From Michael Brendan Dougherty at Business Insider.

And from somewhere on Twitter: "Thirteen Catholic Senators Vote Against Religious Liberty"

My wife got it from the archdiocese via email. If you haven't seen it, you can access it here.

I have predicted that Obama will win this war.

So, what is my evidence? After watching some TV news the other day, my wife informed me with great satisfaction that she'd just heard Marco Rubio say that this conflict is not about contraception; it's about religious liberty. (She thinks he's pretty sharp and wants him for President). This sentiment was echoed by Rick Santorum on the campaign trail:

It’s not about contraception. It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of religion. It’s about government control of your lives. And it’s got to stop!

Hallelujah. For the sake of winning the immediate battle, I'm willing to go with this as a matter of strategy, if it is indeed the winning strategy. But, I assured my wife, the conflict is in fact about contraception, or, as Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard puts it, "it's about sex. The upheaval of the 1960s was a many-splendored thing, but it produced one permanent orthodoxy for liberalism: an absolute commitment to sexual liberation." It's true. I was there.

Now, I know that every reason the Obama admin and its sycophants put forth to justify the sexual liberation mandate is offered under the guise of essential health care for women, sometimes accompanied by a long list of uses for contraception other than birth control; but those aren't the ones given by Linda Rosenstock, chairwoman of a panel of experts "convened by the prestigious Institute of Medicine, which advises the government," and which government in the form of HHS accepted the IOM's recommendations. She says that "prevention of unintended pregnancies is essential for the psychological, emotional and physical health of women." Yes, those little tykes, intended or not, can tucker you out and even drive you crazy, and carrying one to term puts a crimp in your tennis game. In other words, it's about keeping kids out of the picture in order to maintain a woman's viability in the workplace, her freedom from the oppression of motherhood, her figure in a bikini, and her right to a sexual spontaneity formerly reserved to the feral male of the species.

In other other words, it's all a lie. Contraceptive use is rarely about women's health, but always about a woman's right to have sex any time of the day in any room of the house with anyone she wants at any age from adolscence to the onset of menopause, unannoyed by the prospect that a child might issue from it. Children, a natural consequence of sex, are now the womb's illegal aliens, so illegal that they can be legally killed for showing up without notice.

So even though it's all a lie, the mandate's proponents are fearless in their repetition of it. Why? Because most Americans, even most Catholics, agree with them. Even if many are not sure that it's essential health care, they are sure that it's essential, a prerogative not to be interfered with. When some among the conservative pundit class have tried to point out the lie, they get accused of all sorts of things which amount to only one thing: a hatred of women. "You want them to rotate between the kitchen and the bedroom, don't you? You want to take away their contraception. What kind of monster would do that?" Conservatives shrink from this charge of wanting to do away with contraception, so instead they search for what they imagine is a higher ground: "Whatever your position on contraception, you ought to defend the right of people not to be compelled by government to violate the prinicples of their faith. Surely we can all agree on that, since it's in the constitution."

"Well," say the proponents, "one right can't be used to deny another. Women have a fundamental right to contraception. That's in the constitution too."

And then what do we say? We've just been told that one constitutional right cannot run roughshod over another. Well, we could point out that refusing to pay for a woman's contraception is not the same as denying her right to it. But I don't think it will work, because behind the charge is the assumption that contraceptive use is a positive good. And, I repeat, most Americans and most Catholics agree. Therefore, our right to adhere to a dictate of conscience is being misused in this case. There can be no right to protest against a violation of a religious or moral principle when the principle itself is false. If you want to believe that Jesus is the divine second person of the Holy Trinity come down from heaven, fine; no one will try to take away the crutch of your supernatural fantasies because it is not the kind of thing that can be taken away, and there is no state interest in doing so - unless you try to extend its imagined moral precepts into the state's arena where the rights of others are obstructed.

It is simply a fact that most people in the United States do not see a prohibition against contraception as a demonstrably divine command nor even as a very reasonable derivation of any system of moral law. To militate against it is to give offense to the independence and very dignity of womankind, and to all those historically and magnificently heroic efforts to raise her from a condition of servitude. The prohibition is nothing more than an invention of men, an ancient relic and the fossilized remains of a deservedly long-dead, and patriarchal, morality concocted by a gathering of sex-hating celibates.

This is the state of things, and conservatives don't like to talk about it, except for the sort who inhabit certain religious sites. Among the mainstream, they like to talk about religious liberty and the rights of conscience, but they don't like to talk about the abomination that is Griswold v. Connecticut and the miserable moral evil of artificial contraception.

