Rod Dreher's Blog, page 580

Poor Like PA, Poor Like NC

Continuing the discussion about class, Trump, Sanders, and the unwinding of America — see here and here to get caught up, a reader e-mailed this, which I post with his permission:

I’ve been reading your blog for years, and I’m not much for commenting or emailing, but your post today about Mayberry has finally prompted me to respond. My mom is from Mount Airy, my grandma and an aunt and uncle still live there, and the family has lived in that area of for hundreds of years. Deep roots and all. Until my generation, though the family was always poor. They barely scratched out a living as tobacco farmers and after that worked in the textile mills in the area.

As far as it goes for my family, Mount Airy never had a golden age. When my mom was a kid, everyone had to work in the textile mills to make ends meet. For example, my mom never learned how to cook (literally, I grew up eating lots of frozen food and McDonalds) because everyone was so tired at the end of the day that they usually ate KFC. In other words, even during the golden years of industry, it was a place that didn’t pay well enough to provide for a family. The more I hear about how my mom grew up, the more it sounds like what we would think of as third world.

What’s interesting is comparing this to where my dad grew up, the Altoona PA area (luckily for him I guess, not in a Catholic family). My grandpa worked in heavy industry, and the family had a small farm that my grandma took care of. When my grandpa ended up having a debilitating illness (and eventually death) from his work, they got a big settlement and coverage of medical bills because of a strong Union.

Both central PA and the North Carolina Piedmont are Trump country for good reason, they’re suffering from deindustrialization and downright hatred from people on the coasts,  but they’re not the same. Central PA had its problems but my dad’s side were able to live really decent lives during the golden age or whatever we’re calling the middle of the 20th century. My mom’s side in North Carolina barely made it and that has a lot to do with the history and culture of the South. When it did industrialize, business leaders in North Carolina were able to keep out unions and exploit the labor of an area that was already pretty poor. They weren’t looking to promote family or solidarity, they were looking to get away from the unionized north.

Anyway, I’m working on a Ph.D. in political theory and it seems like these two places would be perfect for a case study. They look similar on the surface, deindustrialized, Appalachian, hopeless, etc. One was always that way, the other wasn’t. I’m a lefty so the presence of unions in the one appeals to me as an explanation, but it would take a sustained project to find out.

Anyway, thanks for your blog. I think I couldn’t disagree with you more on sexual politics or the evils of liberalism, but when it comes to place and solidarity, I’m with you 100%.

Readers, any thoughts?

Leah Libresco, Ben Op Den Mother

 

So I was sitting in my home office late this morning working on the Benedict Option book, when my daughter Nora came up the stairs with a box of cookies that had just come in the mail. They came from Leah Libresco, about whom not enough good things can be said. Her note said she was feeling down and out about politics, and decided to make some cookies — oatmeal espresso walnut chocolate chip cookies, to be precise. She wrote on the card:

I was in a funk + feeling powerless but God hardly restricts our actions to elections! So, instead, I hope this lifts your spirits + you run into a lot of small, kinda boring ways to accept + offer love. And happy Pascha!

Love,

Leah

I mean, honestly. That one. They don’t come any kinder or more joyful, and I mean that. Did you know she is getting married?

I’m engaged to @AlexiSargeant! And I’ve put together the bibliography of our courtship. https://t.co/o0m6RqX17rpic.twitter.com/O5BrtFlwzm

— Leah Libresco (@LeahLibresco) March 29, 2016

Any couple that would have a bibliography of their courtship are my kind of people, now and forever. As it happens, I knew Alexi a bit when we lived in Philly (his dad and I were friends and colleagues at work), and he is one of those people that you know will go far, and who are so good-hearted that you want them to go far, if only to prove that there is justice in this world. I saw a production of MacBeth that he directed as a high schooler. Yeah, he’s that guy.

And he’s going to have love and cookies for the rest of his life. Man.

As the Misfit might say, I would be a better man if Leah Libresco sent me cookies every day of my life.

Why Not Close Humanities Departments?

A reader who identifies himself as a tenured college professor in a STEM field at a state university, who remains closeted as a conservative out of fear, writes to say that he holds humanities degrees, but:

I’m a long time reader but am writing for the first time to ask a question.  You write:

“There are some readers, apparently, who believe that I really do advocate closing down the university humanities departments. Honestly, people. Honestly.”

My question is, why on earth not?

My own department has many problems, but there are senior faculty on the left defending us against a particularly ideological version of an “anti-discrimination” class taught by one of our own.  I’m sure there are still some noble souls teaching Shakespeare and Chaucer well, but for the most part I think the humanities departments that should be the heart of the university are now almost completely hydra-headed cancers further afflicting an already perhaps fatally weak patient.  Amputation may be the only answer.  Someday we can grow a new heart.

(I had to slightly edit even this part, because the professor is afraid. One of the things that many liberals simply cannot grasp is how fearful conservatives on university faculties are about their position there, as schools become more liberal, and more ideological. I suppose they cannot imagine that Good People Like Themselves could treat others that way, or make others feel that they have to hide a part of themselves for self-protection in the workplace.)

I’m going to throw it out there to you readers, especially you teachers and professors in the humanities. What do you think?

The Voice Of West Virginia

A reader, bless him, sent in this excellent essay from West Virginia native Jedediah Purdy, analyzing the primary election results from his home state, which voted for Trump and Sanders. Excerpts:

Many people I knew in childhood were openly racist, but in a desperate and ignorant way – not just in the sense that all such racism is ignorant, but because of the overwhelming whiteness of the place. In the majority of my years in public high school, not one student in my country-wide school identified as black. Race was more myth than experience. I still wonder just what the slurs that people used against absent others meant to them.

What mattered concretely there was class. The gradations were small, but so much turned on them. The middle class, such as it was, encompassed teachers and a handful of professionals and county bureaucrats. There was a respectable working class, with regular jobs as gas-well tenders, welders, loggers, secretaries, and school-bus drivers. Many of these men “worked away” building pipelines. And there were single mothers on welfare, dads on disability, drunks and addicts. I never saw or heard of the parents of the small brood of lookalike children who would emerge, unwashed, from a trailer near the back of one hollows to ride my bus to school.

