Commenter Archive

Comments by Art Deco*

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My claim: Evangelicals organized slightly before 1979 based on segregated schools, but that goal did not actually get traction. That didn’t happen until evangelicals started talking about abortion in 1979.

I realize that 'evangelicals' are a big blob of people you don't like in your mind. Out here, people have particular interests that are not shared by or advanced by others in the same category.

Your claim: Evangelicals organized 2-5 years before 1979, but had less ‘sectarian concerns’. The latter, abortion-issue groups upstaged them in 1979.

That was not my claim. My claim was that Falwell, LaHaye &c upstaged a crew of people who had organized earlier and had a more variegated program. I am not aware that any of them were evangelicals (Paul Weyrich was an Eastern-rite Catholic, Terry Dolan was a roue, and no clue about the others).

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Dan, the House of Representatives is a national institution. The party not winning many national elections has held it for 17 of the last 21 years. There's a core electorate (about 37% of the adult citzens) and a periphery (about 17%). There has been for decades. That is not a phenomenon which has appeared in the last 15 years; the same proportions prevailed in 1978. The core electorate and the peripheral electorate vote for Republican congressional majorities.

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You’ve fallen a bit for rewritten history. (Don’t worry, they’re really good at rewriting it.)

I actually lived through that period and read the newspapers.

Evangelicals organized politically slightly before that. It’s just they had organized around a goal that few others supported, so they latched onto abortion as a way to get somewhere.

The mixture of stupidity and projection in this sentence is an amazement. Jerry Falwell wasn't some Hollywood agent on the make. He and his confederates already had large institutional responsibilities - congregations to run, schools to run, businesses to run. They were organizing and giving voice to their own discontents. I realize liberals cannot process the opposition of others, but you might make minimal effort now and again.

It's a minor point, but you're wrong about the chronology. All the notable supralocal organizations were founded within a few months of each other in 1978 and 1979. There was another circle of organizations around Richard Viguerie which appeared 2-5 years earlier, but they had less sectarian concerns. Fallwell et al upstaged them.

Evangelicals had organized on the basis of *pro-segregation*, demanding the right to run tax-exempt private segregated schools. (Which had popped up after public school integration.) But we’re all supposed to forget about that, because now it was always abortion.

The parties in the disputes regarding those academies were the academies themselves, not supralocal bodies.

Falwell and others had complaints about IRS rulings as well, though Falwell in particular was not invested in the issue re segragated academies. Neither Falwell's nor Robertson's institutions were segregated.

Question: What is the Southern Baptist position on abortion?
Answer: There is no official Southern Baptist position on abortion, or any other such question. Among 12 million Southern Baptists, there are probably 12 million different opinions.

It's a non-creedal denomination and the intramural disputes within the denomination at the time concerned modes of biblical interpretation. The ecclesiology of the SBC is quite different from that of the Catholic Church. That is relevant just how? (While we're at it, Falwell was affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship, not the Southern Baptist Convention). Pat Robertson was ordained by the SBC but was a free-wheeling devotee of charismatic practices most fundamentalists abhor. Tim LaHaye's denominational affiliation is unclear; his old congregation admits to no denomination and the schools he attended are not associated with SBC).

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I don't agree with you, as anyone with ordinary reading comprehension can see. The notion that it 'was a matter of individual conscience' for '5000 years' has no reality outside your imagination (as anyone who consulted the statutory law in effect in 1966 could see).

As for the issue being a 'shibboleth', I was aware that liberals had no understanding of or interest in anyone else's concerns without another demonstration from you.

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You can consult the Catholic Encyclopaedia if you care to. The older edition is online. The oecumenical councils of late antiquity prescribed harsh penalties for anyone guilty of abortion.

On “Judge orders ‘intentionally deceptive’ DOJ lawyers to take remedial ethics classes – Washington Times

The political culture of our time differs from that of the 1970s in that once upon a time, people had certain biases but also had a conception of what was 'moral' or 'ethical' among public figures which was not dependent on affiliations or political goals. So, you have a Republican inner-ringer like Barber Conable saying, "I will vote for Article I. I do not approve of leaders who mislead"). What counted as a scandal in 1974 or 1979 seems almost quaint today.

On “How To Fix a Broken Elephant: A Recipe for Electoral Health In Six Incredibly Difficult Steps

I have no comment on what Mr. Trump's voters think. People vote for a candidate for disparate reasons. It's a reasonable inference that discontent over immigration is the modal reason, but I cannot say.

Vociferous social conservatives are people I know and have been reading for twenty-odd years. Consider the following phrase, "He and many others long for the (mythical) day when straight white men were naturally and comfortably at the top of the social pyramid."

Francis, ordinary human beings do not think this way or talk this way. A subaltern in the dean of students' office talks this way. A low rent academic talks this way. Gliberals and leftoids playing rhetorical games talk this way.

