Rod Dreher's Blog, page 629

Oberlin Surrenders to SJW Food Fighters

Oberlin, a.k.a. the ‘Portlandia’ reality show (Photo via IFC)

The terms of capitulation could hardly have been more perfect. From the NYT:

Michele Gross, Oberlin’s director of dining services, said in a statement on Monday that “in our efforts to provide a vibrant menu, we recently fell short in the execution of several dishes in a manner that was culturally insensitive.”

She added: “We have met with students to discuss their concerns and hope to continue this dialogue.”

“A vibrant menu”. For frack’s sake. The whole school is a Portlandia episode come to life.

Will the day ever come when a college administrator tells students, “No, you stupid twits. Grow up!”? Ever?

The Heart of the Trump Matter

I’m genuinely grateful to the reader who posted this on an earlier thread. He explains Trump better than anyone I’ve yet read:

Rod: “Trump is not my guy, and Trumpism not a credible answer.”

On an intellectual level, I agree. The visceral level is another matter. I am an atheist white Southerner who has always voted a straight Democratic ticket because I found the Republicans to be repulsive. But even I feel the appeal of Trumpism. I lost all hope for a better future when I completed an advanced degree and found that I had not improved my job prospects a bit. I am sick to death of hearing politicians bleat on about how wonderful America is, when it is demonstrably not working for millions and millions of middle and working class (and poor) citizens. Working class people are seeing their life expectancy decrease, welfare programs and Social Security are supposed to be cut, with us working until we’re 70 to make up the difference, but there’s always money to fight another stupid, counterproductive war. Practically every public and private institution has lost its legitimacy.

Trump appeals to the nihilism that the elites in this country have let us fall into. I tried to fight against it. I did what they said. I had no college degree, so I studied hard while working hard and got two of them. Instead of this making any kind of a positive difference for my family, I am right where I was before.

So while the logical part of my brain says that Trump is a self-aggrandizing charlatan, I find it hard to think through the abiding sense of anger and despondency that I have developed and most of my friends and family have developed. We are governed by people that we have come to hate, and at the moment, Trump looks like the only way to even have a shot at making them hurt like they’ve made us hurt. That is a tough proposition to turn down.

This brings to mind the Randy Newman song, “I Want You To Hurt Like I Do”. Lyrics include:

If I had one wish

One dream I knew would come true

I’d want to speak to all the people of the world

I’d get up there, I’d get up there on that platform

First I’d sing a song or two you know I would

Then I’ll tell you what I’d do

I’d talk to the people and I’d say

“It’s a rough rough world, it’s a tough tough world

Well, you know

And things don’t always, things don’t always go the way we plan

But there’s one thing, one thing we all have in common

And it’s something everyone can understand

All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do

I just want you to hurt like I do

I just want you to hurt like I do

Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do”

 

Leftward, Ho!

There are a couple of long political reads in The Atlantic that I want to bring to your attention.

The first, by Peter Beinart, discusses the apparently unstoppable leftward drift of the country.  Excerpts:

I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, when the backlash against ’60s liberalism still struck terror into Democratic hearts. I watched as Ronald Reagan moved the country hard to the right, and as Bill Clinton made his peace with this new political reality by assuring white America that his party would fight crime mercilessly. Seeing this year’s Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clinton’s ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction.

But I was wrong. The more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that the current moment looks like a mirror image of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The resemblances are clear, but their political significance has been turned upside down. There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.

Beinart goes on to make a case that even if Republicans hold the Congress and win the presidency, the culture is moving steadily to the left, and will continue to do so. I think he hugely overestimates the impact of Occupy, and would like to think he overestimates the impact of the militant Black Lives Matter movement, except that the Democratic Party today really does see no enemies to the left — and that is their victory.

Beinart argues that on race, for example, even the Republicans are accepting at least some of the left-wing critique:

Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”

Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left.

For the record, I think it’s a good thing if we work to fight police brutality and harassment of black motorists. Conservatives ought to care about those things, as matters of justice! My main objection is to the sense you get among activists that these are the worst problems facing black America, and the viewpoint that seems to remove all moral agency from African-Americans. The crazy demands by black activists on campuses make it harder for conservatives to take seriously legitimate complaints about racial injustice.

More:

And it’s not just crime where the Democratic Party’s move leftward is being met with acceptance rather than rejection. Take LGBT rights: A decade ago, it was considered suicidal for a Democratic politician to openly support gay marriage. Now that debate is largely over, and liberals are pushing for antidiscrimination laws that cover transgender people, a group many Americans weren’t even aware of until Caitlyn Jenner made headlines. At first glance, this might seem like too much change, too fast. Marriage equality, after all, gives gays and lesbians access to a fundamentally conservative institution. The transgender-rights movement poses a far more radical question: Should people get to define their own gender, irrespective of biology?