How do I know? Just last night I heard Charles Krauthammer (in the course of complaining about Santorum's getting bogged down in the issue) informing us that the entitlement to contraceptives is long settled precedent of fifty years standing, with nary a wonder whether it should be thus. It just is, now. A few nights earlier I watched Karl Rove (in the course of making the case that Santorum doesn't want to take away your contraception) complaining about the same thing, finding it hard to imagine why anyone would object to a married couple using contraception within "the confines of a loving marriage," with nary a mention of the fact that Griswold's initial concern for the sanctity of the marriage bond doesn't even exist anymore, nor any worry about "loving" couples using each other's contracepted bodies for mutual masturbation. This amounted to a doctrinal claim that Santorum's beliefs are wrong, and thus ended up hurting the man he was trying to defend. And then I saw Chris Christie, New Jersey governor and Roman Catholic, on CNN bragging about holding the line on gay marriage in his state but, when pressed, conceding that he had "no problem with people using contraception." Lastly, there was the man himself, Rick Santorum, protesting to Fox News that he was being falsely charged. He proceeded to prove it by boasting that he had himself - his very own self - voted to fund "it," contraception, that is. You can watch him doing it right here about a minute in. Approximately four minutes in, you can see him boasting again that, yes indeed, he had voted to fund it through Planned Parenthood.

It's in our bloodstream. Conservatism has swallowed the pill. We accept the opposition's premises. A few are willing to make the case that the pill has caused great harm, but no one who matters. None of the candidates are willing to make that case because it's not a winning issue. How can it be when the whole world's against you? In his staunch opposition to gay marriage (unless the people of his state approve it), has Governor Christy ever bothered to ask whether we'd be debating the issue at all absent the nearly universal acceptance of sterile sex? Has Karl Rove's concern for the loving confines of marriage ever wandered outside the box to consider the fact that "less than 5 percent of births in 1960 were to unmarried mothers, compared with roughly 40 percent today"? Have any of them tried to draw a straight line between Griswold and Roe? Between ubiquitous pill use and ramped up rates of adultery and divorce? Have the Catholics Santorum and Christie bothered to point out that most all of this was predicted by Pope Paul in Humanae Vitae, including the possibility of such government coercion as is now under discussion? Of course not. Who wants to be called an extremist? As nearly universal as contraceptive use is, to at least an equal degree is Humanae Vitae universally despised; it is possibly the most reviled document since the latter half of the twentieth century, with many Catholics - theologians and priests among them - first in line to spit on it. Thus does nearly 2,000 years of Christian accord about the intrinsically evil nature of this act go up in smoke.

I see four possible ways this can end:

1. Catholic institutions will capitulate, survive, and lose even the grudging respect some now enjoy for sticking to their principles. (48% of hospitals already do direct sterilizations. Further, no sooner had Obama issued his uncompromising compromise than a nun named Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, fell to her knees before it. It is always striking to see a religious pledged to the practice of sexual virtue so eager to facilitate the lack of it in others.)

2. Catholic institutions will resist the mandate by refusing to insure, pay the fines, lose a lot of employees, and finally disappear.

3. A court, possibly even the Supremes, will find the mandate unconstitutional, letting the institutions off the hook. Back to business as usual.

4. Catholic institutions will resist the mandate and refuse to pay the fines. The officials responsible for making the decision - in some cases possibly bishops - will prove themselves willing to go to jail for their Faith. Kathleen Sebelius, traitor Catholic, will become (and already is) the persecutor of her own clergy, the men charged with shepherding her soul and from whom she receives Holy Communion. Many will wonder, and probably have already, why she has not been excommunicated. To this question I have no answer.

Thus it may be that we will soon find out what the Catholic Church in this country is made of. I suspect not much. As long as the citizens of this country, which include most Christians, believe that they have not only a constitutional but a God-given right to the orgasm of their choice in the manner and at the time of their choosing, this battle cannot be won. I invite them - no, welcome, and plead with them - to prove me wrong.

-------------------------

Addendum: I had thought to say something about the role of the American bishops in all this, but Edward Feser does a thorough job here, offering the suppport they need and the tongue-lashing some deserve:

But it would have been better if the bishops had been equally vigorously upholding Catholic teaching on contraception and subsidiarity over the last several decades, and disciplining Catholics in public life who obstinately promote policies that the Church regards as inherently gravely evil. Had they done so, it is unlikely that this outrage ever would have been perpetrated in the first place.

