Rod Dreher's Blog, page 669

Praise God Kim has been released! https://t.co/Ev47wkemvD #ImWithKim pic.twitter.com/pHRqajimE3

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 8, 2015

So, I’d say this photo means Cruz has locked down the white rural Christian vote. And it is guaranteed to provoke lots of snark from the Daily Show, Gawker, et alia. But I’m not sure how helpful this shot is going to be in selling Cruz to suburban GOP primary voters. As TAC editor Daniel McCarthy writes in his piece dissecting Republican factionalism:

The Republican Party’s knack for nominating Bushes and Romneys and McCains has a reason, just as there are reasons why certain kinds of opponents catch on. Nate Cohn of the New York Times supplies a piece of the puzzle in a story headlined “The Surprising Power of Blue-State Republicans.” But there’s a deeper philosophical explanation for why the GOP perpetually fails to nominate another conservative like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan—conservatism itself has lost its identity to politics.

The truth is that leaders like McCain, Romney, and the Bushes represent the GOP as a whole better than right-wing candidates do. Contrary to caricature, the GOP is not just the party of the South and relatively underpopulated states in the Midwest. Cohn’s headline calls the power of blue-state Republicans surprising, but it shouldn’t be: the majority of Americans live in blue states—that’s why Obama won the last two elections—and one would expect a national political party to draw a great proportion of its presidential delegates from the states where more Americans actually live.

McCarthy argues that Christian conservatives really are significantly different not only from generic Republican voters, but from mainstream conservatives. He doesn’t blame Christian conservatives for embracing candidates that espouse their vision, but he explains in detail why factionalism on the Right results in presidential nominees that most tolerate, but few love. McCarthy:

The mythology promulgated by the conservative movement has it that a candidate who naturally expresses both Christian conservatism and Goldwater-Reagan conservatism must be out there somewhere. But the record of three decades since Reagan won the nomination with support from both camps suggests otherwise: in a full generation, there has never been a candidate equally appealing to both kinds of conservative. What reason is there to think there ever will be one?

GOP voters who are passionate supporters of Kim Davis may well find that photo inspiring, and appreciate that a Republican presidential candidate stood by her in her hour of need. But I can easily imagine that — fair or not — in terms of its visual symbolism, that shot reminds suburban Republican voters, even some Christians, what they don’t like about the party and its direction.

UPDATE: But wait, there’s more:

I was honored to meet w/ #KimDavis. A woman of such strong faith and conviction. #ImWithKim #ReligiousLiberty pic.twitter.com/RhcaENaA6i

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 8, 2015

Today is the publication date of The Wind in the Reeds, actor Wendell Pierce’s memoir about his Louisiana past and Louisiana present. It’s a book about family’s rise out of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s a book about growing up in New Orleans, and building on the gifts of character and education his family gave him to study acting at Juilliard, and launch a career as a successful artist. It’s a book about how Hurricane Katrina destroyed the neighborhood that had nurtured him, and how he vowed to go home, to rebuild his childhood home, and to commit himself to bringing New Orleans back. It’s a book about the power of art to redeem our suffering and transcend our tragedies. It’s a book about faith, family, resilience, and the promise of America. It is a profoundly American, profoundly hopeful work, and I hope you will read it.

As readers of this blog may recall, it was my very great privilege to work with Wendell on The Wind in the Reeds (the title is a phrase from Waiting For Godot; Wendell played Vladimir in a nationally recognized 2007 production staged in the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, and repeated in the ruins of Gentilly). I wrote here about how the experience of working with Wendell on the book opened my eyes and changed my heart. I will blog more about the book over the coming week, but a conversation I had with my mom this morning prompts me to relate this story from Wind in the Reeds. 

Mama told me about a white man in our parish who, back in the early 1960s, ran for a position on the local parish council (called the “police jury” in those days; it’s a Louisiana thing), and said as part of his campaign that blacks ought to be allowed to register to vote. The Klan paid a visit to his house one night and burned a cross in his yard — this, even though the man, who died many years ago, was a lifelong resident of the parish. It testified to how the regime of white supremacy terrorized not only blacks, but even whites who dared to challenge it. My mom said that the white man terrorized by the Klan recognized at least one of the men, even though they were wearing white sheets, because he recognized the man’s shoes. And because everybody in this small rural place knew everybody else, that white man had to live with the knowledge that his own neighbors were willing to commit acts of terror against him.

I’ve often wondered how I would have reacted had I been a grown man around here in those days. My mother’s story made me reflect on the kind of moral and physical courage it took for anybody opposed to white supremacy to stand up to it. I like to think that if more whites had done the right thing, white supremacy would have fallen sooner. Maybe it would have, but a tale like that helps me understand how hard it would have been for whites to have resisted. The immensity of the thing.

So, when Wendell and I were researching The Wind in the Reeds, we learned a fascinating story from his Uncle Lloyd (“L.C.”), who is now 81. It’s a piece of civil rights history that amazed both of us. Lloyd had never told Wendell the story, and it’s the kind of story that might have been lost to history.

Father Harry J. Maloney, a big, bluff Irishman from New York City, had given his life as a priest of the Josephites, a Catholic religious order founded by Rome in the 19th century to provide priests to serve freed black slaves in America. Believe it or

Wendell Pierce (s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

not, there were lots of Catholic slaves. In Louisiana, if the master was Catholic, his slaves were also baptized as Catholics. After the Civil War, they had no black priests, and the segregated culture made it impossible in most places for black Catholics to share churches with white Catholics. The Josephites dedicated their lives to serving African American congregations.

