Rod Dreher's Blog, page 650

SJW Of The Year

I can’t even. I just can’t even. Read this Yale Herald cri de coeur from an undergraduate who is going to pieces because the master and associate master of her college house have failed her. Excerpts:

As a Silimander, I feel that my home is being threatened. Last week, Erika Christakis, the associate master of Silliman College, sent an email to the Silliman community that called an earlier entreaty for Yalies to be more sensitive about culturally appropriating Halloween costumes a threat to free speech. In the aftermath of the email, I saw my community divide. She did not just start a political discourse as she intended. She marginalized many students of color in what is supposed to be their home. But more disappointing than the original email has been the response of Christakis and her husband, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis. They have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel. They have again and again shown that they are committed to an ideal of free speech, not to the Silliman community.

Today, when a group of us, organized originally by the Black Student Alliance at Yale, spoke with Christakis in the Silliman Courtyard, his response once again disappointed many of us. When students tried to tell him about their painful personal experiences as students of color on campus, he responded by making more arguments for free speech. It’s unacceptable when the Master of your college is dismissive of your experiences. The Silliman Master’s role is not only to provide intellectual stimulation, but also to make Silliman a safe space that all students can come home to. His responsibility is to make it a place where your experiences are a valid concern to the administration and where you can feel free to talk with them about your pain without worrying that the conversation will turn into an argument every single time. We are supposed to feel encouraged to go to our Master and Associate Master with our concerns and feel that our opinions will be respected and heard.

But, in his ten weeks as a leader of the college, Master Christakis has not fostered this sense of community. He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.

Oh, it gets better. Are you ready for this? Here it comes:

I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns. I feel drained. And through it all, Christakis has shown that he does not consider us a priority.

If Yale had any sense of self-respect and intellectual responsibility, it would send all of these pampered crybabies home, and tell them not to come back. Honestly, it is time for this to stop. Think of all the kids in this country who would give anything for a chance to have a Yale education. Kick these mewling neurotics out and give those kids a chance. Come on, Yale, stand by your professors, stand by your staff, and stand by the students who come there to get an actual education, and not be subject to abuse by crazy people who have never been told “no”.

Ben Carson’s Pyramids

Actually, they were built to hold Little Debbie Swiss Creme Rolls (Waj/Shutterstock

Have you heard that Ben Carson believes the pyramids were built for grain storage? I had not until yesterday, listening to a caller to a public radio show, who went to pieces over what a freak like that might do if he got into the White House. Tyler Cowen tells everybody to calm down. Excerpt:

Besides, our Founding Fathers had some pretty strange notions about pyramids.  Most of them did a pretty good job in office.

What Ben Carson has done is to commit the unpardonable sin of talking about his religion as if he actually takes it seriously.

Loyal MR readers will know that I am myself a non-believer.  But what I find strangest of all is not Ben Carson’s pyramids beliefs, but rather the notion that we should selectively pick on some religious claims rather than others.  The notion that it is fine to believe something about a deity or deities, or a divine book, as long as you do not take that said belief very seriously and treat it only as a social affiliation or an ornamental badge of honor.

Bully for Ben Carson for reminding us that a religion actually consists of beliefs about the world.  And if you’re trying to understand his continuing popularity, maybe that is the place to start.

Read everything Cowen said about Ben Carson’s pyramids here.

He’s right. Cowen, I mean.

Benedict Option Mailbag

The mail I receive from readers is gratifying in part because it helps me understand what life on the ground is like elsewhere. A reader writes:

Virtually everything relayed to you by the guy in your blog post “Benedict Option Baby Steps” applies to me. Mid 30’s, young family, southern evangelical upbringing (I live in SC)…Piper, Keller, Dostoevsky etc…I would add Bonhoeffer and Lewis as well.

This is how I am implementing the BenOp in my own way. After months of following and reading all I can on the subject (both pro and con) I think I get the gist of where we will be going with this.

Example 1: Talking about it. I am the Men’s Director at my (very large, and I say that only to stress its influence) church here in town and the one thing that baffles me is how little Christians, and men in particular, actually read the Bible. In a complete departure from what is normal for us on Wednesday nights, I took the last 3 meetings and simply read aloud from the Bible. Week 1, Philippians; Week 2, I and II Timothy and last night I John; each in their entirety.

“How is this the BenOp?” one might ask. Well, for evangelicals who typically read very little and rely heavily on being “fed”, it was a very strange time. Not strange bad, but strange as in a higher sense of gravity. I didn’t elaborate, I didn’t prompt discussion, we simply read. Paul instructed us, via Timothy to commit to the public reading of Scripture. This reading was a new experience for them, but the ironic part is that this practice isn’t new, its simply forgotten. It is actually one of the oldest things we as Christians have ever done together. Our group used this as a time, not only to hear God’s Word, but to look at it as an opportunity to connect to those who have gone before us. The history of Christianity doesn’t start and stop in 2015. Making a connection with those saints that have gone before and those that will come after simply begins by sharing and cherishing the one Book that we’ve all used to guide and direct us. Scripture shouldn’t be a jumping off point for a lecture on money management or on how to fix your relationships, it is sufficient on its own.

Example 2: Taking the BenOp into prisons. I teach at our county detention center every Thursday night. If there ever was a group that needs a positive sense of fellowship and community, it’s these men. Gangs, drifting from place to place, drugs and the like are all manifestations of the attempt to fill a void left by their lack of community/family. (I realize that this is a generalization, but stick with me here). Giving them a sense of membership in something older, bigger and longer lasting than themselves actually seems to give hope. Jails can be the new monasteries…

Yes, there is more to the BenOp than that and I am anxiously awaiting the book. But I am not inclined to wait, we are to be the hands and feet now.

On another note, I am inclined to punch the next evangelical leader to use the word “winsome”.

Ha! The thing I love most about this post is the correspondent is “not inclined to wait.” Nor should he be! Like Leah Libresco in DC, there’s no reason not to start doing something right now. Something is better than nothing.

