What Faith Is He Defending?

Dotty Prince Charles, whose titles should he ascend the throne will include Defender of the Faith, seems to be a bit confused about what faith he is supposed to defend. As a London newspaper reports:

"The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11....

"The Prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington. "I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

"It is understood that Prince Charles did not - and does not - believe that the actions of 19 hijackers should tarnish the reputation of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Muslims around the world.

"Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, was also at the meeting at St James's Palace. 'His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture,' he said."

Loose Canon is a royal history buff and ordinarily would be kindly disposed towards Charles. But now I can only say: Prince Charles, please go home. Americans have remained incredibly tolerant of law-abiding followers of Islam, refusing, for example, to adopt the policy of profiling at airports lest it hurt feelings.

Is Camilla as dotty as Charles? She seems like such an appropriate Queen of England--if, that is, she was not married to Mr. Parker-Bowles in the eyes of God. By the way, the Defender of the Faith title was bestowed upon Henry VIII by the pope. Then Henry got confused about what faith he was defending. Maybe it runs in the family.

Don't Be Spooked!

Loose Canon is a bit put off by all those adults who dress up as ghoulies and ghosties (or, more likely, as George Bush looking like Hitler nowadays) on Halloween. But you have to be a killjoy not to want children to have fun tonight. Christians, adults and children alike, of course, should take time from secular festivities to remember all the saints--those whose names are known and those whose names are unknown--tomorrow on All Saints Day. We should remember our dead on on All Souls Day, which follows.

But don't be spooked by Halloween--that's the message of an informative Christianity Today piece on the origins of the day:

More than a thousand years ago Christians confronted pagan rites appeasing the lord of death and evil spirits. Halloween's unsavory beginnings preceded Christ's birth when the druids, in what is now Britain and France, observed the end of summer with sacrifices to the gods. It was the beginning of the Celtic year, and they believed Samhain, the lord of death, sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. The waning of the sun and the approach of dark winter made the evil spirits rejoice and play nasty tricks. Most of our Halloween practices can be traced back to the old pagan rites and superstitions.

But the church from its earliest history has invited people to celebrate the season differently. Chrysostom tells us that as early as the fourth century, the Eastern church celebrated a festival in honor of all saints. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians celebrated 'All Saints' Day' in May in the rededicated Pantheon. Eventually the All Saints' festival was moved to November 1. Called All Hallows Day, it became the custom to call the evening before 'All-Hallow E'en.'

Some people question the whole idea of co-opting pagan festivals and injecting them with biblical values. Did moving the celebration to November to coincide with the druidic practices of the recently conquered Scandinavians simply lay a thin Christian veneer over a pagan celebration? Have we really succeeded in co-opting Christmas and Easter, or have neopagans taken them back with Easter bunnies and reindeer? In a sense, it's always been the same debate: do we ignore a pagan romp, merge with it, attack it, or cover it up with seasonal fun?

History would indicate that there has been much value in the church's Christianizing the calendar, introducing rich traditions of celebration and spiritual disciplines. Its success could be debated, but when the neighbors are fearfully sacrificing to a lord of death and dodging witches' tricks, it would seem an apt time to celebrate the Lord of life and resurrection. The ancient Christians, after all, had thought out their strategy quite well: the idea behind All Saints' Day is the precise opposite of chains, moaning ghosts, and evil spirits.

When Science Gets Ahead of Morality

"An Instance of the Fingerpost," Iain Pears' wonderful novel set in the Oxford University of Cromwell's England, is one of the most delightful novels you'll ever have a chance to read. It's a murder mystery, but it deals with science, religion and academic life. The church is portrayed as holding up scientific discoveries (specifically how blood circulates and thus the life-saving art of transfusions) because it disapproved of using dead human bodies in research.

Of course, we ultimately, both the churched and the unchurched, decided that there is nothing wrong with dissecting the human body. But was it really so horrible that the Church slowed this just a bit? Shouldn't we at least consider the moral implications of scientific advances before we take a leap? Steven Spielberg's splendid but strangely unheralded movie "Artificial Intelligence," which is about robots in a world of the future, is really about what could happen if scientific advances outstrip our ability to deal with them morally.

This is--of course--an awfully prolix way of getting to the scientific questions of our day, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning and the like. A new survey indicates that the public is far more willing to go slowly and think through the moral implications than the press and other segments of the opinion-establishment. Christianity Today reports:

If you read the mainstream press, you would be forgiven for believing that America is besotted with science, that only half-crazed, pro-life "extremists" have any doubts about the miracle cures that will spring any moment from embryonic stem-cell research, and that "therapeutic cloning" is the technology of the future.

