Rod Dreher's Blog, page 585

Sex Ed In Kindergarten?

This, from The Atlantic, is one reason why the morally sane will end up having to withdraw from this culture:

Both educators believe that children would be better off with a more comprehensive understanding of sexuality, beyond just the issue of consent—one most effectively taught at a younger age as part of a larger curriculum that includes teachings on boundaries, personal autonomy, relationships, and other aspects of sexual health. This attitude reflects a growing movement among sexuality organizations and educators to advocate for comprehensive sex-education programs that begin as early as kindergarten [emphasis mine — RD], to provide students with age-appropriate and medically accurate information that acts as a foundation for later lessons on consent.

More:

Most parents seem to agree that such an educational structure makes sense. A number of studies show widespread parental support for comprehensive sex ed, including one from 2014 finding that the majority of parents in the U.S. support the teaching of human anatomy and reproductive information, gender and sexual-orientation issues, and more starting in elementary school. A full 40 percent of parents supported comprehensive sexuality education in general.

Before cranky readers start griping, yes, we have done and are continuing to do age-appropriate, biologically accurate, morally informed sex education with our kids. They are learning about these things from their parents, within a Christian moral framework. We don’t believe in avoiding the topic, or euphemizing it, or giving the kids the idea that sex is some weird thing to be ashamed of. But I do not trust public schools in this post-Christian society to do it right.

The fact that we are even talking about sex ed for kindergartners is, well, morally insane.

[Note to readers: Today is Good Friday — also known as Holy Friday — for Orthodox Christians, so I will be off the blog. That means I won’t be approving blog comments, or writing new entries. This entry, and all others that will appear today, was written on Thursday night and scheduled to publish today. I will approve the day’s comments on Saturday. Thanks for your patience. — RD]

Benedict Vs. Boethius

A reader writes, provocatively and interestingly:

I teach modern church history at a Midwest Catholic college. Today I was presenting the Benedict option in connection with Pope Benedict XVI. As a contrast, I came up with the term ‘Boethius Option’. Boethius and Benedict were born in Italy in the same year (480 AD) and both spent their young adulthood in Rome: maybe they met. When the civilizational and cultural infrastructure of the West collapsed and the barbarian Theodoric seized control, the two young men went in different directions. Boethius entered public service under Theodoric, he and his sons taking up work in the Senate to restore civil order and enhance public legislation. Benedict abandoned the city and built a Christian subculture in the mountains. I used this to frame the modern choice the Church faces: Boethius or Benedict? (It is noteworthy that Boethius ended up strangled and clubbed to death by his opponents in the city.)

The Boethius Option? O Fortuna! Let us remember Boethius’s greatest literary champion of our time, Ignatius J. Reilly:

“I suspect that beneath your offensively and vulgarly effeminate façade there may be a soul of sorts. Have you read widely in Boethius?”

“Who? Oh, heavens no. I never even read newspapers.”

“Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,” Ignatius said solemnly. “Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books.”

“You’re fantastic.”

“I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”

I think I shall have to make a cheese dip.

But seriously, this is a good observation. Benedict or Boethius? What do you think? I’m going to post this now, because I won’t be approving any comments on Good Friday, so get your comment in early.

Did Trump Kill Reaganism?

Yes, says Bill Galston, contending that “Donald Trump is waging and winning the third major revolution in the Republican Party since World War II.” First there was Eisenhower reconciling the GOP with the New Deal. Then there was Reagan, who wrought a “remarkable fusion of supply-side economics, anti-Soviet internationalism and social conservatism.” And now? Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s candidacy has showed that the cadre of genuine social conservatives is smaller than long assumed, that grass-roots Republican support for large military commitments in the Middle East has withered, and that the business community is politically homeless.

So it has come to this: A mercantilist isolationist is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination. Whether or not he goes on to win the general election, the Republican Party cannot return to what it once was. The Reagan era has ended, and what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Read the whole thing. Well, he’s right about that, but instead of giving Trump credit for killing Reaganism, I think we would do well to think about the extent to which Reaganism died a natural death from old age, and the extent to which its heirs killed it.

