Requiescat in pacem, Antonin Scalia

Oddly enough, according to a couple of sources, Associate Justice Antonin G. Scalia’s best friend was AJ Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Said Marcia Coyle on PBS NewsHour Weekend, Scalia, who passed away Saturday at the age of 79, “was widely liked ... a very colorful writer, and in person ... a consummate gentleman, ... could be very funny. He is going to be missed ... especially by Justice Ginsburg, with whom he had a special friendship — they called each other best friends — and with whom he went to opera and ... to India.”

“He does not write like a happy man”

To hear Scalia described as “widely liked” and a “consummate gentleman” may sound improbable to people who only knew of him through his strident, hectoring argumentation on the bench, especially to liberals and progressives who came to hate him as a conservative obstructionist. (One gay man of my acquaintance sneered, “My condolences to the Koch brothers for their loss.”)

Because Scalia’s opinions coincided often with conservative interests, it was all too easy to claim his originalism was merely intellectual cover for his political views — in fact, so easy that more substantive legal criticism often went lacking. His dissents — and he wrote plenty of dissents in his nearly thirty years’ tenure on the SCOTUS bench — often sacrificed detailed analysis of the legal principles involved in favor of sarcastic fiskings of the majority opinion and fervent homilies on the wider implications of the decision; e.g., his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (513 U.S. ___ [2015]; pp. 69 ff.). So acidic were his opinions that, as Conor Clarke observed in Slate, “Scalia’s opinions read like they’re about to catch fire for pure outrage. He does not, in short, write like a happy man.”

Book Review: To the Martyrs, by Cdl. Donald Wuerl

To the Martyrs: A Reflection on the Supreme Christian Witness

Cdl. Donald Wuerl

Emmaus Road Publishing

Cover Price: $22.95

Recommended

 Anti-Christians condemn Christians for their hypocrisy. However, not a single Christian martyr has ever suffered persecution by non-Christians for failing to live the gospel message perfectly. Rather, Christians were and are persecuted just for associating themselves with the gospel message in the first place. Imperfection of religious practice has hardly been a barrier to execution, imprisonment, maiming, rape, or torture by those who hate Christianity and that for which they think it stands.

This is the first thought that occurs to me after reading To the Martyrs: A Reflection on the Supreme Christian Witness by Cdl. Donald Wuerl. The title reflects both the title of a letter by the Church Father Tertullian and Wuerl’s own personal fascination with, and dedication to, the millions of martyrs and confessors who have been “the seeds of the Church” over the last two millennia. It’s a “reflection” as well in that it’s obviously not an exhaustive treatment of martyrdom intended for scholars and Church historians, but rather a brief overview for the ordinary layman. Written in a very accessible style, it has just enough footnotes to show that the good archbishop didn’t rely on his own memory or make things up as he went along.

As one reads To the Martyrs, though, a theme recurs. G. K. Chesterton famously noted that the Christian ideal hadn’t been “tried hard, and found wanting,” but rather had been “found difficult; and left untried.” However, as Cdl. Wuerl shows, the centuries of persecution didn’t come from people who found the Christian ideal too difficult to live up to, but rather from people who found that ideal too challenging, too uncomfortable to live with.

An Irish Catholic’s Look at White People—UPDATED

Jose Antonio Vargas with two unnamed men. (© 2015 MTV.)

At first, I was reluctant to watch the MTV documentary White People. I’d seen a trailer for it a couple of weeks before, which gave me the impression that a good portion of it was white college kids simply regurgitating the “privilege” narrative. Besides, it was an MTV project; whatever else you expect an MTV program to provoke, thought is not usually one of them.

It was better executed than I thought it would be. This was largely due to Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker who did the interviews and asked the questions. Throughout the film, Vargas is charming, receptive, and avoids all appearance of being accusatory or condemnatory. Although he takes one occasion to change minds, for the most part he simply looks on and asks questions as young people struggle to break through the barriers to openly talk about racial perceptions.