According to a new opinion poll conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), you would be very wrong. Polling, of course, depends a lot on the questions you ask. So you may have seen polls quoted this way and that on these key issues. The VCU poll is generally fair. It does not bend over in either direction, and while we may wish some of the questions had been asked a little differently, its results are clear enough to turn upside down many of the assumptions of advocates for destroying embryos for research or for "therapy." Americans are much more level-headed than many editorial boards and certainly than many members of Congress.

Libby: Truth Is the Best Policy

Indicting vice presidential aide Scooter Libby was the right thing to do -- he allegedly did not tell the truth before the grand jury.

Libby is the new Martha Stewart. My colleague Charlotte Allen had the same thought:

And the charge [wasn't] be revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent (double boo hoo!), but that all-purpose refuge of federal prosecutors when they can't make substantive charges stick: misleading the federal investigators who couldn't make the substantive charges stick. That's the "crime" that got Martha Stewart giving cooking lessons in the federal hoosegow for five months because they couldn't nail her on insider trading.

How the Elites Are Destroying Civilization...

Loose Canon believes that much of the intense opposition to the war in Iraq stems from a loss of belief in the United States as a force for good in the world. The same thing happened to England. It was partly occasioned by the casualties of two world wars (in the same way that the deaths of so many young men in Vietnam affected us. As the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last points out, however, that was not the whole story:

[A]nother important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him.... The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

This sounds so like our own elite--sentimentalists, who speak of hatred rather than challenges to freedom, and unable to confront the realities of a dangerous world. It will be far more dangerous if their view prevails.

Miered No More!

The ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers has ended without more pitting of conservative against conservative. I am proud of the conservatives who opposed her: Because she is (probably) a genuine conservative, Miers most likely would have found a way to reach the rulings "our side" wants. But we showed that we aren't just interested in the results but in the constitutional reasoning behind them. This was a fight about ideas.

You can tell from the chagrin in E. J. Dionne's column--E. J. is the reliable voice of Washington Democratics--that withdrawing the nomination was the correct path. Loose Canon does not buy Dionne's wishful argument that this deals a death blow to the conservative argument that a president's judicial nominees ought, in normal circumstances, to be honored.

Conservatives honored that principle when Ruth Bader Ginsberg, well to the left of the center, was confirmed by a vote of 96-3 in the U.S. Senate. The Miers nomination, however, was an unusual situation: The president sent up a nominee who was woefully lacking in stature for a permanent job on the highest court in the land. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal rightly judges the impact of withdrawing the nomination:

"George Bush's opponents, on the left and on the right, have wanted to shove his presidency into a hole for a long time. Their chance was at hand. He just took it away from them. No matter which of two briefcases Patrick Fitzgerald brings to work today, it's time for this presidency to go back to work."

Charmaine Yoest has a nice piece speculating on who could be the new nominee. Yoest calls for somebody whose name is "not anywhere near" the top of Harry Reid's list:

"Someone like Judge Janice Rogers Brown. People for the American Way hate her. Need I say more? This would be what someone referred to as a 'bench-clearing fight.' Bring it on."

And may we say a few words for the great Texas lady who has so graciously ended the impasse? Here is a nice look at Ms. Miers from the Washington Post.

Is Barack Obama a Spiritual Leader?

Loose Canon is not a spiritual person. (She believes in the teachings of the Magisterium and the unchanging reality of truth.) Baptist minister Albert Mohler has, no doubt, quite a few reservations about the dear old Magisterium. But he also sees the peril of the sentimental spiritualism that is spreading so rapidly:

"Hypermodern America has become a collectivity of 'spiritualities' even as the contours of American culture become increasingly secularized. How is this possible? The emergence of spirituality as an alternative to historic Christianity is itself a product of secularism--offering universal 'meaning' without doctrine, truth, or specific content."

Quoting a column by Newsday's James Pinkerton, I previously noted that any kind of religious expression might be beneficial to Republicans and harmful to Democratic aspirations. Is spirituality, however, good for the Democratic Party?

