Posted 18:08 by William Luse -
It's official: Apologia has moved here. All future posting will be done from that site. This Blogger page will remain up indefinitely, mostly because I can't stand the thought of losing all the wonderful comments stored in the boxes. If I can find a way to import them to the new page, I will.

Posted 13:52 by William Luse -
As I have mentioned previously, this page will be moving, but retaining it's name. Go here to see what the new one looks like. Its appearance will change very slightly over the next few days, and within a week I hope to be doing all posting from there. Feedback is welcome.

Posted 14:38 by William Luse -
Over at Anti-Socialist Tendencies Mr. Varenius is celebrating, as so many others seem to have done lately, his one year anniversary in the blogworld with a list of his worthier posts, all of which I have read at one time or another. And so should you. Today I re-read Mortality Makes Meaning?, in which he takes on the sentimental attempt of some atheists to find meaning in annhilation, and which is summarized by Mr. V in this memorable line: "Things matter despite the fact that they end." Mr. V (and those of us who think things matter because they had a beginning) sees hidden among their protestations a yearning for the transcendant.

Posted 01:32 by William Luse -

Recognition, At Last

Good news came in the mail a couple of days ago, and I thought I owed it to my readers to share it with them. After all, that's what we Christians are supposed to do - share the good news. Okay, this isn't quite that important, but it's still nothing to sniff at. So without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to inform you that I am the recipient of a high honor: the National Republican Congressional Committee's Congressional Order of Merit. It almost gives me as much pleasure as it gave the guys who gave it to me. The letter begins:

Dear Friend,

On behalf of the Executive Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee, I'm honored to inform you that your unfailing support of President Bush, the men and women who serve him, our nation and our Republican cause so impressed the Executive Council they've nominated you for the NRCC's highest honor:

THE CONGRESSIONAL ORDER OF MERIT

I hope you'll accept this honor. You've certainly earned it, and the Executive Council agrees...

On the letterhead were the names of Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, and Tom Reynolds, Chairman of the Committee, one of whom goes on to point out that COM recipients are made worthy by their "commitment, loyalty, and dedication of service to one's nation, as well as service to the Republican Party," and that such attributes are the "demonstrated guideposts for individuals" (like me) "of high moral and ethical character."

It is with these ideals in mind that we, the undersigned members of the Executive Council, place into nomination for the Congressional Order of Merit William Luse, Jr., who shares those beliefs and exemplifies the esteem and spirit this honor embodies.

By this time, as you can imagine, I was dumbstuck with awe at the singularity of this award. To have been selected from among so many is just...inexpressible. And all that was on the first page. The letter went on for four pages, so you can imagine what I felt like by the end - speechless with humility and a sense of unworthiness. And since the letter writer had "championed" my nomination, "the Council's acceptance was easily gained" because my "record is too impressive to ignore". I would soon be receiving a "beautiful certificate", which meant inclusion, along with a " roster of select Republicans," in the Congressional Order of Merit Register, which register would be "elegantly printed and bound," one copy to be delivered to President George W. Bush, a second to be kept "on exhibit at our Republican Party headquarters." You could have knocked me over with a feather.

But I knew that speechlessness from a prone position was not the order of the day. Select individuals are expected to rise to the occasion. A response was called for, perhaps even a speech to commemorate the event. Although there was nothing in the letter to indicate that my presence in Washington would be required, it seemed wise to be prepared for any eventuality. So I pulled myself from the floor to the couch to pen the following letter of acceptance:

Dear Mr. Reynolds:

I thought at first Dennis Hastert himself, the Speaker of the House, was writing to me and then I saw your name at the end of the letter. Kind of a letdown because I've never heard of you. (JK. That's computerland lingo for just kidding. My daughters taught it to me.) So don't take offense. Just a little joke between fellow GOP'ers. The Democrats seem so humorless these days, if we couldn't kid among ourselves what would we do? Besides, you write a pretty good letter, what with half the sentences underlined for emphasis, and I'm sure Mr. Hastert had to approve it.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank you and Speaker Hastert and the Executive Council (by the way, who sits on the Council? I keep picturing a bunch of guys in dark robes or suits gathered in solemn conclave and seated at an elevated dais while they pore over the names of eligible honorees) for the award you are about bestow upon me. Before issuing a formal acceptance, I just wanted to ask a few questions to which I know you won't mind providing a brief answer for the benefit of a fellow public servant. You've already written me four pages; one more ain't gonna hurt, is it? (LOL. That's computer lingo for laugh out loud. My daughters taught me.)

First, as soon as I told my wife the good news about this impending honor, her first reaction, instead of being happy for me, was to ask indignantly why you guys never send her anything. All the stuff from the RNC is always addressed to me. I may be the head of household, but she pays more income taxes. And let me tell you something about women – once they get the bit between their teeth, they don't let go. Just the other day I listened to her intimidate the service manager of a car repair shop that was trying to rip our daughter off into refunding an hour's worth of labor. She said something about estimates and required phone calls if there's an overrun and the guy just wilted. And she did this by long distance on the telephone. IMHO (that's computer lingo for in my humble opinion – my daughters, etc.): if you really want to close or reverse the gender gap, you need to pay more attention to the ladies. And you don't want this one on your case. Trust me.

Now about that registration card you want me to fill out before "we can pen your name into…our nation's great history…Executive Council" (who are those guys?) "rules do not permit entering your name into the ..Register until you've confirmed all of the vital information requested on the Registration Card." And a lot of that was underlined for emphasis. My wife (she's the suspicious one, not me) noticed that there's a contribution form at the bottom where I can check a box from $1,000 on down to $25 on down to "other," and below that a "make check payable to" notice, and on the back of the form a request for credit card information. Seeing as how we're kind of strapped at the moment, she wants to know if I get the award even if I don't contribute. She also says that including a credit card form on the back of a certificate of honor is the height of tackiness, but that's just her opinion.

You also say that if I "include a special contribution" with my response you can begin to "lay the early groundwork for the 2004 election, build …grassroots organizations," etc., "All key factors in our fight to maintain control of the White House…" She notes a couple of things. First, how can you lay the groundwork for anything with 25 bucks, which is the max we could afford if she let me contribute which she won't? Are you telling us (she asks) that you don't have a groundwork? We've got an oil millionaire President and an indirect oil millionaire as Vice-President and you don't have a groundwork? If those guys can't help you (says she) then nobody can. In fact, it's her opinion that these requests for money are flowing in entirely the wrong direction. She thinks, in light of my (in your words) "unfailing support of President Bush," and your belief that (in your words) "we wouldn't be where we are today without you," that you guys should be paying me. You see, we get things in the mail all the time from people wanting money – from Easter Seals, the American Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, the Police Benevolent Association, our local Catholic parish "stewardship" fund, the Catholic diocese of Eskimoland, the Bleeding Hearts for the Homeless, whatever – and she thinks it's about time somebody started sending money our way.

She also objects to your calling it "our fight to maintain control of the White House." She thinks you ought to call it "stewardship" or "custodianship" on behalf of the people who elected you (or rather, Bush) to enact certain policies. She wants to know why she voted for a big tax cut and instead got a little teeny one. She wants to know if her Medicare or Social Security taxes are going to increase to fund the prescription drug benefit. She wants to know why you went along with the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling in the Michigan case when you campaigned against affirmative action, why you didn't scream a little more about the sodomy ruling, why the federal deficit is ballooning out of control again, why little old retired men and ladies with white hair have to take their shoes off in American airports, and why you don't mention the evil of abortion more often.

Whew. Sorry about all the questions, but you know how it is, I'm sure. A certain deference is owed to our better halves' discontents if we are to make life bearable.

Oh, and one more thing (says she): since you seem to know so much about me – about my years of unfailing service and my high moral character – enough to want to give me an award, how is it you can't be sure about my "vital information" for the Registration Card, like how to spell my name right? I mean (her again) you've got the FBI and the CIA and you're not sure my name's spelled right? No wonder you guys can't find Osama bin Laden.

Okay, we're done with her questions (I know, you're thinking: Thank God. No offense taken).

I just have a couple questions of my own and a small confession to make. First, have I just been nominated for the award, or has it been determined that I will actually be awarded the award? It's not quite clear from your letter. Second, the members of the Executive Council are referred to as "the undersigned members of the Executive Council", but their signatures don't appear anywhere. So,just a gentle reminder: who are they? Maybe you could send me a list of their names so that my wife and I could thank them personally.

And now for my little confession. My greatest fear is that you've mistaken me for someone else, like my father or grandfather or maybe someone in Des Moines with the same last name because, I dread saying it, I have never in my life given a penny to the Republican or any other political party, done any poll-sitting or any other volunteer work, and the only unfailing support I've given Mr. Bush was to vote for him (which is supposed to be confidential) and to cheer on the War on Terror. And his wife, who's kind of cute but doesn't want Roe v. Wade overturned, kind of pisses me off, what with her literacy campaign for children. She ever try reading to a dead baby?

But listen, I'm willing to finesse all this in order to garner the award and to protect the public appearance of sound judgement by the Executive Council. In short, I'm willing to lie in a good cause. You thought Bill Clinton was a liar? I can make him look like the Boy Scout of prevaricators if it helps keep the Democrats in the hinterlands.

Anyway, I just want you to know I'm proud to accept this nomination, award, honor – whichever it is. Thanks again, and best wishes in making the Republican Party the party of small government.

Sincerely,
William Luse, Jr. (yep, you had it right on the Registration Card)

Posted 03:40 by William Luse -
This is for Jeff Culbreath, host of the gracefully written, thought-provoking weblog El Caminoreal. It was put down some years ago for my own amusement, but I thought he might enjoy it in light of his recent posting attempts to, well, provoke thought among certain of us, as in here, here and here. It's called

THE EVOLUTION DANCE
or
A Meditation on the Consequences of Heroic Coupling
or
A Moralist Repents

Everybody's doing the evolution dance,
We, along with tapirs and the marching army ants,
Along with nimble monkeys and the dinosaur as well –
(One succeeded admirably, the other heard the knell
Sadly rung for creatures destined for extinction,
Though occupying yet today a place of some distinction) -
We do it with the reptiles, we do it with ourselves;
I've even heard that leprechauns have done it with the elves.
So trip it often, trip it well, this merry dance we do,
For 'tis a trait we share with goats and elk and caribou.

Enlightenment has come to us by way of Darwin's song;
Now each of us precisely knows where each of us belongs;
Now any man may teach his child what life is all about
(Unless the child annoys us then, of course, we cut him out);
Men may wear the dresses now and women wear the pants;
Now we know licentiousness deserves a second chance,
For we understand, by letting loose the animal within,
That our chances of survival are multiplied by ten.

Now we know where man must fit within the cosmic scheme,
That Adam and his seed are but a sentimental dream:
An advance upon the gibbon, though it's much too close a call,
By luck alone we slipped in front of sage Neanderthal,
Who possessed the great misfortune of an elongated head;
He was, they say, as smart as we (thank God the beast is dead).
And now I hear that chimpanzees are learning how to speak
In signs evolving swiftly into Plato's ancient Greek.

We thank you, Lord, for all your gifts, the angels at their stations
(Though now we know their wings are an acquired variation);
We thank you for the scientists whose minds you have perfected
(Though all our higher faculties were naturally selected);
We thank you, Lord, for giving us that clever primate tree
(A commendable invention since it ended up with me);
But most of all we thank you, Lord, for giving us a home
On earth wherein we found you hid within the chromosome.

Posted 19:43 by William Luse -
On occasion, someone can explain the relationship between the culture of sex and the culture of death clearly, simply, and even charmingly without going on at great length, like some people I know. That someone might even be young, a college kid, for example, explaining it to someone older, supposedly wiser, and who ought to know better. I love kids with great faith.

Posted 02:00 by William Luse -
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (or the urinal and constipation, according to Rush Limbaugh) encourages heresy and the modern revolt against Authority by hyping the famous Lost Gospels. Paul Cella goes on a crusade, and slays the gnostic dragon. Onward Christian soldiers, and read.

Posted 20:26 by William Luse -

Post Date: Sun Jul 13, 05:27:56 AM



Like the Annika thing, this is more old news, but I have a feeling its effects have not yet begun to snowball. All that's in the future which, to a Christian, I don't think is going to be very pretty. A part of it will have been fashioned by the Supreme Court's striking down of the anti-sodomy law in Lawrence vs. Texas, and by the sleepy acquiescence of your fellow citizens. We'll call it, for the time being,

Sodomy Goes Straight

As in mainstream. Yep, all sex acts are the same, as in equal, as in they are accorded equal dignity, as in there is no longer in our jurisprudence a sliding scale moving from good to bad to worse to beyond the pale. Now, I'm no constitutional scholar and I certainly ain't no lawyer, but, being slow to evolve with the times, I 'm of the opinion that the common man has a right in this country to question the judgement of his betters - you know, government of the people, by the people and so on- and what it looks like to me is that the court (excuse me, Court) has found in our Constitution a right of certain of its citizens to commit a transparently perverse and filthy act without risk of having their dignity impugned, their status as thoroughly upstanding citizens questioned, their space unnecessarily encroached upon, nor their moral variance from the trodden path pointed out to them. In sum, the Court, feeling their pain, didn't want to hurt their feelings. I know this because of certain sentences and phrases that kept cropping up, things like: "To say that the issue ... was simply the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim the individual put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it said that marriage is just about the right to have sexual intercourse." Yeah, just as. And this: "The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to choose to enter upon relationships in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons." And this: "...touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home." And this: "The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views (ethical and moral principles) on the whole society through operation of the criminal law." I guess not, because Justice Kennedy went on to use the power of his State-appointed position to enforce upon the whole society his own minority view.

I followed a link from somewhere and, like an idiot, went and read the whole damn decision. Even if I hadn't known what the decision was ahead of time, I 'd have figured the game was up from the first sentence: "Responding to a reported weapons disturbance in a private residence, Houston police entered petitioner Lawrence's apartment and saw him and another adult man, petitioner Garner, engaging in a private, consensual sexual act." The Court seems to define the act, in its essence, according to its private and consensual nature, not according to what actually takes place, what it is. (Of course, since Bill Clinton, that word's in trouble.) If you've got some time to kill, count the number of times "private" and "consent" (or some variation thereof) show themselves. Other pop-up buzzwords to be on the lookout for are "stigma," "demean," "intimate," "most personal," and "choice."

Now, I know these judges are real smart people. They have endured a lot of education at prestigious colleges and law schools, spent a lot of years on the bench, and have kept their faces in the books, studying the constitution all day long. Except for Scalia, their prose styles show it. They're so smart they've decided, by wearing their graduation robes to work every day, not to let the rest of us forget it. But since the decision they rendered was pretty much the one I expected, the question that came to mind was not how they arrived at it, but whether these philosopher kings and queens ever wondered, or cared, how it played with us commoners. Do they ever laugh at themselves? Do they re-read certain passages and ask, "What the hell was I thinking?" Passages like this, in which Justice Kennedy, feeling cramped by the legalese, writhes in rhetorical ecstasy: " Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions." The layman wonders: is this kind of language legal? If so, there ought to be a law. Is this metaphysics or mysticism? It looks suspiciously like the kind of flourish a lawyer might resort to when the plain text of the legal document before him does not clearly embrace the expanse of his purpose. All he's trying to do is de-criminalize anal intercourse. Why can't he just say so without sounding like a Catholic theologian on fire with the spirit of Vatican II?

