Rod Dreher's Blog, page 587

Targeting Target

Andy Park, a gay Florida man, walked into a Target store to test its new bathroom policies. He said he was dressed like a male (you can’t see him in the clip), and had two days of beard stubble. He asks the store’s manager if he can use the women’s room. The manager says sure, and if any women have a problem with that, the store will speak to them about it. Read a news story about it here — with dialogue from the clip — and Target’s response, standing by its policy.

Park says in the video (which I saw) that he’s not targeting (ahem) transgenders, but rather “macho heterosexuals who will use this policy to walk in to women’s rooms and commit crimes.” The video went viral the other day, but Park took it down from his YouTube account after a lawyer told him that it might have been illegal to have recorded it with a hidden camera. Still, Target did not deny that it was real.

So Target, for the sake of virtue signaling and political correctness, has turned the door open for heterosexual perverts to harass women trying to use the bathroom. What contempt Target has for the safety and comfort of its female customers. I hope they return the favor.

Meanwhile, I received this letter over the weekend from a reader in New York City. I publish it with her permission:

I’ve been reading your thoughts on the whole transgender debacle this year and notice that in your threads and the comments it’s all been theoretical for you and your readers, including me. Until today.

My 14 year-old daughter is on a swim team with the NYC parks department where she practices at one of the public indoor pools. She is one of the older kids, with the youngest teammate a 7 year old. Today she informed us that just as she finished getting dressed after practice, a middle-aged man came out of the showers. He had a towel on so she couldn’t confirm if any surgery had been done (now there’s a conversation I never thought I’d be having with my kid) but besides his very large, breast-less male body type, bald head and mens’ shoes he was putting on, there was no question in her mind that he was a man. And she observed that the younger girls (remember, one’s a 7 year old girl) were staring with concerned expressions.

Everyone keeps going on about school bathrooms where kids are all the same age and how it should be no big deal. Have any of the politicians considered this particular scenario? Are the De Blasios and Clintons of the world going to be able to assure parents that their children will be safe in public locker rooms now? Is Mitchell Silver, the commissioner of the Parks Department, confident that a 7 year-old girl will not be adversely affected by the sight of a naked male stranger while she, too, stands naked and at her most vulnerable?

If this hadn’t hit so close to home I’d be enjoying the delicious irony of the situation. For several fraught moments, one sweaty locker room held the perfect storm of our nation’s treasured oppressed: transgenders, females, children, and even ethnic minorities, as most of the kids are non-white. (Only oppressed college students were missing.)

I anticipate that with the national climate these days, the kids will get thrown under the bus on this and have to do the accommodating. But because of the intolerance regarding any conversation on this topic, I’m completely at a loss as to how to address it.

It sucks to be a parent these days.

This country is losing its mind. When are parents going to stand up to this madness? I spoke to someone on Friday who told me that in his suburban school district in the Northeast, a couple of parents tried to organize other parents to fight this new trans locker room policy the school board imposed on their schools, but they couldn’t get anybody interested.

Same country, different worlds. Last night I was at a barbecue, and talked to a guy there about this stuff. We agreed that this kind of thing stands to destroy public schools in the South. If the federal government, via the executive or judicial branch, tries to force this on public schools down South, you will see an exodus. Either that, or open defiance.

Let The Word Go Forth

(Photo by Rod Dreher)

That’s our Father Matthew, proclaiming the good news a few hours ago. Here’s a look at the darkened interior of the church before the news arrived:

And:

This means Lent is over, and meat and dairy return. A friend at church, having heard me complain about beans during Lent, gave me a special Pascha present:

It’s going to be a LONG time before I eat beans again. After the Paschal liturgy, at the parish celebration, I had bacon, meatballs, ham sandwiches, cheese from Norcia … and prosecco. Just now I have taken a Pepcid, and am headed to bed.

Pascha is so joyous! Christ est réssuscité! Il est vraiment réssuscité! A special greeting to all my Orthodox readers around the world. Answer in your own language, please.

Mr. Panos’ Pascha

American peypool: Christos anesthi! Alithos anesthi!