Another one:

I am a pastor of an evangelical church in New Jersey. Here’s what it’s like “on the ground” in my evangelical church. For background, I grew up in this church, went away for college and seminary, and then came back on staff in 2013. I was thrust into the role of Youth Pastor about a year and a half ago. I had no desire or intention of doing youth ministry. But, lo and behold, here I am!

Working with the students, I am not sure their parents really understand the crisis that we are in as a church (both locally and nationally). Very few students know the Bible. They don’t even know where to locate certain books of the Bible. There is a “core” of students who grew up in the church who know Scripture well, but I would say it’s less than half the group.

One of the main problems is sheer busyness. The Northeast lies under the dominion of Mammon. In one family, the father makes a ton of money as an executive of some business and works about 80 hrs. a week. The mother is in a medical school and is never home either. The parents don’t come to service on Sunday but just drop off the kids for Youth Group. I am trying my best to teach them the Bible, but I am sorely overmatched due to my other pastoral responsibilities. Teenagers are so emotionally and spiritually needy, but I am so relationally burnt out with caring for the rest of the flock, they definitely get my third or fourth best.

In an attempt to disciple men, I also meet with a group of young married men (25-35). How often do we meet? The only commitment they could make is once per month! And often, at least one or two men don’t come because of work responsibilities…yes, that’s right…work responsibilities…on a Sunday morning.

It sounds sexy to try to call people to a “higher commitment” for Christ, but I am often greeted with skeptical looks when I talk like that to people.

Furthermore, some men do want to commit more, but they are totally dominated by work since they commute to New York City.

I bet these parents, in the years to come, will be shocked and saddened when they find out they have raised Nones. I keep banging on the point here of how wrong it is for parents to outsource the spiritual formation of their children to the church (or to religious schools). Yes, parents should be able to count on their church and, if applicable, their children’s religious school to be partners in the serious formation of their children, but no institution can hope to be as effective as parents themselves. I’ve mentioned in this space before the reprimand a Catholic friend and I rightly received from a Catholic priest back in 2000, who tired of listening to us complain about all the catechetical failures of the RCC. He told us that we were right, but that did not relieve us of our responsibility to take matters into our own hands with ourselves and our families, when we had them. The resources are out there, he said; you can’t sit back and wait for the institutional church to do this for you.

Anyway, in this pastor’s situation, I think what he will see in that church is a winnowing away. People in the congregation — young people and their parents — who don’t embrace that “higher commitment to Christ” will not make it. They will drift and drift until sooner or later, they are lost to the church, and completely assimilated into the world. A church that changes itself to accommodate people like that will lose its core members who really are committed to Christ. Forget “seeker-friendly”; a church needs to be “finder-friendly” above all, and serve first those who really do embrace the faith in its fullness. A church that sees its mission as being a life coach to the bourgeoisie will not make it.

This part of the pastor’s letter got to me:

In an attempt to disciple men, I also meet with a group of young married men (25-35). How often do we meet? The only commitment they could make is once per month! And often, at least one or two men don’t come because of work responsibilities…yes, that’s right…work responsibilities…on a Sunday morning.

I have written in the past about how the Benedict Option doesn’t call on people to relocate out to the desert to a compound, or anything like it, but this letter reveals the limits of that approach. In a situation like the one this Evangelical pastor describes, I believe it will be necessary — not optional, necessary — for families to relocate and/or find another profession, for the sake of their own souls.

A friend who lives in a highly secular part of the country tells me he’s thinking of giving up his good job there to move with his family down to south Louisiana. He believes it may be necessary to give his kids a better shot at holding on to their Catholic faith, because despite all our problem here in Louisiana, the culture is still a lot friendlier to Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, than where he lives now. I would add that to live in a culture that expects family men and women to work so hard and so long that they have no time, or insufficient time, for religious life is a culture that will exterminate faith within its participants and their children. If that degree of commitment to one’s job is what is necessary to “succeed” on middle-class America’s terms, then Christians caught in that kind of culture are going to have to decide between God and Mammon. You cannot serve both.

Finally, here’s a good tweet reflecting on the Christianity Today cover piece by Michael Gerson and Pete Wehner, advocating what they call the “Wilberforce Option” (in contradistinction to the Benedict Option):

The success of any ‘Wilberforce Option’ is dependent on Benedict Option practices.

— Peter L. Edman (@pledman) November 3, 2015

I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way, but Peter Edman is right. Wilberforce and the Claphamites were able to sustain their level of engagement with the world for the cause of abolishing slavery and other social reform because they lived by thick practices. The Wikipedia entry on the “Clapham Sect” speaks to that in its opening paragraph:

The Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints were a group of Church of England social reformers based in Clapham, London at the beginning of the 19th century (active c. 1790–1830). They are described by the historian Stephen Michael Tomkins as “a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its centre of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage”.

That right there is a terrific example of the Benedict Option, and I appreciate Peter Edman bringing it to my attention. Another aspect of the Claphamites that I like from a BenOp point of view is that they did what they did from within an established church and tradition, thus avoiding the strains and the pitfalls that come with starting a new church.

In , Gerson said:

But this set of legal challenges [to religious liberty, by Obergefell] does not translate into social apocalypse. By many (though not nearly all) indicators, American culture is getting better. Divorce rates and abortion rates have declined in recent decades. Rates of violent crime and homicide are down dramatically from historical highs. Many religious conservatives mistake alarming legal trends for across-the-board cultural decay.

It is a mistake to assume that positive social trends — less divorce, less abortion — signal cultural health from a Christian point of view. Gerson is absolutely right that Christians like me, who tend to cultural pessimism, need to deal realistically with the fact that the country might not, in fact, be going to hell, but actually to heck, if that. I accept that caution from Gerson, but would make one of my own: the quality of life in the Scandinavian countries is, by most material measures, superlative — and these are pretty much godless societies. If we think of Christianity as primarily a social reform movement, as the early Social Gospellers did, we deny the core of the religion, and lay the groundwork for its dissolution. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book Natural Symbols (thank you to Father Peter Funk for recommending it to me), writes about “three phases in the move away from ritualism.” She’s talking here about reform within the Catholic Church of the 1960s, in which Catholic reformers sought to do away with what they took to be dead rituals, such as Friday abstinence from meat. She writes:

First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit is finished. … The reformers who set low value on the external and symbolic aspects of Friday abstinence and who exhort the faithful to prefer eleemosynary [that is, charitable] deeds are not making an intellectually free assessment of forms of worship. They are moving with the secular tide along with other sections of the middle classes who seek to be justified in their lives only by saving others from hunger and injustice.