The layman (me, for example) might also wonder about other things, and wonder if the justices wonder with him, to wit: why do Supreme Court decisions so often seem to contradict established social goods, some of which are even acknowledged by the Court's own precedents? Over at NRO, prior to the decision, Robert P. George informed us that "The Supreme Court has never recognized a right to fornication, adultery, or any other form of sexual misconduct," and further, "Under prevailing law, the marriage relationship enjoys constitutional protection; sex outside the marital bond does not." Cool, you're thinking, right? But maybe you've forgotten that in 1965 along came a case called Griswold v. Connecticut and the modern, previously unarticulated, right to privacy emerges chimera-like from the shadowy, labyrinthine passages (the famous penumbras) of its constitutional cave and begins morphing quickly into the progenitor of our modern social horrors: broken families, pregnant teens, and millions upon millions of abortions. Griswold struck down the prohibition against the sale of contraceptives by the sterility-drug pushers and their use by married couples. The reasoning seems to have been that to deny such use was, according to Mr. George, to "interfere in a damaging way with the marital relationship." So who was bothering them in the first place -peeping Toms, the bogeyman? This is a strange sort of "interference," where one must leave the bedroom to go to the doctor or the drugstore to purchase something that will ensure one's privacy. Well, people wanted their contraceptives, and the Court wanted to please them, with the intent of nurturing the permanence of the marriage bond. So what happens? Marriages start falling apart. One of the purposes of having the prohibition in the first place was to inhibit adultery. All of a sudden adultery becomes easy and marriages disintegrate. Amazing isn't it? I wonder if the justices ever think about it.

But that's hardly the end of it. A few years later another case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, extended the contraceptive privilege to unmarried persons because, after all, can the "right of privacy" (the Court now using the phrase with casual abandon, as though it were a matter of longstanding custom) be logically denied to individuals for the mere fact that they are single? Of course not. If there's a right of privacy in the constitution, we're all equally protected by it, aren't we? Again, as with married people, it's the kind of privacy dependent upon items not naturally occurring in the bedroom, but I'm probably missing something here. And again, according to Mr. George, the court merely held that compelling folks to endure the risk of pregnancy in order to deter fornication was not permissible. "Nothing in either case forbids states from banning outright adultery, fornication, or other immoral sex acts. On the contrary... Eisenstadt and other cases expressly acknowledge the authority of government to prohibit such acts." So it's like this: the Court thinks the state's desire to inhibit promiscuity is a good thing, so they hand down a ruling making contraceptives widely available to everyone, which will have the natural effect of inculcating the virtue of chastity among a population of young and sexually vigorous single people. That's why we have so many out-of-wedlock births and rampaging STD's. Like I say, those justices are real smart and probably see something I don't.

But we're not done yet. Next comes the case that causes some of us the most sadness, Roe v. Wade, wherein the right of privacy, invented to protect the marital bond while inadvertantly destroying it, stretches out its arms to embrace our right not merely to prevent the conception of children but to actually kill them once they are. It's not that the justices were promoting abortion, just permitting it. It was not that Justice Blackmun had anything against babies in utero, just that he was for women. Since he knew that women were people, but couldn't make up his mind whether babies in the womb were or not, he decided it was okay to kill the latter. Now with me, it's different. Normally, before I kill something, I'd like to know what it is I'm killing. It seems the safer course of action. But that's just me. Anyway, just as there was no desire to encourage promiscuity with their contraceptive rulings, I presume the justices harbored no desire to encourage abortion. When the abortion rate skyrocketed after the ruling, I wonder what Justice Blackmun thought of it. As the years passed and the toll mounted into the millions, I wonder if he had any second thoughts. Well, he's dead now, so he probably sees the big picture. I wish he could come back and tell us what it says. It would be interesting.

And then the inevitable happened. That right of privacy, usually in the form of the due process clause (Justice Kennedy's favorite) or the equal protection clause (O'Connor's favorite), just wouldn't stop mutating, and so they went after our children. In Carey v. Population Services Int'l, the court did away with a New York law forbidding the sale or distribution of contraceptives to persons under 16 years of age because, yes, they are protected by the constitution as well. Now 16 is below the age of consent in some states, so it's hard to believe the justices were trying to encourage promiscuity among our teenagers, or to "interfere" with the "bond" between parents and their children. No, it was simply the relentless logic generated by the right to privacy. It had a life of its own; it couldn't be stopped. No lessons were drawn from the experiments on married and single adults, and promiscuity is exactly what we got. Those of us who have to live in the real world could have predicted it, but it doesn't matter what the real world tells you. Stare decisis. The law must be consistent even at the expense of common sense and normal human feeling, and you have to pass through an alternative reality, like Harvard Law School, to see the beauty of it.

Does anyone besides me see a slippery slope here, for the espying of which Senator Rick Santorum suffered much vilification, even among conservatives? Actually, yes. All the cases I have just mentioned are neatly laid out for you by Justice Kennedy himself in his Lawrence ruling. He even takes you by the hand and walks you down the hillside, showing you where to place your feet so that you won't slip on the slope. The catch is, he's proud of it. He doesn't seem to think it's a slope, or that it's slippery, or even a little bit muddy, or that, once we're on it, the only way off is down. I think he sees it more as an ascent, a sure-footed mountain climb to the pinnacle of enlightenment, a natural progression upward to Lawrence and beyond to the day when...what? Let's not think about that yet. It's too distressing.

After the decision came down - even though it was only what I expected - I felt in need of cheering up, so I picked up a back issue of National Review (it was on the sofa beside me and had been for weeks) and started reading, hoping the barkeep would serve up some solace. And what do I come across but an editorial (unsigned, of course, and so presumed to be speaking largely for the aggregate, for Derbyshire's "metropolitan conservatives") that, unlike Santorum, their fellow conservative, expresses serious doubts about the existence of the slippery slope: "Santorum's slippery slope...seems stronger as a matter of logic than of legal prediction." (Notice the disjunction between logic and legality. You'd think it would raise an eyebrow.) So... if you could have looked forward from Griswold and seen the future, all those cases I cited and nicely laid out by Justice Kennedy, do you think they would have borne up as matters of "legal prediction?" NR elaborates: "Recognition of a constitutional right to consensual sexual activity would seem logically to preclude laws against incest; but the Supreme Court has squared bigger circles before." Yeah, I trust them. Don't you? It's one of those editorials that makes it hard to tell where they really stand. They think Santorum was treated unfairly, but that his words did not express "wisdom." They think the Texas sodomy law ought to be repealed, but they don't want the Court to do it. They think that "state and local governments have a role to play in support of public morals" (e.g., laws against incest and prostitution), but they don't want a law against sodomy. Why? "Seriously to enforce such a law would be brutal." Read Kennedy's decision: such laws have never been seriously enforced. But, anticipating this: "...and to leave the law on the books, but rarely and selectively enforced, would be unfair and foster disrespect for law." I can see them now, our local thugs huddled together in a room somewhere, strategizing: "Y'know, they got this law against queers out in Texas but nobody pays attention. Let's go rob a 7-11." And further: "To ban same-sex sodomy but leave heterosexual conduct unregulated, as Texas does, seems odd if the goal is to promote sexual morality." And repealing the law would promote sexual morality, or encourage the lack of it among heteros? All right, I try to be mellow when possible, but I've heard this latter argument before, about including heterosexuals, and I'm finally sick of it. The editorial does not say whether they (the NR crowd) would be content with the law if it did include heterosexuals. I suspect they would not, for the only ground they would find acceptable for the court's overturning the law is that of equal protection, which Justice O'Connor, in her concurrence, proceeded to oblige them with. In fact, she goes further, stating outright what NR will not: "I am confident, however, that so long as the Equal Protection Clause requires a sodomy law to apply equally to the private consensual conduct of homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, such a law would not long stand in our democratic society." (Of course, "democratic society" will have little to say about it. O'Connor, Kennedy, and their cohorts will have the final say.) It sounds to me as if O'Connor is warning the states not to send her a law re-fashioned along those lines, because if they do, she'll overturn that as well.

Now, let me chant along with the chorus that I do not want homosexual sodomists rousted from their homes and thrown in jail, and if you want to rewrite the law to include heterosexuals, fine with me. I further suspect that men and women, single or married, ought not to be indulging the practice of sodomy. Even as some variant of foreplay, it shows evidence of a fascination for an unnatural tendency, for the perverse. It is pure lust. But the fact that the parties to it are man and woman allows us at least to hold hope for the possibility that this union will ultimately be consummated in the normal fashion. With homosexuals, this is never possible. A law aimed specifically at that group says two things, only one of which condemns their sexual habits. The other says that their "unions" are disordered at their inception, before they ever get to the bedroom. The law, in short, is a signal from society, a badge of shame that need not be worn in public but serves nonetheless as an ever-present, nearly invisible reminder that we do not accept what they do, and never will. It serves as a quiescent rearguard against talk of other things, like gay marriage, the cacophony of which argument will now, through the media, assault our sensibilities daily, and our personal lives more intimately.

What, for example, do you think is going to happen to certain textbooks in your children's schools? To the free speech rights of students and teachers who have moral objections to homosexual behavior? To the public posture of gay teachers of children who heretofore have found discretion the better part of a valorous "coming out?" To our civil rights laws, now that the right to a degrading sexual practice, like the right to abortion, has been enshrined in our constitutional law? Take it from there.

The National Review editorial concludes with what amounts to a concession, because they knew what was going to happen: "If the Court rules against the law on the equal protection basis...it would at least not raise the slippery-slope concerns that exercise Sen. Santorum." But not NR. This is what gets me about these legal experts: they don't seem to care how it looks to the non-expert. What the latter sees is that sodomy is now legal. He doesn't care what clause or "basis" was used to accomplish it. An evil is now legal and the slope still looks slippery, because he knows the justices will put that basis to whatever purpose suits them at the time. I think a reader's letter-to-the-editor summed it up wonderfully: "There are two purposes to the criminal code: to decrease undesirable behavior through fear of punishment and to serve as a public-policy statement as to which activities are frowned upon by society...What your editorial actually states is that NR has joined the ranks of those no longer brave enough to condemn." Amen, Mr. Bemis. I hope life is tolerable for you up there in Hillary country.

When I said at the beginning that this ruling renders all sex the same, some will object that I go too far. And they have a point. Even Justice Kennedy, perhaps sensing the breadth of the swath his intellectual thresher is cutting through the autumnal, once-verdant field of our moral culture, does a little dancing in the barnyard, his belated attempt to assure us that victims of rape, sexual child abuse, and incest will not find the umbrella of the law's protection withdrawn: "The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter." Could this last refer to marriage? But how will he refuse them? The "liberty" he has granted is based purely on a right to privacy and on mutual consent. He finishes his thought: "The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives," (the Texas law, of course, allowing them their private lives but not the public respect, which is what I suspect he finds most irksome.)

But Mr. Justice Kennedy, many homosexuals want to make marriage a practice "common to the homosexual lifestyle." And since, in marriage, sexual intimacy (not formerly of the kind you have now given constitutional protection) seems to come with the territory, on what principle of law - not of sociology, or psychology, or of any other field of inquiry - but of law will you deny to them this most sublime of human bonds? And don't appeal to the law's reliance on our nation's "history and tradition", for you have already conceded, in your defense of personal "autonomy," that there is no such thing, or at least that no one tradition is better than any other: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." I rather imagine that an Andrew Sullivan will have no trouble fitting marriage into his concept of existence and the mystery and meaning of human life. All he needs is another man to give consent. How will you say no?

I am not optimistic that he will, for here is the most concise rendering of his judicial philosophy I was able to find, and in his own words: "As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom." How will he say no?

How will he say no to community policing of prostitution, a consensual, adult transaction capable of being conducted purely in private?

How will he say no to adultery, a purely private, consensual, adult transaction?

How will he say no to bestiality in the privacy of one's barn, in which only one party's consent is required, and is always given? On the basis that it doesn't involve two adults?

Suppose a group of differently minded adults - say a man and three women, five women and three men, variorum ad infinitum - decide they'd like to marry to fulfill their concept of the meaning of life? How will he say no?

Suppose the age of consent in some state is 16, and a resident, full-blooded brother and sister decide to get it on? How will he say no? A father and his teenaged daughter? How?

This matter of consent is treacherous territory. It's purely subjective, and that's why the law has to draw objective lines, to keep subjectivity from running rampant, even though we know that the age of consent, the ability to discern what they are consenting to, arrives for different people at different times. Not long ago, I was watching one of those legal documentaries on A&E, the kind that follows some cops around in the course of their duties, and they came upon the case of a 13 year old girl who was being sexually molested by an adult woman in whose charge she often was. The woman might have been a nanny, or even an aunt - I can't remember. But she was well-known to the family and the 13 year old, and she seduced the girl. The cops wanted the child to testify against the woman to make prosecution possible, but the girl's resistance was formidable. She liked the woman and she liked the sex. She had given her consent. The cops finally got her to turn the woman over, but it was hard to tell if this was the result of legal and familial pressure, or if she had finally seen the light. I don't think she saw the light. Do you think, in the wake of the Court's decision, that the age of consent will now come under attack? As the shibboleths of autonomy, privacy, and consent rule the day, I frankly do not see why not.

How is an organization like NAMBLA allowed even to exist in this country, and to lobby unhindered for their peculiar interests? Ah, that's a different matter, a matter of free speech. I guess Justice Kennedy hasn't found a penumbra to get around it.

The objective line must be drawn. As we cannot allow that 13 year old to define her own age of consent, neither are we obligated to extend an uncircumscribed privilege of the same to adults. Certain forms of sexual behavior, homosexual sodomy among them, are not good for their practitioners, nor is that compassionate sense of tolerance that would strip away any form of reprimand, even if, in the legal arena, it amounts to nothing more than an affront to conscience. This assertion depends on the belief that there really is such a thing as virtue, sexual and otherwise. Do we believe it anymore? Some do. They just don't get a lot of airtime, or space in the press, or standing before the courts of our land. They are not carrying the day.

A final thought and we're done. What most riles me about this decision is what a slap in the face it gives to the bedroom activities of every father and mother in the country. My special sympathy is with the woman, who allows a man (her husband, we hope) the ineffable privilege of putting a part of himself inside her, and inside her is where everything important will happen. She will give her body over to it for a significant period of time. Now, courtesy of the Court, she can ponder the new dispensation that allows the surrender of her body to the gift of life no more standing in law than the grotesque parody enacted by homosexuals. It's as though your mother had just spent a lot of time preparing a meal of several courses, and then some homeless guy wanders in off the street and pisses in the soup. And in the world of sex and love, that's what the "active" homosexuals are to me - homeless. They think they've found their true destiny, but I think they're lost. They think they're in love, but I say that, pursued in this way, they can't know what the love revealed in the vow to become one flesh really is, and they won't believe it when I say I wish them no ill. Among those spiritually inclined, especially toward Christianity, I know that the cross they are asked to bear is heavier in some ways than that asked of heterosexuals, which fact leads me to wonder if they might not actually be here for some higher purpose, but most will not believe that either.