Of Babies And Barbarians

A reader writes:

Just thought this was worth bringing up.

Vox had a piece today about how both proponents and opponents of abortion are misinformed about the facts of abortion.  Opponents think it is very dangerous whereas it is actually safer than real births.  The statistics that are helpfully provided are – 9 deaths per 1000 live births vs. 0.6 deaths per 1000 abortions.

On the other hand, the article says that proponents of abortion mistakenly think the procedure is rarer than it is i.e. it happens more frequently than we believe.  But funnily enough, no stats are provided to put this in perspective.  I mean its possible proponents may think the rate of abortion is something like 15 per 1000 births when it is actually 25 per 1000 births or something like that. Impossible to know without the data though.

So I checked.  According to the CDC in 2012 (last year with reported data), 699,202 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. The abortion rate for 2012 was 13.2 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 210 abortions per 1,000 live births.  To repeat…for every five births there is one abortion.  91% of these abortions are done within the first trimester and 99% within the first five months.  In the period 2002 – 2011, there were a total of 8.1M abortions reported to the CDC.  I don’t know about you but I am stunned.

Try and spin that through your mind a few times…in the years of the Great War on Terror, 8.1M abortions happened within the walls of the country waging the GWOT. When we talk about this issue…we really should have all the facts on the table.  I have no grand ideas or insights here, but for everybody out there interested in empirical, evidence-based policy, some starting facts might be useful.

8.1M !!!!!!  May God have mercy on us and guide us all….

But … but … they are supposed to be the barbarians! This reader is messing with the Official Story. Good. It needs to be messed with.

I’m guessing by the name of the reader who sent this letter in that he’s a Muslim — which, if true, adds some context to his valid complaint about this country’s regard for human life. We say we want immigrants to assimilate, but it’s important to keep in mind that we are asking them to assimilate to the norms of a nation whose people exterminate about a million of its unborn children each year.

[Note to readers: I’m away from the blog and not approving comments today. I wrote this and all posts appearing on Friday last night. Leave your remarks and I’ll approve them tomorrow. — RD]

Conservatism After Trump

David Brooks says that he’s not taking Donald Trump’s march to the nomination lying down. He confesses that he has spent too much time inside bourgeois circles, talking to people like himself, and hasn’t spent enough time out with the kind of people who respond to Trump’s message. A lot of people don’t like David Brooks (I am not one of them; I’m very fond of him), but you have to give the man credit: it’s very hard to find another prominent columnist at his level who will admit he was wrong, especially in that way, and who vows to get out of his office and into the country to see what’s going on.

Anyway, this part of the column is especially interesting:

We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.

Maybe the task is to build a ladder of hope. People across America have been falling through the cracks. Their children are adrift. Trump, to his credit, made them visible. We can start at the personal level just by hearing them talk.

Then at the community level we can listen to those already helping. James Fallows had a story in The Atlantic recently noting that while we’re dysfunctional at the national level you see local renaissances dotted across the country. Fallows went around asking, “Who makes this town go?” and found local patriots creating radical schools, arts festivals, public-private partnerships that give, say, high school dropouts computer skills.

Then solidarity can be rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe though a national service program, or something else.

He may be right. I hope he’s right. This has implications, obviously, for the Benedict Option.

As I see it, the Ben Op is, as someone here put it the other day, a form of “Christian localism,” one that would inspire exactly the kind of thing Brooks is talking about here. One gives up much hope of changing the country, and focus on what good one can do locally. As I will never tire of saying, the best example I have yet encountered is the Tipiloschi, the lay Catholics in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, who built a community school that also serves kids outside their own community, who reach out to local kids who are falling through the cracks and helps them, and who even launched a solidarity program with the Chesterton Center in Sierra Leone (fellow distributists!) to send them used equipment and other supplies needed to support their own local community. The Tipiloschi are ardently local, but because they are ardently local, they find the resources to reach out beyond their town.

