John C. Wright's Blog, page 140

And who did Mrs Wright date, again, exactly?

Dating the Monsters

The beautiful and talented Mrs Wright, whose maiden name is also her nom de plume of L Jagi Lamplighter, authoress of PROSPERO LOST, PROSPERO IN HELL and PROSPERO REGAINED now has her essay for an Anita Blake anthology (in my opinion her best essay) entitled "Dating the Monsters," up this morning on smartpopbooks.com. It will remain available until Wednesday at 12:00 AM

Time was when the Romance section of the bookstore was a safe and cozy retreat from all things unfrivolous. Sure, there might be an occasional gothic or mystery romance with a terrifying moment or two, but one could basically rely on the fact that any book you took off the shelves would be like eating spun sugar. Going to buy a romance novel was like visiting the confectionary section of a bakery.

Not anymore! Where once dwelt only roses and Almack's, now live vampires, demons, werewolves, Greek gods, and yes, even robots. Though, most of all, it is vampires. And not all these books are sugar sweet, either. It's like heading down to the confectionary and finding yourself in hot spicy foods instead!

By now, you are probably asking yourself: How did this happen …

It started on television with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was Laurell K. Hamilton and Anita Blake who brought stories of girls and monsters to the world of popular books. Though paranormal romance is now a booming business, Anita Blake still leads the way, a giant striding amongst her younger sisters. Anita both kills the monsters and dates them. It's like having your cake and shooting it, too.

The question naturally arises: Why monsters? What is it about vampires and werewolves—once only the stuff of horror stories—that makes them the ideal modern romantic hero? To find the answer, we must first examine the age old war between culture and drama.

 

Throughout history, a tug of war has existed between the desire to use stories to teach and the desire for them to entertain. [....]

The desire to use stories to teach, I shall call for the purpose of this essay "the needs of culture." Proponents of this idea hope to use the medium of entertainment to lead people to make the choices necessary for a moral, law abiding society. [...]

The problem is that, most of the time, the more pleasant a culture is to live in, the less interesting it is to read about. A really fine writer can make anything interesting, but few writers achieve this pinnacle of brilliance. It takes a superb writer to make the process of painting a landscape interesting to an outsider. It only takes a writer of ordinary skill to bring excitement to a chase scene with a thief and a Company assassin on ski mobiles in the midst of the Winter Olympics.

In our entertainment today, the needs of drama often outweigh the needs of culture. We would like to teach our children to be peaceful and chaste, but violence and sex sell.

Read the whole thing at http://www.smartpopbooks.com/dating-the-monsters/.

And if you really like it, you might consider buying the book in which it appears: ARDEUR — 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (sic) Series. Laurel K Hamilton herself was the editrix.

Makes a great gift! Saint Valentine's Day is just past, therefore it is too late to get any gifts for your true love, but today is the feast day of Saint Onesimus the Slave, so get this as a gift for anyone you've manumitted recently.

ARDEUR

So why is Anita Blake a "Hunter" rather than a "Huntress"? Betrays a startling lack of sensitivity for Miss Blake to call her a boy's name, if you ask me.

And we all know that to promote true equality and mutual respect between the sexes is to use certain terminology in a certain correct way. So the word "Huntress" will automatically make readers grant a dignity to women which would NEVER regard them as mere pout-lipped zeppelin-breasted cheesecake models displaying their shapely fannies, right?

Indeed! Anita Blake, icon of femalist empowerment, would never be depicted as some dewy-eyed twentysomething babe in a tight outfight, merely pretending to be feminist-compliant by showing her armed to the teeth, right?

Sex and Violence? Show a Showgirl with a Smokewagon

I mean, vampire-hunting dames, what we in the biz called Van Helsingettes, would never be depicted as mere luscious eye-candy for fanboys, right?

Non-exploitive School Girl Vampire Huntress Image ... In Fishnets

Hmmm. Strike that last. Maybe the needs of the culture are different from the needs of drama after all.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

From the Archives: Parable of the Chessman

I thought it timely to reprint this article from last year, since the topic has apparently surfaced again. Italic text is new, where dated material was edited.

Parable of the Chessmen

A materialist asks whether the electrons in a brain move "according to" the laws of physics as opposed to moving "according to" the willpower of the thinker.

The dichotomy proposed by the materialist is a false one — the choice is not between a brain-electron moving "according to" (meaning 2) someone's will OR moving "according to" (meaning 1) the laws of Newton.

Note the differences here between a proscriptive and a descriptive use of the phrase "according to". If I shake my head to signify a negative, that is according to my will and according to the convention that a head-shake means 'no'. That is proscriptive, in accord with a final cause. If Jack Ketch chops my head with an ax, the fall of my head into the basket is "according to" Newton's laws of gravity. That is descriptive, in accord with a mechanical cause. The head might indeed make the same motion, but asking for an account of the mechanics is not the same as asking for an justification for my refusal.

It is not an 'either-or' question.

The motion of the brain electron, if we are asking how it moves, is answered in terms of mechanics (meaning 1); if we are asking why or for what purpose it moves, is answered in terms of final cause (meaning 2).

Obviously the motion is the same in both cases.

The question is not a choice of either-or. It is both-and. Every motion in the universe BOTH has a mechanical cause AND has a final cause.

Let me use a parable.

If I push a chessman with my finger two inches, from one square to the next, using two ounces of pressure over two seconds, the motion of the chessman can be described in terms of the mass of the chessman, the pressure of the finger, the duration and the direction and the amount of thrust.

This is a description of the physics of the object moving on the chessboard. It is only concerned with the physical aspects of reality.

The same move can be described by the notation "Queen to King's Bishop Seven (Checkmate)" or written in algebraic notion as "Qxf7#".

Please note that this description does not mention the mass of the chessman, the direction and direction of the finger motion, or any else about the physical circumstances. The color of the chessman is not mentioned; the substance, whether wood or plastic or marble, of which the chessman is made is not mentioned. The only thing that is mentioned is the form of the move in its most pure and abstract form. The final cause of the move (the goal is to achieve checkmate and win the game) is noted by the octothorp sign (#).

