The American Conservative

I notice something curious: we are constantly told by pro-SSM activists that conservative/religious fears of significant curtailment of religious liberty as the result of gay rights are paranoid. And yet, when things like this happen, we are told by these folks that it’s not really that big a deal, and besides, Christians deserve it for being bigots.

It’s a nasty little mind game. As I said, in the US, we have a First Amendment that will protect American religious schools in ways that the Canadian religious schools cannot be protected. But I do not doubt that in the years to come, gay-rights activists and their fellow travelers are going to put the screws to religious institutions as far as the law will allow, and that Barack Obama will give them pretty much what they want. He has shown in the HHS mandate case that religious liberty does not matter to him as much as satisfying the culture-war priorities of the left. I very much wish this fall’s election would be fought on the economy and foreign policy, but this president, by his move on the HHS mandate and his subsequent endorsement of gay marriage, has moved this issue to the forefront, at least for conservatives and others who are not confused by the game our opponents play, and who perfectly well understand what’s going on here.

Just keep all this in mind. The way the game works, they mount an attack across culture-war lines, then accuse conservatives of being culture-war aggressors. They even believe their own propaganda, which is as crucial to successfully prosecuting the culture war as getting non-combatants to believe it.

I too am tired of the culture war. But the culture warriors of the left are manifestly not tired of me and the people and institutions I care about.

UPDATE: The server crashed this morning as I was trying to update and expand this item. I tried to bring up the story of the Scorpion and the Frog. If you look at what’s happened to the Episcopal Church, you can perhaps see the same thing happening to society on SSM. First the Episcopal left asked for dialogue and tolerance, in the name of fairness. When they got that, and gained a foothold, next thing you know they were all about stamping out any kind of orthodoxy, because we cannot tolerate bigotry. Same deal is going to happen with SSM. What started out as a call for tolerance and fairness is going to end with attempts to suppress any thought or practice contrary to its orthodoxy, because to do any less would be to give quarter to bigotry, and unsafety.

I had to do about seven hours worth of driving yesterday, and used the time alone in the car to get caught up on my podcast and Mars Hill Audio Journal listening. One of the most interesting things I heard was the Fresh Air interview with the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who has written a much-discussed book, “When God Talks Back,” about the Vineyard Fellowship, and the Evangelical belief that one can have a two-way conversation with God in prayer. I found this exchange between Luhrmann and host Terry Gross to be particularly thought-provoking:

TERRY GROSS: So you said that there are certain consequences to believing that you are hearing God’s voice, to using your imagination to hear God’s voice and to have regular conversations with him. And let me just stop right here, and I know what I’ve said will be offensive to a lot of evangelical Christians because I’ve said that they’re imagining they’re hearing God’s voice, and they would probably say: No, I am hearing God’s voice.

So I’m not even sure what language to – what language would you use here, imagining or hearing?

LUHRMANN: You know, I would use both. It’s a recent part of American history that we treat the imagination as mere imagination. The church fathers thought that the imagination was the route to God, and if you were going – and the way that I think about it is that if you are going to represent a being that is not visible the way tables and chairs are visible, you need to use your imagination.

And the church talks about using the imagination. It’s just – you know, it just makes some Christians uncomfortable to actually use that word because of the connotations that the term has in early 21st-century America.

GROSS: Well, speaking of imagination, I mean, this might be an unfair comparison, but many children have imaginary friends. And at a certain age, that upsets their parents, and the parents have to explain to them that that friend doesn’t exist, and it’s time to outgrow the imaginary friend. And…

LUHRMANN: Right. And that’s a mistake, by the way.

GROSS: OK, if you’re a rationalist, you know, you would say: Well, what’s the difference between the imaginary friend that you’re supposed to outgrow and this approach to believing that, you know, God or Jesus is like your friend, your buddy, you’re talking to each other?

LUHRMANN: In some sense, none. It depends on your ontological stance, what you take to be externally real about the world. So the way that I think about it is that I, as an anthropologist, I don’t have the authority to pronounce on whether God is real or God is not real. I don’t feel like I have a horse in that race.

