Condoms, Human Flourishing and the Meaning of Life...

...or Houston, we have an existential problem:

Nor is it clear what this has to do with a government that occasionally lends a hand to deserving individuals in distress. For all those who need a condom to “keep them from falling,” as well as those whose “ability to succeed in modern America [is] imperiled” for want of a rubber, here’s my crude, heartless, I’ve-got-mine-Jack advice: pursue your dreams and buy one. We are not talking about paraplegic orphans. We are talking about Georgetown law students—the most privileged members of our society, who are training for their future calling (government, or hanging on to it) by haranguing us: you owe us.

I don’t suggest for a moment that Henry actually believes this claptrap. The point, which I think he underestimates, is that a country that doesn’t simply laugh the “free condoms” crowd out of town—without need of explanation—is in serious trouble. The very fact that clever pols can turn this no-brainer into a “wedge issue” makes you wonder about the reservoir of good sense out there.

Maybe conservatism has become disconnected from the thought that “the average person has a moral life that is worth leading and pursuing,” and maybe it neglects or slights the fact that government can at times foster that pursuit. But even if so, that ain’t the major problem. The contemporary transfer state is not about moral worth and aspirations. The administration’s “Julia” had no aspirations and no coherent plan of life, and the government in her story had no objective beyond assuring her that whichever way she might drift or be tossed, there’ll be a government program. To put the point in a sentence: while one can perhaps imagine a government that would help “average” people to realize their transcendent hopes and aspirations, our actual government is designed to wring any meaning out of life. The cheap, nasty free condom campaign encapsulates that agenda.

Henry Olsen is searching for a distinction between a hand up and a handout—between the uplifting and the tawdry, the compassionate and the grasping. But that’s hard to articulate even on paper, and harder still to observe in practice. And against it stands liberalism’s limitless, all-encompassing ethos: If I can’t have my condom, you might as well kill widows and orphans. If conservatism and the GOP often seem disconnected from “average persons” and their need, in distress, for government help, maybe that’s because they sense that before you can explain the needed distinctions, you have to explain that enough is enough and indeed, altogether too much. That strikes me as the right impulse. The hard question is whether even that much, or that little, can still be explained.//

What if, in the effort to make sure that Georgetown law students don't have to shell out a couple of bucks on a Friday night, the paraplegic orphans - who, lord knows, have less political pull than Georgetown law students - get lost in the taffy yank?

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news.

Under Bush, this kind of thing was evidence of our failure to invest in America's infrastructure.

Under Obama - and after a trillion dollars of "investing in America's infrastructure" - this kind of thing is simply a "bridge collapse."

Shocker!

Holder may have lied under oath about "knowing about" the wiretaps on Foxnews reporter James Rosen.

Does James White mistrust reason?

This is from a recent convert to Catholicism who challenged James White to a philosophical debate and was given the patented James White "God is glorified by the fact that you are damned" treatment:

So now let us fast forward the conversation back into this present context in order to make a point. I think what we see in White is a certain Christian tradition that does not hold ‘reason’ in a high regard. This is what is at the heart of so many problems, miscommunications, and controversies that Catholics and fundamentalists have. Catholics (among Christian traditions) see faith and reason as strong allies while fundamentalists, at best, see reason as a weak ally to faith. I think this can especially be seen in the whole Calvinism debate (personal responsibility, the nature of God etc.). This is why I think discussing the issues of faith and reason or faith and philosophy are vital for true ecumenical dialog.

Lastly, though it bothers me to say this, I hope people stay away from White. Not because I don’t want them to hear his arguments against Rome, rather, I think the man is a hindrance to beneficial dialog that could be had with certain Christian traditions. White not only has a reputation of being prideful but he also has a reputation of being very uncharitable and down right rude. There is a part of me that wishes I could post personal emails in order to demonstrate this, however, being that it is illegal, merely testifying of this will have to do.

Does James White really mistrust reason?

On the one hand, that seems accurate, but on the other hand, I tend to see Calvinism as an extremely rationalistic system.  Frankly though I'm not as knowledgeable about Calvinism as I ought to be.

Shocker!

Lois Lerner's decision to "take the Fifth" may not have been motivated by her keen awareness of her own innocence.

Once again, Hyper-Calvinist apologist James White channels the Christian love and goodwill ...

