SEDUCED INTO GAYNESS! ONE WOMAN'S STORY.

Not that D.C. McAllister of The Federalist had ever written anything that made sense to me before (Sample: "If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?"), but when she started talking about how some people, particularly children and butch dudes, have problems with sexuality and friendship I thought she was in the ballpark at least of rational discourse:

Just this morning I was watching Fox NFL Sunday, and Terry Bradshaw was talking about how he was excited by Howie Long the first time he saw him play. The eruption of uncomfortable laughter was expected. But he kept on, saying how Long “took his breath away”—which incited even more snickers. 

While I grinned, having seen this same scenario played out over and over again, I was also saddened, because I saw it as just one more knock on a kind of love we desperately need in our lives—passionate, nonsexual love. But we’re so uncomfortable with the expression of intimate, familiar feelings among men that we’ve given it its own name—bromance. 

I should have known when she started quoting C.S. Lewis that things would go badly wrong (quoting Chesterton is also a useful warning sign). Ditto when she started ranking on Romanticism and The Sexual Revolution. Then:

Let me illustrate this point with two men—let’s call them Steve and Paul—who are both very expressive in their feelings. This is an important distinction because it’s no accident that the top personality types by a large margin for people who identity as homosexual are “feeling types” —INFP and INFJ for women, and ESFJ and ENFJ for men.

Steve and Paul—two highly extroverted-feeling men—meet one another and they have an immediate connection and common interests. The effect of a Puritanical attitude still pervasive in our culture says “Don’t show affection, be controlled with your feelings.” But that’s not who they are. They’re passionate... 

Maybe, if they lived in times past, when men had places where they could really connect as men, they could express themselves in some way. But that’s not the case in modern culture with fluid interaction between the sexes and lack of “man-only space.” So what do they do with their feelings now? Suppress them or show them? 

Not sure what's wrong with "fluid interaction between the sexes" (I could go for some right now!), nor why guys who need a "man-only space" can't just join the Man Scouts and go hang out under a bridge, but okay.

One would hope they can simply show them, but because of the impact of sexualization, they interpret that expression in a sexual way. As a result, the two men either don’t want to be thought of as gay (because they’re not, not because they necessarily think homosexuality is wrong), and they withdraw.

That does sound sad. But there are alternatives to submitting to this kind of social pressure. Changing you support system, for example --

Or, they begin to doubt and wonder, Am I gay?

Oh fuck me.

“I get excited when I’m with Paul,” Steve says to himself. “He puts a spring in my step just talking to him. I’m stimulated by his intellect and insight. He makes me feel more alive after talking to him than I did before. Those feelings are so strong they must be sexual. I must be gay.” Paul feels the same. But they’re not gay at all. They don’t want to have sex with each other. They’re simply men who feel and express deep passions and feelings, and they want to connect with someone with common interests.

Ya gotta wonder how McAllister knows they're not gay. Maybe she decided while staring into Steve's dreamy eyes during one of his long talks about how Paul puts a spring in his step.

Anyway, it turns out the big problem is not that jocks will be awkward among their fellow bros, but that "the more friendship is misunderstood and ignored, the more people will identify as homosexual and bisexual." Out of pure confusion of eros and phileo, men wind up sucking cock and women wind up eating pussy. Not to mention the polyamory! "What you need are friends," McAllister tells one poor soul who has been seduced into multisex, "real, loving friends -- not more sexual relationships." She explains that eros is "a throaty passion that can end badly and lead to tragedy," but that probably just got them more turned on.

Me, I'm all for nonsexual love, including the demonstrative kind, but if my friends are getting laid I'm usually happy for them, not convinced they've made a throaty mistake (unless they've picked up a thrush). Why is sex such a puzzle for these people?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The Ahmed Muhamed case got me thinking of Stiff Little Fingers, which got me thinking of The Undertones, which got me playing The Undertones all afternoon. Loov-ley. 
• Did you know Breitbart.com has a Doritos tag? And no, it's not there to get Jonah Goldberg to come over more often -- it's to denounce the homosexual menace of Rainbow Doritos packaging, which was created to celebrate Frito-Lay's partnership with the It Gets Better project. (Frito-Gay, amirite #c'monbrodon'tleavemehanging.)  It Gets Better was created to keep young gays from killing themselves, which is of course unconscionable in Breitbart world, so John Nolte demands Frito-Lay explain how they can support a project founded by Dan Savage, who has not shown proper deference to bigots, and another operative warns readers of other gay snack foods  so they don't accidentally turn Game Day into Gay Day and convert their beer buddies. (Breitbart.com also reports that the gay Doritos are "a variation of the standard Cool Ranch-flavored chips," which makes sense because they taste like cum.) But American Thinker does B-bart one better by giving an asylum window to one Ed Straker (h/t Will Menaker), who may be a Poe but so what this is awesome:

Furthermore, I think we should push other companies to launch pro-heterosexual campaigns. Perhaps we could persuade a hot dog maker and a hot dog bun company to do a joint effort promoting man-woman relationships. 

Until we try sexualizing food like the left does, we'll never know. And if we think like the left, we desperately need to find out.

Maybe he should marry a chalupa in protest of Obergefell -- or infiltrate gayism, then take it down from the inside. Politics is down-low of culture, comrade!

• It may seem weird to you that, while you look at the Texas clockmaking student's case (made a digital clock, brought it to school, got arrested) and see sad bigotry thwarting the admirable intellectual ambitions of a second-generation immigrant kid, some other people see unearned Muslim-American privilege (or, in the case of some prominent nuts, a conspiracy to let jihadis take over America). But remember, these guys are convinced that America has already been taken over by the Kenyan pretender Barack Obama, and that his seven-year reign of terror has so changed America that it no longer behaves in ways they're accustomed to seeing: Instead of siding with the authorities, people are siding with the powerless, dark-skinned kid. And not just people: MIT, Facebook, and other companies have all told him that, in effect, it gets better. It's interesting that conservatives have been crying because the kid who got suspended for a Pop-Tart gun and others similarly hassled  didn't get all this attention. But those cases actually did get attention -- not only from conservatives, but from the so-called liberal MSM, because everyone loves a bureaucrats-gone-wild story. And from all I can see, conservatives merely turned these teachable moments into more sour grievance to steep in; while supporters of Ahmed Mohamed have reached out to him, encouraged his scholarship, and made something positive out of the experience. Maybe that's why they're so pissed.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST.

Guess what this story at The Federalist is about:

How to Live in Pagan Society

It turns out that this situation is similar to some classic moral problems that Christians and other philosophers have been considering for some time now. If you’re a Nazi soldier, can you, in good conscience, fight the Allies? Would it be moral to kill Jews? At what point, if any, does “obeying orders” stop working as a valid excuse? On the other hand, do you have to starve and die to keep from being implicated in the Nazi atrocities through taxation? 

