When the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib broke, we were all shocked, from the President on down to the bricklayer. Why, your average whore on the street was scandalized right out of her nylon-mesh stockings. All those regular folks who regularly enjoy nudity and more on their cable TV service, rent racy films at the video store, watch them in the movie theaters or in their hotel rooms (to the delight of Marriott, Hilton, and other major corporations), all those who make the porn industry bigger than the NFL, the NBA and MLB combined, were left simply aghast. I know the major media were shocked because they couldn’t gather their wits long enough to stop showing the pictures of it. In fact, when they heard that there were more and newer pictures to follow, they were so appalled that they announced they’d show them to us just as soon as they could get their hands on them. Mona Charen bemoaned the “shame” of it all. “Now any invocation of our values and our standards will be met with contempt and dismissal by the Middle East audience . . . they must see that our system of justice really does function as advertised. It may be our last chance at the hearts and minds of a critical audience.” Yes, they loved us so much before. Now they have an excuse to really hate us. Peggy Noonan was equally “disheartened”. She thought the whole thing “mortifying”, giving rise to “a defensive, ‘That is not who we are.’ As indeed it is not.”

Yes it is, Peggy. That’s exactly who we are. We live in a pornographic culture. We raise our kids in it. While they’re growing up in public school, we can’t tell them that some ways of behaving are better than others. We offer them wonderfully graphic sex-ed classes, but nothing in the way of religion. We censor nothing except religion. If they come to see public displays of piety as more offensive than public displays of sex, it’s hard to blame them. We censor nothing. Censorship is a bad word. An obscene word. Except in the case of children. It’s against the law to use them or look at them in this context. Except in the case of virtual children, no matter how lifelike, because, with the blessing of our Supreme Court, that’s okay. It’s enough to warm the heart of any pedophile. So we raise our kids in our porno culture devoid of condemnation, and then we’re shocked, I repeat, shocked, that when left to their own devices their imaginations fix on what they saw on the internet the night before.

Yes. What is it exactly that distinguishes Abu Ghraib from your run-of-the-mill hardcore pornography, now normalized and legitimized by a hundred different television shows, music videos, popular songs, etc? I will tell you what distinguishes them. Consent. A reed so thin it makes the colloquialism simply pathetic. We hang our entire civilization (what’s left of it) on this strange incantation. If the prisoners had consented to their degradation (and been paid a fair wage), there would be no scandal. There would just a few more nameless depravities peddled as adult entertainment on the Internet. I defy one of my liberal or libertarian readers to show me by their own logic where I am wrong in asserting this.

If America loses this war against her Islamic and Leftist enemies, it will be because the real patriots who remain have forgotten to show us why this is worth fighting for. When the same men who call us eloquently to war cannot muster the merest passion to defend America’s virtue and resist her vice, demoralization is inevitable. President Bush tells us that he is “trying to lead the world in a war that I view as really between the forces of good and the forces of evil” — how words such as those stirred me two and a half years ago — but he cannot see, I fear, that evil is ascendant among us. We put to death the infirm, the weak, the silent and the unborn. We prosper by a ceaseless spectacle of depravity. We sing the praises of democracy but care nothing for its health. Mark Helprin once said that only a sick nation sends its sisters and mother to war. We are a sick nation. There are sins of which St. Paul admonishes “let it not even be named among you.” Such sins have become institutions among us.

So I hear you, Bill Luse. When I took up a recent project, I worried that American patriotism had become little more than shrill trimuphalism, a repetition of catchphrase, a patriotism of superiority. We love America because she is strong. Would men love her still if she were feeble and subjugated? I now know that she is indeed feeble. Her soul is feeble; her spirit is subjugated. The Republic is “luxurious but it is filled with misery; it dying but it laughs.”

“Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

“But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.

“The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up forever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages. But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity the name upon the sacred town. The sanctity of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the northern Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died. From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little walled nations resounding with the lament of Troy.”

Chesterton argued that Paganism was the one real rival of Christianity, the one real alternative religion that could cultivate the creative heart of mankind and build vibrant civilization. It is in this light that we should view his statement that the Iliad “might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision.”

