08.05.10
The wild west is alive and well
So federal judge Vaughn Walker decides Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
Much to unpack here, many levels of consideration:
1.) What kind of a precedent is being set by the immediate filing of a lawsuit to overturn a direct-popular-vote referendum on a particular issue, and a judge whose impartiality is subject to all kinds of questions? There may be circumstances in some future case in which such a scenario could turn out favorably for conservatives, but it still reinforces judicial activism and diminishes the power of the directly democratic voice.
2.) And speaking of questions about impartiality, how come the openly gay Judge Walker didn’t recuse himself?
3.) For all the liberal and libertarian comparisons of this to America’s struggle to eradicate racial and ethnic bigotry, it is not the same principle that is at work in this matter, not at all. For God’s sake, fifty short years ago, this whole debate would never have gotten off the ground, with any demographic group from black Americans to Jews to square old Baptists to peacenik Unitarians. We’re talking about the most basic unit of societal organization, the family. Until the dawn of our postmodern age, that has been univesally defined (save for kinky cultures in which polygamy is the norm) as one man, one woman, and any children they procreate or adopt.
4.) This will eventually go to the Supreme Court.
07.14.10
All-about-me-ism codified in a federal ruling
National Review Online’s editorial on U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act’s impact on the relationship between state and federal authority nails the key issues with clarity and eloquence. Basically, as the editorial says, it’s yet another move to de-link marriage and procreation.
06.25.10
If he were a woman, would he get this treatment?
Mona Charen on outgoing budget director Peter Orszag and the two most noteworthy things about him – his disingenuousness in coming up with presentable numbers for FHer-care, and his chaotic sex life. She uses her examination to raise some important cultural points about postmodern morality, the fawning celebrity media, the fallacy of early feminism’s attempt to deny differences between men and women, and postmodern society’s utter disregard for childhood.
06.06.10
Just when I thought I was getting to a point of consolidation of my thoughts on this
Hoo, boy. Longtime BN readers, or anybody who takes a scroll through the posts in the Religion and Spirituality category, knows that, while I lean toward Christianity, the final sticking points that stand between me and full embrace are knotty indeed. I’ve been working through several of them. The whole Hell thing is something I’m considering in ways I never have, for instance. It’s not easy to look squarely at what committed Christians profess about the subject, but I have had several discussions with myself, the upshot of which have been that dismissiveness will get me nowhere. I’m not saying I buy the whole package, but I’m looking at it with a seriousness I would not have been capable of twenty or thirty years ago.
Then along comes this, and I’m all blasted out of my seat again. Basing a marriage on one verse from Paul’s letters in which he admonishes wives to submit to husbands. I know, I know, as the linked post and several comments and links to be found there point out, one must put that teaching within the context of an entire marriage based on submission to God. Still, this one just comes across like a chain saw starting up in the middle of a Bach concerto.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought about this submission thing as an aspect of what Christians with a capital C are saying. C.S. Lewis refers to it. There’s the “love, honor and obey” snippet in marriage vows one rarely hears anymore.
I’ve even thought about it from an overall anthropological and biological perspective. Religion generally gives primacy to the role of a man. Islam is obviously the handiest example of this to cite, but even the leadership chains in the various strains of Buddhism are exclusively male. We know how gorillas, lions and elephants organize themselves societally. Men have the aggressiveness and upper body strength. They are wired to put fear aside when confronted with a threat. They get horny faster. They’re more analytical.
Still, a female human being is every bit as smart as a man. I’m no fan of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, but there was a point to the effort to get society to see that a great swath of human contribution was going to waste by not having women step up and give their say-so and excel in the various fields of human endeavor and fully participate in fashioning a fine and durable, workable society. To have a woman who enters into an intimate, lifetime commitment with a man base it on a “Here’s-how-I’ve-decided-we-will-do-things”/”Yes-dear-you-know-best” motif seems to me to be a recipe for snuffing out the very core of her humanity.
I guess the largest issue I still have that stands in my way of taking the plunge is this recurring meme I encounter along the lines of “I know these core precepts fly in the face of one’s basic sense of justice and even rationality, but we must submit to them because they constitute the way God decreed reality to be.”