Thankfully, an evil empire and moral purity were precisely the concerns of first-century Christians as they wrestled with living in extensively pagan societies with tyrannical militaries. One ethical conundrum of the day was: is it permissible to eat food sacrificed to idols? In 1 Corinthians 10:25-57, Paul lays out the righteous path: “Eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake; for the earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains. If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat anything that is set before you without asking questions for conscience’ sake.” 

Money spent on food sacrificed to idols ended up funding the pagan temple system one way or another. Paul is unfazed. Like Jesus insisting that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and pay our taxes, Paul shows that the evil actions of the other participants do not preclude the narrowly righteous action of the Christian. The reasoning is, buying food is just buying food; buying food isn’t wrong; what people do with the money does not contribute to your sin... 

Give up? The title of this thing, bylined "The Federalist Editors," is

How Christians Can Bake Cakes And Sign Licenses For Gay Weddings

Ain't even kidding. They're meeting you homo-lovers halfway, explaining to their followers how and under what circumstances they can dispense services to the God-accursed SSMers. Here's part of their summation:

So in the case of a cake for a gay wedding or being a witness on a slip of paper, it makes sense to analyze the act itself. It’s not wrong to give people a beautiful cake. It’s wrong to encourage people to do evil things. If you make your views and the company’s views clear, you can feel free to make that cake. If they want it to say “Congratulations Angela and Norma!” you may feel morally free to do as they wish. As long as they know that you are merely serving their own self-congratulations and are not participating in congratulating, your conscience can be clear.

 So, maybe serve the cake while turning your head to one side and retching.

I run into people who think The Federalist is an upscale, intellectual conservative publication. And I suppose it is, grading on the curve.

UPDATE. Comments are, consistent with alicublog tradition, very good. Here's a sample by Rand Careaga:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon discusses the difficulties experienced by the early Christians as they attempted to observe the tenets of their faith without participating in an overwhelmingly pagan society. Money quote (heh, heh): "Even the reverses of the Greek and Roman coins were frequently of an idolatrous nature. Here indeed the scruples of the Christian were suspended by a stronger passion."

ALSO LINCOLN WAS TALL, WHEREAS OBAMA... WELL, LINCOLN WAS WHITE.

Conservative writing on the Iran Deal has been so feverish that it conjures an image of a red-faced Bibi Netanhayu screaming at the authors to "DO WHAT I'M TELLIN' YA!" like Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday.  One of the weirder specimens appears at National Review where, after some preliminary obvious bullshit ("It’s nice to see that even CNN recognizes the president’s deal with Iran for what it is: 'another legacy-making item on his checklist'"), Ian Tuttle tries this gambit:

What could account for [Obama's] astonishing indifference to American security? In his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Abraham Lincoln suggested ambition, and that seems to me as good an explanation as any.

Lincoln? Iran? Huh? Tuttle preambles a quote from the speech...

This “field of glory” harvested, to what would the next Alexander or Napoleon turn? He warned: 

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction... 

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

 ...and interprets:

Barack Obama’s ambition, his hunger for his own aggrandizement, has long been obvious. No humility afflicts a one-term senator who promises to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, or who proclaims his mere nomination for the presidency “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” 

He is an ideologue, yes, a Chicago leftist, community organizer-in-chief, unreconstructed Columbia poli-sci grad student. I’ve no doubt he thinks a diminished America a better America — for us, and for the world. But “building up” or “pulling down” is secondary. America is merely the instrument with which Barack Obama would carve his name into history.

The short version is: Lincoln said America would have ambitious, bad presidents in the future -- and that's just how I feel about Obama! Plus Alinsky!

The subterfuge seems at first merely lazy,  the prose equivalent of the Obama paintings of John McNaughton. But I see a deeper purpose: The connection between the modern Republican Party and Lincoln has taken a beating over the past 50 years, and the recent Confederate Flag controversy has pretty much severed it. (Tuttle was a big help there!) Now that they've totally blown it on race, I guess they have to find some other way to associate themselves with Honest Abe. Foreign policy seems a stretch, but what else do they have? It's not like they can endorse high tariffs. (And if they don't have Lincoln, what other GOP president is left beside Reagan, who is losing his charm as a demigod? They disowned Teddy Roosevelt. Tricky Dick, maybe your rehabilitation is at hand!)

There's always abortion, which some of the more hysterical brethren (including Tuttle!) like to portray as the new slavery, but in order to get traction on that they're going to have to work on their approach:

COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 13, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ -- Created Equal, a national anti-abortion group, will be displaying abortions in progress on a Jumbo-Tron TV screen at the Lincoln Memorial on July 14, 2015 as part of our week-long Justice Ride.

I'm seeing the hearts and livers angle, but not the hearts and minds. Maybe they should put a beard and stovepipe on Mike Huckabee and see where it gets them.

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO CONSERVATIVES IS GOING GREAT.

Normally I don't talk about the comments sections associated with my subjects, on the proven theory that comments sections are generally awful (not alicublog's, though! Feel free to weigh in!). But I'll make an exception for this post by Andrew Klavan at PJ Media. Klavan, as regular readers of alicublog know, is a culture warrior of the worser sort who gets the brethren to laugh (or at least to go nnnnggh while filleting a Barbie doll named Lena with a Bowie knife) by comparing Democrats to rapists, etc. In this new thing, though, Klavan tells his readers that the hate-fest represented by (I never tire of saying this) Republican Presidential front-runner Donald Trump is a losing bet. He's taken the conciliator role before, telling the guys in 2014 they should go easy on gay marriage outrage lest liberals win the debate "by a flagrant and self-serving display of compassion." But now he sounds a little stressed about it. First he quotes Star Wars:

“Fear is the path to the dark side,” said Yoda. “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Then he preaches sweet reason:

You want to win back your country? Here’s how. Fear nothing. Hate no one. Stick to principles. Unchecked borders are dangerous not because Mexicans are evil but because evil thrives when good men don’t stand guard...

These things are true. They’re true for white people and black people, male people and female people, straight people and gay people. We should support the smartest, most proven, most statesmanlike candidate who best represents those principles. And we should do it out of — dare I say the word? — love. Love for our neighbors, our fellow citizens, white and black, male and female, straight and gay.

Straight and gay? Forbid it almighty God! Commenters descend like locusts on Klavan -- and that RINO bastard Yoda:

Why would I want to take advice from some pipsqueak who didn't see that his Jedi Council was being manipulated by evil into doing evil things in the name of order, until it was much too late?... 

...Yoda's wrong. Frustration leads to anger. I'm not afraid of these lying SOB's at all...

Also:

Klavan must have downed a couple of his elitist pills before penning this attack on conservative Americans... 

Just like the writers at National Review and Republican politicians, PJ Media writers, like Andrew Klavan want to be loved by their liberal friends... 

