Michael Bates: November 2019 Archives
For 11 Years, She Lived as a Man - Daily Signal
An interview with Kathy Grace Duncan, who desisted from living as a man after 11 years.
"Growing up in a dysfunctional family, I believed that women were hated, women were weak, women were vulnerable, and I didn't want that. I didn't want to grow up and be those things....
"I think rather than addressing that symptom--because really that's all it is, is a symptom of a deeper something that's going on--it's trying to look past and asking the why. "Why do you want to live as a man? Why do you think that that's better? Why do you think it's safer? Why is your gender bad?"
"And exploring what [are] the ideas around that and then addressing those things. Because usually it's a place of trauma, or perceived trauma, for them that says, 'Oh, this is not good. Who I am is not good.' And detaching from that and actually becoming hateful of your own self. And that was one of the things I really had to deal with was deep, deep self-hatred just because I was a woman....
"Well, I guess my question for [legislators] would be, 'Have you considered the emotional health? Have you looked at these kids emotionally?' Yeah, they're saying, 'This is what I feel,' but your feelings can lie to you and I can tell you that they lie to you. The way you feel is not always the truth. They need to look underneath all of that.
"'I feel that I'm a boy.' OK. 'Why do you feel that you're a boy?' I would encourage them to look at, do you have the data around the emotional health of that child?
"And looking at the data for those who have already gone through that and have the regret and the emotional trauma that they've gone through, and now they can't really change back necessarily or fully change back.
"So I would encourage them, you need to look beyond the symptoms and you need to get to the cause. What is the root cause of that before you pass any laws about gender identity and boys going into girls' bathrooms?"
A Farewell to Dairy Queens - Texas Monthly
"The old saying that every Texas town has a Dairy Queen is no longer true for many communities, especially the agricultural hamlets of the Panhandle, which have been disproportionately affected by a spate of closures. On October 30, Vasari LLC, which operated about 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 stores, 10 of them in the Panhandle.
"In Haskell, about 150 miles southeast of Lockney, city manager Janet Moeller was so concerned when she heard about the closure in her town that she called her counterpart in Graham to see if the owners of its Dairy Queen would buy the Haskell site and reopen it. So far, nothing has come of the request. 'It's devastating for Haskell,' she said....
"Dairy Queen reached Texas in 1946, when Missouri businessman O. W. Klose and his son, Rolly, bought the franchise rights and opened a store on Guadalupe Street in Austin, near the University of Texas campus. Rather than selling just ice cream and desserts, though, Klose added burgers and other savory items, which set Texas Dairy Queens apart from others across the country."
Haskell is near where my father-in-law grew up. Stamford, where he went to high school, lost its Dairy Queen around 15 years ago (it was an antique store, then a nail salon, and now a Mexican restaurant), but they have a locally-owned drive-in, the Dixie Dog (whose steak fingers are renowned), and a Sonic. I have to wonder how much of an effect Sonic has had on the decline of DQ in Texas. Despite the similar menus, Sonic doesn't provide the indoor space to visit with your neighbors that Dairy Queen provided.
Gone Too Soon - The Bob Waldmire Story | ROUTE Magazine
A short biography of Mother Road artist and Route 66 free spirit Bob Waldmire. His finely detailed pen-and-ink maps of Route 66 are legendary. (Our family had a magical meeting with Bob Waldmire at the Rock Cafe in 2007.)
Podcast: The Benedict-Kuyper Option - Break Point
John Stonestreet, speaking at the Touchstone conference, applies the insights of Calvinist philosopher Abraham Kuyper to Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. (Audio.)
Old Fashioned Goulash - Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts
Ground beef, onions, elbow macaroni, diced tomatoes. This looks like a recipe Mom made when we were kids.
"So to make this old fashioned goulash, you brown the ground beef and onions together until they are cooked. Then just drain any fat and mix in the the tomato sauce and diced tomatoes. Once everything starts to come together, add in all the seasonings."
A Modern Great Books Solution to the Humanities' Enrollment Woes - The Chronicle of Higher Education
A Modern Great Books Solution to the Humanities' Enrollment Woes - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Purdue adds liberal arts to its STEM-focused campus with the five-semester Cornerstone requirement.
