What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

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May 2015 Archives

May 2, 2015

A Hole in the Market

By now my readers probably don't need me to inform them that the crowd-funding site GoFundMe apparently has a war on against Christians. Or for that matter, anyone else who holds to a traditional view of marriage and suffers for it. The site has shut down no less than two campaigns--one for Barronelle Stutzman, the Washington florist, one for Aaron and Melissa Klein in Oregon. The latter case is one I haven't happened to write about yet. It features the disgusting spectacle of a pair of lesbians arguing for (and probably getting) the utter financial ruin of a pair of small-business bakers because the lesbians suffered such "emotional pain" and even "physical suffering" when the bakers refused to make them a cake for their "wedding." The emotional pain of the bakers at the financial destruction of their business and their lives is of no account, of course. They are bigots and made a pair of lesbians feel bad, so this is what they deserve. The administrative law judge has ruled that they should be fined $135K. As in the florist case in Washington, apparently no corporate veil applies. This money will come out of the Kleins' personal assets. Another bureaucrat can accept or reject the proposed fine.

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May 3, 2015

Something Doesn't Add Up

Homosexual orientation, we are told, can’t be changed. Not only that, but attempting to change it is considered potentially dangerous, and some people (such as Barack Obama) advocated outlawing the practice. I must confess that I know very little about what is called “gay conversion therapy,” but an article in the Atlantic recently talked about how Christians have turned against it.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Christian right poured money and muscle into promoting the message that homosexuality was a curable disorder. It advocated conversion therapy, which promised to turn gay men and women straight. But last week, when President Obama announced his support for a national ban on such therapies, few voices on the Christian right spoke up in protest. The announcement confirmed the evaporation of support for these approaches among the communities that once embraced them. As Alan Chambers, who once ran America’s largest ex-gay ministry, told me, “sexual orientation doesn’t change.”

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May 4, 2015

Shrieking Harpies of Tolerance, Superhero Edition

There is no evil Republican hater social conservative (but I repeat myself) on the national scene who treats women, blacks, gays, or transsexuals as viciously as the Shrieking Harpies of Tolerance treat their friends who dare cross the line. Exhibit #2,356,224: Joss Whedon, of the Avengers movies. (Trigger warning: twitter and vulgarity.)

The silver lining here is that, perhaps, more people will see how vicious the Harpies are, and that it's impossible to satisfy them. That may eventually get ordinary people, including famous ordinary people, to stop trying to accommodate them even a little bit.

Unless there is no deviation from their doctrine, and no accidental offenses (of the professionally offended! Good luck), the Harpies will never help anyone win a campaign, create a hit movie, make a blockbuster novel, beat a charity fundraising goal, or turn any other good deed into a great one. They will help until they turn on you, and then they will try their hardest to destroy you -- even if you think they're on your side.

Lesson learned, my harpies. Thanks.

May 6, 2015

A Pyrrhic victory?

It is sometimes painful being the never-ending voice of doom, but in good conscience I cannot agree with David French's sunny perspective on this story. It's understandable that French would look at matters this way, since evidently he actually gave legal counsel to Gordon College in its accreditation crisis, and from his perspective as Clever Lawyer, they got the outcome they were seeking--namely, the accreditation agency dropped its ominous implication that they would lose their accreditation if they did not endorse homosexual acts.

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May 8, 2015

The bullies on the left meet the bullies of Mohammed

Here are my not-terribly-brilliant or original observations on the affair of the recent Mohammad cartoon shootings. In no particular order.

a) I saw the cartoon that won the contest. Please, let's not have anybody talk in this case about those evil, mean, disgusting, pornographic, blah, blah. This is straightforward political satire and protest against the "don't draw Mohammad" sharia restriction.

b) The bullies of the left who are blaming Pamela Geller and her contest for the murderous attack against them are despicable.

c) That the FBI has not contacted Geller is significant, chilling, and revealing.

d) That the would-be-murderers of jihad were gunned down in a matter of seconds, in contrast to the murders and long hunt in the Charlie Hebdo affair, demonstrates the difference between France and Texas. Good for Texas.

