Rod Dreher's Blog, page 592

Catechism By Gramsci

Here’s a bit from Catholic theologian Tracey Rowland:

Thus, in order to destroy their power [i.e., the power of the ruling classes in Christian countries], it followed that one had to undermine the so-called cultural hegemony of Christianity itself.

Different Marxist factions had different ideas about how best to go about this. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci drew a distinction between what he called a “war of manoeuvre” and a “war of position.” The war of manoeuvre was the Stalinist model. One simply used political violence to achieve one’s ends. But Gramsci thought this would not work in the more highly developed Western countries. For these countries, he recommended a war of position. A war of position is one in which one first identifies “switch-points of social power” and then one seeks to peacefully take control of those switch-points. The switch-points all relate to the field of cultural values – in particular, the arts and education. The most important switch-points of power are positions like school principal, university professor, government policy maker, education department bureaucrat and journalist.

In 1967, Rudi Dutschke, a German student leader, reformulated Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of cultural hegemony with the phrase, “The long march through the institutions.” Instead of a long military march, such as the one undertaken by the Chinese Marxist Maoist Tse-Tung, in the highly developed western countries the long march would be through the most culturally significant of our social institutions – that is, through schools, universities, courts, parliaments and through the media, through newspapers and television.

Here, from Villanova theologian Katie Grimes, is an example of this long march. She’s teaching this course in the fall:

22481 THL 4490-002 RACISM and the CATHOLIC CHURCH TR 4:00-5:15 Grimes

Although the Catholic church understands itself as the Body of Christ, the lived history of the church in the United States shows that the church has not been able to bring blacks and whites together as members of one body. This course will explore the way in which the church has operated as an instrument of not racial unity and justice but racial segregation and white supremacy. This course seeks to empower students to draw upon the vast resources of the Catholic theological tradition in order to supply solutions to the theological problem of white supremacy.

Now, it would be really interesting to take a course on how Roman Catholic Christianity has historically dealt — and failed to deal — with issues of race and racism. Just not one taught by über-SWPL Prof. Grimes — we have noted her rich theological and social views here, here, here, and here — whose scholarship includes advocacy for the street theology of gangsta rapper Tupac “A smokin ass nigga robbed me blind/I got a tech nine now his smokin ass is mine” Shakur. A glimpse of her views on Catholicism and racism:

Since the racially segregated space of the United States operates as a habitat of white supremacy, the vice of white supremacy pervades the church’s corporate body and thereby permeates all of its practices, including those of baptism and the Eucharist. Rather than turning to the church’s sacraments as an antidote to the vices of a presumed external culture, this paper chronicles the way in which these very practices have been corrupted by it. The church cannot reform itself from within. In order to enable these sacraments to build the body of Christ, the church must work to dismantle regnant patterns of white supremacist racial segregation in the world.

In other words, the hopelessly corrupt, in Grimes’s view, Catholic Church did not betray itself by supporting white supremacy. The Catholic Church, rather, was being what it is:

Indeed, the vice of white supremacy entered the church’s corporate body not just when the church was acting in un-Catholic ways; the church acquired this vice even by being itself. 

She goes on to say that white people (such as herself) must not be persuaded to do what she considers to be the right thing, they must be compelled to act on behalf of “Black Power,” which, she says, puts the interests of black people first:

Theologians need to learn to care less about how to persuade whites to do the right thing and more on what they need to be made to do. Rather than intensifying projects of moral suasion, the church ought to begin devising strategies of white corporate coercion. At stake is not just the justice of the church but its very identity as the body of Christ.

Just so you know, the “Racism And The Catholic Church” course at Villanova, a Catholic university, will be taught by a theologian who believes that the Catholic Church is, in its very essence, a racist institution, and that its theologians ought to be trained not to make better arguments to convert people away from racist views and practices, but to coerce whites against their will.