...of the Sixteenth Century.

Welcome to Western Civilization 2.0

5 Days of Rioting in Sweden:

Civil disorder in Stockholm started on Sunday, when police shot and killed a 69-old-man in his apartment after he confronted officers with a machete; the unrest has since continued throughout week.

Community leaders insist that a main reason for the violence is the high rate of unemployment in immigrant communities, particularly in the suburb of Husby near central Stockholm, one of the worst affected by the nighttime violence, Peter Oliver reported.

Although Sweden’s unemployment rate is below the EU average, joblessness among those under 25 has reached nearly 25 percent. The RT crew in Stockholm noted that a majority of those taking part in the violence are young.

“In Sweden you’ve got welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare – to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot through stones and Molotov cocktails. It’s ridiculous and a bad excuse,” Swedish Democrats MP Kent Ekeroth told RT.

This will probably seem incomprehensible to most people today, but this insight is simply the foundation of Western Civilization, version 1.0.

Bad Catholic writes:

Our bodies matter. We are not souls trapped in biological cages, souls that might find — to their disappointment – that they “got the wrong body” and thus must explore the label “transgender.” No, we are our bodies. Any integration of the sexuality into the whole person that ignores the body or settles for being opposed to the body is no integration at all. If the body that I am is male, oriented in its inescapable biology to be fruitful with woman, than my personal integration of body and soul cannot be the embrace of homosexual acts, for in this embrace I leave the body behind. I perform acts that contradict the reality of my body, my personal design and my relation to the physical Cosmos. I welcome a ghostliness that neatly separates the reality of my body from the reality of me, as if I could be a me without my body.

Outside of matters involving where people place their genitals, the necessity for integration of the body and soul is usually upheld. An anorexic girl may believe that her normal, healthy body is hideously fat. She may live in the disintegration of soul and body, by which her soul (she) opposes her body by refusing to eat. But it’d be evil to laud this disintegration, this dualistic war by which she lives as a ghost trapped inside the wrong, disgusting, too-fat body. What’s truly loving is the encouragement of body-soul integration, by which a person takes on the project of loving the body she is, of being her body, of living in harmony with the biological functioning of her metabolism, her shape, her natural weight, etc.

We understand this, but having reduced personality to sexuality, we are no longer comfortable giving the exact same loving encouragment to a man who lives as a disintegrated soul and body, who believes he (a woman) is in radical contradiction with his body (male). It would be the social sin of social sins to look upon this man and say, “You are body, and your project is to become properly integrated with your body, and thus become the self who you are.” What he needs is not integration — that medieval fire of red-hot hatred — but a label, and the subsequent social acceptance of that label. Voila, transgenderism, put a “T” in LGB.

I guess we'll find out how Western Civilization, version 2.0, brings u.

The spiritual "thinness" of Catholicism thickens.

Father Longenecker writes:

The historic ritual of Catholic religion is rooted in an acceptance of the metaphysical. In other words, we believe that through the ritual we are making a transaction with the other world. The supernatural impinges on us at all times. We are at the threshold of heaven and on the doorstep of eternity. Most AmChurch Catholics don’t understand this. I am convinced that it is simply not a part of their world view. Why should it be? They have been educated in a culture and by a system that is essentially materialistic, utilitarian and secular. There is no sense of the immanent, no sense of the awesome presence in life. The Protestant founding fathers weeded out all that “nonsense” and the deists and materialists finished the job. Such poetic and otherworldly ideas are not even dismissed by the typical American. They are not even misunderstood. They simply do not exist in their vocabulary.

Worship has become for most American Catholics therefore a mixture of civic duty, a way to inculcate good values into their children, a matter of family tradition which is presented in a way that is comfortable, easy going and entertaining. The idea that we are in touch with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the pillar of fire and the burning bush, the idea that we are on the threshold of a life changing mystical experience is utterly foreign to their imagination.

The desire for the mystical, however will not die, so instead of finding this mysterium tremendum et fascinans in the ritual, music, architecture and art of ordinary Catholic worship or in the religious traditions of contemplative prayer, monasticism and devotions the American Catholic is most likely to wander off into the misty mystical mess of New Age practices, Eastern religions or the occult.

I'm not filled with confidence that the IRS official responsible for auditing conservatives is...

... taking the 5th.

//WASHINGTON — A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups. 

