David Silverman’s Regret

What happens when you defeat your opponent only to unleash something worse? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Remember the new atheists? For a while, they were all the rage with people talking about them regularly. They made atheism more public than it had been before. While they had declared a war on religion, it was mainly Christianity. After all, Sam Harris began writing The End of Faith when 9/11 took place, and yet most of that was not geared towards Islam but Christianity.

And what is Sam Harris doing today? He’s well-known now for his remark about the 2020 election that he didn’t care if Hunter Biden had the bodies of dead children in his basement. All that mattered was getting Trump. Whatever you think of Trump, Harris’s statement is extremely problematic. He was willing to go with a known lie and sacrifice truth and lie to the public because, well, he knows what is better for them.

Silverman looks at what he saw and is aghast at it. I was recently pointed to an article he wrote on substack.

I cannot quote it entirely seeing as it is behind a paywall. (Remember, I have a Patreon below) However, I do have a friend who quoted a large part of it in sharing it. Basically, it’s about how the new atheism was supposed to destroy religion and thus create a utopia of freethought and rationalism where the days of insane religious ideas was behind us.

It didn’t work out that way.

First off, I am in no way saying the new atheists were really a formidable force. They weren’t. I have several blogs here on that front. However, they were certainly a force rhetorically. They had cute little slogans that seemed sensible, but most people weren’t interested in the unpacking necessarily to show their numerous errors.

Second, I am also sure if he were alive today that Christopher Hitchens would be one against this movement as well. That cannot be known for sure, but I do remember him as being one very interested in American history. When he visited SES for a debate, I was told he was impressed by the seminary and even offered to teach a course on Thomas Jefferson.

Third, and this is really important, I do want to commend Silverman on this. It takes a lot of guts to write a public article and say “I was wrong.” Silverman did that. We should not be attacking him for this. We should be commending him.

Now let’s look at the part that I have to quote.

I failed to consider that the members of my movement could reject skepticism yet label this rejection as skepticism to excuse their actions—and get away with it! I never envisioned that every significant player in the movement (save the fledgling Atheists for Liberty, on which I currently serve as Advisory Board Chair) would abandon our core principles and embrace the political hard Left, forsaking every belief and individual that was even slightly to the Right. I did not anticipate that the movement would leave the movement, become swallowed in Critical Social Justice, and lose its relevance and effectiveness in the process. I did not see it coming.

Man by nature is a religious creature. If you remove something for him to worship, he will find something else. That something could be himself, his own happiness. God is often a restraint in many ways on what a man can do. If a man knows there is a judge that He will stand before someday who has all the omni qualities, that can affect his living. If he knows what he does impacts for eternity, that should definitely affect his living.

While there is often something consistent between Christians and the right, the atheist movement saw it necessarily so. So why jump on the bandwagon to defend the LGBT group? Well, they oppose the Christians so let’s go for it! Anything that opposes Christianity is a friend since Christianity is seen as a great evil that has to be eradicated.

If man becomes the god, ultimately, that will pass to the state and who will become the new rulers? It will be those who consider themselves the elites. (Perhaps the term “brights” comes to mind?) It is a parallel with how the new atheists saw Christianity. After all, their opponents were the ones who were people of faith (Which they did not understand) and the new atheists were the people of reason. Obviously, reason is superior to faith. Right? Obviously then, what should be rejected are the standards the Christians lived with.

Thus, get rid of all of this outdated morality, especially when it comes to sex. Get rid of anything that is said to be “Faith-based” (A term I don’t like anyway.) If the Christians tend to want the people on the right to be our governing leaders, then we will reject that. Whatever we can use to paint Christians as the enemy, it will be done. If your identity is not to be found in Christ, then it will be found in your tribe instead.

So, what has happened since we “killed God”? Not atheist Utopia. We won the booby prize—the religion of wokeism has completely taken over the Left side of politics, splitting both families and the nation itself. Riding on a wave of vapid emotion and a juvenile refusal to apply skepticism, the Woke Left—mostly atheists—have embraced this belief system as though it were the greatest new religion ever. Maybe it is.

Any attempt by man to bring about Utopia on Earth has always failed. Always. My ex-wife was once going through a book about how what was being sought was progress and not perfection. Progress though requires a true goal. If progress is just wherever you are going, then everything is progress. However, if you are going the wrong direction, progress is turning around and going the other way.

Silverman is also right in that this has split families and our nation. The best way to split the nation is really to split the family. The family is the foundation. Remember that meme that was shared years ago before the Supreme Court redefined marriage about what would happen if “same-sex marriage” was allowed?

That bottom one? Yep. Happening now. It didn’t start falling apart when marriage was redefined, but that was a killing blow in many ways. I blame a lot of this going all the way back to the sexual revolution. We unleashed a power that we did not know what it was capable of.

And ironically as a Christian, I think what the chart says would happen didn’t, since two people of the same sex can’t marry each other no matter what the court says.

Could it be the sexual standards of Christianity had a point? Could it be there was a reason abortion was a great evil and reproduction was a great good? Could it be that there was a reason that marriage should be for life for the majority of people and that marriage isn’t about your personal happiness? Could it be there’s a danger that happens when sex is removed from the confines of marriage? Could it be there was a reason marriage was established as between one man and one woman?

The new atheists also saw Christians making their decisions based on emotion alone, something I have spoken against as well here, but made a mistake of thinking themselves immune to that. After all, they were the men of reason. They would not fall to such a thing. Unfortunately, they have. One of the surest signs you will fall for something is that you think you cannot fall for it.

I have said before that I am the man who has avoided pornography throughout my life. So in my dating life, I throw caution to the wind. Right? Wrong. Nowadays, I don’t go up elevators alone with women or ride in cars with them and if on a date, I would never go back to her place or have her come to mine. The moment I think I am above the temptation, I have started my fall.

However, lacking a deity, it allowed wokeism to reside within—and be propagated by—the state. This is why the Left has adopted it. We may have subdued the lion of Christianity, but we failed to eradicate religion; we merely revealed that the lion might have been safeguarding us from the Woke Kraken. This creature is now unshackled, entrenched in our government and education system, and is literally coming for your children.

Pay attention to that first part. Remove the deity, and the deity becomes something within. What is the means of the new evangelism? It is the State. When the Christians disagreed with you, they disagreed. They didn’t try to force their way. When the left disagrees, here comes the power of the State!

