Moral Therapeutic Dante

The Southern Bookman writes about the upcoming Divine Comedy self-help book. Excerpt:

Conservative writer Rod Dreher is cutting his way into the self-pity-therapeutic literature market staked out on the left by Anne Lamott. Dreher, who wore his heart on both sleeves, pants legs and shirt collars in his memoir of his late sister, Ruthie Leming, recently discussed his further bouts of depression and how he's cured himself by reading Dante. His account of his continual self-actualization appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Review section on Easter Saturday.

Dante's great poetic work is really a self-help book, Dreher says. Why, one of Dreher's correspondents even quit smoking by reading Dante. Somehow, I missed the canto about the Marlboro Man in one of Dante's circles of hell.

Dreher's "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming," tells the story of Dreher moving back to his hometown of St. Francisville, La., and rediscovering the importance of community from the support given his family through the illness and death of his beloved sister, Ruthie. He moved back home after a dispiriting stint in New York and Washington as a budding conservative pundit. Dreher's book gives a memorable portrait of his sister and delivers an in-depth examination of small-town life, but his emotional extremes ruined the book for me at the end.

My shelf is devoid of anything by Anne Lamott, but I do have some for Dummies books. But there's no Dante for Dummies book yet. So I was thinking that maybe Dreher is writing for that imprint, a division of Wiley. Or even better he could start a whole new brand of Can Save Your Life books. If that happens, I want to sign the contract to do How Blessed Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius Can Save Your Life just for the Trivial Pursuit card.

Do people still play Trivial Pursuit?

Rights Versus Entitlements

Megan McArdle explains what is going on underneath the Hobby Lobby furor. Here's her first home-run paragraph:

I think a few things are going on here. The first is that while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says “Sacred!” and the other side says, essentially, “Seriously? Model trains?” That shows in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, where it seems to me that she takes a very narrow view of what role religious groups play in the lives of believers and society as a whole.

So that is part one, kind of a "don't hold your deeply-held beliefs any deeper than anyone who doesn't have any deeply-held beliefs" on the part of the secular left.

The second part of the explanation is the classic rights versus entitlements struggle. Conservatives want rights, liberals want entitlements. McArdle describes these as negative rights and positive rights.

All of us learned some version of “You have the right to your beliefs, but not to impose them on others” in civics class. It’s a classic negative right. And negative rights are easy to make reciprocal: You have a right to practice your religion without interference, and I have a right not to have your beliefs imposed on me.

This works very well in situations in which most of the other rights granted by society are negative rights, because negative rights don’t clash very often. Oh, sure, you’re going to get arguments about noise ordinances and other nuisance abatements, but unless your religious practices are extreme indeed, the odds that they will substantively violate someone else’s negative rights are pretty slim.

...

In this context, “Do what you want, as long as you don’t try to force me to do it, too” works very well, which is why this verbal formula has had such a long life. But when you introduce positive rights into the picture, this abruptly stops working. You have a negative right not to have your religious practice interfered with, and say your church forbids the purchase or use of certain forms of birth control. If I have a negative right not to have my purchase of birth control interfered with, we can reach a perhaps uneasy truce where you don’t buy it and I do. But if I have a positive right to have birth control purchased for me, then suddenly our rights are directly opposed: You have a right not to buy birth control, and I have a right to have it bought for me, by you.

I think this all is worth taking a lot of time to meditate on. For example, I'm a parent. In a sense it's true to say that my kids are entitled to "free food" since they can't earn it themselves. However, to me, it is much more true to say that my wife and I have the responsibility to feed them than it is to say they have the right to free food. So I have to figure out how to earn the money to do that and my wife has to figure out how to deliver meals to them three times a day, etc. Any entitlement they could claim is secondary and subsidiary to my actions in carrying out my duty.

The language of positive rights or entitlements devoid of any discussion of reciprocal responsibilities is what is found in many places on the left today. For example, people on unemployment are suppose to be looking for work and applying for so many jobs a week. But do they really? If you are out of work you can get low-cost or no-cost tech training in most states; I have a friend who did that. He hated being taxpayer-subsidized, but I'm afraid he's an exception. I've run into many more people who are sitting around waiting for the factory to re-open, content to subsist and blame whoever they dislike for their predicament.

I could go on with more, but you get it. Not only do our negative rights not clash with each other, they fit hand-in-glove with the personal responsibility that is part of the inherent dignity of the human person. On the other hand, so-called "positive rights" are the opposite of personal responsibility. Do you have a right to health care? Of course you do, but you have to pay for it. Do you have a right to food? Yes, and you can pay for it in the self-checkout line or the line with the cashier.

What if you walk into my wig store and hand me money for a wig and I don't want to sell it to you because you are a Zoroastrian? To bad for me; I have to sell you a wig. Otherwise I'm discriminating and trampling your rights. But you don't have a right to free wigs whether or not you are a Zoroastrian. However the entitlement mentality would state that if someone wants a wig but can't pay for it then they should have a right to it. The taxpayers should pony up to make sure there is "economic justice", yet another synonym for the entitlement mentality.

We need to continue the attack the left's constant assault on our personal liberty and the true nature of the rights we have as human beings which the state recognizes and protects. The government's job is not to enumerate ever more "positive rights" to squeeze out the true freedoms and the true nature of our personal responsibilities. We also need to teach our kids this, first by throwing propaganda like The Rainbow Fish into the garbage can, then by explaining the difference in how a Christian views our rights and responsibilities as citizens and how secular leftists like Obama and Ginsburg defines them. And of course by trying to fulfill our duties and respect the true rights of others.

Yay!!

Cleveland gets the GOP convention.

Okay, Cleveland, don't screw this up.

Maybe I'll gate-crash it.

Don’t be sad when the nights are over...

"Wh-what are you listening to?"
"You wouldn't dig it, man."

Makes me smile everytime.

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?