Please note that the octothorp sign does not denote any information about the physical chessman or the physical impulse of motion. It denotes neither mass, nor length, nor duration, nor candlepower, nor temperature, nor moles of substance, nor amperage. It does not denote any physical quantity.

There is one event (Queen to King's Bishop Seven) that can be described in two ways, (1) telling the mass and distance moved over the time elapsed (2) telling the formal meaning of the move Qxf7#.

The first way of telling may not violate the rule that F=ma. The chessman did not violate the laws of conservation of mass or momentum by moving to the square KB7.

The second way of telling may not violate the rules of chess. The King who cannot move out of check, capture the threatening chessman, or block the threat, is checkmated.

A bit of wood carved to look like a crowned woman has two aspects: first, it is made of matter and obeys all the laws of matter, including conservation of momentum. Second, it is a symbol for the chessman in a chessgame called a 'Queen' which can move any number of squares horizontally or diagonally. The Queen obeys all the laws of chess, and cannot, for example, jump over enemy chessman as a Knight can do.

The two sets of rules have nothing to do with each other.

Qxf7# is a legal move even if the chessman is large and brass or small and plastic, heavy or light, painted white or silver, or even exists no other place than in the mind of the chessplayer.

The rule of physics, F=ma is not and cannot be violated by any chessman made of matter anywhere in the universe, since the intertialess chessmen used by the Galactic Patrol of the Lensman universe do not exist.

There is no rule in chess that even refers to any physical property. For example, there is no rule in chess that a king may escape check by suddenly changing into reverse-entropy states prone to antigravity and floating off the board. The laws of thermodynamics, gravity and momentum are never, ever violated in chess. Likewise, there is no rule in physics that says no eighth row pawn may become a queen. Elevating a pawn does not violate any law of thermodynamics.

Obviously, when two people sit down to a chessboard in the park and take out little figures made of wood or brass and play a game, the chessman obey both sets of rules, the rules of physics and the rules of chess.

The rules (meaning 1) of physics are a description of the way matter moves. The rules (meaning 2) of chess are a proscription defining the game and its play. "Rules (meaning 1)" is not equal to "rules (meaning 2)". The same word ambiguously is used to refer to two different and contrary concepts.

Were we ever to ask whether a chessman EITHER obeys the rules of chess OR obeys the rules of physics, the question is incoherently formed. It is not an either-or question.

A chessman both obeys the rules of physics and the rules of chess. The two sets of rules describe two different dimensions or aspects of reality that have no necessary relation to each other.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Flynnine Brilliance from Mike Flynn

From the irreplaceable pen of the irrepressible Mike Flynn, venerable Boy Genius, a charming man, and one of the people to whom I will grant Way Cool Mind Powers (including clairgustatory sense)  to rule the Earth in my name once I unravel the mystery of the Dimensional Omnihedron.

Here is an article on lies, damned lies, statistics, and government mandates, with the emphasis on statistics.

If you like his essay, go out immediately and buy nine copies of IN THE LION'S MOUTH as a Valentine's Day gift for any veterinarian dentists working on leonine dentistry.

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2012/02/statistics-obamas-and-internet-memes.html

here is one money quote:

This power grab was evidently made not so much to control the birth of untermenschen as to assert the Executive's authority to order private citizens to buy Stuff the Executive thinks is Really Kool.  (cf. Obamacare wrt buying insurance).  It has nothing to do with whether contraceptives are a good idea; nor with whether they are legal, nor with whether lots of people want them.  It does have to do with the Omnicompetent State instructing a religious body as to which of its activities are "truly" religious and which are not.  That is explicitly forbidden by the First Amendment to do so.  As Jefferson said, "To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

But this president said, long before his election, that the Constitution was an "obstacle" to doing the right thing and has on more than one occasion expressed the wistful desire to rule by decree – though quickly backing off after doing so.  And after worrisome applause by his audience.  The appeal of fascism did not die with the 1920s and 30s.

Now, the old encyclical Humanae Vitae warned of four trends that would result from freely available contraception.  These can easily be seen as raving delusions of a "slippery slope."  He predicted:

a general lowering of moral standards throughout society;
a rise in infidelity;
a lessening of respect for women by men; and
the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

As you can see, none of these…  Er, um…

And here is another:

A basic rule of statistical inference is that the conclusions of a sample apply only to the population from which the sample came.  If the Literary Digest sampled only telephone owners, a legitimate conclusion cannot be drawn about all voters, only those who have telephones.  If a survey covered only left-handed Iowans, no conclusion can be drawn about right-handed Michiganders.  Get the picture?

Now, one meme that has been repeated in the current foo-foo is that "98% of Catholic women use contraceptives."  How this obligates the Catholic church to pay for them is unknown, since Church dogma is not determined by popular vote, but by either revelation or (as in this case) natural reason.  Since the Church has been described as "a hospital for sinners, not a country club for saints," we would expect that there are many at least nominal members who do not adhere to the moral law.  I know I haven't.  I bet 98% have pilfered office supplies from their place of work, too; but that does not suggest the government should mandate the underwriting of kleptomania.

However, the 98% figure is bogus.  It comes from Figure 3 in a Guttmacher Institute study of the kinds of contraceptives women choose.  Now, the mission of the Guttmacher Institute is to propagandize the use of contraceptives, and their studies should be viewed in that light.  However, this particular study, though statistically primitive, does not itself make the claim attributed to it by the statistically illiterate. 

The 98% seems suspicious.  What of the elderly?  What about nuns?  What about the proverbially fertile Catholic mother?  Do they comprise only 2% of the Church?

Remember what we said that the results of sample S can only be projected onto the population P from which it was randomly selected?  Ignore for a moment the issues related to methodology, randomness, etc.  What was their population? 