There was a democratic spirit among kids until adolescence, at least at the poor and entirely rural elementary school where I sometimes attended classes, dances, and fairs, and where some of my friends and Little League teammates went. After that, though, it might as well have been a caste system. Even bright kids from poor families were put in their place, with slights from teachers as well as classmates. One of the few truly dedicated teachers I met there once looked at one of the smarter students in the class, child of a single mother who lived in a shack down a hollow, and remarked quietly to me, “He is very dirty.” A year later, that student was one of the untouchables who lurked on the periphery of the school during breaks and banded together so as not to be harassed. It was as if his caste status had risen up to consume his promise. When people talk about identity being socially constructed, I think of him: the construction is often through the infliction of wounds, until the hurt person cannot forget who he is supposed to be. People know their place because they have been put in it until it feels natural. Class is not just something impersonal, which you are born into; it is something that is done to you until it takes hold.

And:

I voted for Bernie Sanders in North Carolina, but I can’t pretend that his fifteen-point victory in my home state is an embrace of his Scandinavian-style democratic socialism. Plenty of ancestral Democrats and alienated Independents who will likely support Trump in the fall voted for Sanders because he isn’t Hillary Clinton. But it isn’t as simple as that, either. Obama carried my little home district, nearly all white and very poor, in the general elections of 2008 and 2012. In my home county tonight, Sanders won 693 votes – 431 more than Clinton, but also 213 more than Trump.

West Virginia is neither a secret socialist stronghold nor a racist fever-dream. It is one of several bleeding edges of a sharply unequal country, where people who never had much are feeling as pressed as they can remember ever being. Some are bigots. Many are not. Some, no doubt, find that Trump’s cocktail of arrogance and disgust, grievance and triumphalism, reassuringly resembles their own psychic survival strategies, blown up into world-historical dimensions. Others are voting for the socialist for the same reason they voted for the Chicago community organizer: a desire for a more equal society, born out of the lived experience of inequality. Maybe future organizing and leadership, like the decades-long fight that first built the unions and the Democratic party in the coalfields, will show that they are not alone in that.

 

Read the whole thing.

Finishing it reminded me of this tweet today from Freddie deBoer, who is an actual old-fashioned socialist:

This is open contempt of the majority of poor people by someone who thinks of himself as on the left. https://t.co/buHAB1ZK79

— Freddie deBoer (@freddiedeboer) May 11, 2016

To steal and update a line for Wendell Berry: if you are an American liberal, you can say anything you want about poor white people, as long as you support the right of a lady with a penis to use the women’s bathroom.

When I was looking for a photo with which to illustrate this post, all the stock photos from Shutterstock, under the search term “West Virginia,” were bland landscapes. I added “poverty” to the search, but came up with nothing. To test something, I typed in the word “hillbilly,” which I understand is taken as a slur in Appalachia; I wanted to see if the service had anything tagged under that term. There were lots of images like the one you see above. Type in “ghetto thug” in a Shutterstock search, and you get a lot of images of African-Americans looking very tough and street, but nothing that makes fun of them. Not remotely like this.

A small thing, but it tells us something, I think, about the class contempt the mainstream has for poor white people.

UPDATE: Great comment from reader VikingLS:

I got some criticism for saying this before, but I stand by it. I lived in West Virginia for 3 years and Russia for 5 and there are some real similarities.

Both have some people who are astronomically wealthy, a lot of people who are grindingly poor, and a middle class that is pretty comfortable but isn’t sure what the future holds for their kids. Both also have a culture of corruption that is taken for granted.

Let’s start with Russia. Dimitri is middle management in a bank and lives in Moscow. He’s got a Russian made Ford (yes Russian made) lives 5 metro stops from the center and has a country house outside the city where he goes on the weekends to relax and tend to his garden. He’s got two kids in their teens that he’s got in a good school and has them taking English lessons after school three times a week. He’s got a good life, but he’s also not sure how to pass that life on to his kids.

Now let’s look at Mitch. Mitch is a bank branch manager in St. Alban’s WV. He also has two kids, they’re in public school because there isn’t really an alternative. (He went to Saint Alban’s High too, but he’s a little worried about the safety of the school now, not because of social progressives, but because of drugs) Mitch has a nice house just outside of town, 15 partially wooded acres, two horses he got for his daughter (she never rides them anymore but she cries every time he suggests selling them, so he pays the feed and vet bills) and a nice pond he had built that is teeming with bluegill. He has a good life. He also has no idea how his kids are going to have that kind of life.

Now Mitch and Dimitri have a similar problem. They don’t need to get up and go, odds are any move would make their material situation worse. They also know their kids might be better off elsewhere materially, but would also be both so far away they would rarely see them and would be in a place where they’d face prejudice simply because of where they were born and their accents.

They also, oddly enough, have to worry about Washington killing the economy their comfortable life depends on in the name of some higher good.

Neither Dimitri nor Mitch is going to be very interesting to a journalist and probably would have the opportunity to meet one. (The reporter is talking to people they stop on the sidewalk or government officials. Mitch and Dimitri both drive and are in the private sector. )

Thus they are left out of the story and nobody understands why a Putin or a Bush get votes from these places where everybody seems to be poor other than an ignorant, racist, electorate.

Surprise! Pervs Target Target

Who could have seen this coming? Who? From the Dallas Morning News:

Frisco police are seeking the public’s help identifying a man who recorded a girl in the changing room at a Super Target.

Police said the girl was in the women’s changing room at the store at 3201 Preston Road about 7 p.m. Tuesday when she saw a man peering over the wall with a cellphone pointed at her.

The girl told her parents and Target employees, but the man had already left the store.

The peeper was described as a thin white man, about 5-11 with dark hair. He was wearing a red T-shirt, blue jeans and a dark baseball cap.

Here’s the man police are looking for, caught on a store security camera:

Sure, a heterosexual creep like this could have invaded the women’s facilities before Target’s new policy. But the new policy makes it less likely that if an employee sees a man going into the women’s facilities, that he or she will stop them, and much less likely that if a woman using the toilet or the changing room sees a man lurking there, that she will alert the store security. Good going, Target.

But hey, Love Wins, right? And “Love” is winning over America. Look at the results of the new CNN poll about so-called bathroom bills. Excerpt:

A few weeks ago, we noted that we don’t really know how Americans feel about so-called bathroom bills, an issue that has taken hold thanks to a controversial new North Carolina law. There just hasn’t been a ton of public polling on this.