As a social conservative, I hate to admit it, but our side could not find a way to make our mores plausible to younger generations. It’s true that we faced (and do face) massive, implacable opposition from the news and entertainment media, but the forces dissolving social and religious conservatism are deeper than propagandistic — and we have been unable to mount any meaningful resistance in our churches, or anywhere else. (The epic abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church was a serious blow to our side’s credibility.) The loss of religion, the redefinition of marriage, and the fragmentation of the family represents dramatic losses for our side.

On the military front, the end of the Cold War necessarily posed a challenge to Reaganism, but it was the hubris of George W. Bush and the Republican Party on Iraq that really put the knife into the GOP’s credibility.

On business, even though the Democrats were just as mobbed up with Wall Street as the Republicans, thanks to the Clinton era, the economic crash occurred under a Republican administration. And Wall Street’s recklessness savaged Reaganism’s valorization of free market capitalism. It did not discredit capitalism, not by a long shot, but it did reveal that the largely uncritical stance Reaganites take towards the business class was a big mistake.

Finally, Reagan worship killed Reaganism. As far back as 2005, a full decade before the Trump phenomenon appeared, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam proposed a reformist conservatism that paid more attention to the concerns of the working and middle classes. Excerpt from their Weekly Standard piece:

In May, the Pew Research Center released the 2005 edition of its Political Typology, a survey that slices the American electorate into nine discrete groups. Unsurprisingly, the core of the GOP’s support turns out to be drawn from “Enterprisers,” affluent, optimistic, and staunchly conservative on economic and social issues alike. But the so-called Enterprisers represent just 11 percent of registered voters–and apart from them, the most reliable GOP voters are Social Conservatives (13 percent of registered voters) and Pro-Government Conservatives (10 percent of voters). Both groups are predominantly female (Enterprisers are overwhelmingly male); both are critical of big business; and both advocate more government involvement to alleviate the economic risks faced by a growing number of families. They tend to be hostile to expanding free trade, Social Security reform, and guest-worker proposals–which is to say the Bush second term agenda.

This is the Republican party of today–an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.”

Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn’t just out of touch with the country as a whole, it’s out of touch with its own base. And its majority is hardly unassailable: Despite facing a lackluster Democratic presidential candidate who embodied virtually all the qualities Americans loathe–elitism, aloofness, Europhilia, vacillating weakness–George W. Bush, war president and skilled campaigner, was very nearly defeated in his bid for reelection. GOP operatives boast that their electoral efforts were targeted down to the minutest detail, and that their marketing prowess delivered victory for the incumbent. The trouble is that even such extraordinary efforts delivered only a narrow victory.

These guys could see someone like Trump coming a decade ago — but the Republican Party did not change. Instead, we got presidential candidates with a conspicuous lack of vision, standing up in 2008 and again in 2012 jawing about dear old Ronnie, and how much they loved him.

Which was fine, to a point. But 1980 was a long, long time ago.

Trump didn’t kill Reaganism. He just was the first Republican presidential candidate to notice it was already dead.

Norsemen Raiders Take Children

This is an absolutely chilling story from Norway, whose state-run child protection agency seizes children and separates them from families on flimsy pretexts. Excerpts:

Ruth and Marius’s life was torn apart without warning one Monday afternoon last November when two black cars approached the farm where they live in a remote Norwegian valley.

Their two little boys, aged five and two, and their three-month-old baby son, were in their big, bright, modern living room overlooking the steel-grey fjord.

Ruth was waiting as usual for the school bus that would bring back their two daughters, aged eight and 10.

But that Monday, it never came. Instead, Ruth saw the two unknown cars. One continued along the main road; the other turned up the farm track – and a woman from the local child protection service knocked at the door.

She told Ruth to come to the police station for interrogation.

The woman said the other black car had taken Ruth’s two daughters away, into emergency state care. And she told Ruth to hand over her two older sons to be taken away, too.

The following day, two black cars appeared again. The couple assumed it had all been a terrible mistake and the children had been brought back.

But they were wrong. Four policemen got out. And took the baby.

It turns out that Ruth and Marius spanked their kids occasionally, which is illegal in Norway. Ruth, a pediatric nurse, says a medical examination of the kids showed no problems, but the law says there can be no corporal punishment of any kind — and this was something the couple claims not to have known.

