Rod Dreher's Blog, page 579
May 13, 2016
Trump In The Toilet
A Catholic reader is suddenly, in light of Obama’s “let my people go potty” bathroom decree, is seriously considering voting for Trump. He writes:
This is the test, right? He has been willing to stick it to the establishment on every issue. Every one. Even when it made him look like a goon. Here is where conservative Christians get to see if we are getting screwed AGAIN.
Some things he needs to say:
“In my administration, anyone who proposes a policy meant to pressure school districts, in any way, to force girls to shower with penis-havers, will be fired immediately. In my view, any proper Supreme Court Justice understands that on this issue, I stand firmly with legal experts X, Y and Z on this particular interpretation. You want to call it a litmus test? I don’t care. Then that’s what it is. I will direct my administration’s time and energy to constructing policies to address the very real issues of bullying that LGBT kids face. I think bullies should be expelled from school. I adhere to a policy of No Child Left Behind. Except bullies. To hell with those kids. Everyone needs to feel safe. But safety means a lot of things. A boy transitioning to a girls, who still has a penis, does not need to physically or sexually assault a girl in a locker room for her to feel unsafe. A young lady should not have to shower with someone who has a penis. Period. That’s ridiculous. I don’t care what Gawker says or Mother Jones says or Dan Savage says. Bullsh*t.”
That’s what I want to hear.
If he doesn’t say anything like that, his silence will speak volumes too.
Texas Fights!
MyImages – Micha/Shutterstock)
I announced today that Texas is fighting this. Obama can’t rewrite the Civil Rights Act. He’s not a King. #tcot https://t.co/vDgfQPZXjR
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) May 13, 2016
That’s the governor. More:
Just hours after news outlets reported on the directive, which will be sent to all public schools across the country Friday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered a doomsday outlook.
“This will be the beginning of the end of the public school system as we know it,” he told NBC 5.
Patrick and other top Republicans in America’s largest conservative state, had spent the day listening to Gov. Greg Abbott’s vows to unite with the state of North Carolina as it wages a legal battle with the federal government over the Tar Heel state’s new law requiring people to use the bathroom that aligns with the gender on their birth certificate.
And:
“I got news for President Barack Obama,” Port Neches-Groves (Texas) Superintendent Rodney Canvass told 12News. “He ain’t my President and he can’t tell me what to do. That letter is going straight to the paper shredder. I have 5 daughters myself and I have 2,500 girls in my protection. Their moms and dads expect me to protect them. And that is what I am going to do. Now I don’t want them bullied… but there are accommodations that can be made short of this. He is destroying the very fiber of this country. He is not a leader. He is a failure.”
God bless Texas. Unreservedly.
Having said that, I hope the left thinks long and hard about what it, and its president, are provoking in this country, for the sake of pursuing their all-holy goal of forcing public schools to let transgenders pee in the toilet of their choice. “He ain’t my president, and he can’t tell me what to do.” I guarantee you that this feeling is going to be widespread in parts of this country. I have never felt that way about any president, not even Obama. Until now. And not just him, but the federal government itself.
Team Obama — the president and his supporters — have no idea what they are messing with here. They are accelerating the unwinding of the country.
In Praise Of The Unprincipled Conservative
Philosopher Peter King (above), from his short book of short essays, Here And Now:
I am almost serious when I argue that a principled conservative is one who happily admits that they do not have any principles. They do not wish to impose a worldview on anyone and are quite happy to take the world as it is. Conservatives know that there can be no consensus in society but merely the accommodation of difference. To impose one view at the expense of all others has little to do with truth, but is rather merely an expression of power. Indeed, it is worse: it is power without authority, which can only come when power has a legitimate basis.
Conservatives are people who wish to protect things. They recognise what is valuable in their culture and their daily lives and work to sustain these. This is not about principles, but is a matter of reaction. It is a disposition based on vigilance and on an awareness of the dangers posed by others who wish to sacrifice the present for a future only they can imagine. When you come across those with such principles, sit them down and buy them a drink. It will keep them off their feet and off our backs.
Must. Have. Pint. With. This. Man. Soon. I can predict without fear of contradiction or disappointment that he has proper theology and geometry.
UPDATE: A reader kindly points out that I have confused my Peter Kings. My PK is in the UK, not in Toronto. I’ve removed Canadian PK’s image. Very sorry!
The 2000 Boston Massacre
I recently went back to take a look at a piece I did in the year 2000 for the Weekly Standard, about a huge controversy then in Boston. It is astonishing from the viewpoint of 2016 to observe how all of this was a trial run for what’s happening across the nation now. I’m going to quote from it at length. It’s prophetic:
[Brian] Camenker and [Scott] Whiteman, who live in the Boston suburbs, head a Bay State grass-roots organization called the Parents’ Rights Coalition. For years, the PRC has been complaining to Massachusetts officials that radical homosexuals are introducing grossly objectionable material to children and seeking to undermine parental authority over the moral instruction of their kids. Time and time again, members of the Parents’ Rights Coalition took evidence backing their concerns to school and state officials, to no avail, they say.
