Rod Dreher pivots from 1950s Democrat to...

Bullfrog! Ha, ha, just kidding! Seriously, Vanna, let's pull up the Rod Dreher Values Board and show our viewers at home what this week's menu of values choices offers him an opportunity to believe in for a day.

When we last left ex-whatever values pundit Rod Dreher, a beautiful gypsy woman had read his palm and revealed to him he was "a 1950s Catholic Democrat". Good one, Rod! I chuckled at that myself. But let's see what other lily pads our mobile amphibian has visited this week after showing Bishop Sheen the webbing between his hind toes.

Egalitarian populist! That's a leap! And...

Back to 1950s Catholic Democrat, this time wearing a leather jacket, sporting one of those gay Marlon Brando caps, and swinging a motorcycle chain in a desperate effort to win back the conservatives he lost on the first incarnation. But...ribbit!...and leap...and...

Whoa! Is God a new urbanist? I never saw that coming. How about you, Vanna? Never mind, we're off again to...

Who-ho-hoa! Conservative-Liberal-Socialist! Talk about your three-way! And...leap!

9/11 Truther! Can this possibly get any better, Vanna? This guy has more moral-ideological lily pads to live on than Golden Corral has offerings for old folks with diverticulitis.

And... Well, you knew this was coming, didn't you? Still eating the tadpoles, still bashing the post-1950s Catholics.

Gulp!

UPDATE: One correction, Rod. The archbishop’s first name is “John”.

UPDATE2: It’s John Nienstedt, not William.

Well, I guess that settles it, Bob...er, Rod. Those distracting facts tell us that the Archbishop's name is John, not William. Still, we can always believe everything else you put out there, right?

 UPDATE3: Bob enjoys a public moment thinking about the permutations of anal sex:

 [NFR: What would non-wanton anal sex look like? What about anal sex with a wonton? -- RD]
 
  UPDATE4: T.O. Meehan puts our frog on the dissecting tray and takes him apart.

Too Many Catholics!!

From the Catholic League. Note the familiar chorus of "JFK was our kind of Catholic!" from the secular left.

Bill Donohue notes the reaction of bigots to the Hobby Lobby case:

“Once again an all-Catholic, all-male, all-ultra-conservative majority of five has voted en bloc to eviscerate fundamental rights,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor of the atheist Freedom From Religion Foundation. Yup. Catholics always conspire to do things “en bloc” (save for Sonia).

It's so laughable; we're continually told that the majority of American Catholics support so-called SSM and use birth-control, so the Catholic Church should merely give in on those things. Then some highly intelligent Catholic public servants who practice their faith—or at least defend the right of others to do so—cast a pro-freedom vote and it's all the fault of Catholics that “fundamental rights” have been “eviscerated”. Note that it is the secularists who have been employing the language of wild-eyed lunatics lately.

“Court’s Catholic Justices Attack Women’s Rights” is the headline of Margery Eagan’s Boston Herald article (it’s those Catholics again). The American Humanist Association issued a statement with a picture of a rosary next to birth control pills. Cute.

In the Huffington Post, Ryan Grim noted that “these men [the five judges who voted for religious liberty] are Christians.” He also said, “The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Christian business owners are special.” I guess the ruling does not apply to Mormons.

Some Muslims are against at least certain forms of contraception, especially ones which cause sterility (e.g., tubal ligation, etc.) Some Orthodox Jews are as well. I'm not sure a Muslim-owned business would care, though, since they like the idea of subjugation by all means possible, including out-breeding the infidels. (I like that idea, too, but I like the idea of people not damaging their souls even more.)

Also in the Huffington Post, Ronald A. Lindsay, a militant atheist, asks, “Is it appropriate to have six Catholic justices on the Supreme Court?” His hero is JFK, who famously threw his religion overboard to win votes. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “a majority of the Supreme Court may now be resurrecting concerns about the compatibility between being a Catholic and being a good citizen....” He’s not resurrecting the old canard—the Justices are.

Another unspoken canard in this whole Philip F. Cardarella, writing in the Kansas City Star, says that when JFK ran, the question was, “How could someone who owed his religious obedience to the Pope in Rome and the doctrines of the Catholic Church truly be trusted?” Now, he opines, “Five men on the Supreme Court—all Catholics—may well just have proven him [JFK] wrong.” Got it.

Catholics are 25 percent of the population and comprise two-thirds of the high court. Jews are 1.8 percent of the population and comprise one-third of the high court. Note: only the former is a problem.

There might have been another Jew on the court. His name was Robert Bork. Ironically, he got shot down by JFK's brother in 1987. Then even more ironically, he converted to Catholicism in 2003. He died a year and a half ago, but since the Kennedy-led assault most likely took 10 years off his life, he'd probably still be around but for that. Just an interesting tidbit.

Hobby Lobby Decision Makes Liberal Heads Explode

You have to look at this stuff. Here are my favorite freak-outs:

Because women still have to deal with vagina-hating coots like Alito and Scalia #yesallwomen.

At least he didn't write cooter-hating coots. That would just be confusing.

I hope Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Kennedy drown in a sea of birth-control pills. #hobbylobby

I didn't realize birth control pills were liquid. Well you learn something new every day, especially if you are a misogynistic mantard like me.

Hobby Lobby to mandate employees to eat the blood and flesh imaginary jews on Sundays. #whatwillittake

There it is! Wondered when we'd hit the anti-Catholic stuff, even though the Hobby Lobby people aren't Catholic. Guy Benson has a good article on Townhall about the reflexive attacks. Excerpt:

Leave it to Harry Reid to make the cheapest argument imaginable, which naturally fails to mention that a key related ruling against the overreaching mandate at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals was handed down by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an African American woman. It's time that our white male Senate Majority Leader stop telling black woman jurists how to do their jobs. And I, for one, "can't believe we live in a world" in which a privileged white woman [Elizabeth Warren] can shamelessly traffic in an entirely unsupportable "ethnicity" claim throughout her career, drop the pretense once she's reached the pinnacle of her profession, and still get elected to the United States Senate as an anti-privilege, populist liberal.