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening — or why she didn’t disclose it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor III. Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. 

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Vista). The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

Should this woman be operating the Obamacare enforcement division after taking the 5th?

The Post-Christian Episcopal Church

Reactions to Episcopal Presiding Bishop are not good:

Responses posted on the Episcopal Church’s website to the Presiding Bishop’s sermon have been uniformly harsh, noting her interpretation was at odds with traditional Christian teaching, grammar, and logic. “This is quite possibly some if the most delusional exegesis I’ve ever read in my life,” one critic charged. “I’m sorry, but this sermon is not a Christian sermon.”

The reception by bloggers has been equally unkind. The Rev Timothy Fountain observed the presiding bishop had up ended the plain meaning of the text. “Instead of liberation” in freeing the slave girl from exploitation, presiding bishop finds “confinement.  Instead of Christ’s glory, there’s just squalor.”

The Rev. Bryan Owen argued “What's happening here is the exploitation of a biblical text in service to a theopolitical agenda.  Given what she says in the first paragraph I've quoted from her sermon, the Presiding Bishop suggests that anyone who doesn't buy into that agenda - anyone who holds to the traditional, orthodox understanding of such matters - is likewise afflicted with the same narrow-minded bigotry as Paul, and thus in need of enlightenment.” 

Schori's sermon is here:

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it.  Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God.  She is quite right.  She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves.[1]  But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!  The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there – so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

An earthquake opens the doors and sets them free, and now Paul and his friends most definitely discern the presence of God.  The jailer doesn’t – he thinks his end is at hand.  This time, Paul remembers who he is and that all his neighbors are reflections of God, and he reaches out to his frightened captor.  This time Paul acts with compassion rather than annoyance, and as a result the company of Jesus’ friends expands to include a whole new household.  It makes me wonder what would have happened to that slave girl if Paul had seen the spirit of God in her.

And the relevant passage from Acts is here:

 

16  As we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl with an oracular spirit, 6 who used to bring a large profit to her owners through her fortune-telling.

17  She began to follow Paul and us, shouting, "These people are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation."

18  She did this for many days. Paul became annoyed, turned, and said to the spirit, "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." Then it came out at that moment.

19  When her owners saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them to the public square before the local authorities.

20  They brought them before the magistrates 7 and said, "These people are Jews and are disturbing our city

21  and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us Romans to adopt or practice."

In short, this girl didn't have the spirit of God.  She was possessed by a demon that made insane and exploited by her owners. Paul exorcised a demon.  If it wasn't a demon, how could Paul have "deprived"  here of the spirit of God? What power does Schori think he was using when he commanded "it" to come out of her in the "name of Jesus Christ"?

It's amazing how stupid our elites are.

 

Tough decision - the President is not in charge of his government or the President knew.

White House counsel informed of IRS scandal weeks before President claims he first learned that the IRS was discriminating against conservatives and religious groups.

Answer: Sleeping.

Question: How is the question of where Obama was on the night of the Benghazi attacks relevant?

Obama aid spins on Sunday talk-shows.

Remember back to 2009 when Obama joked about using the IRS to audit people?

Good times, good times.

Hey! Here's an idea! Let's turn healthcare enforcement over to these people!

What could go wrong?

Jonathan Tobin at Commentary writes:

But as the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reminds us today, we know what inspired the whole problem irrespective of which bureaucrat gave the specific order. All the IRS was doing in the course of this scandal was listening to President Obama and his media cheerleaders who had been telling the country for years that the Tea Party and other conservatives were extremists whose illegitimate actions deserved to be placed beyond the pale. The harassment suffered by conservatives by the government’s most intrusive and powerful agency cannot be separated from the calls by the head of that government and his supporters for exactly this sort of prejudicial behavior.

Miller’s evasions and inability to face up to the enormity of this affair are bad enough. So too is the failure throughout the IRS to own up to the problem or to correct it long ago and to promote the person who appears to be among those responsible for the outrages. But the willingness of the IRS to conform its practices to the political opinions of the White House is the root cause of this scandal.

So basically the sham effort to look "transparent" backfired.

The reason for the planted question gambit:

WASHINGTON — It was an unusual way to deliver bad news, even in a town known for its selective leaks, Friday-night news dumps and wag-the-dog distractions.

The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.

