Re two posts ago, I still have time to get the ballot in, but haven't made my choice. Whom should I vote for?

I want to reiterate my request in this post asking prayer for a friend's wife. I can't give details but the need is urgent and the recipients will be grateful.

My absentee ballot for the Republican presidential primary came in the mail today. I read it carefully because that's what the instructions told me to do, and I am an obedient subject of the greatest democracy on earth. Instruction #3 tells me to "Mark only the number of choices as indicated on the ballot."

Now, grammar is sometimes important. On the ballot are nine choices. Can I choose them all? Being a careful reader, I went to the ballot itself and read above the choices, "TO VOTE, COMPLETELY FILL IN THE OVAL NEXT TO YOUR CHOICE." I'm going to interpret this to mean CHOOSE ONE. But you just know that some people who do not read so carefully as I will choose two or more.

Instructions 2, 4 and 6 are related. Number 2 says, "Mark your ballot in secret. No one should help you unless you are blind, disabled or unable to read or write." This one annoyed me. I called my wife into the room.

"Sweetheart," I said, "they want me to mark my ballot in secret, but since we have no secrets I want to mark it in front of you."

"Oh," she said, "that's sweet," and gave me a peck on the cheek.

Number 4 says, "After marking the ballot, re-fold it and place it inside this Secrecy Sleeve." The capital letters made me feel important. The problem is, the Secrecy Sleeve is the paper on which the instructions are written. It simply folds in half. There is nothing secret about it. When someone at the elections office opens the envelope, the ballot will quite likely slip right out of its Secrecy Sleeve. End of secret.

Number 6 says, "VERY IMPORTANT: You must sign your name or make your mark [???] in the box marked 'VOTER MUST SIGN IN BOX' or your ballot cannot be counted." Now the box in which the voter must sign his name is on the envelope into which the Secrecy Sleeve will be inserted, so that everyone from the mailman to the sorter to the clerk and all his buds at the election office can see that I'm a Republican, since only Repubs can vote in the primary. On the envelope is emblazoned OFFICIAL ELECTION MAIL. What if someone at the elections office happens to be, simultaneously, a neighbor of mine (or an acquaintance by some other means) and an Obamabot liberal-leftist? Aha, he thinks, so that Luse is a conservative lapdog, a lover of Wall Street and a hater of the poor, a defender of nonhumans in the womb and an opponent in general of the sexually libertine template to which our society is conforming as it progresses toward complete and total non-discrimination in all things disreputable. I think I'll slash his tires.

You think I'm paranoid. I think the political atmosphere is so poisoned that conservatives in many walks of life fear the enmity incited by their opinions. All right, I'll stop whining.

Most of the other instructions are uninteresting ("Don't forget to affix postage to your envelope"). But number 10 caught my eye: "FELONY NOTICE: It is a felony to accept any gift, payment, or gratuity in exchange for your vote."

My wife, still beside me, asked, "So who you gonna vote for?"

"What's the point?" I said. "Independents will determine the winner, so you and I are in the position of trying to pick whom we think the independents will vote for over Obama."

Yeah, she agreed, it's tough, but we have to choose.

Why? Why do we have to choose?

If everyone had that attitude, she said, the Republicans wouldn't have a nominee. Exactly, I said. A brokered convention. Many long for it. A colleague out at school said he's still fuming at Paul Ryan for not getting in. All the guys who could have won refused to step up to the plate. Oh, she said, it's not all that bad...

Then a light went on. "I was thinking," I said, "of voting for Ron Paul."

"Why would you do that? He's crazy."

"Well, I might be persuaded...."

She went to her purse and came back with a large bill. "I'll give you a hundred bucks to vote for anyone but Paul."

"Done."

I still haven't filled out the oval next to my choice, but when I do I'll make sure she's in the room.

Theodore Andrew Culbreath.

His parents ask your prayers for the child, who has a medical condition that usually ends well but is "potentially dangerous."

I'll tell you what, in the Last Judgement, the Culbreaths will bear no culpability whatsoever for California's demographic problems.

I had a student last semester who wrote her research paper "Against Abortion." One argument she used in her favor was that she herself had once had an appointment with "the procedure." That is, her own mother had wanted to abort her, but something (a change of mind or circumstance - I don't remember what) had interfered. She learned about this when she was 14, and is today 19, keenly aware of how much she loves being alive. This is hardly the first such story I've heard. There is also Sky's story, which I tell here. Miracles which have the appearance of mere accidents do happen. When the anniversary of Roe v. Wade comes around each year, I suspect people like these take notice.

President Obama took notice too. This fellow, whom even conservatives never seem to tire of calling " a very smart man," marked the anniversary by putting his keen intellect into the service of well-worn clichés accessible even to the dull-witted:

President Obama marked the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade court decision Sunday by saying that he remains committed "to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right."

"We must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters"...Obama said Sunday that reducing the number of abortions was something that everyone could agree to, whether they supported or opposed abortion rights.

But if it's truly a private family matter, that is, no one else's concern, why should anyone care if the number of abortions gets reduced? Oh, why bother.

We might look instead at Melissa Ohden's story. I find it more compelling than Obama's boilerplate abstractions about 'reproductive freedom' and 'fundamental constitutional rights.' Melissa is just a woman who is also a wife and mother. She reminds me of some of my students because she, too, had a close call with abortion. She actually survived one. Her own mother's "reproductive rights" included subjecting her unborn child of 20 weeks' duration, Melissa, to a saline abortion. Melissa endured for five days an assault on her life that normally concludes within 72 hours. You can hear her tell about it in a video on this page. "Who in this room wants to tell my daughter that her mother's life was not worth defending?"

You can also see her in an interview with Fox News.

Melissa has founded an organization named after her daughter, Olivia, to "raise awareness of the intergenerational impact of abortion... Painfully aware that Olivia would not have come into existence if the abortion [had] succeeded in ending her life, Melissa felt driven to create this organization that would positively raise awareness of the ripple effect of abortion across generations."

There must be others like her out there. Let's give thanks today that they are now among us, and will have children of their own. And then there are many other 'others' who will not be joining us. What to do about them I don't know. Here's a picture of Melissa. God bless her and all who take heed to what she has to say.

The wife of an old friend of this blog is suffering terribly and needs your petitions. The condition is not life-threatening, but involves relentless pain and consequent lack of sleep for which no treatment has yet proved effective. It sounds like the docs are guessing and hoping the next one will. May His mercy fall upon her.

Excerpts from a fascinating Andrew McCarthy article at NR, fascinating because I did not know this about Fox:

To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina...

Asked at a campaign appearance whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out — "it would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia." Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. They’ve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islam’s legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines — one that, in CAIR’s portrayal, "teaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge."