Labels: conservatism, contraception, government mandate

I'm pressed for time so this may be a little scattered, but I said I'd make a prediction and so I will.

But first: Obama's compromise is not, I think, really that at all. It sounds to me like a word game in which one and the same proposition is described in two different ways, such that the appearance changes but not the substance. It's as if I had declined - wishing to avoid culpability in the transaction - to tell an inquiring friend how he might find a prostitute, but told him instead of a pimp of my acquaintance who had some women at his disposal. If moral sophistry did not already have a bad name, Obama's tactic would, let us say, turn the trick.

Obamabots will object that this is a poor analogy. You, they will say, do not even have to tell your friend about the pimp's services. The pimp himself will be required to approach your friend about this additional free benefit. The pimp makes his real money by selling women to other individuals and institutions who have no moral qualms about sexual activities between consenting adults. You only have to contract with the pimp to provide other, non-objectionable services, such as low co-pay visits to the doctor for treatment of venereal disease.

As far as I can tell, it would work like this: a Catholic institution will no longer have to make noises about its health benefits policy offering contraception, but the insurance company with whom they've contracted will in fact have to offer it. For free! That is, whatever company the institution signs up with must offer the coverage. If the institution refuses, it is required to offer no health plan at all and, further, to pay to the government enormous sums of money in punitive fines. The certain result? Unable to attract a sufficient number of qualified employees and debilitated by the fines, the institution dies. The hoped-for result? The institution, bowing before the state, decides to swallow its principles, rationalizing that it's better to live to fight another day. Before they do that, though, they'd best consider that, once they cave, the impetus to change the law will dissipate like fog in the morning sun. That other day on which to fight will never come.

What Obama has offered the institutions is a chance to pretend that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, even though it knows. They won't verbally be offering the contraceptive coverage, but they know who will. They will always know because they're allowed to do business only with the kind of insurance company that offers the coverage - which is every insurance company in the land. Thus, they become unwilling partners in the birth control drug-pushing business, which is further disguised by calling it "essential preventive healthcare for women." To add another layer of pretense, Obama then tells these institutions that not only will they not be required to offer verbal assent to the transaction, but that the party doing so will be offering the drug for FREE! "See?" he says. "You're not culpable because not only are you not paying for it, NO ONE ELSE IS EITHER! Can we all go home now?"

Obama's supporters think they've scored a great coup with this offer of something for nothing. I'll set aside my scepticism that anything can be gotten for free; that, for example, the insurance companies will part with the pills out of their largesse or even largeness of heart. Let's say it's true; the pills will cost nobody nothing. What Obie's sycophants can't seem to comprehend is that this is irrelevant to the Catholic objection. If I were a streetcorner pimp or pusher, I could offer the whores and the drugs for free and it would still be immoral. A pimp at any price, or none at all, is still a pimp.

I must say, though, that in this arrangement I have some sympathy for the pimp-pusher, who is being as fully compelled by the government to offer this service as is the religious institution with which it contracts. It may be that some insurance companies promote contraceptive coverage with great delight. I presume that its inclusion jacks up the price of a group policy to some greater or lesser degree. But maybe some insurance companies didn't want to become pimp-pushers. Maybe some employees who make their living selling insurance policies have moral inhibitions about providing coverage for someone's sexual behavior, and in some cases for their attempt to be rid of a newly conceived human being. They're in a difficult position now, aren't they? It seems to me that their consciences ought to be as of much value as that of an institution's collective sort.

To make a long story short, this all sounds to me like tyranny, not by another name, but in the fullness of its undisguised contempt for the rebellion of conscience against the reigning secular ethos. After all, people who oppose birth control coverage are extremists, are they not? Well, here's an irony: "As recently as the 1990's," CBS tells us, "many health insurance plans didn’t even cover birth control. Protests, court cases, and new state laws led to dramatic changes. Today, almost all plans cover prescription contraceptives — with varying copays. Medicaid, the health care program for low-income people, also covers contraceptives. Indeed, a government study last summer found that birth control use is virtually universal in the United States..."

In other words, the collapse has been sudden, precipitous, and frankly devastating as regards the liberty interests of private employers and insurance providers, a liberty they have surrendered to government authority without so much as a peep. I don't know how to explain it, but Obama is capitalizing on it and has simply taken this surrender to its next logical degree.

And yet, we can comfort ourselves - can we not? - with the knowledge that the Catholic objection still stands on the moral and constitutional high ground, which must always triumph in the end. Musn't it? Well, it's more complicated than that. My prediction is that Obama will win this "war" (the Catholic Sebelius's word), but that is the subject for another post. Sorry.