In 1948, the New Orleans archdiocese sent Father Maloney to Assumption Parish, where Wendell’s ancestors were living, to serve the black Catholics there. From the book:

“He was a great man,” Uncle L.C. said. “He opened the eyes of many people. Mamo and Papo [L.C.’s parents, and Wendell’s grandparents — RD] always said there’s something better coming by, and that something was Father Harry J. Maloney.”

As soon as he hit the ground, Father Maloney started building St. Augustine parish church, and a new school at St. Benedict the Moor for black children. L.H. [L.C.’s brother — RD] and L.C. stayed in the Catholic school system because Father Maloney organized a school bus service up to Donaldsonville, fifteen miles to the north, taking older black children to St. Catherine High School, where nine nuns, all black, taught them. Tuition was 25 cents per week, which was hard for Mamo and Papo to pay.

But they wouldn’t dream of depriving their sons of a Catholic education if they could possibly afford it. After all, can’t died three days before the world was born. [That’s one of Papo’s favorite sayings — RD] Even some non-Catholic black parents sent their children to study with the Black sisters, because they wanted their kids to benefit from a stricter disciplinary environment.

“When those nuns and those priests finished with your ass, they always instilled in you that you had to have something in your head,” Uncle L.C. remembers affectionately. “When we had a class reunion, none of us had been in trouble in life, and all of us had done some good. What’s the reason? It was the sisters’ school. That’s what I call Catholic school. Ain’t no Catholic schools today. You got your lay teachers, and you call it Catholic school, but it ain’t nothing like those goddamn nuns and priests, the sisters and the brothers.”

I love Uncle Lloyd. Lloyd explained to us that Father Moloney used his privilege as a white man and as a Catholic priest in a heavily Catholic area to break down barriers of injustice. He started a federal credit union to help blacks who couldn’t get loans from local banks. He started a bus service to take poor black workers to and from the Avondale Shipyards, 70 miles away, so they could get good industrial jobs, and not have to settle for low-paying farm jobs. And he worked to undermine the plantation system, which played on the ignorance of poor African Americans to cheat them. More:

In those days, blacks lived in what they called the Quarters on the various plantations’ grounds. Plantation owners would lock the gates at five o’clock, and nobody was free to come or go. No vendors were allowed onto the plantation; tenants had to buy from the plantation store. Many of them were illiterate, so they had no idea what the store was charging them. All you knew was that every month, you were going deeper into debt. If no vendors were allowed onto the property, the blacks living there would likely never learn what things were like on the outside, or what was available for them.

So Father Maloney founded a food bank. He would go by the local stores and collect canned goods and other donations, and put them in the church hall. If you needed food, you bypassed the plantation store and went to see Father. Most amazing of all, when Father Maloney saw that blacks made up 42 percent of the parish’s population, but only three were allowed to vote (the undertaker and two Baptist preachers), he organized a voter registration drive for African Americans – this, in the early 1950s, a decade or more before the civil rights movement undertook them all over the South.

The white power structure in the parish did not like that at all. They went to New Orleans to see Archbishop Joseph Rummel several times to complain about the “nigger-loving” priest. Archbishop Rummel told them to leave Father Maloney alone, that he was doing the work of God.

He was only with the African American people of Assumption Parish for four years, but Father Maloney made a huge impression on the black Catholics there, who were accustomed to a church that defended the racist status quo. He demonstrated that faith could not only give you the strength to endure hardship and injustice, but could also give you the courage to fight for a better world.

I hope you will buy Wendell’s book and read the whole thing. Unfortunately, The Wind in the Reeds tells other stories about priests being rather less than heroic, to put it mildly, on the matter of racial justice. But Wendell’s family held on to their faith — his late mother Tee was deeply faithful, even a daily communicant — because as Tee told her son, there was so much more to the Church than the priests in it.

Besides, sometimes you get priests like brave Father Maloney. It’s hard for me to imagine the guts it must have taken for a white Yankee priest to move to rural south Louisiana and challenge Jim Crow as that man did. But Uncle Lloyd told us that Father Maloney gave the black Catholics of their parish hope, because he was a harbinger of a better America to come.

The Father Maloney story is only a tiny part of The Wind in the Reeds, and it wasn’t the first thing I was planning to blog about re: the book. But the story my mom told today about the local white man in our parish who had a cross burned on his lawn simply because he said black people ought to have the right to vote brought Father Maloney to mind.

This just in:

Hundreds of angry and frustrated asylum-seekers broke through police lines Monday near Hungary’s southern border with Serbia and began marching north toward Budapest, while Britain and France pledged to take in tens of thousands more refugees to try to ease the crisis.

As European leaders debated how to share responsibility for the more than 340,000 people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia who are already seeking refuge, Germany promised to spend billions of euros in extra aid for those already there and those yet to arrive. France weighed whether increased airstrikes against Islamic State militants would help to stem the flow of those fleeing Syria.

But the Hungarian prime minister scoffed at a proposed quota system for refugees in the 28-member European Union, saying it wouldn’t work unless Europe first secured its borders.

Hungary’s inability to control the flow of people across its southern border with Serbia was on graphic display Monday. Crowds who had grown tired of waiting for buses at Hungary’s first migrant holding center near the border village of Roszke tore down flimsy police tape, advanced down a country road and walked around and straight through rows of police trying to block them.