But let's not pretend that the fault is all the Court's or the agitations of activists. It may be, as some have said of the Catholic bishops, that we get the justices we deserve. We elect the presidents who nominate them, and the congressmen who confirm them. Californians are trying to recall a governor, but the Supreme Court sits unmolested. I hear no outraged call to impeach a justice, no movement afoot to take back our nation. We have played our part and now we sleep. We wanted our contraception and the Court obliged. They followed the logic of their decisions, and we can't figure out how things came to such a pass. It was the logic we asked for. Most may still feel that the hetero way is the normal way, but it's evey bit as barren. Sterile sex is the norm now, and everything is permissible. If there's a whirlwind to follow, the reaping of it cannot be deferred to four men and two women in dark robes sitting in a chamber somewhere in Washington.

Posted 20:10 by William Luse -


Here's an interesting story.

Posted 17:50 by William Luse -


Sorry to re-post this, but I need to get it in my archives on this page.

The Mountaintop Comes to Annika

When a man gets to the top of the stack in life, there's nowhere to go but down. Or he can retire. When a woman gets to the top, say in the corporate world, her victory will seem twice the feat because she had to vanquish the men to achieve it. A man will never be admired for having beaten the women. We shouldn't be surprised. A girl born today is coached from the cradle that she can aspire to be anything she wants, be as good at it as anyone else, that whatever she aspires to she deserves, that there are no longer any boundaries and that anyone who says otherwise harbors a dark resentment, perhaps even hatred, toward women. The S word will be invoked. In short, she is lied to, with all the machinery of our educational system, the major media, and our political institutions urging her forward. So what else is a modern princess to do?

If she does end up at the top of her profession, say, golf, she can be like Annika Sorenstam and show up at a men's golf tournament, to the rejoicing of the many and the chagrin of the few. The former group was thought to be inhabited by all enlightened, intelligent, non-sexist folk of progressive mind, the latter by grunting, club-swinging, excessively territorial cavemales with prominent brow ridges, terrified that the girl might show the boys – like Vijay Singh - a thing or two. Problem is, my daughter, a pretty decent college golfer who will soon be trying to make her way through the pro ranks, is also in that group. For some reason, she's never been big on gender-blurring. I don't know why. It's a fashionable phenomenon, and she keeps up with fashion. She likes playing golf with boys, moreso, in fact, than playing with girls. Sometimes she beats them. But she doesn't think she ought to get a free ticket to play in their tournaments. Again, I don't know why. The world teaches us to take any good thing that comes our way whether we deserve it or not. She doesn't subscribe. I've tried to raise her right, but this seems to be a sense she was born with. She's a stickler for the rules, and the concept of merit.

As we've watched this concept deteriorate over the years, I used to think sports was the one area of competition where excellence would always reign, where disguising incompetence according to sex or skin color would be simply impossible. This is still largely true at the higher levels, but now that we've entered the era of Triple A – affirmative action athletics – the social engineers won't give up. In college they use a technique called Title IX, which I don't have time to dissect, but you can read a book about it and a review of that book here. In professional sports, as when an NFL coaching position opens up, it requires PC sports reporters to point out all the black guys available for the job, as if that were the only requirement. In the media, it involves ESPN and other networks running WNBA games even though nobody watches and the league is losing money hand over foot. They can't find women who can actually compete in the NBA, so they give them the next best thing: equal time. And why do they give them that time? Because they're girls, I guess. I'd like to think that their willingness to absorb the expense of showing these games was evidence of a gentlemanly gesture, of noblesse oblige, but I don't think it is. There's something else behind the servicing of this ideology, and I haven't quite figured it out. This isn't about our society encouraging girls to participate in sports. What it's about is women competing against men, and golf, lacking the violence and rapid pace of some other sports, is peculiarly vulnerable to the corrosive curiosity of ideologues of various stripes – bureaucrats, courts, feminists. We'll call them the equalizers. They want men and women to be equal, everywhere and all the time, even though they know they can't be. And there's a market for their product, because the terrible irony is that this time the corruption came from within, from a corporate sponsor who sold out the standards for money. In feeding the crowd's hunger to see a woman competing against men, they saw a ratings bonanza. And they were right; the crowd wanted to see it. That's the part I can't figure out: why they wanted to see it. But they did.

Over at The Golf Channel, from the moment Annika Sorenstam announced her intention to accept the invitation to play in the Colonial Tournament, the enthusiasm was unrelenting. Whenever I tuned in, they were talking about it. And like the blanket coverage offered by cable news networks concerned with weightier affairs, like the legal troubles of Scott Petersen ( also a golfer, by coincidence, I trust), the GC assembled a panel, including sometime prominent British golfer and CBS commentator Peter Oosterhuis, who announced in magisterial tones that "Annika has every right to be there." And why? Because of her sterling record as a professional golfer. His leaving out the adjective "female" was probably an accident. When Mark Lye, who almost won the Masters one year, calmly demurred (he is never strident and was badly outnumbered, the fate of gentleman these days), fellow panelist Kelly Tighlman disagreed, basing her defense on the nature of a sponsor's exemption, not on the premise that Annika had earned her place. The other panelist, Brian Hewitt, even wrote a column for the Golf Channel's website that defended Annika by employing the familiar technique of justifying one thing by assaulting another, in this case fellow male human being Vijay Singh, who had expressed his wish that Annika miss the cut, and that if paired with her he'd consider withdrawing. Hewitt takes revenge by informing us that early in Singh's career " There was more than a whiff of a cheating scandal involving his alleged creative use of a pencil on a scorecard." I wonder what "more than a whiff" means. I wonder what "alleged" means. Did he cheat or not? Hewitt imputes much without specifying anything. And even if Singh did cheat, this justifies Annika's presence how? Well, since Singh got a second chance, she deserves a first. And "because she is the best woman golfer on the planet; because she was invited; because she hasn't broken any rules and because she has worked extremely hard to separate herself from the rest of the women in golf." By this logic, the best female basketball player in the world deserves a spot on the Boston Celtics' roster if she can just wangle an invitation and has not broken any rules. She doesn't even have to try out for the team. But I wouldn't try to follow the logic if I were you. That's not what's driving things. It's character assassination in the service of ideology, a tactic at which liberals are accomplished, as in the event that you find homosexual behavior morally objectionable, you will be called a homophobe for your trouble, the "phobe" implying that your psychological makeup is to some degree neurotic or even deranged; or should you object to affirmative action on principle, you will made to recognize yourself for the sexist or racist you really are. In short, if you object to discrimination, you will be discriminated against. It's the PC, gender-bending, Title IX, affirmative action mentality that admits women to our military academies, sends them to war, makes them cops on the beat, hopes they will become priests, and embraces gay marriage – all because sex doesn't matter. Why this ideology exists I still can't say. Mr. Hewitt is not content with taking exception to Singh's ungentlemanly remarks (and they were). No, he must attempt to destroy Singh himself, all the while utterly avoiding the core of Singh's objection, which I saw him give in a television interview, to wit, that Ms. Sorenstam had not earned her place in the field, that she was taking someone else's, that this was important because this was how they (the men) tried to make their living, and that Ms. Sorenstam was already making a fine one on her own tour. None of this was addressed by Hewitt, most likely because it would have proved inconvenient. It cracks me up how these media people ask for your honest opinion and then, if you give it to them, they proceed to beat your reputation to a pulp with it. All Singh was doing was voicing an opinion shared by many of his fellow players who were too cowardly to do the same, or, if they did, couched their objections in such politesse you couldn't tell they were objections at all.

As far as I know, Singh does not carry the reputation of a cheater, nor has anyone except Hewitt implied that he doesn't deserve to be where he is. What he is known for is his work ethic, one of the hardest workers since Ben Hogan, who used to beat balls until his hands bled. Golfers at Singh's level have an almost Spartanic vision of the purity of competition in their sport, because it's the score that counts. They like the feeling of being exempt from the subjectivity of judgement that ice skaters, divers, and gymnasts must endure, and the diffusion of responsibility peculiar to all team sports like football and basketball. It's the score that makes the golfer worthy. You don't have to like him or the aesthetics of his swing, but you can't argue with his score. He shot it, nobody else, and you can't take it away. Reinforcing this frame of mind is the professional's fearsome respect for the near cruelty of the regime he has to deal with. It's called the PGA Tour qualifying school. If you want to see grown men cry, go watch the third and final stage of the competition. Annika could have done that. She could have paid her four or five grand and gone to qualifying school. Why didn't she? My guess is that she couldn't get past the first stage, but I'm just guessing.

Remember when John Daly won the 1991 PGA Championship? He was the ninth alternate when he got a phone call at 5:30 P.M. on a Wednesday, less than twenty-four hours before the tournament began, informing him that he had moved to first alternate. Nick Price then withdrew to attend the birth of his son, and Daly was in. Without benefit of a practice round, he went on to win. This is the stuff dreams are made of, and Singh makes the reasonable point that, while extending an invitation to Annika might have fulfilled her own dreams, the gesture might also have snuffed out someone else's.

So how did Annika get in? On a sponsor's exemption. And what is one of those? They are places in the field, approximately seven in number, reserved to the discretion of the corporate sponsor putting up the purse for the tournament, the money guys. They can invite whomever they want. The CEO can invite his arthritic, wheelchair-bound grandmother if he so desires. As far as I know, there is nothing in the rules prohibiting cripples and females from participating, at least not since the Supreme Court let Casey Martin and his electric cart into the game. But usually these invitations are extended to golfers of genuine caliber – a Tom Watson in the U.S. Open, for example, or someone of prominence who has fallen on hard times, like a Chip Beck – just as the LPGA might give an exemption to Nancy Lopez who, though past her game, can still play, has at least a chance of winning, and can still draw a crowd. And it was the crowds the Colonial sponsors had in mind, a commercial venture well-calculated, for it appeared to me that Annika's galleries were at least as large as those of Tiger Woods. But that doesn't make it right.

For those of you who think I object to her presence in the field simply because she is a woman, you'd be badly backasswards wrong. In sports, it's the women who discriminate, not the men. The men have the NBA. The women have the WNBA. It's the same in tennis. It's the same in bowling. In golf, the men have the Professional Golfers Association. The women have the Ladies PGA. The men have the U.S. Open; the women have the Women's U.S. Open, which states in the regulations on the entry form that you must have been a female at birth to be eligible. (They might want to re-visit this once a transgendered female signs up; the reverse has already happened in tennis.) Annika could have gone through the two-stage process of qualifying for the U.S. Open. Why didn't she?

To give her aspirations some perspective, we need to remember that a long time ago a woman did try to qualify for a men's tournament, and succeeded. Babe Didrickson Zaharias, possibly the greatest human athlete of any sex (okay, of either sex) to ever walk the planet, made it into the 1945 Los Angeles Open. Not only that, she made the cut. And how did she do it? By playing in a qualifying tournament against 200 men and beating most of them. Annika could do that. She could pay a few hundred dollars to compete on a Monday against a few hundred men for four available spots. Lots of guys, dreamseekers, do it all the time, Nationwide and mini-tour players roaming the country and spending a lot of money to play in Monday qualifiers, hoping for the big break: qualifying, then finishing in the top ten and moving on to the next tournament. It's one of the few ways around qualifying school. Annika could have tried it, but she didn't. Do you think she wanted to? I don't.

What she needed was the sure thing. A good thing came her way and she couldn't turn it down. Having climbed to the mountaintop in women's golf, she wanted to try the men's, so the mountaintop came to her. The men offered her a hand up, and instead of saying, "I don't deserve it," she took the hand. If she'd had to qualify, she might never have gotten the chance to live this dream. Those who are close to the game, have no political agenda, and are able to face reality, already knew this. Even Fred Reed, doing his 'slow country boy armed with shotgun shells of common sense' routine, knew it, and he doesn't strike me as the golfing type: "What I don't understand is how come people in this country, except about five with good sense, can believe things they know aren't true…It's a talent Americans have. Most of our social policy is based on things we know aren't true…And when things don't happen that can't, we wonder why they didn't, even though we know."

To her credit, I suppose, Annika never claimed to be a pioneer blazing new paths for the Advancement of Women. All she wanted was to test her skills at the highest level. (What this said to her fellow lady golfers – that you guys aren't good enough to make me the best I can be – was not much commented on.) But she had to have known what others would make of it, and sure enough, after her first round 71, the Golf Channel convened another panel comprised of current lady pros and one from the past, the great Kathy Whitworth. They were all atwitter with excitement, about what I'm not sure. Kelli Kuehne was at pains to make us aware that the women were as good at their level as the men at theirs. Maybe. It's arguable. Who cares? The thoroughly innocuous and totally agreeable male interviewer asked nary a hard question except maybe for this one: did any of them think there would come a time when a woman would play full time on the PGA Tour? (He must think women are evolving into some kind of superpeople while men are standing still. He even seemed to hope it was true.) There was some hemming and hawing. Well, uh, the important thing was that this was happening right now and it's just so wonderful, and new opportunities for women and, yes, it was distinctly possible that Annika could make the cut. The next day, when she didn't - and modestly confessed that she was in way over her head and going back to her own tour where she belonged - praises were sung to her conduct on the course, her "bravery" in the effort, and then the subject was dropped. Brian Hewitt never apologized to Vijay Singh, and Peter Oosterhuis remains inured to self-doubt. If there were any mea culpas, or admissions that one had spoken in haste or made rash predictions, I didn't hear them.

Some might wonder if I have any good thing to say about Ms. Sorenstam. Yes I do. She's a great lady golfer, female at birth.

Now let me tell you how good she is. She shot 71-75 on a course laid out for men. It's not the most difficult they play, but it's a good one. Most of the top amateur men in the country could not have done that. Even 50%, maybe more, of the men on the mini-tours could not have done it (I do not consider the Nationwide Tour a mini-tour; it's crawling with ex-PGA Tour members). These players are everywhere, in every city in the country, guys with scratch handicaps on their own courses, but they could not have done it. They'd have had at least one score in the high 70's or even in the 80's. And these are the cream of the crop. But what does the average male golfer shoot on any given day, on courses far less demanding than a tour layout? Try this: 97. And that's assuming he's playing honestly, not rolling his ball in the rough or taking an illegal drop or playing by the mythical "winter rules," all of which happen all the time. Yes, 97. Twenty-five strokes over par. How many do you think ever shoot a legitimate round of par? Try this: one tenth of one percent, one golfer out of every thousand. With a piddling two and a half percent ever attaining a handicap of five or less, I'm thinking Annika can beat approximately 97% of the male golfers on the planet any day of the week while playing from their tees. The problem is, that 97% is not to be found on the PGA Tour. Her first round, one over par 71 kept her in touch with the field. Making the cut seemed possible. But in golf, the pressure isn't released with the passing of each round; it gets worse, and the next day her short game let her down. The vaunted "delicate female touch" that is supposed to make their short games better is another myth. Brutish males get up and down more often, and they putt better. The pressure always finds your weak spot. Much was made of the fact that she beat eleven of the men in the field, but not much of the fact that she finished near the bottom. Dominance in golf is established over time, and in time, a very short time, those eleven guys would leave her behind.

