Category Archives: Kulturkampf

The Boy Scout abuse report

Slatest brings this LAT report to our attention:

Hundreds of alleged child molesters were not reported to police by Boy Scouts of America officials over two decades, often giving the abusers a chance to quietly resign rather than risk a hit to the organization’s reputation. The Los Angeles Times reviewed 1,600 of the Boy Scouts’ confidential “perversion files” dated from 1970 to 1991 and found more than 500 cases in which officials learned about abuse directly. In around 80 percent of those cases, there is no record of the Scouts reporting the claims of abuse to authorities and in more than 100 cases there seems to be clear evidence of efforts to hide the abuse. Worst of all, there are clear signs that some of the abusers went on to hurt other children.

Lawyers for the Boy Scouts have been working hard to keep the “perversion files,” which the organization has used since 1919, out of the public eye. Yet as more of them become public, the Boy Scouts could soon face a wave of litigation across the country, although in many states statutes of limitation will prevent the victims from suing.  Boy Scout officials insist they’ve improved their internal process to protect children, noting that since 2010 they require officials to report even the suspicion of abuse to authorities.

Which suggests several things:

  • Golly, I didn’t know so many Boy Scout leaders were Catholic priests! Because, you know, to hear some people talk, that’s the only group that engages in this sort of behavior — even though the evidence indicates that this perversion is no more prevalent among Catholics than among any other group.
  • I had always sort of supposed that the failure to take prosecutorial action on the part of the Church was because of the nature of the organization — that it simply isn’t geared toward punishment of wrongdoing, that it is oriented toward hearing confessions and then granting absolution, however heinous the sin. The Scouts’ failure to report these cases indicates that the problem of letting abusers go free is a more universal problem.
  • Social conservatives will no doubt respond that the mean ol’ media are picking on the Scouts, as they do the Church, on account of it not being on board with this or that “liberal agenda.” And we’re off to the Kultukampf races…
  • And then there’s my own difficulty in ever believing such statistics, which “realists” will scoff at. But I just have always found it difficult to believe that there’s even one person on the planet that would want to sexually abuse children. Much less 500 of them in one organization. I’m not saying it’s not true. I’m just saying it’s kind of mind-blowing.

What’s really wrong with Todd Akin

All the moralizing on this previous post about the work Wesley Donehue is doing for this month’s pariah, Todd Akin, goads me to share what I actually think of Mr. “Legitimate Rape.” Even though I know it’s going to make pretty much everybody mad at me.

Well, here goes…

To begin with, Akin is one of those people who makes you furious because he’s on your side of an issue (if you’re me), and he’s giving people on the other side of the issue more than enough excuse to dismiss you and all who think like you (or, once again, to be more accurate, me) as idiots or evil or both.

The issue here being abortion, not rape. The thing (I think) I agree with him on, that is.

As for being an idiot or evil, well, I reject both with regard to myself, although of course I’m not perfect. With regard to Akin… I don’t think he’s evil, although he possesses a certain very common character flaw (which will be my point, when I get to it) in an extreme form. And as to the idiot part… well, my wife often calls me down for calling people idiots, which is one of my character flaws — and after all, we are specifically enjoined from doing so, and very sternly warned about it, in the Bible.

But… confession time here… when I heard about what Akin said, and then saw a picture of him, one of my first thoughts was, Yes, he looks stupid enough to have done that. Which I know is wrong, to leap to such a conclusion just from looking at someone. I am in fact quite embarrassed to confess it. But there it is.

Basically, Akin tried to make a point that would have been extremely objectionable to most people even if he had put it in the most diplomatic way possible. And then, he managed to put it as offensively as possible. This suggests a sort of genius for offending, but again, I look at him and I think he only stumbled on this perfect combination by accident.

Neither I, nor I suspect his most vehement political opponents (although I could be wrong here) thinks that Akin meant to say that any sort of rape is “legitimate,” in the sense of being licit, or a good thing. So we can set that aside. (And yes, I know I’m setting aside a whole, complex discussion about how some people reject that all cases of rape are “real” rape, but I’m trying to address a separate point, and believe me, this post is going to be long enough.)

And of course, I think he was just trying to defend a political position that I share — the notion that if one truly believes that abortion takes a human life, one cannot defend exemptions for rape or even incest.

And yet, I, too, am deeply offended by what he said. I see it as both foolish and wrong. But then, I think his sin is a very common one.

Finally I get to my point: Like many, many people across the political spectrum, Akin sought to rationalize away any human cost of his own political position. What he did reflects both sloppy thinking and a sort of moral cowardice. And it’s a function of the absolutism that infests our politics today.

Akin and I agree that you can’t have exemptions for rape when you’re talking about a human life. That innocent unborn human didn’t commit the rape, and condemning him or her to death for it is unjust in the extreme. I’m deeply opposed to the death penalty even for murderers, but I can certainly see more justice in that than I can in this.

But here’s where Akin and I diverge: He wants to explain away the consequence of this position. He wants to say, well, if it’s really rape, then the woman won’t get pregnant. Which is amazingly foolish and ignorant, but which seems to arise from a very human desire to believe that no innocent human being will suffer because of the position I’m taking.

I know better. I’m not going to shy away for a moment (I hope) from the fact that the human cost to a woman caught in this kind of situation is horrific, beyond even imagining. I can’t even begin to think of what to say or do that would ease the suffering of a woman in such a situation (aside from such weak expedients as providing material support). I don’t want her to be in that situation, any more than the pro-choice person does. It awakens in me powerfully strong protective impulses, and vindictive ones, including a determination that the person responsible for it must be punished to the fullest extent of the law (while, at the same time, knowing that no amount of punishment could possibly erase this woman’s pain). I am fully aware of the terrible odds her child will face — not only not being wanted by his or her mother, but being the material embodiment of the most horrible moment in her life.

But none of that justifies killing the child, either before or after he or she is born. Not in any truly moral balance that I am capable of conceiving. As much as I understand the pro-choice advocate’s desire for a magic solution that makes at least this one facet of the crime go away for the woman, I can’t see any way that that expedient is justified in a society that is just. It in fact adds another moral horror to that which already so unjustly exists.

It’s not comfortable to face and acknowledge the additional pain to which having to bear this child would condemn a rape victim, but I see no moral alternative to doing so. Akin? He wants to cop out on it.