Indeed, Paul Cellucci, the state’s Republican governor, has continued to budget $ 1.5 million for the Governor’s Commission for Gay and Lesbian Youth. The commission oversees the creation and support of “Gay/Straight Alliances” — student clubs organized around gay issues.
Furthermore, Whiteman was called a “slanderer” by a member of the Board of Education, he says. “I knew I wasn’t lying. I knew I wasn’t making it up. I knew I wasn’t an alarmist.”
Frustrated by official indifference, Whiteman secretly took his tape recorder along to the 10th annual conference of the Boston chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, at Tufts University on March 25. GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”) is a national organization whose purpose is to train teachers and students and develop programs to, in the words of its Boston chapter leader, “challenge the anti-gay, hetero-centric culture that still prevails in our schools.”
The state-sanctioned conference, which was open to the public but attended chiefly by students, administrators, and teachers, undercut the official GLSEN line — that their work is aimed only at making schools safer by teaching tolerance and respect.
The event, backed by the state’s largest teachers’ union, included such workshops as “Ask the Transsexuals,” “Early Childhood Educators: How to Decide Whether to Come Out at Work or Not,” “The Struggles and Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum” (with suggestions for including gay issues when teaching the Holocaust), “From Lesbos to Stonewall: Incorporating Sexuality into a World History Curriculum,” and “Creating a Safe and Inclusive Community in Elementary Schools,” in which the “Rationale for integrating glbt [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender] issues in the early elementary years will be presented.”
You see how the whole “safety” canard was used to smuggle this ideology into the schools. More:
Whiteman sat in on a “youth only, ages 14-21″ workshop called “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality in Health Class.” If “they” didn’t tell you about this stuff, it’s probably because “they” worried they’d be sent to jail.
The raucous session was led by Massachusetts Department of Education employees Margot Abels and Julie Netherland, and Michael Gaucher, an AIDS educator from the Massachusetts public health agency. Gaucher opened the session by asking the teens how they know whether or not they’ve had sex. Someone asked whether oral sex was really sex.
“If that’s not sex, then the number of times I’ve had sex has dramatically decreased, from a mountain to a valley, baby!” squealed Gaucher. He then coaxed a reluctant young participant to talk about which orifices need to be filled for sex to have occurred: “Don’t be shy, honey, you can do it.”
Later, the three adults took written questions from the kids. One inquired about “fisting,” a sex practice in which one inserts his hand and forearm into the rectum of his partner. The helpful and enthusiastic Gaucher demonstrated the proper hand position for this act. Abels described fisting as “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with,” and praised it for putting one “into an exploratory mode.”
Gaucher urged the teens to consult their “really hip” Gay/Straight Alliance adviser for hints on how to come on to a potential sex partner. The trio went on to explain that lesbians could indeed experience sexual bliss through rubbing their clitorises together, and Gaucher told the kids that male ejaculate is rumored to taste “sweeter if people eat celery.” On and on like this the session went.
Camenker and Whiteman transcribed the tape and wrote a lengthy report for Massachusetts News, a conservative monthly. Then they announced that copies of the recorded sessions would be made available to state legislators and the local media. GLSEN threatened to sue them for violating Massachusetts’ wiretap laws and invading the privacy of the minors present at one workshop.
They sent copies of the tape to the media anyway. Know what happened? The Boston Globe denounced Camenker and White in an editorial. A rally of thousands of gay youth in Boston condemned their “hatred” — this, simply for recording what was actually said at the event! Then a judge issued a gag order on the Parents Rights Coalition, as well as all the news media and Massachusetts state legislators, forbidding them to talk about the tapes.
The tapes that were made in public. At a state-funded educational event. For minors. And nobody in the news media protested!
More:
“Sometimes civil libertarians become ambivalent when the First Amendment clashes with their liberal agenda. I’ve been fighting that for years,” Dershowitz told me. “It’s a situation where the political correctness of the Boston news media has caused it to take a back seat,” says Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate. “Of course, what will happen is, in some other case in which the news media will have more of an interest, where one of their darlings will get restrained, then suddenly they will find they’ve allowed a precedent to be set. It’s perfect example of the news media not rushing in and protecting [free speech] no matter whose ox is being gored.”
Days later, van Gestel [the judge] held a hearing to reconsider his gag order. Says Camenker, “The only news organization that showed up to demand their First Amendment right to play the tape was the Fox News Channel.” Van Gestel relented somewhat, lifting the gag on everyone but Camenker and Whiteman.
Read the whole thing. There are lots of details that you really should see. I wrote this line in this piece, 16 years ago: “As goes Massachusetts, in time, so may go the rest of America.”
And here we are. The same dishonest propaganda — that this is all about “safety” and “suicide prevention” — is still being used, and still being bought hook, line, and sinker. The same malicious character assassination is employed, and the same liberal-media disinterest in same. When I met him for dinner in Rome earlier this year, reader Giuseppe Scalas told me about the “gender ideology” agenda in Italy, and how the activists’ focus is on educators. He said that they know the best way to change the minds of future generations is to get to their teachers.
And now, they’ve more or less won the federal government, with Obama’s decree.
Believe it or not, Brian Camenker is still at it, still raising hell, still being denounced by SJW activists. And it all started because he and Scott Whiteman made a tape and told the truth.