Here's another thing: once the competition was underway, I was rooting for her. So was my hard-nosed daughter. In her case it was probably the underdog thing and a faint loyalty to her sex. In my case it was the male thing: Men want too much for women to do well. Women know they can get what they want from us, and that we don't like to see them suffer a hard time even when they deserve it. They know this better than we do. As I mentioned to a female reader, they deracinate us, tangling our emotions beyond reason. Those crowds were cheering for the underdog, the lone sheep in the midst of wolves, and the fact that she was a lady only made her plight more poignant. I'll bet most of the men in the crowd wanted to put an arm around her. Before the round, the guys she was playing with tried to talk her into playing well. They don't do that for each other. A perfunctory "Play well," or "Good luck" is the most you'll get. And they don't get to cry when they lose – only when they win. I know it's hypocritical, but I couldn't help myself. She looked kind of cute out there. The feminists won't like hearing that but, unlike them, I'm able to admire all of a woman's finer qualities.

But here's the bigger question, the thing I can't figure out: why the push to see women compete against men, whatever the arena? What pleasure do they get out of it? Where's the fun in abolishing distinctions and watching the girls get beat? I don't think the equalizers are much into fun. Being the kind of people who were born to Organize Society, they'd gladly live their whole lives without it as long as things go as planned. Is the question of how Annika stacks up against the best men in the world one that we really need the answer to? Of course not. But it seems these days we just can't deny ourselves the answer to any question. I wonder who the first woman will be to step in the ring with Mike Tyson. Every now and then an item pops up in the news about how some girl has been let on to a boy's high school football team. If my football coach had put a girl across from me and told me to run into her, I'd have quit. If I were a pro, I'd do the same. I don't hit girls, period. You can't pay me enough to slam into the sweet softness of creation's cradle. The NBA once let a woman try out for one of its teams. She didn't make it. I'm glad. How many of you really want to see some girl take an elbow in the teeth from Shaquille O'Neal? I guess there are some who do though. Or at least they're willing to let her suffer the elbow to advance an agenda. Again, I look to Fred Reed for wisdom, plainly spoken: "…it used to be that women didn't think they had to compete with men. When I was in high school, everybody knew the boys could beat the girls at basketball. It was just how the world was. Nobody ever thought about it. I didn't figure I was somehow better than Gloria because I could out-rebound her… When girls made better grades, which they generally did, the boys didn't feel oppressed and talk about how their self-esteem was a quart low and the teachers were against them. Girls just did better homework. It was how things were. Now it's different. Women are always challenging men at things."

Yeah, I remember Kathy Stratton, the smartest person in my tenth grade class, maybe the smartest person in the universe. Shy, dumpy, plain and plump, with goggles for glasses, she almost never raised her hand unless no one else knew the answer. She almost never spoke unless the teacher called on her, but we all knew she made nothing but A's. She knew the answer to every geometry question ever asked and probably to some that weren't. No one ever thought she was trying to show the rest of us up, especially the boys. She was smarter than everyone, girls included. I never felt that if I made an A too, which I didn't, she'd hold it against me. Of course, while I gazed out the window, daydreamed about girls, and played every sport in its season, Kathy did her homework. I never saw her at the prom or the sock hops, because no one ever asked her to go. She was never down by the river in some boy's car for a session of heavy petting. The real competition in life is among girls for boys and vice-versa. Kathy wasn't a part of that. I sometimes wonder if she ever married; I hope her smarts did her some good.

But now the competition's everywhere all the time. It throws up a wall between the sexes that ought not to be there. As Fred points out, it used to be that one of the nice things about girls was that "they were people you didn't have to compete against." They offered relief from all that. They were the reason we competed at all. Now, half the time, they're the enemy, and something good has gone out of life. I'd always thought that the union between a man and a woman was the most important thing in the world, and the most interesting, the interest arising from the differences between them that would eventually form a whole. It's what life is all about, and actually keeps it going, but we don't celebrate that fact anymore. I know courtship can feel like some kind of competition, but it's really just a test to see if two hearts can stay the course of a common purpose. It ends in either separation or union. If you survive the courtship, there might be marriage beyond, where the real competition begins. It provides a safe fortress from whose battlements a woman really can rule the world. In my little cabin in my neck of the woods, I'd say the female wins about ninety percent of the time. Why? Because she's a girl, a woman, a queen. She hasn't asked for an exemption through this life, but I'd like her to have one into the next. I want too much for her to do so well. I hope it's by the Sponsor's design, because I wouldn't have it any other way.

Posted 19:54 by William Luse -
Remember, I will be posting from this page temporarily.

Posted 03:16 by William Luse -


First, the really important news. Sometimes its nice to see good things happen to good people, and I got to see it Monday when Bernadette qualified for the USGA Women's Amateur Championship at Bear Lakes Country Club in West Palm Beach. There were 814 entrants to the tournament, 156 of whom will be making the trip to Philadelphia.

The course's "Bear" moniker is no accident. Jack Nicklaus designed it, and Jack designs courses for Jack: thin slips of greens angling away from the player, requiring on the approach a high fade that is all carry and no roll, the lack of carry dropping you into a sand or gnarly grass bunker and sometimes good old Florida swamp water. The wind blew at a steady 15-20 knots all day and sometimes more when storms were near. The greens had to be running at least 10 on the stimpmeter (you non-golfniks try to stay with me; it'll be over soon). That means the kind of greens that, when you chip onto them - thinking you've hit a good one, having landed it just where you wanted - the ball rolls 10-20 feet past the hole. She played well, but a few expected bogies crept in, and the birdies wouldn't fall. She was four over after 14, and getting a little down. After 15 and a freakish double bogey, she was six over and figured she was out of it. I told her no. There was no way to know how the field was playing under these conditions. On 16 she pulled her drive into the rough, but somehow smoothed a 6 iron to the middle of the green. 30 feet for birdie. As she sized it up I said, "Kid, it's about time one went in." She sank it. Unbeknownst to me, her mother, walking the cartpaths while watching the action, was saying rosaries. This could open a new thread about what we ought and ought not to pray for. So...what? God's going to hold it against her? Go ahead, Big Guy, make my day. There's not much you can do about mothers. On 17 she bogied again, a perfect 5 iron from 170 that, the day before under the same conditions, reached its goal. But not this time. Now she's chipping again, another good looking chip that runs 8 feet by, and the putt for par lips out. Back to six over. On 18, her last hole, I said, "There's only one option. In the fairway, on the green, in the hole." She nodded. She slammed the drive a solid 250 yards down the right center. In the short grass. One third of the only option accomplished. On the approach, we badly miscalculated. The wind was right, the yardage was right, but her 9 iron (solidly hit) left her 12 yards short of the green. She had maybe 30 feet of flat green to work with, after which it was all down hill. If her chip went six inches past the flag, she'd be at the bottom of a swale with an impossible uphill, sidehill 30 foot putt for birdie. We made an adjustment. I told her to open the blade and take the swing she was planning. These greens were no longer going to make a mockery of her fine short game. If she was able to execute it, she'd take the run out of the green, and if the ball touched any side of the hole, it would have a chance to fall. (I said this as if it were all in a day's work, and therefore likely as not to happen.) Was she comfortable with the idea? She nodded, and made the swing. The ball landed, skating softly, like an angel getting its footing, then released gently toward the hole, entered the jaws of it, and found the bottom. Click. She leaped into the air. The two girls playing with her yelled their approval, and hugged her. It was genuine. They knew they were out of it and thought she might still have a chance. Plus, most people, after spending some time with her, end up wanting to see her do well. You would too if you knew her. Still in grave doubt, she returned to the clubhouse to find that she had tied with another girl for the sixth and seventh spots out of eight available. In those conditions, even with a fine field of players, the average score was over eighty. Never give up.

Oh yeah, in case you hadn't guessed, I was her caddie. I'll take whatever credit her ego makes room for. I got awfully worn out watching her take all those swings. And no, I don't think the rosary had anything to do with it.

And now for the other news, good news too, I hope. I am a test-user of Movable Type's forthcoming weblog service called Typepad. Some of you may be as well. They have asked us testees not to discuss its features, nor to render public judgement in either a positive or negative direction, so as a Catholic Christian more or less bound to keep his word, let me just say generally that I'm having a lot of fun playing with it and learning the layout. I am allowed to link to it, and I will be making all future posts from that site, so either bookmark it or come here to click on the link. This page will stay up until I've managed to migrate its archives to whatever my future blog-home will be. So please drop by (as a favor) to read the one post I've put up, and to try out the comments system. I'd like to hear opinions.

A personal thank you is owed Jeff Miller, the Curt Jester, who has been my patron saint in this effort. Why he is accorded that status I'll make clear once all this has washed out. Yeah, someday I might have my own domain - Me, myself and I.com.

Posted 02:01 by William Luse -
My latest post can be read by clicking on this link. The new site is temporary until I can figure out what I'm going to do.

Readers can leave comments on the post there, or come back here to do it. I'd rather you came back here, but it doesn't really matter. Bless those who bother.

Posted 05:59 by William Luse -
unless things have changed by later today, this blog is temporarily shut down. I am depressed by blogger. The four errors you see below were deleted on my editing page, and this is what I get. I worked long and hard to get a substantial post up for today, and the result is what you see below. I'll look in to finding a new location. I don't know what else to do.
Update: I got rid of the error messages but I still can't publish the longer post. Here is the error I'm getting: BIG POST ERROR, POST ID 105709508904881899
REPORT IT.

If anyone can help, I'd appreciate it.

I'm putting the post into an email, and any readers who would like it delivered to them that way please let me know.

Posted 02:45 by William Luse -


Written for my wife some years ago, but I would like to re-offer it now in honor of our anniversary. I don't think she'll mind. I'll find out soon enough.

To Mary Helyn

Like a woman, Nature's beauty may overwhelm
(And her indifference, too.) Time's flow,
Made endless by its Source, the dark realm
Beyond the blue - of these I would know,
Though all seem vast beyond our measure.
Her cycles fixed, next to you her secrets pale,
And certain weary facts constrain our pleasure
In her profusion, make her fruit go stale
On the tongue: her flowers shall bedeck my tomb.
But you are creation's handmaid. All men save one
Have slept beneath your heart; without your womb -
Where my world was born - His will cannot be done:
One night the Holy Ghost one knee to a woman bent,
And hung the earth's fate upon her gracious consent.

Posted 01:30 by William Luse -


I am burdened at the moment, not free to do as I wish. Obligations. It's summertime, and the livin' ain't easy. Children coming and going, lots of hellos and goodbyes, departures, little deaths. To those readers ("friends" as I often rashly regard them) in the habit of stopping by regularly, my apologies. Your time spent at this page is a gift I cannot repay. I'll be around. Maybe I'll see you around. Wherever you go, Our Lady go with you.

Posted 02:55 by William Luse -


More Stuff for the Kids
Written for them quite some time ago. I can't remember in response to which question of eternal curiosity, perhaps of the "Why do we have to die?" kind. Neither can I remember if they liked it or just got creeped out by it. Of course, they always say they like it but...there was a look in their eyes...

Deliverance

Oh Lord, take my flesh away,
So piteous are its moans;
It hangs upon me all the day
And drags against my bones.

It hungers loud for food and drink,
It savors woman's skin;
It cares not where the soul would sink
Nor wonders where its been,

And at the sound of heaven's call
Runs to hide its face,
Never having asked at all:
"Why am I in this place?"

Beside the worm it crawls the ground
And burrows in the sand,
Safely wrapped in earth around,
Safe from heaven's hand.

It fears not you but bird and beast,
The jungle's wet decay,
Its carcass now a buzzard's feast,
And prize for jackals' play.

But oh, my God, I love it so,
So warmly does it feel;
It turns from things above it so
And writhes beneath your heel.

It covets life, the light of day,
Finds comfort in its sleep;
How unjust for you to say
It is not mine to keep.

Marvel at its lovely form
Fit for works of art;
If it could but be reborn
I'd listen with my heart.

For when I cower in my death
Will you stem my fear?
Will you give me living breath,
Whisper in my ear?

Will you tell me "All is well,
Take refuge in the cross"?
When they toll the graveyard bell
Will you redeem my loss?

Dare you try and comfort me
With halo round my head?
I beg you never let me see
This body cold and dead.

Oh, my Lord, my soul is sad
Beneath its earthly end;
It sings the song of one gone mad,
A mind that will not mend.

Forgive me, Lord, for having heard
Not you but learned men,
Who pierce themselves not on your word
But on the scholar's pen.

Put this heavy load aside,
Lift away my sin;
With the saints forbid me ride
The roaring evil wind.

When light of day dims to grey
And night is falling down,
Oh Lord take my flesh away -
And lay it in the ground.

Posted 05:34 by William Luse -


Letter to a Priest (continued)

I don't know. Maybe there ought to be something in canon law that prohibits priests my children like from dabbling in speculative theology. Agitating laymen seem to do enough damage by themselves, though the cause behind it can usually be traced to clerical instigation, to some guy with "theologian" after his name. The reader should keep in mind that I am not a theologian, just another layman trying to extrapolate from a set of premises, those basic catechetical postulates, held in common by us all. So here's the letter I spoke of, circa 1991 or 92. As I said, there was no response or acknowledgement of any kind. I thought he might invite me to dinner, but…

Dear Father K.,

When most priests, religious, and laymen of my acquaintance are so comfortable in their ignorance, it is good to find one who so loves the faith that he continually studies and teaches it for the sake of many souls, as well as his own, and for the love of God. I think you would agree that, just as you are a priest forever, when it comes to the study of God we are all students forever. I trust, therefore, you will have patience with a few remarks from a fellow student concerning your sermon of last Sunday, in which you claimed that Christ could have sinned but chose not to.

Your premise for this assertion seems to lie in your conviction that His free will would be impaired if He could not have made such a choice. And, indeed, this has proven to be a problem of no small magnitude for theologians from Patristic times to our own. But it is a problem of explanation, not of doctrine. The Fathers and early councils unanimously uphold the impeccability of Christ, and the dogmatic essentials have all been with us since the end of the fifth century and the close of the Council of Chalcedon. Those essentials are:
- that Christ, born of a woman, assumed a truly human nature, body and soul, intellect and will;
- that He therefore possessed a human and divine intellect, a human and divine will;
- that the two natures remain unimpaired, neither confused (as though one subsumed the other) nor divided (as though merely co-existing side by side), and yet,
- that the two natures are united to form one individual, one person, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and that consequently
- He not only did not sin but could not sin because He was God.

You are, I take it, in contention only with this last item, the part about "could not sin." I quote from Father John Hardon's Catholic Catechism: "Only in the spurious supposition that Christ has two persons is sin conceivable, since the human person might then commit sin, while the divine person would be perfectly holy."

Now the will is the agent of a personality, and in Christ that personality is divine. His divine and human wills were united in and by that person. For a divine person to choose evil, he would have to contradict His very essence, which is goodness, holiness, and all perfection. If Christ, through His human will, could have chosen to sin, then that will would have to separate, disunite, itself from the divine person, and another person would be required to make the choice for evil. But there is no other person.

