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Race Power Politics For Me, But Not For Thee
And: Literal Ben Op; Power & Culture; Santorum Redux; Shavian Magic; 'Mein Cheeks'
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Here is a prime example of the Weimarization of America — to be specific, what is driving an already unstable polity closer to the brink. Click on this link to hear what the Chinese-American leader of the Democrats in the Texas (!) state legislature says. Quote: “Non-whites share the same oppressor, and we are the majority now. We can take over this country.”
You all well know that I fear and loathe the racialized radicalism of white males on the Right, but damn it, the Left got there first, and continues to push it. You cannot create a politics based on non-white racial identity, and expect whites not to respond in kind, if only for self-protection. The path to illiberal-left identity politics embraced by Democrats and the Left more broadly has led to this.
Meghan McCain points out that people on the Left who miss her normie Republican father are forgetting how they demonized him, and later mainstream Republican politicians, a process that led to, well, take it away, Wilfred Reilly (who is black):
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The Literal Benedict Option
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That’s a tweet from a leading pagan thinker — and history supports his conclusion. Monasticism exploded in the late fourth century, throughout the fifth century, as the Western Roman Empire was in its death throes. They were escaping a doomed world without purpose. I shared this information with a priest last night, who reported that the abbot of a traditional Orthodox monastery told him that since Covid, they have had so many young men flocking to their monastery, hoping to join, that they can scarcely accommodate them. Sign of the times.
Power And Culture
Did you watch the Super Bowl? I didn’t. Could not possibly care less. But TPUSA tried to counterprogram the Bad Bunny halftime show. Didn’t work. Thus:
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He’s not wrong about the culture, but I gotta ask: how will political power be deployed to advance the culture that Engel prefers? Hard to imagine a democratic way of doing this. Engel knows this, and doesn’t care. He’s into racial identity politics … but on what grounds would Gene Wu fault him without being a racist hypocrite?
Today’s ‘Rick Santorum Vindication’ News
The C. Jay Engelses come from somewhere. Back in the Olden Times, in 2003, when your correspondent was but a thirtysomething, then-US Sen. Rick Santorum gave an interview in which he commented on the sodomy law case then before the Supreme Court. Excerpts from the transcript:
[Santorum]: I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.
And then:
[Santorum:] In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality—
[Reporter:]I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United States Senator. It’s sort of freaking me out.
[Santorum]: And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately.
By 2015, ex-Sen. Santorum had been tamed, saying he very much regrets his dog-on-man remark, and, of Bruce Jenner, “If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman.”
Well, if you have a strong stomach, here’s a story from Wales about Darren Meah-Moore, a well-known (as in, was once on RuPaul’s Drag Race) local drag queen was found dead, in full drag, after a night of sexual debauchery that ended with him having sex with a number of men in a local park. One of the men was a gay bloke out walking his dog late at night, and who took advantage of the opportunity to pleasure himself with Meah-Moore … until the dog joined in, and the dog-walker lost interest. Meah-Moore instructed his insta-lover to leave the tumescent dog alone. The coroner found sexual, um, residue from both man and beast inside Meah-Moore’s body.
From the story:
He performed CPR until paramedics took over but Meah-Moore was pronounced dead at the scene. The inquest heard tributes from Meah-Moore's father and husband [emphasis mine — RD] who described him as "caring" and "right at the heart of Cardiff's gay community".
Charming. A gay community leader. Now, there can be no doubt that Santorum’s 2003 remarks were ill-advised, to put it charitably. We have had gay marriage for some time now, thanks to the 2015 Obergefell decision, which drew on the 2003 Lawrence decision decriminalizing sodomy. I am unaware that we have seen an upsurge in man-on-dog action as a result. Nor am I aware that the public has become more accepting of bestiality as a result. So Santorum was wrong, in a meaningful sense.
Nevertheless, it’s worth considering Santorum’s point in light of Meah-Moore’s disgraceful end. In the Lawrence decision, the always-perspicacious Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent (scroll down) from the pro-sodomy majority, pointed out that if the State has no right to set laws barring certain forms of sexual conduct, then we have a sexual free-for-all. In Lawrence, the court held that the state has no right to forbid consensual sodomy — but, said Scalia, the rationale it used would mean that no law forbidding any consensual sexual activity could stand. From his dissent:
The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are “immoral and unacceptable,” Bowers, supra, at 196—the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual,” ante, at 578 (emphasis added). The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “ ‘the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice,’ ” ante, at 577. This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.
