Just remember, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible.

Ever have one of those moments when somebody connect a pair of dots and you think something like, "geez, that's so obvious, why didn't I see that before?" Roger Ho makes the observation that at the same time as many Americans are castigating the administration for not finding WMD in Iraq, many Americans will be glued to the TV watching the intrepid Jack Bauer move Heaven and Earth to find the sole carrier of a disease that can kill 20% of the population of Los Angeles.(1)


__________________________
1. In light of the Byron controversy, I want to make it clear that the official editorial position of Lex Communis is that that would be a "bad" thing and that we do not necessarily agree with those who advocate an FBI investigation into Keifer Sutherland, despite the fact that Mr. Sutherland's father is a Canadian.

You know, if it wasn't for the Cracker Barrel Philosopher, I would never have heard of the latest fusion cuisine, which is currently the rage in Seattle.

Another perspective on the Matrix.

The Old Oligarch offers a most optimistic explanation of the end of the trilogy. Although the Oligarch finds in the final movie a vindication of Christian realism, what about the movie as a model of Nietzcheism. Neo is the self-defining ubermensch. He makes his own morality. His final credo is "because I choose," which seems fairly Neitzschian. Further, you have that credo following what has to be an instantiation of eternal recurrence; the movie incarnation is something like the seventh or eighth time that Neo has had to trace the maze.

I'm not saying that the Wachowski brothers decided to pen a movie trilogy based on Nietzsche, but, hey, I can play the game too.

More Hentoff on Schiavo.

[Via Patterico.] Here is Nat Hentoff's column on "whether Terry Schiavo was beaten in 1990." My suspicion is that this is an angle that can never go anywhere after so long.

The Bonhoffer Option.

Mark Byron is a very sober and thoughtful writer. What he was thinking in in a post describing a "Christian" coup de'tat against liberalism eludes me. He was either indulging in the dark thoughts that virtually everyone has at one time or another or he was trying to start some kind of discussion about the morality of civil disobedience.

Dr. Byron's post was picked up on a leftist blog at the History News Network and from there it spread like wildfire with death threats and obscenties being directed at the Good Doctor. The posts and comments all play on a stereotype of Dr. Byron and indulge in virulent bigotry against that group of Protestants who have coopted the word "Christian." (Actually they're the "radical Protestants.") It's worth reading the posts and comments to see the thin envelope of civility that tears when the left starts mocking "christians" - it's as ugly as any form of anti-semitism.

Also, slide through the leftist critique and note the inherent fascism of the response. The suggestions are that Dr. Byron should be monitored as an enemy of the state. Dr. Byron should be reported to the FBI. Dr. Byron is a terrorist. Glenn Reynolds and everyone else should ostracize Dr. Byron. All of which is more evidence of the Leninist heart that needs to be evicted from the culture of the left.

Let me make several points. First, I think Dr. Byron's post was a mistake. The virtues of the post are far outweighed by the costs. Second, I think the scenario is clearly wrong in that we live in a functioning democracy - whereas Dietrich Bonhoffer, famously, didn't. To the extent that the post had any virtues, it should serve to sharpen why we don't believe in violence. On which point, let me cite the best articulation of my postion which is found in the Catechism and provides an insightful analysis:

2243 Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.

One would have hoped for some nuanced discussion on the issue. Instead Dr. Byron got bellowing and name-calling. One philosopher who I had an exchange with even made the amazing suggestion - after trying to argue that civil disobedience on the part of a majority was always illegitimate - that violent civil disobedience was never proper. In Nazi Germany? By Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Of course, violent disobedience against tyranny is moral. It's called the "Right of Revolution," it was posited by John Locke and was the foundational principle of this country, but "Matt" cowardly signed off lest he be accidentally learn something at the hands of this person who he referred to as having the guile of a "Jesuit." Of course, he restorted to this ad hominem attack after I had simply cited the relevant section of the Catechism and after he asked me where he had engaged in name-calling. Presumably, if I'd cited the Torah, I would have been accused of "rabbinical hair-splitting." You just got to love that tolerance and absence of prejudice.

Finally, the ad hominem attacks against Dr. Byron are simply slander. I know that Dr. Byron unconditionally condemned Eric Rudolf, the abortion clinic murderer. I have yet to see the same condemnation by leftist bloggers of Sarah Jane Olsen or others of her ilk.