Details of the now-infamous planted question emerged Friday after acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted the gambit under questioning from members of the House Ways and Means Committee.

It was the day after Lerner had testified to Congress last week, failing once again to disclose the extent of the Tea Party targeting even under direct questioning. The damning inspector general report would come out any day, and Lerner and Miller wanted to figure out a way to disclose the news publicly.

Miller testified about the thought process behind the release strategy Friday. "Now that the (inspector general) report was finalized, now that we knew all the facts, now that we had responded in writing and everything was done, did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public," he said.

The plan, he said, was to simultaneously notify Congress, but that never happened.

After talking to Miller, Lerner called Celia Roady, a Washington tax lawyer whose office is immediately across Pennsylvania Avenue from the IRS headquarters. She also serves on the IRS Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities.

Roady released this written statement late Friday explaining her role:

"On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section's Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks. I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

And so that's how it happened. Within minutes, the Associated Press reported her remarks with a one-line news alert: "WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election."

In a conference call with reporters later that day, Lerner emphasized that her apology came in response to a question.

"I was asked a question at the ABA meeting to give a status update of things that have been in the press" about the agency's treatment of Tea Party groups, she said. Asked why the IRS chose to make an apology that day, she said, "Someone asked me a question today, so I answered it."

Members of Congress in both parties criticized what they called a "scheme" and a "manipulation."

Bozos.

Why didn't Obama choose a staffer to hold his umbrella?

This IBD story seems to capture something about Obama in microcosm:

Another awkward day in the unraveling presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Beset by a trio of profound scandals, the Democrat had planned for Thursday's public message to focus on foreign affairs through a joint news conference with Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a NATO ally and fellow conspirator to oust the Syrian regime.

Unfortunately, Obama's advance staff was apparently too busy preparing his next campaign stops to check the Washington weather forecast. It set up the news conference outdoors in the Rose Garden. Wouldn't you know given POTUS' recent luck, it began raining.

Obama did the only thing he would think of: No, he wasn't smart enough to come in out of the rain.

The commander-in-chief ordered two U.S. Marines to bring umbrellas and hold them over the leaders' heads while standing at attention. So, as the two politicians droned on, including translation, the professionals in their dress uniforms got drenched. As did the attending crowd.

Service regulations expressly forbid male Marines from ever carrying an umbrella in uniform. But nothing should ever stop the Real Good Talker from talking at a photo op. Just as oppressive heat and a fainting audience didn't slow his mouth last summer.

At one point Thursday Obama reached over to show the highly-trained Marine corporal how the president wanted the umbrella positioned to keep his face open to cameras.

Speaking of speaking, here's an interesting little revelation from Obama. About the IRS intimidating and harassing conservative political groups, he was asked a straight-forward question:

"Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?"

Here's the relevant part of Obama's long reply:

"I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press."

Do you see what Obama did there? He dodged the real question about anyone in his White House knowing of the years-long illegal IRS operations. And he carefully (and revealingly) chose to answer a much more limited, irrelevant and unasked question about his knowledge of the inspector general's report.

Brett Easton Ellis notes the Stalinism of Gay Identity Ideology...

... where saying anything less than that every gay is a courageous, well-adjusted, heroic figure results in vicious attacks: 

Gay activists dive-bombing other gays who express an opinion that doesn’t lean toward their agenda means that within the gay world we are living in a very simplistic place. A barbed observational opinion tweeted by a gay man about gay men in Hollywood—and not directed at anyone—becomes, in the world of GLAAD, hate-speech. When a community prides itself on its differences and uniqueness and bans the gay man because of the way the gay man expresses himself—then a corporate PC fascism has been put into play that needs to be seriously reconsidered by the LGBT community. This is a problem: If you are a gay man who is not The Gay Man as Magical Elf, then you run the risk of being ostracized by the elite gay community. An organization holding an awards ceremony that they think represents all gays and also feels that they can choose which gays can and cannot be a member of the party is, on the face of it, ridiculous. The fact remains that if you aren’t presenting yourself as a happy homosexual promoting healthy mainstream gay values and pimping for GLAAD, then you’re somehow defaming The Cause. 