Mohler reports that Leigh E. Schmidt, a Princeton religion professor, has argued that progressives should embrace spirituality. It's a fascinating hypothesis--so interesting that I hope you'll allow me to quote at length, beginning with a description of spirituality in the 19th century, as expressed by an abolitionist turned colonel in the Civil War:

"Schmidt also points to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical abolitionist who later served as a colonel in an African-American regiment in the Civil War. Higginson took Thoreau and Algier one step further, arguing that Americans should simply embrace spirituality as a diverse testimony to one fundamental reality. In Higginson's words: 'I have worshiped in an Evangelical church when thousands rose to their feet at the motion of one hand. I have worshiped in a Roman Catholic church when the lifting of one finger broke the motionless multitude into twinkling motion, till the magic sign was made, and all was still once more. But I never for an instant have supposed that this concentrated moment of devotion was more holy or more beautiful than when one cry from a minaret hushes a Mohammedan city to prayer, or when, at sunset, the low invocation, 'Oh! The gem in the lotus--oh! The gem in the lotus,' goes murmuring, like the cooing of many doves, across the vast surface of Tibet.'

"As Schmidt explains, Higginson's vision called for 'a cosmopolitan piety in which religious identities were open, fluxional, and sympathetic rather than closed, fixed, and proselytizing.'

"Schmidt sees a political possibility behind his analysis of America's religious landscape. A proponent of 'progressive' causes, Schmidt believes that American political liberals should embrace spirituality as a means of countering the influence of conservatives and traditional Christians....

"Interestingly, Schmidt points to Sen. Barack Obama, the recently elected senator from Illinois who has emerged as one of the leading lights in the Democratic Party. Obama, Schmidt advises, wants to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision.'"

With all due respect to Senator Obama, LC remains non-spiritual. Mohler concludes:

"Spirituality is all that is left when truth claims are removed. Spirituality represents little more than an effort to claim higher "values" without the demands of truth, revelation, and obedience.

"Of all people, Christians should be the first to see this for what it is--an effort to replace the Christian faith with an empty 'spiritual' shell. Biblical Christianity is profoundly spiritual--but Christian spirituality is an expression of Christian truth, not its substitute."

The Virtue of Intolerance...

Loose Canon hates to be the skunk at the garden party, but the recent report on the values of religious Americans is not good news. "Faith and Family in America," which was released last week by Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, the PBS show, found that Americans are overwhelmingly religious. That's not the bad news.

Here is what Loose Canon sees as a sign that we're losing our way:

While the survey reveals that 71 percent of Americans believe "God's plan for marriage is one man, one woman, for life," only 22 percent say they see divorce as a sin. Even among religious conservatives (Protestant or Catholic), only about one-third say divorce is sinful. Protestants are more likely than other groups to get married, but they are no more likely to stay married.

About half of Americans now see cohabitation as acceptable, but only 40 percent support "trial marriage," in which people intending to marry live together first.

Although the traditional nuclear family continues to be prized, only 19 percent of families fulfill that ideal (nondivorced parents with children). And '48 percent of Americans live in households that depart dramatically from the ideal,' says John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C.

But divorce is a sin. (As the child of an adored but twice-divorced mother, I don't advocate being mean to people who are divorced. I do, however, believe that divorce must be acknowledged for what it is: breaking the laws of God. I admire my mother, an Episcopalian, for refraining from taking Communion for much of her life.)

What this survey shows is that while many Americans retain a patina of Christian values, they no longer understand the reason behind them. If you do not know that same-sex "marriage" is sinful behavior, you may be against it--for a while. Without the kind of grounding people of my mother's generation had, we are headed for a society in which anything--soon--will go.

Hooray for Harriet

What can I say? Harriet Miers has demonstrated courage and she has done the right thing. Now, as Tony Blankley suggests, we can have the debate over constitutional principles that we wanted all along, instead of a fight between "blind presidential loyalists and sighted presidential loyalists." Ms. Miers has served her country, and now we have a glimpse of why Bush liked her so much in the first place.

2000

Just as the left loves homeless people--such great street theatre!--they have made shameless use of those who died serving our country in Iraq. Don't confuse their reporting on the 2000th death of an American soldier in this heroic struggle for freedom in Iraq and safety for America with genuine mourning.

"The anti-war Left couldn't wait for the death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq," writes Michelle Malkin. "Peace activists have been gearing up for protests, vigils, and other events this week to mark the completely bogus milestone. Why 2,000? Was the 2nd or 555th or 1,678th death not as worth mourning as any other death with nice round numbers?

"Cindy Sheehan barely contained her macabre lust for the spotlight in preparation for the artificially constructed, media-hyped occasion. 'I'm going to go to Washington, D.C., and I'm going to give a speech at the White House, and after I do, I'm going to tie myself to the fence and refuse to leave until they agree to bring our troops home,' Sheehan told a reporter last week as the death count neared her lottery number pick."

