Michael Novak: Americans love belonging to a real, concrete nation

Just yesterday Lawrence Auster had a great post on how mainstream conservatives oppose globalism when it's promoted by leftists and Democrats but support it when it's promoted by Republicans. As if to prove the point, Michael Novak, in the course of criticizing Barack Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin, posted the following at National Review Online's The Corner today:

Real patriotism, [Obama] clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States.

This is the same Michael Novak who wrote a long, blustering article called "Global Liberty" saying that Western nations must spread the universal ideals of democracy and capitalism across the globe, who wrote a book called Universal Hunger for Liberty arguing among other things that the concept of liberty has deep roots within Islam, who has in fact made an entire career of pumping out inane, vacuous books and articles (any time I attempt to read anything by Novak I become so frustrated by the sheer emptiness of his prose that I promptly give up) arguing that all people the world over have an innate longing for liberty and that we must spread democracy and capitalism everywhere so that this longing in everyone can be fulfilled. But now that Barack Obama is promoting globalism, suddenly the great thing about us is that we love our land, soil, mountains, plains, and history.

You must be a genius to read Wise Man's Heart

As can be seen in the sidebar, the Blog Readability Test tool determined that this blog's reading level is Genius. I must be doing something right. If you can understand my writing, give yourself a pat on the back--you're a genius!

Hispanics refuse to vote for McCain despite fully agreeing with his platform

Here's a story which appeared on Yahoo's main page with the headline "Immigration debate turns Hispanic voters away from McCain." How can this be, I thought when I saw the headline, since John McCain is so pro-immigration?

The story is typical of the awful reporting we're so used to seeing. We're told that 56 percent of Protestant "Latinos" (when are they going to start speaking Latin?) supported Bush in 2004, but only one third plan to vote for McCain this year, while 59 percent support Obama. The article goes on to say:

The biggest reason for the shift, though, has been the heated debate over immigration reform that has alienated many Hispanic voters previously receptive to the GOP — and that nearly cost McCain, a co-sponsor of the bipartisan 2006 immigration reform bill that inflamed conservatives, his party’s nomination.

How do we know this is the biggest reason for the shift? We're not told. The article gives no poll results from which this conclusion is obvious; we're just supposed to accept that the immigration debate, a debate in which John McCain is firmly on the side of increasing Hispanic immigration, has turned Hispanics off to McCain.

The reader is then treated to the words of Luis Cortes, "one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential evangelicals in America and twice an early Bush backer."

“I’m going to vote brown,” Cortes said.

“McCain’s problem is the problem of his party demonizing Hispanic people,” Cortes said. “His party demonized us. You can’t switch off the immigration rhetoric and think it will work. In the context of the immigration issue, Hispanics define the enemy as the Republican Party and you don’t erase that overnight.

“Bush didn’t have to overcome his party’s position on immigration and I think that’s the difference,” said Cortes, who heads the Christian social service group Nueva Esperanza (New Hope).

The Republican party stance on immigration may not be clear until the platform is completed, and Cortes said he may wait to read the platform before deciding whether or not to leave the GOP.

“Do the border fence overnight, do it first, fine,” he said. “Then get to work on immigration reform in the first year.”

There is so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. "I'm going to vote brown"? Sounds like he has his mind made up then, doesn't it? Not much chance he'll be voting for a white candidate, unless maybe said candidate gets a deep tan between now and November. The Republicans "demonize" Hispanics? Both Bush and McCain can't say enough good things about Hispanics, can't stop extolling their virtues while denigrating ordinary white Americans, and Hispanics still think Republicans "demonize" them, and admit outright that they define the Republican party as the enemy. This shows the cluelessness of the mainstream conservative movement. We're being told that there's nothing we can do that will bring Hispanics on board. As Steve Sailer said, the Republican party would be much better off trying to capture a larger share of the much more substantial white vote, than going after a fraction of a percentage of the Hispanic vote.

Cortes's last sentence, stating his preferred candidate's immigration policy, is exactly what John McCain has said he'd do: "build the damn fence," then work on amnesty. So, why isn't Cortes a McCain supporter?

