The Meaning of Estase

Why do I use a pseudonym?  I was reminded again last week when someone commenting on another blog called me a lying bubba Bellarmine.  Ah, the decency and fair-mindedness of liberals!  Where debate fails, use slander and insult, huh?  Catholic bloggers are not above outing a pseudonomous blogger.  The reason I don't blog under my Christian name is because people like this cannot be trusted. At all.  People aren't above lying about a blogger's activities to make them lose their job.  If they could, they would fill your inbox with gay porn.  Because that's just the kind of scum they are.  What does Estase mean?  I'm a stubborn S.O.B. that won't shut up, that's what it means.

Justice Thomas on Natural Law

"Howard Metzenbaum was the other kind of senator, and I already knew how he felt about me.  It would have been charitable to call him unlikeable, though he went through the motions of civility during my visit.  At one point he actually tried to lure me into a discussion of natural law, but I knew he was no philosopher, just another cynical politician looking for a chink in my armor, so all I did was ask him if he would consider having a human-being sandwich for lunch instead of, say, a turkey sandwich.  That's Natural Law 101:  all law is based on some sense of moral principles inherent in the nature of human beings, which explains why cannibalism, even without a written law to proscribe it, strikes every civilized person as naturally wrong.  Any well-read college student would have gotten my point, but Senator Metzenbaum just stared at me awkwardly and changed the subject as fast as he could (p.221-22)." "As for natural law, I knew perfectly well that it was nothing more than a way of tricking me into talking about abortion, since many Catholic moral philosophers saw the two things as intimately related.  But my interest in natural law was different, and I hoped I could quell any anxieties resulting from it.  If some senators found the subject silly or radical, I was prepared to oblige them by discussing the silliness and radicalism of the Founding Fathers who had written natural-law philosophy into the Declaration of Independence.  Why shouldn't a federal judge be interested in what the founders thought about natural law--and why shouldn't a black man be interested in the fact that the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution had been in direct conflict with the peculiar institution of slavery, thus fueling the earliest efforts to free my forebears (p231)?"  Clarence Thomas,My Grandfather's Son

Neo-Con and Neo-Cath

A Jewish woman in Minnesota used several anti-Catholic phrases in reference to a judge dealing with her litigation, perhaps a result of the old, continuing problem with Catholic anti-semitism, which continues even today, as the representatives of the Vatican were the only ones not to walk out when the Iranian representative addressed a UN conference on colonialism with a tirade about how the Shoah didn't happen and Israel is illegitimate.  For anti-semites, the term Neo-Con refers to Jewish conservatives.  To the merely ignorant, a Neo-Con is anyone who isn't Ron Paul.

Neo-Cath is a term of abuse directed at anyone who is 1)Catholic and Republican,or 2) accepting of other faiths.  Estase isn't the biggest fan of the SVC, but if anything was good about it, it was the end of Catholicism claiming to be the only legitimate religion, something that in and of itself created hatred of Catholicism.  Perhaps Henry Morton Robinson, author of the novel The Cardinal, was the first Neo-Cath.  After all, Robinson's novel depicted a Catholicism that opposed racism and abortion, one that was consistent with democratic government.  The traditionalists haven't accepted the fact that we cannot rely on Hapsburg monarchs to rule us;  that day has come and gone.  Like it or not, democracy is the modern alternative to total authoritarian statism.  The Church should not spend too much time pining for monarchy, after all, Britain's monarchs made priests hide in cellars.

Continuing Deevolution

Bela Pelosi complained that by opposing the contraception coverage in Obamacare, the Catholic bishops are acting as lobbyists.  Which might be a good objection if the same Catholic bishops had been attacked by Mrs. Pelosi for supporting any measures she also happened to support, such as comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty) or Obamacare itself, which to a large extent was supported by Catholic bishops.  

The defense appropriations bill apparently authorizes the military to arrest any American, in America, and hold them without trial, until the GWOT is resolved.  The Constitution is dead, and Dick Cheney had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Endorsement

Mitt Romney for President!  Sure he's wishy-washy, created socialized health care in Massachusetts, and looks like a Ken doll, but he is soo acceptable to the people who write for east coast newspapers.  And you know who should be his veep?  Newt Gingerich!  Yes, Mr. Life-Begins-At-Implantation!  Mr. I-Left-My-Wife-On-Her-Deathbed!  There's a team America can believe in!

Whatever you do, primary voters, stay away from Bachmann and Santorum!  People of principle and integrity have no place in American politics.

Rights Preceeding Constitution?

First Things.com has an excellent Hadley Arkes column called "Natural Rights Trump Obamacare, or Should,"  wherein the excellent Mr. Arkes raises the excellent, and ignored, question of whether conservatives can/should go beyond black letter constitutional law in defending freedom and the right to life.  It is a pressing constitutional and moral question:  do our legal rights start and end with the constitution?  It is even more pressing, as the Balkinization blog offers a new piece of liberal obfuscation-- the term "sail originalism," which seems like living constitution under a different name.  It is a commonplace of conservative and libertarian legal commentary that the commerce clause has been perverted by Supreme Court decisions since the New Deal, but it is probably impossible to return to original intentions of only regulating interstate commerce.