Two more excellent Supreme Court rulings

 This:

The Supreme Court on Friday invalidated President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, meaning the long-delayed proposal intended to implement a campaign trail promise will not go into effect.

The justices, divided 6-3 on ideological lines, ruled in one of two cases that the program was an unlawful exercise of presidential power because it had not been explicitly approved by Congress.

The court rejected the Biden administration's arguments that the plan was lawful under a 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act. The law says the government can provide relief to recipients of student loans when there is a “national emergency,” allowing it to act to ensure people are not in “a worse position financially” as a result of the emergency.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the HEROES Act language was not specific enough, writing that the court's precedent "requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."

The plan, which would have allowed eligible borrowers to cancel up to $20,000 in debt and would have cost more than $400 billion, has been blocked since the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary hold in October.

About 43 million Americans would have been eligible to participate.

The student loan proposal is important politically to Biden, as tackling student loan debt was a key pledge he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to energize younger voters.

And this:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that an evangelical Christian web designer could not be forced to work on wedding sites celebrating same-sex couples because it would violate her First Amendment right against compelled speech.

The 6-3 decision settled the 2016 case brought by Lorie Smith, 39, who sued the Colorado Civil Rights Commission over the state’s anti-discrimination laws that barred her from advertising that she won’t create websites for couples of the same sex. 

But the high court found that to compel Smith to make sites “celebrating other marriages she does not” would be “an impermissible abridgment of the First Amendment’s right to speak freely,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

Under Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, businesses are barred from denying the public goods and services based on race, gender, sexual orientation and religion — and they can’t post notices doing so either.

But Smith — a married mother of one who owns graphic design firm 303 Creative LLC — has claimed the Centennial State law clashes with her right to refuse business that conflicts with her religious beliefs.

 Some thoughts:

• The student loan forgiveness scheme was rank redistribution. The money owed doesn't just go away. The obligation to pay it back is merely shifted to taxpayers.
• As I noted last August, this was bound to become a court case. Biden never offered even a  flimsy attempt at justifying a purely executive-branch move. Congress was completely sidelined.
• As I also noted then, student loan forgiveness encourages a shrugging-off-responsibility mindset throughout our society. If a precedent is set, how long is it before progressive policy types start opining that car loans and home loans need forgiving? It erodes the principle at the heart of the free market: that an economic transaction occurs when two parties, a buyer and seller, agree on the value of the good or service to bee exchanged, and each understands the obligations he or she is undertaking.
• Administrative bloat is the main reason the cost of higher education has gone up so much.
• Let's nip in the bud any notion that taking a pass on providing wedding services for a same-sex couple is discrimination in the sense that denying lodging, a restaurant table, or the opportunity to look at houses to buy in particular neighborhoods was when racial bigotry met little challenge in this country. There is no explanation for such denials but bigotry. Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 and 20 are, for Christians, God-breathed pronouncements about wrong ways for human beings to use their sexuality. 
• All three of these decisions came down 6 -3, as was entirely predictable.
• No, this doesn't mean the Very Stable Genius was a great president. Any Republican president circa 2017 - 2020 would have made similarly great federal court appointments.

In many ways, these decisions and the one yesterday regarding affirmative action offer us an opportunity to revisit the whole concept of rights - what a right is, what, by definition, cannot be a right, how humankind came to get clear about these matters. I think this will be the subject of my next Precipice post, which I shall spend the afternoon composing. 

Monday roundup

 Basecamp's CEO made a refreshing move corporate-policy-wise:

The web software firm Basecamp is asking employees not to discuss politics or partake in activism on company time. Founder and CEO Jason Fried also announced that the privately owned firm would be dropping committees, obsequious peer-performance reviews, and “wellness” and other “paternalistic benefits” that try to nudge employees toward a particular lifestyle.

Alas, apparently a sizable swath of the company's staff wanted the woke stuff:

Tech journalist Casey Newton said about one-third of the company’s roughly 60 employees took buyouts shortly after, with one fuming: “Basically the company has said, ‘well, your opinions don’t really matter — unless it’s directly related to business…’ A lot of people are gonna have a tough time living with that.”

Matt Welch at Reason on the interface between pandemic policies and the current fashionability of the concept of equity. 

A darkness is descending over Finland. Asserting sound Christian doctrine can get you charged with incitement, as Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, Bishop Elect of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Dicoese of Finland found out when he said marriage was between a man and a woman, or have you facing six years in prison as member of Parliament, medical doctor and mother of five Paivi Rasanen is for similarly speaking out about the Christian position on human sexuality.