Now we have a better idea. And it’s not good news for supporters of what North Carolina Republicans are doing.

A CNN/ORC poll released Monday found a majority of Americans (57 percent) don’t agree with bathroom bills like the one North Carolina is defending that restrict where transgender people can use the bathroom, while 38 percent do.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats are more opposed to bathroom bills than Republicans are. But get a load of this:

Almost half of Republicans are opposed to laws requiring transgender people to use the bathroom on their birth certificates. In fact, according to the CNN poll, Republicans are actually split 48-48 about whether to support these bills.

Here, from the BBC, is a clip from a documentary it aired last fall about teen transgenders, looking for love. In the clip, a male-to-female teenage transgender goes to the beach with two girlfriends, to flirt with boys. The boys think the girls (including Claire, the trans) are cute, and they exchange phone numbers. Later, when the guys find out Claire is transgender, they drop her. She’s on video complaining about straight guys who won’t date her simply because she has a penis. Such bigots! This is how media propagandizes us to accept the insane as normal.

We are living in a new country. There’s a completely implausible op-ed piece on Ethika Politika today, blaming the Benedict Option for giving us Trump. The idea is that when orthodox Christians vacate the public square, people like Trump triumph. But there’s no evidence that American Christians have by and large vacated the public square. Most churchgoing Christians who are Republican voted for other candidates in the primaries; Trump’s victory showed how little power religious and social conservatives have now. No, most Christians have not left the public square; the public square has left them, so to speak.

That is, Trump is part of what it means to be in a post-Christian nation (and so, by the way, is Hillary, with the platform she’s running on). It is simply an illusion that traditional Christians are a silent majority in this country, and that if we only wake up, we can put matters aright. This CNN poll, while not In my own culturally red state of Louisiana, a 2015 LSU poll (pre-Obergefell) showed that a majority of adults 18-49 are pro-gay marriage. Overall, Millennials are decisively rejecting fundamental Christian teachings on the meaning of sex and sexuality, and unborn human life.

And, of course, Millennials are leaving the church in droves.

I was doing some research this week for my Benedict Option book, and was reading about Augustine’s City Of God, written in the immediate aftermath of the sack of Rome (410) by the Visigoths. The author explained that this had been a long time coming, but when it happened, it was such a shock to Roman citizens all over the Empire that many struggled to accept that it had actually occurred.

This is the position many conservative Christians are in today, about American culture and society. You cannot afford your illusions. We cannot afford your illusions.

So, yes, in an effort to be more Love Wins-y, Target instituted a policy that made it more likely that perverted heterosexual men will invade the women’s bathrooms and changing areas, and make women and girls unsafe. Any idiot could have seen this coming. But there is no idiot like an idiot whose eyes are blinded by ideology. This is America today.

Hard to E$cape Public School

In a post earlier today, I said traditional Christians are going to have to start thinking hard now about taking their kids out of the public schools, to protect them from being indoctrinated in this destructive gender ideology. A reader writes to explain why that is so difficult. I’ve slightly edited this to protect his privacy:

I saw the end of your post earlier re: getting churches to help finance private Christian ed, etc. My wife and I live in Fairfax County, VA, near Washington DC. For quick background, I work for the government in DC, and do some teaching in an area college. We have one income (mine), my wife does occasional substitute teaching, we live in a townhouse vs. single family home (which run about 600K+ in our area), and, for now, we send our 2 kids to neighborhood public elementary school.

Just to add to the economic side of the issue — here’s the breakdown of our private Christian school options per year in/near our town. The first one, Ad Fontes, is classical Christian. These figures were per year, AY2014-2015.

Ad Fontes

$8500 K-6

$9050 7-8

$9750 9-12

Trinity Christian

$10930 K-5

$11765 6-8

$13500 9-12

Fairfax Christian

$16000 K-4

$20500 5-8

$26500 9-12

Oak Hill

— doesn’t post their tuition on the website

Practically, then, here’s what it looks like in our neighborhood, if one wants a Christian education option —

1. Leave the neighborhood and the area (move)

2. Find cheaper private school alternative outside immediate locale, which means a very long back-and-forth commute

3. Second mortgage to pay for local private Christian

4. Wife to work

5. Homeschool

I am not surprised by this. That’s why I mentioned in the earlier post that churches and others ought to start brainstorming now to see if they can come up with a model of Christian education that’s more affordable for working people, or some way to subsidize, as a ministry, some scholarships. On the “model” point, our kids have been and will be again this fall in Sequitur, a hybrid classroom/homeschool program in Baton Rouge, one that follows the classical model. The tuition is much, much better than local Christian schools — but given that instruction is only half a day, it would be very hard for two working parents to take this option. Still, Sequitur makes it possible for lots of us who can’t really afford tuition at an established Christian school, or who for whatever reason don’t want to put our kids into them (e.g., Episcopal High in Baton Rouge has gotten on board the Love Wins bandwagon), to give our kids a quality Christian education.

On the earlier thread, a teacher commented:

My head is literally spinning with how I am going to handle this as a devout christian teacher in a public school. I had naively thought I would have time to think through what my options might be, especially since I am in an inner city school district and much of this transgender ideology is not as thoroughly accepted by the communities we serve. But I can see the train light in the tunnel now and its coming at a tremendous speed. I am wondering how other Christians in public schools plan to deal with this. While I would like to think I can just go about my business as long as I dont rock the boat, it seems inevitable that there will come a rubicon point were we are instructed by the state that in order to maintain our licensure we must agree to promote this ideology. I’m sure there will be plenty of posts telling me I’m just a reactionary, but I dont think that will be of much comfort when I have to explain to my children why I no longer have a job.

There will be good, qualified, experienced Christians who cannot in good conscience work in the public schools under these conditions. Why can we not benefit from their talents while giving them a job?

I hear off and on from readers with master’s degrees or PhDs in the humanities who have abandoned university careers because they actually love the humanities, and can’t face the misery of teaching in ideologically corrupted universities, where humanities courses are saturated with corrosive postmodernism, and/or consumed by gender and race obsessions. Some of these people have taken jobs in classical Christian schools, so they can do what they love: teach literature and humanities in the traditional way. There are committed, educated Christians who want jobs teaching the children of faithful orthodox Christians. We need to find a way to employ them with a reasonable salary, and to make it possible for as many children of our community as we can to get into those schools.