Yet the nation’s answer, by large margins, seems to be yes. When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people. It also found a dramatic rise in recent years in the percentage of Americans who consider anti-transgender discrimination a “major problem.” According to Andrew Flores, who conducted the study, a person’s attitude toward gays and lesbians largely predicts their attitude toward transgender people. Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”

That is why, in the 2016 presidential race, Republicans have shown little interest in opposing transgender rights. In July, the Pentagon announced that transgender people will be able to serve openly in the military. One Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, denounced the move. Another, Jeb Bush, appeared to support it. The remaining contenders largely avoided the issue.

This feels right to me. Beinart is right: transgender is a far more radical thing than homosexuality, but I am not surprised that the public is largely getting in line. Everything follows from the principle of that Justice Kennedy articulated in the 1992 Casey decision:

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Does anyone dispute that most Americans today agree with this? If marriage can be fundamentally altered because of it, why not gender? We have lost sight of the Christian meaning of marriage, of sex, of sexual complementarity, and now we are losing sight of the meaning of male and female. We are going to reap the whirlwind, I believe, but Beinart is right about the leftward, liberationist movement of our culture.

The reason why, Beinart says, is that the Millennials (even Republican ones) are a lot less conservative than older generations. Read the whole thing.

The second Atlantic piece is by David Frum, analyzing the GOP crack-up. It starts like this:

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America aren’t the hipster protesters who flitted in and out of Occupy Wall Street. They aren’t the hashtavists of #BlackLivesMatter. They aren’t the remnants of the American labor movement or the savvy young dreamers who confront politicians with their American accents and un-American legal status.

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.”

They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back.

Frum goes on to discuss the Tea Party movement, and how the GOP leadership and donor class fundamentally misread it:

Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. [Emphasis mine. — RD] One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

Read the whole thing. It’s a good analysis of the class war within the GOP, and how immigration in particular separates, and separated, elites and the donor class from the base. Frum says the Republican Party has four options now. I’ll leave it to you to read them and decide which makes the most sense. Frum concludes with a great question: What happens to an elite whose followers withdraw their assent? 

I would dissent from Frum’s analysis in one way. He writes that the GOP should “recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.” Frum has been pro-gay marriage for a while now, and I know that he, like many in the Washington-New York conservative commentariat, finds religious conservatives to be a drag on the party and its prospects. I could certainly be wrong about this, but I sense that Frum, like many establishment folks on both the left and the right, thinks that the question of marriage is something essentially trivial, a “culture-war outrage.” What’s still the matter with Kansas?, etc.

Here’s the thing: the Indiana RFRA defeat was (or ought to have been) for conservative Christians a revealing moment about where we actually stand with the Republican Party leadership. The interests of big business will always matter more to them than the opposite. It was true on immigration and it is true on religious liberty when it conflicts with gay rights. Religious conservative voters may well vote Republican because they are confident that even thought Republican politicians are useless in protecting their interests, at least they aren’t positively menacing, like the Democrats. But voting Republican as the lesser of two evils is not the same thing as affirming the Republican Party and its leadership.

Me, I don’t trust the GOP, but I am resisting being pissed off, because anger is only going to blind us to what needs to be done, and may cause us to commit to futile causes. Trump is not my guy, and Trumpism not a credible answer. This is why I’m working on developing the Benedict Option idea as a creative, realistic way forward for small-o orthodox Christians. The GOP is going to do what it’s going to do, but it’s almost certainly not going to be doing much that defends my interests as an orthodox Christian — not only because its donor class and elites dislike bitter clingers like me, but also because the country is moving away from the things we believe in.

Educating for a Dark Age

In conversation, Yale professor David Gelernter and Bill Kristol talk about how the past two generations in American life have focused on disdaining Western culture. Gelernter says:

And during this same period, universities were being taken over by intellectuals and moving hard to the Left. Intellectuals have also been Leftist, have always been hard to the Left. So the dramatic steer to the Left coincides with a huge jump in the influence of American universities. We have a cultural revolution. And the cultural revolution is that we no longer love this country. We no longer have a high regard for this country or for the culture that produced it. We no longer have any particular feelings for Western Civilization.

More:

KRISTOL: All traditions are called into question, to say the least, you know.

GELERNTER: Exactly. The Judeo-Christian tradition means nothing to us, except in terms of hostility. And we have a generational shift so that when we start in the 1970s and 80s, suddenly public schools’ and college teaching went way down. Deteriorating. There was that famous report in the 1980s, mediocrity, saying mediocrity in the schools. In 1983 or something like that.

