My son’s dog (Arnold Weaver) who is running as the Conservative candidate for president has chosen my sister’s parrot (Kiwi) as his vice-presidential candidate. Kiwi has formed a new group (Bird Brains Matter) to protest innocent birds killed by the inefficient, ugly, subsidized windmills of the tree-huggers.
Perhaps some Beatrix Potter character would be the way to go: Peter Rabbit, or Benjamin Bunny. Maybe Tom Kitten, or even Jemima Puddleduck.
On the other hand, come to think of it, I might just write in Mr. McGregor. We need someone in Washington who will go running after the scoundrels, calling out, “Stop, thief!” 😀
What Christians and conservatives are up against in the ‘new world’ order (it all reminds me of my friend’s taunt on FB regarding same sex marriage: The train is coming, get on board or be run over.
Now that the moral revolutionaries are solidly in control, what is to be demanded of Christians who, on the basis of Christian conviction, cannot join the revolution? The demands have now been presented, and they represent unconditional surrender.
The latest terms of surrender were delivered last week by Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In a stunningly candid essay, Tushnet declared a total liberal victory …
As he makes his case, he argues that liberal judges are now in the majority and that the Supreme Court, given the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, is unlikely to reverse any liberal decisions handed down by lower courts. Federal judges, Tushnet argues, “no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”
… Professor Tushnet delivers the ultimatum to the losing side in the culture conflict, including evangelical Christians — “You lost, deal with it.” To his fellow revolutionaries Tushnet announces, “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won.”
Then he goes for the kill in making his argument:
“For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)”
How to deal with the losers? Here we meet the reality of liberal judgment in a day of liberal ascendency. Tushnet argues that conservatives should now be met with a hard line and a demand for total surrender — no accommodation whatsoever. Don’t even try to be nice to moral enemies, Tushnet commands, since their arguments have no normative authority of any kind.
With absolute candor, Tushnet calls for moral conservatives of all stripes to be treated like Germany and Japan at the conclusion of Word War II. Both nations, having declared war on the United States and its allies, were required to submit to unconditional surrender and were subject to occupation by the victors. We are to be treated like defeated Nazis and the Japanese high command.
Take a hard line, Tushnet openly advises, and take no prisoners. He concludes his point with these words:
“I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.” …
opponents of the moral revolution are to be treated with scorn, contempt, and worse. The terms of moral surrender have been delivered to us, and they are absolute and unconditional. Just ask Japan and Germany what that means.
_____________________________
The Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics is recommending that Judge Ruth Neely be removed from office because she has said that, due to her religious beliefs, she will not preside over gay weddings.
(Judge Neely is a Missouri Synod Lutheran … )
So public officials will be removed from office if they do not agree with the LGBT agenda? If a judge rules against a law favored by gay activists, will that be grounds for removal? If a legislator or executive opposes gay marriage, will that become grounds for impeachment?
_____________________________
Is the culture war over? Or, to use less martial language, is Christian cultural engagement at an end? At the risk of depriving a rapidly shrinking handful of old-school Republicans and countless trendy Christian blog pundits of their reason to exist, I believe the answer is yes. It is over. For to engage a culture there must first be a culture to engage. And, as the ever-incisive Anthony Esolen has pointed out on numerous occasions we no longer have a culture. What we really have is an anti-culture….
Some may push back against this. We are a democracy, after all, and do our democratic institutions not form something of a cultural core for our world? No. Not any more. The mere existence of a cultural artifact from a previous era does not imply that it is itself significant for the present culture in which it occurs. Thus democracy still exists—we thankfully still live in a democracy—but it is clear that we no longer have a democratic culture. The collaborative interplay of the Unholy Trinity of the entertainment industry, big business, and legal institutions has ensured that the most important decisions of our day, those which set the moral boundaries or our civilization, those Rieffian interdicts which frame our forms of life, are no longer significantly shaped by our democratic institutions. They are controlled by others, not by the people. Our democratic culture is dead.
