Equivocating American secularism

You ever read something and find yourself thinking, “Y’know, I’d agree with this if the blinking author had just found a different way to say it”?

On Monday, historian and author Kenneth C. Davis wrote an interesting think-piece for CNN, “Why U.S. is not a Christian nation”. Davis, most noted for his Don’t Know Much About … series of books, makes hits the expected points very well:

No one can argue … that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ’s divinity.

More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.

But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence — the very war celebrated on the “Glorious Fourth” — against a country in which church and state were essentially one.

Here’s where it gets hinky:

They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.

Overheard at a Denny's - III

Again I apologize for inflicting an experiment in place of my usual ponderous, obfuscating commentary. But today got away from me completely — no time to recuperate, too many things to do around here! And besides, I had a lot of fun writing these dialogues. Hmm, maybe I can build a book out of these ….

*          *          *

“So tell me something, Derek: What is it with the Catholic Church and gay people?

“Aw, Mark! I don’t have another job lined up, so I gotta keep the one I got!”

“Hey, come on, we’re buds! You know I don’t get all scream-y like some gay guys do! … Hey, I tell ‘fag’ jokes, for Pete’s sake!”

“Yeah, I know, and I always flinch and look for the PC Patrol to come frog-march us off to HR.”

Overheard at a Denny's - II

I was going to save this second installment for a little later this month. However, I spent yesterday in the hospital being treated for pneumonia I didn’t know I had, so I’m running a bit behind. Thanks for your patience!

*          *          *

“So anyway, Derek, I was thinking about what we were talking about the other night——”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m not entirely convinced. You said we work backwards from the moral wrongness to the psychological illness …”

“Right.”

“… but different cultures have different moralities.”

“Not as much as you think. People cherry-pick the differences and ignore the commonalities, then pretend that the differences mean there’s no intersections. It gets really bad among the college progressives, who tend to split moral sets into ‘white male Christian homophobes’ and ‘everybody else’, really overworking the socialist language of ‘oppressor class’ and ‘oppressed class’.”

The logical end of defensive warfare

Amidst all the kvetching, grimacing and posturing over the New York debacle, a couple of voices here and there have tried to warn us that the problem is worse than we think, that our focus is misdirected, that the legalization of gay marriage has “killed” an institution that was already on terminal life support in 2003, the year the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down its decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.

Stephen Greydanus, for example, writes: “The problem is, it isn’t just same-sex marriage advocates who are unable to explain what marriage is. It’s practically everyone. Marriage has been redefined for decades in our society, and it isn’t homosexuals or politicians who have done it. It’s our culture as a whole. And that’s why we are where we are” (emphasis in original). In line with that thought, Taylor Marshall has pinned down two culprits, contraception and pornography.

David Carlin and John Zmirak have blamed it on our unwillingness to assert on natural-law principles that gay sex is wrong. If it comes to that, we — as a culture — been equally weak at asserting the wrongness of premarital sex and contraception. Here, though, we’ve been as much at the mercy of our allies as of our opponents; those of us who have managed to connect all the dots are part of a rather tiny minority.

The make-believe world of social construction

The trend for the future appears to be towards greater radicalism. [Alison] Jaggar, [currently Professor of Distinction, Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder.—TL], recently denounced the nuclear family as a “cornerstone of repression” and eagerly anticipated scientific advances to eliminate such biological functions as insemination, lactation, and gestation. “One woman could inseminate another … men and non-parturitive women could lactate … fertilized ova could be transferred into women’s or even men’s bodies.”[1]

This partial paragraph comes from Dinesh D’Souza’s controversial book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage Books [Random House], 1992). At the time I first read the book, I was studying sociology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; Jaggar’s statement struck me as an example of how the rhetoric of social-conflict theory could carry someone beyond the bounds of reason and fact.

Alas, no. Since he was studying the success of radical activists in imposing feminist and Afrocentric agendas on college campuses, D’Souza didn’t see —and possibly didn’t know of — the influence of social constructionism, or its apotheosis in queer theory.

Broadly stated, social constructionism is a set of sociological theories that tries to explain how language as a social construct affects our perceptions of reality. Ideally, this set of theories should explain why Aleuts have twenty-seven different categories of snow and Europeans have only one, or why certain tribes may only have two or three words to express color while your local Sherwin-Williams needs a dozen or so just for shades of white.

The end of the Republic

Back in February, I wrote a post comparing the US in 2011 to Rome in 59 BC, asking, “So just how far have we progressed?” Without boasting, it’s been my most successful post to date; it was a lot of fun to write, too.

