The American Conservative

The state of Alabama passed its abortion law this week, while I was in Australia. I have had no time to study the issue at all, so I’m not going to offer an opinion on it until I get back home next week. But this bit of Andrew Sullivan’s column jumped out at me:

It’s astonishing to me, for example, that the Alabama law actually exempts fetuses used in IVF procedures. They don’t need to be protected, it appears. “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant,” explained a state senator in the debate. This is an enormous gift to pro-choicers. It really does prove that for some, this is not about human life. It’s about controlling women’s bodies. If that is revealed in a post-Roe era, the momentum will be with legal abortion.

I don’t think this is quite right, but it’s mostly right. I don’t think the inconsistency of the Alabama law can be honestly chalked up to a desire to “control women’s bodies.” I think it’s because IVF is widely used by Christians, and a consistent, logical pro-life position would outlaw it. If life begins at conception, then all those embryonic lives created in the laboratory and later discarded are human beings. This is something many Christians do not want to face.

There is no moral difference between men and women creating and destroying embryonic human life in the laboratory, and men and women doing the same in women’s wombs. Except for the matter of class — IVF in the US usually costs between $12,000 and $15,000. 

I’m not in favor of making the perfect the enemy of the good enough. But allowing a de facto abortion procedure used by middle and upper middle class people while is pretty ugly.

Hello all. I’m in Brisbane tonight, and have been so busy all day that I haven’t had time to post or to approve comments. Big news here is that the country’s top rugby player, Israel Folau, has had his career destroyed by league officials because he posted to Instagram a Bible verse criticizing homosexuals. More:

An understandably gutted Israel Folau has issued a parting jab at Rugby Australia shortly after his official axing from the Wallabies.

The 30-year-old had his $4 million contract scrapped on Friday following the nuclear fallout to his anti-gay Instagram post.

“It has been a privilege and honour to represent Australia and my home state of New South Wales, playing the game I love,” he said.

“I am deeply saddened by today’s decision to terminate my employment and I am considering my options.

“As Australians, we are born with certain rights, including the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of expression. The Christian faith has always been a part of my life and I believe it is my duty as a Christian to share God’s word. Upholding my religious beliefs should not prevent my ability to work or play for my club and country.”

More:

Outspoken radio host and former Wallabies coach Alan Jones went for the jugular on Friday, insisting Rugby Australia will “fall on its sword” in the fallout to the Folau case.

The 78-year-old tore into the organisation live on 2GB this afternoon, saying it wasn’t a surprise the decision to sack Folau was made.

“There’s no surprise here…you’re dealing with incompetent people … and incompetent people always behave incompetently,” he said.

“They’ve destroyed his employment and internationally destroyed his name for quoting a passage from the bible for God’s sake.

“He hasn’t slaughtered anyone, he hasn’t insulted anyone and he hasn’t even tried to push this stuff down anyone’s throat.”

The Aussie Christians I’ve been talking to today all maintain that Folau is a kind of martyr to the extreme illiberalism of the Australian left. Tomorrow are national elections. If Labor wins, as is likely, I’m told that the party is expected to pass a number of laws further restricting freedom of religion and speech — all in the service of building a progressive utopia.

If they will destroy the career of the No. 1 rugby player in the country over his religious beliefs, who is safe?

This is not just tragic, it’s lethally stupid:

When the man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines. In reality, he was pregnant — a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.

The tragic case, described in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine, points to larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports , entertainment and government . In medicine, there’s a similar danger of missing diseases such as sickle cell and cystic fibrosis that largely affect specific racial groups, the authors write.

“The point is not what’s happened to this particular individual but this is an example of what happens to transgender people interacting with the health care system,” said the lead author, Dr. Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“He was rightly classified as a man” in the medical records and appears masculine, Stroumsa said. “But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”

This person was not “rightly classified as a man.” This person is a woman. Madeleine Kearns speculates on future tragedies that could occur because the medical establishment is too afraid to say “no” to gender delusion, and to progressives who believe that changing language can change reality:

In medicine, there’s no saying where the abandonment of objective sex classifications might end. Let’s imagine, for instance, that this patient — a pregnant female identifying as a male — donated blood which is later given to a male. Research suggests that males who have blood transfusions from females who have been pregnant could be a higher risk of premature death.

Or let’s imagine a different case. Let’s say a male who identifies as female takes a pregnancy test, and it shows up as positive: That male isn’t pregnant, but he may very well have testicular cancer. What treatment would he receive from doctors if they were treating him as a female?

In Canada, doctors just lost a huge medical conscience ruling. They must conform to this culture of death (abortion, euthanasia) and radical disorder (transgenderism). Wesley Smith writes:

Not only that, when most doctors got into medicine, euthanasia was a felony! But who cares? Times change and doctors must change with them because patients are “vulnerable:”

[Quoting the ruling:] The vulnerable patients I have described above, seeking MAiD, abortion, contraception and other aspects of sexual health care, turn to their family physicians for advice, care and, if necessary, medical treatment or intervention. Given the importance of family physicians as “gatekeepers” and “patient navigators” in the health care system, there is compelling evidence that patients will suffer harm in the absence of an effective referral.

Baloney. The real issue here is the message dissenting doctors send when they refuse to participate in a controversial intervention because it is wrong, which the court ruled is “stigmatizing” to patients.

The point of opposing medical conscience is to drive pro-life and Hippocratic Oath-believing doctors out of medicine. The Court goes there, telling doctors who don’t want to euthanize, abort, facilitate sex change, etc., they can always get into hair restoration:

[In] the following areas of medicine…physicians are unlikely to encounter requests for referrals for MAiD or reproductive health concerns, and which may not require specialty retraining or certification: sleep medicine, hair restoration, sport and exercise medicine, hernia repair, skin disorders for general practitioners, obesity medicine, aviation examinations, travel medicine, and practice as a medical officer of health.

So, an experienced and skilled oncologist who doesn’t want to kill can implant hair plugs instead of curing cancer. Brilliant.

And if they won’t do that, get the hell out of medicine.

The appellants have no common law, proprietary or constitutional right to practice medicine. As members of a regulated  and publicly-funded profession, they are subject to requirements that focus on the public interest, rather than their interests. In fact, the fiduciary nature of the physician-patient relationship requires physicians to act at all times in their patients’ best interests, and to avoid conflicts between their own interests and their patients’ interests.

Forcing doctors to be complicit in the taking of human life or face potential civil/professional consequences is despotism.

I’m telling you, readers, its Benedict Option time. This stuff is coming, and coming hard. From the book:

Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.

Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal antidiscrimination statutes covering LGBTs will be not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.

“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.

Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”

David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.

“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”

Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, backers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.

Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.

“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”

I spoke to this physician a couple of months ago. The noose is tightening, he says. Be vigilant.

I would love to see you! Send an RSVP to Yvette.

Sydney, Australia

I resolved to try Vegemite this morning. Peeled the label back, took a sniff, and lost the will to live. It smells like geriatric broccoli ass.

Another day, another case of social media bigs enforcing exclusive, progressive Silicon Valley values on everybody else: From Dublin’s Iona Institute, which has violated secular liberalism’s blasphemy code with four little words:

Facebook has censored our new ‘still one of us’ ad campaign which we launched last week. It has been placed behind a notice of warning and we are no longer allowed us to promote it. The campaign is currently running on a number of billboards in various parts of the country and we had extended the campaign to Facebook where we were paying a small amount (€150 in total) to bring it to a wider audience.

The company said the image of an unborn child that appears in the ad comes under the heading of ‘graphic’ or ‘violent’ imagery. Below is what Facebook users now see where the ad once appeared. (Note, we can still post the image on our Facebook page but cannot pay to bring it to a wider audience).

The Iona Institute is trying to remind the Irish that though abortion is now legal in their country, the unborn are still human beings. That image is not of an aborted child. It’s a photo of an unborn child! What Facebook finds “sensitive” is not the image of the unborn child — which is just a normal image of fetal development, but the words accompanying it.

This is not a real thing. But wouldn’t it be cool if it were?

A reader writes to say he’s thinking about getting involved in Christian beermaking. He sends this along:

1) Inspired by Norcia monks

I’m personally inspired by all monks and many brewers, so the fact that the Norcia monks are brewing beer, and that monks in general have been brewing for hundreds of years, seems to me to be a clear indicator that brewing can be a Christian vocation. Add to that the fact that beer has the ability to bring people together, and that local pubs are in many was an icon of stability and place, I’d say the Ben Op Brewpub is a surefire thing.

2) My personal experience with homebrewing

I’m a chemical biologist, and am currently working in the biotech startup world. I began homebrewing a few years ago when I realized that I was growing microbes in lab, and might as well get something enjoyable out of them by growing them at home. My experience so far has been nothing but a success. While I wouldn’t say I’m a stellar homebrewer (I’m still limited by scale to partial-yeast-extract recipes), I’ve had encouraging reviews from friends and coworkers who’ve tried my brews.

3) Moral / ethical concerns

I became Christian in the Baptist tradition, of which I am still an official member though my mind is far more in line with Orthodoxy. I reconciled my Baptist “upbringing” with a more Biblical attitude towards alcohol many years ago, but in conversations with people who have been personally affected by alcoholism, I’ve been thinking about the role of pubs/bars in society, and what sort of responsibility a brewer has towards his neighbors, and how one might be an effective Christian witness in this vocation.

4) Do you have any readers or contacts in brewing?

I’m interested in you’ve talked to anyone else about how brewing might play a role in the Benedict Option. While I would never venture into such a major career change without the support of my wife, I am seriously considering brewing as a plan B should Christians suddenly find themselves completely unwelcome in my current industry. This is a skill I am intentionally developing, and I would like to know if others are doing so. If you have any contacts, I would be most appreciative.

What do you think? If you can help this guy, let him know in the contents, or write to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll pass it on to him. Put “BEER” in the subject line, please.

I don’t know about you, but politicians are almost the last people I turn to for theological opinions. But that’s not how Australian progressives and the news media (but I repeat myself) roll this election week in Oz. I kid you not, the lead story here, days before national elections, is whether or not gays are going to hell. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has hit back at Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in an argument over whether gay people will go to hell, after both leaders fielded questions about Christian faith and gay rights.

Mr Morrison accused Mr Shorten of a “cheap shot” over the question on Tuesday and made it clear he did not believe that gay people would go to hell, one day after giving a less direct answer to the question.

Shorten is the Labor Party leader who is trying to gin up anger at Morrison for being less reflexively woke on gays than he ought to be. Scott Morrison, a moderate conservative and practicing Pentecostal, supports the gay marriage law.

Reading this Guardian piece, it appears that on religious liberty, Morrison is something less than a profile in courage and consistency. Excerpt:

In 2016 Morrison claimed that opponents of marriage equality also face “hate speech and bigotry”, equating their experience to that of LGBTI Australians.

Despite his electorate of Cook voting 55% to 45% in favour of same-sex marriage, Morrison mounted a conservative rearguard action calling for greater protection of “religious freedom” in the marriage bill then abstained from the vote in parliament.

Still, if the choice is between a conservative who is an inconstant friend to Christians and to religious liberty, and a progressive who positively wants to drive us out of the public square, well, that’s not much of a choice at all, is it?

Of course Morrison’s squishiness is not good enough for many on the left, who want to drive from public life anyone who suspected of not being sufficiently enthusiastic about LGBT issues. This entire issue has come up in Australian politics because one of the best rugby players in the country, a Pacific Islander and Pentecostal Christian named Israel Folau, publicly quoted a passage from the New Testament listing homosexuals as among those who will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.

If there’s any sort of person I’d be less likely to consult on theological matters than politicians, it would be professional athletes. But the Folau controversy has become huge here. Folau, a big athletic star here, stands to lose his professional career because of the stand he has taken. Excerpt:

Israel Folau has revealed how he resisted the “temptation” of a peace offering from Rugby Australia that would have allowed him to resurrect his playing career.

The Wallabies star described his fallout with the governing body as “challenging” and spoke of being tempted by the “opportunity” to rekindle his career with the NSW Waratahs and Wallabies during a Sydney church address.

The fundamentalist Christian faces being sacked by RA after being found to have committed a high-level code of conduct breach for an Instagram post that said hell awaited “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers” and others.

An independent three-member panel is expected to announce Folau’s sanction this week after deciding the controversial posts left him open to having his four-year, $4m contract torn up.

But, in a video of him speaking at a church service on Sunday afternoon, Folau insisted the process was not finished and the “outcome is yet to be known”.

“Potentially I could get terminated, which means that there’s no more playing contract and therefore no more finances or money coming in,” he said from the lectern. “It would be the first time it has happened to me in my life.

“All the materialistic things I have been able to have over the last number of years are slowly being taken away from me. It’s been really challenging but also it’s been encouraging to myself to see what my God is actually doing.”

Watch Israel Folau. He’s being put to the test — and so far, he’s passing. He reportedly refused $1 million to walk away from the sport, even though the 30-year-old’s career is almost certainly over now. If he is willing to surrender his career, and his wealth, for the sake of standing up for the Gospel, then he will be a model to the rest of us Christians. I say that even though I think it was wildly imprudent for him to post that Bible verse to his Instagram. But he did, and I believe that he should have a right to do that without sacrificing his career. There is nothing liberal about a society that seeks to ruin a man professionally for expressing unpopular religious opinions.

Though is was about politics, not religion, I felt the same way about American quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his controversial stance on the National Anthem. Here’s a big difference, though: Kaepernick’s views were not popular with many NFL fans, but are quite popular with cultural and corporate elites. Nike built a major advertising campaign around presenting Kaepernick as a cultural hero. Folau’s views, which one imagines are also unpopular with rugby fans in highly secular Australia, are viewed by political and business elites as toxic.

You can always tell who has the real power in a society by who, and what, you are not allowed to talk about. In Australia, you have white political and corporate elites working to destroy the livelihood of a Pacific Islander who is a conservative Pentecostal. This is what you call “punching down.” Folau’s final fate will be announced by a rugby board this week — but a Tongan pastor says other Pacific Islander players (who are heavily represented in professional rugby, and most of whom are conservative Christians) are frightened, and may leave the sport in solidarity with Folau.

Bottom line: Israel Folau has violated secular liberalism’s blasphemy code. His career must be burned at the stake — all in the name of progress. The left is openly Orwellian, demanding that in the name of “inclusiveness” and “diversity,” a Tongan athlete who is a fundamentalist Christian must be denied the possibility to practice his craft. Whenever you hear anyone speaking about “inclusiveness” and “diversity,” you may be confident that you are about to hear a left-wing justification for exclusiveness and homogeneity. There are few people in public life today more intolerant than LGBT advocates and their allies — and no one more effectively intolerant, because unlike Tongans and Pentecostals, they hold positions of real cultural and economic power.

UPDATE: In an earlier version of this piece, I said mistakenly that Scott Morrison has hedged on the existence of Hell. In fact, that was his opponent. I have taken those lines down, and I apologize for the error.

Today in Sydney I met Anna Hitchings, who is handling media for me on this week-long trip to Australia. She’s a Catholic journalist who caused a big stir here last week with this article wanting to know where in the heck are the Christian men worth dating? Excerpts:

We are living in a unique time in history. Never has politics been so polarised, never has mainstream society come so near to amorality (although Nero’s Rome came close), and never has it been so difficult for a woman to find a good man.

The latter is, I’ll admit, a bold claim but allow me to elaborate.

More:

Yet one important side-effect of all this that gets little attention is how tough this new environment has become for women, especially Christian women, to find good husbands. The situation is so dire there is now an emerging trend of women abandoning their faith and religious beliefs for the sake of romantic relationships.

Perhaps this is not considered a particularly serious issue when compared with Brexit, abortion on demand or the erosion of free speech, but I would contend it is every bit as important, if not more so. The future of our society depends on good, solid marriages, families and citizens. We need families to produce educated and informed young men and women who will continue fighting the good fight on all the issues confronting our society.

Yet for someone like me – a 32-year-old single Catholic – the situation looks bleak indeed.

I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will, one and all, say the same thing: there just aren’t any men. What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25-35 who are church-going, single and worldly-wise.

She writes about how she went to Seattle to a wedding last year, and met a Catholic woman who asked if she should move to Australia to try to find a marriage partner. More:

The fact that this experience is almost universally shared speaks for itself. And unfortunately, the growing desperation fuelled by this trend is beginning to result in some rather alarming outcomes. I personally know three Catholic women in their 20s and 30s who abandoned their beliefs in order to be with a man, all in the last few years. One met a man online who turned out to be married (though separated) with children, but she dated him anyway.

