Halloween: the Health Police's favorite holiday

Halloween is the Health Police's favorite night out--the Safety Nazis' National Holiday. Here's Lenore Skinazy, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it's probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.

Take "stranger danger," the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the "Bewitched" and "Brady Bunch" costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

Imagine that. No one killed. Ever. Read the rest here.

Why a Republican victory on Tuesday won't solve our problems: An introduction to Red Toryism

As soon as we get this Tea Party thing out of our system this Tuesday--which is simply the attempt to replace one form of political individualism with another--let's talk about Philip Blond and Red Toryism.

Blond, a British cultural critic who runs Res Publica, is an influential British thinker who is closely associated with Prime Minister David Cameron. His economic views, which incorporate Catholic social teaching and the economic thought of Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, are the basis of "Red Toryism."

Red Toryism rejects both the valueless, plutocratic capitalism that infects much of conservative thought as well as the quasi-moralist socialism articulated by the left. The right, he says, is controlled by monopoly capitalism that concentrates capital in the hands of a small economic elite, while welfare state socialism plays its part in the system of monopoly capitalism by trying to redistribute some of the capital of the economic elite back down to the poor and lower middle classes through a huge government bureaucracy. They are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the capitalist system, each with its captive constituency that returns it to office again and again--and gives each a turn in power from time to time, as is about to happen in America.

There's got to be something more than a Republican Party that takes money from the middle class and gives it to the rich in the form of corporate welfare to assuage it's big corporation constituency and a Democratic Party that takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor in the form of socialist welfare to get re-elected.

Blond is leading a movement in Britain which advocates steering a course between capitalist conservatism, which serves the interests of big business, and welfare state socialism, which serves the interests of big government.

The original proponents of this "middle way" between monopoly capitalism and state socialism were Chesterton and Belloc, who called it "Distributism." They advocated this view from the offices of the periodical the New Witness (later, the Eye Witness). The principles of Distributism were set forth most notably in two books: Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity and Belloc's Servile State. It stressed the important of individual ownership of property as the central economic principle and the institution of marriage and the family as the central social unit.

Many of the ideas underlying Distributism can be seen in the various agrarian movements of the 20th century and is central to the writings of the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

A third political way like Red Toryism is simply absent in America, but the possibility of something like it arising is latent in the social conservative movement. Social conservatives play the same role in the national Republican Party as minorities play in the national Democratic Party: they are in thrall to their respective parties, who use them for their own political purposes but in large part don't really have any serious intention of advancing their agendas.

The social policy of Red Toryism, being a fundamentally Christian movement (Blond is a trained academic theologian whose mentor was John Milbank of Radical Orthodoxy fame), is understandably conservative (in the true sense of that word). Blond explains his pilgrimage from the left:

My leftish affiliation ended. Many of my left-wing friends suddenly seemed to me to be right-wing….Despite all their rhetoric, all they really believed in was unlimited choice and unrestricted personal freedom. They seemed in important ways to have been stripped of integral values and to have embraced a rootless cultural relativism…They seemed to delight in abortion, for example, and made a fetish to choose, as if this were a real exercise of human freedom and unimpeded will, but they hated fox hunting because they thought it was cruel.

In America, Distributism is currently being propounded at the Distributist Review, which has recently reviewed Blond's book.

If we're going to have a real revolution, it's going to have to be into something better, not just one of two versions of same political individualism.

The World According to San Francisco

HT: Newmark's Door.

Yale sex letter to students

Looks like refugees from Woodstock are running Yale University now. Students wanting to attend an institution of higher learning run by responsible adults should be looking elsewhere.

More WWJD Constitutional Misinterpretation Sightings

The WWJD (What Would Jefferson Do?) School of Constitutional Interpretation has reared its ugly head again in the 2010 campaign. Preachy proponents of the preposterous view that Thomas Jefferson's sentiments expressed in a letter to Baptists written years after the writing of the Constitution are somehow binding on Constitution interpretation are reported to be lecturing another candidate on how he should ignore the plain language and the clear intent of the First Amendment in favor of the secularist view that the First Amendment means exactly the opposite of what it says.

This time, it's happening in Denver, Colorado.

If you are worried about being accosted by one of these people (careful of being wrestled to the ground and having your head stomped on), just be sure to carry with you an actual copy of the Bill of Rights as well as a list of the states that had established religions at the time of the Constitution's signing.

Once they begin their sermon, just begin reciting it and chanting the names of the states. After they hear it several times, they will begin sputtering about "separation of church and state" as if it was part of the language of the Amendment even though its not.

