The left has done a turnabout in the Netherlands, discarding in rather stark terms the tenets of multiculturalism. Academia take note.
The Labor Party issued a paper calling for an end to the failed model of “Dutch tolerance.” Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, wrote:
The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance. . . . The grip of the homeland has to disappear.
The Dutch have a special relationship with liberalism and feel-good policies, so this recognition of multiculturalism’s failure comes from some of its most avid adherents.
Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be “bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise.”
And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before.
Indeed, Ploumen says, “Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally.” Immigrants must “take responsibility for this country” and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.
Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, “The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.
On the heels of a recent decision to weed out some of its pot-selling coffee houses, one has to wonder if the Dutch are beginning to see the light.
December 30th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
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In order to protect your right to privacy, the government has a few questions about your sex life that you must answer.
The right to privacy, famously located in the emanations and penumbra of the Constitution, has been used by courts and legislatures to justify a lot of things, some of them having little or nothing to do with privacy.
The California courts, for example, use the right to privacy to establish your inalienable right to marry whomever you choose. In Ortiz v. Los Angeles Police Relief Ass’n, the court said:
[T]he right to marry and the right of intimate association are virtually synonymous. . . . [W]e will refer to the right to privacy in this case as the right to marry.
Of course, the same-sex marriage movement is not about private acts, but public ones. Marriage concerns more than intimate associations behind closed doors. In a marriage, you make your private choices public, and the state is required to deal with your private choices and provide public benefits.
The gay-rights movement now insists not that you respect the privacy of homosexuals, but that you accord them dignity and smile politely while they tell you about their intimate activities.
So it is not difficult to contemplate how a right to privacy could eventually be transformed into a right to pry.
Last year, the [Brighton & Hove] council introduced new rules to comply with the Equality Act 2006 and Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007.
As part of the changes, it issued a questionnaire to the Pilgrim Home in Egremont Place, Brighton, where 39 Christians aged over 80 live.
When residents were asked to fill in a form stating if they were lesbian, gay, bisexual, heterosexual or ‘unsure’, they refused.
Brighton & Hove Council criticised the home’s response and said because it was based on Christianity, gay people might be deterred from applying for a place.
The council then announced it was stopping its £13,000 grant because there had been ‘limited progress’ in making the home accessible to the homosexual community.
Put simply, the home needs evidence of homosexual activity in order to keep its funding. No doubt that activity must also be quantified and documented for everyone to enjoy his right to privacy.
December 29th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law |
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“Barmy.” That seems like a pretty good word for it:
Hundreds of schools have barred teachers from marking in red in case it upsets the children. They are scrapping the traditional method of correcting work because they consider it ‘confrontational’ and ‘threatening’. Pupils increasingly find that the ticks and crosses on their homework are in more soothing shades like green, blue, pink and yellow, or even in pencil. Some schools worry that red ink upsets students.
Traditionalists have branded the ban ‘barmy’, saying that red ink makes it easier for children to spot errors and improve.
Happy 200th, Fifth. Norman Lebrecht noted the 200th anniversary last week of the first performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
The orchestra played badly, the hall was cold and audience tolerance was exhausted by an overlong programme.
But this was the night that the symphony shed its courtly deference and became a universal art form - a work that represented fate and the individual, and indicating that a free person can take control of his or her own destiny.
Greg Mitchell has more:
On December 22, 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven himself rented a hall in Vienna and promoted the concert to end all concerts: the debut, over four hours, of three of the greatest works in the history of music: his Fifth Symphony, the Sixth (”Pastoral”) Symphony, and the astounding Piano Concerto No. 4, plus the wonderful Choral Fantasia (forerunner to his Ninth Symphony).
* * *
The reviewer for Leipzig’s Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung also observed: “To judge all these executed pieces is — after the first and only hearing, particularly since these are works by Beethoven, of which so many have been performed in one session and most of which are great and long–nearly impossible.
That’s a refreshing example of humility from a music critic.
December 27th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Music |
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I am in the habit of spending Christmas in Germany. The historic city of Weimar in the former East has all of the amenities I could ask for in easy walking distance: concerts, theater, a great variety of restaurants, fast train connections to Berlin and Leipzig, and outside my window the vast park designed by Goethe. Weimar provides the perfect counterweight to rural Texas.
There is much to write about here where I am surrounded by cultural history. On my short five-minute walk to the city center I pass Goethe’s house, traversing the same alley he used to visit his mistress. Liszt’s house is about the same distance. Bach’s house would be closer if it were still standing.
The time before Christmas is an occasion to walk the streets, visit the Weihnachts Markt, and stand in the cold drinking Glühwein in the holiday ambiance. But the kiosks are now being disassembled and the stores will close at noon on Christmas Eve as the Germans eliminate the commercial distractions and focus on family and friends. The sparsely attended churches will fill up on Christmas Eve.
