Rod Dreher's Blog, page 5

I spoke once to a Christian friend who left his (very good) job because he could not in good conscience live with all the woke changes the new CEO was implementing. He told me there were enough conservative Christians in his senior-level department to have stopped most of this executive action, but almost none spoke out. They were too afraid to endanger their

career prospects, and to be thought poorly of by liberal colleagues. As my friend put it, what they really worshiped was success and assimilation to Babylon.

When he said this, I thought of the anti-communist Christian dissident Kamila Bendova’s warning to me in her Prague apartment: that I should not count on our fellow Christians to make a risky stand for our beliefs. She told me (I tell this story in Live Not By Lies) that under communism, in a time when her late husband went to prison for his beliefs, most Czech Christians did what everybody else did: kept their heads down and their mouths shut, to avoid trouble.

That does not apply to five Christian players on the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball team. Excerpts:

Some Tampa Bay Rays players reportedly broke from the organization’s support of the LGBTQ+ community Saturday during the team’s Pride Night against the Chicago White Sox.

Most Rays players were wearing rainbow logos on their caps and sleeves. But the Tampa Bay Times noted that pitchers Jason Adam, Jalen Beeks, Brooks Raley, Jeffrey Springs and Ryan Thompson were among those who didn’t wear the logos of support.

Adam made a statement on behalf of the players who opted out and cited religious beliefs.

“A lot of it comes down to faith, to like a faith-based decision. So it’s a hard decision. Because, ultimately, we all said what we want is them to know that all are welcome and loved here,” he said, via the Tampa Bay Times.

“But when we put it on our bodies, I think a lot of guys decided that it’s just a lifestyle that maybe — not that they look down on anybody or think differently — it’s just that maybe we don’t want to encourage it if we believe in Jesus, who’s encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior. Just like (Jesus) encourages me as a heterosexual male to abstain from sex outside of the confines of marriage. It’s no different.

“It’s not judgmental. It’s not looking down. It’s just what we believe the lifestyle he’s encouraged us to live, for our good, not to withhold. But, again, we love these men and women, we care about them and we want them to feel safe and welcome here.”

From the team’s website, woke capitalism is in on the game, naturally:

 

 

From the Tampa Bay Times:

The topic sparked numerous conversations — team-wide, small-group and individual — over the last several weeks. Players on both sides and management said they were constructive and did not create any division.

“I certainly hope not,” manager Kevin Cash said. “I think what it has created is, like, what you’ve heard — a lot of conversation and valuing the different perspectives inside the clubhouse but really appreciating the community that we’re trying to support here.”

In post-Christian America, I think that’s about the best outcome orthodox Christians and other dissenters from the forced Pride march through the institutions can hope for: a respectful dialogue that allows us to abide by our consciences. (I’ll have more to say about this in a separate post later today.) It’s good that the team’s management defends the right of religious dissenters within the organization, even as that management proclaims its devotion to the (typically coercive) civic religion.

As a Christian, I suppose it would be delightful if a sports team, I dunno, decided to have players wear crosses to observe Easter. But I would be appalled if any player — of another religion, or no religion at all — were compelled or pressured in any way to take part. It’s not right. And in the end, I would probably wish the team wouldn’t do it at all, because I wouldn’t want non-Christian players to feel socially pressured. The faith is strong enough to survive a sports team not signaling its support for Christianity.

Frankly, I wish we could return to a time when athletes were not invited or expected to show support for any cause other than winning the damn game. But as we know, Pride is the new civic religion, and one must burn a pinch of rainbow-colored incense to woke Caesar if one wants to avoid trouble.

I took this shot of a placard in an upscale clothing shop window in Vienna yesterday. I am sure it is not meant ironically; many of the shops, especially the fancy ones, in Vienna now are falling all over themselves to celebrate Pride. The words in Latin mean “true joy”. It certainly feels like the joyful unicorns are puking rainbows over all of us during this High Holy Month. I admire how those five Tampa Bay Rays did not resist this angrily … but they certainly resisted living by the lie. We all know there are more of you dissenting Christians (Jews, Muslims, atheists, and others) out there. Aren’t you sick of being coerced and vomited upon? Where is your courage?:

 

I affirm this commentaru from the sports news and commentary site Outkick. The writer is Gary Sheffield, Jr. Excerpt:

Hard to argue against players wanting freedom to express themselves based on their religious backgrounds. Major League Baseball, and most other major networks, have done everything they can do make people appear anti-gay for failing to celebrate gay pride, but these five are doing well standing up for themselves. It should be understood that we all don’t have to agree on each other’s life decisions/sexual orientations because we can mind our own business. Some people just want to make decisions that best suit them and let others do their thing. That’s how life was before social media and many would like that way of life to continue.

Rays manager Kevin Cash spoke to the media and admitted the player’s reluctance to wear their pride patches stirred conversation in the locker room and not once did he mention a heated discussion. Maybe this is how life should work? We aren’t all bullied to share black squares or flag patches to be viewed as quality human beings. We have nuanced discussions like adults that lead to a more healthy environment.

Good for these guys, man. Standing up for their faith.

The post Five Rays Of Light appeared first on The American Conservative.

My friend a podcast partner Kale Zelden, a Catholic, has an interesting Twitter thread about how troubled he is by Pope Francis’s recent acts, and what it says about the direction of the Catholic Church. It begins here:

A thread on where we’re at:

1/16 pic.twitter.com/7dR4SrqmlR

— Kale Zelden (@kalezelden) June 3, 2022

Kale talks about how, as a younger man, he was so inspired by the figure of John Paul II, and the solid rock of Truth his papacy, and the Roman church, represented. Now, though, Francis continues to repudiate so much of JP2’s legacy, and not only that, but magisterial Catholic teaching. More:

Kale refers his readers to this Catholic World Report essay by the Catholic theologian Larry Chapp, along the same lines. Chapp begins by talking about what it means that Francis has just elevated Bishop Robert McElroy, the super-liberal Uncle Ted McCarrick disciple, to the cardinalate — just the latest in a line of progressive red-hats made in America by Francis. Excerpts:

Indeed, McElroy was one of the bishops who voted against a USCCB petition pressing the Vatican for more transparency and speed in the McCarrick investigation. I repeat: he voted against transparency. Which marks him off as either someone who is: A) personally compromised himself in the McCarrick situation and who is seeking to cover things up; B) uncaring toward the victims of abuse; C) a Pope Francis sycophant who was simply trying to shield the Pope from criticism; or D) all, or some combination, of the above.

All that said, I think there is a need to identify the root issue at stake in all of these concerns and criticisms. Beyond particular and proximate issues such as LBTQIAA+++ promotion, Eucharistic discipline, sex abuse scandals, and obstructionism, it is important to ask a simple question: why does Pope Francis like Bishop McElroy enough to make him a Cardinal? After all, the man has some serious baggage.

And the answer to that question can only be ascertained once we understand how important to this pontificate Amoris Laetitia is. Just as Traditionis Custodes was in many ways a clear repudiation of Summorum Pontificum, so too is Amoris Laetitia a repudiation of large parts of Veritatis Splendor.