And

e) Have you heard about the Facebook angle? (This is the one place where perhaps I will be telling readers something they didn't already know.)

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May 10, 2015

Our regional inheritance

appomattox.jpg

The tracing of American regional inheritance comprises one of the richest fields for patriotic study. In the fine historical works of David Hackett Fischer, and the more breezy sketches of Colin Woodard, among many other books, American regionalism emerges dynamically. Its patterns of regional texture and integrity illuminate much that is otherwise obscure in the history of the North American continent.

Within so large a Republic as ours, regions often stand for past dispersions of whole nations. That it is why, as a matter of history, and often observable in the present, it is descriptively possible, without undue exaggeration, to speak in the plural of the American Nations.

Fischer’s book focuses tightly on the Anglo and Celtic peoples who settled the rugged parts interior to the Eastern Seaboard: the Nation of Greater Appalachia. Woodard’s lighter fare broadens the historical lens to compass Acadians, Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, Frenchmen and Native Americans.

The vigor and variety of these regional nations should kindle in us a surer patriotism than any facsimile of perfect national consolidation, a kind of continental-wide General Will, could possibly manage. We may appreciate the virtues of other regions, but we are mostly at home with our own people in our own nation.

We know that from tensions among these American nations much of our country’s drama springs. More than once the nations have threatened to come to blows; once they came to very severe blows.

[UPDATED with image. Appomattox River, 1864, Library of Congress]

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May 14, 2015

Farris's gauntlet

Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association and chancellor of Patrick Henry College, has this article in USA Today. It is both heartwarmingly spirited in its defiance and disturbing in its predictions.

Farris takes the omens from the discussion of tax exempt status and homosexual "marriage" before SCOTUS recently in oral arguments. As Farris notes, Justice Alito asked Donald Verrili, who was arguing on behalf of the federal government in favor of imposing homosexual "marriage" on the entire country, whether the Bob Jones precedent would be used to strip tax-exempt status from Christian schools who refuse to recognize homosexual "marriage." Verrili replied, "It's certainly going to be an issue," implying that this could indeed happen.

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May 15, 2015

The peace of the city

The prophet Jeremiah gave the following message to those who would be exiled from their land:

[S]eek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. (Jeremiah 29:7

This post by Russell Moore has a great many things wrong with it, but one of the central things wrong with it is that Moore does not understand that we should seek the peace of the city in which God has placed us.

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May 20, 2015

When is expressing mere outrage constructive?

Front Porch Republic author Pete Davis has an interesting post on making Facebook outrage more constructive. I admit to a certain amount of suspicion about Front Porch Republic and to a resulting thought that this post is directed partly at those of us on the right of the political spectrum who are filled with righteous anger. There is a little bit too much of the cool, above-it-all moderate saying, "A pox on both your houses" to right and left.

In any event, I do think he has a point when he deprecates some mere venting, whether on Facebook or on blogs. A paradigm (made-up) case would be a news story about a viciously abused child followed by Facebook shares with variants on, "I just feel so terrible about this" or "This is outrageous" as a status update.

It's true: Our social media culture is indeed replacing meaningful action with words on a flickering screen; Facebook shares and expressions of outrage can be an example of the growing impotence of real humans to do real things as they become wedded to their devices.

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May 21, 2015

The necessity of natural law for medicine

Recently this extremely poor piece came out by Jason Lee Steorts, the managing editor of National Review.

In passing: A little googling has not turned up much about Steorts's previous history, so perhaps my readers will know. Is this turn to the left on the issue of marriage any sort of surprise, or has Steorts always been a shallow social liberal, at least on this issue? All that I was able to find in a brief search was the fact that he has freaked out a couple of times at his own writers (once at Mark Steyn and once at Kathryn Jean Lopez) for their "rhetoric" in the vicinity of the issue of homosexuality. I suppose that was warning sign enough, but I still wonder if this is considered some kind of earthquake in conservative circles. It is, in any event, a sickening comment on how low National Review has fallen. So much for standing athwart the course of history crying, "Stop!"