'In 2016, Reingold asked Zook to direct the fledgling program. Her "great achievement," he said, lay in the design of a yearlong, two-course sequence of Great Books courses for first-year students. Known as "Transformative Texts," the courses are built around a list of "foundational texts we recommend," said Zook. This first-year sequence has become the centerpiece of Cornerstone and its most distinctive feature.
'As a historian, Zook is well aware that Great Books courses have been criticized for enshrining a static canon of dead white men. "That argument came up initially," she said, but it receded "once people saw the list."
'Developed by various faculty committees, the reading list is highly diverse, not limited to the "usual suspects," and built around "books that people were really going to teach," Zook said. So among its 214 authors, the roster includes Sophocles and Plato, Shakespeare and Milton -- but also Adrienne Rich and Sherman Alexie, bell hooks and Bob Dylan.'
The Sorry State of Evangelical Rhetoric - Sovereign Nations
Stephen Wolfe writes:
"The social justice talk in evangelicalism is remarkable for the absence of systematic thinking on the pertinent questions of justice. One rarely encounters precise and detailed theories of justice and careful applications.... The actual moral conclusion or determination precedes the moral principle. So their reasoning has a two-step sequence:
"1) Have a negative, moral reaction to something, a reaction that one is socialized to perform (perhaps on social media) upon encountering some event.
"2) Christianize the moral impression by confidently stating an extremely broad principle or statement from the Bible ('love your neighbor') or some other Christian-like statement without any attempt to make distinctions or qualifications or systematize or consider competing goods....
"...it is irrelevant that a consistent application of the principle would lead to all sorts of absurd outcomes, policies, actions, etc. For example, if one were to react to a restrictive immigration policy by affirming, without any distinctions or nuance, "the universal dignity of all people" or by saying that Christians ought to "love your neighbor," then how can any immigration restriction or even the illegality of border crossing stand up to the demands of Christian morality? But the logical consequences of the supplied principle are irrelevant, because it doesn't function in their reasoning as the determinate of their moral conclusions....
"...It is effective and expedient rhetoric, but wholly unprincipled. Even worse, it forms habits of thinking among evangelicals that are bad for them. Indeed, it is an abuse of the mind. The social justice evangelicals use and enforce rhetoric that harms people...."
"The two-step process of evangelical moral reasoning does very little, and perhaps nothing, that enables evangelicals to resist the world's moral influence. They will shift and progress with the moral doctrines of the world; and the superstructure of christianizing devices, which are extremely broad in the possibilities of their application, will always fulfill its purpose, regardless of the impression--it will always christianize and elevate moral conclusions into Christian morality. "
Pastor Steven Wedgeworth offers a pithy summary, a pattern I've noticed in articles that seem aimed at dislodging Christians from their support for conservative politicians:
"1) Decry a position that no one holds, 2) Affirm a position everyone supports, 3) Declare that this proves a different, more contentious point."
What's 'Incredibly Damaging To The Gospel,' Joshua Harris, Are Your Lies - Katy Faust
Katy Faust of Them Before Us writes:
"The denial of sexual and marital norms by believers is often adjacent to a rejection of the core tenets of the faith. That's because to arrive at these 'inclusive' and 'affirming' positions on marriage, Christians must exalt intoxicants such as emotion over uncompromising scripture, tradition, and natural law. Once you shift the authority from sola scriptura to sola feels, it's only a matter of time before every other orthodox teaching finds itself on the woke chopping block....
"There are many areas in this Christian life where honest believers can disagree. Sex and marriage is not one of them. No amount of textual contortions can land you in a place where God affirms same-sex marriage because in scripture (and law), marriage is connected to parenting. Redefining marriage, in a Christian or cultural context, redefines parenthood in a way that makes mothers or fathers optional in the life of a child. That's a problem because Christians are repeatedly commanded to protect the fatherless, not create them.
"That's why biblical prescriptions on sex and marriage result in safeguarding the rights of children. Adults directing their sexual appetites into lifelong heterosexual union sets children up for success. When we fully understand the transformative nature of the gospel, adults have the power to conform their lives to God's good design, and children are the primary beneficiaries."
