Rod Dreher Finds the Subtle Nuances in Mass Murder

Rod Dreher was shocked by the story of a Texas man whose wife and children were slaughtered by his daughter and her friends. But he wasn't shocked by the brutal murder itself. Murders happen all the time. Big deal. What shocked him was a passing remark by the father who survived the attack by Erin, his little murderess. After he moved his family from the small Texas town of Celeste (pop. 800) to the liberal Emory (pop. 1200) his daughter was subject to the horrors of big city debauchery. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' "

Dreher was understandably shocked by this revelation. "This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers?" he wrote. "WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe? I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it." If for some reason Dreher's children decide to murder him, though I can't think of any reason why they would off the top of my head, at least he'll go to his grave comforted by the thought that he saved them from the evils of bisexuality.

But as horrifying as this story of bisexuality is, it does have a silver lining. As soon as Erin's parents realized that the public schools in Emory were cesspools of bisexual Bacchanalia, they took their kids out of school and started home schooling them. When they re-enrolled Erin in public school three years later, she was armed with the values she learned from being home schooled and didn't fall back into a lesbian lifestyle. Instead, started dating an 18-year-old boy, which must have been a big relief to her parents. Unfortunately, it was this boy who then helped her murder her family. But if you look past the murders, this story actually has a happy ending because it shows that it is possible to save our kids from homosexuality and that should give Dreher some solace when he gets over his shock.

Unfortunately, some people willfully misread Dreher's column and claimed that Dreher was saying that bisexuality caused the murders when in fact he was just focusing on the most horrific aspect of the story. Dreher is used to being willfully misread like this and having his values and priorities questioned. Recently, for example, he wrote a column pointing out that our "social decline" did not begin with the Sixties but back in that dark period known as the Enlightenment. "The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative," he wrote. Again, some people misread his column to mean that he thinks we should revive slavery or the Inquisition. But if you read his column carefully, you see that he is just saying that on the whole things were better before we had homosexuality, abortion, feminism and horseless carriages even when you balance those things against slavery and torturing heretics.

But Dreher is not the only conservative intellectual who is sadly misunderstood. Unfortunately, a lot of liberals just don't get the subtle nuances of some of Rush Limbaugh's thinking either. Some conservatives, like David Frum, are saying that Rush does not help our cause when he says, for example, that he wants President Obama to fail. Others even claim that we should be disingenuous and talk down to people instead. "The problem is, Americans have short attention spans and don’t always do nuance well," says one of our most nuanced thinkers, Paterico.

But I agree with Jeff Goldstein who says, "I don’t want to have to measure every word I say with the thought in mind that somebody is going to take me out of context. Instead, I’d like to be free to say what I mean." Goldstein is tired of pandering to people who think "it’s just too damn difficult to demand that what we mean be presented honestly, and so rather than fight that kind of complicated battle, it’s best just to learn to self-edit in a way that placates those who don’t do nuance well."

Although I often don't understand what Goldstein is trying to say, it would be a tragedy if he tried to pander to people like me and write things that people can actually comprehend. And I don't think Dreher should worry if people believe that he cares more about bisexuality than murder or that he wants us to return to a time when people who were not Catholics like him were burned at the stake when that is not what he is saying at all. And if some people cannot understand the subtle difference between wanting Obama to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression or wanting Obama's policies to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression, then is it really worth the energy to try to explain to them what Rush really meant?

So I hope that conservatives will say more things that can be taken out of context by the liberal media and continue to make subtle distinctions that can't be understood in 30-second sound bites. It is time for us to gird our loins (whatever that means) and fight complicated battles. Sure, we might lose a few elections and we might give people the false impression that we are homophobic or racist or misogynist or that we want America to fail and be punished for its decadence, but that's a small price to pay to hold on to our integrity, which is what is really important. Instead of making compromises, the way to get back into the good graces of the American people and start winning elections again is to stick to our guns and not be afraid to call Americans who don't understand what we mean "idiots." And if you don't think this is a winning strategy, then you're an idiot.