Actually, it teaches polygamy, the underwriting of jihadist violence through ostensible charity, and the Islamization of knowledge. Don’t take my word for it. I refer you instead to a CAIR favorite, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Newt Gingrich is not pulling this stuff out of the sky any more than I am. It is all there in black and white, courtesy of CAIR’s Islamist allies....Fox is owned by News Corp, whose second-largest shareholder is the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose fabulous wealth spearheads the aggressive campaign to put a happy face on sharia while promoting it in the media and the academy — just as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna instructed in his elaborate plan for Islamizing societies. It is no surprise, then, to find Fox’s report on Gingrich parroting CAIR’s stock rebuttal that sharia is no threat to America because it mandates that "Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.".... Nearly two decades of boot-licking by a bipartisan parade of American politicians and administrations have conditioned these CAIR "civil rights" activists to expect — to demand — that no one will question them, not about sharia tenets, not about their organization’s sordid history.

From Yahoo via the original story at Cambridge News, we learn that a UK couple has kept their child's sex hidden from the world except for closest friends and family. Now that the boy - I mean human child - is five and entering school, the parents had to reveal his sex because schools apparently want to know stuff like that.

"Sasha," the article says, "dresses in clothes he likes -- be it hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother." I'd always thought kids that young generally dressed in the clothes with which their parents supplied them. Is there any chance that a 5 year old boy would choose to wear dresses and pink swimsuits without some guidance from Mom and Dad, especially Mom, since she's the one who usually pays closest attention to such things? For example, Sasha has plenty of dolls to play with, but Barbie is forbidden as are "hyper-masculine" toys and clothes (G.I. Joe, trucks, combat fatigues). Although Sasha has to wear a uniform at school, his mother dresses him in pants and a girl's blouse.

The boy's parents are Kieran and Beck. Beck is the mom (I'm pretty sure). The fact that one parent is female and the other male is important in that Sasha could not have been conceived otherwise. But post-conception, your sense of belonging to one or the other sex is not important. Why? "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," (Beck) Laxton said..."Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?"

So, those of us who are, theoretically, men, like me, who like guns and tools and, in younger days, playing football and admiring (with purest heart) beautiful women, do all those things because our understanding of ourselves and others is governed by stereotypes, not because of who we really are. We are blinded by them. I don't really love my wife because I can't see who she really is. I got so swept up in (enchanted by, knocked off my feet by, rendered spellbound by) her biological otherness that all this time I've been unable to appreciate the fact that her femininity, which had always seemed to me intimately connected to her biology, wasn't really important because I was allowing it to disguise her essential humanness. Ipso facto I haven't been able to fully appreciate my daughters, either; I've always delighted in the fact that they were girls, or appeared to be, in body and soul, but there's nothing but bad news these days, is there?

Some day, when we're a little more advanced, a new translation of the Bible will tell us that "God created humans in Its own image, in the image of God created It them; gender-neutral created It them..." He also told us to be fruitful and multiply. It's hard to do that in a gender-neutral fashion, but as long as we remember that the physical differences that allow it are truly trivial, we'll somehow suffer through it.

The Yahoo article concludes that

Maybe Sasha's early years will be character building, maybe he'll have a higher emotional quotient being raised with dual perspectives on gender. Or the reverse could be true: Sasha may have less of a formed identity because of his upbringing, and feel angry at his mom for dressing him in flowery shirts and telling the world about it. Then again, maybe he'll get over it.

We ask our kids to get over a lot these days. I'm still so blinded by stereotypes I wonder why there can't be a law against parents who aren't.

One of Sasha's human progenitors has a blog. It's accompanied by a profile picture. It looks like a woman to me, but what do I know?

Matthew Franck at First Things notes of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that it defends "the proposition that the FCC should cease and desist from enforcing any notions of decency in broadcast television..," causing him to wonder how anyone could "make such vacuous arguments." He thinks he might have found the answer in a Tony Esolen column called "Pottersville, USA," wherein Mr. Esolen speculates on a topic of recent interest here -

During a recent debate among candidates for the Republican nomination for president, one of the members of the media asked what has been decried as an absurd question. It was not about a massive health care bill, whose details were quite unknown to the very senators and congressmen who voted on it. It was not about American tax law, whose tendrils and curlicues are describable only by a judicious application of chaos theory. It was not about the American army attempting to make the world safe for – we aren’t sure. It was about whether in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court was right to remove from the states all authority to regulate contraceptive devices and drugs.

Apparently, it is a question to arouse contemptuous laughter, whether one is an extreme statist with the false name of liberal, or a moderate statist with the false name of conservative. It is as if the nation were now basking in the warm benevolent glow of the sexual revolution; Marriages are stronger than ever before, and divorce is almost unheard of; children grow up knowing both mother and father, within the fostering shelter of committed love; Abortion is considered a scandal.

Read the whole thing here.

In a thread here critiquing the RC Church's teaching on contraception, in which we find mystery being opposed to morality - what we might call the "I feel your pain" wing of moral theology - the host says:

...the modern Christian Church needs desperately to recover its mystical focus, even at the cost of setting aside its focus on specific moral conflicts.

People break the Christian Laws because they cannot understand, cannot feel, the reason for these precise Laws - and without this feeling the Laws seem merely arbitrary.

To which Jim Kalb offers a defense:

...The general role of sex in human life, and the weight and orientation of institutions essentially connected to sex (like marriage), depends I think on its general tendency to make babies. The habit of intentionally interfering with that general tendency denatures sex and makes it something to manipulate rather than something that essentially involves giving our all and therefore naturally gives rise to an absolutely fundamental personal connection.

As to the nature of Christianity, it's a religion that says God created the world and its order, found it good, and became incarnate within it. So to be Christian is among other things to accept that the world is charged with meaning and value. That leads me to believe that Christianity should not be spiritualized to the extent of not taking seriously how people live concretely, especially with regard to something as basic as sex.

And from someone whose handle is Proph:

...In fact, having tried many, many times to explain the natural law basis of the Church's ban on contraception to people (probably on 40-50 different occasions, online and in person), the resentment of the teaching is not that it is irrational. (Superficially that is the claimed objection -- once I explain the teaching, the objection becomes that it is TOO rational). People, at least the ones I've spoken to on the matter, resent it because they feel entitled to participate in the great, dripping cesspool for carnal delights that the modern world provides. They want sex available to them all the time. They want oral sex. They want to be able to masturbate. All without consequence and with the approval of their consciences.

I don't think Catholics should apologize for natural law. Reason is a good, and one liberalism more or less denies. Of course it is vulnerable, but that is no reason to forego its use.

Neither commenter made any progress with his hearers that I could see. Mr. Kalb's website is here.

My daughter sent me this. She thinks it's funny.

