Light On Dark Water

Alabama Jubilee

For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.

–Richard Weaver

It's been obvious for some time that traditionalists, or realists, or whatever you want to call us, were going to lose the same-sex marriage battle. But I had thought that the more conservative states might be allowed to hold out for a while longer. I'd forgotten that all it takes is one federal judge who wants to snuggle up against that famous right side of history.

There is a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that this god of history that they worship will most likely one day turn on them, and hold them up to the ridicule from which they thought they were preserving themselves.

Maclin Horton
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34 responses to “Alabama Jubilee”

  1. Rob G

    “this god of history that they worship will most likely one day turn on them, and hold them up to the ridicule from which they thought they were preserving themselves.”
    Yes, or else they will find themselves being eventually devoured by their own revolution. As James Kalb says, liberalism is tyrannical, and there is always someone more liberal than you. The dragon of “choice” is an ouroboros.

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  2. Mac

    At least that process is likely to provide a little amusement of a not very nice sort, at least until they start putting people in asylums or euthanizing them. There was (is?) a controversy on at least one campus about performing The Vagina Monologues (a title which always makes me laugh, for reasons which I will leave to your imagination): it discriminates against women who don’t have vaginas. TVM was of course the sine qua non of political correctness on college campuses until just now.
    And then there’s the question of how you can have a women’s college when nobody knows what a woman is.

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  3. Janet

    Darn. I was hoping you were going to say there were fish all over the beach.
    When I worked at the seminary, we had about 6 applicants from MS University for Women. They were all men, or maybe there was one woman, but even without the gender thing, I don’t think that women’s colleges are long for this world.
    AMDG

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  4. Mac

    Not too many years ago there was a massive freakout at one women’s college when they talked about going co-ed. I don’t know how it came out. That’s probably an even more hopeless last stand than Alabama probate courts refusing to issue marriage licenses.
    I thought you were going to say you were hoping I was going to provide some music.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Ty1vHkOeg
    That other kind of jubilee is strictly a summer phenomenon, btw.

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  5. Janet

    Well, that record was as good as dead fish any day.
    AMDG

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  6. Marianne

    I think this is my favorite part from the article you linked to, Mac:
    In October, the New York Times covered how this specific situation was handled at another women’s college, Wellesley. One student had simply checked off “female” on the official application but then began to identifying himself as a “genderqueer” male named Timothy once on campus. Wellesley has had transitioning students before, so Timothy was not only allowed to stay but didn’t face any problems at all. That is, until he tried to run for class diversity officer and students started a petition saying he wasn’t qualified because he was a white man now.

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  7. Janet

    I’ve been thinking about what you said, Maclin, about jubilees only occurring in the summer, but even though it would be unnatural and hard to believe, given the topic of this post, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to believe it might happen.
    AMDG

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  8. Art Deco

    It’s a problem for these institutions because they are run by people whose sense of self is derived from the stances they take (against what they posit are the opinions of ordinary people). The wages of vanity…

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  9. Mac

    Not to mention that many of them now seem to be just plain crazy, or at least unable to defy the crazy ones.
    Actually, Janet, I guess there would be a jubilee going on, if you were a federal judge and you said there was. If you do that, I hope you’ll allow the rest of us to continue to believe there is not. ’cause I don’t see no fish.
    Marianne, that was definitely the crowning glory of that piece, the point where it went from amusing to classic.

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  10. Janet

    I suppose they would be some sort of spiritual fish, only we were too sinful to see them.
    AMDG

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  11. Robert Gotcher

    Here’s the problem for home schoolers. We tend to raise our kids to think that the traditional understanding of sex and marriage is the norm for them. Problem is, as our society moves further and further away from the norm, we de facto wind up seeming extremist and overprotective or whatever. AND we are accused of not socializing our kids.
    The second problem is that it is distressing for home schoolers when they move away from their homes to try to stay rooted in a classical understanding when everyone around them has come unhinged from it. You can prepare your children for the distress (by not isolating and being over-protective and by talking to them about what they find in the world), but you can’t make it so they won’t experience the distress.
    Heck, I constantly experience the distress and I grew up in a much more main-stream environment that was already waltzing its way down the path of disintegration.
    Although if I recall the waltz wasn’t the dance we were dancing.

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  12. Mac

    You’ve summed up the sad situation very well.
    Janet: lol, and you know I don’t use that very often.

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  13. Rob G

    “Not to mention that many of them now seem to be just plain crazy, or at least unable to defy the crazy ones.”
    Libertarian radio guy Jim Quinn used to say, “Liberalism is standing on your head and telling everyone else they’re upside-down.” That about sums it up.
    On a less lighthearted note, I’ve read dozens of articles, essays, etc., on the whole SSM thing and its effect on American Christianity and the Church, but this is far and away the best shortish (12 pages) take on it that I’ve come across. This is some serious stuff that Christians really need to digest.
    http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-american-christianity

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  14. Mac

    I will definitely read that this weekend. I’ve been thinking of writing something on it but probably it’s been said elsewhere.
    It has been clear for a long time that proponents of SSM were going to win. Apart from the fact that all the force of pop culture, journalism, and academia is behind it, the arguments for it are simple and emotionally appealing and concerned with immediate results, while the arguments against it are complex and concerned with far-ranging effects. But it’s still important–even more important–that we understand what is really happening.