So the schools were failing to teach but at least the parents had been educated before the cultural revolution. You know, they’d been educated in the 60s and the 50s, some by the 40s or the 30s. So they – When their children were taught garbage, when their children were taught nonsense, when their children were taught outright lies, at least the parents could say, “Hold on, not so fast, are you really sure about that?” Or “You know, there are Republicans in this country, too.” Or, “You know, we’ve tried those policies, and they created catastrophes. Are you sure we should do this all again?”

But what happened in – as we move out of the 90s and into the new century – the children educated in the first generation of the cultural revolution in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, those children are now the young teachers. And then the not-so-young teachers. And they’re the parents.

And so the children who were being taught nonsense and garbage and lies in school, instead of going home and having the parents say, “Well, wait a minute, this is really idiotic, by the way.” The parents say, “Yeah, that’s what I was taught, too.” You know, the same.

KRISTOL: The second generation.

GELERNTER: So we have second-generation ignorance is much more potent than first-generation ignorance. It’s not just a matter of one generation, of incremental change. It’s more like multiplicative change. A curve going up very fast. And swamping us. Taking us by surprise.

KRISTOL: And it seems to me – and of course, everyone has his own and so much prejudice is based on where and when you grew up and so forth – but what strikes me is the difference – I mean, people didn’t know much honestly in my generation or probably our parents’ generation.

I mean, there was a lot of faking it. A lot of what was then this middlebrow culture that was kind of vague knowledge of the name of an artist but not really knowing anything about his work. And in some ways the critique, at the time, the whole middlebrow thinking was anti-intellectual, people were almost complacent in it. But there still was this sense that you should know about X, Y, or Z. And it would be good to know more but you’re a busy person so you can’t have time to learn a language or to read or think but you admire the people who do.

What strikes me today is – correct me if I’m wrong – is there’s not even that sense of lack or of not knowing or knowing that you don’t know or admiring the people who really know. It’s almost not even a sense of what it would mean to really know something. Is that exaggerating?

GELERNTER: I think that’s exactly right. It’s certainly not the case that my education in the 60s and 70s, was anything to write home about. It sort of overlapped the cultural revolution, but a good deal of it was before. My parents often said, “Well, you mean they’re only teaching you that, they’re not teaching you this?” My parents themselves complained about the education they had gotten: “We wish we had studied this, we wish they had taught us that.”

But what we used to do and, for example, art education has always been a joke. Music appreciation was never taken seriously. But what we used to do was, at least, expose students to things that they might be excited about, that their own minds would propel them into. So they would know nothing about Beethoven in any deep sense but they would have heard a phrase from the Fifth Symphony, they would have heard a phrase from the Ninth Symphony or the Moonlight Sonata. Doesn’t mean they know Beethoven, but it means if they love music, the door is open, they have some concept of what culture is.

If you are the sort of person who responds to painting or who loves history or cares about writing or poetry, you still know it’s there.

KRISTOL: You have a sense that maybe you should want to know more; then if you have a taste for it, you then actually learn more.

GELERNTER: It’s a good thing to care about these things.

Read the whole thing.  I’m working tonight on some questions that a potential publisher of my Benedict Option book wants to know before her firm decides whether or not they want to make an offer. She asks, reasonably:

What concrete phenomena reveal that we are going into a new Dark Age? Why is Obergefell the impetus and not Roe v Wade?

That’s a good question — and the Kristol/Gelernter conversation gives us most of the answer.

What is a Dark Age? It is a time of mass amnesia. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, a massive amount of knowledge from the Classical world was lost. The monks preserved much of it painstakingly in their monasteries, which became fortresses of memory throughout the long forgetting. I wrote about this phemonenon back in October, in a long post about the work of social anthropologist Paul Connerton. Excerpt from that post:

Connerton says that modernity is a condition of deliberate forgetting, of choosing to deny the power of the past to affect our actions in the present, so as to create a new condition of existence marked by the individual’s freedom of choice. Capitalism requires this deliberate forgetting, and facilitates it, and rites we invent in modern times “are palliative measures, façades erected to screen off the full implications of this vast worldwide clearing operation.” Here is the core:

Under the conditions of modernity the celebration of recurrence can never be anything more than a compensatory strategy, because the principle of modernity itself denies the idea of life as a structure of celebrated recurrence. It denies credence to the thought that the life of the individual or a community either can or should derive its value from the acts of consciously performed recall, from the reliving of the prototypical. Although the process of modernisation does indeed generate invented rituals as compensatory devices, the logic of modernisation erodes those conditions which make acts of ritual re-enactment, of recapitulative imitation, imaginatively possible and persuasive. For the essence of modernity is economic development, the vast transformation of society precipitated by the emergence of the capitalist world market. And capital accumulation, the ceaseless expansion of the commodity form through the market, requires the constant revolutionising of production, the ceaseless transformation of the innovative into the obsolescent. The clothes people wear, the machines they operate, the workers who service the machines, the neighborhoods they live in — all are constructed today to be dismantled tomorrow, so that they can be replaced or recycled. Integral to the accumulation of capital is the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment. Integral too is the transformation of all signs of cohesion into rapidly changing fashions of costume, language and practice. This temporality of the market and of the commodities that circulate through it generates an experience of time as quantitative and as flowing in a single direction, an experience in which each moment is different from the other by virtue of coming next, situated in a chronological succession of old and new, earlier and later. The temporality of the market thus denies the possibility that there might co-exist qualitatively distinguishable times, a profane time and a sacred time, neither of which is reducible to the other. The operation of this system brings about a massive withdrawal of credence in the possibility that there might exist forms of life that are exemplary because prototypical. The logic of capital tends to deny the capacity any longer to imagine life as a structure of exemplary recurrence.

What does this mean? 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.

Why was Obergefell the tipping point? (And believe me, it really was; as longtime readers know, I’ve been writing about this stuff for at least a decade, but few people paid attention until Obergefell.)

The Obergefell ruling was only possible as the conclusion of a long period of the dissolution of the ties that bind (in the Connerton sense). When the Supreme Court can find in the Constitution the right to deny not only biological reality, but virtually the entire history of Western thought and practice about sex and social relations, we have entered into uncharted waters. Obergefell is critically important because of what it says about individualism and desire in our post-Christian culture, and because anti-discrimination principles will be the instrument in which Christian individuals and institutions are banished from the public square, both in law and in culture.

In short, Obergefell is a condensed symbol of nominalist, therapeutic, individualist culture, and how it has conquered the American mind and the American Establishment. Roe v Wade was a part of this long march away from our past, and anything that would restrict individual liberties because of a Christian moral order, but it wasn’t as revolutionary. Roe did not challenge the basic idea of gender, marriage or family, much less write the cultural revolution that did into constitutional law.

What does this have to do with Kristol and Gelernter? Notice this from Gelernter:

So we have second-generation ignorance is much more potent than first-generation ignorance. It’s not just a matter of one generation, of incremental change. It’s more like multiplicative change. A curve going up very fast. And swamping us. Taking us by surprise.

Young adults today, especially many Christian ones, cannot explain in even a rudimentary way why we believe and do the things we do. It’s all about individual choice and preference for them. And so they don’t really know that they are guided by their own passions, and that these choices are being made for them, because neither their parents nor their normative institutions gave them any grounding in the past, or outside of themselves. Their religious institutions have by and large been conquered by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, an infinitely malleable faith that bears only tangential resemblance to what came before it.

And here is Kristol, again:

What strikes me today is – correct me if I’m wrong – is there’s not even that sense of lack or of not knowing or knowing that you don’t know or admiring the people who really know. It’s almost not even a sense of what it would mean to really know something. Is that exaggerating?

Gelernter says it is no exaggeration. I have heard the same thing from other college professors, men and women who teach at Christian colleges. Most of the kids they teach don’t know what they don’t know, and critically, don’t care.

The Benedict Option has to be about learning to love the past, and to care about it, to the point of suffering for it. And not just “the past,” which can become an idol, but the God and the faith that comes to us through the past, in Scripture, and in Tradition. We cannot make it up as we go along. Churches that do this in an attempt to be relevant and seeker-sensitive are preparing their flocks for assimilation to the secular culture.

The Czech dissident novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The struggle of Christians in the West today is not the struggle of conservatives versus liberals, but the struggle of remembrance against amnesia. I’m reading a history now recommended by Yuval Levin, The Final Pagan Generation, by Edward Watts. It’s about fourth-century Rome, which was the tumultuous century when the Empire left behind its paganism and embraced Christianity. The thing that impresses me so deeply about this book is how the pagan elite didn’t see what was coming until it was too late. They really did lack the imagination to grasp how radically things were changing.

This is true for Christians in America too.

UPDATE: Look, if you want to see this post as an opportunity to gripe about Bill Kristol, Iraq, and neocons, I must warn you that I’m not going to publish those comments. Stick to the subject matter of the post.

Theology of the Lady Parts

O, Fortuna, this is just too much!:

The Augustinian Patristic Institute, near St Peter’s Square in Rome, will host the first meeting of the European Society of Aesthetic Gynaecology in April next year.

The society is headed up by Dr Alexandros Bader, a world renowned surgeon, who boast of being able to ‘enhance’ a woman’s G-spot on his website.

Topics covered at the landmark conference are said to include the lifting, tightening and bleaching of female genitals.

Delegates will also discuss the amplification of the G-spot and the O-spot, a point behind the surface which experts claim is more sensitive to pleasure than the G-spot.

The delegates will also be greeted to an audience with Pope Francis and a walk with in the Vatican gardens, the Times reported.