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Brown v Board of Education's Original Intent

In his confirmation hearings Chief Justice John Roberts affirmed his support of Brown v. The Board of Education, a decision that has often been misinterpreted by judicial activists. Finally, more than 50 years after the Brown decision, Justice Roberts has revealed in his opinion for the 5-4 majority in Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 what Brown really meant. "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin," he wrote of the cruel injustice of white children being told they could not attend the black schools of their choice. In the wake of Brown liberals only compounded this injustice by forcing black children to go to school with white children even if they didn't want to. In the name of equality hardly anyone got to attend the schools of their choice. Although the decision in Parents Involved generated 185 pages of opinions, Roberts has conveniently boiled down the true meaning of Brown in a sentence that could fit on a bumper sticker: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.''

Brown v. The Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson which upheld the segregation of railroad cards based on the doctrine of "separate but equal." But Brown had the inadvertent effect of replacing this doctrine with an even more unfair policy: "together but unequal." Black children were forced to attend white schools where they couldn't possible compete and white children where forced to attend black schools where they weren't challenged enough. Parents were horrified that their children had become pawns in social experiments that tried to force equality and integration. Many parents responded understandably to forced busing of their children by throwing rocks at buses carrying other people's children.

The Brown decision, perhaps more than any other event in our history, gave rise to the modern conservative movement. In writing about Brown in his book Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater said, "In effect the Court said that what matters is not the ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution, but the Court's ideas. It was only by engrafting its own ideas on the law of the land that the Court was able to reach the decision it did….I am therefore not impressed that the Supreme Court's decision on school integration is the law of the land" William Buckley's National Review also denounced the decision at the time. And future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote a memo in 1952 urging the Court to do the right thing. "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed," wrote Rehnquist, who would stay true to his ideals and make a lot of unpopular and unhumanitarian decisions. If it weren't for Brown, there might be no modern conservative movement.

But like all conservatives Justice Roberts is a great respecter of the principle of stare decisis and did not want to overturn an important precedent like Brown after more than 50 years (although the Warren Court apparently felt no such compunction in overturning Plessy). So instead, he went back to the original intent of the decision, which was that the government should be completely colorblind. If many schools have become resegregated in the half century since Brown, then the government is totally blind to this outcome. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, quoting Anatole France, "The majestic equality of the law, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." Under the Roberts court the government gives black students and white students the same freedom to go to dilapidated segregated schools if they want to.

If parents don't want their children attending segregated schools, then the have the freedom of choice to move to another district, earn enough money to send their kids to private schools or quit their jobs and homeschool their kids. Other parents, on the other hand, may prefer that their children attend segregated schools. "People -- black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, poor, Christian, secular, etc. -- naturally want to be around people like themselves. Why is that such a bad thing?" conservative Rod Dreher recently wrote. He points to a study by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam that shows that "the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone." The recent conservative uprising over immigration legislation was a warning to politicians that conservatives do not want to be forced to listen to salsa music and be subjected to the pungent odors of Mexican cooking in their own neighborhoods, because that will only make them trust their Spanish-speaking neighbors less, especially since they can't understand a word they are saying.

"It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much," Judge Stephen Breyer said in an angry dissent from the bench. But all Justice Roberts has done is return to the original intent of Brown, changing things back to the status quo. In coming years I think we will see the Court returning to the original intent of a number of decisions. Hopefully, we will return to the original intent of Roe v. Wade, which affirmed that the government does have the right to restrict abortion, the original intent of Griswold v. Connecticut, which granted only married couples the right to privacy and the original intent of Marbury v. Madison, which affirmed that the Supreme Court only has the power to interpret the original intent of the Founding Fathers not make up its own interpretations.

I hope that the Roberts Court will also return the original intent of legislation that has been distorted over the years. It made some strides in this direction in another decision the Court issued yesterday, which stripped away 96 years of misinterpretations of anti-trust laws and returned back to the original intent of the law. If Justice Roberts Court succeeds in his efforts to wrest control of the judiciary away from the radical judicial activists, this country will be returned back to the original vision of the Founding Fathers and the last 200 years or so will just seem like a bad dream.

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