May 12, 2016
Obama’s Outrageous Decree
Russell Moore says that if anyone had suggested in 2009 that the Obama Administration would do this, they would have been called paranoid. From the NYT:
The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.
A letter to school districts will go out Friday, fueling a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration — signed by Justice and Education Department officials — will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.
It does not have the force of law, but it contains an implicit threat: Schools that do not abide by the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law could face lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.
Defy this cretin. Make him sue. You watch: if Congress and the states lie down and accept this ukase from the White House, it will tell social and religious conservatives all we need to know about what is coming. Because here’s the thing: it won’t stop with bathrooms and locker rooms. The federal government is going to mandate the teaching of gender theory, at the risk of having federal funds cut off.
Make no mistake: if Obama gets away with forcing this on public schools, social and religious conservatives will have to leave the public education system — not necessarily because transgender boys will be changing with girls, but because it is the first step — a major step — in redefining by state mandate what it means to be male and female, and a human being. Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who hold to tradition will be stigmatized as bigots.
It’s happening so fast. But it’s happening. If you believe that these radicals are reasonable in any way, shape, or form, you are a fool. We now see what they will do. It won’t stop with this. And Hillary will bring it even harder.
UPDATE: A reader writes:
My wife and I had been contemplating which schooling option we thought would be best for our kids and our family. I was public schooled K-12, private Christian school for college. She did everything: public, private and homeschool. We met at a college in which one-third was private-schooled, one-third was homeschooled, and one-third was public-schooled. Our oldest kid just turned 5 a couple weeks ago and is ready to start school in the fall (he’s already writing a bit and doing basic arithmetic). We decided just before he turned 5 that we would homeschool.
If we hadn’t decided by now, this made the decision for us.
We have had the talk with him and our 3-year-old about inappropriate touch. We have taught them, when they’ve seen something in passing or heard their mother and me discussing the news, about boys not kissing boys, girls not kissing girls, etc. We are orthodox Christians. Conservative Presbyterians. But I still feel a small degree of shame even in explaining these things to my kids — not because I don’t believe it with every fiber of my being, but because I know I’m setting them up to be ostracized, criticized, and regarded as bigots (like the KKK) if they hold on to the faith we’re teaching them. We believe what we tell them; we believe what we believe. But when my kids are my age, there will be little space for them in to operate in the public square with the values our entire country had up until half a generation ago.
I have prayed a lot over this election and mulled the options throughout the primaries. I vowed from the start that I would not vote for Trump. My pick for president was out early, so I had been planning a write-in vote for a while (I cannot vote Hillary). But if Trump came out swinging against this edict from the Obama administration, I might well vote for him. This has come to our doorstep so fast, I’m willing to consider voting for someone as slimy, untrustworthy, and sickening as Trump if it gives us a chance to fight this. This will go all the way to the Supreme Court after the districts who want to fight decide to do so. I don’t know if I’m alone in my less-than-an-hour-old sentiments. But I doubt it.
So, #NeverTrump Christians, what now?
UPDATE.2: Oh. Didn’t know this. We really are screwed, then:
Donald Trump says transgender people should be able to “use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.” On NBC’s Today show Thursday morning, the GOP front-runner said he opposes North Carolina’s “very strong” bathroom bill, which allows businesses to prohibit transgender people from doing just that.
“North Carolina did something that was very strong and they’re paying a big price. And there’s a lot of problems.” Trump said. “Leave it the way it is. North Carolina, what they’re going through, with all of the business and all of the strife — and that’s on both sides — you leave it the way it is. There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble. And the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment they’re taking.”
UPDATE.3: Whaddaya know, Trump flip-flopped the next day. So I guess we don’t know what he’ll do. We do know that he has no principles. And we know on the matter of religious freedom and moral sanity, Hillary Clinton has the wrong principles. Come what may, we are still really screwed.
SJWs Attack At Catholic Girls School
That image above is of a handout Catholic high school teacher Gavin Ahern passed out to his students at Xavier College Prep, an elite girls’ school in Phoenix. Imagine that: a Catholic teacher giving out a flyer saying that abortion disproportionately harms African-Americans, that even Unborn Black Lives Matter. Whoever heard of such a thing?!
Then all hell broke loose from SJWs within the school and its alumnae network. From a local TV report:
A controversial handout given to students looks like something from the 1960’s; it references the KKK, abortion, and black genocide. Believe it or not, it’s being handed out to students at Xavier College Preparatory School in Phoenix. And parents and alumni are furious. They’ve started a petition to get rid of the teacher using the material in his classroom.
Gavin Ahern has taught theology classes at Xavier College Prep since 2002 and has been a moderator for the schools “Right to Life” club. But he’s found himself at the center of a growing controversy after handing out an anti-abortion flier to students titled “Black Genocide” which some Xavier alumni say was out of bounds.
“It immediately struck me as racist and sexist and completely out of line with anything a teacher in a position of authority should be dealing with in class,” said Peg Perl.
Perl graduated from Xavier in 1993 and over the weekend started a petition calling for Ahern to be fired. The petition has over 4,000 signatures with many current and former students leaving comments.