The article as a whole is so jejeune that I am going to resist a temptation to fisk it. The temptation isn't that great, anyway. It just doesn't deserve the time that a fisking would take. A central aspect of Steorts's "argument" is the dismissal, with a flick of the wrist, of the entire natural law tradition by the magical invocation of the is-ought distinction and the name of David Hume. Really. See for yourself. Gosh, it's just that simple.

As I was musing on Steorts's cavalier treatment of natural law and wondering what sort of response might be effective with someone this dismissive, I remembered this post of mine from a few months back. Rather surprisingly, it didn't get any comments, so here I will try to make the connections to current issues explicitly yet again.

Continue reading "The necessity of natural law for medicine" »

May 26, 2015

This is not a good idea

It always pains me to have to disagree with Wesley J. Smith, who is such an important and stalwart spokesman for the cause of human exceptionalism, but this time, I have to do so.

Smith is positively inclined toward this proposal to institute "organ preservation" measures on patients who "die unexpectedly" when they or their relatives have not yet agreed to organ donation. The actual proposal is to ask relatives only to agree to these "preservation" measures at first, to give them time to process the patient's death, and then after some unspecified period of time (I cannot see how it would be more than a few days, maximum) to try to obtain their agreement to actual organ donation. Wall, et. al. (the JAMA article authors) sound like they would actually prefer a European system in which organ preservation is begun immediately on all patients whether or not relatives consent, but they realize that people in the U.S. will balk at this and suggest this alternative as (it appears to me) a halfway house sop to U.S. sensibilities.

I think their proposal is a very bad idea.

Continue reading "This is not a good idea" »

May 30, 2015

Pray again for Ken Miller

Remember Pastor Ken Miller? He was the Mennonite pastor who was tried and convicted of assisting a kidnapping (or some such crime) because he helped ex-lesbian Lisa Miller (no relation) escape from the country with her daughter Isabella. When I say "daughter" I mean that Isabella was her own biological daughter. A judge had ordered that full custody of Isabella be given to the former lesbian lover of Lisa Miller to punish Lisa for (after trying it) eventually not allowing Isabella to have unsupervised, overnight visits with her former lesbian lover, who is (I stress) no relation of Isabella's at all. Vermont law, however, regarded the lesbian as the child's "other mother" solely on the grounds that Lisa had given birth to her (by artificial insemination) when they were in the legal relationship of a civil union. (Please, please, please remember this case next time some foolish person recommends civil unions as the "conservative" response to homosexual "marriage.")

Lisa became a Christian, broke off the relationship, and fled to Virginia. Eventually she fled the country with Isabella. That was years ago. Meanwhile, the federal government has persistently persecuted all of her former friends and associates who helped her to flee the country.

Pastor Miller is not in jail right now because his lawyer cleverly appealed his conviction on the grounds that the trial was held in the wrong venue. He's also not in jail right now because, as you can see following the case, the judge was fairly sympathetic to him and almost hated to oversee the prosecution. I follow the Miller case here.

Now Pastor Miller's lawyer has warned him that new charges will probably be brought against him in the next ninety days. Ain't that sweet? The feds saved up some charges in case they didn't git him the first time. You know, sort of like when some scumball murders and tortures several people and the government breaks up the charges into different trials so that they can get multiple whacks at bringing the scumball to justice without committing double jeopardy.

Only not really like that.

I don't actually know what these new charges are going to be. As always, I am in awe of Pastor Miller's calmness, his respectfulness for those in authority, his integrity. In the face of this never-ending persecution, undeniably politically motivated, he never wavers and never reviles.

Those of you who are Christians, pray for Pastor Miller yet again.