The privilege walk comes to medical school

(I keep revealing more and more details that will eventually make it possible for someone to determine which school I go to and "out" me in real life. I know this is a danger, but I think it is a risk worth taking to blog about these issues.)

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse: last week, as part of our weekly liberalism seminar, our class had a group interview with a patient and her doctor. The patient was black, and said some things which were funny, at which both she and the class laughed. Apparently, some of the many left-wing members of the class thought that she reinforced black stereotypes and that it was insensitive of the class to laugh, and found this discomfiting. Word has it that they are proposing a "solution" to this "problem:" host a "privilege walk." You know, the college orientation-type left-wing indoctrination exercise where someone reads off a series of yes-or-no questions about how privileged you are, and everyone takes one step backward or forward depending on their answer to each question, and all the white men end up at the front and have to turn around and see how far behind the nonwhites, women, homosexuals, and immigrants are, and feel guilty about being such horrible racist sexist oppressors. Worse, this is being proposed not as an ad hoc event, but as the main event of one of our weekly liberalism seminars at some undetermined future date.

I've thought about this, and realized that I need to take a stand. I cannot in good conscience participate in this anti-white, anti-American activity, but I'm not sure how to make my views known. I will almost certainly stand alone in refusing to participate: I'd estimate that about 50% of my class would say that this is a great idea that will be a really powerful, eye-opening, consciousness-raising experience, 45% probably thinks it would be somewhat interesting, 5% (libertarians or mainstream Republican types) would roll their eyes and go through the motions, and then there's me: the only one I know of who is strongly opposed in principle to this sort of thing. I'd appreciate any advice on how to stand up against it.

By the way, John Derbyshire did a good job of taking apart this privilege walk. I suspect that, like him, I'd actually end up farther toward the back than the front.

Links

I apologize to the (few) appreciative readers I garnered over the first few months of this blog's existence. I really had planned to post more often, but school has only grown ever-more time-consuming, and my poor time-management skills (there's a downside to having been the type who could get away with goofing off and then cramming the night before tests when you were younger) have caught up with me. As those skills improve, my hope is to at least get something up every weekend, though I can't guarantee even that. Unfortunately, blogging in mid-week has become all but impossible.

I have a substantial backlog of drafts or post ideas I just need to get around to finishing. In the meantime, I'd like to spotlight two links. The first, via Dennis Mangan, is a blog I've just added to my blogroll: Delenda est Carthago. The blogger there, Phi (like Mr. Mangan, I have no idea how to reproduce the Greek letter,) has some excellent observations on race and sex. The second, Free Market Cure, is devoted to combating socialized medicine and promoting fixes that preserve freedom in health care, something you should care about if you want to uphold the traditional American value of self sufficiency, especially the self-sufficiency of the family.

New Hampshire turning 'blue'

According to the Christian Science Monitor,

The Republican Party in New England's only "red state" may be going the way of the Old Man of the Mountain, the craggy icon of independence that crumbled a few years back in a rock slide.

In the last election, Democrats took both seats in Congress for the first time in nearly a century and both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1874. Democratic Gov. John Lynch won a second term with a record 74 percent of the vote, and lawmakers recently authorized same-sex civil unions and a smoking ban in bars and restaurants.

The "Live Free or Die" state is becoming "Blue Hampshire." The Granite State, said a blog for the conservative National Review, is "trending alarmingly Granola State."...

The shifting political landscape is mainly a product of demographics. New Hampshire is the fastest-growing state in New England, growing more than 6 percent since 2000 as the Massachusetts suburbs sprawl northward, baby boomers retire to their second homes, and vibrant high-tech and healthcare industries draw affluent city dwellers from across the country.

Call me paranoid, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this story was "immigration, anyone?" The article doesn't mention the i-word, so I looked for some other sources.

According to FAIR's page on New Hampshire, between 2000 and 2006, the foreign-born population of New Hampshire grew from 54,154 to 65,465, or from 4.4% of the population to 5%. That, taken together with the fact that the majority of foreign-born persons are not naturalized and thus not eligible to vote (or at least, aren't supposed to be able to vote) indicates that the problem is probably not with immigration to New Hampshire directly.