After a few more minutes, they will begin babbling something about the 14th Amendment and how it somehow applied to the states the promise that established state religions would not be disestablished by Congress, resulting in exactly the opposite effect.

Keep reciting the Amendment and chanting the state names until they have become fully logically incoherent. As soon as they are laying there, panting on the ground, exhausted from their attempts to justify their position in the face of the rational, linguistic, and historical facts, just fold up your copy of the Bill of Rights and stick it in their pocket on the distant chance that they will actually read it and realize how bone-headed their position is.

It's all you can do.

New research on being gay

People born gay do not have an innate tendency to overstate the evidence that people are born gay, according to studies conducted by people who are born gay who deny that they have this innate tendency.

Not really, but we expect there will be such a study out sometime soon. In the meantime, you can read a book showing that gays are born that way by someone who is gay and thinks he was born that way.

The secular salvation offered by Political Correctness

James Kalb, the author of the The Tyranny of Liberalism, posts the transcript of a recent speech at the H. L. Mencken Club on Political Correctness. As Kalb points out, Political Correctness operates as a secular religion, offering its adherents a sort of worldly salvation:

What it relates to, in fact, is a sort of new religion: the gospel of inclusiveness. It's a religion of salvation, and what PC stands for is the salvation of the world. It's going to destroy the demons of the past--hatred, bigotry, division--and open up a new age of freedom, equality, unity, world peace, and unbounded horizons.

It's heaven on the one side, hell on the other. With that in mind, it's not surprising people are willing to do and say strange things for the sake of political correctness. Nothing could possibly be more important than doing whatever it tells us to do.

The new gospel, we are told, is the same as the old, only better. It completes and corrects the previous version, and cuts out a lot of stuff that's not really to the point. I went to a wedding recently in a rather beautiful Episcopalian church in an old Pennsylvania town. Instead of the Stations of the Cross on the wall, they had the stations of the UN Millennium Development Goals--gender equality, fighting HIV, global partnership, and the rest.

Amen, Hallelujah!

And what is Political Correctness and how does it work? Here is where you start hearing the sound of goose stepping:

Political correctness is the gospel of radical inclusion. It's treating all identities and ways of being as equal. As such, it follows quite naturally from the present-day liberal principle of equality, that everyone's as good as everyone else.

That principle is comprehensive, and it's invincibly strong. It's not just a claim that all human beings are equal on basic points, so they all have souls, or they all have the right not to be murdered, beaten, robbed, or swindled. It's a claim that everyone, or at least every kind of person, has equal, or at least equally valuable, capacities and ways of acting. Every way of living is as good as every other way of living, and if there are distinctions they can't be distinctions of value. We're all equally special, each in our own way.

If you don't agree you're a heretic. You've separated yourself not only from respectable society but probably the human race. It's people like you who are responsible for Auschwitz. That's why possible racism trumps actual murder. If you might be a racist, you can be murdered and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

The principle of comprehensive equality has to be as strong as it is because it's so evidently false. People and groups are obviously different in all sorts of ways, some of which matter a great deal. So to exist at all the principle has to be a super-principle that crushes all obstacles. Otherwise the normal competition of ideas would wipe it out.

That's why you're suspect if you moderate the principle in any way. If you believe that individuals differ with regard to characteristics like intelligence, even though groups don't, or if you believe that groups differ in some ways, but the differing qualities are equal in value, you're under suspicion. Anything short of simple-minded adhesion means you aren't going to be reliable.

The only "Diversity" these people are interested in is in the different flavors of Kool-Aid available for you to drink in order to believe it.

Read the rest here.

Where are the Thought Police when you need them?

What do evolutionary scientists do when they find a kind of amber that is supposed to be about 140 million years old in 320 year old rock? They deny the chemical evidence, says Jay Wile:

So what does an evolutionist do when a fossil find contradicts his treasured hypothesis? He just waves the magic wand of “convergent evolution.” Remember, similarities between species are strong evidence for evolution, except when the hypothesis of evolution cannot accommodate them. When that happens, the similarities are a result of “convergent evolution,” a process by which species have similarities based on sheer coincidence alone.

So in this case, the fact that the amber has all the chemical features of being made by an angiosperm must be ignored. Instead, because the amber appears “too soon” in the fossil record for angiosperms, we must assume that it was made by something other than an angiosperm. Furthermore, we must assume that the similarities between its chemistry and the chemistry of resin made by angiosperms is the result of sheer coincidence.