Police shoved individual migrants and fired jets of pepper spray, but it had little effect as about half of the 500-strong crowd reached the M5 highway that connects Serbia and Hungary. They headed north along the shoulder, raising their arms and chanting “Germany! Germany!”

There is no law there. There is no security. Buchanan wrote a couple of weeks ago:

Germany, which took in 174,000 asylum seekers last year, is on schedule to take in 500,000 this year. Yet Germany is smaller than Montana.

How long can a geographically limited and crowded German nation, already experiencing ugly racial conflict, take in half a million Third World people every year without tearing itself apart, and changing the character of the nation forever?

Do we think the riots and racial wars will stop if more come?

Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer is extremely bleak about the situation:

The leaders and bureaucrats of the European Union (EU) are fortunate that they have largely disarmed the citizens of EU member states. If the citizens of Europe had personal weapons, all officials at all levels of the increasingly authoritarian EU organization might well be under fire — and rightly so – for causing the horde of unwanted, unneeded, and non-assimilable migrants that is now inundating Europe.

The migrants will produce further lawlessness, a debilitating level of societal tensions, enormous increases in the expense of social services and public housing, and contribute nothing worth having to the nations of the EU. The migrants also will wreck the status quo in EU security as the many hundreds of thousands of incomers are mixed with a goodly number ISIS and al-Qaeda organizers, recruiters, fighters, and suicide attackers who will make the job of EU security and intelligence services even more undoable. Indeed, the only upside of the migrant flood is that elected and appointed EU officials will feel proud of themselves for spending the money of the EU’s wildly overtaxed citizens for a “humanitarian purpose” that, to anyone with commonsense, clearly carries the seeds of terrorism, the end of the EU, fascism, and civil war.

Scheuer is not happy with the Pope:

And then there is the Pope Francis who wants to get all the migrants possible into Europe and wants Catholics to defy the law and put them up. The mindless, do-gooding interventionism of this Pope will not be sated until he helps to turn the EU into a gigantic Greece, and ensures the impoverishment of the rest of the Western world, while the Vatican’s art collection and property holdings remain intact.

Read the whole thing. He blames the West’s thoughtless military interventions in the Islamic world for this refugee crisis.  And he calls for massive disobedience by the West’s citizens of their governments until those governments put a stop to an immigration influx that will permanently change the character of Western nations.

Very strong stuff. Ross Douthat, far more ameliorative, nevertheless says some profound issues of national identity are at stake in this crisis. Excerpt:

And the countries that have opened the door widest are places like Germany and Sweden, which are motivated by a different theory of moral obligation: A utilitarian universalism, which holds that the world’s wealthy nations have an obligation to accept refugees, period, regardless of whether their own governments bear any responsibility for the crisis that produced them.

This theory has the advantage of eliminating any messy haggling over who bears responsibility for what. When tragedy strikes, everybody above a certain level of G.D.P. just has to open the gates. (Or, perhaps, to have them open permanently.)

But it has the disadvantage of being completely unworkable over the long run, as Europe is beginning to discover. The utilitarian theory is blind to the realities of culture, the challenges of assimilation, the dangers and inevitability of backlash. It takes what is a deep, long-term issue for European society — one way or another, over the next century the continent will have to absorb large numbers of new arrivals, from Africa especially — and brings things to a crisis point right now. And then it tries to evade that crisis by treating dissent as illegitimate, which only works until it doesn’t: One day you have a pro-immigration “consensus,” and the next a party with fascist roots is leading Sweden’s polls.

So prudence has to temper idealism on these issues. There may be a moral obligation to accept refugees in wealthy countries, but there cannot be a moral obligation to accept refugees at a pace one’s own society cannot reasonably bear.

Reading all the coverage from the past few days, I couldn’t help thinking of a notorious novel I had never read: French author Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic The Camp of the Saints (1973). I found an English translation for free online, and spent a couple of hours this afternoon reading it.

It’s easy to see why the book has been denounced as racist. Every few pages or so there’s language that makes one cringe. It is offensive to read how Raspail depicts all non-Westerners as faceless, frightening hordes. Yet beneath the ugliness of that, the novel makes some hard to ignore points. From what I can tell so far — and I’m only about a quarter of the way through the novel — the book is not about race, but about culture, and the West having become too broad-minded and humane to protect itself from an unarmed invasion by people who do not share its culture, and who do not want to adopt its culture, but only want to peace, security, and prosperity of the West.

The villains of the book are do-gooders in the European establishment — government, academia, media, the church — who have come to hate their own civilization, or at least not love it enough to defend it from a flotilla of a million Third World migrants sailing towards Europe. They are coming ashore on Easter Sunday, and all of France is in a panic. At this point in the novel, the government has decided to welcome the migrants, because the alternative is too cruel for them to contemplate. This passage, from early in the book, gives you a sense of the thing, in both its moral ugliness but also its crude realism. The speaker is a Belgian consul in India, whose government had put forth a policy of adopting Indian children as a way of easing poverty and overpopulation, but who found that there were far more Indians eager to come to Belgium, or at least to send their children, than the country could handle:

“You and your pity!” the Consul shouted. “Your damned, obnoxious, detestable pity! Call it what you please: world brotherhood, charity, conscience … I take one look at you, each and every one of you, and all I see is contempt for yourselves and all you stand for. Do you know what it means? Can’t you see where it’s leading? You’ve got to be crazy. Crazy or desperate. You’ve got to be out of your minds just to sit back and let it all happen, little by little. All because of your pity. Your insipid, insufferable pity!”