Out of curiosity I have asked many Christians, Catholic or otherwise, "Did Jesus have a human personality?" Almost all, after a moment's hesitation and fearful of denying His humanity, respond, "Yes." And so I conclude that this sense of the human and divine in Jesus sort of casually hanging out together – joining hands but not hearts, involved in a courtship but not a marriage – comes easily to many of us.

As to your central premise: Do we impair Christ's free will if we say that He could not sin? The answer lies submerged in the mystery of the hypostatic union (and part of it always will because it is a mystery). In His divinity such a choice clearly could not be made; but what about His humanity? Is His humanity denied if we deny Him this choice, or rather this capacity to choose? Again, His humanity had no decision-making power apart from His divinity. That power resided in the divine person, to whom the humanity belonged, with whom it was in union, not at war. We might as well ask if God's freedom is constrained because He cannot choose to be other than what He is. Are the blessed in heaven somehow deprived because they no longer suffer temptation, no longer see, as we do, evil as an option? I realize they got where they are by making choices, the right ones, while on earth, but their goal was to become like the One who need never make such a choice. The lives of the saints provide ample evidence that virtue can become as much a habit as sin, that the good can be recognized and adhered to without entertaining an evil alternative. It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas that at some point he no longer suffered temptations of the flesh. Was he less free because God's grace allowed him to bring an unruly passion under control?

I would therefore like to offer a tentative solution – tentative because I appeal to no authority on its behalf, and will surrender it if shown to be in conflict with the Church's understanding of human psychology. It is this: the defining mark of freedom of the will is not the necessity of making endless choices between good and evil, which is a faculty peculiar to our fallen humanity. (Christ's humanity was, of course, unfallen.) The defining mark is the ability to see the good and to follow it, period; that if an alternative exists, it may as well involve a choice between two goods as between a good and an evil; and that the soul has greater freedom of movement in the former case than in the latter. No temptation, no agony of decision, is necessary, as was the case when Christ in the desert betrayed no internal delight in Satan's suggestions, nor a moment's hesitation in rejecting them. As further example, I would venture that Adam and Eve were fully human and fully free in their innocence. It was only after yielding to the serpent's wile that they became enslaved to the necessity of choosing between good and evil. This necessity is a kind of prison in which we now labor, where the war in our souls is an endless distraction from the boundless good and abundance of grace into which Adam and Eve were born, when they were most fully human and truly free. Why they had to confront the serpent is as mysterious to me as most anything. We can only say that God allowed it, but did not provoke it. Christ's coming seems to have been contingent upon, and necessitated by, a misuse of the will by both angels and men. We cannot impute to Jesus even the possibility of a misuse of His will, as though He might have participated in the very sinfulness He came to atone for, locked Himself in the very prison from which He came to free us.

A complementary difficulty in this area arises, I think, from another too casual supposition about the nature of evil: that our choices for evil are real and substantial in the same way as our choices for good. They are real, all right, and so are their consequences; if only we could plainly see how awful they are. Satan is also real but, as evil personified, what kind of reality has he next to God? His (and our) evil is measured by our distance from God. Understood in this way, evil is less a presence than an absence – the absence of good. (I like C.S. Lewis' formulation, that what goes to hell is not a man, but the remains of one.) There is no greater freedom than to choose what is right, and Christ's freedom is perfect. The possibility of choosing evil would not be an expansion, but an adumbration of that freedom.

Finally, the doctrinal implications of your position are astounding. If Christ could have sinned on one occasion, might He not have done so on others? Could He have been in error on one thing, but not on anything else? (As I mentioned before, and as you know from your place in the confessional, sin is habit-forming.) Could a fallible Christ found an infallible Church? Could a morally deficient Savior offer the perfect sacrifice to the Father to take away the sins of the world? Could such a doctrine as the Immaculate Conception survive? Would there be any point in having, if it were possible, a sinless Mother give birth to a sinful Savior? She would then be truly in danger of receiving what Catholics are often falsely accused of giving her: the adoration due only her Son. Could there have been a resurrection from the dead, the crown of incorruptibility, of a God-man who had corrupted his own soul? How would the example of His life make saints through the ages? Perhaps He would have been reduced to proclaiming weakly: Do as I say, not as I do. It seems clear to me that the possibility of sin is the devastation of His mission. Christianity (and preeminently, Catholicism) as we now know it and have known it through history, would simply not exist. The Father sends His Son into a fallen world to save it, on the off-chance that He might actually succeed.

I offer these thoughts out of love for the Church and the priests who must guide it. We fall so easily into error it can pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, the standards for priests are higher. They must notice because they are commissioned to preach and teach. Likewise, if I am in error, show me. But I can find no endorsement for your position in the decrees of councils and popes, the writings of the Fathers, nor in Scripture. Lots of debate, but no endorsement.

Also, my kids like you. You said the first mass our family attended at St. Charles, and before leaving the church, while still facing the altar and standing before the sanctuary, you genuflected toward the tabernacle. The kids thought this the best thing they'd seen in a while. "He's very reverent," whispered the eight year old. She and her younger sister attend St. Charles school. They have heard the other priests and still like you best. I have not tried to disabuse them of this affection, nor will I. But I will teach them the Truth as it has been handed down.

Sincerely (in Christ),

Posted 04:59 by William Luse -


Letter to a Priest

A rare venture into theology, and one not eagerly embraced. Like most of you, I try to follow St. Paul's advice and always be ready with a reason for what I believe, though I'd rather not have to ready myself against fellow Catholics, especially priests. I (like most of you?) would much rather just sit in the pew and trust that the guys in the robes will say and do the right thing. I do not like the feeling of having to enter a Catholic church with my error radar raised high, probing the air for evidence of an enemy incursion. But over the years I think many of us have developed the habit, some willingly, others with reluctance. I hope I'm among the latter. I get the sense that some who would argue for the Tradition have enjoyed the confrontations of the last forty years (what Monsignor Kelly called The Battle for the American Church) a little too much. I haven't. I knew before I joined up that the Church to which I was converting could be as fractious in its own way as our political culture was in another, but that doesn't mean I liked it. I didn't take the oath in order to find a good argument. I took it because of Christ's wish that we all be one, and I saw the only hope for that oneness in this particular gathering of souls. I came to the conviction that if I couldn't find it here, it wasn't to be found.

I was raised to hold the Episcopalian priests of my childhood in high esteem. And I did. To me they were practically perfect. I knew they were men, but instinctively considered them something more, as though touched by heaven in a way the rest of us aren't. Again with Saint Paul, I tried to put away childish things when I became a man. Priests are people too, we hear. It's a fact, I'm afraid, unpleasant though it may be. Becoming a man has not made it much easier to accept. They are just human, we are told, (and in the light, or darkness, of recent revelations some of them have seemed less than that), but we don't want them to be "just human." We want them to be more. Some of them are. I have known a couple, and so, probably, have you. But you've also known the other kind, the ones who feed the disunity, the ones who set your teeth on edge, the ones that make you want to go parish shopping. You're not sure how to deal with such a one. Should you confront him? Most of the time you don't. You keep your mouth shut, offer it up to God, cling to the truth in spite of him. You vent to your family and like-minded friends. Perhaps you even buy a computer and, after surfing around a while, discover St. Blog's Parish and a whole new circle of like-minded friends, where no one ever argues because none of the essentials are in dispute, because no one ever pretends to know more than he really does…Forgive me – I digress.

And usually it's not a matter of outright heresy, but of what we might call erosion by emphasis, his preferring, for example, the unifying significance of that communal meal known as the Eucharist to its previous incarnation as the body and blood of Him who died in agony on a cross and whose blood spilled to the ground for our sins, of which we are unworthy to partake but do so at His gracious command, this latter sacrificial and redemptive understanding being not so much overtly displaced as made to take a back seat, to recede into the background where it need not trouble us unduly, or interfere with the "celebration." Or perhaps he engages in what some consider an understandable, socially necessary, and rather mild form of disobedience (enlisting in his cause a surrogate shield of enablers in the form of deacons and various lay ministers), such that, for example, while Rome commands that neither the letter of the liturgy nor of the Bible quoted therein be fooled with, he sets about with a flailing scythe, severing every masculine pronoun from its Scriptural root and stalk, not so much feminizing the Mass as neutering it utterly, as though Christ were neither a man nor born of a woman, or, if he was, it's not important.

Like most people, I usually keep my mouth shut. Usually. On the other hand, it's hard to let the subterfuge pass unchallenged Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year. To do so seems an abdication of one's duty. I have confronted a few priests, as politely as possible, and hated every second of it. I had to argue with the priest who brought me into the church about contraception. (This was some months after he brought me in and I had re-learned a few things.) The disagreement remained cordial, because I could not be rid of my affection for him, for the role he had played in my life. But he would not be moved. I was tougher than the Church, he claimed, though the only resource I cited was Humanae Vitae. He referred me to a famous footnote at the bottom of a page in the Council documents, and to the cerebrations of eminent clerics like Richard McBrien. At another parish, the pastor made a contemptuous remark during a sermon about that embarrassing precept concerning the One True Church. On the way out I shook his hand and politely noted (all right, my tone was polite, the words carrying a clear rebuke) that he had just made a mockery of a two thousand year old creed. His smile gave way to red-faced anger. "Oh, yeah?" he said belligerently, like he wanted to step outside or something. I moved along. He was later relieved of his position and forced into rehab, not for lousy sermons but for an alcohol problem. I had noticed he seemed red-faced on more than one, unprovoked, occasion.

One day I entered the vestibule of the church attached to my kids' school (I often joined them for weekly Mass) to be greeted by a sight I'd hoped never to see: pubescent twelve and thirteen year old girls in diaphanous skirts, their leotards clearly visible beneath, practicing their moves as they prepared to liturgically twirl and dance their way down the aisle. The priest and the processional were ready to go. This time the red face of anger belonged to me. "This is forbidden," I addressed the priest. "Oh no," he began, "Vatican II…" "It's forbidden," I interrupted. (Do these priests really believe everything they say about Vatican II?) I marched into the church and snatched the seven year old from her seat. I left the kindergartner because I couldn't find where she was sitting. We marched back out, the priest pleading as we passed him, "If you'd stay you'd see how worshipful…" "It's forbidden," for the third time. It's a simple thought, but one the usurpers can't get through their heads. I took the seven year old straight to the rectory where we had a sit-down with the pastor. He was laid back, reluctant to intervene. Was I sure it was forbidden, he wanted to know? I thought it odd that he needed to depend on a layman for the answer. A week later I provided documentation with which he could not argue but, judging by his expression, having to acknowledge it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. He did not thank me for it. I found out later that other parents and teachers (by no means all – it was a teacher and some complicit parents who had been allowed to choreograph the whole affair) were offended by the presence of the liturgical nymphs in fairy dress, but to my knowledge not a one of them made any protest. But it never happened again, at least not while my kids were there, and that's the only time I ever made a scene, occasioned by the reformers' using the element of surprise to spring this spectacle upon an unwitting congregation.

A few years later in another parish in another town, a deacon gave the sermon one Sunday while the pastor remained in his chair. The deacon let us know that some teachings never change, but others do, and that one day women might be permitted to receive Holy Orders. An awkward smile crossed the pastor's face, and I think he might have squirmed a little in his seat, but he remained in it. I later asked the associate pastor, a conservative fellow, if anyone screened what the deacons might say. "The faith of the people of God will prevail," he announced, absolving himself of taking any direct action, and betraying a quaint ignorance as to currents of faith among the "people of God." Most laymen I knew thought the sight of women in white collars inevitable, if not just around the corner of the next decade. The welcome new presence of girl altar servers was evidence of progress and possibly of proof.

On another Sunday in this same parish, this same pastor again relinquished the pulpit, or the time allotted thereto (for I don't think the girl ever ascended to the sanctuary), so that a woman from the choir who was also an actress might strut her stuff. It was that time of year when the Gospel tells us of the Samaritan woman at the well from whom Jesus requested a drink. Dressed in peasant garb and carrying a straw basket (looking more like a Swiss maiden than a Samaritan), she began her routine seated on the steps leading up to the altar, from which she eventually rose to stride before the "audience" while delivering a dramatic, consciousness-raising monologue on the status of women in the time of Christ, and the apparently perfect concurrence of His mission with their progress in modern times. I was also in the choir, among that number let in to provide relatively on-key background noise, and about midway through her act I couldn't stomach anymore. I and my robe simply walked out. I was near the side door anyway, so no scene or scandal was made. People walk out of church all the time, either because they're ill or feel nature calling. In fact, from what I have read, it seems most Catholics save themselves the stroll and don't even bother showing up from one Sunday to the next.

After Mass, I met the pastor at the back door of the sacristy as he was emerging into the courtyard. "Is this how it's going to be from now on?" I asked. "The homily given over to performance art by actresses from Universal Studios?" "Oh no," he protested, and went on about how it was a one time thing, a special occasion of some kind, but I could see from the manner of his mumblings that he knew he'd done wrong. And this guy, like his associate, was a good guy, straight up and down, orthodoxy on the hoof. He had supported the desire of my wife and me to educate our kids at home rather than through the parish's religious ed program. The unhabited nun who ran things didn't like the idea, believing there was more to catechesis than doctrine, like "community," but in this case the pastor had the last word. I enjoyed the look on the nun's face. The kids would still have to take confirmation classes when the time came, but by then they'd already know everything. So he was one of my good guys, but the good guys, in this age of the laity, want to please too many people, and we end up with an actress using a church for her stage. The rebels don't care about pleasing you. They have an agenda and want to ram it down your throat. Join the New Church, or find space to recline on the rubbish heap of an antiquated and dying dogma. Come along or be left behind. The good guys don't go after you like that. They want to persuade. The rebels want to impose. The good guys could take a lesson.

(A tragic aside: this priest was later transferred, in the normal course of things, to a parish on the coast where, one evening, he was found alone in the church by a homeless man who, for reasons unknown to me, beat the poor priest nigh unto death. The brutality of the beating is difficult to describe, and I think left the pastor in a coma for a while. This truly good and gentle man survived, but last I heard he still has problems.)

Some of the abuses I have described are offenses against doctrine, others against discipline, but I have never been able to separate them fully. Flaunting a discipline bears contempt for the authority of those ordained to exercise it, and ultimately for Him by whom all authority is given, and who prayed before His agony and death that we would be one in Him as He is in the Father and the Spirit. He even gave them a silly little discipline to practice that very night, the washing of each other's feet. He gave them that night a sacramental and a sacrament. Would he have done so were they not connected? Does the preeminence of one trivialize the other? And was He in the habit of recommending trifles? I know that priestly celibacy is not a mark of the Church, but does that mean that the Holy Spirit did not lead us to it? Newman said that those who truly love their religion revere its forms, because those forms, those disciplines, depend at some point from a doctrine, and the doctrine from a Person. And so I see an attack on one as an attack on the other, an assault on either as one against the person of Christ Himself.