The point is that even from a secular, anthropological point of view, to consider fidelity to Christianity as a matter of good works, downplaying the difficult-to-accept moral and theological aspects, is to open the door to secularizing the religion. I don’t think that this is what Gerson intends, but to cite positive social statistics as a counterargument to decline-and-fall-ism may be read as implying that Christianity is thriving because indicators of social health are improving. We would certainly hope, as Christians, to see believers building more stable, prosperous lives, but it is certainly possible to build a stable, prosperous life without having religious faith. That cannot be the primary measure of spiritual health.

Of course I agree with Gerson (and Wehner) that “religious conservatives must learn to operate in a same-sex marriage world,” and that that means at times “work[ing] cooperatively alongside people in gay marriages. This is not moral compromise; it is the normal practice of democracy.” But I disagree here:

Pulling back from the practical, religious conservatives will need to recover some perspective. For most of the past 2,000 years, Christians have lived in societies that did not reflect their sexual ethics. And sexual ethics is not the sum total of Christian ethics, which, at its best, affirms the priority of the person and the defense of human rights, well-being and dignity.

No, sexual ethics is certainly not the sum total of Christian ethics, but they cannot be set aside, either, for the sake of peace with the post-Christian world. It is precisely on this point — sexual ethics — that the greatest attacks on the Christian faith are coming in this culture. It is precisely that which draws lawsuits and government action against us and our institutions, and that will continue to do so. Nobody is going to sue Christians for proclaiming the countercultural Christian teaching about wealth, and trying to live it out. No Christian individual or church is going to be called a hater for insisting that the Bible means what it says about Mammon.

Not long ago, I heard a very sincere Evangelical say, “When can we get away from this stuff and go back to preaching the Gospel?” This is a trap. The Gospel can no more be sanitized of its hard sexual teaching for the protection of moderns who don’t wish to hear it than it can be sanitized of its hard teaching about wealth. True, Christians today can make an idol of sexual purity, but the answer to that is not to minimize its importance. Authentic Christian living is irreduceably ascetic, meaning that it requires all Christians to struggle against the passions of the flesh. This does not mean all Christians must give up all material goods and pleasures (though monastics are called to that), but it does mean that they must be rightly ordered — something that can only be accomplished by ascetic practices, as the Orthodox Church still teaches, and the Catholic Church understood until the Second Vatican Council.

Anyway, I think C.S. Lewis gets it right here. Sexual ethics are not the point of Christianity, but in an erotomanical culture such as ours, we had better be careful about downplaying them:

Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

To return to Peter Edman’s point: we will only be able to sustain the strength to live out the Wilberforce Option in public if we are living the Benedict Option in private. I would take this a bit further: the Benedict Option entails the Wilberforce Option as public witness. If we neglect the Benedict Option, though, in time, we will find no basis for the Wilberforce Option either.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the documentary Into Great Silence, about the Grande Chartreuse, one of the most ascetic Catholic monasteries in the world, it’s well worth your time. These men live in another world:

Campus Cultural Revolution –> More Culture War

Every time I think that there could not be anything more outrageous than whatever these crackpot campus Social Justice Warriors come up with, they manage to exceed my own imaginative capacities. Brace yourself for this one.

At Yale University, there’s a campus-wide tempest underway over an October 30 letter the wife of a master of Silliman College there wrote to residents of the college regarding the Intercultural Affairs Committee’s directions not to dress offensively at Halloween. Erika Christakis, whose husband Nicholas is master of the college (she is associate master), wrote, in part:

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin­revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience;increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity – in your capacity ­ to exercise self­censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? We tend to view this shift from individual to institutional agency as a tradeoff between libertarian vs. liberal values (“liberal” in the American, not European sense of the word).

Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society. But – again, speaking as a child development specialist – I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?

In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.

You would think that college students, especially college students at one of the nation’s leading universities, would appreciate that kind of respect for them. And if they disagreed with her, they would at least consider the matter debatable.

Oh no, no, no. Over 700 students and faculty at Yale (and a few at other colleges) signed an open letter denouncing Erika Christakis. It reads, in part:

The contents of your email were jarring and disheartening. Your email equates old traditions of using harmful stereotypes and tropes to further degrade marginalized people, to preschoolers playing make believe. This both trivializes the harm done by these tropes and infantilizes the student body to which the request was made. You fail to distinguish the difference between cosplaying fictional characters and misrepresenting actual groups of people. In your email, you ask students to “look away” if costumes are offensive, as if the degradation of our cultures and people, and the violence that grows out of it is something that we can ignore. We were told to meet the offensive parties head on, without suggesting any modes or means to facilitate these discussions to promote understanding. Giving “room” for students to be “obnoxious” or “offensive”, as you suggest, is only inviting ridicule and violence onto ourselves and our communities, and ultimately comes at the expense of room in which marginalized students can feel safe.

More:

To be a student of color on Yale’s campus is to exist in a space that was not created for you. From the Eurocentric courses, to the lack of diversity in the faculty, to the names of slave owners and traders that adorn most of the buildings on campus — all are reminders that Yale’s history is one of exclusion. An exclusion that was based on the same stereotypes and incorrect beliefs that students now seek to wear as costumes. Stereotypes that many students still face to this day when navigating the university. The purpose of blackface, yellowface, and practices like these were meant to alienate, denigrate, and to portray people of color as something inferior and unwelcome in society. To see that replicated on college campuses only reinforces the idea that this is a space in which we do not belong.

 

Nicholas Christakis attempted to meet with a group of students for hours to talk about all this. Take a look at how these coddled brats treated him:

There are more videos. Greg Lukianoff was there watching it, and writes:

One of the stronger accusations the students make is that Christakis’ refusal to apologize for his wife’s email makes him unfit to be master of Silliman.

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him.