Look at what happened in Indiana or at what is being pressed in North Carolina. The will of the Boss aspires to carry more weight than the will of the people. …
_______________________________________
A Hard Road before Them
16 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so [a]be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.
Footnotes:
Matthew 10:16 Or show yourselves to be
So we should be shrewd. Judge Ruth Neely should have been shrewd and said nothing. Since she was in the midst of wolves (LGBT) she should just be unavailable. You can always leave almost any situation to go to a restroom. Who can fault you for that? While there you can “have a problem.” Take a long time and then need to go home immediately!
In the mean time we christians need to think how we will handle these situations. How are we going to handle the girls/boys bathroom thing? We need to be careful about this. We can and should win this but stay off our high horses on this. Just think about the cost! It will be $100,000 each to add a bathroom to every school and public building. No, cost won’t enter in. Just do the right thing. We certainly can’t just go to the restroom of our plumbing. too easy.
“The federal government is reinterpreting statutes, saying what they mean, with no warrant other than their own political will,” said Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. “People don’t understand the unprecedented nature of what’s going on and how dangerous it is for freedom.”
________________________
Bob, valid points — and we’ll all need to evaluate how to best navigate the new culture as Christians.
But I think it’s also fair to generally raise concerns about the rather alarming Orwellian shift we’re seeing on how much control government can exert over our families, communities and states.
If we love our neighbor, we’re obligated to speak out. It would seem our nation’s historic understanding of the Constitution and government — and what it can and can’t do to control its citizens — is changing rapidly.
Kind of like the frog in the boiling pot of water, though, it’s one of those things that can happen before many are even aware of it. And that’s scary.
The transgender issue isn’t as big, for now, up here. Maybe that is because the hot topic of the day is the euthanasia/assisted dying bill. Quite a few Members of Parliament are consulting their constituents to see how they should vote, including the one for our riding – it was good to be able to give some input. The prospect of the pending bill is however, intimidating. Knowing how the assisted dying drugs are given (by IV), I foresee nurses will be asked to be involved (since we insert IVs, hang IV medication, and monitor IV infusions), and such requests will come in hospitals, nursing homes, community care, etc. It won’t be easy to avoid. I’ve already had to say I wouldn’t assist in abortions in a job interview, but that was confined in a specialized area, the OR. Now matters of conscience will arise in any area of nursing. A difficult time to be returning to nursing. But those around me have counseled me to go ahead any way. I have considered it in prayer, and Psalm 37 keeps coming to mind:
Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
be not envious of wrongdoers!
For they will soon fade like the grass
and wither like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,
and your justice as the noonday.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;
fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,
over the man who carries out evil devices!
Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
For the evildoers shall be cut off,
but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.
In just a little while, the wicked will be no more;
though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land
and delight themselves in abundant peace. (v.1-11, ESV)
And, yes, Moore (as usual) makes excellent points on why making something so basic as our created sex something that’s now somehow a ‘subjective’ decision —
And not to beat a dead horse, but here’s a good piece from National Review. I hope this latest move by the president gets a lot of push back — it should. If it doesn’t, we’re lost.
You may not have realized it yet, but the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school. Without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the Supreme Court, and without even going through the motions of the regulatory rule-making process, the administration issued a letter drafting every single public educational institution in the country to implement the extreme edge of the sexual revolution….
And yet the administration’s letter isn’t significant just for what it says — it’s significant for what it means. The federal government can and will use extralegal means to override local control, the rule of law, and even the Constitution itself when social justice demands it. That principal you love? He’s not in control of your school. The great school board you just elected? They’re puppets. The teacher your child bonds with? She doesn’t run her own classroom. …
And the political fights are only escalating, with local school boards exercising decreasing amounts of control over curriculum, textbook selection, and school policies. The progressive thumb is always on the scales, often nudging and sometimes shoving instruction in a comprehensively leftward direction: Islam is wonderful and peaceful. American history is a story of unrelenting repression and intolerance. Academic standards and in-school discipline matter less than social and racial justice. Orthodox Christians are bigots. …
You may not have realized it yet, but the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school.