That’s not to say the documentary is, shall we say, without its moments. A young man in a “privilege workshop” talks about “never having to represent your race to other people.” My first reaction on hearing that was: “You’re a kid. You’ll get your chance soon enough.”

One of my sharpest memories is of a discussion I had twenty years ago with a coworker and her fiancé about mixed couples. My coworker noted that black parents seemed to welcome such couples, while white parents didn’t, then turned to me and said, “Why are they like that, Tony?” The only thing I could tell her is that my previous girlfriend had had an opportunity to meet my dad and his wife, and that she had ducked out. I’d been called upon to explain white people, as if we were all of a piece.

The smile on the lips of martyrs

I suppose we Catholic writers are socially expected to have a massive episode of cognitive dissonance over the news of the significant drop in religious affiliation over the years 2007 to 2014. Because, of course, this sort of thing has never happened before (he said while rolling his eyes melodramatically).

Religious revivals come and go. So do intellectual fads and ideological fashions. Leftist progressivism has been in the ascent in the last few decades, and irreligion has been riding its coattails as it’s risen. As I pointed out in my very first post on this site, neither atheism nor agnosticism offers us better arguments than they did a hundred years ago. However, the bar has been lowered. Scientific advances haven’t made Christianity indefensible; rather, pedagogical innovations and ideological indoctrination in the classrooms have left fewer Christians able to defend it.

When you’re not satisfied with an answer, it doesn’t take much to change your mind. Many if not most former Catholics didn’t leave the Church so much as they formalized a separation that had been there for many years, even from childhood. There’s now almost no social cost to abandoning religious practice; in some circles, irreligion is not only tolerated but expected. And, to be perfectly frank, the Church in the West made it easier by decades of poor religious education, clerical malformation, and episcopal cowardice.

By the same token, when you find an answer that satisfies you both intellectually and emotionally, the argument against it has to be very powerful in order to change your mind about its truth. No one has yet made an argument to Catholicism’s falsehood that I find remotely persuasive, let alone convincing. Indeed, many people seem more committed to mocking, berating, and shaming me out of my illusions than they are to showing me that they are illusions.

The Indiana RFRA and the torn-down forest

As of this writing, it appears that the Indiana state government is taking steps to undermine its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act. According to the Associated Press, Gov. Mike Pence has called for legislation “clarifying that [the RFRA] does not allow discrimination on his desk by the end of the week ... to address concerns that the law will allow businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians.” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, facing similar pressure, has already preemptively called for changes to an RFRA bill on his desk.

Nineteen states have RFRAs. Of these, eleven have non-discrimination laws at the city or township level, and two (Illinois and New Mexico) have state laws protecting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Another eleven have RFRA-like restrictions based on SCOTUS decisions. (Source: Daily Signal.) On the surface, the problem with Indiana’s RFRA is that it’s loosely written; critics claim that businesses can refuse gay people’s business, and that the civil-rights legislation and decisions of the last sixty years have determined that “you don’t have the right to choose who gets to sit at the counter.”

The truth of the matter, though, is that the other states all caught the RFRA wave at the right time, before SCOTUS’ decision in Lawrence v. Texas (539 US 558, 2003) made it “okay to be gay”. Now that wave has long passed; the LGBT lobby has command of a sizeable chunk of the culture factories, as well as the allegiance of the majority of our celebrities and politicians.

This makes the conditions most favorable for anti-RFRA moral posturing, along with its attendant obliviousness. For instance, the Daily Caller reports, “Connecticut Gov. Dannell Malloy will issue an executive order on Monday calling for a ban on state-funded travel to Indiana” … conveniently forgetting that Connecticut has an arguably more restrictive RFRA. Oops.

What took Robert Tracinski so long?

You know things are getting pretty bad when a libertarian atheist devoté of Ayn Rand links arms (albeit grudgingly) with conservative religious types. That’s just what Robert Tracinski does in his Federalist post, “Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior”.

