Have We Brought Back the Freak Show?

I have some questions for Christian and/ or socially conservative friends on social media. It's not my intent to rebuke anyone, but to raise an issue for reflection. This is probably too heavy a topic for the middle of Easter Week, but it's on my mind because as we try to get a handle on how to oppose the "transing" of America's youth, all my social media feeds have become visually very disturbing, as everyone seems to feel the need to document the deranged people caught up in this movement. It strikes me that every time I have seen a deeply disturbing picture or video of an obviously disturbed individual in the past several years -- the kind of image for which I try to practice old-fashioned custody of the eyes out of protection of my own heart and the other person's dignity-- it has been in the feed not of my progressive friends flaunting sexual transgression and imposing their libertine ways on me (I say that tongue in cheek) but in the feed of "pro-family" or Christian authors tut-tutting the latest outrage. Yes, I am telling you my lefty friends' posts are in a certain respect more wholesome and PG-rated than many of my Christian and pro-family friends.

Here are my questions, in no particular order.

1) I understand the need to educate people about threats or potential threats to civil society and family life. Does every troubled person doing something weird rise to the level of cultural threat? Is it possible that some practices are so isolated and bizarre that they will never catch on as a trend, and it would be better to pass over them in silence than to publicize them? 2) What was wrong with the old-fashioned circus freak shows? Anything? Aren't many of the photos and videos that accompany weird practices of merely prurient interest? What good is served by thrusting those photos in the faces of those who see your posts? 3) Is it possible that that certain notorious transgressive accounts have been exposed enough and don't require further documentation -- we now get what these people are about? Is there a point at which we cross the line from reporting to marketing for the transgressive? 4) When we invite people to gawk at disturbing behavior, often behavior we know or reasonably assume is associated with serious mental illness, isn't that use of a person, betraying his or her human dignity? 5) Similarly, if we illustrate our stories and posts about trends we think are harmful with (possibly) prurient pictures, aren't we guilty of using people?

6) When we easily pass along images that are deliberately intended to shock and disturb, do we have any responsibility to shield our audience in some way so they have an option not to see them? (Twitter, for example, allows you to tag your own photo as possibly disturbing). (Tangentially related: not so long ago a certain sector of Christian twitter got into a discussion about the prudence of the use of foul language if you're an influential evangelical or Catholic writer. Interestingly, some of the folks most adamant that the F-bomb does not befit a professing Christian's social media page are pretty blithe in passing along images that cannot be unseen and I would argue probably shouldn't be seen. Isn't it possible sick images are more powerful and therefore more potentially soul-damaging than an F-bomb?

It Was The Greatest Thing

 On this day in 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company began selling sliced bread.  A convenience we take for granted, but at one point during WWII the government tried to ban it! 

Sweet Land of Liberty

Image credit: Independence Day, Andrew Wyeth, shamelessly pinched from here. 

The first post-Roe Independence Day, and I'm feeling more hopeful than I have in a while. Not optimistic, mind you, but hopeful! If that great and wicked spell can be broken, so can others. 

I'm not sure why I'm telling you this because I don't expect anyone to understand,  but yesterday at Mass, our genuinely beautiful choir sang America the Beautiful as one of the post-communion hymns. As I've confessed previously, I can't sing that song, especially the later verses, without tearing up, so when it happened it didn't take me by surprise. 

But I was completely overcome with unexpected weeping when we sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic as our recessional hymn. I'm not positive this meaning was intended (though knowing the choir director I think it was), but it felt like a comment on the Dobbs decision, and in an instant, every bit of joy at finally attaining the long-awaited destruction of that wicked legal fiction, every bittersweet memory of all the heroes of the movement who didn't live to see the day, all the sense of alienation from pastors and erstwhile pro-lifers who couldn't muster a bit of happiness or gratitude for the decision came pouring out. I couldn't stop. It was embarrassing! But cathartic. 

Spent yesterday with some old political philosophers and patriots in a small town on the water where they had a great parade and fireworks, and that was also good for the soul. 

For your Independence Day reading: 

Patriotism as A Virtue.  "John Adams calls us to celebrate our country by prayer, parades, and pyrotechnics. I’m with Adams."

