That expanding legal abortion is now the single most important issue to the Democrat Party? If they are willing to sacrifice nationalizing health care if it doesn’t involve making it cheaper for women to get abortions, I’m not sure there’s any other conclusion to draw. Health care! This is a target they’ve been aiming at for over sixty years. But they’re willing to let it slide yet again simply because Senate Democrats couldn’t let this bill pass without using it to further a pro-abortion agenda. Justice is a strange thing.
Two things are worth noting as this farse continues to unfold. First, if the anti-abortion Democrats actually do stand firm, I will be flabbergasted. Honestly, I’m flabbergasted that they’ve stood firm to this point. This debate shows how deeply ingrained pro-abortion sentiment is among Democrats; that these ostensibly “pro-life” politicians were willing to have a D after their name made me believe they weren’t really that firm in some of their beliefs. I’m pleased to be wrong.
Second, all the libertarians who spent all eight of the Bush years griping about social conservatives should take note. Government takeover of 1/6 of the economy is being thwarted not by eloquent libertarian arguments about economic freedom, but by a strange coalition of those who object to using the government to promote abortion.
I also don’t know who’s listening to [Robertson]; in my entire life, I’ve never met anyone, in church or elsewhere, who didn’t roll their eyes when his name was mentioned.
But why, then, is he still around? Robertson is the crazy uncle of right-wing Christianity: he says the damnedest things, and these are taken as just “who he is.” And like any crazy uncle, I’m not sure if he could say anything bad enough to prevent him from being invited to the family reunion.
Allow me, for a moment, to stand out from the crowd. I will now say something nice about Pat Robertson: he puts on a good tv show. I say this unironically, and not as a backhanded compliment. Around here it airs during daytime hours when crappy judge shows and soap operas are the only alternative on broadcast tv. The 700 Club has good human interest stories, approaches news stories from a conservative Christian angle – which, literally, you can get nowhere else on television – without being overly biased, and provides competent discussions of most of its subject matter.
On the few episodes I’ve watched, Robertson was inoffensive and came across as surprisingly knowledgeable. I watched one episode where he gave a competent lecture (complete with whiteboard drawings) of the chemistry underlying ozone depletion. For the life of me I can’t remember in what context he gave that lecture, but I remember looking up and seeing a marker in his hand and the phrase “free radicals” escaping his lips. He talked about it fairly indepth for about ten minutes, didn’t say anything that contradicted what I knew to be true, and said several things I wasn’t aware of. All on broadcast tv, during daytime hours, on a show geared toward conservative Christians.
I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for people saying stupid crap, but Robertson occasionally exceeds that tolerance. Still, I’d no more kick him out of the family than I would vote for him for president.
The most meaningless and misleading euphemism in English-speaking politics – and that’s a difficult list to top – is how abortion advocates have turned “choice” into a synonym for abortion.
Read this story. And count how many choices that this woman made that led up to her abortions. Opposing abortion has nothing to do with opposing “choice,” no more than opposing theft or vandalism or slavery involves opposing “choice.” That is, surely all things we ban restrict “choice” in some way, but the relevant question is whether that is a choice we believe should be closed off to our fellow citizens. Monopolizing the word “choice” for the pro-abortion cause is perhaps the single most audacious maneuver in the lengthy American history of twisting language for political purposes. What’s galling – utterly galling – is how the entire media goes along with it.
Romney won’t run for Kennedy’s seat. It’s an open seat, in a year that will be the best chance for Republican pick ups since 1994. And Romney can’t be bothered to try to pick up this seat.
He’s a one-term governor who refused to let his constituents pass judgment on him in a reelection bid. His most remarkable political feat thus far has been his failure to unite conservatives against John McCain in a Republican primary. And he lost a senate bid a fifteen years ago. He’s stiff, comes across as the guy who will say whatever he thinks will get him elected, and has a history of saying whatever he thinks will get him elected.
It makes me cringe when conservatives talk about him like he’s some sort of hero, and the obvious conservative candidate in 2012. If he’d won a senate seat next year, I would have reconsidered. But it should be obvious that Romney has no faith in his ability to win in his own state, and Republicans are damnfools if they think he can win elsewhere. He is a sure loser, and the sooner more Republicans get past him, the better we’ll be.
Just about everybody who looks at the data agrees that people are having fewer children. The debate gets interesting when people try to determine why this is so. What to do about this is almost a Rorschach test for judging what motivates the commentator. Some examples.