That’s the kind of mental gymnastics it takes to be an evolutionist today.

I didn't know anyone could say these things anymore. Isn't it illegal or something? Where are the thought police? Are they on coffee break?

I don't know what this country is coming to.

What did the Courier-Journal know and when did they know it?

"Don't worry about it. Everything's okay."

Those are the words that an attorney representing Jack Conway's brother in a drug investigation used in a conversation with one of the investigators, assuring him after the detective told the attorney he was scared of losing his job because he had tipped off Matthew Conway, hopelessly compromising the investigation.

But the words could just as easily have been spoken by the Louisville Courier-Journal to U. S. Senate candidate Conway himself after the paper apparently did everything it could to downplay the issue at a crucial time in a close campaign that the whole nation is watching.

Did Jack Conway illegally interfere in the investigation of his brother? It's hard to tell until more information comes out, but what is equally disturbing is the question of whether the state's largest newspaper was trying to minimize the public's attention to the issue.

Just go read at the story, printed on the worst news day of the week (Saturday) when the least number of people would notice it. It is one of the most confused and contorted news stories I have ever read. You have to read it several times even to figure out what is going on, and mentions Jack Conway's involvement mostly at the end and even then it appears to do it reluctantly.

Here are the facts as I have gleaned them from having suffered through about fifteen readings of what has to be one of the worst-written news stories of the year:

According to the story, Matthew Conway (hereinafter, "Conway"), an assistant Commonwealth's attorney, became the target, while serving as a Jefferson County prosecutor, of an investigation on drug use or trafficking. Conway is the brother of the state's chief law enforcement official, Attorney General Jack Conway. Conway was not only tipped off about the investigation, he was allowed by one investigator to read the complain filed against him. He also received a two day heads up that his house would be investigated, and lied, as did one of the detectives, to police about the investigation.

Conway has never been charged.

And what was brother Jack's involvement? Jack found out about it when a supporter was tipped off by one of the detectives in a restaurant. Conway called his brother and said they needed to meet. The next day, there was a meeting in Jack's home with his brother and an attorney. The attorney then called the Louisville Police Chief to "report" the detective.

"Report" him? For what? For tipping them off? That's rather strange. Or was he "reporting" him for investigating Jack's brother?

At some point between the meeting in Jack's home and March 10, brother Matthew's attorney called one of the detectives who had breached secrecy in the case and asked him if he was investigating Jack's brother. According to the detective, Conway's attorney called him back two or three times, at which point the attorney assured the detective, now scared for his job, "Don't worry about it. Everything's okay."

What does that mean? And by what authority could an attorney for the subject of an investigation tell one of the detectives investigating him that "Everything's okay"? Who was the attorney representing in his calls to the detective? Matthew? Or Jack?

In detective novel parlance, the whole thing smells to high heaven. And that's not the only thing that smells.

What is the Courier-Journal's response, given that it now has this information in its possession? To run the story on a Saturday, and to bury the details involving the Democratic candidate for U. S. Senate that it has editorially supported at the tail end of a long and convoluted news story.

I've written plenty of news stories in my time and I know how to write my lead--that's the sentence you start your news story with that includes as many of the most important and interesting facts of your story. The lead on this story was clear: you have a potential scandal involving a Senate candidate in a nationally covered race. And your headline is pretty clear too.

But what did the Courier use as its headline? "LMPD probes detectives who tipped off prosecutor under investigation." Huh? And here's the lead:

A Jefferson County prosecutor was tipped off by Louisville narcotics detectives twice in the past two years that he was under investigation for possible drug use or trafficking, according to police records obtained by The Courier-Journal.

That's the story? The detectives? Really? You've got people associated with a candidate of one of the nation's most closely watched political races calling detectives investigating his brother on drug charges and telling them "Everything's okay" and the story is about a couple of detectives?

You have to wait until the fourth paragraph to find out that there's any relation between the attorney being investigated and the candidate. And you have to read to the end of the story to find out that the candidate is actually involved in some way.

Ask yourself this question: If Rand Paul's name had been associated in some way with activities that appeared to be interfering with a criminal investigation of a sibling and it appeared that his connections had had an influence on the case, how fast do you think it would have taken the Courier-Journal to jump on the story? And how do you think the headline would have looked? Would the lead in the story have mentioned his name? Would you have had to read to the end of the story to find out the nature of Paul's involvement?

