Ready for Polyamory Yet?

Same sex marriage, polygamy, polyamory. What are the liberals up to? For some time Stanley Kurtz has been following the movement to break up the traditional heterosexual monogamous marriage. In his latest article he focuses on a feminist activist law professor in Canada who is leading the fight to abolish marriage and replace it with

a modern, secular, “non-patriarchal” relationship system that would allow for marriage-like unions in any combination of number or gender.

The way that activists like Martha Bailey, Queens University law professor, propose to get to their non-patriarchal unions is by dismantling the exclusivity and privileged position of heterosexual monogamous marriage by advocating same-sex marriage and polyamorous relationships.

Well, you can read all about it in Kurtz’s article, but let us think about what these activists are missing.

Suppose they are wrong in supposing that monogamous marriage is “patriarchal,” that is, oppressive to women. The argument of conservative writers on marriage like George Gilder in his Men and Marriage is that the opposite is true. Far from oppressing women, monogamous marriage is a profoundly democratic institution that binds men to the mothers of their children and civilizes them out of the gang and into productive work. It is, of course, women that civilize these men, and the work of civilization is a hard and “oppressive” job. But without monogamous marriage, Gilder argues, boys mature into aggressive predators that do little work and prey on the flocks of single women that are created by the collapse of marriage.

The advocates of non-heterosexual marriage are high-status women who see a vision of a more relaxed, more creative world where people are free to pursue their personal vision of sexual relationship and experience. But suppose that the relaxed, creative world is instead a hell on earth? It is not as if we don’t have clear indications that it will, with the growth of violent underclasses throughout the western world where traditional marriage has broken down under the warped financial incentives of the welfare state.

And then there are the children. Children seem to want a mother and a father—their mother and their father—and they get pretty angry when they don’t get them.

And when women have less sexual security they have less children. We are finding out in the aftermath of the sexual revolution that the twenty years of female fecundity is not all that long. When a woman takes a couple of detours through graduate school or a live-in relationship or a failed marriage she ends up having less children than she might have instinctively preferred. When she gets to the other side of 50 she regrets that she didn’t have those children. But then it is too late.

It is easy to get angry with the same-sex marriage movement, their mendacity and the blindness of their cloying elitism. But things are really more serious than that. As we will shortly find out.

What About The Democrats?

Everyone is counting out the Democrats this week after their defeat in the Battle of the Court. Talk show hosts are delightedly signing up for their funeral.

For Tony Blankley the liberal party has become the nihilist party. For him the defining moment of that transformation was the Democrats cheering that nothing had been done to fix Social Security.

Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.

Considering that Democrats have run on protecting Social Security from evil Republicans for over half a century, it is a curious thing to cheer at leaving Social Security out in the street. But hatred is what defines today’s Democratic Party.

Until George Bush became president the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.

Even the kindly Peggy Noonan is disturbed.

Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The Democratic Party has changed into a party of anger and venom.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

Where did this venom and anger come from? It was created by the Democratic Party leadership itself, in the Clinton impeachment when the Clintons decided to fight and sent out their attack dogs to rile up the base, and it was reinforced after the 2000 election when, after the Supreme Court spoke, the Democrats decided not to accept the result with a good grace but keep their base riled up for what they expected would be smashing victories in 2002 and 2004.

Now the leadership are reaping the whirlwind, for the Angry Left that they created for tactical reasons to defend President Clinton and to help boost turnout has become a political force in its own right. It is no longer a tool of the party leaders but is an authentic political movement that is demanding a seat at the table.

Let us not count the Democrats out. That would be a fatal error. But they really have a problem with their crazies. As Noonan says:

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

It is, of course, the great achievement of William F. Buckley that he had the courage and the wisdom to read right-wing crazies like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement. Who will step up and read the left-wing crazies out of the Democratic Party?

Twas a Famous Victory

Republicans enjoyed a well-earned victory lap last night, giving President Bush a manly cheer as he addressed the Congress and the nation. “It was a grand night for celebrating,” wrote Stephanie Mansfield.

For all the quagmire talk coming out of the MSM the President has had an astonishing year, winning at the important things while stumbling on the unimportant things.

He achieved three elections in Iraq (think of that!), continued robust economic growth founded upon the taxs rate cuts of 2003, and he ended the Bork era by nominating two conservatives to the Supreme Court and obtaining the advice and consent of the Senate to do so.

The Democrats decided to give battle on the Supreme Court nominations and they were soundly beaten. In retrospect, it is easy to see that everything turned out in the president’s favor. First he nominated John Roberts, a man that the Democrats could never get a grip on. Then he nominated Harriet Miers who turned out to be a curious diversion, reminding Republicans just what the long march through the judicial institutions of the last twenty years was all about. Then he nominated Italian-American Samuel Alito (it translates from the Italian as “Breath” according to Google), and the Democrats attacked. They sent in the Old Guard, just as Napoleon did at Waterloo, with drums rolling. But even the Old Guard of Senators Kennedy, Kerry, and Schumer could not break the Republican square. La garde recule! came the cry, and the Kossites broke up in rage and confusion. It was a famous victory.

After the battle, what then? What do we do next to continue the long march to transform this great nation from Entitlement America to Ownership America, from rights-obsessed adolescence to mature self-government?

Take a look in the mirror. The next step is up to you and me.

Take the Kossies Out to the Woodshed

Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but what exactly was the point of the bad-tempered Democratic filibuster over the Alito nomination?

Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kerry could remind us that he was very importantly attending a very important World Economic Forum in Davos? Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kennedy could make another stemwinder on the floor of the United States Senate so that he could remind us that he is not exactly the liberal lion of his prime?