“Who the f*ck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

This student is not alone. Many other students are going so far as to demand that Christakis and his wife resign from their roles as master and associate master. According to theWashington Post, students were drafting a formal letter Thursday evening, calling for the removal of Christakis and her husband from their roles in Silliman.

Read about the whole thing, courtesy of Lukianoff, of the indispensable FIRE.

Make no mistake about it, this mob is the enemy of free thought, the enemy of culture, the enemy of all of us who care about the intellect and learning. They are trying to hound this man and his wife off campus simply because she voiced skepticism over the university’s administration’s attempts to manage the way adult college students costume for Halloween. Incredibly, this mob of students, in the name of “safety,” demands that Mommy and Daddy Yale’s administration protect them from having to confront any image or sight that might cause them the least distress.

If the Yale administration gives a single inch to these people, they will have disgraced themselves. Mark my words, though: these young left-wing, anti-liberal tyrants will move into elite positions in the American establishment, because Yale is a gateway to that kind of privilege. And when they do, they will exercise that power against anybody who doesn’t bow down to their radicalism.

Sooner or later, the backlash will come, and it is not going to be pleasant for the Social Justice Warriors. Ordinary people are going to get sick and tired of this Maoist bullying, and push back hard. May that day be hastened.

 

Keep It Classy, Crimson Tide

Photographed outside a fraternity house off-campus student housing in Tuscaloosa:

Leonard Fournette was in Katrina.

You won't like Leonard Fournette when he's angry. pic.twitter.com/HPpgsk1C6l

— Bill Mooneyhan, (@billmooneyhan) November 6, 2015

The LSU-Alabama game is Saturday night. It was going to be a big game anyway, but after this — which, it appears, nearly everyone in Louisiana has seen by now — it’s going to be very, very personal.

The Book Plate of Doom

Found inside my purchase on Thursday from a used book store on Chartres Street in the French Quarter:

 

Aside from the solecism (“wrung”), this is a pretty impressive sentiment, one with which I wholly concur. I hope Joe Bille parted from this book, Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe from Byzantium to Kosovo, of his own volition. I am enjoying it very much.

Our Beloved Patron

Conor Friedersdorf and Your Working Boy, paying homage to Ignatius J. Reilly outside the former D.H. Holmes, on Canal Street. We thought of Mark Levin, and communiss, and bottle-green jackets.

Photo by the Mighty, Mighty Reihan Salam, with whom we broke bread at Domenica.

Why Trump Matters

This is a problem that’s a serious tragedy on more important levels than politics, but it may explain why people like me cannot understand why Donald Trump is so popular: middle-aged white men without college educations are dying in record numbers, and they’re killing themselves. From the NYT:

Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

They don’t really know why this is happening. This, below, is an important part of this story too. From the WaPo:

Deaton and Anne Case, both Princeton economists, received international media attention for the paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But before they submitted it there, they tried to get it published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Deaton said.

“We got it back almost instantaneously. It was almost like the e-mail had bounced. We got it back within hours,” said Deaton, who was interviewed in Dublin, where he was attending a conference on the Ebola crisis and global public health sponsored by Princeton University.

Deaton and Case then tried the New England Journal of Medicine, putting their work in the form of a two-page “Perspective” that summarized the alarming trend they’d discovered in government mortality statistics. Again they were rejected.

Why do you suppose that is? Is it that elites don’t want to hear about the suffering unto death of middle-aged white men with high school educations or worse?

A lot of people in this dismal demographic are backing Donald Trump, says this Real Clear Politics analysis of his supporters:

In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican. Slightly over half are women. About half are between 45 and 64 years of age, with another 34 percent over 65 years old and less than 2 percent younger than 30. One half of his voters have a high school education or less, compared to 19 percent with a college or post-graduate degree. Slightly over a third of his supporters earn less than $50,000 per year, while 11 percent earn over $100,000 per year. Definitely not country club Republicans, but not terribly unusual either.

… [H]is support comes from across the full range of Republican identifiers but is slightly higher among those who are less well educated, earn less than $50,000 annually and are slightly older.

The death story doesn’t explain Trump, to be clear, but it gives a pretty good idea where a lot of Trump’s support comes from.

Why is this happening to this demographic cohort exclusively? Steve Sailer offers a couple of partial answers: one is the Seventies Finally Caught Up With Them; the other is this:

Perhaps painkiller overdoses, mental health declines, reported pain, disability, dropping out of the labor force, lower wages, and The Big Unmentionable (immigration) all tie together. As Hispanics flooded in, lowering wages, blue collar whites felt less motivated to stay in the labor force as they aged and their bodies got creakier. Getting on disability requires, I imagine, an ability to get doctors and other authority figures to believe your account of musculoskeletal and/or mental health disabilities. The most effective way to get other people to believe you are disabled by physical and mental pain is to believe it yourself. And if you tell the doctor your back is killing you so much you can’t work and you persuade him, he’ll likely write you a prescription for some pills.

Note this passage from the Deaton/Case paper; emphases mine:

The three numbered rows of Table 1 show that the turnaround in mortality for white non-Hispanics was driven primarily by increasing death rates for those with a high school degree or less. All-cause mortality for this group increased by 134 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2013. Those with college education less than a BA saw little change in all-cause mortality over this period; those with a BA or more education saw death rates fall by 57 per 100,000. Although all three educational groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, increases were largest for those with the least education.

And note this too, while asking yourself what Republicans have done for these people lately:

Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience (lanekenworthy.net/shared-prosperity and ref. 30). The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans (31).

Remember a decade ago, how George W. Bush used his re-election mandate to try to privatize Social Security? Those were the days.

It’s important to note again that Deaton and Case say that nobody knows what is causing this. They offer possible economic causes. R.R. Reno at First Things offers some possible cultural causes:

The male-female difference is a fundamental, orienting reality in every culture. Having a sense of oneself as a man or woman gives us a place to stand in the world. The transgender revolution represents that latest, most dramatic stage in today’s efforts to efface the social authority of the male-female difference. Well-educated adepts know how to use today’s multicultural patois to navigate in our brave new world of officially mandated gender blindness. They can affirm the progressive orthodoxies in words, while conveying to their children in their deeds a plastic but nevertheless gender-differentiated approach to life. Meanwhile, kids and young adults from poorly educated households are deprived of a functional language to talk about what it means to be a man or woman. Without such a language, they can’t see themselves as successfully being men or women. And so they are deprived of a baseline adult achievement that come-of-age rituals in traditional cultures have always celebrated.