So, as Dr. Byron might say, don't complain about the speck in your brother's eye until you have removed the beam from your own.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has in fact suggested that Dr. Byron needs to "sober up." The ever-sober Kevin Holtsberry offers his take on what the reaction to Byron says about the tenuous commitment of bloggers to the free speech of speech they don't want to hear.


Update: By the way, if you're interested, my "dark thoughts" involve a rifle with a sniper scope, a time machine and Germany in 1517. OK, start the cards and letters rolling. Report me to the FBI. Maybe Glenn Reynolds will tell me to sober up.

Sarumen is one classy guy.

Listen up, you Infotel punks. You are all a bunch of low-class, low-budget cowards. Don't like me saying that? Send me a letter and I will respond with a B&P 17200 action in Fresno Superior Court.

Justene Adamec has been served with an official lawyer letter - ooh, scary - for comments left at her blog by some outfit named Infotel.

In my experience - and I was involved in a case which resulted in several people doing federal time for setting up a Ponzi scheme - people who resort to threatening letters at the drop of a hat to stifle speech are more likely than not involved in a scam. The usual scenario is that the scam reaches a ragged end, at which point the scam-artists need to point to someone for bringing down the business. Further, legitimate businesses want to fix problems with unhappy customers because they want repeat businesses. Scam-artists want to get out of town with the loot and know that there will be no repeat business.

By threatening suits in a systematic fashion, Infotel is probably engaging in "unfair business practices" as defined in California Business and Professions Code Section 17200. Further, if Infotel is threatening to recover punitive damages, it may be opening itself to an abuse of process counterclaim.

Infotel is a public entity engaging in public activities in the public arena. Infotel knows that it has no claim for defamation. Infotel is simply and illegally trying to stifle legitimate public discussion about its activities - the very thing that the First Amendment was intended to protect.

The, ahem, Marketplace of Ideas.

You don't know how much it hurts to say that, even though that was the theses of a law review article I co-wrote.

In any event, Voyage to Arcturus is promoting this delightfully original and ironically refreshing cartoon by "Tom Yesterday."

As Joe Bob might say, "check it out."

The Times they are a'changing.

Naval Academy Grads Seek Gay Chapter.

That should liven up the re-unions.

Eating their young.

It must be a proud thing to be a leftist. You are always on the side of tolerance and charity. So it means nothing to call a fellow liberal a "brownshirt" when he suggests why other leftists are out of touch with mainstream society. I picked up this example through Dodd who vouches that the blogger, Andrew Hagen is a principled, courteous liberal. I particularly liked this bit of appalling invective:

Tbogg's outed you dumbass. You might as well quit lying. Quote "I hold left-wing views. As an American, I'm a political independent who leans toward the Democratic Party and away from the Green Party." Please don't lean toward the Democratic party. We don't want your worthless, lying ass. Go back and join your freeper friends.
P.S. Time to get off the Oxycotin dittohead now that they got your dealer Limbaugh in a padded cell where he belongs.

Yah, that says tolerance and love.

Then, scooting through Fresno blogger The Accidental Jedi, I stumbled upon this post on the disgusting trashing of Randite blogger by commenters at Atrios. Silber, apparently, is financially suffering from the transit strike in L.A. and may suspend blogging. This led to a round of comments celebrating the joy of seeing someone else's misery at Atrios. Check out this pearl:

Obviously, by his own philosophy, he does not deserve to live. Law of the jungle. Dog eat dog. Kill or be killed.

Amazing how it takes personal experience for so many of these types to realize how wrong that philosophy can be.

Feel the love?

Finally, Bear Flagger Citizen Smash used his own experience as an Iraq-War veteran to disembowl a tendentious cartoon by Tom Tomorrow which attempted to paint supporters of the war in Iraq as hypocrites and cowards. Before you could say "Beavis and Butthead," Citizen Smash was flooded with disgusting, and often mis-spelled, Atrios-style comments. (What is it about the Left and the exclusive use of the lower case anyway? Do they think they are e.e. cummings?) This one is choice:

Tom skewered you fat-ass big-mouthed brownshirts to a tee. No wonder you're in such a tizzy.

Don't like it? Enlist and prove him wrong.

Now go back to eating the Cheetohs...

After all, it's not a real debate until someone invokes the brownshirts.

These people don't need political power. They need a course in anger management.

Somedays it seems like no one's getting "lucky" anymore.

If you know what I mean.