Silverman did not eradicate religion as was his goal. He instead just moved it somewhere else. He defeated in his mind what was the greater evil without realizing that that “evil” was keeping something else at bay. Chesterton said years ago that before you remove a fence, you should see why it was put up in the first place.

Christianity did serve to contain man’s great evil and propel him to something greater than himself, and not the state. It still does for many of us. It teaches us that there is a real king named Jesus and we owe our allegiance to Him. It teaches us that there is a real right and there is a real wrong and there is a purpose to our lives here and we are to seek more than just the temporary good.

This idea—that atheists should stop resisting and instead actively promote Christianity, perhaps even joining churches, in an attempt to fortify it so that it may defeat wokeism—is gaining traction. Evan Riggs wrote in the European Conservative: “This is a call for sheer pragmatism… Of the two inescapable religious choices before us, Christianity is undoubtedly the better option.” My friend Peter Boghossian echoed a similar sentiment, tweeting, “Better to believe that a man walked on water than all men can give birth.”

I have been pleased with what I have seen from Boghossian and Lindsay lately on this front, two writers I have critiqued on their work on atheism before. However, a word of caution to the atheist movement. You might just wind up seeing that there is a lot more reason and truth to Christianity than you thought. Be prepared. The king will not be used. Christianity is not a means to an end. We go with Christianity not because it produces the best end result, which it does, but because it is true.

Maybe you should consider that question as well.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

By Nick Peters and published on July 4, 2023 in Deeper Waters Apologetics and can be found here.

The Remaking of America

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

The Weaponization of Justice. Administrations and their efforts to stock the justice department with supporters come and go. But in the last decade the Left has viewed the Department of Justice as a political extension of the party—whose unchecked power must properly be directed to hurt enemies and help friends. No wonder Eric Holder described himself as Obama’s “wingman” and became the first Attorney General to be held in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena.

Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service.

The mass murderer Charles Manson faced less legal exposure. No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts—most of them involving allegations from years past—were he not running for President.

One count that Donald Trump is not charged with is bribery, or taking money while in office, a crime cited as impeachable in the Constitution and germane to the accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency. For what reason did Joe Biden lie that he never discussed his son’s business? Why did Hunter complain to his daughter that Joe demanded half of his own grifting income? Why would a Vice President serially call disreputable American grifters and foreign corrupt oligarchs? Can Joe’s lifestyle ever be reconciled with his reported income?

Given such asymmetry in the application of the laws, conservative or even apolitical Americans are apprehensive that any political prominence will draw the attention of government in effort to either indict or bankrupt them with legal expenses.

The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes. 

The former CIA Director admitted to lying twice under oath. The FBI hired social media corporations to suppress election-cycle news deemed unhelpful to the Left. The agency, along with Democratic operatives, helped hatch the election-cycle conspiracy of the 2015-2016 Russian-Collusion hoax, and the 2020 Russian disinformation laptop hoax. The FBI played a central role in many of the 2024 indictments. In other words, the FBI along with the DOJ, has sought to warp three presidential elections in a row.

On the prompt of a Joe Biden campaign official (and now Secretary of State) and a former interim CIA director, 50 former intelligence officials lied to the electorate that an authentic but incriminating Biden computer was a likely Russian plant—a fact known to be lie but not disclosed as such by the FBI.

The Attack on the Supreme Court. Once the Court achieved a more or less predictable conservative majority, the Left sought to diminish it in a variety of ways. It has called for packing the Court with leftist jurists to create a new 15-justice bench. Leftist law professors in the Ivy League, in neo-Confederate nullification and insurrectionary style, call for the nation to ignore Court rulings on abortion and affirmative action.

The Senate minority leader led a throng to the doors of the court, threatening justices by name: “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Protestors now mob the homes of individual justices hoping to intimidate them and alter their upcoming opinions—confident that the Department of Justice will exempt them from any legal consequences of such felonious behavior.

The media routinely accuses conservative justices of improper or illegal behavior, without worry about the emptiness of the charges. A traditionalist justice now accepts that a controversial ruling can result in media charges that he is corrupt, in shrieking protestors mobbing his home, in a mob assembling at the doors of the Court, in disruptions during Court hearings, in politicians issuing threats to his person, in congressional calls to alter the century-and-a-half make-up of the Court, and in Ivy League law professors urging the country to ignore majority decisions.

In sum, a conservative jurist must be careful where and when he goes out in public.

The Media-Democratic Fusion. If one were to listen during the last few years to NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, or CNN, or read the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, then one would have believed the following:

A) Donald Trump worked with the Russians to throw and win the 2016 election. As part of that skullduggery, frolicking amid prostitutes he urinated on a Moscow hotel bed to spite Barack Obama. B) He was mentally incapacitated as president and should have been removed under the 25^th Amendment. C) In 2020, his campaign once more worked with the Russians to create an exact replica of Hunter Biden’s laptop, replete with dozens of lurid fake photos and hundreds of cleverly doctored emails to smear the Biden family and aid his own reelection effort. D) Trump as chief conspirator preplanned a violent and armed insurrection that sought to storm and permanently occupy the government, violently hijacking the balloting and seizing the presidency—resulting in the murder of a Capitol police officer and the subsequent deaths of other traumatized officers.

E) For the last eight years, none of Trump’s political opponents have ever destroyed subpoenaed evidence, conspired to hire foreign nationals to compile false and lurid files on him to subvert his political campaigns, or used their political offices to help solicit foreign money for family lobbyists. F) Trump is the first major candidate and politician who allegedly overvalued his real assets to obtain a loan that he repaid; the first to have concluded non-disclosure agreements with potential embarrassing liaisons; the first ex-president to remove sensitive files to his personal residence; and the first to phone a state official to whine about the integrity of the vote count. G) He is the first losing presidential candidate or major politician to question an election result or to seek redress through government agencies to rectify the purported corruption of the balloting.

In sum, for the first time in American history, nearly all the major communication and journalistic networks have been fused with a political party. They believe the new role of the media is to advance a shared progressive cause, oppose and even defame common opponents, and feed their audiences things that are not, and cannot possibly be, true.

The Destruction of Common Law. By defunding the police in major cities, and by showering leftwing district attorney candidates with millions of dollars in campaign funding, the Left systematically eroded the law as we know it in our major cities.