Young people raised by relatively prosperous Baby Boomers know that if they reproduce in their early twenties, it is possible — even likely — that they’ll be unable to afford their children all the same advantages they remember. Even among my Catholic high school friends who married young and desire children, there is a widespread practice of waiting many years to do so, a period that is one of financial and emotional preparation. The middle class notion of what it means to be a good parent is simply much higher today than it was in the past. I’m uncertain about whether these trends are demographically problematic, but let’s imagine that they are. It is quite possible that later marriage and child bearing is bad for society as a whole, but good for the vast majority of individuals who do it.
Take away: delaying marriage and childbirth is thoughtful and perhaps a good thing, but we need to figure out how to balance the individual and society.
Conor disagrees, but I believe he is disagreeing out of impressions formed, as he writes, “In my experience.” I’d suggest Conor consider that the experiences he and his friends have gone through in recent years, while fascinating in their own way, are not a broad enough sample group to evaluate how children and marriage are viewed in 21st Century American life (were I to rely only on my own experiences, one would assume the American family is thriving and reproducing at an astounding rate) . . . .
When people get married and have children, they transform from being a potential society to being real societies, creating a cycle of productivity and inheritance that allows individuals to succeed and surpass their parents, and forming a community of stability and support that dramatically reduces the demand for larger government to provide for the health and economic needs of the young (as poverty is feminized), the infirm (as caregivers disappear), and the aging. Increases in the number of unwed and childless individuals necessitates demand for expanded social programs and governmental authority to take the place of family.
Take away: we adults are getting married, but the irresponsible (who cannot be true conservatives) aren’t.
[I]mmigration increases the population density, which raises land prices, which both makes non-Hispanic whites more Democratic and discourages those Hispanics who successfully assimilate to the norms of local non-Hispanic whites from becoming as Republican.Formerly Republican California supplies the classic example of both processes at work.
Non-Hispanic whites became sharply less Republican as their marriage and fertility rates plummeted.
Back in 1990, California still had a higher white fertility rate than Texas. But during the Nineties the birthrate for California white women dropped 14 percent and their years married plummeted to the third lowest in America, behind only ultra-liberal DC and Massachusetts.
In Texas, however, which has much more available dirt and only about half as many immigrants as a percentage of the total population, white fertility rose 4 percent.
Texas, which voted Democratic in four out of five Presidential elections from 1960 through 1976, is now the mainstay of the GOP.
Meanwhile, those California Hispanics who succeed in assimilating fully now find themselves in a state where most role models vote for Democrats for President.
So, Hispanics in California have stayed well to the left of Hispanics in Texas—where the white elite is fervently Republican.
Take away: High immigration leads to fewer children.
All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man’s anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: “The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death.” Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.
The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. . . .
For today’s Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe’s morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.
Take away (apologies to Hilaire Belloc): Western Civilization is the faith, and the faith is Western Civilization. Western Civ must return to the faith, or it will perish.
Time to speculate about the future. In sum, we will have more people with lower future time orientation (i.e., the temperament to save for a rainy day and delay gratification for greater future gain), more impulsiveness (great for knocking up broads, not so great for building and sustaining first world levels of civilization), and more distrust of societal institutions in favor of tighter familial bonds (great for aspiring warlords and corrupt kleptocrats, not so great for maintaining a loyal national military or respect for the law or a basic sense of fairness).
In possibly what will turn out to be the juiciest irony in all of human history, feminism and its co-ideologies of deceit may usher in an America that looks more like a patriarchal Middle Eastern caliphate of their worst nightmares. The realization of the matricentric utopia that feminism has been clamoring for these last few generations will undo the very foundation upon which the rancid ideology was able to prop itself.
Human nature does not offer us a bottomless chest of treasure. Few are exempt from trade-offs, and no society can have everything its heart desires. To restore American greatness and comity of its people, feminism and its cousin -isms will have to be rolled back. This will mean women will sacrifice their earning power and some career freedom. The alternative is what we have now — economically independent women, freed from shame and the restrictions of their biology by the pill and abortion, following their vaginas straight into soft polygamy, state-supported single motherhood, and grossly unjust payday divorce settlements.
Now I will tell you how to save America from this fate. The answer will surprise some of you:
More PUAs [Pick up Artists]
Take away: More sex and sluts, please!
It seems as though the proposed solutions tend to dovetail rather neatly with the proposer’s worldview: he doesn’t need to change, but the world needs to be more like him.
Question: how does one design an experiment to test these various hypotheses? Anybody can point the correlation of trends, but how do we prove causation?
Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM EDT on Friday, July 17th, 2009 as Kulturkampf
Everyone’s favorite high-profile victim is sounding the outrage alert again, this time over a doctored picture which photoshops a conservative talk radio host’s face onto baby Trig. It’s not much to tear your hair out over, but wingnuts are over-reacting to a degree that would be surprising if we weren’t talking about wingnuts. The real winner, though, is the Palin camp’s press release (emphasis added):
“Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child,” Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapelton said in a statement provided to CNN.
