A moving piece by AmSpec’s Quin Hillyer, about the movement to pray for and support Starla Chapman, a very sick little girl in Alabama. Hillyer writes about how shared religious faith brought black folks and white folks together in prayer and solidarity for three-year-old Starla — and how hard this is for some people to grasp:

Here’s what the sneering elites don’t understand: Out here in flyover land, people believe. We really believe. That’s why several hundred people would gather on a dreary winter night, trying to keep the breeze from extinguishing our candles, listening to prayers, and to live singers with lovely voices lifting songs written especially for Starla, and to a motivational lay speaker, and to a pastor’s stem-winding call to faith, and to more songs, and again to more prayers. Dozens of black pre-schoolers stood there under the oaks, perfectly well behaved for nearly two full hours. So did an octogenarian white factory owner, and so did people of just about every imaginable time and culture and stratum of life in between. College-age folks wore brightly colored homemade t-shirts bearing Starla’s “Just Trust” message; a black homeless guy walked up and said he usually sleeps in the park and wondered what it was all about.

After taking in the prayers for a few minutes, he said, “Today’s my 47^th birthday. This is nice.” After a few more, he added, “I can tell, that little girl is already healing. She’s right over at that hospital [just down the street from Lyons Park] and she can feel these prayers, and she’s already better than she was before this started. I can tell it.”

I interviewed my late sister’s oncologist the other day. He told me that in his 26 years of practicing oncology, he encountered a number of patients who started out not believing in God, but only can think of one, maybe two, who died as confirmed atheists.

UPDATE: I will grant you that the “sneering elites” remark was gratuitous and took away from an otherwise moving essay. But the “sneering elites” crack is not why I posted this.

Jay Nordlinger has a point:

I’m learning, more and more, that political perceptions have a great deal to do with style. If you slash and shout, many people think of you as “conservative” or “right-wing.” If you say right-wing things in a calm, polite way, you may be seen as a moderate.

“Attitude” is another word that comes to mind — attitude and style. They have so much to do with political perceptions.

Think about two governors, Perry and Romney. (Well, one’s a former governor.) Perry is considered the more conservative by far. But there are some areas in which Romney is to the “right” of Perry. Thing is, Perry could quote The Communist Manifesto and he’d still come off as conservative. It’s the swagger, the chest, the twang — all that.

In the early to mid 1990s, when I lived and worked in DC, I was a writer for The Washington Times, and a conservative. But I had longish hair and favored combat boots, and looked like nobody’s idea of a right winger. It was often entertaining to listen to liberals who didn’t know me carry on, thinking I was one of them.

I am old enough, barely, to remember that the stereotyped image for “conservative” used to be a Bill Buckley or a Nelson Rockefeller type — that is, a buttoned-down Easterner, or a Midwestern banker type. Sober-sided, pinstriped. Now one associates — or at least I associate — that look with John Kerry liberals. As Jay points out, when I hear saying conservative things in a calm, polite way, I instinctively believe he must be a moderate, even if I know better. Mind you, I don’t think this is progress. I think this is what talk radio has done to conservatism — taken it downmarket.

On the other hand, when is the last time you heard a liberal speak convincingly in a way that would fire up blue-collar audiences? If I saw and heard a slobby guy offering up red meat for liberals, I would think, “Oh, Michael Moore,” but if it wasn’t him, I would be disoriented. You just don’t see working-class liberals much on TV. I remember as a kid, seeing old George Meany  of the AFL-CIO on the news a lot. When is the last time you’ve seen an American labor leader on “Meet the Press”?

I think things must have changed when American politics and class conflict stopped being about economics and started being about culture.

We got DirectTV when we moved down here, because it came bundled into our AT&T broadband service, and because I need the news channels to be writing about the presidential campaign. I cannot imagine why anybody would voluntarily pay for this. We have hundreds of channels, and nothing on. It seems like every other channel is an infomercial vector. What is the point? Looking at the channel guide is like opening up your post office box and pulling out a fat sheaf of junk mail. Humph.

So, “Mad Men” is finally coming back to TV, with Season Five’s premiere on March 25.  Do you know when the last episode of Season Four aired? On October 17, 2010. It will have been a year and a half since a new “Mad Men” episode aired. The delay was due to a spat between the show’s creator and AMC, the cable network.

I used to love the show, but I’m going to have to work hard to get back into it after so long. How about you?

Evidence from The New York Times that backers of gay marriage, of which the Times has been a leading advocate, sense that victory has been assured:

1. Dan Savage tells us in a recent NYT Magazine cover story that hey, married gay couples may not be faithful to their marriage vows, and not only is that okay, but redefining the marriage ideal to accomodate creative infidelity might be just what straight couples need to spice up their lives.

2. In today’s paper, Frank Bruni and Cynthia Nixon say that hey, despite what you’ve heard, some gays really aren’t born that way, but rather choose to be that way — and the only people who care about such things are bigots. 