My now-perennial posting of Peter Schramm's Born American, but in the Wrong Place. 

Irving Berlin singing God Bless America. 

Oh, and: the first tomato of summer!  Just a cherry tomato, but the promise of things to come! 

 

 

Happy Independence Day!

From the National Mall, July 4, 2019

Here's What A Citizen Looks Like

This fellow gives me so much heart, less because of his specific position and more because of his robust understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. I love his line about whatever the Founding Fathers intended, they wrote rights for all. He isn't waiting for rights to be bestowed on him; he claims them because he knows they are inalienable. Bravo!

Is "America First" UnChristian?

Peter Leithart has a piece in First Things, On Trump & Trumpism, that's probably a pretty good summary of what many practicing Christians, or at least practicing Catholics, think about Trump. It's an open-minded and fair-ish read of the President's virtues and vices, and why Leithart is wary of him, but maybe cautiously optimistic about his presidency.

There are things he says I both concur with, dissent and partially dissent from, but I want to object strenuously to this assertion:

even in the best of circumstances “America First” is not a Christian slogan or outlook. Whoever occupies the White House, it's “kingdom first.”

I'd guess that many if not most pious Catholics I know would agree wholeheartedly with those two sentences, and I think therein lies the reason pious Catholics are often abjectly stupid in politics, a field where they are called to be wise as serpents in addition to harmless as doves. I think it's also a principal reason why our American bishops, even though I admire many of them for their courage and orthodoxy and personal virtue, on the whole have a deleterious effect on American politics.

Properly understood, "America First" is the only attitude a President qua president can have. If you are not capable of defending the good of American citizens and America as a whole first and foremost, you ought not to run for office, as that is the precise job description.

Properly understood: "America First" does not mean my country right or wrong; it does not mean my country in contradiction of the moral and natural law; it does not mean my country without due respect for the just claims of other nations and individuals. It does not mean jingoist inability to appreciate the gifts and goods of other nations or cultures, or inability to learn from them. Observing the demands of justice, morality, the common good and constitutional order are in America's (or any nation's) long-term best interest.

Of course, qua human individual with a soul that will spend eternity in heaven or hell, any given President would be foolish and wicked to lose his soul for Wales. So yes, qua individual, he must govern "for the kingdom" -- meaning, he must follow the dictates of an upright conscience when the thorny decisions arise.

However, the instant a President (or his followers) thinks his political acts are "for the Kingdom," he has moved beyond the political order and is asking politics to do what it by nature cannot do. Politics by itself cannot make men moral, nor can it immanentize the eschaton. It can only provide the tranquility of order and the conditions of liberty that leave us free to use our freedom for moral ends. We must observe a space of "legitimate secularity" as BXVI used to remind us.

Such a president would also be guilty of colossal hubris. As Lincoln said when someone prayed that God would be on our side, "Let us pray rather that we are on God's side."

Nor can any President try to govern with the generic interests of the entire world in mind. We would rightly criticize a father who fed the neighborhood at large before feeding his own children (the moreso in time of famine). Not because his own children have more value in the eyes of God than anyone else's, but because his precise job is to love and look out for his own children -- the presumption being that if he takes care of his family, they will not be burdensome to the rest of the community and the community can concentrate its charity and its emergency measures on the truly needy (to cite the reason most relevant to the common good, and leaving aside a discussion of concentric circles of relationship and duty and what parents owe their children).

I'm afraid far too many Christians mistake the small-c catholic "neither gentile nor Jew" demands of charity with the corrupt and cynical cosmopolitanism of progressivism and the huge, trans-national corporate behemoths that have no allegiance to anyone, only to their bottom lines. But you can't be a good citizen of your own country if you fancy yourself a citizen of the world. The fact that a Christian knows this world is not his ultimate home doesn't relieve him of the duty to be fully engaged as a citizen any more than the fact that his children are destined for eternity entitles him to be cavalier about their physical well-being.

Without saying more about it, in this regard I like to think about how Polish St. John Paul II was, and whether that strengthened or limited his ability to love universally. And similarly I think of the example of Benedict XVI, who could not have been more German, or more specifically, Bavarian.  It does not detract from the wholesome diversity of the world for Americans to be fully and whole-heartedly American. On the contrary, it helps others rise and find their own wholesome identities.

