Alexander Cockburn R.I.P.

Alexander Cockburn passed away last week at the age of 71.

Cockburn was a left-wing gadfly and a columnist at the Nation. He was a brilliant writer, and in my view was one of the few coherent and thoughtful voices on the far left. I disagreed with much of what he wrote, but he wrote well and made his case with precision and passion.

Cockburn was not a doctrinaire leftist. In recent years he alienated many of his comrades with viewpoints most commonly associated with the right.

John Fund notes:

... over the years he mellowed, even as he sometimes denied it. He became an American citizen in 2009. That same year he became a columnist for the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, a platform he used to rail against American imperalism, big-business corruption, and imbecilic leftists. A conservative would have agreed with large parts of most of his columns. He was a passionate defender of gun rights and believed a well-armed society was a bulwark against anyone who wanted to control a population.

He became a true heretic to the Left in 2007 when he declared that supporters of global warming were promoting a fraud: Their “pied piper,” he said, was a “hypocritical mountebank” named Al Gore. (Cockburn was an enthusiastic supporter of Ralph Nader against Gore in 2000.)

My last meeting with Alex came in 2009, when he showed up in New York at the Heartland Institute’s conference featuring dozens of global-warming skeptics. We stepped outside of the conference for a long chat. He cheerfully recounted all the places where he had been denounced for his global-warming views. “They hate me because I tell the truth: The environmental Left wants to deindustrialize America so they can exercise political power and control people’s lifestyles,” he told me.

“I’ve felt like the object of a witch hunt,” he said as he described how the Left treated him after he dissented from the global-warming “consensus.” “One former Sierra Club board member suggested I should be criminally prosecuted.”

Cockburn was at the conference collecting material for his forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, in which he planned to explore the link between fearmongering and climate-catastrophe proponents. “No one on the left is comfortable talking about science,” he told me. “They don’t feel they can easily get their arms around it, so they don’t think about it much. As a result, they are prone to any peddler of ideas that reinforce their preexisting prejudices.”

Cockburn understood that the global warming hoax is the ultimate power-grab by elites.

He even had doubts about the culture of death:

The liberals are howling bout the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her “Death Panel” talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.

But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.

In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, with the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many as 90 percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with the genetic condition chose to abort the child.

One survey of 499 primary care physicians treating women carrying these babies, however, indicated that only 4 percent actively encourage women to bring Down syndrome babies to term. A story on the CNS News Service last year quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, reacted to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) pre-natal testing endorsement as another step toward eugenics. “The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic example of “mission creep,’ ” Johnson said. “In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.”

Cockburn was a rare beast on the left-- a man of intelligence and integrity. He fought for human dignity, as he understood it. Towards the end of his life, he understood it pretty well.


Please keep him and his family in your prayers. 

Please pray for the Sikhs in Wisconsin

There's been another horrendous shooting rampage in Wisconsin. Seven people were killed in a Sikh temple and many more were injured.

Police have not released information about the gunman, who was killed by police.

Please pray for the innocents, and their families. 

Marlene-Annette

One of the great Catholic poems, by Francis Thompson:

The Hound of Heaven

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
   Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
            Up vistaed hopes I sped;
            And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
           But with unhurrying chase,
           And unperturbéd pace,
       Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
           They beat—and a Voice beat
           More instant than the Feet—
       “All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

   I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
    Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
            Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)
But, if one little casement parted wide,
    The gust of His approach would clash it to:
    Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
    And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
    Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars:
            Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.
I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Eve: Be soon;
    With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
            From this tremendous Lover—
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
   I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
    Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
    Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
          But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
        The long savannahs of the blue;
            Or whether, Thunder-driven,
          They clanged his chariot ’thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet:—
    Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
            Still with unhurrying chase,
            And unperturbéd pace,
        Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
            Came on the following Feet,
            And a Voice above their beat—
        “Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”