It seems to me that we can explain Katie Grimes’s employment one of two ways:

1. The theology department at Villanova is so politically correct that it foolishly hired a racist white theologian who wants to destroy the Catholic Church; or

2. The theology department at Villanova knows exactly what it’s doing

UPDATE: Comes the complaint that Women In Theology, the collective blog for culturally leftist female theology professors, does not explicitly invite transgendered women to participate. To which Villanova Catholic theologian Grimes responds:

Katie from Women In Theology here. Thanks for calling this to our attention. We are currently discussing ways to better avoid any form of transphobia or gender policing, and we particularly welcome advice from those who identify as genderqueer or transgender on how to do this.

For myself personally, I would consider trans women to be women full stop. I sincerely regret not realizing the exclusionary character of the language we chose and take full responsibility for it.

Oh. OK.

Porn: A Civilizational Crisis

Conor Friedersdorf makes a familiar point: that if porn is so bad for you, why is there less rape and greater support for gender equality?:

None of that answers whether pornography is medically healthy or morally permissible. But given that the rise of ubiquitous porn has coincided with significant declines in rape and spousal abuse, and with increasing support among men for gender equality, how can anyone be confident that it makes men disrespect women, let alone that it causes harm so dramatic that it represents a civilizational threat?

The same logic applies abroad.

Lots of countries with ubiquitous pornography seem to be much more successful, and to treat women much better––to grant them more rights, dignity, and status as equal persons––than countries where porn is more restricted or unavailable. Again, that doesn’t prove that the new era of hi-definition, streaming video porn doesn’t represent a public health threat, or that it isn’t morally objectionable, but it does suggest that Burk and those who hold his particular views about pornography have a lot of explaining to do about how porn functions in the real world.

Conor is referring to this earlier column by Denny Burk, in which Burk calls the pornography epidemic a “civilizational calamity.” Burk writes:

The sexual revolution promised us more sex and more pleasure. It has actually delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure. It has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life. It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting. This means that it has given us a generation of young men completely unprepared for marriage and for fatherhood.

I’ve read the Time magazine cover story on which Burk’s column is based, though the piece is not available online to non-subscribers. The lengthy Time story presents some neuroscientific evidence, as well as a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that prolonged exposure to pornography affects your brain and renders you sexually dysfunctional. Sociologist Gail Dines, writing in the WaPo, says the evidence that porn is a “public health crisis” is undeniable:

The thing is, no matter what you think of pornography (whether it’s harmful or harmless fantasy), the science is there. After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence and gender equality — for the worse. By taking a health-focused view of porn and recognizing its radiating impact not only on consumers but also on society at large, Utah’s resolution simply reflects the latest research.

The statistics on today’s porn use are staggering. A Huffington Post headlineannounced in 2013 that “Porn Sites Get More Visitors Each Month Than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter Combined,” and one of the largest free porn sites in the world, YouPorn, streamed six times the bandwidth of Hulu in 2013. Pornhub, another major free porn site, boasted that in 2015 it received 21.2 billion visits and “streamed 75GB of data a second, which translates to enough porn to fill the storage in around 175 million 16GB iPhones.”

Extensive scientific research reveals that exposure to and consumption of porn threaten the social, emotional and physical health of individuals, families and communities, and highlights the degree to which porn is a public health crisis rather than a private matter. But just as the tobacco industry argued for decades that there was no proof of a connection between smoking and lung cancer, so, too, has the porn industry, with the help of a well-oiledpublic relations machine, denied the existence of empirical research on the impact of its products.

Samuel D. James, a former student of Denny Burk’s and a Friedersdorf fan, writes:

I think Friedersdorf misses the crucial point. The reason that Time, and many other publications, are covering the pornification of American culture is not a sexual violence epidemic, but it’s an epidemic nonetheless. It’s an epidemic of sexual and spiritual dysfunction. Psychologists and social scientists are literally just beginning to uncover porn’s terrifying neural imprint. As Aaron Kheriarty has noted in an excellent essay for The Public Discourse, the mental and emotional stakes of sexual habits are high, and where those habits involve isolation, fantasy, and authoritarian control of the sexual ritual, the human brain quite literally begins “fusing” reality with unreality.

