In the next issue of TAC, I’ll have an essay about the Prince of Wales as a Traditionalist. Meanwhile, The Atlantic’s site has excerpts from a landmark speech Charles delivered at Georgetown last year, at a conference whose speakers included Wendell Berry. From the Prince’s speech:

However, the really big issue we need to consider is how conventional, agri-industrial techniques are able to achieve the success they do, and how we measure that success. And here I come to the aspect of food production that troubles me most. The well-known commentator on food matters Michael Pollan pointed out recently that, so far, the combined market for local and organic food, both in the United States and Europe, has only reached around two or three percent of total sales. And the reason, he says, is quite simple. It is the difficulty in making sustainable farming more profitable for producers and sustainable food more affordable for consumers.

With so much growing concern about this, my International Sustainability Unit carried out a study into why sustainable food production systems struggle to make a profit, and how it is that intensively produced food costs less. The answer to that last question may seem obvious, but my ISU study reveals a less apparent reason. It looked at five case studies and discovered two things: firstly, that the system of farm subsidies is geared in such a way that it favors overwhelmingly those kinds of agricultural techniques that are responsible for the many problems I have just outlined; and secondly, that the cost of that damage is not factored into the price of food production. Consider, for example, what happens when pesticides get into the water supply. At the moment, the water has to be cleaned up at enormous cost to consumer water bills; the primary polluter is not charged. Or take the emissions from the manufacture and application of nitrogen fertilizer, which are potent greenhouse gases. They, too, are not costed at source into the equation.

This has led to a situation where farmers are better off using intensive methods and where consumers who would prefer to buy sustainably produced food are unable to do so because of the price. There are many producers and consumers who want to do the right thing, but as things stand, doing the right thing is penalized.

I said in the previous entry that watching the depressing GOP debate tonight, in which Santorum and Romney, one of whom will be the GOP nominee, fell all over themselves to declare themselves ready to attack Iran, it seems that for me, this election is coming down to voting to protect religious freedom, or voting for war. Let me explain what that means.

A vote for the Republican nominee is a vote for a bellicose foreign policy conducted by a president and a party that learned nothing — nothing! — from the Iraq experience. I find it very, very hard to imagine voting for such a candidate. It must be admitted, however, that Obama has not ruled out war against Iran either, though it is reasonable to believe he would be much less willing to cross that line than either Santorum or Romney.

I would have been satisfied to sit this race out, or to vote third party — or, in an extreme case, vote for Obama to keep someone like Newt Gingrich from the White House. But the religious freedom fight over the HHS rule changed that. I am not against contraception, but I found the position the administration took, and the way it handled the controversy, chilling. It told me that when it got right down to it, the Obama administration would stick a shiv in the back of religious institutions to please the cultural left. Given what I take to be the likelihood that the Supreme Court will mandate same-sex marriage at some point in the next eight years, I am genuinely worried about the impact that will have on the liberties of religious schools, houses of worship, and other institutions that dissent on gay marriage. And don’t start with this nonsense that there is no substantial religious liberty questions at issue here. As Thomas Berg wrote on the SCOTUS Blog:

Unfortunately, courts that have found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage have been blind to the range of religious-liberty issues.  Like Judge Walker, the California Supreme Court in In re Marriage Cases (2008) found that same-sex civil marriage “will not impinge upon the religious freedom of” anyone, for two reasons: “no religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples, and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs.”  The first reason overlooks the reach of antidiscrimination and public-accommodations laws; the second indefensibly limits religious-freedom concerns to the church ceremony and the clergyperson.

It’s understandable that judges ruling on gay marriage would avoid opining on the whole range of possible conflicts with religious liberty.  Courts by nature discuss only the precise issues before them.  But the narrow judicial references also reflect that constitutional doctrine on the free exercise of religion has become quite weak.  Both the U.S. Supreme Court, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), and the California Supreme Court, under the state constitution, have held that courts should not order an accommodation from “laws of general applicability” that are formally neutral toward religion.  Presumably, this includes laws prohibiting discrimination against same-sex couples.

Therefore, once the California Supreme Court ordered same-sex marriage, voters could understandably lack any confidence that religious-liberty concerns would ultimately be addressed and given weight.

After HHS, it is not irrational to be concerned that in its policies, and in the judges it appoints to the federal bench, the Obama administration will give little or no weight to religious liberty concerns. And for the religiously observant, that’s not nothing. I find it hard to imagine minimizing this concern in my mind when election day rolls around.

But war with Iran is not nothing either.

UPDATE: Here’s a thought experiment for you. Let’s say that the Republican presidential candidate this fall had a Ron Paul view of war, and was clearly the candidate far less likely to go to war with Iran, if elected. But he also had a strong view on gay marriage, and was likely to appoint judges, to the Supreme Court and throughout the federal system, who do not see a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. A vote for this Republican would mean a significantly lower chance of war with Iran, but a significantly higher chance that same-sex marriage would not become the law of the land for decades.