I sought no more that after which I strayed
            In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children’s eyes
            Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
            With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
“Come then, ye other children, Nature’s—share
With me” (said I) “your delicate fellowship;
            Let me greet you lip to lip,
            Let me twine you with caresses,
                Wantoning
            With our Lady-Mother’s vagrant tresses,
                Banqueting
            With her in her wind-walled palace,
            Underneath her azured dais,
            Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
                From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.”
                So it was done:
I in their delicate fellowship was one—
Drew the bolt of Nature’s secrecies.
            I knew all the swift importings
            On the wilful face of skies;
            I knew how the clouds arise
            Spuméd of the wild sea-snortings;
                All that’s born or dies
            Rose and drooped with; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine;
            With them joyed and was bereaven.
            I was heavy with the even,
            When she lit her glimmering tapers
            Round the day’s dead sanctities.
            I laughed in the morning’s eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
            Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
            I laid my own to beat,
            And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven’s grey cheek.
For ah! we know not what each other says,
            These things and I; in sound I speak—
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
            Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
            The breasts o’ her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
                My thirsting mouth.
                Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
                With unperturbèd pace,
            Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
                And past those noised Feet
                A voice comes yet more fleet—
            “Lo! naught contents thee, who content’st not Me.”

Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
                And smitten me to my knee;
            I am defenceless utterly.
            I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
            I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
            Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist.
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
            Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
            Ah! must—
            Designer infinite!—
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou can’st limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
            From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
            Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpséd turrets slowly wash again.
            But not ere him who summoneth
            I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields
            Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
            Be dunged with rotten death?

                Now of that long pursuit
                Comes on at hand the bruit;
            That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
               “And is thy earth so marred,
                Shattered in shard on shard?
            Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
            Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said),
“And human love needs human meriting:
            How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
            Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
            Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
            Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
            All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
            Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
    Halts by me that footfall:
    Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
    “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
    I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”

Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

HT: The Anchoress 

Maybe 'Egnor' isn't such a bad name after all...

It could've been worse. 

In the shower with Michael Mann...

John O'Sullivan has a great post on the striking similarities between Penn State University's "investigation" of Climategate scientist Michael Mann and its investigation of now-convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Excerpt:

Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “The Penn State ethics review [of Mann] was “designed as a whitewash. The evidence of manipulation of data is too obvious and too strong.” Ebell and other critics argue that, as with football coach Sandusky, Michael E. Mann brought huge financial rewards to the university. The smell of money swayed the senses of Spanier because in his world money and success equated to integrity and prestige. This was tellingly revealed in the reasons he gave why Mann should be exonerated. 

Such critics point to [Penn State President Graham] Spanier’s statements about both men as proof of the (corruptible) self-serving money motive at PSU. Spanier first declared that Mann’s:

“level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…”

Then Spanier issued an eerily similar statement to exonerate Sandusky:

“This level of success on the football field and revenue generated from it, clearly places Coaches Paterno and Sandusky among the most respected professionals in their field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of their profession in operating a football program… Had Coach Paterno or Coach Sandusky’s conduct of their program been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for them to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from peers who may or may not agree with his program … ”

The above statements prove the status of the football program and its leaders, Paterno and Sandusky, are an EXACT parallel to Michael Mann’s status. Both brought massive funding to PSU. Both enjoyed the adoration of the press. Both worked outside the system of checks and balances. Both were “investigated” by PSU staff. Both were cleared by PSU of wrongdoing. From plain reading of Freeh’s report we see there is NO reason to believe that the same corrupt administration that empowered Paterno and Sandusky’s crimes would act any differently in Mann’s case.

The near-verbatim similarity between the Penn State statements exonerating Sandusky and exonerating Mann would be hilarious, if it were not so sick.

Institutions like Penn State and larger interest groups of scientists and academics cannot be trusted to investigate themselves, especially when huge sums of money and prestige and butt-covering are involved.

The investigations of the Climategate scandal by Penn State and by panels of academics in England and at the National Academy of Sciences were obvious whitewashes. They are as worthless as Penn State's original exoneration of Jerry Sandusky. Climategate revealed massive systematic scientific fraud and illegal conduct on the part of climate scientists. Penn State and the several panels of scientists had a clear conflict of interest, and their investigations clearing the Climategate scientists are worthless.

There needs to be a formal investigation of Mann and his colleagues by independent professional investigators with subpoena power, and academic institutions such as the University of Virginia need to stop covering their own butts and stop covering up for their institutional cash-cows.