I spent hours interviewing Marco Sermarini, the leader of the group, this past February, finding out how and why they succeed so brilliantly. Alas for you, you’ll have to wait for my book to come out next year to hear what he has to say. For now, I will say that the Tipiloschi are defiantly countercultural. They see the contemporary world as badly misguided, and don’t want to conform to it. The key is that they are not simply against something; if they were, they would be stuck in a defensive crouch. Rather, they are for something, and for it with joy and energy.

The main lesson I took from my short time with them is evidence that it’s simply a false choice that if one thinks of one’s community as separate from the world in a serious sense, that one has by that fact turned one’s back on the world. Granted, it’s a hard thing to pull off, I imagine, but they could not imagine being faithful Christians without doing both. That is, they know that in order to hold on to their faith in the world today, they have to adopt certain practices that build internal solidarity, deepen their roots, and that set them apart from the mainstream. But they also know that the very faith that holds them together and gives them a reason to live both commands and inspires them to serve others. How they do so is a fascinating case study. I hope David’s travels take him to San Benedetto del Tronto, because we Americans have a lot to learn from those Italians, for sure.

The great challenge orthodox American Christians face in our fragmenting society is one that the Tipiloschi have somehow mastered: managing to be in the world but not of it. That’s not just a saying with them; they live it. From what I can tell, the Tipiloschi, all of whom are orthodox Catholics, know exactly how far their religious beliefs put them from the mainstream of Italian society. They don’t feel beaten down or abashed by that, but embrace their difference. They are open to the outside world, but confident enough in their own beliefs and practices not to want to compromise with the world for the sake of getting along. If the world wants to join them, great, come on in. But they’re not going to water down their Catholicism for the sake of being seeker-friendly. In fact, they consider their faith the primary good that they have to share with the community, but not the only good.

When I visited the Tipiloschi “clubhouse,” as I call it, on top of a hill overlooking the Adriatic, I saw three teenage boys, all of whom had been involved in one way or another with juvenile crime, who had been drawn into the community and were now a part of it, working with its adults and its young people to improve the site. The Tipiloschi gave them a ladder of hope. It was a beautiful thing. They’re doing small but effective things too, like trying to keep the tuition low enough at the community’s school, the Scuola G.K. Chesterton, so that working families outside the community can afford to send their kids. But here’s the thing: they insist that the school’s mission to educate kids in a classical manner, according to the Catholic faith, cannot succeed unless the parents are also part of the mission. In other words, people in the community cannot sit on the outside, partaking of its goods as consumers. Real solidarity requires them to assume a role in the overall mission.

To pull this off requires immense confidence, and that’s what they have, for sure. It’s going to take the same kind of confidence here. One of the big lessons I took from the Tipiloschi is a very Benedictine one: by focusing first and foremost on serving God as Roman Catholics committed to their local community and its practices (frequent mass, Scripture study, prayer, confession, at least once a week having a communal meal, etc.), they find the strength to be of real service to others. The difference between this and what I’ve observed in (non-Benedict Option) American Christian communities is that Americans tend to believe, mistakenly, that the fundamentals of the faith are solid in themselves and their own young people, such that they can spend most of their time focusing outward. That’s not how the Tipiloschi are. Everyone in the community, even the adults, participates in Bible study and the like. Learning about the faith is a lifelong project, one that provides the fuel for the light that they bring to others outside the community.

This is an example of anti-political politics in action. They all vote, and in fact many of them went earlier this year to a big demonstration in Rome in favor of traditional marriage. But the national political scene is not really their concern. Localism is.

In our country, I wonder to what extent laws and public sentiment will allow Benedict Option Christians to do what the Tipiloschi do, given the growing move to demonize orthodox Christians. No doubt things are going to tighten up on us, and we need to give up hope that we are going to solve this through political engagement. What we need to do is to build strong internal resistance, by putting down deeper roots in our faith (through study and practices), and by building thick relationships with each other and our local communities.

Some people say that the state is bound to forbid Benedict Option communities like the Tipiloschi from operating in this country. Maybe that will come one day. Who knows? In the meantime, we have to do what we can with the time and the resources we have. The Tipiloschi suggest what can be accomplished by religious conservatives locally.