It's called human nature. It's called the natural reaction to the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force coming for what belongs to you:

Wealthy Americans will avoid paying 90% of the estimated $1 trillion increase in investment taxes that President Joe Biden is proposing this week, according to new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.

The Wharton researchers concluded that tax avoidance, much of it legal, would cut nearly $900 billion of what the proposed increase on capital gains taxes could raise for the government.

"We don't think that the proposal has a lot of teeth," said John Ricco, director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan fiscal policy research group at the business school. "There are a lot of games you can play to avoid paying this tax."

 The University of Pennsylvania plays identity-politics favoritism with its initiative to address how the COVID pandemic has affected its faculty's output in pursuit of tenure:

The  University . . . has issued guidance promising an extra pre-tenure year to pretty much all assistant and associate professors while observing that the pandemic’s “specific” effects “will be different for different faculty members.” UPenn could’ve stopped there, and just said that the pandemic disrupted a lot of teaching, convening, and research, and that’s why it’s giving faculty some leeway.

Instead, the university went on to endorse a series of rather specific race- and gender-based assertions about how the pandemic affected college faculty, backed only by the sloppy, misleading application of junk science. It’s a study in how a sensible impulse can go awry in the hands of today’s woke campus bureaucrats.

UPenn officials asserted that “the negative implications [of the pandemic] for traditional measures of faculty productivity may be greater, on average, for women faculty and faculty of color, given gender differences in caregiving responsibilities, disproportionate negative health- and economic-related effects of the pandemic on Black and Brown people and communities, and greater expectations for women faculty and faculty of color to engage in mentoring and institutional service. Early data show that journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men.”

We couldn’t help but be curious about the research cited to justify these sweeping assertions.

Turns out, the pickings are pretty slim. The guidance is supported by only six references. Two of the citations explain how to write a pandemic impact statement and outline general pandemic effects on faculty well-being. That leaves four to address the pandemic’s disparate impact on women faculty of color and women faculty more broadly.

The citation used to justify the assertion that the pandemic had a disproportionate negative impact on the research and publication of women and on black and Latino faculty turns out not to be a study at all — but a June 2020 opinion column, published by the National Academy of Sciences and penned by Jessica Malisch, a biology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which advises universities on how to promote gender equity.

Malisch’s piece is, itself, a revealing exercise. Malisch offers a handful of references to support her call for changing campus hiring and tenure. But only two of these are studies which purport to study the pandemic’s impact on faculty research (the others are op-eds or actions guides). And neither of the two studies actually support Malisch’s point. To back her claim that COVID-19 has driven “a wedge between women and men in academia in terms of research opportunities,” Malisch cites an Inside Higher Ed story discussing a study which used data from the first few weeks of the pandemic—and which found that women faculty, overall, submitted more work than they typically did in that time period! The other study, focused solely on women economists, found that women were submitting working-papers at their normal rate. In other words, neither study actually made Malisch’s point.

UPenn’s other citation regarding the pandemic’s effect on women faculty of color was an Inside Higher Education guide titled, “Keeping COVID-19 from sidelining equity.” The guide simply posited that higher education “will most likely become less diverse and inclusive, given the pressure the pandemic is placing on women and faculty of color.” In other words, it was a think piece predicting inequitable impacts which was then used as evidence of inequitable impacts. This would be considered shady practice by used car dealers — research institutions should be held to a higher standard.

The guidance also claimed that evidence showed “journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men,” though the data in question relied entirely upon a study of submissions to Elsevier academic journals in the first eight or ten weeks of the pandemic. The researchers found that women submitted about as many submissions as normal, while men submitted more than they normally would (hardly evidence of the pandemic’s devastating impact on scholarly productivity). However, given that the study only examined submissions between February and May 2020 relative to that same period in 2018 and 2019, and given that the pandemic didn’t actually cause disruptions until mid-March 2020, it’s hard to gauge how representative this limited snapshot might be.

Some Midwestern farmers are not going to take the Biden administration's racially discriminatory loan forgiveness program lying down:

A group of Midwestern farmers sued the federal government Thursday alleging they can't participate in a COVID-19 loan forgiveness program because they're White.

The group of plaintiffs includes farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio. According to the lawsuit, the Biden administration's COVID-19 stimulus plan provides $4 billion to forgive loans for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers who are Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Alaskan native, Asian American or Pacific Islander.

