| Dear Reader (a number of people have told me you are not in fact readers of the G-File, but members of a disturbing sex cult that prints out over-long "news"letters such as this to administer a series of painfully exquisite paper cuts all over your bodies before dipping into the Carnal Hot Tub of Buffalo Wing Sauce®. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate otherwise),
Freedom: It Tastes Just Like Chicken
I love the Chick-fil-A story. I think it would make a great Frank Capra-esque movie on the Hallmark Channel. You'd need to punch up some of the dialogue, and turn the CEO of Chick-fil-A into a franchise owner. But the final scene with thousands of people lining up to buy some chicken would be a classic of the genre. It's a shame Michael Landon is gone because he'd be perfect as the Chick-fil-A owner in his apron looking out on the line of cars stretching off into the distance like at the end of Field of Dreams. He'd pull his first wife closer to him and give that little wink heavenward.
A few quick points:
Speaking of first wives, I think it's interesting to note that Dan Cathy's original controversial statement is more pointed at the institution of divorce than at gay marriage. "We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that."
And yet it wasn't the divorced-American or the re-married-American community that rose up in outrage. It was the gay-rights community -- which apparently sees belief or rather vocal belief in "Biblical marriage" as a crime unto itself.
Speaking of gays, I think it's fascinating and horrifying that the political incentives for three big-city mayors are such that they thought this was an easy pander. After all, we know that all gays don't believe that committing such a thought crime should disqualify you from getting a business license, and yet these politicians all thought this was a gimme. One political takeaway from this, I suspect, is that the insider-clout of gay-activist donors and allies is incredibly strong within the mayoral bubble in big cities, so strong that it distorts one's perspective of the larger political climate. For hacks like Tom Menino and that crook who runs D.C. that's not too shocking, but that Rahm Emanuel was seduced by the temptation tells you something.
Last, I don't believe that everybody who waited hours for a chicken sandwich opposes gay marriage, though many surely do. My sense is that a large number of people showed up simply because they despise the glib bullying of the liberal Gleichschaltung. Rahm Emanuel, Tom Menino, and Vincent Gray (the aforementioned crook) looked for an easy way to score some points in the culture war and they inadvertently tipped their hands: They're bullies, like the gay dudes in Seinfeld who insist that everyone wear an AIDS ribbon.
Being Pro-Life and Pro-Death Penalty
I recently wrote about the death penalty and I've been getting annoying feedback ever since. I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. I very much oppose the death penalty for people who do not deserve to be put to death. I phrase it this way because so many opponents of the death penalty love to point to innocent men who were sentenced to die as if proof of error in the system invalidates capital punishment in principle. I don't know if an innocent person has ever been executed, but even if one were that outrage (and it would be an outrage) no more invalidates the death penalty than an instance of friendly fire invalidates the need for a military.
Look at it this way: If in, say, Illinois they wrongly sent a man to death row does that make the Aurora killer any less deserving of the chair? Where is the transitive property here?
But that's not even why I'm talking about the death penalty. One of the more annoying rejoinders to any discussion of the death penalty is, as one e-mailer puts it: "You f***ing wingnuts are such hypocrites, you talk about being pro-life but you have no problem killing minorities when it suits you."
I find this category error mind-boggling. Now while I'm functionally pro-life for the most part, I am not conventionally so. But that's irrelevant given the charge of plenary incompatibility of the pro-life and pro-capital-punishment positions.
First off, when a fetus shoots up a movie theater or rapes and kills a little girl or throws political dissidents into a wood chipper please be sure to shoot me an e-mail or tweet about it, because that sounds like an interesting story.
On that point, the argument against abortion hinges on the fact that it is the taking of an innocent life, often for selfish purposes. If you don't think it's a life worthy of respect that's something we can argue another day. The point here is that pro-lifers do think it is a life, an innocent life. And as I said at the outset, I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. What has an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus done that it deserves to be put to death? The abortion-rights position holds that the uterine-occupant's crime is that, if allowed to be born, it will potentially inconvenience or harm the mother. Obviously, the issue of harming the mother is morally significant, but the inconvenience issue is much less so.