May we offer prayers for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and for those they have left behind. Like Casey Sheehan, many had signed up for a second tour of duty and knew that they served in the cause of freedom.

In the Swim...

One of the most beautiful passages in the astonishingly beautiful Gospel of St. John is Christ's healing of the man born blind:

"And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. ...

"And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing."

Some Biblical scholars have interpreted the pool of Siloam as purely metaphorical. But Christianity Today reports that archeologists have found what appears to be that very pool.

"'To dismiss John as not historically important is absurd,' [Princeton Theological Seminary Professor James] Charlesworth said. 'Now it becomes clear that the Gospel of John does have reliable historical information. We have found there is such a pool, precisely as John describes it.'

"Tradition has always located the Pool of Siloam near the end of Hezekiah's water tunnel, which dates to the eighth century B.C. The pool under excavation is just a few yards from a much smaller Byzantine-era pool that visitors to the area had been calling the Pool of Siloam."

Godliness Good for GOP?

Is any expression of religious faith harmful to Democratic hopes of taking back the White House? It's obvious that political reverends can influence their flocks to vote Republican. However, apolitical expressions of religious faith may be just as bad for them, according to Newsday columnist James Pinkerton:

"The 18th-century Scottish politician Alexander Fletcher once declared, let me write a nation's songs, and I care not for its laws. By that he meant that culture precedes politics; it's a person's culture, including religion, that shapes his or her attitudes toward government.

"So the recent visit of Joel Osteen, pastor of a Houston megachurch - he filled most of the Nassau Coliseum and Madison Square Garden - is a revealing indicator of the future cultural and political direction of the country. In the past six years, the boyish Osteen has emerged as perhaps the hottest of the Christian televangelists.

"Yet unlike, say, Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, Osteen is entirely apolitical. But make no mistake: Osteen is a Christian proselytizer....

"And more bad news is coming. John Gibson, my colleague at Fox News, has just published a book, 'The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.' The liberals doing the plotting, including the litigating, Gibson adds, are almost all Democrats.

"Critics will savage the book, of course, but one suspects Osteen's fans will agree with Gibson. Such agreement is gold for the GOP - and will outshine whatever happens to Karl Rove or Tom DeLay."

Rosa Parks, R.I.P.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to sit in the back of the bus changed history, has died at her residence in Detroit.

Mrs. Parks, who was 92, had genuine courage. La Shawn Barber paid tribute in a moving column:

"Parks and her husband Raymond didn't have children, as far as I can tell from news accounts of her life. In a way, I suppose those she inspired to stand up to injustice were her offspring. Once people understand the power they have in a free country, the moral authority to demand justice, watch out. I once heard this line from a movie: 'Change the way people think, and things will never be the same.'

"Whatever her reasons that fateful day, I'm glad she decided to stay in her seat."

Joe Sobran, some of whose opinions make me queasy, is not a writer I often quote. However, a snippet from his piece on true courage and feigned courage, posted elsewhere, speaks to the occasion:

"[Bill] Clinton is a perfect specimen of bogus courage -- the sort of guy who says things that are now safe and even fashionable with an air of jut-jawed determination that suggests he would have said them when they were not only unfashionable, but dangerous to espouse. In fact he has even told us that when he was nine years old, he and his little friends, in solidarity with Rosa Parks, rode in the backs of buses in Arkansas! Clinton is only a parody of many other liberals who want us to believe that their willingness to conform to today's fashions is proof that they would have had the courage to defy yesterday's fashions. Somehow I find it hard to believe that today's coward would have been yesterday's hero, if only he'd had the chance. More likely he would have been, like most people, a timid conformist in any circumstances."

Not the Right Time to Change Celibacy Rules...

Loose Canon is glad that the synod upheld the rules about priestly celibacy--not that there was any real chance it would not do so. But here's the scoop:

After weeks of soul-searching that identified Catholicism's global priest shortage and the sacramental status of remarried Catholics as top concerns, the bishops came full circle, reaffirming traditional teaching, based on Christ's example, as the best answer to the challenges of modernity. ...

At the start of the worldwide gathering, bishops had jockeyed to set the synod agenda and test the limits of their freshman pontiff. Issues often ducked during John Paul's 26-year reign took center stage as bishops pondered the possibility of introducing exemplary married men known as "viri probati" into the priesthood as a means of stemming the priest shortage. One bishop even challenged the theological validity of the priesthood's celibacy requirement.

At the Sunday Mass, Benedict offered an initial reaction to the synod while giving a clear reaffirmation of traditional church teaching.