My view of this papacy is that Pope Francis—slowly and brick by brick—is attempting to subvert the theological hermeneutic of the previous two papacies: Pope John Paul II’s in particular, and primarily in the realm of the late Pontiff’s moral theology. Bishop McElroy has been an unabashed supporter of Amoris and his promotion to the red hat is the Pope’s way of signaling that McElroy’s approach to the moral theological principles of Amoris is correct.

More:

This also explains, as I have blogged on before, why Pope Francis has systematically dismantled the John Paul II Institute in Rome and replaced numerous professors and leadership—all of whom were devotees, of course, of John Paul’s thought, of Communio theology, and of Familiaris Consortio/Veritatis Splendor—with theologians who are largely proportionalists in moral theology and strong supporters of a more “progressive” agenda. And they have all been given the specific mandate to transform the Institute into . This is also why nobody from the previous regime at the Institute was invited to the Synod on the Family.

Therefore, in my view, the various red hats that Francis has given out to the Church in the U.S. are primarily, although not exclusively, about moral theology and the revolution in the post-conciliar theological guild on the topic of human sexuality. People tend to focus on the great controversies surrounding liturgy in the post-conciliar era. And those issues are important. But take it from someone who lived through it—the deepest, most important, most contentious, most divisive, and most destructive debates surrounded moral theology, especially after Humanae vitae and the massive dissent from it that followed.

Read it all. 

You might think this is inside Catholic baseball. You’re wrong: it’s one of the biggest religion stories of our time. Kale Zelden is just a few years younger than I am. It turns out that we were both in the New Orleans Superdome in 1987 to see John Paul II. I wasn’t yet a Catholic, but I was drawn to the Dome by the personal magnetism of this Pope. Six years later, I was received into the Catholic Church. It wasn’t a straight line from one to the other, but as I was wrestling with whether or not to become a serious Christian, Catholicism seemed to be the only option (I barely knew what Orthodoxy was back then).

Why? Well, because of John Paul and what he signified. I understood him to be a morally courageous, powerful spiritual leader who stood confidently against the chaos and corruption of the modern world. I believed back then, in my early twenties, that if Christianity was going to survive, it would need what the Catholic Church alone had: a Pope and a Magisterium. The Protestant world was divided into thousands of churches, but the Catholic Church bestrode history and the globe as a colossus of unity and truth. Et cetera. That’s what I believed, because that’s what a lot of the triumphalists of the JP2 era said.

If you had come to me in 1993, right after I had been received into the Catholic Church, and told me that I would live to see a pope do the things that Francis has done, I would not have believed it possible. Seriously, I would not have believed it. Maybe you had to have been there, and been young and in love with John Paul II, to have been so confident about the future. The kind of thing Kale Zelden talks about (“We watch as the legacy of our whole life is just systematically dismantled”) resonates deeply in my heart, though I left the Catholic Church sixteen years ago.

If the abuse scandal hadn’t annihilated my capacity to believe in Roman Catholic claims of authority, then the Francis papacy probably would have done the trick. The reason I wouldn’t have believed a visitor from 2022 going back in time to 1993 with news of the many liberal accomplishments of the Francis papacy is because I honestly believed all that stuff about unchanging doctrine, and the pope never teaching error.

I know that many of my closest Catholic friends are suffering greatly right now. None have talked to me about becoming Orthodox, and I would not take advantage of someone’s suffering to press the case for Orthodoxy on them, unless I feared that they were in danger of losing their faith entirely. Don’t misunderstand me: I think that Orthodoxy is true — I believe that far more strongly today than I did when I became Orthodox in 2006 — but I remember how much pain I was in when my Catholic faith was being gutted out of me, and I would have resented anyone who took advantage of my suffering to push their version of Christianity on me.

Nevertheless, as someone who admires the Catholic Church and who wants it to be strong, and as someone who is passionately interested in religion, I can’t avert my eyes from the iceberg towards which Capt. Bergoglio is sailing his ship. In fact, I think he’s broadsided the thing, for the same reasons Kale Zelden and Larry Chapp do.

I doubt this will matter to most Catholics, who go about their business without worrying too much what the Pope says about this or that. Even Chapp ends his essay with:

Again, at the end of the day, I really don’t care whose head is adorned with a red hat or whose petard sits in an office chair on the via della conziliazione. The immediate needs of my day and the tidal undertow and sinful entropy of my degraded life seem much more pressing to me. I seek Christ and Him crucified.

It seems to me that if a Catholic is determined to remain Catholic, that’s the only realistic response he has after this papacy. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, but I don’t see how it’s possible to make the kinds of claims for Catholicism’s steadiness and continuity, especially through the papacy — claims that drew me in like a tractor beam in the early 1990s — and be taken seriously. After JP2 and BXVI, and now Francis, it looks like the Catholic Church is governed like countries are with changes of parties and governments after elections. You can’t just say, “Well, let’s just sit back and wait for God to send us a pope we like better.” It doesn’t work that way. A future conservative pope who undid all Francis has done would unavoidably destabilize the institutional Church and its authority even further.

I welcome comment and critique, but what I won’t post is griping about me being an ex-Catholic writing critically about this papacy. Nor will I post anti-Catholic smears. If you just want to take potshots at Catholics, or me, don’t bother writing anything, because I’m not going to post it. What I’m genuinely interested in is hearing from small-o orthodox Catholics — especially Gen X Catholics whose idea of the Church was shaped by the JP2 era — about how they are coping, and how they are explaining all this to themselves.

The post After Francis, What Stability? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg is steaming mad about the verdict in the Johnny Depp – Amber Heard trial. This paragraph is insane:

As a First Amendment issue, the verdict is a travesty. By the time Heard wrote the essay, the restraining order she’d received had been all over the news, and a photo of her with a bruised face and bloody lip had appeared on the cover of People Magazine. Even if Heard lied about everything during the trial — even if she’d never suffered domestic abuse — she still would have represented it. But if the police call wasn’t part of a hoax, then it’s hard to see how Heard hadn’t suffered as well.

Wait … what?! Even if she lied about everything, Johnny Depp should have lost the case because some women somewhere suffer domestic abuse? Depp might not have been guilty, but some men somewhere are guilty, and really, isn’t that all that matters?

Here is a fantastic tweetstorm by lawyer Natalie Whittingham Burrell breaking down why Johnny Depp had a massive mountain to climb to prevail in this case — and why he succeeded. Bottom line: Amber Heard was shown in court to be an extremely unreliable narrator. For example:

Let me be clear here, AH contradicted her own self. That’s bad, real bad. It’s always evidence of deception. Anyway, the very next day, after appearing with the bruise, AH was photographed smiling with her friend Rocky, with no bruise on her face. pic.twitter.com/Yb5oCtMJzw

— Natalie Whittingham Burrell (@natlawyerchic) June 2, 2022

Another one:

Finally, probably most damming, Kate Moss, JD ex GF and super model, testified from the UK that JD never pushed her down the stairs. This is damming because it appears that AH just made this rumor up, to justify her “decking” JD pic.twitter.com/Hc2LiBbmM4

— Natalie Whittingham Burrell (@natlawyerchic) June 2, 2022

Finally:

AH lied on the stand, repeatedly. Demonstrably. Even at times, contradicting her own self. AH hurt victims of DV by making it possible that all people will be more skeptical of true victims. The jury really didn’t have a choice but to find in JD’s favor. The blame lies with her.