We discover that the study was restricted to "women at risk for unintended pregnancy." [emph. added].  They defined this group as those:

aged 15-44
who were "sexually active" in the three months prior to the survey
but were not pregnant, postpartum or trying to get pregnant







Fits Guttmacher profile

IOW, it excluded any woman participating in the Darwinian effort to colonize the future.  Excluded are Catholic women who are married, trying to have a baby (or at least open to the possibility), nuns and other virgins, and any woman older than 44 years or younger than 15.  This may actually exclude a fair number of "Catholic women" from the population.

So the study tells us only that 98% of women of child-bearing age who want to have sex without having babies use some form of birth control.  That qualifies as a sort of "d'uh" moment.

(Remember, Guttmacher focused on this group because their interest was centered on which form of birth control different groups used.  It was not they who made the unwarranted inference to "all Catholic women.") 

BTW, you will notice the criteria also excludes anyone sexually active in the preceding three months, using contraception, but who became pregnant anyway.  That would be an interesting number.  

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

If you only read one blog post today…

… your day will be more productive than mine.

But by all means read this one. Bad Catholic is the Man. Ecce Homo, dude.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/02/how-the-catholic-church-became-cool-overnight.html

He speaks with Chestertonian eloquence and power:

This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer "Scientific humanism." That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.

And he speaks with the tongue of a lover for his beloved, a Dante to his Beatrice:

But here's the thing about the Church. Once you begin the radical task of defending Her right to practice what She preaches, you can't help but notice how excellent that preaching is. Thus the issue of why — precisely — the Church is against the use of artificial contraception is similarly irritating the public eye, and as it turns, 'tis a beautiful irritant. The Business Insider, an entirely secular journal, found it alarming enough to publish Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control. From the article:

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

So what happened overnight? Why is the Church's most controversial teaching something that — suddenly — can be affirmed in the secular, public sphere without fear? The teachings didn't change — they've always been awesome. Our culture didn't change — it continues to suck. No, we owe this shift in disposition to the remarkable act of placing our hands on the desk, pushing firmly down upon it while pushing firmly up with the toes, and straightening the kneecaps until the body is aligned vertically between heaven and earth.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Slavery in China, or, a Little Unavoidable Mockery

In a recent article in this space The Theist Widow Cannot Regain Her Atheist Virginity I said the following:

In order to be logically consistent with the conclusion that the answers to any or all of the ultimate questions of the meaning of man's life in the cosmos is forever beyond human reason one must either be a Stoic, or a hedonist, an idolater or a nihilist.

A Stoic says that he can endure the pain of not knowing his purpose and destiny because he must.

A Hedonist says there is no purpose and destiny aside from those pleasures a man can devise for himself before he dies, and laughs at the notion that such pleasures will pall and fail with passing time.

A man can adopt some human cause, some simplistic and simply wrong idea, such as libertarianism or communism or environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, and bring to the idols of this world those selfless impulses and spiritual hungers which otherwise would draw man's heart to the next world.

A nihilist says such questions can have no answer in this or any other universe, because life is meaningless by definition, and the only truth is that there are no truths.

A reader, whose name in kindness I will not repeat, in reply to this, wrote:

I was speaking specifically about the arbitrary and flawed categorization of Wright's "four groups" of stoicism, hedonism, idolatry (that one makes me chuckle the most), and nihilism … which are three out of four, philosophical theories. Not morals.

His logic is off, or at least his statement is false, when he claims that these philosophies exist to "to produce a satisfactory account for life, a moral standard consistent with human dignity, and a motive to uphold civilization." He's adding all this excess baggage to them, in order to fit his assumptions. I can't speak for idolatry, but the other three are not this, and certainly not in isolation. He has also left out tellingly Confucianism, which did a fine "moral" job of maintaining one of the largest and most enduring human empire without slaves ….

My Comment: I did not at first address any reply to this reader because I did not think he was serious. In this, I did him a disservice, because an objection should be answered, even if it is not serious, if for no other reason some other reader who is serious might indeed have the same objection, and merit an answer.

I did not think him serious because, to be blunt, his statement betrays ignorance of astronomical magnitude.

The statement that there was no slavery in China is false, and betrays an appalling void of basic knowledge of history, of the hemisphere, and of human nature.

From the The Historical encyclopedia of world slavery, Volume 1; Volume 7 By Junius P. Rodriguez:

"Although Confucianism's canonical texts contain numerous references to slaves of various kinds, apparently there is no specific Confucian position or treatment of the topic. It is difficult to distinguish between Confucian attitudes to slavery and state policies, because throughout most of Chinese history, Confucianism was the official ideology of rulership and Confucians determined and administered much of the legal structure. Generally, traditional Chinese law restricted slaves' conduct in various ways: the punishment for crimes committed by slaves was harsher than for the same crimes committed by a free person, and the punishment for crimes committed to slaves was correspondingly lighter. Owners could determine female slaves' marriages, and male slaves who had sexual relations with freewomen in the owner's household were severely punished, but men could use their unmarried female slaves as sexual partners. If such intercourse produced the birth … of a son… the slave might become a concubine and gain somewhat higher status… "

The encyclopedia goes on to say that Chinese law held the slave as equivalent to a child, had lesser status as witnesses in court. Masters could beat slaves but not to death, etc., etc.

As for the Confucian stance on slavery, it is somewhat easier to describe than the encyclopedia says: Confucianism promotes benevolence toward slavery, but recommends that landowners be limited in the number of slaves they own, or the amount of land. The Confucian concept of li or propriety is offended when slaves are dressed above their sumptuary status. Confucian commentators condemned the conferral of a ceremonial cap by one Liu He on a male slave: "A slave boy was capped; the world was anarchy." (Wilbur, 1943)

So ancient Chinese law goes into considerable detail for an institution which the reader asserts did not exist.

I was in China last year, and saw the exhumed bodies of slaves buried alive with one of the Southern Emperors. So I saw with my own eyes the people, or rather the remains, the reader blithely says do not exist.

