PINHEAD'S PROGRESS. When Rod Dreher lived among New Yorkers, he found us morally distasteful, expressing to the OpinionJournal clods his fear that were his son to grow up in here in Sodom, "he will be immersed in a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build," whereas "For all the drawbacks of the rural South, a man can raise a family there knowing the seeds of faith and virtue he plants in his children's hearts will have a less hostile environment in which to grow."

Just before he finally got transferred to a Dallas outpost of the conservative empire, Dreher applauded a writer who pointed out that suburban sprawl started when liberals tried to make white children go to school with black children -- and implied that he could relate: "I hate the way sprawl looks," said Dreher, "and believe that more intelligent design could mitigate the worst aspects of sprawl. But all it takes is riding the NYC subway daily, and having to live with fear and loathing of the violent, profane and altogether anti-social teenagers who make public spaces here their playpens, to understand why middle-class people get fed up and move the hell out of town to raise their kids."

Dreher's been in Dallas about two years now, and he has a complaint -- seems the folks in God's Country... well, now don't git him wrong, they got plenty of them seeds o' faith and virtue, and he shore likes 'em better than those "subway" people, but they jes' don't share ole Rod's sophistercated view of housing preservation:

Lord, Jonah, come to Dallas. In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. Whenever the people who actually live there object to what this practice, at least in the way developers are currently doing it, is doing to the aesthetic character of the neighborhood, the developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification.

He says the rampant building of houses he finds ugly is not conservative -- "Libertarian, yes, but as you know, that's not the same thing as conservative."

You made your bed, hoss; now die in it.