No sooner had the news hit that Rick Santorum had finished in a virtual tie with Mitt Romney in Iowa than the sexual liberation emergency alarm system sirens began going off throughout the land. A columnist at Salon.com screeched that "Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control." At National Review, another columnist shrieked back that No he isn't. In fact, Santorum himself screamed (okay, not literally) to Bill O'Reilly that he didn't want to illegalize contraception:

Someone asked me if the states have the right to do it? Yes. They have the right to do it, they shouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t vote for it if they did. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to do it. As you know, Bill, you’re a Catholic, [the] Catholic Church teaches contraceptive [sic] is something you shouldn’t do. So when I was asked the question on contraception I said I didn’t support it.

It's easy to get lost in all the "its," isn't it? The first 'it' presumably refers to a hypothetical state attempt to outlaw birth control, which I take Santorum to mean that if it happened in his state, he would oppose the effort. The second 'it' probably refers to the use of such control, which Santorum doesn't support because of his Church's prohibition of 'it.' (To which the Catholic Bill responded that this prohibition was "made by men," bringing to Santorum's face a look of incredulity but no interruption.) The third 'it' is the 1965 Griswold decision itself, which Santorum does not support, believing that the Supreme Court made up a new constitutional right to privacy not previously known to exist outside the emanations of the penumbras which point to 'it.'

Now, a president cannot outlaw anything all by his lonesome, so I presume what really exercises the liberals at Salon and the HuffandPuff Post is not that he could actually effect such a ban but that he thinks it would be a good idea. They wish to marginalize him by characterizing him as an extremist. No right-thinking American of any political persuasion can possibly believe that artificial birth control is anything but a blessing to the integrity of the American family, and especially to the hopes for happiness of all those poor people whose rates of reproduction left Margaret Sanger aghast.

But I think they're misreading Santorum. If they really want to take advantage of this political opportunity, they should label him not only 'extremist' but also 'hypocrite.' He thinks Griswold was wrong, but he wouldn't vote to outlaw contraception? We already know that he thinks Roe v Wade wrong and would vote for any restriction on abortion up to and including its eradication. Why not the same with the use of contraception, which many moral conservatives have argued bears a straight line, cause and effect relationship to the abortion liberty? Charles Cooke, the NR columnist, offers Santorum assistance with his rationale: that "to acknowledge that one’s legal opinions can be separate from one’s moral convictions" is not hypocritical but sophisticated; that "Santorum’s true position demonstrates that it is eminently possible to argue for public policy that yields outcomes of which one disapproves;" that, as "William F. Buckley Jr. famously argued, what 'is legal is not necessarily reputable;'" and finally, that, "while he may well believe that the states have the right to ban condoms and sodomy, that is not the same thing as advocating that they do so."

Voila, some might say, problem solved, while others, like me, see only a perpetuation of the hypocrisy, since separating "one's legal opinions...from one's moral convictions" sounds like what we conservatives say about liberal Catholics all the time, and inclines us to ask, "Why can't we ban condoms and sodomy? I mean, we did ban them once upon a time. What's so obviously legally and morally superior about the current, and very recent, state of affairs?

As suddenly as Mr. Santorum rose to prominence, he may quickly fall back into obscurity. But just for fun, let's pretend that his ascencion continues, and that his nomination for the presidency pans out. He will then find himself in debate with Mr. Obama, assisted by his sycophants among the media moderators, who will ask Santorum the following question:

"Senator Santorum, it has been noted in various press reports that you believe the Griswold and Roe v Wade cases were wrongly decided by the Supreme Court. Is it true, as some of these reports claim, that you would advocate outlawing American women's access to all forms of artificial birth control, and to their right to abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity, and thus that your desire is to meddle in the very private lives of American citizens - to bring into their bedrooms, no less, the police power of the American government? Your opponent in this election, most Americans, and even some in your own party, say that these are very extreme, even draconian positions, verging on the totalitarian. How would you respond?

The question is mildly loaded, but that's only what Santorum expects. On the supposition that he would not immediately run for butt-cover as he did with O'Reilly, he might try the following response, which I offer free of charge. He will need either to memorize it or use note cards. A teleprompter is acceptable:

Totalitarian? What an absurd charge. Contraception was once illegal in this country and no one called us totalitarian, but rather a nation striving to meet our virtuous ideals. Abortion was once illegal in this country, and no one called us totalitarian or draconian, but rather a nation of exceptionally humane concern, in our love for those least among us, and who remain most dear to us, even while hidden in their mothers' wombs. There was a time when the fruit of the womb was our future. No longer. Now our future ends with ourselves, for we have granted that self, not God, power over the life and death of the most innocent. If I am draconian, how would you characterize my opponent, President Obama, who would not vote to pass a born alive infants protection act when he served as senator from Illinois? He gave what he hoped were good reasons, about which he was later found to be dissembling. President Obama did not feel it necessary to compel, by law, medical personnel to try to save the lives of babies who survive abortions at whatever stage of development. Yet I'm draconian.

As to my "extremism" regarding contraception, let me repent by singing its manifold praises, and delineating in brief what it has done for us. Between 1965, the year of the Griswold decision, and 1980, the divorce rate in this country more than doubled. How can this be, since the justices based their decision on a wish to enhance the stability of marriage? How can it be that no sooner do the judges start enhancing than marriages start falling apart? It couldn't be - could it? - that once you make cheating easier, a bunch of people might decide to give it a try. Let me also praise the increased incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, which, among the black population, rose from 26.3 percent in 1965 to 69 percent in 2000, and among the white population from 4.0 percent to 27 per cent. But don't worry about all those children born into fatherless families.. Most will adjust, some by joining gangs, others by repeating the pattern in their own lives. And some will be aborted to preserve the mother's life, health, financial viability, and her figure in a swimsuit, though that seems to me a rather "draconian" way of coping with the difficulty.

At first thought, a premarital pregnancy might seem to signal a failure to use contraception, and often it does. (People are foolish, aren't they?) But back in our extremist days, premarital sex often meant exactly that - sex before marriage. It doesn't anymore. Back then, a girl would ask of her one true love, "What happens if I get pregnant?" And he'd reply, "Why, I'll marry you, of course." And often he did. How do I know? The leftyish Brookings Institution tells me so: "Until the early 1970s, shotgun marriage was the norm in premarital sexual relations." Now, we're lucky if the question even comes up, because the girl is as likely to be having sex with someone she hardly knows as with her future husband, which makes what they're doing not really sex before marriage but sex before morning.

Does this mean that there has, on the whole, been an increase in the percentage of young single people, from teenagers on up, engaging in premarital sex? Just based on my observations of human nature, I'd bet real money the answer is yes. If you make it easy for people possessed of poor impulse control not to control their impulses, my guess is they won't. And if we bother to look it up, we find out that "The percentage of white women married from 1960-65 who were virgins was 43," which is, I admit, not a good figure from an extremist's point of view, but then you'll be comforted to know that in our more normal times the figure has dropped to 14%. I forgot to mention that there was another Supreme Court decision extending the contraceptive liberty first to single people and then to very young single people, even to minors, and without their parents' permission. But don't be alarmed. This is just normal behavior. Why? Because only 35% of the people in the country think that such sex is always wrong. About 75% have sex before marriage.