Would it be worth it to you to vote for this Republican, then? Would you sacrifice the prospect of full “civil rights” for gay folks for the sake of avoiding war with Iran? If not, why not?

If this is in any way a difficult issue for you to think through, then you might be on your way to understanding what religious conservatives are facing. We are looking at the possibility of taking enormous and significant and permanent hits to the liberty, even the existence, of our religious institutions, and, in turn, the way traditional Christianity is regarded in the public square. It is not a mere inconvenience, as so many of you seem to think. I encourage you to answer my question posed above.

Getting ready to start. I should have a cocktail at the ready, and sip every time the word “contraception” comes up.

UPDATE: Santorum is so, so much better in these things than when the debates first started.

UPDATE.1: Mitt: “It this program so critical that it’s worth borrowing money from China to fund it? If not, I’m going to get rid of it.” Nice line. At this point, though, it’s hard to take anything they say literally.

John King asks Ron Paul why his latest ad calls Rick Santorum a fake. Said Paul, “Because he’s a fake.” Hilarious! And then Paul backs up what he said. Pretty effective.

(But why is Paul making a big deal about foreign aid votes? It’s a tiny sliver of the federal budget.)

Ah, but Santorum had a strong comeback. “We had a strong record in a tough state to be a conservative,” he said. Unlike representing a district in Texas.

UPDATE.2:  What the heck is Newt talking about, with this “modern management system”? Is this his latest Big Idea? Did this come from the Tofflers? And why is Gingrich now swearing off “class warfare,” given that he aired that Michael Moore-ish anti-Romney video in South Carolina?

UPDATE.3: I agree with Romney on the earmark process, but what on earth can the President do about earmarks? He can’t tell Congress not to do them.

“While I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere,” Mitt said to Santorum. Nice zing. But good grief, how many times has Romney brought up the Olympics tonight?

UPDATE.4: Andrew Sullivan is right:

8.33 pm. Boos, sneers, gotchas … all about earmarks, which is a meaningless isue without a line item veto, which Rick and Mitt agree on. Newt eventually calls Romney on his bullshit. In the end, Ron Paul managed something of a win. But it was a confusing, petty, cat-fight. They all lost. I would have turned off the TV by now if I weren’t being paid to keep watching.

UPDATE.5: Notice how Mitt Romney is completely ignoring John King’s actual question, about the lack of private capital for managed bankruptcy?

UPDATE.6: Romney and Gingrich ripping Obama hard on freedom of religion. Romney especially strong.

Santorum’s attempt to turn the contraception question into an issue of bearing children out of wedlock was pretty weak. But he had a great line: “Here’s a difference between me and the Left: just because I’m talking about it doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.”

Romney gave a great answer about the importance of the traditional family to the strength of American society. What, though, does a president have to do with this? Honest question. I like what Romney says very much, but what could he, or any president, do to build up the family?

UPDATE.7: Santorum is flailing, being caught up trying to defend various Senate votes.

UPDATE.8: Santorum: “Michael Dukakis balanced the budget for 10 years. Does that make him qualified to be president? I don’t think so.” Yow! Great line. And Santorum had a plausible response as to why he supported Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey. I don’t think it’s entirely true, but it’s plausible.

UPDATE.9: Now they’re onto defense spending. Romney wants to expand the military. All of them do, except for Ron Paul. It drives me nuts, these guys. How the hell are we going to pay for it? Twenty percent of the federal budget goes to defense. But see, the Republicans are going to cut taxes too, haven’t you heard? How are we going to get spending under control if we don’t tackle defense too?

UPDATE.10: So, Mitt says that if we vote for him, we’ll go to war with Iran before we allow it to have nuclear weapons. Santorum agrees. Just so we’re clear about that.

UPDATE.11: So, candidates, should we arm the Syrian opposition?

Santorum: I’m not going to answer that, except to say Obama is handling it badly, because he’s chicken, and there’s going to be an apocalypse because of it. 

Gingrich: I’m not going to answer that, except to say we need to replace the EPA and expand offshore drilling, and Obama is bad.

Romney: I’m not going to answer that, except Obama is bad, and so is Iran. Furthermore… [At which point Mrs. Dreher accidentally bumped into the DirecTV box and cut off the satellite transmission, ending the debate for me tonight. I cannot thank her enough for this.]

 UPDATE.12: One point that I want to make, via Matt Yglesias’s Twitter feed: when that peacock jingo Mitt Romney said that under Obama, if you’re America’s enemy, you’re safe, he conveniently forgot the late Mr. Osama bin Laden. Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich are such frauds on this stuff.