UVA's refusal to release Mann's emails at the Attorney General's request is prima facie a cover-up of a crime.

The only credible investigation of Climategate will be one carried out by a criminal prosecutor and a grand jury with subpoena power and access to all of the emails and all the evidence, and with nothing to hide.

Sandusky is in prison and the kids are safe. But we're all still in the shower with climate science.

"Is throwing out a lot of straw about predictions inviting the Egnors to make straw men?"

Commentor steven johnson on Steven Novella's blog Neurologica has a perceptive overview of the 'predictive power" of Darwin's theory.

Novella argues that my skepticism about Darwinism's "prediction" of the link between birds and dinosaurs that Novella had touted is misguided. Novella repeated his hysterical claims about the amazing power of 'things change and survivors survive' to predict the future. He admits that Darwinism predicts nothing specific about the bird-dinosaur link, except that some links should be found between some things, whenever, whatever. Potent theory.

He also makes no comment about the obvious inference that if the discovery of 'links' is evidence for Darwinism, then the failure to discover links is evidence against Darwinism.

There are virtually no 'links' at the species level-- millions of species-- in the fossil record. This lack of evidence for speciation is the explicit basis for the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium-- the theory that speciation occurs "off" of the fossil record, in tiny peripheral populations, that are invisible to paleontology. Punctuated Equilibrium posits that fossil evidence for speciation will never be found, which will count as evidence-- for Darwin's theory.

Evidence in favor counts. Evidence against doesn't count. Absence of evidence is evidence. Such is evolutionary science, 2012. You have to admire the audacity.

I'll try to respond to Novella's post in detail when I can, but commentor johnson's post is coherent and thoughtful, and worth spending some time with.


steven johnson:

Yes, Egnor erected a straw man, then still got confused while attacking it. But some of the confusion seems to be about prediction, testability and explanation.

The requisite 'Egnor is an idiot, but...' used by dissenters on Darwinist sites.

The principle of common descent would in another time or field of science would probably have been called a “law.” Scientific laws are commonly described as descriptions or generalizations about how things work in nature. Common descent was established on a mass of observations from morphology and embryology, and later confirmed further by genetic data.

Common descent is a problematic theory.

Scientific laws may be refined or possibly even wholly refuted by later observations. For instance, lateral gene transfer in bacteria seems to justify a refinement in the doctrine of common descent.

Lateral gene transfer is a proposed explanation for genetic evidence that casts doubt on universal common descent. Perhaps the genetic evidence is explained by lateral gene transfer, or perhaps common descent isn't true. Those would be the obvious scientific inferences. The Darwinist inference is to find an explanation-- any explanation will do-- to salvage the theory.

There are antecedents to this principle, for instance, the cell theory, which implicitly requires that all changes in descent be physically possible for cells to carry out. And there are consequences too, such as that new species must come from old species. But is it really useful or enlightening to call these predictions?

The inference to common descent is supported by some evidence, and weakened by other evidence. Common design or common teleology is consistent with some of the evidence now invoked for common descent.

In my view, the strongest evidence for common descent comes not from Darwin but from Pasteur, who was the greatest biologist of the 19th century. Pasteur destroyed the theory of abiogenesis, making it much less likely that life would arise de novo multiple times. Although Darwin hypothesized common descent, it was Pasteur who did the real science that made the theory of abiogenesis untenable and rendered multiple new arisings of life less likely than had been commonly believed.

Darwin worship obscures the good science that was going on in the 19th century, exemplified by Pasteur and Mendel and Ehrlich and Lister and Schleiden and Schwann and Remak and Virchow and Weismann and Koch, all of whom made actual contributions to biology in germ theory and genetics and cell theory that eclipsed Darwin, who besides authoring a few trendy books for lay audiences, specialized in the categorization of barnacles.

Natural selection, on the other hand, is what some would call a theory, a scientific explanation, although I gather others would define “theory” as an algorithm (or verbal/conceptual equivalent) for generating predictions.

If a theory makes no testable predictions, how can it be science?

What "predictions" does natural selection make? What is the evidence against it? Is it the only scientific theory supported by all evidence?