First, there's the New Hampshire decision that lesbian sex isn't adultery because it's not "sex." (And how could that be important to a legal decision? Is New Hampshire not a "no fault" jurisdiction?) Then, Winkola reports that a suit by an Israeli lawyer to enforce his "twice daily conjugal rights - if you know what I mean - has been summarily rejected by the courts.

Darn, if that one had gone somewhere, my business would be booming.

Update: Here is the decision on the New Hampshire lesbian adultery case. And it does appear that:

(a) New Hampshire requires "fault" for a divorce and

(b) lesbians can never get "lucky."

(If you know what I mean.)

Worth Following.

Nat Hentoff has had the civil liberties beat for as long as I can remember. I've always pigeon-holed him as a principled lefty libertarian. The Mighty Barrister has flagged this Nat Hentoff column on the Schiavo debate which really is worth a read in a low whistle kind of way. Hentoff has apparently done some independent digging and will be writing follow up columns on the tendentious nature of Terry Schiavo's purported death-wish and on the husband's refusal to allow potentially effective rehabilitation.


I found this paragraph most arresting:

Ignoring the facts of the case, the American Civil Liberties Union—to my disgust, but not my surprise in view of the long-term distrust of the ACLU by disability rights activists—has marched to support the husband despite his grave conflicts of interests in this life-or-death case. The ACLU claims the governor and the legislature of Florida unconstitutionally overruled the courts, which continued to declare the husband the lawful guardian. On the other hand, the ACLU cheered when Governor George Ryan of Illinois substituted his judgment for that of the courts by removing many prisoners from death row. In a later column, I'll go deeper into the constitutional debate over saving Terri's life.

I think Hentoff comes out of the liberal tradition that had a visceral concern for the helpless. I think this tradition still exists, but is being swallowed up by the technocratic left (and center and right, for that matter) which believes that the existential meaning of life can only be found in the ability to have an orgasm. I don't think that tradition is entirely dead and two cheers for Nat Hentoff who appears to fighting something of a last stand to conserve something of that tradition.

Of course, anyone who questions the ACLU has my support. Like many Americans, I think I first began to despise the ACLU because of the Skokie issue. I started despising the ACLU's simplistic, black and white, disagree-with-us-and-you're-not-a-real-American, we-strain-at-gnats-lest-the-skies-collapse attitude when the ACLU told us that nothing less than American democracy was at stake if neo-Nazis were refused a parade permit through a neighborhood filled with concentration camp survivors. (I understand that the ACLU lost a substantial percentage of its membership over that one, and it has clearly refused to be out of touch with its ultra-liberal base ever since.)

Eric Burns mirrors my feelings:

I don't like the ACLU. Strike that — I despise the ACLU. I have despised it ever since the late seventies, when, as a correspondent for NBC News, I covered a neo-Nazi march through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois.

I watched the brutal, young thugs in the streets, saw their twisted grins and their swastika tattoos. I watched the old Jews in the neighborhoods, saw their sorrowful eyes and their concentration-camp tattoos. The punks were shouting slogans of hatred. The Jews were remembering when they, or their parents or friends, had heard such words before.

The Nazis had been given permission to march through the streets of Skokie because of a judge's ruling that the First Amendment was on their side. The ACLU represented the Nazis. It did not represent the Jews. It did not care about the gratuitous pain that the Nazis were going to inflict, pain that had nothing to do with free speech in any compassionate definition of the term.

I will never forgive the American Civil Liberties Union for what it did that day. And to this day it is the same group. It insists that virtually anyone has a right to say or do virtually anything, and so the ACLU itself stands for nothing. It insists that only the right of the speaker matters, and so the ACLU denies the very humanity of those who are assaulted by the speech. It insists that the First Amendment is to be interpreted in a way that the Founding Fathers never intended, and so the ACLU makes principle, not patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Democracy requires a little flex in the joints. The Republic will not fall because Nazis are forced to march through a different neighborhood. Hell, when you think about "Marching Season" in Northern Ireland, maybe democracy requires that the forces of intimidation not be allowed to march.

But, not to the ACLU. Keep the camp survivors indoors that day. We don't want the Republic to fall because a bunch of skinheads were told to move their little march across town.