Now the state is attempting to permanently remove their five children — to steal them from their parents, forever. The couple are Pentecostals, and Marius is a Romanian immigrant, two factors that lead supporters to believe they are the victims of discrimination. According to Marius’s brother:

What we know so far, and is now also supported by documentation, is that the entire investigation started from an alert provided to the Barnevernet by the school principal, where the girls Eliana and Naomi attend. The principal called Barnervernet, expressing ‘concerns’: the girls told her they are being disciplined at home, also the girls are ‘challenging’ in the sense that they talk a lot and do not want to obey the school rules, but are creative and intelligent. In her message she also said that the parents are faithful Christians, ‘very Christian’ and the grandmother has a strong faith that God punishes sin, which, in her opinion, creates a disability in children. According to the principal’s statement, the girls’ aunts and uncles also share this belief. The complaint further says that although the girls are distinguished by good results at school and that she does not believe them to be physically abused at home, she believes that the parents need ‘help’ and guidance from the Barnevernet into raising their children.

Can you believe that? The whole thing started not because of suspicion of physical abuse, but because a busybody school principal didn’t like the kind of Christianity the family observes. So the Norwegian state smashed a family when there is no evidence of serious abuse. The whole thing could probably have been solved with a stern talking-to. But no, the Norwegian state feels compelled to destroy a family.

This couple is not alone. Barnevernet, the child protection agency, takes most kids now because it doesn’t like the parenting style of moms and dads. More:

That, in short, is the reason Barnevernet gave for taking away the four-month-old baby daughter of a young Norwegian father called Erik and his Chinese wife in the country’s second city, Bergen.

Home videos of the little girl when she was three and four months old show her lying in her cot, apparently alert and responsive as she interacts with her parents.

But Barnevernet, the child protection service, said lack of eye contact, and other signs, revealed she was suffering serious psychological harm. They said her parents couldn’t meet her emotional needs, partly because her mother was depressed, and Erik – to quote one social worker – was “simple”.

However, Erik’s never been diagnosed with any condition other than a slight lack of short-term memory when he was small. And the baby was never examined clinically by any health professional to establish if anything was wrong with her, and if so whether the parents could be at fault.

One journalist has calculated that children with a foreign mother are four times more likely to be seized than those with native Norwegian mothers. This suggests that the authorities are prone to criminalizing differing parental styles. Erik’s father tells the BBC that his daughter-in-law’s Chinese mother cared for the baby, which is common in China but not in Norway — and he theorizes that that’s what drew the authorities.

Read the whole thing. It’s terrifying that agents of the state can take your children without warning, only because those agents don’t like the way you’re raising them. Around 170 psychologists and others who work in the child welfare field have published an open letter of protest to the government, accusing Barnevernet of running amok.

Norway is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited, and I am very fond of its people. But it sounds like this government agency is a stain on its reputation.

(Thanks to the reader who sent this story.)

Annals Of Dirtbaggery

Former GOP House Speaker and convicted dirty old man Dennis Hastert was sentenced yesterday to 15 months in jail for a banking law violation related to his attempt to cover up past as a molester. Get this, though:

The sex abuse victim who testified against Dennis Hastert at the former U.S. House speaker’s sentencing hearing said he ultimately decided to do so publicly after Hastert reached out to his brother for a letter of support asking the judge for leniency.

Scott Cross, a 53-year-old businessman who lives in the Chicago suburbs, was on the Yorkville High School wrestling team that Hastert coached in the 1970s. Struggling to hold back tears on Wednesday, Cross walked the courtroom through a chilling account of the abuse and the way the man he trusted fondled him on a locker room table, a situation Cross said he was manipulated into with a promise that a massage would help him lose weight to qualify for a match.

“Because I trusted him, I believed him and took him at his word,” he said Wednesday in his victim impact statement. “As a 17-year-old boy, I was devastated.”

Scott Cross’s brother is a former top Illinois GOP lawmaker and a one-time protege of Hastert’s.

Can you believe the nerve of that guy? “Hey man, sorry I molested your brother back in the day, but can you write me a letter of recommendation so I get less time on a conviction related to molesting your brother?”