We don't need to be lectured about things we already know, pal. Out here in what you seem to believe is the backwater idiocracy between Hollywood and DC, we know precisely what Trump is and what he is doing... You and your peers, on the other hand, seem to have let your girlish social ambitions swirl away at your brains. This sort of article isn't about us: it's about you. It's about your preening egos and need to be seen as a certain type of (frankly, faux) conservative who can be accepted in certain circles [nnnngh etc.]... 

I am tired of people like Klavan and others calling us idiots for disagreeing with them. I am done reading Klavan and Goldberg. If I wanted to be insulted I could go to some liberal site...

The more optimistic of you may be thinking, ha, their Frankenstein's Monster has turned on them! It's tempting to think so, as the Trump phenomenon has become such an obvious embarrassment to the GOP that conservatives are trying to portray Trump as a liberal and his candidacy as good news for Republicans.

But the monster hasn't turned on them, quite -- the brethren are just lumbering around with increasing agitation, as they tend to do in that aimless period between the beginning of a Presidential campaign and the nomination of some douche of whom it can at least be said that he's not a libtard. Other conservative pundits are finding ways to occupy their attention so they won't turn on them -- which perhaps explains the latest Planned Parenthood attack, as it gives their more excitable columnists like Kevin D. Williamson an opportunity to really lay the outrage on thick ("the people who run Planned Parenthood are crooks," "President Barack Obama... is neck-deep in blood," nnngh, etc.). After a few days of that, the punters are spent and ready for a lie-down until it's time to repeat the process with #Benghazi or whatever else turns up on the Wheel of Fortune.

So they haven't lost control yet. But I'll be interested to see how many of their followers will be left after a few more rounds like this one.

I'M ONLY ONE MAN.

Was it really just 10 days ago that National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, attempting to show his range by playing the role of conciliator, claimed that the wiser conservatives understood that the Obergefell "decision is now the law and that it is not going to change" and that sweet reason would prevail? Today at The Federalist, a team effort by Ben Domenech and Robert Tracinski:

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage -- the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists -- some were...

Ah, some were! Be advised Domenech and Tracinski supply no links to support the following assertions, which should give you some idea of how substantial they are:

....already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs. We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides...

Let's pause here a moment to note that, on that last bit, Domenech and Tracinski are apparently talking about the Harrisburg Patriot-News' decision to treat letters to the editor and op-eds critical of gay marriage the way it would treat "those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic," an arguable position to which the Patriot-News, being a private enterprise, has a perfect right, but which the brethren, whose thousands of web outlets claim and exercise similar rights every day, nonetheless insist is censorship (e.g., "Post-Obergefell, Dissent Is Now The Highest Form Of Bigotry," "FREE SPEECH TOSSED OUT THE WINDOW AS BIG NEWSPAPER BANS OP-EDS AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE"); they may also be talking about BuzzFeed's forthright support for gay marriage, which (since conservatives think every popular media venue, online or off, owes them a platform as a form of wingnut affirmative action) has similarly shivered their timbers (e.g., "EIC BEN SMITH: BUZZFEED IS PRO-GAY MARRIAGE — NEUTRAL ON SHARIAH").

...and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe...

I could ask what they mean by "must" -- has a law been passed? Or do they merely assert a right, undetectable in the Constitution, not to be mocked for their racism?  Indeed,  I could go on through every particular of the whole wretched screed -- for instance, "every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs," to which a reasonable person might respond, first, this kind of thing is certainly not the exclusive province of liberals (e.g., "PIERS MORGAN GOT PWNED ON TWITTER OVER GUN CONTROL"), and second, grow the fuck up.

But you know what? For the first time since I took up this loathsome duty, I feel a bit overmatched.* Because since the Obergefell decision, I perceive that not some but most conservatives, from their elected officials and top pundits down to the bottom feeders, have gone barking mad. I do this alicublog thing in my spare time, you know, and most days I get material for posts desultorily, just by idly rifling through conservative sites. It's been kind of fun peeking into their rooms, detecting which of them has gone a little off his feed, and reporting back. But since gay marriage came in it's like every rightwing door I open reveals a shit-smeared, babbling Bedlam, with nearly every inhabitant shrieking his fool head off about the homosexual apocalypse. I could quit my job and report the atrocities day and night, and still not get the scope of the thing.

And it's not as if all of it's about gay marriage. Take this post by -- oh, look, it's Cooke again, and the title is "Repainting the General Lee Won’t Erase What It Symbolizes from History." No, really, Cooke, a British transplant whose pat-riotism apparently includes a fetish for the cheesiest Americana, is outraged that the impeccably Southern Bubba Watson, owner of the car from The Dukes of Hazzard, is replacing the rebel flag on the roof with the Stars and Stripes. Cooke reacts as if Watson planned to draw tits on Whistler's Mother:

There is a clear and necessary answer to Watson’s rather naïve inquiry, “Why not the American flag?” That answer: Because the General Lee is a piece of America’s cultural history, and civilized people do not vandalize their antiques.

The Dukes of Hazzard. He's talking about The Dukes of Hazzard. I was a teenager when that came out and even I knew it sucked. One searches in vain for signs that Cooke is kidding, or at least ironically inflating his own obsession like a nerd ostentatiously sighing over the set of the original Star Trek, but no, Cooke actually thinks this is important:

It is fashionable in our age to seek unity in all things, but the “General Lee” is not a statehouse, responsive to and reflective of the popular will. It is a historical artifact and cultural totem that sums up a particular moment in time. By amending it to suit contemporary fashions Watson is seeking, in effect, to erase that moment from history. This in my view is extraordinarily dangerous...

Must the owners of Monticello take Wite-Out to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, lest the more egregious passages offend our modern sensibilities?; Must the custodians of vintage Aunt Jemima boxes throw them into the Mississippi to atone for their ugly anachronisms?...

And finally:

Just as to burn an unwanted book is not to kill its author, to paint over the roof of an attitude-laden car is in no way to go back in time and to eradicate that attitude from the record.

If you're wondering why that sentence is even clumsier than we can normally expect from Cooke, my guess is that he really wanted to compare painting over the General Lee with burning books, but something in his soul rebelled and convoluted his sentence structure. Which means there may be hope for him yet.

*UPDATE. Not that I didn't read the whole thing, but I don't recommend it -- it proceeds to a bizarre theory that the Culture War is not just a fucking annoyance for all concerned, but the wellspring of human progress:

The culture wars of the past produced great achievements in art, architecture, literature, and science as the opposing parties strove to demonstrate that they had more to offer and deserved the people’s admiration and loyalty. Those culture wars gave us Michelangelo’s David, Galileo’s science, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment, and the movement for the abolition of slavery.

I look forward to Ben Shapiro's blueprints for Breitbart Tower. It also contains this amazing sentiment:

The Sad Puppies are just the Salon des Refusés with different players...

It's the rightbloggers' world, we just don't live in it. Meanwhile in comments, which are choice, Another Kiwi points out that The General Lee of legend was actually a series of Dodge Chargers, so if Cooke is seriously about preserving Suthun heh'tage, he's in for a long search of collectible car dealerships and junkyards.

