Answers for Kemetica

In a previous thread, our new commenter Kemetica posed a few questions:

My point was that those who oppose SSM must be very clear on what it is that they want:
Just to be allowed to dissent (e.g. a clerk doesn't have to file an SSM marriage license) because of conscience?
To be allowed to refuse gays service for arguably expressive activities (e.g. cakes and photos and flowers)?
To be allowed to reject any service to gays in any context (e.g. housing)? 
To eventually be able to ban SSM?
To eventually be able to ban domestic partnerships? 
To eventually be able to reinstitute the closet?

My answers are a bit too long to be conveyed in a comment in that thread, not to mention that the comments are taking off in a different direction from Keith's original post, so I'm answering them in this new post.

But to answer fairly, I'll need to reframe the questions differently. Actually, they fall into two separate questions.

1.  "To eventually be able to ban SSM?" 

The short answer is:  unquestionably yes.

As I discussed here, IMO and under current equal protection law, a State can have a perfectly rational basis for establishing a special status for one-woman-one-man committed relationships (i.e. marriages).  To rehash briefly, biology matters in that men and women are different in ways that complement each other -- and that complementarity not only results in procreation, but indeed has shown through history to be the basis of stable and prosperous societies.  A State can (and should) recognize the importance of these facts, as based in biology, by favoring such arrangements.

Secondly, under our constitutional system, a State may, through its duly elected legislature, choose to define marriage to extend to same sex arrangements.  I don't think they should, but under our system they can. But the electorate and their representatives ought to be permitted to work out this question one way or the other, so that those who are disappointed by the result can at least respect the process. But if the Supreme Court rules that a State cannot define marriage as one-woman-one-man, that process is taken away from the electorate -- rather than settling the question, preventing the question from being settled  See the political effects of Roe v. Wade if you don't believe me.

2.  Why should you not be compelled, under penalty of law, to offer services to those selected by the State?

On the questions about "rejecting service" and the like, your questions are framed incorrectly IMO.  What you are asking is why the State shouldn't compel any business to offer their services to those identified by the State.

Here's where I'll earn some libertarian points, maybe.  IMO, the starting point should be:  no person shall be compelled, under threat of law, to perform services to anyone who he or she do not want to, unless there is a damn good reason.

As I mentioned here, race is a damn good reason.  We fought a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of our citizens lost their lives over this issue, and we have express constitutional amendments on this issue.  And MLK showed us why racial discrimination is contrary to reason and God's laws.

I would pose that there are few other "damn good reasons" to compel businesses, under penalty of law. Preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation falls short of a damn good reason, IMO.  And as Keith mentioned, the market and social stigma can provide excellent motivations in this regard.  Few businesses will turn away willing customers -- and if some do for illegitimate reasons as judged by the consuming public, competition will take care of the issue.

But in any case, the law should never require one to violate one's religious tenets (facilitating sin) in order to comply with the law.  We must not entertain a regime, as we have now with Obamacare and in the Indiana situation, in which the approach is to enact and enforce such a law, with the possibility that waivers or exemptions may be granted for religious reasons.  No -- a law requiring compliance by violation of religious tenets is an unjust law, and "an unjust law is no law at all" (St. Augustine).

Does this mean that a homeowner renting out a room or half of a duplex via AirBnB can choose not to rent to practicing homosexuals so as not to facilitate sin?  Of course.  Does this mean that a Muslim restaurant can require men and women to sit in separate rooms if required by their flavor of Islam?  Sorry, but it means that too.

There you go.  Have at it. Convince me of my error.

Why Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is a capitulation for Christian conservatives

Rod Dreher, Christian conservatism's Marshall Pétain, writes in his post The LGBT vs. Orthodox Christianity War

My friend Ryan Booth speaks my mind on this on his FB page:

That’s part of why I resigned from the Republican State Central Committee and am planning to enroll in seminary.

In other words, he's electing the still-unemployable-Charles-S.-Featherstone-Option. Has Dreher's protege Featherstone found a job yet? If and when he does I'll be happy to update this.

In the meantime, those voluntary Christian unemployables among us are going to need a safety net. What might be another word for such a thing...oh: a big government welfare state. And I'll bet there would even be politicians willing to help out voluntarily unemployable seminarians with extra netting in exchange for their votes.

You go, Ryan. Go to your room like a teenager, shut the door, stamp your feet, and say, "You just wait, mean Mom and Dad. One day you'll get yours. Then I'll come out and it will all be mine."

Except, well, until they (oops, looks now like that won't include you, Ryan) change the Constitution to make the seminaries the levers of government power, then the only people passing laws and filling judiciaries will be the non-Ryan evil Moms and Dads. Who may legislate and vote, while Ryan and Rod hide out in their teenage rooms, to change the tax status of seminaries, making them economically untenable entirely. Or in their absence legislate and vote on any number of other anti-Christian things.

