Thanksgiving 2021: America’s mightiest blessing

Most years now, one of the things I do for the major holidays is look at what I wrote the year before to see how it has held up.

Doing that in 2021 took me back to this post for 2020.  Surprisingly, perhaps, it wasn’t about the pandemic or the lockdowns, at least not in any direct or explicit way.  It was about something that was getting almost no attention at the time: the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock.

A Tyler O’Neil article at PJ Media was a pretext for writing about something I was already concerned with.  He highlighted an exceptionally important concept from the Mayflower Compact executed by the arriving settlers: the idea of a “Civil Body Politic.”  America’s connection with that concept is unique, historic, and essential, as in, going to our essence as a nation.

Campaign against religious freedom: Orwellian? Demonic? Both?

Mocking freedom of religion, to weaken your commitment to it. (Image: 21alive Indianapolis)

A campaign against religious freedom – the central purpose for which America came into being – had been underway for some time before the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, on 26 June.  But the campaign went into overdrive with the news of that ruling, and it’s becoming increasingly furious and determined.

The principal method of the anti-freedom campaign is owning the terms in which it is discussed.  The anti-freedom contingent insists, in essence, that what traditionalist Christians want is not legitimate freedom, but a license to hurt people.

Fascist collectivism always makes its arguments in these terms, and the campaign against religious freedom is no different.  It picks a specific demographic target and vilifies the members of it, based on a garbled and inverted premise about social harm.

Same-sex marriage: Supreme Court cries ‘Havoc!’

The law, as she is practiced in America.

It’s been a banner week for the opponents of reason and the rule of law.

It will also turn out to have been a banner week for the opponents of tolerance, which includes most of today’s political left.

The left has never been about tolerance.  It has always been about opposing what other people believe, as the left defines it – which may or may not even be what those other people actually believe.  The left is about opposing things: about setting up definitions that require either affirmation or enmity.

And it’s the tide of the left’s “affirmation or enmity” proposition that will quickly rise around us, now that the Supreme Court has declared that people have a “right” to have their specialized definition of marriage recognized by the state.

Navy chaplain guilty until proven innocent in gay-discrimination allegation

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

Wait – shouldn’t we be able to refuse service to people?

I don’t know what the big deal is about the proposed Arizona law protecting business owners who decline to provide services for ceremonies they believe are wrong.

Quite a few people cheered in 2010 when three Washington, D.C. area hotels refused to host the convention of American Renaissance, a “white nationalist” group that advocates racist and other discriminatory beliefs.

The hotels didn’t refuse service because of who the members of American Renaissance are.  They refused service because of what American Renaissance does.  What American Renaissance does is perfectly legal,