However, look at who is moving to New Hampshire. "Affluent city dwellers from across the country" who work in high-tech and health care (when did that phrase become one word?) industries, people who are, in the words of a pollster quoted in the story, "highly educated, liberal Democrats." While this group no doubt includes large numbers of left-wing whites, it is well-known to anyone who has worked in the high-tech or health care industries that there is one population group whose representation in those fields is much higher than their proportion of the U.S. population: Asians.

And how do Asians vote? According to a blogger at the disturbingly named asian-nation.org (is the USA an Asian nation now?) they vote Democratic.

As reflected in my article on the 2004 Elections, national-level aggregate data tends to show that in terms of political affiliation among those stating a preference, about two-thirds of all Asian Americans lean Democratic and the other third identify with the Republicans.

But as reported by Politico.com, new data from a Harvard research team shows that among young Asian Americans, the percentage who lean Democratic is much higher:

The Institute of Politics at Harvard University recently released data from an online survey of 2,525 18- to 24-year-olds. Among the survey’s more notable statistics are those concerning party affiliation among Asian-Americans: 47 percent identify themselves as Democratic, 15 percent Republican and 39 percent independent — making them more Democratic than any other ethnic group except African-Americans in the survey. . . .

So, while I suspect that the spread of the Boston exurbs means that white liberals are the main source of Democratization of New Hampshire so far, there is no doubt that Asians play a role. And the vast majority of those Asians would not be here if we had not had, for the past 40 years, an immigration policy which regards all peoples in the world as equally worthy to come to America, and permits massive amounts of chain migration through family reunification provisions.

What a tragedy, to see the "live free or die" state forced to throw its lot in with the socialist left by a bunch of recent transplants who have no love for or long-standing connection with New Hampshire. Wasn't this the state of the Free State Project, whose goal was to have libertarians move there en masse and try to create a society with a drastically reduced government? According to the website 8,142 people have joined so far, while the Monitor says that there have been 145,000 "newcomers" to New Hampshire in the past 6 years. So much for that. Can New Hampshire's vestiges of traditional self-sufficient America be saved, or will it become the latest fatality in the left's push for a unified bureaucratic socialist state?

How liberals see Western culture as a vacuum

Back in August, Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative and John Savage of Brave New World Watch commented on how liberals often admire traditionalism and "authenticity" among non-white, non-Western peoples but despise those same traits in the white Western world. Their posts sparked a few thoughts which I made a note of, but I never got around to actually writing a post. More recently, however, a post from Vanishing American and a comment on her blog from John Savage have brought this concept to mind again, so I was inspired to comment.

Richardson quotes Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University, waxing nostalgic about the Australian Aborigines, and then provides his own comments:

Manne recently defended the traditional Aboriginal way of life by referring to the work of white anthropologists who, Manne believes, observed:

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

It's difficult to imagine anything more out of line with liberal modernism. At the moment the bookshops are full of works by the liberal intelligentsia claiming that religion is a dangerous threat to humanity. Yet here the Aborigines are given a free pass to live in an enchanted world in which there is not only religion, but a world "soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual" and "pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning".

Why isn't the ethos of liberal rationalism and scientism applied to Aborigines?

Similarly, liberals have pressed for an ideal in which we are unimpeded in choosing who we are and what we do. We are supposed to be self-determining individual agents, who aren't constrained by unchosen forms of identity based on gender or ethnicity, or by traditional social roles or patterns of family life.

Again, Manne doesn't apply the logic of liberalism to Aborigines. Not only do they get to keep basic forms of family life and gender identity, they are even praised for having "an intricate social order, in which, through kinship structure, every human held a precise and acknowledged place".

Indeed, one hears this sort of thing all the time. How can liberals praise the authenticity of nonwhite, non-Western groups like Australian Aborigines, American Indians, African tribes, etc., and then, far from admiring medieval Europe or red-state Evangelicals for their authenticity, decry them as evil and oppressive? It's impossible to imagine a Robert Manne looking at, say, the insular Dutch Reformed communities in the Midwestern USA, with their traditional gender roles, prayer meetings, and Sundays that revolve entirely around church, and extolling their world for being "pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning" and for possessing "an intricate social order, in which, through kinship structure, every human held a precise and acknowledged place." After all, they support homeschooling and oppose same-sex marriage!