If the traditional American public school (to which I regrettably send my children) wasn’t in shambles from the start, it certainly has been for at least 40 years. Anything Obama does to it is just picking at scabs on a dead guy.
I recant none of my previous criticisms of Trump’s unsuitability to be president, but the case that he—and he alone—has an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt (in the right ways) the crisis of American government today deserves to be understood. …
I have a simpler case, and, unusual for me, it doesn’t require any classical metaphysics. I keep coming back to the curious fact that so many Bernie Sanders voters (almost half in West Virginia) say they will vote for Trump if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination. This can’t be because they think Trump is a socialist. And I doubt the dislike of Hillary sufficiently explains it either.
I think the explanation lies in this chart: …
____________________________________
Wandering Views 
My son’s dog (Arnold Weaver) who is running as the Conservative candidate for president has chosen my sister’s parrot (Kiwi) as his vice-presidential candidate. Kiwi has formed a new group (Bird Brains Matter) to protest innocent birds killed by the inefficient, ugly, subsidized windmills of the tree-huggers.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I see the pets-for-president theme continues. 🙂
Perhaps some Beatrix Potter character would be the way to go: Peter Rabbit, or Benjamin Bunny. Maybe Tom Kitten, or even Jemima Puddleduck.
On the other hand, come to think of it, I might just write in Mr. McGregor. We need someone in Washington who will go running after the scoundrels, calling out, “Stop, thief!” 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
They got my vote Ricky.
But I think Hillary has the LGBT Vote sewed up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Not Benjamin Bunny–He stays in more trouble than Peter.
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Peter Rabbit, not Peter L, right?
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What Christians and conservatives are up against in the ‘new world’ order (it all reminds me of my friend’s taunt on FB regarding same sex marriage: The train is coming, get on board or be run over.
No other choice? Apparently not.
http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/05/12/the-moral-revolutionaries-present-their-demands-unconditional-surrender/
__________________________
Now that the moral revolutionaries are solidly in control, what is to be demanded of Christians who, on the basis of Christian conviction, cannot join the revolution? The demands have now been presented, and they represent unconditional surrender.
The latest terms of surrender were delivered last week by Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In a stunningly candid essay, Tushnet declared a total liberal victory …
As he makes his case, he argues that liberal judges are now in the majority and that the Supreme Court, given the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, is unlikely to reverse any liberal decisions handed down by lower courts. Federal judges, Tushnet argues, “no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”
… Professor Tushnet delivers the ultimatum to the losing side in the culture conflict, including evangelical Christians — “You lost, deal with it.” To his fellow revolutionaries Tushnet announces, “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won.”
Then he goes for the kill in making his argument:
“For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)”
How to deal with the losers? Here we meet the reality of liberal judgment in a day of liberal ascendency. Tushnet argues that conservatives should now be met with a hard line and a demand for total surrender — no accommodation whatsoever. Don’t even try to be nice to moral enemies, Tushnet commands, since their arguments have no normative authority of any kind.
With absolute candor, Tushnet calls for moral conservatives of all stripes to be treated like Germany and Japan at the conclusion of Word War II. Both nations, having declared war on the United States and its allies, were required to submit to unconditional surrender and were subject to occupation by the victors. We are to be treated like defeated Nazis and the Japanese high command.
Take a hard line, Tushnet openly advises, and take no prisoners. He concludes his point with these words:
“I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.” …
opponents of the moral revolution are to be treated with scorn, contempt, and worse. The terms of moral surrender have been delivered to us, and they are absolute and unconditional. Just ask Japan and Germany what that means.
_____________________________
LikeLiked by 1 person
Half the country, at least?