Priestly celibacy is 'a precious gift and the sign of the undivided love towards God,' Benedict said, linking the practice of celibacy to the Eucharist, the sacrament of bread and wine that was the synod's official theme.

The rules regarding celibacy could be changed--we have had married priests in the long history of the Church. But if the Church were ever to change this practice, now is not the time. Celibacy is a sign of contradiction to the sexuality-drenched, selfish times in which we find outselves.

Banned in Manitoba!

No, it's not a dirty book. It's Anglican Planet, an alternative newspaper for orthodox Anglicans in Canada. Bishop Jim Njegovan of the Diocese of Brandon refuses to allow it in his diocese. The bishop says that the Anglican Planet is "sowing the seeds of distrust and disdain within the Church, and that the publishers have no respect for those in authority over them."

However, the Reverend David Harris, a parish priest in Charlottetown who co-edits the new publication, seems to recognize a higher authority than the Rt. Rev. Njegovan--the ancient teachings of Christianity:

"Harris said the group wanted to present more conservative viewpoints on topics such as same-sex marriage.

"'The whole issue of human sexuality is a big issue that needs to be talked about from every side. And if a certain group bullies their way into it, then there's no real solution to the problem.'"

More Controversial than a Vampire...

Vampire novelist Anne Rice is about to find out what it's like to have a really controversial Hero in her novels. Newsweek explains:

"For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish 'Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,' a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself.

It seems that Rice has returned to the Catholic Church. Her conversion grew out of a series of personal trials, including the death of her husband. "I promised," she told Newsweek, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord."

Welcome home, Ms. Rice. But are you prepared for the criticism you will face from a secular culture that can accept the supernatural better in novels about ghouls than in belief in Christ?

Pagans in Prison: The Naked Truth...

Alas, Pagans in the British prison system are facing some restrictions on their religious practice--no nudity is allowed, and wands that could be used to beat the living daylights out of somebody won't be tolerated:

"Wands, wine, and tarot cards, but not nudity, may be allowed in Pagan acts of worship in prison, says the Prison Service’s first written guidance on Pagan worship....

"Requests for a Pagan chaplain must be made through the Pagan Federation Prison Manager, say the guidelines. Hoodless robes may be permitted during private and corporate worship, but 'skyclad' (naked) worship is not allowed. A risk assessment must be carried out first if prisoners are allowed to have tarot cards.

"Prisoners may use flexible twigs as wands and set up a desk or small table as an altar...."

And you call this religious freedom?

Finding the Right Voice...

It was obvious at the synod in Rome that that Latin has been so tragically neglected in recent decades that even bishops and cardinals no longer comprehend the Church's ancient lingua:

"O, tempora! o mores! The rolling thunder that is the Latin language is in such trouble, even in its last redoubt, the heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, that cardinals and bishops have begged Pope Benedict XVI to put it on a life support machine.

"The Princes of the Church appear to have the same problem that bedevilled generations of baffled English schoolboys battling their way across the three divided parts of Gaul with Julius Caesar — they don't speak it, read it or understand it. And while the grandly dressed and highly respected congregation at the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops may not have to write out 100 times Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres as a punishment for their ignorance, they appear now to be at least as embarrassed as any ink-stained duffer who confuses the vocative with the nominative."

The Church is a repository of both truth and beauty. By allowing widespread celebration of the Tridentine Mass, the Church could serve both. More indults for the Latin Mass, coupled with a demand for better vernacular translations. That's the Loose Canon prescription for a restoration of liturgical dignity--and it appears that the Church will be using more Latin (over the reluctance of some prelates).

The National Catholic Reporter's John Allen explains:

"[I]t appears that Synod sources told NCR Oct. 22 that all the propositions passed with solid majorities. The proposition that attracted the largest number of "no" votes was number 36, which suggests that in international celebrations the Mass be said in Latin, apart from the readings, the homily, and the Prayers of the Faithful, and that priests be trained from the seminary to use Latin prayers as well as Gregorian Chant. It also recommends that the faithful be educated to do so as well. Even that proposition, however, passed with a comfortable majority."

Mirabile dictu.

Miered...

Loose Canon has long admired George W. Bush's refusal to be intimidated, especially by those who oppose the Iraq war. But right now his ruling passion--that Harriet Miers deserves to be on the Supreme Court--is wrong. The word on the Sunday morning talk shows, however, is that Bush is digging in his heels; he won't budge.