Ellis's sin was in noting the infantilizing way that gays are treated when they "come out":

Was I the only gay man of a certain demo who experienced a flicker of annoyance in the way the media treated Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and—yes—infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man would come out as gay (let alone a black man) is not only an LGBT triumph but also a triumph for pranksters everywhere who thrilled to the idea that what should be considered just another neutral fact that is nobody’s business was instead a shock heard around the world, one that added another jolt of transparency to an increasingly transparent planet. It was an undeniable moment and also extremely cool. Jason Collins is the future. But the subsequent fawning over Collins simply stating he is gay still seemed to me, as another gay man, like a new kind of victimization. (George Stephanopoulos interviewed him so tenderly, it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy.) In another five years hopefully this won’t matter, but for now we’re trapped in the times we live in. The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play. 

But, hey, tolerance is not enough.

Frankly, I'm not understanding why Lois Lerner did this.

IRS Tax Exempt chief "planted" question about discrimination against conservatives so that she could issue apology:

The veteran tax lawyer whose pre-arranged question to an IRS official at a panel last week prompted the admission that the agency had targeted conservative groups said in a written statement on Friday that she did not know what the answer to the question would be.

Celia Roady, a partner in the Washington D.C. office of Morgan Lewis and a member of the the IRS’ Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities, said she got a call from Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division, on May 9, the day before Lerner appeared on a panel at the American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting. 

“On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks," Roady said in the statement, obtained by TPM. "I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question.”

The point of this story could be about humorless, oppressive feminism, but in fact I just like the phrase "walked in like Lady Astor's per horse."

Bras may be used to decorate bar:

I'll let Skowronski explain what happened when a city inspector stopped in recently. 

"We've had bras hanging here for 45 years. It's been a charm of the place. So here comes this gal, and she's walking in here like Lady Astor's pet horse, you know, and she says she wants those bras down because they're a fire hazard. Now how can a bra be a fire hazard unless someone is wearing it? Honest to God."

Dammit, this is America.  If Americans want to court death by self-igniting bras while drinking, that is their god-given right as Americans.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/citys-bra-ban-doesnt-hold-up-9m9vimk-207805611.html

IRS asked organization to detail the contents of members' prayers to 510(c)(3) application.

'You've got to be kidding me."

James Geraghty writes:

Today’s hearing on IRS abuses had a lot of “are you kidding me?” moments, but this one stands out:

 

“It would surprise me that that question was asked,” acting commissioner Steven Miller tells Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois.

UPDATE: Chris Moody at Yahoo has the IRS letter and responses that began this line of inquiry: “Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”

Among the other questions the IRS posed to the Iowa Coalition for Life: “You stated that you sponsored a Forum on Stem Cells, End of Life Decisions and a possible forum on Contraception. Please describe in detail the information provided at each of these forums.”

The fact that Democrat Senators were asking for heightened scrutiny of Americans based on their political views is itself - with nothing more - a scandal.

Tolerance - the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

DOJ guidance states that silence about LGBT rights will be assumed to be disapproval.

Our sources have provided Liberty Counsel an internal DOJ document titled: “LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers.” It was emailed to DOJ managers in advance of the left’s so-called “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month.”

The document is chilling. It’s riddled with directives that grossly violate – prima facie –employees’ First Amendment liberties.

Following are excerpts from the “DOJ Pride” decree. When it comes to “LGBT pride,” employees are ordered:

“DON’T judge or remain silent. Silence will be interpreted as disapproval.” (Italics mine)

That’s a threat.

And not even a subtle one.

Got it? For Christians and other morals-minded federal employees, it’s no longer enough to just shut up and “stay in the closet” – to live your life in silent recognition of biblical principles (which, by itself, is unlawful constraint). When it comes to mandatory celebration of homosexual and cross-dressing behaviors, “silence will be interpreted as disapproval.”

This lawless administration is now ordering federal employees – against their will – to affirm sexual behaviors that every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology reject.

Somewhere, right now, George Orwell is smiling.

The directive includes a quote from a “gay” federal employee to rationalize justification: “Ideally, I’d love to hear and see support from supervisors, so it’s clear that there aren’t just policies on paper. Silence seems like disapproval. There’s still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace (particularly for transgender people), or that people who bring it up are trying to rock the boat.”

Of course there’s “still an atmosphere of LGBT issues not being appropriate for the workplace.” When well over half of federal employees, half the country and most of the world still believe in objective sexual morality (and immorality), “the workplace,” especially the federal workplace, should, at the very least, remain neutral on these highly controversial and behavior-centric issues.