Presumably the idea was to throw a bone to the Kossites of the Angry Left, to put on a show for them, to assuage their disappointment. So Senator Kennedy hauled out the old themes, as reported by Josh Gerstein.

"The one organization - the one institution that protects us is the Supreme Court of the United States," Mr. Kennedy said. "Too much blood has been shed in those battles, too much sweat, too many tears to put at risk that march towards progress and that is what we are doing with this nominee."

Well yes. That puts it rather well, Senator. It’s true that the Supreme Court has sat there like a progressive watchdog for the last generation doing the will of the progressive elite. And there is no doubt that with all these nominees from the Federalist Society, that situation is going to change—if not this year, then next year.

Of course, there are those of us that believe that the “march toward progress” has been, in many ways, a miserable retreat. It has taken many of a once proud self-governing people and made them into a fractious dependent class, a pack of dogs-in-the-manger demanding their “rights” and unwilling to slice their benefits according to their contributions. It has damaged the bourgeois family, and it has created vast entitlement promises that aren’t likely to be honored. For too many, it has turned a productive working class into a non-working underclass.

But the big question is, are you Democrats really doing the right thing by truckling to your Angry Left activists? Shouldn’t you experienced pols be taking some of these folks aside and giving them a few tips about how to win elections and how to understand the American people?

Throughout the rise of the conservative movement, we conservatives have always understood that the enthusiasm of the base is one thing and the winning of elections another. We have always understood that to enact our program we first needed to persuade the American people to let us have a turn at power. We have understood that the American people are rightly hesitant to agree to too much change too soon, and we have responded by not asking for too much too soon. It is the ordinary American, after all, who will be left holding the baby after the suits, conservative or liberal, have done the skedaddle.

Your Angry Left chappies just don’t seem to get this. Until they do, they are going to cost you Democrats big time.

God is Love says German Pope

First we had a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we have a German pope, and the first words out of his mouth, in a papal encyclical, is “Deus Caritas Est” or God is Love.

And it is telling that the first thing he does, as he renews the Christian message for a new generation, is deal with the challenge of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who accused Christianity of having “poisoned eros” and the Church of turning “to bitterness the most precious thing in life.”

Benedict accepts the challenge and writes unflinchingly about the two forms of love, eros and agape. He admits that the distinction between the two forms of love, ascending love and descending love, have been “radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them.”

But he protests that the Church Fathers saw a “connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received.”

The point of the Christian reciprocity where the love of God is reciprocated by God’s love for mankind is symbolized, for the pope, in the purification of eros by agape.

Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God.

We shall hear more from this German pope, and it may be that just as the rude courage of John Paul II transformed the world, the German scholarship of Benedict XVI will work a complementary if no less mysterious miracle.

Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart

Everyone is doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits. It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live.

That is all very well, and very elegantly put. But there is another side to Mozart, and that is that ordinary amateur musicians like you and me can play his music.

One of the great joys of my life has been to play Mozart string quartets. There are a bunch of them, usually published in two volumes as the Early Quartets and the Late Quartets.

To play a Mozart string quartet is to feel yourself participating, in a palpable way, in the very center of the western experience. First of all, you are playing a violin, the most perfect musical instrument ever conceived and executed. It demonstrates in its form and its sound both the male principle of tautness and tension and the female principle of lushness and pregnant beauty.
Then, of course, you are actually playing the music, this remarkable outpouring of a young genius. What music can compare with the power of the Quartet K.465 the “Dissonant,” the mystery of its opening measures, the bleakness of its second movement, the Andante Cantabile?

Next month, we are playing an early Mozart quartet at the concert of the string orchestra I play with, Hildman Strings. In addition to Mozart we’ll be playing Benda, C.P.E. Bach, and premiering a composition by composer Dell Wade.

You could play the violin, you know. You can start any time and any age, and in a couple of years find a sandbox orchestra in which to play, as I did. There are amateur orchestras all over the United States. One of them is waiting for you.

Chicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs

Everyone agrees that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and their programs, why, people would starve, children would not go to school, and old people would lack health care.

That’s why the Chicago City Council voted against giving Wal-Mart a zoning change so they could build a store on the South Side. The local alderman, Howard Brookins Jr., tried.

Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart when other South Side aldermen failed to support his request for a zoning change.

No problem. Wal-Mart want ahead and built their store outside Chicago city limits.

So why did did 24,500 Chicagoans apply for a job at the new Wal-Mart just outside city limits, as Leslie Baldacci reports?

And that is after 11,000 people applied for a job at a new Wal-Mart in Oakland, California.

What is wrong with these people? Don’t they understand that Wal-Mart is an evil influence that will snatch away their health benefits or force them onto Medicaid? And as for working them to the bone, well, you could read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed to learn about that, if you haven’t already been forced to read it in freshman orientation at your local selective college.

Of course, old Rush Limbaugh had a field day with this story, because he loves nothing more than poking fun at the Democrat shibboleths and hypocrisies: that only they can represent the little guy. He envisions an army of Wal-Marts surrounding the Democratic bastion of Chicago.

It is interesting to look at the satellite map of the site of the new Wal-Mart just outside Chicago city limits in the village of Evergreen Park. You can see the north-south arterial just to the east of the Wal-Mart location. That’s Chicago city limits. It can’t be a coincidence that the local shopping mall in which Wal-Mart is located is just to the west of the intersection. Of course, the $1 million in property taxes from the new Wal-Mart will go to Evergreen Park and not to the City of Chicago.

But we don’t need Wal-Mart’s stinkin’ taxes, or their stinkin’ jobs, eh Dems?