— Natalie Whittingham Burrell (@natlawyerchic) June 2, 2022

Read the whole tweetstorm, especially if, like me, you didn’t follow the trial. 

We also learned during testimony from a medical professional hired to evaluate Amber Heard that Heard has Borderline Personality Disorder. From Harvard Health, this about how BPD sufferers behave:

When stressed, people with borderline personality disorder may develop psychotic-like symptoms. They experience a distortion of their perceptions or beliefs rather than a distinct break with reality. Especially in close relationships, they tend to misinterpret or amplify what other people feel about them. For example, they may assume a friend or family member is having extremely hateful feelings toward them, when the person may be only mildly annoyed or angry.

A distortion of their perceptions or beliefs rather than a distinct break with reality. I think it is entirely possible that Heard really did believe the things she was saying. One of my readers who says he’s married to a BPD wife sent me this passage he typed in from a book called Understanding The Borderline Mother, which a commenter recommended the other day:

Some borderlines consciously distort the truth in order to prevent abandonment, maintain self-esteem, or avoid conflict. Others may lie to evoke sympathy, attention, and concern. From the borderline’s perspective, however, lying feels essential to survival. (Although not all borderlines consciously lie, all borderlines experience perceptional distortions.) When desperation drives behavior such as lying or stealing, they feel innocent of wrongdoing and do not feel guilt or remorse. Apologies are rare, therefore, and borderlines may be confused about why others expect them to feel remorse. They believe that others would do what they did in order to survive. Their explanation is succinct, “But I had to!” Thus the borderline is unconcerned with the consequences of lying because she feels she had no other option.

I found an online PDF version of the book, and scanned through it, looking for clues. That a medical professional found Heard to be suffering from BPD is damning to her credibility. From the book:

Wow. More:

“Manipulative.” “Distorts the truth and may even blatantly lie.” “Overreacts.” “Impulsive” “Hasan unreliable memory.” “Inconsistent.”

You think Heard might have been an unreliable witness? Gosh. “I don’t trust her” — said the jury.

One more from Understanding The Borderline Mother:

I don’t know what kind of childhood Amber Heard had, but this is really interesting to learn: that growing up with a chronically stressful childhood may damage the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation. That’s astonishing information to have when evaluating the contradictory testimony of Amber Heard. If she really does have BPD, then she might not even have been aware that she was lying on the stand. I have somebody in my broad family network who is known to all of us as a chronic liar — not a malicious one, but one who will say whatever that person has to say to achieve a sense of peace. Growing up, we all had to learn to discount what X. said because X. would lie compulsively without even knowing that they were lying. I know for a fact that X. had a traumatic, abusive childhood. Now that I’ve read around Understanding The Borderline Mother, I pity my poor kinfolk X.

I didn’t pay attention to the trial at the time, but it seems clear in the aftermath that though Johnny Depp is an unsavory character in many ways (and this came out in the trial), contra Michelle Goldberg, the Depp verdict was no travesty. It was vindication that truth, not feelings, and not political utility, matters in these cases.

As it happens, tonight I watched the absolutely must-see Matt Walsh documentary What Is A Woman. I had a press screener. I don’t know what you have to pay to watch it, but it’s almost certainly worth it. What an immensely powerful documentary, the kind of thing that you ought to be able to see all the time, but our media don’t care about truth, or difficult questions; they only care about Narrative. This tweet by Allie Beth Stuckey is true:

One of the things that stood out to me in @MattWalshBlog’s “What Is A Woman” is that everyone on the pro-sex switching side denied not only the existence of biology but the entire concept of truth itself. This is a theological debate more than it’s a political or scientific one.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 2, 2022

Well, theological, or philosophical. Either word works. That paragraph from Michelle Goldberg, who works as a columnist at the most powerful newspaper on the planet, tells you the kind of decadence that is consuming our society. If they remade the mid-century courtroom classic Twelve Angry Men according to Goldberg’s standards, the accused killer — an 18-year-old Hispanic young man on trial for murdering his abusive father — would have been convicted because even if he didn’t do it. Early in the movie, when the jury begins deliberation, one of them says:

“You’re not going to tell me that we’re supposed to believe this kid knowing what he is? Listen I’ve lived among them all my life. You can’t believe a word they say, you know that. I mean, they’re born liars.”

Here’s the scene:

“You’re not going to tell me that we’re supposed to believe Johnny Depp knowing what he is?” says the Michelle Goldberg juror. “Listen, I’ve lived among men all my life. You can’t believe a word they say, you know that. I mean, they’re born liars. OK, maybe Amber Heard is lying in this particular case, but lots of men beat women and lie about it. And we’re supposed to believe Johnny Depp?”

Seems that people on the Left are eager to given mentally ill people what they want, as long as it hurts the “correct” people. Here’s the reaction of the “justice correspondent” of the left-wing magazine The Nation:

From the Matt Walsh documentary, here he is interviewing a university professor of the phony discipline “gender studies”:

This brief video is really, really important. It’s a 40-second encapsulation of the moral and epistemological problem we are currently facing. https://t.co/UXSQXevirn

— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) June 2, 2022

The post Amber & Johnny & Who & Whom appeared first on The American Conservative.

You hear about the controversy at Canada’s Western University? A reader told me about it. The university put out some posters for Pride. Such as:

And this one:

 

Turns out that the lesbian Muslim ladies smooching pissed off the local Muslim community, which raised hell. Western took that poster down, over the protests of LGBTs. Read all about it here. So at least we know a bit more how the Oppression Hierarchy shakes out at Western University. Leftists can’t get their oppression narratives, um, straight. Say what you want about Muslims, they will not put up with this stuff. In Britain a few years back, it was Muslim parents, not Christian ones, who went public to protest the LGBT indoctrination of their kids in schools. They have the courage that we lack.

So it goes with the new civic religion. It’s really quite something to walk around the Austrian capital during the High Holy Month of Pride. We are everywhere reminded of who are real rulers of our civilization are. For example, this uplifting scene I came across on my walk home today:

 

It ain’t Budapest, I tell you what.

Today, a Catholic reader wrote:

Today on the Roman calendar is the feast of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, African Christians martyred in the late 19th century for defying a local potentate’s desire to rape little boys.I heard of him years ago when I read then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter cautioning Catholic politicians to oppose homosexual marriage in civil laws. I noticed that the letter stated it was issued on St. Charles Lwanga’s feast. I hadn’t heard of him and so read a little about his astonishing martyrdom. He was burned slowly to death but evidently said nary a word until, at the very end, he cried out “God!” (I asked a good priest whether the letter’s being issued on his feast day was a coincidence. He laughed and said, Oh no.)A link to Bishop Barron’s discussion of the fruits of his martyrdom for Africa:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7WlYcr0EU0Ratzinger’s letter:  https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030731_homosexual-unions_en.htmlIn any event, he seems an appropriate Saint for Pride Month.St. Charles Lwanga, Ora Pro Nobis!