I think this is what President Trump had in mind in his excellent speech in Warsaw in the moving passage about Polish heroism that was really a call to every decent person in the world to quit apologizing for existing, and learn to be who you are:

Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God.  And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. 

Democracy requires a demos, as Sir Roger Scruton has said. And the role of the American president is to serve and protect the American demos*.


*For the benefit of Peter Beinart and the similarly obtuse, this includes American citizens of any color and creed, natural born or naturalized. 

Peace on Earth to All Men of Good Will

I love this story of a Muslim restaurant owner in London who has proclaimed to the homeless and elderly, "No one eats alone on Christmas Day!"

pic.twitter.com/0BUh2gvOlz

— Shish restaurant (@shishsidcup) November 18, 2016

RTWT, as I think there's something instructive about how he got the idea (from an elderly woman who reminded of his mom home in Turkey) and about how the gesture has spread.

A couple of Christmases ago Mr. W. read me a news story about a Jewish man in (I think) Detroit (Nope: Milwaukee) who volunteered to work on Christmas in place of a Christian and did a whole variety of different jobs as a result. (Oh, hurrah! I found the story. And I can't believe it's from 1998!)  That's diversity and multiculturalism I can get behind -- because it so evidently springs from genuine good will.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick: Government & Us

Here's a wonderful essay by the late U.S. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick that is supremely relevant to our times, and yet I can't find it online. Someone sent a scan of it to me. It was written in the 1970s some time, for the Georgetown University Yearbook. Cutting and pasting here. 

Government & Us by Jeanne Kirkpatrick

I was asked to address two questions in this essay: What should citizens expect from government, and especially, how moral should citizens expect their government to be? These are, of course, perennial concerns of political philosophy. In more stable times people think they know the answers to these questions, and professors are not asked to address them in college yearbooks. But in an age like ours — when the authority and legitimacy of government are challenged and common understandings concerning the right and duties of rulers and citizens questioned — the concerns of political philosophy become the private dilemmas of ordinary citizens, who must find their way among competing claims, clashing interpretations and conflicting demands to a reasonable understanding of their relationship to government. In the comments that follow, I shall not deal with the relation of citizens and governments in the abstract, but with our relations to our government.

Because the purpose of the nation’s founders was to limit government’s power and protect liberty, it makes sense to approach the first question negatively, asking what we should not expect from government. High among these are virtue and happiness. It is not the obligation or even the right of government to prescribe our goals, to provide meaning to our lives to guarantee us self fulfillment.  These are our own responsibility. Government should not try to make us happy but to provide a framework in which we may pursue happiness. The whole American tradition — in religion, politics, science, art, and everyday life — is based on the conviction that societies are more creative, religions more believable, civilizations more interesting and persons more fully developed when individuals are left free to develop their interest and talents, express their views and visions. An unfortunate verbal convention has developed according to which the liberty to order our own lives, seek our own goals, express ourselves, organize ourselves is called “negative” liberty, and freedom from arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, execution and other manifestations of tyranny is called “negative” freedom — as if these had no positive value. We should note, however, that that the people who regard these individual liberties as trivial also frequently believe that ordinary people are not really to be trusted with managing their own lives and need to be directed toward the achievement of some “high” or more “worthy” goal selected by others.  In truth, the most important demand we should make of government is that it leave us free to choose our jobs, raise our children, cultivate our friendships, write our books, seek our salvation, criticize our government, and vote it out of offices when that seems desirable.

These freedoms are prerequisite to democracy, which is, of course, the political system that protects liberty by insisting that government seek the consent of ordinary people before it makes laws binding on them.  The second most important demand we should make on government is that it serve the common purposes of the society as these are expressed through the institutions of popular rule. As liberty is a prerequisite to democracy, law is a prerequisite to liberty. It is respect for law that we must ultimately rely upon to limit the power of government and provide the framework of order needed to enjoy both freedom and democracy.