This psychological phenomenon has consequences. As Time and others have noted, those addicted to porn tend to struggle with even the basic elements of interpersonal relationships. But the consequences also go far beyond social skills. Pornography doesn’t just absorb libido, it replaces it with something completely different. This is why, for example, Kevin Williamson saw scores of men paying for access to an adult entertainment convention when cheaper and legal prostitution was nearby. What these men want, by definition, isn’t a sexual experience but a pornographic one. They aren’t getting bootleg copies; they’re going into another business altogether.

This gets at the heart of what I think professor Burk meant when he said “civilizational calamity.” Porn doesn’t supplement sex. It replaces it. And what many in our culture are beginning to understand is that whatever it replaces it with is an acid to healthy sexual psychology. Lest we pat ourselves on the back for ending the kind of patriarchy that Friedersdorf mentions, let’s remember that in the porn-saturated world of the internet, women are still subjugated to the language, attitudes, and behavior that exemplifies a culture where they are in real physical danger.

 

Reading Francis Through Rieff

Liberal ex-priest James Carroll writes to celebrate Pope Francis’s “love letter,” saying in part:

Conservatives have long warned of the dangers involved in a forthright, public acknowledgment that moral complexity requires flexibility. Rules and doctrines, they worry, will be undermined if absolutist attitudes about their meaning are mitigated. The conservatives are right, and they will surely see this new exhortation as a further source of concern. Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy toward the divorced and remarried doesn’t only mean that those people will more freely partake of Communion. It also means that the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, however much it is still held up as an ideal, will not grip the moral imagination of the Church as it once did.

This, to Carroll, is good news.

Ross Douthat has other views.  He says Francis has not formally changed Church doctrine, but has endorsed the de facto violation of it:

But there is also now a new papal teaching: A teaching in favor of the truce itself. That is, the post-1960s separation between doctrine and pastoral practice now has a papal imprimatur, rather than being a state of affairs that popes were merely tolerating for the sake of unity. Indeed, for Pope Francis that separation is clearly a hoped-for source of renewal, revival and revitalization, rather than something that renewal or revival might enable the church to gradually transcend.

Again, this is not the clear change of doctrine, the proof of concept for other changes, that many liberal bishops and cardinals sought. But it is an encouragement for innovation on the ground, for the de facto changes that more sophisticated liberal Catholics believe will eventually render certain uncomfortable doctrines as dead letters without the need for a formal repudiation from the top.

This means that the new truce may be even shakier than the old one. In effectively licensing innovation rather than merely tolerating it, and in transforming the papacy’s keenest defenders into wary critics, it promises to heighten the church’s contradictions rather than contain them.

And while it does not undercut the pope’s authority as directly as a starker change might have, it still carries a distinctive late-Marxist odor — a sense that the church’s leadership is a little like the Soviet nomenklatura, bound to ideological precepts that they’re no longer confident can really, truly work.

This reminds me of Philip Rieff’s observation:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.

Bless Her Heart!

I. LOVE. HER.:

Hell hath no fury like an angry Southern mom.

Taking away electronics is a common parental punishment, but this mother decided to take it one step further – and shoot up her children’s iPhones with a rifle.

‘I hereby denounce the effects that social media have on my children,’ the mom shouts at the beginning of the video, a gun in her hand. ‘Their disobedience and their disrespect.’

She then points the gun and the camera moves to reveal that she’s not about to shoot a pheasant or a bottle, but is aiming straight for an iPhone perched on a tree trunk.

More:

‘My children’s lives are more important to me,’ she begins, as the camera reveals she is standing over the trunk with a sledgehammer, ‘than any electronic on this earth.’

