The Rule 5 Bride

Christina Hendricks gets married.

Don't mind me. I always cry at weddings. Especially when they won't let me shoot fireworks at the reception. But let's don't go there. Too painful.

Hat-tips: Kevin and Jimmie on Twitter.

Even worse than fake boobies or . . .

. . . how do you say "ick" in Arabic?

If you're a woman in a conservative Muslim country, you had better bleed on your wedding night. If you don't, your husband or his family will know you aren't a virgin. For that, you could be beaten or killed. . . .
The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins—culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. . . . .

Via Instapundit and there's sickeningly more at from the L.A. Times and the Associated Press. Every blogger and his brother has already commented on this, and there's probably not much more I could say. Yet I feel that I must, even though I'm running late for an appointment in D.C. Perhaps the commenters can further elaborate on the wrongness of this situation.

Innocence is a wonderful thing, but deceit is heinous. Who is the worse fool here?

• The man whose obsession with bridal chastity is so extreme that he would kill his own wife if he learned she was not a virgin?

or

• The woman who would perpetrate an elaborate ruse in order to be considered acceptable by such a buffoon?

Is not honesty a virtue equal or superior to chastity? And what virtue shall we praise more than mercy? For even if society condemns fornication -- as well it should -- it would be a most cruel thing to seek a woman's hand in marriage under such terms as to require her to engage in a horrid deceit, lest she suffer death for being honest.

If this is genuinely the state of society in some places, then there is only one proper and honorable course of conduct for any woman who, for whatever reason, may have fear of this particular custom: Let her reject the proposed marriage.

Her would-be husband, if he genuinely wants her, ought to be willing to accept her as she is, however she is. Should the woman's suitor or her family demand to know the reason for her refusal, the woman is not obligated to incriminate herself by any confession of fault. Her adamant rejection could inspire suspicion that she hides a secret sin, or it might be supposed that she is merely excessively proud, and unwilling to accept a suitor she deems beneath her.

Either way, no woman should ever be compelled to accept marriage on dishonest terms.

Question: Why do people treat you badly?

Answer: Because you let them.

Not long ago, at a social event in D.C., I found myself talking to a very intelligent, funny, attractive woman who is 31 years old and not married. She had just ended a "relationship" with a guy, and I was sort of amazed.

Why was she still single? And why would this guy date her and dump her? Surely, if he had any appreciation of her wonderful qualities -- some qualities evident to the eye, and others that might be learned in a brief conversation -- he would have spent all he had to buy her a diamond ring, fallen on his knees and, with tears streaming down his face, begged for her hand in marriage.

He had not done this, however. Rather, he treated her like Just Another Woman, not as Someone Special, and so they drifted along for a while and then parted company. As always in such cases, I advised the young lady how to avoid a repetition of her painful disappointment.

Update: (Smitty) An alternative answer would be: "They have the permissions and you can't stop them." This interruption brought to you while issuing a party foul for saying:

"You know the old story about free milk and a cow? Make up your mind to keep the cow in the barn."

How do you not embed the Georgia Satellites?

(There. Fixed that for ya. Back to the original post.)

Tactics, Strategy and Nookie
Excuse me if that sounds simplistic and old-fashioned, but it works. I'm not saying that women should be uptight, Victorian prudes about sex. And, rather than argue about "tithing mint and cumin," I'll take an agnostic stance on the wisdom and morality of engaging in what we might call minor premarital intimacies.

Still, if it is a husband that a woman is seeking, rather than just another in an endless series of going-nowhere "relationships," her negotiating posture in the marriage market is greatly enhanced if she avoids giving up the nookie -- humping, screwing, fornicating, making the beast with two backs, call it what you will -- until she can entrap her prey and drag him to the altar.

Ladies, please note that this is strategic advice. You don't have to be a Christian or a conservative or a pure-as-driven-snow virgin -- although it would be better if you were all three -- to benefit by putting your vajajay off-limits until you can persuade some horny fool respectable gentleman to make the pledge of "forsaking all others 'til death do you part."

Making the decision to keep your britches on henceforth does not require you to make a moral judgment about your sexual past. Even if you spent your teenage years slutting around like Meghan McCain after four margaritas, this doesn't necessarily make you a bad person -- unless you start writing ill-informed RINO political commentary for Tina Brown's Daily Beast, in which case, you're a total whore with pustulent chancres.

Habit, Behavior, Identity
It is important to understand, in this regard, how sexual habit can become sexual identity in such a way that people effectively trap themselves into self-defeating patterns. The largest and most vital sexual organ is your brain, and a lot of what is nowadays is described as sexual "orientation" or sexual "preference" is actually a matter of mental habit.

By repeated thoughts and actions, people's minds become accustomed to one sort of behavior, one sort of sexual ideation. The nature of the human mind is such that our minds can be trained to respond to stimuli in a patterned way, which is true not only in sex, but in eating, writing, talking, etc. If a certain Daily Beast columnist has a habit of slugging down tequila and then wandering off with any man who shows the slightest interest, this is a learned pattern of behavior. She wasn't "born that way."

Once well-established, these mental patterns and their associated behavioral habits are difficult to unlearn, no matter how unsatisfactory or harmful the results. In this sense, people with unfortunate sexual habits are kind of like people who keep voting for Democrats no matter how badly the Democrats screw them over. It's a matter of personal identity: Being a Democrat is who they are.

And so, for some women, being a "party girl" becomes a matter not only of mental habit and behavior pattern, but also a source of self-identification. One sometimes encounters a woman so far gone in this kind of hardened whorishness that, like Naomi Wolf, she scoffs at the very idea that chastity might be considered more virtuous than promiscuity. And if you try to defend the concept of chastity in argument with such a person, you'll quickly find yourself accused of misogyny or being "anti-sex."

Hypocrisy and the Damage Done
Anyone who's known me for more than five minutes would laugh to think that I might ever be accused of being "anti-sex." If you don't consider my 20-year marriage and six children sufficient proof of my pro-sex bona fides, perhaps you ought to inquire among friends who knew me before I met my wife, when I was a extremely wicked person.

"Well, see there?" says the scoffer. "You're such a hypocrite! You slutted around until you were 29, but you expect other people not to do that."

Oh, if only you knew what harm I did -- to myself and others -- during my days of heedless wickedness. We are talking about harm that cannot be undone, lives that cannot be repaired, dreams left shattered like glass. Had it not been for grace, and the persistent prayers of those who cared about me, who knows where I might have ended up? And who knows what further harm has befalled innocent others because of the ripple effects of evil I did more than two decades ago?

"Judge not lest ye be judged" is one of those passages of the Bible that always gets twisted around to mean something quite different than what it actually supposed to mean. Jesus never hesitated to call sin by its right name.

In fact, in one of the most famous incidents of the ministry of Christ, when he saved the life of the woman caught in adultery -- "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" -- after telling the woman that he did not condemn her, Jesus then commanded her, "Go, and sin no more." Having extended grace and mercy, he asked in return her repentance from the sins for which he had refused to let her die. And who can doubt, from that moment forward, this woman lived a life of extraordinary virtue?

