I am especially pleased that Dan Guernsey wrote, and the SF Chronicle printed, a letter which not only correctly explains the entirely proper and admirable actions of the nuns who chose to “walk away from Omelas,” as it were, but actually offers several well-conceived, wholly proper suggestions for further constructive responses:

In the future, Marin Catholic might consider teaching the importance of protecting gays and lesbians from abuse during the worldwide U.N. Anti-Bullying Day May 4, justly supporting the goal of preventing bullying and discrimination while upholding the Catholic understanding of human sexuality.

There is already enough confusion among some of our young Catholics regarding human sexuality. The school might consider using this moment to not only teach the good news about the God-given dignity of all people, both gay and straight, but also about God’s wonderful plan for human sexuality.

Sadly, many people in today’s culture have difficulty viewing Catholic teaching as anything but discrimination. Catholics don’t mean it that way. Our understanding of human sexuality is holistic and anchored in a Christian anthropology of man, with body and soul united. Our sexuality is, in fact, a wonderful, life-giving gift of God meant for the fruitful relationship of a husband and wife. The unity of the person, the integrity of the body and soul working in cooperation with God’s creation is all positive, healthy, good news for our youth.

(source: Why the Marin Catholic nuns walked out – San Francisco Chronicle)

I watched the first episode, and have to agree with pretty much everything that Weigel (among others) has said, here.  My own observation was that the show (and presumably Mantel, though I can’t imagine why I’d read her books) “jumped the shark” early in the first episode, when Cromwell’s domestic life was portrayed in a scene clearly plagiarized from common depictions (not least Bolt’s) of More’s domestic life.  Say what you will, but not even the most pro-Henry Tudor or Reformation apologist views the mercenary, break-eggs-to-make-omelets Cromwell as remotely humane or gentlemanly.  He was a hatchet man, and like most of them he overplayed his hand in the end.  As Weigel says:

[Wolf Hall] proves, yet again, that anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in elite circles in the Anglosphere.

The distortions and bias are not surprising, considering the source. Hillary Mantel is a very talented, very bitter ex-Catholic who’s said that the Church today is “not an institution for respectable people” (so much for the English hierarchy’s decades-long wheedling for social acceptance). As she freely concedes, Mantel’s aim in her novel was to take down the Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons—the Thomas More the Catholic Church canonized—and her instrument for doing so is More’s rival in the court of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell.

Hillary Mantel does not lack for chutzpah, for Cromwell has long been considered a loathsome character and More a man of singular nobility. In the novel Wolf Hall, however, the More of Robert Bolt’s play is transformed into a heresy-hunting, scrupulous prig, while Cromwell is the sensible, pragmatic man of affairs who gets things done, even if a few heads get cracked (or detached) in the process. All of which is rubbish, as historians with no Catholic interests at stake have made clear.

(source: “Wolf Hall” and Upmarket Anti-Catholicism)

I started to set up a two-headed conditional in my last post, saying, “If you believe in the Resurrection…,” but I never came back to fill in the contrary.

Simply put, if you don’t believe in the Resurrection (thus incurring a responsibility to take account of “the democracy of the dead”) you have no choice but to live in a different sort of democracy of the dead.

After all, as John Maynard Keynes famously put it,

Jay Nordlinger, renowned for his spirited defense of the oppressed in Cuba and China, weighs in on the Wisconsin incidents:

A while ago, a couple of people involved in the Wisconsin case, on the conservative side — or the freedom side, or the rule-of-law side — came to visit us at National Review. They told us what had gone on. We listened in horror.

I had just finished reading, in pre-publication form, Roger Scruton’s novel about Communist Czechoslovakia. That book was not only fresh in my mind but pulsating all over my mind. And what I was hearing about Wisconsin, in good old Amurrica, reminded me of the book (as I noted to our guests). I was not being figurative, or poetic. I meant, it really reminded me of the book.

In the past, I’ve said that most people aren’t democrats at heart. The democratic spirit is relatively rare. Some people chastised me for saying this. I will now say that, at a minimum, many people aren’t democrats at heart. In a democracy, they must be curbed. They must be guarded against, constantly. Do not assume that people as a whole, including those in power, are devoted to the Declaration and the Constitution and Mom and Abner Doubleday and all that stuff. It isn’t true.

(source: ‘Wisconsin’s Shame’ . . . | National Review Online)

Consider and compare this vision of democracy, Continue reading →

I am unremittingly hostile to the kind of abuse and mistreatment that is considered “normal” on our frat- and sorority-ridden campuses, these days, and have spoken out about the ridiculous manner in which some now attempt to use a totalitarian, moment-by-moment public adjudication of privately-given “consent” to accomplish poorly and unjustly what has from time immemorial been accomplished by marriage (public giving of permanent and exclusive consent together with embrace of responsibility for all offspring of the union) and its related cultural institutions.  As a result, I am pretty tough on “rape culture” in the sense that concentrates on real dangers to the sexually vulnerable, though unlikely to subscribe to tenuous ideological constructions that erode our grip on reality and our ability to preserve ourselves and protect others.

And it is in the grip of that unfortunate irony that I happened to read two pieces in juxtaposition, today.

These two pieces lead me to meditate on how close to deranged our conception of “safety” has become:

Students at both Oberlin College in Ohio and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., have been crying out that they fear for their safety because conservative groups invited someone who disagrees with their views on sexual assault and rape culture to speak on campus.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism?, spoke at Georgetown last Thursday and is scheduled to speak at Oberlin tonight.

[…] Georgetown students placed a “trigger warning” sign outside of the speech, advising that it would “contain discussions of sexual assault and may deny the experiences of survivors.” A photo on Twitter shows a student holding another sign reading, “TRIGGER WARNING: anti-feminism” and advertising the location of a “safe space” for anyone who might feel traumatized by Sommers’s opposing views.

(source: Students Fear for Their Safety Because Conservatives Invited a Speaker to Campus | National Review Online)

Compare this to the following (and do read the whole thing):  Continue reading →