White farmers aren't eligible, amounting to a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.

Jack Butler at National Review examines how consultant behemoth McKinsey is the prefect representation of the technocratic overlord class:

. . . one pithy expression of woke capitalism was a letter, signed by hundreds of corporations and executives and published in the New York Times in mid April, reflexively and baselessly condemning election-integrity legislation such as that passed by the Georgia legislature.

Among the signatories was McKinsey & Company, the consulting behemoth. Its employees are hired the world over, ostensibly to improve other organizations’ internal operations. But the true nature of the company, as well as its recent history, gives its presence on that list an irony dark enough to be worth singling out even among the many corporate hypocrites and virtue-signalers who signed that letter.

McKinsey is one of the premier firms in the consulting world, with annual revenue of $10 billion and 2,600 partners. Its business model is more or less that of a typical consulting firm: Its employees parachute in to an enterprise that has decided itself needful of improvement, study that enterprise’s operations and imbibe its goals, then advise it on how best to go about achieving those goals. With such a remit comes quite an ego; ergo, McKinsey employees, whether consciously or not, partake of the essence of a kind of technocratic capitalism that can be difficult to distinguish from its public-sector counterpart. “Its partners like to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room,” as The Economist put it. The best and the brightest, you might say. And with that tendency comes an inclination to view one’s fellow humans in the abstract, as cogs in various machines — projection, perhaps, on the part of many consultants who are themselves cogs in a machine.

Some consultants, I assume, are good people. Or at least one would hope so, given that the people in leadership roles in society seem increasingly cast from this mold. McKinsey alumni in government include Pete Buttigieg, Susan Rice, and even Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, a welcome traitor to his elite class. Maybe there is at times a need for their services. At other times, though, they can seem simultaneously arrogant and useless, showing up at a place they know nothing about, repeating back what they are told on-site, and then providing a pedigreed, credentialed gloss on marginal efficiency improvements or on the hiring (or firing) decisions a given organization’s executives hoped to make before they showed up. Think less Manhattan Project whiz kids and more the Bobs from Office Space.

John McWhorter, at his Substack newsletter It Bears Mentioning, has another must-read entitled "Do Black People Enjoy Being Told They Are Weak and Dumb? The Elect Hope So." A taste:

 Tom Taylor . . . [is] the head of the upper school at Riverdale Country Day school, and has penned an article where he serenely lays out his educational philosophy. You know the drill from the title alone: “Independent School Rhetoric and its Role in the Neoliberal Construction of Whiteness.” Some choice passages from Mr. Taylor’s opus:

In light of the deeply embedded and largely unexamined neoliberal ideologies in the foundation of NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] (and thus in independent schools as a broadly constructed segment of the education landscape), it would appear that such schools are fundamentally problematic spaces.

Get ready, though: to people like this, problematic means blasphemous, and blasphemy requires desperate, and even hostile changes of procedure.

Neoliberalism and its attendant beliefs about the market, individual control, and meritocracy are existential elements of independent schools and, thus, any attempt at constructing an inclusive space or decolonizing community will face immediate challenges.

That is, the problems people like Taylor have with what they call neoliberalism justify deriding the idea of anyone having control over their fate (who isn’t white), and the things we consider it a positive trait to excel in – i.e. “meritocracy.”

Thus, private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward culturally responsive schooling are free to draw a line in the sand, so to speak, and assert firmly and positively a philosophy of education that is explicitly anti-racist, decolonizing, and culturally affirming. 

That is, parents’ objections are not to be heeded because today’s “antiracism” is a higher morality these “Nice White People” are too benighted to understand (although quite a few of them are South Asian and African, but never mind).

In light of the problematic elements of neoliberal ideology evident in the structures of independent schools, it is not merely a freedom they have to construct their environment in this way, but in fact an obligation.

Again, the school is channeling Jesus and will not be questioned. Thou shalt not question Tom Taylor.

Given the buzzwords, the period of composition, and current practice at such schools nationwide, we are reasonable to assume that the program Taylor is espousing will include excusing black students from real standards, teaching students to distrust one another across racial boundaries, narrowing scholastic coverage to “center” issues of oppression and inequity, “decentering,” well, just plain school as “too white,” assigning KenDiAngelonian texts as scripture, and creating an atmosphere where students and teachers are afraid to take issue with any of this because they don’t want to be rhetorically roasted alive and socially excommunicated.