But that’s a common impulse. Too seldom do any of us face up to the very real consequences of the positions we take. We like to believe that our attitudes are all to the good, that nothing bad would happen if only the things we believe were acted upon. And in the take-no-prisoners absolutism of today’s politics — in which each side wants to see itself as all good, and the other side as all bad — people regularly paint themselves into corners trying to make their positions look as good as possible. And to make themselves feel good about those positions. There are a lot of Todd Akins out there.

For instance… and here’s where I make everybody mad… there are those on the opposite side of the abortion issue who rationalize away the human life that is destroyed by abortion. They say it isn’t a human being at all, even that it’s nothing more than a random collection of cells, and ridding oneself of them has no more moral weight than sloughing off dead skin.

(Not all do this, of course. Right off the bat, I can think of pro-choice friends who have persuaded me that they are fully cognizant that abortion takes an innocent human life and that it is deeply wrong — but that the imperative of choice overrides it. This chills my blood — just as my antiwar friends are chilled by my advocacy of some military actions in spite of my pro-life beliefs — but I can’t criticize them for failing to face reality.)

They say this — that the fetus is not a human being — because they would find the moral burden of believing their position results in the destruction of innocent human life even more unbearable than Akin would find it to contemplate the suffering of a rape victim. (Now, before all my pro-choice friends shout that they say it because they believe it, let me quickly interject that I know you believe it. I just, personally, find it very hard to believe that you would believe such an unlikely thing without a powerful human need to rationalize, which is related to the fact that you are a good and caring person.)

Now to an empiricist, of course, there’s a difference between Akin’s rationalization and the it’s-not-a-human-being rationalization — one that I readily acknowledge. After all, you can physically, scientifically prove that Akin is wrong in his fantasy about true rape not leading to pregnancy. Whereas science can’t prove or disprove that a fetus is human — no matter how strongly I believe it unlikely that smart people would assert that it isn’t, in the absence of this powerful cause for rationalization. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that similar mechanisms are at play.

This dynamic translates to other issues, of course. There are those who advocate war, and blind themselves to the worst aspects of the human cost — such as the deaths of noncombatants, at the most extreme end of that spectrum. On the other side are those who are so opposed to war and its horrific human costs that they try to rationalize away the cause for war — minimizing the evils of the Saddam Hussein regime (how many times have I read that we invaded an inoffensive country that wasn’t doing anything to anybody, as though it were Switzerland?), or the costs of a precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to rise again.

There are costs both to acting militarily and not acting militarily, and it’s wrong to blind yourself and try to wave them away. For my part, seen as I am here as the bloodthirsty warmonger, I try never to turn my mind from the horrors of war, and I recoil from efforts to make war seem costless just as much as I reject attempts to paint it as never worth engaging in. And for me, the horrible thing about war is not just that innocent civilians, or one’s own soldiers, get killed and maimed. Every armed enemy’s death also diminishes us. (I’m reading right now a phenomenal book about the cost of killing in war, Dave Grossman’s On Killing. It powerfully reinforces something I have long believed — that the greatest price we ask of a soldier is not that he die for his country; the most awful thing we ask of him, the thing that costs him the most, is expecting him to kill for his country.)

Well, I could go on and on. Actually, I have. There are other places I could go with this, carrying this phenomenon out of the realm of life-and-death issues. I could get into how, for instance, in this absolutist political atmosphere, neither those who want more government spending nor those who advocate shrinking government small enough to drown in a bathtub like to face that there are tradeoffs to their positions… but I think this is enough for how…

1st Amendment meant to protect POLITICAL speech

Some of my friends here on the blog occasionally ask whether I ever change my mind about anything. They mistake the certainty, and consistency, with which I express myself for rigidity. There are a number of reasons for this. One is a certain… forcefulness… that creeps into my writing when I’m not trying to hold it back. Another is that, if I express it here, it’s usually an idea that I’ve tested many times over the course of decades. And I’m not likely to shift suddenly on a matter such as that.

But here’s an example of something I’ve changed my mind on…

Back when I was a special-assignments writer at The Jackson Sun in Tennessee — we’re talking late 70s, early 1980 perhaps — I would occasionally fill in when one of the editorial writers was on vacation. On one occasion, I wrote an editorial headlined something like “Yes, even Hustler.”

It had something to do with one of Larry Flynt’s legal battles. Basically, I was asserting that however disgusting his exercise of it may be, the free-press right guaranteed under the First Amendment applied to his publication as well.

Potter Stewart, who knew it when he saw it.

I would not write that today. My respect for the intent of the Framers has grown over the years, and I am far more reluctant to cheapen the Bill of Rights by inferring that they meant to assert a right to publish pornography. No, I’m not inclined to launch a crusade to ban such publications, either (which are almost quaint in view of what is freely available on the Web). I just wouldn’t take up my cudgel in Flynt’s defense today, because to do so would require dragging Madison, Hamilton and Jay into the gutter with him.

And I believe that would be wrong. The intent to protect citizens in expressing political ideas that may offend the government just seemed too clear to me. And no, I don’t accept the convenient canard that obscenity is in itself an inherently political statement.

The courts may not entirely agree with me all the time on this, but in general they have not granted commercial speech, or obscenity, the same protections as political speech.

What brought this to mind was something that Logan Smith — who is roughly the age I was when I wrote that defense of Flynt — posted yesterday on his blog, Palmetto Public Record:

It’s been less than a week since thousands of angry conservatives swarmed Chick-fil-A restaurants in South Carolina and across the country to support the fast food chain’s stance on same-sex marriage. Many expressed outrage that city officials in Boston and Chicago wanted to ban the restaurant, claiming that doing so would somehow violate Chick-fil-A’s “freedom of speech.”

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of free speech and censorship, of course, but that’s beside the point. At least people are getting politically active — even if their form of activism is buying fried chicken.

However, we do agree that government officials who use regulations to target specific businesses are abusing their power. That’s why we’re waiting for those Chick-fil-A fans to launch a similar flash mob of support for another business being banned by city government for moral reasons — the Taboo Adult Superstore in Columbia.

When he called attention to his post on Twitter this morning, asking, “Why no defense of Columbia sex shop from Chick-fil-A supporters?” I replied, “Perhaps they believe (as do I) that “free speech” refers to POLITICAL speech. The Framers didn’t have sex shops in mind.”