Not only is there a story here, but it not only involves Jack Conway. Thanks to its handling of it, the Courier-Journal has now made itself a part of the story. There a few questions they should be asked too:

• Was the news story intentionally hard to read?
• How long have they known about this story?
• Why did they run it on a Saturday?
• Why did they not include mention of Conway in the headline when it was obviously the most explosive aspect of the story?
• Why did they bury the comments about Conway late in the story?
• How would they have handled this story if it had involved Rand Paul instead of Jack Conway?

When you stop just reporting on events and get involved in them, you need to answer questions too.

HT: BluegrassBulletin.com

The WWJD School of Constitutional Interpretation

I have little use for Christine O'Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, partly because she sued one of the finest conservative organizations on the planet, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, for $6.9 million for "mental anguish" caused by alleged "gender-based discrimination." That and her record of public comment is not exactly impressive. And just by invoking tea party affiliation doesn't get you immunity from legitimate criticism.

All that being said, she's right in saying that the First Amendment does not contain the words (or the principle) "separation of church and state"--and she's right in thinking that it matters. And Rush Limbaugh was correct earlier this week in defending her.

But Ed Brayton, who fashions himself a voice of reason on church/state issues, is having none of it. Brayton loves to criticize David Barton for oversimplifying and misrepresenting the role of religion in America's founding. I agree with much of what Barton says, but Brayton is correct in criticizing some of Barton's overstatements and oversimplifications. He was also correct this week in criticizing the argument, often used by Barton and many evangelicals, purporting to demonstrate a connection between the taking of prayer out of public schools and the later decline in SAT scores. You couldn't invent a more egregious example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy--that the mere fact of something following another thing implies that the former is caused by the latter.

But secularists like Brayton don't usually just react to religionists like Barton and O'Donnell, they more commonly overreact, as Brayton does to O'Donnell's remarks:

Only an ignoramus, a moron or a demagogue would make such an argument. The fact that it doesn't use this exact phrase is irrelevant. Nowhere in the constitution will you find the phrases "separation of powers," "checks and balances" or "limited government." But no one in their right mind would claim that those concepts are not accurate descriptions of the purpose of various provisions in the Constitution.

Ed is right is saying that from the fact that something is not explicit it does not follow that it is not implicit. But if it is not explicit, you better have a good argument for saying that it is implicit. Brayton and his ilk argue that within the first, establishment clause is some latent church/state separatism. In other words the reason for preventing Congress from establishing an official national religion was because of the larger concern that government and religion be kept apart. Is this true? Was it really because they had a philosophical problem with mixing religion and government? What is the evidence for that?

How do we know this? Because the men who wrote the Constitution used those phrases to describe those provisions, just as Jefferson and Madison used the phrase "separation of church and state" to describe the purpose of the First Amendment. We can disagree about what exactly that phrase means or entails, of course; the founders themselves disagreed on it. But to pretend that it just isn't there at all is either idiotic or dishonest -- take your pick.

Somehow you just knew that Jefferson's name would come up in this regard, since he is the man who coined the phrase "separation between church and state" in a letter to Baptists. This is the most common argument for this position--just as the argument that the expression doesn't actually appear in the First Amendment is the most common argument on the other side.

Can we just map every belief Jefferson had onto the Constitution? Wouldn't that make everyone's life easier? This way, the courts could save themselves a lot of trouble trying to interpret it: they could just look at what Jefferson said, and presto, you've got your answer.

WWJD: What Would Jefferson Do?

It all sounds so simple. But while it is common to see the WWJD School of Constitutional Interpretation in operation, it's hard to find people who will actually man up and expressly admit to their assumption that we can simply take the views of a few of the Founders and simply map them onto the Constitutional language, as if the plain language of the Constitution itself didn't matter.

In fact, isn't this exactly the kind of reasoning that Brayton and his ilk criticize when they see it in the arguments of those who argue that America is a Christian nation? Can we just take some statements from the orthodox Christians involved in the Constitutional Convention and do the same thing?

So why did the writers of the Constitution try to prevent the establishment of a national church? If it was because of some commonly held belief among the delegates of the signatory states that government and religion should not be officially (or unofficially) connected, then why was it that, at the time of the signing of the Constitution, five of the thirteen colonies had established state churches? And two or three of them only disestablished during the course of the Constitutional deliberations. Only Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware never had established churches.

This fact is not even in dispute. No one denies it. But people like Brayton do the next best thing: they ignore it.