Why would it be such as surprise? Because libertarians tend to be liberal where a Christian who takes traditional Christian morality seriously ought to be conservative, and vice versa. Because many atheists, like Tracinski himself, object to select parts of traditional Christian morality, and clamor that adopting anything they don’t like into law is tantamount to enacting a “Judeo-Christian Sharia” or a “theocracy”. Because Ayn Rand’s objectivism is, as Marina Galperina so charmingly put it, “the philosophical system for people who pleasure themselves over thoughts of laissez-faire capitalism and believe that self-interest is the highest moral purpose and that’s that, the objective truth, f**k you;” Tracinski proposes it as a “third way” precisely because it isn’t and can’t be considered a religion-based ethos.

Whatever else you can say about self-interest, though, it can occasionally prompt you to recognize that precedents established to destroy your cultural nemeses can — and often will — be turned against you and your allies sooner or later. And in the struggles over the last year, from the Hobby Lobby decision to gendered toys, Tracinski, whose normal position on cultural issues was “Could we talk about something else, please?”, heard Martin Niemöller begin his famous poem with a new line: “First they came for the Christians ….”

Tracinski the libertarian objectivist atheist has finally seen the Progressivist Thought Police on the march.

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and leftist bigotry

Not a Catholic-owned company ... not that the left cares.

Has anyone else noticed how very few of the left’s attacks on SCOTUS’ decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby involve little real legal analysis of the opinion? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; very few journalists are lawyers, after all, and many are simply political activists pretending to report news.

Instead, what we see is a lot of unhealthy focus on the religious and sexual makeup of the bench. Forget that, of the men on the majority, at least two would continue to uphold Roe v. Wade without reservations; forget that one of those men, just over a year ago, voted to strike down DOMA in United States v. Windsor; forget that one of the two women in the minority shares the same religious self-identification as the five men in the majority. Haters gonna hate; and when they hate, facts, logic and even recent history can just go whistle.

As I said of the Windsor decision, progressivist rhetoric about “the inevitability of change” and being “on the right side of history” disappears whenever there’s a significant setback, and various activists and talking heads start talking as though every key civil right is about to be rolled back. Now HuffPo is sweating out the implications of Burwell for gay rights, while the Guardian’s Jessica Valenti is hyperventilating over the Court’s “obsession with female purity”.

And through it all are constant references to the number of Catholic men on the bench and in the majority, as if the decision had been dictated by Catholic doctrine and Y chromosomes rather than by proper legal reasoning. They forget that the six Catholics and three Jews on the bench were all appointed by Protestant presidents; the only Catholic president, Kennedy, appointed an Episcopalian and a Jew.

Leftists, you see, have their own brand of bigotry.

Dancing with the Devil—UPDATED

Satanic Temple's proposed statue of Satan ... which is actually
based on a picture of Baphomet, which is probably a 12th-
century corruption of Mohammed. So much for research.

This post was rewritten for length and republished in Catholic Stand on May 15, 2014, at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

*     *     * 

The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a Host consecrated at a legitimate Catholic Mass for ritual desecration.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Ms. Scalia also quotes an anonymous spokesperson, who told her, “Please understand, there is in fact, respect for the beliefs of others, and our intention was not to be in anyone’s face. We did not mean to mislead.” And Boston Magazine says the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.”

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, doesn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “will mock rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics aren’t the only ones being dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner is suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress points out, implies that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

Three cosmic historical errors—UPDATED

Hypatia of Alexandria: astronomer, mathematician,
philosopher ... martyr of Science?

Yesterday morning (3/20/14) I shared on Facebook a link to Artur Rosman’s CosmosTheInLost post, “Walker Percy on the College Dorm Arguments of Sagan and deGrasse Tyson”. Rosman reprints an extensive footnote by Percy in the latter’s book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Picador, 2000), in which he bemoans the “unmalicious, even innocent, scientism” of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey. Neil deGrasse Tyson comes into the matter because of his reboot of the Cosmos miniseries, which includes Sagan’s highly-defective history of scientific development illustrated in cartoons (how appropriate!) by Seth MacFarlane.

