Imagine if an Islamist nutter went to the convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor and murdered a bunch of nuns (alas, hardly an unimaginable hypothetical). Would I be right to say that the New York Times and its allied Brain Trusts have no right to be outraged? After all, liberals have heaped scorn and contempt on those nuns for their effrontery in not wanting to be forced to pay for birth control. Or what if an Islamist shot up a Baptist Church or Koch headquarters or the Washington office of AIPAC?
.. On the secular left today, conservative Christians (and Zionist Jews) are the enemy. They are the other. The oppressor. The villains in the stories the Left tells itself.
Queers vs. Conservative Christians
I have discovered that there is no way to defend the orthodox Christian teaching in a way that most gay folks find acceptable, even if they disagree.
.. “You should see my e-mail inbox,” I continued. “It’s filled with letters from Christian and conservative academics who are genuinely terrified for their belief about homosexuality to be discovered, and in some cases for it to be known among their colleagues that they’re Christian. They’re afraid for their jobs, their reputations, and their careers.
.. I heard an editor once defend biased coverage of the same-sex marriage issue by comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan.”
.. It very often seems to me that gays and their allies see conservative Christians as nothing but haters who deserve no consideration as fellow human beings, and deserve every bad thing that happens to us as our comeuppance for having beliefs they hate.
.. “Consider this,” she said in reply. “That both things can be true at the same time. That gays and lesbians really do have reason to fear discrimination and worse, and that conservative Christians really do have reason to fear discrimination and losing their livelihoods.”
In Praise Of Bohemian Conservatives
At the risk of approaching a definition, a bohemian conservative believes humans ought to appreciate, live amidst, and even love the eccentric particularity of physical nature, of distinctive persons, of local culture, of odd traditions that reach back before memory, and more generally of the person rooted in time and place–a historical expression as unique as the proverbial snowflake. The bohemian conservative appreciates less the abstract beauty of the woman on the billboard and more the peculiar beauty of the woman who works at the diner. The bohemian conservative does not love the individualist as much as the eccentric person who is rooted in cultural soil unprocessed by sanitizing consumerism. The bohemian conservative admires the unique and peculiar over the abstracted perfection of a universal form.
.. The complexity of his person, as contextualized in a living culture, allows him to think of himself as physical and spiritual, as an individual and part of a group, as living in the flux of existence that is nonetheless situated in the timelessness of reality.
The Unity Illusion
For starters, this line of thinking is deeply anticonservative. Conservatives believe that politics is a limited activity. Culture, psychology and morality come first. What happens in the family, neighborhood, house of worship and the heart is more fundamental and important than what happens in a legislature.
Ryan’s argument inverts all this. It puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values.
.. The classic conservative belief, by contrast, is that character is destiny.
.. The Republican Party can’t unify around Donald Trump for the same reason it can’t unify around a tornado. Trump, by his very essence, undermines cooperation, reciprocity, solidarity, stability or any other component of unity. He is a lone operator, a disloyal diva,
.. By one theory narcissism flows from a developmental disorder called alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. Sufferers have no inner voice to understand their own feelings and reflect honestly on their own actions.
.. To make decisions, these narcissists create a rigid set of external standards, often based around admiration and contempt. Their valuing criteria are based on simple division — winners and losers, victory or humiliation. They are preoccupied with luxury, appearance or anything that signals wealth, beauty, power and success. They take Christian, Jewish and Muslim values — based on humility, charity and love — and they invert them.
.. Other people are simply to be put to use as suppliers of admiration or as victims to be crushed as part of some dominance display.