I believe this is mostly a matter of imagination and determination, not resources. We can do this! We must do this. This is part of the Benedict Option.

That said, I think lots of Christian parents are going to have to make some hard calls now and in the years to come about moving for the sake of educating their children, and raising them in a peer environment where they are more likely to absorb the faith, or at the very least not have their faith leached out of them. Radical times call for radical measures.

UPDATE: Brian Daigle, the headmaster of Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, created these charts, saying, “A great education gets results, without making Christian parents bankrupt. Check out Sequitur’s results below.” People, we can do this! It’s not easy, but it can be done:

Benedictine Tribes

A reader e-mailed yesterday with some fascinating and important information:

Reading your work about the BenOp, I’ve wanted to contribute a piece of the puzzle, a notion that would help to solidify one of the axes in locating this complicated mess we are all in.  I hope not to write a treatise, but to share an insight.

Gordon Neufeld, a Canadian psychologist, has written about the idea of peer orientation, that is to say, the tendency to model oneself after the people whom one considers like individuals.  (www.neufeldinstitute.org)

This is not to be confused with peer pressure.  It’s not just about children, though that is Neufeld’s focus.  Peer orientation has been evolving along with mankind, but exploded with the Industrial Revolution and again in the Post WWII era, and yet again with the Digital Revolution.  I’m sure you can think of more accelerators.

In a functioning society, culture is transmitted mostly vertically, and somewhat horizontally; that is, children model their parents’ behavior, who in turn model the extended family culture, who in turn model their institutions, sacred and otherwise.  Loving adults are meant to be nurturing Alphas to dependent children.  Adults are to take turns in the Alpha and dependent roles as only one can lead at any given moment.  (You can see where there has been ample abuse of the Alpha throughout history, ruining relationships, institutions, etc.)  A healthy human goes through stages of attachment: through the senses–sameness–belonging and loyalty–love–psychological intimacy–emotional intimacy.  We learn to be diplomatic as well as true to ourselves.  People are more or less designed neurologically and psychologically to relate to a tribe.  We can learn to live in a pluralistic society, but it takes a hell of a lot of maturity, which ironically can only come with a strong attachment to the family or close surrogates.  Atomization happens when families/communities/personal maturity falls apart.

Our cultures flatline and we become susceptible to whatever is the fashion of the moment.  It’s not something we think about; it just happens.  All the things that dilute our relationships, that pull us away from the people we are personally attached to, contribute to peer orientation.  Needing to work too many hours and not getting enough face time with family;  inability to bridge separation due to differences with our loved ones; loss or perceived loss of unconditional love; the shame a father feels when he can’t provide and subsequently loses the confidence to nurture and lead; children who spend all day with other children, who are not designed to care for them and whom they are more likely to attach unless their teacher presents as a strong and trustworthy caregiver and parents also nurture the bond.  A lot of our assumptions about how society and people are and should be, are perverted by peer orientation.  We assume adolescents should not only individuate, but must also rebel and reject their parents.  We assume we must know so much more about any subject than our backward ancestors, and we don’t integrate new findings with old wisdom.  (On the other hand, sometimes we refuse to reinterpret old wisdom in light of new knowledge and we render our relationships brittle.)  We constantly throw the baby out with the bathwater and then wonder why it is so hard to live life when we start from zero at each generation and at each human being.  We create cultures at a disconnect from their roots, cultures that are sterile and cannot reproduce across generations.  Yet there is hope because we are hardwired for relationship and maturity, if only we could respect nature’s rules, if only we would not educate ourselves out of our instincts.

I have been studying this paradigm for about five years now and could go on and on, but won’t.  I particularly like to zoom out to macro and societal implications.  Hope you find this engaging.

I do! Boy, do I. Thank you. This is really helping me break through a conceptual fog I’ve been struggling with.

Might the Benedict Option be described as a form of localist retribalization for orthodox Christians seeking to deepen their roots in tradition and ties to each other?

We will be talking about this real soon at the Idea Of A Village conference near Clear Creek Abbey in eastern Oklahoma, on May 20-21. I don’t know if they’ve sold out on tickets yet. Check the website on the link. I’m really looking forward to being there with my friend Ralph Wood, from Baylor. If you haven’t heard Ralph before, you are in for a treat.

And by the way, he’s going to be at Walker Percy Weekend too, talking Dostoevsky and Percy with Jessica Hooten Wilson. If you haven’t bought your tickets, we still have some available for the June 3-5 event, but they tend go fast in the final two weeks. Go to the website and reserve yours.

UPDATE: The reader who wrote the e-mail writes back:

A couple of notes: peer orientation is about arrested development.  I should add that peer orientation is characteristic of when a person is stuck in that second stage of relating–attaching via sameness.  Think of it as when a baby begins to do things to be like mommy or like daddy or brother or auntie.  It is a reflexive, uncritical adoption of others’ qualities because we feel attached to them.  It’s teenagers dressing alike and being more at home with each other rather than their families and extended community.  It’s fascinating to think about the manifestations in adults; perhaps when we seek statistical normality rather than reaching for potentials.  The thing is, we are supposed to become all we can be, not just a clone of our family and not just a facsimile of our culture of origin, but if the culture is working, you should be able to see congruency as well as evolution through time.

Neufeld has a short explanation here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKRp3dsPelE

I also was a slightly inaccurate with the stages: senses–sameness–belonging and loyalty–significance–love (emotional intimacy)–being known (psychological intimacy).  We’re not meant to relate to everyone, totally; that’s why you’ll not be that close to all 700 of your Facebook friends.  We are meant to leave home base carrying the relationships that ground us, to go out in the world and be ourselves and let others be themselves.

Texas Schools Go Trans

The public schools in Fort Worth — Fort Worth — are going trans-positive. Here’s a link to the new school policy, which is based on the new federal interpretation of Title IX. It’s in Scribd, so I can’t quote excerpts. Highlights include:

There doesn’t need to be a medical or mental health diagnosis involved. If a male student says he’s a girl, then he’s a girl, and vice versa.
Schools are instructed to keep the student’s asserted gender identity hidden from parents unless authorized to share that information with them.
School personnel are to consider themselves to be allies of a student undergoing gender transitioning. That means not telling their parents or guardians.
Transgender students must have the opportunity to participate in school sports as the gender they claim to be, though they are not guaranteed this as a right.