One of my best friends, a Methodist, didn’t see the problem:

Being a fan of both of these men (Sagan and Tyson) and a fan of the original and the new one, I don’t understand the need to find an anti-theistic agenda in the productions. These men have made careers in astrophysics and increase the wonderment that is our world. The production value is huge and the entertainment value is bigger still. Am I so different from the supposed slack jawed, numb skull, UFC watching set that are supposedly changed in mindset with a show like this? My beliefs are not changed by the fact that this show grabs my attention and entertains me with all matters of the universe.

The problem isn’t an anti-theist agenda in the productions. Rather, the problem is in the perceived need to strip Christians and Christianity of all contributions to scientific development, and to add distortions of history in support of the “Christians hate science” trope. Three stand out in the Cosmos series, two of which Sagan elided together: 1) The murder of Hypatia; 2) the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; and 3) the death of Giordano Bruno.

Caricatures of the Catholic Church

Abp. Fulton J. Sheen and his Life Is Worth Living blackboard.

One of the eminently quotable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s most well-known dicta is this: “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.”

Let’s face it: The history, beliefs and culture of the Catholic Church comprises almost 2,000 years of development. To do justice merely to the last hundred years or so would require two or three volumes the size of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is thick enough to make Stephen King pale with fright. Frankly, non-Catholics ought to read Frs. John Trigillio and Kenneth Brighenti’s Catholicism for Dummies^® and at least peruse the Catechism before they attempt to comment on matters of the Faith. All too often, though, people hate a caricature of the Church, usually one they learned from similarly ill-informed people, like a person who hates Pres. Obama based on editorial cartoons he’s enjoyed.

Case in point: Before I went on my post-Easter “Internet fast”, I wrote a post for The Impractical Catholic arguing that the “rich Catholic Church” trope was a simplistic and unjustified treatment of Church finances. When I came back online Saturday, I found a reply from “Chester” which was little more than a dismissal. For our purposes, two lines stand out which illustrate this tendency to beat the stuffing out of straw men:

I think you raise some good points about businesses, but the Catholic church claims to be above human law, above mere business dealings.

The Catholic church is claimed to be a charitable organisation, but they actively discriminate against women and gays. If your god is good enough for everyone, so is your time and money.

O those awful Catholic writers!

Nope, no religious bigotry here in the Land of Tolerance!

My last post, on gender differences, drew attention from an unexpected source. I mentioned that SisterLisa, the author of a condescending piece on women’s ordination and male insecurity, had drawn inspiration in part from a piece of satire written for Forbes by Victoria Pynchon. I just mentioned it; I neither praised nor blamed it.

In the marvelous world of cyberspace, that’s all you need; it must have shown up as a trackback. Pynchon decided to be the first to comment. As of this writing [3/21/13 @ 12:27 am], I’m having issues with IntenseDebate, so her comment hasn’t shown up yet.

There are a few lines that deal with Pynchon’s own experience of gender stereotyping and social role expectations. It’s not my purpose to devalue or minimize them; while the examples she quotes may sound quaint to postmodern ears, there are still parents who are pleased when their daughter is a “girly girl”, and who are more apt to give them a cosmetics case for their twelfth birthday rather than a chemistry set. No, I’m simply cutting to the chase:

I have no business telling Catholics what they should do, think or believe. I’d prefer it if Catholics didn’t tell non-Catholic American women what they should do, think or believe. [That’s a first.] If Catholic writers would like to tinker with women’s lives, perhaps they should stick to reconciling the gap between the Church’s position on birth control (it’s wrong) and American Catholic women’s refusal to stop using it.

In other words, she’s happy to “discuss” gender biological differences — so long as it’s her talking and me shutting up. Drat that pesky First Amendment, which allows me to shoot my mouth off whenever I please on whatever I please! Why … it even allows Catholics to have opinions on secular subjects! O the outrage!

What’s so funny here?