In that case, this link says that Popper’s claim is that natural selection, equating adaptation to fitness, is non-predictive because all organisms must be adapted to their environments, else they would be extinct.

Correct.

The [Darwinist] rebuttal is that 1) the unfit are extinct 2) physically impossible changes will not occur along the chain of common descent and 3) new species descend from old species. 

Note that 1) is merely a restatement, not a prediction while 2) & 3) are trivial “predictions,” because they are not unique to the theory of natural selection.

Correct.

At this point, the link goes on to explain that fitness is defined causally, functionally, statistically a posteriori, not logically and semanticaly a priori.

Fitness is defined as survival. Fitness has no logical or a priori cache. If it survives (reproductively), it was fit. If not, not.

And besides that, fitness is not determininistic but dispositional. What is not clear is how fitness being those things makes it possible to make predictions. There have been a number of experiments that have successfully tested predictions about natural selection’s effects on gene frequencies but it seems that the difficulties in defining fitness in a way that you can predict/control makes them the exception rather than the rule in evolutionary science. 

The thing worth thinking about, is that Darwin provided masses of evidence in favor of natural selection decades before experiments that teased out a prediction could be performed. Science since has provided masses more.

Apologists for Darwinism who have reservations about the theory have an amusing rhetorical tic. They express the reservation, usually something obvious-- "fitness is not deterministic but dispositional. What is not clear is how fitness being those things makes it possible to make predictions."

They immediately follow the quite correct critical observation with 'Darwin was a genius of course and was right about everything'-- "Darwin provided masses of evidence... science has since provided masses more."

'Comrade Lenin wasn't precisely right about the State withering away... but he provided masses of genius since proven right by all science..."

When you are in the Darwinist congregation and you sing the wrong hymn, you need to make penance and lay an offering on the altar. Before you leave the church.

But they weren’t predictions.

Correct, Comrade. But Darwin sure provided masses of evidence...

You can use natural selection to explain vestigial organs. An organ is no longer adaptive, nature selects agains the waste of resources for it. The mechanics of genetics may not permit an easy way to simply erase the organ, but the slow increment of genetic changes diverts resources from the less fitting organ, it gets smaller and smaller, that is, vestigial. As the resources diverted become less cumbersome, however, the intensity of selection pressure becomes less and less. The vestigial organ can then survive indefintiely until the vagaries of genetic change do possibly succeed in erasing the last trace. 

Natural selection (particularly gene-selection) says traits are adaptive, increase fitness. We can explain fitness-decreasing vestigial organs as above, using supplementary hypotheses and contingencies that explain away the violation of this prediction.

Nice story. Darwinism has all sorts of stories.

We cannot predict which organs will become vestigial; we cannot predict which will finally disappear; we cannot predict for which a new function might be found; we can not statistically predict incidence of vestigialization, time for vestigialization, rates of vestigialization or intensity of natural selection against vestigial organs.

Darwin's theory can't predict which organs will become vestigial. So how does it explain why organs become vestigial?

But, rather than throw up our hands, isn’t the real clarification, not that natural selection is scientific because it is predictive, but, because it is explanatory of massive amounts of data.

Darwinism explains everything and predicts nothing. Name the other scientific theories that explain everything and predict nothing.

Charles Darwin made a convincing case for natural selection before the experiments. And the kind of evidence he presented has only been added to.

Natural selection can be understood in three ways:

1) A tautology
2) An acausual statistical inference about changes in gene frequency
3) A causual assertion as to how evolutionary changes occur.

Which definition of natural selection is buttressed by the evidence?

Even more to the point, if there are experiments confirming predictions of natural selection about speciation (instead of change in gene frequencies,) they are a well kept secret.

Refreshing honesty. Evidence for intermediate forms between species in the fossil record is virtually absent. For millions of species.

I suppose it is likely that eventually science will find a way to conduct such experiments.

Until then, is it ok if we just say that Darwin's theory of speciation isn't supported by the evidence?

But even if no one were ever ingeniuous enough to find the way, we already have quite a bit of evidence showing that natural selection is a major factor in novel speciation,

Speciation is very rarely observed, except in novels.

and overwhelming evidence it is the major factor in maintaining species morphology (the forgotten aspect of speciation?)