Still, to borrow from self-styled “queer activist,” anti-Christian bigot and Obama buddy Dan Savage, “it gets better”:

“DO assume that LGBT employees and their allies are listening to what you’re saying (whether in a meeting or around the proverbial water cooler) and will read what you’re writing (whether in a casual email or in a formal document), and make sure the language you use is inclusive and respectful.”

Is this the DOJ or the KGB? “[A]ssume that LGBT employees are listening …”? And what are “LGBT allies”? If you disagree with the homosexual activist political agenda, does that make you the enemy?

Yes, in any workplace, language should remain professional, but who defines what’s “inclusive”? Who decides what’s “respectful”? If asked about “LGBT issues,” for instance, can a Christian employee answer honestly: “I believe the Bible. I believe God designed sex to be shared between husband and wife within the bonds of marriage”? Or is that grounds for termination?

Peggy Noonan on - 

No ordinary scandal:

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

I repeat, it is passing strange that the IRS just happened to go rogue and target only the enemies of Obama after Obama became President.

Also, as bad as this is for the health of democracy, the Benghazi scandal - leaving Americans to die, ordering a stand-down on the rescue, going to bed, blaming American free speech - is the one that pisses me off.

Gay marriage, the importance of elites and social conformity.

Brendan O'Neill at Spiked writes:

With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer, ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.

Others say there should be no ‘acknowledgment of subtleties and cultural differences’ on gay marriage, since ‘there is a right answer’ on this issue. Those who insist on possessing ‘cultural differences’ on gay marriage – or even worse, opposing it – feel the fury of campaigners. A chicken restaurant in America was boycotted after its owner criticised gay marriage, while voters in American referendums who have said no to gay marriage have been called every name under the Sun by the respectable political and media classes: ‘ill-informed’, ‘deceived’, ‘plain ignorant’, ‘knuckle draggers’. This has the effect of beating down critical questioning. Gay marriage supporters actually boast of using moral pressure over political debate to win people’s acquiescence. Scientific American magazine recently discussed the apparently brilliant way that social media is being used to influence people’s ‘attitudes and behaviour’ on gay marriage. Everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure’, it said, so constantly saying favourable things about gay marriage on social-media websites can be a way of ‘send[ing] out a message about what’s acceptable, appropriate and… well, normal’. That is – never mind convincing someone with reason; just heavy-handedly let them know it’s normal to support gay marriage, and thus presumably abnormal to oppose it.

This is how conformism is forged and enforced today: elites devise an idea or campaign, far away from what one gay-marriage proponent calls ‘the tyranny of the majority’; that idea or campaign gets disingenuously depicted as something that protesters and campaigners demanded and actually put pressure on the elites to come up with; and through a process of debate-demonisation and pathologisation of dissent, through the treatment of acceptance as normal and criticism as abnormal, the idea or campaign is spread more widely through society. Eventually, in the words of Caldwell, even those who are unsure about gay marriage ‘quell their natural misgivings’. Indeed, when I interviewed the British pop star Dappy recently, and asked him if he supported gay marriage, he said: ‘I want to say no… but I get so much stick already. So say “yes”. Definitely say “yes”.’ How many other people are saying ‘yes’ not because they believe in gay marriage, but because they don’t want, in Caldwell’s words, to be thought of as ‘losers’ who have failed to ‘emulate their betters’?

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live. Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.

Welcome to the next Banana Republic.

IRS used power to protect Planned Parenthood:

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status to two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election.

“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”

Isn't ironic that the IRS just happens to go off the reservation and start targeting Catholics and conservatives during the Obama administration?

From the Blaze:

n the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.

According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her. While they did not ask directly it seemed as though the agent wanted to know about the leanings of these particular organizations.

It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year — a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.

“The IRS calls my house and says … ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.

AP Leak Investigation Scandal - The Holder Recusal.

From Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin:

Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee he recused himself from the leak investigation involving sweeping surveillance of the Associated Press because he was a “fact witness,” meaning he had access to the classified data at issue and was questioned about it. But he can’t recall when he recused himself. And it wasn’t in writing. In one of the worst security leaks of which he is aware (he says), he never told the White House (he says) that he took himself out of the loop.