Richardson, his commenters, and John Savage all had some thought-provoking ideas, but I wonder if something more basic is being missed. Recently I was ruminating on the epithet "white-bread," used to mean boring, bland, and homogeneous, as when Charles Murray said that he'd "a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of." The idea being that white-bread communities don't have the festive music, the vibrant colors, the spicy foods of Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala, so no intelligent sophisticated man of the world would want to live in one. Yet, of course, traditional Western culture does have exciting or "vibrant" aspects--just listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony, visit a museum with a collection by Leonardo da Vinci or Manet, sample some French cuisine, attend a German Oktoberfest; the list goes on.

So what explains this? We conservatives, rightly, make much of the fact that the left simply hates traditional Western culture (for, e.g., its inequality) and wants to destroy it, as Richardson and John Savage have commented. Yet perhaps it is not always necessary to dig so deep. I believe that liberals fail to see the cultural distinctiveness, the "authenticity," of our own society because they have been immersed in it since birth; it is what they see as the "default," the state of man without any interesting cultural adornments. They view Western culture as a vacuum, a blank template onto which can be written all kinds of "enriching" distinctive cultural traditions, a kind of foundation for a culture, but inadequate as a complete culture.

In fact, this could be seen as a reason the left hates Western culture, that they view failure to provide any interesting "add-ons" as a moral failure. We could have had interesting cultural traditions, but we failed to develop them. Meanwhile, look at these wonderful non-Western cultures. They add loud, exciting music, parades with elaborate costumes and rich colors, spicy foods, and what do we do? Eat our dinners of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and cooked peas and then retire to the living room to put our feet up and read the Saturday Evening Post until little Jimmy gets home from Boy Scouts.

I can't point to any published examples that show this is how liberals think; it's based mainly on my observations of and interactions with college-student-style liberals. Based on the way they behave and innumerable little things they've said, I get the impression that they view that dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas not as its own, perfectly legitimate cultural particularity, but as the base one is left with if one strips away the curry powder, habanero peppers, wasabi, or whatever.

This explains the incident Vanishing American referenced in the post I linked to above. David Yeagley was having a discussion with a student:

"Look, Dr, Yeagley, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing."

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her "Rachel."

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

"Look at your culture," she said to me. "Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing."

Notice what this girl was saying. She didn't say her culture was evil, racist, discriminatory, intolerant, oppressive, imperialistic, etc. She may have believed it was all of those things, but that wasn't the particular objection she was raising to it at the time. She merely said it was nothing. In other words, you have your fancy feathered tribal headdresses, others have Cinco de Mayo, others still have the Chinese New Year. But we have nothing. Thanksgiving, fireworks on the Fourth of July, Christmas choirs in colored tuxedos and dresses accompanied by an orchestra and majestic pipe organ, those are all nothing. They're not interesting cultural traditions in their own right; they're just there.

It also explains something John Savage wondered about in a comment:

Thus I think most stereotypes about whites are pretty well justified (the "racist" one aside). The question should be, though, what qualities are necessary to create an advanced and free country. Whites possess all those qualities better than others. Blacks and Mexicans may have certain qualities we appreciate, but not those that help to sustain the kind of country we want. They don't spontaneously create cultures that sustain advanced and free civilizations. Asians, it would appear, can sustain advanced ones, but only with a minimal amount of freedom. It's telling that leftists usually care more about having people with "rhythm" who can jump, than the fundamental abilities and virtues that have traditionally made America what it is.

We know that liberals think that human beings are blank slates, that our natures are all fundamentally the same and it is only our environments that make us different. When we combine this fact with the concept of Western culture as blank slate, it makes sense that liberals would think the way John Savage describes. They don't see the fundamental abilities and virtues that have traditionally made America what it is--i.e., an advanced and free country--as being in conflict with having people with "rhythm" who can jump; they don't see the two as being the same kind of thing at all (i.e., civilizational characteristics particular to a population group.) They think that the ability to create a free and advanced country like America is present in everyone; it's part of the foundation or template which we see as Western culture, but which is unexposed but still present in other cultures because it has spicy foods and exciting parades built on top of it. America, or more broadly Western Europe, is nothing but the ability to create a free and advanced country, for we have no cultural traditions built on top of it. Other cultures are the ability to create a free and advanced country plus all sorts of interesting cultural traditions. Therefore, liberals think we will always have a free and advanced country, and in their view are merely "improving" on our society by painting on that blank canvas, by importing characteristics like rhythm and the ability to jump.