This article is so typical of the mainstream media. They write articles containing conclusions not supported by their facts, containing huge, gaping questions the article doesn't even acknowledge the existence of, like an elephant in the living room. And though they are losing their influence, there are still far too many people who turn to reporting like this for their "news."

Parent-free services for thee, but not for me

I have to say that if anyone who enjoys having the time to write is thinking about going to medical school, don't. I thought that during the summer, with only a "day job" doing lab research, I was going to have more spare time for blogging, but between occasionally staying late at the lab, trying to get regular exercise, spending time with friends whom my academic obligations forced me to neglect during the school year, and family obligations, it almost feels like I have had less time for blogging during the summer than I did when school was in session. And the 2nd year of medical school starts in one week.

Because I don't like neglecting the blog for months at a time, I thought I'd finish and post an old entry I'd had in draft form that's not too long or involved. I think I've mentioned before that in my weekly liberalism seminar, one of our faculty "facilitators" is a female family practice doc who works for the big downtown county hospital which provides a lot of medical care to the Holy Underserved. This woman is fully on board with the liberal practices we are taught based on individual moral autonomy, like the idea that you must offer contraception to adolescent patients without their parents knowledge or that you must kick the father of a woman's baby out of the room before informing her she is pregnant (in case she wants to make a decision about the pregnancy without him.)

Well, one morning this female doc came in complaining about the process of getting a passport for one's child. She and her husband were planning a family vacation, I believe to Bermuda, and she discovered that in order for a child to get a passport, both parents must be present. This had caused her major inconvenience in that she had to leave work to join her husband at the passport office. Obviously, this is done so that one parent who is on the outs with the other cannot abscond with the children.

I immediately thought of this woman's policy of not allowing parents to be in charge of the medical care of their children nor husbands (or, in the case of most of her patient populations, "babydaddies,") to be involved in the care of the women who are carrying their children. She doesn't want these parents to be trusted, allowing the children or pregnant women to be completely autonomous. Yet she wants US passport policy to trust her husband when he shows up without her to get passports for their children.

When I first conceived this entry, I thought this was hypocritical of her; thus the post title, which I am leaving intact. But upon further reflection, I think that both cases could be seen in the light of wanting as little parental involvement as possible. Though I'm sure she wouldn't say that a dependent minor should be able to get a passport with neither parent present, so her passport policy is not consistent with her contraception policy. This could be a classic case of an unprincipled exception--we can't have children getting passports against their parents' wishes and leaving the country, that's taking things too far.

The woman's anecdote ended with her sarcastically saying, "I love America." This reminded me of how much I hate sarcasm. You intentionally say the opposite of what you mean. You say "I love America" in order to communicate the fact that you do not love America. No doubt she thought that this was all somehow George W. Bush's fault.

Whatever the case, despite their claim to belief in absolute equality, the elites don't really believe they should have to play by the same rules as the hoi polloi.

Does sexual liberation deter white men from being traditionalists?

When you've been a traditionalist for a while, you become accustomed to the obviousness of non-liberal truths. You wonder why everyone can't see, for example, that Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to Western countries, or that whites should recognize and be conscious of ourselves as a group and celebrate our heritage, or that homosexuality should not be publicly recognized by society. Yet you also know that the vast majority of your countrymen, including most "conservatives," would brand you a racist and a Nazi, compare you to a Klansman or Hitler, for saying these things. Still, the obviousness of them is on your mind, and you can't help but wonder whether, given enough time and a chance for a non-threatening conversation, you could make converts.

Therefore, it was inevitable that over the past year I would find myself from time to time imagining "coming out" as a traditionalist to my classmates, calmly trying to convince them, and wondering what their reactions might be. They are overwhelmingly liberal, but some of them seem like reasonable people who could be persuaded of a non-liberal view with sufficient evidence. So, I tried to imagine with whom I might broach the subject some day, perhaps in the midst of shooting the breeze during some downtime on a call night during 3rd year. Obviously, the black students are out of the question. There aren't many of them, but they have an enormous amount to lose if the affirmative action regime and American society's current practice of treating them deferentially were to come crashing down. Not only would I be called a racist, I'd probably be reported to the Dean and face disciplinary action. The Asian students, being at the top of the heap IQ-wise, would probably be more sympathetic to arguments about racial differences, but no more sympathetic than the blacks to arguments that America should take conscious steps to remain a white, Western European, Christian country.