[Note to readers: I am not posting or approving comments on Friday, which is Holy Friday for the Orthodox. Leave a comment if you like, but I won’t approve it until tomorrow. Thanks for your patience. — RD]

NCAA Polices Political Morality

The oh-so-progressive NCAA just cannot keep from imposing its morals on everyone, even when their moralizing has nothing at all to do with athletics:

After months of hinting that it would use its financial clout to take a stand against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the NCAA on Wednesday made it official.

The organization’s Board of Governors, at its quarterly meeting in Indianapolis, adopted a new requirement for sites hosting or bidding on NCAA events in all divisions — from Final Fours to educational conferences.

Those host sites must “demonstrate how they will provide an environment that is safe, healthy and free of discrimination, plus safeguards the dignity of everyone involved in the event,” the NCAA said.

More:

It’s not the first time the NCAA has taken a strong stance on a controversial issue. It already prohibits championship events in states where governments display Confederate flags. It also bars NCAA members from hosting championships if their school nicknames use Native American imagery that is considered abusive and offensive.

The NCAA in a statement said it “considers the promotion of inclusiveness in race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity as a vital element to protecting the well-being of student-athletes, promoting diversity in hiring practices and creating a culture of fairness.”

Did you ever think you would see the day when a law that prevents a man dressed like a woman from taking a whiz in the ladies’ room would be grounds to deny a city the right to host a football game? If it was about protecting the right of gay athletes to compete, that’s certainly morally justified. But policing the toilet laws of states and localities? Really? The NCAA’s moralistic political preening is nauseating. This kind of thing has absolutely nothing to do with athletics, and everything to do with imposing liberal morality. Just shut up and play ball already.

If you are a conservative Christian college, you had better read the handwriting on the wall: the NCAA is very soon going to make you choose between sports and your religion. Not sure how many collegiate Charioteers of Fire we have in this country. We’re about to find out.

[Note to readers: Comments made today will be approved tomorrow. Thanks for your patience. — RD]

Trump Bait — Again

Donald Trump could not have paid for a better advertisement for his campaign. From the Los Angeles Times:

Hundreds of demonstrators filled the street outside the Orange County amphitheater where Donald Trump held a rally Thursday night, stomping on cars, hurling rocks at motorists and forcefully declaring their opposition to the Republican presidential candidate.

Traffic came to a halt as a boisterous crowd walked in the roadway, some waving American and Mexican flags. At one point, a demonstrator stomped on a police cruiser, its windows smashed to pieces.

“Dump the Trump,” said one sign. Another protester scrawled an expletive and Trump’s name onto a Costa Mesa police cruiser.

“I’m protesting because I want equal rights for everybody, and I want peaceful protest,” said 19-year-old Daniel Lujan, one of hundreds in a crowd that appeared to be mostly in their late teens and 20s.

Video footage showed some anti-Trump demonstrators hurling debris at a passing pickup truck. One group of protesters carried benches and blocked the entrance to the 55 Freeway along Newport Boulevard, with some tossing rocks on motorists near the onramp.

When a guy running for president can’t speak to his supporters without opponents staging a near-riot outside, throwing rocks at passing motorists and vandalizing police cars, it makes you wonder if he doesn’t have a point about how the country is going downhill. Remember how protesters in Chicago back in March shut down a Trump rally before it got started? We cannot have a country where violent mobs no-platform political candidates. Period.

I mean, look, I don’t blame Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for being offended by Trump’s nasty remarks about them. I don’t blame them one bit for protesting against Trump’s big mouth. But attacking the police over the fact that Trump is in town giving a speech to his backers? Turning yourselves into a violent mob because you hate the guy? This is not an America I want any part of. I mean, look at this (via Steve Sailer, who has pictures of the protesters waving Mexican flags):

the peaceful & tolerant left protesting trump!

mainstream media isn't showing! sad! pic.twitter.com/eo9nRia23g

— Baked Alaska (@bakedalaska) April 29, 2016

Growing Up With Sensual Religion

Last night we had one of the longest services of the year in the Orthodox Church: the ritualized Holy Thursday reading of these 12 Passion narratives from the Gospels. It takes about three hours, with all the accompanying prayers, chants, Psalms, candle-lighting, and ceremonials. Holy Week in the Orthodox Church is pretty close to overwhelming. It’s grueling — I’m putting in a five-hour shift from midnight till five a.m. on Saturday, reading the Psalms aloud in church — but it’s also transcendentally beautiful.