‘Good for you,’ one of the children interrupts. ‘We still don’t give two f***s’.

‘I refuse to have them influenced in negative ways,’ the mother continues.

‘Contacting people they don’t know, being involved in drama they don’t need to be in, and being in trouble at school for having phones out.’

She then hammers the remaining pieces a few times, her dog watching, before screaming: ‘I’m done!’

Read the whole glorious thing! I’m short-listing this heroine for a Nobel.

‘Bacon Is My Beatrice’

Teaching the Divine Comedy to his students at Petra Academy in Bozeman, MT, Sam Koenen was trying to convey how the pilgrim Dante sees Beatrice sacramentally. Struggling for a way to explain to them how sacramentalism works, he drew on the Jim Gaffigan routine about bacon (“the most beautiful thing on earth”). This:

The pig is an amazing animal. You feed it an apple, it makes bacon. The pig is turning an apple, essentially garbage, into bacon. That’s magic…!

One of the students said, “Mr. Koenen, it sounds like bacon is your Beatrice.”

Well, yeah, the teacher said.

So they made him a bumper sticker. And they made one for the author of How Dante Can Save Your Life. It will be on the bumper of a certain 2007 Honda Accord before sunrise Monday. Thanks, y’all!

Vibrancy! Diversity! Conformity!

WE DEMAND that Stanford expels Panda Express from campus, since its food is culturally appropriative, and celebrates the harvesting of the endangered panda bear.

WE DEMAND that Stanford renames White Plaza to Black Plaza. Naming a central plaza after a race is hateful.

WE DEMAND that Stanford recognizes that half-lives matter, and establishes a committee to fund the Chemistry and Physics Departments accordingly.

Et cetera. Some of them were funny, some of them were lame. But campus snowflakes melted down. The College Fix collected some of the social media rage:

Sorry fam for putting this out here, but the Review just loves being disgustingly offensive. April Fools or not, this is no joke. These are people’s lives and cultures and struggles. Stop throwing out slander. Stop throwing out garbage. And I see no one wanted to put their name on this one either. That’s the only smart thing y’all did with this article. …

Y’all think you’re being hella cute and funny with this don’t you? Like, are you forreal? Do you still not get it? There are no words. Honestly I’m tired. Blatant disrespect. Have some freaken respect. Have some ounce of understanding. Oh but wait, too busy crying cis white male tears that I still don’t really see the point in collecting?????? …

So, another day, another absurd day on an elite American campus. But here’s where it gets well and truly pathetic. The administration of an actual Ivy League college elite American university e-mailed this drivel to all students on Friday:

Dear Stanford Student,

When you joined Stanford University, you became part of our diverse, vibrant community founded upon academic excellence, innovative thinking, collaborative engagement and civic responsibility.

The challenge for us all is to balance freedom of thinking and expression with our responsibility to others. At Stanford, we believe one way to do this is for community members to engage in respectful conversations with each other. The goal of these exchanges is to foster a learning environment that includes multiple perspectives and life experiences different from our own, thereby affirming the value of all identities as distinctive strengths of our university community.

At Stanford, we are each responsible for our words and actions, and we are accountable to the people in our community who are impacted by what we say, regardless of the initial intent.

Free speech is paramount to the success of our academic community, and, at the same time, we must reject language that encourages or reinforces stereotypes and bigotry including racism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia [sic], sexism, homophobia—discrimination of any kind. As James Baldwin says, “Language is a political instrument.”

There is a long history in the United States of racial animus through satire that we all need to recognize. We must be careful of participating in and perpetuating inequities. Parodies or stereotypes of people of color, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientation and gender non-conformity have the effect—whether intended or not—to undermine the legitimacy and value of already marginalized people.

Thus we must be particularly alert as to how our language, including the use of humor, can undermine the climate of respectful dialogue that we are building and be careful that it does not work to delegitimize critical claims toward the diversity that Stanford affirms.