And Taylor’s position is “If parents don’t like what we’re doing they can go fuck themselves. We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Half of self-characterized Christians in the US say casual sex is acceptable.  

How the Republican Party treats Liz Cheney in the coming days will tell us whether it has a chance to once again be the natural home of conservatism or whether it is doomed as a moribund Trumpist freak show. 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday roundup

Love me some natural gas!

The decade in energy saw the returns from the shale boom of oil and gas pay off.

The shale revolution from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, which started to take off in 2006 but peaked this decade, helped get the United States to the verge of being a net energy exporter for the first time since 1953, moving off its dependence on Middle East oil and closer to “energy independence."

“The entire psychology of energy as a country shifted this decade to one of scarcity to one of adequacy and eventually abundance,” said Kevin Book, managing director for research at ClearView Energy. “What it means is Americans are not afraid of running out of energy like they used to be.”

The rise of gas has allowed the U.S. to wield energy as a geopolitical weapon. 

Before the shale boom, the U.S. was expected to become a big importer of liquified natural gas — the chilled, liquid form to which gas must be converted for shipment in giant tanker vessels across the sea. 

The U.S. now exports LNG to 36 countries, double the 18 destinations at the beginning of the Trump administration, which has sought to ship more gas to Europe to reduce its dependence on Russia.

“The geopolitical leverage of dominant pipeline suppliers like Russia has been weakened, enhancing our energy security and helping move China to less polluting fuels,” said Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former White House energy adviser to President Barack Obama.

The proliferation of natural gas is also the biggest reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined this decade, defying projections from the Energy Information Administration in 2010 that emissions would continue rising, but at a slower pace. Natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits half as much carbon as coal, has mostly replaced coal in the electricity sector, generating 35% of U.S. power in 2018, the most of any source.

Scotland officially goes all in on the mass delusion of our time:

 Adults will be able to choose between 21 sexual orientation options in the next Scottish census under plans to expand the categories.

Sexual orientation will be featured for the first time in the 2021 census. The National Records of Scotland (NRS) has suggested increasing the range of categories from four: straight or heterosexual, gay or lesbian, bisexual, or other orientation.
The new choices include: androphilic, androsexual, asexual, bicurious, bisexual, demiromantic, demisexual, fluid, gay, gynephilic, gynesexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian, pansexual, polysexual, queer, questioning, skoliosexual, straight, unsure.

In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

2 Timothy 3:12 

Islamic State released a video purporting to show its militants beheading 10 Christian men in Nigeria, saying it was part of a campaign to avenge the deaths of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and its spokesman.

The militant group posted the footage on its online Telegram news channel on Thursday, the day after Christmas, with Arabic captions but no audio.

The video showed men in beige uniforms and black masks lining up behind blindfolded captives then beheading 10 of them and shooting an 11th man.

An earlier video seen by Reuters said the captives had been taken from Maiduguri and Damaturu in Nigeria's northeastern state of Borno, where militants have been fighting for years to set up a separate Islamist state.

In that video, the captives pleaded for the Christian Association of Nigeria and President Muhammadu Buhari to save them.

Reuters could not verify the authenticity of either video.

Memo to the Very Stable Genius: knock off the protectionism:

President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.

While the tariffs did reduce competition for some industries in the domestic U.S. market, this was more than offset by the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs, the study found.

“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said.

Tit-for-tat trade retaliation is an idea best relegated to the past, given the presence of globally interconnected supply chains, the Fed researchers found.

The top ten manufacturing industries hit by foreign retaliatory tariffs were producers of: magnetic and optical media, leather goods, aluminum sheet, iron and steel, motor vehicles, household appliances, sawmills, audio and video equipment, pesticide, and computer equipment.

But that would probably also require him to quit winging it in everything he does:

Trump’s fancy-free scheduling approach is no mistake. In "The Art of the Deal," he explained that he thought too much planning curbed his creativity and impeded his thinking. That philosophy is alive and well in the White House, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials.

Between the lines: Trump believes to his core, one former senior White House official told Axios, that he's better off not preparing for some meetings. He thinks preparation hinders his ability to read the room and act with spontaneity, this former aide said.

• "I play it very loose," Trump wrote in 'The Art of the Deal."
• "I don't carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops."

One of the key challenges for his staff: He doesn't like long or complex documents.