You may argue that what Mr. Cathy engaged in was the exercise of religion, rather than politics, but hey — same amendment. More to the point, he was expressing himself on something that has undeniably become a political issue. And local government types in some jurisdictions were proposing to use governmental power to penalize him for it. (At this point, we could get really strict constructionist and say that this is not the same as Congress passing a law to abridge this right, and that would be an interesting conversation — but irrelevant to the case at hand. We’re not arguing the merits of a lawsuit here, but whether all those people who flocked to Chick-fil-A last week are consistent in their political ideas by not similarly defending a sex shop.)

Now, all of this said, I give Mr. Smith credit for not merely presenting the sort of empty, kneejerk, moral-equivalence argument that I fear I did all those years ago (the editorial is buried in a box somewhere in my garage, and fortunately not readily at hand). He gets into “adverse secondary effects,” which is more sophisticated than what I recall saying.

But I still say that the analogy is a false one. One would in no way be inconsistent to stand up for free speech rights in one case, and not the other. If I had been moved to participate in that Chick-fil-A demonstration, which I was not (aside from being, you know, allergic to chicken), I certainly would have felt no obligation to have defended the latter.

‘If you support Chick-fil-A and free enterprise, give money to Joe.’ Say WHAT?

If you want to know why both sides keep the Culture fires stoked, Joe Wilson makes it clear in this release:

Liberals want to control private industry. Let’s take only the most recent events that have occurred as examples.

First, yesterday was Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.  Why?  Because liberals are attacking a private company for using its funds to support the traditional family.

Millions of Americans believe in the traditional family, but Americans also believe in free speech. Chick-fil-A can and should be able to support Christian organizations if it chooses, but liberals won’t be happy until all American businesses toe their liberal line.

Then, we have President Obama telling American business owners that they didn’t build their businesses.  Why? Because he wants to tax businesses even more than current tax rates to supply his overspending.

Businesses and all Americans benefit from infrastructure and education.  But education and infrastructure do not exist without the taxes from our businesses and our citizens either. Instead of tearing down the ideals of the free market, we should be encouraging entrepreneurs and other business owners to hire, grow, expand, and innovate. Because when businesses grow, our roads, our bridges, our students, and all Americans benefit.

So what are liberals telling us?  Don’t stand up for what you believe in.  Don’t try to take credit for your hard work.  That’s apparently the American value system that liberals want, but I reject.

If you reject it too, click here to stand with me against liberals’ disappointing agenda and donate $10, $25 or $50 now.

Sincerely,

Joe Wilson

P.S. We must fight for our businesses and our values.Donate $25 now to the campaign because I will continue to stand for jobs and freedom.

It’s all about separating you from your money. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone in this universe is foolish enough to think that the way to show support for Chick-fil-A is to send money to Joe Wilson, but apparently this sort of thing works, because both sides keep doing it.

Turns out that’s a Kulturkampf cow…

At first, I thought this was the influence of longtime dairyman and Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, since it came from his Senate Republican Caucus. I remember when Harvey used to pass out cow-shaped erasers over at the State House. (Or was that his brother Bob? No, I believe it was Harvey.)

Now, I see it’s something else. Sigh. The Kultukampf does go on, doesn’t it?

Dang. I heard something about this flap on the radio the other day, and it reminded me of something else entirely that I wanted to share here on the blog, and now I can’t remember what it was.

Oh, well. It will come to me again at some point…

Hoping Obama won’t really run this way

Maybe y’all have time to read this piece by John Heilemann in New York Magazine. I don’t, not today. If you do, please get back and tell me that things don’t really look as dark as they do at the beginning:

The contours of that contest are now plain to see—indeed, they have been for some time. Back in November, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, two fellows at the Center for American Progress, identified the prevailing dynamics: The presidential race would boil down to “demographics versus economics.” That the latter favor Mitt Romney is incontestable. From high unemployment and stagnant incomes to tepid GDP growth and a still-pervasive sense of anxiety bordering on pessimism in the body politic, every salient variable undermines the prospects of the incumbent. The subject line of an e-mail from the Romney press shop that hit my in-box last week summed up the challenger’s framing of the election concisely and precisely: “What’s This Campaign Going to Be About? The Obama Economy.”

The president begs to differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come…

Y’all know how I feel about Identity Politics. I want leaders who want to lead all of us, not this or that arbitrarily selected subset. Obama, to me, is the guy who inspired a victorious crowd in Columbia to chant, on the night of the 2008 South Carolina primary, “Race doesn’t matter!” Amen, said I. The atmosphere that night — when voters rejected the continued partisan strife that the Clinton campaign seemed to offer — was one in which we put our divisions behind us, and work toward building a better country together, as one people.

And if there’s anything more distressing in my book than Identity Politics, it’s Kulturkampf. Those couple of paragraphs are enough to push me toward political despair on that count. The next two grafs are worse:

But if the Obama 2012 strategy in this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will represent a striking deviation. Though the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This [f*@#ing] guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”

Yeah, that’s all we need. A campaign that sees itself as an army of indignant minorities, feminists, gays and young people up against a coalition of self-interested white males, Ayn Randers, birthers and nativists, with both sides convinced that it is at war with the other. And each subset being motivated not by what’s good for the country, but by what it sees as advantageous to itself as a group.

So much for the United States.

All that’s left to me at this point is to hope the campaign plays out differently from the way this writer envisions it.

How’s your Confederate Memorial Day going?

Stream of consciousness this morning…

I got a bit of a late start and didn’t get to the Capital City Club for breakfast until after 9. I had been struck, when I parked my truck on the southbound side of the Assembly median between Lady and Gervais, that there wasn’t a single other vehicle parked on the block. Many days, you can’t get a space.

Forty minutes later exactly, I come out and my truck is still completely alone. What causes such fluctuations in the demand for parking in that area? No idea…

NPR comes on as I crank up the truck. As I move toward Gervais and prepare to turn left, author John Irving is being interviewed. This prompts thoughts about why he’s so celebrated. I read a review in the WSJ of his latest, and saw nothing that made me want to read it. At the insistence of a friend (who was sure I would love it) years and years ago, I tried to read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Distaste caused me to quit after the first chapter, much as I did with Conroy’s Prince of Tides. (I have a strong negative reaction to novels that start out heaping horrific personal misfortune on the central characters — I mean, come on; gimme a chance to get used to who they are first.)