I hope I've got this right. Lydia McGrew will be on Ave Maria radio today at 4 p.m. to take apart the oft-repeated media claim that 98% of Catholic women use birth control. This devastating statistic is naturally thought to showcase the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in resisting the tyranny of Obama's contraceptive mandate. Even without doing research, I can say with confidence that that statistic is a lie (aside from being irrelevant to the principle at stake). But Lydia has actually crunched some numbers gotten from the purveyors of those statistics, and is ready to make the case that Guttmacher and all its lackeys can find no safety in numbers. You can listen to her here.

It all got started when she put up this post at W4, which then got picked up by Twitter, and once that happens you could end up with Pope Benedict as a follower.

Following up on the previous post, I'd like to do two things: to be a little more forthright and to make a prediction.

As to the first, I want to make it clear that I don't believe that Obama is invincibly ignorant or that he is just another Christian acting in good conscience. My apparent willingness to so believe in the previous post was just that, an appearance, a semi-polite and quite condescending strategic ploy in service to a larger point, which is that, in fact, I don't believe he's a Christian at all. He's an oxymoron. He's a Christian anti-Christ. Not the anti-Christ, but an exemplar of the kind.

To accuse your opponent of acting in bad faith is not what one is supposed to do in these latter days of political and moral intellectual warfare. No one, we're told, should ever venture to judge another man's conscience. All right, I'll back off if someone, preferably Mr. Obama himself, can answer a few questions:

How can a man who calls himself Christian look at two thousand-plus years of Christian history and belief and then confidently claim that he finds in that historical witness permission for a mother to seek out a hit man with M.D. after his name for the purpose of having her unborn child done in?

How can a man claim allegiance to the Christian understanding of marriage - one man, one woman - but then swear he'll lift not a finger to enforce a federal law proclaiming precisely this understanding? A man who, in fact, responded to California voters' rejection of that existentially impossible thing called same-sex marriage by muttering about "divisive" and "unnecessary" discrimination against folks of a different persuasion. Well, Mr. President, you fur it or agin it? Or, in modern parlance, "What would Jesus say?" Hmmm? It's hard to tell what a man's for when he's against nothing.

And where, Mr. President, in your love of Jesus and all the words He uttered and all those written about him (also known as Holy Scripture), or in the entire Christian tradition common to both Protestant and Catholic, do you find the holy counsel that men and women, in defiance of the command to be fruitful and multiply, should make themselves chemical and surgical eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of sexual gratification on earth? Just where, exactly, are we told that it's all right to keep the kids at bay by any means other than a chaste stewardship of our sexual faculties?

As with the "living" constitution, I suppose it's possible Mr. Obama believes in an evolving Christian morality. In which case he'd have to be a Christian born yesterday, one for whom time and history have no meaning. Can anyone tell me of one thing he has said or done that would shore up the Christian foundation of this country, or that would give hope and solace to those of us who claim to share his love of the Savior?

There might be many interesting and inspiring ways to describe our President but, lacking evidence, I doubt that 'Christian' can be the chief modifier. In fact, I believe that he is of an entirely different sort, and that his issuing of the contraceptive mandate results from precisely what Andrew McCarthy delineates:

Government may not compel an American to parrot the policy preferences of the executive branch, nor may it force an American to engage in or directly abet practices that are repellent to Christian doctrine.

The Obama Left is well aware of these things,for these things are basic. The president does not care. His doctrine, hard-Left doctrine, is government promotion of contraception and abortion on demand. On these tenets, he brooks no dissent. Regardless of what the Constitution says, you are commanded to obey. He has started the war against our liberties not because of any crisis, but because he can. That is tyranny. It is a rupturing of the American conception of sovereignty, in which the president is our servant, not our ruler. It cannot stand.

Now, as to that prediction I wanted to make, it will have to wait for another follow-up, because right now I need food accompanied by strong drink. And I have scriptural evidence that Jesus did not entirely oppose that latter thing.

I've longed since ceased caring about what's going on in President Obie's head. I know only that he must be sent back to wherever he calls home. Considering what a citizen of the world he is, I am left to assume that that will be somewhere in country. He needs to be set down where he can start organizing some little community into the socialist enclave he envisions for America. At least then the stakes won't be quite so high for the rest of us, unless, of course, Obama's not a cause of the disease but a symptom. Maybe we've already drifted so far left that his crushingly oppressive vision of a "fair" country is in fact an inevitability. We just need to wait a few years while the demographics sort themselves out.