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And a case in point:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2016/05/removing-a-judge-for-not-following-the-lgbt-agenda/
_________________________
The Wyoming Commission on Judicial Conduct and Ethics is recommending that Judge Ruth Neely be removed from office because she has said that, due to her religious beliefs, she will not preside over gay weddings.
(Judge Neely is a Missouri Synod Lutheran … )
So public officials will be removed from office if they do not agree with the LGBT agenda? If a judge rules against a law favored by gay activists, will that be grounds for removal? If a legislator or executive opposes gay marriage, will that become grounds for impeachment?
_____________________________
LikeLike
And more on the same topic from First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/the-rise-of-the-anti-culture
______________________________
Is the culture war over? Or, to use less martial language, is Christian cultural engagement at an end? At the risk of depriving a rapidly shrinking handful of old-school Republicans and countless trendy Christian blog pundits of their reason to exist, I believe the answer is yes. It is over. For to engage a culture there must first be a culture to engage. And, as the ever-incisive Anthony Esolen has pointed out on numerous occasions we no longer have a culture. What we really have is an anti-culture….
Some may push back against this. We are a democracy, after all, and do our democratic institutions not form something of a cultural core for our world? No. Not any more. The mere existence of a cultural artifact from a previous era does not imply that it is itself significant for the present culture in which it occurs. Thus democracy still exists—we thankfully still live in a democracy—but it is clear that we no longer have a democratic culture. The collaborative interplay of the Unholy Trinity of the entertainment industry, big business, and legal institutions has ensured that the most important decisions of our day, those which set the moral boundaries or our civilization, those Rieffian interdicts which frame our forms of life, are no longer significantly shaped by our democratic institutions. They are controlled by others, not by the people. Our democratic culture is dead.
Look at what happened in Indiana or at what is being pressed in North Carolina. The will of the Boss aspires to carry more weight than the will of the people. …
_______________________________________
LikeLike
Guess Who (I have never figured out who you are.)
Matthew 10:16New American Standard Bible (NASB)
A Hard Road before Them
16 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so [a]be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.
Footnotes:
Matthew 10:16 Or show yourselves to be
So we should be shrewd. Judge Ruth Neely should have been shrewd and said nothing. Since she was in the midst of wolves (LGBT) she should just be unavailable. You can always leave almost any situation to go to a restroom. Who can fault you for that? While there you can “have a problem.” Take a long time and then need to go home immediately!
In the mean time we christians need to think how we will handle these situations. How are we going to handle the girls/boys bathroom thing? We need to be careful about this. We can and should win this but stay off our high horses on this. Just think about the cost! It will be $100,000 each to add a bathroom to every school and public building. No, cost won’t enter in. Just do the right thing. We certainly can’t just go to the restroom of our plumbing. too easy.
LikeLike
And more at World (Guess Who is always me, donna j)
http://www.worldmag.com/2016/05/feds_all_public_schools_must_redefine_gender
________________________
“The federal government is reinterpreting statutes, saying what they mean, with no warrant other than their own political will,” said Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom. “People don’t understand the unprecedented nature of what’s going on and how dangerous it is for freedom.”
________________________
LikeLike
“It’s as if the tyrannous King George III had regained control over the American Colonies & was making up for lost time” — Eric Metaxas
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Bob, valid points — and we’ll all need to evaluate how to best navigate the new culture as Christians.
But I think it’s also fair to generally raise concerns about the rather alarming Orwellian shift we’re seeing on how much control government can exert over our families, communities and states.
If we love our neighbor, we’re obligated to speak out. It would seem our nation’s historic understanding of the Constitution and government — and what it can and can’t do to control its citizens — is changing rapidly.
Kind of like the frog in the boiling pot of water, though, it’s one of those things that can happen before many are even aware of it. And that’s scary.