Turns out that — possibly because his latest is about a sexual omnivore; at least they seem to be relating the question to that — he’s being asked about Obama endorsing the idea of same-sex “marriage.” Great. Kulturkampf. Yesterday’s post was enough time spent on that for me. With an air of weariness, I change to Steve FM.

Just as I do so, into my view come two jokers dressed up in butternut imitation uniforms, standing at attention in front of the Confederate soldier monument. Aw, gee, not… yes. It’s Confederate Memorial Day.

I would say, “Get over it!” But what would be the point? South Carolina is so not over it that this is an actual state holiday. Really. In fact, this observance should have been on the front page of The State this morning, right next to the Obama gay-marriage thing, to remind us all where our state leaders’ priorities lay. But I had to be told about it by these guys.

So now I know why there was a whole block of empty parking spaces.

It’s a good thing I got some good personal news this morning (my mother, who is in the hospital, is doing better). Otherwise, the day would be starting out feeling rather hopeless.

In South Carolina, we can’t get our stuff together on anything that would actually advance our state and make the lives of its citizens better. Everything that might move us forward languishes, year after year. But we can decide to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, yet again. Because that does everyone so much good, you know.

Here I would type “sigh,” but that wouldn’t express the weariness that I feel.

Carefully, artfully, Obama shifts to support for same-sex ‘marriage’

Perhaps some of y’all will want to discuss this. For that purpose, I give you this post.

Basically, in a fairly transparent series of steps designed to test the waters, two people in the administration stepped out and said they now support same-sex marriage. From the time they did so, it seemed highly likely that they were doing so to see if the world exploded in their faces, ahead of the president making this statement. (Excuse the mixed metaphors; I’m having a busy and harried day.)

But it was artful the way they did it. By having Joe Biden, the famous loose cannon, be the first one to step out, it was possible to disown the statement completely if there was too much of a negative reaction. There wasn’t — at least, not particularly (something that reflects the fact that most people, whether they are pro- or anti-, simply don’t care as much about this as the portion of Obama’s base that cares deeply) — and that made it safe for the next soldier to step into the minefield (sorry! sorry! there’s another metaphor). And when Arne Duncan didn’t get blown up, that made everyone go, Arne Duncan — he’s no loose cannon. And he’s Obama’s longtime basketball buddy!

The next step was for the president himself to say the words that would calm down a significant portion of his fund-raising base. And to do it early enough in the campaign that most of us will have mostly forgotten it by November, since there are so many other things we care so much more about.

The calculated nature of this move was reflected in the language used by one “LGBT advocate” quoted by the WashPost: “The conversation is, what can and should we do to quiet the uproar and to get donors back on board.”

Well, that’s done, and now the Obama campaign will be ready to move on, having brought this up and dispensed with it during the dead time in the campaign between the effective end of the GOP contest and the party conventions just before Labor Day. There was no other time that the president could have done this that would have made less of a political splash.

As I say, deftly done. If there was anything about it unartful, it was perhaps this part:

And he said he wanted to be “sensitive” to the fact that for many Americans, the word “marriage” evokes “very powerful positions, religious beliefs and so forth.”

That somewhat bemused characterization of religious traditionalists is somewhat reminiscent of his “God and guns” misstep of four years ago, making people with traditional values sound a bit like critters in the zoo or something — as something out there that one understands only with great effort. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as that earlier faux pas. And after all, how is he supposed to characterize people whose entire worldview he is rejecting?

So the thing was done about as skillfully as it could be done. If one is determined to do it.

Romney Gay Shocker!

Just ran across this exclusive from Jennifer Rubin at the WashPost:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign…

And I couldn’t believe it.

I know what you’re thinking: What? Romney had an openly gay adviser? Even for a second?

Yep, that’s what I was thinking, too. Who’da thunk it?

A thoughtful, informative elaboration on a kick-in-the-gut campaign

In a previous thread, in response to Bud suggesting that there’s not as much hyperbolic pandering on the left as on the right, I cited the ridiculous rhetoric about a supposed “war on women,” and such other things as the billboard I’d seen near 5 Points that said, “contraceptives could become contraband.”

Over the weekend, I saw the above, which is evidently part of the same campaign as the other one, and doubled back and got a picture. This one was on 378 between West Columbia and Lexington.

Rather than just fulminate, I thought I’d pose some questions, which the above website helped me do. Under the headline, “OK, I’ve just got to ask,” I sent the following email to the organization:

Who on Earth are these lawmakers who supposedly want to “outlaw birth control?” And could you please cite a bill that would do that?

Even though it was Saturday, I got this quick response:

Hi Brad~

Thank you for emailing me with your question (and for the photograph).

Every year for the past 15 years, legislation has been introduced in South Carolina that would outlaw birth control. Currently, there are 4 bills that would do that through establishing personhood (aka defining life at conception). The sponsors listed on these bills are Senators Bright, Verdin, Fair, Cromer, S. Martin, Reese, Bryant and Grooms. Currently, the bills in the South Carolina legislature are S. 165: Life Beginning at Conception Act, S. 245: Life Beginning at Conception Act, S. 616: Personhood Act of South Carolina, and H. 3945: Personhood Act of South Carolina (I know it looks like I’m repeating myself, but they are all named similarly).

“Pregnancy” is established when a fertilized egg has been implanted in the wall of a woman’s uterus. Hormonal contraceptives (“The pill” is the most common form of hormonal contraception, but newer options of hormonal contraception include “the patch” and “the ring” – both of which provide a combination of hormones to control ovulation) act before implantation and prevent pregnancy. Nonetheless, a movement emerged in the U.S. during the decade of the 1990s that seeks to outlaw all hormonal contraceptives on the grounds that these forms of birth control may interfere with a woman’s ovulation, may prevent fertilization of a woman’s egg by a sperm, or may prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus. Members of this movement consider any form of hormonal birth control to be the equivalent of an abortion in spite of medical evidence to the contrary. They lobby aggressively in state legislatures, including South Carolina’s General Assembly, and they are behind “personhood” ballot initiatives, most recently in Mississippi.