• He'll skim newspaper articles, news summaries and bullet points, but hates anything longer. So his evening briefings look quite different from his predecessors'.
• "Trump does review briefing materials, at least if you make it a point to have him do so," said a former senior White House official who has direct knowledge of Trump's reading habits. "But only if you talk and guide him through it as he's reading."
• Trump receives national security materials and news summaries every evening. But the package is more visual than those of his predecessors, with screenshots from the Drudge Report homepage, pictures of his own tweets and snapshots of cable news chyrons from throughout the day, according to people who've seen Trump's nightly briefing packages.

Maybe the decade now in its final hours was one of big accomplishments - in terms of commonly recognized credentials and symbols of personal advancement -  for you. Then again, maybe it was your decade for inner accomplishments, which sometimes require even more character and perseverance.

 Turkey seems less interested in being a NATO member in good standing or even a Western nation by the day. Now it's seriously considering shutting down US access to the Incirlik and Kurecik military installations. Those are where we store nuclear weapons and have critical radar capability.

The ominous direction China is taking

The inerrant word of God is getting a totalitarian makeover:

As the world prepares to celebrate Christmas, Chinese Communists have announced plans to rewrite the Bible so that it falls in line with the Party ideology.

The bizarre requirement was reported by respected French newspaper Le Figaro yesterday evening, quoting their correspondent in Beijing, and it apparently extends to all major religions, including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

Apparently, China wants all the major religions to review their holy texts and to adapt them to the "era of president Xi Jinping ". 

As well as being president, Xi Jinping is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). 

China recognises all the major religions, but the country is known for its Big-Brother surveillance and policing religion is just one aspect of this.

The Chinese authorities, according to Le Figaro, have asked the representatives of all the main religions in the country to review the Chinese translations of their religious texts so that they conform with "the requirements of the new era." 

The report in French news stemming from Beijing highlights "Jesus Christ's parables" will have to fall "in line with the Communist Party, failing which they run the risk of being purged from the bibles available to the faithful."

The Bible and Christianity are apparently not alone in being targeted, with the authorities setting their sights on all major religions, requiring a "sinicisation" of the Quran, the holy book of the Islamic faith, and the sutras found in Buddhism. 

The bizarre requirement, which French newspaper Valeurs Actuelles noted "even the Soviets had not dared" to put forward, took place during a meeting on November 6.

The authorities apparently want "a complete reevaluation of existing translations of religious classics". If some texts are found not to confirm, they will have to be "modified and translated again." 

The representatives of the various religions practised in China were reportedly summoned to the meeting after China's 4th Plenum.

Reuters describes China's Plenum as a meeting of the country's roughly 370-person Central Committee "to discuss improving governance and 'perfecting' the country's socialist system".

The Chairman of the assembly, Wang Yang, reportedly underlined "the fundamental importance of the interpretation of the religious rules and doctrines" so as to be able to "gradually form a religious ideological system with Chinese characteristics."

This is not the behavior of a nation that is opening its society and integrating itself into a freedom-based system of norms.

Holy Spirit, give courage to China's Christians. May your word get through even in this dark time.

 

This is why you don't cave

I've seen some of the tweets expressing two somewhat related points of view:

• "Come on, let's remember that we've always maintained it was just a chicken sandwich."
• "Their foundation is still giving to other overtly Christian charitable organizations."

I'm sorry, but it was a cave. It happened too soon after the Ellie Goulding situation to think that that wasn't a factor.

And you can never appease identity-politics jackboots enough. You can puke all over yourself to show how woke you've become, and they will not be satisfied.

Exhibit A:

As one might have predicted, the move was not enough to quell the backlash from activist groups on the Left the company was apparently attempting to appease. Powerful LGBT agenda lobby GLAAD quickly posted a statement condemning Chick-fil-A for allegedly still being anti-LGBT.

“If Chick-Fil-A is serious about their pledge to stop holding hands with divisive anti-LGBTQ activists, then further transparency is needed regarding their deep ties to organizations like Focus on the Family, which exist purely to harm LGBTQ people and families,” a statement from the organization reads.

“Chick-Fil-A investors, employees, and customers can greet today’s announcement with cautious optimism,” the statement continues, “but should remember that similar press statements were previously proven to be empty.”

“In addition to refraining from financially supporting anti-LGBTQ organizations, Chick-Fil-A still lacks policies to ensure safe workplaces for LGBTQ employees and should unequivocally speak out against the anti-LGBTQ reputation that their brand represents,” GLAAD concludes.