I sometimes wonder what our country could have been thinking back in those days of Comstock laws and illegal contraception. It was illegal under those laws because contraception was considered one of several "obscene" materials that were not allowed as legitimate items of commerce or education. Those laws must have been the relics of Luther, Calvin and the Catholic Church, all of whom thought the frustration of fertility an abomination. (Those entities still do; it’s only individual Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics who do not.) I wonder what those judges of the Connecticut Supreme Court were thinking when they overruled a lower court in 1939 that had tried to nullify the prosecution of two doctors and a nurse who ran a birth control clinic. Well, they were thinking that "The police power could be employed 'in aid of what is ... held by the prevailing morality to be necessary to the public welfare'." And further:

"[w]hatever may be our own opinion regarding the general subject, it is not for us to say that the Legislature might not reasonably hold that the artificial limitation of even legitimate child-bearing would be inimical to the public welfare and, as well, that use of contraceptives , and assistance therein or tending thereto, would be injurious to public morals; indeed, it is not precluded from considering that not all married people are immune from temptation or inclination to extra-marital indulgence , as to which risk of illegitimate pregnancy is a recognized deterrent deemed desirable in the interests of morality."

In fact, the extremist Connecticut court "quoted with approval" a similar case from Massachusetts in which it was made clear that the "plain purpose behind restrictions on birth control" was (prepare yourself):

"...to protect purity, to preserve chastity, to encourage continence and self-restraint, to defend the sanctity of the home, and thus to engender ... a virile and virtuous race of men and women."

My, such language issuing from a court in our land, such deference to the legislature. But don't worry. It's all gone now. The Court rules and Griswold is revered precedent. You get to keep your birth control. We - the vast majority of Americans - have separated sex from the having of children and from the confines of marriage, and yet some of us bother to complain about this newly respectable, sterile concoction called "same-sex" marriage. We have lent lust a new legitimacy, and yet we complain that with a click of a mouse our children can access its pornographic simulation in living color and high definition, all the while maintaining our intellectual self-respect by abhorring censorship. We hold in high regard our notions of a right to sexual autonomy, but are horrified to find that our sons and daughters are living in sin at best, are sluts, rogues and cads at worst. Our national womb is barren, yet we complain that our Social Security taxes might be raised, our retirement age postponed, and the whole program might go bust because there won't be enough children around to foot the bill. We have turned our bodies into amusement parks, the romping grounds for a society of playful hedonists whose understanding of what sex is really for got stuck at the stage of juvenile delinquency. We'd get hauled into court if the judges weren't in on the scam.

So, yes, if all that's normal, I'm an extremist. If I were president and the congress sent me a bill proposing to outlaw contraception, I'd sign it. But we also know that that will never happen. We love our contraception too much because we love our childless sex. We are a dying society, soon to be rotting in our graves. On our tombstone someone will inscribe an ancient wisdom, that the circumstances of sex ought to be swallowed up in the permanence of love, that it is a sacred thing because so too is the life that comes from it. But it won't matter because when you're dead it's too late to learn.

But be of good cheer and vote for me anyway in November. I may be an extremist, but whatever you get from me can't be any worse than what you've got now.

He won't get elected after giving this speech, but it will have the benefit of consistency, and he will be able to go home with his principles intact.

Do you believe?

[A reader has pointed out that he was unable to comment. I've fixed this.]

From my old friend, Zippy, on retiring from blogging: "Non-participation in the blogosphere is remarkably peaceful, in no small part because I am not forced, by the bizarre distant intimacy of the format, to form low opinions of various people I hardly know."

Yes, I feel the peace. So now that I've retired from W4 (but not from The Christendom Review) I've decided to keep at it anyway. Maybe. Here, when I do it, if I do it at all. Shorter stuff here, longer stuff someplace else which I'll link to as necessary.

Some of you (it is a huge assumption on my part, I know, to imagine that any "some" of anybody is still reading this) will be glad to know that Jeff Culbreath has brought his Stony Creek Digest back to life, while people like TSO and Dylan never quit. Good for them. Hardy souls. I think TSO's latest post implies that there might be something sacramental about drinking. I heartily agree and will drink to the sentiment as soon as I'm done here.

Meanwhile, here are some recent things I've done which almost everybody has missed and probably with good reason, from oldest to newest:

A little Sunday meditation on the purpose of suffering. Or something.

Another one about agnosticism.

From back in September, another in tribute to the victims of 9/11.

A piece about a young woman and what happened on her way to the abortuary.

This one's called Wastage, but I can't remember what it was about. Probably important though.

On the new Dept. of HHS regulations, a consequence of Obamacare, requiring religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans.

A guessing game. If you like Christmas music, a pleasant diversion.

Some thoughts on Christmas, my contribution to the editors' post at W4. It can be found here.

And finally some befuddlement about the necessity of giving 12 year olds the HPV vaccination. Lydia McGrew's comments are better than the post. It's not often you find a tour de force in net comments, but sometimes it happens.

Oh, I got a lot of Christmas presents. One was a book called The Complete Book of German Cooking, or The Complete German Cookbook - something like that. And it is complete. As I was leafing through it right after stuffing down Christmas dinner, I started drooling. It doesn't tell you how to make German beer, but I can buy that any day of the week. Anyway, I expect to be eating well in the coming weeks. Now I'm going to toast something or someone for no reason at all - well, for the reason that the eggnog I made for Christmas is still plentiful. It goes well with everything. Someone can let me know how the Iowa carcasses turned out in the morning.

Frederika von Stade and Kathleen Battle

The latest issue of The Christendom Review is now up.

We're experiencing an unavoidable delay in bringing the current issue of The Christendom Review online. But it shouldn't be long. Keep an eye out.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving. To everyone.

[posted also at W4]

I visit Fred Reed now and then because he usually makes me smile when he's not drawing foolish moral and intellectual equivalencies (see his essay on patriotism). I opened up his recent piece on evolution because the truth that Darwinism deadens everything cannot be repeated often enough. In fact, I was smiling even before I started reading, until I ran into another of those equivalencies:

This agglomeration of everything under one theoretical roof appeals powerfully to minds that need an overarching explanation of everything. The great intellectual divide perhaps is not between those who believe one thing and those who believe another, but between those who need to believe something — I am tempted to say believe almost anything — and those who are comfortable with uncertainty and even the unknowable. Adherents of Christianity, atheism, scientism (as distinct from science) and classical evolutionism fall into the first category; the agnostic of every sort, into the second. Unshakable belief seems to alleviate unease with the unfathomed, the anxiety that naturally comes of not knowing where we came from, or why, or whither.