Reading this Image Journal interview with the novelist and short story writer George Saunders late last night made me wonder how … well, see this excerpt first then I’ll tell you what it made me wonder:

For a couple of years when I was quite young, the Mass was still done in Latin, and my mom tells me I could say it from memory, beginning to end. Artistic things were going on there. Every day the altar would be decorated differently, in different colors, for different holy days and so on, and I remember being really interested in that—in the care that was taken in the visual display. And there were things about the Mass itself that were powerful training for a would-be artist. The Mass is a beautiful, big metaphor, and one thing a kid could learn by going to Mass over and over was that meaning can be conveyed in various ways, including sublingually and subconceptually, through metaphor and repetition and what is not said. That’s great training for an artist—the idea that even if you can’t articulate a certain effect, it can still be happening. Once that notion gets into you, you’re hungry for it the rest of your life. I’m grateful for all those things: For the idea that you can be more than you think you are. …

That’s really great. It made me think about how the only thing my kids know is the Orthodox form of Christianity. The younger two kids only remember Orthodoxy. Matthew was seven when we became Orthodox, so he might have some memories of Catholicism, but surely most of his sense memories of churchgoing are in Orthodoxy. And that means a far more elaborate mystical and aesthetic experience of Christian worship than he would have gotten anywhere else.

Orthodoxy has it’s problems, Lord knows, but one thing the Orthodox Church knows how to do better than everybody else is celebrate liturgy (Many Eastern Rite Catholics use the same liturgy, so I mean them too.) The colors of the icons and the vestments, the liberal use of incense, candles everywhere and the aroma of beeswax; the frequent crossing, bowing, kissing, blessing, and ritual gestures that tell a story; and the fact that nearly all the liturgy is sung, sometimes in ancient melodies that simply stun — I’m wondering how this kind of thing stands to affect the artistic imagination of children raised in it. We know how having something similar in preconciliar Catholicism affected George Saunders. I wonder how it’s going to affect my own children, especially if any of them become artists, but if not, then simply their own imaginations.

I’m not making a theological claim here, but an aesthetic one linked to theology. Will the fact that their experience of Christianity as children has been so sensually vivid make a difference in how they think about the faith as adults? In how they think about the world?

I grew up in a low-church Protestant tradition that did not emphasize liturgical worship, or sacramentals. I think God heard our prayers just as well as he heard the prayers of anybody else. But as longtime readers know, when I walked into a medieval cathedral in France for the first time, I didn’t know what hit me. There was something about my own personality and sensibility that resonated so deeply with the rich colors in the stained glass, and the vaulting architecture. Beauty made God more accessible to me, more real. It’s not that way with everybody, granted. But reading the Saunders interview tonight made me wonder how my own sensibility as a writer, and a Christian writer, would have been different had I grown up in a more aesthetically complex tradition.

There’s no way to know, of course, and in any case I’m grateful for what I was given. It no doubt shaped me in ways that aren’t clear to me now, and perhaps had I been raised in a more liturgical, sacramental church, I would have taken it all for granted. Who’s to say? This later passage in the Saunders interview offered me a clue:

Image: But for a reader, the presence of ghosts and prayer and so on seems to suggest that life is more than just what is evident in the material realm. Is this something you are thinking about when you’re writing?

GS: Well, as I mentioned, my sense is that we live in an incredibly material time. We like stuff, yes, but we are also inclined to think that whatever is, is all there is. Whatever we feel is sufficient. Whatever we habitually think is right. That’s a weird contemporary trait, that we could be so arrogant as to think that it just so happens that in this generation we are fully equipped to know all that there is, and that we can know it logically and via the senses, period. And this inclination leads us to be very rational and data-reliant and pragmatic and mystery-denying—and yet mystery is real. We have no satisfactory answers for any of the biggest questions.