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  15. Mac

    Of course there are simple and emotionally appealing arguments against it, too, but they’re pretty easily dismissed as emotionalism or superficial Bible-quoting, which they often are.

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  16. Janet

    You know what is really strange about 50 Shades is that it was touted as something new and brave, when really that sort of book has been around for a long time. When I was a new mother, and recently returned to the Faith, a young woman at work was disgusted with the sort of Christian book I was reading. She brought me a book by, I believe, Rosemary Rogers, and told me that that was what I needed to read. Ms. Rogers book were ubiquitous at that time–about 1974.
    Well, I started to read this book and I was totally amazed at the stuff that was in it. I kept reading in a sort of deer-in-the-headlights way because I kept thinking, “What could possibly come next?” I didn’t read it at work. I couldn’t even sit in the same room with my husband and read it. Thankfully, my curiosity didn’t lead to the sort of addiction that it does in some people. When I saw that somebody had one of her books under her chair at a prayer meeting once, I was thinking, “How can she read that stuff, and what’s more, how can she advertise that she reads that stuff?”
    But anyway, there is was, and very popular 40 years ago and nobody making any big deal about it.
    AMDG

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  17. Mac

    Women somehow get a pass on stuff like this and Cosmopolitan, etc.–and now 50 Shades–I guess because it’s less explicit than plain old porn. It may be just as toxic, though. In fact, regarding 50 Shades, it’s hard to imagine anything much more toxic, because of its success and mainstream acceptance, although in a very different way from plain old porn.
    I only vaguely recognized Rosemary Rogers’s name as a romance writer, so I looked her up on Wikipedia and saw that she’s the Sweet Savage Love perpetrator. I was working in a bookstore when that came out and according to book industry news really shook up the romance genre. It apparently was the first or at least most successful of its kind, and for a while “sweet savage” became the label for a sort of sub-genre. As in “this should go in the sweet savage section.”

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  18. Janet

    I think that was the one.
    AMDG

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  19. Janet

    But I will say that I think that Rogers could write, whereas, any evidence I’ve seen from 50 Shades seems to indicate that his woman cannot.
    AMDG

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  20. Mac

    So I hear.
    “I was working in a bookstore when that came out and according to book industry news really shook up the romance genre.”
    It really shook up the genre. I didn’t.

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  21. Marianne

    I remember when Helen Gurley Brown, the person responsible for the toxic Cosmopolitan, was lionized by the media, showing up everywhere on TV, smugly spouting her gospel that being a sex object was the coolest thing ever. Evil that left me shuddery, really, and I could never figure out why everyone else didn’t have the same reaction. Of course, maybe most did, but didn’t want to appear retrograde, or something.

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  22. Mac

    I suppose she’s part of a long though not exactly noble tradition: the woman who “monetizes”, to use a new but very fitting word, sex and sex appeal, her own and others. It’s easy to imagine her running a brothel.
    I’m reading a biography of P.G. Wodehouse. If I’m not confusing that with something else I’ve been reading, he published stories in Cosmopolitan. So did a lot of other worthy writers. Hard to imagine, but of course the mere fact that the name has continued doesn’t mean there is any other connection between today’s magazine and the one Wodehouse wrote for.

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  23. Janet

    I’m pretty sure we had that in our house when I was young and I’m sure we wouldn’t have had anything trashy lying around where we could see it, if at all.
    I think I thought it was boring because it didn’t have paper dolls in it.
    AMDG

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  24. Marianne

    By the way, the actor in 50 Shades is the same guy who plays the super-creepy serial killer in Gillian Anderson’s TV series, The Fall. Some career trajectory.

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  25. Rob G

    Does anyone know — did the 2nd season of The Fall pick up where the 1st left off?

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  26. Mac

    Since no one else has answered this, I’ll offer my inconclusive bit: I read something that implied that in the second season the same policewoman is chasing the same killer.
    I guess that trajectory is sort of positive, Marianne–from murderer to recreational sadist or whatever he is. I gather there’s plenty of consent in 50 Shades.

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  27. Craig

    Sorry to interrupt this conversation, but last night I had the strangest dream…
    No, really, I did: In my dream I was attending a summer camp, and Maclin was there, and Janet, and Grumpy, and the whole LoDW commentariat. It was a Bible and Wagner and physics camp, which was perfect for me but maybe not so good for everyone else. We were watching a trailer for a new (and, I assume, wholly imaginary) Wes Anderson film. It was a really good trailer, if I may say so myself.
    Anyway, I thought I’d share.

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  28. Janet

    I had the same dream!

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  29. Mac

    Dang, I missed it.

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  30. Janet

    Well, it wasn’t exactly the same. In my dream it was a badminton, P.Diddy, and macrame camp.
    AMDG

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  31. Craig

    Not so good for me, Janet, on all 3 counts.

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  32. Janet

    I know. Must have been something I ate.
    AMDG

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  33. Mac

    I did read the FT piece Rob linked to above. Here’s the link again. It is indeed excellent. I’m going to do a blog post about it in a couple of days.

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  34. Louise

    I’ve only just seen this thread – the bit about the camps is very amusing and even rather attractive. I wonder if I can request a similar dream.

    Reply

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