions — and that matters. It matters a lot.