As a result, downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters. Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce. Criminals and homeless now routinely break the law with impunity. Public violence, defecation, urination, fornication, and injection do not even rate as misdemeanors.

The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable. Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested. Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves. There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden. Seven-million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.

In sum, in blue states and at the federal level, leftwing prosecutors and justices decide to enforce or ignore statutes, pile up or reduce indictments, increase or decrease punishments not on what the law entails, or evidence directs, but on the race, class, or ideology of the perpetrator, usually in connection with the particular status of his victims. If asymmetry in race, class, or ideology is suggested, then the law must modulate in redistributive fashion to contextualize the crime and criminal as a victim rather than a victimizer. The result is the veritable destruction of law and order as we once knew it.

The Erosion of the Military. Rarely has the American people polled so little confidence in the U.S. military. It perceives the Pentagon mission largely one to greenlight social change through the rapidity of the chain of command, not necessarily to maintain deterrence, much less to win all its wars. 

The Left has ensured that our armed forces are underfunded, short on munitions and weapons, and military officers are used to promote progressive social agendas. Officers expect to be promoted or stalled on the basis of their views on race and gender.

Those who traditionally died at twice their numbers in the general population in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are ostracized and in near record numbers leaving, while their friends and relatives are no longer enlisting in the military.

Former Pentagon four-star officers violated the Code of Uniform Military Justice in attacking a sitting president with the harshest invective, invoking comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini, again predictably from a leftwing point of view.

The public expects the Joint Chiefs to be both appointed on ideological considerations, and from time to time even to free-lance to contact enemy counterparts should they feel a conservative president is dangerous to world peace.

There is no longer any social stigma or legal jeopardy for retired officers in working as defense contractor lobbyists or board members, after revolving from or soon back to the Pentagon.

Sexes. The heterosexual male and female, marriage, and the nuclear family are all to be suspect. There are three sexes or perhaps still more. English language pronouns are inadequate to reflect sexual diversity.

So adherence to such ossified languages is career endangering. An epidemic of childlessness, singlehood, and collapsing fertility rates are either of no national importance or illustrate the preferred non-nuclear family model. Powerful hormonal drug regimens and permanent radical sex-change surgery should be the choices of minors alone who know best when they choose to transition to another sex. Graphic sex manuals and drag queen shows with simulated sex acts can perhaps acculturate preteens to the dangers of growing up in an oppressive “normative” binary society.

Sex, but not race, is constructed, and thus a matter not of biology but of individual choice.

Race, Not Class. Racial inequality and lack of parity are due to “whiteness.” Racial quotas, segregated dorms, graduations, workshops, and safe spaces are exempt from civil rights statutes given they are necessary to achieve equity. Integration and assimilation are the opiates of the masses. Apartheid and segregation are misunderstood modalities, and thus, if enlightened, sometimes necessary corrective measures.

Reparations are to supersede ineffective affirmative action. Wokeness liberates us to see how race explains everything in America, past and present. At universities and in popular culture “proportional representation” of various ethnicities and races is no longer sufficient remedy.

Instead reparatory hiring and admissions are required to atone for prior generations of discrimination. It is taboo to suggest that cultural conditions not just race accounts for inequality. Everything from meritocracy to promptness to physical fitness is racist in nature, requiring DEI experts to expose and inform about the systemic nature of American racism.

Debt is a Construct. Modern monetary theory proved that annual deficits and national debt are just a state accounting challenge. So printing more money is an act that properly diminishes the value of existing capital improperly horded by parasitic profiteers. Spreading the ensuing cash wealth to the more deserving and victimized is long overdue social justice.

At any time, the national “debt” can be deconstructed by renouncing usurious bond obligations, appropriating private retirement accounts, or further inflating the currency—if governments are committed enough to social justice.

Universities. It is now heresy that universities should be places of disinterested inquiry and inductive investigation. They can properly instead become a valuable tool in ridding society of racist and sexist forces, platitudes about free speech and equality under the law, and the tyranny of private property, capitalist profiteering, and white, male heterosexual Christian oppression.

So the role of a university is to create a brief safe space in which graduates can leave with proper training about the terrible history of the United States and the ways in which it must be dismantled and then be rebuilt by the properly trained experts from the ground up. Counterrevolutionaries or deluded liberals and their quaint adherence to a racist and archaic Bill of Rights have no place on these islands of progressive resistance.

None of the above was true at the millennium; all are now—with more still to come.

By Victor Davis Hanson and published in American Greatness on August 7, 2023 and can be found here.

Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work

If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling.

Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.

Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.

The first problem is that there are thousands of different plastics, each with its own composition and characteristics. They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing. For example, polyethylene terephthalate (PET#1) bottles cannot be recycled with PET#1 clamshells, which are a different PET#1 material, and green PET#1 bottles cannot be recycled with clear PET#1 bottles (which is why South Korea has outlawed colored PET#1 bottles.) High-density polyethylene (HDPE#2), polyvinyl chloride (PVC#3), low-density polyethylene (LDPE#4), polypropylene (PP#5), and polystyrene (PS#6) all must be separated for recycling.

Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together. This is one of several reasons why plastic fast-food service items cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S.

Another problem is that the reprocessing of plastic waste—when possible at all—is wasteful. Plastic is flammable, and the risk of fires at plastic-recycling facilities affects neighboring communities—many of which are located in low-income communities or communities of color.

Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers. According to a report published by the Canadian government, toxicity risks in recycled plastic prohibit “the vast majority of plastic products and packaging produced” from being recycled into food-grade packaging.

Yet another problem is that plastic recycling is simply not economical. Recycled plastic costs more than new plastic because collecting, sorting, transporting, and reprocessing plastic waste is exorbitantly expensive. The petrochemical industry is rapidly expanding, which will further lower the cost of new plastic.

Despite this stark failure, the plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.

Conventional mechanical recycling, in which plastic waste is ground up and melted, has been around for many decades. Now the plastics industry is touting the benefits of so-called chemical recycling— in which plastic waste is broken down using high heat or more chemicals and turned into a low-quality fossil fuel.