I don’t feel I have the authority to say whether God showed up to somebody or did not. I do think that if God speaks to someone, God speaks to the human mind. And I can say something about the social, cultural and psychological features of what that person is experiencing.

And so when people experience God as a companion in their lives, they’re using their imagination the same way a child is using the imagination to experience an imaginary companion. But at the same – but, you know, that person doesn’t experience God as being imaginary, because they have a different ontological stance. And, you know, who are we to pronounce on that?

To restate her point: if God exists, then He must communicate to us through the mind, which is to say, through the faculty of imagination. (An interesting aside: notice that Jesus did not teach so much through proposition as through analogies and metaphors.) It is to be expected, then, that at least some people who claim God speaks to them are not merely generating these thoughts in their imaginations by themselves, but are experiencing actual communication by God through their imaginations. If, however, you have a prior ontological commitment to atheism, then any experiential claim of God cannot be interpreted as anything other than a purely psychological phenomenon. There is no neutral, wholly empirical way of interpreting these claims and verifying their nature. Different churches have methods, techniques, and rules of discernment, but all presuppose that God does exist, and sometimes chooses to communicate to his people.

This is an interesting bit as well:

LUHRMANN: Absolutely. So I think that there, again, you know, if God speaks God is speaking through the human mind. And one of the features of the human mind is that when we pay attention to our minds differently our experience changes. And what I saw was this millennia-long tradition of using the imagination to experience God by attending intensely to this internal world. It becomes more alive. It feels more real. And occasionally I noticed it kind of almost slipped over the edge of that boundary that defines the difference between the inner and the outer and people would hear God speak audibly or they would see something that somebody else wouldn’t see. I don’t think that has anything to do with ontology. If there is a God, God is choosing those moments when you have that unusual experience. But the psychological technique of prayer is independent of religion. It is a way of changing the inner experience of the person.

She is saying that it’s a psychological fact that we can train our mind to experience the world differently. How are we to know that the Vineyard people haven’t trained their mind to perceive a level of reality that eludes common experience? The other day I read something the Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard wrote about how Tibetan lamas don’t consider their own meditative experiences to be entirely subjective, but rather that their many years of practicing spiritual disciplines have revealed to them objective facts about reality that can be experienced to those who submit to the discipline. Orthodox Christian monks on Mount Athos report the same thing from within their tradition. The question is, what should we consider as normative human experience? Are there things that we do not see and experience because we do not believe? Are there things we can only see if we believe?

Nearly 20 years ago, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead penned one of the most talked-about essays of the year, with her Atlantic piece provocatively titled, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” Oldsters will recall that the then-vice president had caused a huge stir by faulting the TV show “Murphy Brown” for portraying the choice made by its title character, an unmarried professionally successful woman, to have a child outside of marriage, and without a father at home. Quayle got pounded mercilessly by the cognoscenti, but Dafoe Whitehead said the social science was on his side. Excerpt:

Despite this growing body of evidence, it is nearly impossible to discuss changes in family structure without provoking angry protest. Many people see the discussion as no more than an attack on struggling single mothers and their children: Why blame single mothers when they are doing the very best they can? After all, the decision to end a marriage or a relationship is wrenching, and few parents are indifferent to the painful burden this decision imposes on their children. Many take the perilous step toward single parenthood as a last resort, after their best efforts to hold a marriage together have failed. Consequently, it can seem particularly cruel and unfeeling to remind parents of the hardships their children might suffer as a result of family breakup. Other people believe that the dramatic changes in family structure, though regrettable, are impossible to reverse. Family breakup is an inevitable feature of American life, and anyone who thinks otherwise is indulging in nostalgia or trying to turn back the clock. Since these new family forms are here to stay, the reasoning goes, we must accord respect to single parents, not criticize them. Typical is the view expressed by a Brooklyn woman in a recent letter to The New York Times: “Let’s stop moralizing or blaming single parents and unwed mothers, and give them the respect they have earned and the support they deserve.”