Another got married outside the Church, against the advice of her priest, to an agnostic she’d only been dating a short time. The third started going out with an atheist she met at university. A year or two later, she abandoned the Church and those closest to her to marry him.

These were not women whose religious faith extended to a tick on the census. They were all cradle Catholics, well-educated in their faith and very active in either their parishes or Christian communities. And these are just women I know myself – there are undoubtedly others.

Read the whole thing. I told Anna she would light up America with this discussion. Maybe among our European readers too. Christian ladies, what do you think?

And Christian men, likewise?

UPDATE: From a reader:

Contrary to the anecdata you might be getting from twitter or the comments feed, there are some real problems that that young woman is being affected by (and most Christian women I know in her shoes, including some pretty extraordinary ones).

The roots of the problem can be understood here, in Mark Regnerus’ latest book:

https://www.amazon.com/Cheap-Sex-Transformation-Marriage-Monogamy/dp/0190673613/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1502483409&sr=8-1

The long and short of it is that marriage and sex markets are extremely finicky things. Single digit imbalances in gender ratios can produce dramatic results. It sounds stereotypical but it is generally born out in social research: men demand sex and supply relationship, women demand relationships and supply sex. When marriage/sex markets are skewed towards women (more men than women), the cost of sex goes up, and men behave better (as seen by cheating rates, investment in relationships, etc). When these markets are skewed towards women, men basically behave worse and demand more sex (or, to put it another way, women are incentivized to demand less of men, and those that don’t are frozen out of the market).

Online dating, women in the workplace, pornography, and contraception have also changed these markets, which are always (generally) local markets. The Princeton mom who wrote an op-ed saying women should try to meet mates in college and was ridiculed for it was essentially right, but most people don’t take her advice, and women in college especially elite ones are inclined to focus less on relationships anyways. So they don’t really start looking until after college. This is where the problems start.

Marriage and dating markets are defined by who is in them. The pool for most college-educated women is essentially other college-educated men (you don’t want to date a failson. This isn’t fair to working-class guys, but it’s generally the case). Problem is, for the past 20 years more women have graduated from college than men. (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-education-gap/546677/)

If you’re a Christian, you want to marry a Christian. Problem is, more women than men practice, almost across the board (the Orthodox and the Mormons are the two general exceptions IIRC). So if you’re a college-educated Christian woman looking for the same…you’re in trouble.

In sum, it’s impossible to imagine a Christian man writing what this young woman has. But I know at least a dozen very successful, attractive, devout Christian women who are in exactly her shoes.

UPDATE.2: There’s a wide divergence of opinion in the comments. I don’t know Anna, though we just met yesterday afternoon. She struck me as smart, funny, and interesting. She also goes to the Latin mass, for what it’s worth. I’ll be seeing her later today, and will ask her what she meant by “worldly-wise,” but I took it far more benignly than many of you. I think she simply meant “someone who enjoys life in the world, and is not some ghostly ascetic or weirdo.” When I was dating after my conversion to Catholicism at age 25 — this was in the early 1990s — it was not easy to find women who were serious about their Catholic faith and also interested in worldly things *in a good way*. I think this issue might speak to the difficulties many have in understanding the Benedict Option. They see it as a kind of binary, either-or thing: either you are serious about the faith (in which case you are monastically withdrawn from the world), or you are engaged in the life of the world, but are therefore not serious about your faith. This is not true.

I am one of the most worldly people I know, but if I can live engaged with the world as a Christian, then I have to also practice disengagement to a real extent. This is what St. Paul meant when he said Christians are to be “in the world, but not of it.” Most of my Christian friends are people who are deeply engaged in worldly pursuits — teaching, the practice of law, medicine, journalism, and so forth. They bring to these professions, and to the people they meet in the world, a deep and sincere Christian faith. It’s not an easy balance to maintain, but it is possible, and indeed necessary.

Sydney, Australia

Dinner tonight at the home of a wonderful Franco-Australian family with eight wonderful kids with beautiful manners, and a mama with Breton roots, who knows how to make a crepe. With delicious Australian sauvignon blanc. And now, it’s just past 7, and I’m going to bed, fat and happy.