Any legislator, at any level of government, that supports personhood or defining life beginning at conception rather than implantation supports outlawing hormonal birth control. Similar bills have been introduced and failed to pass in numerous states, including Mississippi (ballot initiative), Virginia, and Oklahoma. All of the current Republican nominees for President have pledged their support for establishing life beginning at conception (Mitt Romney did so during an interview with Mike Huckabee; Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have all signed the Personhood Pledge).

I have attached our Personhood legislative fact sheet to give you more information about Personhood bills and how they would affect South Carolina. I hope that this answers you questions, but I would be more than happy to speak with you about this further. Please feel free to email me back with any further questions or comments.

~Emma

Emma Davidson

Tell Them Program Manager

Imposing further on Ms. Davidson’s patience, I responded thusly:

… you don’t think calling that “outlawing birth control” a bit of a stretch? Because they would outlaw one small subset of what some people would call “birth control?”

Do you not think that when most folks say “birth control,” they’re talking about the Pill (and not the “morning after” pill, but the one that’s been around for 50 years), condoms, foam, diaphragms and the like?
In any case, for the statement, “Some lawmakers want to outlaw birth control” to be remotely true, they would have to be outlawing all forms of it — not just one relatively small subset of the category. I don’t see how a reasonable person could possibly read it any other way.

Ms. Davidson hasn’t gotten back to me yet. And that’s cool; I very much appreciate the time she took to answer me so thoroughly the first time, especially on a weekend. (When she does respond, I’ll share it here.)

But really — when you’re driving down the road and see the statement “Some lawmakers want to outlaw birth control,” do you read it as meaning “some very specific and limited forms of birth control”? Because I don’t. And that’s what bugged me about the billboard to start with.

Too bad Ms. Davidson’s very specific and informative email won’t fit on a billboard (actually, it would fit, but you couldn’t read it safely). I wouldn’t have a beef with that, because that would be very clear about what it was the organization opposes, and I could make an informed response to it. But as things are, I hope I can be forgiven for believing the group is looking for a kick-in-the-gut, emotional response from the average motorist.

Which brings up the fact that maybe, with such powerfully loaded issues, it would be better to conduct the debate in a manner somewhat more extensive and specific than the billboard/bumper sticker level.

Happy to be a resource for a colleague

I see that one of my episodes of “The Brad Show” (a feature I really must get around to reviving one of these days) provided some grist for Kevin Fisher’s mill, in a piece headlined, “Harpo, Homophobia and Hypocrisy:”

Harpo characterized McConnell as “prancing” in Civil War reenactments rather than “marching” or “participating” or “performing” in those events for a reason, the same reason for similar comments he made in a video interview with local blogger Brad Warthen in April 2011.

In a discussion of McConnell’s high-profile involvement in Civil War history, Warthen noted that the then-senator reportedly owns “17 Confederate costumes,” to which Harpo replied, “And one of them has hoops.” To make his point crystal clear, Harpootlian gestured around his waist to indicate a hoop skirt…

Finally, what about you, Cindi Ross Scoppe and Warren Bolton, editorial writers for The State — does Harpo get a free pass that you wouldn’t give anyone else of his prominence who was making such remarks?

Speaking of which, Harpootlian also told Warthen that “the girly boy thing didn’t work” for Democrats. For Harpo, it’s all macho, no homo, no doubt.

If you’d like to go back and view the full episode, here it is.

Oh, and as for Kevin’s challenge to my former teammates…  well, I suggest he’d be hard-pressed to find when Cindi or Warren ever took anyone to task for their perceived “homophobia.” So, no, they’re not giving him a “pass” that they wouldn’t give anyone else. I think Kevin is falling into a trap here, one I see folks fall into a lot: Cindi and Warren work for the MSM. That means they must be doctrinaire liberals. Therefore they’re probably always going on about “homophobia.” So they must be hyprocrites for not castigating their fellow “liberal.”

Fine theory for the ideologically inclined, except that it can’t be supported.

As for my own part — I showed you what Dick had to say. You decide what you think about it. I’m just glad I was able to provide Kevin with some original material. Makes me feel authoritative…

This is my rifle, this is my gun… The Laurens County GOP purity test

The thing that got me about the Laurens County GOP “Purity” pledge wasn’t the general idea about having politicians behave themselves on the sexual front. I’m for that. Mainly because I get sick of hearing about their failures in that department, when there are a lot of other things we should be talking about.

If you can find a candidate who never did anything wrong on that front and never will, I’m all for it. And I’m particularly sympathetic to the Laurens County folks, because they’ve endured such aggravation on that front:

The 28-point pledge passed last week appeared to be at least in part a response to an extramarital affair had by the county sheriff, who was also accused in a lawsuit of driving his mistress to get an abortion in a county-owned vehicle, leading to an inter-party squabble when the local group’s leader called for the sheriff to resign.

So I’ve got no beef with that. Nor am I bothered by the impracticality of, for instance, living in the United States in 2012 and not being exposed to pornography. You couldn’t, for instance, be on Twitter. The Twitter folks do an awesome job, I think, of keeping it clean. I’m surprised by how quickly new followers who are really just come-ons for porn sites disappear.

But still, there are those brief moments, before they get booted off as spam, when you innocently go, “Let’s see who’s following me now,” as I did this morning, and you make the mistake of clicking on the avatar, as I did this morning, and bang, you’re looking at a wet, naked girl in a bathtub. And I mean “girl,” as in so young you feel like the dirtiest man in the world for having glimpsed her even for a second. You see something like that, and the first thought in your head, if you’re a normal, red-blooded American male, is, “Now I can never run for office in Laurens County!” (By the way, lest any of you perves go to my Twitter feed and click on my followers trying to find the picture — I’ve already reported that account for spam, and it’s gone.)

But that’s not my biggest problem with the pledge, either. My biggest problem is that the “purity pledge” is… adulterated… with unrelated material:

The pledge is full of traditional Republican talking points in a conservative state – balancing budgets, opposing gun control laws and abortion, supporting school choice and a statement that marriage is “fundamental to the stability, betterment and perpetuation of our society.”

Nothing against balanced budgets, but what does that have to do with porn? And opposing gun control? Really? So you’re saying, you can’t touch a woman until you’re married to her, and you’re not to touch, um, porn ever, but you’re encouraged to sit there caressing and oiling up your Smith and Wesson?