How does that happen? Is Hastert really that cold and self-centered?

Here’s information on the men Hastert molested when he was their high school wrestling coach. 

The One Percent Democrats

Some of you have been sending me evidence for the Democrats: The Party Of The Rich file. Check this out:

1. Phillips Andover Academy, the posh New England prep school that once educated the children of the Republican elites, has now flipped: 

Andover Academy has changed, reflecting national political trends. Instead of the children of the nation’s GOP corporate leaders, the school now educates the children of a professional, and largely Democratic, elite.

History teacher Anthony Rotundol said the students “tend to come from households that are more liberal than the voting public in general. . . . They tend, by and large, to come from the social groups that are most likely to support the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The predominant class of the place and the predominant tone of the place is the kind of educated upper middle class.”

At the new Andover, no longer a male-only school, there is the Academy Gay/Straight Alliance, which holds an “annual festival of rainbow colors, drag dancing, and open discussion . . . to celebrate the gay and lesbian community.” The Brace Center for Gender Studies examines “the complex issues related to gender, including sexuality, race and ethnicity.” The Office of Community and Multicultural Development is “committed to raising awareness and encouraging sensitivity to differences of culture, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and geographical origin.”

2. Tom Edsall at The New York Times writes a really interesting piece about how the Top 20 Percent lives. Excerpts:

For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income.

This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.

More:

Political leverage is another factor separating the top 20 percent from the rest of America. The top quintile is equipped to exercise much more influence over politics and policy than its share of the electorate would suggest. Although by definition this group represents 20 percent of all Americans, it represents about 30 percent of the electorate, in part because of high turnout levels.

More:

Move forward to 2008 and 2012. In 2008, voters from families making $100,000 to $200,000 split their votes 51-48 in favor of John McCain, while those making in excess of $200,000 cast a slight 52-46 majority for Barack Obama.

At the same time that lifestyle and consumption habits of the affluent diverge from those of the middle and working class, wealthy voters are becoming increasingly Democratic, often motivated by their culturally liberal views. A comparison of exit poll data from 1984 and 1988 to data from the 2008 and 2012 elections reveals the changing partisan makeup of the top quintile.

Here’s the cherry on top:

At the same time, the priorities of the truly advantaged wing — voters with annual incomes in the top quintile, who now make up an estimated 26 percent of the Democratic general election vote — are focused on social and environmental issues: the protection and advancement of women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay and transgender rights and climate change, and less on redistributive economic issues.

Do read the whole thing. It’s fascinating — and terrible news for Republicans, given that their donor class is about as likely to share the downscale party members’ interest in social conservatism as the Democratic donor class is on income inequality.

3. Yale University’s president announced yesterday that the university plans to keep the name of Calhoun College, despite its connection to a leading Confederate, but it will do away with the title “master” for its heads of colleges, even though the term comes from the Latin magister, because slavery. Of particular interest is the name of one of the school’s new residential colleges. From his letter to alumni:

The northern-most college, sited closest to Science Hill, Pauli Murray College will honor a Yale alumna (’65 J.S.D., ’79 Hon. D.Div.) noted for her achievements in law and religion, and for her leadership in civil rights and the advancement of women. Pauli Murray enrolled at Hunter College in the 1920s, graduating in 1933 after deferring her studies following the Great Depression. Later, she began an unsuccessful campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. Murray’s case received national publicity, and she became widely recognized as a civil rights activist.

A graduate of Howard Law School, Murray had an extraordinary legal career as a champion of racial and gender equity. United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall cited her book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, for its influence on the lawyers fighting segregation laws. President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Committee on Civil and Political Rights of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.

Awarded a fellowship by the Ford Foundation, Murray pursued a doctorate in law at Yale in order to further her scholarly work on gender and racial justice. She co-authored Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII, in which she drew parallels between gender-based discrimination and Jim Crow laws. In 1965, she received her J.S.D. from Yale Law School, the first African-American to do so. Her dissertation was entitled, Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy. Immediately thereafter, she served as counsel in White v. Crook, which successfully challenged discrimination on the basis of sex and race in jury selection. She was a cofounder, with thirty-one others, of the National Organization for Women.