I usually attend the Jakobskirche, built in the 12th century, where on a typical Sunday you might find a dozen worshippers. On Christmas Eve, hundreds will appear, with standing room only on all three levels.
And that has one German lawmaker doing what lawmakers frequently do – meddling in things that shouldn’t concern him and turning a small problem into a big one.
“I’m in favor of having church services on December 24 open only for people who pay church tax.”
Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches are still largely funded by tithes, which are collected by the federal tax office. Germans have the right to opt out of paying tithes — by leaving their church.
So it upsets some tithe-paying religious folk to find their normally underpopulated churches crowded with people at the holidays. The head of the business-friendly Free Democrats in the Berlin city assembly gave support to Volk’s proposal, telling Bild that members should be handed tickets to guarantee them a seat during a crowded service.
This phenomenon is not unknown in the U.S. On Christmas and Easter, the regulars frequently stand as the pews fill with people we have never seen before. It’s a small problem, and we should remind ourselves that it’s better that they come twice a year than not at all.
The secularism that grips Europe is exacerbated by state regulation. The state controls the purse strings and, if this particular lawmaker (of the Christian Democratic Party) has his way, it will also function as gatekeeper, man the box office, and perhaps someday administer tests on the catechism.
If Europe continues on this course, as it probably will, the primary question seems to be whether the churches will become museums or mosques. The foundation of the culture is eroding. If we are lucky, we may find future Germans standing in the cold drinking Glühwein in celebration of nothing in particular. Alternatively, there will be no Glühwein, no Weihnachts Markt, and no opting out of state-supported religion.
December 23rd, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure, Politics, Religion |
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Jerry Brown says the people be damned. The Attorney General of California is asking the California Supreme Court to invalidate the popular vote on Proposition 8.
Proposition 8 stated: Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Brown’s argument on Proposition 8, contained in an 111-page brief filed at the last possible moment before the court’s deadline, surprised many legal experts. The attorney general has a legal duty to uphold the state’s laws as long as there are reasonable grounds to do so. Last month, Brown said he planned to “defend the proposition as enacted by the people of California.”
But Brown had a revelation, something that he says was not apparent to him immediately after the vote. Brown has now determined that the right of a person to marry someone of the same sex is a fundamental, inalienable right, and therefore one that cannot be abrogated by a ballot initiative.
In an interview, Brown said he had developed his theory after weeks of consultation with the top lawyers in his office. “This analysis was not evident on the morning after the election,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine how Brown missed this analysis until now. The analysis depends on the fallacious argument that same-sex marriage has always been a fundamental right. The argument finds its rationale in the notion that the California Constitution has always protected the right of an individual to marry someone of the same gender and that Proposition 8 actually changes the Constitution.
What has happened to Jerry Brown? He used to be a trailblazer, and now he is bringing up the rear. You see, the Supreme Court of California had this same epiphany last year, well before Brown. In fact, the whole point of Proposition 8 was to refute the Supreme Court’s fanciful interpretation of the Constitution and, indeed, of history:
The constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish – with the person with which the individual has chosen to share his or her life – an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage. As past cases establish, the substantive rights of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own – and, if the couple choose, to raise children within that family – constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitutes secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.
Now, one can certainly be justified in finding this opinion confusing and illogical, but it is hard to miss the court’s conclusion, right or wrong, that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right. If Brown read the opinion, he would know that this is what the court said. So why was this analysis “not evident” to Brown immediately after the vote on Proposition 8?
Answer: this analysis was always evident; it comprises the core of the legal debate. The only thing not evident to Brown on the morning after the election was which side to argue. Brown has now chosen. He chooses to make the argument that the Supreme Court has already embraced, the argument that he personally prefers, rather than the counter argument historically accepted and recently reiterated by a majority of the state’s voters.
Brown’s surprise turnabout seems calculated to leave the proponents of Proposition 8 unrepresented before the court. And people wonder why lawyers have a bad reputation.
More from Michele Malkin.
December 20th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law, Politics |
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Gene Robinson calls it a “slap in the face.”
“I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” Bishop Robinson said, “but we’re not talking about a discussion, we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Bishop Robinson knows something about controversy, being content to drive a wedge through the Anglican Communion to satisfy his own sense of entitlement. He celebrated the slap in the face he delivered to the worldwide church in order to become the Right Openly Gay Bishop of New Hampshire.
But he apparently considers the slap he delivered to the rest of the communion well deserved. And when it is not Robinson’s ox being gored, he preaches that others must be tolerant. Here is Robinson discussing the subject from his perspective:
By the time I went to college [at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.], I found that not only were my questions tolerated, but applauded. I was generously and hospitably welcomed into the religious community there and helped with my journey. I had an assistant chaplain there who, when I was ranting and raving about how much of the Nicene Creed I didn’t believe, encouraged me to just drop out when I got to a phrase that I didn’t believe. And participate in however much of it I did feel comfortable with.