And notice the passive-aggressive snowflake-ism oozing from the phrase "ensure safe workplaces." Is there some kind of documentation to the effect that Ckick-fil-A workplaces aren't safe?

This was a colossal blunder.

 

The jackboots shut down the UK's first Chick-fil-A

They will not be satisfied until they's as successful at eradicating Christianity as North Korea and Saudi Arabia have been:

Little more than a week after Chick-fil-A’s first grand opening in the UK, it’s been announced the Eat Mor Chikin chain will be closing up shop.

And it’s really out of the restaurant’s hands — the shopping center holding its lease is refusing to extend it.

And why? Gay activism.

As reported by the BBC:

“Gay rights campaigners called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A, which opened its first branch at The Oracle shopping centre in Reading on 10 October.”

A spokesperson for The Oracle said it was “the right thing to do” in response:

“We always look to introduce new concepts for our customers, however, we have decided on this occasion that the right thing to do is to only allow Chick-Fil-A to trade with us for the initial six-month pilot period, and not to extend the lease any further.”

Reading Pride — an LGBT group from the local (Reading) area — was tickled pink triangle.

These stormtroopers will not hear of any discussion of sin or the Godly design for human sexuality:

The organization cited CFA’s donation to three groups which, as statedby the BBC, “have a reputation of being hostile to LGBT rights”: Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Salvation Army.

They now have a case study on which to build a model for the further silencing of Christians.

They're one step farther along in seeing that the idea that to follow Jesus is bigotry pervades every corner of our culture.

Time to put on the full armor of God.

 

Satan's agents are on the case

Today's metric for gauging how close Western civilization is to completely flatlining:

On Tuesday, a British court ruled that belief in the Bible was “incompatible with human dignity.”

That statement came in a case involving Dr. David Mackereth, a devout Christian who had worked as an emergency doctor for the National Health Service for 26 years. He said he was fired from his job because he refused to call a biological man a woman. The court’s ruling stated: “Belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.” The court added. “… in so far as those beliefs form part of his wider faith, his wider faith also does not satisfy the requirement of being worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not in conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

The Telegraph reported that Mackereth said he was removed from his job with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in late June 2018 after his boss “interrogated” him about his personal religious convictions. Mackereth told the court in July that his line manager had asked him, “If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as ‘she’ and ‘Mrs’ would you do that?” Mackereth said that because of his religious beliefs, he could not, and his job was subsequently terminated.

CBN reported that Mackereth’s attorney, Michael Phillips, told the court, “His belief in the truth of the Bible, and in particular, the truth of Genesis 1:27: ‘So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.’ It follows that every person is created by God as either male or female. A person cannot change their sex/gender at will. Any attempt at, or pretense of, doing so, is pointless, self-destructive, and sinful.” 

That's a noteworthy aspect of the demonic nature of this situation. The movement to force us all, by virtue of the language we use, to indulge this fantasy that a man can be a woman and vice-versa is aimed at rendering God's creation unrecognizable. Indeed, it's the ultimate gaslighting - getting us to question whether anything can be objectively true.

And we can file this one under, "I Need To Vomit Right Now":

The infamous abortionist LeRoy Carhart invites women to cuddle with their freshly killed babies. His clinic also offers them take-home keepsakes such as photographs and footprints of their child.

Carhart specializes in third-trimester abortions, those done when the baby is approximately 24 weeks of gestation and older. You may recall that he was at the center of the debate on partial-birth abortion when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 2000. Seven years later, the court upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion.

Along with cuddling, you can avail yourself of these services:

. . . the brochure offers the following “Services After Your Delivery: Viewing your baby after the delivery; Holding your baby after the delivery; Photographs of your baby; Cremation services referral; Funeral arrangements referral; Footprints; Spiritual and ceremonial accommodations [through the facility’s partnership with pro-abort clergy of various stripes]; Remembrance certificate.” 

Again, a particularly demonic aspect of this grotesquerie is the new level to which it takes all-about-me-ism. It offers the illusion of absolving the killer, of wrapping the killer in the warm blanket of "perfectly understandable mixed feelings." A person is dead at the hands of Dr. Carhart and at the direction of the mother, but that is a mere secondary consideration. The dead person's impact on the mother's "feelings" is overwhelmingly what matters.

Where all this leads is a godless state that determines who each of us is, what we are worth, and for what purpose we're allowed to exist.

God will not tolerate our giving him the middle finger forever.