That means it is up to Republican senators to buck the president. If you're interested in how this fiasco happened, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund has the inside track. Fund agrees that Bush won't give up:

"President Bush has returned from a weekend in Camp David, where much of the discussion centered on the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers. While the president is determined to press forward, the prognosis he received was grim. Her visits with senators have gone poorly. Her written answers to questions from the Senate were sent back as if they were incomplete homework. The nominee herself has stumbled frequently in the tutorials in which government lawyers are grilling her in preparation for her Nov. 7 hearings.

"The president trusts his instincts, and they are usually right. But when they fail him, the result can be calamitous. Take last December's nomination of Bernard Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security. After several scandals involving his time as head of New York City's police quickly surfaced, it was then learned he had employed an illegal alien as a nanny and failed to submit required Social Security payments. After only a week, Mr. Bush quietly allowed Mr. Kerik to withdraw his name."

According to Fund, Bush will not be so sensible about a member of his inner circle:

"Many longtime supporters of President Bush have been startled to get phone calls from allies of the president strongly implying that a failure to support Ms. Miers will be unhealthy to their political future. 'The message in Texas is, if you aren't for this nominee, you are against the president," one conservative leader in that state told me. The pressure has led to more resentment than results.'"

This is one time the President must be thwarted. For those who can't get enough of Harriet, Jim Boulet of English first sees something nefarious behind the notoriously detail oriented Ms. Miers' inadequate response to senate questionaires,while John Hindraker questions the wisdom of a Republican rejection of Miers. I think the wisdom of a justice without legal wisdom is even more questionable...

For the record, however, I should not have referred to Ms. Miers as Harriet the Apostate--despite several earlier reports, Ms. Miers was never a Catholic.

Say Goodnight, Harriet...

All Loose Canon's liberal friends are in full chortle mode. They feel that Harriet Miers will split the Republican coalition. They are wrong. But she does have the potential to do something else harmful: be a mediocre Supreme Court Justice. She is not the justice we have been awaiting for years. Quite rightly, the editors of National Review are calling upon Republican senators to insist that the Miers nomination be withdrawn:

It looks as if the confirmation hearings will be the very fight over judicial principles that conservatives have long wanted, but the White House has tried to sidestep. Instead of having a nominee as equipped as, say, a Judge John Roberts as their champion, conservatives will watch the case be made by Miers, who may not even grasp all the principles or believe in them. If she implodes at the hearings, it will not just be her personal embarrassment. She will set the conservative cause back dramatically. Surely, she will be coached to say all the right things initially, but she has no depth in conservative judicial philosophy. If she wilts under questioning, the conventional wisdom might be that the principles themselves were indefensible.

A Miers withdrawal will stop the bleeding. It will seem a blow to the White House at first, but soon enough people will forget — how many people remember Bernie Kerik? — and the focus will become the next nominee. If that nominee is of the caliber and has the beliefs we have come to expect from other Bush judicial nominees, conservatives will rally around him or her, and the White House and its allies can unite in a clear fight to transform the Court.

If Harriet Miers is the nice lady she seems to be, she will insist on stopping the madness. A fight over principles would actually reinvigorate the Bush presidency. Is Bob Bork still available?

A Nice Place to Visit

Europe is a great place to visit. After all, that's where the great cathedrals are. Like Loose Canon, James K. Glassman loves it there, but he realizes that Europe's vigor has been sapped by the very policies that our intellectuals would like to introduce in the U.S.:

[W]hen it comes to public policy, Europe has taken a wrong turn. Its welfare state has sapped initiative and driven jobs abroad; its treatment of immigrants is shameful; unemployment is in the double digits; health policy is making people sicker; and foreign policy is based on isolationism and moral posturing....

My concern is with Americans. Is it inevitable that, as we grow more prosperous, we will become more like Europe -- losing initiative, insisting that our governments coddle us?

Apostles of Marketing

Ever since the runaway success Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," Hollywood has heard the jingle jangle of the Christian dollar. There is a report on marketing for Christians in today's Washington Post:

"Marketing executives say the decision is part of a major trend. The entertainment industry has discovered there is power, power, product-moving power in selling movies, books and music through churches -- particularly the suburban megachurches that draw thousands of well-heeled worshipers....

"The leading apostle of marketing through churches is the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, a much-emulated megachurch in Lake Forest, Calif. Since January 2003, he has sold 23 million copies of his book 'The Purpose Driven Life' without any significant print, radio or television advertising, or even a conventional book tour."

Sometimes Hollywood's innocent yearning for the Christian audience is touching--but if the product is good, why not? Barbara Nicolosi is amused by the sales pitch of the forthcoming Narnia flick but says the movie is excellent. You can't ask for more.