Which brings me to my final example. Sometimes the attack can be unintended. The homilist thinks he is expanding our knowledge of the God-man called Christ, without realizing that he has stuffed Him into a very narrow box. The trend of the last few decades has been to emphasize the man side of this relationship to help us see how intimately bound to us He is in His humanity. And so a new fashion in our comprehension of Christ's consciousness came upon the scene, and this fashion was to deny that Christ's awareness of His true identity and the nature of His mission could have found completion during His earthly sojourn, but came into its fullness only after the Resurrection. I heard this set forth one evening during an inquiry class presided over by a black priest in the employ of the parish governed by the red-faced, alcoholic pastor. This black priest offered the most dramatically reverent rendition of the vernacular Mass that I have ever seen, and I valued him for it. But he had been doing some reading and had found the new theory (which was not new at all) convincing. It was now his opinion that Christ did not fully know who He was until post-Resurrection. Since the effect of the theory was, by necessity, to deny Christ possession of the beatific vision while on earth, compelling Him to discover His destiny by a fortuitously stumbling route, I raised (politely, of course) certain obvious questions (since, for example, as the second person of the Holy Trinity, it was His vision, how might it be denied him?) to which he responded by raising his hands soothingly to reassure me that it was only his opinion, and that mine was okay too. It was indeed reassuring to know that believing what had always been taught was "okay." The session proceeded in all cordiality, and no bonds were severed, for he ended up baptizing one of my children. But he reminded me a few years later of another priest that my family admired, though more from a distance, for we were new to the parish. He too was very reverent. One of my kids, an eight year old at the time, pointed out with no encouragement the extravagant bow he made toward the Blessed Sacrament before leaving the sanctuary at Mass's end. (Kids really do notice these things.) He also cut a dignified figure: he was tall, balding, well into middle age, and he gave sermons that sometimes hung in the air for a longer time than it took to deliver them. You could see the intelligence in the eyes behind the glasses. Which meant that, like the black priest, he probably read a lot. One Sunday, perhaps concerning Christ's temptation in the desert by the Tempter himself, the priest found it necessary to share his belief that Christ could have sinned but chose not to, the point being, I suppose, that, according to our choices, the very earth may hang in the balance, certainly our lives. A very good point, by the way, his manner of making it, however, forcing an immediate extrusion of the radar. On the way out, wife and kids in tow (or, more likely, vice-versa), I paused to shake his hand and ask quickly, "Are you sure, Father, that He could have done something contrary to His very nature?" He cocked his eyebrow, as though in response to an unexpected impertinence, and said (I can't remember his exact words) that, oh yes, for He was a man and to deny Him the freedom to choose was to impair His freedom of will, saying this as he turned to the next proffered hand waiting in line to shake his own. I understood; the moment was inconvenient. But the conversation was clearly over. So I wrote him a letter, of which more in a moment.

Now, am I to presume that either of these two priests was somehow injured in his relationship with his Savior? I wouldn't venture to say, but I will say that it worries me. The state of a man's soul is private, but his utterances are public (especially from a position of authority), and with these we are free to take issue because they might affect the state of another man's soul, or of a child's, and we all know the penalty for misleading a child. Neither of these men, as far as I could honestly tell, was attempting a coup de tat or mounting an overt siege (a la Hans Küng) against the rightful occupant of the throne in the castle of Truth. Each wanted to enlighten our understanding, not darken it; they wished to help, not hinder, nor give aid and comfort to the enemy. It may be that both were more infatuated with their own intellectual prowess than with imparting truth to our minds, but this I cannot know. As I said, the attacks were most likely unintended, but I don't think them any less seditious for being so subtle.

Orthodoxy is a balancing act, a very delicate one (making the Church's perdurability through two millennia all the more remarkable), and if the scale is tipped ever so slightly to one side, His person will suffer, our understanding of it, that is, which cannot but cause our faith, and our relationship with Him, to suffer as well. All the heresies that have arisen through the centuries, in defense against which many councils have been called, were really just fights about the answer to that one question: "Who do you say that I am?"

Confronted with a mystery, the tendency of our minds is to seek a solution. That some mysteries do not admit of one, that we should in fact desire some to remain insoluble, is a proposition we find irksome. In our lust for certainty, our pride of intellect, our arrogance of will, we can wander far afield. And I would maintain, against the common wisdom, that only one road leads to Rome, that of obedience; the road of disobedience and dissent leads into the wilderness, and to the outposts of fragmented faith, apostasy, and unbelief. It was an act of disobedience that got us into this mess in the first place: "Do not eat of the fruit of this tree." Our earthly mother and father did not doubt His existence, nor wish to fine tune the nature and extent of His attributes. They simply doubted His seriousness in issuing a command that forbade a certain activity. The instant they doubted they were corrupted, allowing instant access to that arrogance of will, that pride of intellect, and that lust for certainty, which put suddenly an entire race deeply in trouble, and ended up nailing God to a tree.

All this has served as an overly long prelude to the letter written to that priest last mentioned. I walked it up to the rectory in a sealed envelope with his name writ large across the front, and handed it to the secretary. I don't know if he ever received it or even read it, because no response was ever forthcoming. It was the last letter I remember ever writing to any Catholic personage or institution, and it is likely to remain the last. For those of you who have managed to maintain interest this far, I will post the letter sometime during the next couple of days.

Posted 16:56 by William Luse -


I've been travelling a lot lately, mostly to college golf tournaments. We got home from the last one this past Sunday at 3:30 in the morning after sixteen hours on the road. The tournament was in Winston-Salem, N.C., the NCAA East Regionals, home of Wake Forest University, where my daughter's team, Ole Miss, shot itself out of the tournament in the first round with a 322. They came back the next two days with a 302 and a 296, the kind of play that, over all three days, would have kept them in the hunt for Nationals. The daughter, too, shot herself out of it with a first round 82, then came back with a 76 and a 69. She's a full-spectrum, equal opportunity golfer, wanting no decade to feel left out. She had seven birdies that last day, one triple-bogey, and she birdied number 18, the last hole of her collegiate career. Her mother behaved in a most unbecoming manner, pumping her fist as the birdie fell and shouting, "Yes!" (The daughter traveled to Atlanta a few days later and shot a 75, good enough to get her through the first round of U.S. Open qualifying. Next comes the hard part, sectionals, 36 holes in the blazing Florida sun against LPGA pros and the best amateurs in the country.)

We said good-bye to her in mid-afternoon and headed north toward Charleston, W. Va. and then west across Kentucky and finally north to Bloomington to pick up the other kid and bring her home for the summer. I like traveling, at least in theory. And I prefer the car to the airplane...theoretically. I can drive forever. I get tired but never sleepy. I think it's the idea of getting there that keeps me going. That's what the airplane does - gets you there - but you don't get much feel for the countryside. This ability to persevere makes it easy on my carmates. The wife need only ask now and then, "You doing okay? If you need me to take over just say so." Or: "Are you hungry by any chance?" Or, from the kid in the backseat: "Dad, I gotta pee." "Now?" I ask. "Well, I can hold it a while." "Yeah? How long?" But I don't torture her. We stop soon enough. One man who's lived with three women knows who's running things.

As evening falls on these trips, my wife gets giddy. It was getting late in the day as we approached Charleston, and seemed even later because of the shadow of the mountains. Somewhere in West Virginia a change takes place in the rocks. Whoever told you there's coal in them thar hills wasn't kidding. You can see the blackness in the rocks they've blasted out of the mountains to make room for the highway. Charleston is a long city stretching along a valley cut through the mountains by the Kanawha River. All the houses are box-shaped with triangular roofs stuck on top. All the paint seems to be changing colors, and anything made of metal is running rust. There are mountains of black coal everywhere and conveyor belts standing nearby. We didn't see much activity down in the town, hardly any cars or people moving around. My wife was getting hungry, but didn't want me to stop there. I asked why. She said it looked scary down there. I said it was just another hardworking town, everyone in bed after a day in the coalmines. She said it looked like "Deliverance" country. I told her not to be a city snot. These people were Bible-believin' salt of the earth. It seemed every time we rounded a corner the three wooden crosses of Calvary loomed above us on a hillside. I know it's a sign of piety, but it had the effect of a hangman's scaffold, as though an execution were scheduled for dawn. Besides, if these people were so salty, why did they keep re-electing Robert Byrd to the Senate? A little later we passed a town called Institute. "I wonder who's running the place," she said, "the inmates or the guards." I offered a supportive snicker or two. We passed a town called Nitro. "Must be a blast living there," she said, and went off into gales of laughter. She didn't need my support anymore. She took to trying to figure out what the high school football team's mascot would be for every town we passed. I can't remember if it was West Virginia or Kentucky, but we went by the village of Gnaw Bone. The Gnaw Bone hyenas, she suggested. I reminded her there were no hyenas in West Virginia. "Dogs," she said. "Dogs gnaw bones. It's the Gnaw Bone Dogs." "How about the Gnaw Bone Jaw Bones?" I asked. "I don't get it," she said. I didn't feel like explaining.Other permutations occurred to me, more vulgar and vaguely obscene, which I kept to myself, though I did wonder aloud if this might be Monica Lewinsky's home town. She didn't get that at first either, but when she did, she slapped me on the shoulder. She doesn't like dirty jokes. But when we passed Salt Lick, Kentucky, she thought there must be a lot of deer in the area. The Salt Lick fawns, does, bucks? She couldn't imagine the cheeleaders yelling "Go, Does, Go!" Or fawns either. It had to be bucks. "Go, you Bucks! You big Bucks! Go, you big horny Bucks!" She had tears running down her cheeks. Even good Catholic girls have their dark side. I just kind of watched in amazement, for we had another six hours of road time ahead of us to Bloomington. I stopped somewhere to get her something to eat and she settled down.

Those kinds of goings on are pretty much par for the course. (Sorry.) But on the last trip a couple of weeks earlier, to the SEC's in Athens, Georgia, we ran into trouble. I've been to Athens a number of times and thought I knew all the ins and outs, the entry and escape routes. When the tournament was over and the daughter we'd come to watch play couldn't reach us by phone that night at the appointed time, I had to explain in an email entitled "Wrong Turn Will" what had happened. As follows:

Dear Bern:

Ok, so here's how it happened. Your mom and I think it'd be nice to have some MacDonald's coffee and fries to go with our 3 day old soggy-bread tuna sandwiches on the way out of Athens. So we hit Mac's and then I proceed on down Broad Street and veer left onto Epps Bridge Road thinking it'll take me to 129. Why I thought this is a mystery. So we're tooling along and things don't look familiar and suddenly I find myself on Loop 10 heading north toward 78 (which is Broad Street again) and Atlanta. I inform your mother I've effed up and get off at 78 by the Roadhouse Grill where you and I went to dinner and ate peanuts in the waiting area and ran into Courtney S. and real soon I see a sign that says Timothy Road which is the one I want. Timothy good, Epps bad. What I had done was make a sort of big stupid circle. So we follow that which turns like it's supposed to into 129 and head south toward Madison, passing Spartan Lane which leads to Sarah Kate's place, and having wasted a mere twenty minutes. That's twenty minutes I can never have back. That's twenty minutes closer to the day I die and that could have been spent sitting on the couch vegetating in front of the tv. Your mom's still calm and I'm not yet pissed beyond restraint. Twenty-some miles later we enter Madison where people with a lot of money are restoring old houses and we passed the Golden Pantry where we stopped 3 days earlier to take a pee and where big black guys all going to work at the same place stop in to get big fat stinky sausages for breakfast at 5 A.M. They looked like they should be playing pro football except that being big don't make you coordinated, or fast or able to remember a lot of different formations - bad luck. We finally see the sign to 83, the road Dave C. recommended and which we took on the way in no problem. Problem is I'm heading north like Santa's reindeer but don't know it. Your mother would later say that when I made that turn she said, "83 North?" with a big question mark in her voice but I don't remember her saying it because I was probably still re-living the iron you hit over the green on hole number 5 and the subsequent chip shot you either chunked or chickened out on and the following 3 putt to put a tragedian finishing flourish on the whole mess. So we're cruising happily along through the scenic, rolling Georgia countryside - yep, real cow country - and all of a sudden a sign says we have to turn right NOW with about 50 feet of warning so I do. Slam on the brakes, screech the turn and now we're rolling again past a Sam's Club distribution center out in the middle of nowhere and then we come to a stop sign. Still in the middle of nowhere - lots of pastureland out there dotted with manure piles - and I say to you're mom, "I don't remember this." Well she did. She remembered the bumpy things in the road that tell you you're approaching an intersection in the middle of nowhere. So I crossed the road and then we're slapped in the face with a sign that says: End 83. "Do you remember this?" Uh, no, she didn't remember this. So we pull into the parking lot of a little ramshackle motel that doesn't look like people go there to sleep and look at the map. Yep, we've been heading north to Alaska. Now I'm upset. Not out of control but doing a real slow burn inside. We decide to turn around and head north some more toward Monroe where we can catch a road called 11 south to 83 south and hence to the interstate where, with some luck, I might be able to tell my ass from a hole in the ground. 83 north takes us to 78, which really upsets me cause that's the road that leads to Atlanta where I don't want to be going. "It's a goddam conspiracy!" I yell. Your mother reminds me that you don't like that word and that she at one point, back in Madison, had said "83 North?" and I respond that she might have made a bigger deal out of it and she says she was afraid to (?????) and I say I'm willing to listen to reason, something like, "Bill, you're heading north and we need to be going south." That would have gotten my attention, that would have registered, but no, she just sits there and lets me drive blissfully through cow patty heaven. So we drive through a bunch of quaint, small Georgia towns and the sight of each town just makes me madder because they remind me I don't want to be there - towns with names like Monticello, like Thomas Jefferson lived there or something, and another called Social Circle. Yeah, a town called Social Circle and sure enough as we're passing through there's a bunch of people in a front yard having a...social gathering. Yeah, they're real sociable in Social Circle. They might have all been standing in a circle too for all I know. It looked like one of those gatherings in front of a fraternity house in Athens except everybody was better dressed and the front lawn was grass instead of dirt and there were no cars parked on it and though everyone had a glass in hand nodbody looked drunk. I don't remember which town it was but I finally yelled, "I gotta stop and take a pee! I'm so pissed I gotta pee!" We find a gas station-food mart joint and I go inside and guess what. Yeah, it's a gd conspiracy: the restroom's OUT OF ORDER. Uh-huh and my bladder's just about breaking. So I get back in the car and we go across the street to another place with a working can. The people inside look at me kind of funny as I come through the front door running in a sort of crouched posture for the door in the back. I get back in the car and a few miles down the road your Mom starts laughing. I ask her what's so funny but she's laughing so hard she can't get it out. You know how she gets: lifts a hand to her forehead, thumb and fingers to each temple, tears squeezing out the corners of her eyes, and she keeps trying to say something but can't get past the first two words. I think she deals with stress by entering a state of giddy, mild hysteria, a defense mechanism that has served her well in the trying task of living with me (our 30th anniversary is coming up in June). She finally makes it known that the line, "I'm so pissed I gotta pee!" really did it for her. And then I started laughing with her ( a humorless laugh - I sounded like a madman) because there was nothing else to do in light of the knowledge that, in addition to the 20 minutes in Athens, I'd just wasted another hour, an hour that I can't have back, one hour closer to the day I die and that could have been spent hitting plastic golf balls in the back 40 or just sitting around thinking about really important things like how stupid I am. When we got to the interstate your Mom reminds me to "go left, towards Macon. Go south, Bill." Yuck, yuck.