In 2018, Dow Chemical claimed that the Renewlogy chemical-recycling plant in Salt Lake City was able to reprocess mixed plastic waste from Boise, Idaho, households through the “Hefty EnergyBag” program and turn it into diesel fuel. As Reuters exposed in a 2021 investigation, however, all the different types of plastic waste contaminated the pyrolysis process. Today, Boise burns its mixed plastic waste in cement kilns, resulting in climate-warming carbon emissions. This well-documented Renewlogy failure has not stopped the plastics industry from continuing to claim that chemical recycling works for “mixed plastics.”

Chemical recycling is not viable. It has failed and will continue to fail for the same down-to-earth, real-world reasons that the conventional mechanical recycling of plastics has consistently failed. Worse yet, its toxic emissions could cause new harm to our environment, climate, and health.

We’re not making a case for despair. Just the opposite. We need the facts so that individuals and policy makers can take concrete action. Proven solutions to the U.S.’s plastic-waste and pollution problems exist and can be quickly replicated across the country. These solutions include enacting bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products, ensuring widespread access to water-refilling stations, installing dishwashing equipment in schools to allow students to eat food on real dishes rather than single-use plastics, and switching Meals on Wheels and other meal-delivery programs from disposables to reusable dishware.

If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling. Although we may not be able to stop them from trying to fool us, we can pass effective laws to make real progress. Single-use-plastic bans reduce waste, save taxpayer money spent on disposal and cleanup, and reduce plastic pollution in the environment.

Consumers can put pressure on companies to stop filling store shelves with single-use plastics by not buying them and instead choosing reusables and products in better packaging. And we should all keep recycling our paper, boxes, cans, and glass, because that actually works.

Judith Enck is a former EPA regional administrator, the president of Beyond Plastics, and a visiting professor at Bennington College.

Jan Dell is a chemical engineer and the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup

By Judith Enck and Jan Dell and published in The Atlantic on May 30, 2022 and can be found here.

3rd Circ. Backs VA’s Win In Nurse’s Retaliation Suit (featuring the Law Office of Faye Riva Cohen)

The Third Circuit refused Monday to reinstate a retired nurse’s lawsuit alleging the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs refused to promote her because other prior complaints against it, saying she failed to show a link between her filed grievances and the agency’s hiring decisions. A unanimous three-judge panel said a trial court did not err when it granted the VA summary judgment in June in Sharon Finizie’s Title VII lawsuit. Finizie, who worked for the VA for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2018, alleged she was passed over for numerous positions she sought in retaliation for her prior U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints. “Finizie has not pointed to any evidence of a pattern of antagonism during the periods between her complaints and when she was not selected for the [infection control nurse] positions,” U.S. Circuit Judge Anthony J. Scirica wrote for the panel. “Similarly, she has not presented any evidence that the VA has been inconsistent in its stated reasons for why she was not selected for the ICN positions.” The VA said it demoted Finizie in 1993 from her infection control nurse position to a quality management specialist role due to poor performance. Finizie frequently applied for open ICN positions as they opened over the next 25 years, but they never panned out for her, court filings said. Each time she was rejected, she filed an EEOC complaint, the VA said. In the present case, which she filed in December 2020, she alleged that she was wrongly passed over for a pair of ICN positions she applied for in 2012 and 2015. The panel said that although filing EEOC complaints is a protected activity and she experienced an adverse employment action by not being promoted, she failed to show a link between the two events.

As a baseline issue, the time periods between her complaints and the VA’s decision not to promote her do not suggest a retaliatory motive, the panel said. Before she was passed over for the ICN role in 2012, her most recent complaint had been filed in 2010, according to the opinion. “These two-year gaps between protected activity and adverse employment action are too long to be unusually suggestive of a retaliatory motive,” the panel said. Further, the VA has consistently proffered nondiscriminatory reasons for not choosing her to fill the roles she applied for, and she failed to rebut them, the panel said. The VA has maintained that it did not choose Finizie because she lacked recent infection control experience and, in 2015, she scored lower than other applicants on the agency’s screening tool, according to court filings. “Accordingly, Finizie is left with her own subjective belief that she was not selected for the ICN positions because of her previous protected activity,” the panel said. “Because speculation and conjecture are insufficient to defeat a motion for summary judgment, the district court did not err in granting summary judgment in favor of the VA.” Representatives for the parties did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. U.S. Circuit Judges Michael Chagares, Anthony J. Scirica and Thomas L. Ambro sat on the panel for the Third Circuit. Finizie is represented by Faye R. Cohen and James W. Cushing of the Law Office of Faye Riva Cohen PC. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is represented by Colin M. Cherico of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The case is Sharon Finizie v. Secretary United States Department of Veterans Affairs, case number 22-2292, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. –Editing by Haylee Pearl.

By Emmy Freedman and originally published in Law360 on May 15, 2023 and can be found here.

Coleman Hughes: The Empirical Problems with Systemic Racism

Every now and again I come across something the warrants posting here; I recently came across this a video which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

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Practical Problems of Sola Scriptura

Simply stated, the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”) teaches that every teaching in Christian theology (everything pertaining to “faith and practice”) must be able to be derived from Scripture alone. This is expressed by the Reformation slogan Quod non est biblicum, non est theologicum (“What is not biblical is not theological,” cf. Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, Richard A. Muller, Baker, 1985).

An essential part of this doctrine, as it has been historically articulated by Protestants, is that theology must be done without allowing Tradition or a Magisterium (teaching authority) any binding authority. If Tradition or a Magisterium could bind the conscience of the believer as to what he was to believe then the believer would not be looking to Scripture alone as his authority.

A necessarily corollary of the doctrine of sola scriptura is, therefore, the idea of an absolute right of private judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures. Each individual has the final prerogative to decide for himself what the correct interpretation of a given passage of Scripture means, irrespective of what anyone-or everyone-else says. If anyone or even everyone else together could tell the believer what to believe, Scripture would not be his sole authority; something else would have binding authority. Thus, according to sola scriptura, any role Tradition, a Magisterium, Bible commentaries, or anything else may play in theology is simply to suggest interpretations and evidence to the believer as he makes his decision. Each individual Christian is thus put in the position of being his own theologian.

Of course, we all know that the average Christian does not exercise this role in any consistent way, even the average person admitted by Fundamentalists to be a genuine, “born again” believer. There are simply too many godly grannies who are very devout in their faith in Jesus, but who are in no way inclined to become theologians.

