Mere Posts

Two interesting items over at Mere Comments. The first concerns two different takes on "excommunicating" (in the sense of not communicating with) Pat Robertson. Terry Mattingly thinks journalists should find someone new for their rolodexes. A less generous soul thinks evangelicals should give him the hand.

Let's pretend it is Oct. 1, 2005.
After a long, long September of storms, Hurricane Wilma misses the Keys and veers into the Gulf of Mexico. It heads straight for Louisiana. After a long, long day in the newsroom, you sit on the couch flipping from one cable news channel to another. Then you see a familiar face in an MSNBC tease and hear, "We'll be back, live, with the Rev. Pat Robertson, who says that this new hurricane is more evidence that God is angry at New Orleans because ..."
Pause for a minute.
When you hear these words do you experience (a) an acidic surge of joy because you are 99.9 percent sure that you know what Robertson is going to say, or (b) a sense of sorrow for precisely the same reason?
If you answered (a), then I would bet the moon and the stars that you are someone who doesn't think highly of Christian conservatives and their beliefs. If you answered (b), you are probably one of those Christians.

Read all of James Kushiner's post. [Just by the by, is he still "Rev?" He gave up his status as pastor to run for President at one point, so I think he's just Mr.]

Then Anthony Esolen is concerned about John Roberts' remarks about the Griswold case during his hearings. His Grizz-fisk is unique:

In saying that Griswold was based on at least some shade of legal reasoning, I don't imply that the decision was sound. For the Court assumed what it could not have any grounds or any expertise for assuming, namely that the holiness of marriage would actually be safeguarded by making contraceptives free to all. The Court was well aware that you could not sell contraceptives only to married people; that would be both discriminatory and unenforceable.

The result was what we see now: people delay marriage longer and longer, enjoying the marital act without having to sacrifice themselves for the marital reality; and inevitably the tricksy devices will fail, or people lulled into a false sense of security fail to use them, and millions of children are born out of wedlock.

Surely that could have been predicted even back in those days -- and it was predicted, a few years later, by Pope Paul VI. Essentially, then, the Court decided that marriage was such a holy institution, and the relations between husband and wife were so private, that husbands and wives and everybody else in Connecticut could not preserve what was then a rather modest law designed to -- to protect the institution of marriage.

Do RTWT, because there are ideas of interest both before and after the preceding.