Murray was a vice president of Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina; she left to become a professor at Brandeis University, where she earned tenure and taught until 1973. She was the first person to teach African-American studies and women’s studies at Brandeis.

The final stage of Murray’s career continued a life marked by confronting challenges and breaking down barriers. At age 63, inspired by her connections with other women in the Episcopal Church, she left Brandeis and enrolled at the General Theological Seminary. She became the first African-American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Pauli Murray represents the best of Yale: a preeminent intellectual inspired to lead and prepared to serve her community and her country.

The Yale president left out this interesting bit of Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray’s biography:

Murray struggled with her sexual and gender identity through much of her life. Her marriage as a teenager ended almost immediately with the realization that “when men try to make love to me, something in me fights”. Though acknowledging the term “homosexual” in describing others, Murray preferred to describe herself as having an “inverted sex instinct” that caused her to behave as a man attracted to women. She wanted a “monogamous married life”, but one in which she was the man. The majority of her relationships were with women whom she described as “extremely feminine and heterosexual”. In her younger years, Murray would often be devastated by the end of these relationships, to the extent that she was twice hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, in 1937 and in 1940.

Murray wore her hair short and preferred pants to skirts; due to her slight build, there was a time in her life when she was often able to pass as a teenage boy. In her twenties, she shortened her name from Pauline to the more androgynous Pauli.  Murray pursued hormone treatments in the 1940s to correct what she saw as a personal imbalance,  and even requested abdominal surgery to test if she had “submerged” male sex organs. 

The reader, a Yale alumnus, who sent me this item remarks:

Isn’t this such a perfect choice for our day and age: the complete subversion of traditional religion (particularly Christianity), sex-gender, and sexuality, all in one package? Could there be a more perfect sign of our present ‘elite’ cultural crisis, a more symbolic thumb in the eye?

Indeed.

Keeping The Sabbath

A new national survey conducted for the Deseret News finds that Americans don’t pay as much attention to the Sabbath as we used to. Excerpt:

Half of U.S. adults today (50 percent) say the Sabbath has personal spiritual meaning for them, down from 74 percent in 1978. However, 62 percent of people agree that it’s important for society to have one day a week set aside for spiritual rest, the survey reported — and only 11 percent disagree with that proposition.

The Deseret News poll was conducted by Y2 Analytics and YouGov among 1,000 Americans plus an oversample of 250 Mormons and 250 Jews, two groups known for their Sabbath observance. It finds that members of some religious groups, such as Mormons and evangelicals, continue to focus their Sunday activities around church attendance and Bible study, while others spend their time on less spiritual pursuits.

It also shows that millennials are less likely than other generations to say the Sabbath is important or engage in religious activities on that day.

Shifts in Sabbath observance illustrate how modern life influences people’s understanding of this holy day, religion experts and Sabbath-keepers said. Religious activities are becoming less common on Sunday — or Saturday for Jews — as people fit shopping, work around the house and time in nature into their Sabbath routines.

More:

The new survey depicts the modern Sabbath as a day focused on relaxation and errand-running rather than religious commitment.

More than 7 in 10 U.S. adults (73 percent) today say they “take rest and relaxation” on the Sabbath, compared to 63 percent in 1978. Thirty percent of people go shopping, an 11 percentage point increase over nearly 40 years.

Religious activities like attending church, prayer and Bible reading are less likely to be a part of people’s weekends today than they were in the past, the Deseret News Sabbath survey reported.

In 2016, 27 percent of U.S. adults attended church on what should have been their Sabbath, compared to 55 percent in 1978. Around one-in-10 (11 percent) spent time in religious meditation, an eight percentage point drop over four decades.

Read the whole thing.

This is part of the de-Christianization of America. People will tell themselves, “Well, I don’t go to church on Sunday, but I can experience God in other ways.” And maybe that’s true. But Sabbath observance, including gathering for prayer and worship, has been at the core of Christianity since the beginning. You begin by neglecting the Sabbath, and you end by losing your faith (or your kids do).