COMEBACK KIDS.

How goes the rear-guard, dead-ender attack on gay marriage? Hilariously! Have a look at this symposium at Opus Dei strokebook First Things featuring the Douthats of Tomorrow. Say what you will about snake-handlers and desert mystics, there's no crazier Christian than than Christian intellectual; they dress  like Chesterton and talk like the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. All the symposiasts  want to see overturned (or, in Scaliaese, o'erturned) not only Obergefell but also America's sexual freedoms in general. Some have interesting ideas as to how to achieve this. Hadley Arkes, who like many of his compatriots compares Obergefell to the Dred Scott decision (because having to live in a world with married gays is the same as slavery), suggests this:

...it must start with the voice that rings out the depth of the wrong and summons the resistance—that “this shall not stand.” We will learn here right away, from the reactions springing from our political class, just who among our political figures may be up the task and adequate to the moment. But it may not be a man in office, or someone running for anything. Rick Santelli, emitting a cri de coeur on CNBC, triggered the coming of the Tea Party movement. A Robert George, with the attention properly focused, might accomplish the same thing.

A Tea Party, only anti-gay! Presumably instead of tricorners and knee-breeches, they'll all dress in Eldridge Cleaver codpiece pants and other affectations of extreme butchness. And with Robert George as their inspirator! This would be the same Robert George who's been wowing the West for years with his rap about how "masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, cannot unite persons organically" and other such keep-it-in-your-pants perorations. Put him out on the town square with a bullhorn and watch the next Great Aweakening unfold. (Arkes also calls for a Constitutional Convention, which should go about as well as that schtick always does.)

Some are enraged by the brands who waved their rainbow flags for the decision, and want a holy boycott. Mark Bauerlein:

It’s time for conservatives to apply principles to their purses. Coca-Cola, ESPN, and Walmart are prominent cases of corporate culture warfare, and every time a conservative buys a Coke, watches SportsCenter, or enters the megastore, he helps them do their damage.

I can see the faces of Bauerlein's readers falling, then their wheels turning: Maybe they can drink Coke on the down-low.

No conservative likes to turn his consumption into a political act...

Ha ha -- no conservative, he says! Someone buy that cowboy some Chik-fil-A! Peter J. Leithart wants the brethren to cease with the happy-clappy love-one-another bogus Christianity and cut to the chaste:

And we might as well say it plainly: We oppose gay marriage because we believe homosexual acts are sinful, and we believe that for biblical and theological reasons. Unbelievers already know it. Let’s admit it.

Noted! Rabbi David Novak suggests they "stop co-officiating (i.e., along with the marriage license clerk) at civil weddings, and thus remove their names from the civil marriage registry" -- which is actually sensible, and so will probably not catch on, as his comrades seem to think that when a single God-botherer doesn't like a party it's the party that should leave, not him.

Some of them reach back to root causes, none further than Ephraim Radner, who has half decided that democracy itself is inconsistent with his religion:

Second, the vitality and moral usefulness of the liberal state is increasingly in question: has this form of rule by procedural decision-making served its purpose and collapsed under the weight of its own outsized reach? We are perhaps about to enter times of political revolution and re-inventing government analogous to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Maybe he can mob up with ISIS; really, what's for them to wrangle over except the name of God? Melinda Selmys, meanwhile, blames it all on the disastrous abandonment of arranged marriages. Once upon a time, there was forced marriage for the godly stuff, and "concubinage" for funsies:

The difficulty that presents traditional marriage in the modern world is that over several centuries we’ve undergone a major social shift. The keeping of mistresses or concubines stopped being socially acceptable at about the same time that the idea of “marrying for love” first started to gain traction in the public imagination. The institution of marriage began to change: the focus slowly shifted from the creation of family alliances and provision for the continuation of the line, to the happiness of the couple and the love that they have for one another. In the process, a lot of other concepts (consent, for example) also shifted. The relationship in which people joined their lives on a permanent basis in order to have children became, at the same time, the relationship in which people enjoyed intense erotic attraction and emotionally satisfying interactions.

Now, in a lot of ways this was a good development...

Marrying for love isn't all bad! See, she's meeting you halfway. But:

...Simply put, mutual responsibility towards offspring naturally demands a long-term commitment (at least eighteen years) while mutual attraction and erotic desire does not... The battle over the institution of marriage is basically a battle over which of these two purposes of marriage ought to have primacy.

So if you're not as sexually voracious as you were when you were 20, Selmys doesn't see why you stay in your otherwise meaningless modern marriage. Well, she might win a convert or two among unhappily-marrieds looking for a loophole.

But above all, whining -- always whining. "We have entered Canaan and been swallowed up before Moloch in the same way that Israel was enveloped by a surrounding religion of idolatrous violence," cries Radner. "On the bright side, we’ve entered an era that will make for some of the bravest Christians we’ve ever seen," consoles Mark Regnerus; we will see them huddled in the food courts, enduring the sight of men holding hands. Patrick Deneen compares himself and his buds to Solzhenitsyn, and wails:

What has been most striking all along is not the division, the passion, at times the vitriol. What has been most remarkable is the insistence by same-sex marriage proponents that all dissent be silenced—whether through threats of economic destruction, legal bludgeoning, and now, increasingly by appeal to the raw power of the State.

Did they have a straight Holocaust and I missed it?

The firing of Brendan Eich was a bellwether for what has now become a commonplace: the fanatical insistence that all opposition be squelched, and more—that even belief in an alternative view of marriage be eradicated.

Ah, Brendan Eich -- the rich CEO dismissed by his rich Board of Directors, and therefore a martyr (in fact Rod Dreher -- yeah, they couldn't have this party without him -- declares "We are all Brendan Eich now." I wish! I could probably live on his pool fees).  You know, if one of these Jesus freaks got as upset when, say, a minimum-wage worker got fired for talking to the Washington Post about her shitty job, maybe people would take them a little more seriously.

I'm tempted to say it wouldn't be half bad if an actual Gay Gulag appeared for them to be sent off to, but you can't even joke like that around these guys -- in an hour it'll be added to their list of oppressions. I'll say this for them -- their persecution mania is so intense it almost overpowers the smell of their gay-hate. Say, maybe that's the idea!

UPDATE. Had to gender-correct a pronoun for Hadley Arkes because the gay oppressors forced her to have a sex change. (No, actually he was always a man from what I know.) Also comments are so fun you should just dive in. For example, John Wesley Hardin reveals the revolutionary agenda: "'Taste the Rainbow' is now a diktat from our fabulous cultural commissars!" And there's this cautionary tale from Jay B.: "First they came for flowers and I said 'Since when did fags like flowers?' Then they came for the cake and I said 'Pastries are sacred.' Then there was no one to have cake and flowers with me." I think he speaks for us all.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

This old tune jumped into my head today for some reason. 