After that, Christians pretty much fade from view as Fred goes after the scientistic assumptions undergirding evolution, but are left to wonder why they should be grouped with such a crowd, especially since most Christians would agree with Fred on virtually every point of attack. We are left to suppose that the Christian's belief in Jesus (and all the depending dogmas that implies) and the naturalistic scientist's belief in Darwin's fairy tale are reflections of the same need: to believe in something, even though the things they believe in are polar opposites.

This, says Fred, "is very different from seeing the world as profoundly mysterious, as in many ways being beyond our understanding, as containing questions that have no answers."

I wonder what sort of Christians Fred's been talking to. The ones I talk to, even the semi-literate ones, utter the word "mystery" with a compulsive regularity exceeded only by that of a Tourette's sufferer. All you have to do is ask this semi-literate Christian a few questions about what he believes:

"I hear you Christians believe in God. Is that right?"

"That's right. We believe in the Holy Trinity."

"What's that mean?"

"Three persons in one God." (semi-literate Christian smiles; he knows what's coming next).

"How can that be? Sounds like a contradiction in terms."

"Well, it's a divine mystery." (Christian's face is glowing.)

"How can you believe in something so illogical?"

"Jesus told me to."

And should you go on to ask about Jesus, your Christian will try to explain the "mystery" of the Incarnation, which means that he can't explain it but still thinks it was real. Get into more detail and you'll hear about that God-human's virginal conception in his mother's womb, about a Transfiguration, a Resurrection from the dead, an Ascension into heaven and, from you adherents of the True Faith, about an Immaculate Conception, an Assumption, and a thing called Transubtantiation, all prefixed and suffixed by the word "mystery." Of the great mystery which is the source of all the others, the Trinity, you'll be told that it can be known but is ultimately unknowable. Christians even write books with titles like The Cloud of Unknowing, in which you're likely also to hear stories about miracles through the ages which are in themselves plenty mysterious, but only to a mind disposed to entertain their possibility. Even the mere fact of biological life on earth strikes many people as miraculous. The naturalist is not so struck. But I've heard many a Christian claim that the existence of life is so unlikely, the mechanism of even the simplest cell so complex, that God must have reached down and kickstarted the whole thing. That is, He performed a miracle. Now, even if one is convinced that this is probably not true, how does the assertion that "God did it" make the origin of life any less mysterious? To the naturalist it is a mystery only in the sense that it's a problem he has not yet solved. He has theories about it, has a story to tell, but he can't tell all of it. It's hard to see how he can blame the Christian for pointing out that the mystery remains.

But what is Fred's objection? (I am assuming he would make one.) Is it that the Christian should not assign a cause to an effect without certain evidence that it (the miracle) is in fact the cause? Okay. But there is a level on which he should welcome the Christian's answer, even if it might be wrong, since it respects the mystery he is so adamant to retain. In fact, what such a Christian is saying is that the origin of life is so mysterious, that only another mystery can explain it. And, as I said before, the areas in which Fred finds Darwinism lacking explanatory power - concerning the problems of consciousness, volition, morality, and reproductive necessity - are the very same areas in which he will find the average Christian cheering him on.

Maybe the problem with Christians is that, like physicalists, they have a creed. The latter avow that there is nothing beyond the physical, while the former claim that beyond the physical hides the Source of all the nothing. Fred will have no truck with those materialists, but I don't know exactly where to pin him on the religio-philosophical specimen board. With his love of mystery, I thought he might be a mysterian, a central tenet of which is that some problems are unsolveable, which is what Fred seems to prefer. It's a - I don't know what to call it - 'category of thinking' that I believe John Derbyshire embraced when he kicked Chrisianity to the curb. But I don't think it fits Fred because it's mostly drawn into service by the very materialists Fred despises, and usually in reaction to the mind-body (consciousness) problem. Ed Feser made mention of it at his blog:

...the conception of the Trinity as a “mystery” finds a parallel in the view of some contemporary philosophers of mind (e.g. Colin McGinn) that while an adequate naturalistic explanation of consciousness exists, our minds are too limited to understand it. This view even goes by the name “mysterianism,” and it is motivated not only by a desire to sidestep the various philosophical objections to materialism, but also by the idea that natural selection is unlikely to have shaped our minds in a way that would allow us to discover everything there is to know about the world. It is far more likely, mysterians contend, that the contingent forces of evolution so molded our cognitive faculties that they are useful only for understanding a fairly narrow range of truths, and that there are barriers beyond which they cannot push. This is certainly a very reasonable view to take if there are good reasons to think naturalism is true in the first place. (There aren’t, but let that pass...)

In other words it's a physicalist's trojan horse. We can't know everything there is to know about the relationship between mind and matter, but that doesn't prevent us from asserting that matter is all there is. (But since we can know only a narrow range of truths, how do we know that this very broad truth is one of them? Sorry, I got distracted.) No, that description won't fit Fred. As he says of its parishioners, "They are not immoral. They just can't explain why they are not."

But Fred is. Moral, I mean. He must be some sort of agnostic. Yes, there are different sorts. I just don't know much about them, except that they're always telling me how open-minded they are. I believe they are allowed to have morals, but can they explain why they have them, any better than a materialist can, by appealing to a vague sense of mystery? I had an agnostic in class this semester (I'm sure there were others), of Iranian extraction but with all the scales of Islam having fallen from his eyes, who wrote a paper full of resentment about having Christian (or any religious) values imposed upon society. I told him I didn't know what society he thought he was living in, but that over a million babies were slaughtered in their mothers' wombs in America last year against the wishes of most Christians, and wondered if he resented having atheist values imposed upon society. Because that's the fallback position, the default. I told him that the agnostic wish to be free of imposition was a fantasy freedom that existed only in his mind, and that most agnostics of my acquaintance were, in public policy terms, functional atheists. Remove Christian values and the atheist's "neutrality" will be substituted for them. Neutrality on certain issues is another way of issuing a death sentence. Was he okay with all that? I told him that Christians want to "impose" their values only because they cared about him, about his infinite worth as an individual in the eyes of God. That's the bottom line, the foundation stone on which all their other "culture war" positions are built. That's why those awful Christians don't like a law that would have allowed his mother to abort him, because that law doesn't care about his worth, does not consider that with his conception he occupied a purpose in God's plan, nor did it in any way allow for the possibility that his destiny is one belonging to eternity rather than the world. I asked him which vision he preferred, because it will be one or the other and the choice is rather stark.

Well, uh, he saw my point but, uh, he didn't want anyone's values imposed on him, and he hadn't really thought it all out yet, but uh...