Here’s a link to the anti-Ahern petition. It has close to 7,000 signatures — but note that only a small fraction of them are from Arizona. The petition has received coverage from the SJW feminist shriek site Jezebel, which means the story has gone national.
Xavier alumnae & supporters (including some who are now XCP parents) have seen and heard about a handout given to students in class last week by Theology teacher Gavin Ahern. We feel the handout is hateful, racist, sexist and goes against everything we hope our young women to be. The handout is filled with racist and anti-women language based on alleged “facts” that are neither true, nor citing any references. Unsubstantiated hate speech is not appropriate in the classroom, and it is in stark contrast to the academic excellence and love for community we associate with our experience at Xavier. Women-shaming and and race-baiting such as this by a teacher in a classroom of young women is an abuse of the authority and trust placed in Mr. Ahern.
We further understand this indefensible handout is merely the latest manifestation of Mr. Ahern’s misogynistic rhetoric against women and their “proper place” in society as stay-at-home wives and mothers supposedly backed up by Catholic theological pedagogy. We are appalled these sexist ideas are put forth by someone entrusted with the education of young women at an institution we believe to have the mission of challenging stereotypes and empowering Xavier graduates as they go forth into our world.
Perhaps the most disheartening part of this situation is learning that many past and current students, parents, alumnae have been afraid to speak up about Mr. Ahern’s behavior because of fear of retaliation. We understand students have experienced grade demotion for speaking up and heard stories of similar retaliation from other students. Parents and alumnae have expressed fear of raising the issue or adding their name to a call to stop this type of hate-based rhetoric in the classroom because of possible boycotts of small businesses or loss of jobs which may be are at risk from like-minded vocal forces in the Valley that may agree with Mr. Ahern’s statements.
These are certainly not the lessons we learned from Xavier–or your leadership. We demand you take swift action to remove Mr. Ahern from the classroom immediately and take whatever steps are necessary to permanently remove him from the Xavier community.
From those of us united in the Xavier Sisterhood, and allies committed to supporting the current and future young women of Xavier.
There has arisen a counterpetition, started by some students at the school:
This competing petition is being set forth against the petition urging the firing of Gavin Ahern. We and many of our peers feel that the initial petition is unfair and that the other side of the story needs to be heard.
Many of the people who signed the petition do not even know Gavin Ahern and certainly have not attended his classes. The worksheet posted, which was part of a theology class exercise, was not explained correctly in the opposing petition and made it seem as though Mr. Ahern wrote the worksheet himself. As Xavier students (in his class (JP) or in a comparable theology class (ST)), we can agree there are some topics that are disheartening and hard to deal with, but the purpose of this exercise was to expose the students to unpopular and unacceptable views from the past. Mr. Ahern has never been racist in class and actually has a very large understanding and big heart toward multiple views and opinions. He has never just stated a fact and told us to deal with it; he has always explained and answered questions relating to the topic under discussion. Mr. Ahern has been one of the few theology teachers who have ever made sense to me (JP) in class and taught me that the Catholic faith is accepting of all people. He has taught about love and acceptance in class. It is unfair for people to be so immature as to start a petition of hate against him when most of them do not know him as a person. The petition is extremely hateful and against all that Xavier teaches us as a community. Xavier teaches us to be women of excellence and mature adults. Creating something as petty as this is not what we stand for. Gavin Ahern is an amazing teacher and it is unfair to treat him like this. Please before voting and hating someone understand who they are and understand that distribution of the worksheet was taken out of context. Signing this petition indicates that you agree that Mr. Ahern should not be fired.
Well. For starters, let me say that I think the “Black Genocide” material is overwrought propaganda, to say the very least. It is true that a disproportionate number of abortions are of unborn black children, and there’s nothing wrong with pointing that out, and talking about it. But presenting a serious issue in that shrill way does more to discredit the pro-life cause than advance it. That’s my view, anyway. For all I know, Mr. Ahern presented it in class for the sake of having his students analyze its claims.
But let’s not pretend that this handout is what this controversy is about. It’s not remotely what this controversy is about. Here’s what anti-Ahern petition organizer Peg Perl told Phoenix New Times:
Though the Roman Catholic Church is zealously pro-life, Perl thinks distributing the literature does not befit her alma mater.
“Single-sex education is supposed to be empowering for women,” says Perl, adding that the anti-abortion tract “is not in keeping at all with the goals and mission of the school, and the education of young women.”
OK, let’s review. Peg Perl believes that the point of a Catholic school for girls is to “empower women,” not to teach them Catholic theology and morality along with their standard education. Well, according to the school’s website, its “philosophy” is as follows:
We, the community of Xavier College Preparatory, are committed to a belief in God according to the tenets of the Catholic faith enlightened by the Second Vatican Council. In that spirit, we believe in providing opportunities for all to contribute to the community of faith.
We fully believe in the ideals of democracy, integrity, tolerance, and respect in harmony with the love of God, of self, and humankind, and we affirm the fundamental roles of parents and families as primary instruments of faith and education.
We also believe in conscientiously reviewing and improving our college preparatory curriculum, educational goals, and performance objectives, in order to sustain a learning process that encourages personal growth, faith development and community involvement for the young women entrusted to our care.