Not only is the average Christian totally disinclined to fulfill the role of theologian, but if they try to do so, and if they arrive at conclusions different than those of the church they belong to-an easy task considering the number of different theological issues-then they will quickly discover that their right to private judgment amounts to a right to shut up or leave the congregation. Protestant pastors have long realized (in fact, Luther and Calvin realized it) that, although they must preach the doctrine of private judgment to ensure their own right to preach, they must prohibit the exercise of this right in practice for others, lest the group be torn apart by strife and finally break up. It is the failure of the prohibition of the right of private judgment that has resulted in the over 20,000 Christian Protestant denominations listed in the Oxford University Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia.

The disintegration of Protestantism into so many competing factions, teaching different doctrines on key theological issues (What kind of faith saves? Is baptism necessary? Needed? Is baptism for infants? Must baptism be by immersion only? Can one lose salvation? How? Can it be gotten back? How? Is the Real Presence true? Are spiritual gifts like tongues and healing for today? For everyone? What about predestination? What about free will? What about church government?) is itself an important indicator of the practical failure of the doctrine of private judgment, and thus the doctrine of sola scriptura.

However, there is a whole set of practical presuppositions that the doctrine of sola scriptura makes, every one of which provides not just an argument against the doctrine, but a fatal blow to it. Sola scriptura simply cannot be God’s plan for Christian theology.

In fact, it could never even have been thought to be God’s plan before a certain stage in European history because, as we will see, it could have only arisen after a certain technological development which was unknown in the ancient world. Before that one development, nobody would have ever thought that sola scriptura could be the principle God intended people to use, meaning it was no accident that the Reformation occurred when it did.

If God had intended the individual Christian to use sola scriptura as his operating principle then it would have to be something the average Christian could implement. We can therefore judge whether sola scriptura could have been God’s plan for the individual Christian by asking whether the average Christian in world history could have implemented it.

Not only that, but since God promised that the Church would never pass out of existence (Matt. 16:18, 28:20), the normal Christian of each age must be able to implement sola scriptura, including the crucial patristic era, when the early Church Fathers hammered out the most basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy.

It is in this practical area that the doctrine comes crashing down, for it has a number of presuppositions which are in no way true of the average Christian of world history, and certainly not of the average Christian of early Church history.

First, if each Christian is to make a thorough study of the Scriptures and decide for himself what they mean (even taking into consideration the interpretations of others) then it follows that he must have a copy of the Scriptures to use in making his thorough study (a non-thorough study being a dangerous thing, as any Protestant apologist warning one against the cults and their Bible study tactics will tell you). Thus the universal application of sola scriptura presupposes the mass manufacturing of books, and of the Bible in particular.

This, however, was completely impossible before invention of the printing press, for without that there could not be enough copies of the Scriptures for the individual Christians to use. Sola scriptura therefore presupposes the inventing of the printing press, something that did not happen for the first 1,400 years of Church history (which will be the almost three-quarters of it if the world ends any time soon).

It is often noted by even Protestant historians that the Reformation could not have taken off like it did in the early 1500s if the printing press had not been invented in the mid-1400s, and this is more true than they know, because the printing press not only allowed the early Protestant to mass produce works containing their teachings about what the Bible meant, it allowed the mass production of Bible itself (as Catholics were already doing; one does realize, of course, that the Gutenberg Bible and the other versions of the Bible being produced before Protestantism were all Catholic Bibles).

Without the ability to mass produce copies of the Scriptures for the individual Christians to interpret, the doctrine of sola scriptura could not function, since one would only have very limited access to the texts otherwise-via the Scripture readings at Mass and the costly, hand-made copies of the Bible kept on public display at the church. Thus sola scriptura presupposes the printing press.

This is a key reason why the Reformation happened when it did-several decades after the invention of the printing press. It took time for the idea of the printing press to make its mark on the European mind and get people excited about the idea of easily available books. It was in this heady atmosphere, the first time in human history when dozens of ancient works were being mass produced and sold, that people suddenly got excited with the thought, “Hey! We could give copies of the Bible to everyone! Everyone could read the Scriptures for themselves!”-a thought which led very quickly into sola scriptura in the minds of those who wished to oppose historic Christian theology, as it would provide a justification for their own desire to depart from orthodoxy (“Hey, I read the Scriptures, and this is what they said to me!”).

Of course, the invention of the printing press does not itself enable us to give Bibles to every Christian in the world (as all the calls for Bibles to be sent to Russia illustrate), which leads to the next practical presupposition of sola scriptura…

Second, besides the printing press, sola scriptura also presupposes the universal distribution of books and of the Bible in particular. For it is no good if enough copies of the Bible exist but they can’t be gotten into the hands of the average believer. There thus must be a distribution network capable of delivering affordable copies of the Bible to the average Christian.

This is the case today in the developed world; however, even today we cannot get enough Bibles into many lands due to economic and political restraints, as the fund raising appeals of Bible societies and their stories of Bible smuggling inform us. However, in the great majority of Christian history, the universal distribution of books would have been totally impossible even in the what is now the developed world. During most of Church history, the “developed world” was undeveloped.

The political systems, economies, logistical networks, and travel infrastructure that make the mass distribution of Bibles possible today simply did not exist for three-quarters of Church history. There was no way to get the books to the peasants, and no way the peasants could have afforded them in the first place. There just wasn’t enough cash in circulation (just try giving a printer 5,000 chickens for the 1,000 Bibles he has just printed-much less keeping the chickens alive and transported from the time the peasants pay them to the time the printer gets them).

Third, if the average Christian is going to read the Scriptures and decide for himself what they mean then he obviously must be able to read. Having someone read them to him simply is not sufficient, not only because the person would only be able to do it occasionally (what with a bunch of illiterates to read to), but also because the person needs to be able to go over the passage multiple times, looking at its exact wording and grammatical structure, to be able to quickly flip to other passages bearing on the topic to formulate the different aspects of a doctrine as he is thinking about it, and finally to be able to record his insights so he doesn’t forget them and he can keep the evidence straight in his mind. He therefore must be literate and able to read for himself. Thus sola scriptura presupposes universal literacy.