They will then take part in a ‘hands on course’ which features operations on ’14 live cases’.

From his harem in Hell, Pope Alexander VI Borgia, whose family were noted fans of aesthetic (and technical!) gynecology, must be amused. Maybe it’s just me, but I find this more ridiculous than truly scandalous. It’s the sort of thing that makes the Church seem completely silly. Then again, that’s a different kind of scandal. I mean, this isn’t about female health; it’s about the basement equivalent of boob jobs. For this these cosmetic surgeons get an audience with Pope Francis?

Maureen Mullarkey, the Catholic writer who essayed about this upcoming conference in The Federalist, takes this kind of thing seriously:

We look at the world and mourn the West’s descent into the dark. Nostalgic for confidence in the truth of what Christianity proclaims, we grow wistful for lost certainties. Little by little, trust in the reality of transcendence—of a world unbound by created time, redeemed, and sanctified—recedes in favor of its mirror image: contemporary society, with its immediate material concerns and ideological obsessions.

Christians gaze at the sinkage only to rationalize the decline of the church as a victim of this inversion. Perhaps it is time to attend more carefully to the church as an agent and accomplice of its own subversion.

Our Populist Future?

Bill Galston at Brookings says the rise of Trump could portend a populist future for America. Excerpts:

Elections are about more than counting votes. They reveal peoples to themselves. They are democracy’s mirror. And what we see is often disconcerting.

In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.

Whence the new vogue in the West for illiberal populism?

Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.

Galston, who has been advisor to Democrats, cites some recent statistics showing that for some time now, the system has ceased to work for the vast number of Americans in the middle. Galston says that

Donald Trump didn’t create these sentiments. Like demagogues throughout history, he is exploiting them for his own purposes.

And:

Conservative populism in America is a complex phenomenon. Compared with Europeans, Americans have long been less inclined to respect elites. The demographic transformation set in motion by immigration reform half a century ago has reached critical mass, and many white Americans fear that the country in which they grew up is disappearing.

For me, it’s the rapid erosion of Christianity and the moral order based on it, and the spiteful attitude towards Christianity among elites in law, academia, media, and liberal politics. I have no doubt at all that they are working to marginalize and defeat people like me at every turn, and they are using the language of tolerance and equality to legitimize it. They didn’t create the rising hostility to orthodox Christianity in this country, but they are exploiting it for their own purposes.

I also believe that the economic elites who support both parties care more about their own narrow interests than the interests of their countrymen. This year, in Indiana, with the RFRA controversy, conservative voters saw for the first time business elites take a stand against social conservatives (as opposed to staying on the sidelines). They would rather see the nation and its history, its traditions, and its traditional liberties, dissolve than do anything that gets in the way of making money and pushing cultural revolution, both on this country and others.

I hope more and more social and religious conservatives will wake up to the contempt with which the GOP’s money men hold them. But what good will that do? The Democrats are worse on social issues, and not much better on economics.

Trump is not the president we need, to put it mildly. But he’s not going to be the last populist to run for president. I would be lying if I said that did not please me. In some important ways, the Benedict Option is a vote of Christian ‘no confidence’ in the system.

Read the whole thing. 

Diversity Cult Polices Boundaries

A reader writes:

I wanted to pass along this email that I got today from Career Services at my university. This what we grad students have to look forward to when we go on the job market to try to get a job in academia now–a thorough vetting of our commitment to diversity. Notice the complete lack of anything related to intellectual or ideological diversity.

We get emails announcing diversity-only initiatives and fellowships and other opportunities all the time. What’s different now is that this is increasingly becoming part of the materials required for the job application.

I’m sure that the Career Services people were trying to be helpful by sending this list of tips out, but it’s not exactly encouraging. Liberals often wonder why conservatives self-select out of academia; these kinds of requirements that essentially signal that “you will be discriminated against” are one major reason.

Here is the full text of the message sent to grad students at this university:

It is becoming increasingly common to see requests for diversity statements in announcements for tenure-track positions, and you may have already seen requests like these:

 

Please submit a cover letter, curriculum vita, research and teaching statements, contact information to 3 to 5 references to provide letters (the names/addresses, including email address), and a separate statement describing your past experience in activities that promote diversity and inclusion and/or plans to make future contributions.

 

Please submit the following: a cover letter, curriculum vitae; teaching statement (including teaching philosophy, teaching experience, commitment to effective learning, concepts for new course development, etc.); research and scholarship statement (innovative concepts that will form the basis of academic career, experience in proposal development, mentorship of graduate students, etc.); commitment to diversity statement (including broadening participation, integrating multicultural experiences in instruction and research and pedagogical techniques to meet the needs of diverse learning styles, etc.); samples of research such as working papers, journal articles, or books.