What Hollywood is going to have to understand is that it's not all marketing--there's also the product. The ingrained values of the Hollywood culture tend to be inimical to Christian values.

Intelligent Design? How about an Intelligent Debate?

Evolution is the reigning scientific theory about how we got here. So teach it in schools. But what's wrong with mentioning that science sometimes revises itself? Or that a debate over evolution and intelligent design is raging? I can see all sorts of possibilities for papers that might really excite students. Talk about replacing perfunctory classroom discussion with spirited debate!

What's wrong with this?

What's wrong is that you might end up in court. That's what happened to science teachers in the school district of Dover, Pennyslvania. The ACLU is arguing that it is against the Constitution to question evolution in the classroom.

"The elite," reports the American Spectator, "sensing a chance to score a victory against critics of Darwinism are watching the trial breathlessly.

"Slate has assigned famed correspondent Hanna Rosin to cover the trial; the New York Times dispatched Laurie Goodstein -- note that she is a religion (not science) reporter -- to cover it. There is an all-hands-on-deck feel to the reporting, which has been made even more critical by the presence of the Dover school board's star witness, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. A dreaded scientist who perversely refuses to accept the overwhelming and obvious 'consensus' in favor of Darwinism.

"While neither Rosin nor Goodstein are up to the task of explaining evolutionary theory convincingly, they do realize the sacred duty of stopping this scientist. He's wandered much too far on to the Darwinists' turf.

"Garbling the elite's dogmatic schema, Goodstein, in the Wednesday edition of the Times, had Behe challenging the 'Darwinian theory of random natural selection.' Random natural selection? No, no, Ms. Goodstein, nature selects not randomly but necessarily, choosing random mutations that happen to prove useful, under Darwin's theory. What is nature? And how does it choose with such incredible precision and marvelous efficiency? Well, that's not important and certainly not within the province of science, even if Aristotle, who probably believed in the gods and went to temple, did consider these questions in The Physics and concluded that nature requires an intelligent cause."

Quest

When Meghan Basham signed on for college lit courses, she "got the gist of it--Wife of Bath: enlightened; Edmund Spenser: uptight, if brilliant, prude. And had I not uncharacteristically turned one night to an original Vulgate-cycle source for an already overdue paper on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, I might have gone on taking academia's word for it, congratulating myself for shrugging off the yoke of Christian morality that was my sad, oppressive heritage."

Modern academics are marooned in our time, cynical about the Judeo-Christian moorings of our culture and literature. They can do little besides be glib and shallow. But a funny thing happened to Basham on the way to having a laugh at Sir Lancelot's expense:

"[T]he Lancelot of The Quest was not the tragic, romantic figure depicted in later incarnations. Rather than Malory's notion that star-crossed love caused his (and, by extension, Arthur and Camelot's) downfall, The Quest suggested that common lust alone brought him low, and that nothing noble or romantic followed from it: 'Growing conscious of Guinevere's glances [Lancelot] ... set his feet in the path of lust, the path which degrades both body and soul to a degree that none can really know who has not tried it.'

"This Lancelot was a prideful man who dismissed his nagging conscience in favor of a chivalric sham that suited his desires better. This Lancelot--beautiful, gifted, favored with every material asset, and assured he could achieve every great thing--had been taught to honor the tenets of the Christian faith and was expected to offer God some return on his blessings. Instead, selfish pursuits dulled his interest in all but the lowest passions, causing hermit after hermit to rebuke him: '[Our Lord] gave you beauty in full measure; He gave you understanding, and wit enough to distinguish good from evil; courage He gave you ... and over and above He gave you such good fortune that success has crowned your every undertaking ... And you were so careless of your trust that you basely forsook Him.'"

Who's the Duck in the Shooting Gallery?

When you see moments of silence to honor our dead soldiers, don't be fooled--the press is more concerned with using our war dead as propaganda than actually paying tribute to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

"Unable to convince the Bush administration or our troops to cut and run," Ralph Peters writes, "the American left is waging its campaign of support for Islamist terror through our all-too-cooperative media. And you're the duck in the anti-war movement's shooting gallery."

The Implications of Capital Punishment

Death penalty supporters (like Loose Canon)have have come under attack lately as being as out of harmony with Church teaching as abortion rights advocates. T'aint so. In a beautifully-reasoned piece in his archdiocesan newspaper, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput shows that the death penalty does fit into Church teaching:

"The death penalty is not intrinsically evil," writes Chaput. "Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.