Fourth, if the average Christian is going to make a study of what Scripture says and decide what it teaches, he must possess adequate scholarly support material, for he must either be able to read the texts in the original languages or have material capable of telling him when there is a translation question that could affect doctrine (for example, does the Greek word for “baptize” mean “immerse” or does it have a broader meaning? does the biblical term for “justify” mean to make righteous in only a legal sense or sometimes in a broader one?).

He must also have these scholarly support works (commentaries and such) to suggest to him possible alternate interpretations to evaluate, for no one person is going to be able to think of every interpretive option on every passage of Scripture that is relevant to every major Christian doctrine. No Protestant pastor (at least no pastors who are not in extreme anti-intellectual circles) would dream of formulating his views without such support materials, and he thus cannot expect the average Christian to do so either. Indeed! The average Christian is going to need such support materials even more than a trained pastor. Thus sola scriptura also presupposes the possession-not just the existence-of adequate support materials.

Fifth, if the average Christian is to do a thorough study of the Bible for himself, then he obviously must have adequate time in which to do this study. If he is working in the fields or a home (or, later, in the factory) for ten, twelve, fifteen, or eighteen hours a day, he obviously doesn’t have time to do this, especially not in addition to the care and raising of his family and his own need to eat and sleep and recreate. Not even a Sunday rest will provide him with the adequate time, for nobody becomes adept in the Bible just by reading the Bible on Sundays-as Protestants stress to their own members when encouraging daily Bible reading. Thus sola scriptura presupposes the universal possession of adequate leisure time in which to make a thorough study the Bible for oneself.

Sixth, even if a Christian had adequate time to study the Bible sufficiently, it will do him no good if he doesn’t have a diet sufficiently nutritious to let his brain function properly and his mind work clearly. This is something we often forget today because our diets are so rich, but for most of Christian history the average person had barely enough food to survive, and it was almost all bread. “Everything else,” as the British historian James Burke put it, “was just something you ate with bread”-as a condiment or side-dish. This means that the average Christian of world history was malnourished, and as any public school dietitian can tell you, malnutrition causes an inability to study and learn properly. That is one of the big motivating forces behind the school lunch program. If kids don’t eat right, they don’t study right, and they don’t learn right, because they don’t think clearly. The same is true of Bible students. Thus sola scriptura also presupposes universal nutrition.

Seventh, if the average Christian is going to evaluate competing interpretations for himself then he must have a significant amount of skill in evaluating arguments. He must be able to recognize what is a good argument and what is not, what is a fallacy and what is not, what counts as evidence and what does not. That is quite a bit of critical thinking skill, and anyone who has ever tried to teach basic, introductory logic to college students or anyone who had tried to read and grade the persuasive essays they write for philosophy tests can tell you (I’m speaking from personal experience here), that level of critical thinking does not exist in the average, literate, well-nourished, modern college senior, much less the average, illiterate, malnourished, Medieval peasant. This is especially true when it comes to the abstract concepts and truth claims involved in philosophy and theology. Thus sola scriptura also presupposes a high level of universal education in critical thinking skills (a level which does not even exist today).

Therefore sola scriptura presupposes (1) the existence of the printing press, (2) the universal distribution of Bibles, (3) universal literacy, (4) the universal possession of scholarly support materials, (5) the universal possession of adequate time for study, (6) universal nutrition, and (7) a universal education in a high level of critical thinking skills. Needless to say, this group of conditions was not true in the crucial early centuries of the Church, was not true through the main course of Church history, and is not even true today. The non-existence of the printing press alone means sola scriptura was totally unthinkable for almost three-quarters of Christian history!

All of this is besides the limitations we mentioned earlier-the fact that the average Christian, even the average devout Christian has no inclination whatsoever to conduct the kind of Bible study needed to become his own theologian and the fact that he is encouraged by many pressures from his own pastor and congregation (including the threat of being cast out) to fall in line and not challenge–especially publicly challenge–the party platform.

CHRISTIANITY FOR THE COMMON MAN?

It is thus hard to think of sola scriptura as anything but the theory spawned by a bunch of idealistic, Renaissance-era dilettantes–people who had an interest in being their own theologians, who had a classical education in critical thinking skills, who had adequate nutrition, who had plenty of leisure time for study, who had plenty of scholarly support materials, who had good reading skills, who had access to Bible-sellers, and most importantly, who had printed Bibles!

The average Christian today, even the average Christian in the developed world, does not fit that profile, and the average Christian in world history certainly did not, much less the average Christian in the early centuries. What this means, since God does not ask a person to do what they are incapable of doing, is that God does not expect the average Christian of world history to use sola scriptura. He expects the average Christian to obtain and maintain his knowledge of theology in some other way.

But if God expects the average Christian to obtain and maintain the Christian faith without using sola scriptura, then sola scriptura is not God’s plan.

By Jimmy Akin and published on his website and can be found here.

Defend the Right of Christians to Adopt

Imagine losing your spouse and having to care for your beautiful family by yourself.

Now imagine feeling a conviction to adopt and care for other children—to love those who don’t even have one parent.

And now imagine that your state is excluding you from adoption because you won’t contradict your Christian beliefs—you won’t use a child’s preferred pronouns, take children to LGBT-affirming events like Pride parades, and facilitate a child’s access to dangerous procedures like sterilizing puberty blockers.

This is exactly the situation Jessica Bates faces in Oregon.

Oregon officials are preventing Jessica from adopting a child because of her Christian beliefs — despite the fact that they otherwise accommodate people of different religious and cultural backgrounds and try to pair children with families who are well suited to each other.

It’s a blatant act of religious discrimination, and it must end.

Last year, the Department reported having nearly 8,000 children touch Oregon’s foster care system. Many of these children are waiting for their forever homes.

We’re taking on Jessica’s case to ensure that Oregon accepts Jessica and people of faith to adopt — opening the door for more placements into forever homes.

This was a post from the Alliance Defending Freedom website and can be seen here.

ANGLICANS AND THE REUNION OF CHRISTENDOM

Upon the Catholicization of the Anglican Church hangs the destiny of Christendom,” wrote the American monk and Episcopalian bishop Charles Chapman Grafton at the end of the nineteenth century. Grafton believed that if the Anglican Church emphasized its sacramental life and restored older, pre-schismatic Catholic practices and traditions, this could lead to inter-communion among Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics (those Catholics who split with Rome after the First Vatican Council), and eventually Roman Catholics. This sentiment may provoke bitter laughter from those who have weathered the many Anglican departures from the apostolic tradition over the past few decades, but it was earnestly held by the scions of the Oxford Movement to which Grafton belonged.