Humor and satire are powerful tools that can be provocative and profound; they can also be insensitive, hurtful and cruel. When we employ such tools, we need to measure the impact of our words and be responsive to those whose own experience is the basis for the intended humor.

We know many in our community have felt the pain of recent events. And, as members of this community, we acknowledge your hurt. We want you to know that we care about you and value you.

Integrity, empathy and accountability are foundational to our community, and it is our responsibility as ethical citizens to practice these actively with each other.

Sincerely,

Greg Boardman

Vice Provost for Student Affairs

Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Patricia J. Gumport

Vice Provost for Graduate Education

These people. I swear. First of all, does it not occur to these adults that by acting like nursemaids to a bunch of spoiled privileged children, they are only making their lives and the life of the university worse? Here’s an audio version of that letter, for your listening pleasure.

Second … really, Stanford administration? You’re trying to tell college students that they can’t poke fun at favored minority groups? This paragraph is asinine:

Free speech is paramount to the success of our academic community, and, at the same time, we must reject language that encourages or reinforces stereotypes and bigotry including racism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia [sic], sexism, homophobia—discrimination of any kind. As James Baldwin says, “Language is a political instrument.”

Translation: “We have to say that free speech is important, because we like to tell ourselves that. But you should not feel free to say anything critical of favored races, Judaism, Islam, women, gays, or, well, anybody. As the party commissar says, “Language is a political instrument.”

Honestly, somebody help me here. What kind of actual adult college administrators draft a response to an humorous op-ed in a student newspaper in the first place?

The Stanford Review editorial board responded, in part:

Time to address the elephant in our inboxes. We are disappointed that, in the middle of student elections, Stanford’s administration has chosen both to politicize themselves and to ignore by far the clearest abuse of free speech this campus has seen all year. An April Fools’ Day joke commanded 300 words of commentary from Stanford. Anti-Semitic comments from a sitting student Senator? Two words, and in passing.

Our administrators claim that students must be “accountable to [those] impacted by what [they] say, regardless of the initial intent”. If this were true, nobody would dare engage in discussions of controversial topics at all.

Of course, there are limits to speech. Words that directly incite violence should be condemned and prohibited. But offense is subjective. At Brandeis, the Asian American community created a gallery of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”, only for another group to deem the gallery itself offensive and demand it be taken down. Punishing people for statements that cross a line known only to the person hearing them leads to fearful silence, and a campus unwilling to push boundaries or ask questions that matter.

Neither the Review nor the administration has called on Stanford to prohibit speech like Senator Knight’s. However, condemning speech and attacking its merits is itself an exercise in free speech. And leveraging administrative power and procedures to threaten and stifle words because you do not like them, or because they intrude on campus “empathy”, is arbitrary and wrong.

 

Norcia In Bozeman

Brother Ignatius, guestmaster of the Norcia monastery, and Area Man

Montana readers, come out tonight (Saturday) to Bozeman’s Petra Academy at 7pm and hear me talk about the Benedict Option by sharing the wisdom of the Benedictine Monks of Norcia. I’ve been transcribing the interviews I did in February, and will be sharing some of their advice for how we orthodox Christians can live more faithfully in these chaotic post-Christian times. I knew I had good material when I left Norcia, but listening to those interviews again and transcribing them made me excited about this book, and sharing what those prayerful men have to offer to the world.

Come out tomorrow night to get a preview of the Benedict Option book.

Bring The Gaypocalypse To Tupelo!

There was a time not too long ago when, had this Guardian story been written as is for a major media outlet, it would not have been published because it would have been seen as aiding and abetting the cause of the Religious Right (by feeding prejudice). Times have changed. Vice is a virtue, and debauchery is now liberation of a politically advantageous kind. Arwa Madhawi reports from Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, California. Excerpts:

Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, and I’m one of them. It’s my second time at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the world. I’m staying at the Hilton in Palm Springs, which is hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.