Remarkable really, even if true. John Yoo, who authored the enhanced interrogation memos in the Bush Justice Department and was widely criticized by the left for taking a broad view of executive power, was somewhat incredulous when I asked him about the Justice Department’s behavior. As for the paperless recusal, he told me, “There must be something in writing to at least the DAG [deputy attorney general].”

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey agreed, emailing me that ”it is inconceivable to me that you would not do it formally. Of course, you’d have to inform all the people who might otherwise have to contact you. Indeed, if you didn’t you might conceivably come into possession of information you should not have.” He added that “in the one case I can recall in which I recused myself I did it in writing. Hard to imagine how else you’d do it — shout ‘I recuse myself’ in your office? In the hall?”

But it is the unrestrained nature of investigation that is breathtaking, beyond anything Mukasey has seen, he told me. Yoo observed, “I cannot think of another example this broad that didn’t turn out to be unauthorized. The only comparable thing was cases where a court tried to get a journalist to reveal a source. But I cannot think of the actual monitoring of reporters and editors.” He added, “If something like that had ever come up during the Bush administration in my time at DOJ, I would have said it was unconstitutional.”

The "worst security leak" that the President is never told about.

The recusal that wasn't in writing.

These people are lying clowns who think we are idiots.

Benghazi E-mail dump -the e-mail trail.

Interesting reading from Powerline.

n Congress, “they all think it was premeditated,” so we need to “correct the record.” In fact, though, it was premeditated, as everyone now knows. Furthermore, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was already well aware, based on her famous 2 a.m. conversation with Greg Hicks, that the attack was premeditated; that there was no demonstration; that armed terrorists assaulted the Benghazi compound and overran it. Yet Hillary Clinton did not participate in the email communications, and she apparently never communicated what she learned from Hicks to anyone involved in the messaging process.

Not only that, the emails show that the FBI had already concluded that al Qaeda (not just al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) was involved. Yet this information never saw the light of day:

I have not seen this reported anywhere. It strikes me as a blockbuster revelation.

Lots more questions to answer.

E-Mail Dump on Benghazi.

From the Weekly Standard:

The initial CIA changes softened some of the language about the participants in the Benghazi assault – from “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to “Islamic extremists.” But CIA officials also added bullet points about the possible participation of Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group, and previous warnings about the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi. Those additions came out after the talking points were sent to “the interagency,” where the CIA’s final draft was further stripped down to little more than boilerplate. The half dozen references to terrorists – both in Benghazi and more generally – all but disappeared. Gone were references to al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, etc. The only remaining mention was a note that “extremists” had participated in the attack.

As striking as what appears in the email traffic is what does not. There is no mention of the YouTube video that would become a central part of the administration’s explanation of the attacks to the American people until a brief mention in the subject line of emails coming out of an important meeting where further revisions were made.

Carney, in particular, is likely to face tough questioning about the contents of the emails because he made claims to reporters that were untrue. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two – of these two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility,’ because the word ‘consulate’ was inaccurate,” he told reporters on November 28, 2012.

That’s not true. An email sent at 9:15 PM on September 14, from an official in the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs to others at the agency, described the process this way. “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised the document with their concerns in mind.”

That directly contradicts what Carney said. It’s also difficult to reconcile with claims made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during testimony she gave January 23 on Capitol Hill.

“It was an intelligence product,” she said, adding later that the “intelligence community was the principal decider about what went into talking points.” (See here for the original version of the talking points and the final one.)

This is looking more likely now than it did in October of 2012.

The Daily Caller asks "Did the IRS give Mitt Romney’s tax returns to Harry Reid?"

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Harry Reid claimed to have intimate knowledge of what was secretly inside Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

As President Obama’s campaign slammed Romney nearly every day for not releasing more tax returns, the Senate majority leader repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that, at one point in his life, Romney hadn’t paid taxes for almost a decade.

He even did so from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

“The word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years,” the Nevada Democrat claimed on the floor in August. “Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

It made big news at the time, but Reid’s old accusations are popping back up now that it’s been revealed that the IRS has been targeting conservative groups and in some cases, reportedly leaking their tax information.

Knowing that, could someone at the IRS have leaked Romney’s tax information to Reid? At the time, Reid claimed he learned of Romney’s tax background from someone who had once been an investor in Romney’s firm, though he wouldn’t say who.