Russell Shaw is glad that there has been some serious pushback by Catholics against the forces within the Church, as well as outside it, that effectively dissolved in the postwar era so much of what was distinctive about Catholic life. But he is also concerned:

This is all to the good—up to a point. But note that when I speak of the desirability of a new Catholic subculture, I do not mean a self-regarding, inward-looking ghetto. Unfortunately, signs of such a thing already can be glimpsed here and there. They seem likely to spread if steps are not taken to discourage that from happening.

Here is where the new evangelization comes in. It provides rationale and  motivation for Catholics to set their sights on something far better than a Catholic ghetto—the creation of a new, dynamic American Catholic subculture specifically designed to be a source of creative energy for preaching the gospel far and wide, with particular attention to former Catholics and nominal Catholics who are teetering on the brink.

This is asking a great deal—a subculture able to nurture and sustain a strong sense of Catholic identity without turning in on itself. Can it be done? No one really knows because up to now it hasn’t been attempted. Evangelization is the key. Meanwhile, one thing does seem certain: If it cannot be done, or if no attempt is made to do it, the situation of the Catholic Church in the United States is likely to become increasingly troubled in the years ahead.

I take his point, but boy, is this a difficult issue. The force of the mainstream cultural current is so strong that it often seems the only communities that successfully resist it are those who take a rock-hard communal stance against it. What Shaw is warning against is a bunker mentality. I think he’s right to do so. One reason that it took so long to deal with the problem of clerical sexual abuse is because generations of Catholics had been taught tribalist habits from the immigrant church experience. I imagine that this is one thing that Shaw has in mind. One of the dangers of a tight-knit community is that it becomes more difficult to point to wrongdoing within that community, because many of its members see that as threatening the cohesion of the whole. This is not just true of Catholics; it’s true of all human communities.

Anyway, how do we strike a balance between being in the world but not of it? Some conservative-minded folks I’ve known adopt the strategy of denying that there’s a problem with the mainstream culture. It has seemed to me that they do this because the challenges are too great to think about … so they choose not to think about them. That is, they understand, and will say, that we do live in a degraded culture, one that is aggressively hostile to conservative values — but they seem to have effectively surrendered their children to this culture. On the other hand, you have the bunker brigades, of which Shaw writes, people who are afraid of everything, and who may instill their children with this same rigid fear. Last year, I was accompanying friends on a visit that took us to the home of a conservative Catholic homeschooling family. It struck me that there was only one piece of art in the house that wasn’t devotional, and no books on any shelf (that I could see) that weren’t either devotional or written with a heavily Catholic focus. The impression I got was that this is an airless, rigid place. I could certainly have been wrong, but the impression was of a bunker. I’m sure that had I talked to the parents, we would have agreed on most things regarding the threat the mainstream culture poses to our religious and moral values. But we have significantly different responses to it, our families.

This is hard. Shaw says that what Catholics call (following JP2) the “new evangelization” is a countervailing force to ghettoization, to bunkerization. By this I suppose he means that as long as these conservative Catholics realize that their mission involves being open to the world and reaching out to the world with their beliefs and way of life — indeed that their mission requires making disciples of the world — then that should work against bunkerization. I think he’s right. The thing to remember, though, is that given the cultural realities in which postmodern Christians live, a certain degree of conscious, critical withdrawal from the mainstream is required, simply so that we can know who we are.

Ross Douthat on the new HHS rules that put the screws to the Catholic Church. Excerpt:

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

Read the whole thing.  Ross goes on to make the point that liberals might see this expansion of government power as a culture-war victory for progressivism over the retrograde Church of Rome. But they should realize that once government asserts this power over private associations, it may well be used against liberals by a future administration hostile to their beliefs.

So, the other night I was at Melvin Harvey’s house, eating gumbo. He’s a local banker. His dad, Melvin Sr., and my dad, Ray, were big friends when they were young men. They were all country boys, and went rodeoing all the time. It was a different world. At Melvin Jr’s house the other night, he and I listened to my dad tell us stories from the old days, about the generations of friendship between the Harveys and the Drehers. When my dad was a small boy, his house burned down. Mr. Fletcher Harvey and Mr. Jerome Harvey turned up and helped him rebuild the cottage. It’s still standing today, 70 years later. My grandfather had helped other Harveys build their houses here in the country. In fact, Melvin Jr. said that the Harveys, the Daniels, and the Drehers all emigrated to this part of Louisiana from South Carolina, looking for land for dairy cattle. We are all deeply involved with each other. We are all deeply implicated in one another.

I have nearly reached the 46th year of my life without thinking of these connections. I am glad to have them aware to me now. “You’re living in Sicily,” says my Sicilian American friend, enviously.

The roots, they’re very thick here.

I am unwilling to take any guff from Ron Paul supporters who accuse me (see the comboxes) of being some sort of coward or careerist for objecting to the man’s dodgy and cynical past involvement with racists and white supremacists. For one, I have taken my lumps for standing up to racist agitators like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who denounced me in a speech and radio broadcast.I spent the week before 9/11 hiding out in my Brooklyn apartment after multiple Sharpton-inspired death threats. Al Sharpton is a buffoon and an evil man. But look: if I object to blacks playing the race card for political advantage, I damn sure have an obligation to stand up to whites doing so. Ron Paul is very far from Al Sharpton, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was happy to play among the white supremacists and race-baiters for political advantage some years ago.

This is not an abstract thing for me. Most of my readers know that I come from, and now live once again in, a small Southern town. You hear stories from the bad old days. The other night, I was at an event in which a man told a story from what must have been the 1940s or 1950s. It involved a wealthy white landowner, N., who was a hard, cruel man. N. made a habit of basically stealing the land of poor black people. The storyteller, who knew N., said that there was once a black man who owed N. money, and who was begging to pay him off so that he could keep his land. The black man saw N. walking down the main street of a town near our own, and accosted him there, trying to get him to take his money so he could pay his mortgage off.

The rich white man took out a pistol and shot him dead, right there on the street, in broad daylight.

Of course the rich white man never had to answer for this murder. Nor did he have to answer for the many other cruel and illegal things he did to poor black people. He died peacefully in his bed many years later.

This is not something that happened in the 1800s. This happened within living memory. This happened right here, in the next town over. And there are other things like this that happened too here. These aren’t rumors. People who live here know the history.

I hate black racist rhetoric and bullying. I hate white racist rhetoric and bullying. It is all evil. If Ron Paul played around with this poison, he should be held accountable for it. This is not some game. This is not some historical abstraction. I knew people from my town — I am related to people from my town — all dead now, who participated in an extrajudicial lynching of a black man who, it came out later, had been falsely accused of a crime. This happened in the 1930s. All “respectable” white men.

Murderers. Men who believed that race was righteousness.

I’m not trying to get all righteous on you here. It’s just that I can’t stop thinking what it must have been like to have been black in this town in those days, and to have known that you or your brother, or your husband, or you child, could have been murdered by a white man, and nobody would have done a thing about it.

UPDATE: Some readers — see the combox thread — are bound and determined to say that I equate Ron Paul with the white man who shot the black man dead on the street. Nonsense. My point is fairly obvious, except for those who won’t see it: that racism is a demon that is very difficult to tame, and nearly impossible to corral once give free reign. I despise black politicians like Dallas’s John Wiley Price because they so freely and unashamedly play racial politics, and traffick in racist rhetoric, and in so doing call up the very thing that has been used in the past, and may be used again, to oppress their own people. You legitimize it for yourself and your own race, you have no grounds to deny it to people of other races.

I don’t personally believe that Ron Paul is a racist, nor do I dislike Ron Paul; any reading of my blogging here will find repeated praise of Paul, but also some criticism. The former outweighs the latter by far. I think that Ron Paul has not been as thoughtful or as morally sensitive as he ought to have been to the question of race and racial bigotry. He’s preoccupied with economics and foreign policy; it seems to me that he thought it was worth associating himself with some nasty pieces of racist work for the sake of recruiting followers to his views. If Ed Crane at CATO is correct, and Paul appealed to the mailing list of Willis Carto’s crackpot outfit, then Paul ought to explain just what he hoped to accomplish by reaching out to the followers of a raving pro-Nazi lunatic. To put it a different way, I don’t believe Paul is personally a racist, but I believe his demonstrable insensitivity to the evils of racism and, if the Carto allegation is true, anti-Semitism, reflects very poorly on his character and judgment. Megan McArdle:

I think the arguments and counter-arguments about what he knew and when he knew it will be rather beside the point.  It is simply not credible that Ron Paul never saw any of the newsletters published under his name, and so the minimum working thesis has to be that whether or not Ron Paul believed that the biggest problem America faced was all those black folks getting one over on the white man, he was perfectly willing to encourage such sentiments if doing so would advance his political goals.  This alone should disqualify him from office, so we shouldn’t need to waste time litigating other charges on the indictment.

Now, if Ron Paul were to sorrowfully admit that he had once harbored such beliefs–or failed to understand what it really meant to encourage such thoughts in others–then I would probably agree that we should forgive and forget.  But that is not what he has done.  What he has done is to cravenly attempt to avoid responsibility by blaming his subordinates.

It is a mystery to me why some of you Paul supporters refuse to see why any of this is problematic. Unfortunately for you, I have a record of writing against affirmative action, against unrestricted immigration, against political correctness, and against black racism, especially racist hucksters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If I’m wrong on this issue, criticize my reasoning, but keep the ad hominem blather to yourself.