The Consul was sitting behind his desk, a bandage on his forehead. Across from him, some ten or so figures sat rooted to wooden chairs, like apostles carved in stone on a church façade. Each of the statues had the same white skin, the same gaunt face, the same simple dress—long duck pants or shorts, half-sleeve khaki shirt, open sandals—and most of all the same deep, unsettling gaze that shines in the eyes of prophets, philanthropists, seers, fanatics, criminal geniuses, martyrs—weird and wondrous folk of every stripe— those split-personality creatures who feel out of place in the flesh they were born with.

One was a bishop, but unless you already knew, it was quite impossible to tell him apart from the missionary doctor or the starry-eyed layman by his side. Just as impossible to single out the atheist philosopher and the renegade Catholic writer, convert to Buddhism, both spiritual leaders of the little band … They all just sat there without a word.

“The trouble is,” the Consul continued, “you’ve gone too far! And on purpose! Because you’re so convinced it’s the right thing to do. Have you any idea how many children from the Ganges here have been shipped off to Belgium? Not to mention the rest of Europe, and those other sane countries that closed their borders off before we did! Forty thousand, that’s how many! Forty thousand in five years! And all of you, so sure you could count on our people. Playing on their sentiments, their sympathy. Perverting their minds with vague feelings of self-reproach, to twist their Christian charity to your own bizarre ends. Weighing our good, solid burghers down with a sense of shame and guilt. … Forty thousand! Why, there weren’t even that many French in Canada back in the seventeen-hundreds. … And in two-faced times like these, you can bet the government won’t admit what’s really behind that racist decree. … Yes, racist, that’s what I called it. You loathe the word, don’t you? You’ve gone and worked up a race problem out of whole cloth, right in the heart of the white world, just to destroy it. That’s what you’re after. You want to destroy our world, our whole way of life. There’s not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for …”

“Not proud, or aware of it, either,” one of the statues corrected. “That’s the price we have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We’re happy to pay it.”

If you replace “white” with “Western,” it become easier to grapple with the consul’s point.

I’ll keep blogging about the book as I make my way through it. The Camp of the Saints is an unnerving book to read. Despite being badly dated in parts — it was written in the 1970s, and shows it — it is uncannily reminiscent of today’s headlines. If you can hold the episodic crudity of its language at bay, Raspail is confronting the existential dilemma facing Europe today with this invasion by the Third World. In a 2013 interview in a French magazine, Raspail says:

Many will be naturalized.

This does not mean they will become French. I’m not saying that these are bad people, but “naturalization papers” are not the heart of naturalization. I can not consider them as my compatriots. We must drastically toughen the law urgently.

How can Europe face these migrations?

There are only two solutions. Either we try to live with it and France – its culture, its civilization – will disappear even without a funeral. This is, in my opinion, what will happen. Or we don’t make room for them at all – that is to say, one stops regarding the Other as sacred, and we rediscover that your neighbor is primarily the one living next to you. This assumes that you stop caring so much about these “crazy Christian ideas”, as Chesterton said, about this erroneous sense of human rights, and that we take the measures of collective expulsion, and without appeal, to avoid the dissolution of the country in a general miscegenation [métissage, a word that in French carries more the sense of the English words “multiculturalism” and “diversity”]. I see no other solution. I have traveled in my youth. All peoples are exciting but when mixed enough is much more animosity that grows that sympathy. Miscegenation is never peaceful, it is a dangerous utopia. See South Africa!

At the point where we are, the steps we should take are necessarily very coercive. I do not believe and I do not see anyone who has the courage to take them. There should be balance in his soul, but is it ready? That said, I do not believe for a moment that immigration advocates are more charitable than me: there probably is not one who intends to receive at home one of those unfortunates. … All this is an emotional sham, an irresponsible maelstrom which will swallow us.

Right there is what is both urgent and appalling in Raspail. I found this blog post featuring translated highlights of an interview he gave on French TV in 2011. Here, in less provocative terms, he frames the essential moral and civilizational question posed in The Camp of the Saints:

The Camp of the Saints is a novel. It’s purpose is not to send a message. I’m a novelist. I imagined this situation which is a bit like ours today except the arrival of millions of immigrants seeking paradise did not happen in twenty-four hours, but over a longer period of time.

And The Camp of the Saints ends badly… badly or well, according to your opinion. There are four hundred pages. Imagine all the questions it raises in our minds – on a social level, on the national level, but also on the inner level of each person. What do you do? If you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country? If you don’t allow them in where is your Christian charity? Where is your pity, and many other things like that…

More:

You said I was an explorer. I spent thirty years traveling among small peoples in danger of extinction. I know well civilizations that are about to disappear. When a minor civilization is in danger it must defend itself. If civilizations have disappeared it is because they were engulfed by the tidal wave of the more advanced newcomers. With us, the situation is the reverse. We have an old civilization in Europe, in France, and we find ourselves before gigantic masses of people. Europe does not have a billion people, yet we face hundreds of thousands, millions, billions. Logically, we should be forced to defend ourselves, but how?

True enough: there are unprecedented masses of both war refugees and economic migrants moving from the Middle East and Africa to Europe in boats. If Europe lets them all in, it will soon no longer be Europe. How do those nations defend themselves against invaders who come unarmed, seeking charity? If one is a Christian, what is the Christian response? Keep in mind that you are not simply giving over your country to the Other, but are giving over the country of your children, and all your descendants.