For me, spirituality is the more intelligent part of me asking, “What are the odds that you, a little created cellular creature, just happen to be ideally suited to understand all of this?” Smarter generations have known that we are just sensing little bits of whatever the ultimate reality is. They treasured those little bits, and they didn’t overanalyze them or discount them. The spiritual life acknowledges that those little glimpses are real. I can’t get back to them all the time, but I can at least not forget that they exist. That would basically be my definition of the sacred: those little traces of that greater knowledge that extend beyond our everyday ability to grasp it—and then the spiritual life is just that set of rituals or practices that serve to remind us of the reality of those glimpses.

Any moment in which you say to yourself, “All right, stop bullshitting, please,” or turn your mind to your actual fears, or are shaken out of your usual position of clinging to certain things for comfort (your success, your position, your unerring goodness)—that is a moment of prayer. Prayer is truth, or is steering oneself toward truth. Prayer is briefly getting free of our habit of denial, maybe. Sometimes I think it’s just taking a moment to ask, “Where am I?” and then answering that as honestly as you can. The convention is that we pray “to” God—but it reduces to the same thing, I think.

All my life — but especially when I was a kid — I have had this strong sense that there was much more going on than we could see in front of us. As a boy, I craved some validation of the sense of mystery that I carried within me but could neither articulate nor find articulated, or even represented. My father found that in nature, but I could not follow him there. For me, it came by stumbling into art and architecture. I remember being shown a Monet painting for the first time when I was in ninth grade. It was in a collection of plates in the center of our literature textbook. I kept staring at it, trying to figure out why the experience of this painting of the sea felt more like the sea than a more realistic reproduction of the same scene. After that, I started checking books of Impressionist art out of the library, trying to understand it. By the time I found my way into the Chartres cathedral at 17, and made the connection between beauty and religion, I was primed. Prior to that, in my ignorance and lack of experience, I had rejected Christianity because I thought it was mostly about sitting still and listening to a morally edifying talk. I had no idea, no idea at all, that it could be a portal into great mystery.

Maybe I’ve got it backwards. Maybe my latent aesthetic sense guided my religious belief. If I had never had the opportunity to experience a form of Christianity that was aesthetically rich, I wonder if I would have drifted away from religion, and become one of those people who say art is their religion. Hmm… .

OK, enough from me about this. I would love to hear from you readers about how your aesthetic experience of church as a child, or as a young adult, shaped the way you see the world — especially if you are an artist of some sort. I don’t think that only people who grew up in highly liturgical, or exuberant forms of Christianity (e.g., Pentecostalism), are the only ones who have something to say here. I have heard it said of Marilynne Robinson that her Calvinism shapes her aesthetic. I don’t know her work well enough to say (nor do I know Calvinism well enough to say), but here’s a bit from someone who does:

Robinson’s Calvinism, however, is not just a political theology. It is aesthetic as well—not just a matter of topics and themes, but something woven into her style: the luminosity of her carefully crafted sentences, the attentive attention to detail, the respect with which she describes the small movements of character and conversation. She touches on it in Gilead, where narrator John Ames, the Congregationalist minister, writes: “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought to be aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. … I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.”

In her autobiographical meditation on Psalm 8, Robinson amplifies this sense of a Protestant aesthetic: “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

What better description of the creative process—indeed, of her own finely wrought work—than this: “So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.”

I need to think about that, and how what Robinson’s “Protestant aesthetic” differs from the way a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian would see the world. I welcome your comments, and even more, I welcome your stories.

And don’t miss the Image Journal interview with Saunders. I’ve never read his work, but it’s still a great interview.

[Note to readers: Today is Good Friday (or, to be precise, Holy Friday) for Orthodox Christians. I wrote this post on Thursday night, and have scheduled it to appear on my blog today. I will not be approving comments on this holy day, because I am staying offline. Please be patient; I will approve everything on Saturday. — RD]

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.