There is no more important demand citizens of a democracy can and should make on their leaders than that these latter use power only in times, places and manners prescribed by law and the Constitution. The events we call ‘Watergate” constituted a “constitutional crisis” because they involved a refusal by high public officials to be bound by legal restraints on government’s power.  The “crisis” was resolved when the supremacy of law was reaffirmed and the offenders submitted to prescribed legal processes. Watergate was an offense against the public morality because the officials involved failed to honor official obligations.

This brings me to the final point: how moral should we expect our government to be? There is a tendency for contemporary Americans to judge the moral quality of government by the personal morality and motives of its high officials, and to assume that when good men with good motives and good personal habits lead a government, good government results.  But this is not necessarily the case.  There are important differences between moral governments and moral individuals. Private morality depends on such personal virtues as honesty, generosity, reliability, industry, fortitude. Public morality concerns the polity and depends on institutional relationships and policies which protect and enhance democracy, freedom, accountability, order, justice. A responsible person, for example, is one who can be counted on to honor his obligations, but a responsible government is one in which rulers are held accountable through periodic competitive elections for their use of public office.  It is true that the moral quality of rulers sets the tone for the political class and seeps downward into the political culture and it is also not unreasonable to suppose the values and predispositions present in leaders’ private lives affect their behavior in office as well as out.  But a passion for the cultivation of personal virtue has never been the distinguishing characteristic of political men, and it is unreasonable to expect that political leaders will be paragons of personal virtue as well as persons of high political skill.  Politicians are at least as prone as others to ordinary hypocrisy and venality and their personal moral failings should be treated in about the same way as the comparable failings of others in the society.  There is no good reason, for example, to judge a Congressman who is unfaithful to his wife more [or less] harshly than a private citizen guilty of the same offense — providing that the Congressman has not used the powers of office to expedite his pursuit of pleasure.  But if we may not expect our leaders to be more virtuous than the rest of us, we should demand that they be more scrupulous, and more meticulous than anyone in their observance of the law, because they have unique obligations to uphold and enforce it.  Most governments in the world testify that the happy condition in which rulers are subject to law is not easily come by or widely enjoyed.

Once liberty, democracy and law are secure we can discuss and debate the nature of the good life and move toward its achievement, leaving it to successive majorities to determine how best to protect the public tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure equality of opportunity and minimum economic wellbeing to all.  These can be dealt with if not finally solved providing that those very positive substantive demands on government — for liberty, popular rule and law — are successfully made and enforced.

And Yet, Somehow the Marxists Aren't Pleased

Via My Spy in New York: this guy has the best line yet on #Brexit: 

The left has claimed for generations that it wants a working class revolution. Now they've got one.

BREXIT!

I didn't really believe they'd do it, so didn't think much about the implications, but to the extent that this represents a sovereign people re-asserting its sovereignty over detached and imperious bureaucrats, Hurrah! Still...

And then again, here's a very sound counter-argument:

 

Comments to Paypal on Closing My Account

I closed my paypal account today. It took quite a while to even figure out how to do it, as the site's instructions are out of date and they are hard to contact except by phone. 

Yesterday I gave up, but today I was ticked off again enough to persevere.  Here's approximately what I told them in the "why are you leaving" comment box.

Sexual assaults on women are on the rise generally, and there is evidence that attacks on women in restrooms are likewise on the rise -- not so much by trans people, but by men dressed as women who take advantage of trans-friendly ordinances.
In response to this, the people of NC chose to defend an increasingly vulnerable population --women and girls-- from unscrupulous people who will take advantage of well-intentioned, but obviously stupid, policies.
As a woman myself, and as the mother of a daughter, I applaud them for this common sense protection, noting that a key proponent of the trans-friendly bathroom measure in NC is a convicted sex offender.
You do not have to agree with them, but you can show them the same respect you show the numerous countries you do business with which criminalize homosexuality outright, some even with the death penalty.
Paypal is a corporate hypocrite and bully, and that is why you've lost my business.  

 Update: deleted a lot of beside the point blah-blah about this not being a real problem -- or if it were, we'd have a more sensible solution.  Replacing it with David French's line:

Corporations have a right to their values. And I have a right to express contempt for their double standards and empty moral gestures. PayPal isn’t virtuous – it’s just fashionably greedy.