Strata of recognition are inherent in human societies and they are implicit in the judgments people make and the actions people take. There are people who are power motivated or narcissistic for whom obtaining this or that is an end in and of itself. If you fancy such people are not operating on your side of the argument, you're a deluded jackass. (See Stanley Rothman's research on occupational groups: one of the more power-motivated are journalists; business executives tend to be achievement motivated). However, most people are not primarily self-aggrandizing in this way and some are not self-aggrandizing at all. The hospital supply salesman is not standing outside the Planned Parenthood clinic with a home-made sign because he wants to lord it over post-adolescent sluts. He's there because he has a horror of what goes on inside those clinics.

I was involved in a liberal political action committee for a number of years a generation ago. The topic of homosexuality took up almost no space in our heads apart from some glancing references to public health matters. There was too much else to discuss and to do to be all that concerned with boutique causes. How dispositions toward homosexuality came to define the sense of self of liberals and define in-groups and outgroups among a certain sort of bourgeois is an interesting question for the anthropologist. It has both gross manifestations (a physician in Boston fired from his job for reciting some banal facts in an intramural memorandum) and weirdly comical ones (the editor of this site deleting as a 'slur' colloquialisms used by lesbians, among others, or going on a silly jag about psychotherapists &c).

People from my side of the argument are not and have not been fretting over their 'position', but over the insistence that the rest of the world adopt the obsessions of the professional class twits who have been so fixated on this subject. There is no need, none at all, to have babble about sexual subcultures imported into school curricula. There is no need, except to please the homosexual population itself, to sic lawyers on merchants and landlords. There is no need to grant any sort of legal recognition to homosexual couplings These issues have been raised by others, democratic deliberation has been denied by others, and yet somehow the whole problem is our drives for power or recognition.

As for the racial angle, that's a hoot. The black population is predominantly working class and not thickly populated with financially or socially ambitious people. There aren't any racial resentments of any degree of prevalence deriving from blacks in management. The continual manufacture of patron-client relationships bothers people (and is wholly contrived). Obnoxious hustlers like Ben Crump bother people. Urban crime bothers people. You have those inane patronage programs not because so-and-so's social position is threatened, but because, under most circumstances, it really would not be. And it does not do its beneficiaries any good; it just makes the supplicants of people like you. The same deal applies regarding the mestizo population. Ordinary people can see mass immigration and racial preference schemes for what they are: contrived efforts to displace them tinged with petty insults directed at them. The perpetrators are ... people like you.

It's pretty obscene for someone in a predatory occupation like yours to look at an ordinary man who has been through the wringer of contemporary divorce proceedings (or, more rarely, put in front of a campus star chamber) and babble about 'being at the top of the social pyramid'. That's not what's on his mind.

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No it did not. The theological discussion differed some prior to the advent of modern embryology, but abortion has always been seen as a grave sin.

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Sanders has polled better than Hillary does against all four Republican competitors.

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As Fred Clark notes, the idea of absolute opposition to abortion being the defining characteristic of social conservatism is newer than the McDLT.

Abortion was generally illegal prior to 1973. Abhorrence of the practice has been a signature of Catholic political action ever since the issue was bruited about ca. 1962. Regarding evangelicals, opposition to it has been adhered to since conservative evangelicals began to organize in a systematic way (around about 1979).

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No, they'd have been forced to make do with tax revenues without short term borrowing until the conflict was resolved. If they elected to stiff the bond holders rather than stretching their vendors, that was their choice, not Cruz choice.

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You're referring to what?

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We were discussing Cruz, not Trump.

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Francis, a default is a failure to service obligations. The only circumstance in which that would happen would be if the Treasury failed to release available funds to pay the interest charges. Cruz could neither force nor inhibit them from doing that.

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And it actually kinda makes me sad to say that. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to frame various ideas within supposed conservative thought, and it’s a little annoying to realize that no one actually believed any of that anyway.

If it helps you feel better, go with that.

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Hillary is not a technocrat at all. She's a crooked, self-aggrandizing lawyer. Her pal Ira Magaziner would qualify as a technocrat. Janet Yellen would qualify as a technocrat. Michael Dukakis had a technocratic cast of mind. Hellary? No.

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To put forward an analogous claim – many/most Americans may believe that this is a “Christian nation” despite the language of the Constitution. Convincing them otherwise may observably be difficult or impossible.

The 'language of the Constitution' prohibits a federal religious establishment and federal laws restricting the free exercise of religion. That's it. It does not make any categorical declarations about the character of the nation or society bar that it is one governed by electoral and deliberative institutions and has no delineated orders of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasantry.

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Strange as it may seem to you, the goal of political parties is to defeat their opponents.

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You'd like to make a substantive argument on behalf of the flim flam imam?

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You think he's going to appoint Peter Schiff to the Federal Reserve board?

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It does not miss the point at all. It discredits your point. However, you're emotionally invested in your point.

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Just what are you expecting from 'inflation hawks' that you're not already getting?

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The only memory of 'Fritz and Tits' I have is that it was mentioned in passing in an inane piece of commentary by Barbara Ehrenreich.

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Inflation is currently running below 2%.

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