Today's college women more accepting of pornography: it's all men's fault

The purpose of this entry is to continue a discussion from another blog which it was not possible to continue there, and to illustrate to my fellow traditionalists who are not as familiar with the evangelical world the kind of liberal thinking that often occurs among evangelicals.

At Boundless Line, the blog of Focus on the Family's webzine for young single Christians, Steve Watters commented on a study finding that today's college women are more accepting of pornography. He wrote the following:

My hunch is that the mainstreaming of pornography is making it easier for both men and women to cover over their hunch that something's inherently wrong with porn with the fig leaf that it's just entertainment. For every problem we'll come across in life, there will be two camps -- one camp that says we just don't know how bad the problem really is and another camp that says the problem is really not a big deal and in fact the real problem is those prudish people who think it's a problem.

It's my perspective that the "porn is not a big deal camp" is clearly beginning to win the day -- and we just don't know how bad that problem really is. No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance of material that "educates" men to treat her like an object of their self-centered fantasies. It might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment, but it's a lot like saying, "oh, it's just a cute little kitty" while letting a fox into your house.

I submitted this comment:

Ah, the view of women as innately good rears its ugly head again. Unlike Loris, I'm going to make the case that those women really were okay with it.

Steve Watters wrote the following:

"No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance of material that 'educates' men to treat her like an object of their self-centered fantasies. It might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment, but it's a lot like saying, 'oh, it's just a cute little kitty' while letting a fox into your house."

What makes Mr. Watters think that these women's primary goal is to experience meaningful sexual intimacy, as opposed to physical pleasure? What makes him think that they are merely trying to seem sophisticated, instead of genuinely seeing pornography as benign or even empowering to women? The fact is that women's sexual attractiveness to men gives them enormous bargaining power with us. The sexual revolution didn't just "liberate" men, it also unleashed this power of women in a radically new way. When men are slaves to their lust for women--and relations between men and women are not tempered by pre-sexual revolution traditional morality, in which sex was considered inextricably linked to marriage and childbearing--men will go to great lengths go obtain women's sexual favor. Thus, modern feminists are right to view pornography as empowering to women. Women are out becoming doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and elected office-holders, while men are sitting at home in front of their computers masturbating. Those same men are willing to go to any lengths, including disavowal of traditional morality and manhood, to get modern liberal women to allow them access to sex. How is that not "empowering" to women?

Another commenter named Carrie Lea then responded to me:

Jacob M.,

"Ah, the view of women as innately good rears its ugly head again."

On the contrary, Jacob. I wish that my opposition to porn were motivated purely by the fact that it is wrong and harmful. However, I realize that my strong reaction against it occurs largely because of my very human need to feel secure in my desirability as a woman (to my husband, in particular).

"What makes Mr. Watters think that these women's primary goal is to experience meaningful sexual intimacy, as opposed to physical pleasure?"

Obviously, Mr. Watters understands the female psyche better than you do. Here's a hint: Don't assume that women are driven by the same things that drive men.

"Women are out becoming doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and elected office-holders, while men are sitting at home in front of their computers masturbating."

I'm sure that you love the idea of porn being "liberating" to women, since that seems to justify your own acceptance of porn (and, I would venture to guess, your own use of porn). Nevertheless, your above statement is ridiculous. You imply that the widespread acceptance of porn has led to women's ability to obtain certain careers, but this is nonsense. In fact, it is insulting. I did not obtain two degrees and a career in engineering because my male counterparts were too busy watching porn.

Also, you further betray your misunderstanding of the female psyche. Different women feel differently about their careers, but from my perspective as a woman (even in a male-dominated career field), your above statement is like saying, "Women are out being overworked, overstressed, and struggling to keep their families intact, while their husbands are sitting at home having affairs with the next-door neighbor."

"Those same men are willing to go to any lengths ... to get modern liberal women to allow them access to sex."

To what lengths did my husband go to get access to sex with his beloved? He married me and continues to reject pornography. Your argument in the above statement is incoherent at best.

For your sake, I hope that you will one day look past the phony justifications that you give yourself for using porn, and start spending your time focusing on what makes a woman truly happy. You wouldn't believe what you're missing out on.

