The word radical occurs only in the title of this essay about J. D. Vance

 I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for The New Yorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.

If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.

It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.

For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.

We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.

For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:

In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,” is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported, Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...

For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as ‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”

I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.

Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.

These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to The New Yorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it. 

Freedom really ticks them off.

I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other. 

The country is just too damn LGBT for that.

 

    

 

Nancy Pelosi in shock as Supreme Court overturns liberal sacrament of abortion

 PELOSI: WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE? 

https://www.mediaite.com/uncategorized/what-is-happening-here-emotional-pelosi-slashes-at-trump-and-the-republicans-over-cruel-roe-v-wade-decision/

A US Supreme Court of Judas Iscariots: All Catholics and Jews, not a Protestant among them, stick it to a Southern Baptist

Conservative SCOTUS Betrays Barronelle :

Rod Dreher:

. . . Where were you, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? These two, by the way, also were among the majority that refused to hear the Gavin Grimm case, handing a big victory to transgender bathroom-invaders. [UPDATE: Bret Kavanaugh also left Stutzman in the lurch.] . . .   

Comments

Achilles Rienzi:

This so wrong—another stab in the back. I am angered by it. If this wasn’t a stab in the back, then what was it?

This is why people hate establishment Republicans and conservatives. Roberts has sided with the liberals in every split decision since Kennedy retired.

I honestly don’t know how this collection of Judas Iscariots sleep at night. It takes a certain type to backstab like this then sleep like a baby. They are where they are because of people who support religious liberty, then they turn around and stab us in the back.

Only a mass movement led by credible anti-conservative far right leaders will solve our problems. A far right solution but one that is not conservative is the only solution.

Honorable exceptions like Thomas and Alito aside, no group has done more to impose and solidify leftist policies than Republican-appointed SCOTUS judges.

Supremes decline to hear case, polygamy remains a crime in Utah

Here is the lede:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear arguments from the husband and four wives who star in the television show "Sister Wives," letting stand a lower court ruling that kept polygamy a crime in Utah. 

The story indicates the Supremes let stand a Denver appeals court ruling that "The Browns" had no standing to sue in the first place under the Utah statute.

Viewership of their Sister Wives show struggles around the 2 million mark.

Duck Dynasty by contrast, a show about a large successful colorful but traditional family, averaged 8.7 million viewers in 2013. 

Here's another "religion" which should be banned in the United States, but our insane Supremes think otherwise

The Associated Press just recently reported here:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A man described by police as a Santeria priest caught with human remains in his Connecticut home agreed on Monday to go to Massachusetts to face accusations that he stole the five skeletons from a mausoleum. ... Police arrested Medina on Friday after the remains were found in his Hartford apartment. Medina told police he was a Santeria priest and wanted the human bones for religious and healing ceremonies, said Hartford Deputy Police Chief Brian Foley.

Give them an inch in 2009 they'll take a mile in 2015:

As the sacrificial hour approaches, several priests (Santeros) are preparing the 40 assorted goats, roosters, hens, guinea hens, pigeons, quail, turtle and duck who grow noisy and nervous in their cages. Their lives will be taken in an exchange mandated by Olofi, Santería's supreme god and source of all energy, to heal the broken body and spirit of Virginia Rosario-Nevarez and to initiate her into the Santería priesthood. No medical doctor has been able to alleviate her suffering—the intractable back pain that makes walking unbearable, her debilitating depression and loneliness.

The Grandmothers Of Bolshevism Celebrate ObamaCare

"[W]e are convinced that health care is not a privilege, reserved for those who can afford it, but a right that should be available, at high quality, to all."

-- National Council of Churches

"[A] huge step in the right direction [single payer health care] and we celebrate provisions in that law that continue to fill the gaps and expand existing health care, particularly to low-income Americans."

-- United Methodist Board of Church and Society

"We rejoice today as the Supreme Court rules to uphold [the] constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act."

"[S]ingle payer [is the] best vehicle for providing such health care resources."

-- Presbyterian Church USA 

"The Supreme Court decision today is a clear signal that we as a country are moving toward the realm of God on earth -- the realm of this merciful, compassionate God, full of love for all."

-- United Church of Christ

(source)

"Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933

Jeffrey Goldberg Thinks Mormonism's Bad Rap Is Due To Its Proximity To Our Own Times

For Bloomberg.com, here:

In talking to my Mormon friends (some of my best friends are Mormons), the answer is clear. The practices and origin stories of most religions, when viewed by outsiders, all seem fairly strange. But Mormonism seems just a bit stranger than the rest. The great fear is not that Americans will see a Mormon politician as too sinister to lead the country (the way that some Baptist leaders once saw the Catholic John F. Kennedy) but that Americans will see a Mormon as too bizarre to be president.