UPDATE.13: OK, one more, this from Andrew Sullivan. Amen and amen:

9.40 pm. Santorum really does seem to be implying that Obama has some kind of secret agenda vis-a-vis Iran. And he pretty obviously would launch a massive war on Iran. We’re hearing the kind of language we heard after 9/11. Exactly the same language; exactly the same arguments; exactly the same paranoia.

There seems to be no memory of the Iraq war at all. It never happened. There was no error. There is nothing to explain. And yet they do not seem to realize that that catastrophic war is the reason Barack Obama is president.

For me, this election is shaping up to having to decide between protecting religious freedom, and going to war.

From Matt Bai’s portrait of the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a compulsive public masturbator who is now in prison on morals charges:

What really agonizes Ritter is that Americans seem to care about his forays into chat rooms, or about Michael Jackson’s doctor or the Kardashians’ wedding, but not about the moral crisis that Iraq unleashed on the land. They keep talking to Scott Ritter about justice for what he has done, and yet no one is paying for the larger crimes he believes were perpetrated against the society.

“Everybody who lied about the war got rewarded,” Ritter said. “Because they played the game. Tell the truth about the war, you don’t get rewarded.” He paused. “And then, you know, let’s be frank — you compound it with me shooting myself in the foot on personal, behavioral issues.” An awkward moment passed between us. “I’ll just ask the fundamental question,” Ritter said, looking at me squarely across the table. “My personal missteps — how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.”

It’s clear from this story that Scott Ritter has problems. Big problems. He’s a pervert who has earned his stint in jail. His logic in the above passage is a non sequitur. Boo, Scott Ritter!

Still, it’s interesting to contemplate part of his point here: that no prominent figures who argued for the war in Iraq have suffered for the disaster they visited upon this country. Rick Santorum, a big and unrepentant Iraq War hawk, a senator who voted for the war, is a leading candidate for the GOP nomination. Mitt Romney likes every position on the Iraq War, and has among his elite national security advisors a couple of men — Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan — who were leading Iraq War proponents among the policy elite. The fact that Iraq isn’t even an issue in the GOP primary race tells you that the American public, or at least GOP voters, aren’t interested in learning any lessons from the Iraq debacle.

Again, none of this has anything to do with why Scott Ritter is in jail. But yeah, the jailed masturbator is right: America seems to have no problem with allowing the US foreign policy, military, and intellectual elite who led the country into this disaster to get away with it. Which, if you think about it, is truly perverse.

Andrew Sullivan makes a reasonable point:

I conscientiously dissent from the Magisterium on marriage equality, contraception, and women and married priests. But I publicly acknowledge that I am dissenting and this is not the hierarchy’s view and that I am not representing the Magisterium. Santorum, it seems to me, needs to be just as explicit in his statement that he dissents from his own church on the question of the inviolable dignity of the human person. He is advocating crimes “deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles”. He is proposing to “break” a human person, without even due process. He is standing as the publicly Catholic foe of human dignity.

What’s he talking about? Santorum supports torture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns torture:

2297Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, andsterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.⁹¹

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

Joe Carter is worth reading on the evasions certain pro-torture Catholics use to justify the unjustifiable.

I hope the moderator of tonight’s debate asks Rick Santorum how he squares his support for torture with his Catholicism. How does one hold the line on contraception, but ignore the line on torture?

O Diversity! O Sensitivity! Teach us thy ways:

The Army is ordering its hardened combat veterans to wear fake breasts and empathy bellies so they can better understand how pregnant soldiers feel during physical training.

This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.

Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.

Look upon us, ye enemies of America, and tremble!:

(H/T: Mark Shea, who asks, “Where’s Patton when you need him?”)

From time out of mind, the idea that marriage constitutes the union between one man and one woman has been the unquestioned standard in our civilization. Same-sex marriage has only been on the national radar since 1993, when a Hawaii court ruled that the state had to demonstrate just cause for why marriage ought to be denied to same-sex couples. That was fewer than 20 years ago, and in that time, support for same-sex marriage has increased at a pace that is nothing short of revolutionary. According the the trajectory of polling, at some point in the next few years, what had been the settled view of the nature of marriage for millennia will have been rejected by a majority of the American people. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, all must agree that it is a revolutionary thing.

This stunning victory has been achieved by mounting an all-out assault on tradition. It wouldn’t have succeeded had the tradition not been hollowed out by the (hetero)sexual revolution, of course, but that’s an argument for another thread. The point is, the marriage innovators assaulted the settled tradition — and have just about won. But here’s the thing: they won in part by framing their own assault on tradition as self-defense. This is what it means when same-sex marriage advocates talk about attempts by marriage trads to attack their families and their rights. It’s brilliant propaganda, because it paints people who preferred the status quo into culture-war aggressors, rather than those who are actually aggressing against the settled tradition.

