Inspired by the Vice President’s approach to foreign and domestic policy, I offer these modest resolutions in her honor.

I will no longer keep my door locked.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of breaking and entering.

I will no longer support better training for police officers.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of violence.

I will no longer favor a strong defense.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of war.

I will no longer drive carefully.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of highway accidents.

I will no longer teach.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of ignorance.

I will no longer work.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of poverty.

Finally, I will no longer vote.  Instead, I will focus on the root causes of idiocy in public life.

Natural law supports the preservation and restoration of natural function, but not its alteration or destruction:  For example, it wouldn’t be good to “fix” soldiers so that they never had to sleep at all.  That wouldn’t be fixing them, but ruining them.  But it would be a fine thing if we could cure narcoleptics, who keep dropping off, so that they can stay awake.

Transhumanists, who are sprouting from trees, might hijack this distinction to support their hopes of making people live forever.  For -- they might argue -- isn’t death the cessation of function, and wouldn’t immortality be its preservation?  Why not fix death too?  It’s just a disease, like narcolepsy.

You would think one experience of building “a tower that reaches the heavens” would be enough, but some people never learn. 

Can such persons be answered without appeal to divine revelation, just on the basis of natural reason?  I think so.

For what would it be like to live in a world without the laughter of children, or a world in which those who hold power hold onto it, perhaps, forever and forever?  We don’t know of any way to have a truly human life without the rotation of the generations.

In the second place, even natural reason gives us grounds to believe that we were made for something we cannot experience in this life.  Endless duration in our current state would doom us to endless despair of attaining it. 

Finally, we don’t need the help of revelation to know that there is something wrong with us.  Such as we are, death is not just a punishment, but a gift, a difficult medicine.  It remedies the pride of men who, by trying to become gods, become beasts.

Liberals used to be neutralists – I don’t say neutral -- toward religion.  There is no such thing as neutrality, but there is such a thing as a pretense of neutrality, and neutralism is that pretense.  It was never anything but a stalking horse.  Except among a few useful idiots, suspending judgment about religion was always code for the judgment that traditional religious beliefs and practices must be locked up in a cage.

The progressive heirs of those old neutralists are now openly and militantly at war with religion.  A few still wear the neutralist fig leaf, but these days the greater number call openly for discrimination against the organized worship of God and the expression of faith in public life.  Their leftist ideology also functions as a religion, but it is not a traditional religion, because its “gods” are things other than God.

At this point in the argument, people worriedly ask:  “If neutrality is a fraud, then in order to resist those who wish to suppress religious faith, must we go in the other direction and have a confessional state?”

Not in the sense intended.  But the question isn’t clearly framed.  For what is a confessional state?  There are several different kinds.

One kind of confessional state both declares and enforces articles of faith.  The Founders of our own republic rejected that kind – rightly, I think -- not because true faith in God is unimportant, but because the threat of punishments is no friend to it.

But these same Founders gave us another kind of a confessional state – one that declared certain articles of faith, but did not coerce anyone to believe in them.  Our founding political document, the Declaration of Independence, explicitly placed faith in God, viewing Him as the Creator, the Judge of nations, the Vindicator of the innocent, and the Author of natural law and natural rights.  Yet the force of this founding creed was the pure force of persuasion.  On the ancient assumption that God does not desire an unwilling obedience, no one was compelled to believe in it.

During its neutralist phase, the goal of the liberal movement was yet a third sort of confessional state.  The government enforced articles of faith, but never owned up to having any.  For in the name of not enforcing any faith, the movement came to enforce a faith in which politically correct pieties replaced God.  From declaring but not coercing, the nation went to coercing while not declaring.

Now that neutralism has outlived its usefulness, the progressive heirs of old-fashioned liberalism seem to be aiming at the old-fashioned sort of confessional state – the kind that the Founders rejected, which both declares and enforces articles of faith.  The difference lies in which faith they want to enforce.  They call upon the power of the state to heap punishment and opprobrium on those who publicly oppose the Woke creed.

During colonial times, the dissident Puritan, Roger Williams, said that enforcing faith produces not a nation of believers, but a nation of cowards and hypocrites.  That may have been an overstatement, because some people do believe whatever dogma they are told to believe – in our day, the leftist one.

But there are certainly a lot of cowards and hypocrites.

When a couple with their six fine children accepted our invitation to have dinner with us, my wife and I were charmed by the cheerful courtesy of their oldest daughter.

“Without a doubt,” we told her, “you’re the politest teenage girl who has ever visited our house.”

She laughed.  “Since I’ve been working at Chick-fil-A, I talk that way to everyone.”

Also:

My new article in Public Discourse,

Between Man and Man: Friendship,

Law, and the Common Good

Younger woman to older woman (referring to her child):  He’s reading about Rosa Parks.

Child to older woman:  Were you against that then?

Older woman:  Against what, honey?  Do you mean racial segregation?

Child:  Yes.

Older woman (convert from progressivism):  Oh, yes, I was always against it.

Younger woman (convert to progressivism):  Separate but equal.  That never worked, did it?

Older woman:  No, I was against it then and I’m against it now.

Younger woman:  What do you mean, against it now?

Older woman:  The races are being separated again all over the country.  I’m against that.

Younger woman:  What are you talking about?

Older woman:  Well, Columbia University has separate graduation ceremonies for blacks and Hispanics.*  And that sort of thing is happening all over.  Dormitories too.

Younger woman (skeptically):  I haven’t heard anything about that.  (Younger woman changes the subject.  Transcript ends.)

Progressives, do you really not know that what your movement now stands for in the name of antiracism is racism?

__________________

* She was right.  In a textbook example of doublespeak, Columbia University says that the six segregated ceremonies -- Native, Asian, Black, “Latinx,” “Lavender,” and “First Generation or Low Income” -- are not really segregated because no one is forced to attend one of them and there is also a campus-wide ceremony.  In other words, they are segregated, but there is no enforcement because the graduates are encouraged to segregate themselves.