And, boy, was that worth doing. Thank heavens for the ACLU and their principled stands. Why if it wasn't for the ACLU, we might have Supreme Court decisions permitting the police to walk into protests by pro-life and pro-choice forces and arrest only the pro-life supporters. Or we could conceivably have a constitutional approval of a rule that prevents education - not harassment, mind you - within 10 feet of people going to abortion clinics based on nothing more than the content of the speech involved. (In other words, you can educate them on the benefits of abortion, but not the disadvantages of abortion.) Or we might have a legal regime that allowed warrantless, random stops of people for a crime that targets the generally law-abiding middle-class, but not for drugs or murder, oddly enough.

Incidentally, what was the ACLU position on those issues?

Update:

Bruce Rheinstein who can be trusted on First Amendment issues links to an article on the Skokie march which states that the the Naziz never marched in Skokie:

It was April 30, 1977, the judge and former village attorney recalled this week. A crowd of Holocaust survivors and their supporters gathered in front of village hall refused to leave after officials told them the Nazis had been turned back.

Elsewhere:

It has been a quarter century since the Nazi marchers were turned back by an injunction served at the Edens Expressway.

Skokie would embark on an 18-month legal battle to keep them out. The village ultimately lost its case in court, but the Nazis never marched in Skokie.

The United States Supreme Court eventually sided with constitutional arguments by attorneys representing Frank Collins’ National Socialist party. The justices dismissed Skokie’s arguments that allowing the march would be an assault on survivors who lived in the village.

Burns' memory of being present at the march would therefore seem to be confabulation. Now, this doesn't suggest mendacity on his part. Human memory is fallible and malleable. Burns could easily be conflating incidents he did witness nearly a quarter century before.

Is the Skokie March a bit of historical urban folklore? I was a senior in High School in 1977. I remember the controversy. I remember the concentration camp survivors in Skoke. I remember the ACLU prevailing on its claims on behalf of the Nazis. I don't remember the march, but I would have placed money in a bar bet that it happened.

Whether the march actually happened doesn't really detract from the fact that the ACLU supported the Nazi's right to march in Skokie. That support traumatized Skokie and the ACLU membership. I have seen publications that state that the ACLU lost something like a quarter of its membership because of the Skokie decision.

As for the decision, my law school Prof, Richard Delgado, writes in "Must We Defend Nazis?" - which itself harkens back to Skoke - as follows:

And in the "Nazis in Skokie" case, the Seventh Circuit's opinion reverberated wtih Justice Home's reasoning. In upholding the neo-Nazi's right to march in that city, the court wrote that its result was dictated by the fundamental proposition that if free speech is toremain vital for all, courts must protect not only speech our society deems acceptable, but also that which it justifiably rejects and despises.

So it seems that the ACLU won the legal battle. What stopped the march?

Incidentally, Skokie reverberates as a "ripple of battle," a battle which may be forgetten by those in their 20s and 30s. Delgado's book is premised on Skokie. Delgado cites Collins v. Smith which is the "Nazis in Skokie" case on page 3. I don't agree with Delgado's premise that racist speech is uniquely outside of the First Amendment. I just think that reasonable time, place and manner limitations are permissible. If the neo-Nazis had nowhere else to march than Skokie, my pragmatic judgment might change. I think that the failure to make such distinctions rather than the purported support for the Nazis is what caused the backlash against the ACLU.

On the other hand, I don't want to participate in spreading historical fables. I'm going to see if Burns will respond to an e-mail on his stated recollections.

The News out of Poland.

This is really sad. Peter Hitchens describes the latest dictatorship to rape Poland:

More shocking yet, in a strange mirror image of the battles of 23 years ago, the workers who once protested against the Kremlin now riot against Brussels decrees which threaten to throw them on the dole.

Warsaw's new middle class were astonished and scared last month when miners - revered as heroes of the struggle against Russia but widely viewed as peaceable - erupted into the city centre hurling Molotov cocktails and attacking police with pickaxe handles among the city's expensive new boutiques.

The authorities, taken by surprise, eventually put down the protest with tear gas and water cannons, but not until the miners had smashed the windows of the ruling 'Democratic Left' Party, the direct descendant of the old Communist Party.

How did this happen? For decades Moscow imposed its alien will, forcing the Poles to follow stupid Marxist policies that Stalin himself admitted were about as sensible as a saddle on a cow.

The countryside was laden with disastrous collective farms, while cities were blackened by crude heavy industry. A grim elite of Party henchmen explained there was no choice. Poland was so weak she had to accept the 'protection' of the USSR.

Now the EU plans to ravage the farmlands yet again by exposing them to heavily subsidised competition from Germany and Austria. It is also demanding that the old heavy industries are deprived of state aid, meaning thousands of coal miners will head for the dole.

And a smartly-suited new elite, led by Mr Miller, explains this is all necessary because there isn't any choice. Poland is so weak she has to welcome the embrace of federal Europe.

It gets worse. Poles, and other East Europeans, are beginning to realise the new EU constitution means they have lost their independence just after regaining it.

The new voting system will leave them powerless against France and Germany on any major issue. Mr Miller is noisily complaining that the constitution is so different from what Poland voted to join that he may have to hold another ballot.

In the neighbouring Czech Republic, President Vaclav Klaus has said: 'After this there will be no more sovereign states in Europe. Basic matters will be decided by a remote federal government in Brussels.' So much for the ludicrous pretence by our own Government that this document is just a minor tidying up that doesn't require a referendum.

Flanders Fields.

My Canadian partner left this poem on my desk to remind me that at 11:00 tomorrow Candadians will mark the 85th anniversary of the end of the Great War.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.


Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

85 years is not such a long time. My grandfather was a twentyish enlisted man in the United States Navy at the time soon to return to Brooklyn to marry my grandmother. At times like this, I wonder where he was on November 11, 1918? What did he think about that day? We have a picture of him in Paris taken in 1918, so he was there on Armistice Day. [By the way, I note that William Sulik's grandfather was in the vicinity of my grandfather 85 years ago, albeit apparently on dry land.

Here is an interesting site about John McCrae's poem, including this bit of information:

The most asked question is: why poppies?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

Here is the handwritten original of McCrae's poem, which he wrote during a short rest from his duties as surgeon.

And as long as we're on the subject of Great War poetry, let's not forget Rudyard Kipling's Epitaphs of the War. Here's one I've always liked for its segue from the ridiculous to the profound:

THE REFINED MAN

I was of delicate mind. I stepped aside for my needs,
Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar and killed....
How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged by his deeds.
I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I have willed.

And, a final one for Penner and the Canadians for whom tomorrow is properly Armistice Day:

TWO CANADIAN MEMORIALS

I

We giving all gained all.
Neither lament us nor praise.
Only in all things recall,
It is Fear, not Death that slays.

II

From little towns in a far land we came,
To save our honour and a world aflame.
By little towns in a far land we sleep;
And trust that world we won for you to keep.

Update: More somber Great War poetry is offered by The OmbudsGod.

On the same subject, here is more Kipling:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob;
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

But, in this year of conflict, we also shouldn't forget that this attitude induced France and England to appease and procrastinate and, in turn, was a cause of the infinitely greater evils of Nazi Germany.

Knowing the Words, but not the Music.

Jcecil3 - who is a frequent commenter on other Catholic blogs - has a single topic, single post blog on Theological Reflections on Homosexuality. The post pulls together many of the arguments that I have seen which seek to argue that this Biblical passage or that Biblical proof-text against homosexual practices really doesn't condemn homosexual practices. The goal of Jcecil's exegesis is to find a place for homosexual practices and active practitioner's of homosexuality at the table of Christian morality. In order to achieve this goal, Jcecil's strategy is to examine the texts typically offered as condemnatory of homosexuality and to argue that each such text is misunderstood or susceptible of an interpretation congenial to the modern understanding of the gay lifestyle.(1)

I think that Jcecil's individual arguments may in some cases be tenable. My understanding of reading of Genesis 19 has always been that the sin of Sodom involved inhospitality more than homosexuality. For example, notwithstanding the fact that the men of Sodom appeared to have "intimacies" with the Lot's guests, the fact that Lot attempted to assuage the men of Sodom with his daughters (Genesis 19:8) suggests that the men of Sodom were not the models of fixed, immutable homosexuals that are offered as the basis for changing social policy today.

The rest of the examples sound like "special pleading" to me. Certain words could mean one thing. They could mean another. Perhaps one can restrict the meaning of certain terms to a particular kind of activity and then define "true homosexual" conduct outside of that definition. For the sake of argument, I'll grant Jcecil's exegesis.

All that said, Jcecil's project is ultimately unsatisfying for several reasons.

First, where is the proof-text in favor of homosexual activity? One can spend a lot of effort pondering the meaning of malakoi versus arsenokoites, but where is the positive example of homosexuals engaging in homosexual activity in the text? The closest I can think of is David and Jonathon, but the circumlocutions and ambiguities suggest that maybe homosexuality was not on the list of permitted activities in ancient Israel. Likewise, attempts to depict Jesus as engaging in, or approving, of homosexual relationships evidence more about the agenda of the proponents of such a reading than about the text itself.

Second, what about the texts concerning the teleological end of human sexual activity? Genesis quickly develops the following: "God created man in His image. In the image of God, He created them. Male and female He created them. Then God blessed them and said to them. "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it." ...For this reason a man leaves his father and mother, and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh." (Genesis 1: 27-28; 2:24.)

Now, note the absence of circumlocutions and ambiguities here. The model of human sexuality is viewed from the start as having the final cause of procreation, which plainly in the text - and in the natural world - involves a male and a female.

Jesus does not weaken the importance of marriage as His pronouncement on divorce attests.

Third, what about the texts on chastity and virginity? The Old and New Testament are replete with such passages which compare chastity as superior to marriage in terms of the commitment of the individual to God.

One reading of these texts, therefore, is that sexual activities were to be confined within marriage, marriage is an institution whose final cause is procreation, and that outside of marriage, morality requires chastity. I think that reading fits the relevant text better than one which purports to find a casual acceptance of homosexual activity, which by definition does not involve procreation or marriage.

What then to do about problematic social institutions, such as concubinage and adelphopoiesis?

Adelphopoiesis is defined as Jcecil as a rite "whereby two people of the same gender were joined in an inddissoluble bond of love making them eternal siblings." The rite appears to exist and has been seized upon by those with a pro-gay agenda as constituting gay marriage in the early years of the church. The rite appears to exist, albeit according to a woman who went through the ceremony, the rite is anyting but a gay marriage. (Unless one wants to focus on the casual liason and essential meaninglessness of the ceremony, which is not entirely a cheap shot based upon sociological data.)

Concubinage strikes me as a more difficult proposition for my thesis that sexual relationships were understood as being properly confined within marriage. Concubinage existed well into the Christian era. St. Augustine famously had a concubine with whom he had a son. When St. Augustine was contemplating a political marriage, he put away the unnamed concubine, which admittedly cost him great emotional distress.

On the concubine issue I will largely punt by saying that Christian ethics evolved over time as individuals like Augustine worked out the implications of Christian morality in a Pagan world. Further, note that Augustine's great nemesis was not too much sex - although he notoriously claimed that it was. The demon Augustine fought before his conversion was Manichaenism, which argued that sex between male and female was wrong because it could lead to children, which was an evil because bits of God would then be trapped in human flesh. Augustine's response was many-fold. First, he argued against the idea that creation - flesh - was evil. Second, he argued that spirit was not trapped in the flesh as if flesh were evil and good only to be discarded. Augustine, in fact, reminded us that our resurrections will include our bodies.

Third, the prolific Augustine wrote on The Good of Marriage for the purpose describing the three goods that flow from marriage - children, mutual faith and sacrament - which converge in the one comprehensive good of marriage. In other words, notwithstanding the fact that Augustine clearly had a concubine, he apparently saw sacramentl value in marriage.

So, I'll punt on concubinage, except to say that the argument in favor of homosexual - non-procrative - sexual relationships would have been strengthened in an alternative universe where the Manichees prevailed. In that history, heterosexual relationships would have been viewed with disdain because of their propensity for reproduction. It seems likely, then, that homosexual relationships would have become normalized and preferred.

Which is the final reason why I think that readings of the Bible which attempt to argue that there was a time when homosexuality was historically tolerated, or claims that there was a time when homosexual marriage was an option, are pure myth-making. Any such practice would have been seen as clearly Manichian and would never have been anything other than a heretical diversion.

________________________________________________

1. I am going to ignore the axiomatic acceptance of the notion that homosexuality has been scientifically proven to be a fixed and immutable characteristic determined by some presumable genetic characteristic. I find such notion to be problemmatic in the extreme. Proponents of such a view are often the first to deny strenuously that intelligence, criminality or anti-social characteristics could ever be genetically determined, and, in fact, outside of XYY genes, no one has purported to locate these personal characteristics in anyone's geno or phenotype. The objection to such latter views are quite properly viewed as being fraught with political implications. Further, pace Thomas Kuhn, we have to be skeptical of "scientific proofs" that so neatly favor ideology.

This is interesting.

Aaron's Rantblog correlates generosity with the "Red/Blue State" distinction from the 2000 Election. "Suh-prize," as Gomer Pyle used to say, Bush voting states are consistently far more generous than Gore voting states. So to paraphrase Tim Robbins, "F*** Tim Robbins" and two cheers for "compassionate conservatives."

By the way, though, look at the data closer. Of the first 20 states, only three - South Dakota (3), Utah (8) and Kansas (18) - are outside of the Old Confederacy. (Yea, I see West Virginia (14), which started the Civil War as part of the Confederacy, and Missouri (19), which could have been easily part of the Confederacy. ) The notion here is that being a Southerner is as strong an indicator of generosity as voting for Bush.

So "two cheers for the South" as well.

Matrix III

James Lileks has surprisingly positive review of Matrix III. Long story short, it's not as awful as you think.

Update: I went to see Matrix III at the local Edward's Multiplex. It cannot be a good sign for the movie that on the first Saturday after its Wednesday opening Edward's had moved the movie from the large theaters to the smaller - but still crowded - theaters further from the front doors. [The simile that comes to mind is Fritz Lieber's Street of the Gods, where religious cults gradually get pushed down the street until they are ejected from Lankhmar as the number of devotees dwindles.]

Lileks is absolutely dead-on about the movie. The fight scenes were a treat to this life-long Science Fiction reader, but the movie as a whole howled like a dachshund whose tail has been stepped on. One could throw the said dachshund threw the holes that are visibly apparent at the end of the movie. I don't want to give away the story line - so I won't - but I am reminded by one review of Frank Herbert's Children of Dune which went something like: "After thousands of years of a carefully planned and exactly executed breeding program designed to bring about the Uberman, we end up with a midget covered in silly putty?" Ok, you have to know something about the Dune trilogy - long before it ended up as an interminable series - to understand the reference. But even so with the Matrix: after all the prophecies and pretentious philosophizing, we end up with a Clinton-negotiated Bosnian armistice?

Go to watch the shoot 'em up.

Bishop Robinson.

For the viewpoint of someone who's "been there and back" on the issue of the ordination of the active homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop in the Episcopalian Church, check out David Morrison's blog.

Incidentally, in reading his past posts I've formed the view that Morrison speaks to more than gays. He speaks to anyone who anyone in our society who cares to listen to what reason sharpened by faith requires from humans with respect to the virtue of chastity. The goals of Courage could be a credo for anyone living outside of marriage.

Another point, watching the poor man's Blaise Pascal - Bill O'Reilly - last night, I saw a "debate" between Episcopalian clerics on the issue of Robinson's ordination. The precis of the debate was essentially "how would Jesus feel about the ordination." The pro-ordination cleric kept asserting the general notion of Jesus's tolerance and that his mission was to the outcast and marginal, thereby establishing his reading of more trendy Christological sociological deconstruction of Jesus. The "anti" cleric stressed Jesus' own statement that He had come to fulfill the law, not overturn it.

The split in the debate says a lot about conventional theology. I can't help but think that the "pros" read their own desires and agenda into Christ. They believe in tolerance - well, maybe not for racists or people who want lower taxes - and they fashion their view of Christ accordingly. Jesus said a lot of things that were not warm and fuzzy. For example, He said "no divorce." He said "go and sin no more" to a woman caught in an act of adultery. How does one honestly factor those sayings into this 21st Century worldview. Was He wrong? Is He the God who Failed?

Needless to say, I think that the "pros" are wrong and that the Piskies are on their way to being nothing more than a social arm of secular liberal politics. I think that that the ECUSA disappears in a merger with the other liberal denominations as a move to protect pensions during my lifetime because there simply is no reason to choose to donate to the ECUSA when you can donate to the Sierra Club or GreenPeace just as easily.

Update: Amy Welborn has a nice reflection that manifests the distinction I was subconsciously discerning from the O'Reilly "debate." She writes:

You probably learned that Christianity is good because practicing it and following Jesus can ake you a better person and make a better world. You might have learned that in Catholicism, you have a beautiful heritage that says many wonderful things about the human condition and aspirations. You probably heard that Christianity is one of the paths through which people get to know God.

But did you once, ever, learn that Christianity deserves serious attention because it’s true?

Ah, but what is truth? Can we be certain that our bedrock belief today won't be overturned by some scientific or archeological finding tomorrow? Perhaps it is safer to retreat to the unassaible truth of feelings. Was Jesus married? - as was the hot discussion at last night's Communio group between the 70 year old theologically liberal reader of America and our early 20s fire-eating conservative. Well, what's the data? Can we be sure that aliens didn't videotape the whole thing and are waiting to spring pictures of a domestic Jesus on us? And besides isn't there something reassuring and inviting in the image of a Jesus who was married and had children?