The role that Anglicanism could play in reuniting Christendom was central to Grafton’s life work, and to his Selected Writings, an anthology recently published by Nashotah House Press as the first in its Classics of American Anglicanism series. The volume is a timely collection of passages from Grafton’s sermons, letters, and addresses, which benefit from editor Clinton Collister’s sparse but salient editorial comments. Born in Boston in 1830, Grafton read law at Harvard, but under Tractarian influences offered himself for Holy Orders. At the end of the Civil War, he went to Oxford to pursue the religious life, and consequently helped to found the Society of St. John the Evangelist there. After working for some years in one of the great Anglo-Catholic slum parishes of London, Grafton returned to his home diocese of Maryland in 1872. 

Consecrated bishop of Fond du Lac in 1889, he continued to push for the re-Catholicization of his own Protestant Episcopal Church. This he did both internally, advocating firmly for the sacramental life of the Church and founding a new religious sisterhood, and externally, building relationships with newly arrived hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox and Polish Old Catholic churches. Reunion with the Orthodox and Old Catholics, Grafton hoped, would force Rome to renegotiate, and open the possibility of “the reunion of Christendom,” the cause “dearest to the heart of Christ.” His work earned him the disdain of many Episcopalian contemporaries, whose reactions sadly frustrated his efforts toward the reunion he desired: namely, mutual recognition of one another’s orders; acceptance of legitimate variations in liturgy and discipline, including the question of whether priests or bishops might be married; and recognition of the pope as primus inter pares without admitting universal jurisdiction or infallibility.

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) meeting held this April in Rwanda makes Grafton’s hopes less fantastical than they were only a few months ago. Estimated to represent 85 percent of Anglicans worldwide, which is to say some seventy-five million Christians, the mostly evangelical bishops of GAFCON have announced that they no longer have confidence in the archbishop of Canterbury to preserve orthodox biblical teaching. The precipitating event was the Church of England’s February decision to allow clergy to offer services of blessing to same-sex couples. Some may think this means GAFCON is a single-issue movement, but the case in point is merely the last chapter of a long saga. The majority of Anglican bishops are from the affluent global North, but represent a small and shrinking minority of Anglicans. Whereas the bishops of the global South, despite being fewer in number, represent the overwhelming majority. The bishops of the South see where the sexual revolution has led the North, do not relish its fruits, and are aggrieved that the Anglican Communion has privileged the wealthy minority and ignored their people’s concerns.

The publication of Grafton’s Selected Writings is apposite to these developments. Anglicans have historically looked to England for doctrinal succor, so reprints and internet archives of sundry Oxonians proliferate, but comparatively little attention has been paid to their American contemporaries. Yet with Canterbury playing ventriloquist’s dummy to the establishment, it is Americans, Africans, and East Asians of the old colonies who are leading the renewal of global Anglicanism. Like them, Grafton was not content merely to echo his contemporaries in England. He saw the establishment of the Church there as “bondage to the world’s power,” the subjection of “spiritual rights” to “state control.” And he saw in his own pluralistic American context an opportunity for a reunion of Christendom “through the union of the Anglican and Eastern Churches.” 

Anglo-Catholics of Grafton’s time tended toward Rome and often treated the Orthodox with disdain, but Grafton’s sympathy with Rome was definitively chilled in 1896 by the papal encyclical Apostolicae Curae, which condemned Anglican Holy Orders as invalid. Judging their clergy by their fruits, Anglicans simply could not doubt that they were truly ordained. So “when the pope decided against what Anglicans knew, with a divine certainty, to be true, they knew with the same certainty that he was not infallible.” Grafton goes so far as to set up “papalism” against Catholicism, arguing that the latter properly construed refers to the common faith of the pre-schismatic Church. Reunion, for him, would therefore necessitate dropping the Filioque and demoting any doctrines not consented to by ecumenical councils to permissible opinions rather than binding truths.

Modern Anglicans, faced by the problems in their own communion, may be more circumspect than Grafton about the errors of papalism. Despite a brief period in the 1930s when Orthodox churches acknowledged Anglican orders, more recently full inter-communion seemed likelier with Rome. The ordination of women has halted Anglican-Roman Catholic negotiations, for now; but if Anglo-Catholics have a place in GAFCON, they could bring Grafton’s dream of reunion with the Old Catholics and Orthodox closer to fruition. GAFCON has essentially exorcised latitudinarians from the Anglican picture, leaving them to fade away in their Canterbury ghetto. It is undoubtedly an evangelical-dominated movement. Nonetheless, that leaves a significant Anglo-Catholic minority, particularly in the U.S. and Africa. That minority could be all that is needed to graft the majority of Anglicans firmly onto the apostolic vine. The Union of Scranton founded by the Polish Old Catholic hierarchy that Grafton once courted is already moving toward reunion with some Anglo-Catholic jurisdictions, and the Anglican Church of North America, which split off from the U.S. Episcopal Church in 2009 to join GAFCON, could become a bridge between the Old Catholic movement and the worldwide Anglican majority. This could help GAFCON to decide whether it is just evangelical, or both evangelical and Catholic. If it opts for the latter course, then Grafton’s thesis may not yet be a dead letter.

The quintessentially American optimism of Grafton’s voice, free from the colonial suppositions and eurocentric inclinations that can beset the English church, should encourage traditional Anglo-Catholics in the U.S. and beyond to heed his call for reunion. We have before us the potential for a revivified Western Church, no longer dominated by Europeans and compromised by their political expediencies, but with episcope shared equitably among the churches of the world. The publisher of Grafton’s Selected Writings, Nashotah House, is a seminary that already bridges the shrinking Anglo-Catholic remnant in the Episcopal Church and the bold new Anglican Church in North America. As ACNA cements its role in GAFCON, this publication could herald a further step in Nashotah’s mission of unity. One therefore hopes that this will be only the first of many volumes in the Classics of American Anglicanism series—and that classics of African or Asian Anglicanism might soon follow.

The Reverend Dr. Thomas Plant is chaplain of St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University, Tokyo. 

By Charles Chapman Grafton and published in First Things in May 2023 and can be found here.