But there’s more. The Fort Worth schools are now compelling teachers and others to teach gender ideology to students. Highlights:

Teachers are no longer to call their students “boys” and “girls,” but to use gender-neutral language to refer to them, e.g., “students”
Classrooms are to “feature diversity” in their classroom materials

So, let’s recap: public school teachers and personnel in the Fort Worth Independent School District are now required by policy to instruct students that gender can be whatever you want it to be. And they are required to keep parents in the dark about their kids transitioning or presenting themselves as the opposite gender at school.

Not in Austin. In Fort Worth.

And look: the Fort Worth Episcopal bishop (naturally) has come out in favor of the policy. Excerpt:

All human beings are holy, for we all carry a scrap of divinity in us – our souls. It is that which matters, not our outward appearance. Gender identity is a complex mysterious thing, and as science learns more about it, we are led to understand more about the amazing diversity in God’s creation.

To drum up unwarranted and unfounded fears around the issue of gender identity and seek to scapegoat the transgender community is certainly not doing the work of God. Instead they are targeting an already vulnerable community, whose members are already at risk of violence simply for being who they truly are.

I urge the Fort Worth school board and its superintendent to remain strong in the face of this fear-mongering as they work for the welfare of all our children.

We barely have an understanding of what transgenderism is, but elites in government, education, and media are fast-tracking this progressive agenda in the schools. It’s madness.

Don’t be fooled: the bathroom issue is a proxy for a deeper conflict over what it means to be male and female, and beyond that, about fundamental human nature. These standards are collapsing in American society in part because of elites pushing against them, but also — and perhaps moreso — because radical individualism is going into hyperdrive. We call it freedom — freedom to choose who you are, with neither custom, nor religion, nor even biology standing in the way of your will. But here’s what’s going to happen. People who submit to this way of thinking will find that their freedom, so construed, will make it impossible for them to construct a coherent, stable identity. They’re not going to make it. This perversion of liberty will wreck them.

Chances are the FWISD would do this even if the US Government didn’t issue its new Title IX guidelines. But there are plenty of local school districts, in Texas and in many other places, and parents who would not yield so quickly to federal dictates. Are the feds going to sue them all? I hope they fight, but I don’t have any hope that they will prevail in the long run.

If you are a public school parent who doesn’t want your child catechized in gender ideology, you had better start figuring out how you can get your child into an orthodox, traditional Christian school. Churches that have the resources would be wise to begin planning now to educate the children of the congregation, and making available scholarships and other ways to help working and low income parents get their kids into these schools.

Noting that this is happening in Massachusetts public schools, by state diktat, Catholic writer Mary Hasson wonders if there will be an exodus of Catholic kids from the state’s public schools:

The Massachusetts policy systematically foists a perverse orthodoxy on every teacher and child within the system. It promotes the core belief – the big lie – that there is no such thing as human nature or natural distinctions of male and female. Instead, the Board of Education embraces the idea that each person is a god unto him or herself, creating a gender identity and sexual expression based on feelings, or one’s “internalized sense” of self, regardless of biology.

The indoctrination (“education and training”) will be part of every Massachusetts school’s “anti-bullying curriculum, student leadership trainings, and staff professional development.” And the Massachusetts Board of Education clearly expects all students and teachers to get with the program. The entire school community must help create a “safe and supportive” culture for transgender and gender non-conforming students.

Catholic parents who send their children to public school in Massachusetts now have to worry not only about the system’s hostility to religious belief but also about its hostility to basic truths about the human person.

She goes on to make a crucial point:

Catholics in the past have been able to opt-out of public school sexuality education classes; it’s impossible to opt-out from a pervasive culture based on a flawed anthropology.

She’s right. You can’t escape this pervasive ideology, and you cannot deny that it’s not simply about sexuality, but about anthropology.

I have been thinking that schools are going to be a major part of the Benedict Option, but I had not quite anticipated how quickly things would move, and how radically. Christian schools and homeschooling programs need to start preparing now for an influx of students getting out of the public schools in the next few years. Parents, if you think it’s not coming to your school district, you’re wrong. If it can happen in Fort Worth…

And if tradition-affirming religious schools intend to hold the line against gender ideology, they had better start strategizing now about how they’re going to stand up to alumni and parents who object. Mount Saint Charles Academy, a small Rhode Island Catholic school run by a religious order, said it could not accept transgender students because it could not accommodate them. After a social media campaign that included many outraged young alumni, the school reversed itself. And after losing a court case, a Catholic school in Massachusetts just settled with a former staffer it fired after finding out that he was in a gay marriage, against school policy. As the reader who sent that last item to me said, “Goodbye, free association.”

These are the battle lines today and in the near future.

Wyoming Goliath Vs. Small-Town Judge

“How will my neighbors’ gay marriage affect me?” said the people a decade ago, implying that it would not, and that any objection to gay marriage was bigoted nonsense. That wasn’t true, and it was never true, and I take no pleasure in saying, “I told you so.” Excerpt from an AP story, datelined Cheyenne:

Some current and former Wyoming lawmakers as well as national religious groups are supporting a municipal judge who faces a dismissal petition before the Wyoming Supreme Court for saying she would not preside over same-sex marriages.

The Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics is recommending the court remove Municipal Judge and Circuit Court Magistrate Ruth Neely of Pinedale. The commission started investigating Neely after she told a reporter in 2014 she would not perform same-sex marriages because of her religious beliefs.

Attempts to reach Neely and her attorneys, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona religious advocacy law firm, were not successful Monday.

Neely is fighting removal, arguing she has a constitutional right to voice her opinion. Her lawyers have said no same-sex couples have asked her to preside over their weddings.

More:

In a response to the removal petition, Neely’s lawyers stated in a court filing last month that removing her would violate her rights. They quoted a provision of the Wyoming Constitution which prohibits the state from finding a person incompetent to hold public office, “because of his opinion on any matter of religious belief whatever.”