Then there are the white students. Half of them are women, and I can just imagine the jaws hitting the floor when I say that, while there will always be exceptions, the general rule should be that women stay home as housewives while men are leaders of the society. Again, Dean's office, here I come. That leaves the white men. If no one else would, wouldn't they be able to be convinced of how much better life would be in a traditionalist America?

Blacks, Asians, women... in my mind's eye, those in these groups call me racist, sexist, bigot, etc. But the predicted white men's reaction to my traditionalist views is: "you're never going to get laid with an attitude like that." Young men know that most single young women are liberal, and, except for those with strong religious convictions about sexual behavior, the overarching concern in life is to have sex with women. So the truth or falsity of non-liberal views is almost irrelevant; the question for the young man is "will women be attracted to me if I accept this view versus that one?" This phenomenon has spilled over to religious conservatives as well; a few weeks ago I remarked to some evangelical Christian friends that I thought that by and large, women should not be doctors, and one of them said to me, "you're never going to get married!"

One would think that white men would realize how the liberal regime has made the life they plan to lead so much worse: the expectation that women will work and children will be placed in day care leading to a fractured family life, affirmative action programs causing the white man to fail to get the promotion he deserves, refusal to acknowledge racial differences leading to his children being placed in classrooms full of unruly low-achieving minority children, preventing them from learning at the level they're capable of, no-fault divorce laws making it easy for his wife to walk out on him, and the very same sexual liberation he prizes when young creating the view that sexual fulfillment is paramount in life, making it likely that his wife will walk out on him when she becomes "bored." Instead, non-liberalism is out of the question, because if they adopt it women won't want to have sex with them.

There is much more to say about this topic; in particular, the direction my thoughts are going is toward the inversion of the concept of manhood, of what is masculine vs. what isn't; how in the past restraining one's sexual desires was seen as manly, whereas today to bend over backwards for liberal women in order to "get laid" is seen as manly while to care more about standing on principle than about opportunistically having cheap sex will get one labeled weak, feminine, wimpy, etc. But that is for another post. I admit here that I could be wrong; I haven't talked to any of these men about the big questions facing our society and I don't know for sure what their reaction would be. But based on everything I can surmise from interaction with those of my own generation, their reaction would be what I described. Which means, if we can just somehow free them from this enslavement to sexual desire, somehow help them gain just a little more foresight, we could potentially convert large numbers of white men to traditionalism. What do others think?

How dishonest use of the term "evangelical" weakens Christian influence in our society

By now we've all seen the headlines about James Dobson's "accusing" Barack Obama of distorting the Bible. The story being several days old, we are now on round two or three, with the most recent articles describing counter-responses to responses to the original story. So we know Obama thinks Dobson was wrong. But where do evangelicals themselves stand?

According to an entry on the Dallas Morning News religion blog, Jim Wallis, noted liberal evangelical, has "ripped" Dobson for his criticism of Obama. This is not surprising, since Wallis is a known left-winger, and has become something of a darling of the left for allegedly squaring evangelicalism with leftism and proving that not all evangelicals are rabid right-wing troglodytes. Thus he has become useful in the left-wing quest to weaken the influence of Christianity in our society. But wait, isn't he an evangelical? And isn't the very definition of an evangelical to be a patriotic, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, pro-prayer in schools, etc., etc., conservative American?