Then again, as I say, I’m only leaning toward Christianity. Maybe once you make the full declaration, you see this all differently, and see a depth to Paul’s directive that’s not available to those peering through the crack in the door.
05.09.10
Your personal situation proves nothing
There’s a polemical exchange going on between Stacy McCain and a commenter at his blog that sheds much light on at least two levels of cultural implication. The overall subject at hand is the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill. In the second of his posts on the subject, the main thrust of which is to cite Raquel Welch as someone who sees the matter the way he does, he quotes from the commenter’s post in which the latter basically says, “Look, I’m a happily married guy with a wife on the pill, and when we’re ready to have more kids, she’ll go off of it. Now, get off my case.” Stacy uses the opportunity to coin a term I may occasionally pilfer in the future, given its applicability in multiple situations: The Empire of Choice. What he is illustrating could be thought of as the chip on the shoulder of the soft libertarian. He puts it in the form of a syllogism:
- You criticize Practice A.
- I engage in Practice A.
- Ergo, you are attacking me personally.
Not only does it waste time on proving one is not engaging in ad homeniem polemics, it starts us down the road of digression from the subject at hand. In this case, which was the thrust of Stacy McCain’s first post on the subject, that was the cultural destructiveness wrought by the Pill’s advent. It’s an extensive and incredibly comrehensive look at the toxic consequences of that pharmaceutical development, and it’s worthy of serious discussion, not the kind of dismissiveness his commenter treated it with.
03.04.10
I always thought this was a despicable movie, too
Bookworm says she lost respect for people who said they liked the 1990 movie “Pretty Woman.” She uses that as the lead-in to an examination of some statistics about prostitution.
02.16.10
Multiple layers of cultural rot in sixty seconds
Dennis Prager on the Super Bowl Doritos ad.
01.26.10
Glad someone said this
By way of a refutation of Charles Johnson’s (Little Green Footballs) ten reasons for parting with the right, Dennis Prager demonstrates the basic decency and intellectual integrity of mainstream conservatism.
01.19.10
The state apparatus wants inside your head
TCM’s EEOC nominee is on record as positing that society should not tolerate anyone’s beliefs that interfere with a homosexual’s equality. We should presume she reserves the right to define all the terms in her assertion, such as “beliefs” and “equality.”
Sometimes the most uncomfortable messages are the ones we need to consider most carefully
. . . such as Dennis Prager’s Townhall column today on whether society is still producing actual men.
01.17.10
Incentives matter
Jennifer Robach Morse does a great job of disspelling the libertarian argument that expanding the definition of marriage to include same-gender couples wouldn’t affect society and culture much.
01.05.10
Who meant what?
The Anchoress on Brit Hume on Tiger Woods and by inference Buddhism. She also offers a roundup of other perspectives, ranging from Buddhist to Christian to secular.
What is the relationship between forgiveness and peace of mind?
12.26.09
Look to this quartet for a lot of the nonsense we’re having to refute now
The latest print-edition issue of National Review is one of those magazines physically lying around the house that needs to go into some kind of permanent file.
The cover story is actually comprised of four related articles. Taken together, under the title “The Four Horsemen of Progressivism,” they provide a very timely look at the question of how we got here that VDH explores in his own fashion in he link in the last post.
Along with the pioneers of progressivism examined in each of the articles – Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Richard T. Ely – the reader is inspired by choice references to go back and bone up on such figures as Auguste Comte and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Each of the four NR articles at one pont or another delves into biographical data, and it’s here that one can see that a lot of our current cultural forces go back a long way. Both of New Republic founder and Promise of American Life author Herbert Croly’s parents were New York journalists. The dad was into some kind of kooky movement to loosen up society to the point of being cool with premarital – and, I think, extramarital – sex, and the mom was an ardent feminist.
There is much examination of the German influence on the development of American progressivism. Several members of the first and second generations of the faculty of Johns Hopkins, for instance, studied at German universities in the mid-19th century under pioneering scholars in such new fields as sociology.