Confucianism, for those familiar with it, is a duty-based approach to life: precisely what I describe and label as Stoicism.  The reader's criticism that I failed to mention it leaves me nonplussed. I did not list every duty-based form of morality by name because I was not writing an historical survey. Instead I grouped all duty-based codes under the label "stoicism" as the most fitting descriptor.

The reader dismisses the connection between philosophy and morality (or moral philosophy) with equal insouciance, and betrays an equal degree of unearthly ignorance on the topic.

The idea of a philosophy that does not justify and promote a moral code is a peculiarly modern invention of one and only one philosopher: Sartre. And even Sartre promotes a moral code, merely an incoherent one, implied rather than explicit. Older philosophers, like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius wrote on nearly no other topics aside from exhortation to virtue.

I promoted the idea that Stoicism and Hedonism and the various modern ideologies I called Idolatry account for life and dignity and give at least some motive to uphold law and civilization. In contradicting this plain fact, the reader is likewise not merely speaking in error, but again betrays dizzying in the magnitude of unfamiliarity with the subject being discussed: Stoic writings promote obedience to law and order; Confucius emphasizes this point almost to the exclusion of all else. Hedonists, including thinkers like Bentham and Hobbes and even Ayn Rand, expressly write for the purpose of promoting a logical foundation for obedience to the law and upholding civilization. Various idolatrous ideologies like Communism preach a duty of absolute obedience to legitimate authority even unto death, and differ from past philosophy only in having a radically different (and I would say nonsensical) standard for what constitutes legitimacy: the established authorities of the world are all illegitimate by the mystical decree of history and evolution, and by the same mystical decree the revolutionary authority to usher in a dictatorship of the proletariat is legitimate.

In sum, the breezy dismissal of the reader can be breezily dismissed. He knows not whereof he speaks.

So I did not answer this reader since I assumed him to be not serious and not relevant.

However, upon closer examination, buried somewhere beneath the disorganized mass of words, he does actually offer a serious and relevant question: namely, what is the justification for my fourfold classification?

Ah, well, when a serious question comes even from an unserious source it must be answered seriously. This I shall do in my next article, when time permits, for the answer is somewhat lengthy.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

We Will Comply with Christ

Elizabeth Scalia over at FIRST THINGS has said, and with more charity than my crabbed heart and more clarity than my dull brain could muster, the response to be uttered to the detractors of the Church — including the talking-points reader might recognize from the comments in this space.

I reprint the whole thing without further comment:

The Counter-Cultural Church has a Credible "Yes"

Feb 7, 2012

Elizabeth Scalia

Last week's column on the HHS mandate brought a rash of email from the usual suspects—men and women who feel passionately inclined to inform me that the church is "mysogynistic, women-hating, gay-hating, authoritarian, fetus-idolizing…" well, you get the drift. People who could not begin to accurately articulate the church's position on most matters are quite sure that her counter-cultural stances are grounded on nothing more than hate.

The dominant narrative of the mainstream is that whatever gets in the way of what you think you should have must be founded on hate, and not just hate, but hate-without-reason. Love, in this narrative, is nice; it always says yes. Alternative points of view offering nuanced philosophies and theologies, reasoned compellingly and with depth through the ages and offered with respect? The very definition of twenty-first century hate.

Aside from revealing a general deficiency in reasoning skills and a stunning lack of curiosity as to why the Catholic church objects to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, there existed in these emails a general lack of interest in identifying what the conflict between the administration and the church is actually about. What little coverage has surfaced in the mainstream has been framed along predictable lines: those nasty Catholic bishops are trying to deny women contraception, which "even Catholic women" use. The constitutional question of whether the government has the right to define a church's mission or usurp its conscience is ignored. For my correspondents, at least, it's "all about contraception and the Catholic Church of No."

That people are still swayed by headlines and the tired bumper-sticker rhetoric that gets hauled out and tapped into Twitter feeds is not surprising. But it speaks poorly of our academic institutes, where civics classes have been put aside and our students develop only a passing acquaintance with their rights and responsibilities; it suggests that curiosity has been discouraged in an effort to stick to the curriculum and, perhaps, the standardized tests.

That people can willingly believe the church is dishonorable, misogynistic, homophobic, unreasonable, and sexually repressive, however, speaks poorly of the church's own instruction and her presently strained abilities not just to catechize—although that is important—but to bring light and clarity to issues that have gone murky thanks to distortion and emotionalism, and in doing so, foment genuine conversation instead of name-calling, real understanding instead of memes.

The culture, cognizant of almost nothing about the whys and wherefores of Catholic teaching, is being encouraged to believe that religion is not simply unenlightened and unnecessary, but a socially negative force best driven from the public square. Its historic mission of outreach—its healthcare, educational, and charitable service to surrounding communities in need—is being redefined as not a mission at all, but an intrusion. Her effective and cost-efficient programs, to which the federal government contributed because doing so saved taxpayer monies, are now being cited as justification for wholesale government interference with the church, with who and what she is, and how she serves.

Time is running out; it is up to the Bishops and an informed laity to defend the church from ideological aggression and they must do it by engaging the other side and gently, but firmly, challenging them to learn the church's teachings before demonizing them.

When someone spits the word "homophobe" at us, we must offer them the USCCB's pastoral letter, "Always Our Children" and—acknowledging that the document may not be precisely what they like—ask whether, having read it, they can make a credible argument that the church is "anti-gay."

Then, when they accuse us of misogyny and a lack of compassion, give them the brief but powerful and prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae and then ask: can you credibly call the church anti-feminist or anti-humanist?

Can they read Pope John Paul II's exhaustive teachings on The Theology of the Body and credibly declare the church to be sexually repressed or disinterested in the full expression of ourselves as sexual beings?

Can they read Gaudium et Spes and credibly argue that the church is out of touch with the Human Person or Society.

Can they read Fides et ratio and credibly argue that the church does not hold human reason in esteem.