“A lot of people in the last couple of days…they’ve mentioned ‘intellect,” Gibbs said. “I’m not sure what number they graduated in their class at Princeton, but my sense is it’s not second.”
Because we should all bow our knees and bang our foreheads when an Ivy League graduate comes near. Frankly, I think we mortals are fortunate that Sonia Sottomayor continues to bless us with her presence in this realm.
I mean, she finished second in her class! Has anyone ever done better than that? Um, well, presumably, if we could find the guy who finished first, he could criticize her. Though we’d migh have to compare SAT scores to determine whom to believe. I’m sure the richness of the experiences of this wise Latina woman would overwhelm whatever that guy had to offer.
Here’s Keith Olberman and Mike Musto providing America with a substantive entry in the national conversation about the Ms. USA controversy:
Yes, because when push comes to shove, the best way to fight for equality and equal recognition is to make personal cracks about Carrie Prejan’s boobs. You keep things classy, Keith!
Gay marriage supporters — among whom I count myself — deserve to lose. Keith Olberman is a disease.
Tom posted this at 9:54 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 as Kulturkampf
Richard Socarides, an attorney and former senior adviser on gay rights to President Clinton, said the ruling carries extra significance coming from Iowa.
“It’s a big win because, coming from Iowa, it represents the mainstreaming of gay marriage. And it shows that despite attempts stop gay marriage through right wing ballot initiatives, like in California, the courts will continue to support the case for equal rights for gays,” he said.
1. I thought us folks in the middle of the country were somehow questioning the Americanness of others when we implied that the coasts are full of effete liberal snobs. I suspect that charge won’t be raised in the coming days when gay marriage supporters go on and on and on about how “mainstream” Iowa is.
2. I seriously doubt the Iowa Supreme Court represents the mainstream of Iowa, or, really, anywhere.
3. Is he calling California a “right wing” state? I think he is!
I’d also like to observe that every state high court that has mandated gay marriage (Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Iowa) is an appointed body. If you really want to show me that gay marriage has gone “mainstream,” win me a case in a state that elects it judges.
Apollo posted this at 11:26 AM EDT on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 as Kulturkampf
Over at The American Thinker, Charlie Nathan is worrying about the millenial generation:
According to the Josephson Institute for Youth Ethics 2008 survey on the ethics of American youth, 64 percent of high school students admitted cheating on a test during the previous year and 38 percent did so two or more times. 30 percent admitted to stealing from a store within the past year. Yet, incredibly, an astounding 93 percent of those same high school students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character.
My personal experiences have confirmed these statistics. I know of one instance where rich parents offered a brand-new BMW to an SAT tutor to take the test for their child, who was surely in on the scheme. The parents didn’t want their child to achieve on merit alone and encouraged cheating. The tutor declined the offer, but I am confident this is not the only case.
To share another personal example of twisted morality, two summers ago I was eating at a diner with some recent acquaintances. After we finished, I left a generous tip. As we were leaving, my companions started to laugh hysterically. I asked what was so funny and they revealed that they had taken my tip, a reward for service that was perfectly fine, and replaced it with a penny. These boys essentially stole the major source of income from a waitress, insulting her in the process — all to “teach me a lesson” about over-tipping.
His concern for his generation is admirable, but perhaps his diagnosis is misplaced. Hannah Arendt once observed that in every generation Western Civilization is invaded by barbarians, which we call “children.” People aren’t born good. It’s something that needs to be learned. Mr. Nathan seems to go off track when he writes:
From Enron to Madoff, we have witnessed the economic consequences of immoral behavior. The current financial crisis was in part caused by immorality: buyers bought homes they couldn’t afford, sellers sold homes to people who couldn’t afford them, and the government sat back, enjoying the show.
. . .
So far, we Millennials have not had much of a chance to step up to the plate and prove ourselves morally capable of becoming the leaders of the American economy. But we will have no choice and, unless we change our ways, our immoral behavior can have disastrous consequences.
There’s far more to criticize in what happened before the Millenials. They’re the children of the Baby Boomers, and have come by their narcissism because they imitated their parents. It seems a stretch of logic to go from “the younger generation has a selfishness problem” to “the institutions are failing because of the older generation’s selfishness.”
The logical connection, which Mr. Nathan nibbles around but doesn’t really get to, is that the older generation, which both trashed the institutions and raised the younger badly, is at fault. The Baby Boomers shortcomings are an explanation—but not an excuse—for the Millennials. How much the Millennials are like their parents will determine the course of the 21st century.
Deroy Murdock deserves worlds of kudos for his excellent column contrasting the marriage lobby’s obsession with SSM and obliviousness to AshleyMadison.com, a hook-up site for adulterers:
AshleyMadison.com calls itself a “dating site specifically designed to help married people cheat on their spouses.” Its slogan is “Life’s short, have an affair.” Its previous tag line was “When Monogamy Becomes Monotony.” It boasts 3.5 million registered users, among whom some 400,000 active members each pay up to $249 quarterly.
…
Over the last six months, for example, Rick Santorum appeared in 22 stories that mention “gay marriage,” but in zero citing AshleyMadison.com. Maggie Gallagher materialized in 41 gay-marriage stories and zero on AshleyMadison.com. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s numbers are 276-0, respectively. For Focus on the Family, the score is 389-0. The phrase “same-sex marriage” yielded 24 hits for Santorum, 52 for Gallagher, 256 for Romney, and 449 for Focus. All of the above were absent from the 67 Nexis-archived stories on AshleyMadison.com between September 5, 2008, and March 5, 2009.
Clearly, straight-marriage fans fret about what two men wearing wedding bands might do to a man and woman with rings on their fingers. Whether this concern is scientific or superstitious, surely they must acknowledge that seeing Bob and Steve together in a porch swing is trivial compared to Adam philandering with his new AshleyMadison.com adulteress as Eve waits at home, watches dinner grow cold, and wonders why on Earth he’s so late.
Well said, sir.
Tom posted this at 6:53 PM EDT on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 as Kulturkampf
Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn have co-written an op-ed on gay marriage. It’s somewhat like seeing Nancy Pelosi and Rick Santorum co-write on abortion. If there’s a conservative way to integrate gay families into the law, this is it:
We take very different positions on gay marriage. We have had heated debates on the subject. Nonetheless, we agree that the time is ripe for a deal that could give each side what it most needs in the short run, while moving the debate onto a healthier, calmer track in the years ahead.
It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.
Michael Novak is right: this column by E.J. Dionne now looks pretty foolish. Granted, it took Obama until his fourth day in office to reverse the Mexico City policy, whereas Bill Clinton did it on his first, but for someone who talked during the campaign like he wanted to put the culture wars behind us, our new president sure used his first few days in office in a funny way. Almost as though he’s some sort of doctrinaire liberal on every issue and will govern as one.
Of course, some of us never fell for Obama’s smooth talk, and thought of those who did as suckers. The funny word of the day: Kmiec. Congrats, Doug, your pro-life candidate is now using your tax dollars to fund abortions in foreign countries.
Back in 1996, when supporting gay marriage was a very fringe position, Obama supported it. Now that it’s a fairly mainstream – though still minority – position, he says he opposes it. Which do you think is his actual position?
And, um, impressive how these things keep coming out. I suspect we’ll learn more about Obama’s past in the next year than we’ve learned in the last, and I suspect it will include several more things that might have been unpopular during the elections.
Eugene Volokh has a post about a woman who was fired from a state university for writing a piece which, among other things, opposed gay marriage and praised ex-gay groups. He has the text of the article, which hardly seems hateful or mean-spirited, and then writes:
Given this, how should people who share Ms. Dixon’s religious views, and who are trying to figure out how militantly to fight against pro-gay-rights causes, react? Of course, you might think the answer is “change your views, and accept homosexuality as perfectly proper.” But let’s assume that those who oppose homosexuality continue to disagree with you on that. What should a reasonable person in their shoes do, faced with the prospect that expressing their views — and quite likely expressing any opposition to pro-gay-rights policies, when the opposition rests on a claim that homosexuality doesn’t merit legal protection of various sorts — is becoming a firing offense as to a large range of jobs?
Indeed. The effect of various aspects of the modern left – labeling anyone opposed to gay rights a bigot, anyone opposed to racial preferences a racist – is to make large numbers of jobs available only to leftists and the most closeted of conservatives. Already the diversity officers that every corporation and university employs must be card carrying leftists, but evidently the rule is reaching out to swallow up all of HR. Once the entryway into employment is controlled by an ideological cadre of holier-than-thous, what are the chances that those of us who have conservative paper trails will get our feet in the door?
That’s obviously a few steps down the road, but the reality is that many jobs that ought not be ideological are already closed off to conservatives on ideological grounds. Volokh concludes with a wortwhile question: “But what should be the reaction of those who oppose homosexuality on religious grounds, and care a good deal about their and their coreligionists’ ability to express their views and act in accordance with those views in their private lives?”
If you stand to get fired for your views, even by a state employer, I guess the answer is to shut up. Yay freedom!
Apollo posted this at 10:13 PM EST on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 as Kulturkampf