Nothing against guns, either, but really — what does that have to do with purity?

This is what I was warning about, people

It was Tuesday when I warned that the unnecessarily-fanned flames of several Culture War flashpoints threatened to make this into the kind of presidential election I detest — one that consists entirely of yelling about social issues (about which no one changes anyone else’s minds, which makes them ideal tools for infuriating the base and raising money to keep the pointless partisan strife going), rather than talking about issues more central to the job of president, such as foreign affairs, national security and the economy.

Now, it seems the MSM is catching up with me. This AP story was on the front page of The State this morning:

WASHINGTON — All of a sudden, abortion, contraception and gay marriage are at the center of American political discourse, with the struggling — though improving — economy pushed to the background.

Social issues don’t typically dominate the discussion in shaky economies. But they do raise emotions important to factors like voter turnout. And they can be key tools for political candidates clamoring for attention, campaign cash or just a change of subject in an election year.

“The public is reacting to what it’s hearing about,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. In a political season, he said, “when the red meat is thrown out there, the politicians are going to go after it.”…

Precisely. And on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, also this morning:

In a year where the economy was supposed to dominate the November elections, the contraception backlash showed that social issues could have a powerful influence on the race. Republicans used the controversy to paint Mr. Obama as assailing religious rights—and adding another black mark against the 2010 health overhaul that spawned the policy….

Yep. That’s what I’ve been on about.

In any case, you were warned of it here first. And of course, the 137 comments on my previous post (so far) are indicative that even smart people, such as you, my readers, can’t resist rising to such bait. What hope do we have that the rest of the country will let it go, and allow us to return to more relevant (to the job of president) issues?

Yeah, that sounds pretty French, all right…

This should distract y’all from the never-ending post on Kulturkampf earlier in the week…

Don’t know if you had seen the piece in The Wall Street Journal about the (American) woman who has written a book all about how the French are better at raising children than we are.

Never mind my natural suspicion of any American who chooses to live in France rather than here. This is NOT the 1920s; it’s just not done any more. Those who do are all a lost generation, to my mind. Alice B. agrees with me.

It still seemed interesting, and my wife and I shared the info with our kids who have kids, in case they could get anything out of it. From my cursory glance, it was stuff like how the French somehow manage to keep their kids from whining and stuff like that. The downside, from what I read — basically, a huge part of the formula is that the French neglect their kids by American standards, because they’re into having time for themselves. And if I got into what I think of that, we’d get into a discussion of whether my Anglophilia has led necessarily to Francophobia, and I don’t want to go there today.

Where I want to go is here, to this revelation I read this morning in the Post:

Pamela Druckerman, the writer who set off parenting debates this week with her essay in the Wall Street Journal, “Why French Parents Are Superior,” (which was an excerpt of her newly published, “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting,” Penguin) has just involuntarily launched another discussion.

It turns out that in another essay a few years ago for the magazine Marie Claire, she revealed that she had planned and engaged in a threesome with her husband.

Slate’s Rachael Larimore discovered the piece called, “How I Planned a Menage A Trois.” It is filled with excruciating details about what she writes was a gift for her husband’s 40th birthday. It culminates in a paragraph that would make anyone viewing it in their own rearview mirror — let alone a writer who is now selling a parenting book — wince:

“Finally, they tire themselves out. There’s a sweet moment at the end when the three of us lie together under the covers, with the birthday boy in the middle. He’s beaming. I’ll later get a series of heartfelt thank-you notes from him, saying it was as good as he had hoped.”

Larimore revealed Thursday that Marie Claire editors had agreed, at Druckerman’s request they said, to remove the essay from the magazine’s online archives. Enough evidence of the essay existed, however, that Larimore said she came on it accidentally.

It’s not what they did; it’s that she frickin’ WROTE about it, under her real name. That’s seriously defective. If you had to get a license to have kids, one hopes she wouldn’t be issued one.

I am reminded of some wisdom I obtained from watching “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby” (from now on, I’m sticking to American sources of wisdom, however low or tacky). When the French Formula 1 driver tries to join the NASCAR circuit, the other drivers heap scorn on him. He responds by telling them that France had given them “democracy, existentialism, and the Ménage à Trois.” As one of the rednecks responds, “Well that last one’s pretty cool.”

Perhaps so, perhaps not. But it certainly sounds French to me…

Let sleeping culture warriors lie, please…

I’m beginning to suspect that the Left is dissatisfied at the prospect of an election about real national priorities, and is conspiring to get the Culture Warriors of the Right — heretofore MIA — to enter the 2012 fray.

I’m just going by the top three stories on my most recent email from The Slatest:

Federal Appeals Court Deems Prop 8 Unconstitutional

But backers of California’s gay marriage ban are expected to take their fight to the Supreme Court.

Komen VP Resigns in Wake of Planned Parenthood Dispute

Karen Handel defends her work to cut funding to the group, saying it was the best for Komen and the women it serves.

University Selling “Morning-After” Pill from Vending Machine

Students at Shippensburg University now have easier access to Plan B emergency contraception.

Think about this for a minute, people…

The Culture Warriors of the Right have been pretty quiet lately. Their guy in the GOP presidential contest, Rick Santorum, hasn’t caught fire, in fact has been totally an also-ran since Iowa. It was looking like we might have a presidential election about national security and the economy, which I’ve gotta say, would be nice for a change.

So what happens? Culture Warriors of the Left sue to get a court to overturn a public vote on a hot-button issue, and get a favorable ruling from a panel of… the 9th Circuit. This of course will now be taken all the way to the Supremes (who on the right would ever be satisfied with the judgment of the 9th?), assuring that this attempt to overturn a public vote by judicial fiat (talk about waving a red flag at a bull!) will blaze on through the election.

Some of their comrades then go totally ballistic over a decision by one private organization not to help fund another private organization. These Culture Warriors freak out to such an extent over what — $680,000? And the ramifications continue, with everybody on all sides all worked up.

As for the third thing… I don’t know. I’ve been to Shippensburg a number of times, and I’m trying to square this with the images I have of Amish people riding up the High Street in horse and buggy, and Civil War re-enactments. This is a whole new wrinkle…

All I can conclude is that the left just wasn’t happy with the Culture Warriors of the right being all dormant. It’s like there is a concerted effort to make the 2012 election about all this Kulturkampf stuff. Which I, for one, would not appreciate. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for Obama’s re-election chances to get the right’s Culture Struggle machine all hot and bothered.