Since the new IRS scandal broke, Republicans have found the question of who Reid got his information from — and from where — intriguing.

“We all wondered how Harry Reid had Mitt Romney’s taxes,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told The Daily Caller. “The question is, will he call for a full investigation into the IRS?”

The Pius Wars.

My review of "Inside the Vatican of Pius XII."

These are the war time memoirs of American diplomat Harold Tittman, Jr., who spent 1941 to 1944 within the Vatican with other Allied diplomats, and who thereby had the opportunity to observe Pius XII and  Vatican officials as they attempted to maintain Vatican neutrality.  Tittman's memoirs ought to end the nonsense that Pius was indifferent to human suffering or that he was in any way pro-fascist.

It's Science!


Here's the reason that whenever someone says "I was raised a Catholic, so I know what it teaches," what follows will be the weirdest farago of nonsense you will ever hear.

According to the research blog of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate:

//In comparison to the Pew study, D'Antonio et al. find that half of self-identified adult Catholics (50%) are unaware that the Catholic Church teaches the following about the bread and wine used for Communion: "the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ." However, 63% of adult Catholics, regardless of what they think the Church teaches, believe that "at the Consecration during a Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ."

As shown below, this creates four groups. The largest are "knowledgeable believers," representing 46% of adult Catholics, who are aware of the Church's teachings about the Real Presence and say they believe these to be true. Additionally, there is another 17% who believe in the Real Presence but who are unaware that this represents a Church teaching. These are the "unknowing believers." 

The second largest group is the "unknowing unbelievers" who do not believe in the Real Presence (i.e., they believe the bread and wine are only symbols) and do not know that this represents a teaching of the Church. There is something hopeful about this group, which represents a third of adult Catholics (33%). Even though they currently do not believe the Church's teaching, they may come to believe it if they knew and understood it better. Knowledge and belief of this may even bring more of them to a Catholic parish on Sundays.

What is rare, representing only 4% of adult Catholics, is someone who knows about the Church's teachings regarding the Real Presence and who states they do not believe this teaching to be true. These are the "knowledgeable doubters" (...note that this study uses the same methods of CARA Catholic Polls, e.g., anonymity, self-administered response without an interviewer, which limit social desirability bias).

And a handy graph to prove the point!

Are there any new heresies?

This post by Father Z suggests that the modern "old school" nun of the LCWR have simply re-invented the heresy of Montanism - the notion that the Holy Spirit speaks directly to prophetesses - in order to to circumvent orthodox Catholic teachings:

Why is Florence Deacon saying this? She is manifesting yet another dimension of the Magisterium of Nuns.

She is using the “poor”, and the poor can be translated loosely, as a hermeneutic for just about everything they want to justify doing. La Voz de los Pobres, The Voice of the Poor (it’s just better in Spanish), is a cover for setting aside Magisterial teaching.

This is how this works.

First, I take the “experience” of the person I am talking to. That person, who has some sort of conflict or problem, is in the category of “the poor”, or “the marginalized”, no matter what their income is. When that “poor” person speaks, I am listening to the voice of God, because the voice of God is heard in La Voz de los Pobres. So, the “poor” person’s experience, and then my “experience” of listening, become the grounding of interpretation of God’s will. See?

Then, after this listening, I interpret what the person wants to do. For example, the “poor” person wants to have sex with someone of the same sex, or wants to simulate ordination to the priesthood, or wants to vote for pro-abortion politicians who support certain social justice programs, or even wants to have an abortion.

Then, because the “poor” person told me what they want, and because I, the interpreter of La Voz de los Pobres have listened, I give the “poor” permission to do what they want. I have effectively bypassed the Church and the authentic Magisterium. I, wielding the Holy Spirit, have listened to God in La Voz de los Pobres and that listening has given me all the authority I need no matter what the “official” Church says.

Say for the sake of this exercise I am a LCWR nun. I encounter another “gay” person. I listen. I can now affirm her in her “gayness”. I can affirm her because I listened to the voice of God in La Voz de los Pobres.

This blah blah from Sr. Deacon, reveals what these nuns are after: they seek to set aside the defined teaching of the Church and simply affirm their own desires. They are seeking to supersede the Magisterium of the Pope and bishops with their own Magisterium of Nuns, rooted in whatever the hell they want to do.