To a great extent, our progressive culture strips ordinary people of almost all settled roles, other than economic ones. This heightens the existential pain of the already harsh economic realities of our globalized economy, which can be very punitive to the poorly educated. Two generations ago, a working class man was often poor or nearly poor, but he could be respected in his neighborhood as a provider for his family, father to his children, law-abiding citizen, coach of a Little League team, and usher in church. The culture that made such a life possible has disintegrated, partly due to large-scale trends in our post-industrial society, but also because of a sustained and ongoing ideological assault on the basic norms for family and community. Death rates are likely to continue to rise for poor Americans. I see no signs that the war on the weak will abate.

I can hear it now: “That right-wing religious hater is blaming transgenders for working-class white people drinking and doping themselves to death!” If you think that, you run the risk of dismissing a more profound critique of the way both free-market capitalism and the permissive morality of post-Sixties America have conspired to wreak havoc on those least able to bear the burdens they impose.

But even that is only a partial explanation (though one that I, obviously, find plausible). Why is this not happening to Hispanics and African-Americans, neither of whom are getting rich, and both groups of which are also suffering from the problems of fatherless children and family disintegration? Here there might be a religious explanation, or at least a spiritual one: white people do not know how to suffer successfully.

Hear me out. Here is a link to a paper by sociologist Brad Wilcox and several colleagues that gives insight to this problem. From the abstract:

We find that religious attendance among moderately educated whites has declined relative to attendance among college-educated whites. Economic characteristics, current and past family characteristics, and attitudes toward premarital sex each explain part of this differential decline.

Religion is becoming increasingly deinstitutionalized among whites with moderate levels of education, which suggests further social marginalization of this group. Furthermore, trends in the labor force, American family life, and attitudes appear to have salient ramifications for organized religion. Sociologists of religion need to once again attend to social stratification in religious life.

The authors say “the evidence we present here suggests that the middle is dropping out of the American religious sector, much as it has dropped out of the American labor market.”

Going deeper into the paper, Wilcox et al. show that:

We then turn to a consideration of the economic, demographic, and cultural correlates of the religious disengagement of moderately educated whites. We do so from a broadly institutional perspective, recognizing both that religion is not only a social institution that supplies norms, beliefs, and rituals that pattern social behavior, or moral logics, but also an institution that depends on social and cultural structures from other institutions to sustain these moral logics (Friedland & Alford, 1991). In particular, we explore the possibility that working class disengagement from the institutions of work and marriage (Cherlin, 2009;Wilcox, 2010) are strongly associated with recent declines in religious attendance among white working class Americans. We view these two institutions as particularly important objects of inquiry because American religion has both legitimated and been bolstered by an “American Way of life” marked by stable employment and marriage over much of the last century (Edgell, 2006; Herberg, 1955). Thus, if moderately educated whites are now less likely to be stably employed, to earn a decent income, to be married with children, and to hold familistic views, they may also be less likely to feel comfortable or interested in regularly attending churches that continue to uphold conventional norms, either implicitly or explicitly (Edgell, 2006; Wilcox, 2004). We also view the institutions of work and marriage as important sources of social and normative integration that link Americans to religious institutions (Schwadel, McCarthy, & Nelsen, 2009). For these reasons, this paper relies on the GSS and NSFG to explore the links between declines in working class religiosity and patterns of employment, income, family structure, sexual behavior, and attitudes toward premarital sex.

The religious disengagement of working class whites is important for at least three reasons. First, religious institutions typically supply their members with social and civic skills, and often a worldview that motivates them to engage the political or civic spheres, that increase their civic and political participation (Putnam, 2000; Verba et al., 1995; Wuthnow, 1995). Second, religious institutions appear to foster higher levels of physical and psychological health among their members, both by providing social support and by furnishing people with a sense of meaning (Ellison, 1991; Ellison & Levin, 1998). Third, and most important for our perspective, some research suggests that least- and moderately-educated Americans are especially likely to benefit from the social support and civic skills associated with religious institutions. The non-college-educated often lack the degree of access to social networks and civic skills that the college-educated have; and religious activity can compensate for this deficit.

There follows a brief but fascinating discussion about the cultural attitudes of working-class whites toward work, self-esteem, marriage, and church life. It’s too long to quote it all here, but the bottom line is that the changes in the American economy over the past few decades have worked to alienate working-class whites from religious life because of the way the white working class connects its sense of self, and of justice, to the ability to be rewarded for hard work, being honest, playing by the rules, and delaying gratification. When this formula fails, they don’t know how to deal with it. Say the sociologists, “In brief, the declining economic position of white working class Americans may have made the bourgeois moral logic embodied in many churches both less attractive and attainable.”

What’s more, say the sociologists, white churches are strongly oriented towards the traditional family, and traditional Christian prohibitions on premarital sex. When working-class families fall apart because of divorce and/or having babies outside of wedlock, those whites feel less comfortable going to church.

Why don’t sociologists observe the same phenomenon in black and Hispanic working-class people? Because black and Hispanic Christians don’t have the same kind of religious sensibility:

Black churches, however, emphasize marriage less than white churches, relative to qualities such as shared struggle and perseverance (Cherlin, 2009; Ellison & Sherkat, 1995; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990). For instance, when it comes to family life, they speak of parent and child, of broader networks of kin, and of the fictive kinship to be found among one’s brothers and sisters in church. It is possible, then, that African Americans could achieve the caring sense of self, even in an unfavorable economy and without benefit of marriage, and find support at church. This suggests that declines in church attendance among the moderately educated should be less for blacks than for whites.