Taxation & Statesmanship

Daniel Henninger has a devastating column in today's WSJ: Panama Bernie (behind the paywall, but it was also at RealClearPolitics this morning; currently some kind of glitch or hack is interfering with that link for me, but presumably that will resolve shortly).

His thesis is that while Bernie, Hillary & the President rail on about rich people and "offshore accounts" it's government policies that cause them.

Spare me the crocodile tears over the immorality of tax avoidance. Panama is an indictment of government greed..... 

Most governments, including ours, overtax their citizens to feed their own insatiable need for money. Then the legal thieves running the government and their cronies, unwilling to abide the tax levels they created, move their wealth offshore to places like Panama. Arguably, all the world’s people should be able to move their assets “offshore” to escape governments that are smothering economic life and growth, which has stalled in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Blah, blah, blah. Not that I disagree with the point, but given how ticked off I am with the hypocritical, corrupting, cronyist, cowardly, virtue-signaling and bullying business community, I can't muster any fellow feeling for the individuals who head its companies. Big Business deserves anything negative it gets as far as I'm concerned.

The important point he makes, though, is that it's not just rich people who dodge high taxation. EVERYONE does.

Suppressed for generations by high tax rates and regulatory minutiae, most Europeans survive in an economic half-life of gray and black markets, with their assets protected by cash-only transactions, bartering, and endless hours devising off-the-books deals involving family real estate, inflated art prices and anything else they can hide from the taxman.

This is the point that not only progressives, but also many distributists and sincere social justice types, miss. No government, whatever its form, has infinite power to simply plan an economy and gain compliance from its citizens. To paraphrase Jurassic Park's Dr. Malcolm, people find a way. Wise law-givers --even on the rare occasions where they actually are more far-seeing than their citizenry-- are nonetheless bound by what their people will actually bear. 

It's nice that you think tax rate "x" or regulation "y" will contribute to the common good, but if it's so onerous that no one will pay it or abide by it, all you have done is create black markets and inventive ways to skirt the law. And every time you do that, you make it easier for people to beak the law again next time. 

Corruption is the main problem in Third World countries. Progressivism is just the West choosing voluntarily to become more and more corrupt -- all the while blathering on about immorality. 

As Menninger concludes: 

When private capital is under public assault, it will hide. From the wealthiest to the poorest, it creates a world of chiselers, not productive citizens.

I Love This So Much

I praised my 97yr old Godmother today for learning to text...

She reminded me she worked at Bletchley during war #codebreaker

— Dee (@sayitaintsojoe9) April 3, 2016

To You & Yours

We pray sincerely for America and the ideals of democracy and freedom that are here enshrined. May she be strong to withstand all the currents that assail her and all the forces of evil that would invade her sacred precincts. A tower of light to her own citizenry, may she cast a steady beam and light up all the dark areas of the world and show to a perplexed and straying humanity the path of freedom, of life, and of peace. 

      ~Rabbi, Joseph Lookstein Thanksgiving 1940

A Trump Two-Fer

These two pieces in tandem scratched an itch for me, because I am so tired of the purge-our-way-to-electoral-majority crowd, and its allies, the "look! there's a corrupt republican! Therefore I don't have to vote against the progressives" crowd, both of which are just versions of people who are at heart anti-political and unwilling to be part of a political community. You've probably seen Jonah Goldberg's "intervention" for Trump fans, because it's been everywhere. He enumerates all of Trump's actual positions, none of which have the least thing to do with conservatism. 

I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative. 

But the money quote is this: 

Look, these are rough times for conservatives, for reasons too lengthy, and all too familiar, to go into here. But none of our problems — demographic, political, cultural — can be solved unless conservatives take the cause of persuasion to heart. All of our problems can be fixed by convincing people to join our cause. That is what politics is about — persuading people that their interests and concerns are better addressed by coming to our side. And, given the degraded nature of our culture, I won’t deny that having a celebrity on our side has its utility. But it’s only helpful if that celebrity convinces people to switch sides. As a purely mathematical proposition, it is insane to believe that Donald Trump will convert more voters than he will repel.

People no longer understand basic terms (ask anyone criticizing "capitalism" what he means by that word, and then we can have a conversation) and no longer share basic suppositions, so if you are going to be so lazy as to keep shouting at them without taking time to educate, then you deserve the devolution of civilization you are enabling. 