Such views are not to be dismissed. Indeed, they help to explain why family structure is such an explosive issue for Americans. The debate about it is not simply about the social-scientific evidence, although that is surely an important part of the discussion. It is also a debate over deeply held and often conflicting values. How do we begin to reconcile our long-standing belief in equality and diversity with an impressive body of evidence that suggests that not all family structures produce equal outcomes for children? How can we square traditional notions of public support for dependent women and children with a belief in women’s right to pursue autonomy and independence in childbearing and child-rearing? How do we uphold the freedom of adults to pursue individual happiness in their private relationships and at the same time respond to the needs of children for stability, security, and permanence in their family lives? What do we do when the interests of adults and children conflict? These are the difficult issues at stake in the debate over family structure.

Today, two decades later, in the Washington Post, Isabel Sawhill repeats the claim. Sawhill is a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution. Excerpt:

I’ve been studying single mothers since long before “Murphy Brown” was on the air. In a study I co-authored with Adam Thomas, I put them into hypothetical households with demographically similar unmarried men who, in principle, would be good marriage partners. Through this virtual matchmaking, we showed that child poverty rates would fall by as much as 20 percent in an America with more two-parent households.

In later research, Ron Haskins and I learned that if individuals do just three things — finish high school, work full time and marry before they have children — their chances of being poor drop from 15 percent to 2 percent. Mitt Romney has cited this research on the campaign trail, but these issues transcend presidential politics. Stronger public support for single-parent families — such as subsidies or tax credits for child care, and the earned-income tax credit — is needed, but no government program is likely to reduce child poverty as much as bringing back marriage as the preferable way of raising children.

More:

The government has a limited role to play. It can support local programs and nonprofit organizations working to reduce early, unwed childbearing through teen-pregnancy prevention efforts, family planning, greater opportunities for disadvantaged youth or programs to encourage responsible relationships.

But in the end, Dan Quayle was right. Unless the media, parents and other influential leaders celebrate marriage as the best environment for raising children, the new trend — bringing up baby alone — may be irreversible.

The trick is learning how to combine mercy with justice — justice in this case meaning the right ordering of things. Anyway, the broader point: Culture precedes politics. Creating a culture of life — by which I mean a culture amenable to the healthy thriving of the individual as well as the overall community — means today raising your children to look at what the mainstream media and culture-makers celebrate as good, and doing the exact opposite. As Flannery O’Connor put it, with typical unsentimentality:

“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

Someone wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1947, asking if he, the correspondent, should be a writer. Here is the response. Cowley says that asking the question is a good sign that you aren’t cut out to be a writer. That seems harsh to me, but essentially correct. Professional writers are often asked this question by young people, and the correct answer — the answer that young potential scribes do not want to hear — is a version of the one Cowley gave. (Rainer Maria Rilke’s version was, of course, more poetic, but essentially the same). I didn’t want to hear it when I was 20 years old and asking the same question, and reading in Rilke that the only reason you should try to be a writer is if you felt that you had to write to live — by which he meant: if writing is to you like eating and breathing. Only that depth of feeling would give you the inner resources to endure what you would have to endure to make a career out of writing.

Cowley’s point, obviously, is that to question whether you should be a professional writer is to reveal that you don’t have what it takes to be one. Again, I think that takes things a bit too far, but he’s more right than wrong. I recently spent a year unable to write professionally because of the unusual and unanticipated requirements of the job I held, and it was, in some respects, the worst year of my adult life. But it taught me in my bones the truth of Cowley’s and Rilke’s insights. That I could not write for publication felt like a deformation and a perversity. It was as if someone had come into the house during the night, broken both my legs, and told me to walk. Until I left that job for a position here at TAC, I fought depression and anger. It was a miserable time, but it reinforced my conviction that writing isn’t simply a job for me, and never would be: it is a vocation.

So, when people ask me, “How did you decide to become a writer?”, the smart-ass answer is also the most honest answer: “It’s all I can do.” I have been very, very blessed to have had the opportunities to make a living at it, and I owe to the people who have been my patrons — I mean, those who hired me when they could have hired anybody else — a far greater debt than I can ever repay. Nobody makes it as a writer, or any kind of artist, on talent and passion alone, and anybody who thinks so is full of himself, and full of other things besides.