A Protestant friend of mine decided to tweak me publicly on Facebook.  “I was reading Tony Layne’s blog the other day and it reminded me of this bit from The Meaning of Life which Tony took me to in the theaters.”  (Yes, yes, I did.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)

© 1983 Handmade Films

The bit in question?  The musical number, “Every Sperm is Sacred”.[1]  Two minutes later, he added, “I would be remiss in not posting the proper response to my last post,” to which he appended the sketch that follows the song, in which a Protestant man (the late Graham Chapman) waxes rhapsodical over the Reformation and condoms, unaware that he’s arousing his seemingly proper wife (Eric Idle).

My favorite exchange comes near the end:  Chapman says that Martin Luther may not have been aware of the full implications of his ninety-five theses in 1517, “but because of him, my dear, I can put anything I want on my John Thomas.”  To which Idle replies pantingly, “Well, then, why don’t you?”  But alas, Thomas Cranmer is too wrapped up in thundering self-righteously against the hidebound Catholic morality to pick up on her hint.  Protestants, the message seems to be, can do whatever they want … but they don’t.

Of course “Every Sperm is Sacred” is a hideous exaggeration of Catholic teaching about sex; it wouldn’t be satire if it weren’t.  Catholic teaching places great emphasis on the sacramentality of the marital act; in its proper context, sex is man’s participation in God’s act of creation.  And the Pythons unwittingly tell us precisely what’s wrong not only with contraception but with the Protestant Reformation: the inordinate, isolating emphasis on the individual will.  But you neither expect nor even necessarily want nuance from a comedy film … even one made by a very erudite British comedy troupe.

No such thing as free contraception

Yesterday, Catholics across the country were merely angry with the Obamination.  Today, we’re not only angry but mortally offended and insulted.

Why?  Didn’t Pres. Obama outline an accommodation on the HHS mandate that would allow religiously-affiliated institutions to not offer contraceptives and sterilizations?  What more could we want?  Isn’t that enough of a compromise?

In truth, it wasn’t an “accommodation” at all.  Under the “accommodation”, the insurance company would offer the employee the coverage … at no additional cost (wink-wink-nudge-nudge).  But since the employer is still paying the insurance company, and because the insurance company doesn’t get a conscience exemption, the net effect is that the employer will still be paying for the contraceptives indirectly through higher rates … the bookkeeping will look a little different, that’s all.

Let’s explain it a different way: Under the old phrasing, the religiously-affiliated employer was subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives.  Under the new phrasing, the employer is still subsidizing coverage for no-copay contraceptives … but she’s allowed to say she’s not.  But she still has to tell the employee how to get the coverage she’s not providing from the carrier she’s paying to not provide the coverage the employee is still getting.  Make sense to you?  It doesn’t to me.

By offering such a transparently phony compromise, Obama told mandate opponents, “Forget it, you’re not gonna get out of paying for birth control.  I’m just offering you this one chance to chalk up a face-saving ‘win’.  Then you might as well just shut up and bend over.”

Further thoughts on “Judeo-Christian Sharia”

Yesterday I stripped apart a post by comedian Dean Obeidallah on CNN, in which he regurgitates the boilerplate liberal “establishment of religion” red herring under the label “Judeo-Christian Sharia”. 

My main focus was on the examples he brought up of the horrible dhimmitude Rick Santorum, if elected President, would somehow manage to force on an unwilling electorate all by himself … almost all of which social conservatives of every religious background have been calling for, including some atheists and agnostics.  No porn!?  No federally-funded contraceptives!?  No gay marriage!?  O the inhumanity!!!

Particularly objectionable is how Obeidallah equates a law based on traditional Judeo-Christian morality with Sharia to play upon American anti-Islamic feelings:  “Santorum wants to base laws on the Bible; Arabs want to base laws on the Qur’an; what’s the difference?” [Not his exact words, I add in honesty.]  Sharia creates oppression; Sharia is based on a particular religion’s sacred scripture; laws based on religious scripture oppress; Santorum wants our laws to be based on Christian scripture; therefore Santorum wants to create a Christian Sharia.

Not only is this kind of “see Spot run” association implicit in Obeidallah’s argument, it’s illogical, counterfactual and reprehensible.  And as his examples of “Judeo-Christian Sharia” demonstrate, like most pampered children of the West since the “baby boom”, Obeidallah has no real grasp of what oppression is.