Assessing trends over the past few decades in attendance among Hispanics is difficult because of changes in the composition of the Hispanic population. Given that issues related to immigration, discrimination, and incorporation into American society loom large for churches serving Hispanics (Figueroa Deck, 1989), we suspect that Hispanic churches are less focused on family structure and employment, and more focused on providing a sense of solidarity and practical support to their members, than are non-Hispanic white churches. Moreover, there is less class heterogeneity among Hispanics, who tend not to be college-educated or affluent; this probably affords working class Hispanics a sense of comfort in the churches they attend (Schwadel, McCarthy, & Nelsen, 2009). Thus, we would expect that employment difficulties and lower incomes would be less likely to influence the church attendance of Hispanics than non-Hispanic whites.

So, if Wilcox et al. are right, the black and Hispanic working classes are better able to weather economic adversity and family setbacks because they are more closely tied in to their churches. Their faith gives them resilience that whites more or less do not have, because of the way we whites believe. I believe that as holding to traditional Christianity begins to cost the white middle class something serious, we are going to see a mass apostasy. We whites had better get busy learning from the black and Hispanic church if we are going to make it.

Now, there is one more aspect to white working-class despair: dispossession. It does not take a sociologist to grasp that the tectonic social changes in American life since the 1960s have been at the very least disorienting to whites. The point to grasp here is not that we shouldn’t have had those changes; many of them were just and necessary, others, not so much. The point to grasp is that the experience of those changes may have been psychologically traumatic to certain whites who expected the world to work in a different way — a way that favored them.

Perhaps there is a comparison to be made with Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union — which was, of course, a vastly more severe phenomenon, but I think there may be some comparison to be made, re: a people who assumed that the world was a certain way, and woke up rudely to the fact that it was not. Add to that the fact that among elites in our culture — especially academic and media elites — white working-class people are the bungholes of the universe, and, well, here we are.

 

 

René Girard, 1923-2015

A great man has passed: René Girard, one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century, died Wednesday at home in Palo Alto. He was 91:

In particular, Girard was interested in the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior. Our desires, he wrote, are not our own; we want what others want. These duplicated desires lead to rivalry and violence. He argued that human conflict was not caused by our differences, but rather by our sameness. Individuals and societies offload blame and culpability onto an outsider, a scapegoat, whose elimination reconciles antagonists and restores unity.

According to author Robert Pogue Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford, Girard’s legacy was “not just to his own autonomous field – but to a continuing human truth.”

“I’ve said this for years: The best analogy for what René represents in anthropology and sociology is Heinrich Schliemann, who took Homer under his arm and discovered Troy,” said Harrison, recalling that Girard formed many of his controversial conclusions by a close reading of literary, historical and other texts. “René had the same blind faith that the literary text held the literal truth. Like Schliemann, his major discovery was excoriated for using the wrong methods. Academic disciplines are more committed to methodology than truth.”

Girard was always a striking and immediately recognizable presence on the Stanford campus, with his deep-set eyes, leonine head and shock of silver hair. His effect on others could be galvanizing. William Johnsen, editor of a series of books by and about Girard from Michigan State University Press, once described his first encounter with Girard as “a 110-volt appliance being plugged into a 220-volt outlet.”

Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961 in French; 1965 in English), used Cervantes, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky as case studies to develop his theory of mimesis. The Guardianrecently compared the book to “putting on a pair of glasses and seeing the world come into focus. At its heart is an idea so simple, and yet so fundamental, that it seems incredible that no one had articulated it before.”

The work had an even bigger impact on Girard himself: He underwent a conversion, akin to the protagonists in the books he had cited. “People are against my theory, because it is at the same time an avant-garde and a Christian theory,” he said in 2009. “The avant-garde people are anti-Christian, and many of the Christians are anti-avant-garde. Even the Christians have been very distrustful of me.”

Girard took the criticism in stride: “Theories are expendable,” he said in 1981. “They should be criticized. When people tell me my work is too systematic, I say, ‘I make it as systematic as possible for you to be able to prove it wrong.'”

In 1972, he spurred international controversy with Violence and the Sacred (1977 in English), which explored the role of archaic religions in suppressing social violence through scapegoating and sacrifice.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978 in French; 1987 in English), according to its publisher, Stanford University Press, was “the single fullest summation of Girard’s ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall.” He offered Christianity as a solution to mimetic rivalry, and challenged Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

One of the great disappointments of my life was the time I had dinner with Girard in 2002 at Peter Robinson’s house at Stanford. He sat right across the table from me, and was perfectly congenial. I did not know who he was, though, and missed the opportunity to speak with him about his work, and to learn from him. He was quiet and humble that night. It was only later, when I discovered that I had shared a table with one of the towering intellects of the 20th century, that I realized what a fool I had been.

Here is a good piece from Touchstone about Girard and the meaning of his work. It includes an interview. The writer and interviewer is Brian McDonald. Excerpts:

InViolence and the Sacred(1972), he moved from the realm of literature to that of culture itself, and added to his concept of mimetic desire that of scapegoating. This analysis of the way religion, mythology, and culture are built upon an unrecognized foundation of mimetically caused violence and scapegoating brought him considerable acclaim when it was published.

However,Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World(1979), though a best-seller in France, lost him much of that acclaim, for in this latter work Girard dared to assert that the shackles of sacrificial religion were broken for a large portion of mankind by the force of the biblical story in which a number of narratives reversed the classical mythological pattern byexoneratingthe scapegoat and showing thecommunityto be guilty of gratuitous murder.

What most offended his secular audience was that he saw in the culmination of the biblical witness, the passion of Christ, a permanent exposé of the “the things hidden from the foundation of the world”—that both the order and disorder of human life are founded on the clashes of mimetic desire relieved by the lie of the scapegoat mechanism.

Hence, Girard identifies the foundational principle of culture as “Satan,” since it mirrors perfectly Christ’s description of “the Prince of this world,” who was moved by envy and was “a liar and a murderer from the first.” By laying down his life to expose and overthrow this kingdom built on violence and untruth, Christ also introduced the world to another kingdom, one “not of this world,” whose fundamental principles are repentance for sins instead of the catharsis of scapegoating and love of God and neighbor rather than the warfare of mimetic desire.