Can they learn of the Vatican supporting and funding stem cell research, or read even the briefest list of religiously-inclined scientists and researchers and credibly argue that Christianity is "anti-science?"

The secularist society does not want to hear alternative thought; they want a simple "yes," to whatever is on the agenda of the worldly world and suits its values. People seem not to realize that far from being an Institution of No, the church is a giant and eternal urging toward "Yes"—a self-actualized "yes" formed through an engagement with what is true, over what is reported; what is real, over what is caricature. A "yes" that is greater than the self, and lives beyond the moment.

The moment to argue the credibility of our church, however, is now.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

We Will Not Comply

IN A RELATED STORY to my last — the Leftists now would prefer schools and charities and hospitals be penalized, fined, and closed rather than be run by Catholic charities, because we do not promote sterility and prenatal infanticide.

Those champions of freedom and progress would rather see children uneducated, the sick unhealed, the poor in the street and the prisoner in the jail go hungry and untended, rather that let our despicable and unclean Christian hands touch them.

This letter sums up the situation:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever!

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith.

The federal government, which claims to be "of, by, and for the people," has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees' health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception.

Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those "services" in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation's first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).

The Obama Administration's sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.

People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America's cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

And therefore, I would ask of you two things. First, as a community of faith we must commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I would also recommend visiting www.usccb.org/conscience, to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Obama Administration's decision. That website again is www.usccb.org/conscience. Thank you, and I will keep you all in prayer during my "ad limina" visit to Rome this week. Sincerely yours in Christ,

+Alexander K. Sample

And here is another letter, a call to arms:

Friends and colleagues,

Ave Maria Radio Communication has launched a project called StopHHS.com.

As, I'm sure you know, On January 20, President Obama informed Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, that the Catholic Church in America has until August of 2013 to provide almost all of their employees with insurance that covers sterilization and contraception, including drugs like the 'morning-after pill' that may cause an early abortion. If the Church refuses to comply with this mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), various penalties will ensue. The Church will be considered an outlaw, a bad neighbor and its leaders subject to prosecution.

To sixty million American Catholics the President has said that now to be good Americans, we must be bad Catholics. Archbishop Dolan understood immediately. His ironic response: "So you've given us a year to figure out how to violate our conscience."

Through StopHHS.com, we are committed to reversing the decision of the Obama Administration to force Catholic organizations to provide contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs in their health care plans.

We will accomplish this by providing a place where all reporting, commentary, statements, legislation, video messages, audio messages, interviews and press releases will be complied into one single comprehensive website. We will petition the Obama Administration through the voice of the people to reverse course and respect the consciences of Christians of all stripes as he promised to do in his Commencement Address at Notre Dame in 2009. We will urge support for all legislation that would force the Obama Administration to rescind their decision and would protect the Church from further government intrusion. And we will engage the media in an effort to provide accurate information to the American people on the issue of conscience protection.

I'm asking you first to go to the website, sign the petition and second to use whatever means you can to promote this effort. You can post a banner on your sites, use social media, e-blast, WHATEVER YOU CAN. Our facebook page is simply StopHHS.

Thank-you for your partnership in this vital mission.

Nick Thomm

Executive Producer

"Kresta in the Afternoon"

734-930-3164

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

An Answer and a Question

This story, in two paragraphs, explains why I am no longer a Libertarian, and why I have never been a Leftist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-abortion-issues-split-obama-administration-catholic-groups/2011/10/27/gIQAXV5xZM_story.html

… a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services in late September to end funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to help victims of human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. The church group had overseen nationwide services to victims since 2006 but was denied a new grant in favor of three other groups.

The bishops organization, in line with the church's teachings, had refused to refer trafficking victims for contraceptives or abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and HHS officials said they made a policy decision to award the grants to agencies that would refer women for those services.

[...] On the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS awarded the new grants to the bishops' competitors despite a recommendation from career staffers that the bishops be funded based on scores by an independent review board, according to federal officials and internal HHS documents.

 

I am no longer a Libertarian because under Libertarian political theory it is morally wrong to give taxpayer dollars to a Catholic charity to help the victims of slavery.

Libertarians are so in love with liberty that they will not help slaves.

I have never been a Leftist because I have always been a man of logic, reason as cold and clear and shockingly clean as the streams of water from an Alpine peak. Logically, reality is real and symbols only refer to reality. When the symbols are substituted for reality, that it is a fetish.

Leftists would prefer victims of slavery not to be helped if they cannot be given abortions and condoms, and the other things Leftist fetishize as symbols of freedom, but which are either indifferent to freedom or antithetical to it. (Certainly the dead baby is not free except in the most cynical sense of the word: free of life.)

Leftists are so in love with liberty that they prefer slavery to life itself. They would rather we not help the slave at all, if we will not help her kill her child.

To the Left, it is better than the mother remain a slave than that she not be helped to kill her baby in the womb. Rather than a free mother and living child, they would prefer slavery, suffering and death.

Here I am assuming some loss of services, that is, by turning the charitable funds over to someone an independent board finds to be less efficient, in effect, the Administration is provided less aid to the victims. Whatever that percentage is, those victims who otherwise would have received aid, now will not, in order to pay for the moral preening of the ACLU.

I understand what the ACLU gets out of it: it is an act of masturbation. They get momentary pleasure to boost their self-regard. I do not see what the slaves get out of it.

We Christians made the abolition of slavery possible, by presenting the pagan world with a worldview that elevated the value of the meek and weak and humble to a sacred thing; we then eliminated slavery first throughout the European continent, and then worldwide.

The credit is solely our own — before the coming of the White Man, there were no abolitionist or antislavery societies among the Confucian, Taoist, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, or anywhere in the Americas, nor any sentiment or philosophy native to those lands which could have supported such a thing, or even imagined it.

Where Christianity is triumphant, human liberty is possible. Where Christianity fails, as in communist nations, or in the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, slavery slowly or swiftly returns.

There is nothing akin to the abolition of slavery in history: a worldwide elimination of a universal and prehistorical wrong in defiance of economic and cultural reasons, purely for reasons of moral sentiment.

