Category: Politics

France continues its nightly bouts of rioting and mayhem, perpetrated by “youths” (i.e., north African Muslims). The French assumed their vastly superior culture would overawe the backward immigrants. They assumed wrong.
Some articles worth reading on the subject: First, there is always, always, Mark Steyn. Ever his own best publicist, Steyn points out that he predicted this “uprising” in February of this year. (At the time, I thought he was extrapolating too far, but as he notes, he was being optimistic.)
Second, Israeli professor Steven Plaut recommends that France ought to take its own advice that it gives to Israel: give up large parts of its territory and capital city in exchange for vague promises of “peace.” His words are bitter, but his logic is compelling. I would add that we should refer to the Muslim thugs as “freedom fighters.”
Finally, Newsweek has a good overview of the riots.
What is France supposed to do? From the reports, it sounds like most of the rioters are citizens, and as such they cannot be deported back to north Africa. Even if they could, how would the authorities go about deporting that many people?
The “nice” approach doesn’t seem plausible, either. Unemployment surely fuels the rioters’ anger, but if the French government knew how to create economic opportunities it would have done so already. It cannot hand out jobs because there are no jobs to be had in France.
The smart money says the French will do what good leftists always do when confronted with evil on the march: blather and capitulate. If the jihadis are smart, they will present “community leaders” to the French government, to receive the customary promises of government money, slobbering declarations of “respect” for Islam that they would not dream of applying to Christianity. They will say things like….
Please don’t incinerate 1,300 cars every night. A few dozen would be acceptable.
Didn’t you notice that we hate America just as much as you do?
When you are done with all the other infidels, please slit our children’s throats last.

It didn’t take long before the Moonbat Left started employing anti-Catholicism against Judge Alito. No sooner was he nominated to the Supreme Court, but the loons on Daily Kos started hyperventilating about a CATHOLIC MAJORITY ON THE SUPREME COURT!!! They didn’t notice that Scalia and Kennedy often find themselves at odds, and neither of the judges use their religion to justify their rulings, as well they shouldn’t. (In fairness, several commenters dissented from this display of raw bigotry.)
Alito would join faithful Catholics Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts. That would make a 4-1 ratio of decent Catholics to Judases on the Court. Not as good as the 11-1 ratio at the Last Supper, but for a secular institution, not bad.

The best thing I can say about this article by Maureen Dowd is that I didn’t hate it from the very first line. The tipping point came here: “Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women.” This was in a middle of a passage where Dowd tries to convince us that men don’t like to marry women who are too darn smart and successful. (Like her: fifty-three years old, a columnist at the most powerful newspaper in the world, and as single as an ace of spades.)
This opinion is backed up by a bunch of pseudo-scientific claptrap:

“A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.”

There probably is an evolutionary explanation for that phenomenon, assuming it’s true, but it isn’t what Dowd thinks. If evolution is all about perpetuating your genes, then men will naturally tend to avoid many high-achieving women, because they presume that these women will want to spend more time on their career and less time caring for their offspring.
For women, the reverse isn’t true, because primarily they want men to contribute two things to families: moral leadership and physical sustenance. If Dowd thinks that will ever change, she’s fooling herself. Women will only behave differently if they are under the sway of false ideologies such as radical feminism, or if they aren’t thinking of marriage at all.
Long-time Catholic Light readers will recall that I’ve asked whether Dowd is “the dumbest prominent columnist in America, or the most prominent dumb columnist in America.” This piece has all of Dowd’s hallmarks, from the embarrassingly unreadable sentences (“Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole”) to the lengthy passages where she assumes everybody agrees with her already:

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a “comfortable concentration camp,” as Betty Friedan wrote in “The Feminine Mystique,” where they are losing their identities and turning into “anonymous biological robots in a docile mass.” Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued – to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for “Stepford Fashions” – matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50’s-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts – and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