Just as every trip has a destination, I feel like this piece ought to have one too, but at the moment it escapes me. Maybe it's what my wife said after we picked up the other kid in Bloomington and started home. On the whole it was a pretty smooth trip, and I drove the entire sixteen hours. We got slowed down in Louisville by road construction, and in Nashville we came to a complete dead stop for thirty minutes caused by what we never found out. Just stopped. As I said, I like traveling, but I like getting there. The two impulses seem contradictory, but you can't have one without the other. As my impatience surfaced (I'll spare you the mutterings) on an interstate in downtown Opryland, my wife grew sleepy. "Relax," she said, "what's the hurry?" No hurry, I replied, I just wanted to keep moving. I didn't like unexpected impediments. I wanted to get there. She inclined her seat backwards and reached for a pillow in the back seat. "Don't worry," she said, "we always get home eventually." She laid her head on the pillow. "I'm going to take a little nap now, okay? If you need me, just wake me." In spite of her dark side, she has great faith.

Posted 03:46 by William Luse -


I've been on the road for five days and have not the energy for originality. So here's something I received by email, as part of one of those chain prayer letters. It's called "The Center." I'll let you deconstruct the significance:

The center of the Bible

What is the shortest chapter in the Bible? Answer - Psalms 117

What is the longest chapter in the Bible? Answer - Psalms 119

Which chapter is in the center of the Bible? Answer - Psalms 118

Fact: There are 594 chapters before Psalms 118

Fact: There are 594 chapters after Psalms 118

Add these numbers up and you get 1188.

What is the center verse in the Bible?

Answer - Psalms 118:8

Psalms 118:8 (NKJV) -- "It is better to trust in the LORD
than to put confidence in man."

Of course, you'll have to put your trust in a man that the stats are accurate, unless you want to do a lot of counting.
Here's another one called "The English Language." I don't know who wrote it. A couple of excerpts:

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox becomes oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and showed you my feet,
and I gave you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother, we never say methren.

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

And more...

There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted.

But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wiseguy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the uniqueness of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
If Dad is Pop, how come Mom isn't Mop?

Posted 05:23 by William Luse -
My wife went to see Chicago with a friend, because it's hard to get me into the theatres. (That means it's hard to get me to go, not that they won't let me in.) She liked it. Said Queen Latifah did a good job. Was stunned by Renee Z's performance. Oh, and Catherine Z-Jones Douglas was good too. I'm sure she was, but she wouldn't have to be very good to get my attention. That was Friday. I did a lot of yardwork - mowed, edged, trimmed hedges, hauled branches to the curb, dug weeds out of the border trenches - in 90 degree heat and a lot of humidity. Sweated a lot, worked up a thirst. Started downing Bass Ale. More than one. While she was watching Chicago, I ordered take-out ribs with beans, fries, cole slaw, and garlic bread. Washed it down with Bass Ale. I also went to the video store and rented a movie. I didn't know what was supposed to be good so I settled for a recent horror flick, Darkness Falls. I like horror, though most of it isn't any good, which makes it pretty much like the rest of the industry. How bad are today's movies? On more than one occasion I've rented one, only to pop it into the VCR and find out I've already seen it. They don't stick in the mind the way books do: "In the summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains." "It was the worst of times, it was the best of times." "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anyway, I was looking to kill time and this movie killed it nicely. And a lot of people get killed in it too. Like our hero's mother somewhere near the beginning. A sweet, caring mom, the kind you don't see much of anymore. She gets sliced and diced and, oh well, that's that. Many more followed her, but I didn't care. Their characters were so thinly drawn they seemed better off dead anyway. I got the gist of things pretty quickly. The thing about a movie like this is that you can go to the bathroom a bunch of times without pausing the movie and not miss anything. You can also go to the refrigerator for another Bass Ale. And you can keep drinking it without losing the plot thread. And if you keep drinking it you'll eventually head for the head again.

Basically what got it all going was that this town executed an old woman for some crime she didn't commit just because she was ugly. I don't remember what the crime was. I don't remember how they executed her. Maybe burned her at the stake. But before she expires, she puts a curse on the town, and everytime one of their kids loses a tooth she comes back as a maleficent tooth fairy, seeking murderous revenge on the town's children and anyone who gets in her way, swooshing through windows, levitating in lighthouse towers, dropping out of the darkness like a vampire's spawn, except she doesn't want to drink your blood, just spill it. Thus, our hero's mom's murder. The story's not about the boy's growing up without his mother, and with the memory of her horrible demise. No, in Hollywood, once you're dead, that's it. Life goes on. We pick up with the boy as a young man. Maladjusted, to be sure, but a lot of years gone by. He's obsessed with staying in the light. That's the only place the tooth fairy can't get him. That's also about the only rule inhibiting the fairy's choice to lead an afterlife of murderous mayhem. There is no cosmos here. Her presence doesn't imply a Christian or even a Swedenborgian hierarchy of powers and principalities. She's just a nasty ghost who shows up in the course of ordinary life in an American town. It's hard to scare me with something I know can't exist, especially after four or five (who's counting?) Bass Ales. I need more rules than just "Stay in the light." It took our hero a long time to convince people of the need to follow this advice. You might think that the light is supposed to represent something, but there is no parable, fable, or allegory here, because there is no cosmos. I already said that, didn't I? Excuse me a moment while I go to the refrigerator.

Be right back. Have to use the boy's room.

Okay. The movie's most memorable line: "All this because of a fuckin' tooth."
The movie's most understated line: "She comes at you fast, so be ready."

I felt like I ought to ask for my money back, but as they say, "In life, youse takes your chances."

Posted 03:52 by William Luse -


My main post for the day is immediately below, but first I must call your attention to a mighty powerful post by the Mighty Barrister. Right now it's at the top of the page and is called "Despair." The included picture alone is heartbreaking and gutwrenching. If ever there was a pro-life (in the most all-embracing sense of that term) lawyer, this guy is it. Bush should nominate him to the Supreme Court. I'll bet he could out-filibuster the Dem filibusterers. I'll bet he could argue them into giving up the game. If they had hearts, that is.

Great work, Mighty One.

Posted 03:17 by William Luse -


A Tribute

Last weekend, Bernadette's golf team had its end-of-year banquet in Oxford. It's a time for the coaches to give out awards to the players, for the players to give presents to the coaches, and for everyone to wax sentimental and eat good food. On Saturday afternoon before the banquet there was a father-daughter golf tournament. I was unable to attend either of these in this, her senior year. And since it appeared the team's season was over, my dismay bordered on despair. But her mother was able to attend. Since the senior players and their parents are invited to say something if they wish, I sent along the following, which her mother read aloud to all assembled. We have since found out that the team has been invited to the NCAA East Regional Championship tournament, so I will get to see her play at the college level at least one more time. I could have written a book in admiration of this child - girl, young woman - but I don't think the crowd would have sat still for it. But I had to say something, so if you don't mind I'll share it with you:


Fathers are famous for wanting sons, little images of themselves whom they can raise to share their enthusiasm for football, baseball, basketball and beer. The kid might even become famous, excelling in some endeavor at which the father was famous only for his mediocrity.

At the risk of embarrassing her, I must say that when Bernadette was born, she was so beautiful I knew at once that I didn't need a boy. If you think she looks okay as she is, you should have seen her as a baby. I didn't care anymore about football, baseball, or basketball, though I have refused to give up the beer. And, as girls will do, she took up ballet at the age of three. I didn't care anymore about those other sports, but I didn't care about ballet either. She taught me to care. Eleven years later and she was still at it. She was a beautiful dancer. She will deny it now because she thinks her sister is the goddess of the stage, but her mother and I remember how she looked up there.

When I watched her dance, I knew she was an athlete, and it came as a pleasant surprise to find myself in the yard, at her request, teaching her how to throw a baseball like a boy, which she can to this day. This was much more interesting than actually having one, a boy that is. Imagine teaching a boy how to throw like a boy. She liked football and basketball too, and tennis and swimming and volleyball and...golf. Sometimes she came to the driving range with me, and sometimes onto the course. She had a lovely, natural, flowing swing that went on forever, but it was only for fun and she kept on dancing. Until one summer day when she was fifteen, at the end of a junior tournament series run by a local golf course, she notified me rather suddenly that she wanted to play golf. "And what about dance?" I asked. Her high school was starting a girls' team and she wanted to be on it. She gave up dance and never looked back, or at least she says she hasn't. Her scores ranged from the mid-eighties to the mid- nineties that year. The following year she took her team to districts, won the individual title with a 75, and was named the Orlando Sentinel's Orange County Player of the Year. She's been playing competitive golf now for a mere six years. I'd say she's done all right, and that with luck and God's blessing, far more lies ahead.

After that, all she ever wanted was to play SEC golf, and that dream came true. Others did not, but she can live with it. You work hard, show up for the next tournament, and maybe something good will happen. Golf's done a lot for her, and may yet do more, but let me tell you what it's done for me. It gave me a daughter to pal around with. She was my best buddy on a daily basis. We were always on the course or on the range, grinding, adjusting the swing, getting all the parts to fit. I don't know how many fathers get to have this. My guess is, not many. I've played golf on many levels - with professionals, with amateurs, with hackers and hustlers in the local skin game - but no victory, no amount of money, no one's companionship ever gave me as much pleasure as playing just one round with this kid. She never swore, never threw a club, never made excuses, never did anything to betray anger. It was eerie. You'd think double bogey and par were the same score. Watching her play, you can't know how much she wants to win. But I knew, because I was the one she wanted to beat. At first I gave her strokes, lots of them. Later, I couldn't give her any. I'd be standing over a one foot par putt and ask, "Is this good, Berno?" And she'd say, "No." In golf, as in life, she thinks everyone ought to be required to hole out. Nothing should be given; nothing's for free. You have to work for it, and even then you might not get it. That's life. She seems to have known by instinct, without instruction, that as great as golf is, it's just golf, and that when she dies God is not going to ask her why she didn't win the U.S. Open, but that he might ask her, were she capable of such a thing, why she rolled her ball in the rough.

She wants to win, but not at the cost of her soul. She has never wished anything but good to her fellow competitors. She wants to win, but on her own score, not at the cost of another's misfortune. Bernadette, do you remember that girl at the Auburn tournament who got the shanks in the middle of her round, her ball finding nothing but trees and sand and water, causing her great anguish, and you went up and put your arm around her and told her to forget it, that it was just another round, nothing in the grand scheme of things, that tomorrow was another day? After which she proceeded to make birdie after birdie, so that Coach Purdom and I suggested that, in future, you might consider keeping your mouth shut? Well, to this day, I know you did the right thing. And I'll bet that girl, whoever she was, still remembers you.

I want you to know that never once have you given me cause for embarrassment or shame. You have class; you're a lady; you stride the course with grace and dignity and an enviable calm, the source of which no one knows. It's your secret, and His.

My sweetheart, I thank God for you every day. At times I cannot believe that He has so favored me as to have put you into my care. Thanks for being my kid. I don't deserve you, as no parent deserves his child. God takes a risk on our capacity to love one another, and to treasure His gifts. Don't ever doubt mine for you.

I know I've put the pressure on you, but there is also something you must know: and that is, that as long as I'm around, whether you continue on this path or not, I'll be standing behind you, ready to bear witness to any who should doubt, that Bernadette played the course as she found it, and the ball as it lay; she made friends of her opponents, and of every loss a win, because, win or lose, she gave her best, tried to do the right thing, and never complained that the conditions were unfair. And when it came time, for whatever reason, to depart the field of play, she walked away with the same grace as she had strode upon it, knowing in the end that it was all just a gift, not hers to give or to take away, but only to receive for awhile, and that she had made her Daddy proud.

Love forever, my child

Posted 04:02 by William Luse -

An Award, of sorts

Dylan has announced that the honor of having made the two thousand two hundred and twenty-second comment at his blog goes to yours truly. Naturally I wanted to know if this was of any significance, Biblical or otherwise, or, at the very least, if there was a prize attached. His response:

"Given the recent breast-motif at Apologia, I thought your "prize"
should be the following quatrain from the soundtrack to the (alas,
Miramax) film "Chicago," sung by the full-figured prison matron Mama
Morton --"

They say that life is tit for tat
That's how I like to live
So, I deserve a lot of tat
For what I've got to give.

"I know. It's not so much a prize as it is a booby prize. Happy 2,222nd!"

The song is sung by Queen Latifah, with whom I am familiar by way of the picture at Dylan's site, which he has taken down but to which he still provides the link. As we all know, Dylan is a writer of exceptional endowments; thus, it is fitting that so, too, would be the objects of his admiration. I am indeed honored and promise to see this movie at the first possible opportunity.

Posted 16:16 by William Luse -
As I say, I've been away for about a week so I go surfin' around and find out by way of Michelle that the Moss sisters have been pondering the propriety of public breastfeeding. Whoa, excuse me there. Breastfeeding in public is what I meant to say. I realize this is a pointed issue, pregnant with pitfalls, swollen with possibilities, and that we could discuss it for weeks without hardly touching the tip...I get a melon-sized headache just thinking about it.

I also understand the urgency of the issue. What if you're a nursing mom on an airplane and the kid won't stop screaming because his ears are popping? We all know that swallowing or sucking on something (or both) is the only way to alleviate this. So what's she supposed to do? Take the kid back to the stinking port-o-potty they call a bathroom? I say, hey, do what comes naturally, especially if you're sitting next to me. I won't complain. In fact, if you're sitting next to me, you can let it hang out whether you're feeding the kid or not. And if the American Gothic couple across the aisle complains to the stewardess that this amounts to indecent exposure, tell 'em to sue you. Tell 'em it'll be (to vary a phrase) like squeezing milk from a coconut.

And then there are the competing points of view and the interests to be balanced. There's the woman's point of view, the baby's, the man's, and society's. The baby's is generally poorly articulated, limited to thirsty cries and contented gurgles. (Reminds you of a man, doesn't it?) He just knows he wants it. Society's is a consequence of the conflict between the man and the woman. The woman thinks she's performing a perfectly natural, non-sexual function - so why are you staring? The man knows she's right but stares anyway. The woman thinks she ought to be allowed to breastfeed in public, but she doesn't want her husband staring at other women who do the same. The man doesn't mind seeing women breastfeed in public unless one of them happens to be his own wife. And so we have the competing demands of a natural necessity versus public propriety.

Context is everything, some people say. There's one standard of modesty for the beach, another for the cocktail party. We have trouble striking the right balance. Women think it's men's fault. They think we eroticize everything. Men are macaques, capable of getting it on in the total absence of any provocation whatsoever. Why do they have to sexualize this nurturing activity natural to every mother? Oh, it's our fault, is it? Then explain this to me: when my wife and I left the hospital with our first baby, they gave her an advice book for first time mothers. One day I walk into the bedroom and she's nursing the kid. "How's it going?" I ask. What the hell was I supposed to say? Ever try carrying on a perfectly natural conversation with a woman in the midst of this perfectly natural function? If I say "perfectly natural" often enough maybe it'll hypnotize me.