LikeLike
Dr. Moore’s take on it all: http://www.russellmoore.com/2016/05/13/what-the-transgender-bathroom-debate-means-for-you/
The transgender issue isn’t as big, for now, up here. Maybe that is because the hot topic of the day is the euthanasia/assisted dying bill. Quite a few Members of Parliament are consulting their constituents to see how they should vote, including the one for our riding – it was good to be able to give some input. The prospect of the pending bill is however, intimidating. Knowing how the assisted dying drugs are given (by IV), I foresee nurses will be asked to be involved (since we insert IVs, hang IV medication, and monitor IV infusions), and such requests will come in hospitals, nursing homes, community care, etc. It won’t be easy to avoid. I’ve already had to say I wouldn’t assist in abortions in a job interview, but that was confined in a specialized area, the OR. Now matters of conscience will arise in any area of nursing. A difficult time to be returning to nursing. But those around me have counseled me to go ahead any way. I have considered it in prayer, and Psalm 37 keeps coming to mind:
LikeLiked by 4 people
No one cares about the bathrooms, per se, it’s the shift in the US government and added heavy handedness that is (and should) get our attention
LikeLiked by 3 people
And, yes, Moore (as usual) makes excellent points on why making something so basic as our created sex something that’s now somehow a ‘subjective’ decision —
A whole lot of much bigger themes going on here 😦
And there’s cause for concern
LikeLiked by 1 person
And not to beat a dead horse, but here’s a good piece from National Review. I hope this latest move by the president gets a lot of push back — it should. If it doesn’t, we’re lost.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435379/transgender-school-edict-public-schools-need-conservative-reform
__________________________________
You may not have realized it yet, but the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school. Without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the Supreme Court, and without even going through the motions of the regulatory rule-making process, the administration issued a letter drafting every single public educational institution in the country to implement the extreme edge of the sexual revolution….
And yet the administration’s letter isn’t significant just for what it says — it’s significant for what it means. The federal government can and will use extralegal means to override local control, the rule of law, and even the Constitution itself when social justice demands it. That principal you love? He’s not in control of your school. The great school board you just elected? They’re puppets. The teacher your child bonds with? She doesn’t run her own classroom. …
And the political fights are only escalating, with local school boards exercising decreasing amounts of control over curriculum, textbook selection, and school policies. The progressive thumb is always on the scales, often nudging and sometimes shoving instruction in a comprehensively leftward direction: Islam is wonderful and peaceful. American history is a story of unrelenting repression and intolerance. Academic standards and in-school discipline matter less than social and racial justice. Orthodox Christians are bigots. …
_______________________________
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“Guidance”?
Obama administration issues guidance on transgender access to school bathrooms
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/12/politics/transgender-bathrooms-obama-administration/index.html
“The letter does not carry the force of law but the message was clear: Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.
“North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory slammed the guidance and called on Congress to address the issue.”
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Ha, I like this one:
You may not have realized it yet, but the Obama administration just destroyed the traditional American public school.
If the traditional American public school (to which I regrettably send my children) wasn’t in shambles from the start, it certainly has been for at least 40 years. Anything Obama does to it is just picking at scabs on a dead guy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
But perhaps a tipping point?
We can hope …
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Back to where we started this morning, Arnold the Dog is going to fix all this stuff.
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But wait …
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/trumps-moment.php
_________________________________
I recant none of my previous criticisms of Trump’s unsuitability to be president, but the case that he—and he alone—has an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt (in the right ways) the crisis of American government today deserves to be understood. …
I have a simpler case, and, unusual for me, it doesn’t require any classical metaphysics. I keep coming back to the curious fact that so many Bernie Sanders voters (almost half in West Virginia) say they will vote for Trump if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination. This can’t be because they think Trump is a socialist. And I doubt the dislike of Hillary sufficiently explains it either.
I think the explanation lies in this chart: …
____________________________________
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Why do you think this is all coming down now? Isn’t everything calculated in politics? Why now, why today? What is it distracting us from?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good question
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