But though I've stopped caring what goes on in his head, I'll have to admit that the only pleasurable reaction I have to his various pronouncements is to wonder what's going on his head. As when he calls himself a Christian, then cites Jesus' words about requiring much from those to whom much is given, and concludes syllogistically that this entitles the U.S. government to confiscate more money from (I'm sorry, to tax) the rich. Now it may be - based on the crunching of a whole lot of numbers and the analysis of social and economic factors and unintended consequences that I'm sure somebody out there is qualified to do - that the rich ought to pay more taxes. But how you get that from the words of Christ I don't know. It's also possible that we take too much money from the rich, isn't it? Sure it is. It's also possible that those of us of more modest means don't charitably (that is, voluntarily) give enough of our substance, isn't it? Sure it is. We all know it's true. So the next logical step is for the government to step in and force us to give it, although where it goes after that I have no idea. Now that we have the Affordable Care Act (another form of taxing the rich and the not-so-rich), one thing it might go to is the financing of your neighbor's sexual habits in the form of contraceptive pills, or even a surgical procedure that, if I remember my biology, effectively frustrates the male fishies in their desperate desire to find a soulmate. It might even finance the severing of her significant other's vas deferens, but I don't want to talk about that because it makes me curl up in my seat. Besides, I haven't heard men mentioned much in the current controversy.

Obie, and his evil twin Sebelius, wouldn't word it that way, though. They call it "preventive women's health care." I can't help but wonder (wondering and caring are not the same things) if this euphemistic grotesquerie is not also a consequence of Obie's Christian faith and his theologian's grasp of Scriptural nuance. Somehow that faith has led him to the conviction that fertility in a woman is a malady rather than a sign of good health, and that if she should find herself pregnant against her wishes and in spite of her actions, she is being "punished." And that, should she be so punished, she possesses the inalienable constitutional right to punish in turn the punisher, that is (for those of you who haven't had it spelled out before), to have murdered in her very womb her own innocent human child, who didn't know he was trying to punish her. And should the punisher survive the attempted murder, he, Obie, favors imposing no legal or moral obligation upon healthcare personnel to now treat this creature as a separate, living being entitled even to so much as terminal palliative care. They can dump it in a pan and let it gasp like a fish out of water. If you're going to punish, you might as well take it to the limit.

As he so vigorously reminded us on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Obie supports this right. I must assume he was led to it by his Christian faith. A man of good conscience surely would not support something he thought downright evil. Now, in my side-job as an amateur Scriptural analyst, I once read in Genesis the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" and thought its meaning pretty obvious on its face. I also read those parts in the Gospels in which Jesus seems to have nice things to say about children. He says you must become like one if you want to cross the threshhold of his house. He said to let them come unto him, mentions millstones for those who offend them, and even the joy that a woman experiences - following upon the pain of childbirth and presumably the inconveniences and the general burden of an unexpected, nine month pregnancy - "that a man is born into the world."

I suppose I could strain real hard and find in all this a permission to obstruct a woman's fruitfulness, or to murder the fruit of her womb, but my interpretive skills aren't sophisticated enough. All I could gather was an homage to life. It's especially right there in the story of his own conception and birth: See? Life is good. And to prove it, I'm going to join you.

Maybe I'm too timid. Unlike me, bold Obie looks at the same passages and sees the exact opposite. I must assume that he would agree, that, yeah, life is good, but then feel compelled to add, "But so are those other things - keeping it at arm's length and even killing it should it show up without permission." Blessed be the name of the Lord.

This has been a roundabout way of getting back to wondering without caring what was going on in the President's head when he and his evil white female twin came up with those HHS contraceptive regulations to be imposed on Catholic institutions, and with yesterday's moderation of it, the contraceptive mandate accommodation con job. In the first instance - and instead of simply calling him a Machiavellian liar or a tyrant or a sophist in service to treachery, but, rather, granting him the benefit of his good conscience - he must have been simply incapable of understanding the Christian objection, even though he calls himself one. Perhaps he was thinking something like this: the Catholic employer, an institution of some sort, like a school, isn't being forced to do anything except to offer a healthcare insurance plan and to make sure that contraceptive benefits are included. No one is being forced to use those benefits. If you want to stick to your conscience, then do it. If you fall down on the job, the benefit is there, but no one's conscience is being coerced unless you, the user of the benefit, coerce yourself.

