Apologia

Waking Up

2012-05-17T00:41:00.005-04:00

One semester ends, another begins. I don't remember much about the last one. It's all a blur. Before the papers start coming in, I've decided to try blogging again before I permanently lose my ability to communicate. I could try talking to real people in real life, but real people are messy. You let one start a conversation and you never know where it's going or when it will end. Here, no one can interrupt and I can end the conversation when I want to. That's because it's not really a conversation. I talk, you listen (sort of). All two or three of you. You're probably just as real as other real people but, separated by cyber distance, it's harder to prove. You're as real as I want you to be. I'm pretty sure that people like TS O'Rama and Paul Cella are real because I've met them in the flesh. And a number of Facebook friends. But now that they're back in the networld, I can pretend otherwise. Maybe I just imagined it all. This is probably a sign of illness unknown to the ancients. A description of the symptoms can be found here in verse form, at Dylan's.

Sometimes you can't avoid real people, though. I've kept up with the jogging, and I've noticed that a fair number of people like to wave and say, "Hi," or "Good evening." Often they just smile, especially the women walking their dogs. A woman's smile is hard to resist. I don't understand how they can be so pretty and gracious and yet still initiate two-thirds of divorces. It's not flirting, by the way. I have a different theory. They're wired to disarm the world. A woman needs to know the intentions of this approaching male. Is he indifferent, predatory, or civilized? She wants the world to be a warm fuzzy place that your presence does not jeopardize. Or it could be that she's just the friendly sort. I said it was a theory.

And sometimes neighbors with whom I'm actually acquainted will pass by in a car. The car slows down, the window rolls down, and an incredulous voice asks, "What are you doing?" I could be a smart-ass and say, "What does it look like?" but instead it's usually, "Trying to get home alive," or "Tempting fate," you know, something mildly self-deprecating so that they can feel good about making fun of me. I resist informing them that it's not true that sedentary people age slower.

* * *

I trotted by a house the other day with a big white pickup in the driveway with "So and So's Lawn Maintenance and Landscaping" emblazoned on the door. The owner's yard was a pastiche of dirt, weeds and yellow patches of grass. There's a lesson there, probably.

* * *

I might have mentioned somewhere else - can't remember where or when, as I say it's all a blur - that one night I was attacked by a couple of dogs, a pit bull and a Shepherd mix. They were working together. They chased me for a quite a while, until I realized that running just made them react like predators to a prey's flight response. Cesar Milan's hissing and finger-snapping trick didn't work either. So I turned and tried to kick the Shepherd in his snapping jaw. He dodged but they backed off. Some animals, like a lot of people, don't understand anything but the threat of force. I carry a weapon now. At first it was a cut-off piece of irrigation hose, but now it's just a larger than average pocket knife. Yes, I love dogs, but if yours attacks me, I'll gut him. Sorry about that.

* * *

So anyway I wake up from my semester blur and all kinds of things have been happening. Up in Sanford, a few miles north of here, the so-called Reverend Al Sharpton, the New Black Panthers, and all kinds of strange folks showed up in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing to agitate about "Justice." Of course, none of them know what really happened during the deadly confrontation, and yet it's the next great civil rights cause. Meanwhile, up Norfolk, Virginia way, two white reporters got set upon by a black mob for no reason whatsoever, were beaten badly enough to spend a week in hospital, and their own newspaper failed to report the incident for two weeks. And the reporters are suing the police department for what we might call a lack of investigative enthusiasm. Things are just fine in this country. They're getting better all the time.

Somewhere in this great land a judge proposed throwing out four of the ten commandments in order to resolve a church-state dispute between a high school displaying those commandments and someone who found the display offensive. (It only takes one these days.) If I recall, the evicted commandments contain mention of the word "God." Getting rid of the word, the judge hopes, will settle everybody down. But I wonder what good the other six are if it is not acknowledged that they come from God? How long would the constitution last if we all pretended we didn't know who wrote it? Why do I bother?