We have no objection to using the institutions of government and using institutional religion to accomplish this single monumental triumph of the moral evolution of mankind. Libertarians, because they object to all but the minimal institutions of government, and Liberals, because they worship evil, pardon me, because they object to binding their conscience in obedience to an objective law, and on those grounds object to institutional religion, would both prevent taxpayer funding of a Catholic charity that helps freed slaves.

Here is my question to Liberals and Libertarians and all modern ideologues who say they love liberty: What have you done to make men free?

Aside from getting in our way, I mean.

Here is my question to Catholics: a small cadre of revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the government by force. They changed the society down to the roots and changed everything. In a democracy, there is never a need to overthrown anyone by force, merely to persuade the majority by force of reason.

We Catholics far outnumber the smelly Bolsheviks, and we have angels and archangels to do battle for us. We have a large, ancient, and well organized international organization: a Church against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.

And yet Catholics vote for, support, fund, and defend politicians loyal to abortion, to contraception, to sexual perversion, and to all the bogus salvific ideologies of an Antichrist.

My question to you is the same: What are we doing to make men free?

Are we to be less zealous in saving mankind as the Bolsheviks were in enslaving?

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Futurism and Shoepiles

Too often we Catholics have been criticized, nay, have been savaged, for being mere medievalists, disloyal to the modernism; the Christianity we confess has been dismissed as an anachronism promoting a moral code past its sell-by date.

I confess I am always amused when those who denounce eternal truths as old-fashioned seem not to realize this denunciation was fashionable in the days when Marx and Hegel, bastardizing Darwin, took pen to paper. The idea that truth is relative to its time period belongs to the optimistic Victorian Age. It is an idea long past its sell-by date.

The argument about anachronism is itself anachronistic: the last gasp of grayhaired and dying conformity in no sense fitted for life in the future. It is not an accusation one needs soberly to answer, since it is not a sober accusation.

But I was reminded of this recently. Crisis Magazine has an essay written by Jason Jones that you would do well to read. It is from last month, the dread date of January 22. (Hat tip to Frank Weathers at Why I am Catholic). Allow me to recite some telling paragraphs:

For most of you this weekend contains a date you'll never forget, along the lines of September 11, or December 7 — anniversaries of profound wounds to our country as a whole, even if we didn't lose a relative in those surprise attacks or the wars that ensued. For millions of Americans, however, January 22 portends a loss that is much more rawly personal. One woman in three who came of age after Roe v. Wade has exercised the "right" the judges discovered in 1973 to terminate a pregnancy; millions of men took part in those decisions; too often forgotten are men who (like me at 17) were bereaved of our unborn children against our wishes. All those Americans lost a family member in the events of January 22, and so this day will never slip by unnoticed, much as most of us wish it would. We'd rather not "go there," not dredge up the guilt of many flavors—participant's, bystander's, survivor's. It all feels much the same. If I can speak for the many, let me tell you we'd rather think about almost anything else, be it baseball, stock prices, or shoes.

So let's talk about shoes.

One of the authors to whom I owe the most intellectually is the political philosopher Hadley Arkes, of Amherst College. Arkes is the world's leading advocate of a deeply unfashionable theory called Natural Law. You never hear about that notion any more, but it played a major role in certain historic events: the American Declaration of Independence, the Abolitionist movement, the U.N.'s post-war assertion of human rights that transcend the laws of nations, and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. It's almost stunning to think that an idea with such a pedigree could simply be dropped by the world's intellectuals, like a toy that a child grew bored with, but that is what has happened. People will still assert human rights, or insist that our government act with justice, plucking fruit from the branches of a tree they pretend isn't there. (I won't speculate for the moment why they do this. Just take it from me that "Natural Law" is a term you shouldn't use in academia, law, or politics. It will brand you as an extremist.) Anyway, in one of my favorite books by my favorite thinker, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes starts by talking not about abstract right and wrong but a particular pile of shoes. That has a better philosophical precedent than you might think: One of Heidegger's most famous essays concerns the making of shoes.

But Arkes isn't interested in what Germans have thought about crafting shoes, as in the careful way they protected them, kept shoes safe from heedless destruction in time of war, gathered them carefully and avoided wherever they could the needless waste of a single shoe—almost as if each pair had a unique and irreplaceable destiny, a dignity no man could rightly ignore.

The Pile of Shoes at Dachau

You have probably guessed by now where the shoes that interest Arkes were found: piled neatly, outside the gas chamber at an extermination camp. Those shoes, and other personal items like gold teeth, were extracted from the items of human waste those plants efficiently processed into smoke. They remain with us as a testimony to modern economy and thrift. Really, I can think of no other single thing (not a skyscraper or a space ship) that sums up the essence of what it means to be modern as that pile of Jewish shoes.

…

The age we mark as modernity began with grand, exhilarating gestures: discourses on method that would set us free from the dead hand of tradition (Descartes); declarations of the rights of man (the French Revolutionary Assembly); manifestos rejecting the tyranny of mere economic laws over the lives and labor of men (Karl Marx). The grand progression of the movement Henri de Lubac dubbed "heroic humanism" was full of such golden moments, which moved through the dark night of history like torches leading us forward, ever forward, to a glittering future that would make life at long last worthy of man. At the end of all the struggles, after the next (surely final!) conflict, or the next, we were promised without any irony a brave new world, an earthly paradise. Descartes had no doubt that science would end disease and aging, so men could live forever. Robespierre offered public safety and a reign of absolute virtue. Marx fought to eliminate war, inequality, and even boring jobs: in the stateless, classless Communist endpoint of history, no one would even have to specialize in anything. We could move from one career to another from day to day, and have ample time in the evening to philosophize or write poetry. As Thomas Paine said, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

And we did. That's what we spent the 19th and 20th centuries doing, energetically. We broke up historic empires into nation-states, where men forgot their loyalty to tiny village or global Church, and learned to think as members of ethnic tribes or aggrieved social classes. After these collectives had done their work, and proved themselves too dangerous (in 1945, and 1989, respectively) we set about smashing them, too. We broke down the ramshackle, inefficient structure of the old extended family to its minimal, nuclear core—and then when that didn't prove as economically useful, we split that into atoms. When we learned that families have no economic use or political import, we redefined them at last as consensual, temporary alliances of adults—to whom the State contracts the duty of caring for children overnight, in the hours when schools and daycare facilities aren't open. We have very thoroughly accomplished the job modernity's founders set us: liquidating every barrier to the assertion of the Self, short of the laws of physics. We have killed all the fathers. We are free to make of ourselves exactly what we will, no less and no more. And here we sit with the treasure we've won: this pile of shoes.