However you want to think about all of that, what's very clear is that the moral contexts of abortion and capital punishment are very, very different.
This is a good time to invoke William F. Buckley's old line about moral equivalence. If you have one man who pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus and you have another man who pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus, it will simply not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who push old ladies around. Abortion renders a whole class of humans, non-human. Capital punishment says that a specific human being, one who has been proven to have taken another human life, is fit for execution. The death penalty may or may not be wrong, but to my mind it has as much in common with abortion as indexing capital gains or the infield fly rule.
What I find fascinating is the way pro-abortion, anti-death-penalty types find this so hard to understand. Here's my theory: They think that pro-lifers suffer from magical thinking. A burning bush, or a guy in a white robe, or some mystical book told them to oppose abortion. The incantations surrounding this belief involve phrases like "sanctity of life" and "every life is sacred." And so they conclude that pro-lifers are being inconsistent by not extending the magic cloak of protection to serial killers, mass murderers, and child rapists.
Now, for some pro-lifers who also oppose the death penalty that actually is part of their argument. The "seamless garment" argument holds that all life is sacred. But it's worth noting that official Church doctrine still allows for both just wars and capital punishment.
Regardless, I'm not a seamless-garment guy. I believe that if you wantonly and brutally, with evil in your heart, tear that garment you deserve to pay for what you've done.
Various & Sundry
This will be my last G-File for a while. Next week I'm going on a real grown-up vacation with my wife. My daughter is going to sleep-away camp (picture me saying this with a single tear streaming down my cheek), so after a brutal few months we're taking advantage and heading to Europe. Much of the itinerary is on a need-to-know basis, but I can tell you we'll be in Switzerland, Austria, and -- most exciting -- Prague. I haven't been to Prague in 20 years. After college I briefly taught English there (and had hopes of being a starving writer. I didn't starve, and I didn't write). I am really excited to see how much it's changed.
Oh, note to vandals, crooks, and moperers, Cosmo and my house will have adequate supervision so don't get any crazy "while the cat's away . . ." ideas.
Speaking of the G-File, it would be useful to me to get some feedback from you people. Is it actually worth the effort? Should I go more Morning Jolty and do straight-up political stuff? Is there too much eggheadery or not enough? Should I go more pop-culture and ignore politics altogether? Is it too long, too short? Is it strange that I am saying all of these things out loud in a poorly executed Indian accent? Do you think bears know how clichéd it is when they crap in the woods? Do you think we'll find anyone alive in Harry Reid's secret basement?
Oh, speaking of Harry Reid, this morning on Twitter, I was beating the dead horse of Reid's McCarthyite insinuations. I tweeted "Cut Harry Reid some slack, he's breaking in a new set of nipple clamps and can't think straight."
In response someone with the twitter handle @JewishAmericans posted "you are disgusting. comments like that are why people hate jews. please learn to talk with civility."
I love that! Who knew that millennia of cruelty and bigotry aimed at Jews was the result of nipple-clamp jokes and the like?
Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted by my own train of thought, is the G-File too discursive and rambling? Is it too self-indulgent? Hey, you know what? A train of thought would literally be awesome. Behold the Locomotive of Cognition!
Look, cows!
Anyway, on with the linky-links.
My latest in my long-running effort to get Mitt Romney to run against George W. Bush.
35 modern words recently added to the dictionary.
30 reasons why the world might actually end in 2012.
24 vintage pics of Lincoln "being awesome." This one's a disappointment in that not one picture shows him taking out vampires.
Rich Lowry's favorite T-Shirt!
Only footage of Mark Twain.
How much to live in the Clue mansion?
In case you missed it, Hell Comes to Frogtown.
And I just learned there were two sequels to HCF! I love that Rowdy Roddy Piper apparently believed the sequel material wasn't up to his standards so he bowed out of the project.
Goodbye people. Get back to work.
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Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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