Does Rod Dreher simply invent his anonymous readers?

I for one think he does, the most recent being here and here. The reason these particular narratives ring hollow to me (not that they each could not occur independently on their own, saying the same thing) is that each of their factual narratives reads like one of Dreher's oblique, elliptical, passive-aggressive pseudo-intellectual aesthetic-moral ramblings but now made incarnate, inevitably producing the same wooden result as a Tom Clancy attempt at a female character or a romantic scene.

By externatizing the narrative and rendering it "factual", even if anecdodatal, Dreher sock-puppets himself, in the process creating a three dimensional reality in which his thought vapors now live (ostensibly) fully rich and realized lives. For example, a reader writes to tell me

Our endemic Southern Gothic culture of early childhood sibling incest here in the West Feliciana Parish area, though never, ever spoken of in polite company, probably has much to do with sibling conflicts that erupt later in life around here and can never really be adequately explained.

There's at least one fairly obvious reason that otherwise credulous readers can be led to be made complicit in legitimizing what might otherwise be a wholly fictitious post: their ego's need to comment on whatever its content is and to see their comment in print.

If I as a wholly reactive commenter on a Rod Dreher post decides, "Bullsh*t! This is obviously fake, and I'm having no part of it", I now have to wait until Dreher makes another post before I can see the scintillating wisdom of my comment in print. Besides, he won't publish any comment that outright claims he's inventing content out of whole cloth to facilitate his own job. So maybe I'll just ignore that little voice in my head and go ahead and comment anyway as if the post were legit. Really, what harm could it do? And that way, I can eat the offered treats right out of his hand. And he might even pet me.

Of course, realize I'm not taking a hard and fast stand on any of this, I'm just throwing these various issues out there for you readers to discuss among yourselves, among them, what is Dreher's objective record when it comes to veracity? Is there a baseline of evidence that should compel me to give him the benefit of the doubt, even when something doesn't ring true?

Waiting for the color of spring

Here she comes
Silent in her sound
Here she comes
Fresh upon the ground
Come gentle spring
Come at winter's end
Gone is the pallor from a promise that's nature's gift
Waiting for the color of spring
Let me breathe
Let me breathe the color of spring
Here she comes
Laughter in her kiss
Here she comes
Shame upon her lips
Come wanton spring
Come for birth you live
Youth takes it's bow before the summer the seasons bring
Waiting for the color of spring
Let me breathe you

But it's for research!

Big news today over on the Dreher blog. His self-help book on Dante (the theme and apparent working title being How Dante Saved My Life) apparently calls for additional research -- specifically, a week's trip to Tuscany with a buddy. To better learn how The Divine Comedy can help each of us in our lives, of course. Even his commenters are seeing through this one.

Dreher asks for suggestions from the gang:

So, readers, help me plan our itinerary.  We know the Dante places to see in Florence and Ravenna, but where else would you recommend?

Where else would I recommend Dreher go to research The Divine Comedy?



Yeah, I know. Too easy.

(And no, we certainly do not wish that Rod Dreher actually loses his soul. . . .)

Hispanics are not "one issue voters"

Michael Barone explains why Hispanics aren't as supportive of Obama as they had been.

Two trends in polling also point in this direction. One is that Hispanic voters don't seem hugely preoccupied with immigration. The Pew Research Center reports that many more focus on education, the economy and health than the one-third who say immigration is "extremely important" to them personally.

The other is that the president's job approval among Hispanics has been falling sharply. He got 71 percent of their votes in 2012, but fewer than half approve his performance today.

It's not hard to see why. The sluggish economy has hurt Hispanics more than most Americans. Obamacare and big government policies have not helped them as they apparently have hoped.

This suggests that non-passage of comprehensive legislation won't hurt Republicans as much as predicted. And inaction, always the easier legislative course, would prevent a debate in which the cries of angry opponents, gleefully highlighted in mainstream media, could antagonize Hispanic voters.

The emphasis at the end is mine. I'm one of those "soft on immigration" conservatives, and while I understand the enforcement-first argument, I literally hate the rhetoric that often accompanies it. I cringe when I hear Rush say "All these people are going to be Democrat voters!!" Well, they are if you write them off that way. Yes, the media is disgusting in the way they bait Hispanics, but we're supplying free chum. The least we can do is keep quiet while Obama is melting down with his own base.

If we're going to say anything it should be to point out—as Barone does—that Obama didn't care about immigration reform when Democrats had Congressional super-majorities at the beginning of his presidency. All Americans—including Hispanics—are paying now for his ridiculous economic policies that he crammed through then, and they're paying attention to recent history now as his reign continues to crumble and stumble toward a close.

Hey, you!

Dymphna just posted this excellent artwork on her blog. I won't republish her humorous comments; go read them yourself.

I have often thought my guardian angel has "bumped" me when I'm suppose to be waking up but have hit the snooze button, or when I'm not paying attention while driving. I once heard a theologian point out that one of the striking features of the angelic salutation to the Virgin Mary is how the angel doesn't deal with her using the customary angelic brusqueness. For example, the angel busting St. Peter out of prison in Acts 12 is almost explaining to him how to put on his clothes like one might do with a 3-year-old. In fact, maybe that is what the angel is saying in this painting to St. Jerome—"Get some clothes on, for God's sake." They are used to barking out orders at us; that's their job. I, for one, hope I learn to listen.