•   So far, the most delicious reaction is from the American Life League:

Today’s Supreme Court decision strikes at the heart of our nation just as Roe v. Wade did decades ago. Now, by judicial fiat, we are called to honor the fictional union of two people of the same sex. A nation that has lost its values has lost its soul. Our nation has become like a dead body floating downstream, to what destination only the devil knows.

But I'm sure someone will top it by this afternoon.

•   National Review is awash in anti-gay-marriage tears now. Michael Potemra asks whether we could have avoided all this gayness if only the Senate had approved Robert Bork in 1987:

...I’m not saying merely that if Bork hadn’t been rejected, President Reagan wouldn’t have appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote today’s opinion: I think that if Bork had been on the Court, that platform would have given him an outsized opportunity to influence America’s cultural and constitutional discussion – and that America would have been significantly less likely to embrace the sort of the change the Court affirmed today.

Except that Bork was a fucking nut, a gay-hating would-be censor, out of step with ordinary Americans even in that more conservative time -- hell, even Ole Perfesser Instapundit couldn't get with his narrow view of liberty. Also, he looked like an Old Testament prophet cross-bred with Bozo the Clown. Someone, perhaps a kindly intern, may have pointed this out to Potemra, for he continues:

What if, instead of my hypothesis, the American people came to dislike Justice (or eventual Chief Justice!) Bork intensely, and as a result moved even faster in the direction of anti-originalist “living-Constitution” views? But I submit that, in my experience, even legal scholars who are in strong opposition to Bork’s views recognize that he would have been one of the most ferociously intelligent and effective justices ever to serve on the Court. He would, in my opinion, have been a game-changer.

As as our legal scholars go, so goes the nation! Well, these are the same guys who thought we'd all fall in love with Sarah Palin.

•  On gay matters Rod Dreher simply cannot disappoint: He tells his fellow Christians that "persecution is coming" and they should "prepare for resistance." Wonder if that means he's going to postpone his European  trip:

James C., Sordello, and I are going to celebrate the Fourth of July in Lyon at the Café des Fédérations. We will have dinner the night before with Prof. J-F Mayer at Le Boeuf d’Argent, and Sunday lunch at Café Comptoir Abel. My liver will spend the rest of the summer recovering. 

Any other foodie stops in Lyon to consider? I’m thinking probably Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse. Help me out here.

I'm guessing not. Resistance prep is for the rubes. But when he gets back, he expects to see those filtration systems assembled!

•  Oh, Rod:

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

It's interesting that he feels the need to draw this distinction. I guess in the new, air-conditioned and artisanally-fed Benedict Option, old-fashioned Simon of the Desert-type prophets are déclassé. See you jokers at the next Livin'-as-Exiles Brunch!

•   National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke predicts that "the long-term path the Republican party will take after today’s Supreme Court decision" will be mellow and accommodating --

Those hoping to determine which long-term path the Republican party will take after today’s Supreme Court decision need to look no further than to the RNC itself. In a message released immediately after the ruling, Reince Priebus mildly criticized the ruling (correctly, in my view) while acknowledging its “finality;” struck a magnanimous note, confirming that the GOP “[respects] those on the winning side of the case” and remains “committed to finding common ground”; and identified the key priority going forward, which is to ensure the protection of conscience rights and the maintenance of religious liberty.

Meanwhile Cooke's colleague David French froths:

This is the era of sexual liberty — the marriage of hedonism to meaning — and the establishment of a new civic religion. The black-robed priesthood has spoken. Will the church bow before their new masters?

Common ground, indeed.

WHY DO ALL THESE TRANSSEXUALS KEEP SUCKING MY ATTENTION?*

Let's see what's going on at one of our favorite rightwing opinion factories, The Federalist:

How The Hypersexual Trans Movement Hurts Feminism

Hmm. That's --

...These carpet-baggers to womanhood are trying to prove to all of us that what it really means to be a woman is to pose in a playboy bunny outfit and make kissy faces at men. They reinforce this idea to teenage girls: go put on the miniskirt, honey, celebrate Jenner’s beauty, and try to exemplify it in your own life.

(Pause.) Let's try another story.

Bruce Jenner’s Transformation Is A Lose-Lose For Liberal Ideology

Huh. How ya figure?

...For years, a major aim of the sexual revolution has been to deconstruct gender differences as being “social constructs"...

This is the ideology that governs liberal sexual philosophy, and it collides head-on with major aspects of the transgender movement. Transgenderism is unavoidably based on a kind of gender essentialism...

Hey, look at the time. Let's see what else:

Bruce Jenner: Selfie Culture Hero

Great! I could use some light reading.

....As he adapted, he still was treating his body not as his own, but like a shiny new midlife crisis vehicle that came with a great rack worth flashing to his son...

Yikes.

Personally, I don’t care either way, and I wish him well, but I’d prefer we identify actions of bravery with real bravery...

Oh, so we're making too much of Caitlin Jenner, huh? The obvious solution is to continue talking about her.

So is the best response to Mother Nature’s cruel visual inequity more surgery for everyone and glam teams ‘til their outsides match their insides? If that is case, Jenner just won another gold medal in the vanity Olympics...

Aw snap.

Who knows, and who cares. That’s some silly discussion...

Come into the light, Federalist author!

...one that will make “Jezebel rain hellfire down on” you. What matters is how it sounds, how it makes you feel, and if it’s attractive. Silence is easier and more attractive when roving bands of social-justice warriors vociferously silence dissent...

Do these guys get bonuses when they work conservative persecution into stories?

Now that we dispensed with critical thinking and an honest debate of ideas, welcome to a world where what matters most is how you look. It’s a brave new superficial world that had no better launching location than the pages of Vanity Fair. We are a society that has fallen in love with its own reflection.

Please, no one ever show her a magazine rack from the past fifty years; she'll run into the street screaming like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Let's move on:

Bruce Jenner is Not Brave

Oh for --

In a few days, we will celebrate the anniversary of D-Day, when men stormed enemy-filled beaches and died by the thousands...

Jesus Christ, aren't there any stories in this conservative magazine that aren't about transsexuals? Okay, one more:

Taylor Swift Flirts With The Feminist Dark Side

I'll take it -- oh wait, it's full of Lena Dunham. Have you got a copy of Field & Stream?

(*Titular reference here.)

HEY, I READ SOMEPLACE LINCOLN WAS GAY.