Monday roundup

Britain native Louise Gorsuch, wife of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has written a magnificent short essay entitled "Why I Became An American Citizen." Don't worry, there's not a syllable of saccharine boilerplate in it. It's authentic, bits of it are funny, and the observations are keen.

Check out the before-and-after photos that show the transformation of a Los Angeles homeless camp after activist Scott Pressler and his team donned hazmat suits and removed 50 tons of garbage in nine hours.

This essay is actually from May 2018, but I came across it somewhere yesterday and it's far and away the most helpful, in terms of speaking to my biggest challenge as a faith-walk pilgrim, thing I've read in ages. It's by theology student Ethan Roe, and it's entitled "Is It Okay If I Don't Feel God?"

When Elizabeth Warren and her people use the term "accountable capitalism," understand that it is raw tyranny. One creepy thing to consider is that if she's - God forbid - in a position to implement it, she'll have the acquiescence of the Business Roundtable, which has already resolved that the long-standing understanding that a company's only responsibility is to show a profit to its shareholders has somehow been rendered obsolete.

Mass protests by Christians across Ethiopia to protest the spike in church burnings.

Christianity-haters in The Big Easy turn on one of the city's most beloved residents

That would be Drew Brees, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints.

In August, he did a short video for Focus on the Family encouraging kids to take their Bibles to school.

The backlash followed pretty much immediately:

One local New Orleans website, The Big Easy Magazine, explains, "What is surprising is the anti-bullying advocate‘s support of a religious group known to be one of the most well funded anti-LGBT organizations in the country."

Likewise, The Advocate, homing in on Focus on the Family's beliefs about sexuality, wrote, "New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees has recorded a promotional video for the anti-LGBTQ organization Focus on the Family." The website went on to chide Brees for his connection to the popular Christian organization, ending their article with a dig at Brees' anti-bullying work in the past by implying that this current video undermines his past messages.

Not to be left out, Twitter users have also been piling on the QB. One person smugly tweeted, "I can’t believe that y’all are surprised out [sic] Drew Brees being attached to a religious extremist group. Have you not been paying attention? Dude has been problematic. Throwing TDs doesn’t make you a good person. Even doing some good things doesn’t make you a good person." 

It's pretty late in the cultural rotting process to do so, but the effort must be made to keep "anti-LGBT" and "extremist" from becoming the way adherence to sound biblical doctrine is characterized in our public discourse.

Taking such a stand involves no small amount of professional and social risk, but the alternative is for Satan to finish off what's left of America's cultural foundations.

Sunday roundup

Open Doors USA president David Curry, writing at USA Today, takes American churches to task for not addressing persecution of Christians in lands such as Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India and China with requisite urgency.

The ABC affiliate in Austin oh-so-objectively reports on a nine-year-old-drag queen without saying a thing about how somebody really evil allowed this to happen.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune presents fresh evidence indicating that Ilhan Omar's marital track record is quite shaky. Looks like she arranged things to skirt immigration laws.

LITD likes this. Really, really, likes it:

Some upstate New York county clerks are taking a stand against the state’s controversial new lawgranting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Clerks in Erie, Rensselaer, Niagara and Allegany counties have said they won’t be handing out the licenses, despite the legislation signed Monday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Of all these items in today's roundup, your must-read is "The Madcap Caution of Donald Trump" by Rich Lowry at National Review:

Subtract Trump’s taste for nonstop controversy and rhetorical brinkmanship, and you’re left with an incrementalist center-right government that has pursued an expansionary fiscal policy and avoided foreign war, for a period of peace and prosperity that — in any other universe — would be at the core of a stay-the-course reelection message.

For a while, the Obama doctrine was, “Don’t do stupid stuff.” The Trump team has built out the doctrine to “Privately consider and sometimes openly threaten stupid stuff, but at the end of the day, don’t do it (usually).”

An example that has come along since Lowry penned his piece: the Very Stable Genius did a sudden about face on the ICE roundup of illegal aliens who had been turned down for asylum-seeker status.  Giving Congress two weeks to act, or then, by golly, he will authorize the roundup! Actually, a valid point can be made here - namely, that the legislative branch has, in this case and generally, been shirking the large role it's Constitutionally supposed to play in crafting policy, preferring instead to grandstand. However, in both this case and the Iranian non-response to the drone downing, the VSG has displayed a tin ear for momentum.