I like her colorful, forthright, descriptive language. No euphemisms there, nor any of the self-censoring media used to do when reporting on these things a decade or two ago, lest the public read the facts and come to doubt the Narrative. Do not fail to observe that even today, despite the securing of same-sex marriage rights and the ongoing cultural revolution around all things LGBT, if a cultural conservative used the same language to describe the event, it would be prima facie evidence of bigotry. More:

There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).

“Flashing is normal,” Charlotte, 24, told me. “I get flashed at a lot.” Random girls pulling you into their hotel rooms are also pretty standard. One year, there was a minor earthquake in Palm Springs. Debbie, a Dinah veteran who has attended every event since 1991, recalls that half the water splashed out of the pool. Most of the girls were too drunk to realize or care.

The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.

It’s a surreal experience: for a few days the world is turned upside down, the minority is suddenly the majority. Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing.

I will never accept that acting like an animal is evidence of human dignity. And:

Speaking of economics: corporations have finally woken up to the profit margins of the margins, and the Dinah has become a lot more attractive to brands. Bacardi, Bud Lite, Smirnoff and Barefoot Wines are all big sponsors this year. Bacardi and Bud have sent teams of scantily clad promo girls (most of whom are straight) who hand out swag, pose for photos and generally act a little gay for pay. While it’s normally irritating to get relentlessly advertised to, in this case it’s a sign of progress. You’re not a real human until you’re recognized by corporate America.

What a great line, that last one, and so very true. Read the whole thing. 

This is our world now. I spent the past few days talking to conservative Lutheran pastors in Canada, where LGBT consciousness in both law and culture is further advanced than in the US. If you doubt the need for the Benedict Option, spend a little time north of the border talking in depth with orthodox Christians, both pastors and laity. Where Canada is today, the US will be tomorrow or the day after — though Deo gratias, we will be spared the terror of the Human Rights Commissions.

Note too the conclusion of the Dinah Shore Weekend piece for a sign of what’s to come:

It’s also a reminder of how much today’s gay people owe to previous generations. There was a long fight for our right to party, and it’s not over yet. I got back from the Dinah on Tuesday morning; the same day Mississippi’s governor signed legislation making discrimination against gay couples legal. There’s still a while to go before we can all really celebrate.

Madame DeFarge has a Sapphic side, methinks. Humankind will not be free until the gaypocalypse comes to Tupelo.

UPDATE: I kept getting annoyed reading the people in the comments section saying that I had a double standard for Spring Break and Mardi Gras. Annoyed, because I specifically mentioned Spring Break and Mardi Gras as examples of heterosexuals acting like rutting animals. The software saved an earlier version of the post, but not the final version, and my online connection cut off as the flight I was on began to land. So, yes, absolutely compare this to heterosexual bacchanals. That’s totally fair. Thing is, events like Spring Break and Mardi Gras, when they get like this, are simply regarded as vice. This writer frames the Dinah Shore Weekend as an identity-politics virtue.

Religious Liberty In Mississippi

I am trying to find a neutral description of what the religious liberty bill the Mississippi governor just signed into law would and would not do. The Washington Post said:

It is the first law to prohibit state government from taking any discriminatory action against a person, religious organization, business or government employee for refusing services to LGBT people because of “sincerely held religious beliefs” or “moral conviction” against same-sex marriage, extra-marital sex and/or transgender people.

That is misleading. When I first read that, I thought that it would give a fundamentalist Christian cashier at Burger Doodle the right to refuse to serve fries to gay customers. That would be wrong, no doubt. But it turns out that that’s not exactly what the law does. ABC News says:

Specifically, religious organizations protected by the law can:

– Decline to “solemnize any marriage” or provide wedding-related services based on their religious beliefs or moral convictions. Those services run a full gamut, from wedding planning, photography, disc-jockey services and floral arrangements to cakes, venues and limos.