Recently I came across a cover of Time picturing a good-looking blonde woman breastfeeding her son. Her four year old son, who was standing on a stool to get at the goodies. A number of people were offended. I have a long-established, publicly available opinion on the matter of breastfeeding in public (links in the sidebar) and about the allure of women's breasts in general, but I'll have to say that there is something unsettling about the picture, and especially the woman's attitude. She's staring - not in maternal tenderness at her son - but at us. Brazenly. She's daring some sort of reaction. And besides, shouldn't a boy that age have gotten started on cow's milk by now? Milkshakes? Yogurt? Ben and Jerry's? Well, why should he? He's got his own Dairy Queen on heels. The cover's justification is apparently some regnant controversy about a thing called "attachment parenting." I don't know what it is, and don't want to know, but can settle it right now: Both my kids are grown, but I'm as keenly attached to them as I ever was, and never breastfed either one. There.

Up in New York, a court of appeals ruled that it is not illegal to view child pornography online, the ruling coming down in the case of a college professor in whose computer cache the images were found. New York law prohibits (I paraphrase) creating, possessing, distributing, promoting or facilitating child pornography. But, saith the judges:

"[S]ome affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen. To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

In other words, the professor had not downloaded, except in the sense that everything you view on the internet is downloaded to your computer, to your various caches. If you're using Windows, for example, such images will be stored in your temporary internet files, your content.IE5, your history, your pagefile.sys, and probably several other places because of the redundancy built into certain programs. And they will remain there until you delete them, and most of you don't know how to delete certain of these files, didn't know they even existed, and it's possible some of them can't be deleted short of a hard drive reformat, in which case you lose everything. And it is possible that you could end up on a filthy site after clicking a deceptive link. And so, no, I don't think you should be prosecuted for something in your cache that might have gotten there through no fault of your own. Unfortunately, this protects the professor too, even though his cache-track evinced a pattern of depraved behavior, and even though we all "exercise dominion and control" over the images we see, and can "facilitate" their dispersal simply by emailing the link to our fellow enthusiasts without ever downloading the thing itself.

The law in this area seems to me confusing and cowardly. It's against the law to make the stuff but not to look at it. But looking at pornography facilitates it. If no one ever looked at it, it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, we don't want an innocent grandmother who clicked on an email scam sent to the hoosegow. And if someone downloads the stuff, but never distributes it, never does anything with it but look at it, how is that different than "viewing?" It isn't. And yet we consider child pornography (and I would include all pornography) to be so morally noxious that its manufacturers can face very long jail terms. I wonder how that professor found his child porn. Did he search for it? If so, is the search engine he used "facilitating" the distribution? I think so. Why can't that company be prosecuted? Isn't that company a pimp for the porn manufacturer's product?

In other words, what needs to be done will not be done. We're enlightened now and know that 'censorship' is a dirty word. I can only conclude that it must be dirtier than the thing we want to censor, or else we'd have the will to carry through. We want so much to protect our children...just not that much.

I'm getting tired. I wanted to write about Obama's gay marriage epiphany, but it will have to wait.

Speaking of wait, Wait. I just remembered something from that blur of a semester: one of my students was converted to Christ after viewing a film about the Shroud of Turin. About a year ago, she was attending one of her church's youth group meetings, which she did regularly, motivated by a desire to please her parents and to associate with friends, but not out of any love for Jesus, to whom she seldom gave much thought. At this particular meeting, a guest speaker showed them the film (I don't know which one), and toward the end, when the figure's three dimensional quality began to take focus, a funny feeling came over her. A white light formed in her field of vision, nearly blinding her to everything else. When she got home, she went to her room in a state of great anxiety, touched somewhat by fear that her body could not of its own accord dispel the light, and finally felt compelled to demand of Jesus that he show himself. Either tell me who you are, that you're real, or else leave me alone; either come into my heart or go away, if you're there. And after many minutes of this (the way she told it gave the impression she was in a state near agony) she felt what she could only describe as a great love, like a liquid being poured into her, flood her heart, letting Jesus into it. She had to let him in, she said, and she's kept him there. It is exactly the sort of experience the effects of which I'd expect to dissipate within days or weeks, but a year later she's still in the camp of the righteous, so I have good hope that this one will "endure unto the end."