 

Interested individuals should submit the following application materials: 1) a cover letter specifying which rank you are applying for; 2) your most recently updated curriculum vitae; 3) Research, Teaching, Service, and Diversity Statement – a statement of research interests, teaching experience, and service, including your contributions toward enhancing diversity and inclusion in higher education; 4) pdf copies of 2-3 publications; and 5) three letters of recommendation

 

Institutions define diversity in multiple ways; most aim to emphasize that they value the variety of experiences, interests, and worldviews that are informed by differences in race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more.  Before you begin writing a draft of your own statement that addresses diversity, a good starting point will be to explore the diversity-focused webpages of several institutions. It is helpful to reflect on your own personal diversity experiences and goals in the same context as these institutions. Some universities have more robust diversity resources than others, but this information can be very helpful in providing background perspectives for your statement. These are just some examples from different institutions (and within the same institution) that illustrate the type of topics addressed:

University of Chicago
NC State
NC State Design
Johns Hopkins University
Seattle University
University of Pennsylvania

With this information in mind, you can now turn your attention to developing your diversity statements. In an ideal scenario, the institution making the request for a diversity statement also describes in detail what they are hoping to get from you. Some good examples are below:

UC San Diego


Carnegie Mellon
Rochester Institute of Technology

Not every institution will provide such clear guidelines, but you can begin to create a draft statement by combining the different recommendations offered by those academic institutions that do. The diversity statement isn’t just a definition of what you mean by diversity, it is a way to demonstrate what you have done and what you will do to engage with diversity going forward. In general terms, diversity statement should include past experiences and activities, and also future plans to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. As you are thinking about your statement, keep the following questions in mind, as these can help you to structure what you are writing about:

What does diversity mean to you, and why is this important?
Do you understand the university’s diversity goals?
What have been some of your experiences either being part of a non-majority group, or interacting with diverse populations?
How has your thinking about diversity actively influenced your teaching, research, and/or scholarship?
In thinking about the different roles you have played, and will play, as part of your university service, what role has/will diversity issues play?
What role do you believe that advising and mentoring play in working with diverse populations?
Does your engagement with diversity help students prepare for careers in a global society?

Your experiences working with diverse populations will themselves be diverse, and there is no one type of experience that will be sought by search committees. For example, if you are first in family to go to graduate school, you might emphasize that in your statement. If you are a woman scientist in a field where there are not many women faculty (e.g., computer science) you could discuss your experience relating to this as well. As long as you are making an honest attempt to consider your role in meeting each institution’s diversity goals, then you are on the right track. Think about your past experiences and future goals as they relate to these approaches:

Service experience with under-represented groups such as outreach, tutoring, or other types of programs addressing topics relevant to groups such as women, minorities, veterans, and people with disabilities. This might include being involved in committee or group focused on diversity, equity, climate and/or inclusion

Teaching, advising, or mentoring under-represented or under-served groups

Teaching approaches that focus on different learning styles and that can accommodate different learning abilities

Being aware of challenges faced by historically underrepresented populations

Community involvement beyond the university

Research activities that specifically contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion

Future activities you might pursue in context of how they might fit into a research area, department, campus, or national context, listing any ongoing campus initiatives of particular relevance you have found from your research into the institution’s diversity efforts

If you do not conform to this ideology, you may not be employed. Hey, I believe that as a general rule schools have the right to set the boundaries for what it means to be a part of that community. But “diversity” is such a politically charged category. It is not sufficient that you believe in “diversity”; you have to show how you have acted on that belief. This is a test to weed out politically unreliable or undesirable scholars.

This is a heresy test. This is a loyalty test. I can understand religious universities doing something like this; it is important for them to police their boundaries. But let us note that mainstream secular universities, when they propagate the Cult of Diversity (and it is that, because its dogmas are considered uncontestable), are engaged in a secular-left version of the same kind of thing, while pretending to be tolerant and open.

 

Federal Judge: ‘Gay’ and ‘Straight’ Don’t Exist

The noose tightens around the necks of Christian colleges and universities:

The federal ban on sex discrimination in education includes a ban on sexual orientation discrimination, a federal judge in California ruled this past week.

U.S. District Court Judge Dean Pregerson’s ruling appears to be the first time a federal judge has made this ruling as it pertains to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal ban on sex discrimination in education.

Without much fanfare, advocates and federal officials in recent years, with support from some courts, have undertaken a significant effort to expand the reach of existing federal anti-discrimination laws — primarily Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX — to cover lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination.

The California case was brought by two women who allege that Pepperdine University “discriminated against and harassed them” because of their perceived sexual orientation.