And that's where Kevin Williamson comes in, with a nice polemic that devolves a bit from the high note Goldberg sets -- he's a little condescending-- but it felt good. There are RINOs and CINOs, but there are also WHINOs. 

The WHINO is a captive of the populist Right’s master narrative, which is the tragic tale of the holy, holy base, the victory of which would be entirely assured if not for the machinations of the perfidious Establishment. Never mind the Democrats, economic realities, Putin, ISIS, the geographical facts of the U.S.-Mexico border — all would be well and all manner of things would be well if not for the behind-the-scenes plotting of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their enablers, who apparently can be bribed with small numbers of cocktail weenies. The WHINO is a Republican conspiracy theorist, in whose fervid imaginings all the players — victims, villains — are Republicans. Barack Obama? Pshaw. The real enemy is Jeb Bush.

A little more...

At FreedomFest, I did an interview with Matthew Boyle of Breitbart Radio, a nice enough guy but a pretty good example of the WHINO style in American politics. What about Romney? Boyle demanded. Romney, he said with absolute assurance, lost to Barack Obama because millions of conservatives stayed home, finding him insufficiently committed to their cause.The first aspect of what is wrong with this analysis is obvious: It assumes that a “real conservative” who couldn’t beat Mitt Romney in a Republican primary dominated by “real conservatives” would have defeated Barack Obama in a national election not dominated by conservatives at all, i.e. that Romney was the weakest candidate except for all the guys who couldn’t beat him.

The point is not "Mitt Romney lights my fire."  The point is: nothing at all substitutes for the hard work of persuading people. You should read the whole things either to be heartened or slapped awake, but Williamson's closing point should be a slogan: "Whining is no substitute for winning." 

A Hard Rain Is Falling, Happy Independence Day!

detail, Childe Hassam, Flags on the Waldorf

Literally, as I'm typing on this Independence Day, a hard rain is falling in Washington, DC, as it has been every day -- with intermittent bursts of spectacular sunshine-- since last Thursday & Friday, when the Supreme Court tried its best to end America with a trio of decisions that are spectacularly bad, even for them. They upheld Obamacare by denying the flat meaning of words; they declared that the people have no authority to decide for themselves what marriage is, converting marriage from a natural right that the government recognizes into a power deriving from government to be conferred at will; and they did a major power-grab in a little-noticed elections case, in which it was revealed that 5 of 9 Supreme Court Justices do not know what a "legislature" is.  (And they thought Harriet Miers wasn't intellectual enough for this body?)  Odiousness level: Dred Scott.

Of the three, the gay marriage case is the most pernicious in terms of the hard rain that is going to fall as a result of "penumbrae" emanating from it (see Ken Masugi's fabulous essay). Taken together, it's tempting to feel that the regime of liberty America once represented is like one of the Twin Towers as the flames of 9/11 were melting the steel frame: still standing, but doomed. Rapidly we replace the rule of law with the rule of men -- in Lincoln's words, "the same old snake."

Tempting, but not, in my estimation, manly or noble. The great thing about virtue and about the principles of liberty is that no matter how far you fall, they are eternal, always there to be reclaimed if you have the will to do so.

I'm not being Pollyanna. Persecutions of a certain kind are here, and more are certainly in the offing. Archbishop Wenski enumerated them brilliantly in his homily for the close of the Fortnight for Freedom. And I have personal examples.

For more than five years now several priests of this archdiocese, separately, have said privately to me that they expect to be jailed for upholding the faith at some point, and a friend recently said to me he didn't know if he'd want his kid to become a cop, for fear he'd be asked to arrest priests or that kind of thing. Christians and others are being systematically run out of entire fields: medicine, academia, technology, education -- and now the florist and baking industries too. At the National Catholic prayer breakfast this year I was sitting next to a fellow who runs a marriage preparation program in the projects in DC. It's secular, but the group putting it on is Catholic. Thanks to a provision in DC law that prohibits Christian charities from hiring and firing in accordance with their own faith, their board met to discuss no longer offering the marriage program on their website, but only secretly and by word of mouth. He told me he went home and told his wife, "What is this, Poland? I can't believe we are seriously talking about taking a charity underground in the United States of America!"