Oh, you know what the fourth story on the Slatest email was? It was this:

Santorum Poised for 2 Wins in Tuesday’s GOP Contests

But with no delegates up for grabs, the Iowa winner will need to be content with PR victories.

Coincidence? Well, yeah, I think it is a coincidence. But those of us who would rather this election be about something other than abortion and sexuality and the like still eye such developments as all of the above with foreboding.

The good news is that the White House appears to be trying to take down the temperature a bit, on one thing it can control. It may dial back on its recent ham-handed effort to make Newt Gingrich’s ravings about a “war on the Catholic Church” seem to be true. That’s good. I like the sound of that. No-Drama Obama, that’s what I want to see. This was yet another completely unnecessary fight (and with a demographic that the president needs to keep in battleground states, which made it seem particularly weird).

Next, could we all talk about Iran and Israel and Afghanistan and consumer confidence? Throwweights, perhaps? Please? Anything but this hyperemotional stuff…

No profanity in the city’s parks? What the…?!?

Bryan Cox, former news director at WACH-Fox, brings this to my attention. That’s Bryan in the picture, holding the “COCKS” photograph.

Here’s Bryan’s commentary on the matter:

Hey Brad,

These pics were taken Sunday at Sims Park in Shandon. The Columbia police department announced anti-profanity signs were going up via a Facebook post on Wednesday.

See that post here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=288864641151114&set=a.182579751779604.32971.182562865114626&type=1&theater

This announcement sparked some local media coverage; none of which I saw took a hard look at whether this is legal. The city ordinances cited on the sign are 14-91 (disorderly conduct) and 15-1 (rules of a park).

The SC Supreme Court has ruled at least twice that profanity alone is not grounds for arrest. See: State v Pittman (2000) and State v Perkins (1991). The court has since ruled for profanity to be illegal it must have been accompanied with “fighting words” that could reasonably incite violence. For example, (my understanding of the case law, not an actual example given by the court) cursing at a man’s wife in public likely would not be protected speech as it could reasonably incite a fight with the man. However; simply cursing in front of the man and his wife in public is protected speech.

Aside from contradicting South Carolina law, the city claim runs contrary to other states’ recent action on the issue.

North Carolina Superior Court struck down that state’s anti-profanity law in January on free speech grounds. Here’s a link: http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/state-s-anti-profanity-law-unconstitutional-rules-superior-court-judge

Chicago suburb Park Ridge repealed its anti-profanity law in October. In this article the city police chief is quoted as saying the law likely was unconstitutional: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/05/park-ridge-repeals-anti-s_n_995899.html

Obviously I’m not an attorney. However; it seems clear the city knows, or should know, this isn’t enforceable and is spending taxpayer money on signs threatening to arrest citizens for actions that are legal.

It’s also worth noting I posted my photo as a comment on the city’s Facebook page Sunday afternoon, and it was quickly deleted by the department. Apparently, in addition to arresting citizens for crimes that don’t exist the department wants to censor those who dispel this misinformation.

Thanks for taking interest in this. Bryan

Well, of course I’m going to take an interest. You hold up a picture of a pretty young woman holding a sign saying, “COCKS,” it gets my attention.

But I think Bryan’s missing something here: I think that in the Midlands, anything having to do with the Gamecocks or anything that takes place at the Grid Temple takes on religious overtones. Just as we are enjoined against coveting our “neighbor’s ass” in Exodus 20:17, there are words that are OK in a certain context (as long as they refer, in this case, to a donkey). I think in the Grid Temple Bible, there’s probably something about, “Thou shalt have no gods before thy Gamecocks,” or some such.

Anyway, to be serious, I have to say that while Bryan may be on firm legal ground here, my sympathy lies with anyone trying to make our public spaces less coarse. I don’t think we, or our children, or our wives, or our innocent asses, for that matter, should have to be subjected to the kind of filthy that is routine poured forth in loud voices in our parks and elsewhere.

So I’d give our local cops an A for effort, even if they do get slapped down. And don’t quote the First Amendment at me. No rational person believes that the Founders meant that Congress shall make no law abridging F-bombs in public.

On a president asking God to bless America

Sooner or later, we’ll turn to more profane matters, but to follow up on a question from Bud:

Does anyone besides me find it offputting when the POTUS says “God Bless America”? Who started this practice? I never noticed it before George W. used it at every opportunity. Now Obama is getting carried away with it.

My first reaction was that every president in my memory had done it. But I thought I’d check, however cursorily. My quick search turned up this piece from TIME magazine. Apparently, no president from FDR through LBJ had ended speeches that way. But then…

On the evening of April 30, 1973, Richard Nixon addressed the nation live from the Oval Office in an attempt to manage the growing Watergate scandal. It was a difficult speech for Nixon: He announced the resignations of three Administration officials, including Attorney General Richard Kleindienst — but Nixon nonetheless tried to sound optimistic. As he approached the end of his speech, Nixon noted that he had “exactly 1,361 days remaining” in his term and wanted them “to be the best days in America’s history.” “Tonight,” he continued, “I ask for your prayers to help me in everything that I do throughout the days of my presidency.” Then came the magic words: “God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.”

Not an auspicious beginning, give the extent to which Nixon was given to self-pitying self-interest.

According to this source, neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter (surprised?) used the phrase to end speeches. But Ronald Reagan did, big-time. And every president since.

Of course, this account is rather nitpicking. Presidents before Nixon DID invoke the Deity’s blessing, just in different words:

Presidents from Roosevelt to Carter did sometimes conclude their addresses by seeking God’s blessing, often using language such as “May God give us wisdom” or “With God’s help.” But they didn’t make a habit of it.

As for whether presidents should do this or not (and Bud thinks not), I think it’s fine either way.  As I said in response to Bud earlier, I generally like it. No matter how pompous the speaker, those words end the speech on a note of humility. It’s a nod to that which is greater than the speaker and all the power he commands.

It is an invocation. OK, technically, since it’s at the end, it’s a benediction. But basically, it’s a plea sent aloft — Please bless this nation which I have been elected to serve. It’s impossible to imagine anything more benign, or more appropriate, for an elected leader to say.

