Friday afternoon roundup

If you're looking for a singularly evocative, grotesque and heartbreaking instance of the inhumanity of statism and central planning - either generally or in health care - the case of Baby Charlie is it:

On June 27, the parents of 10-month-old Charlie Gard lost their final appeal to travel to the United States to have him treated for a rare brain disorder. The European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) denied the appeal of London parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates, which means that his life support will be removed and, at some point, he will be allowed to die.

Charlie's parents raised over £1.4million in private donations via GoFundme to pay for the treatment and their travel expenses. Charlie Gard suffers from a mitochondrial disease that causes muscle weakness and brain damage. His parents wanted to bring him to the United States for experimental nucleoside treatment, but the administrators and doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children denied the request. Their alternative? Withdraw life support, administer palliative care, and let Charlie "die with dignity."

Let that sink in a minute: This treatment would have come at no cost to the hospital or the National Health Service (NHS), and would have been covered completely by private donations. They denied the parents their right to determine care for their own child.

And the Vatican's response is extremely disturbing:

Against the backdrop of this barbaric abuse of judicial authority, the Catholic Church—the world’s greatest defender of the right to life, and long a moral bulwark against state intrusion into the rights of the family sphere—has decided that the courts in this case are basically right.

These are difficult times for orthodox Catholics, beset by a pope who often appears inclined to dismiss centuries of church teaching and a fair number of bishops who are apparently determined to follow him. Catechetical esoterica regarding Eucharistic doctrine, of course, can seem hopelessly complex for even the lay Catholic these days.

But the Catholic Church’s position on the sanctity of life is unmistakable to anyone, and has been for several thousand years. Its stance on the authority of the family has also long been clear. We should assume that the Vatican would be more than happy to condemn and rebuke in no uncertain terms an idiot juridical decision that condemns a little baby boy to die rather than allowing his parents to fight for his once chance to survive.

You would be wrong. The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life yesterday released a statement that waffles between limp-wristed equivocations and outright willful ignorance of church teaching. If this is where the Vatican now makes its stand, then the most vulnerable members of society—which is to say all of us, at some point—are in trouble.

The academy attempts to explain away the courts’ decision by citing “the complexity of the situation, the heartrending pain of the parents, and the efforts of so many to determine what is best for Charlie,” acknowledging that “we do, sometimes…have to recognize the limitations of what can be done” in modern medicine.

This is preposterous nonsense, what, growing up, my family called “mental babble.” The situation is not at all “complex”: Charlie’s parents want to attempt to save his life, and the courts have made it illegal for them to do so, in direct contravention of their parental authority. The “heartrending pain of the parents” is now primarily a feature not of their dying child (whom they are trying to save) but of the soft-tyrannical decision of the British courts (which are preventing them from doing so). As for “what is best for Charlie,” the obvious fact is clear: his parents have decided that for him. 

Nature-denial indoctrination among the periodicals aimed at adolescents: Teen Vogue Digital is on an overt campaign to "banish heteronormativity from its content." And Seventeen magazine has posted a video on why pronouns are important to transgendered young persons.

AEI scholar James Pethokoukis interviews Notre Dame professor of political thought Patrick J. Deneen on the question of whether there's a true conservative tradition in America:

I want as much growth and innovation and technological progress as possible. But am I wrong?

Maybe those are really good things, but maybe they also come at the price of what we’re calling conservatism. Or a kind of moral society grounded in a certain kind of way of life, a certain kind of culture, a certain set of beliefs that are passed down from one generation to the next. In other words it may be that that’s exactly what American civilization is, and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised then that we’re not conserving a lot. That a kind of a society defined increasingly by the inability of especially the middle class to form families, to pass on tradition, to forge and create religious belief — that one of the results of a society dedicated to restlessness, constant technological innovation, globalization, et cetera is that it’s not going to be a very conservative society. And if that’s what we want that’s fine. But conservatives should fess up. They should acknowledge that that’s going to be a cost. And that seems to me what American conservatism has failed to do, and why, in many ways, if we look at the landscape of American life today — social, cultural, political, religious life — why we have actually conserved very little.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File at NRO this week puts the entire sad Squirrel-Hair phenomenon in a - well, here comes a pun of such a low-hanging fruit variety that even small tree-dwellers with large fluffy tales may wince - nutshell:

The president of the United States really just isn’t a very good person. There is no definition of good character that he can meet. You certainly can’t say he’s a man of good character when it comes to sexual behavior. His adulterous past is well-documented. You can’t say he models decency in the way he talks. He’s not honest (you can look it up). He brags about whining his way to winning. He boasts of double-crossing business partners. If you want to say he’s charitable, you should read up on how he used his “charities” as leverage or for publicity stunts. I think we can all agree he’s not humble or self-sacrificing. When asked what sacrifices he’s made, in the context of his spat with the Kahn family, he couldn’t name anything save for the fact that he worked very hard to get rich and that he employs people (presumably because it profits him to do so). I don’t know how anyone could absolve him of the charge of vanity or greed. He’s certainly not pious by any conventional definition.

Some argue that he’s loyal, and there’s some evidence of that. But the loyalty he shows is instrumental and self-serving. In The Art of the Deal, there’s a fairly moving passage about Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, and loyalty. “The thing that’s most important to me is loyalty,” Trump says. “You can’t hire loyalty. I’ve had people over the years who I swore were loyal to me, and it turned out that they weren’t. Then I’ve had people that I didn’t have the same confidence in and turned out to be extremely loyal. So you never really know.”

He added: “The thing I really look for though, over the longer term, is loyalty.” Trump then said this about Cohn:

He was a truly loyal guy — it was a matter of honor with him — and because he was also very smart, he was a great guy to have on your side. You could count on him to go to bat for you, even if he privately disagreed with your view, and even if defending you wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him. He was never two-faced. Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers boasting about their uncompromising integrity and have absolutely no loyalty. They think about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. . . .  Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

But when Cohn got HIV, Trump severed his ties with Cohn. “Donald found out about it and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, said. “It was like night and day.”

I could go on. But you get the point. I am truly open to the argument that there’s some morally and intellectually serious definition of good character that Trump meets. I’ve just never heard it. And that’s why the tweets are ultimately just a symptom.

Conservatives for most of my life argued that character matters. That went by the wayside for many people in 2016.

The question now is what conservatives should do about it. I agree with Ramesh and Charlie entirely. Conservatives should condemn the bad behavior. But we shouldn’t fall into the liberal trap of saying that because Trump isn’t a gentleman, we should therefore abandon a conservative agenda. Being ungentlemanly is not an impeachable offense. At the same time, however, we should not follow the path of his worst enablers who insist that his bad behavior is admirable or that the bad behavior of others is a justification for his. That’s Alinsky-envying bunk. “Let the lie come into the world,” Solzhenitsyn said, “let it even triumph. But not through me.”

One for the good-move side of the ledger:

President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) announced that it would not defend an Obama-era rule that has doubled the salary threshold at which employers must provide overtime compensation to employees.

The rule, championed by former President Barack Obama’s DOL, would have raised the salary threshold for workers to qualify as exempt from overtime pay from $455 to $913 per week (or from $23,660 to $47,476 per year). The rulewas set to go into effect Dec. 1, 2016, before a federal judge issued a temporary injunction.

U.S. District Court Judge Amos Mazzant questioned the DOL’s authority to raise the minimum salary threshold. In his opinion, Mazzant said that the DOL “exceeded its delegated authority and ignored Congress’s intent by issuing the rule.”

The DOL said Friday that it would not appeal Mazzant’s temporary injunction, meaning that Obama’s overtime rule is likely dead.

Peter Heck at The Resurgent says that one important reason Ted Cruz has earned hero status is his fierce defense of free speech, and he provides video of a thunderous pronouncement at a Senate Judicial Committee hearing to prove it.