Go and read the rest.

My comment:

Like most Catholics at some point in their lives, I found myself upbraided for my disloyalty to the modern age and to the grand march from apehood to supermanhood the modern age has so brashly promised.

I was told that the work of creating the superman was important, and that it was sad that a man of my intelligence would not join the glorious triumphal procession away from the musty superstitions of the past into the iron immensity of Tomorrow, lit by cold and metallic greenish light, roaring with the turning of wheels, ebullient with the shouts of multitudes speaking in unison, and no silence any where, and no music.

The criticism was of course meaningless pro foma, uttered by someone unfamiliar either with my public statements and private opinions: to a bigot, whatever bigotry says Christians are like, all Christians must be like! The cirtic failed to note that I am a great fan, booster, and supporter of the future and futurism. I am, in fact, a science fiction writer. My assigned task in life is glamorizing the future.

What I do not do is glamorize the past.

The cheerful Victorian utopianism which pretended whatever the calendar brought next must of course surpass what the calendar left behind was an idea found quaint and unscientific 120 years ago, back when the meat of the idea was fresh. That very scientific notion called entropy belies the concept that mere passage of time makes things better. If you prefer frontiers to factories, a world with fewer frontiers and more factories may not win your enthusiasm.

The notion was revived in the 1930′s in Russia and Germany.

The idea of the bold march over the smashed statues and toppled spires of the Church by jackbooted echelons of scientifically efficient secular visionaries reaching the immanent eschaton is also one which, to me, has the odor of antiquity, a quaint "diesel-punk" anachronism.

I get the same sensation seeing retro-futuristic images from the 1930′s and 1940′s, or seeing the Red Skull's Flying Wing from the recent CAPTAIN AMERICA flick, or the Youtube commercials for IRON SKY of Luftwaffe Flying Saucer bases on the Moon. To be blunt, it is an idea that our fathers bleed to extinguish on VE-Day.

My loyalty to the Modern Age, or to the Glorious Future cannot be questioned by any quaint retro-futurian still drunk on the unmixed wine of Victorian promises of progress, or fascist daydreams of eugenics.

It is not that I (or any Christian) can be called disloyal to the future. It is that we Christians, and all men of good will of any faith, must be the enemy of the particular future which equates "progress" with the extinction of human decency and human life and perhaps even human nature. It is "progress" in the sense that burning a Cathedral and all its books is progress away from civilization and progress toward glowing ashheaps beneath gasping clouds of smoke.

It is progress in the same sense leprosy or senility progresses.

That pile of shoes is not an aberration to the modern age. It was erected in the most modern and scientific of nations, Germany, renowned alike for its mathematicians and technicians as for its militarism and Progressive programs under Bismarck. Those shoes are a monument to modern ideals of Darwinian eugenics, of placing emotion over reason, of saying truth is relative to era and class and race: all notions repudiated and denounced in Christian doctrine.

So, Christian gentlemen and ladies, and all men of good will, the next time a Progressive sneers at your disloyalty to the glorious future of glorious modernity and postmodernity, as we slouch from the Age of Reason into the Age of the Postrational, ask yourself this:

Is there nothing to criticize in the Modernity? Truly? Not a thing?

Philosophy is as luminous as ever it was in Athens, art as divine as ever shined from the hand of Phideas, our music as wondrous as that of Beethoven, our poetry as sublime as what lept from the lips of Milton, and our women are as chaste as St. Agnes and pagan Diana, our men as concerned with honor as the passengers of the Titanic, our courts of law as careful of justice as Trajan?

The Modern Age has given us wealth and liberty undreamed by our ancestors. It would be wrong to be ungrateful for these blessings. Science has opened creation like a vast treasure hoard of wonders, and, unlike earthly treasure, this grows ever greater the deeper we go. Medicine has abolished countless forms of suffering. The slave trade has been abolished world wide.

But those who say that it was not Christendom that did these things tell lies. Where Christian virtues fail, the liberty turns into license and licentiousness: pornographers admired as men of business. Wealth promotes an industry of envy, as a lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians make it their daily business to loot what others produce. Medicine turns to infanticide, and the Hippocratic Oath languishes. Science goes mad, and says the universe is nothing but a carousel of atoms, and your brain a defective calculation machine that merely hallucinates self-awareness and free will.

These are not inevitable. There is nothing in modernity which make these evils necessary evils, and no rule of history which decrees that liberty must evolve into tyranny,  capitalism to socialism, virtue to vice, chastity to all-permissive hedonism. These things are not the goods whose price tag demands we abandon Judeochristian virtues, values, traditions, goals and goods. Indeed, this wealth and virtue and goodness are the outcome and by-product of the Christian world-view.

There is a reason why other great civilizations in South America, India and China stagnated before their discovery by the West, and why only the civilization of the Mediterranean produced modern science: that reason is Christianity.

It is not a trade-off and not a zero-sum game. When the Roman Empire converted, it gave up slavery, gladiatorial games, abortion, infanticide, divorce, sodomy, pornography, temple prostitution, and other inhuman practices. Nothing good in the pagan world was lost, and must pagan virtue and learning preserved through the Christian era.