Of course, there is the problem of an inducement to evil, which is what the presence of the benefit actually is. And there is the other problem of having to pay for it. Even in the unlikely event that no employee or student ever takes recourse to the benefit, they're all still paying for the privilege of not doing so. And does Mr. Obama think such a restoration of virtue likely? Of course he doesn't. He knows very well that Catholic institutions employ non-Catholics, and that even a fair number of the Catholics themselves will violate Church teaching to exercise their right to sexual autonomy, on which territory of individual conscience no Pope, priest or prelate has a right to instruct them. He was banking on that, the hope, the certainty, that only that segment of Catholics who didn't vote for him anyway in 2008 would kick up a fuss. The rest, those with a broader, more open-minded view of women's health care, would see his logic and the light behind it. This may sound like a cynical summation, and a withdrawal of that benefit of good conscience offered earlier, but it is simply not possible that political considerations played no part in his calculations. What's left to his good conscience is the likelihood that he cannot see why Catholics and some other Christians find anything wrong with contraceptives. When the Catholic screams, "You're forcing us to cooperate with evil!" he says, "What evil? No evil, no cooperation." He probably doesn't even see it as a religious issue, but as a matter of common sense and common moral urgency: every child a wanted child. He doesn't sound like Jocelyn when he gives a speech, but he says the same things.

Which leads me to the question: is a birth control pill like a gun? A thing nonmoral in itself except when put to an immoral use? A gun can be used to save life, or to take it unlawfully. So, too, can the pill be put to legitimate therapeutic purpose (or so I've heard). That would seem to make it a moral nonentity. Well, one difference I see is that a gun is just a gun, but the pill has those unfortunate descriptives preceding it: birth control. Does Obama think that Catholic institutions should be forced to provide access because he is so deeply concerned that those who avail themselves of it be able to put it to its occasional therapeutic purpose; or does he force the issue because he believes that young college (and high school?) men and women have a right to sexually express themselves when and as they see fit, and to arm themselves against being "punished by a baby?" And so I surmise that the probablility of how a thing will be used has a lot to do with whether we will consider ourselves to be facilitating, and thus cooperating with, an evil intent and its consequent action. It's sort of like handing out condoms to teenage boys and girls and expecting them to be put to the innocent use of making water balloons.

There is something important to keep in mind about Mr. Obama. Remember when he and McCain submitted to that interview with Rick Warren in the run-up to the 2008 election, and both were asked, "When does a baby acquire human rights?" and Obie looked pensively at the floor, then hemmed and hawed a little before announcing modestly that the answer to that question was above his pay grade. Thus we are confronted with the somewhat sick irony that he doesn't know when an unborn child is a human being deserving of protection by the law, yet knows with absolute certainty at what stage of life he is eligible for execution. He will see no inconsistency here because what I've been describing - granting again that good conscience - is a man wrapped in the invincible ignorance compelled by his ideology. But an adult Christian isn't allowed to be invincibly ignorant of, and utterly insensitive to, certain moral concerns. Some Christians need converting to Christianity, and he seems to me one of those. I'm not the man to do it, and neither are you, for the mantle of infallibility in which the ideologue must also wrap himself allows no entry for those several lights characteristic of the true Christian, a gentle and humane unity of faith and reason, and that humility which follows them in the shadow cast by a wisdom that did not begin with me.

You may pray for him if you wish. I just want him to go home.

The Last Good Woman is now available on Kindle, real cheap, for those interested. Thanks to old blog friend TSO for writing a nice review. Others welcome. It can be found here.

Who's singing this? No research, nor trickeration of any kind.

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.

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.

The essay can be found here.

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.

Seve Ballesteros passed away last week from complications of a cancerous brain tumor. Back in the late 80's or early 90's (sorry about the time fog) my dad and I followed him around for 9 holes at Arnold Palmer's Bay Hill Tournament. We saw him take a confident, one handed swipe at a 6 inch putt...and miss it. The look on his face made it painful to watch, but he didn't pitch a fit. No muttered profanities, none of that "I don't deserve this" attitude. I'll bet he never tried a one handed putt again.

I remember reading an interview in which he was asked what went through his mind when he made a bad shot (he was known for making many and then magically escaping). He said, and I paraphrase, that many people won't understand this, but that you just have to forget about it, no matter how badly you're playing. It's in the past, it's gone, there's nothing to be done about it, and you have to move on to the next shot. And so he has.

The following is an ESPN profile shown during last year's British Open, to which Seve had hoped to return to participate in a four hole, pre-tournament competition with other past champions.

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