I wonder if “many women” hated Betty Friedan and her ilk because back then, there were many recent survivors of real concentration camps, who probably didn’t appreciate the equasion of Buchenwald and the suburbs.
Be that as it may, Dowd’s article, excerpted from a forthcoming book, is not a screed, and for her that’s saying quite a lot. When she writes, “…the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century,” it’s a startling admission.
In the ’90s, feminists argued that feminism hadn’t succeeded in making women happy because feminism wasn’t yet fully implemented. (Just as Marxists said that no state had ever implemented communism correctly, so you couldn’t say it had ever failed.) Feminism originally appealed to many women (and not a few men) because of the spiritual emptiness of postwar American consumerism, as well as the undeniable injustices that men often perpetrate upon women. At its best, feminism affirmed that women needed lives with dignity and self-worth, and should not be treated as means to an end.
As a living intellectual movement, feminism ran out of ideas a long time ago, and as a political movement it committed suicide by defending Bill Clinton’s disordered sexuality. Its fundamental mistake was to seek material solutions for spiritual problems. For example, feminists demanded that women should be able to work outside the home and thus gain their own status; the American tendency to value money too highly was left unchallenged.
What began as a ringing challenge to treat human beings as uniquely valuable has shriveled into an increasingly strident, narrow demand that unborn children should be treated as worthless blobs of cells, which (if you’ll pardon the phrase) seems to be their sole remaining viable political issue. Had they rooted their movement in an authentic anthropology such as the late Pope John Paul II’s, or at least left the door open for an understanding of what humans truly are, they might have survived. Instead, feminism still wanders the world, doing much damage but having forgotten why it began in the first place.

Virginians know that God created Maryland to make Virginia look even better than it is. But we can envy our northern neighbors for its lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, who is running for the U.S. Senate next year.
Steele grew up in poverty to a single mother, attending Catholic schools on his mother’s earnings in a laundromat. He’s more conservative than the Republican governor, and he’s charismatic and loquacious. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, he gave a solid prime-time speech.
What’s more, Steele is openly pro-life in a very pro-abortion state, and one of his personal heroes is John Paul II, whom he quoted in his announcement speech. In a state where elections are decided in two places — Baltimore and the D.C. suburbs — Steele’s race won’t hurt him, either. Keep an eye on Michael Steele, because you might be seeing more of him in the very near future.

If you’re a Virginia resident, for the second year in a row you have the opportunity to decide between a pro-life, conservative Protestant and a pro-abortion sell-out Catholic. This time, instead of Bush and Kerry, it’s Kilgore and Kaine. (Too many “K” names, I know.)
Tim Kaine, the current lieutenant governor, is the liberal former mayor of a big city who alternatively runs away from his record or tries to conceal it. Virginia is a solidly right-of-center state, and the only reason we have a Democrat governor is because he swore up and down that he wasn’t a liberal. Kaine has to win by simultaneously pretend he isn’t a lefty, while sending enough lefty vibes to urban and suburban liberals to keep them interested.
It probably won’t work, although it isn’t for lack of smarmy pandering. Read this statement on “Values and the Family.” He quotes scripture, talks about being a Catholic missionary…you’d think this was a true son of the Church. This abortion statement would lead an unsuspecting voter to believe that Kaine is pro-life because of his Catholicism: “I have a faith-based opposition to abortion.”
That is so misleading that it constitutes a lie. He does not want any abortions prohibited, so far as I can determine (feel free to send me evidence to the contrary.) He wants to promote contraception as an alternative to abortion:

Kaine said the state should emphasize “tried and trusted ways to cut abortion,” including contraception access. He does not support abortion, citing his faith, but said he would enforce laws allowing it.

Worse, Kaine doesn’t even stand up for his own principles. He used to be an opponent of the death penalty, which enjoys massive support among Virginia voters. Executing murderers, along with abolishing parole, liberalizing concealed-carry permits for firearms, and imprisoning more criminals, led to a dramatic drop in the statewide crime rate over the last decade, significantly more than the national average.
Kaine called for a death-penalty moratorium in the past, and as an attorney he represented capital-murder defendants. His opposition seemed honorable, but now he’s running advertising where he practically promises to kill death-row inmates with his bare hands. “My faith teaches me that life is sacred,” Kaine says into the TV camera, “but I will carry out death sentences handed down by Virginia juries, because that’s the law.”
His opponent, Kilgore, has been running tough ads attacking Kaine’s previous views on the subject, and so Kaine decided that the law trumps faith. Had he said, “I believe that the death penalty is necessary to defend society against the worst criminals,” he would have remained within Catholic tradition. But unlike abortion, where he will merely look the other way, Kaine is willing to take an active role by signing convicts’ death warrants. It’s the kind of thing that gives weak-willed politicians a bad name.
Kaine’s candidacy is an opportunity squandered. In 1928, Virginia gave its electoral votes to Republican Herbert Hoover because the Democratic candidate was Catholic, marking the first time that our commonwealth had ever gone Republican. It’s heartening to see that Kaine can showcase his Catholic faith for this overwhelmingly Protestant electorate, but it is unconscionable that he should attempt to conceal his moral and political cowardice with a veil of religion.
Which is why on November 8, I will vote to give him the sound electoral thrashing that he so richly deserves.