Religion is not just what we believe (that is, the thoughts we carry around in our heads), but what we do. As social anthropologist Paul Connerton has written, societies remember the stories that give shape and meaning to their lives most effectively by recalling them ritually. Modern life is designed to cause you to forget that you are part of a larger story, and that your identity is not fully self-chosen. Connerton’s analysis is somewhat Marxist, but he’s right. As I wrote about it earlier:

He’s telling us that in modernity, the market is our god. It conditions what we imagine to be possible. We can’t dream that life should be ordered by rituals that bound and define our experience, and link it to the past, to a sacred order. There is no sacred order; there is only the here and now, the tangible. The world exists to be remade to fit our desires. There are no ways of living that we should conform our lives to, no stories that tell us how we should live. When Connerton says that in modernity, and under capitalism, we can hardly “imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence,” he’s saying that we can no longer easily believe that we should live according to set patterns of thought and action because they conform to eternal truths.

If we no longer keep going to church as at the center of Sabbath observance, we unavoidably deny that there’s anything sacred about time. Or, to be precise, we affirm, whether we want to or not, that we, not the God of the Bible, are the sovereigns of our own lives, and have the right to pick and choose what it means to be faithful. Sabbath worship is absolutely integral to Christianity. For the overwhelming majority of us, it is non-negotiable.

Whether you want it to or not, this habit — or lack of a habit — will erase the memory of Christianity from yourself and your family. This is the risk you take by making Sabbath churchgoing optional. Choices have consequences.

(I don’t know about how Sabbath observance works among Jewish communities in terms of keeping the faith. I’m interested to hear from Jewish readers, both believing and unbelieving.)

UPDATE: Deacon Greg Kandra writes:

A religious ed teacher told me about a talk he had with a Catholic parent a few weeks back. The mother was upset because her grade-school-aged daughter was feeling guilty about missing Mass. The mother blamed the church. Isn’t it enough that they go to CCD classes,?  she asked. Don’t you people realize we have a busy schedule on Sunday? There’s sports! Projects! Homework! We can’t get to church every week, you know.  There’s too much to do.

The teacher tried, with limited success, to impress upon the mother why Mass is important—above and beyond the simple fact that it’s, you know, an obligation.  I don’t know if it sank it. Nobody seems to think that way anymore.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped teaching that going to church isn’t an option, that Mass is an obligation, that we are commanded to “keep holy the sabbath.” We’ve minimized teaching the importance of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist—or in the assembly or in The Word, for that matter—and people think they can take it or leave it.

UPDATE.2: People. People. Chill on chastising me for calling Sunday the “Sabbath”. It may be theologically and historically incorrect, but that’s how most Americans think of the Lord’s Day. That understanding forms the basis of this survey.

The Misery Of Mizzou

National Review reports on the well-deserved misery the University of Missouri is enduring as the result of its craven appeasement of Social Justice Warriors last fall. Excerpts:

The 7,400 pages of e-mails, obtained exclusively by these two publications, reveal how Mizzou overwhelmingly lost the support of longtime sports fans, donors, and alumni. Parents and grandparents wrote in from around the country declaring that their family members wouldn’t be attending Mizzou after the highly publicized controversy. Some current students talked about leaving. The e-mails reveal how Mizzou overwhelmingly lost the support of longtime sports fans, donors, and alumni.

This passionate backlash doesn’t appear to have been a bluff. Already, freshman enrollment is down 25 percent, leaving a $32 million funding gap and forcing the closure of four dorms. The month after the protests, donations to the athletic department were a mere $191,000 — down 72 percent over the same period a year earlier. Overall fundraising also took a big hit.

Read the whole thing. The internal e-mail trove also shows that students not involved in the protests were telling university officials that they were intimidated by the violent rhetoric and tactics of the protesters — and that the officials were taking the fear seriously. Of course their way of defusing the volatile situation was appeasement. And now the university is suffering for its cowardice regarding defending itself and its students.

Good. This is the only thing college administrators will understand. More, please.