They point to the issue of “sacred underwear,” the derisive term for undergarments worn by some Mormons to remind themselves of their religious responsibilities. Many find the concept odd, but should they? Is Mormonism really that much stranger than other religions?

I vividly remember learning from a Catholic friend that, each Sunday, his family would attend church to drink the blood of Jesus and eat his body. Freaky. But is it any freakier than the sight of a bunch of Jews gathering around an 8-day-old boy to watch a man with a beard snip off the tip of the baby’s penis, and then to eat blintzes afterward? Religious Jews, of course, also wear a variation of “sacred underwear” -- zizit and tallitot, traditional garments that date back thousands of years, to the ancient Middle East.

The Mormon tradition dates back less than 200 years, to Palmyra, New York. What Mormons suffer from more than any other major religion is proximity. The foundation stories of Mormonism took place in the age of skeptical journalism, and they took place in the U.S.

This seems right to me, except that the lineage factor is missing from the analysis and what significance that has for the progenitors, which cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of doctrinal matters. 

Jews find Christians especially strange because Christianity is an heretical sect of Judaism which crossed the line and made a god of a man.

Christians find Islam strange because it is an heretical sect derived from an heretical sect of Christianity which crossed the line and made a man of a god.

Mormonism is an heretical sect of American Christianity which American Christians historically found objectionable more on moral grounds than theological, so much so that they quite literally drove the Mormons out west to Utah.

In point of fact, the Supreme Court of the United States itself ruled against statehood for Utah until Mormons officially abandoned polygamy because the practise was considered by the Court to be destructive of public (Christian) morals. No state in the union was going to be allowed to be a polygamist enclave.

Imagine such a ruling today, say about same sex relations.

Theologically Mormonism's problem for Christian America is its divinization of not just one man but of all men. But as far as I can tell, the Mormon in the race for president is probably the last Mormon I'll have to worry will push his ideas on anyone.

I'm not convinced he has any.

Compared with the ideas of his opponent, however, I can live with that. 

Let Us Now Shun Famous Men, Like David Bentley Hart

Without fear of contradiction I can assert that the group most detested by all and sundry at this hour in America is the Westboro Baptists, who have the unmitigated gall to show up at military funerals and proclaim God's hate, hate!, for America, her soldiers and her symbols.

"Her" is said advisedly, because to the Westboro Baptists, America is a bitch, a whore, ancient Babylon re-incarnate, for her late friendship with homosexuality, among other things.

Closely following them in opprobrium is the US Supreme Court which has rather thumpingly ruled that these fanatics have a right to express their opinions as they do, which has been according to the law. As far as the Supremes would have it, the quarrel is local, the politics local, and the local laws the law until such time as the locals change it and the Westboro Baptists break it.

A writer for First Things, one David Bentley Hart, is quite beside himself over all this. Here he calls the Westboro Baptists barbarians, fiends, resorters to absolute license, and abusers, with Mr. Hart fancying that the founders would have had them duly arrested. Actually, the founders would have criticized the Westboro Baptists for their timid response to the moral outrage of homosexuality, the practitioners of which the founders would have characterized as the barbarians, the fiends, the abusers and licentious in the extreme. The rest of us they wouldn't recognize as countrymen.

The truth is Mr. Hart actually would have preferred a fascism of the judicial sort, while crying out the generic variety, saving him all this trouble.

True to the readership of First Things, Mr. Hart has taken it a bit in the shorts not for any of that, but for suggesting, facetiously enough, that the Westboro Baptists and the military families might usefully settle this by a duel, which should tell you two things.

One, many readers of First Things apparently live where Rush Limbaugh lives, in not liberally educated Literalville, in a different neighborhood from Rush but still the same town, which comes as quite as much a shock to me as it does to Mr. Hart.

Two, Mr. Hart is sufficiently unnerved by this that he has found it necessary to write a follow-up (here) in which he has proposed instead that we all quickly recover the manners of a bygone age and treat these Westboro Baptists to the cut instead of the duel, a refined social custom descended from the shunning teaching of, for example, Paul's First Corinthian Epistle, chapter the fifth.

Oh yeah, that'll hurt 'em.

Except that in First Corinthians, Paul advises shunning actually the sinners, like the homosexuals, whereas Mr. Hart advises shunning, well, the shunners, Paul, and the Westboro Baptists, for example.

If there is a God in heaven, the Westboro Baptists are surely His prophets, and Mr. Hart is one of their targets. I'd say they're scoring hits.