GRADING ON THE CURVE.

Fuckin' Dreher, man. He's just too rich a subject. There's his post about Brown University providing free tampons in its unisex bathrooms -- which he finds an outrage ("virtue-signaling at its finest, from tomorrow’s generation of American elites") and closes with a link to a video of Putin laughing, no doubt because this is how great civilizations fall: by failing to require females pay for sanitary products, the way St. Paul intended. (The really creepy thing about that post is, Dreher doesn't even bother to explain why anyone should find such a modest change a threat to society -- it's like free tampons are ungodly or something.)

Anyway, today Dreher pimps a Peter Hitchens First Things essay about how sure, Putin is bad, but the Soviet Union was worse so shut up about Crimea. One of the sections Dreher quotes is particularly worthy of note:

A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre [in Moscow], is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.

Very poetic, but if the grass and trees were being fertilized by human bodies, wouldn't they be flourishing, not stunted and bad? I guess maybe their growth was actually suppressed by totalitarianism, in a sort of reverse miracle.


Anyway Dreher swallows this whole, and then tells us about some kid who played Pokemon Go in a Russian church and, under the enlightened reign of the current not-Soviet leaders, faces five years in prison for it. Dreher:

They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.

If only the Bolsheviks had possessed Pokemon Go, and expressed their barbarism by catching imaginary creatures instead of Christians!  Later, after (apparently) even Dreher's fans protested, he updates:

Since so many of you asked, I would not give this guy five years. I would not give him five weeks. I would give him five days, max. What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces.

Sacred spaces yes, safe spaces no!

It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.

Next time you read some of Dreher's "You will be made to care," "Law of unmerited possibilities" bullshit about how transgender Hitler is trying to curbstomp Christianity with the power of the State, keep this in mind.


Oh, and if you can take any more, get a load of Dreher's post on the author of Eat, Pray, Love leaving her husband for a woman, and this update:

In an earlier version of this post, I had some very caustic commentary about Gilbert’s words here. A friend and reader of this blog e-mailed me to point out that I was guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Gilbert had generously blurbed a book of mine, and in this reader’s view, I was wrong to be so nasty about this affair in her life...

I like to think the "friend and reader" was his agent.