We're Screwed

2012-04-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

"By a 50% to 42% margin, more Americans have confidence in Obama than in Romney on economy"

Up on Cripple Creek - The Band

2012-04-21T04:26:00.002-04:00

Levon Helm, RIP

Articles here and here.

2012-04-14T04:46:00.003-04:00

That young priest I spoke of in the previous post may have known whereof he spoke. According to this article, Traditional Catholicism is winning. Vocations are indeed up slightly (in America). The interesting thing is that the increase in numbers is not evenly spread. They tend to spike in certain locations, and the key seems to be that a diocese be led by bishops who "are unambiguous and allow a minimum of dissent about the male, celibate priesthood," and who aren't afraid to say such things as did Chicago's Cardinal George in a homily, "pronouncing liberal Catholicism 'an exhausted project . . . parasitical on a substance that no longer exists.' Declaring that Catholics are at a 'turning point' in the life of the church in this country, the cardinal concluded that the bishops must stand as a 'reality check for the apostolic faith.'"

Easter Sermon

2012-04-09T05:00:00.003-04:00

Naw, I wouldn't do that to you. I'm talking about the one I heard in church. Delivered by the priest. A young priest. Very, very young. He's not a teenager, but I'll bet he still remembers every day of his senior year. He's afflicted with the optimism of...the young. I hope he never loses it. He says the Church is growing. And that vocations are increasing among both priests and religious. At the place where he studied, the young men are packed three to a room, which I took to mean that the dorms are overcrowded. More like him are on the way, young men and religious sisters who love the Church, the Pope, and everything Catholic. He must know something I don't. I sure hope so. (All this was being related to the Resurrection, a rebirth, a new springtime.) He's on fire with a zeal for Christ. I hope a complacent laity and the clerical bureaucracy don't grind it out of him. When he asked us during the renewal of our baptismal vows if we renounced all of Satan's promises, he didn't like the half-hearted response. "Let's try that again." Unless you don't renounce them, he said. He didn't want us to lie. "DO YOU RENOUNCE SATAN AND ALL HIS EMPTY PROMISES?!!"

"YES!!" they all roared.

I don't know how he led into it, but at one point he said, "If you, as Catholics, aren't willing to go to jail for your faith, then you don't understand what this next election is all about." And that was it for the politics. I'll bet some butts squirmed in their seats, though.

Right now, I think this kid (no disrespect intended) would go to jail for the Faith. And maybe further. I just hope he never has to labor under the likes of a Cardinal Wuerl.

Good luck, Father.

I guess we should do more than wish such young men luck. We're supposed to pray for them, aren't we? As if I didn't have enough to do, but okay.

Surprise

2012-04-05T03:24:00.002-04:00

So I was jogging along our neighborhood's main thoroughfare when I hear the laughter of young girls coming up behind me. They were also singing, and as they passed me on their bicycles I hear "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so..." They were in the 13-15 age range, voices fading as they disappeared down the street. Considering the normal run of things, it seemed bizarre and refreshing at the same time. I went around the lake and on the leg home I'm huffing and puffing uphill through a fairly ritzy area (by my standards) when I'm brought up short by some words carved into the concrete sidewalk, presumably many years ago when it was first poured. Or, if it had been resurfaced, not so many years ago: Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your Lord. Right there in upscale suburbia.

In the end, not a bad day. By my standards. I don't ask for much.

History lesson

2012-04-02T04:14:00.003-04:00

I was watching a documentary this weekend on one of those Discovery type channels. It was called "Who Really Killed Jesus?" One of the narrator's confident assertions was that, historically speaking, there is no hard evidence that Jesus even existed. There is only peripheral evidence. What a bummer.