It makes me nervous when young people ask me if they should become journalists. Nervous, because I’ve had a good career as a journalist, but I also know what they don’t, or don’t wish to: that there has not been a more treacherous time — in living memory, I mean — to enter the field. And yet, people still do. I would say, then, that you have to have the same kind of passion for journalism, and writing journalistically, that Cowley and Rilke say professional writers should have. In my generation of journalists, and older ones, I have known many people who wrote decent, serviceable prose. They rarely, if ever, wrote anything memorable, but they got the job of daily journalism done. For them, writing was a nine-to-five job, and there was work for them. Nowadays, though, I don’t think people who conceive of journalism as a nine-to-five job, as opposed to a vocation, will have the internal resources it will take to bear the stresses of a career in journalism.

Cowley offers great advice to the undergraduate regarding coursework to prepare one to be a writer. He advises against taking literature and composition courses, instead telling them to focus on courses in other fields of study (e.g., the sciences, languages), and study the techniques of writing on the side. This is great advice for an undergraduate tempted to major in journalism. I majored in journalism, and picked up two minors: in political science and philosophy. If I had it to do over again, I would have majored in either poli sci or philosophy, and minored in journalism, but still worked as hard as I did at the college newspaper. You really do need some basic courses in journalistic writing to introduce yourself to technique, and to the journalistic approach to storytelling. But I find that in my 33 years as a professional journalist, I have drawn more on what I learned in my politics and philosophy classes than what I learned in my journalism classes. Journalism classes taught me how to write (or, to be more precise, drew out and honed the writing talent within me), but the politics and philosophy classes gave me a perspective from which to interpret the world I was given to write about. When I was an undergraduate thinking of changing my major to journalism, an old friend C., a working journalist and my first mentor in the field, told me that her master’s degree in economics and finance had been as useful to her than her undergraduate degree in journalism, because they built on each other.

Among this blog’s readers are at least a few professional writers. I would love to know what lessons you’ve learned about writing as profession and vocation. If you have anything you’d like to share, please indicate how old you are, or at least how long you’ve been writing professionally.

(H/T: Sullivan).

 

 These photos from Marseille were so delectable I couldn’t choose. So, a double helping for you, at no extra charge!

I muchfully enjoyed former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett’s rant against Democratic lobbyist and fixer Lanny Davis, who had sniffed at Lovett for saying that he, Lanny Davis, in his abuse of language to shill for his clients, represented everything wrong with Washington. Lovett’s piece concluded thus:

Washington is filled with people making other people’s arguments for money. Anyone trying to do anything of good purpose is in a constant struggle to keep from drowning in the river of steaming bullshit served up by lobbyists and politicians and pundits and PR firms. They bend statistics, they do impressions of people who believe what they say, and all the while the country burns. And it is the height of arrogance to decry what’s happened to our politics when you are a bonded practitioner of what’s happened to our politics.

You want to be a pitchman for warlords? You want to carry the Devil’s water in Washington? Go for it. But just don’t tell me how to fu*king talk.

Michael Fumento’s unshirted broadside against the bug-eyed Right is pretty good too.

Once again, the March of Progress on gay rights flattens religious liberty, this time in Canada:

The Ontario provincial government has ignored months of behind-the-scenes negotiations by announcing Friday that all schools, religious or otherwise, will be required to host gay-straight alliances, Church sources say.

As part of the original Bill 13, which was intended to curb bullying in schools, the province included a provision for organizations with the name “gay-straight alliance or another name.”

However, the Ontario Assembly of Catholic Bishops had been working with the government to reach a compromise that would allow Catholic schools to focus on bullying in general rather than a specific group.

But late Friday afternoon, Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten said there would be no compromises.

“Schools need to be safe places for kids to be themselves — and for some kids, that means being able to name a club a gay-straight alliance,” Ms. Broten said. “I don’t think there’s anything radical about allowing students to name a club.”