That’s pretty squishy, but it clearly says that the school is committed to “the tenets of the Catholic faith. The “enlightened by the Second Vatican Council” modifier is the “spirit of Vatican II” codicil that allows Catholic individuals and institutions who have no intention of teaching or living by certain hard Catholic teachings to claim that they’re still good Catholics. One trusts that the Xavier community is not among them. In any case, it is normal for a Catholic teacher to hand out pro-life material as part of a theology class exercise.
Let’s say you were a student in that class. You could have said, “Mr. Ahern, I think this handout is wrong, and here’s why.” Etc. This is what people do in class. In fact, the students who support Ahern say his critics are taking this out of context.
Are they ever! Lawyer Peg Perl’s verbiage is screaming-meemie Social Justice Warrior hysterics worthy of a Maoist mob. “Hateful, racist, sexist”. “Racist and anti-women language”. “Unsubtantiated hate speech.” “Women-shaming and race-baiting” — this, for a handout that criticizes abortion as racist.
Peg Perl and the mob she has whipped up want Gavin Ahern sacked. They don’t just want him disciplined; they want his career ended for his blasphemy.
So, what is this controversy really about? It’s about de-Catholicizing Xavier College Prep, and frog-marching it toward secular liberalism. More broadly, it’s about demonizing any Catholic content in Catholic education, and making teachers and administrators afraid to present anything that offends SJW dogma, for fear of being put on trial for blasphemy. One of my readers, an untenured professor at a Catholic university, told me that he would be afraid to present the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality to his students, for fear that he would be denounced to the administration for hate speech. That is a post-Catholic college, trading on its Catholic name and reputation. Peg Perl and her ilk want all Catholic schools to be this way. Some of them are eager to capitulate, but not all. If there’s any fight left in them, they must fight.
On an earlier thread here, a reader who teaches in a university said the older scholars in his department are fair-minded liberals, while his younger colleagues are fanatically intolerant SJW robots. Easy to tell which one of these Peg Perl is. Look at the kind of supporters she’s getting. This is from the comments page of her petition (all caps in the original):
OLIVIA DE JAVELINA
4 hours ago
AZ
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. I AM BECOMING MORE OF A SUPPORTER OF REIGNING IN FREE SPEECH AS THEY DID IN GERMANY. IT IS DISGUSTING THAT THIS COUNTY ALLOWS RACIST, HOMOPHOBIC, SEXIST AND ESPECIALLY KLAN LITERATURE TO BE PRINTED AND DISSEMINATED. FOR IT TO BE DONE IN A PLACE OF LEARNING IS SHAMEFUL AND CERTAINLY NOT ANYTHING SUPPORTABLE IN A RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. I AM NOT CHRISTIAN, BUT IT IS PEOPLE LIKE THIS AND ESPECIALLY A “TEACHER” THAT GIVE ALL CHRISTIANS AN INCREASINGLY BAD NAME. FIRE HIM NOW. IT IS AN EMBARRASSMENT TO LIVE IN ARIZONA AND THIS IS JUST ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF THE DISTURBING RACISM AND RIGHT WING WRONG THINKING.
The comments section is like something from another planet. Non-Catholics are calling for Ahern’s head. Despicable.
I hope the Xavier community rallies behind Gavin Ahern. This attempt at anti-Catholic, left-wing ideological bullying must be resisted firmly, and must be resisted everywhere it is attempted. They are going to keep coming, and keep coming, and keep coming. I hope too that the larger Phoenix Catholic community rallies to Gavin Ahern’s side. His fight is not his alone, nor is it merely Xavier’s.
Great Flip-Flops In History
OK, OK, y’all can stop sending me the link to today’s story that Caitlyn Jenner is thinking about de-transitizing herself:
Ian Halperin, the author of “Kardashian Dynasty: The Controversial Rise of America’s Royal Family,” said that, while researching his book, multiple sources told him that the former Olympian had been miserable for months and has considered transitioning back to a man.
“One source confirmed to me Caitlyn has made whispers of ‘sex change regret,’ hinting she might go back to being Bruce Jenner,” Halperin said.
Halperin said that one long-time friend told him that, while Jenner was “thrilled” to champion transgender issues, the reality TV personality could de-transition “in the next couple years.”
“It hasn’t been easy for Caitlyn, it’s been very hard,” the friend said, according to Halperin. “She’s thrilled she has raised awareness about how transgender people have long been discriminated against but I think there’s a chance she’ll de-transition in the next couple years. I don’t think it would surprise anybody in her inner circle. It has been much harder than she anticipated. My heart goes out to her and I know her true friends will be there to support her on whatever path she chooses.”
Team Caitlyn has denied the report, as you knew they would. I bet it’s true, but we’ll see. Good thing he kept his junk. If it does pan out, it will be no time for gloating. Consider what happened to Mike Penner. Whatever the case, Bruce Jenner is a deeply troubled man. The fact that he did all this in public, and has become a cultural icon, promoted heavily by ESPN, Vanity Fair, and everybody else in the cultural elite, has set him up for an extremely hard fall.
Say, let’s all force the trans treatment on children and adolescents who go wobbly on gender identity. What could it hurt?