Now ask yourself a question: If the First Amendment was a general declaration of the principle of the "separation between church and state," then how could the delegates from these five states have approved it? If that was the understanding, how could they, being the representatives of states with established churches, have committed their states to it? The answer, of course, is they couldn't--and wouldn't--have. It is fairly clear that those who deliberated on the First Amendment did not have anything like the view of it that the WWJD School has.

In fact, isn't it more likely, given the historical context, that at least one of the reasons Congress was prohibited from establishing a national church was that it would have conflicted with the state churches then in existence--and with state and church entanglement that existed in the colonies? That view would make far more sense than the strict separationist view that now rules in the courts and on secularist blogs.

But one thing is perfectly clear--not only from the express language, but from the likely principle that the framers were working from: the First Amendment says nothing about what states themselves (as opposed to the federal government) should or can do. Nothing. It applies only to the federal government ("Congress shall make no law..."). Brayton can bellow all he wants about "ignoramuses, morons, and demagogues," but at least the ignoramuses, morons, and demagogues can read plain language.

Let's do something that most of the people who make these kinds of arguments hardly ever do. Let's review the actual language of the First Amendment as it pertains to religion:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...

In other words, the Congress (that's right, the Congress alone) can neither establish a national religion or prohibit people from doing religious things.

That's it.

If anything is clear from this amendment, it is that its chief purpose seems to be to restrict the federal government from being involved in the issue at all--one way or the other. After all, there are only two ways the federal government could conceivably be involved: through a) having an official religion itself and b) restricting some other religion(s). So the import of the text is pretty clear: "Federal government, don't have anything to do with religion. Don't have one of your own and don't do anything to hamper anyone else's." And yet from this language has been spawned all kinds of mutant legal progeny.

The First Amendment is a limitation on the federal government explicitly, and, far from imposing a limit on the states as to what they can or cant' do about religion, part of the reason for the amendment was to protect what the states could do in promoting and entangling themselives with religion from federal government limitation.

How do we know this? Why, because Jefferson said so:

In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the constitution independent of the power of the federal government. I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them, as the constitution found them, under the direction of state or church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies. (Second Inaugural Address)

Furthermore, Jefferson himself, as a state legislator, voted in favor of bills that entangled church and state.

WWJD. You gotta love it.

Gloria in Profundis

Carl Olsen, over at Ignatius Insight, the blog of Ignatius Press, the premier Catholic publishing house in the United States, re-ran Chesterton's great poem "Gloria in Profundis" the other day. Ignatius is the publisher of G. K. Chesterton's Complete Works. They're not finished with it, and I expect that it will take quite some time still to complete the set. I don't know, but I am guessing that they consider the project an act of publishing charity, since they can't be making much much money off of it and may even by losing money on the project. I hope they continue to plug along. It is a great work, and the publication of what is now the third book of Chesterton's poetry is not the least important part of it.

The poem itself is simply astounding. There are some lines here that you can just roll over in your mind and simply marvel at how someone could have put it that way. That's the way poetry is: it is a mode of expression, mostly foreign to we modern English who value our scientific abstractions so much, that allows us access to a whole other side of truth that prose can only inadequately negotiate.

Prose is restrictive in that it attempts to stuff all the content of a truth into its own limited mode of expression, lopping some of it off, like the Greek robber Procrustes, when it is too big in order to fit within the constraints of the words by which we may attempt to articulate it. It is prescriptive and reductionist. Poetry, on the other hand, does not require the truth to restrict itself to our own pitiful ability to tell it. It is descriptive and open-ended. It allows us to see, not by shrinking reality to a size that fits our field of vision, but by calling us to an acknowledgment of how great is the world, and how small is our ability to either comprehend or articulate it. The greater the poet, the more inadequate he knows he is before the magnitude of the thing he attempts to express. Through prose we ask truth to bow the knee to our own limitations. Through poetry, we bow the knee before the greatness of all that we know we cannot know.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The poem expresses a theme Chesterton returns to over and over again: the unlikely and startling truth of the Incarnation. Read it and marvel:

Gloria in Profundis
G.K. Chesterton

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all—
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

Read Carl's post here.

Using positive thinking to save the Crystal Cathedral

The "Crystal Cathedral," the Rev. Robert Schuller's conduit for his message the positive thinking can solve all problems, is going bankrupt. Apparently, they haven't been thinking positively enough about their finances.

I remember the controversy when the Crystal Cathedral was built. After weeks of derision about the amount of money spent on the place, Schuller responded, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Several days later, the Los Angeles Times ran Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad's cartoon showing a cloud over the Crystal Cathedral, out of which a big boulder had been hurled.

You had to laugh.