Remember Stella Morabito, covered here last year for a magnificent column in which she compared advocates of gay marriage to Symbionese Liberation Army members raping and brainwashing Patty Hearst? Sample passage:

If we step back and take this all in, there should be no question that coercive persuasion can happen on a mass scale in America. Those pushing the [gay marriage] agenda first cultivate a climate that creates social punishment for dissent and social rewards for compliance. Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a “hater,” a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

Soon we'll have Pat Buchanan in assless chaps! Well, Morabito is still writing, and still obsessed with guess what and conservative treason to the cause:

LGBT Activists Arm For Further War On Free Speech

Apparently Morabito read a story about some folks who are campaigning for "a major federal nondiscrimination bill that protects people from prejudice based on sexuality and gender identity," and has decided this means homosexualists will ban Americans from saying things like "we don't serve your kind here, faggot." The whole thing's a joy -- Morabito's writing style remains fever-pitched and prone to metaphor metastasis ("There’s so much to unpack here, but if pressed to dissect this vat of worms...") -- but this is my favorite part:

The LGBT lobby has always known that it needs to get Republicans, conservatives, and evangelicals on board—through their leaders—because they still command a wide swath of America, and, worse, some people might not be intimidated enough to refrain from saying things not in line with the lobby’s agenda. 

Hence, there are infiltration efforts like “Log Cabin Republicans,” whose sole purpose has been to promote the LGBT lobby while claiming to be conservative.

The Log Cabin Republicans! Most of us think of them as charmingly ineffectual, but we're apparently just brainwashed by the liberal media, who cover for their true Mattachine machinations. I like to imagine them back at their founding in 1977, no doubt in some tastefully-appointed sex dungeon, rubbing their hands with glee and telling one another, "yessss, it's a long game, but the rewards will be sooooo-cialistically delicious!"

I wonder who's doing more to hurt the anti-gay-marriage campaign: the LCR, or stuff like this? Or maybe Steve Wiles is a double agent. This thing goes deeper than we imagined! 

IN WHICH ROD DREHER COMPARES THE PLIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA TO GUESS WHAT?

I had a minute, so I figured I'd go look at Rod Dreher's blog for some crazy. He's nothing if not reliable:

There’s a racist joke that speaks to an ugly truth here: “Q: What do you call a millionaire black brain surgeon? A. [racial slur].” The idea is that for people who hate black folks, nothing that black folks do matters; it’s who they are that the racist cares about.

Got that? OK. Take a breath. Now:

Similarly, for many (though certainly not all) modern people liberal conviction, it doesn’t matter that orthodox Christians serve the poor, or do good in their own communities. What matters is their stance on homosexuality.

Him and the New Black Panthers ought to rap about this. Keep building bridges, Brother Rod!

A CHANGE OF SCENE.

Hey look, Rod Dreher took a moment off from his endless war against the gays to address the Baltimore riots! His first instinct is to tell us the rioters have "lawlessness in their hearts," but list ye, sinners, for "the rest of us are destroying the basis for self-governance and order in our polis too." What can this mean? Later Dreher amplifies: He knows a religious school where they have a sexual assault problem, and the obvious reason is that society at large no longer adheres to "the concepts and the language of the Bible," which Biblelessness has apparently been transmitted atmospherically (you know, like Ebola!) to the religious school or something:

...the school’s leadership refuses to use the language or morality, or moral absolutes. It couches everything it says in the language of liberalism, which is to say, in consent and procedure...

Whereas previously the Holy Ghost wrote the disciplinary policies. This is also, per Dreher, why we don't have another MLK; I thought it was because we tend to shoot them. Inevitably:

This is why what is happening in Baltimore is linked to what is happening on Capitol Hill at the Supreme Court today. America in 2015 is a culture that defines the good as whatever the individual says it is.

Son of a gun, he brought it back home! Eventually, Dreher revisits:

It’s society’s fault. It always is. In this view, poor black people are always acted upon, and are never moral agents.

Also, Freddie Gray "was a layabout who had a bail bondsman the way other people have an auto mechanic," thugs, black fatherlessness, etc. -- why, it's as if Dreher remembered there were other people besides homosexuals for him to hate! He ends thus:

...we will get absolutely nowhere toward harmonizing our badly fractured communities if all we do is blame Somebody Else, or some abstraction — White People, Black People, History, Social Injustice — for our own sins and failings, both individual and collective.

If self-awareness were a virus, scientists could build a vaccine off Dreher's immunity.

UPDATE. Many alicublog commenters note the howling irony of Dreher complaining that a sexual assault policy is based on "consent and procedure." ("The language of 'consent and procedure' officially became the basis of our legal system in 1215," says Gromet. "Leave it to Dreher to find the High Middle Ages too liberal.") The lack of clarity among conservatives on the concept of consent is well documented, but it will always be worse with Brother Rod, an every-head-shall-bow-and-every-knee-shall-bend type who probably left Catholicism because they wouldn't let him into Opus Dei.

Kudos to Megalon: "You better watch it, America! The Rod From God is THIS CLOSE to opening a serious can of smite ass!"

Oh, and Dreher has a new Baltimore post up, basically a new entry in the Longest Way To Say 'They're Animals' Competition. And he cites Kevin D. Williamson as a moral authority! Here's an example of Williamson's writing on the riots:

Translation: All liberals are white (blacks are Mau-Maus or something) and they're all as scared of black people as I am.

IT CAN'T MISS.

From: Central Committee
To: The Brethren
Re: Bruce Jenner - Next Steps

Now that Bruce Jenner has come out as both a woman and a Republican, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Some of us are apparently sticking with the traditional conservative approach toward LGBT issues. In fact we’ve heard from a few of you who disapprove of our use of the term “LGBT,” suggesting we revert instead to the schoolyard phrases favored by our movement's founders. But the Central Committee thinks these comrades are missing a big opportunity.

We direct your attention to John Nolte of Breitbart.com. John is no friend to gay and trans people, as shown by his columns such as “GAY MARRIAGE IS THE MEDIA'S VEHICLE, DESTINATION IS TO DESTROY THE CHURCH” and “BULLYING GLAAD GOES ON ANOTHER CENSORSHIP RAMPAGE,” and his Homer Simpsonesque jokes about homosexuals. Yet when Jenner came out, John grasped the nettle. First he announced that liberals are the real bigots. This is SOP, though we give John credit for claiming that “the last person to use the word ‘fag’ in my presence was a liberal celebrity, and the look on my face made vocalizing my disapproval unnecessary.” Imagine, John hanging out with liberal celebrities, let alone intimidating them with his facial expressions! We applaud his nerve.

But John pushed things further in a way I’m not sure many of us fully appreciate. Please note this line from his column:

Unlike the elite media, conservatives and Christians are the true liberals.

And this one:

Like sex outside of marriage or lying, homosexuality is a sin, being gay is not. 

Now, to an outsider this will sound like gibberish, or perhaps even typos; but if you’ve been attending our workshops, you will recall our maxim, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few logical chains.”

Let’s be honest: Gay rights has been a disaster for our movement; we’re losing share on it every day, and for various reasons (cough deep south cough) we can’t back down on policy. But John’s assertions may flip the board for us if we follow up properly.

First, if we can get voters to accept, even on a subconscious level, John's proposition that conservatives are the real liberals and that being gay is not the same thing as being homosexual, we may shake up the current paradigm to the point that voters don’t know what to believe.

And that’s when we’ll activate our follow-plan — one we caution must remain top secret until after the roll-out, and for which we are currently seeking volunteers.

