Religious Liberty? Or Dogmatic Transphobia?

And what will the exodus of the Nones turn into? Passive resistance like what filled the speakeasies under Prohibition, undermining it with every jug of moonshine and bathtub gin? More open, organized pushback?

Who knows: but I have an actual example of what could happen in mind: For 300-plus years, the Catholic Church was the dominant institution in Quebec Canada, with immense political as well as social power.  Then around 1960, for reasons historians still debate, Québécois just had enough, and quit showing up. It wasn’t “organized,” but it was  unstoppable. The mass departure sparked what is now called “The Quiet Revolution,” and included the collapse of clerical hegemony.

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A Delightful Sketch of John Woolman

The African Saint started Western Europe on the downward course of religious persecution proper. Before him there had, indeed, been persecution of religions for racial or political reasons, but St. Augustine was perhaps the chief of those who supplied the religious motive for religious persecution, and turned God Himself into Moloch, a feat which no one but a really “good” man could have performed. Thenceforth, until the age of the much abused Whigs and sceptics, all the best people in the world were engaged in torturing each other and making earth into hell. It was through St. Augustine rather than through Constantine that the Church drank poison. The torch was handed down from him through St. Dominic and St. Ignatius till it scorched the hand of St. John [Calvin] of Geneva by the pyre of [Michael] Servetus. They were all, at least after their conversions, unusually “good” men, but not good all through like John Woolman.

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Abortion & Civil War – 2019 Update; 2021 Postscript

In 1988 I wrote a substantial essay laying out my views about abortion, and describing how they had evolved over time. The piece also considered the increasing parallels, both rhetorical and political,  between this struggle and the Civil War. Thirty-plus years later, despite some continuing evolution and updates, much of the piece still seems relevant, … Continue reading Abortion & Civil War – 2019 Update; 2021 Postscript →

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Emily Dickinson: 192 Years Young; and Just as Mysterious

Biographers note that Emily Dickinson, who was born on December 10 in 1830, was most productive in the first half of the 1860s. Secluded within the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts (except when tending the flower garden), she turned out hundreds of poems, mostly short, striking, often astonishing — but unnoticed by the outside world; her fame came after her death, which was likely okay with her.

Biographers speculate about what spurred this massive outburst (she left 1700 poems behind, almost none with titles, given numbers  instead). Some extended personal crisis? Missives to a secret love?  (She did seem to have some “affairs of the heart,” but most were entirely epistolary, and the few signals are mixed enough to suggest some may have been same sex.)

I haven’t read all the biographies, but want to dip my amateur oar into this rippling reflecting pool, to mention a possibility not dwelt upon in those I’ve seen: could the flood of verse have been her way of coping with the Civil War?

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Spy Story of the Day, Maybe

So here I ask myself: what spook outfit would want to harass the godfather? (First guess: all of them, because he’s sidelined & made fools of them from the jump.)

And how could they do that, with decent cover?

Now recall the convenient fact that apparently Junior lied like a rug (as did so many others) when he was at the Intel Committee before. So in some cubbyhole at Langley, or wherever, the light went on:
Burr -Voilà!

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