A “Judeo-Christian Sharia” … really?

I keep thinking there was a time when, if a media outlet wanted a respectable opinion written or spoken — something the public would read/watch and consider carefully — they would ask a prominent politician, or a “think tank” analyst, or eminent scholar.  Alas, how “infotainment” has bankrupted our culture: to make an analysis of Rick Santorum, fresh from his Iowa triumph, CNN asked Dean Obeidallah.

The editor informs us, “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian who has appeared on Comedy Central’s Axis of Evil special, ABC’s The View, CNN’s What the Week and HLN’s The Joy Behar Show.”  So even if the title of the hit piece — “Santorum wants to impose ‘Judeo-Christian Sharia’” — didn’t give it away, you would still be warned that Obeidallah would hardly give Santorum a bouquet of flowers, judging by the venues he’s playing.

Imagine if either of the two Muslim members of Congress declared their support for a proposed American law based on verses from the Quran. The outcry would be deafening, especially from people like Santorum.

One of the great ironies is that Santorum has been a leader in sounding alarm bells that Muslims want to impose Islamic law — called Sharia law — upon non-Muslims in America.  While Santorum fails to offer even a scintilla of credible evidence to support this claim, he continually warns about the “creeping” influence of Muslim law.

So okay, Obedallah’s first complaint is hypocrisy.  I might buy that if Santorum weren’t speaking in the context of a democracy where the concept of God-given inalienable human rights obtains as a Christian legacy (despite secular humanist attempts to take credit for it).  As it is, Obeidallah’s attempt to make the two equivalent merely strike one as ludicrous.

Clohessy’s double standards—UPDATED

SNAP director David Clohessy told CNA on Jan. 3 that his organization should be held to a “different standard” of transparency than Church leaders and dioceses, which he described as “organizations that enable and conceal thousands of pedophiles to rape tens of thousands of kids.”

I read this paragraph in Michele Bauman’s CNA story and my jaw dropped.  Surely this must be a misquote, even a false quotation!  Not even David Clohessy could be this nakedly hypocritical and hysterical!  But no, here’s his response as reported by the adulatory National Catholic Fishwrap:

Asked whether he thought his organization’s refusal to hand over certain documents contradicted its calls for transparency from diocesan offices regarding allegations of sex abuse, Clohessy said he believed there “are two standards of transparency.”

“Our view is that agencies that counsel and help sex crimes victims should never be transparent about the people who call them desperately in pain and seeking guidance,” Clohessy said.

“We believe that there are two standards of transparency,” he said.  [So he’s honest about having double standards.]  “One for institutions that have enabled thousands of pedophiles to assault tens of thousands of kids and conceal the crimes.  And another standard for organizations that enable kids to be safer and expose heinous crimes.”

In other words, “We should be able to hide whatever information we want because we’re the good guys.  Our intentions are noble, right and just; rules are for bad men, like those sneaky, lying bishops.”

Pushing the “not the boss of me” button

My little brother, Bob (God be good to him), was a great guy. If he had one major personality flaw, though, it would be willfulness.

As in “You’re not the boss of me!”

Very simply, if there were something he wanted to do, by God, he was going to do it. And the best way to get him to do it was to forbid him to do it at all, or to express doubts that he could get away with it. I don’t know how much trouble — physical, fiscal and social — he got into over the years because he placed independence even over common sense.

Of course such an attitude has consequences, as does any principle pushed to an absurd extreme. And toward the end of his life he began to realize it. If you beat your head against a brick wall long enough, you’ll eventually figure out it hurts you more than it hurts the wall. “I can do whatever I damn well please” is a stupid, potentially self-destructive rule to live by unless you’re only pleased by Virtue in all its aspects … including humility and obedience.

It’s always easy to rationalize away a rule you don’t like; but rules don’t exist just to take away your independence of action. It’s easy to ignore or sass back an Authority Figure who tells you something you don’t like; but Authority Figures don’t say “Thou shalt not” and “Thus it is” just to indulge their control freakiness — occasionally, Authority Figures know what they’re talking about, and actually care what happens to you.

