What’s Wrong with the World

Peter Wehner writes in his Commentary Magazine blog:

Senator Barack Obama has announced his opposition to a California ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriages–a decision that was forced on the citizens of California by the state’s Supreme Court. In a letter expressing his support for extending “fully equal rights and benefits to same-sex couples under both state and federal law,” Obama wrote that he opposes “the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states.”

A joyful Independence Day (July 4) to my fellow Americans and friends of America and W4. If someone wants to suggest a cool image for this post and tell me, in easy instructions for the techno-challenged, how to imbed it, I'll be grateful.

Only positive comments allowed. No gloom.

By the way, it's a lovely day in my part of the world. I can't remember having such a beautiful July 4 before in the entire thirteen years I've lived here. It's sunny but not hot. (That's what a Yankee thinks of as a lovely July 4.)

The argument has often been made that we should basically shut up about torture as long as abortion is legal, since the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale. Both are evil, and both ought to be opposed in principle, but we should basically shut up about torture until we can say 'mission accomplished' on abortion.

Needless to say, I find this argument unconvincing. We can't say everything all at once, and we have an obligation to oppose the legalization/normalization of both torture and abortion ferociously, in general.

There is an underlying truth though, a truth which is being misused in this argument, which is not so easily dismissed. That underlying truth is that the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is in fact more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale.

What follows from this should no doubt make progressives and those with progressive sympathies uncomfortable. Progressives tend to be rather squishy on the compelling need to treat abortion legally as a form of murder, and to ferociously advocate for such treatment. Indeed "ferocity", if it applies at all, usually applies to their efforts to undermine the point and reverse the objective priorities. As a result they have a credibility problem when it comes to torture, precisely because of the obviously upside-down priorities. And that credibility problem does a great deal of damage to making the case against torture.

When it comes to opposing torture in the company of those who are soft on making abortion illegal, the old adage 'with friends like these' comes to mind.

(Cross-posted)

As you've probably seen elsewhere on the blogosphere, two boys in a public school in the UK were punished with detention for refusing to kneel down on prayer mats and pray to Allah as part of a "religious education" lesson.

But although you've no doubt seen it elsewhere, you haven't heard my two cents, so I might as well give you those two pennies, unasked, just because you were kind enough to drop by W4.

C. S. Lewis said that women are fidgets and men are lazy.

I find that there is a fair bit of truth in this, though both can be either. (I'm frightfully lazy myself, and a fidget, which explains why I blog.)

But it occurred to me that Lewis's evaluation of male and female traits might have some relevance to a recent fad from which some of you may have suffered--the assessment craze.

On a wonderful new blog, The Catholic Thing, my dear friend, Hadley Arkes, offers, in his own elegant way, an assessment of the reasoning of Doug Kmiec and other like-minded Catholics who have come out in support of Senator Barack Obama. Here are some excerpts from Hadley's entry:

This can be found in the Guardian Angel Cathedral off the Las Vegas Strip, where I served as an altar boy in elementary school. I found it in the photobucket page of someone named Mansfield Fox. I had been looking for a photo of this unique stained glass since having completed the manuscript for my forthcoming book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, 2009), which will be released in November of this year. I've created a website for the book, ReturntoRome.com, which you can find here.

While putting together my previous post, I discovered that Brazos Press has now created a page for my forthcoming book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic. Here's the cover:

That's me in the bottom right corner in 1968 at my First Holy Communion.

Just saw this on the Catholic League's website:

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:

“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Here's Professor Myers' contact info, and his reply to the Catholic League.

(cross-posted)

The University of Minnesota, Morris professor, P. Z. Myers, who has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist,
has secured the support of Richard Dawkins. Writes Dawkins:

PLEASE WRITE IN SUPPORT OF PZ MYERS. By Richard Dawkins

Readers of yesterday's thread "It's a Goddamned Cracker" will be aware of somebody called Bill Donohue, whose grasp of reality is so poor that he can't tell the difference between a wafer and Jesus. The shrieking hysteria of Donohue and other Roman Catholics over the temporary removal of a communion wafer from a church service epitomises all that is ridiculous in the religious mind.