And I [thought], a religion that can be that undefensive about itself is the place for me. I gradually said more and more of the Nicene Creed until I did believe it. I found [the Episcopal Church] to be this amazing community where people were not afraid to use their minds, where people were not afraid to read and believe the scriptures, and did not seem to be forcing on anyone else its own beliefs in the way that I felt the religion that I grew up with had been doing.
Inclusiveness, as Robinson sees it, has its limits, and Rick Warren is outside those limits. Robinson assigns Warren his place at the table - a low place at a very small table by the kitchen.
The “undefensive” church in which Robinson found a home while disputing its creed has been transformed. Now that the questioning Robinson has been welcomed in and given authority, the debate must end.
As with all great liberal causes, once the left gains the upper hand, the debate is declared over.
Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, and Robinson deserves something more substantive. Heresy comes to mind, but I suspect Robinson shrugs off that label daily, sure in the belief that his own lights have guided him to a higher understanding.
But there’s more: Robinson articulates the breathtaking hubris that the nation must not invoke a God other than the one Robinson knows. Which makes Robinson precisely what the left accused Jerry Falwell of being. The comparison is not fair to Falwell, who was far more tolerant than Robinson. Robinson is more like the left’s caricature of Falwell.
Come to think of it, Robinson is rather like a caricature of all he professes: a caricature of tolerance, a caricature of a bishop, and a man consumed by own hedonism.
December 20th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics, Religion |
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This man turns 238 today. He wants cake and a song — or else!
P.S. Sing loud.
December 16th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Music |
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Adam Smith and Benedict XVI. From the religion and economics department, Spengler explains Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1985 thesis that an unethical economy destroys itself.
Ethics founded on religion are the precondition for long-term economic success, if for no other reason than economies depend on family formation. If the present economic crisis helps the West to reflect on its moral weakness, the cost well may be worth it.
Unimaginativity. Reverent Stephen Coulter visited the West Bank and discovered that modern-day Bethlehem is not an idyllic scene of shepherds and babes and peace and joy. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” cannot be sung in such circumstances. Cranmer reports:
So he has deleted the carol from Christmas worship in the Dorset parish of Blandford Forum on the grounds that the words were “too far removed from life in Bethlehem’ and no longer ‘represent the modern-day reality of the war-torn city.”
Memo to Rev. Coulter: The Christmas Story is not about the town, and the hope of Christmas is not that Bethlehem will be preserved as a liturgical theme park. Did you also notice that the star is no longer there?
Military wisdom. “Don’t draw fire; it irritates the people around you.” (via BurtonBlog)
Finally, a coherent argument for environmentalism. From Are We Lumberjacks, a site with many good diversions.
December 15th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Ammo, Leisure, Politics, Religion |
one comment
Joy to the world, for peace shall come, let this be our refrain!
Um, no thanks. I prefer the not-politically-correct version with its pronouncement that “the Lord” is come. “Let Earth receive her King.”
But I am apparently out of step with the times (something I’ve known for quite a while) as Ship of Fools explains:
We’ve all noticed the “new” words, grimaced, tried to remember what the original lines were, shaken our heads in bemusement, and politely carried on singing. Theologically-modified carols will ring out everywhere this year. Innocents like king, man, son, virgin and Lord have been slaughtered to make carols more modern and inclusive. In some cases, entire verses have been re-written.
Some of our Christian brothers (yeah, okay, sisters too) are trying to make sure we don’t offend others, or even each other, with anything that might suggest we actually believe all that traditional mumbo-jumbo.
So “O, come let us adore Him” becomes “O, come in adoration.” Precisely what or whom we come to adore – well, who’s to say? Everyone can simply fill in the blank for himself – or herself – or theirselves.
“When like stars his children crowned / All in white shall wait around.” White? We can’t have that. Whether it implies racism or chastity is hard to say, but we wouldn’t want to encourage either. And so we have the bland and colorless: “Where his children gather round / Bright like stars, with glory crowned.”
And of course if you can’t have chastity, you certainly can’t have virginity, as in “This day is born a Saviour / Of a pure Virgin bright.” The mystery is removed in favor of the straightforward birth announcement: “To you is born a Saviour / In David’s town tonight.” Cigar, anyone?
The state’s war on Christmas, misguided though it is, has some rational basis. The state simply misconstrues the law.
The stores that want to sanitize Chrismas, on the other hand, are working against their own interests. Cultural traditions can be co-opted for secular and commercial purposes, but the stores make a serious mistake when they start watering down the occasion that causes people to open up their wallets. They misunderstand human nature.
But churches that join the secular parade take self-defeatism to its ultimate heights. Oops, can’t say “ultimate”; probably can’t say “heights.” Let’s just say they got it wrong. All of it.
December 13th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Music, Religion |
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