Larry Auster explains:

The only way opposition to liberalism can manifest itself is as a series of holding actions, in which the holdouts, who generally accept the prevailing liberalism, will nevertheless resist it on some particular issue without opposing liberalism as such. These unprincipled exceptions to liberalism take the form of appeals to established habits and traditions, or to majority opinion, or to common sense, or to social utility, or to inertia, or to some undefined feeling that we shouldn’t go “too far,” or even to some supposed beneficent fate that will keep the unwanted liberal victory from occurring without our having to do anything about it. A liberal who adheres to one or more such exceptions to liberalism is called a conservative. The conservative’s appeal is to what exists. At any given moment in time, there is present in a society an inchoate body of sentiments, habits, traditions, and understandings that liberalism has not yet challenged and which seem, as far as anyone can tell, unquestionable and authoritative. But the apparent authority of these values and beliefs is only based on the fact that they have not yet been questioned. Because no anti-liberal principle has been articulated to back up these values, as soon as they are seriously challenged, they begin to be abandoned, if not immediately, then through a prolonged process of foot-dragging. To liberals, of course, the failure of conservatives to come up with principled arguments against liberalism only proves that there is no principled position other than liberalism.

Quoting David Frum (who by this taxonomy is a right-liberal), VFR applies this tool to Islam. “‘Moderate’ Moslems (as well as naïve Westerners like President Bush) may claim that Islam is a ‘tolerant’ and ‘peaceful’ religion; but the inherent logic of Islam, to which the ‘moderate’ Moslems are unable to offer any principled resistance, leads inevitably toward global jihad.” And contributor Matt, who I believe is the originator of this fascinating interpretive tool, summarizes cogently:

More consistency in liberalism gets you leftism and few unprincipled exceptions. Less consistency gets you right-liberalism and more unprincipled exceptions.

More consistency in Islam gets you the terrorists and few unprincipled exceptions. Less consistency gets you the “moderates” and more unprincipled exceptions.

The interesting thing is that Frum can apparently see “moderate” Moslems where they truly reside on the spectrum of Islamic ideology. One wonders if he will ever realize that he himself is in the same exact position vis-a-vis liberal modernism as the “moderate” Moslems are vis-a-vis Islam.

Moderate Moslems who do not commit terrorist acts are still Moslems; they just aren’t terribly consistent. Neocons and right liberals like Frum are still liberals; they just aren’t terribly consistent. Neither has an intellectual basis from which to reject the main ideological thrust, because they have already accepted the premises of their more consistent — and therefore more extreme — bretheren. Whenever they do reject the main ideological thrust they are making what we call at VFR an unprincipled exception. They decide without intellectual basis that the ideology they have already accepted themselves and that drives the extremists has gone too far. Not that it has something fundamentally wrong with it, mind you, but that it has just gone too far.

When someone who accepts the premises of an ideology makes an unsubstantiated appeal to common sense to say that that ideology has gone too far on something, we call that intellectual act (really just an arbitrary act of the will outside of the person’s major line of reasoning) an unprincipled exception.

Now there is a quasi-Hegelian process that occurs when a more extreme ideologue encounters a less extreme ideologue who nonetheless accepts the basic premises of the ideology. The more extreme ideologue will allow, for a time, some unprincipled exception to stand (say “civil union” instead of “gay marriage”). That creates common cause with the less extreme ideologue. But because the less extreme ideologue has no independent intellectual basis upon which to rest the unprincipled exception, he eventually lets go of it and it crumbles. In the case of liberalism we call this the Hegelian Mambo; a dance in which all of the steps move leftward. In the case of Islam perhaps we can call it the Jihad Jitterbug.

This, as I say, is a valuable tool. It has the rare virtue of illuminating in a constructive way the unwitting role played by many soi-disant conservatives in advancing what Willmoore Kendall called the Liberal Revolution.

Gladiator with Russell Crowe is an example of getting things right. They got Roman battle absolutely right. They got gladiatorial combat well enough although they obviously exaggerated or heightened the action. They got Rome right, the murderous intrigue and madness of some emperors. It had the right look and feel. They respected Crowe's character reverence for his god, his faith. I thought the latter parts slow and lugubrious, but the basic universe for the rather weak story was there.