Here is the Wikipedia description of Charles Lwanga’s martyrdom:

The persecution started in 1885 after [King] Mwanga, a ritual pedophile, ordered a massacre of Anglican missionaries, including Bishop James Hannington who was the leader of the Anglican community. Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the Catholic major-domo of the court and a lay catechist, reproached the king for the killings, against which he had counseled him. Mwanga had Balikuddembe beheaded and arrested all of his followers on 15 November 1885. The king then ordered that Lwanga, who was chief page at that time, take up Balikuddembe’s duties. That same day, Lwanga and other pages under his protection sought baptism as Catholics by a missionary priest of the White Fathers; some hundred catechumens were baptized. Lwanga often protected boys in his charge from the king’s sexual advances.

On 25 May 1886, Mwanga ordered a general assembly of the court while they were settled at Munyonyo, where he condemned two of the pages to death. The following morning, Lwanga secretly baptized those of his charges who were still only catechumens. Later that day, the king called a court assembly in which he interrogated all present to see if any would renounce Christianity. Led by Lwanga, the royal pages declared their fidelity to their religion, upon which the king condemned them to death, directing that they be marched to the traditional place of execution. Three of the prisoners, Pontian Ngondwe, Athanasius Bazzekuketta, and Gonzaga Gonza, were murdered on the march there.

When preparations were completed and the day had come for the execution on 3 June 1886, Lwanga was separated from the others by the Guardian of the Sacred Flame for private execution, in keeping with custom. As he was being burnt, Lwanga said to the Guardian, “It is as if you are pouring water on me. Please repent and become a Christian like me.”

Twelve Catholic boys and men and nine Anglicans were then burnt alive. Another Catholic, Mbaga Tuzinde, was clubbed to death for refusing to renounce Christianity, and his body was thrown into the furnace to be burned along with those of Lwanga and the others. The ire of the king was particularly inflamed against the Christians because they refused to participate in sexual acts with him. Lwanga, in particular, had protected the pages.

Here, from Father Zuhlsdorf’s blog, is a photograph of the Ugandan martyrs, including St. Charles Lwanga (Number 13):

Pope St. Paul VI said of St. Charles and his companions:

“These African martyrs inaugurate a new age… Africa is the new country of Christ. A clear witness of this fact is the direct simplicity and unshakeable fidelity of these young African Christians.”

May their memory be eternal. A suitable saint for this month, indeed. Holy Charles Lwanga, pray for us, spiritually dying from pride.

The post St. Charles Lwanga, Ora Pro Nobis appeared first on The American Conservative.

An informed and highly trusted source tells me:

Homeland Security has officially notified the bishops there are credible threats to the safety of Catholic churches, clergy, and bishops if the Supreme Court overturns Roe. Violence has been called for beginning the night such a decision is handed down.

This does not surprise me. Catholics and their allies should prepare to stand guard around their churches on that night and the nights to follow. It won’t only be Catholic churches at threat, I’m sure — conservative Evangelical churches will be too — but to their great honor, the Catholic parishes will be the most obvious targets.

They were in Poland a year or so ago, when the country’s highest court approved a near-total ban on abortion:

In January, here’s what pro-abortion protesters did to a Catholic church in Manhattan:

Just so you’ll know who’s who and what’s what, keep in mind that the Satanic Temple got a 14-minute puff piece on VICE for its work to “protect abortion rights.”

This is not a joke, or an over-abundance of caution. A pro-life organization’s Wisconsin offices were set on fire after the Roe draft leaked. And Justice Samuel Alito, who drafted the leaked opinion, has been in hiding, and unable to participate in public functions because someone might attack him, even try to kill him. What does that tell you about the kind of country we live in?

Here are protesters outside Justice Barrett’s house. The hatred of God is intense:

Now: Activists of @RuthSentUs @downrightimp and @OurRightsDC pass by the home of Justice Amy Barrett “Keep your rosary off my ovaries!” making multiple passes. pic.twitter.com/i8cUPLuEs0

— DCMediaGroup (@DCMediaGroup) June 2, 2022

All of this is happening in the same country where this happened two years ago:

So tonight is the two year anniversary of when the whole united states including Washington DC was up in flames with riots breaking out all over with tear gas flashbangs and looting happening across all major cities pic.twitter.com/6pcbOJ8Pze

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) June 1, 2022

It’s all been forgotten. But our media are still talking about the (indeed disgusting) January 6 assault on the Capitol. All about managing the Narrative, you know.

Our media and the Cathedral class are going to apply the Law of Merited Impossibility to Catholic churches trashed by pro-abortion radicals: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

The Roe decision will be announced this month. It will be an apocalypse (“unveiling”) for Christians in America, as the true meaning of the de-Christianization of the United States will be made manifest. I keep telling people to prepare themselves, their families, and their religious communities for what’s coming. Specifically, if your church is in any way publicly associated with the pro-life movement — and all Catholic churches, even those known to be liberal, are by default — you had better now, this very day, start organizing vigils to surround and protect your church buildings. We saw in the “mostly peaceful” burning streets two years ago what the Left in this country is capable of, and what the ruling class in this country will excuse, even support.

My books The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies have sold well, but I have told friends that it’s frustrating that so many US Christians refuse to believe that things are as far gone as they are in our post-Christian country, and that they therefore have an urgent obligation to prepare themselves spiritually and otherwise. I’m afraid they are about to get a shocking wake-up call. The alert Homeland Security sent to the US Catholic bishops is part of this.

The post Warning To Catholic Churches appeared first on The American Conservative.

Do you know about “rice Christians”? It’s the slur term used for Third World Christians who converted only to get material benefits, e.g., a bag of rice to feed their hungry family.

The Biden Administration is forcing America’s hungry schoolchildren to be “rice Christians” for the religion of Pride. What they’re doing to school lunch programs:

In line with @POTUS’ sex and gender identity anti-discrimination executive order, we are working to ensure our @USDANutrition programs are open, accessible and help promote food and nutrition security, regardless of demographics https://t.co/6QxJ7oFEak pic.twitter.com/lQNryOxYYU

— Dept. of Agriculture (@USDA) May 5, 2022

Can you believe that? From the USDA press release:

As a result, state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Those organizations must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Nutrition disparities negatively impact health, productivity and overall well-being for too many in the U.S. FNS recognizes that equitable nutrition assistance means that every American – regardless of identity or background – can access the food they need to thrive.

Liars. Joe Biden and his team do not believe that every American should have access to food. Only those who attend schools and interact with food-providing institutions that pledge faith in the Pride religion are eligible for food.

This is what our Very Catholic president Joe Biden is doing: in effect, forcing hungry Americans to cooperate with evil in order for their children to be fed.

How is this tolerable? This is not even liberal. How can anybody deny food to hungry poor people who don’t agree with one’s political or religious beliefs? What kind of SOB compels a hungry person to deny their conscience as a condition of being fed? I would give food to the children of the worst racist, the worst anti-Christian bigot, the worst anybody. Because that’s what it means to be human. 

This is the United States Government today: tyrannical, inhuman, progressive as Hell.

Meanwhile, here’s a tweet from a magazine that imagines itself to be “empowering men to raise great kids and lead more fulfilling adult lives”:

Pride Parades and the Pride festivals that follow are noisy and crowded. They’re filled with sights that may be new to kids, like public nudity and kink. So is it appropriate to take your young kids to Pride?https://t.co/CZDnooZq5f

— Fatherly (@FatherlyHQ) June 1, 2022

Gosh, let’s read what Fatherly has to advise. Excerpt:

Before going to Pride, you should also sit your kids down with a few more children’s books about LGBTQ+ people and families. Kids have a tendency to point and ask questions when they’re exposed to new things, and you don’t want people celebrating Pride to become a convenient life lesson for your children. If you’re straight and cisgender or just haven’t exposed your kids to much of the LGBTQ+ community yet, prepping your children beforehand can ensure that your family is respectful of queer people while at Pride.