– Decide “whether or not to hire, terminate or discipline an individual whose conduct or religious beliefs are inconsistent” with their beliefs or moral convictions.

– Decide to whom they will sell or rent housing they control based on their religious beliefs or moral convictions.

Does anybody actually believe that religious organizations should not have those rights — even if you believe that exercising those rights would be wrong? More from ABC News:

In addition, for others protected under the law:

– Adoptive or foster parents can raise a child they’ve been granted custody of by the state with the same beliefs and convictions of those protected by the law.

– Medical and therapy professionals can decline “treatments, counseling, or surgeries related to sex reassignment or gender identity transitioning” and “psychological, counseling, or fertility services” to people whose lifestyles violate their religious beliefs.

– People can create “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming, or concerning access to restrooms, spas, baths, showers, dressing rooms, locker rooms or other intimate facilities or settings.”

– State employees and those acting on behalf of the state may recuse themselves from authorizing or licensing legal marriages, although they may not stand in the way of others doing so.

With the possible exception of the state employees’ provision, I fail to see why any of this is outrageous. Ryan T. Anderson goes further:

HB 1523 specifies types of people and types of organizations for particular protections—including religious organizations, medical professionals and professionals working in the wedding industry, and government employees. It crafts careful protections for each type of entity.

For example, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a religious organization because it declines to solemnize or celebrate a same-sex wedding, or because it makes employment decisions in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage. It prevents the government from discriminating against religious organizations that do adoption or foster care work in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage as the union of husband and wife.

When it comes to professionals, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a surgeon, psychiatrist or counselor because they decline to do sex-reassignment surgery or decline to do marriage counseling for a same-sex marriage. The bill makes clear, however, that it cannot be used to deny visitation or proxy decision making to a same-sex spouse, nor to deny any emergency medical treatment required by law. Likewise, under HB 1523 the government could never penalize a photographer, baker or florist who declined to help celebrate a same-sex wedding.

As for government employees, HB 1523 strikes a reasonable balance. It says that the government cannot discriminate against employees for speech or conduct they engage in in their personal capacity outside of their job responsibilities when it comes to these three beliefs.

And regarding the state employees’ provision, Anderson says that the bill:

says that a government employee may seek a recusal from issuing marriage licenses, provided they do it ahead of time and in writing, and provided they “take all necessary steps to ensure that the authorization and licensing of any legally valid marriage is not impeded or delayed.” A commonsense win-win outcome.

Isn’t it? It’s saying that religious people with conscience objections don’t have to participate in the licensing of same-sex marriages, but they have to register their disapproval in advance, and make it so that no gay couple seeking to marry faces any obstacles or delay to their wedding from the state licensing authorities. Why is that unfair?

I reserve the right to revise these opinions if I read a more complete account of what the law does and doesn’t do. But at this point, it seems like a legitimate attempt by a socially conservative state to offer limited and specific protections to people who have a sincere religious objection to changing views on homosexuality. I might be wrong about this, and appreciate correction if so.

My friend Matthew Sitman strongly disagrees, and in particular focuses on conservatives complaining about big corporations punishing states for attempting to protect religious liberty in these matters. Excerpt:

What the conservative position on LGBT rights and religious freedom, exemplified in the Mississippi and North Carolina bills, amounts to is this: they want maximal ability to opt out of any and all situations that might involve doing business with LGBT people or treating them in minimally considerate and decent ways, but then rail against others for not going along with it. They want the state to sanction their own discrimination, but then are horrified when others freely choose to follow a different, better path. They want their freedom, but despise the free choices of others.

Anti-LGBT conservatives, in other words, want to live in a world made over entirely in their own image. Freedom means getting their way, all the time. The future of religious liberty in this country will be a perilous one indeed if it becomes associated with such nonsense.