Why the concept of public accommodation does not apply to the current situation regarding Christian wedding-service providers

I've had my disappointments with Bookworm of late - namely, her enthusiasm for Trump to the point of saying flat out that she doesn't care about his sybaritic dalliances, and that she's come to find a certain charm in his rough edges. Still, she has a sharp mind and occasionally makes truly valuable contributions to a current national conversation.

Such is the case with the way she demonstrates that  the concept of public accommodation does not apply to the current situation for Christian wedding-service providers.

The QueerBorg, to advance its demand that all surrender before it, is trying to frame its battle as a civil rights battle and to liken Phillips’ refusal to bake a cake to the closed doors a black man would face in the Jim Crow South when he tried to rent a room for the night or dine in a restaurant. The way in which Congress broke that monopoly of closed doors was through the notion of “public accommodation,” something it enshrined in Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The relevant language states as follows:

(a) Equal access All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

(b) Establishments affecting interstate commerce or supported in their activities by State action as places of public accommodation; lodgings; facilities principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises; gasoline stations; places of exhibition or entertainment; other covered establishments Each of the following establishments which serves the public is a place of public accommodation within the meaning of this subchapter if its operations affect commerce, or if discrimination or segregation by it is supported by State action:

(1) any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment which provides lodging to transient guests, other than an establishment located within a building which contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and which is actually occupied by the proprietor of such establishment as his residence;

(2) any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises, including, but not limited to, any such facility located on the premises of any retail establishment; or any gasoline station;

(3) any motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment; and

(4) any establishment (A)(i) which is physically located within the premises of any establishment otherwise covered by this subsection, or (ii) within the premises of which is physically located any such covered establishment, and (B) which holds itself out as serving patrons of such covered establishment. (42 U.S.C. § 2000a.)

The most obvious distinction between the LGBYOB+ and African-American situations, of course, is that the statute is directed at “race, color, religion, or national origin.” That’s why there’s such a big push on the Left to enact The Equality Act, which would raise sexual orientation and claims about gender to the same legal level of protection afforded race, color, religion, or national origin. The Equality Act, though, is another post entirely, and not a subject I wish to explore here. Instead, I’m interested in the monopoly of closed doors.

Keep in mind that, as I noted in passing above, the Civil Rights Act did not arise in a vacuum. It was a direct response to a very specific problem: The fact that Jim Crow laws in the South, backed by the personal preferences of bigoted people all over America, meant that places ostensibly held open for walk-in customers could arbitrarily refuse customers based upon the customers’ race (or color, or religion, or national origin). Under this all-encompassing regime, blacks theoretically could travel throughout the South without ever being able to obtain either food or lodging. (As the recent movie Green Book shows, blacks responded to this monopolistic denial of service by identifying hotels, restaurants, and other “open to the public” establishments that would serve them, but it was an imperfect solution and one that was both deeply offensive to human dignity and antithetical to the promise of our Declaration of Independence.) 

In other words, that portion of the Civil Rights Act relating to Public Accommodations was intended to break a monopoly that was driven by culture and backed by legislation. The legislation, of course, was the real kicker. As Milton Friedman famously noted, had Jim Crow not been legislated, it likely would have died away as hoteliers, restaurateurs, and the owners of entertainment establishments ended up competing for the only color that mattered: the lovely green of dollar bills. However, legislation, backed by societal prejudice, created an insupportable hurdle to free market sources, and created a monolithic wall that blacks could not breach.

Jack Phillips clearly does not fall into the category of a monolithic monopoly on all institutions open to the public. First, no one can deny that he held his doors open to all customers who walked into his store and sought to buy any of the products on display. He reserved only the right to withhold his services from specific ceremonies (not customers, but ceremonies) that offended his religious sensibilities. Second, Phillips was/is anything but a monopoly. The LGBTQLMAO+ community in Colorado has a lot of choices when it comes to custom baked goods prepared for QueerBorg ceremonies. 

Her mention of what Milton Friedman had to say on the subject is pretty much what I've said for some time. The free market and shifting zeitgeist were conspiring by 1965 - certainly by 1967 - to relegate boneheaded we-don't-serve-your-kind-here-ism to the dustbin of history. A few well-placed television commercials showing a black couple and a white couple enjoying a restaurant meal together would have finished it off. Alas, though, there were, as Bookworm says, bigoted laws on the books, so legislation was necessary.

And she understandably didn't want to muddy the waters with a digression into this Equality Act that is currently on the nation's plate, but that is as poisonous an idea as has come down the pike in some time and must be resolutely extinguished.