Of course, surface comparisons can only take us so far, especially when you’re trying to write social commentary. You can get so wrapped up in the obvious similarities that you ignore the deeper differences; even worse, you can strain to make meaningful equivalences out of situations that are apple-and-orange different.

For example, gay-rights advocates are at some pains to equate the homosexual experience of discrimination with the black American experience … an effort that must cause many black Americans either amusement or disgust. The most obvious dissimilarity? Most of the time, if you’re black, you don’t have to tell anyone. And that accounts for most of the differences in treatment and experience.

(By the way, this isn’t another flipping post on gay marriage; I’m sick to my gills with the topic. Just let me set the stage here.)

Overheard at a Denny's - I

“I really don’t see what business the government has prying into people’s sex lives. I think whatever goes on between consenting adults in the privacy of the bedroom should be nobody’s business but theirs, as long as nobody gets hurt.”

“Okay, so you’re for sexual restrictions?”

“What? How did you get that out of what I said?”

“Simple. You said consenting, so you’ve ruled out force — that’s one restriction. You said adults, so there’s another restriction — no pederasty, no pedophilia. You said in the privacy of the bedroom, so I presume no sex in the middle of The Ballpark at Arlington, right? You said—”

“Y’know, Derek, you really are annoying when you get like this.”

Reflections on the setback in New York

Okay, I suppose at this point, I should make some grumbling noises about the State of New York passing (and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signing) the gay marriage bill. Supposedly there was an amendment adopted requiring stronger religious protections … but the bill was voted on almost as soon as the amendment was released, before anyone could take a good look at the legal language. I have no doubt that, when the legal analysts actually take a look at it, the language will be equivocal, capable of bearing the worst interpretations possible.

Okay, I’m not happy about it. But then, I didn’t expect a victory for the “culture of life” team. It would have been nice, but New York was a blue state long before colors were assigned (what would Richard Nixon have thought about conservative states being called “red”?). And of course, there’s always three or four RINOs on the floor, who talk pro-life and pro-family during the election cycle yet manage to find reasons to vote with the liberals when the issues become final votes. (“Crypto-liberals?” “Stealth Democrats”?) But we’re not England, so party members aren’t required to vote the platform.

The wealth gap and economic stalemate

If there’s any commercial which sums up the economic trap we’re in, it would have to be the one recently released by the American Realtors’ Association.

The commercial does a pretty good job of pointing out that building homes puts people to work, and has been a major driver of our economy for some time. From there, it wants us to draw the conclusion that it’s Our Patriotic Obligation to buy new houses, to get America back to work again.

But I already have a house. It’s not twenty years old yet. I’m not moving anywhere. I don’t have the funds on hand or the income to justify a second home. Nor do I see the point in having a new home built for me when this one does me just fine; to do so is simply wasteful — consumption for consumption’s sake.

And even if I could qualify for a mortgage for this theoretical new house, the construction workers would be put to work for only a couple of months. After that, for the next thirty or so years my money would go to support people who service mortgages.

I think you get the drift: Asking people out of work to buy houses and saddle themselves with extra debt to put some people to work for a short time is a clear sign that nobody knows what the hell to do.

Freedom and the paradox of choice

Over at Startling the Day, my friend Elizabeth Hillgrove talks about a label psychologists and sociologists are starting to apply to certain twenty-somethings: emerging adults. These are the typical qualities of the emerging adult:

• They are searching for their identity and exploring different options.
• Their lives are unstable.
• They are self-focused, meaning they are not yet beholden to anyone.
• They feel “in-between” adolescence and adulthood.
• It’s a time of remarkable optimism.

My first reaction to this list was to quip: “After thirty, they’re called slackers.” And, in the way of all jokes, this is true. I ran into a similar label, pre-adulthood, in Kay S. Hymowitz’s controversial WSJ essay, “Where Have The Good Men Gone?”, which I discussed back in February (“Fish need bicycles”). But while emerging adulthood as given by psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is given a positive spin, Hymowitz’s pre-adulthood is almost synonymous with “men who won’t grow up”.

The odd thing is, this post comes up right after I’d had a quick discussion on Facebook with the Crescat and Michael Liccione over Richard James Verone, a 59-year-old man who deliberately “robbed” a bank for $1 very politely in order to go to jail and get free medical care. I’d also watched an hour-long talk psychologist Barry Schwartz gave at Google on The Paradox of Choice. And, to top it all off, the day before I’d just watched The Shawshank Redemption, one of the best movies ever based on a Stephen King story.