UPDATE: One of my learned readers responds to this news with a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:
Below, find the Tiresias stanza to “The Fire Sermon” in all its glorious Eliotic pessimism about the inability of meaningless sex, gender-bending, and creepy old peeping Toms to solve any, let alone all, of the world’s problems:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
Did The Benedict Option Cause Trump?
Peter Wolfgang wrote what I consider to be a really dumb piece yesterday, arguing that the Benedict Option produced Donald Trump. His point is that we got Donald Trump because too many Christians stayed out of the political fray. It’s a groundless argument for a number of reasons. But here’s the gist of it:
Some of the same churches that defended traditional marriage a decade ago now seem to be in thrall to ideologies urging a Christian withdrawal from public life. This has had an effect on how they vote. Some view Trump as the strong man best positioned to make the government leave them alone to practice their faith. Many seem to have given up on political involvement altogether.
Regardless of whatever the Benedict Option actually is, it and other things are heard as a call for disengagement from politics. Many small-“o” orthodox Christians are actually doing it. This is especially true here in the Northeast, where Trump scored his biggest margins of victory.
Andrew M. Haines, also writing at Ethika Politika, counters as a “fan” of the Ben Op. Excerpt:
One criticism of Benedict Option thinking is that because it doesn’t directly produce real-world effects — or because those effects aren’t puristic — it’s not salutary. But that’s a category error. How could it produce direct political or social effects? (And for that matter, how could it directly prevent them?) That’d be especially ironic given MacIntyre’s portrayal of the non-communicability of virtue in contemporary society. Rod Dreher makes a similar point: he calls the Benedict Option “an intentional and thoughtful retreat into narrativity, by which I mean a reclaiming of the church’s story, inculcating commitment to it within the lives of its members, in defiance of the narrative collapse around us.”
Dreher says that to ask whether the Benedict Option could have caused Trump’s political ascendancy is “a stupid question to ask. A really stupid question.” I assume he means it’s stupid because it’s just the wrong sort of question.
For Wolfgang to be right, there has to be a “silent majority,” or something like it, of orthodox Catholics and conservative Evangelicals, who could turn this thing around if they just committed themselves more completely to partisan political activism. For one, that’s especially untrue in the Northeast, which is one of the most liberal, secular regions of the country (see here). Plus, we are living in a time of declining religious belief across the board in America. Finally, the Indiana RFRA debacle last year was the political Waterloo for religious conservatives. It showed that when Big Business takes sides against us in the culture war, the Republican Party will cave.
This is political reality. The Benedict Option is meant to be an alternative strategy to coping with this reality, and more broadly, with the fact that we now live in a post-Christian culture.
I don’t say that conservative Christians should get out of political life, stop voting, stop running for office, and so forth. I expect that we will keep doing that, and that’s fine, that’s even necessary. But we should abandon political hope, by which I mean that we should understand that politics can at best be a defensive action at this point, not a means by which conservative Christians can transform the commons, except at the local level.
The Ben Op is also about transforming the way we conceive of politics. At the broadest theoretical level, politics is the art and science of managing our common life. Seen this way, creating a classical Christian school to serve your community is a political act. Building a local economic network to serve your community (see Bernacchio and de Mahy on this) is a political act. Anything you do to build up the common good according to what you know to be good, true, and beautiful can be seen as a political act. As Bernacchio and de Mahy say:
We must be anti-modern to the extent that contemporary social and economic structures are destructive of the common good of local communities.
Dreher and other proponents of the Benedict Option stand at the crossroads of economics and ethics. Transcending contemporary cultural debates requires an understanding of the relationship between modern ethics and modern economics. Putting flesh on the Benedict Option requires an examination of contemporary forms of community that have been able to defend common goods against the atomizing effect of contemporary economic institutions.
This is true. The Benedict Option is a work in progress. Shoot, the Benedict Option book is a work in progress, literally. I don’t expect the book to settle arguments, but rather to start and give direction and substance to both contemplation and action to build these alternative Christian communities. A lot of people have this idea that I’m talking about building communes or somesuch thing. No. I mean, some might do that, and that’s fine by me, but most of us cannot do that, and do not want to do that. But it’s more achievable to build schools, and other institutions, and to build up our churches as our primary communities, in concrete ways. All of this I’m going to talk about in the book.
But hear me: I intend this book not to be the last word in the Benedict Option, but the first. Imagining it and building it is going to be a collaborative process, involving Christians all around the country, and even overseas (I got a very nice, long letter from a Hungarian Catholic, aged 31, today, saying how much the Benedict Option is needed in her country). This is going to be an adventure.
The longer Christians cling to the obsolete notion that if we just keep doing what we’ve always done, politically, things are going to turn around, the longer it’s going to take them to understand the reality we are now living in, and act both realistically and idealistically to construct a useful and meaningful response. These are not normal times. We cannot react normally to them.
The reconstruction of a morally serious political culture is essential, if American democracy is not to descend into incoherence and what an eminent churchman once called the “dictatorship of relativism.” That reconstruction could start with U.S. Catholics leavening our politics—and the culture as a whole—with Catholic social doctrine.
