Of course not, but at least we can acknowledge it as offensive and destructive.

I sometimes wonder.  A Muslim member of Ricochet has posted concerning the tone of comments about his tradition.

Do you really equate ordinary Muslims with the Nazi SS?  If that is your intention, your comment supports my previous point.

I do not propose that we listen to them.

Yes, the mainstream media needs to face up to the existence of homicidal fanaticism.  The question, though, is how best to go about combating it.  Christians in the Middle East, not fanatics, are going to be the victims of Mr. Jones' rhetorical stunt.  What he proposes to do is also, frankly, offensive.  Whether many American conservatives like it or not, there are good things about Islam (e.g., fasting, almsgiving, prayer), and many Muslims are decent human beings.  Yes, there are also problems with the tradition, but the fastest way to get someone not to listen is loudly and obnoxiously to abuse their religion.

A further thought:  the Court in Smith also said that "It would be true, we think (though no case of ours has involved the point), that a state would be 'prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]' if it sought to ban such acts or abstentions only when they are engaged in for religious reasons, or only because of the religious belief that they display."  Later, in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, the Court struck down a Florida ordinance banning animal sacrifice precisely because it was not a neutral law but was in fact directed at the Santeria religion.  So the Obama administration is going to be very careful to argue that their only concern is "women's health," and that the HHS mandate has nothing to do with targeting religious employers who oppose contraception.

Perhaps as devil's advocate, I will offer a defense of Smith.  In explaining why he did not use the compelling interest test when prohibited conduct is central to a person's religion, Justice Scalia wrote, "What principle of law or logic can be brought to bear to contradict a believer's assertion that a particular act is 'central' to his personal faith? . . . As we reaffirmed only last Term,

[i]t is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants' interpretation of those creeds." (citations omitted).

Picture this:  a Christian community teaches that charitable work is central to the Christian religion, but the government says no, charitable work is actually peripheral.  The scenario that appears to worry Justice Scalia is one in which a court attempts to decide the question.

Of course Mr. Jones is not equally responsible for the deaths of innocent people.  Still, when one makes a choice as to whether to do an act (assuming the act is not intrinsically evil), one normally weighs the foreseeable good consequences against the foreseeable bad consequences.  Here the foreseeable good consequences are . . . ?  The foreseeable bad consequences are that Christians in the Middle East get killed.

Let me suggest that the difference has to do with the fact that for women, sex is inextricably tied up with conception.  If she's sleeping around, who is going to help her rear the baby?  The average woman is more likely than the average man to avoid promiscuity not because she is asexual, but because the implications for her are different.  Even in a society that embraces contraception, there is still an intuitive awareness of this issue.

Excellent post, Tommy.

These monks are great:  http://www.clearcreekmonks.org/.  The website explains their way of life and why it's worth supporting better than I can.

I find it interesting that many people who really are not all that sympathetic with the attitudes summed up in Kirk’s cannons will still be considered "conservative" in today's parlance.  Perhaps this is because when we say "conservative" in the age of Obama we really mean anyone who, for whatever reason (and let's face it, there could be many reasons) dissents from the progressive agenda.

I am actually using the term "religious" loosely to refer to an ultimate commitment.  Emotion often goes along with religion, but is not the gist of it.  For orthodox Christians, the ultimate commitment is to a transcendent God.  The religious left, as Grendel elaborates in #8, transfers that commitment to secular history.

Yes.  We have a friend who was studying philosophy, but quit to volunteer in the military because he had read about courage, but didn't feel he knew what it really meant.  He was sent to Afghanistan, and ended up fighting Al Qaeda in tunnels (apparently, only urban fighting is more terrifying).  When he came back it occurred to me how few people must even be able to relate to his experience, whereas surely things were different for World War II veterans.

Just read the Glamour article; this is extremely scary.  What's interesting is that the article cites a study showing "that young women have a strong longing for motherhood: More than half of them said they would like to be a mom right now 'if things in their life were different.'"  Which in one sense is good, because it shows the feminist hostility to femininity has not completely taken over.  The article also notes the pattern of delayed marriage and the expectations that women be focused on a career.  So society is sending a mixed message: celebs with babies are cool, but early marriage is not.  The culture doesn't seem to do much to encourage young people to get from A, single life, to B, family life, if they want children.

What I find interesting is the number who go home and live with their parents after graduating.  This is apparently a generational thing; people who graduated in the '70s were very unlikely to do that.

Couple thoughts on this.  First, I can easily imagine that kids home schooled in this way gain a habit of self-motivation, and that is obviously good.  I wonder, though, whether kids are always the best judges of what they need to learn.  Some subjects (classics, for example), are not fun, and it may not be apparent why they should know it, but there is a huge payoff.  Also, I knew a mom used this method; her daughter was very bright, but scored average on standardized tests.  These tests don't show everything, obviously, but my impression is the average child home schooled in a traditional way out-performs most of his or her peers by a long shot--so the scores raised some question whether this particular child was really getting as much as she could have out of home schooling.

This is an interesting theory, and I would like to know more about it, but I am skeptical.  It seems to me that what generally arises in the absence of a competent political authority is rule of the mafia.  For example, in poorly policed parts of the world, gangs often have turf wars, the subject of the dispute being "you can't sell drugs in our territory"--which is a restriction on the free market.  Outside the drug context, communities have to resort to force to defend their right to free trade from thugs and pirates.  Thanks for the book suggestion.

I absolutely agree that no one is entitled to equal compensation or to have the government step in and set a value on their goods or services other than the value the market puts on them.  Equality, I guess, is a loaded word.  There is a certain equality among human beings that at least arises out of our freedom, and it is not in keeping with human dignity for people to live in squalor and misery.  The free market is really the best public policy for alleviating squalor and misery, though.