Eldest Weed, who is something of a programming whiz, took what happened to Brendan Eich very personally. He is 18 and already sees that he will either never work in his field or will have to squelch anything he actually believes all his life. That makes it very difficult this 4th of July to sing about the land of the free and home of the brave.

My kids are inheriting a very different country than the one I have lived in. I grew up white in an all-black neighborhood and was often the only white person in the game or on the bus; the only Conservative in an entire school; the only outspoken Protestant in Catholic religion class; the only Drama major who wasn't smoking weed and sleeping around; and later the only Catholic in my family and one of the few orthodox Catholics among "the spirit of Vatican II" types at my home parish. I've been the only pro-lifer in a room full of rabid pro-aborts and posed them impertinent questions. For whatever reason, until late in life I've been accustomed to being the sole person who thinks as I do in many situations. I've taken a fair amount of ribbing and been on the ugly side of unfair judgment, but never once have I felt it was unsafe for me to speak up -- to ask a question, to say what I actually think. I never felt physically at risk, nor that my ability to earn a living could be at stake, or that my kids would suffer over something their mom said or wrote. People of all stripes, even those who hated what I said, have been on the whole respectful and willing to engage in debate: sometimes more pleasant, sometimes more heated, but: debate. That is simply not the atmosphere here in the States anymore. For the first time in my life, I often do pull punches, thinking twice before subjecting myself or my family to the consequences of speech I would have uttered confidently a mere five years ago. Not confident of a pleasant response, but confident of my liberty and everyone's respect for it.

It's going to be a rough next decade, and I have to admit when I heard the news while on silent retreat last week, I had to go to my cell and have a good cry. Not because I begrudge gay people anything: that would be seriously to misunderstand the source of my sorrow. I love my gay neighbors and want them to be happy. I was crying for the loss of the rule of law --and the realization that my kids will not know the freedom --the genuine liberty-- that I knew as a kid and young adult. Any liberty they have they will have to fight for, and it's hard to know where they will find allies, since not even the good guys bother to read or study anything relevant to the political order. (Is there any place other than Hillsdale College where a student can learn anything about the principles of American politics?) Christians are good people, but I get frustrated with them in cultural battles, because they seem to like to head straight for the catacombs first, there to complain about how bad things are, rather than recalling the duty of charity to be a witness to the truth. You stand up for what is right not to impose anything, but because you see your fellow men hurting themselves and you wish to propose a better idea. As the archbishop said, we are in the world, not of it; but because we are in the world, we are also for the world.

My other fear is that my kids will eventually hate us for raising them Catholic because of how hard that identity is going to be for the immediate future: the likelihood is great that it will be held against them at university and in job hunts. Our two eldest will have difficulty in college, but at least they will go. I wonder whether in a few years our youngest will even be permitted to attend university if he does not first renounce his faith. The kids may be like Catholics in Communist Poland, those who refused to join the Party: excluded from everything.

But what if, to quote the story of Esther, we were born for such a time as this? If liberty is never more than a generation from failing, it's equally only a generation away from rebirth. In this crisis there's also a great opportunity to stand up, re-teach the principles of law and civic and Christian virtue, and beat back the snake. Catholics have triumphed over Know-Nothingness and other forms of anti-Catholic prejudice before, and they can do so again. In the first place, we've still got it very, very good in comparison with much of the world.  And what we have is very much worth defending, as Charles C. W. Cooke notes in this lovely essay.

Secondly: it's important not to indulge in the same kind of hurt feelings and offense-taking that are the weapons of Progressivism.  Cowboy up, Conservatives, as Andrew Klavan says:

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of conservatives saying things like, “It’s over. The left has won. This is no longer America. I’m not even going to celebrate the Fourth of July this year.” I confess this disturbs me. I expect feminists to squeal like hysterical little girls. I expect Social Justice Warriors to act like small boys who pretend to be heroes against imaginary enemies then run away from actual danger.
I expect conservatives to act like men and women — men and women who understand they are part of a fight for liberty that began when Moses killed the Egyptian slavedriver and will not end until Jesus comes again.
Open your eyes. The hills are filled with chariots of fire. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.  