Perhaps, but that approach amounts to myth-making. There's nothing necessarily wrong with myth-making, but the orthodox approach has been to say that reality is better because it's true. The Western approach has been to prefer the Real and the True because we trust that we will not be deceived.

Connecting Various Dots.

Mike at Cold Fury puts together the Dem memo that proposes to use American intelligence for political ends, Steve Den Beste's observations about the patriotism of Thomas Dewey after Pearl Harbor and a comment at the Democratic Underground wishing American deaths - lots of American deaths - to undermine something that the commenter describes as the "laughable American democracy."

The Baby Boomers will have a lot to answer for when they face George Washington in the After-life. Not the least of which will be the notion that American security or the security of Americans is a means which can be sacrificed to partisan political goals. The Baby-Boomers (First Cohort, Dem division) have spent a life-time looking to recreate the rush they felt in opposing the Vietnam War - a war that Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates quite succinctly was being won by the lethality of American firepower, even under the crippling rules of engagement that the American military had to observe.

Being a Boomer(First Cohort, Dem division) means never having to say you're sorry. In Carnage and Culture at page 420, Victor Davis Hanson observes the simple, ineluctable facts of Vietnam - the South Vietnamese government did not engage in wholesale massacres on the scale of the North, during Tet, the communists had "compled a sordid record of executions and persecutions" that were ignored or forgotten by the critics of the war, nine out of ten refugees went south rather than north. But anti-war critics, like William Shawcross could whimper that they hoped for reconciliation, didn't foresee a chain of reeducation camps, and couldn't have been expected to foresee the racist purging of the ethnic Chinese.

Shawcross whines "should we have expected" these outcomes? To which Davis responds, ""Of course" - and plain to any sensible observer of either the atrocious civil rights record of the North Vietnamese in the decades before the war or the systematic slaughters in the Soviet Union and China by Communist Party bosses."

Davis further writes "Perhaps the gratest moral crime of the American disssidents was their later near unanimous silence about the Cambodian holocaust...."

The great mystery to this Boomer (Second Cohort) is the complete absence of the wisdom that comes from experiencing life. I remember the older Boomers from those days. They pioneered the attitude that Jonah Goldberg describes as "The only thing that unites young people politically, as a general rule, is that they are — by definition — at the bottom of the learning curve and, consequently, they try to power their way uphill with passion instead of wisdom." The Boomers always thought that they knew it all at eighteen or twenty and, perhaps, they simply stopped learning. Consequently, when a new problem presents itself they trot out the same answers. For them, every war is Vietnam. Every Republican president is Richard Nixon.

Somehow, in their minds, it's always 1972.

Update: I was going to end the last post with a question about why this stuff isn't objectively and subjectively treasonous. I erased it because I didn't like the "wacky hard right" sound to the question.

Well, why isn't it treasonous? If sabotaging American military efforts with the intent of seeing Americans die isn't treason what is? (Kind of the same question about the Green River Killer - if killing 48 women isn't worth the death penalty, what is?)

Further , no one mentions it, but everyone knows that every time an American star or politician speaks out against the War, the risk of American soldiers in Iraq increases. Now, that's not to say that we should stifle speech - and we clearly shouldn't given the Western tradition of auditing military performance - but why should we pretend that such speech is cost-free.

Then, fortunately, along comes Zell Miller who says the obvious:

“I have often said that the process in Washington is so politicized and polarized that it can’t even be put aside when we’re at war. Never has that been proved more true than the highly partisan and perhaps treasonous memo prepared for the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee.

“Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics. The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. For it involves the lives of our soldiers and our citizens. Its actions should always be above reproach; its words never politicized.

“If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible - be they staff or elected or both should be dealt with quickly and severely sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused.

“Heads should roll!”

Patterico has been all over the Schiavo case for the last several weeks, even though it cost him one long time reader. He's picked up at least one nice "gotcha" where the New York Times presented a person who regularly testified for the pro-death position as a neutral "expert." The technical expression that we Real Trial Lawyers (tm) use for such people is "whore," as in, I got my "plaintiff's whore" and you got your "defense whore," or "I've got a problem with proving this fact, do you know where I can find a "whore" to say it."