The problem with this is that the pro-LGBT side also wants maximal ability to impose its own views of right and wrong in these matters on everyone else, and to refuse to treat religious dissenters in minimally considerate and decent ways. Consider the Washington state florist Barronnelle Stutzman, who is paying a heavy legal price — and who may lose her business — because she declined on conscience grounds to provide flowers for her friend and longtime customer’s same-sex wedding. Stutzman explained her position in the Seattle Times:

That’s why I always liked bouncing off creative ideas with Rob for special events in his life. He understood the deep joy that comes from precisely capturing and celebrating the spirit of an occasion. For 10 years, we encouraged that artistry in each other.

I knew he was in a relationship with a man and he knew I was a Christian. But that never clouded the friendship for either of us or threatened our shared creativity — until he asked me to design something special to celebrate his upcoming wedding.

If all he’d asked for were prearranged flowers, I’d gladly have provided them. If the celebration were for his partner’s birthday, I’d have been delighted to pour my best into the challenge. But as a Christian, weddings have a particular significance.

Marriage does celebrate two people’s love for one another, but its sacred meaning goes far beyond that. Surely without intending to do so, Rob was asking me to choose between my affection for him and my commitment to Christ. As deeply fond as I am of Rob, my relationship with Jesus is everything to me. Without Christ, I can do nothing.

I’m not ashamed of that, but it was a painful thing to try to explain to someone I cared about — one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. But Rob assured me he understood. And I suggested three other nearby florists I knew would do an excellent job for this celebration that meant so much to him. We seemed to part as friends.

But then I was sued.

Seems to me that treating Barronnelle Stutzman with “minimal consideration and decency” would at least put filing a lawsuit against her out of bounds. She does not believe in refusing to do business with gay customers across the board. She had been doing so for years, knowing that her customers were gay. And she suggested three other places where her gay friend could find a florist to accommodate him. But that wasn’t enough.

I can understand why progressive-minded people in Mississippi would not want to trade with a bakery or florist that would not participate in gay weddings. That’s just a price that those business owners would have to be willing to pay for following their conscience. And Matthew is right, to a certain extent, that free-market conservatives have limited grounds for objection when a corporation refuses to do business in a state it regards as discriminatory. But I think conservatives are perfectly within bounds to point out that companies like PayPal have no problem doing business with countries that are far more discriminatory against gays and lesbians than the State of North Carolina is, but this doesn’t affect their desire for corporate profits.

The fact is, very few people on either side have a consistent, non-absolutist view on what constitutes an acceptable degree of religious liberty in an era of greatly expanding gay rights. Is there any situation in which gay rights supporters believe that a business owner or religious organization should have the right to opt out of providing a product or service to gay couples, on conscience grounds? If not, then religious liberty is meaningless. It’s only meaningful when it protects the right of sincerely religious people to do unpopular things in accord with their conscience.

The problem is that gay rights and religious liberty really are a zero-sum phenomenon in most ways. That is, the advance of one comes at the expense of the other. Nobody can have his way completely without causing the other side some loss. The problem for social and religious conservatives is that the other side either doesn’t understand the compromise it demands from the religiously dissenting minority, or it doesn’t care — and with the rare exception of places like Mississippi, the other side holds most of the power.

I would bet that in 20 to 30 years, this would hardly be an issue in Mississippi. In my home state, Louisiana, a majority of adults under the age of 50 support same-sex marriage. Social change is coming, and coming fast, even in the most culturally conservative parts of America. But having won so many victories, and so quickly, the LGBT rights side seems determined to rub the noses of the culture war’s losers in their own humiliation.

One more time: if I am missing something about the Mississippi law that ought to affect my opinion, please let me know.

Your Working Boy In Bozeman

Hey Bozeman, Montana, area readers, you have a chance to hear Your Working Boy tonight and Saturday night, as part of the Trinity Presbyterian Church’s lecture series. Here’s the info.

I have received assurances that the lecture halls will be a Sasquatch-free zone. A guy’s gotta have his safe space.