"That book they gave me said that some women experience orgasm while breastfeeding," she said. "Don't believe everything you read," I said, and got the hell out of there. Men really don't know how to respond to stuff like that. It's total woman-world. The book was, of course, written by a woman, and given to my wife by the obstetrics department of a reputable hospital. I know there's a lot of quackery out there, and that today's wisdom can become tomorrow's psychobabble. I didn't know whether this was quackery or not and did not want to know. If that's what women do, far be it from me to interfere. But a man does not like to think of the child as a competitor. Men have enough trouble giving women orgasms without contracting some of this duty out to infants. Women want us to be neither prudish nor lascivious in the presence of this "natural" moment, but they want to be able to talk about their orgasms in connection with it.

When it comes to sex, I don't trust the perfect naturalness of any of our impulses. Intercourse, pregnancy, birth, nursing - it's all connected and gets all tangled and twisted in our fallen psyches, so poorly are those impulses in abeyance to our will. We can pervert any part of it. In modern times we've attempted to redirect the sexual impulse 180 degrees away from its natural end, reproduction. But women's breasts were a powerful lure long before we perfected contraceptive techniques. When women nurse, we all know it's natural. They're only doing what every mother has ever done all over the earth. Her breasts are designed to suckle the child, but first they had to issue a summons to the man who would beget her with the child. The man got there first. Why does he go after them so ardently in his lovemaking? Why does he begin what the child must finish, mimic what the child must do for real? It's all very mysterious, almost bothersome, though I think I'm glad God designed it this way. Nursing is natural, but to get it done the woman must employ part of her private sexual equipment. Even in marriage women retain a certain shyness about unveiling themselves, knowing what it can lead to. But it's not just shyness. They don't want us to take the sight of them for granted; they choose the revealing moments with some care. They want us to desperately desire them, but they want the desire disciplined. Some of us even try to accommodate them. But they can't then claim that the modesty they employ in private can be dispensed with in public. The baby's presence doesn't do much to vitiate a man's attraction to the sight of her breast. In fact, it may aggravate it. Even in our contraceptive times, her fecundity exerts a powerful subconscious pull. I've often wondered why women have to be put together the way they are. Everything about them is designed to…oh never mind.

I'm thinking of starting a victim's movement for American males. It's the fashionable thing to do, and we really are victims of an eroticized culture in the creation of which women have cooperated mightily. Most victims' groups seem to embrace their victimhood eagerly, and I think we men will be up to the task. The disorder will even have a name: mammaropathic hyper-affective syndrome. And - let's get this straight - it is not a defect of the will, but a disease. Just as alcoholics used to be called drunks but are now chemically-dependent, so too will we be pronounced helpless in the grip of our disorder. It's in the genes. There's nothing to be done about it except to enter a 12-step program. With luck, each step will require ten years to master, so that no man will be alive to finish and can die happy. Each initiate will be required to mount to the dais and confess: "My name is so-and-so and I'm a mammaroholic." There will be treatment, but there is no cure. Once a breast fiend, always a breast fiend. I'm not sure what the treatment will involve, but the object would be to eradicate a man's fascination for these objects. Perhaps forced viewing of thousands of pictures of naked breasts. But I don't think pictures will work. (I've tried it.) No, ladies, to thoroughly desensitize us what will be required is an endless parade of real live bare-breasted women. I'm willing to be the first guinea pig. Any volunteers?

Some people think the savages have gotten it right, the Amazonian Indians and African tribespeople, among whom the women sit around nursing in public and no one even notices. Okay, fine. Problem is, I don't want to live in those places. It's common wisdom that we could learn something from them. They treat all this so "naturally" we hear. But I'm always skeptical of the common wisdom. Maybe they could learn something from us, like the concept of wearing a bra to fight the sag factor. Our own bra-burners of the sixties are probably experiencing some regrets about now. I'm trying to picture an America in which women breastfeeding in public is as common a sight as the exposed belly buttons of teenage girls at the local mall. No, I think I prefer the erotic tension, the messiness of it all, to a benumbed indifference. The day the sight of a woman's naked breast doesn't raise my eyebrow, among other things, is the day you can put me in the ground. And if you're that nursing mom sitting next to me on the plane, trapped by circumstances, go ahead and do your thing. Like I said, I won't complain. And don't you complain either if I take a sneak peek.

Umm, I've got to sign off now. My wife just walked in...

Posted 15:37 by William Luse -
Paul Cella has a fine essay on the Santorum stink. It covers more than the usual territory, and is, as usual, superbly written.

I'm sorry I haven't posted lately. I've been busy, often out of town, tired, and somewhat enjoying being away from the computer. And, unlike most people, I like doing yardwork. It makes the beer taste better. I bought a six pack of Bass Ale yesterday to support the Brits for sticking by us. They make wonderful ale, absolutely wonderful. Reminds me of the British old-timer who was alive during WW II and was asked about British males' reaction to so many American GI's consorting with their women. He replied, "Ye can tike me women, but just don't tike me aisle." It satisfies some deep down thirst. Thinking about it makes me want to go do the yard right now. There are only about three of us left in the neighborhood who do our own lawns. Everyone else has a "landscaping" service, which means big pickup trucks with long trailers blocking the road and lots of noise created by edgers, blowers and riding mowers. It's a status symbol, I suppose. You never see a teenage son doing anything that would dirty his hands. But they all have SUV's to drive courtesy of Mom and Dad.

Oh yes, I'll try to get something up for tomorrow.

Posted 04:29 by William Luse -
I have to leave town tonight to go to Lexington, Kentucky to serve as a highly partisan observer of the SEC Women's Golf Championships. Be back Monday. Maybe. Think good thoughts for my kid. Wasn't it Christian of the SEC to schedule this for Easter weekend? All of these schools used to have deeply Christian foundations. All gone. The foundation I mean.

I want Jeanetta, and Jeff Culbreath, and John Adams, and the Moss Ladies, and Alicia, and Patrick Sweeney, and Mark Wyman , and Lee Anne and a few others to know that I'm aware I owe you a link and will provide it. Actually I don't owe Wyman one, but he deserves it.

Meanwhile, an excellent means of appreciating Good Friday, of trying to live it, you might say, is to read this sermon by Cardinal Newman: The Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Agony. Here's a taste:

"And as men are superior to brute animals, and are affected by pain more than they, by reason of the mind within them, which gives a substance to pain, such as it cannot have in the instance of brutes; so, in like manner, our Lord felt pain of the body, with an advertence and a consciousness, and therefore with a keenness and intensity, and with a unity of perception, which none of us can possibly fathom or compass, because His soul was so absolutely in His power, so simply free from the influence of distractions, so fully directed upon the pain, so utterly surrendered, so simply subjected to the suffering. And thus He may truly be said to have suffered the whole of His passion in every moment of it."

It gets deeper and more vivid. One of the most astounding and insightful pieces of writing I've ever come across.

Posted 03:51 by William Luse -
Where do we go wrong? From conception? From birth?
It must have been all written in the stars,
In the big-bang, in the so-called book of life, in the chaos of atoms.
They seem all the same now to me, as one
Not fond of predestination, but that's how it feels.
Some don't fit in, don't play the game too well.
What is it in them, in us, in me, that repels good fortune?
We are counseled to accept that we deserve none.
All right. I accept. Let the world have its way.
I am its instrument, though I longed to be yours.
I have not fulfilled my promise,
But how does that make me so different?
I would, with words, have made straight your path,
But none listen or care. Do you? Speak. Please.
There you go again, in silence retreating.
But I have listened and spoken and believed.
I took an oath, and you at your word;
I'd have plowed the field that it might take root.
I must have expected something in return.
I know: no favors for the favored. I ask too much.
"Take no thought for the morrow." But I must.
I wanted only to make a world for three.
But I cannot stand before my children.
How will I explain their father's legacy?
There comes a time when even children
Know the absence of a thing. It can't stay
Hidden. The world relishes one more defeat.
If there is justice, if you are listening,
If you care, spare them their father's sins,
For only sin explains this desert.
They deserve none of my lot, and more
Than you have given them in me.
Loving them with my life was not enough,
Or you'd not have left me here to wither.
If there is justice, if you are listening,
If you care. Speak. Please. It's true
What they say - you are unmovable.
So now I surrender, now I yield,
I am nothing and nothing will come.
I'll sleep in this desert, on a thoroughfare of stone,
If you give safe haven to those I cannot.
If there is justice, if you are listening...
The universe is not dark by accident,
With sputtering lights scattered throughout.
My soul's mansion has many rooms
But no shelter; I can't find the light;
A thief has broken in, stolen the lamp;
The roof is gone, the corridors blind alleys;
The windows are sealed, the curtains drawn,
The garden wilts in a ceaseless rain.
Hope is the hardest virtue.
I've never lived without it before,
The time not of my choosing. Or was it?
How strange to believe but not care,
To be alive, yet not be.
There's more to say...
When I was young I dreamed;
There was beauty then, everywhere.
I loved the world , trusting it would love
Me back. Fatal error. But I did love, I do...
But now I'm tired and need rest
From the dreams I don't dream anymore,
And the wearisome conversation.
I wish good to those I love,
Among whom I am not numbered.
I'll hold them close with my last breath;
I'll look for their faces, not yours.
They are all the evidence I have.
But (if you are listening) please remember
I once loved these more than the world.
Though life be an ember when I'm dying
I'll hold it in my hands once more,
Toss it lightly palm to palm;
Though blind with age I'll see it on the air,
With a puff of breath make it burn once more,
For (if there is justice) none, not even you,
Can take it away, this light that flared
To light my life's moment in time;
One more time I'll make it burn
Within this heart I've built for three,
This one good thing I've done.

Posted 03:50 by William Luse -
For Elizabeth, on her first Holy Communion
(Written about a year after the Letters Home came to an end, circa 1991)

Can God come down to a little child?
Suffer them to come, He said,
Jealous of souls yet undefiled,
As one on earth both born and bred.

Among us here He laughed and played,
With Joseph worked, for Lazarus wept;
In our cities He preached and prayed
And in our desert night He slept,

The chosen gathered round His fire,
On guard that none disturb this rest,
Prisoners of a world made higher
Than home to scorpion and viper's nest.

Here, by day, they flocked in droves -
Suffer them to come, He said,
Then blessed the fishes and the loaves;
Upon a word five thousand fed.

If God must rest, so must men
Who, in the garden at Gethsamane,
Closed weary eyes upon a friend
And slumbered through His agony.

Night brought down the Prince's soldiers -
Suffer them to come, He said -
The chosen hid among the boulders,
Among the trees till all were fled,
    The trees of earth where He was born -
    Suffer it so to be, He said -
    Upon a tree His limbs were torn,
    Upon the earth He bled.

O Maker of a million, million worlds
(Like grains of sand so much the same
Save one, for where the earth was hurled
Life was given, and God a name),

Jesus, Lover of hidden places,
Here in a child's heart find room
As once a woman full of graces
Bid you dwell within her womb.

Exalter of the humbler things -
Oil and water, bread and wine -
Help a child to spread her wings,
Remembering that she once was mine.

Remember her mother and I have prayed
She be of those who attend your voice,
The chosen gathered round your fire;
Now this is her day, and You have made
A prisoner to a world much higher.

We are glad and rejoice.

Amen, Elizabeth. Love, Daddy

Posted 04:19 by William Luse -
I guess most know by now that Lori Ann Piestewa, female American POW, has been found dead, her body in a shallow grave along with those of eight of her fellow soldiers. They were found near the hospital in Nairiyah from which Jessica Lynch was rescued. Jessica and Lori Ann were friends. Shoshanna Johnson's uniform has been found, but not Shoshanna. My anger at the bureaucratic ideologues who allowed this to happen (who include Bill Clinton and Les Aspin) is at the moment too hot for words. But Rhonda Cornum and Melissa Rathbun-Nealy were captured during the first Gulf War, and Clinton wasn't president then. So whose hands are dirty on that count? George Bush, Sr.? And Reagan was president before him. Who was in charge of the defense department during all those years? I hope their sense of "equality" has been vindicated. I'll bet they all sleep just fine at night.

Here's a news story about Lynch's rescue and Piestewa's demise. Lori Ann was a Hopi Indian, and leaves behind a four year old son and a three year old daughter. You can still pray for Shoshanna. There's still hope.

Posted 04:18 by William Luse -
At the moment, I am drowning in worldly obligations, and have not the leisure to do as I wish. In the meantime I'd like to respond to Lee Anne Millinger and Paul Cella, the only ones to answer my question concerning the Iraqi torturer who surrenders. Lee Anne said she'd probably shoot, this impulse overriding any other, the other, I assume, being the one she knows she should obey. But both she and Paul raised questions about the exigencies of the situation, Lee Anne wondering if there might be more enemy in another room waiting to leap forth, Paul noting that during such an operation an American soldier would not be looking to take prisoners. The torturer would be shot before he had time to surrender. Of course, I wanted them to answer based on what was given in the hypothetical, that the surrender did indeed transpire and that other considerations, such as cohorts in the next room, were not in play. Under those "givens", Paul is right that the surrender must be accepted, though like him I can only hope I'd have the integrity to carry through. I have reason to doubt that I would. Beyond that, their other concerns are legitimate and more likely to reflect the reality of the moment. This is where we enter that grey area of uncertainty: is the surrender legitimate, or is the torturer still capable of doing harm in some way not readily apparent? Might his gesture be a signal to others to make themselves known? Is it possible for a torturer to transform himself in an instant from a combatant to an innocent? By the rules of war (and longstanding Christian tradition) apparently so. In this moment's grotesque intensity, the soldier might be forgiven for doubting it. It seems to me that in such a moment, if the soldier has any sense of forboding, however vague, concerning his own safety, he is free to fire. For if he must have absolutely certain knowledge that the danger is past, or that further attack is imminent, then he cannot fire, and this war we are presently fighting is most certainly unjust. Our country has gone after Saddam on the premise that the danger is not past and that an attack, if not imminent, is exceedingly likely. We have lost our tolerance for surprises.

Speaking of Lee Anne, I have often wondered what the atmosphere of St. Blog's would be like without its women. A religious sports bar? Do you remember how your mother could deliver a lecture to any one or several members of the family while at the same time setting the dinner table? Even when the gals take up an argument like the guys, there's a different feel to it. It's that sense of the table being set. Lee Anne's not Catholic I don't think, but neither do I much care. The table is being set over at her new blog called Such Small Hands, and though I encourage everyone to visit, I think you ladies would find an instant Christian soulmate. Scroll down to her April 5th post entitled "Your Dross to Consume, Your Gold to Refine," and see what I mean. She may not be Catholic, but she's willing to link to one. Like me. And maybe you too. But most importantly, she could use a warm welcome.

Posted 03:17 by William Luse -
I have to leave town tonight to go watch the kid play golf at the University of Georgia in Athens, and I won't be back until Sunday night. I forgot to mention that after her final round disaster at the UF tournament (she was tied for second after two rounds) she came back the following week at the University of South Florida's tournament in Bradenton with a 75-73-74 to tie for fifth. Wish her luck.

I will respond to any comments or emails concerning the posts below when I get back, so feel free to leave them.

Here are some more kids answering the question, "What does love mean?"

"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."
Karl - age 5

"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any
of theirs." Chrissy - age 6

"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired." Terri - age 4

"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure
the taste is OK." Danny - age 7

"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that.They look gross when they kiss." Emily - age 8