Darn dat Dinesh D’Souza!

His books and movies sell like gangbusters. Mine don't. I don't even have a movie. I wonder why. Why would someone even read someone who's not as sexually pure as I tell you I am every day? Oh, I meant to update you: a doctor emailed me and told me I got my oral herpes kissing disease from a mosquito. Darned mosquitoes! Darn dat Dinesh D’Souza!

Oh, well. I'm gonna tell you all about rubbing Vicks VapoRub all over my chest and tummy and put on a clean white T-shirt so you'll like me more and buy my books, too! And if you "like" me on Facebook, I'll even let you peek underneath!

Why is my wife still in Alaska?

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.

"Miserabiliousness"

A reader sent me this comment on Rod Dreher's post Everything as Miserabilism. The reader had attempted to post it in the combox over there, but it was not approved. That's OK; we'll just read it and discuss it here. If the reader wants to claim the comment, the reader might do so in the combox; I'm posting this with permission. I really don't think Dreher reads this blog, at least not very much.

RD: Everything As Miserabilism

Certainly somewhere, somehow, in all of this there has got to be a tie-in to The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.

Maybe Ruthie was a kind of anti-miserabilist.

RD: At the end of my years as a Catholic, I had allowed anger over the abuse scandal to become almost the only way I could relate to the Catholic Church.

This is about the 10th thousand time you have reminded everybody about this. We are getting weary and miserable hearing about it, yet one more time. I suspect you might be having a bout of miserabilism here because miserabilists love to remind everybody not only about all their present miseries but all their past ones as well.

Perhaps, anti-miserabilists make miserabilists especially miserable in that the miserabilists obsess about what it is about those anti-miserabilists that makes them so dang un-miserable. I imagine that some miserabilists, being so obsessed with this perplexing issue, can concoct some very elaborate and far-reaching theories regarding the nature of Anti-Miserabilism.

Miserabilists might say to themselves something like this: “Why are all these dang anti-miserabilists not properly miserable like us? It just cannot be right. Don’t they know what’s going on in the world? Don’t they know that there’s something wrong with Kansas? There has got to be some kind of connection to anthropology or philosophy here! Maybe there’s this cultural predisposition among some backwards people that causes them to be anti-miserable when they should be cultivating all the proper feelings of misery that advanced people like ourselves have? After all, to be miserable is to be enlightened and refined and educated. Or maybe it is the food the anti-miserabilists eat? They are not getting the necessary nutrients and gastronomic experiences needed to render them properly miserable like us. Or maybe they listen to too much Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and they just don’t read enough profound and intellectual books like we do? They just need to study more Ludwig Wittgenstein or Søren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer! Or Friedrich Nietzsche! Ah, we know! There has got to be a Unified Field Theory of Miserabilism. That explains it. It must be like matter and anti-matter meeting each other, except that instead of everything disappearing in a flash of gamma rays, their Anti-Misery Field causes our Misery Field to become even more amplified, thus making us even more miserable.”

Now here are my comments. Let's start off with some self-plagiarizing from two years ago. I made this in response to the anonymous Orthodox commenter; I provide his/her comment in italics:

There is no reason ever to convert to the Orthodox Christian faith unless one genuinely believes that it is the true faith. From the beginning, the signals from Mr. Dreher were that he did not convert to Orthodoxy because he believed it was the truth, but only because it was not the Catholic religion. It was sad to witness.

Thanks for this, Reader, you speak wisdom. We can't know for sure what is going on in someone's mind, but the evidence supports your balanced analysis.

If there is one thing I am trying to bring to light in my posts about Rod Dreher it is that he is haunted by the Catholic Church day and night. He can't stop writing about his Catholic experiences even when he tries to write about something else. He can't stop criticizing the Catholic church even when he is in the midst of criticizing a different church. He has become the professional ex-Catholic which he claimed to loathe. I see only one happy ending for Rod and that's to come back to the Catholic church quietly and take a seven year hiatus from writing about religion. If he can't bring himself to do the first, the least he could do would be to try the second.

I still stand by these words, and I'm still trying to hope that he does come back. People who consider themselves friends with Rod who are Catholic are certainly hoping that he returns. And they know that he knows that they want him to return to the church.

Here are my last thoughts about the matter. On the day I converted to the Catholic faith as an adult, a priest gave a group of us a talk basically stating that what we were about to do was one of the most serious and consequential things anyone could do. Based on that he said “No one will think or feel any less of you if you get up and leave and decide you don’t want to go through with it.” Something like that. I don’t know if Rod heard the same thing, but it really doesn’t matter—as a potential convert embracing the faith you know it already. I lost a lot of friends by converting, and my family was more religious than Rod’s so there were harder feelings there. Joining the Catholic church isn’t something you do on a whim. However it seems to me that Rod may have left on a whim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man has tremendous guilt feelings about leaving the Church, and he is constantly “kicking against the goads” so to speak, and blogging endlessly about his departure is his continuing attempt at catharsis.

I don't think it's working. He's been at this for years now. We notice that the man's miserabilism about Catholicism flares up whenever there is Catholic stuff in the news. Flannery O’Connor famously stated that she didn’t know if the American South was Christ-centered, but it definitely was “Christ-haunted”. And along those lines, I believe that this man is haunted by the Catholic Church.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha

Here's a laughable comment on Sarah Palin from one of the "Lewnies" on the far-right:

Writes Rick Banks: "Wouldn't joining McCain mean that this woman, despite any good she has done, has decided to put that aside to be on this man's ticket?" Yes. She has sworn a blood oath to the neocons, Wall Street, and the military industrial-complex, to be Vice Sauron in Mordor.

Fortunately for the United States, in the modern political arena these folk are taken about as seriously as people who dress up like Hobbits.