It is not a question that can be satisfactorily answered by denouncing Raspail and his sort as heartless racists.

Like I said, I’ll blog a bit more about this novel as I work my way through it. I do not love this book. But I respect it.

We have been talking in this space for the past few days about religious liberty fights worth committing to. This Oregon case is a big one:

Marion County Judge Vance Day is being investigated by a judicial fitness commission in part over his refusal to perform same-sex marriages on religious grounds, a spokesman for the judge said.

When a federal court ruling in May 2014 made same-sex marriage legal in Oregon, Day instructed his staff to refer same-sex couples looking to marry to other judges, spokesman Patrick Korten said Friday.

Last fall, he decided to stop performing weddings altogether, aside from one in March that had long been scheduled, Korten said.

“He made a decision nearly a year ago to stop doing weddings altogether, and the principal factor that he weighed was the pressure that one would face to perform a same-sex wedding, which he had a conflict with his religious beliefs,” Korten said.

It’s not just in Oregon:

Last month, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Conduct said judges can’t refuse to marry same-sex couples on personal, moral or religious grounds.

Judges who stop performing all marriages to avoid marrying same-sex couples may be interpreted as biased and could be disqualified from any case where sexual orientation is an issue, the Ohio board ruled.

We have a wide variety of men and women serving as judges in this country. I could be wrong, but I am not aware of any situation in which a judge is presumed to be incapable of reaching an impartial decision because of his or her religious beliefs. True, a particular judge may well be biased, but the presumption upon which our entire legal system is based is that a judge is considered impartial absent a flagrant conflict of interest (e.g., a case involving a relative is brought before his court).

It’s not like the Kim Davis case because all citizens in Rowan County have to go through Kim Davis’s office to get married. There are many ways to get legally hitched without having to go to a particular judge. You can find a willing clergyman, or a justice of the peace, or another judge. It might be inconvenient, but it is a price that can easily be paid for the sake of pluralism.

But if judges are not allowed to withhold their services as marriage agents, as a matter of religious conscience, without jeopardizing their offices, in what sense is this not a de facto religious test for public office? If this trend takes hold among the judiciary, it will result in orthodox Christians being unable to serve as judges, no matter what their demonstrated record of fairness. It is about policing the ranks of the judiciary to weed out orthodox Christians.

In 2012, a lesbian judge in Dallas County stopped marrying couples, as a protest against the absence of same-sex marriage. By the same logic that is being deployed against orthodox Christian judges, shouldn’t Judge Tonya Parker be disqualified from presiding over cases that have to do with sexual orientation?

Yes, but judges like her won’t be. It’s all about “who, whom.” This is a fight Christians should be eager and willing to take on. Marriage is widely available, from both religious and secular agents, so there is no compelling reason to penalize judges for declining to officiate at marriages. If this stands, orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims who have a conscience objection to presiding over same-sex marriages will be excluded from the judiciary.

This is potentially huge. And, I believe, this kind of thing is the main way orthodox Christians and others will be driven out of the public square: by guilds and professional associations regulating their own professions in such a way as to forbid employment to people who do not conform. In his Lawrence v. Texas dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote:

Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. I noted in an earlier opinion the fact that the American Association of Law Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct. See Romer, supra, at 653.

    One of the most revealing statements in today’s opinion is the Court’s grim warning that the criminalization of homosexual conduct is “an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.” Ante, at 14. It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream”; that in most States what the Court calls “discrimination” against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal; that proposals to ban such “discrimination” under Title VII have repeatedly been rejected by Congress, see Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994, S. 2238, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. (1994); Civil Rights Amendments, H. R. 5452, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. (1975); that in some cases such “discrimination” is mandated by federal statute, see 10 U.S.C. § 654(b)(1) (mandating discharge from the armed forces of any service member who engages in or intends to engage in homosexual acts); and that in some cases such “discrimination” is a constitutional right, see Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000).

That was 2003. What would we say today to professional associations who regulate, and regulate access to, their professions, and do so to keep out of their ranks people who believe that homosexuality is morally aberrant? It may be the case that if challenged constitutionally, rulings like the Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Conduct’s could be overturned or modified as a violation of the Constitution’s ban on a religious test for public office.  This is a result religious believers should be fighting for.

It gets murkier when it comes to private entities, like the American Bar Association and the American Association of Law Schools, institutions that control access to the legal profession. No one who has not been a practicing lawyer can hope to become a judge. But if you are not able to enter legal practice without affirming homosexuality in every way, then religious conservatives — Christians, Jews, Muslims — will be unable to practice law, and unable to become judges.

Please return to my interview earlier this year with “Prof. Kingsfield,” a deeply closeted Christian professor at one of America’s elite law schools:

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

And:

“Accreditation is critical to being admitted to law schools and medical schools,” Kingsfield said. “College accreditation will matter for some purposes of sports, federal aid, and for the ability to be admitted by top graduate schools. Ghettoization for Christians could be the result.”

“In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure. There’s a question among Christian law professors right now: do you write about these issues and risk tenure? This really does distort your scholarship. Christianity could make a distinct contribution to legal discussions, but it’s simply too risky to say what you really think.”

The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.

“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

In the Kim Davis case, I think there can be and is a reasonable work-around that would protect her conscience rights but also protect the ability of gay citizens of her county to exercise their marriage rights (see Ryan T. Anderson’s piece in the NYT today) — if the Kentucky governor would get off his butt and act. But it is very hard to argue persuasively in the court of public opinion that a local official has the right to deny, effectively, a constitutional right because she perceives it to violate her religious beliefs.