Jenifer McGuire, Ph.D., an associate professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, has been to Pride celebrations across the world with her family, from Tucson to Amsterdam. McGuire, a lesbian parent, always preps her kids for possible adult content beforehand. After a few events, the kids knew to expect nudity and other surprises. “They just had to learn to laugh and enjoy things. Like there were these Beanie Babies with giant penises on them,” McGuire says. “For a fourth- and fifth-grade kid, that’s super funny.”

The benefits to her family always outweighed any potential downside, McGuire says, because they could see how many other queer families were in their community and around the world. “They don’t necessarily get that from their swimming teams and drama clubs and school,” she says.

I’m old enough to remember in the early 1990s, Pat Robertson being assailed for airing on The 700 Club racy video from the Washington DC Pride parade. He was criticized as homophobic not because he distorted anything, but because he aired it at all. Normies were not supposed to notice all the nudity and kink.

I cannot believe that we live in a time in which the US Government is compelling schools an dother organizations to affirm transgenderism as a condition of being able to receive and distribute food for hungry people, including children. But we do live in such a time. The Pride god is a jealous god.

The post ‘Rice Christians’ Of The New Religion appeared first on The American Conservative.

I arrived yesterday in Vienna for the summer. The Austrian capital is in the throes celebrating the High Holy Month of Pride. The trams all fly Pride flags, the stores are decked out in festal decorations, and the rainbow banner is everywhere. A foreigner arriving here would think there was a national holiday or religious festival going on. They would be right.

You see this?

Throughout June, the USMC takes #Pride in recognizing and honoring the contributions of our LGBTQ service members. We remain committed to fostering an environment free from discrimination, and defend the values of treating all equally, with dignity and respect.#PrideMonth #USMC pic.twitter.com/MOyvFmyJiB

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) June 1, 2022

How about that! Shoot rainbow bullets at the enemy, and suddenly the Left finds war to be glorious.

This culture war is having measurable effects on the generation raised within its rituals. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a new report out about it. Here’s the summary:

The last decade has seen a precipitous rise in the share of Americans identifying as LGBT, particularly among the youngest adults. Today, among those under 30, a wide range of surveys converge on a number of around 20%.Government data from Canada and the UK indicate that surveys might be overestimating the extent of the rise in LGBT identity. This caveat must be kept in mind in understanding this report.Nonetheless, these government sources indicate that the trend is real, even if less reliable surveys might exaggerate it. The UK’s Office for National Statistics finds that 7.6% of those 16-24 identify as LGBT, which can be taken as a low-end estimate for that country.The most popular LGBT identity is bisexual, which is significantly more common among women than men.When we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification. Men and women under 30 who reported a sexual partner in the last five years dropped from around 96% exclusively heterosexual in the 1990s to 92% exclusively heterosexual in 2021.Whereas in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar, by 2021 LGBT identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual behavior.The author provides a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30. Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.Very liberal ideology is associated with identifying as LGBT among those with heterosexual behavior, especially women. It seems that an underlying psychological disposition is inclining people with heterosexual behavior to identify both as LGBT and very liberal. The most liberal respondents have moved from 10-15% non-heterosexual identification in 2016 to 33% in 2021. Other ideological groups are more stable.Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.Because the rise in LGBT identity is so heavily concentrated on the political left, its influence on the balance of power between the two parties is likely to be limited.College students majoring in the social sciences and humanities are about 10 points more LGBT than those in STEM. Meanwhile, 52% of students taking highly political majors such as race or gender studies identify as LGBT, compared to 25% among students overall.Various data sources indicate that gender nonconformity – trans and non-binary identity – reached its peak in the last few years and has started to decline.What kind of high school or college a young person attends poorly predicts their likelihood of identifying as LGBT. The one exception is Liberal Arts colleges, where 38% of students describe themselves in this way. This indicates that schooling might not have a large effect on changes in LGBT identity.Overall, the data suggest that while there has been an increase in same-sex behavior in recent years, sociopolitical factors likely explain most of the rise in LGBT identity.

Read the entire report.

The US Embassy to the Vatican has, for the second year in a row, raised the Pride banner— which, let’s be honest, makes the US Embassy more honest than some clerics within the Vatican. This identity splits churches, as we have seen for some time. For example, some progressive Methodists have embraced a drag queen preacher, “Penny Cost,” who describes “herself” as a “Dragavangelist”:

Recently, a video was posted by openly gay Isaac Simmons, an associate pastor at Hope UMC in Bloomington, Illinois, who has been widely celebrated as the first drag queen certified as an ordination candidate in the UMC. Simmons regularly preaches in drag as the female persona “Ms. Penny Cost,” and has been featured as a speaker for progressive United Methodists across the country.

The video immediately raises questions about the wisdom of ordaining Simmons. Blatantly titled “The Bible is Nothing” the video is now featured prominently on Simmons’ website. It contains repeated use of profanity (including blasphemy), consistent anger-filled claims against orthodoxy, casual hate, and a denial of God. Simmons opens with a shocking disparagement of the Bible’s unique authority, stating, “The Bible is no more holy than Allen Ginsburg’s howls of life, no more peaceful than Oscar Wilde’s Requiescat in pace, and no more stronger than Tammy f—ing Faye’s g—d— eyelash glue.”

Simmons delivers the poem orally as himself (wearing a shirt with the words “PROUD MARY” and an apparent picture of a statue of Jesus Christ’s mother overlaid with rainbow colors), rather than in his drag queen persona. In this video, he calls the Bible “nothing but poetry, pain, and performance” and refers to God as “God, themself” (avoiding male pronouns for God).

The poem eventually devolves into a condemnation of “theology of toxic masculinity” and “Christian terrorists who wield their flappable doctrine to inflict harm on God’s queerly anointed creation.” Simmons even likens Christians with traditional biblical beliefs to literal murderers of gay people like Aaron McKinney, Roger Nunez, and Omar Mateen.

In a generation or less, the congregations that embrace the Penny Cost fraudulent version of Christianity will be defunct. Cause of death: suicide.

I’m with Calvinist theologian Carl Trueman on all this. Pride Month is not the kind of thing you can simply roll your eyes at and get on with it. He writes:

If anybody wants to understand what is happening to the public square in America—indeed, if anyone wants to know how America, or at least her ruling class, wishes to understand itself, they need look no further than Pride Month. If the arrival of the Pilgrims, the founding of the nation, and even the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr. receive no more than 24 hours on the national calendar, the LGBTQ+ alliance has an entire month to party in the streets. And this street party is enabled by the countless commercial ventures that post rainbow flags in their windows and on their websites.

For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one’s sexual identity—indeed, even considering sexual desire to be an identity—would seem at best pitiful and at worst a deep perversion of what it means to be human. Yet, here we are. And we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies.