Pinedale is a tiny Wyoming town (pop. 2,030) that Judge Neely has served for over 20 years. According to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Judge Neely:

Ignoring the pleas of LGBT citizens in the small town of Pinedale, Wyoming, a state agency is demanding that – after over 20 years of sterling service – Judge Ruth Neely be banned for life from the judiciary and pay up to $40,000 in fines merely for stating that her faith prevents her from personally performing same-sex weddings. Even though small-town magistrates like Judge Neely aren’t required or even paid by the state to perform weddings, the state agency concluded that Judge Neely “manifested a bias” and is therefore permanently unfit to serve as a judge. This would be the first time in the country that a judge was removed from office because of her religious beliefs about marriage.

Let’s be clear: in her role as a municipal judge, Neely cannot solemnize weddings because she lacks the legal authority. Her court handles things like traffic fines and public drunkenness. Though her role as a part-time magistrate — separate from her municipal judge job — can include performing marriages, Wyoming law does not require her or any other magistrate to do so.

Nobody has asked Judge Neely to perform a same-sex marriage. So how did the state judicial commission come to know of her beliefs? In late 2014, after a state judge in Wyoming legalized gay marriage there, Judge Neely was contacted by a reporter from the Sublette Examiner asking her if she would perform them.  According to the article:

“I will not able to do them,” Neely told the Examiner. “We have at least one magistrate who will do same-sex marriages but I will not be able to.”

All judges are required to marry those who meet the legal requirements, unless there is a scheduling conflict or other problem. In those cases, prospective couples will be referred to other magistrates.

But Neely’s inability to perform the marriages has nothing to do with her schedule but, rather, her religious beliefs.

“When law and religion conflict, choices have to be made. I have not yet been asked to perform a same-sex marriage,” Neely said.

In February, the Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics recommended to the State Supreme Court that she be removed from both positions (even the one in which she is not allowed to perform marriages), and pay a $40,000 fine, simply for “manifesting bias.” This, even though Judge Neely has never questioned the legality of same-sex marriage, even though she affirms that she will treat gay citizens equally in all cases before her, and even though she affirms that she will treat married gay couples as legally married in all cases that come before her.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, as you read above, is representing Judge Neely. It’s not (yet) available on the group’s website, but I obtained a copy of the brief ADF filed on Judge Neely’s behalf. It says, in part:

 

Part-time circuit court magistrates like Judge Neely have discretion when deciding whether to serve as celebrants for weddings. Neely Aff. ¶ 6 (C.R. 828). Wyoming law provides that a magistrate, just like a “minister of the gospel, bishop, priest or rabbi, or other qualified person acting in accordance with the traditions or rites for the solemnization of marriage of any religion, . . . may perform the ceremony of marriage.” Wvo. Stat. 20-1- 106(a) (emphasis added). The law thus does not require part-time magistrates to celebrate marriages, and the Commission admitted this during discovery. See Soto Dep. at 153 (C.R. 438) (acknowledging that judges are not “required to perform marriages”); Comm’n Resp. to Judge Neely’s Reqs. for Admis. No. 4 (C.R. 487).

Practice confirms that magistrates in Wyoming have discretion when choosing to solemnize marriages. In fact, part-time magistrates and other judges decline to solemnize marriages for a host of reasons: (1) if a magistrate limits herself to solemnizing marriages only for friends and family members (and thus refuses to officiate a stranger’s wedding), Soto Dep. at 152-54 (C.R. 438-39); Smith Dep. at 43-44 (C.R. 465); (2) if a magistrate arbitrarily decides that she “just  do[esln’t feel like” solemnizing a particular wedding, Soto Dep. at 152 (C.R. 438); (3) if a magistrate refuses to travel more than a certain distance for a wedding, Id. at 153 (C.R. 438); (4) if a judge refuses to perform a wedding scheduled outside of business hours, Haws Dep. at 60-62 (C.R. 360-61); (5) or if a magistrate “is too busy” for a wedding, Soto Dep. at 151 (C.R. 438); Haws Dep. 66-67 (C.R. 362).

Judge Neely is a member of the conservative Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). But she affirms that despite her religious beliefs, if a gay couple asked her to marry them, she would refer them to another magistrate willing to perform the legal ceremony.

The brief also quotes several gay citizens of the town, going on the record defending Judge Neely and her fairness:

The fundamental principle that no judge should be expelled from office because of her core convictions unites a diverse group of Wyoming’s citizens, including members of the LGBT community who have expressed dismay at the Commission’s actions here. Most notably, Kathryn Anderson of Pinedale said that “it would be obscene and offensive to discipline Judge Neely for her statement . . . about her religious beliefs regarding marriage.” Anderson Aff. ¶ 5 (C.R. 901-02). Judge Neely asks this Court to heed Ms. Anderson’s words, reject the Commission’s recommendation to expel her from her profession, and allow her to continue serving her community with excellence as she has done for more than two decades.

The brief has some disturbing information about Ned Donovan, the reporter who wrote the original article, and follow-up editorials calling for Neely’s removal. Judge Neely asserts that he promised not to write the original article if she would reverse her decision. Donovan has since left his position at the paper, but the current editor submitted an affidavit saying that Donovan has been calling him, urging him to campaign for Judge Neely to be “sacked.”

More from the brief:

Early in these proceedings, the Commission’s attorney told Judge Neely that the Commission would forego its prosecution if she would agree to resign both of her judicial positions, never again seek judicial office in Wyoming, admit wrongdoing, and allow the Commission to publicly state that she had decided to resign in response to a charge of judicial misconduct. See Neely Sanctions Mem. at 11 (C.R. 1300). Faced with such an unreasonable demand, Judge Neely had only one option to defend her compliance with the Code and her constitutional liberties: litigate against the Commission’s claims.

The Commission tried to sanction Judge Neely for accepting the pro bono religious liberty legal organization ADF as her counsel, because in their view, ADF is an organization that “advocates for discrimination” (that is, defends the religious liberty rights of people of faith caught in the LGBT crosshairs). It backed down when the judge challenged them on constitutional grounds.