The Vajayjay Gospel
Sometimes I'm amazed at how superficial and judgmental professed Christians can be, and how they insist that everyone engage in a pharisaical pretense of sinlessness, not even acknowledging the sin they see everywhere around them, except to condemn it in the stereotypical fashion of Official Church Talk. To these "churchy" people, it is abhorrent to speak to a sinner in terms the sinner can relate to -- and what am I, but a sinner myself? -- as if writing humorously about "nookie" and "vajayjay" might lead someone astray.

Let's go back now to that 31-year-old lovelorn lady whom I advised to keep the cow in the barn. She was raised in a religious home, and would almost certainly like to live a life that her parents and grandparents could admire. "Churchy" people are effectively telling that woman she only has two choices. She can either (a) be all uptight and churchy like them, or else (b) keep on fornicating like a two-bit floozy.

Excuse me if I consider that a false dilemma. If you live long enough to see a few miracles worked in people's lives, you know that many decent, respectable Christians -- the finest pillars of their community and exemplars of moral conduct -- were once the most horribly shameless of reprobate sinners. And even today, the redeemed may face terrible struggles and temptations as they strive to live up to the repentance that was asked as the only price of their priceless salvation: "Go and sin no more."

When I talk to young people (and some not-so-young people) about developing their careers and initiating projects -- whether in politics, business or anything else -- I like to say, "If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it." To explain what I mean:

• Conceive it -- Anything we accomplish in life begins with a concept, some idea we have of something we wish to do, whether it's starting a rock band or organizing a petition drive. We may alter our plans along the way, improvising and revising by the process of trial and error, but we must begin by coming up with an idea -- conceiving -- of something we wish to do.
• Believe it -- There is something almost magical about the enthusiasm and confidence of someone who truly believes in what they're doing. At CPAC '08, a month before I started blogging full-time in March 2008, one of my earliest endorsements came from Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs: "The most enthusiastic blogger I have yet to meet." Although I only got 6,000 visits that first full-time month, I knew in my heart that if I worked as hard as I could at it, using what I'd learned in my journalism career and what I'd picked up from studying the work of successful bloggers, I could make it work. Every small success therefore was welcomed as affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and every disappointment shrugged off as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than an insuperable barrier to success.
• Achieve it - What could possibly be more enjoyable than succeeding at something where no one ever expected you to succeed? Imagine the satisfaction of seeing all those naysayers and detractors eat their words when you accomplish something they told you couldn't be done. You've earned it, you sweated for it, you kept plugging away no matter how often you failed and despite all the criticism of those who called you crazy for even trying. Now you're the freakin' big dog, baby, and those critics look like fools for having ever doubted you.

William Jacobson just crossed the million-hit threshold and if you'll look around, you'll notice all kinds of people achieving things that people told them couldn't be done. Andrew Breitbart was once a slacker with ADD, and Glenn Beck was once a washed-up alcoholic DJ.

God loves to make the impossible happen, just to remind us that he's still in the business of miracles. And when I see someone like that 31-year-old lady -- smart, funny, attractive -- feeling lonely, unloved and unloveable, I want to share with them the idea that it doesn't have to be that way. All you've got to do is to conceive it and believe it, and you can achieve it.

Trust me. As the Rule 5 guru, I'm a good judge of what guys like, and this girl's definitely got it. She must merely learn to negotiate from a position of strength -- keep the cow in the barn, honey, and don't let guys treat you like Just Another Woman -- and she'll have 'em begging for it.

That's why I remind you of the motto of The McCain Institute: Good nookie is a terrible thing to waste.

Update: (Smitty)

Bride of Rove links and ponders this post.

Update II (Smitty)
Further linkage from:

• Little Miss Attila and
• Villainous Company

OMG! Ashley Herzog has decided to prove once and for all she's a natural blonde!

Photographic proof, IYKWIMAITYD!

Not since Little Miss Attila published those nude photos of Hannah Giles has such a scandal rocked the conservative blogosphere. BTW, both Ace of Spades and Matthew Vadum claim to have seen Little Miss Attila topless at CPAC a couple of years ago, but they're probably just joking.

Speaking of natural blondes, everybody's favorite strawberry blonde, Becky Banks Brindle, will be having her big church wedding to Allen "Big Al" Brindle next weekend in Pittsburgh. Allen is very tall and has incredibly large hands, which probably explains why Becky dragged him to a courthouse in Virginia in December to stake her legal claim to the breathtaking awesomeness for which "Big Al" is legendary.

Now, just to make their mutual satisfaction copacetic with The Man Upstairs, the suspiciously happy couple -- we notice that "Trout Pout" has been smiling rather blissfully since December -- will be doing the formal religious acknowledgement of their blessed union.

In case anyone's been wondering why Becky hasn't been blogging much lately, it's probably because she's been so busy (a) planning her wedding, and (b) serving up hot home-cooked deliciousness to sate her hubby's voracious appetite. Nudge, nudge.

Despite the universal envy which their connubial contentment inspires, we all wish them the best, and expect the first of many large-handed blonde Banks/Brindle babies to make its appearance sometime early next summer. Allen's already refused lucrative offers for video of the conception, but maybe if you guys will hit the tip jar, I'll see if I can talk him into arranging for me to take photos of the delivery. IYKWIMAITYD.

(Trust me, Allen: I'm a happily married father of six. As we say at The McCain Institute, if you've seen one episiotomy, you've seen 'em all. This is about neutral, objective professional journalism.)

The Palins Are Getting Divorced,As Are Mrs. Other McCain and I

(BUMPED; SEE UPDATES BELOW.) Also, it's entirely possible that George W. and Laura Bush -- perhaps even George H.W. and Barbara Bush -- are heading for "Splitsville," if we accept such "proof" as we find in the latest edition of Star magazine:

"Sarah and Todd are fighting all the time," Mercede Johnston — sister of Levi Johnston, ex-boyfriend of Sarah's eldest daughter, Bristol — tells Star in an exclusive interview. "When they do, Todd often ends up sleeping on the couch at their home in Wasilla. Bristol used to tell Levi that her parents would argue and bicker over the littlest things, like who was supposed to take out the trash or wash the dishes."
Levi, the father of Bristol's 7-month-old son, Tripp, recently told RadarOnline.com that Sarah and Todd have had marital trouble "from day one," and that he believed their escalating problems were the reason behind her mysterious decision to resign as governor of Alaska last month with more than a year left in her term.
His sister Mercede predicts: "If they ended their marriage within the next year, I wouldn't be surprised at all. It really seems to me their marriage is just a sham for the cameras now!"

Ri-iiiight. The trashy sister of that scumsucking vermin Levi Johnston (a/k/a "Ricky Hollywood" ) is such an expert on marriage, y'know.

Feel free to ask Mrs. Other McCain how recently -- and if memory serves, it was week before last -- she gave me the kind of spousal ultimatum that involves an offer to help me pack my bags. We've made it past the 20-year mark, and I'm determined to hold true to my vow of "till death do us part," even if sometimes Mrs. Other McCain also helpfully offers to assist me with the "death" part.