This leads me to a personal reflection. I remember one professor in particular when I was working on my master’s degree in American history in the 1980s who, while he did try to deliver his lecture content with a credibly objective tone, nonetheless, it is clear in retrospect, spoke glowingly of the above-mentioned figures, in addition to Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard. I was being fed PC propaganda, no doubt about it. (On reflection, it does seem as if he brought a bit of dismissive tone to his mentions of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.) This teacher was keen on impressing on us what an intellectual trailblazer Germany was at that point.
The overall impression one gets from the sum total of the four articles comprising the cover story in the latest NR is that this archetype of the American progressive goes back a long way: a professed empathy with the “struggling” or “disadvantaged” classes and demographic groups, which must be juxtaposed against an actual snobbery that borders on contempt for the actual human beings in those classes. You see, Croly, Dewey et al looked down their noses at devout Christians who put personal faith above the state, people who were at home working with their hands and backs, and those who had profit among their considerations when thinking up ways to benefit humankind. They preferred the east-coast chin-rubbers, the oh-so-judicial / sensitive / culturally-up-to-the-minute types that comrised the entirity of their social and working circles.
The rest of the issue is of this caliber. Mark Steyn’s back-page column on Nuaru’s recognition of Abkhazia, as well as Theodore Dalyrimple’s look at what Conan Doyle contributed to our culture with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, are two more examples of why you ought to avail yourself of a copy.
12.07.09
The war’s education front
Like Mark Lloyd, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, John Holdren, Carol Browner, and Kevin Jennings, this monster must be given the Van Jones treatment. Unaccountable “czars” per se are undesirable, but it has become quite clear why TCM is so keen on the concept. It’s a highly effective vehicle for implementing his mad, perverted vision of a grim, grey totalitarian world in which dignity and common sense have been utterly eradicated.
10.19.09
Rather universally regarded with great reverence
The Anchoress reflects on some particular aspects of intimacy and why we ought to keep them sacred.
10.06.09
Giving a pass to zoo animals with artistic talent
Two great Townhall columns today – one by Cal Thomas and one by Bill Murchison - sum up everything I’d have to say about the Polanski and Letterman matters and what they have to say about the relationship between the arts-and-entertainment world and the erosion – as in chunks of the cliff falling into the ocean – of Western civilization.
06.25.09
The Sanford matter
The guy can put on a heart-wrenching presser, can’t he? It was brimming with the requisite deep respect for the initial good intentions of his mistress to repair her own marriage, oozing with remorse for the spouse, sons, staff and state he let down, drenched in on-the-knees humble yearning to find a way back to spiritual health.
My favorite kind of movie is the noir-era morality play. Double Indemnity, A Place in the Sun, High Noon, Casablanca. They hinge on a moment in which a moral choice is set before someone with unmistakable clarity.
A lot of life is boring or exciting or stressful or interesting or funny or gratifying or whatever, but once in a while, it is uncompromisingly demanding. There are points along the vector at which we are called to make choices that tell God everything He needs to know about the quality of our souls. It’s not a matter of the “deep,” “complicated,” “untamed” nature we express as humans. The heart having its reasons and all that. that’s using the poetic stuff as a smokescreen for unvarnished spiritual failure.
What should Sanford do? He ought to resign as governor, completely remove himself from the public arena, and focus on the supremely uncomfortable work of repairing his role in his family.
At this point, a certain kind of BN reader will no doubt be interested in seeing if I have anything to say about Newt Gingrich, for whom I have expressed admiration on many levels. For the record, I think his failings in this regard disqualify him from seeking the presidency or other high public office ever again. I am curious as to how he and his daughter Jackie Cushman, with whom he recently wrote a book on the basic principles for a happy life, have forged a close relationship, given Newt’s tawdry treatment of her mother. Anybody out there know the inside scoop on this one?
I am also willing to believe that Newt’s conversion to Catholicism is his sincere desire to learn how to face his Lord squarely in all his shame and sinfulness and seek real forgiveness.
It’s also important to state that the behavior of a Sanford or a Gingrich in no way has anything to do with the principles they assert and defend in the realm of public-policy and cultural polemics. Free-market economics, a foreign policy that accounts for enemies, and, yes, the championing of Judeo-Christian values, are good and immutable whether espoused by saints or scoundrels.
When it comes to putting those principles into law or executive policy, though, we must insist on that being done by people who hold themselves to a higher standard than adulters with good minds and intentions.