Today's development is that Donohue is now inciting a witch-hunt against PZ, and is trying to whip up Roman Catholics to write to the President of the University of Minnesota, urging him to sack PZ. We need a massive counter flood of letters in support of PZ Myers. Please write, bearing in mind PZ's two requests:-

1. Please use your own name, not a pseudonym
2. Please take care to write in a good, literate, adult style, in order to increase the contrast between the letters of support and the incoherent, juvenile flaming that will doubtless characterise the letters from the Catholics.

For details of the address to write to, see Pharyngula, here (or PZ's post below)
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fight_back_against_bill_donohu.php

Please rally round and show support for PZ, in the face of this hysterical latter-day Grand Inquisitor.

Thank you

Richard [emphasis added by FJB]

Apparently, Dawkins' instructions for a "literate, adult style" are not being followed by supportive commentators on Myers' blog. (Unless Dawkins meant by "adult style" what "adult" means in "adult bookstore.") Take a look for yourself here, here, and here. But make sure that you are over 18 and no children are looking over your shoulder.

UPDATE: Apparently, Professor Myers' website, Pharyngula, on which his pledge to desecrate the Eucharist is published, was accessible via his department's faculty page for several years, until it was taken down within the past 48 hours. Fortunately, it had been cached on July 6, 2008 by Google here. If one consults the Wayback Machine, it looks like the taxpayers of Minnesota have supported UMM's biology department's portal to Professor Myers' anti-religious screeds since at least November 9, 2006. (You can find all the archived pages here). Professor Morris has also had Pharyngula mirrored on the University of Minnesota Morris' server, here.

....In the July 12, 2008 Washington Times and on the Catholic News Agency (11 July 2008).

They both concern the Professor-Myers-Eucharist-desecration postings.

However, let us not forget that Christ's body was broken for us, and thus we should not think it unseemly that we find ourselves on occasion broken for him. This means that in this present case we should remember that Professor Myers, though indeed a troubled soul, is one for whom Christ died. Let us lift him up in prayer on this Feast of St. Benedict, which happens to be my 21st wedding anniversary. (How providential that my wife and I married on the Feast of St. Benedict only to be received together into the Catholic Church 20 years later under the papacy of Pope Benedict. God, indeed, has a sense of humor).

I just submitted this to the combox on a blog entry on HigherEd.com (My comments will not appear on the blog until they are vetted by the editor):

Update: I've taken the excerpts down until the final galleys are done.

In the combox in the post about my forthcoming book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic, Aristocles suggested I post some excerpts from the book. I have done so at the website returntorome.com. I have also included a detailed table of contents on the site. Just click "Excerpts" or "Table of Contents" at the top of page.

(HT: Lex Communis).

Contrast Professor Myers' public treatment of Catholics and their beliefs with his public posture when, over two year ago, Muslims were upset about Danish cartoons published that depicted Muhammed in unflattering ways. He writes:

If and when, God willing, that blot on the moral and legal landscape Roe v. Wade is fully overturned and the states are free once more to protect unborn babies, what sort of legislation may pro-lifers write or vote for?

There has been an interesting discussion of this question on our own Zippy's blog through several threads, here, here, and here. I added a bit of my own here, besides many long bits in the comments threads at Zippy's place.

As a preview, I will just say that the main disagreements turned on whether a) it would be morally wrong or morally legitimate to write/propose abortion legislation including exceptions, where one does not actually think that those victims should be unprotected in law, but where the legislation would pass only with these exceptions and would protect more children in law than had been protected before, and b) whether there is a crucial difference in such a situation between the legislator who proposes the legislation and one who votes for it.

The one rather sad thing is that I'm just getting around to mentioning this to our W4 readers as Zippy, who has been central to the whole discussion, is by his own statement going "AWOL for a couple of weeks." We shall miss him, and meanwhile, I will be interested to see what W4 readers have to say. Feel free to refer to threads on varying sites in threads on other sites. (That isn't confusingly worded, is it?)