Not when the meaning of the term "evangelical" is shifting. The word comes from the Greek "evangelion," meaning good news. In the strictest, perhaps original sense, it simply means one who is concerned with spreading the good news of the Christian gospel, namely that Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to earth to pay with his life the debt we could not pay for our own sin, purchasing for us eternal life. Now, in theory, this is something a Jim Wallis, a mainline protestant, or a Roman Catholic could sign on to just as well as James Dobson. So how did "evangelical" come to mean conservative, generic, non-denominational (or not particularly denominationally oriented) low-church Protestant? I speak only from my own memory here, but I believe that the term was not in common use in this sense until the 1990s. When I was a child in the 1980s, the term the media used for such people was "fundamentalists." That word had a negative connotation, and was not entirely accurate because only a small subset of conservative Protestants are true fundamentalists, so, by my understanding, this group of which we speak mounted a large PR campaign to replace the f-word with "evangelical," a more positive word that emphasized the seemingly benign mission to spread the gospel.

This campaign was largely successful; the media, and those outside the conservative Protestant world, actually began using this word instead of "fundamentalist." But a funny thing happened on the way to the church: instead of swapping meanings, liberals, secularists, and the mainstream media swapped only symbols, leaving the underlying meaning intact. "Evangelical" simply came to mean exactly what "fundamentalist" used to mean, negative connotations and all. (I had a coworker, a secular Russian Jew about my age, who like many in my generation got all his information about the world from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who used to say the word "evangelicals" with a sneer in his voice, just the way an older leftist would speak the word "fundamentalist.")

It was inevitable that this would happen. Since conservative Christianity is defined as bad in the worldview of liberalism, any word which conservative Christians adopt to describe themselves must take on negative connotations. This makes it extremely dishonest of the media to describe Jim Wallis and other liberals as "evangelicals," since for them the word implies holding to a level of religious "fanaticism" that goes beyond what is legitimate. I'm not exactly sure why they would use a word that has negative connotations to describe someone they view as good, but I think what they are trying to do is discredit conservative Christians' claim to be true Christians; by co-opting the word commonly used to describe conservative Christians and applying it to liberals like Wallis, they're trying to say that he is the one really spreading the good news, and the Dobsons of the world are spreading hate, intolerance, judgmentalism, etc. (Note: I know that Wallis himself embraces the label "evangelical," but since he is on the same side as the left and the mainstream media, I'm including him under the pronoun "they.")

The other major point of dishonesty in the entry is the following:

Older Religious Right leaders are now being passed by a new generation of young evangelicals who believe that poverty, "creation care" of the environment, human trafficking, human rights, pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS, and the fundamental issues of war and peace are also "religious" and "moral" issues and now a part of a much wider and deeper agenda.

For the past several years, news stories on religion have been peppered with statements like the above, saying that the younger, rising generation of evangelicals believes that typical left-wing concerns are "also" religious and moral issues, that they take the liberal line on poverty and environmentalism "in addition to" opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. The effect is to make it sound as though these young liberal evangelicals are, to invert a common libertarian catch-phrase, socially conservative and fiscally liberal; that they are in fact conservative on cultural issues but merely add income redistribution and environmentalism to those issues; that their concerns form a superset of the older evangelicals' concerns (i.e., "part of a much wider and deeper agenda.") What they want us to believe is that older evangelicals care only about abortion and same-sex marriage, while the new generation, in addition to caring about these things, also cares about human rights and AIDS.

This is a bald-faced lie. These liberal evangelicals don't care about left-wing causes in addition to the standard right-wing social and cultural concerns; they care about left-wing causes instead of right-wing social and cultural concerns. How often do Wallis or Tony Campolo or other liberal evangelical leaders call for abortion to be illegal, or same-sex marriage to be resisted? Answer: never. Instead, they say they are personally opposed to these things, but refuse to call for a public morality enshrined in law that opposes them. Here is an interview with Campolo where he says that abortion should remain legal and takes the pathetic "get the government out of the marriage business" line on same-sex marriage. And here is an article by Wallis in which he says that liberal Christians "find it painfully difficult to vote Democratic" given that party's stance on abortion, similar to Campolo's description of himself as a "reluctant Democrat." But notice what he's saying: it may be painfully difficult for them to vote Democratic, but they still do it. And why not? The Democratic party's stance on abortion is what allegedly troubles them so much--but their own stance is that abortion is regrettable but should remain legal, a stance indistinguishable from that of most Democratic politicians! How many times did Bill Clinton say that abortion should remain "safe, legal, and rare?"