"It is not an idolatry of individual rights — in this case, the rights of the murderer. Catholic social teaching rests on two equal pillars: the dignity of the individual person, and the common good. The right to life of the convicted murderer must be balanced against society’s right to justice and security."

Even ardent supporters of the death penalty (like me) only want to see it used for the most heinous crimes. Chaput is quite moving on this:

"What Catholic teaching on the death penalty does involve is this: a call to set aside unnecessary violence, including violence by the state, in the name of human dignity and building a culture of life. In the wake of the bloodiest century in history, the Church invites us to recover our own humanity by choosing God’s higher road of restraint and mercy instead of state-sanctioned killing that implicates all of us as citizens."

But I hate to see Chaput using hackneyed notions from the left: "State-sanctioned killing that implicates all of us citizens"? Give me a break. If capital punishment is justly applied, we need not worry about being "implicated."

How Do You Say Schism in Baptist?

Sexual matters will someday be remembered as the dominant issues of our day. These questions go to the heart of who we are: Do we own our bodies or are they on loan from God? They also go to the heart of what constitutes reality: Is it plastic or can we make reality, including our gender identification, anything we want it to be?

Loose Canon has focused on the Catholic Church's dilemma over the ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood. But we aren't the only band of Christians faced with homosexuality-related controversies. Christianity Today reveals that the Baptists, that denomination synonymous with rock solid values, is about to split:

"The Pacific Southwest region of the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) has begun defecting in the largest church exodus from any denomination over the presenting issue of homosexuality. Underlying issues, according to leaders, include the authority of Scripture and church discipline. Representing more than 300 churches, the region's board of directors voted September 8 to begin withdrawal. At least four other regions are considering leaving the ABCUSA, a member denomination in the National Council of Churches."

Bingo!

The cause of the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the nineteenth century's great English converts to Catholicism has long languished--one theory is that Newman's followers are so cerebral that they don't go around begging for that mandatory miracle. But now there's a Newman miracle and the cardinal is on the road to beatification! Catholic Wold News reports:

"Church officials would not reveal the identity of the man who benefited from the reported miracle, but said that the Boston archdiocese has established a commission to investigate the report. If a miracle if verified, it would fulfill the final requirement for beatification of the English scholar.

"Word of the alleged miracle became public at an October 18 press conference in Rome for the publication of a new book, Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Newman, edited by veteran Catholic journalist Peter Jennings. The book highlights the admiration that the Pope had professed for Cardinal Newman's writings."

Newman's "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," recounting how he moved from Anglicanism to Catholicism, is a spiritual classic.

An Uncool Level of Discourse...

Loose Canon went to a reading at one of Washington, D.C.'s leftwing bookstores last week, and, of course, it turned into an anti-Bush rally. All these well-heeled people simply assumed that everyone educated hates the president. It wouldn't be refined to do otherwise. The amazing thing is that these people, unused to strenuous debate, expect to be taken seriously.

Columnist James Bowman captures this ethos:

"The unspoken assumption behind their protests was that, merely by existing the protestors had acquired a right not only to speak up on the issues of the day but also to be listened to — even though they have only slogans and no serious geopolitical or strategic arguments to offer. At the protests, the level of debate was typified by one of the Telegraph's other interviewees who said: 'Bush is so uncool.'"

Family Feud

The Miers nomination is a disaster for the reasons that Judge Robert Bork (registration may be required), the intellectual heavyweight who was denied a place on the Supreme Court by a Democrat-controlled Senate, explains:

"There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no 'ability to write clearly and argue incisively.'

"The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.

"There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging."

Judge Bork is harsh on Bush (who richly deserves opprobrium in this matter), and all my liberal friends are licking their chops--they believe that what they perceived as a fragile coalition between intellectuals and the religious right is going to fracture. This is wishful thinking. We are angry and we are having a debate about ideas--that is healthy. Liberal intellectuals, because they regard Christians as backward, can't imagine Christian evangelicals and intellectuals being comfortably in the same party. They are wrong. This is just a family feud.

Loose Canon Archives

As you can see, Loose Canon has moved to a new blog format. You can use the new comment tool to post messages in response to each blog item. The archives of Loose Canon are still available here.

Driving Gay Priests Underground?

Loose Canon is fighting hard to remain squishy on the subject of ordaining homosexual men to the priesthood. It's becoming harder and harder. Mainly because those who advocate the ordination of homosexuals inevitably advance an argument that makes me move closer to the against position.

A case in point is a piece by Michael Sean Winters, a Catholic writer who seems to think that a Vatican ban on homosexual priests is imminent (an