Here’s one heart of Neely’s defense:

In order to justify its claim that Judge Neely refused to comply with the law, the Commission suggests that she announced a refusal to follow the Guzzo ruling (which legalized same-sex marriage in Wyoming). See Order at 5 (C.R. 1104). But that is not correct. Guzzo requires the state to ensure that same-sex couples may enter into a state-recognized marriage. See 2014 WL 5317797 at *9• It simply does not address whether an individual circuit court magistrate (or any other judge) with discretionary authority to solemnize marriages must personally serve as a celebrant for weddings that conflict with her religious beliefs. Once the state ensures that same-sex couples have access to marriage licenses and authorized marriage celebrants (which is unquestionably true in Sublette County, see supra at 14-16), it has satisfied its obligations under Guzzo.

If the State Supreme Court upholds the Commission’s finding, “the Commission has effectively said that no one who holds Judge Neely’s widely shared beliefs about marriage can remain a judge in Wyoming.”

None of the three living US Supreme Court justices in the Obergefell minority could serve as any kind of judge in Wyoming. That’s how extreme this is.

This is the product of a highly politicized legal culture willing to go to any lengths to trample the rights of dissenters from the professional LGBT agenda. This is why it is vital to support religious liberty legal organizations like ADF and the Becket Fund. These court fights are going to occupy religious believers for years to come. This is very much a David vs. Goliath fight.

This does not solve the long-term problem of an entire estate of American society — the lawyers and the judges — who despise traditional Christians and others, and who are going to use the power of the law to flatten us whenever they can. But we fight the battles in front of us as best we can, and hope for the best.

UPDATE: Carl Trueman, on this case:

We should all reflect on the significance of this case because it has far-reaching legal and cultural implications. Can one not hold public office in the United States now unless one is committed to the latest ideological fad, regardless of whether that fad is actually relevant to one’s work? Could one be a public school teacher—or a teacher of any government accredited school for that matter—unless one subscribes ex animo to whatever the creed of the day happens to be? And where will this end? Given the Unholy Trinity’s ability to defy democracy and transform our world according to its own tastes, are private persons any safer in the long term than public employees.

Further, given the constantly changing goal-posts of a politics immersed in the emotivist chaos of competing psychological identities and subjective personal rights, why on earth would anyone now want to pursue a career that in five, ten, or fifteen years might be torn from them simply because somebody somewhere finds a right to goodness-knows-what in the Constitution—even, as in this case, when their job does not actually require them to be involved in said goodness-knows-what? However bien-pensant you like to think you are, there will always be somebody out there who is more so. And if they take charge, you might find your own revolution devouring its own children.

Read the whole thing.

 

Postcard From Mayberry

You might recall from a few months ago my linking to this great essay about “A Message From Trump’s America” by Michael Cooper, a liberal Democrat and a lawyer in rural North Carolina. Excerpt:

My Republican friends are for Trump. My state representative is for Trump. People who haven’t voted in years are for Trump. He’ll win the primary here on March 15 and he will carry this county in the general.

His supporters realize he’s a joke. They do not care. They know he’s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who’ve long ignored their interests.

When you’re earning $32,000 a year and haven’t had a decent vacation in over a decade, it doesn’t matter who Trump appoints to the U.N., or if he poisons America’s standing in the world, you just want to win again, whoever the victim, whatever the price.

Trump won’t win the presidency, of course. If he’s nominated conservatives will walk out of the Cleveland convention in July and run a third ticket candidate, and there are not enough disaffected white males in Pennsylvania or Ohio to make up for the independent women who would vote for Hillary Clinton in November. But the two parties can no longer afford to ignore Trump’s America.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from him, which I publish below, with his permission:

I was wondering your thoughts on morality and the cause of working-class decline? I was rather frustrated reading Kevin Williamson’s NRO piece blaming the dysfunction on their own lack of morals:

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles…If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization…Nothing happened to them…The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” 

Not that these things aren’t happening. But that there’s more to the story. I was the one who did that piece on “Trump’s America” you cited, and every morning I see the dysfunction first hand. Just this month I’ve represented a fifteen-year-old with sores on his face and a swastika on his wrist whose first words to me in the holding cell after a three week meth binge were, “Man I need a cold beer.” A few days later I represented an eight-year-old girl (charged for assault as a juvenile) whose life ambition is to “drop out of high school and borrow money from friends.”

These kids never had a chance. There have always been poor people. But this is something new. The meth. The drugs. The self-destruction. The dissatisfaction. The despair. It’s real, and contrary to Williamson’s beliefs, something caused it besides laziness. There’s a Baptist church on every street corner in my community and we’ve voted Republican as a county in every election since 1868. So it’s not just our own morality that’s the problem.

People got rich off our decline. They sold us the Iraq war and prescribed everyone OxyContin and then blamed us for buying it. Williamson blames only the folks applying for disability and dropping out of society but it’s time someone called out the Sacklers of the world too. Because they’re not blameless. – SO yes, I do think a lack of moral is part of our decline. But we didn’t start it. The greed, the self-interest, the instant gratification, the turn towards reality television and social media instead of community and real interaction, those have real world consequences, and the ripples didn’t start in Appalachia.

I blogged about KDW’s essay here and here. I half agreed with him. I agreed that culture and character have a great deal to do with why many people are poor, or stay poor. But I disagreed with him that they were always to blame for their own condition, and I said that those who have done well in life owe something to those who have fallen through (though I didn’t specify what, or how much; it depends; I’m talking about a disposition towards charity).

Mike and I had a further e-mail exchange. He later wrote:

My town is twenty minutes from where Andy Griffith grew up. The real life Mayberry. It’s the next county over. Last month there was a national reporter going around town doing interviews like we’re a war zone. Mayberry is ground zero of society’s fall. Who saw that coming?

Last Thursday I go into the gas station, and this young girl comes in, probably mid-20s, in a very nice dress, desperately in need of cigarettes. Obviously on meth. Otherwise she’d be very pretty.

She’s so frantic and anxious that the line lets her cut. As she walks out we all just stand there. Silent. Not even shocked. Just sad.

Humanity has always had problems. Slavery, etc… But this is something new.  Man is not made to act like that.

There’s no coming back. The window of going from meth addict to Doctor/CEO is small. Everything would have to go right. It won’t.

I think the breakdown of values comes so much from the breakdown of interaction. I read this article recently and found it helpful: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html. It’s about isolation as the cause of addiction. Two rat groups are used. Both with access to drugs. One group is isolated. The other gets to interact with one another. One group tries the drugs and never goes back. The other gets hooked. You can guess which one.