"At one time, the elite at least attempted to conceal their boundless enthusiasm for population control from the general public, but now they aren't even trying to hide it anymore. On Tuesday, an alarming new study that advocates global population control as one of the solutions to the "climate emergency" that we are facing was published in the journal BioScience. This document has already been signed by 11,258 scientists from 153 different countries, and it openly calls for a reduction in the human population of our planet. This has always been the endgame for the climate change cult, but now a big push is being made to make the public believe that there is a "scientific consensus" that this is necessary."
Auburn student newspaper attacks professor for views expressed on his personal Facebook account. Authors Anthony Esolen and Robert A. J. Gagnon weigh in in the comments section. Esolen writes:
"Professor Murray has the same kinds of things to say about boys who sleep with their girl friends. And about men and women who divorce. And about men and women who commit adultery. He says what people until the day before yesterday pretty much all accepted: certain kinds of sexual behavior are wrong. They hurt the actors in the very act, as all wrong actions do, and they hurt the society roundabout. That is the turf on which the arguments must be conducted. You do not get to say, 'Oh dear, how horrible it is that somebody believes that X is wrong,' when, first, X has met widespread disapproval and not just from our own culture, and when the somebody gives reasons why he believes so, reasons that are based on observation of human realities (children need a married mother and father committed to one another for the very long term -- really, for life) and on the religious faith that is the foundation of his culture itself.
"Grow up, people. Make your case. Men fight in the arena of ideas. Fight, then. No tears allowed. Appeals to fear are out of bounds -- this man has NEVER had a single complaint against him. Or do not make your case, but live your lives and take the consequences, but do not expect the whole world to go along with you."
When We Make It Hard to Build, We Give Developers More Power Over Our Communities -- Strong Towns
"There's a much deeper source of dysfunction here, and that is that it's so onerous to develop in San Bruno (or virtually anywhere in coastal California), and there are so many costly regulatory hurdles and delays involved that it's virtually only viable to do so at an enormous scale like 425 or 600 apartments. Imagine jumping all those same hurdles just to build 20 or 30 apartments on a much smaller piece of land. Who would be crazy enough to try?
"This is a system designed to turn each individual development proposal into a high-stakes battle. And when that's the case, the only developers in the arena will be the ones big enough to throw their weight around....
"The biggest problem with 'Make developers give something back to the public' is that a city's efforts to do so end up ramping up the cost and complexity of development until the game is even more stacked in favor of the biggest projects and the deepest pockets. And that, in turn, even more dramatically raises the incentive to shout 'Make them give something back!'
"In an ideal world, we'd have hundreds of small infill projects going on at once. San Bruno could still get that 475 new apartments (or far more than that) but spread over dozens of sites instead of all in one gargantuan building. The culture of negotiation and dealmaking would be less dominant, because it's not practical to operate that way with small projects. For example, the logistical complexity of trying to impose inclusionary zoning on small projects is such that almost all such ordinances exempt individual homes or projects below a certain number of units (20, perhaps, or even 50).
"What should replace it is a culture of consistent rules applied consistently. With a steady stream of small projects going up all over the place, you'd have a steadier stream of revenue flowing into the city's coffers, and a stream less dependent on the approval or denial of any one specific proposal. The small-scale developer can't throw their weight around--but nor does the city need to throw its weight around."
One man zoned huge swaths of our region for sprawl, cars, and exclusion - Greater Greater Washington
One man zoned huge swaths of our region for sprawl, cars, and exclusion - Greater Greater Washington
Historical sketch of a planner who shaped zoning and urban design in St. Louis, the Metro Washington area, and many other cities.
"On Wedges and Corridors is regularly cited as the framework underlying Montgomery [County, Maryland,]'s current plans, and the county's agricultural reserve faithfully fulfills its vision for the wedges. But the county's success in creating lively urban centers rests on its rejection of the plan's prescription for the 'urban ring' - the area inside and just beyond the Beltway that suburbanized before 1960.
"As he had in the District in the 1920s, [Harland] Bartholomew made preservation of upscale single-family neighborhoods a paramount goal. 'How many more people,' On Wedges and Corridors asks, 'can crowd into your community before you feel completely "hemmed in"?... Without planning, a prospective home owner can buy a piece of property and a house, but he cannot purchase an unchanging environment.'"