The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays.

You will notice the people identified as “gay” at present are mostly college-educated and high-earning, and favor hair and clothing styles most citizens cannot afford either financially or socially. They also have a strong interest in the arts. It should be clear that these so-called gay people are actually just liberal elitists, pretending to be gay because they think it makes them look like victims, which is the highest aspiration of the liberal (see also their tiresome identification with black people and women).

Many of these “gays” even go to the extreme measure of having sex with members of their own gender, often on a regular basis, which only shows how desperately they pursue the mantle of victimhood.

Conversely, real gays (that is, conservatives) don’t need to make a show of their status by having gay sex. They are good Christian people, married or attracted to members of the opposite gender, who oppose gay marriage and the liberal fascist attempt to force other Christians to make cakes for them — and just happen to be gay.

Volunteers for this project will be expected to come out as gay. You may let it be known, in a casual way, that you’re not that kind of gay, but you must be disciplined enough not to make a big deal of it. If your status is challenged, simply say: Who are you to define me, to tell me how to define myself? Show sympathy for their blinkered vision, and pray (good and loud, and where people can hear you) for your oppressors to learn toleration.

Keep your temper as liberals sputter and make themselves unattractive over this; soon enough, when the idea has taken hold, you will be able to post photographs of your opposite-sex partners with captions like “I love my gay husband” so no one gets the wrong idea. After a while, when gay marriage bans and RFRAs have been instituted with the support of us gays — and our straight allies — people will come to wonder what all the fuss was about back in the dark, dead days of discrimination. Then we will truly be able to say that we have overcome.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Good day for this. Never a bad one, really.
•   At National Review, Mona Charen snarls in "Racial Milestones and a Corrupt Press":

You can do this all day, I know, play “What if a Republican had done...” But the contrast is so galling, it simply must be noted. Today’s Washington Post carries a story about the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as attorney general. The inside headline, on page A7, proclaims “Lynch Will Be First Black Woman to Head the Justice Department.” A glance back at the coverage of Condoleeza Rice’s confirmation as the first black woman Secretary of State? The headline was “Rice Confirmed Amid Criticism.” The story accompanying that headline featured Democrats’ slams against attorney general-nominee Alberto Gonzalez, but not a word about the history-making moment of confirming the first black woman secretary of state.

This tears the veil off the “first blah blahs” the press and Democrats make such a fuss over. It’s completely partisan. It has nothing to do with true pride in the accomplishments of once oppressed peoples. Conservative women’s accomplishments are illegitimate. Black conservatives are invisible...

The Washington Post is only one hydra-head of the Liberal Media, so I went to see what other treasonous news orgs had reported on Rice's milestone. The New York Times:

Condoleezza Rice, a scholar of the cold war who was President Bush's closest foreign policy adviser during his 2000 campaign and throughout his first term, was sworn in as secretary of state Wednesday evening, hours after the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 85 to 13.

Ms. Rice, who is the second woman, and the first black woman, to become secretary of state...

Talk about burying the lede! Worse, CNN didn't get to Rice's race/gender qualifications till the third paragraph. And NPR, well, you can imagine, the first line was probably about how she was a fascist or something --

The Senate votes 85-13 to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, making her the first black woman to serve as the nation's top diplomat.

-- okay, well then surely those commies at the Associated Press --

WASHINGTON (AP) — America's first black woman secretary of state took the ceremonial oath of office Friday surrounded by family and friends...

Look, it's no fair, that Democrat bitch got a headline! Elsewhere at National Review, you can read Mona Charen's racial opinions about Obama's Secret Service protection: namely, that Obama has torn the races apart, so now if someone sic-semper-tyrannises him "it’s a good bet that close to 100 percent of blacks and a good percentage of others would believe that a demonic conspiracy brought him down." Yeesh. Maybe cook gave her some runny eggs this morning.

•   Rod Dreher's blog remains a mix of persecution mania and book peddling, but I have to to tell you he surprised me in his latest sermon on how the gays are persecuting Christians:

We must try, anyway, because if we are going to hold on to the orthodox Christian faith in this increasingly anti-Christian culture, we are going to have to learn how to endure, and to endure joyfully.

I ran out of time this morning on the stage, but I wanted to talk briefly about how we will have much to learn from the African-American experience. A black friend’s grandmother, encouraging her children in the 1940s not to let their spirits and their dignity be broken by white hatred, counseled, “Don’t be the kind of person they think you are.” That’s great advice for Christians going forward.

Sure, they experienced slavery, segregation, and lynchings. but Big Gummint made us bake a cake. Now for a rousing rendition of that old cracker spiritual, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Gay."

•   Speaking of whiners, here's Mollie Hemingway claiming we're heading toward a joyless Orwellian dystopia of "comedy speakeasies" where "people will have to have the password. But they’ll also have to be patted down for recording equipment," etc., because comedians are ascared someone will hear their jokes outside the club and some tattletale will get them sent to PC Jail. What's her evidence for this? 1.) The New York Post said David Letterman's audience was "'stunned' by his 'sexist' joke"; 2.) "Jamie Foxx was accused of transphobia"; 3.) Trevor Noah lost his Daily Show gig -- no wait, that didn't happen; rather, he "received criticism." And... Michael Richards. No, really. If a white guy can't yell "nigger" over and over onstage without getting a hard time for it 12 fucking goddamn years ago, we're headed for totalitarianism. Maybe if Hemingway keeps this up, the conservative movement will gain strength from all the shitty comics who finally have an excuse for nobody liking them.

BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable. 

Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

A WEEK OF SHORTER ROD DREHERS.

4/6/15, 10:42 am: The gays are oppressing us Christians.
4/6/15, 2:02 pm: Buy my book.
4/6/15, 5:35 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians
4/7/15, 12:05 am: Facebook and the gay drag queens are oppressing us Christians.
4/7/15, 5:08 am: Buy my book.
4/7/15, 12:45 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians (and after Ross Douthat was theoretically so nice to them!).
4/7/15, 10:57 pm: I know many of you must be sick and tired by now of my posting so heavily on the gay rights vs. religious liberty question, but the gays are oppressing us Christians.
4/7/15, 11:51 pm: The sex liberals are oppressing us Christians and Muslims.
4/8/15, 8:50 am: The sex liberals are close-minded about abortionmurder, and are oppressing us Christians.
4/8/15, 11:14 pm: Buy tickets to my festival.
4/8/15, 11:45 pm: Buy my book.
4/9/15, 4:26 am: The gays are oppressing us Christians, and Jews too I bet.
4/9/15, 8:52 am: The sex liberals and the gays are oppressing us Christians but we will go Benedict and outbreed them and then they'll be sorry.
4/9/15, 10:38 am: Buy my book.

UPDATE. Thanks, commenters, for letting me know I had the wrong dates at first -- this is not speculative fiction, but American History X-for-Jesus! Also thanks, commenters, for comments -- for rahab's "TL;DReher," for Jay B's "Imagine something being shoved down one's throat repeatedly, forever..." for Ted the slacker's "50 Rods of Gay," and so much more.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of the funniest things by two of the funniest people of all time.