Then, as the Modern Era devolved into the Postmodern, one after another, the Old Ways came back, and the rate of Progress slowed. The traditions we were told were the obstacles standing in the path of progress, the faith of our fathers, was nothing other than the engine of progress. As is the coachman shot the horses to prevent them from blocking the career of the coach, and then wondered why the coach ground slowly to a halt.

Have you ever wondered where your Flying Car is, now that you live in the Age of the Jetson's, dead reader? Answer: you sold it for a mess of pottage. When civilization abandoned institutional Christianity for liberalism, then abandoned Christian notions of decency and individualism for socialism, and then abandoned Christian notions of chivalry and truth for political correctness, and then abandoned Christian notions of the objectivity of truth, beauty and virtue for the roaring abyss of nihilism, civilization lost the engine and motive of its progress.

When you stopped calling yourself sons of God and started calling yourself naked apes, you stopped climbing Jacob's Ladder toward the angels, and slumped instead toward the jungle where Nature red in tooth and claw holds reign.

That pile of shoes makes a lie of notions that all things of the modern age are wonderful, and all things of all times past abhorrent.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

An Apology and an Argument about the Argument

A reader with the sartorial name of AndyHat writes:

Also, please watch the ad hominem: "You talk exactly like a PC Lefty seeking the unearned moral high ground, reveling in the strength of an unrestricted state." I resent that; you have no idea what my actual views are, and I don't believe that they're particularly germane to the discussion. I'm simply trying to present counter-arguments to your views from a variety of other viewpoints in order to better understand the arguments you're making.

Sir, the justice of your comment cuts me to the quick, and I admit the error and seek to make amends. Having once been a Libertarian myself, I have great respect for the breed. The main flaw of the philosophy is that it is inflexible to the point of folly, but the main virtue is that it is inflexible in its purity. To hear a Libertarian blithely espousing statements in direct opposition to the foundational principles of Libertarianism is unheard-of.

To answer your question: all your arguments presented so far are presented on the grounds that the federal government has a valid interest in compelling institutions including charities, schools, hospitals and businesses, to provide services unrelated to any public interest.

Providing sterilization, abortifacients, and contraceptives is neither a health issue nor a public safety issue. It neither repels enemies nor stops fraud. It is not necessary for the peace and dignity of the commonwealth. It is not even an administrative convenience needed for the orderly execution of the laws, such a commanding all motor vehicles to display a license number, nor a public work, such as a library or highway which benefits the citizens. It is not even the erection of a public monument or festivity which arguably might be justified by such imponderables as public morale and the honor due veterans.

It is not a health issue. If the state and local government had an interest in promoting the public health, such as by commanding certain sanitation features and practices to halt the spread of disease, this could be accomplished by enforcing the laws prohibiting fornication and sodomy.

It is not a regulation, akin to establishing standardized weights and measures, or a uniform commercial code governing negotiable instruments, needed to regulate commerce between the several states or with the Indian nations.

I agree that no right is an absolute: every right, if it conflicts with another, must be balanced by some just standard. The Supreme Court has on many occasions, however, drawn a distinction between (1) justifying an imposition on ordinary rights upon a showing of an arguable state interest and (2) justifying an imposition on Constitutional rights, which are much more jealously guarded, and can only be upheld if the state interest is compelling, AND IF not other less obtrusive means exists for serving the state interest.

Add to this, the face that the federal government has no powers aside from the enumerated powers granted under the constitution. This regulation, promulgated by an unelected bureaucrat,  does not arguably fall under any of them.

That is on the one hand. On the other is the First Amendment 'free exercise' clause, which strictly forbids the federal government to compel members of a church to that which violates their doctrinal precepts.

We are not talking about some mere formality, such as that saying Catholic women must cover their heads in the chapel. It is a Christian doctrine older than any other regime, law, or institution forbidding the use of abortion and contraception, and this includes abortifacient drugs. The oldest surviving written record of this doctrine is the Didache of the Twelve Apostles, circa 100 AD; all Christian denominations up until the 1930′s adhered to it.

So this is the general shape of the Constitutional Law argument. Now, to argue against this position, you have to allege, first, that some state interest exists; second, that it is a compelling state interest; third, that there is no Constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion; or in the alternate that this guarantee does not cover this case; four, that it is lawful for secular magistrates to command Catholic institutions such as charities and hospitals and schools to violate Christian doctrine; and five, that it is lawful for the Federal government to do so in this case, despite the violation of the First and the Tenth Amendment.

You have not done so. All you have done is proffer "unclean hand" arguments alleging that for one reason or another the Catholics are insufficiently pure to be allowed to defend themselves: such as by saying that since some Catholics violate the Christian prohibition on contraception, all Catholic institutions are barred from raising an objection to being forced to fund sterilization procedures or funding the distribution of abortifacients.

The logical error here as I said before: if my fellow Catholic is a Pharisee or a sinner, it does not give the federal government the right to decree that the Catechism of the Catholic Church no longer applies to govern Catholic institutions such as schools and hospitals.

You make augments like this: the Catholic Church has an all-male celibate hierarchy; no all male-celibate hierarchy has the right to promulgate divine commandments concerning chastity, abortifacients, or sterilization to its followers; therefore the Catholic Church has no right to promulgate divine commandments concerning chastity, abortifacients, or sterilization to Catholic followers.

Those are not legal, or even rational, arguments. They are PC ad hominem bullshit: an attempt to seize the moral high ground based on victim-group politics. It is an emotional appeal to a set of false-to-facts associations: identifying sterilization and contraception with "womyn's issues", identifying males as being of one group with a uniform set of interests and females with another, identifying sterilization and contraception as therefore issues where men are not allowed to make rules or have opinions, blah, blah, blah. It is poisonous nonsense.

If you wish to answer those who make such arguments to you, as a Libertarian, the correct answer is the back of your hand. Your rights are inalienable. That means, your rights do not become aliened from you the moment you join a Church whose members are not perfectly "pure" according to politically correct ever-shifting golaposts of purity.

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.