And, hey, get this: the only culture sure to collapse by the voluntary resignation of Christians from the public square is Christian culture. Or do you subscribe to the psychotic delusion that anti-Christians will lovingly maintain Christian enclaves among them at their own expense like little tanks of sea monkeys?

To put this in some perspective, just try to imagine an Islamic Benedict Option:

"Verily, my brothers and sisters, even though we are a dominating presence there, I fear all our lands of the Levant as well as Europe and even Dearborn, MI will inevitably be lost to the Infidel. I know, who are you to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes? Trust me, not your lying eyes. All is lost. Let us be happy in our prayers and in our delicious hummus. By the way, my new book, The Hummus Option, will be available from Amazon.com Monday."

But maybe I'm being too short and too cruel and taking Ryan out of context. The Facebook page Dreher excerpts ends

And we can’t show people the life-changing power of Christ if we’re fully enmeshed in the culture. If our lives don’t look any different than those of non-Christians, then why would anyone decide to become a Christian?

Gee, I don't know. Why would anyone decide to become a Christian? Anybody know? Maybe if we all wore Mohawks (you, too, Diane) even more people would want to celebrate us and and join us. Because of our cool differentness.

Dreher migrated out of political arguments in his blogging into ultimately now this pseudoreligious I Am the Eggman Generic Mahdi Tune In Turn On Drop Out Maharishi guru babblelogue of his Benedict Option because, frankly, cogent, coherent political arguments are harder to make than it is to play the mystical neo-Benedictine guru to the easily cowed and easily suggestible types who get approvingly "curated" into his blog.

The problem is that the fantasies of developmentally-arrested adolescents* like Rod always tacitly assume that the behavior of Mom and Dad will remain the same, unchanging indulgent supportiveness they've always known while they're petulantly sulking in their room, that they won't crack the door and find out, dang!, Mom and Dad have said good riddance to Rod and Ryan, sold the house, and moved to Fiji with the proceeds, leaving R & R faced with flipping a coin to determine who will have to kill little Skippy the hamster with his bare hands if they're going to eat that night.

I know, I know. The narrative Dreher's surfing is that the Benedict Option he has now appropriated as his own supposedly has a legitimate and venerable pedigree in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

“We are not waiting for Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Read all of Goerke just to scratch the surface of the difficulties of translating that sort of romantic academic apocalypticism into practical action for everyday people. For example, in a recent post, The Accidental Benedict Option, Dreher had originally concluded with

"I’m taking my stand there. I have made more progress towards healing and wholeness in the past two years at that mission than at any time in my life. St. John the Theologian Mission really is a “school for conversion,” to use St. Benedict’s phrase from his Rule. Without even knowing what we were doing, and by following standard Orthodox liturgical and spiritual practices, we have build a community institution that, in my view, keeps its members focused on what the church is for.

If you’re Orthodox or Orthodox-seeking, and looking for a solid parish in rural America for Benedict Option reasons, come see us."

When updating it, Dreher removed that last paragraph, and for practical good reason: how many people can really move to a rural parish in south Louisiana before it becomes exactly like the place they're fleeing? We can think of this as the Tragedy of the Benedict Commons.

And, as I pointed out previously here, implicit at the heart of Rod Dreher's Benedict option is the savage misanthropy of the petulant, passive-aggressive adolescent ("Oh, I wish a post-Enlightenment apocalyptic breakdown would just wipe them all out!"):

 At some point on our journey through the logic of the Benedict Option we really do have to ask: if all society but the cells of the Benedict Optioneers themselves collapses into chaos and barbarism, that is, into that seed bed now fertile enough for the Benedict Optioneer to finally re-emerge - what sort of Christian does that leave the Benedict Optioneer being himself - if any sort at all? Everyone else finally in misery, so he can finally triumph. Exactly what sort of Christian is that?

Until then, who wants to juggle the emperorography of presenting himself as that another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict?

Why, probably someone who has this as the formative, enduring focus of his world view:

*When I think about the bullying I endured in high school, the most indelible image on my mind is being pinned to the floor and tortured in a hotel room on a school trip, and the two adult women chaperones in the room literally stepping over me, lying there screaming for them to help me, as they left the hotel room.

Like the special snowflakes of academia, all Rod Dreher wants is some other, adult to provide a safe place for him where he can be whatever he wants to be, without criticism and without fear of anyone being mean to him. But to render that psychological obsession objectively legitimate, he needs you to believe in and create a functional Benedict Option for him - so he can then write a book about it and sell it back to you.

To cut to the chase, for the adults reading, here's our real Option, or at least the non-emperorographic basalt bedrock upon which it must be built: the Constitution of the United States of America. There has never been anything like it and there probably never again will be.