Further reading: 10 Things You Should Know About the American Founding; 12 Things to Remember if Obergefell is getting you down.

Update: This post was intended to be sober, but not enervating, which is why I closed on the "Cowboy Up" note.  We remember Thomas Paine, right? "“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

Here are a few links to help with bucking up.

The Fourth is a time to Fight

Christian Patriotism after Same-Sex Marriage

Archbishop Wenski's homily for the Fortnight for Freedom

Memorial Day, 2015

Image credit

Can't put it better than Archbishop Chaput:

On this Memorial Day, let’s take time to pause in grateful prayer and remembrance for the men and women of our armed forces who have paid for our freedoms with their lives. Let’ also remember those who have had to bear and still bear great sorrow at the loss of a loved one who served our country. May the Lord give you peace.

Here's a nice piece about military chaplains.

Fight Back Against the Regulatory State

Some days it seems to me Charles Murray is the last American. Not literally, obviously. There are plenty of scholars of the Founders and the Founding and people with wholesome notions about liberty whose work I respect and who are doing good things in politics and academia. What I mean is that Murray seems to have a genuinely American temperament: friendly good will, common sense and spunk. I'm sure it's not true, but I sometimes get the sense that everyone with any fight left in him is mean-spirited and arrogant and therefore unable to build a coalition (looking at you, Ted Cruz) and that everyone who's capable of listening with an eye to understanding others is inclined to be utterly supine before Stalinist tactics and manifest encroachments on our liberties (looking at you, Mike Pence and Bishop Paul Bootkoski).

Yes, the FDA has a SWAT team. Shrug. Whatcha gonna do?

Murray, however, has a big idea about what we might do. It's been called "Conservative civil disobedience" and he has a new book on the subject and a great summary of the project in this morning's WSJ.

I appreciate the way he sets the stage for why his idea is necessary.

America is no longer the land of the free. We are still free in the sense that Norwegians, Germans and Italians are free. But that’s not what Americans used to mean by freedom.
It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country, you could live your life as you saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else. The “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, was one “which shall restrain men from injuring one another” and “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Americans were to live under a presumption of freedom.
The federal government remained remarkably true to that ideal—for white male Americans, at any rate—for the first 150 years of our history. Then, with FDR’s New Deal and the rise of the modern regulatory state, our founding principle was subordinated to other priorities and agendas. What made America unique first blurred, then faded, and today is almost gone.
We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put aside all the ways in which city and state governments require us to march to their drummers and consider just the federal government. The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves.
The laws setting out these crimes are often so complicated that only lawyers, working in teams, know everything that the law requires. Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to “obey” laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810 pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or Dodd-Frank (2,300 pages). We submit to them.

He wants a mass movement to simply disregard obviously arbitrary regulations (he has ideas about how to reach consensus within each sector about what those are and not encourage mere lawlessness), and something like akin to a private sector Legal Services Corporation to defend people and institutions that run afoul of unfair targeting. Make it painful for regulators to do dumb stuff like send cops out after kiddie lemonade stands or sue corporations over regulatory infractions that harmed absolutely no one.

Read the whole thing.  I don't know what will come of this idea, but the very way he lays it out is immensely heartening. 

Look Who's Discovered the Birth Dearth

Formerly Grey Lady reports:

Recently, Sex and Society, a nonprofit group that provides much of Denmark’s sex education, adjusted its curriculum. The group no longer has a sole emphasis on how to prevent getting pregnant but now also talks about pregnancy in a more positive light.
It is all part of a not-so-subtle push in Europe to encourage people to have more babies. Denmark, like a number of European countries, is growing increasingly anxious about low birthrates. Those concerns have only been intensified by the region’s financial and economic crisis, with high unemployment rates among the young viewed as discouraging potential parents.

But oh: the comments! the comments!

Happy Independence Day!

"...And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

Click to enlarge

Thinking about these men today. 

And how they influenced men a world and two centuries away: Born American, but in the Wrong Place.

And how they influence people today. Danielle Allen thinks the text of the Declaration has a period where a comma was intended. I don't think I really understand the significance she places on this, but what's very nice in this interview is her account of how the Declaration inspires her unemployed or under-educated night school students.