How tasteless can Harold and Kumar get?

A few years ago, my friend Larry and I rented Time Bandits. We watched about forty to forty-five minutes of it, breathlessly waiting for it to be as funny as it was when we were seventeen. I’m quite certain I wasn’t stoned when I watched it the first time, so my only explanation is that my sense of humor has changed.[*]

So when I watched what I could stand of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, it was with a sense of having been sold a pig in a poke – my older brother’s family insisted it was a scream. What I saw was a crudely overdone remake of Up In Smoke, without the laid-back grace of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. The closest I got to actually laughing was when Kumar (Kal Penn) started fantasizing a romantic relationship with a garbage bag full of weed; however, the scene couldn’t squeeze even a chuckle out of my larynx.

Needless to say, I found no desire to see Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. There are just some movies that you can tell from the trailers are going be stupidly bad … for instance, if the title begins with American Pie, or if the star is Adam Sandler or Mike Myers (the good thing about the Shrek movies is you can’t see Myers try to act).

And now we have A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. Not confident that a dope-smoking Father Christmas, a little girl who snorts coke, and further self-parody by Neil Patrick Harris can justify extending the franchise further, director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have gone even further down the low road to cheap laughs and thrown in some anti-Catholicism: lesbian nuns, pedophile priests chasing an altar boy, trashing a statue of the Blessed Virgin and shouting obscenities at Jesus Christ.

And you thought Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo was tasteless.

Have you no sense of decency, Mr. Cuomo?

Here’s the lede on a story filed on LifeSiteNews on Oct. 26: “An employee with the New York Archdiocese warned of an ‘impending persecution’ after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called same-sex ‘marriage’ opponents discriminatory and ‘anti-American’ last week.”

October 26 … a week and a half ago. And this was on comments Cuomo made “last week”, i.e. two and a half to three weeks ago.

Where were we when this happened? Was nobody except the Archdiocese of New York awake when Cuomo let this appalling sentiment fly? Why isn’t Cuomo being raked over the hot coals of the religious conservative world?

I could understand if the New York Times didn’t pick it up; the editors of that fading rag have long since abandoned any pretense of fairness or objectivity. But surely such an assertion should be as damning as Rev. Samuel D. Burchard’s infamous “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” line that cost James G. Blaine the 1884 election!?

For the first time in many years, I’m truly surprised. Anyone my age ought to be at least dimly aware of what McCarthyism was, and how long a shadow it cast on American politics. Anyone claiming to be a liberal ought to be especially sensitive to it. That a politician with the national presence of a New York governor can utter the word “anti-American” without pundits making the automatic mental association to “House Un-American Activities Committee” is both bad news and worse news.

Killing a public conscience

Today we observe in memorial the beheading of St. John the Baptist. For what was he beheaded? Well, the proximate cause was Herodias’ daughter, Salome, whose dance at Herod’s birthday feast was so … um, enchanting that he rashly promised her anything she wanted (Mk 6:17-29; cf. Mt 14:3-12).

But the final cause was Herodias’ desire to shut St. John up forever. Why? Because he pointed out loudly and publicly that her adulterous relationship with Herod (she was married to his brother Philip) was sinful. At her prompting, Herod had already imprisoned the Baptist; nevertheless, apparently he was still a goad to either Herod’s or her conscience.

Every now and again, this determination to squash one’s personal Jiminy Cricket gets played out on the world stage. Especially notorious are the deaths of Ss. Thomas Becket and Thomas More, both done in by kings who had been personal friends but who couldn’t stand public opposition on moral grounds. But we also have more recent examples in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and — with some qualification — Harvey Milk.

Stacy Trasancos — scientist, theologian-in-training, wife, mother of five and author of the increasingly popular blog Accepting Abundance — is undergoing a kind of martyrdom right now. So far it hasn’t led to her death (quod Deus avertat!), but it has led to death threats. Why? Because she had the temerity to express her indignation with gay PDAs.