The familiar and stale argument that says we should disable our critical imagination when viewing such a film — an argument often expressed in such phrases as “you’re overthinking this” or “come on, it’s just a movie” — seems particularly thin and forced here. Is it acceptable for film-makers to turn a work of art into its opposite? Is there not a point of contempt for truth and accuracy and fairness at which we will simply shudder and walk away? Hollywood’s parochialism is profound indeed — most of its output appears to be afflicted by an incapacity for any real sympathy for a perspective different from its own. Thus Hollywood is bewildered by the success of a film like The Lord of the Rings, which, limited though it was, at least suggested to the audience the depth of J. R. R. Tolkien’s admiration for Mediaeval Man. And Tolkien’s admiration was no fantasy, though its issue as art was: for Mediaeval Man is admirable, as are men all of ages, when subjected to a human searching study.

Tolkien tried (successfully) to let us understand the Mediaevals as they understood themselves; the Iliad still allows us to understand a part of ancient Greece as it understood itself; Hollywood, for the most part, cares only for its own obsessions.

There must be no confusion in these matters. Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences. It is for this reason that these Catholics, whether candidates for office or those who would vote for them, may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled with God and the Church in the Sacrament of Penance.

Meanwhile, here is a striking exposition of the tyranny which has descended via the court over the last fifty years.

‘You are not sufficiently democratic,’ answered the policeman, “but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.’

Syme struck his hands together.

‘How true that is,’ he cried. ‘I have felt it from my boyhood, but never could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed — say a wealthy uncle — he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them. Yes, the modern world has retained all those parts of police work which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up its more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors the in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.’”

— G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today announced an agreement settling a discrimination complaint filed by a gay man against a local business that refused to print invitations to his wedding with his same-sex partner. Under the agreement, the business owner has apologized for her actions and agreed to abide by Seattle’s anti-discrimination law in the future.

Jeff Culbreath comments,

American society will either embrace public homosexuality, or it will reject public homosexuality, and there will be painful consequences for dissenters. There is no sustainable public belief system that can tolerate both homosexuality and traditional Christian morality at the same time. So the present tensions cannot last: there is no middle ground in the long run.

Now Mr. Millman is no hothead; some grumblers may be heard in the back of the room charging him with long-windedness. His views are to be taken seriously, and his general gloominess sits heavy with me, for one.
_______________
* “Amateur” in no way should be interpreted to suggest “amateurish.” It suggests instead a cultivated fondness for an object of study.

“Senator, uh, the facts are somewhat different than that.”

Although a schism is far from imminent, the proposal is part of a long-term strategy and an indication that Methodist conservatives intend to use the gay issue as a wedge to precipitate a fracture — just as conservatives have in the Episcopal Church USA, in which some churches are forming a rival network. Methodist conservatives do not plan to advance the proposal here but to build support for it among church members in advance of the next convention in 2008.

Those cleaving, against all the capricious tides of modernity, to the doctrines and traditions of 2000 years of Christian history, are the aggressors, you see. They seek to drive a wedge into the community of the faithful. They are rocking the boat; and disturbing the peace of “denominations long associated with theological diversity and liberal causes.”

However fair it is, from the most narrow historical perspective, to emphasize the “theological diversity and liberal causes” of the mainline Protestant churches, the story remains woefully incomplete without an acknowledgement of the plain, irrefragable fact that these things comprise as massive and spectacular an innovation upon the body of Christian doctrine as has ever been proposed.

Let us imagine that a well-dressed and highly-esteemed gentleman stumbles and falls into a muddy and murky ditch while walking to his place of business; and then, having fallen, somehow in his disorientation comes to prefer mud and murk to clean air and a brisk walk, and the prompt attendance to business. Let us imagine that his brother, similarly well-dressed, though perhaps less esteemed, comes upon him in the ditch and urges him to rise from the murk; but, faced with his brother’s disoriented truculence, fails to persuade, until the moment arrives when he realizes that he cannot compel sense into his kin, and must be on his way. What are we to think of a third character in this drama, a solemn stranger and observer of what is fit to observe, who exclaims, “Sir! Why would you disturb the peace of this glorious day, and the tranquility of your brother’s simple human revelry, by imploring him so importunately to get up and leave; why, further, would you not go ahead and join him there, in the murk, and save your business duties for another day?” — what are we to think of him? A strange fellow indeed.

