thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb It turns out that upwardly-mobile Republican Catholic Justice Kennedy was going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 1992, but ended up casting the decisive pro-Roe vote. It seems that Blackmun, O’Connor and Souter brought him around by working him over in private.
Because of the switch, the Casey decision ended up … More ...
Tom Woods has a piece at LewRockwell.com on Catholic social teaching discussing the relation between (resolutely free-market) Austrian economics and various papal pronouncements of the past century, and why orthodox Catholics who also like Austrian economics should follow what their economic theories say alleviates poverty or whatever rather than take the Pope’s advice when the … More ...
Landmarks on the road to a glorious future:
Recent reminders that things that aren’t well founded don’t last no matter how settled they seem:
Liberalism never sleeps. Even as I write, its intellectual and operational functionaries are beavering away all over the world working out the implications of what now counts as the One True Belief:
A reminder that the culture war has been the same, not only in principle but in detail, for at least the past quarter-century: James Hitchcock’s Competing Ethical Systems. It’s a discussion of the nature of “pluralism” and the significance of the assault on traditional sexual standards that was written in 1981 but could as … More ...
My liberal lawyer correspondent (previous exchanges here and here) has asked how to compare and decide between a liberal and a more traditionalist and Catholic approach to politics and society. Here’s an edited version of the exchange:
… More ...Liberal Lawyer: Is it possible to come up with an objective standard by which one could
Rationalized insanity like “zero tolerance” and political correctness suggests there is something basically irrational in social life today that has to do with a conflict between publicly compulsory standards and normal human expectations. Some people try to laugh the conflict off and make jokes about PC or whatever. Others deny it or explain it away—these … More ...
My exchange with my Finnish correspondent continues (previous installments are here, here, and here). This time he’s pressing the issue of the value of tradition:
… More ...Finnish Correspondent: Your reliance on tradition seems misplaced. Isn’t it just functionalism? Some social arrangements may work, although they are not right. For instance, abortion has
Here’s a useful FAQ on the Inquisition put together by a PhD student at Cambridge. The reputation and symbolic status of the Inquisition, it seems, has much more to do with the needs of those who appeal to the symbol than with the institution itself.
Leaving the bigotry and darkness of Old Spain for the … More ...