Scalia clarified that for him, this is not about homosexuality per se, but about the right of a democratic people to enact their own moral standards into law. He pointed out that the fact that Texas was at the time one of the few states to still have anti-sodomy laws on its books was a sign of how successful gay activists and their allies had been at persuading people, democratically, to overturn them. Said Scalia:
But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts—or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them—than I would forbid it to do so.
He went on:
One of the benefits of leaving regulation of this matter to the people rather than to the courts is that the people, unlike judges, need not carry things to their logical conclusion.
Translation: if this kind of thing is left up to legislatures, then they can decriminalize sodomy without having to decriminalize other sexual acts that deviate from the heterosexual norm. (This, by the way, is why I opposed the Texas sodomy law even back in 2003, despite considering sodomy to be gravely sinful; yet I agreed with Scalia’s dissent for precisely the reasons he gave.)
Based on the reasoning in Lawrence, I don’t understand on what logical basis the courts would be able to uphold morals laws in any matter involving “consent.” In the case of Meah-Moore and Fido, the fact that Fido was the active party in that coupling is prima facie evidence that Fido consented to the evil act. Had Meah-Moore enjoyed his final canoodle with Fido in an American park, it would no doubt have broken the law (I presume anti-bestiality laws are still on the books), but on what logical grounds is bestiality considered illegal? Consent? Seems pretty thin, especially in a case in which the human is the passive partner.
Which, I think, is the point Santorum inelegantly tried to make.
I remember back in those Olden Times, we were assured that legalizing same-sex marriage would tame the passions of gay men in the same way marriage tames the passions of straight men: by channeling them into a binding commitment to a single partner. I wonder what Meah-Moore’s widower thinks about that.
There’s something about this ugly case that reminds me of the plot of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1950s sci-fi novel Childhood’s End, in which the aliens who come to rule the earth do not reveal themselves until many decades had passed, and humanity had had engineered out of its collective imagination the traditional image of demons with horns, hooves, and tails. Because that’s exactly how the alien rulers look! That is to say, by the time the rulers reveal themselves, people have forgotten — or, to be precise, been made to forget, what demons look like.
Drag queens and transvestites have been with us for ages, but only in the last thirty years or so were they normalized, and seen not as a form of clown (at best) or degenerate at worst. Now we have people taking their children to Drag Queen Story Hour, and little boys who dress as women celebrated on national TV. Fortunately, we are still a society that recoils in horror at what Meah-Moore got up to in the park that night. For now. But ask yourself: why is what he did illegal?
You might say, “He did it in public.” OK, but what if it had happened in his own home? The US Supreme Court declared in Lawrence that if people decide to engage in sodomy in their own dwellings, it is no business of the state. And I agree with that result (the lawsuit had been brought by a Texas gay couple who had been charged with sodomy after police entered their home and caught them in flagrante). But as Scalia said, the legal reasoning the Supreme Court used to get to that result in principle kicks out the supports for any morals legislation.
Again, “consent” is a tissue-thin barrier to any number of inhuman acts. As disgusting as you no doubt find what Meah-Moore did, would you consider that it ought to be legal, at least in private, on the grounds that it was a private, consensual act? If not, why not? If the animal had been the passive partner, you could have said it was a case of animal abuse. But the dog was the active partner, who willingly participated.
To use the Court’s language, what is the “legitimate state interest” that justifies intrusion of the state into the private life of Darren Meah-Moore, if he chose to make his body available for the sexual gratification of a dog, especially in private?
I know it’s a revolting thing to consider, but here we are. What are the legal grounds to continue to forbid polygamy among consenting adults? What about forbidding incest between two consenting adults who are sterile (meaning that they cannot produce children)? In the UK, first cousin marriage remains legal, even though the Pakistani community there, which still practices it, has an unusually high percentage of mental and physical defectives produced by incest (e.g., Pakistani Britons account for only 3 percent of the population, but produce 30 percent of children born with serious genetic defects). You could justify banning consanguinous sex on the grounds that incest produces disabled offspring, but again, what if the partners are sterile?