Hang in there, Todd and Sarah: I put my journalistic credibility on the line for you. Like I said this morning:

I don't care if Todd Palin hikes the Appalachian Trail to Argentina or Sarah Palin flies to Vegas and spends Labor Day weekend with the Chippendales dancers. As long as the Palins don't get a divorce, the continuation of their marriage proves that Jesse Griffin is a liar, Dennis Zaki is a floppy-shoed clown, and I'm solid gold, baby.

Think of the children! (And me, of course.) Also, everybody needs to hit the tip jar today, just to remind my wife what a solid-gold guy she married.

UPDATE 3 p.m.: Jesse Griffin denies having anything to do with the Star story:

It looks like Mercede has been talking to them again. And just to put the potential rumor to rest Mercede is NOT one of my sources.

He thus denies an accusation no one ever made. But "Gryphen" already told us who his sources are:

The operator of the Immoral Minority blog admits that he is in regular contact with one Rex Butler and Tank Jones. Rex Butler is the high-priced attorney who is handling legal issues for the Johnston family.

The Rex Butler/Tank Jones angle, of course, leads straight to "Ricky Hollywood," and it looks like the whole grubby Johnston clan is feeding at the same trough of slime:

Butler magically appeared in court to defend Sherry Johnston on her drug-dealing related arrest -- she originally was so broke she had to get a public defender.

Which, of course, leads directly to the Florida headquarters of . . . the Star:

How does Sherry Johnston afford an attorney like Rex Butler? How do the Johnstons get the money to zoom around the United States giving interviews? How do they pay their rent/mortgage or even the payments on Levi Johnston's truck . . .
Airplane tickets from Anchorage to Los Angeles and New York run a minimum of around $700 per person, and that doesn't include hotel stays and other transportation. Trips from Anchorage to Florida, where Mercede Johnston claimed (on Larry King's show) to have traveled in March, are running around $1200 round trip.
They have claimed on television that they are not receiving compensation for their appearances. So what gives? Levi has no job, his mother has no job, his sister has no job, so who is paying for this "Smear Palin" tour? If you recall the Larry King interview with the Johnstons, you will remember that Mercede Johnston mentioned that she had recently returned from Florida. Why Florida? Well, Florida is where Star Magazine has its headquarters. Hold on a second, Mercede gave an interview to Star Magazine!

You see? It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure this out: The Star is paying its sources, just like the Enquirer pays its sources, which creates a sort of commodity market for anti-Palin dirt in Alaska. As I said:

Meanwhile, here is Jesse Griffin, one of the left-wing Alaska blogospheric myrmidons who've spent the past 11 months trashing Palin online for the amusement of PDS-affected "progressives" worldwide. Now that Palin's resigned as governor and the spotlight has shifted, the blog-o-bucks are harder to get for the Alaskasphere, and everybody -- ex-staffers, "Ricky Hollywood," Griffin, his blog buddies -- is trying to cash in before the sell-by date expires on this dirt-dishing bonanza.

So what you're seeing here, as any Hayekian would surmise, is a final frenzy of activity before the closing bell on the Anchorage Slimeball Exchange.

UPDATE 3:45 p.m.: Oh, it keeps getting better and better, as Griffin updates to assist with the process of elimination that increasingly seems to point the finger at Butler and/or Jones:

Also I did not talk to either Mercede OR Levi before I made my post, and I called some of the other media outlets working this story and asked them if the Johnston family was one of their sources and they said no. So when the Palin-bots come after this family I am here to tell you it just another example of attacking the messenger instead of addressing the validity of the information.

Meanwhile, we learn that last October, Rex Butler was smearing Palin as a racist:

"Blacks don't have the levels of access to the governor and state commissioners as with past administrations," said attorney Rex Butler, an Alaska resident since 1983. "It seems the posture of (Palin's) administration with Blacks is: Don't need them—don’t worry about them."

I'm betting that Butler's financial status is not entirely opaque. Interesting things might turn up in that regard. "Means, motive, opportunity," as they say, and I wonder if the Alaska bar association might be interested in the question of whether Butler's been playing the role of a libel broker in the Anchorage Slimeball Exchange, in which Jesse Griffin seems to have been such an active participant. Keep updating, Jesse!

Expect further updates . . .

'Uh, honey, about that Speedo . . .'

No, that's just a joke. Just because you swing a big bat doesn't make you a Hall of Famer, and I was strictly an amateur. Not so with young Jason, who neglected to inform his bride-to-be about his major-league past:

"There was no way I could marry an adult film star . . . I don't know if I will ever be able to trust a man again."

Well, ma'am:

• Never trust a man to begin with; and
• If he's got UDSA Prime beef folks will pay just to see, be happy to ride the bull for free.

(Via JammieWearing Fool.)

Massachusetts: The Gay State

Associated Press celebrates the five-year anniversary of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts:

According to the latest state figures, [from May 2004] through September 2008, there had been 12,167 same-sex marriages in Massachusetts -- 64 percent of them between women -- out of 170,209 marriages in all

.No figures are cited on gay divorce, of course. If you read the 2,700-word story, you will see that AP reporter David Crary tells a sunshine-on-a-cloudless-day tale, elaborated with picturesque anecdotes about wonderful couples.

Crary won second place in the 2006 National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association competition. This year, he's going for No. 1, baby!

I would very much like to be able to compare state-by-state marriage data to demonstrate that Massachusetts has one of the lowest marriage rates, and one of the lowest birth rates, in the United States. Unfortunately, as the NCHS bluntly admits, the federal government stopped providing even a semblance of comprensive data on marriage and divorce more than a decade ago.

However, birth data continue to be collected, so let's look at the 2003 total fertility rate for Massachusetts, as well as four other states -- Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine -- that have legalized same-sex marriage, as well as New Hampshire, where legislation is currently awaiting the governor's signature.

Massachusetts......1.74
Connecticut..........1.92
Iowa.....................1.99
Vermont...............1.68
Maine...................1.75
New Hampshire...1.77

You see that in none of these states is the total fertility rate at or above the 2.1 average lifetime births per woman necessary to prevent demographic decline. Now, let's look at the states with the highest fertility rates:

Utah..................2.57
Arizona..............2.39
Alaska................2.37
Texas................2.35
Idaho................2.32

The fertility rate in Utah is 53% higher than the rate in Vermont, and the rate in Idaho is 33% higher than the rate in Massachusetts.

My point is that the popularity of same-sex marriage is strongly associated with low fertility rates. If adequate state-by-state data were available, I'm sure you'd see a similar association with low marriage rates.

Don't mistake the direction of causality, however: The decline of the traditional family caused the rise of same-sex marriage, and not vice-versa. It was America's embrace of the Contraceptive Culture -- detroying the natural connection between love, sex, marriage and parenthood -- that has made possible the radical triumph.

Gays did not do this. It was the God-haters, with the help of self-righteous fools who claimed to be religious even while they disobeyed one of God's original commandments: "Be fruitful and multiply." They thought they could embrace the Planned Parenthood lifestyle without consequence.

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . ."
-- Romans 1:22 KJV

Mother's Day, the Planned Parenthood way! Declining birth rates mean an aging population. One of these days, we'll all be as gay -- and gray -- as Massachusetts, and they'll call that "progress."