•    It is axiomatic that Jonah Goldberg can make anything worse, and the Indiana RFRA case is no exception. Here he shows evidence of having been crammed with some libertarian revisionism: Goldberg argues that the pre-"clarification" RFRA was not like Jim Crow because Jim Crow was really about economic oppression -- because everything is! -- and had nothing to do with anything so gauche as violent prejudice against a despised minority, and still less to do with political power:

Of course, the more infamous Jim Crow laws were aimed at barring blacks from being able to vote. But there was a pernicious logic to such efforts. Denying blacks the vote, even in states where they were the majority of citizens, guaranteed that they couldn’t overturn racist state economic regulations. 

In fact, says Goldberg, Confederate businesses loved serving black people, but because a flood of emancipated black workers caused a labor shortage (forget it, he's on a roll), both blacks and black-loving shopkeepers were Jim Crowed into submission not by the Klan nor by the White Leagues, but by Big Business -- you know, the people conservatives worshiped as gods until Tim Cook said he was gay. "Ultimately," says Goldberg, "the federal government had to use just coercion to crush unjust state-government coercion," without mentioning that his own magazine was against that "just coercion" every step of the way; they affect to feel sorry about that now, and one would like to think that they'll apologize for their absurd attitude toward gays fifty years from now (if they and the nation last so long), but alas, Goldberg shows that they haven't really learned a thing:

In Indiana, the most vocal and arguably the most powerful voices against even the perception of anti-gay discrimination have come from the business community. And, one suspects, there are plenty of people in the wedding-planning industry eager for such business. 

We could impose a fine on recalcitrant religious wedding photographers. But the market already does that, every time they turn away paying customers.

They still think Title II is an injustice and don't want it applied to anyone else.

•  One Bob & Ray thing isn't enough: Enjoy this bit -- first four minutes of this clip from the Letterman show, but the rest is okay too -- in which "Barry Campbell" talks about his disastrous opening in the play "The Tender T-Bone."

•    From the Weird Reaction file: You may have seen the fascinating story of a suitcase full of photos, receipts, and diary entries chronicling a German businessman's extra-marital affair forty-five years ago that has been revived as a gallery show. Most of us find it interesting or creepy or a spur to reflection. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, however, reacts thusly:

IT WASN’T AN AFFAIR, it was performance art. Bow down and don’t criticize, philistines!

Most of the time I think Reynolds is just putting it on for the rubes, but sometimes it seems he really is that weird mix of Babbitt and Nathan Bedford Forrest he plays on the internet.

•    Speaking of the arts, I went over to Acculturated to take in the latest by Mark Judge, or Mark Gauvreau Judge or Gark Jauvreau Mudge or whatever he calls himself these days. He's sighing over a 1954 Sports Illustrated cover showing a pretty girl in a modest one-piece bathing suit largely obscured by sea spray. As you may have guessed, this inspires a meditation on how much sexier things were before sideboob.

More than fifty years later, the Pamela Nelson photo ignites my passion more than anything that is in the hyped, recently published 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. The photographs in the new swimsuit issue are dull. The poses are clichéd, similar, and the models look like cyborgs. There is the arching-back pose. The bedroom-eyes-on-the-beach shot. The backside shot (or shots). Did I mention the arching-back pose?

In our culture today, pornography has excelled at titillating the masses, but is poor at capturing the soul. And no matter what our sex-drenched society tells us, sex is sexier when the soul is involved.

Every single one of the poses named above comes with a link, so Acculturated readers can decide whether they want to beat off to contemporary or vintage pin-ups -- which I guess is how some people measure cultural seriousness. Chacun à son gout is very very true...

•    Still speaking of the arts, this is from a report on wingnut intellectual George Nash's speech to the Philadelphia Society last month:

“Many conservatives, of course, including many in this room, are laboring valiantly and effectively in the realm of cultural renewal,” Nash said. “But as a historian I am constrained to note that the ‘progressives’ in this country continue to predominate in the production of culture, and in the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites. As long as this imbalance continues, the fate of post-Reagan conservatism will be problematic.”

Do remember this, dear reader: You may think of novels, plays, ballet, music, etc. as works of art that illuminate the human condition, but to the great minds of the conservative movement they are merely widgets in "the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites." Their policies are inhuman, that is, because they don't really relate to humanity.

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES...

I'd like to forget about Indiana, but it keeps exponentiating stupidity like some kind of Moron Collider. Some jerks menaced an anti-gay-marriage pizzeria, and the brethren declared this the fault of the reporter who revealed they were anti-gay-marriage. PJ Media's Scott Ott claimed the reporter "fabricated" the story "out of nothing" (that is, she accurately reported what the pizza people said); then people started menacing the reporter.

By the way, does anyone here approve of pizza shops getting death threats? I didn't think so. I suppose if you really did, you'd have adopted the successful gamergate model  and I'd be hearing how the threats were just satire. But the big story in rightwing circles is that you, me and Ted Kennedy have the pizzeria pinned down with Kalashnikovs.

"The left doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as they get what they want," raved Ott. "Leftists use Gay people as blunt instruments to hammer only Christens," agreed Samuel Gonzalez at Right Wing News. "They don’t have the guts to go after Muslims who literally throw Homosexuals off roofs in the Middle East." (I don't normally bother to say this, but all rightblogger spellings/capitalizations are verbatim.) And of course the Daily Caller's resident drama queen Jim Treacher cranks it to eleven:

The social-justice bullies of the modern left got what they wanted. Gay marriage is legal in Indiana. But that’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, because they need to think of themselves as victims.

That last line must be some sort of inside joke.

...Exit question for gay-marriage enthusiasts: If you’re so sure you’re right, if your stance is so strong, why do you feel the need to destroy anybody who so much as dissents from it?

Why do I what? I don't remember calling in a death threat to the pizza parlor -- but Treacher's not talking to me or you, he's declaiming to the galleries as he plays the lead in The Tragedy of the Victims of Big Gay, and hams it way up. That's what all these guys are doing. If they can get enough people to buy their martyr act, they seem to hope, they might get them to think American Christians are actually being ground under the heel of homosexuals. It's win-whine!

UPDATE. Matt Welch of Reason:

The bad news, for those of us on the suddenly victorious side of the gay marriage debate, is that too many people are acting like sore winners, not merely content with the revolutionary step of removing state discrimination against same-sex couples in the legal recognition of marriage, but seeking to use state power to punish anyone who refuses to lend their business services to wedding ceremonies they find objectionable. That's not persuasion, that's force, and force tends to be the anti-persuasion among those who are on the receiving end of it.

Like Title II of the Civil Rights Act. Well, I expect they'll get rid of that soon enough. (Welch quotes Rod Dreher in support of his argument, which is just perfect.)