Free Speech on Campus, British Style

Tip of the petasus to Biased BBC.  St. Andrew's University has a conservative organization,which, according to tradition, has something they call a heretic burning to commemorate Guy Fawkes Day.  Typically, political organizations pick a member of the other team to burn in effigy.  The Brit Cons chose Oh Blah Blah for the honor this year, and predictably the BBC pretended that this is racist.  Was it bigotry against WASPs to call George W. Bush Hitler, the Smirking Chimp, or a retard?  Civility in politics is all-important to the left, except where their opponents are concerned.

National Legislature

"'Tis not therefore for Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone, but for the whole nation, that the members chosen in these places are sent to serve in Parliament:  and tho it be fit for them as friends and neighbors (so far as may be)to hearken to the opinions of the electors for the information of their judgments, and to the end that what they shall say may be of more weight, when everyone is known not to speak his own thoughts only, but those of a great number of men;  yet they are not strictly and properly obliged to give account of their actions to any, unless the whole body of the nation for they serve, and who are equally concerned in their resolutions could be assembled."  Algernon Sidney Discourses on Government, p 565.

"If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect, that they who are creeping and abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom, against the most seducing and the most formidable of all powers(p216). . . if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things;  we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency."  Edmund Burke Guildhall Speech

Purple Shirts Against Walker

Estase just read that the recall election against Wisconsin Governor Scott Brown is costing the Cheeseheads nearly eight million Dollars.  A vendetta waged against anyone whose judgement counters the public employees' unions.  At least Wisconsin, unlike the People's Republic of Illinois, has politicians who can stand up to greedy public employees.  Illinois has been broken by the fact that it has to pay two or three pensions to some retired teachers.  No state can afford to pay one retired employee more than one pension, and it is immoral to expect the public to pay one person more than one pension.  Ask a military retiree whether anyone seems interested in paying for their healthcare, and then look at a schoolteacher living like a crowned head of Europe.

Burke and Kant Defended

Immanuel Kant takes a beating on the Accepting Abundance blog today that is predictable.  Immanuel Kant's catagorical imperative is a secularized form of Christian morality that AA (no, not the twelve-step group) finds fault with.  I will defend Kant because he was a contemporary of Edmund Burke who I always thought had some affinity with the thought of that great parliamentarian.  If you reject Christianity (and there were many such characters in the time of Burke and Kant, from Collins and Voltaire to D'Alembert and Bolingbroke), your arguments cannot be answered by simple recourse to "the Bible says thus-and-such" or "the Catholic Church says thus-and-such."  If there were no athiests and revolutionaries in the eighteenth century, there would not have been a need for a Burke or a Kant to try to defend Christian morals without explicit appeals to revelation.  Kantian ethics are one fork in the road, and the scary thing is that the second fork in it is Hegelianism--the unapologetic embrace of atheistic statism instead of traditional modes of government.  Incidentally, another favorite of Estase's, the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge was Britain's first popularizer of Kantianism.

Androgyny, Immaturity, and Alcoholism

A tip of the old petasus to Fr. Powell at Hanc Aquam:  Cardinal Bertone disowns the recent report of the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice calling for a global economic authority.  Probably a smart move, as we all know how friendly to Catholic values the UN has been.

One book I should eventually pay some attention to is Kay Hymowitz's Manning Up, wherein she discusses the perpetual boyhood many men in the post-feminist world suffer.  We all know the grown men who seem uninterested in marriage until their thirties, or those with an obsession with pornography.  Reportedly, Ms. Hymowitz calls "Knocked Up" a fairy tale for child-men, wherein an immature drug-addled loser is saved by a beautiful woman he happens upon who teaches him to want marriage.  The subject of mature masculinity has always been something of a mystery to Estase, since he grew up without a father.  The maturity level of most other undergraduate men in the early 90s seemed pretty low.  Estase always saw most of his contemporaries as being so insecure about their own masculinity that the way they asserted themselves as men was by putting down other young men as homosexuals, and pursuing lives of drunkenness and repeated meaningless sexual encounters.  Happy Veterans Day!  The military may be one part of society where the god of feminism and the god of pornography have made only half-measure victories.

Friendly Fire, Part Two

Toure (don't you love people with only one name) has opined that Herman Cain making advances on a blond should be scary.  Yeah, if you're the Grand Wizard and you live in Missisippi.  What kind of a brother (oh yeah, the kind with one name!) brings up nasty racial and racist stereotypes?  Need I say, friendly fire?  Hat tip Adrienne's Corner.  Father Zuhlsdorf has another example--John Courtney Murray and Robert Drinan, both Jesuit priests and intellectuals, confabed with the Kennedys in 1964 to advise them on how to reconcile their opportunistic pro-choice positions with their ostensible Catholicism.

Archdiocese of Cincinatti Kills Blog

Rich Leonardi's excellent "Ten Reasons" blog has been silenced by his bosses at the Archdiocese of Cincinnati because he dared question his bishop's support for Campaign for Human Development, a left-wing fraud that pretends to be a Catholic charity, but actually gives money to bottom-feeders at labor, environmental, and even Marxist organizations.  As a result of the nature of CCHD recipients, the groups supported are usually pro-gay and pro-abortion.  (For more information, go to www.reformcchdnow.com)  See also the report by American Life League on CCHD.

Illinois' Entirely Wonderful Governor

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn gives an award to a woman who attacked the pro-life Republican opponent Bill Brady in the 2010 race.  The only hitch is it is an award for the pro-abortion Personal PAC.  This is another sign that Illinois will continue its official hostility to all opposed to abortion, a trend that kicked into overdrive when previous Governor Rod Blagojevich made an executive order that all pharmacists be required to dispense abortion drugs, conscience claims notwithstanding.  Cardinal George and the bishops of Illinois have registered their complaints, which count for very little in Illinois.

Kicking and Screaming

ACLU is making policy.  According to William Cox of the Alliance for Catholic Health Care, the mandate forcing Catholic hospitals and institutions to cover contraceptives and abortion in their health plans was DESIGNED to affect Catholic institutions.  The secularists strike again.  If you are a Catholic, and believe contraception and abortion are wrong, then you are just a flat-earther, and the liberals will drag you into the twenty-first century.  Hat tip to Elizabeth Scalia.

 Republicans must want no one but either liberals or scumballs as their candidates.  The obvious pro-life candidates, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have been killed by the establishment types at Fox News.  Rick "Gardesil" Perry and Herman Cain have very real creditability problems.  Mitt Romney is Oh Blah Blah's doppelganger, virtually identical in politics to any liberal.  And who does Fox News try to resusitate?  Newt Gingerich?  You've got to be kidding me.  Gingerich is so much of a RINO, they have been talking about making him a zoo exhibit.  Mr. "Global Warming/Paul Ryan-is-too-far-to-the-right" is going to be the conservative knight in shining armor?  Mr. "I cheated on two wives" is going to speak about family values?  Maybe Jesse Ventura has the right idea--Obama is going to get reelected and this country is toast.