UPDATE: Pundette says, "Move over, Mark Steyn." No, no, Pundette. It's more like, "Please link me, Mark Steyn!" BTW, Pundette is a mother of seven, and has an excellent Mother's Day linkfest round-up.

UPDATE II: Linked at Creative Minority Report and by Dad 29, who notes that my pro-natalist traditionalism is unusual for a Protestant. I get this all the time, as does Mark Steyn, who is Jewish and, indeed, one will find that nearly all Muslims share a similar attitude. (Dinesh D'Souza caught holy hell a couple years ago for a book in which he suggested that the Muslim world's anti-American rage is a reaction to the decadence of Western pop culture.)

The feminist-infested progressive Left would doubtless characterize this ecumenical pro-natalism as a function of the patriarchal phallocratic desire to oppress The Sisterhood. Rather, I think what accounts for the similarity of perspective is a skepticism toward the truth-claims of modernism. Confronted by the arrogant assertions of the elite consensus, from which dissent is forbidden, we skeptics detect the unmistakable aroma of bovine excrement.

The disciples of Progress look at tradition -- including the traditional belief that a large family is a blessing -- and see everything they despise as obsolete and unjust. The traditionalist agrees with G.K. Chesterton:

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Once an intelligent person begins to question Progress in this way, once he starts wondering whether everything old is bad and everything new is better, he will soon discover evidence that contradicts the modernist truth-claims. At that point, he is likely to become a full-blown reactionary and, unless counseled by men of reason whom he respects, will soon be arguing for the divine right of kings or some other embarrassing anachronism. (The informed reader will smile in recognition of the hint of autobiography here.)

Extremism of one form or another -- and Osama bin Laden will suffice as an example -- is too often the result of the traditionalist's resentment of modernist arrogance. Being a Bible-thumping hillbilly myself, I have sometimes thought the Islamic radicals have the better of the argument with their "moderate" antagonists within the Muslim world. If the Koran is true, if Muhammad was a divine Prophet who spoke on behalf of the Almighty, then jihad against the infidels is the True Faith.

But please note the hypothetical; I certainly do not accept that Mohammed was an agent of divinity, except in the sense that the Babylonian conquest was an act of God. The Israelites were God's chosen people, but disobeyed him, and the Babylonian armies were thus the temporal means of chastisement. In the same way, one might say that the errors and unfaithfulness of the 6th-century church inspired Muhammad's ignorant anti-Christian theology, which from its beginnings in a rebellion of Arab tribesmen, advanced thence by conquest until at last Christendom rallied.

Students of history will find that the Christian world did not defeat the Ottoman Empire (in the 1683 Battle of Vienna) until after Martin Luther had struck the spark of Christian reform. Make of this what you will. The relevant point here, however, is that any crisis or tribulation suffered by Christendom must be seen as the chastisement of human failing, a call to greater faith and greater obedience to God's commandments.

God will not abandon us, if we are faithful and obedient, but if He desires to call us to repentance, He will work through means at hand, and we must pay attention to understand wherein we have failed.

PREVIOUSLY:

• 5/3: The Demographics of Dhimmitude
• 4/22: 'Forbidding to marry'
• 2/11: The taxpayer shortage

The Demographics of Dhimmitude

DEMOGRAPHIC CRASH

Video: Gay gynephobia

Look, I've made clear my disapproval of breast implants. So now, watch as Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto make clear their disapproval of . . . vagina:

Please remind me of this video, next time a feminist calls me a misogynist.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, Allahpundit has this video of Laura Ingraham and the viciously intolerant Gloria Feldt:

Notice how Feldt says that Prejean "has a right to her opinion." Leftists don't actually mean this. The whole point of the gay-rights movement is to abolish your right to disagree with them.

Linked by Hedgehog Blog and Daley Gator.

UPDATE II: BTW, the Ingraham/Feldt interview is the kind of TV I hate. Feldt filibusters and interrupts; Ingraham becomes derisive. As a journalist, it has always been my thought that, when interviewing someone who is transparently wrong, the best policy is to give them enough rope to hang themselves. I wish Ingraham had let Feldt finish her prefab talking points and then hit her with a hard question.

As to Feldt's talking points: She began with the assertion that "feminism is about justice and equality," which ideology Prejean is accused of betraying and therefore (to complete the syllogism) Prejean is not a feminist.

Which is correct. I have argued explicitly (a) that feminism is wrong precisely because it is a radical egalitarian ideology and (b) that the same-sex marriage argument is based on the same fallacious doctrine. Please see my American Spectator column, "Marriage: A Hill to Die On," as well as "Whither Marriage?" and "Gay Rights, Gay Rage."

The argument against same-sex marriage can only prevail if we begin by rejecting the assertion that men and women are "equal" in the sense that feminists mean it -- identical and therefore interchangeable.

In fact, men and women are different, and it is their differences that create the necessary complementarity of marriage. Insofar as we accept the counterfactual feminist ideology of legally-mandated androgyny -- that men and women are the same, and thus fungible -- then it becomes impossible to argue coherently that it makes any difference whether you marry a man or a woman.

UPDATE: Dan Collins reminds Musto and Olby that "despite what your girlfriends may tell you, catty, stupid, vicious, jealous, ugly and self-righteous is no way to go through life, son." I've got some related stuff here.

SHANNA MOAKLER: NAKED LIAR?

Earlier today, I reported Shanna Moakler's denial of Perez Hilton's report that she had told Access Hollywood that pageant officials paid for Carrie Prejean's implants. Now Access Hollywood reports:

Shanna Moakler, Co-Executive Director of the Miss California Organization, has confirmed the group behind the pageant paid for Miss California Carrie Prejean’s breast implants, weeks before she competed in Miss USA.
In a new interview with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush, Shanna confirmed the news.
"Did you guys pay for it?: Billy asked Shanna directly.
"Yes," Shanna said. "We did."
The organization paid for Carrie’s breast enhancement prior to her competing in the Miss USA pageant, which was held in Las Vegas, almost two weeks ago.
"It was something that we all spoke about together," Shanna said referring to herself, Carrie and Keith Lewis, Shanna's co-executive director. "It was an option and she wanted it. And we supported that decision."
Shanna, a former Miss USA herself, defended the Miss California Organization's decision to pay for the elective surgery.
"Breast implants in pageants is not a rarity. It's definitely not taboo. It's very common. Breast implants today among young women today is very common. I don't personally have them, but you know — they are," she added.

You lying bitch! You deleted your earlier Tweet, in which you denied the Perez Hilton story, then turned around and Twittered:

Just did Access Hollywood, feel very good about it and hope I cleared up things! Billy Bush was a great!

Public Relations 101: NEVER LIE TO A REPORTER. We are not stupid. You are not required to respond to any press inquiry. You can refuse to comment, "neither confirm nor deny," etc. But never lie, because once you're caught lying, your credibility is shot.

Obviously, however, you're telling the truth about not having implants. I did my research, lady. They're real enough, all right. But they're definitely not spectacular (or safe for work). No wonder Travis dumped you. Maybe he'll take the kids, too.

