What’s Wrong with the World

In the Fall 1992 issue of Touchstone, S.M. Hutchens argued that Christianity and feminism are mutually incompatible. Here's the money quote:

Feminist doctrine cannot accommodate the Church's insistence that all must bend the knee before the Man who is the perfect and complete revelation of God, for it simply does not believe God can be perfectly and completely revealed by a male. In consistently egalitarian theology there must be at the very least a feminine co-principal. But this orthodox Christianity denies, agreeing here with the more thoroughgoing feminists, that those who wish to retain their alliance with the faith by styling themselves Christian egalitarians can only do so by misunderstanding both Christian doctrine and the telos of their own ideology. You cannot have both at once; Christianity and feminism, whether of the egalitarian or gynarchial variety, exclude one another.

I invite comments. But please read the whole thing first. These are deep waters.

...about my earlier post on the failure of state schools in the U.K., here's
a necessary corrective:

"To determine students’ level of basic civic knowledge, we surveyed Arizona high school students with questions drawn from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) item bank, which consists of 100 questions given to candidates for United States citizenship. The longstanding practice has been for candidates to take a test on 10 of these items. A minimum of six correct answers is required to pass. The service recently reported a first-try passing rate of 92.4 percent.

"The Goldwater Institute survey, conducted by a private survey firm, gave each student 10 items from the USCIS item bank...Questions included (1) Who was the first president of the United States? (2) Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? and (3) What ocean is located on the East Coast of the United States?

"...Only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students attending public schools passed the citizenship test..."

Continue reading "In case anybody's feeling smug..." »

Apparently bureaucrat Elaine Thibodeau, of the Maine Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, thinks it does. Thibodeau sent a letter to the Christian Action Network concerning a fund-raising letter it sent out this year. Thibodeau's letter of accusation contains a list of charges, a fine for $4,000, and a place for CAN's leaders to sign that they admit to all the charges and waive their right to appeal.

Among the allegations are #5, "The correspondence contained an inflammatory anti-Muslim message."

To which my immediate reply is, "So? This is illegal?"

Interestingly, the $4,000 fine is actually being levied for two other alleged violations. The first is sending out a fund-raising letter without being properly registered as a non-profit. But actually CAN has canceled checks showing that it was duly registered in 2008, and the state doesn't make any claim to the contrary. The letter in question was sent before the end of the renewal grace period for 2009 re-registrations, so their 2008 registration should still have been in effect. Moreover, the state's complaints about missing paperwork for their 2009 registration seem plausibly to have been cooked up for harassment purposes when the state decided it disapproved of the group's message.

More worriesome is the $3000 portion of the fine for using the state governor's name without his written consent! The fund-raising letter urges recipients to write to the government concerning a pro-Muslim public school curriculum (with Muslim prayer "play-acting"), urging him to stop the institution of the curriculum. Anyone who gets mailings from non-profit organizations recognizes this sort of lobbying suggestion quite well. If it is illegal in Maine to urge people to write to the governor without the governor's written consent, Maine has serious First Amendment problems.

But back to the "inflammatory" speech thing:

Continue reading "Does Maine have Hate Speech laws?" »

To the puzzlement of many, one of the first changes our new President made to the White House was sending back to Britain a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had watched over the Oval Office since the September 11th attacks. There was little explanation for this gesture, or hint of its significance.

The significance of Churchill for Americans, and for all mankind, need hardly be hinted at. He was the greatest statesman of the calamitous twentieth century, and among its greatest men of letters.

Fortunately, though America now lacks the bronze of the great man, thanks to ISI, a small publisher out of Wilmington, Delaware, we no longer lack a current edition of one of his neglected literary works. ISI has brought forth a new printing of Churchill’s 1932 collection of essays, Thoughts and Adventures, and we are all the richer for so superb and enjoyable a read.

[Read the rest.]

Just saw this interesting piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's an excerpt:

Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:

"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Read the whole thing here.

What's Wrong With the World readers in the greater Chicagoland area may be interested in an upcoming conference on Global Bioethics sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. It will be held July 16-18, 2009 on the campus of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. Among the featured speakers are yours truly, O. Carter Snead (Notre Dame Law School), and David P. Gushee (Mercer University). You can find out more about the conference here.

(Originally posted on First Thoughts, a First Things blog)

New Atheists like Richard Dawkins feign outrage at any suggestion that their creed itself amounts to a kind of religion – even as (for example) they issue their own suggested revisions of the Ten Commandments (see The God Delusion, pp. 263-4). Now, a reader informs me, Dawkins has decided to sponsor his own version of Bible Camp. I kid you not. All Dawkins needs now is a camp song; have fun coming up with your own lyrics.

After dragging out the process for a good, long, time (for no apparent good reason), Cardinal Sean O'Malley is to be commended for withdrawing Caritas Christi at the 11th hour from a joint venture in which an insurance company half-owned by Caritas would have provided abortion and sterilization to the poor in Massachusetts. According to the Boston Globe story, the insurance venture is now wholly owned by the secular Centene Corporation, rather than being 49% owned by the Catholic charity company as it previously was. According to the story, Caritas Christi's hospitals will receive patients covered by the Centene venture, as they receive patients covered by other insurance companies. Patients seeking abortions will be told that they must contact their insurance company--in this case the Centene-owned Celticare. Caritas claims that this represents no change from their previous policy regarding patients seeking abortions, which I would say is plausible enough.