It is much easier, at least for now, to point out how even Christians who have no record of discriminating against gays and lesbians in their public and professional lives are being, and will be, pushed out of those professions — and to mount resistance to it. The unsympathetic Kim Davis cannot be the only face of Christian resistance, not if we want to successfully defend our present, though shrinking, liberties.

The op-ed page of the Raleigh News & Observer brings us this heart-rending testimony from a UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate and star athlete, an attractive and accomplished young woman (“I identify as female,” says Miss Dodge) who can barely breathe from the oppressors closing in on her at every turn. Excerpts:

The following is a string of subtle and routine occurrences that make me feel less human and should take their rightful place among the larger narrative of sexism in contemporary America.

Public Victim No. 1

When I wake up at 6 in the morning for practice, I put on spandex that will ride up and allow my legs to chafe. I know this is because I don’t have a thigh gap like most of the distance runners on my cross-country team. I eat an easily-digestible carb and make a note of the calorie count.

After “a good early-morning chafe,” as I call it, I change into dry workout clothes, this time being careful not to wear too much “Carolina gear.” I do this so as not to give my professors and peers another reason to discount me.

Oh lord. I never knew. More:

I head to a study space. I sit with a classmate – a good friend of mine since freshman year. He identifies as male. Another male-identifying friend approaches. They engage in a “bro dap”: a sort of masculine greeting ritual. The newcomer, my friend, acknowledges me second with a nod of his head: “What’s up, Blake?”

I check my email. My student government group co-director, who identifies as male, has taken it upon himself to send a mass email to our organization and relevant tangential members to schedule a meeting. I am CCed along with four others. They are not co-directors. The body of the email bounces between “I” pronouns to set an agenda for the first meeting of year. It concludes with his signature. The first reply thanks him for “getting this started.”

The horror … the horror. One more:

I go to bed and think about my projects and my callings. Law school. Public service. Economic injustice. Songwriting. Halifax County schools. Filmmaking. Where did I put that SD card? Writing.

I fight others every single day to be taken seriously. But at night, I fight off my own insecurity that I cannot make a difference because of how others perceive me. Sometimes, I do this in vain.

The key word in this entire op-ed piece is “vain”. If the neurotic Miss Dodge, the college’s Elizabeth Wurtzel Fellow in Self-Dramaturgy, is having trouble being taken seriously, maybe it’s not actually society’s fault.

In all seriousness, it’s a shame that a campus culture of victim-valorization encourages people like her to intellectualize her insecurities. Seems like she’s a very talented young woman who is bent on sabotaging herself. More on Blake Dodge’s struggle below:

This morning on This Week, George Stephanopoulos cited this blog in questioning Mike Huckabee on the Kim Davis situation. Watch here:

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Huckabee said that Your Working Boy must dislike Abraham Lincoln, who held there was no obligation to obey the odious Dred Scott decision. I looked up the 1857 speech in which Lincoln said this. Excerpts:

And now as to the Dred Scott decision. That decision declares two propositions-first, that a negro cannot sue in the U.S. Courts; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in the Territories. It was made by a divided court-dividing differently on the different points. Judge Douglas does not discuss the merits of the decision; and, in that respect, I shall follow his example, believing I could no more improve on McLean and Curtis, than he could on Taney.

He denounces all who question the correctness of that decision, as offering violent resistance to it. But who resists it? Who has, in spite of the decision, declared Dred Scott free, and resisted the authority of his master over him?

Judicial decisions have two uses-first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use, they are called “precedents” and “authorities.”

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

More:

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents, according to circumstances. That this should be so, accords both with common sense, and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country-But Judge Douglas considers this view awful. Hear him:

“The courts are the tribunals prescribed by the Constitution and created by the authority of the people to determine, expound and enforce the law. Hence, whoever resists the final decision of the highest judicial tribunal, aims a deadly blow to our whole Republican system of government — a blow, which if successful would place all our rights and liberties at the mercy of passion, anarchy and violence. I repeat, therefore, that if resistance to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in a matter like the points decided in the Dred Scott case, clearly within their jurisdiction as defined by the Constitution, shall be forced upon the country as a political issue, it will become a distinct and naked issue between the friends and the enemies of the Constitution-the friends and the enemies of the supremacy of the laws.”

Why this same Supreme court once decided a national bank to be constitutional; but Gen. Jackson, as President of the United States, disregarded the decision, and vetoed a bill for a re-charter, partly on constitutional ground, declaring that each public functionary must support the Constitution, “as he understands it .” But hear the General’s own words. Here they are, taken from his veto message:

“It is maintained by the advocates of the bank, that its constitutionality, in all its features, ought to be considered as settled by precedent, and by the decision of the Supreme Court. To this conclusion I cannot assent. Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power, except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled. So far from this being the case on this subject, an argument against the bank might be based on precedent. One Congress in 1791, decided in favor of a bank; another in 1811, decided against it. One Congress in 1815 decided against a bank; another in 1816 decided in its favor. Prior to the present Congress, therefore the precedents drawn from that source were equal. If we resort to the States, the expressions of legislative, judicial and executive opinions against the bank have been probably to those in its favor as four to one. There is nothing in precedent, therefore, which if its authority were admitted, ought to weigh in favor of the act before me.”

I drop the quotations merely to remark that all there ever was, in the way of precedent up to the Dred Scott decision, on the points therein decided, had been against that decision. But hear Gen. Jackson further-

“If the opinion of the Supreme court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the co-ordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the executive and the court, must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer, who takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.”