UPDATE: Via Dan Collins, prepare for the weirdness of Perez Hilton in drag as . . . Bettie Page. Go ahead and laugh while you can. If Obama gets his way, it will be a hate crime to laugh. It's already illegal discrimination to fire a transsexual.

UPDATE II: Frank J asks: "Why are people always trying to tear down our heroes?" Feet of clay, boobs of silicone?

Also, not to fuel anyone's paranoia, but I'm getting anonymous tips that Carrie Prejean might actually be a Trojan Horse for the gay-rights movement. Prejean is friends with pageant director Keith Lewis, who was executive producer for a pro-gay documentary, "For The Bible Tells Me So."

According to my tipster's theory -- and this is just speculation -- the whole Perez Hilton question for Prejean was a setup, a stunt conceived to catapult Prejean to celebrity as a national spokewoman against same-sex marriage. Then, a few months later, she'll have a "Road To Damascus" conversion, claiming to have "seen the light" about how hateful those conservative homophobes are, and why same-sex marriage should be the law of the land.

Also, my tipster speculates, various people (including Shanna Moakler) are using the Prejean controversy as publicity to help them negotiate new reality-TV gigs. (Apparently, landing a reality-show contract has in recent years become the obsession of every washed-up starlet and D-lister in Hollywood.)

This is all just speculation from anonymous tipsters, and is close enough to being outright conspiracy theory that I take it with numerous grains of salt. However, it's worth keeping in mind as we watch the continuing saga of Carrie Prejean.

UPDATE III: I've also explained the tin-foil hat/silicone boobs theory at the Green Room. Meanwhile, Brian Simpson disputes my assessment of Moakler's (non-)spectacularity. I'm sorry, Brian: I've got very high standards in this regard, after being married 20 years to such a hottie.

UPDATE IV: Naturally, Pandagon's Pam Spaulding is outraged that anyone could (even pretend to) be against same-sex marriage.

UPDATE V: Ace says Prejean is getting the "Joe The Plumber treatment" from the press corps, and sees a double standard at work. Please note that, although I'm a thoroughgoing right-winger, I don't feel like it's my job to ignore Carrie's fakies.

News is news, facts are facts, and -- most importantly -- traffic is traffic. I'm a capitalist blogger, and I don't see any reason to let Gawker and Perez Hilton monopolize the "Carrie Prejean fake boob" traffic.

Twenty years of happily ever after

Yes, dear reader, it was on this date in 1989 that Mrs. Other McCain and I went to the Gordon County Courthouse in Calhoun, Ga., and became man and wife. Probate Judge Johnny Parker presided at the ceremony, with our friends Jim and Dawn McFadden as witnesses. Here is a photo of my lovely bride I took a couple years later:

And here is a photo of me and my bride, taken by my good friend Matthew Vadum, just three days ago:

Can I pick 'em, or what? The reader will observe that Mrs. Other McCain is still just as sexy as ever. OK, so she doesn't have that cool '80s big hair anymore. But I don't have my cool Patrick Swayze mullet anymore, either.

I'll never forget when Judge Parker said, "forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live." Wow. Heavy concept. Six kids and 20 years later, I'm thinking I got the best end of this bargain. Don't you agree?

Then hit the tip jar, so maybe I can take her out to dinner.

Young marriage goes mainstream?

My pro-marriage colloquy with Laura of Pursuing Holiness, advocating a return to a more traditional idea of nuptials in the youthful prime has been echoed by Mark Regnerus in The Washington Post:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That's up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. . . . The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men -- and a minority at that -- lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.

You should go read the whole thing. Regnerus is insightful to note the declining gap between the average age of bride and groom. My beautiful wife is four-and-a-half years my junior; I make up for it by my abysmal immaturity, and we've been married 20 years.

The pushback from a liberal like Matthew Yglesias is expected. Exactly what he intends to prove by citing the history of marriage in Japan, I'm not sure.

More intriguing is Peter Suderman's evident horror of young marriage. Given that he's currently involved with Megan McArdle, might I suspect that Peter is eager to forestall any effort to drag him into the matrimonial snare? But alas, he trips over the facts:

[C]ouples want kids when they want kids, and increasingly that's going to be in the late 20s and early 30s.

Good luck with that plan. As Orwell said, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

The mean age of U.S. women at first birth, which had risen steadily to 25.2 in 2005, declined to 25.0 in 2006. This was due in part to the influx of Hispanic immigrants, but also due to the stark biological reality that demographers express by the maxim, "Fertility delayed is fertility denied."

The slow rise in mean age at first birth, from about 22 in 1964 to 25 now, was entirely a result of the decline of childbearing by women under 25, rather than an increase in childbearing by older women. The oft-heard assertion that women today are having more babies in their 30s is counterfactual. The 2006 birth rate for women ages 30-34 (97.7 births per 1,000 women) was actually lower than the rate in 1964 (the last year of the Baby Boom) when the 30-34 cohort produced 103.4 births per 1,000.

In 1957, at the very peak of the post-WWII Baby Boom, when the total fertility rate (average number of lifetime births per woman) was 3.7, the median age at first marriage for women was under 21. In 1957, the typical American mother had two children by the time she was 25, added a third before she was 30, and there was a 70% chance she'd have a fourth child sometime after she turned 30.

What has happened since then is that the typical college-educated American woman has merely subtracted the two children (those born before age 25) from that 3.7 Baby Boom-era average, leaving her with the typical upscale "microfamily" of 1.7 children. This is, of course, merely an average. The part about delayed childbearing that gets little attention is that it is necessarily accompanied by a rise in childlessness, much of it tragically involuntary, as Pundette explains:

In this scenario, after 10-15 years of contracepting, the not-so-young woman tries to turn her fertility back on. When this doesn't work as well as the couple hopes, they consult Dr. Frankenstein, who may or may not be able to help them obtain the child they're now so desperate to have.

The Contraceptive Culture quite often leads to a Darwinian dead end. Among other ironies of 21st-century America is that the secularist elites who most emphatically embrace Darwin are the ones being weeded out as "unfit" by their own instruments, Science and Progress. Meanwhile, the supposedly backward fundamentalists flourish.

Nature ultimately triumphs. Despite all the Science and Progress -- the widespread availability of contraception and the advances in medical treatment for infertility -- the birth rate for U.S. women ages 18-19 in 2006 (73.0) was still 54% higher than for women ages 35-39 (43.7). Is this not a strong argument that it is more natural to marry at 17 than at 34? Or, at least, to split the difference and say that it is better to wed at 25 than at 30?

UPDATE: Dang, almost forgot Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, at whom I'd merely nodded earlier today. Amanda perfectly exemplifies the sour-grapes aspect of feminist rage against marriage. A grim man-hater who could only expect a proposal from a man with suicidal tendencies, Amanda fulminates:

Sometimes arguing from tradition is merely irritating. Sometimes it's beyond fucking stupid. But I suppose the good thing is that Regnerus is coming right out and stating a value that social conservatives tend to avoid baldly stating--they desire young marriage (for women), because it's an effective tool at clipping women's wings.