You see how this works. If this were really about keeping kids safe from bullying, the Liberal government in Ontario would be satisfied with a general anti-bullying policy. Whenever you see “safety” brought into these discussions, you can be absolutely certain that “safety” is a wedge that pro-gay activists are using to outlaw or delegitimize any opposition to gay rights. It is not enough for these people to win; the opposition, religious or otherwise, must be crushed. Thus do we see gross illiberalism and anti-religious radicalism promoted as a liberal reform in Canada.

The First Amendment offers us Americans a substantial measure of protection from things like this. But make no mistake, insofar as religious institutions and individual believers can be bullied on this issue in the US, they will be. It’s coming.

The NYT has a story today about a North Carolina business that has suffered because of its stance in favor of gay marriage, leading up to the recent Amendment One vote there. Excerpt:

Hostile letters and e-mails poured into the company from customers canceling their business and demanding to be removed from its e-mail list. “I understand that your company donated $250,000 or so to the effort to ban the marriage amendment,” read one. “I am very concerned that with an increased visibility and acceptance of the gay and lesbian lifestyle, one of my children, who would have grown up and been happily married to a husband, could be tempted to the lesbian lifestyle.”

Another read: “I was excited to see your wares and expected a pleasant shopping experience. Instead I was accosted by your political views, which I do not share. It was very uncomfortable and unpleasant browsing with all those signs and T-shirts against amendment one, to the point where I had to leave.”

A third said, “Money you used to support this opposition came from my many purchases from your company and that is not O.K. with me,” adding, “I will look for my replacement pieces elsewhere.”

Several writers seemed more sad than angry. “Visiting Replacements Limited has always been one of my favorite treats,” said one. “I had the privilege of experiencing your beautiful store firsthand,” began another. Both said they would never return.

This goes both ways, of course. You will remember that in California, which is as socially liberal as North Carolina is socially conservative, business and individuals who supported Proposition 8, the referendum that successfully rolled back same-sex marriage (for a while, until the courts intervened), suffered in the same way. Remember the L.A. Mexican restaurant El Coyote, whose owner contributed $100 to the pro-Prop 8 campaign, and was subject to a boycott after that? It wasn’t just them, said the L.A. Times:

Bob Montoya, a manager at El Coyote, said customers have called and threatened to boycott the restaurant, but it does not appear to have affected business. Montoya said he thought a boycott, if one was called, was misguided, as the restaurant has a number of gay employees and has always been gay friendly.

“I”m gay and I work here, and I’ve been here for 31 years,” Montoya told The Times. “It’s gay friendly. People have been coming here for many years, gay and straight, families and everybody.”

Word of the boycott has spread around websites and Facebook. “We should put our money where our mouth AND support is AND NOT AT EL COYOTE,” says a posting on one activist’s website.

The Times also received a letter threatening a boycott of an El Pollo Loco whose owner apparently contributed to the Prop. 8 campaign.

Sonja Eddings Brown of ProtectMarriage.com said the boycott threats have extended beyond eateries.

“We have received calls today from our members in Greater Los Angeles and other parts of the state indicating that today their businesses are being hurt because they contributed money,” she said. “People who contributed have been receiving calls from people dropping their business with them.”

And remember the controversy at the California Musical Theater in Sacramento? A Mormon management executive there, Scott Eckern, had given $1,000 to the Prop 8 campaign, prompting a boycott call of the entire theater from gays. After making a groveling public apology, he still had to resign. According to the NYT story:

The Web site antigayblacklist.com published a list of data from electiontrack.com of anyone who contributed more than $1,000 to Yes on Prop. 8. The site calls for activists not to patronize the businesses for which donors work.

So yeah, this thing goes both ways. Don’t forget that. Though I favor traditional marriage, I wouldn’t cease to patronize a business whose owners took the opposite stance. I believe boycotts are certainly a morally licit form of political protest, but I think you have to have a pretty damn high bar to clear before you set out to ruin a man or a woman’s livelihood because you don’t agree with their political views.

People love to say, “I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” But they don’t mean it.

From an irresistible collection:

Here’s the title track of “Julie’s Sixteenth Birthday.” Follow the link above to check out The Braillettes, the Faith Tones, and the incomparably sexy Igor & Natasha.

UPDATE: A Cambridge, Mass., reader sends this shot in from a record store in Boston: