At least inside my own head, whenever I do forecaster punditry, I feel like I always qualify what I say. Our lives are a mist, we know not what cometh, I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet, etc. But then some years down the road somebody chortles at me in the …
Michael Horton, Gender Stereotypes, and Me
Michael Horton recently offered up a critique of something he called “muscular Christianity,” and because I was (I think) referenced in his article as being among the bad guys, I thought I should say something about it. My first point has to do with the (I think) in the previous sentence. Throughout the article, Horton …
The Emperor’s Whitey Tighties
Yesterday our president hurled himself into a frothing maelstrom of flattery and praise by taking the astonishingly courageous step of endorsing gay marriage. Whoa. There have been other thoughtful interactions with this decision, as, for example, here, here, and here, but I have not asked for a moment of your time in order to thoughtfully …
Reading the Tea Party Leaves
And now for a quick little political roundup. And speaking of that, wouldn’t it be nice if we had enough Round Up to spray all over Washington, but I find I have stumbled into the common error of confusing things that sound alike, and I also really need to work on focusing. The turnout for …
The Problem With Their Syncretisms
Suppose a measure is before your state legislature to build a bridge over a river in your town. There are ardent Christians in your town who think this is a good idea, and ardent Christians who want to leave well enough alone. Surrounding these pro and con Christians are the unbelievers who also, not surprisingly, …
A Whipped Up Tolerance Mob
We live in a highly politicized (and therefore dishonest) culture, and this means that before you decide whether you are for or against any proposed measure, law, or pr campaign, you have to look past the language. “Hate crimes” is code. “Anti-bullying” is code. Invariably it turns out to be code for some aspect of …
Getting Our Sensate Groove Back
I recently caused a small stir on Facebook by saying this: “One of the greatest aesthetic and arististic gifts the world ever received was the casting down of images in the Protestant Reformation.” I thought it might be good for me to explain what was behind that comment, at least a little bit. Yesterday, our …
Bloodshed and Buggery
So Mitt Romney hired Richard Grenell as his foreign policy spokesman, and Grenell is an “out and proud” homosexual. Well, who could have seen that coming? The issue is how these things get mainstreamed. There is a certain kind of conservative who, in Dabney’s immortal phrase, is the shadow that follows radicalism to perdition. It …
Political Thimblerig
A presidential election is not a discrete vote on issue y, as though it were a referendum. If we were a pure democracy, and if at every fork in the road we all had to text in our druthers (“text FP113 for bombing Tehran,” “FP114 for signing the peace treaty,” etc.), besides creating a hellish …
How Incrementalism Works
I have made this point before, way back in 2006, but it bears repeating now. The Left has an incremental strategy of making their gains slowly and steadily, and they have been very successful. Conservatives have an incremental strategy of having the Left make their gains more slowly than they wanted and less steadily than …