There's only one problem. You can't be Christianity's or conservatism's very own passive-aggressive special snowflake like Rod Dreher or Ryan Booth and operate it. It just won't work for invertebrates of that sort. You have to assert your rights under it.

Actively. Politically. Yourself.

As for "The LGBT vs. Orthodox Christianity War"? Unless you're a socially and politically passive Christian conservative like Rod Dreher, perched on your hands and knees, simpering back over your shoulder in the hopes of selling a Benedict Option book based on that posture, there isn't one.

Instead, like Kevin and Crystal O'Connor of Memories Pizza you're already exercising what I'd like to call...let's see...oh, I know - The Christian Option.

Loving. Treating everybody equally, under God and under the Constitution.

Uncompromising with respect to your Christian principles. Unmovable.

Not whining, "lying there screaming for them to help me".

Selfless and generous. When other Christians come to your aid, sharing the excess with those even worse off than you, not filling your belly at Galatoire's or sucking down oysters like the Sun King.

The Christian Option. Sort of has a ring to it, doesn't it? Sort of old-timey, some might even say authentic, yet at the same time, timeless.

But, darn. Somebody beat me to it. There's already a book out about it.


UPDATE (as they say): More David French

A long rant by Ace you must read

Having chided him in private (not personally) for letting himself be gulled into promoting Rod Dreher's Benedict Option book campaign yesterday, let me turn about and post a long rant by Ace you really must read if you hope to prevail religiously in America. Whining and screaming and hoping Teacher stops them from pulling your pants down on that hotel room floor is probably not going to cut it anymore, no matter how productive that sort of marketing might be in flogging book sales for someone else. There are naughty words involved, for any who need such warning.

Dear Bill Quick...

Of course, if your life is only of the mind, you can just retreat there and hope others take care of things for you the way you instructed them to through your megaphone from deep inside there.

The Tea-hadist

72 virgins for the Tea Party:

It's like some evil genius convinced the Congressional Republicans that they would get 72 virgins if they blew up their own party.
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) October 11, 2013

Thomas Jefferson is weeping, and not just for the cheapass theft of copy.

T. L. Davis: The Barrel Will Be Hot

I've warmed up to the blogging of T. L. Davis, TL In Exile. His message is urgent and resolute, and yet never crosses over into wild-eyed Alex Jones territory. I would call him clear-eyed rather than wild-eyed, and he's written several books, so his message is delivered with precision and succinctness. I've purchased The Constitutionalist on Kindle and look forward to reading it.

Here are some excerpts from his latest post, The Barrel Will Be Hot.

The federal government, particularly Barack Obama and Eric Holder might want to pay attention here. They are losing the PR battle when it comes to the Second Amendment. Instead of making the supporters of the Second Amendment look like nuts who just want to kill people, they are convincing the other half of the nation that the government is full of nuts who just want to kill people.

It wasn't so long ago when those of us in the patriot/liberty community spoke about resistance we were shrugged off. When we spoke of unconstitutional laws we were ignored. When we called out the President and the Attorney General as Marxists who wanted to disarm the American people to force their collectivist policies on people we were shouted down as unreasonable and delusional.

That isn't happening now. People are reading stories of excessive laws like those which have ensnared Nathan Haddad and Keith Pantaleon and recognize that something is wrong. When Chicago produces a higher body count than Afghanistan day in and day out with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, the charge that more gun restrictions will lead to safety fall on ever more deaf ears.

The traitorous media refuses to print the daily instances where guns have saved lives and it rises to the millions in a given year. In Atlanta a student shot a 14-year-old at a middle school before an armed volunteer overpowered him. Not the police, somebody at the scene. A Sandy Hook was averted by the presence of a gun in a school and it just slipped by unnoticed except on the Drudge Report and The Blaze.

The equal division of the nation's people is being forged by the Obama Administration and I would like to think it was an error in judgment on the part of the President, but I have seen too many instances where division and strife were exactly what he wanted to achieve. So he has his divided society between "rednecks" and sycophantic liberals. He has driven a wedge between federal law enforcement and local law enforcement.

This last is an astute observation. That's why we can't start flipping out in our actions or our rhetoric. That would be handing political ammunition to the gun control crowd. And just because most of the mass killers of recent times have been on the left, that doesn't mean people on our side can't flip out and do something horrible. And lately I've been worrying about some of the "open carry" proponents; they seem to more concerned about making a point than self-defense as I've noted before.

We are there and we are ready to fight, because we are ready to die. The people know deep down that these threats to regulate, register and confiscate our weapons is the last item on the agenda leading to absolute despotism. They are the prelude to everything our fighting men have died to oppose over the past centuries. There is something just un-American about it and they can't stomach it.

Mr. Davis is eloquent and I think the readers here would appreciate him. We're all in exile, by the way, in case any of you have forgotten.