My sketch is by no means perfect, but I think it adequately suggests the position of The New York Times, peeking in and chiding the sane for asseverating common sense, and encouraging the mad in demanding a capitulation to madness.

AIDS victims in 1987: Philippines 135 / Thailand 112

In 1991 the WHO predicted the Philippines would have 80,000 to 90,000 cases and Thailand 60,000 to 80,000 AIDS victims.

Thailand promoted the use of condoms in massive campaigns where Catholic Philippines promoted “Abstinence” and “Be faithful.”

The prognosis of the WHO was wrong for both countries:

1999: Philippines 1,005 / Thailand 755,000 AIDS victims

Source: British Medical Journal, volume 328, April 10th 2004.

Mark Shea comments succinctly: “The West’s commitment to sexual promiscuity is a religion that people will both kill and die for.” (via Jeff Culbreath.)

Unlike your run-of-the-mill historian [author Jim Powell] is aware of the large literature on the actual economic consequences of the New Deal. FDR’s Folly simply puts it between one convenient set of covers, in clear language accessible to the layman. For 30 years at least, professional economists have recognized that the New Deal was harmful medicine for a struggling economy. Faced with a similar crisis, there cannot be more than one in a hundred who would now recommend FDR’s specific curatives. [. . .]

FDR expropriated all the privately held gold in the United States by executive order. He plowed inconceivable sums into Soviet-style public-works megaprojects; tripled federal taxes; gave unionized craft workers new privileges (often simply by looking the other way at their racketeering and violence) at the expense of poorer non-unionized workers and the indigent; supported farmers by paying them to destroy crops amidst unprecedented material want; created the first American payroll taxes amidst unprecedented unemployment; imposed a national code of industrial production and schedule of industrial wages; and stacked the Supreme Court with judges who make contemporary liberals look like Newt Gingrich. [. . .]

The material in this book even calls into question FDR’s basic goodwill toward the American people. Powell documents incontestably that political cronyism was rampant in New Deal relief programs and that the spending of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal showpiece, went mostly to northern and western states which were the best-immunized from the Depression’s effects in the first place -- but which, by pure coincidence, were disproportionately low-hanging fruit for a Democratic ticket trying to win the Electoral College. If one grants that FDR possessed the personal integrity usually attributed to him, it’s still hard to see how his worshippers can fail to squirm at bizarre jeremiads against “economic royalists” and “privileged princes” delivered by a wealthy blue-blood who had married his own cousin in the best tradition of the old European houses.

Ouch.

This account leaves little doubt that madness has triumphed among many men, and shows us what madness triumphant looks like; just as it shows us that even in madness hope remains.

The first amendment MUST be absolute, or it is meaningless altogether. If you’re going to protect the freedom of speech, then you must protect ALL speech, even speech that you or I may consider it hateful, immoral, annoying, vulgar, obscene, irrational.... All of those descriptions are OPINION, and opinions vary widely.

With all due respect, it is very hard to take this argument seriously. It begins with a very reckless and erroneous assertion, which remains undefended, and blunders along from there. The First Amendment is not and cannot be “absolute.” Shall we throw out all our libel and slander laws? Shall we strike down our laws against passing military secrets to those who mean us harm? Shall we eviscerate all intellectual property protections? All these things are speech — and yet they are, quite rightly, restricted.

Once concede that free speech is not absolute, as any serious man must, and the whole issue immediately falls under the jurisdiction, so to speak, of republican discourse. It is a matter for We the People to work out in our legislative bodies. The First Amendment describes some limitations on what Congress is free to enact in its legislation, but even there it cannot be interpreted to be absolute, because Congress has other responsibilities which it cannot simply abandon in favor of some ahistorical absolutist First Amendment jurisprudence. Congressmen do not swear to uphold merely the First Amendment.