Via Tom Piatak, writing at Taki's, it would appear that Myers has befouled a comment thread over at Rod Dreher's blog, averring that

The point of desecrating the host isn’t to make people angry--it’s to demystify and desanctify nonsense. It’s how we wake people up--by showing that their beliefs are powerless.

Yes, but such an appeal to history, even recent history, by way of demonstrating the incompatibility of militant atheism with human dignity, would lie beyond Myers comprehension, presumably, as he would prefer to have the 'truth' established by means of his contrivance: let a singular communion wafer represent the entirety of the Christian claim, and let his sacrilege represent the claims of enlightenment, and if no bolt of lightning or pillar of fire descends from the heavens to smite him, Christianity stands exploded as rank superstition. Let us be forthright about what such presumption is: it is not merely indicative of a mental imbalance, an obsession or mania, but expressive of mental primitivism. Truth is established, not by reasoned discourse upon evidences and arguments, but by what amount to tests of strength, defiance, and pride. Might makes right, by the infernal glow of impudence. And mankind undergoes a spiritual and intellectual regression of some score of millenia.

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (via Dawn Eden's blog), from a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace:

Via Glenn Greenwald, Tom Friedman ruminates on the strategic rationale for the Great Mesopotamian Quagmire Near Eastern War of Democratic Liberation:

Friedman's astonishingly puerile and uncouth exposition features a choice piece of verbal legerdemain, which begins with a mention of the Open Society and our willingness to defend it, and concludes with a vulgar peroration, which has American servicemen (and women, of course, for one mark of our civilizational superiority is that we send our women to bleed and die in our wars) going door to door between "Basra and Baghdad", telling anyone who might oppose the Open Society to "Suck on this." I mentioned a piece of legerdemain, by which I mean an unthinking attempt at esotericism. Friedman, of course, commences by discussing the Open Society, and then avers that no border controls, no clever INS officials - in summation, no declensions from the (utopian) conceit of the Open Society - could possibly suffice to protect us from further terrorist assaults, leaving as the inevitable conclusion the imperative of converting the recalcitrant of the world to our visions of global order. But, of course, this standard line is a farrago of nonsense. The firm proscription of certain Islamic doctrines, the cessation of Muslim immigration, beginning with the abolition of the Visa Express programme and student visas for nationals of countries which contribute disproportionately to the jihad, and rising to the encouragement of Muslim emigration from the West, would, over time, mitigate the threat of jihad, and all without the perceived imperative of wars of (democratic capitalist) imperial conquest. What, therefore, Friedman really means is that we cannot maintain simultaneously the Open Society and measures inhibiting the social and economic intercourse of the Western and Muslim worlds; we can undertake either, but not both, and, inasmuch as the latter is simply unthinkable - a form of apostasy, in reality - we must opt for the former by means of war. The exoteric rationale is that we cannot defeat "terror" save by waging wars of "liberation"; the esoteric reality is that our elites cannot preserve the politico-economic articulation of their class interests save by waging wars of "liberation".

Glenn Greenwald takes Friedman's utter self-delusion, his incomprehension at negative global perceptions of the U.S., and nails it to the wall:

Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College is emphatically not of two minds about the Abraham Lincoln. Writing in The Claremont Review of Books, he laments Conservative ambivalence about, and castigates Conservative antipathy for, this same Lincoln who bulks so big in our history. While I share Guelzo’s impatience with Lincoln-hatred, it just won’t do to conflate ambivalence and antipathy. He cites, for instance, Willmoore Kendall’s judgment (argued most extensively in Basic Symbols of the American Tradition) that Lincoln “derailed” the American political tradition by replacing the Constitution (i.e., self-government) with the Declaration of Independence (i.e., equality) — and, what’s more, with a single passage from the latter document, at the expense of the rest of it. This would seem to locate Kendall among the Lincoln-haters, a strange place to locate a man who also named Lincoln as standing among Shakespeare, Milton and Burke — the great masters of the English language and rhetoric.