The death of Christ and its effects move Girard’s theory from “naturalism” to Christian affirmation, since he is convinced that the mindset of natural humanity is so wholly immersed in the “intervidual” psychology of sacrificial religion that only a divine revelation could break us free of it—or even make usrecognizethe suppressed lie at the basis of our existence. Hence, the very appearance of the Christ, and his successful exposure of the lies at the base of human life and culture, is a proof of his divinity, since “no human is able to reveal the scapegoat mechanism.”

Girard’s belief about the death of Christ may be no less controversial among Christians than his allegiance to Christ is scandalous to the secular world. Against the view of Christ’s death that would see him as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to the Father, Girard would argue that Christ’s death was intended to overthrow in its entirety the religion of propitiatory sacrifice, since he sees that religion as of the very essence of fallen man.

Here is a 2009 profile of Girard and his work in the Stanford alumni magazine, a piece that talks briefly about the circumstances of his conversion — or reversion — to Catholicism:

Published in 1961, Deceit, Desire and the Novel was important to Girard not just for the mimetic theory, but also for the powerful personal epiphany it brought the author. Girard discussed it with James Williams in an interview included inThe Girard Reader. “I started working on that book very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking, and of course recognizing mimesis is a great debunking tool because it deprives us moderns of the one thing we still have left, our individual desire.”

He described his eventual realization this way: “The author’s first draft is a self-justification.” It may either focus on a wicked hero, the writer’s scapegoat, who will be unmasked by the end of the novel; or it may have a good hero, the author’s alter ego, who will be vindicated at novel’s end. If the writer is a good one, he will see “the trashiness of it all” by the time he finishes his first draft—that it’s a “put-up job.” The experience, said Girard, shatters the vanity and pride of the writer. “And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible,” Girard said. The work is no longer a self-justification, and the characters he creates are more than good guys or bad guys.

“The debunking that actually occurs in this first book is probably one of the reasons why my concept of mimesis is still viewed as destructive,” he added. “Yet I like to think that if you take this notion as far as you possibly can, you go through the ceiling, as it were, and discover what amounts to original sin.” The experience, “if radical enough, is very close to an experience of conversion.”

Indeed, that awakening returned Girard to an orthodox view of the Bible as revelation—the revelation of the nature of mimetic desire and what it would lead to, which became the subject of subsequent books. This was his “intellectual conversion,” which he describes as “comfortable,” without demands or commitment. But a brush with cancer in 1959 changed everything. “Now this conversion was transformed into something really serious in which the aesthetic gave way to the religious.” He had his children baptized, and he and his wife, Martha, were remarried by a priest.

More:

In a spellbinding lecture last year, Girard pointed out that we have reached a point in history where we can no longer blame scapegoats. The mechanism of scapegoating is too well known, so the ritual murder no longer expiates the society. War no longer works to resolve conflict—indeed, wars no longer have clear beginnings, endings or aims. Moreover, as weapons have escalated, war could destroy us all.

The weapons of war are less and less distinguishable from forces of nature, echoing apocalyptic texts of the New Testament. “Before the invention of apocalyptic weapons, we couldn’t see how realistic these texts were,” Girard said. “But today we are in a situation where we can see that, and we should be extremely impressed by that.”

Man is creating “more and more violence in a world that is practically without God, if you look at the way nations behave with each other and the way people behave with each other,” he said. “History, you might say, is a test for mankind. But we know very well that mankind is failing that test. In some ways, the Gospels and scriptures are predicting that failure since it ends with eschatological themes, which are literally the end of the world.”

His conclusion: “We must face our neighbors and declare unconditional peace. Even if we are provoked, challenged, we must give up violence once and for all.”

 

René Girard, rest in peace.

No, Liberals Aren’t Losing the Culture War

Ohio potheads and Houston transgenders lost on Tuesday, and that makes Molly Ball conclude that liberals are losing the culture war. Excerpt:

To be sure, Tuesday was an off-off-year election with dismally low voter turnout, waged in just a handful of locales. But liberals who cite this as an explanation often fail to take the next step and ask why the most consistent voters are consistently hostile to their views, or why liberal social positions don’t mobilize infrequent voters. Low turnout alone can’t explain the extent of Democratic failures in non-presidential elections in the Obama era, which have decimated the party in state legislatures, governorships, and the House and Senate. Had the 2012 electorate shown up in 2014, Democrats still would have lost most races, according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, who told me the turnout effect “was worth slightly more than 1 percentage point to Republican candidates in 2014”—enough to make a difference in a few close races, but not much across the board.

Liberals love to point out the fractiousness of the GOP, whose dramatic fissures have racked the House of Representatives and tormented party leaders. But as Matt Yglesias recently pointed out, Republican divisions are actually signs of an ideologically flexible big-tent party, while Democrats are in lockstep around an agenda whose popularity they too often fail to question. Democrats want to believe Americans are on board with their vision of social change—but they might win more elections if they meet voters where they really are.

Oh, Molly, if only! She’s right that the Dems push too far in some places, but I’m afraid this week’s results are only a temporary setback for progressives. The Ohio marijuana legalization proposal was so badly worded that even pro-pot forces in the state came out against it. Still, the idea that Ohio — Ohio! — got to vote on legalizing marijuana is a pretty huge step in the progressive direction.

And on the transgender matter, probably the only reason the Houston ballot proposal failed is because huge numbers of Houstonians hold the common-sense belief that no business should be forced to open its bathrooms or changing facilities to people of the opposite sex, no matter what sex those people think they are. Frankly, I’m glad this happened, because it ought to wake the rest of the country up to how radical the Democratic Party’s leadership is (and how radical the business community, which supported the HERO initiative, has become). Kevin D. Williamson writes about how, in their zeal to bend the arc of justice, out of touch Democrats have become with bread-and-butter issues:

The liberal white lady du jour is Houston mayor Annise Parker, who has just failed — spectacularly — in her tireless and ruthless campaign to bring Houstonians’ private opinions under political discipline through a so-called civil-rights ordinance that would have made the abolition of penis-bearing persons (we used to call them “men”) from the ladies’ locker room an official offense in the same category of wrongdoing as shoving Rosa Parks to the back of the bus.