Again and again have I heard Judge Douglas denounce that bank decision, and applaud Gen. Jackson for disregarding it. It would be interesting for him to look over his recent speech, and see how exactly his fierce philippics against us for resisting Supreme Court decisions, fall upon his own head.

Lincoln’s speech shows one thing unambiguously: that the respect politicians have for the Supreme Court’s authority often depends on whether or not the agree with the decision.

Beyond that, Lincoln says that recognizing and obeying a SCOTUS decision depends on the subjective judgment of others as to whether or not the Court rightly decided the case at hand. That is, he says we should respect and obey Supreme Court decisions, unless we find them egregious.

Well, it is hard to find a more egregious decision in the Court’s history than Dred Scott. Still, just because the sainted Abraham Lincoln said something does not make it Gospel truth. Do we really want to grant to the executive branch the right to reject decisions made by the Supreme Court? What if Eisenhower had rejected Brown v. Board, and told Southern governors that federal authorities would decline to enforce it on unwilling states? If Lincoln is right, and if Jackson before him was right, on what firm and clear principles do we reject SCOTUS rulings?

What if Anthony Kennedy had sided with the conservative dissenters in Obergefell, finding that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage — and, in response, the president and state officials said they were not bound to recognize it, because they find the decision to be egregiously wrong? We all know that conservatives would have been the first to insist on law and order, and calling on liberals to respect the Constitution. And had Obama refused to accept the lawful decision of the Supreme Court, it would have provoked a constitutional crisis.

Here’s a bit of the exchange between Stephanopoulos and Huckabee this morning:

HUCKABEE: … We had so many different presidents, including Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln — there were other founders like Hamilton, Adams — who made it very clear that the courts can’t make a law. The Constitution is expressly clear that that’s a power reserved to Congress.

When the courts have a ruling, then it is incumbent on Congress to codify that into law and specifically delineate what that means. That hasn’t happened, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But how is this different then from Loving v. Virginia back in 1967? Of course that was a Supreme Court ruling that struck down bans on interracial marriage. If a clerk at that time had said my religious beliefs forbid me from issuing this license, would you support that?

HUCKABEE: Well, it is incredibly different situation because —

STEPHANOPOULOS: How so?

HUCKABEE: — what the Supreme Court did in Loving — no, it’s not the same, George, not even close. Because in Loving you still had a marriage which was a man and a woman, and it was equal protection. But it didn’t redefine marriage. What’s — the Supreme Court did in June —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you didn’t have laws implementing —

(CROSSTALK)

HUCKABEE: This is why —

STEPHANOPOULOS: You didn’t have laws implementing the ruling then either, so would it have been OK to defy the Supreme Court in that case?

HUCKABEE: I think it’s — again, it’s a very different equation altogether because this is a redefinition. Marriage is not defined in the federal Constitution at all; it’s a matter for the states. And applying the Fourteenth Amendment to the equality of men and women and their relationship in marriage is totally different than redefining marriage.

And I think what we’ve seen here is the overreach of the judiciary. This, if allowed to stand without any congressional approval, without any kind of enabling legislation, is what Jefferson warned us about. That’s judicial tyranny.

Wait, what? Under our constitutional system, if the people reject a Supreme Court ruling, they have through their elected representatives the power to amend the Constitution to override SCOTUS’s call. In what sense do we have judicial tyranny if we have the mechanism in our democratic system to nullify a judicial decision? And if the executive branch could pick and choose from among the SCOTUS decisions it would recognize, would we not have executive tyranny?

Lincoln seems to be saying that we should play by the rules, except when we shouldn’t. That is, it is “revolution” (Lincoln’s word) when we disobey the Court’s rulings, except when we conclude that the Court really and truly blew it. How are we to know when the justices have blown a ruling so badly that we can defy it?

In that case, doesn’t the rule of law all come down to “who, whom”?

Anyway, I agree with Huckabee that race and sexuality are two very different things for purposes of marriage, but he’s completely sidestepping Stephanopoulos’s question here. The rest of Huckabee’s performance is equally uninspiring. For example:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Doesn’t she have to the duty to obey a legal order from the court?

HUCKABEE: Well, you obey it if it’s right. So I go back to my question. Is slavery the law of the land? Should it have been the law of the land because Dred Scott said so? Was that a correct decision? Should the courts have been irrevocably followed on that? Should Lincoln have been put in jail? Because he ignored it.

I mean, that’s the fundamental question. Do we have a check and balance system? Do we have three equal branches or do we have one supreme branch, not just the Supreme Court? That’s the fundamental question.

“You obey it if it’s right.” Well, who decides that? Had Anthony Kennedy ruled the other way, would a liberal Episcopalian county clerk be justified in refusing to recognize the conservative Obergefell ruling? And, doesn’t the “checks and balances” system Huckabee claims is being invalidated by the Supreme Court provide for a lawful way to override Obergefell and its implications: a constitutional amendment? Why is Huckabee not organizing a campaign to amend the constitution either to overturn Obergefell or to make religious liberty protections even stronger in the Constitution than they already are in the First Amendment?

Look, what I, as an Orthodox Christian, believe about same-sex marriage is unpopular. It is not unpopular in Rowan County, Kentucky, perhaps, but in the country as a whole, it is unpopular, and it will become increasingly unpopular as the oldest Americans die out. The rule of law — specifically, the willingness of authorities who detest people like me as dirty rotten bigots to obey court decisions — may well be the only thing that safeguards people like me from abuse. I believe Americans like me are safer in a country with respect for the rule of law, even if it means allowing for something we find morally repugnant, than we would be in a country in which people felt free to flout court decisions they believed strongly to be wrong. We might cut down all the laws in the country to get at the devil, but when the devil turns on us, where would we hide?

(It’s not an original line, granted, but it’s highly appropriate to this discussion, I think.)

UPDATE: Religious conservative Denny Burk didn’t buy it when Huckabee forwarded this argument last week. Excerpt:

So Davis’s legal team has been making a religious liberty claim. Yet Huckabee argues here that the Supreme Court’s decision does not have the force of law. I agree with Huckabee that Obergefell is judicial tyranny, but his defense of Davis seems really strange. I’m no lawyer, but it’s hard to imagine any judge of any ideological persuasion buying this line.

2. Notice the looks on the faces of Joe, Mika, and the other hosts. Their tortured expressions reveal their nonplussed disbelief at Huckabee’s legal argument. They aren’t buying it. And what we witness in their response is likely what other Americans will feel as well.

3. Because Huckabee’s argument isn’t really based on religious liberty, I do not think that it is likely to persuade fair-minded Americans who might otherwise be open to a religious liberty claim in these kinds of cases. I’m concerned that this appearance isn’t really helping us to move the ball down the field—at least not in the direction that we want it to go. I am thankful that Huckabee wishes to defend Davis and do the right thing, but I’m skeptical whether this line will help the cause of religious liberty. It seems more likely to sow confusion and contempt toward our first freedom.

Letter From A Carter County Jail. #KimDavis #FreeKimDavis #MLKim pic.twitter.com/dM0KCqA0wm

— Kim Davis (@kimdavis917) September 5, 2015

UPDATE: As it turns out, this is fake, an elaborate trolling prank that fooled a lot of media and others. I apologize unreservedly to Kim Davis for believing it and criticizing her based on the belief that this document was real.

There are no words.

“Dad, can I play you a song I wrote?” said my son Lucas this afternoon.

Here he is above doing it a second time, for the camera. He wrote down the lyrics to his song, “It Was Love,” on the notepad on the counter. It’s an amazingly good song for an 11-year-old who just picked up the guitar this summer.

Notice how faded that Avett Brothers concert tee is. Here’s a post from November 2013, when it was brand-new because I bought it for him at the concert they held in our town. Excerpt:

So we were standing in the darkness under the moon and the pine trees tonight, with the band about half an hour into their set, and Lucas was in front of me, and then he turns and plants his head into my chest, sobbing, saying, “I didn’t think I would love it like this.”

The power of music. I had tears too, thinking about how those chords, those harmonies, that power on the stage moved a little boy to tears. He couldn’t talk about it. All throughout the show, he was so moved he couldn’t speak, or even look at me. We’ve been home for an hour, and he still can’t talk about it. He’s going to be a musician one day, I know it. I liked music a lot when I was a kid, but what the music did to that little boy tonight was something that was beyond me at that age. It’s a beautiful thing to see. I bought him an Avett Brothers concert t-shirt, and gave it to him on the walk back to the car. You’d have thought it was a golden fleece.

I hear him in his bedroom these days practicing the opening bass and guitar parts (all on his guitar) to the Meters’ “Cissy Strut,” and think that that’s one funky little white boy. I’m so proud of him, and excited to see him finally discover his thing. He has labored in his older brother’s shadow for so long, and now he’s coming into his own. What a pleasure it is to think back to that night under the stars where the Avett Brothers’ music plowed the ground of his heart and planted a seed.

Writing in First Things, Luma Simms informs us that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage but disagree with Kim Davis’s actions are just like those Washington RINOs who sell out their convictions for the sake of invitations to Georgetown cocktail parties. Examples:

We are Christians first, before we are Americans. So before we start talking about whether this is a good religious liberty case, or not, before we start distancing our educated selves from her simple faith, and before we take to the internet to show the liberal gestapo that we really are for the “rule of law” and that Kim Davis is a simpleton of a Christian who should have resigned before embarrassing us Christians—let’s just step back from this fog and think with a faithful mind.

Yes, because we who disagree can only be faithless snots humiliated by the hicks in our ranks. More:

Kim Davis is being driven by her conversion, by her zeal and love for God. Her awakening to her past sinful life coupled with her present desire to live in obedience to every jot and tittle should drive us to say “thank you Jesus for the witness to faith,” rather than wishing she would just offer a little incense to Caesar and go back to obscurity already.

Yes, because her sincerity justifies her imprudence, and if you believe that she’s morally right but taking actions that are mistaken and possibly harmful to the broader cause of religious liberty, that can only mean that you are willing to betray Our Lord by bowing to idols.

It is very disheartening to read so many attacks on orthodox Christians critical of Kim Davis that question not the logic or premises of our position, but the quality of our character. When was the last time someone was insulted into changing their mind? This all-or-nothing approach to this issue, in which people denounce their own Christian allies as the worst kind of infidels, not because they have embraced same-sex marriage, but simply because they think one person’s dissenting act is wrongheaded — look, is this kind of thing really going to help protect our religious liberties in the long term?

Note well that this is the same rhetorical tactic that so many on the pro-gay left use: insisting that those who disagree with them are not simply wrong, but also wicked.

UPDATE: Alan Jacobs takes Luma Simms to the woodshed.