Ri-ight. Marriage as a conspiracy against female ambition is the pet paranoia of feminists. They psychologically resemble anti-Semites who see everything as a Zionist plot.

BTW, notice that Amanda illustrates her screed with a 1950s bridal magazine cover. This is the feminist's favorite revisionist-historical theme of The Bad Old Days, when your mother or grandmother was allegedly oppressed, repressed and suppressed by your evil patriarchal father or grandfather. But wait, there's much, much more:

I remember the girls who wanted to marry young in college, and everyone felt like they were desperate and weird . . .

"Everyone," in this case, being the angry, antisocial girls that Amanda hung out with. And yet more:

Being married means handing over a lot of yourself to a man, especially if you're in your puppy years and haven't learned to stand up for yourself yet. . . .
The problem with older women (well, not problem---I’d say solution!) is that they are set in their ways, and that means they have more bargaining power in their relationships. If you already have your career, for instance, you know what you stand to lose if you give into the pressure to give it up. But if you don't have it yet, it makes it much easier to let your husband's needs and desires dictate the entire relationship.

Well, thank goodness that Amanda Marcotte's precious career as a 31-year-old feminist blogger is in no danger from a "husband's needs and desires." But what tremendous "bargaining power" she'll have if she ever meets that fellow with suicidal tendencies!

Alas, even some of her fellow feminists have found such men, leaving Amanda always a bridesmaid, never a bride, a sad necessity that she narcissistically imagines as heroic virtue.

UPDATE II: Blame it on Darwin:

Evolution, in short, favors nubile females who still look like they have a great many years of fertility ahead of them.

Hey, I'm a creationist. Don't blame me.

UPDATE III: Carolyn Tackett:

It seems to me that women these days believe that the path to power, and equality, is the path to masculinity. In other words, the only way for a woman to achieve success is to be more like a man. That belief is a head shaker for my Mom. . . .
My Mom is a real feminist. And after fifty-eight years of marriage, my Dad still looks at her like she's the hottest woman on Earth.

Wow. Fifty-eight years! And here I was thinking I'd done a big thing to make 20!

Shhh! Don't tell anyone!

"Large families collect comebacks to the question 'Why do you have so many kids?' and here's one I once heard: 'We're trying to take over the world.' . . . Let God plan your family and the world will be a vastly better place."

Carrie Prejean bikini pics

UPDATE 5/5: CARRIE PREJEAN NUDE PIC SCANDAL.

(BUMPED 4/25; URGENT UPDATES BELOW.)

The politics of coercive approval means that to disagree with the policy of same-sex marriage is to disapprove of homosexuality, which is impermissible. As with other "progressive" causes, the object of the gay rights agenda is not merely a matter of policy. Rather, it aims ultimately at thought-control, to forbid dissent.

By speaking out against same-sex marriage, Miss California USA Carrie Prejean may have lost the Miss USA crown, and now she's the target of "progressive" death threats, as Donald Douglas points out:

You just can't hold an opinion contrary to the secular progressive hordes in this country: They want her DEAD! They want her family DEAD! They want her house burned to the GROUND! They wanna go there in the middle of the night and PISS ON HER ASHES!

Ah, the sweet voices of multicultural tolerance! They want to mount an inquisition because the CIA plays rough with Abu and Khalid, but let someone dare to criticize their agenda, and we see what they're really all about: You have a right to our opinion!

Maybe they just hate her because she's beautiful?

A closer examination of that photo causes me to wonder if Carrie's got implants:

You notice that (a) she's extraordinarily lean, and (b) her breasts have that unnatural globular quality that is the telltale hallmark of fakies.

At least they're a semi-credible B-cup rather than those ginormous porn-star fakies. But I'm still anti-fakie. Whether they're AAs or DDs, ladies, stick with what the good lord gave ya. To do otherwise is as unnatural as . . . uh, same-sex marriage.

UPDATE: Not only am I now the top Google result for "Carrie Prejean bikini," but I'm also the No. 6 result for "Carrie+Prejean+naked." Remember, hits is hits. And since I'm not quite making that $75K/year for 100K visits/month, I'll gladly take the traffic.

UPDATE II: Welcome Townhall readers! Hope you share my traditional-values opposition to breast implants. "Traditional" and "natural" go together. If a girl's naturally skinny, that's OK. And if a girl's got a little more to love . . . well, nothing wrong with that, either. But keep it natural.

UPDATE III: Speaking of naked, check out the naked bias of Miss USA pageant director Shanna Moakler:

But she lost the crown because she wasn't able to convey compassion for ALL the people that as MISS USA she would be representing. and if YOU like it or not, gays and lesbians make up this country as well. THIS is why we have judges so they can find the RIGHT woman who obtains these qualities. they are crucial in my eyes when holding a honor and title as big as being Miss USA. The panel of judges was qualified and did their job, they represented all of us, men, woman, black, white, gay and straight.

OK, to start with, Ms. Moakler, you're blogging on MySpace, OK? But I skip past that, as well as overlooking your UNUSUAL choices of ALLCAPS. What you can't seem to comprehend, Ms. Moakler is how evil it is to make someone's position on a controversial public policy question a measure of their "compassion."

You are evil, Ms. Moakler. Perez Hilton is evil and so are any of the Miss USA judges who share your evil mentality that equates opposition to the politicized gay-rights agenda with a lack of "compassion." How about you arrogant elitists read an actual book once in a while and try to understand why politics as an exercise in moral narcissism -- The Vision of the Anointed, as Thomas Sowell dubbed it -- is so heinously evil.

UPDATE IV: Carrie Prejean: Hateful Oppressor?

UPDATE V:

(April 25) I am not going to name the distinguished conservative academic who e-mailed me a link to a site titled, "CARRIE PREJEAN NAKED." However, I do want to serve notice that anyone who thinks they can out-pander me has got another think coming. When it comes to random-Google keywords, nobody out-panders the Rule 5 King.

I'm No. 1 on "Carrie Prejean bikini," and if somebody's aced me out on "Carrie Prejean nude," or "Carrie Prejean naked," or "Carrie Prejean upskirt," I'm not going to give in without a fight.

BTW, the photo above is meant to illustrate my earlier argument (I'm currently the No. 4 Google return on "Carrie Prejean fake boobs") that Miss California USA is implant-enhanced. One of the commenters has referred to the clearly evident "refund gap" between Miss Prejean's suspiciously globular breasts.

Having done extensive hands-on field research from 1973-1988, I'm an authority on varieties of female pectoral configuration. Miss Prejean's chest is a phenomenon not found in nature. There is no purely biological possibility of a girl that skinny having breasts that large, perfectly spherical in shape, and separated by several inches of flat sternum. Trust an expert: Those boobs are as unnatural as "Adam and Steve."