Well, yes, I would like that very much. But how does that happen politically when the tides are turning strongly against Catholic teaching? Who does the orthodox Catholic vote for? Hillary? Trump? Neither one offers a platform other than one notionally consonant with Catholic (or traditional Christian) teaching. By what means would Catholics achieve that, except at the local level? The nation itself is post-Christian! We have to accept that reality and figure out how to be what Pope Benedict XVI called (after Toynbee) a “creative minority.”
I don’t know how to do this completely. Nobody does, as far as I can tell. But we have no choice now but to put our heads together and try new things, risk failure, learn how to live as minorities in a hostile culture and to thrive. This is the heart Christian politics now and in the future. Yes, we will keep voting, and yes, we will run for office. But that kind of political action is now at the periphery. We lost the political fight because we lost the culture a long time ago. It’s going to be a very long time before it will even be possible to return to normal politics for us. We need a Christian politics for the long duration — and that will look a lot like what Peter King envisions in his great, wholly secular book The Antimodern Condition:
What makes [King’s program] manageable is that we focus on what is close to us, and what we focus on remains close to us. It is important because it is close, and close because it is important. And of course only part of the world is close to us. We cannot hold it all close to us; we cannot focus on all of it; and we can only understand but a fraction of it.
… So acceptance, which begins with the personal and ripples out, becomes, in its way, political. It shows how we view others as well as ourselves. It sets out the limits for our actions and what we should do for others and well as ourselves. Acceptance is the antimodern condition, whereby we reject the modernist ideal of progress and perfectibility. The beauty of the concept of acceptance is precisely what it encloses. It allows us to move beyond the assumptions of modernity, and we can do so positively. We can reject modernity in favour of something else. We are not being nihilistic or relishing in contrariness and rejection. Instead what we are doing is showing that there is an alternative to modernity and that this does not involve the flight of fancy of postmodern thought. We can stay grounded while criticising the modern. We can hold our position without seeking to transgress or to destroy. What we are saying is that we wish to keep what we have and we wish to do so because we know what it does for us. We know and need nothing more than this and this understanding arises out of experience. Our complacency is not groundless but based on an honesty that comes from a clear vision of what is close rather than scouring the horizon for what we hope might one day appear. The antimodern condition allows us to make that most peaceful of political statements: ‘I know my place.’
… Instead of calling for political action, [I argue] for a withdrawal to within the four walls of our home. This is not so we can isolate ourselves, but rather a pleas for acceptance of what makes our lives tenable and meaningful.
Here is a link to Prof. Peter King’s blog, also called The Antimodern Condition. I wish he updated it more often. He’s marvelous, and more people should know about him. Here’s a link to his latest book of essays, Here And Now, available inexpensively on Kindle. Try the “read inside” feature. If you’re a Ben Op fan, you’ll like what you read.
(Note to Ashgate, the publisher of The Antimodern Condition: Please consider releasing an affordable paperback instead of the wildly expensive, limited edition academic hardcover. I am going to praise this book to the heavens in my forthcoming book The Benedict Option, and I think there will be something of a clamor in the US for it. I hope so.)
Christian Principal Goes Into Exile
A reader sends this e-mail. I quote it with permission, provided that I deleted geographical details, which I have done:
I am leaving public education this year for a classical school in [deleted]. I already have lesbian students in my current school who are physically affectionate. The problem is: I often do not always know the difference between erotic affection and sisterly affection. Even if I did, I do not know if I want to go there as a public school principal. I am not about to try to sort out the two and discipline the ones I think are erotic. I am conservative and there are many conservative families in my school–but I firmly believe this could turn into a big mess if I tried to discipline lesbians for “inappropriate display of affection.”
One of the worst things about public schools is that they are raising our children as if they do not have souls. In a public school, discipline and motivation to do the right thing are based purely on external stimuli–school-wide behavior programs and incentives for the good kids and discipline for the bad ones. These are simply controls that do not prepare anyone to do what he ought. This Skinner based approach is pervasive and inescapable. The poor and poorly behaved get the worst of it, for they are truly treated like soulless animals and governed purely by external stimuli. Christian kids do okay, but I have seen even these struggle to do the right thing when the external stimuli is removed. Schools are teaching our children to merely respond to pain/pleasure responses. This is no way to raise children to stay in the faith or to live in and perpetuate a free society.
The reader adds in a follow-up letter:
As a Christian parent I would be worried that even a good principal is not going to protect their daughter from lesbian advances. Principals protect the weak against the strong, but we cannot in this case.
I wonder to what extent we are going to see people like this conservative Christian high school principal leaving the public schools over all this. Imagine that you are an Evangelical, conservative Catholic, or Muslim elementary school teaching in the Fort Worth ISD. Your administration has now ordered you to present material to your students that normalizes this radical gender theory. You cannot even call your students “boys” or “girls,” by order of the superintendent. What do you do? If it were me, I would simply not do it, and wait for somebody to complain, and immediately start looking for another job, hoping that I could find something before they requested my resignation.
This is exactly the kind of situation that the Benedict Option is meant to address: what do you do when they effectively kick you out of the public square (in this case, the public schools) because of your religious beliefs? This is what traditional Christians are going to increasingly face in the years to come. In places like Fort Worth, Massachusetts, and many other locales, they are facing it now.