But, uh, I'll tell you whatuh. Next Fall he'll walk into the booth and pull the lever for the Christian-atheist Obama, that's what. I can't tell you how hard these nuts are to crack.

Appearances aside, I don't mean to pick on Fred per se, but as a representative of a certain 'type.' Fred, as he avers, has morals. He doesn't like gay marriage, I don't think he likes abortion, he lauds homeschooling, and he despises feminism and all its rotten fruit. But why? I can't help but wonder. The 'type' I'm talking about won't be a materialist and won't be a Christian, but stands always in the middle. He will tell you that he cannot, "in good conscience," claim to believe what he cannot believe, and thus is bound to keep the proverbial 'open mind,' a stance that seems not quite akin to the purpose Chesterton thought it should serve: to close on something. Fine. I'm not here to attack anyone's conscience but to question his courage. How does a very vague appreciation for the "mystery of creation" (Charles Darwin claimed to have as much) lead to the conviction that gay marriage (or abortion, or any number of things,) is wrong?

I admit that a man who is willing to look at the world straight on (that is, with intellectual honesty) can come to the right conclusion. But what will bind his soul to this principle that he thinks he discerns? For what reason will he surrender his job, give up his friends, or lay down his life should circumstances ask it of him? That he perceives there is some great inexplicable mystery behind it all? I suppose it's possible. Aside from his great courage, Socrates may have had more than this, but by how much I'm not sure. But I do believe that had he an acquaintance with Christian revelation, he'd have known better than to lump their mode thinking in with the materialist sort. Even if he'd rejected the revelation, I think he would have seen us as brothers.

Since Fred can be neither a materialist nor a mysterian (since too many of the former are also the latter), maybe we should call his sort "mysterialist." It's the worship of the mystery of mystery, weekly club attendance and participation in rituals of obscure origin not required. There is no dogma attached except the core tenet: It's all a great mystery. That is all ye know and all ye ever need know.

But at least one disciplinary rubric ought to be required of members of this communion: drop the resentment against Christian certainty. All those Christians are saying is that the mystery has content; that, within limits, it can be delineated; that it is a definite thing, though not of this world; that it is worth revering because it is the source of all other things, which includes you. It is neither an indifferent nor impersonal "creative force", because such a phantasmagoric creature could never give birth to anything, never create. We know this (hold on now) because it has spoken to us, and it is trying to speak to you. And what the mystery has told us is that you instinctively revere it because it brought the world into being with a purpose, and that you are a part of that purpose. Thus it has a grip on your mind, your soul, that cannot be severed no matter how much you kick and scream. That, in essence, the Mystery loves you, and that this gratitude you feel for the creation in which you find yourself, and this reverence you feel for its unseen existence, is the impulse to love it back.

So, for God's sake, take a stand, and tell me once more how I think like a Darwinist.

This blog is now in retirement. The page will stay up so that I can announce, twice a year, new issues of The Christendom Review.

Thanks to all who stopped by now and then.

Classes begin again tomorrow, so I've been watching more TV than I ought to. Because I hadn't seen it before, I DVR'd The Day the Earth Stood Still (the recent remake) starring Keanu Reeves, whose acting ability is probably still up for debate. He's an alien who comes to earth in a giant sphere - no doubt metaphorically significant - in order to save it. Not us, it. "It" is dying, says he. But, protests Jennifer Connally, "we can change." Instead of telling him to get his slimy alien ass back to his own planet, that he had no right to interfere with ours, especially since he was planning on wiping out the human race, she pleads like a prisoner up for parole: "If you let me out, I'll be good from now on. I'm all better now." Our alien really loves the earth. The other spheres that accompanied his sphere across the light years turn out to be "arks" for the plant and animal species. As for us? Well, the spheres release what appear to be little metallic cockroaches that multiply by splitting in half, an instantaneous mitosis (or is it parthogenesis?), and before you know it there are billions of them streaking around the planet eating every manmade object in sight - football stadiums, skyscrapers, roadsigns, railroads - and all the people who made them and those who didn't. The earth's going to start all over again without people. But our alien, who really loves the earth (maybe 'loves' is the wrong word - maybe he only finds the earth necessary to a sort of universal ecology that bridges the space-time continuum, or something), finally finds the human inside himself and changes his mind. I forgot to mention that he can heal the sick, raise the dead (as long as you haven't been dead too long), and walk on water. He somehow stops the metal and people-eating cockroaches so that we can have another chance. I suspect that a lot of people were devoured before he got that done, but I also suspect we're not supposed to view him as a mass murderer but as a superior (if not quite Supreme) being entitled to dole out justice and mercy in its measure by virtue of that superiority. And, after all, he showed by the end that he had a heart. Since the Hollywood scenarios generally avoid the question, I've always wanted to ask one of these aliens if he believes in God. Somehow I don't think I'll get the chance. Except for the special effects, the whole thing is preposterous unless you accept the apocalyptic "our planet is dying" scenario, which I don't. The citrus crop was bountiful this year, the trees are still green, the squirrels are happy, I still have to mow the growing green grass once a week, and I ain't having any trouble breathing when I step outdoors.

My wife has become inexplicably addicted to watching a show we ignored for the first, oh, six years of its existence: Criminal Minds. It's about a team of FBI agents who are experts in hunting down serial killers. Being forced to watch them, though, is not as bad an experience as you might first surmise. The shows are so formulaic as to be fun on the surface but forgettable in the end. You can watch them over and over without remembering what happened the first time.

I watched some of the South Carolina Republican presidential debate before I got bored and switched over to Criminal Minds. Or maybe it was Babylon A.D., another sci-fier about the earth's last best hope, which resides in the person of an innocent, virginal young blonde thing with an interesting European accent who was raised by nuns of some stripe in a convent quarried into a mountainside somewhere in the Far East, whose innocence does not prevent her from showing sexual interest in Vin Diesel's torso (her interest goes unfulfilled), and who in the end finds herself miraculously pregnant with twins. That she has done the Blessed Mother one better is probably supposed to be important, but I couldn't figure out why. Oh, and when she finally does give birth (which kills her for some reason), one of the kids is white and one is black. GET IT? I don't.