After several more replies, including some in which other commenters came to my defense, I attempted to submit the following response. I was informed that the comment was not accepted because it had been determined by Typepad's anti-spam filter to be potential spam. (Of course, the software does not tell you why your post is considered spam or give you the opportunity to fix it. I suppose that would defeat the purpose of the filter.) That is why I am posting it here.

Oh, boy. A lot has been said for me to respond to, and I really don't have time to respond to everything. I think Adam T. did a good initial job of answering Carrie's criticisms of me; I wouldn't change much of what he wrote. There are, however, a few of Carrie's misunderstandings I need to correct.

First, when I used the word "women" here, I was referring not to evangelical Christian women who believe that pornography is morally wrong, but to the women in the study who say that they find pornography acceptable. Presumably those two groups don't overlap.

Second, I want to clarify that I do not look at pornography, nor think that it is good or morally neutral, nor want it to be legal or even exist at all.

This would appear to confuse Carrie, since I said that pornography (and the sexual revolution in general) is "empowering to women." That this should cause confusion highlights the essentially liberal nature of our entire society, and the fact that even most people today who are considered "conservative" (e.g., evangelical Christians) are really liberal. Conservatives today are always trying to appeal to liberals by saying that they agree with liberals' goals, they just don't agree that the methods proposed by liberals to reach those goals are the most effective. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find a conservative or evangelical Christian today who would argue that women's "empowerment" is a good thing. The only difference between the liberal and "conservative" points of view on the subject is that liberals believe that women are best empowered by being made totally independent from men and being free from the bonds of traditional sexual morality, while "conservatives" think women are best empowered by having lasting marriages, maybe staying home with the children while they're young if their financial situation allows it, but otherwise pursuing careers and advanced degrees just as liberal feminists advocate that women should.

The problem stems from the fact that modern liberal society separates men and women into discrete groups with competing interests. I, as a traditionalist, believe that we should not view these issues in the light of "men's interests," vs. "women's interests," but rather that the family, not the individual, should be considered the basic unit of society, with men's and women's interests unified under the banner of the interests of the family. And in those families, women would occupy a generally subordinate role to men. So I do not regard the "empowerment" of women as a good thing.

I could have been more clear on the issue of women being innately good. It's not that women's acceptance of porn means that they're innately good; it's that women's acceptance of porn is explained away by the supposition that they're innately good, a supposition that often crops up on Boundless and among modern Christians in general. My point wasn't obvious perhaps because the belief is stated only implicitly in this entry, but I was referring to Mr. Watter's statements that "No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance" of porn and that "it might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment." I take this to mean that even among women who accept porn, their goal is still to experience meaningful sexual intimacy and they are accepting porn only because it makes them seem sophisticated to do so. Mr. Watters seems to be saying that when men say they like porn, it's because they do, because they're lustful and tainted by sin (a true statement, don't get me wrong.) But when women say they like porn, well, they don't really like it, they're just saying they like it to gain the acceptance of porn-loving men so that men will marry them, because deep down the true desire of their pure innocent hearts is to be stay-at-home-moms and enjoy the life of domestic tranquility God intended them for.

When you look at the world realistically, and you see a survey finding that 49% of college women find porn acceptable, this interpretation is laughable. Why not take women at their word? We know that all people, men and women, are stained by original sin. Why not simply assume that if women say they find porn acceptable, they are saying it because they really mean it? Then we can work to understand the reasons and implications of that, and try to deal with it realistically, instead of trying to explain it away with our premises of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails vs. sugar and spice and everything nice.

If you would like to continue this discussion at a different venue, feel free to visit my blog, which should be linked to my name in this comment's header. There you will find a link to email me, and I'll create a new blog entry for the discussion.

Philadelphia commission: limiting the language a shop conducts its business in is "hate"

Philadelphia is my home town. The cheesesteak is one of its hallmark foods. In 2005, Joe Vento, the owner of Geno's, one of the two biggest tourist-trap cheesesteak shops, posted signs in the shop's window which read "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH." Vento is now being charged with "discrimination" by an ominous-sounding entity called the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. According to the Associated Press article,

After extensive publicity in 2006, the commission began investigating whether Vento violated a city ordinance that prohibits discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing on the basis of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

In February, the commission found probable cause against Geno's Steaks for discrimination, alleging that the policy at the shop discourages customers of certain backgrounds from eating there.