Apparently, this means that Caritas isn't getting a contract with the state and is, rather, just continuing business as before. The contract with the state is now merely with Centene-owned Celticare, and Caritas can go back to doing things as it always did. That, at least, is how this is being reported, and I hope that it is true.

Some have implied that the financially distressed Caritas will go out of business altogether if it does not get this contract with the state. Naturally, I hope that this does not happen, though a Christian organization should certainly not provide abortions as the price of continuing to stay in business. If Caritas stays afloat without the state contract, this will only make the original intention to seek the contract with all its illegitimate requirements all the more blame-worthy and unmitigated.

Over at First Thoughts (a First Things blog), I posted an entry about the online discussion between Stephen Barr (on First Thoughts) and John West (on Evolution News). To find my posting, go here.

Via Laban Tall, blog-chronicler extraordinaire of British decline, comes this gem: The Best Educated Generation in History:

"Alas, our well-educated young people are finding that their lives are being ruined by a despotic tyranny.

"'Students who failed to understand the words "despotic tyranny" have been complaining about their history A-level exam.

"'It is claimed the question "How far do you agree that Hitler's role 1933-45 was one of despotic tyranny?" was too confusing for some students to understand.

"'A protest group called Despotic Tyranny Ruined My Life has been set up on Facebook.

"'So far 1,151 people have joined the group, leaving comments such as "My life is DESTROYED because of this exam. Seriously" and "This exam made me sad.'

"What's at once impressive, pathetic and sad are the self-righteous complaints of the students. Look and despair. These are next year's university intake..."

Continue reading "Sound Familiar?" »

A commercial from Macedonia. (HT: Inside Catholic)

Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg offers some nice insights on the way the media have covered Michael Jackson's passing. Here is an excerpt:

[H]is relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.

Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we're hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.

If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic....

I feel sympathy for Jackson’s family and friends who understandably mourn him. But I can't bring myself to mourn him any more than I mourn the random dead I read about in the paper everyday. Indeed, I confess to mourning him less.

Every channel says this is a sad day for America. I agree. But not for the same reasons.

(Originally posted on First Thoughts at First Things)

The invaluable Wesley J. Smith, who is now on a well-deserved vacation, posted just before he left a link to this sickening little article on the site of The Hastings Center. In the course of discussing it, Smith alerts me to something I'd never heard of before: The culture of death in medical ethics is now trying to pass itself off as "family values" in ethics.

Reading the Hastings article, I see the rhetoric. There's a reason why Socrates hated the sophists so much. I imagine they were very effective in their day and in their way. And conservatives, especially conservatives of a particular sort who regard themselves as anti-individualist, may be especially vulnerable to the kind of snake oil being peddled here.

Let me explain:

Continue reading "Family Values comes to medical ethics--Conservatives, do not fall for this" »

Writing at The New Ledger, Francis Cianfrocca lucidly explains the precarious financial condition of the Republic. In the course of this he also provides some very useful economic history about how we got where we are. The answer to how we got here is deeply entangled with the geopolitics that emerged after the devastation of the World Wars and the Depression.

One way of looking at it is that we got here because after those historic calamities, concentrated in Europe, no one was left with the credibility to anchor world finance -- no one except America. "The bottom line is that the United States exports dollars, which function as a store of value in the global trading system much as gold did in the past."

Let it be noted that this settlement -- generally referred to as Bretton Woods, after the resort in New Hampshire where the victors in the Second World War met to begin the work of bringing to the ravaged world to a workable system of finance -- faciliated an expansion of wealth almost unparalleled in history. Under the operation of this settlement, both Germany and Japan were restored to a level of prosperity which would have been unthinkable to most observers at point of their ruin and subjugation after the war. Under the operation of a modified version of this settlement, China, India, and other nations in Asia have similarly witnessed an explosion of productive economic activity which has lifted countless millions out of grinding privation. And under the operation of the settlement, Americans became the richest people ever to walk the earth. The accomplishments of Bretton Woods should not be overlooked.

The problem here, as I see it, is that the position of the United States as the fons et origo of the world's reserve currency, the primary "store of value in the global trading system," presented extraordinary moral and even spiritual vulnerabilities. In a word, it exposed us to Usury on a staggering scale.

Continue reading "The tragedy of usury." »

...see here...

...for successful conservative male politicians.

As conservative politicians, they are bound (morally speaking) to uphold heterosexual monogamy as the foundation of civil society.

Which, of course, it is.

But, as successful males, they are also bound (a-morally speaking) to cheat on their wives - men being what they are, and the opportunities for successful males being what they are.

Add in the all-seeing gaze of the modern media, and the only conservative male politician who can possibly succeed in the long run in the U.S.A. today must be either a saint or a eunuch.

Rare folks, these days, saints & eunuchs...