Discussing “the line between discrimination based on gender stereotyping and discrimination based on sexual orientation,” Pregerson wrote, “the Court concludes that the distinction is illusory and artificial, and that sexual orientation discrimination is not a category distinct from sex or gender discrimination.”

Read the whole thing. The full text of Judge Pregerson’s ruling provides more grist, including:

Simply put, the line between sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination is “difficult to draw” because that line does not exist, save as a lingering and faulty judicial construct. …

In sexual orientation discrimination cases, focusing on the actions or appearance of the alleged victim of discrimination rather than the bias of the alleged perpetrator asks the wrong question and compounds the harm. A plaintiff’s “actual” sexual orientation is irrelevant to a Title IX or Title VII claim because it is the biased mind of the alleged discriminator that is the focus of the analysis. This is especially true given that sexuality cannot be defined on a homosexual or heterosexual basis; it exists on a continuum.

So there’s no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality? Really? If Judge Pregerson has defined homosexuality and heterosexuality out of existence, then no wonder he sees no distinction between discriminating on the basis of male and female, and discriminating on the basis of same-sex romantic relationships.

To be sure, Judge Pregerson’s ruling only allows the case against Pepperdine to go forward. He has not ruled on the ultimate merits of the claim against Pepperdine, a Christian university,, only that the claim does have sufficient merit to proceed forward to trial.

If Pepperdine is found guilty of a Title IX violation, it could lose federal funding, though that has never actually happened; what is more likely is that the school would have to pay damages to the plaintiffs. The precedent would be chilling, though, for religious liberty, and set up a major First Amendment clash in the courts.

It’s all happening so fast, isn’t it? How can you dispute these people when they and their allies change the rules on, well, reality, in order to get what they want? People send me e-mails all the time pointing out that we orthodox Christians have to stay in the public square and fight for our liberties, not do a Benedict Option withdrawal. I point out to them that nothing about the Benedict Option says we are obliged to quit fighting; in fact, I think it’s very important that we fight, even though the odds are stacked against us, if only because the fight delays the inevitable, and gives us time to prepare. The Benedict Option is in part our plan for when we have been defeated in court. What then? For the faithful, what form does the resistance take?

May the Farce Be With You

James C. passes this along:

The force is strong in Berlin.

A church in the German capital invited “Star Wars” fans to attend a special service Sunday themed on the sci-fi blockbuster in an attempt to attract more young people into the pews.

About 500 people heeded the call and attended the service, some carrying light saber props or wearing Darth Vader masks. It was more than twice as many as usually come to Zion Church on a Sunday.

“We were very happy to see so many people in the church today,” said Protestant pastor Lucas Ludewig said after the service. “It’s great that there are subjects that people are interested in. They trust us to make them part of the church service without making it too Christian or too Star Wars, but to find a good compromise.”

Says James C., “Taking ‘Star Wars’ too seriously and Christianity not seriously enough…is this not the West today? The quotes in the article are almost parodic.”

If a church teaches its children that Christianity is like a comic book, it should not be surprised when they grow up to put away childish things — including the faith. As with most things, we should look to Hank Hill (above) for spiritual guidance.

UPDATE: A megachurch in New Jersey:

Pastor Tim Lucas was 6 years old when the first Star Wars movie came out, and he remembers, in the Christmases that followed, replacing the tiny figures in his mother’s Nativity scene with Han Solo, Princess Leia and R2D2.

“I didn’t care about the star of Bethlehem,” said Lucas, the lead pastor at Morristown-based Liquid Church. “I cared about the Death Star.”

Now, Lucas — no relation to George, sadly — is doing the same thing on a wider scale as a new installment of the franchise is about to hit theaters. Services in the coming Sundays at Liquid Churches around New Jersey will weave the Star Wars story together with Biblical theology in what they’re calling a “Cosmic Christmas.”

This Sunday, Lucas will deliver his second weekly sermon dressed as Han Solo, reading from the Bible and playing Star Wars clips that are thematically similar (instead of a choir, dancing Storm Troopers; instead of Santa, Darth Santa).

And on Christmas Eve, Cosmic Christmas is culminating in a live, Star Wars-inspired live performance with costumed characters; at the end, instead of lighting candles, congregants will wield glow sticks shaped like light sabers.

Says the website of Liquid Church: “Tired of man-made religion? So are we.”

From www.liquidchurch.com

Sushi & Social Justice

The Social Justice Warriors at Oberlin College, perhaps the SJW-iest of the grim archipelago of SJW-dominated schools, have taken a bold, uncompromising stand over something utterly trivial. Normal college students would say, “Hey, this school cafeteria food sucks.” The SJWs say, “Hey, this school cafeteria food is offensive because it is inauthentic and appropriative of the culture of others!” From the Oberlin Review:

Diep Nguyen, a College first-year from Vietnam, jumped with excitement at the sight of Vietnamese food on Stevenson Dining Hall’s menu at Orientation this year. Craving Vietnamese comfort food, Nguyen rushed to the food station with high hopes. What she got, however, was a total disappointment. The traditional Banh Mi Vietnamese sandwich that Stevenson Dining Hall promised turned out to be a cheap imitation of the East Asian dish.

Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs, the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork and coleslaw. “It was ridiculous,” Nguyen said. “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”

The horror…the horror. More:

Perhaps the pinnacle of what many students believe to be a culturally appropriative sustenance system is Dascomb Dining Hall’s sushi bar. The sushi is anything but authentic for Tomoyo Joshi, a College junior from Japan, who said that the undercooked rice and lack of fresh fish is disrespectful. She added that in Japan, sushi is regarded so highly that people sometimes take years of apprenticeship before learning how to appropriately serve it.

“When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture,” Joshi said. “So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.”

Oberlin students from other races have gotten in on the titty-baby tantrumfest. From the NYPost:

Oberlin’s black student union joined in the fray this month by staging a protest outside Afrikan Heritage House, an on-campus dorm.

The cafeteria there wasn’t serving enough vegan and vegetarian options and had failed to make fried chicken a permanent feature on the Sunday night menu, the school newspaper reported.

Those students started a petition that also recommends the reduction of cream used in dishes, because “black American food doesn’t have much cream in it,” according to the Review.

The Review covered the black student group’s petition and subsequent protest at the dining hall, and the response by campus dining services administrator Michele Gross, who probably wants to shoot herself by now:

While Gross claims that CDS is working to meet the demands stated in the petition, many students are still concerned with the integrity and intention of Afrikan Heritage House’s space.

“We students are concerned about our safety,” said Gloria Lewis, College sophomore. “And so beyond that, it’s about having a safe space. So it’s not just the dining hall. It’s everything. It’s the posts on Yik Yak. It’s the micro-aggressions.”

Beyond the concerns of Afrikan Heritage House, Lewis said that she would like to see more oppression training held by faculty and staff on campus.

I bet she would. Béchamel is slavery! In fact, the black student group at Oberlin has delivered a 14-page set of demands to the college administration, signed by 700 emotionally disturbed malcontents. Excerpt:

[T]his institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. Oberlin College and Conservatory uses the limited number of Black and Brown students to color in its brochures, but then erases us from student life on this campus. You profit off of our accomplishments and invisible labor, yet You expect us to produce personal solutions to institutional incompetencies. We as a College-defined “high risk,” “low income,” “disadvantaged” community should not have to carry the burden of deconstructing the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system that we took no part in creating, yet is so deeply embedded in the soil upon which this institution was built.

The students demand “exclusive Black safe spaces on campus,” which is to say, segregation. And, in that other petition, fried chicken on Sundays. Think about it: ultraprogressive black students at Oberlin are demanding segregation and fried chicken.

If I were the president of Oberlin (heh), I would say, “OK, snowflakes, you want to gripe about the food? Then you’ll eat only foods culturally appropriate to Ohio. Nothing but goetta, skyline chili three-way and sauerkraut balls from now on.”

Says a reader who first alerted me to the Oberlin food fight:

Are all college students like this? Of course not. If they were, one shudders to think what they’d make of the Ramen noodle industry.

Still. Better, more authentic, more flavorful foods aren’t necessarily bad. It’s a cause you might support! But there are no longer complaints or gripes or suggestions. Only outrage. “Hey, putting ketchup on the linguini isn’t really Italian night,” becomes, “You are oppressing me with your white privilege.”

Why? Because it works. Saying that to a college administrator is like telling a self conscious girl that she looks fat in her jeans, or telling a young fella that size really does matter and, sorry pal, you don’t measure up. And threatening to do these things publicly.

No infraction is not a maximal infraction. Bad call by an official in the big game? Inauthentic gazpacho in the commissary? Too many stay-off-the-grass signs leading up to commencement?

Just like Selma.

Mole ruit sua?

That remains to be seen. Of course, I’ll be taken to the woodshed for displaying that kind of privilege.

But yes. The only response is mockery. Analysis is pointless. We need legions of pot smoking kids to mock them. We need South Park just as much or more than we need First Things. I know that’s a false choice. But the most important thing wild not be to get Camille Paglia yelling at these kids on campus. You need Chris Rock to get back on campus.

Fried chicken. As if any college administrator ANYWHERE would ever suggest that the dining halls should serve it more often to satisfy the black kids on campus. Can you imagine?

So now they are in trouble for NOT saying that.

And the administration dutifully calls in the PR team to accommodate.

Screw the politics. That’s HILARIOUS. From a conservative point of view, look at what these people made of themselves.

It’s classic comedy.

Lux et veritas, baby.