So much of the moral order depends on the collective memory of Christianity, which provided grounding in authoritative transcendence as the basis for law. And that is disappearing. Don’t be surprised when illiberal right-wingers like Engel arise to say there’s no saving this corrupt democratic order, because liberalism has rotted the moral judgment of the people. I’m not endorsing that view; I’m just saying its comprehensible in Weimar America. And it will increasingly be persuasive.
Once more: the legalization of sodomy, and then of same-sex marriage, did not produce a mania for bestiality (though the idea that extending marriage to same-sex couples would curb homosexual male rutting has been disproven; most gay male marriages allow for extramarital sex). Still, the moral question remains: why is bestiality illegal, given that “yuck!” is not considered a sufficient legal argument?
Martin Shaw’s Travels
In more upbuilding news, I got this from a reader who went to see Martin Shaw in Pittsburgh the other night:
Martin was here!
I learned of the event after it was already sold out. With some luck and more than a touch of Grace I managed to get a ticket anyway.
A friend asked me this morning how things went. This is what I said:
“It was like when you stand on a beach and hear the water coming in wave after wave and you notice a stillness as the water recedes, and then how in the rhythm of the crashing waves there’s also a stillness. And, how before you know it you are still inside and everything else fades into the background. Everything except the awe, wonder, and the love the deepest part of you recognized when your toes touched the sand.”
Thank you for introducing me/us to Martin’s work.
Martin is on a book tour in the US behind Liturgies Of The Wild: Myths That Make Us.
Here he is in a teaser for a new video course, “Tales Of Christian Initiation,” telling the story of Ruth and Boaz. Please watch to get an idea of his charisma.
I’m telling you, if you have the chance to see and hear this man live, take it! And while you’re at it, subscribe to “The House Of Beasts & Vines,” Martin’s Substack. Finally, here’s a link to the Martin Shaw website, which features prominently a quote from none other than Iain McGilchrist, who describes Martin as “our greatest living storyteller.” I believe it.
Martin will appear at the Orthodox Christian Arts Festival this Friday night. It will be held in an Orthodox church in Carrollton, TX (DFW area). Go! You won’t regret it.
Clavicular’s Really Bad Arizona Weekend
It seems that the celebrated Zoomer weirdo who goes by the name Clavicular, and who taps on his cheekbones with a hammer to “looksmaxx” himself, found himself in an uncomfortable situation over the weekend:
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What on earth does that mean? This tweet breaks down the slang for you, my fellow Olds. Meanwhile, enjoy Charlie Cooke’s Wodehousian take on the matter:
“Jeeves,” I said, “you look . . . pensive.”
“I confess to a slight concern, sir.”
That, from Jeeves, is rather like hearing that the Bank of England has “a slight concern” about the stability of the pound. It makes you sit up.
“Concern, Jeeves?”
“Concern, sir. I ran into Lady Flashcome this morning, who informed me that that, last night at the Drones, Viscount Clavicular was mid jestergooning, when a group of Foids came and spiked his Cortisol levels.”
“Well, I’m bound!” I said, nodding the old bean. “So that’s what it is, is it? Most interesting.”
I paused.
“Jeeves?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I confess I didn’t quite follow that.”
“Understandable, sir. The essential question, as I understand it, is whether ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids is more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club.”
“Come again, Jeeves,” I said, for though I had caught the words as they came out, the meaning had slipped past me like one of those greased eels making a dash for the open sea.
“In plain terms, sir, the speaker is asking whether it is more advantageous, in a social setting, to disregard women entirely while attempting to dominate or impress other men through vulgarity and competitive posturing, rather than attempting to attract women by means of artificially inflating one’s perceived desirability—particularly through the presentation of a false identity suggesting superior physical attractiveness and social value.”
I stared.
“In other words,” Jeeves continued smoothly, “it is a comparison between two strategies for attaining social status: one based upon humiliating rivals and cultivating masculine hierarchy, and the other based upon deceiving prospective romantic partners by misrepresenting one’s own attractiveness.”
He coughed politely.
“Neither approach, sir, would generally be considered conducive to the development of sincere human relationships.”
Worse, Clav got brutally frame-mogged by an Arizona State frat boy. And if that weren’t enough, the hope of a generation was arrested for trying to get into a bar with a fake ID, and ended up with two felony charges. O tempora! O mores!
Assuming he is literate, I only hope this young man can take advantage of his jailhouse tenure to do as another young visionary a century earlier did while incarcerated, and produce a world-changing manifesto:
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