Williamson points out that Houston’s electorate is heavily minority, and heavily Democratic. And it demolished progressive hopes for the HERO proposal. More:

As I reported earlier, Houston is a city with some serious challenges: roads and transit infrastructure of a distinctly dystopian flavor, heavy debt and enormous deficits projected for the next several years, and billions of dollars in unfunded pension promises for the coddled government workers who make up the backbone of the Democratic party’s governing coalition in the cities. Mayor Parker is a lesbian and therefore a mascot for all things progressive, and her campaign for HERO — a law already thrown out by the state supreme court for having been improperly imposed — brought in millions of dollars of donations from progressive groups nationwide, along with the mouth power of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. None of that was sufficient.

What on earth makes the Obama administration think that, with all the intense challenges facing public schools and colleges in America, forcing them to allow full, unrestricted access to opposite-sex locker rooms for transgenders is an urgent cause? Earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune reported:

The U.S. Department of Education reiterated that stance Monday, when it informed Illinois’ largest high school district, Palatine-based Township High School District 211, that it violated Title IX, the federal law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex, by prohibiting a transgender student from using the girls’ locker room.

“The law could not be any clearer,” Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, said in an interview Tuesday. “… The law has been, thanks to Congress, since 1972, that no student shall be subject to discrimination in school on the basis of sex, and it’s my job to enforce that promise for all of our nation’s students. I take that job very, very seriously, and I feel very strongly that all of our students should see their civil rights satisfied in school.”

The necessary assumption, obviously, is that refusing to grant full access to a girls locker room to a teenager with a penis (or to a male locker room for a teenager with a vagina) amounts to sex discrimination. It is by no means agreed upon outside of progressive circles that a male who says he’s a female is, in fact, a female. NPR reported yesterday on how far the Illinois school district went to accommodate that transgender “girl”:

CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: There are five high schools in Township High School District 211, and superintendent Daniel Cates says there are transgender students at all of them. He says the district has fully recognized requests to change names, to reassign gender on school records and has allowed students to choose the bathrooms they feel fits their gender identity since there are private stalls. Even locker rooms, says Cates, are not off-limits.

DANIEL CATES: We have offered access to our transgender students in our locker rooms, and we have asked them to agree and commit to observing an individual measure of privacy when changing their clothes or showering.

CORLEY: The name of the student has not been released, but she identifies as female and plays on a girls’ sports team. She typically changes in a bathroom and, when using the girls locker room, is required to change clothes behind a privacy curtain.

She got everything she could possibly have wanted, except one small thing, but that’s not good enough for the transgender girl, for the ACLU, or for the US Government. Schools and those who attend them will be forced to accept the progressive point of view that denies biological reality. There will be no compromise.

Bathroom reading (Mike Mozart/Flickr

If the extremists in the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton, who endorsed the Houston proposal — are willing to go this far, where will they stop? The Mitrailleuse earlier this year pointed out how educrats are using the public schools to condition young people to accept the Joy of Caitlyn Thought. He talks about how the Fairfax County (Va.) school board voted to add “gender identity” to its non-discrimination policy:

If the vote had gone the other way, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would only delay the inevitable. The Fairfax school board vote was a microcosm of what’s happening across the country. The tide is going out on the broadly Protestant culture that once defined America. We’re entering a post-Christian Age, where temperance and tradition are code words for oppressive bigotry. If you attempt to defend perfectly normal things like objecting to girls and boys sharing a locker room, then you risk becoming an outcast.

… The real reason behind the push to de-gender bathrooms is deeper than nickels and dimes. This is about changing cultural perceptions. The aim isn’t ending bullying of gay or transgendered students. That would be a respectable goal. Instead, the warriors for LGBTTQ…whatever….are interested in changing our very conception of truth in existence. This really is a war for our minds (paging Alex Jones!).

Orwell, intentionally or unintentionally, taught us that language and history matter when it comes to shaping the future. That’s why transgender supporters put so much focus on pronouns. If our liberal gender-defiers can vanquish sexual distinctions from our vocabulary, then we can kiss the traditional binary goodbye. Everything about the human person will be malleable. And when everything is alterable and fluid, then there is no grounding for understanding our place in the world.

I have a few questions, à la Ross Douthat, for our transgender pioneers. If little Johnny must have the right to pee next to Susie, these should be easy to answer:

Under this new paradigm, should middle-aged men be allowed to share bathrooms with female students? If not, isn’t that both sexism and ageism?

What’s the deal with locker rooms? Should they be de-genderized? Can male wrestlers change next to female cheerleaders? Is it bigoted to answer “no”?

Have you given a modicum of thought about the mental stress this will put on the 99.7% of children who aren’t transgendered and who may be freaked out by the very idea of she-males?

The abnormally high suicide rate among transgendered people is well-known. Is it really prudent to encourage children to embrace identifying with the opposite sex, especially when nearly three-quarters of young people lose feelings of gender confusion over time? Being young is hard enough in 21st-century America. Helicopter parenting, obsession over school lunches, merit-based love, masculinity shaming, hormone changes, toilet humor passing for entertainment – the list goes on. Is it wise to celebrate gender dysphoria while children are in their formative years?

I don’t expect to get an honest answer to any of my questions. At best, I’ll be ignored. At worst, I’ll be doxxed and lose my livelihood. Such is the risk of speaking out for good sense in an era of hysteric egalitarianism. The enlightened minds in academia and the media have settled their opinions. Transgenderism is extraordinary and brave. If you disagree, you’re scum of the earth and deserve a good purging.

Trust me when I say Fairfax is just the beginning.

Yep. If you are a traditionalist Christian, Muslim, or Jewish parent, you had better start making plans now to Benedict-Option your kids out of public school. It may not get to your school in the next few years, but it’s coming.  The Republicans are too witless and gutless to stand up to it. The setback in Houston this week is just a bump in the road to our progressive future. Think about it, Molly Ball: the fact that voters in Houston, Texas, would probably have approved a gay-rights ordinance had it not given transgenders the run of bathrooms and locker rooms is actually a powerful sign of how much ground progressives have won in the culture war.