'Forbidding to marry'

Laura from Pursuing Holiness wrote a post at the Hot Air Green Room that inspired me to respond at great length:

Christians believe that marriage is an institution ordained by God, and every marriage is thus blessed. However, in ordaining marriage, God commanded man to "be fruitful and multiply." This commandment has never been repealed or amended, no matter what any Malthusian population-control fanatic tries to tell you. One trend that has undermined marriage has been the rise of the Contraceptive Culture, which celebrates sterility as the norm and views fertility as a pathology requiring medical prevention.
How many Christians have embraced this false -- dare I say, evil -- worldview? How many young Christian married couples use contraception because "we can't afford children now"? And how many married Christian couples have unwittingly subscribed to the Zero Population Growth ideal of exactly two children per couple? Did you know that surgical sterilization (tubal ligation) is the No. 1 form of birth control for American women? It's the "two and tie 'em" mentality: Have exactly two children, then get yourself surgically sterilized. . . .

You should read the whole thing.

UPDATE: In the comments at the Green Room, Anna writes:

My husband and I were married at 21. . . .
What galls me is the anti-child atmosphere nowadays. We have 3 kids (including a set of twins), and we'd love to have another. We aren't really in a position to have another right this minute, but the door is not shut. However, mention this to my (devout Lutheran) in-laws, and they rant about how they'll kill my husband if I get pregnant, and how they don't 'need' any more grandchildren. We even hear from other members of their church about how we're too young to have so many kids - how are we going to pay for college/cars/etc for not only them, but for ourselves. We’re 26/27! How is that too young? There are only so many times that I can retort with "We're old enough/it's our family/you can take out loans for college, but not for retirement!" before I have to run to the bathroom to cry.

Anna, once you understand that their criticisms of you are actually a defense of their own decisions, this anti-baby attitude becomes more comprehensible. People can always justify their own behavior, and people who embrace the Contraceptive Culture typically display these attitudes. Negative conceptions of others -- the "trailer trash" stereotype of large families -- are a defense mechanism to enhance their own self-concept.

Believing that their way is the only way, they must necessarily believe that, by marrying young and having lots of babies, you are dooming yourself (and your children) to misery and poverty. The "how will you pay for college" question is meant to be the ultimate "gotcha." My daughter's working her way through college. Next question?

UPDATE II: More wisdom in the comments (here) from father-of-five Larry:

I cannot count the number of times we have been unintentionally insulted by well meaning, self-identified Christians, asking if we know what causes that (pregnancy) . . .

To which I always answer, "Yes, and we're very good at it." That shuts 'em up quick.

Iowa gay ruling: Power to the elites!

The news:

The Iowa Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Friday finding that the state's same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples, making Iowa the third state where gay marriage is legal.
In its decision, the court upheld a 2007 district court judge's ruling that the law violates the state constitution. It strikes the language from Iowa code limiting marriage to only between a man a woman.

The court's ruling begins, bizarrely, by praising the character of the plaintiffs:

Like most Iowans, they are responsible, caring, and productive individuals. They maintain important jobs, or are retired, and are contributing, benevolent members of their communities.

Can you say "non sequitur," boys and girls? Whether they were drug addicts or unemployed truck drivers, this is no measure of their rights. Will update with more.

UPDATE: This goes back to something I blogged about yesterday, when Debra Dickerson wrote:

Enjoy the last few years left of discriminating against gays 'cuz them days is almost gone. . . . Homophobia is on a short list of acceptable bigotries. But it's fading fast.

This is the attitude of an elite that is about to impose its will on the reluctant masses. Debra Dickerson sees that her opinion -- that pathological "homophobia" is the only reason why gay marriage is not legal -- is shared by her fellow members of the elite, including the legal establishment. They have the power to make their opinion law, and Dickerson's scoffing at the masses is the elite exulting in its own power: "Hahaha, you ignorant rubes can't stop us!"

Notice how the rainbow armband accentuates their brown shirts. Splendid!

UPDATE II: More elitism from the Iowa court's ruling:

Many leading organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the Child Welfare League of America, weighed the available research and supported the conclusion that gay and lesbian parents are as effective as heterosexual parents in raising children.

Argumentum ad verecundiam -- the appeal to authority, in this case the authority of "many leading organizations" in the social sciences. One of the dirty little secrets of social science is that it is possible to "prove" anything, if you're willing to accept shoddy methodology.

We need only ask what "many leading organizations" said about homosexuality circa 1920 or 1950 to see that there is no fixed and permanent truth in social science. And again this returns us to the fallacy of "progress": Because elite opinion has changed in recent decades, this change becomes synonymous with progress, and skeptics find themselves excluded from the argument because their opposition to "progress" represents an attack on the prestige of the elite.

UPDATE III: To judge by the Memeorandum thread, as of 11:55 a.m., only liberal bloggers are commenting on the Iowa court decision.

UPDATE IV: Allow me now to put on my "top Hayekian public intellectual" hat, and explain a bit of why my Austrian-influenced views don't send me trotting into the camp of the left-libertarians on this issue. To be as concise as possibly, the gay marriage issue is not about liberty. It's about equality, as Andrew Sullivan makes explicit:

As always, there is a backlash against civil equality. But the process of removing basic constitutional rights by amending the constitution to strip a specified minority of such rights is, understandably, an onerous process.

"Civil equality" -- what a heavy freight Sully wishes those two little words to carry! He refers to proposals by conservatives to pass a state constitutional amendment to prevent the court from imposing its will on Iowans.

No one can plausibly argue that the authors of the Iowa state constitution, or the people who ratified that constitution, intended to make sodomy -- which the same people and their representatives proscribed as a crime, in accordance with venerable Anglo-American common law tradition -- a "right" of the citizen. And yet, because the state constitution also speaks of "equality," the trick of the litigious sophists is to argue that the equality clause negates the right of the people to define marriage.

"Equality" is not a libertarian maxim, and yet many people who have wandered into the libertarian camp have brought with them this smuggled cargo of egalitarianism. The principle of liberty dos not require that we treat different things as if they were equal, or to pretend that differences do not exist.

The crusade for same-sex marriage is a consequence of a prior crusade to convince us that there are no meaningful differences between men and women. As a certain Hayekian public intellectual wrote in January:

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility -- the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man. . . .
This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that "man" and "woman" define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

Andrew Sullivan is as free to marry a woman as I am, and I am prohibited (at least by the laws of my state) from marrying a man just as Sullivan is. We are, therefore, fully equal under the law, the only difference being that he desires to be married to a man and I do not. His desire for legal endorsement of his preference is thwarted, although his civil liberty is uninfringed.

Sullivan may own property, execute contracts, serve on juries, vote, drive, own firearms, etc., the same as anyone. Yet he makes a great show of his martyrdom to homophobia, so as to elicit pity, to qualify for the victim status that is so coveted in contemporary culture. And if you call bullshit on his histrionic display, you are a bigoted homophobe (since Sully arrogates to himself the power to decide who is or is not a homophobe).

This entire way of thinking is contrary to the Anglo-American tradition that Hayek praised. Hayek understood that knowledge is diffuse, scattered widely throughout society, and that the traditions of a successful society represent the collection of useful knowledge that the society has gained through experienced. The arrogance of the elite, desirous to impose their own modernist experiments upon the society, is based on the fallacy that the elite's modernism is more "scientific" than the traditions of the society.