They seem pretty sure that Pontius Pilate existed though. They found some kind of evidence, but I can't remember what kind. One of the "authorities" interviewed for the piece (I've never heard of any of them, btw; they all hail from the university of this and that, and are all quite confident in their knowledge; orthodox Catholic theologians seem to be off the radar), a blonde enthusiast from the University of Edinburgh, claimed that Pilate's offer to let the Jews free either Barabbas or Jesus could not possibly be true. It was a mere literary device (to what purpose I can't imagine), since the idea of Pilate allowing such a choice during the most volatile season of the Jewish calendar was simply unimaginable. She thinks that Pilate and Caiphas were in cahoots all along and that Pilate's washing his hands of it all was just good theater. So maybe that happened. It was all very confusing. I think the purpose was to get this idea out of our heads that the Jews killed Christ. The Romans are a whole lot more to blame than they are generally given credit for. Okay, fine. But who, aside from a certain sort of crank, sits around dwelling on that? Most Christians of today seem well aware that their first predecessors were Jews. Jews founded the Catholic Church. Honest, I don't hold it against them that a few in authority couldn't abide the interloper and had him crucified.

I think these Christian authorities they interview for these shows aren't really Christians at all. I think they're professional theorists more in love with theory than with faith. Their purpose in life is to throw around so many hypotheticals that people like me get tired of fending them off. If I get tired enough, maybe I'll become a theorist like them. Theories (especially conspiracy theories) are more fun than certainty because you get to speculate a lot. People who love them are fascinated by possibilities. The truth would spoil it all. The possibilities are manufactured inside their own heads, and the more they manufacture the more they get to admire their own minds at work. It's a form of self-worship.

Well, that's my theory, anyway, about Christian theorists. I'm too old to join them. They can't tire me out because I'm already tired - of theories. And I already know that the world's conspiring against me, so no news there.

Remember Terri Schiavo

2012-03-31T03:55:00.003-04:00

Today is the 7th anniversary of the murder of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo. She was starved and dehydrated to death by order of the Florida judiciary, specifically by Judge George Greer of the 6th Circuit Court. His decision was upheld by the Florida Supremes, and the U.S. Supremes washed their hands of it.

"I thirst."

United for Religious Freedom

2012-03-16T20:10:00.004-04:00

A Statement of the Administrative Committee
Of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
March 14, 2012

Excerpt:

Second, we wish to clarify what this debate is — and is not — about. This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive, even when it is not provided by the Church’s hand and with the Church’s funds. This is not about the religious freedom of Catholics only, but also of those who recognize that their cherished beliefs may be next on the block. This is not about the Bishops’ somehow “banning contraception,” when the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations ago. Indeed, this is not about the Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the Church — consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions — to act against Church teachings. This is not a matter of opposition to universal health care, which has been a concern of the Bishops’ Conference since 1919, virtually at its founding. This is not a fight we want or asked for, but one forced upon us by government on its own timing. Finally, this is not a Republican or Democratic, a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American issue.

Chicago's Archbishop: Obama Will 'Steal' Or Close Down All Catholic Hospitals Within Two Years

2012-03-02T05:49:00.003-05:00

From Michael Brendan Dougherty at Business Insider.

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

Cardinal Dolan's letter to his brother bishops

2012-03-02T04:54:00.002-05:00

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

The Contraceptive Mandate (cont.): Obama Wins

2012-03-01T04:05:00.010-05:00

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.

The Contraceptive Mandate Accommodation Con Job

2012-02-22T20:25:00.006-05:00

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.

Lydia McGrew, Protestant, does Catholic radio

2012-02-14T02:47:00.005-05:00

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.

Invincible ignorance (cont.)...

2012-02-12T23:30:00.005-05:00

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.

Obama's Invincible Ignorance

2012-02-11T05:21:00.011-05:00

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.

Novel for Sale

2012-02-08T04:57:00.004-05:00

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.

Sunday Music Guessing Game

2012-02-05T18:06:00.003-05:00

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

Indecision

2012-01-27T16:48:00.002-05:00

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

More Prayer, please

2012-01-25T23:45:00.002-05:00

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.

Voting in absentia

2012-01-25T18:27:00.009-05:00

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.

Welcome to another Culbreath

2012-01-22T18:34:00.003-05:00

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.

Lives Worth Defending

2012-01-22T17:10:00.006-05:00

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.

Prayer request

2012-01-22T05:25:00.002-05:00

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.

Fox Trots to the Islamic Beat?

2012-01-20T22:24:00.005-05:00

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.