Anyway and as I was saying, present on the dais for the debate were the unelectable Ron Paul, the unelectable Herman Cain, the unelectable Tim Pawlenty, the unelectable Rick Santorum, and the unelectable Gary Johnson, of whom I'd never heard. Turns out he's a former guv of New Mexico. Not present were the unelectable Newt Gingrich, the probably unelectable Sarah Palin, and the debabatably unelectable Mitt Romney. Am I forgetting anyone? I use the word 'unelectable' in proportion to the frequency with which the American people cast their votes based on a deep familiarity with the issues, an ineradicable moral traditionalism, a hatred for attractive but superficial soundbites, and an equal hatred for attractive but superficial candidates, which, in my opinion, is almost never. Stand these guys (except possibly for Palin) up next to Obama and his charisma will devour theirs like, oh, metallic cockroaches devouring Manhattan. I wish Gingrich, Palin and Romney had been there because I'd like to have heard their take on the current Republican devotion to the doctrine of torture. They like to call it 'enhanced interrogation.' Among radio commentators like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin (two of whom are Catholic), endorsement of the doctrine is rapidly becoming a litmus test of your political loyalty, your true conservatism. This is the result of the revelation that the use of torture by the Bush administration apparently aided in the discovery of Bin Laden's whereabouts. It worked, they say, therefore you must embrace it. Among the panel of present debaters, only the unelectable Ron Paul and the unelectable Gary Johnson were against it. They say it doesn't work, or is at best unreliable. They also make noises about how use of "it" isn't "who we are," that use of "it" doesn't "reflect our values." But mostly we hear of whether it works or it doesn't. I've never understood how the efficacy of an act translates into moral goodness. I remember stealing a tootsie roll from a Woolworth's when I was 8 years old. I knew it was wrong, I felt bad about it later, but I did not get caught and never told my parents. I skated. My thievery "worked." Let's legalize it. Tim Pawlenty took the position (identical to Bill O'Reilly's, if that tells you anything) that permission to use such techniques should be allowed only to the President and only under special circumstances. I guess that means that under ordinary circumstances using them would be wrong. Your run-of-the-mill murder suspect should not have water poured over his face to deprive him of the air he breathes and thus be terrorized into believing he's going to drown. This should be done only to terrorists, because the terrorist wants to kill innocent people. Of course, run-of-the-mill murderers want to kill innocent people too, but maybe not as many. Numbers count. (I'm speculating here; I don't know what motivates muddled morality). The life of the one is of less value than that of the many. Or maybe it's what I heard Sean Hannity screaming about yesterday. He said that you could not justify shooting Bin Laden in the head while protesting the use of waterboarding. It's just plain inconsistent, it just is, it is, it is, he kept shouting. Of course, it's pretty pedestrian traditional morality (Hannity labels himself a "traditonal Reagan conservative") that it is not under all circumstances wrong to kill a human being, as is true of an enemy combatant in war, but that it is always wrong to torture a human being, whether he's an enemy combatant or not. If that latter status describes Bin Laden, then his killing was legitimate. All killing is not murder, but all torture is just that. To even begin to attempt to justify it would require extending the use of 'enemy combatant' to include people who are in fact completely within our power and at our mercy, which is pretty much the antithesis of 'enemy combatant.' It would require a redefinition not familiar to the traditional Western rules of war, let alone to the lowly Army Field Manual.

Ah well. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. That's all the time I have for TV horror shows. Tomorrow I return to the fresh faces of the young, who watch their own fair share of TV. I make them write at least once about a show they either love or hate, and they come up with things I've never heard of. Some of them are cartoons (the only ones I remember having heard of are The Simpsons and South Park), some are talk shows (I have heard of Jerry Springer), but the most remarkable are the reality shows, which are remarkable for their sheer numbers and their apparently depraved situational dramas. The students almost universally claim to hate these shows, but then I have to wonder how they know so much about them. I don't know what proportion of them believe in virginal conceptions and saviors of the earth, but if any do, I know from experience that it will not prevent them from endorsing gay marriage, gays in the military, gays everywhere else, universal healthcare, sex-for-fun out of wedlock, abortion, unhindered access to pornography, legalized prostitution, amnesty for illegal immigrants, embryonic stem cell research, use of frozen embryos for embryonic stem cell research, UFO's as evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, and enhanced-to-the-point-of-torture interrogation techniques. Which, in several essentials, makes them like a whole lot of other people, including a fair number of Republicans. They are the future. I like most of them anyway because their souls are not set in stone.

With Christians suffering under a persecution called by the Roman emperor Decius, St. Cyprian wrote from his place of exile a letter entitled "On the Unity of the Catholic Church" to the Christians in Carthage, ending with an exhortation to his sheep thereof, for he was their bishop. Now that Carthage has risen again, as much in need of his words as ever, is there anyone to listen?

This common mind prevailed once, in the time of the Apostles; this was the spirit in which the new community of the believers obeyed Our Lord's command and maintained charity with one another. The Scriptures are witness to it: But the crowd of those who had come to believe acted with one mind and soul. And again: They were all persevering with one mind in prayer with the women and Mary who had been the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. And that was the reason why their prayers were efficacious, that was why they could be confident of obtaining whatever they asked of God's mercy.

But amongst us, that unity of mind has weakened in proportion as the generosity of our charity has crumbled away. In those days, they would sell their houses and estates and lay up to themselves treasure in heaven by giving the money to the Apostles for distribution to those in need. But now, we do not even give tithes on our patrimony, and whereas Our Lord tells us to sell, we buy instead and accumulate. To such an extent have our people lost their old steadfastness in belief. That is why Our Lord says in His Gospel, with an eye on our times: The Son of Man, when he cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth? We see what He foretold happening before our eyes. As to fear of God, or sense of justice, or charity, or good works - faith inspires us to none of them. No one thinks of the fears that the future holds in store: the day of the Lord and the wrath of God, the punishments that await unbelievers, the eternal torments appointed for the betrayers of their faith - no one gives them a thought. Whatever a believing conscience should fear, our conscience, because it no longer believes, fears not at all. If only it believed, it would take heed; if it took heed, it would escape.

Let us do our utmost, dearest brethren, to rouse ourselves, and breaking off the sleep of our past inertia, give our minds to the observance and fulfillment of Our Lord's commands. Let us be such as He told us to be: Let your loins be girt and your lamps burning, and you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord when he shall come from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh they may open to him. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching. Our loins must be girt, lest when the day comes for the campaign, it find us encumbered with trappings. Let our light shine brightly in good works, so that it may lead us from the darkness of this world into the splendor of eternal light. Let us await the sudden coming of Our Lord, ever attentive and on the alert, so that when He shall knock, our faith may be watching, ready to receive from Our Lord the reward of its vigil. Were but these commands obeyed, were but these warnings and precepts observed - it is impossible that we should be tricked and overcome by the devil in our sleep; from being watchful servants we shall, under Christ's lordship, come to reign ourselves.

Cyprian surrendered in 258 A.D. to Valerian's persecutors, becoming by his martyrdom blessed among those watchful servants who so remain.

From volume 1 of Good News From the Badlands, by Bob Ayanian

Labels: Christian Music

Reports are that Usama binlongtimegone Laden has been taken out by Navy Seals. As in he's dead. And buried at sea. So they say. Now that he's fish food, how will we know? I want to see his death certificate. The long form.

It turned out to be worth missing. Advice to Western women: stay out of Islamic countries, and don't ever, ever marry a man hailing from one.