First of all, there should not even be a city ordinance prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing, for such prohibitions interfere with our right to freedom of association. Even so, on what basis does this ordinance forbid a business owner from insisting that business in his store be conducted in English? Is ordering a cheesesteak from a private business now a form of "public accommodation?" Here we are seeing the leftist tendency to eliminate the private and make all things public.

Camille Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, testified that Vento's signs harken [sic] back to the "Whites only" postings of the Jim Crow era.

"The signs give a feeling of being unwelcome and being excluded," Charles said.

So we see that liberals want to use the power of government to forbid people from doing anything that might make other people feel unwelcome and excluded. I suppose if I had a party and didn't invite the guy upstairs, he might feel unwelcome and excluded. Should I then be prosecuted for "discrimination?"

Or if I went to France, and encountered a sign in a sandwich shop which read (in French) "This is France: When ordering please speak French," would I have a legitimate grievance against the owner?

Well, at least Professor Charles didn't mention Hitler. Maybe that would have been too trite.

I hear that Philadelphia, like most northeastern cities, has been deluged by Hispanic illegal aliens over the past ten or fifteen years. Indeed, to borrow Professor Charles's terminology, they are not welcome here, and should be excluded. I applaud Joe Vento's effort to maintain America's identity as an English-speaking society, and I hope this case is thrown out.

(Note: I see upon spell-check that either Professor Charles or Bob Lentz the AP writer do not know how to spell the word "hearken." A sign of the deterioration of English in our society, perhaps?)

Conservatives entertained by nihilistic propaganda

View from the Right had a good discussion today on people not noticing the liberal messages that surround us in modern society. A commenter mentioned meeting "conservatives" who enjoy movies like Pleasantville without even realizing that these films are leftist propaganda.

By far the most egregious example of this phenomenon, in my experience, is how so many conservatives are fans of the television show The Simpsons. I used to watch it sometimes in college, before I became mature and discerning enough to realize how destructive it was, and I honestly don't think it's possible to pack more nihilism, cynicism, and scorn for all things traditional into one half-hour than the producers of this show do. Appallingly, I have even met evangelical Christians who are fans of the show, despite the fact that mockery of evangelical Christians from a clearly atheist or secular-left perspective has been one of the show's longest-running and most prominent themes. When I pointed this out to one of them, he replied, "well, they pretty much make fun of everyone." I can't imagine how one can consider oneself a devout Christian and think that mockery of, say communism, or alcoholics, or Indian culture, somehow excuses mockery of Christianity.

Another example is the movie The Golden Compass which recently opened in theaters. Now, I have not heard conservatives or Christians express admiration for this film, but it is certain that many people are completely unaware of its anti-traditional religion message. To be fair, the message may not be clear from the first movie alone. I read the first two books, before the author's intentions in writing them became known, and if I recall correctly, at the end of the first the message is still unclear, but by the end of the second it is obvious that the trilogy is intended as an anti-Christianity diatribe, which is now well-known to anyone who cares to read reviews. As I understand it, in the fictional world of the books God is really just the most powerful of angels, and he wrongly usurped power long ago and convinced everyone he was God, and now he must be killed so that mankind can be free from his tyranny. The author, Philip Pullman, has stated in interviews that he hates C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books (not to mention Christianity), and essentially set out to write an anti-Narnia. Despite this, I recently overheard someone describing the movie as "basically another Narnia, except instead of a lion there's a bear, and instead of a witch there's a [something]," and he listed several other superficial differences without which, he was implying, the movie is very similar to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I wonder if what is going on here is that people have lost the ability to think beyond any but the most superficial level. The Golden Compass is a fantasy movie featuring talking animals based on a series of children's novels, so therefore it must be like the Narnia stories, even though it suggests that the Christian God is evil and can and should be killed. The Simpsons makes fun of people doing foolish things, so it's funny; it doesn't matter who it makes fun of or why it considers what those people do foolish. At the moment, though, I can't figure out how this happened; how supposedly educated people, and especially professing conservatives, lost sight of the fact that ideas have consequences.

A final note: I was about to claim that I had never seen commentary from a traditionalist or conscientious cultural conservative on the topic of this "conservative" adoration of The Simpsons, something that should outrage us. But after searching, I came across another VFR discussion in which Sage McLaughlin, the same commenter who made the Pleasantville point, wrote a good comment about it. It's about halfway down the page.