It is a basic fact of history that if you control time and space, you also control the culture. The early Christians of the fourth century knew that as they slowly but surely claimed space in pagan Roman culture for churches and marked the rhythm of time with the development of the liturgical calendar. And all sides in our current political divisions know this as well. It is why debates about the naming of Columbus Day and the status of Confederate statues and the flag of the Confederacy are such contentious topics. These arguments are not just about the things themselves. They are about who owns time and space. In short, they are about who owns the culture’s memory and imagination.

This makes Pride Month something with which no Christian should have any sympathy whatsoever. It marks the beginning of summer with a dramatic assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire. The rebels take over time. And with their flags and their parades they assert ownership over space—public, commercial, virtual, and even—via yards signs and symbols on social media posts—personal and private. It is not about what the state allows consenting adults to do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Far from it. Rather, June witnesses as comprehensive an attempt at cultural revolution as one is ever likely to see.

Read the whole thing. 

If you are a Christian, or any sort of traditionalist, you cannot support Pride month — even if you have no problem with homosexuality. I have a couple of gay conservative friends who are not religious, and who are comfortable being gay (one is partnered, the other isn’t, but is open to it), and who hate the way sexual desire has become an identity and a cultural celebration. Though they don’t share Trueman’s (and my own) negative judgment on homosexual behavior, they would likely agree that Pride month is “a dramatic assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire” — and, as conservatives, reject it. The reason Pride has been so seamlessly co-opted by consumer capitalism is because both celebrate desire as constitutive of personhood and virtue.

This is something that Christians who identify as conservative need to think about. Before the rise of LGBT and woke capitalism more generally, most of us didn’t have a lot to say negatively about capitalism and how it shapes morality and deforms the human person. In fact, we would have probably thought even saying such a thing was to endorse socialism! We were wrong. Any ideology that worships desire makes an idol of a false god. At its best, a capitalism bounded by Christian ethics can provide the material benefits of capitalism without losing sight of the fact that the market is made to serve man, not the other way around.

Pride Month is a 30-day celebration of human desire, sexual autonomy, and the defiance of all that restrains desire’s expression. It is, in that sense, Luciferian — and it’s what the West worships. All those rainbow flags do — I saw one on top of a government building this morning — is make explicit the post-Christian decadence that was spreading within the West even when LGBT was a fringe phenomenon.

We are being weighed, and we will be found wanting. You watch. From Live Not By Lies, here’s a passage about how eros-worship opened the door to revolution:

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington [in The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture— RD] called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, which found renewal in sexual passion. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

Pride goes before a fall. Like I said: you watch.

The post The Shame Of Pride Month appeared first on The American Conservative.

As conservatives spend lots of time and energy defining and redefining conservatism, leftists do no such thing. They’re uninterested in self-examination. It’s one reason why they’ve racked up win after win.

— Mark Bauerlein (@mark_bauerlein) June 1, 2022

I think this is generally true, but it’s true in a way that I don’t think the Right can do much about. Here’s why.

The Left in theory wants many different things, but the thing they want above all is the Current Thing. The Left is driven by the Myth of Progress. As Kundera observed, anything that can be made to join the Grand March of Progress, the Left can and will embrace. You would think that there would be a real fight among the ranks of the Left over whether or not class politics are more important than identity politics (i.e., race and SOGI), but there’s really not. Identity politics will win every time within the Left today.

This alienates a lot of voters who would be interested in some form of left-wing economic policies, but who don’t want the pink-haired, pierced weirdo teaching their first graders that men can have babies and white people are wicked. The Left doesn’t care. Or rather: the people who set the agenda in left-wing institutions don’t care. The Educated Race Radicals and the Alphabet People are their constituents, not the workers.

Ezra Klein is a certain kind of  thoughtful, earnest left-liberal wonk who writes essays like, “What American Needs Is A Liberalism That Builds.” Okay. It contains passages like this:

I am unabashedly sympathetic to this vision. In a series of columns over the past year, I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds. Scratch the failures of modern Democratic governance, particularly in blue states, and you’ll typically find that the market didn’t provide what we needed and government either didn’t step in or made the problem worse through neglect or overregulation.

We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.

This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.

And so forth. It’s an intelligent, substantive point. But you want to say, “Dude, your side wants to cut the balls off of little boys, and train children to hate white people.” That’s a crude way of putting it, but the point is that technocratic liberals (both left-liberals and right-liberals) have a very difficult time wrapping their minds around the significance of cultural matters. I’ve been on Ezra Klein’s show before, and he makes a serious effort to understand, at least I think he does. But he is left baffled by social and cultural conservatism. It’s hard for me to account for this blindness. Most thoughtful conservatives I know well understand why liberals and progressives see the world the way they do, even if we disagree with them. But to the other side, it’s all Conservatives In The Mist.

Here’s another example: a review in the Financial Times (subscriber-only) of new books warning that the US is headed for another civil war. It’s an interesting piece, but the reviewer only looks at forces from the Right that are fragmenting the US. Fair enough — there clearly are right-wing forces at work in this process — but not once does the reviewer consider the role left-wing identity politics and its offshoots play in the dynamic. It’s an astonishing oversight — but a telling one, because it reveals how the neoliberal ruling class (and the FT is certainly a newspaper of the neoliberal ruling class) sees the world.

So, back to Mark Bauerlein’s original point: that the Right ties itself up in knots trying to figure out what conservatism means, while the Left goes from victory to victory. The Left has made its peace with neoliberal capitalism, and focuses instead on cultural revolution — which has been embraced by capitalists, hence “woke capitalism,” hitching the cultural revolution to the most revolutionary force in history, capitalism. (It has been argued that capitalists, recognizing the threat from the sentiment behind Occupy Wall Street, realized that embracing cultural progressivism was a way to short-circuit socialism.) The Left doesn’t really have to worry too much about what it means to be Left, because the answer is always: further destruction of tradition (especially religion), hedonism, and the consolidation of power within institutions (public and private) that guarantee hedonic individualism, even if it costs us certain political liberties. This is what James Poulos means by the Pink Police State: yes to 126 genders and legalized pot, but no to free speech and religious liberty.

But the Right? Which Right? What do we want to conserve? Or do we want to conserve anything? Not all right-wingers are conservatives, remember. Fascism was a Modernist movement of the Right, after all. Is conservatism to be nothing more than “whatever liberalism wants, just slower”? Go to the National Conservatism conferences, and you’ll understand why factions on the Right are struggling to figure this out. How are you going to bring people like, say, the Catholic integralists into the same movement as gay conservatives? Is the movement big enough for Sohrab Ahmari and Douglas Murray? It had better be — the antiwoke Right is too weak against the institutional power of the cultural Left — but it’s hard to see what unites the Right today other than opposing wokeness. That might be enough to bring politicians of the Right to power, but we are going to have to articulate a positive and unifying vision if we are going to deserve power.

This discussion must seem absurd to people on the Left, who are about to see Roe overturned, and who may be looking at a staggering political defeat this November. The great advantage the Left has enjoyed is that Conservatism, Inc., largely exists to subsidize grifters, carnival barkers, and those billionaires who cannot yet incorporate themselves into the Democratic coalition. The American right, as shown during the Trump administration, has little interest in taking on the Left’s monopoly on key credentialing organs or holding them accountable, with the result being that the majority of our non-hereditary aristocracy align with the Left on every issue of question either sincerely or through manufactured consent and enforced conformity. A Trump restoration in 2024 will be just as ineffective, and a lot of conservatives will make a lot of money grifting and shitposting but the outcome won’t change.