So, we see that liberal evangelicals aren't some new amalgam of liberals and conservatives, independent thinkers offering a "third way," people who are suffering great personal anguish at being horribly torn between two sides, agreeing more with one on certain issues and with the other on other issues. Instead, they are garden variety left-wingers who completely sign on to the Democratic party platform and have nothing but scorn for conservative positions.

Left-wing dishonesty knows no bounds.

Forget marriage mandate, it's the miscegenation mandate!

Here's something from the "Evangelicals can't save Western Civilization" files.

A certain segment of the evangelical community has been taken to task by some writers and bloggers for promoting a "marriage mandate," the notion that with few exceptions, everyone is obligated to get married. Usually, it is said that more women want to get married than men, and so the blame is placed on the men for not marrying the women. Boundless Line, a blog run by Focus on the Family, whose posters are all conservative evangelicals and which draws a lot of evangelical commenters, is among the publications accused of promoting this view.

I don't want to discuss the marriage mandate controversy here. The purpose of this post is to point out a Boundless post from last July on the subject of interracial dating. As you would be stunned, pleasantly surprised, or knowingly disappointed to learn, based on whether you are a leftist, a neocon, or a traditionalist, the post as well as most of the comments were strongly pro-interracial dating.

I've been familiar with the world of evangelicalism for many years now, so most of the comments did not surprise me. It is not at all shocking to hear evangelicals repeat typical liberal platitudes such as the idea that race is merely a social construct, or make snarky comments about "melanin" or one's "epidermis," falsely reducing race to mere skin color. However, there are a few real howlers in the comments section, like the statement that "a person with black skin raised in a Norwegian community is culturally Norwegian." Even that absurdity, though, is the logical conclusion of the view voiced by many other commenters that any problems encountered in interracial dating are due to culture and culture alone, culture being something completely separate from race.

I was, however, mildly surprised by a comment from a black woman who opposed interracial dating on the grounds that it would lead to the end of the black race. Some traditionalists and paleos have, rightly, said that from the white Western point of view, race-mixing should be frowned upon, because it will lead to the end of the white race. Of course, that is undesirable, but more than the end of the white race, global race-mixing will lead to the end of every race. Non-whites should be expected to care as much about the potential end of their races as we care about ours. The comment was surprising only because the liberalism most often expressed by evangelicals is of the right-liberal variety, where any concern about race is seen as invalid and bigoted, instead of the left-liberal variety, where the white race is constantly upbraided but the exaltation of other races is perfectly legitimate. To hear even a black person within an evangelical context speak so frankly about race is rare.

The point about the end of races was lost on most commenters, though, like the one who said that she grew up thinking inter-ethnic families were the norm (she meant interracial, but wrote inter-ethnic because she doesn't believe race exists.) If you think about it, for interracial families to be the norm is a self-contradictory proposition: if most people marry and have children with someone of another race, soon all races will have blended into one, and without distinct races, there cannot be interracial families. The fact that this commenter thought that something inherently impossible was the norm shows how confused most evangelicals are on these issues.

All of this brings to mind a quotation by Sam Francis I came across for the first time a month or two ago:

The real problem with the religious right is that, in the long run, its religious vehicle won’t carry it home. If it ever ended abortion, restored school prayer, outlawed sodomy and banned pornography, I suspect, most of its followers would simply declare victory and retire. But having accomplished all of that, the Christian right would have done absolutely nothing to strip the federal government of the power it has seized throughout this century, restore a proper understanding and enforcement of the Constitution and of republican government, prevent the inundation of the country by anti-Western immigrants, stop the cultural and racial dispossession of the historic American people, or resist the absorption of the American nation into a multicultural and multiracialist globalist regime.

Indeed, all evangelicals really seem to care about is abortion and same-sex marriage. They would be perfectly happy to see America become a nonwhite, third-world country, as long as abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research were illegal. Which means that whoever saves America, it will not be evangelicals, at least not in their current incarnation.