The Gift Of Life

Irene and Father Matthew Harrington (Photo courtesy the Harrington family)

If you’ve been reading this blog for a year or so, you will remember the drama last summer, when Anna Harrington, the wife of our parish priest Father Matthew, gave birth to their fourth child, Irene. They knew it was going to be a very difficult birth. Hers was an extremely high-risk pregnancy. What’s more, doctors diagnosed in utero Irene has having hemifacial microsomia, a condition that affects the shape of the face, and severe scoliosis.

There was a significant chance that Irene would not survive till birth. There was a significant chance that neither Irene nor her mother would survive the birth. Doctors performed a C-section a month before the due date, because it was too dangerous to let the pregnancy continue. During the operation, Irene’s mother required 31 units of blood; the human body contains only 11 to 12 units. She bled out nearly three times.

Doctors told the Harringtons that Anna’s survival was a miracle.

Irene’s medical bills, including the money needed for her medical needs going forward, are substantial. Clergy families aren’t well off. Some friends of the family set up a GoFundMe account to help. Many of the readers of this blog contributed — and still do contribute. Thank you. The need is enormous.

This week — Holy Week for the Orthodox — the Harrington family had Pascha pictures made. Father Matthew posted this one, of Irene and him, to Facebook. I reproduce it here with his permission. For you who have prayed, and do pray, for the family, and who have contributed, this is what it’s all about. Glory to God.

Democrats: Party Of The Rich

T.A. Frank writes that if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, the One Percent is going to flock to the Democrats. Excerpts:

In a world of Trumpism and Clintonism, Democrats would become the party of globalist-minded elites, both economic and cultural, while Republicans would become the party of the working class. Democrats would win backing from those who support expanded trade and immigration, while Republicans would win the support of those who prefer less of both. Erstwhile neocons would go over to Democrats (as they are already promising to do), while doves and isolationists would stick with Republicans. Democrats would remain culturally liberal, while Republicans would remain culturally conservative.

The combination of super-rich Democrats and poor Democrats would exacerbate internal party tensions, but the party would probably resort to forms of appeasement that are already in use. To their rich constituents, Democrats offer more trade, more immigration, and general globalism. To their non-rich constituents, they offer the promise of social justice, which critics might call identity politics. That’s one reason why Democrats have devoted so much attention to issues such as transgender rights, sexual assault on campus, racial disparities in criminal justice, and immigration reform. The causes may be worthy—and they attract sincere advocates—but politically they’re also useful. They don’t bother rich people.

Emphasis mine. More:

It’s a costly arrangement. The more that Democrats write off the white working class, which has been experiencing a drastic decline in living standards, the harder it is for them to call themselves a party of the little guy. The more that the rich can frame various business practices as blows to privilege or oppression—predatory lending as a way to expand minority home ownership, outsourcing as a way to uplift the world’s poor, etc.—the more they get a pass from Democrats on practices that hurt poorer Americans. Worst of all, the more that interest groups within the Democratic Party quarrel among themselves, the more they rely upon loathing of a common enemy, Republicans, in order to stay united.

Things get darker still, for, if the G.O.P. becomes ever whiter, failing to peel away working-class voters of other races, then partisan conflict could look more and more like racial conflict. That is the nightmare. Our politics are bad enough when voters are mobilized mainly by culture-war issues, such as abortion, because compromise is often impossible. But when voters are mobilized by issues of identity, something most people can’t change, then nothing works. It’s just war.

Read the whole thing. 

This is something that drives me nuts about the way our media cover race and politics. They never write critically about blacks and Hispanics who vote heavily Democratic. It is assumed that it is naturally in the interest of black and Hispanic voters to vote Democratic. Any criticism in the media is reserved for the GOP, for failing to attract black and Hispanic voters.

But if whites were to openly identify their interests with the Republican Party as whites, just as blacks and Hispanics do with the Democrats, then it’s freakout time. I agree with Frank that it’s not good for America for political parties to break down strongly along racial lines. But the double standard our media have for whites in this respect is galling. Is racial bloc voting only bad when white people do it?

Might as well get used to it. As whites in the US become a minority sometime this century, we should not be surprised to find many of them bloc-voting for one party. It might make as much sense for them then as it does for black voters to bloc-vote for the Democrats today. But the day will never come when you find someone in the national media chastising working-class blacks and Hispanics for voting Democratic, against their economic interests — even if it’s true.