In short, there is hatred of Lincoln, which Guelzo rightly censures; and there is ambivalence about him. The two are not the same; and the project to establish a rigid orthodoxy of unqualified approbation is one unworthy of Prof. Guelzo. In my admittedly amateur judgment, Lincoln, like many a great man, is too much of an enigma to merit unqualified anything. One writer (could it have been our own Zippy, some years ago?) once referred to Honest Abe as a “Calvinist agnostic.” The phrase alone, which only appears facile, is a virtual treatise on the mystery of the statesman and the man.

I’ll conclude this mere sketch of an argument with a little anecdote. Some years ago I called my wife over to read through an essay I had just completed, which included a long quotation from Lincoln’s Lyceum Address. I believe the topic was the rule of law — in the context of judiciary usurpation or immigration or something like that. She read it carefully, paused, and said, “pretty good, Paul, but I like Lincoln’s part best.”

So do I. So do I.

Unfortunately for those of us who would prefer to leave behind the moral preening caterwauling that followed upon the Supreme Court's decision in Heller, there are those who cannot let it go, and insist upon drawing our attention to the infantile tantrums of Europeans who know next to nothing about American history, law, and government. And who, apparently, pen, with apparent ingenuousness, such luminous analyses as this:

The Second Amendment states that the armed forces ought to be armed.

While I do not wish to dwell upon this subject at any great length, it is worth noting, in connection with a recent display of grotesquely bestial conduct, which was precipitated by the refusal of a father to permit his adolescent daughter to suffer molestation at the hands of one of the glowering men depicted in the Star Tribune article, that not even the abolition of firearms can obviate the necessity, and imperative, of defense, whether of others or of self. By what principle of ethics should a lone man, attempting to defend his womenfolk, be left deprived of potential strategic leverage against their depravities? It will be said that security personnel and police exist for this purpose, but the success of such assaults proves only the obvious: that these public servants are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent.

It is worth observing, further, that none of the assailants was armed; their limbs were their weapons of choice - well, their limbs and the earth itself. So, it is not merely a matter of wishing for some candyland from which firearms have been banished - and prudent minds will shudder at the thought of what manner of government in the U.S. would be necessary to disarm the populace - but a question of what relation ought to obtain between the ordinary citizen and the predators among them. Once more, the notion that a relation of formal equality ought to obtain, such that ordinary people, not accustomed to aggressive action, should be compelled to confront barbarians long accustomed to such acts, upon an imaginary level field, is positively perverse.

For five years my wife and were members of St. James Episcopal Church in Newport Beach, California (1997-2002). Our rector at the time was the Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, president and CEO of the American Anglican Council, the ecclesiastical Green Zone for the U.S. Anglican traditionalists trying to secure orthodox dioceses and parishes from hostile assimilation into the Borg of Anglican liberalism. For this reason, as well for another reason, I've had more than a passing interest in what is going in the World Anglican Communion.

In the midst of catching up on the recent goings on in the Anglican world, I just saw this entry (authored by Margaret Cabaniss) on the Inside Catholic Blog

Begin here.

I have committed another YouTube Video:

Rod Dreher poses the question, by way of commenting on a NYT article on conservative reconsiderations and Andrew Stuttaford's dismissal of the hypothetical benefits of a stint in the political wilderness:

Do you find it more depressing to think that we might be in the political wilderness post-November, or that we might not be? Explain your reasoning.

In truth, conservatism has been in exile throughout the Bush administration, and, I would argue, for many years preceding the inauguration of this unfortunate presidency. Conservatism will be in a barren and waste place in the event of a McCain triumph, because it is already in that place. More's the pity that so few comprehend this, imagining that either a McCain victory, or a bit of tinkering at the margins of policy, might deliver conservatives, and conservatism, from its season in the abyss.

"It’s always a bad practice to say 'always' or 'never."

Wesley J. Smith executes a karate chop on the genetic reductionists. He quotes an article that says,

Consider the fact that chimpanzees share about 98 percent of our genetic makeup....Of course, the reverse is also true: We are 98 percent chimpanzee.

Responds Smith:

Nonsense. This is reductionism writ large. We are no more "98% chimp" then we are 40% lettuce because we share about that percentage of genes with radicio.

For me to add anything would be gilding lilies.