The point is not that the pro-SSM folks are wrong, or that they’re right. The point here is that they are by any rational measure the culture-war aggressors, but paint themselves as the victims of a right-wing assault. It’s brilliant propaganda.

Rich Lowry shows again how this thing works, in the case of Obama’s HHS rule. Excerpt:

Three Democratic women senators, Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), Barbara Boxer (California) and Patty Murray (Washington), wrote in The Wall Street Journal that critics of the mandate “are trying to force their politics on women’s personal health-care decisions.”

How are they proposing to do that exactly? The Catholic bishops are merely fighting to keep institutions affiliated with their church from getting coerced into participating in what they consider a moral wrong. They are the agents of a status quo that the day before yesterday wasn’t considered objectionable, let alone an assault on women’s health. [Emphasis mine — RD]

… If the mandate were only about extending contraception coverage, exempting religious institutions would be obvious. But it’s more than that. It is about bringing institutions thought to be retrograde to heel, and discrediting their morality. It is kulturkampf disguised as public health.

Rich is absolutely right. Note well the principles that follow. It will help you make sense of events, especially media coverage of them:

The First Law of the Culture War: Conservatives are always and everywhere the aggressors. 

The Second Law of the Culture War: The existence of conservative values, traditions, and institutions constitute acts of aggression. 

Rick Santorum appears to imply that Barack Obama is a crypto-Hitler who has bamboozled the masses into thinking that he’s not so bad after all. Good grief. The thing is, I don’t believe Santorum is cynical at all. I think he believes all of it. Noah Millman speaks to why even though I’m on the same side as Rick Santorum on a number of social issues, the guy makes me nervous:

I find the highly ideological character of Santorum’s mind to be quite scary, much scarier than the specifics of his views.

I wouldn’t have said “scary,” but the milder “off-putting.” But it’s really off-putting. Santorum doesn’t so much hold views as grips them with white trembling knuckles. In him there is something of Savonarola: a righteous and religious man who spoke out courageously against the moral corruption of his age, but who got carried away when his pious rectitude turned into rigidity, and ultimately into fanaticism.

Pete Wehner, also a social conservative, gets it too:

It’s almost impossible to overstate how important tone and countenance are when it comes to social issues. There is a great deal to be said for those who care about the cultural condition of American society. But the arguments on behalf of moral truth need to be made in ways that are winsome, in a manner that is meant to persuade. What this means, in part, is the person making the arguments needs to radiate some measure of grace and tolerance rather than condemnation and zeal. What we’re talking about is using a light touch rather than a heavy hand. To understand the difference, think about how the language (and spirit) of the pro-life movement shifted from accusing people of being “baby killers” to asking Americans to join a movement in which every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. Social conservatism, if it ever hopes to succeed, needs to be articulated in a way that is seen as promoting the human good and advancing human dignity, rather than declaring a series of forbidden acts that are leading us to Gomorrah.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat:

All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.

That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman. Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.

<– Kidding! Berlin isn’t really totalitarian, but it’s worth noticing that that old brownshirt spirit lives among the cultural elite in the German capital. As Steve Sailer points out, the blog of the Berlin Bienniale defends artist Martin Zet’s exhibition there, in which he invited people to give him copies of a popular German book critical of immigration so he could burn recycle them. According to the right-thinking Igor Stokfiszewski at the Berlin Bienniale:

Discussion about Zet’s proposal must not be colonized by the fantasies of others—by flames in their heads which immediately subject every reading of the artwork to the argumentum ad Hitlerum, while the initiators and those involved are blackmailed by the immanent world of one’s own paranoia. The discussion should take place within a framework that is most easily described as truth, and which consists of: the artist’s true intentions; the actual intentions of the curators; and, plainly speaking, the subject matter of the project Deutschland schafft es ab.

Zet opposes the xenophobic and racist message presented in Sarrazin’s book. Therefore, he has suggested an action that would make it possible to actually reduce the existing number of copies in circulation. This idea corresponds to the general theme of the Biennale, according to which artistic actions should be focused on effecting a real impact on reality and offer ways of transforming it permanently.

Moreover, the project by the Czech artist draws upon a collective mobilization and its range is the condition of the work’s failure or success. In other words, it is up to German society to decide how many copies of Sarrazin’s book Zet should receive, and how many will be left on the market or on the shelves of private libraries. The intention behind the artist’s actions is to refer to a direct democratic procedure and civic decisions made by fully-fledged autonomous subjects. This intention once again corresponds to the themes of the Biennale, which seeks to contribute to a democratic revival and to a growth of direct participation of citizens in developing collective opinions and making decisions that shape the life of a community.

A German-language video report on the Zet installation is here. Shorter Igor Stokfiszewski: “Yes, we’re inciting the public to destroy books once again in Berlin, but it’s completely different this time, because we’re on the left, and we’re right.”