You charge me with hypocrisy, but fail to address the main thrust of my argument, which is that the First Amendment is a part of the Constitution. It is contained within the larger document and cannot be wrenched free of that context. Every right implies a concomitant duty, and many rights stand in direct conflict with one another; reconciling these conflicts and complications are the daily bread of what a republic does.

I have no patience for the “we must protect the children” argument either... Not everyone has kids, you know... Are we going to “child-proof” our existence to the point that adults have no access to the entertainment and information that they want?

For those who do have kids, it is their job as PARENTS job to monitor and censor what their children see, hear, read, etc.... it is NOT the job of our government, not the FCC, and certainly not you or me.

Every television, every radio, every CD player, every computer.... EVERY single one of them....has a 100% effective and user-friendly personal censorship device built right in. It’s called the “OFF” button. Use it, and quit whining about what other people do or do not see, hear, etc....

As for children, no republic can regard the upbringing of its future citizens with indifference. It matters not at all that some citizens do not have children. Again, there are honest disagreements about how to balance the competing goods of liberty and virtue. Such disagreements are the grist of our public dialogue. But you would put them outside that dialogue by shouting, “First Amendment!”

In short, your libertarian philosophy simply has no grounding in the American political tradition. Prior to the Second World War, it was utterly alien to this country. You are free to hold it, and argue it in the public square, but it is, in a strict but not pejorative sense, un-American.

Mine is hardly a “reckless assertion.” The examples you point out: libel, slander, military secrets, intellectual property: these are not simply matters of free speech. They are criminal acts, done with the intent to cause another person actual measurable harm, and the fact that they can involve some degree of “speech” is incidental. You are comparing apples to oranges. I don’t see what bearing it has on freedom of speech. Shock jocks, pornographers, etc. are not willfully causing harm to other people. They are not revealing harmful secrets, nor is anyone FORCED to listen to them. They are merely providing entertainment that obviously, judging from their huge successes, there is a very large market for.

Written, published, pixelated, or broadcast speech does not lose its quality of being speech simply because it has been made a criminal act. The speech is not at all incidental; it is of the nature of the thing. It seems to me that here you are being the rigid traditionalist: traditionally, we outlaw speech uttered with the intent to cause harm to another person; traditionally, we outlaw publishing as one’s own something previously published by another person — therefore, -POOF- — that speech is simply no longer speech by definition. This is dubious argumentation indeed.

Any standard for judging “harm” inflicted by a form of expression is going to be vague, somewhat subjective, and hardly measurable in any empirical sense. Libel “harms” a man’s reputation, his good name, which, I agree wholeheartedly, comprises a real injury to him. But how does one quantify it? And how does one say that this injury is greater than that which I perceive is inflicted by ubiquitous pornography?

Again, my point is that such questions cannot be answered a priori, so as to preclude debate about them; and that to debate them in a republic is ultimately to legislate upon them.

The fact that my “libertarian philosophy” has no “tradition” in the American political landscape (a statement that I don’t entirely agree with) does not mean that it is inherently an inferior concept. I don’t see where you’re going with that remark, unless it is to say, “Well, we shouldn’t do it that way, because my daddy didn’t do it that way, and his daddy didn’t do it that way....” The “traditional” way of doing things is not always the BEST way of doing things.

The reason I noted that libertarianism is alien to American political philosophy is to demonstrate that claiming the First Amendment to make libertarianism our guiding Legislation is to misuse said Amendment, and traduce said political philosophy. I am happy to argue the merits of libertarianism — a philosophy which has much to recommend to it — but will not stand for the usurpation of the American political tradition — my tradition — by another, lesser tradition.

The important thing to understand is that free speech cannot be absolute. My correspondent evades this reality by a semantic redefinition of certain kinds of speech. To speak libel is not to speak, according to him. But once we recognize that our laws admit of quite a variety of restrictions on what can be said and published, we are faced with the plain pulverizing fact that the specifics of these restrictions form the material for legitimate legislation.