This is why I keep going on about the positive future of the American Right being some form of what Viktor Orban and other populist European politicians are doing. We need an American Reagan to Orban’s Thatcher. That is, we need a right-wing leader who has an actual vision of where he wants to take the nation (and of what the nation is), and who is not afraid to use power to realize that vision — even if it pisses off globalists, capitalists, and left-wing institutionalists. Western media simply couldn’t grasp that Viktor Orban is a truly popular politician for much the same reason that the FT reviewer is blind to the role left-wing cultural politics are helping to drive America towards civil war. Orbanism is a good example of what Yoram Hazony means by national conservatism. It’s culturally conservative, but not in an ideological way, and believes the power of the state should be used to shore up the natural family, and the common good as defined by traditions and interests of the particular nation. (That is to say, Hungarian national conservatism will be particular to Hungary; US national conservatism will look different.)

Put another way, we need a Right that will no longer defer to whatever Big Business wants; that has an economic vision that works to support families, and family formation; that will use the state to aggressively push back on woke institutions, including credentialing ones, to defend the liberties of dissenters, and their right to exist in these institutions; and that will be more committed to nationalism abroad and localism (federalism) at home. We need a Right that looks at Davos, and says: these people are our enemies.

That’s what I think. We await a charismatic politician who can unite the disparate factions on the Right behind a positive program. Is Ron DeSantis that man? Is J.D. Vance? The fact is, all the theorizing on the Right, in our magazines, at conferences, and within intellectual circles, isn’t going to matter if we can’t get people elected who are willing and capable of doing things.

In the end, though, culture very much remains in the hands of the Left. There’s not a lot politics can do to change that, except for work to keep publicly subsidized institutions open to a wide variety of voices, not just officially left-wing approved ones. I wonder what this means in light of Auron MacIntyre’s powerful short essay about how anyone on the Right who comes to power must clean out the left-wing permanent bureaucracy. Excerpts:

To be credentialed as an ‘expert’ today, and thus qualify to work within the bureaucracy, you must attend university. The more prestigious, and most likely progressive, the university you obtain your degree from, the higher you are likely to climb in the deep state. What this means is that every boss and coworker who a bureaucrat needs to interact with and impress to climb the ladder was required in his or her formative years to absorb the morality of increasingly radical college professors. In other words, it is in the nature of the deep state to select those who constantly signal the virtues of the woke institution, which will one day inevitably go on to inform all of their day-to-day policy decisions.

Whenever the Left consolidates power and creates a new agency, it is immediately staffed with diehard progressive bureaucrats. In many cases, it is literally required by law that experts be placed in key positions of authority, who are all but guaranteed to be leftwing zealots. And the vast majority of this staff does not rotate out or get laid off when a Republican administration or legislature comes to power. Protected by their status as credentialed experts, the ideological foot soldiers of the bureaucracy stay firmly entrenched in the deep state. That’s why things always seem to sprint left when progressives are in charge and at best grind to a halt when the GOP has its turn at the wheel.

More:

The idea that the Left will pay a cost for centralizing more government power once Republicans return to the driver’s seat, is a myth. The battle the Right is fighting both culturally and politically is an asymmetrical one. Until we understand that, we are destined to keep standing bewildered as the losses for our side continue to pile up. Yes, Republicans have become a lot more optimistic lately about their prospects in upcoming elections. Approval numbers for Joe Biden have cratered, and so many on the Right expect a significant electoral backlash due to the horrific job done by Democrat Party since 2020. But any future leader on the Right who is serious about fixing our problems must start by aiming to dismantle the administrative state, clear out the entrenched bureaucracy, and return power back to an executive who can actually govern the country. Anyone who isn’t planning to do that is only wasting our time.

Yep. Read it all. 

I’m not interested in a conservative government that exists only to slow down what the Left wants to do. I’ll vote for it in despair, but without enthusiasm. I also don’t want a Trump restoration if that means little more than tweets, shitposting, and lib-owning, while the Left moves from strength to strength. Bauerlein is right, I think, in that the Left, broadly speaking, doesn’t want to interrogate itself, and that’s why it keeps winning culturally. But this will prove to be a weakness should the public actually elect a government of the Right that actually means to use the power the people give it to change things, as opposed simply to nominally opposing whatever the Left wants next. This is why it’s important for us on the Right to argue among ourselves now, and figure out a program, and a politician, that we can get behind. Me, I have an idea of what I think conservatism should be, but the Trump years, including the Great Awokening and also the effect Trump’s presidency had on shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, compelled me to realize that I can’t let the ideal be the enemy of the necessary.

 

The post Conservatives In The Mist appeared first on The American Conservative.

(H/T)

As we prepare to enter the High Holy Month of Pride, the children’s toymaker Mattel debuts its latest creation: Tranny Barbie, modeled after the trans actor Laverne Cox. Mattel saith:

Laverne Cox is an award-winning actress, producer, writer, and prominent LGBTQ+ advocate. We’re proud to honor her in the Barbie Tribute Collection, to help amplify her message of moving beyond societal expectations to live more authentically.

“Authentically,” as defined by a major corporation. There is nothing that Woke Capitalism can’t co-opt.Meanwhile, bigots aren’t allowed to drink Sam Adams beer during the High Holy Month. Non-bigots, however, are invited to these Sam Adams sponsored public liturgies:

The entire list is here.

And did you hear about the “unicorn” Ukrainian soldiers, LGBT combatants who are fiercely engaging Russian invaders? You gotta believe!

Anyone doubting the centre of gravity for support for Ukraine is Western liberalism need doubt no more …. have to respect the hustle here https://t.co/IxBrQqLPxN

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) May 31, 2022

Queer beer, non-binary Ukrainian soldiers, tranny Barbies. Never forget, though, that if you find any of this weird, or withhold your approval in any way, then you are the one obsessed by LGBT, bigot!

June is gonna be a fun month with Woke Capitalism and other canons of the Cathedral catechizing us to be affirming, or else.

The metaphysical aspect of all this, though — the trans stuff, I mean — is that the culture in which we swim is teaching us to despise the givenness of our bodies, and to think that we can change Nature with a sufficient application of technology, law, and cultural command (including persecuting dissenters). You think this stuff is only about happy-clappy affirmation? Think about what you are affirming: the erasure of masculinity and femininity as biological facts. And we wonder why so many young people in our culture are so psychologically distressed. They are born into an unreal world, and told by the gatekeepers of this culture that they must deny among the most fundamental truths that we can know: the facts of our maleness and femaleness.

I think of the poor 12-year-old Slovenian girl whose father I spoke with last summer in Ljubljana. She got a smartphone when she was eleven, and inadvertently made contact with two trans activists in Oregon, who told her that she had a right and a duty to choose her sexual and gender identity. Her father said she has become paralyzed with depression, not knowing what and how to choose.