This is why the elite always advocate centralization of authority, so that their projects will be universal in scope, allowing no alternatives, no diversity whereby ordinary people may evaluate by comparison to the two regimes. The Soviets wanted to abolish free societies, because the prosperity of free societies stood as a rebuke to the misery of the victims of socialism. But within the sphere of their own influence, the Bolshevik commissars insisted upon a centralized regime of universal scope: Everything was subject to the rule of the commissars, and the fact that their authority was total is where we get the word "totalitarian."

Sully speaks the language of "civil equality," but it has a meaning quite opposite of what such terms meant to Hayek. Sully's "equality" is one imposed with authority of an elite, a regime that is fundamentally hostile to the rights secured by the victors at Runnymede.

Excuse me if I've offended any of my fellow Hayekians. There is a huge chasm between Sully's totalitarian "must" and Hayek's libertarian "may." We ought not encourage Christians and other traditionalists to believe that "libertarians" would require them to endorse policies that their conscience requires them to oppose. The denizens of Castro Street and Provincetown are at liberty to do as they wish, but the friend of liberty should be skeptical of the proposition that every street must be Castro Street or that every town must be Provincetown.

UPDATE V: In the comments we hear from Professor Donald Douglas -- who yesterday elaborated on my examination of nihilism in the gay rights movement -- and who today congratulates me on "getting over to the social conservative side of things."

Well, Professor, I've never been anywhere else, really. The crisis of the moment has required me to focus on promoting opposition to the Obamanomics agenda (IT WON'T WORK), and in that cause we'll take every ally we can get. There are plenty of gay men and lesbians (including Cynthia and Tammy) who share my respect for sturdy economic truth, however much we disagree as to their "rights."

Without economic freedom, there is no freedom. The captives in the gulag did not spend their time arguing about gay rights, eh? (Solzhenitsyn was a devout, conservative Christian who condemned the decadence of the West with as much vehemence as he denounced Soviet tyrrany.) Let me remind my Christian conservative friends of a passage of Revelation that gets too little scrutiny:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
-- Rev. 13:16-17

The infamous anti-Christ, whose name is the mystery number "666," is exercises religious, political and economic authority. Either you worship and obey the Beast, or you will be denied even the right to buy and sell. Therefore I conceive it the duty of every faithful Christian to oppose every expansion of governmental economic power.

The Book of Revelation has often been twisted into pretzels by self-appointed prophets who claim to know the identity of the Beast. I am sufficiently modest in my theology that I would not dare claim any such knowledge. However, we have seen many times in history tyrannies that resembled this final apocalyptic tyrant: The Jacobins of revolutionary France, Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

We know how these bestial tyrannies operate, and we know that centralization of economic authority is fundamental to their power. As the passage says, the anti-Christ wields power over "small and great, rich and poor, free and bond," and we might as well add "gay and straight," for centralized tyranny is ironically equal in its evil. Study how Stalin sent his own henchmen to their deaths and you see that it is often more dangerous to be a supporter of evil than to be an outspoken opponent of evil. Read the Koestler quote I use as the blog motto:

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

Now, what I believe to be the truth about gay rights may be offensive to some of those who agree with me about economics, but I would forfeit my self-respect if I didn't write about social issues as ruthlessly as I write everything else. If you are a gay person who thinks that I "hate" or "fear" you because I disagree with you on such issues, you must ask yourself, "Who told me this? Who told me that anyone who disagrees with the gay-rights agenda is a hateful bigot? And if I see evidence to the contrary, should I trust my own experience or should I continue to trust what I have been told?"

As to Christians who endorse economic interventionism, I need merely reference the observation of Ludwig von Mises that a "Christian socialist" is . . . a socialist.

UPDATE VI: Finally, Memeorandum lists comments by NRO's Ed Whelan (who calls the ruling "gobbledygook") and the Weekly Standard's John McCormack (who calls the decision "preposterous").

UPDATE VII: Professor Douglas now generously gives me the FMJRA. (NTTAWWT.) Isn't it kind of ironic, BTW, that one of the most important rules of "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog" involves this decidely non-"family values" joke?

UPDATE VIII: Dale Carpenter at Volokh Conspiracy analyzes the Iowa decision in a lawyerly context.

UPDATE IX: Tom Maguire:

C'mon - what kind of a country are we if liberals can't launch another grand social experiment on the backs of the black community?

Meanwhile, a clever variation on the "progress" fallacy in the comments:

As someone said, gay marriage is less a moral issue than a generational one. And you're on the wrong end of the generational divide.

All the cool kids are for same-sex marriage! This combines the "progress" fallacy with the "bandwagon" fallacy, neither of which is persuasive to sober minds. Even if the syllogism were valid (it's not), the premise is flawed.

"A majority of voters 18-24 favor progressive Proposition X, which is opposed by a majority of voters over 50." Ergo, the fool believes, once the old fogeys die off, the progressive views of today's youth will prevail. Yet youth is fickle and especially subject to trendy suasion, otherwise the death of Archie Bunker and the triumph of the Woodstock Nation would mean, in 2009, we'd all be wallowing naked in the mud to the sound of Canned Heat.

Most of the Baby Boomers sobered up, got jobs, acquired kids, mortgages, minivans and paunchy bellies, and if today's 60-year-olds are not as staunchly traditional as their parents were in 1969, they nonetheless are more traditional than they themselves were at 20. At 35, I was still a staunch Democrat; sometimes a stubborn fool remains fooled longer than others, but even a stubborn fool need not remain a fool forever.

How long until Easter?

Cynthia Yockey was the Good Sapphic Samaritan last week, helping me maintain my Lenten vow (I'm a proud Protestant, but made a promise to a friend who is a notorious Catholic hypocrite), and now as further testimony that the Lord sends "angels unawares," Katha Pollit adds her widow's mite:

But [William Kristol's] presence on the [New York Times op-ed] page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don't see why there must be two conservatives on the page.

I suppose I should also acknowledge that, via Rule 3, a hat-tip is owed to Matthew Yglesias, even though he couldn't be bothered to read Atlas Shrugged before denouncing it.

Now, I have acknowledged to Cynthia that she is owed an apology, because when I responded at length to her dispute of my views on gay marriage, I ignorantly wounded her -- an unintentional offense, yet an offense nonetheless.

Thinking that Cynthia was currently in a long-term lesbian relationship, I engaged in a hypothetical speculation on the possibility that, should she by misfortune become a "lesbian widow," there would be no guarantee that her next relationship would also be lesbian. Whatever one's orientation or your congenital predisposition, whatever your habit and custom, life is like a box of chocolates, and sometimes a chance encounter becomes a "pivotal life movement." Not until many years later, wondering how you arrived at your present circumstance, do you look back and ask, "When did that road fork? Where did I turn?"

My intention was kindness, but the result was cruelty, for I did not know that Cythnia's 20-year relationship had ended with her partner's death -- after a long, painful, debilitating illness -- on Dec. 7, 2004.

Ms. Yockey has chronicled her devotion to Margaret Ardussi in a page that I promised her I would link. My oppressive patriarchal heteronormativity bids me speak, but as Smitty points out, "He that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding." Therefore, Ms. Yockey, I pray only that my apology is sufficent and acceptable, as it is my continued hope ever to remain

Your most humble and obedient servant,

ROBERT STACY McCAIN