The article quotes Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law about the effect of the work Harland Bartholomew did in St. Louis:
"The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments. With no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations."
Two years later, Tulsa city officials would attempt to use land use regulation to prohibit residents from rebuilding the destroyed Greenwood district, with the intention of repurposing the land for industrial use.
Preference and Amorality - Churches Without Chests
David de Bruyn writes regarding "adiaphora":
"Second, 'indifferent' things do not remain morally neutral once used by a moral agent. Certainly, food by itself does not commend us to God one way or another (1 Cor. 8:8). The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Ro. 14:17). Yes, the heart is established by grace, not by foods (Heb.13:9). And yes, what goes into a man does not defile him, but what comes out of his heart (Mark 7:18-23). All of this establishes that certain substances, objects, sounds, periods of time, and places are neither intrinsically good or evil.
"Once used, however, these things become instruments of faith toward God, or unbelief (Ro. 14:23b). This is Paul's project in 1 Corinthians 8-10: to show the Corinthians that morally neutral food can be used to glorify God or to please self sinfully. It can glorify God in thankful participation, and it can be used to glorify God in deferential and considerate abstention. It can be used selfishly by eating wantonly in front of a believer whose conscience has not stabilised, and it can be used selfishly by eating in front of an unbeliever who associates the food with idolatry. It can be used selfishly by abstaining with a proud and haughty attitude, or by eating with a scornful, in-your-face attitude. The food itself is simply part of 'the Earth which is the Lord's and the fullness thereof'. It is what moral agents do with the morally neutral food that makes their action moral or immoral....
"Put simply, morally indifferent things almost never translate into morally neutral actions, or morally neutral agents. We are required to take those morally neutral objects and discern their nature, their associations, their use, their dangers, their possibilities. We may find that certain morally neutral things, such as the musical notes C, D, or G, or the chemical substance alcohol (C2H6O), are no longer morally neutral once combined into a musical language, or an inebriating drink. To rightly use adiaphora, we are to consider a number of questions, mentioned in an earlier post in this series."
de Bruyn then offers 10 clarifying questions, based on scripture, that Christians ought to ask themselves about adiaphora.
- How is this thing typically used? What activities, actions and ends is it used for?
- Does it make provision for the flesh (Ro 13:14)? Are you fleeing from sin and lust by doing this? (2 Tim 2:22)?
- Does it open an area of temptation or possible accusation which Satan could exploit (Eph 4:27)? Are you taking the way of escape from temptation by doing this (1 Cor 10:13)?
- Is there a chance of enslavement, or addiction (1 Cor 6:12)?
- Does it spiritually numb you, and feed the flesh or worldliness within (Ro 6:12-13)?
- Does it edify you (1 Cor 10:23)?
- With what is this thing or activity associated? Does it have the appearance of evil (1 Thes 5:22)? Does it adorn the Gospel (Tis 2:10)?
- Could an unbeliever or another believer easily misunderstand your action? Does it lend itself to misunderstandings (Ro 14:16)?
- Could your action embolden a Christian with unsettled convictions to fall back into sin (1 Cor 8:7-13)?
- Could your action cause an unbeliever confusion over the Gospel or Christian living (1 Cor 10:27-28)?
The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time
"Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you've probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it's the untold story of Hill's fraudulent business practices, tawdry sex life, and membership in a New York cult that makes him so fascinating."
The Importance of 'No-Men' - Daily Signal - Cal Thomas
Cal Thomas writes of a meeting with disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker after Bakker's release from prison:
"'When did you start to go wrong?' I asked Bakker.
"His answer was instructive: 'When I began to surround myself with people who told me only what I wanted to hear.'...
"The key to great leadership is to not overly regard yourself, to understand you don't know everything, realize that, like everyone else, you are flawed and can make bad judgments, and to surround yourself with people who think well enough of you to tell you the truth from their perspective, even when it disagrees with yours.
"As long as the objective is to help you succeed with your agenda, such advice can be valuable and even humbling, humility being one of humanity's better characteristics and a grace that appears in short supply in Washington."