 

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A reader e-mails:

Mr. Dreher, I wanted to say that I am very sorry about your divorce, and I appreciate you for respecting the privacy of your family and not talking about the details. Of course curiosities abound, but it sounds like you and your wife are doing the right thing for your kids by seeking an amicable parting. The news of your divorce coming around the same time as the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial has me thinking thoughts that had never occurred to me.

First of all, I can’t believe I’m riveted by a dang celebrity trial. It’s typically not something I spend any kind of time on. But riveted I am. Despite the fact that we are practicing conservative Christians, our own marriage is headed for a hard crash, because I’m confident that my wife is mentally ill. Watching the Depp/Heard trial, I learned about the existence of a condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, and poked around a bit. Wow. I don’t know if you have been paying attention to the trial, but Ms. Heard is said to have the condition. Here is a link to some information about it: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20370237

When I read that, everything became SO CLEAR to me about why my marriage is in so much trouble, and why therapy has not worked for us. I found in my online research that when you are in a relationship with someone with BPD, they can treat you cruelly, but then hold you responsible for not being close to them. It shocked me to find this out, because this is how my wife has been dealing with me for years. It’s the same dang dynamic. She complains all the time that I won’t show her affection, and I’ve said to her that it’s hard to feel affection for somebody who spends so much time telling me how much I’m failing her. I quit doing that because that would just make her blow up at me.

I feel so alone facing this. To be honest, the kids are the only thing holding us together now, and I worry all the time about how much damage we are doing to them by our fighting. I try not to engage her, because there’s no such thing as winning these fights, but that doesn’t stop her from ripping me up in front of the kids. I have been stuck inside this crazy house for so long that I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing by being a doormat, but minimizing the fighting, or if I should just end this hopeless situation. When you said about your own divorce that people should be careful not to judge, because nobody knows what really goes on inside a marriage, that really resonated with me. Most people who see us probably think my wife and I are a respectable middle-class Christian couple. They have no idea how bad it is behind the walls of our nice middle-class house. I can only imagine that our kids are going to spend years in therapy because of what they saw growing up.

At this point, I have no idea what to do. My pastor advised me privately to “carry your cross,” and I get that we are supposed to do that as Christians, but this is destroying me on the inside, and God knows what it is doing to our children, and how it is making them think of marriage. Will they ever be able to form real attachments?

The reason I’m writing you is that I have found out in recent weeks that a lot of men I know are going through the same thing with their wives right now. Is it a Covid thing, do you think? The problems my wife and I have been having started a long time before Covid, but with all the discussion about general mental health issues that have gotten worse since Covid, I am curious to know what other people are going through. I would be interested to know what your readers say.

This is really something, because I have been getting a surprising number of e-mails from readers saying pretty much the same thing. A lawyer told me that the divorce filings he’s been dealing with are way up in the post-Covid era, but what I’ve been hearing in particular from readers (all male readers, I hasten to add) is that they are enduring marriages in which their wives have intense emotional disorders that they (the wives) either refuse to get help for, or that conventional marital therapy doesn’t correct. I think I mentioned here the other day that a female friend of mine is going through a separation from her husband right now, because he has long shown signs of BPD, and refuses therapy.

The reader’s email this morning, one of a string of similar emails — all from men, note well — has me thinking. For one, these e-mails (and thank you, readers, for confiding in me) really underscore the point that nobody knows what really goes on inside a particular marriage. I found out recently details about the divorce some friends of mine had a few years ago. I had formed a judgment about who was probably at fault — and it turns out that I was 100 percent wrong! Like I’ve said, I never imagined that one day I would know what divorce is like from the inside, but now I do, and my God, are my eyes ever opening. And I’m going through a relatively amicable divorce, where there are no gross factors like infidelity, substance abuse, porn, or anything like that!

Anyway, back to the letter. Interestingly enough, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist points out in his 2009 book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World that in modern times, we see a sharp increase in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, borderline personality disorder, and other diseases associated with under-function of the brain’s right hemisphere, and over-function of the left hemisphere. He writes about how in these suffering moderns, we observe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Sorry for the formatting issues; you can’t cut-and-paste from a Kindle manuscript the way you can from a Word document or HTML story.)

McGilchrist’s book — this is the 2009 predecessor to 2021’s The Matter With Things, which I’ve been writing about here lately — discusses in fascinating depth the interaction between the brain and cultural forms. From philosopher Mary Midgeley’s 2010 review of the book in The Guardian:

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.

McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philo–sopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. He questions the accepted doctrine that the left hemisphere (Left henceforward) is necessarily dominant, the practical partner, while the right more or less sits around writing poetry. He points out that this “left-hemisphere chauvinism” cannot be correct because it is always Right’s business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence.

Thus patients with right-brain strokes – but not with left-brain ones – tend to deny flatly that there is anything wrong with them. And even over language, which is Left’s speciality, Right is not helpless. It usually has quite adequate understanding of what is said, but Left (on its own) misses many crucial aspects of linguistic meaning. It cannot, for instance, grasp metaphors, jokes or unspoken implications, all of which are Right’s business. In fact, in today’s parlance, Left is decidedly autistic. And, since Left’s characteristics are increasingly encouraged in our culture, this (he suggests) is something that really calls for our attention.

More:

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. (Thus, as a shocked nurse lately told me, it is proposed that all nurses must have university degrees. Who, she asked, will actually do the nursing?) And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more.

This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached from us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. It was designed to glorify God by removing all competing spiritual forces from the realm of nature. It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home – in the zone of spirit. (That, of course, was why Newton, to the disgust of later scholars, was far more interested in theology than he was in physics.) But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consist of billiard balls, when we all supposedly believe that we are parts of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms – when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist – seems rather surprising.

The book goes on to talk about how we have created a culture that conditions us to accept alienation, decontextualization, disembodiment, and fragmentation, because that is how the left hemisphere construes the world. Look at this mentally ill young woman on Tiktok, the social media platform that has sparked an upsurge in young people claiming to have multiple personality disorder:

One of this person’s headmates goes by paint/paintself pronouns. You must make an effort to make paint feel comfortable. pic.twitter.com/8e5XkG6fTF

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 27, 2022

It seems to me that this would be an example of the kind of thing one would expect in a culture that rewards this kind of insanity. Similarly with the transgender fad, it is impossible to believe that gender dysphoria, a real psychological condition that was observed in a vanishingly small number of people until a short time ago, is in the current moment not a symptom of advanced cultural breakdown along the lines Dr. McGilchrist discusses in The Master and His Emissary. (By the way, if you want to watch a clever and informative animated explanation of McGilchrist’s thesis, click here.)

So what this reader’s letter today has me wondering is whether or not the loss of social stability in the modern era has made it more likely that these psychological maladies will emerge, and that they will destroy marriages. Yesterday I quoted this from McGilchrist’s more recent book The Matter With Things:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

Let me put the point more directly: is it the case that this man’s failing marriage is not merely a sad story about a psychologically unwell wife and her long-suffering husband, but also has a broader cultural and social dimension linked to this time and this place?

Very curious to know what you think. What are you seeing in your own marriage? The marriages of your friends? Please be anonymous if you have to. It’s just really strange to me that the announcement of my own divorce has brought in a number of letters like the one above, though none so precise. Then again, maybe my having been reading McGilchrist on the flight over this weekend made me especially alert to the reader’s concern.

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