On that euphoric day when Egypt's Hosni Mubarak relinquished the power of his presidency, and many Americans seemed to join their hearts with those of Egyptians in the street yearning for the fresh air of freedom, CBS reporter Lara Logan was made a prisoner by a mob of freedom-loving Egyptian males who brutally assaulted her physically and sexually. The perpetrators have not been found, and it is unlikely that anyone is looking for them. Logan is convinced that had she not somehow been saved, she would have died. She is married and the mother of two very young children. At last she tells her story:



The transcript is here. Follow-up video on this page.

They say that any man's lunacy grows from a single, deeply buried seed of sanity. And if you think that one must be crazy to be a birther, then you'll be dismayed to learn that one might be running for president. Our friend TSO reminds us that some of such type wonder if Obama was born at all, or at least on this planet. As I said to him:

To renew my driver's license the other day, I had to show my social security card, two proofs of residency, and my birth certificate (in addition to those, my wife had to show her marriage license). Like Obama, I couldn't find my birth certificate, so I had to send off to Lassen County, Cal. to get a certified copy. Not a photo copy of the short form, but a certified copy with that official stamp on it. All told, the b.c. and license renewal cost me about a hundred bucks, just to prove I'm a citizen, which they already knew anyway. And unlike Obama, I have an all-American pedigree, descending from a father and grandfather who fought in a bunch of our nation's wars. All this just to be allowed to drive a car. But to be president of the entire country, I wouldn't have to show any of that. It's the arrogance that annoys, and the free pass issued by the legal authorities. Since Obie's on a spending binge, I'll stop complaining if he'll just reimburse me for the hundred bucks.

I don't know how many birthers are really out there, people who believe, or did believe, that Obama was not a citizen. I never could because it would have amounted to an act of imposture unheard of since The Manchurian Candidate. I haven't even taken the trouble to research what the constitution means by a 'natural born citizen.' But I do know that when people who have lived in the same place most of their lives are being asked to prove that they are who the Keepers of Records already know they are, resentment tends to build toward those who are exempted from the trouble.

From all appearances, it seems that Donald Trump got Obama to take the trouble. He got done what no establishment Republican could, mostly because they wouldn't touch the issue with a ten foot soundbite. This same establishment is now telling us that Trump is not a serious candidate. I think they ought to be more cautious in their claims, coming as they do from a rambunctious phalanx of new congressmen and women who charged into Washington all gung-ho to cut spending, balance the budget, and repeal ObieCare, and who then proceeded to cave to Obama's budget offer in terror of being blamed for shutting down the government and wanting to kill old people by restructuring Medicare. I bet they'll cave on the debt ceiling issue as well.

I think we're living in a time when people are sick and tired of bravado backed by cowardice. Maybe they're not sure what to make of Trump, but one thing they don't see (yet) is cowardice. And I think they're sick and tired of being told whom they must take seriously. Why shouldn't they be, when the people they elect don't take them seriously?

Found a couple of articles, one at the Orlando Sentinel, the other at WDBO, both so brief that the issue could hardly be of any importance. Their substance was to inform us that "Orange County leaders voted 6-0 this morning to extend health and other workplace benefits to the partners and children of gay county employees."

As a result, we get to pretend one more time that homosexual partners actually have children.

Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs (who got my vote in November but won't get another) said that "All people deserve to be treated compassionately. Those values of compassion, sensitivity and fairness are things we need to value."

Mayor Jacobs also said that she had to "wrestle through her own beliefs as a Roman Catholic on the sanctity of marriage." And, as invariably happens when politicians go to the mat with their faith, the Faith lost again. Just to be a pain in the ass, I'd like to ask a question: how is it compassionate to treat two homosexuals as though they were married when they're not and never can be? Isn't it cruel to encourage people to live in an unreality, and to puposely delude them? How is it "sensitive?" Or is that the same thing as compassionate? How is it "fair" to extend benefits to the partner of a homosexual employee when the two are not married, never can be, and such benefits have always been reserved to married people, that is, a man and a woman; and, furthermore, which partner had nothing to do with bringing the aforementioned children into the world, which could only have been accomplished via our employee sleeping at some point with a human female, or via some technological tinkering that made use of that female's egg? The partner had nothing to do with it. The child is not "theirs."

Am I being too picky? The questions seem to me to proceed from common sense, but common sense doesn't always pay benefits.

I know that said benefits have heretofore been reserved to married couples (that is, to repeat, a couple comprised of a man and a woman) because the WDBO article points out that "the county decided not to allow opposite-sex unwed couples to receive health insurance coverage because they have the option of getting married."

But why? Is there something disreputable about living together while not married? There must be. But then why would you extend benefits to unmarried homosexuals? If there is something morally questionable about living, and having sex, together while unmarried, isn't it still questionable whether or not one has the option to marry? If at a later time homosexuals acquire the "option to marry", will you then in hindsight admit that their previous arrangement was wrong? Or is it only wrong when the option is absent, because without that option one is, so to speak, forced to live in a state of sin, whereas with the option the sin is not sin? Sorry to sound suspicious but... is there an agenda here, some kind of subtle pressure being exerted upon the state to move it, and public sympathy, in the direction of same-sex marriage? How else to explain the urgency of extending compassion, sensitivity and fairness to homosexuals while denying it to heteros? At least the latter can "have" children, and extending benefits to them might confer a stabilizing influence on the union leading toward marriage. A real one.

Lest anyone think it's all been made too easy for the homosexual "partners" (such a vague word), it should be known that "starting January 1st, domestic partners of county employees and their dependents will be able to receive health, dental, vision, and life insurance, along with bereavement leave, if they meet certain requirements":

1. They "are in a long-term, committed relationship."

[Common sense question: how long is long-term. How committed is committed?]

2. They "live together for at least six months."

[Oh, that long.]

3. They "are jointly responsible for each other's financial welfare and basic living expenses."

[But can't heterosexual couples be also thus responsible? Sorry, I forgot. They have the option of getting married and therefore should be punished for not doing so, while the homosexuals do not have the option and therefore should be rewarded for not doing what they cannot do under Florida law and what does not even exist under God's.]

The newest issue of The Christendom Review is now up. Poetry, essays, fiction, art and music (you read that right).

...of Terri Schiavo, whose court-ordered murder began today six years ago. Mentioned also at W4.

Another recent post was called "Double Trouble, or Double Effect?"

If you like gospel music, you might like this site, where you can find literate appreciation of the genre (by a Yankee, no less, and a girl, even better) accompanied by video exemplars. It's the Southern Gospel Yankee blog.

...writer of Braveheart and other things, at the National Prayer Breakfast. In attendance (and also on the list of speakers) is President Obama, Michelle, and other eminences. The full video can be found here.



Cross-posted at W4.