The left will say, “Oh, you’re just saying that because you hate LGBT people.” It wouldn’t be that, not for me. It would be because I could not in good conscience teach something, or help create an environment, that seriously compromised my religious beliefs. If it were only a matter of making sure LGBTs were treated with respect and not bullied in any way, absolutely I could do that, and given my acute hostility to bullies, I would make that a priority. But the activists and their allies in politics and in administration want much more than that. As in Fort Worth, teachers and administrators now have to be positively affirming — even of transgender, which far more than gay and lesbian, deconstructs and destroys the very idea of male and female, and what it means to be a person.
I want to part of that. My conscience would not let me have any part of that. Christians who are in the public schools as teachers and administrators are going to have to make a choice, and soon. The choice is upon many of them now, and will be on many more of them in the next few years. The ideologues in the Obama administration don’t care what they destroy in the name of Progress — and the next Clinton administration will build on their work. Check out this jaw-dropping statement the US Attorney General gave in response to North Carolina’s defiance with the bathroom bill: comparing the state’s leaders to old-timey Jim Crow segregationists, and threatening to defund the state’s public safety department, and the University of North Carolina, at the federal level.
These people are playing for keeps. They think we are all bigots, no better than Klansmen.
Read the signs of the times, and make your plan.
About the way schools manage students, treating them like animals — well, when a society loses its moral grounding, this is what you get. A Catholic university I’m familiar with refuses to address sexual violence on its campus (date rape, etc.) by standing on Catholic sexual morality. No, that would not be progressive. Instead, its leadership is standing on procedural liberalism, specifically, the idea of consent, of negotiating sex like it’s a contract. You think that’s going to work? Please.
And what passes for “character education” is very thin gruel, and has to be by its nature, because the public schools cannot proclaim moral norms, except in the vaguest sense. I know people who teach and administer in public schools who would very much like to do this, but the ongoing stripping from the public square of moral norms, in favor of the procedural liberalism model, handcuffs them.
We are rendering our population unfit for self-government. Sooner or later, we are bound to lose it. The principal who wrote me is doing the right thing, in my view. He is going to apply his talents to building up a community of education where truth and moral order can thrive. The chief political task of traditional Christians and other conservatives is to fight like hell to protect these schools, and institutions like them, as we expand them to accommodate the coming exodus of people of faith from the educational public square.
Madison Avenue Satyricon
A reader in NYC who loves to feed Your Working Boy delectable morsels of Dreherbait, writes:
You’ll love this one. In general, it’s not even worth trying to “document the decline,” because it would keep us too busy to do our day jobs, and would only degrade us further . . . everyday life, at least in my part of the country, increasingly resembles Fellini’s Satyricon. I envy you, living in the dark heart of Louisiana.
Here, from The New York Times, is what he’s talking about. Excerpts:
Among the more polarizing sights in Manhattan this spring were the Madison Avenue windows of Barneys New York, an unlikely showcase for a series of mannequins. They were ringers for the real-life models who stalked the Hood by Air men’s runway in January, right down to their elaborate tattoos and the uncanny grillwork distorting their grins.
During a recent week, passers-by stood welded to the spot, challenged to make what they could of the scene, a curious hybrid of street theater and fashion porn. “Obviously, this was done by an artist,” Paul Roberts, a visitor from Edinburgh, said appreciatively. “It goes beyond window dressing, doesn’t it?”
But Claudia Brien, a young Upper East Side matron, pronounced those vitrines “beyond disgusting.”
“I pass them most days, but I go out of my way to keep my children away,” Ms. Brien said.
Yeah, if you go to the link and see the mannequins made up to look like freakish modern primitives, you’ll understand Ms. Brien’s reaction.
Love them or loathe them, the windows, their mannequins lurching toward spectators, lips ringed in jeweled pacifiers, “skin” elaborately inked, were a come-on. They were as surely a testament to a widening fascination with body modification in its most eye-popping extremes: allover tattoos, subdermal implants, piercing, stretching, scarring, branding and the like.
Nasty. But:
At the same time, the windows “opened a door to a very interesting dialogue,” said Dennis Freedman, the Barneys creative director. “You start to become familiar with something that at first might be frightening. But I suspect that, over time, people do acclimate.”
Doesn’t that describe American culture at the moment? One more:
No one, of course, would argue that uptown matrons will be besieging their dentists for grillwork any time soon. But there is plenty to suggest a widening acceptance of body mod’s more subtle arts: fake and real septum rings, quarter-size ear gauging, tattooed “sleeves” on the upper arms.
Yes, well. Here’s a line from Vincent Canby’s 1970 Times review of Fellini Satyricon:
Watching Fellini Satyricon, which opened yesterday at the Little Carnegie Theater, you suddenly realize that Fellini, unlike the creatures of his extraordinary imagination, has refused to be stopped by the sea. He has pushed on, and there are moments when he seems to have fallen over the edge into the cinema of the ridiculous. You ask yourself: Is this dwarf, or this albino hermaphrodite, or is this latest amputation, really necessary?
Anybody checked on Sweet Meteor o’ Death yet? Isn’t it about due?
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