I guess it makes sense. Folks in Appalachia are isolated, (and by nature of the scots-Irish heritage) independent minded. And meth/pills are tearing us apart. There must be a connection.

But how do we restore community in the iPhone age? When everyone in the room, the elevator, the car, is looking down? I don’t know.

I think people also lost power over their own lives to big institutions: They have to wait on hold to talk to their bank. Their own job is in a call center (it’s the new middle class employment here). They didn’t grow or hunt their food. They don’t know their neighbors. And that can’t be good for the soul.

I’m optimistic in the long run. But I’m not sure we’ve hit bottom.

Technology changes society too fast to debate the consequences. But the dawn of the Industrial Age brought decadence too. So eventually we’ll make this work. At least I hope.

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that Mike Cooper ought to write a book about this.

The lines of his that sticks with me are:

Humanity has always had problems. Slavery, etc… But this is something new.  Man is not made to act like that.

That’s true. This made me think about how when I was a kid, people had it harder, economically, than they do now. But we didn’t have this. When my folks were little, many people in our rural county were poor. But we didn’t have this. That’s why I’m skeptical when people blame only the lack of good jobs for our current situation. That’s part of it, no doubt, but not all of it. Poverty does not require moral squalor.

Some people blame the decline of religiosity for our situation. That’s part of it too, I think, but not the whole thing. In Latin America, Pentecostals and Evangelicals are doing so well evangelizing the Catholics in part because for whatever reason or reasons, indolent, womanizing, drunkard, nominally Catholic men are finding in that robust form of Protestantism the wherewithal to change and take responsibility for their lives. So that is evidence that religion itself doesn’t make a difference, but the form and substance of the religion does.

But African-Americans are much more religious, and religiously engaged, than the average American, yet the black church hasn’t made much of a difference in the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community — and that’s a powerful predictor of poverty. Unlike black Christians, white working-class Americans are falling away from the church:

The decline in church attendance among the non-college-educated matches a decline in stable work opportunities and in marriage among the working class, [sociologist W. Bradford] Wilcox said. All three factors interact with one another: Churchgoers are more likely to get married in the first place. Less stable employment might mean you don’t make the leap into marriage, and the unmarried are less likely to attend church. Lack of a steady job might also cause people to shy away from a church community, Wilcox said.

“This instability they’re feeling in the work force spills over into their family lives and into their ability to plug into religious communities,” he said.

Whether the retreat from religion is a good or bad thing depends on your opinion about religion, Wilcox said. He’s concerned, however.

“Religious institutions have often been sources of support and solidarity for working-class Americans,” he said. “I think it does spell yet more trouble for this portion of the population.”

 

If the Christianity preached is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, then it’s not hard to see why working-class people feel alienated for spiritualized pep talks for the middle class.

Still, the decline of a more morally demanding form of Christianity can only explain part of it.

I think Mike Cooper is onto something, talking about isolation and social atomization as being at the root of this. Three years ago, I blogged here about the loss of a sense of the common good in contemporary life. Excerpt:

[Timothy] Noah faults modern conservatives for undermining the sense of the commons by viewing everything through the lens of the market. Of course he has a point. Much less remarked on, however, is how modern liberals have done the same thing, by undermining a common moral sense — this, by placing a high priority on individualism and liberty in personal behavior. It becomes harder and harder to appeal to common standards of behavior, much less to enforce them, because they do not exist as they once did.

We learn to tolerate or to ignore behavior that used to be frowned on and stigmatized because we don’t want to pass judgment. I’m thinking at the moment about how discourteously many people behave in public, as if they owe no respect to others around them. As if they were free to do exactly as they pleased. As if self-assertion and display were their right. I’m speaking very generally, but if there are no common standards — and those common standards will vary from culture to culture — it becomes difficult to maintain common spaces. If the common good is only thought of as the sum total of all the individual goods, the commons becomes a problematic concept.

In the early 1990s, it was thought that “public/private” places like Universal’s CityWalk would be the coming thing. Remember that? It was a facsimile of a three-block urban commercial landscape — sidewalks, street cafes, etc. — that was supposed to be an idealized version of the city. It was clean, safe, and … well, it was weird. It was like an outdoor mall. The idea was that it looked and felt like an actual city street, but because it was on private property, it was much easier to police by keeping the antisocial element out. One can see the attraction, in principle, of such a place, however ersatz the execution, but there’s no denying that a place like CityWalk is a defeat for the commons. If we are thought so incapable of governing ourselves that the only safe and desirable places to gather together are spaces under private ownership, then we have lost something precious.

Anyway, it’s interesting to think about how contemporary individualism, in both its left-wing and right-wing expressions, has worked to liberate the individual at the expense of the commons. It’s in our American cultural DNA. I think we’re all complicit in this; I know I am. It’s easy for us to look at people who don’t share our convictions or tastes and think that they should give up this or that individualist practice for the sake of the common good, but it’s hard to look at ourselves and decide what we should be willing to sacrifice for the same goal.

I’m a strong proponent of the liberty to homeschool, as you know, but there can be no doubt that choosing to opt out of the schools to which most in one’s community attend weakens the sense of the commons. But I think the good obtained by homeschooling is worth it, and I’m willing to fight for the liberty to homeschool. You have your own sacred individualist cows, for which you can surely make good arguments. I keep going back to Alan Ehrenhalt’s great book The Lost City, in which he calls out all of us on this point. Ehrenhalt says most people want the close-knit feeling of community and common purpose we used to have in this country 60 or more years ago, but very few of us are willing to accept the strong limits on personal behavior and consumer choice that are inseparable from the strong sense of the commons we shared. If everybody is prepared to be part of the commons, but only on their own terms, then it’s hard to say we have a real sense of the commons. We like to think of ourselves as citizens, but really, aren’t most of us really just consumers?

The cost of liberty is solidarity, it seems. Very few of us are not implicated in this. But the dynamic seems impossible to stop. One of the core reasons for my Benedict Option project is to build some kind of resistance to these destructive, atomizing forces. I doubt they can be turned back, but if we can figure out how to ride the crest of this tsunami, we might make it to solid grown when the wave expires.