"Maintaining species morphology" means net absence of evolution. So natural selection is 'the major factor in maintaining the absence of evolution'.

You have to admire the gall.

Is throwing out a lot of straw about predictions inviting the Egnors to make straw men?

Johnson understands something Novella doesn't, aside from the science. He understands that the hyperbolic paeans to Darwin-- predicted everything, indispensable to biology, the basis for all medical research, the best idea anyone ever had, on and on-- don't advance the ideology. Darwinism is best served by indoctrination and silence. Ask questions in school, Darwinists don't argue. They call the police. As questions in academia, Darwinists don't debate. They ruin you.

Praise Darwinism effusively, and people will ask-- did it really predict that? Is it really indispensable to research? Isn't there any evidence against it?

Hagiography endangers Darwinian orthodoxy. Hagiography exposes Darwin's theory to scrutiny, which is the one thing it cannot withstand. 

Ross Douthat on the “of course we respect religious freedom” facade.

A good post to mark this first day of the Obamacare regulation that force business owners-- including Catholic businesses owners-- to buy contraception and sterilization insurance for their employees.

Ross Douthat has a fine essay on religious freedom and its despisers.

Excerpt:

Defining Religious Liberty Down

THE words “freedom of belief” do not appear in the First Amendment. Nor do the words “freedom of worship.” Instead, the Bill of Rights guarantees Americans something that its authors called “the free exercise” of religion.

It’s a significant choice of words, because it suggests a recognition that religious faith cannot be reduced to a purely private or individual affair. Most religious communities conceive of themselves as peoples or families, and the requirements of most faiths extend well beyond attendance at a sabbath service — encompassing charity and activism, education and missionary efforts, and other “exercises” that any guarantee of religious freedom must protect.

I cannot improve upon the way the first lady of the United States explained this issue, speaking recently to a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday,” Michelle Obama said. “It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well ... Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church. He was out there fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day.”

But Mrs. Obama’s words notwithstanding, there seems to be a great deal of confusion about this point in the Western leadership class today...

Douthat discusses the Obamacare demand that Catholics violate their consciences and provide contraception and sterilization for employees, and the German court ruling banning circumcision even for Jewish children, and the Chick-fil-A imbroglio in which mayors threatened a Christian businessman with withholding of business licenses because of his personal views on gay marriage.

Douthat continues:

I have described all these incidents as resulting from confusion about what freedom of religion actually entails. But of course every freedom has its limits. We do not allow people to exercise beliefs that require, say, forced marriage or honor killing. You can believe in the gods of 15th-century Mesoamerica, but neither Chicago values nor American ones permit the use of Aztec sacrificial altars on the South Side. 

To the extent that the H.H.S. mandate, the Cologne ruling and the Chick-fil-A controversy reflect a common logic rather than a shared confusion, then, it’s a logic that regards Western monotheism’s ideas about human sexuality — all that chastity, monogamy, male-female business — as similarly incompatible with basic modern freedoms.

He notes eloquently:

It may seem strange that anyone could look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged, family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society menaced by a repressive puritanism. But it’s clear that this perspective is widely and sincerely held. 

It would be refreshing, though, if it were expressed honestly, without the “of course we respect religious freedom” facade. 

If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will. 

There, didn’t that feel better? Now we can get on with the fight.

Free exercise of religion means the freedom to act on religious belief, and that means the freedom to act in the public and political arena. But secular elites are using force to make sure Christians don't imperil with even a whiff of chastity our culture's adultery or gay sex or pornography or abortions or sex education or condoms or sterilizations.

So let's drop the facade.

Secularists are suppressing free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. They have been using force against Christian practice for at least half a century in the United States, beginning with the ban on voluntary organized prayer in schools.

Now Catholics are being forced to buy other people condoms. In Europe Jews are told they can't circumcise their sons. And in Chicago and Boston Christians are told that they won't be allowed to open a business if they express their opinion on gay marriage.

It's a refreshing moment of clarity on the repression that Christians are facing today, once again. We pray that we will prevail in this political and cultural struggle, but if not, we will resist.

We will never worship at the secular altar.