AT THE SAME TIME…

I respect that some presidents have generally avoided such an invocation. Declining to do so is another way of demonstrating humility, and proper respect toward a deity. A serious, thoughtful politician might well consider it crass to invoke God in connection with a political speech, as the rest of the speech is necessarily tied to petty temporal concerns and usually designed to advance the position of the speaker.

I excuse the practice to the extent that it is a sort of departure from the rest of the speech. I tend to hear it as the speaker saying, “Whether you go along with what I said just now or not, whether I continue to serve you or not, whether I and my party prevail or be consigned to the dustbin of history, I ask that God bless our country.”

It at least gives me one thing I can always agree with.

He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays

Just to cleanse the spiritual palate, brethren, I invoke Brother Tull to share with us a musical interlude.

This song has been running through my head a good bit lately. (Seeing “all the bishops” — or at least, all the Anglican clergy — lined up and harmonizing at Jason’s ordination the other day was but one instance in which it has come to mind.) You may find that interesting, in connection with my outrage at the tawdry way Rick Perry is trying to wind God up and make him toddle across the room, beating a toy drum that says “Perry for President.”

Perry’s message, considered most charitably, is after all that God has a place in the public square. He’s not supposed to be kept in a steepled ghetto. God is for every day, not an hour on Sunday.

I agree with that with all my heart and soul. God, properly considered, is for every day, every moment. (For that matter, it’s not for us to say what God’s for; it’s up to us to figure out what WE’RE intended for.) That’s one reason I like this song.

But I would submit that that includes the moments in which you try to exploit God to your own ends. You don’t wind him up then, either. Rather, you endeavor to alter yourself to fit His expectations.

This is a tough thing to talk about because we’re not supposed to judge, either — are we? So people get away with some really horrific stuff, because who are we to say? If another man testifies that this is how he experiences God, who are we to condemn?

And so people get away with all sorts of stuff, and if we protest, we are painted as being one of those who wants to keep God in a box.

And there are such people. Good, well-meaning people, quite often — although they are confused. They confuse the First Amendment with Jefferson’s views (when he wasn’t involved with it), and then go the further step of assuming that a ban on establishment of religion by Congress implies that we individual citizens (and that includes officeholders) are not supposed to talk about religion in the public sphere.

They are wrong. And their wrongness is all the more wrong because they create a space in which someone like Perry can construct a lie about a “war on religion.” And everything just gets worse. They are wrong, and he is wrong, and I suppose I’m wrong, too, for judging both.

But I feel better when I listen to the music. Don’t think you have to turn up your speakers when it starts out so soft. It builds.

The nuclear escalation of Rick Perry’s unholy war

Wow. I inadvertently backed into that last post.

I had looked at  the CNN report (the text, anyway), and the Perry “holiday greeting” from last year that made it look hypocritical. But I had failed to look at the ad that prompted the CNN report to begin with.

I thought I had seen Rick Perry take riding God like a hobby horse about as far as he could, in the ad I showed you last week.

But if that was Perry trying to be a holy warrior, in the latest ad, that war goes nuclear.

There is no way that I could ever support for president a man who tries so nakedly to bend God to his own ends. And that is a hard thing to explain to the sort of people Perry is trying to appeal to. And that just divides our country more and more (and leaves me feeling more and more alienated, since I can neither identify with secularists nor those who could actually believe the POTUS is engaged in a “war on religion”). And it’s so unnecessary.

How can a man think it’s SO important for him to be elected that he would do this? This is stomach-turning stuff.

And so this is Advent, and what have we done?

And so that time has rolled around again, a time when some of our avowedly “conservative” brethren start griping that no one will let them say “Merry Christmas.”

This has always struck me as one of the non-ier nonissues of the world, not least because it always comes up during Advent, not during Christmas, so why do they want to say “Merry Christmas” anyway, and doesn’t “Happy Holidays” cover it… but I’m not writing this to get all liturgical on you.

Anyway, Rick Perry, who seems to have decided that an evangelical offense is his best chance to get back into the game in Iowa, is now taking a big stand for Christmas. And he’s doing it with such apocryphal assertions as this, on CNN’s Situation Room:

What we’re seeing from the left, of which I would suggest to you, President Obama is a member of the left and substantial left-of-center beliefs, that you can’t even have a Christmas party. You can’t say a prayer at school.

Say what?, you’re thinking. But he’s counting on people who are not thinking to be impressed.

And I hate to put it that way, because I sound like one of those very godless secularists Perry’s trying to demonize. There are indeed people who see people of faith as simple fools.

But that means they see ME as a simple fool, so I’m not one of them.

By saying he’s trying to appeal to people who are not thinking, I’m saying that Perry himself is the one insulting the intelligence of people of faith. Particularly when those people can look back at Gov. Perry’s own official “holiday” greeting of last Dec. 22:

Gov. Perry: Keep Veterans, First Responders in Your Thoughts and Prayers this Holiday Season

Wednesday, December 22, 2010  •  Austin, Texas  •  Press Release

The holidays are a special time of year to pause and take stock of the many blessings we enjoy, not just as human beings, but as Americans and Texans. Of all those blessings, I’d offer that the most precious is our freedom.

There are thousands of Texans serving the cause of freedom all over the world, in dangerous places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Driven by a dedication to our country and communities, they’ll spend the holidays thousands of miles from parents, friends, spouses and children.

I encourage you to keep our fighting men and women in your thoughts and prayers, along with their families who anxiously await their return. At the same time, I hope you’ll remember the folks who keep our neighborhoods safe: our state’s first responders.

While we enjoy the comforts of home with loved ones, these brave men and women are on the job, providing care in the back of an ambulance, preparing to respond to a fire call or patrolling our international border.
We should never take them for granted and we should definitely keep them in our prayers as they sacrifice for our safety.

So, during this holiday season, remember to thank a first responder or salute a veteran for their service and pray for God’s protection on them and their families.

May God bless you and, through you, may He continue to bless the Great State of Texas.

Did you see any Jesus in that greeting? Neither did I. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fine. It’s just that you wouldn’t know that to hear Perry now.

Mainly what Perry has done is amuse the godless secularists mightily with his hypocrisy, which is why this inconsistency is flying around the Internet, which is why I knew about it to share it with you.

Nothing like a quiet, holy, contemplative Advent, huh?