Class of 1972 Reunion Celebrates Success, Begins a Legacy (featuring Faye Riva Cohen, Esq.)

1972. The Vietnam War continued to rage overseas. In June of that year, a break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters led to an investigation that revealed multiple abuses of power by the Nixon administration and kicked off the scandal known as Watergate. And in December, the City and County of Denver voted to give back its chance to host the Olympics.

Amid an uncertain future, the University of Denver (DU) College of Law graduated a unique class of individuals, set on making the world a better place. The class of 1972 is filled with talented, driven, and creative thinkers who have dedicated their careers to improving the lives of people they touch. On Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022, at Del Frisco’s in Cherry Creek, the class came together for its 50^th class reunion to celebrate their storied lives and remember, fondly, their times at DU.

Organized by the Class of 1972 Reunion Committee, Robert (Bob) Zupkus, Herbert (Chip) Delap, Howard Kenison, and Dan Whittemore, the evening at Del Frisco’s turned into an opportunity to give back (more about that later), and then brunch the next day as the class was recognized as part of the DU Golden Barristers Society; an exclusive event for individuals who have reached 50 years since their graduation.

Reflections from Alumni

“It is hard to believe that 50 years have passed since my law school graduation,” wrote alumna Faye Riva Cohen. “I was one of five women in my law school class, and the only married woman until the last quarter of school. Our class was diverse and personable, despite their various backgrounds.”

Today, Cohen is known as the “tough lawyer lady” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“I have practiced my entire legal career in Philadelphia, but I fondly remember my time at DU,” she said. “The education I received provided me with the bedrock to establish my own law practice as one of the first women-owned law firms in Philadelphia.”

Fellow graduate Jim Martin came to the reunion excited to see his former classmates. During his career, Martin served as Colorado Assistant Attorney General and represented the Colorado Department of Institutions in federal and state court litigation. Today, he lives in Montana, but the Colorado lifestyle has never left him.

“Play still includes downhill and cross-country skiing, cycling, and motorcycling, as well as tennis, platform tennis and now, pickleball,” he explained.

For some, living the Colorado lifestyle was always part of the plan.

“Enjoyed it all, especially the solo work,” said Jim Engelking, reflecting on his career “And never having to leave Colorado, which was the plan when I decided to come to Denver after leaving the Navy.”

Alumnus Dan Whittemore is known for his extensive work in education, having served as Colorado State Controller for Governor Dick Lamm, Controller at Chicago Public Schools, Vice Chancellor for Business and Administration for all ten Maricopa Community Colleges, and Vice President for Finance of Colorado Community Colleges, to name a few. But when reflecting on his time at Denver Law, he offers a different sentiment.

“When spry and younger,” he said, “I climbed all of Colorado’s fourteeners.”

Creating Philanthropy

The class of 1972 so loved their time at Denver Law, that they independently decided to give back to law students now.

“The law school is personal, interesting, and there are no limits to what you can do,” explains reunion committee member Bob Zupkus, who retired in 2017 from the law firm he founded. “The practice programs get you [students] hands on experience with legal aid, state government, clinical practice programs. It was an inspiring educational process. That keeps me involved.”

Leading up to the reunion weekend, the reunion committee created and launched the Sturm College of Law Class of 1972 Externship Fund. The fund will support stipends for law students in summer of 2023 pursuing unpaid externships with non-profits, legal aid organizations, judicial chambers, state and federal public defenders, and local, state and federal government agencies.

“The idea for students that there is so much you can do with a legal education is amazing,” Zupkus continued. “Business, nonprofit, government, this degree applies across many sectors.”

On his time at Denver Law, and his induction into the Golden Barristers Society, Zupkus is nostalgic.

“I never knew that fifty years went by,” he said. “I loved what I was doing, and in the blink of an eye, here I am.”

The class of 1972 never forgot where they started, or the way of life in 1972. Their uncertain graduation year propelled them into successful lives, and they continue to turn around and pull others with them. We look forward to celebrating their successes, memories, and legacy for years to come.

By Jordan Kellerman, and published on December 1, 2022 on the Denver University website and can be found here.

HOW GAY MARRIAGE CHANGED AMERICA

In November 2022, the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice came out against gay marriage. “I find it disappointing how much time and resources went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage,” Chase Strangio wrote on Instagram. Two months later, Taylor Silverman, a female skateboarder who gained prominence after objecting to the inclusion of biological males in women’s athletic competitions, criticized gay marriage from the opposite direction: “I used to think gay marriage was ok until all of the things that conservatives warned us would happen next actually happened. Now it seems it really was the beginning of the dangerous slippery slope.” With the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, the legal status of same-sex marriage has never been more secure. Public opinion is strongly in its favor, even as, not so long ago, it was overwhelmingly opposed. Yet the ideological case for same-sex marriage seems strangely fragile, subject to challenge on both the left and the right.

It has been eight years since the White House was lit with rainbow colors in celebration of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. Hailed as the enshrinement of a new consensus, the national recognition of same-sex marriage can also be understood as an event that accelerated polarization—leading some on the left to press for ever more changes, and some on the right to doubt the very possibility of liberal governance.

Not all of the effects of gay marriage are obvious, or were anticipated. In the runup to the national recognition of gay marriage, much attention was paid on both sides to such questions as whether children raised in same-sex households could thrive as did those raised by a mother and father. Important as they were, these discussions distracted from another way in which gay marriage would affect national life. Its recognition changed the makeup of the American elite by causing more conservative and religious actors to lose standing while left-wing activists gained power and prestige. For thoroughgoing progressives, there is nothing to lament in these developments. But for figures on the center-left, gay marriage has had an ambiguous legacy.

Gay marriage was the first great triumph of cancel culture. Sasha Issenberg, a historian of gay marriage, has observed that by deploying the novel weapons of “shaming and shunning,” activists “changed the economic terrain on which cultural conflict was waged.” One of the early breakthroughs occurred when eightmaps.com appeared online. The site used information gathered under financial disclosure laws to list the names and locations of people who had donated to California’s Proposition 8, a referendum that stated marriage could take place only between a man and a woman. Suddenly American citizens came under pressure for their political views—not just from their friends and families, but potentially from anyone with an internet connection. Some reported receiving envelopes with powder and death threats.

Donors to Proposition 8 were ­also targeted through their employers. Scott Eckern, the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, was forced to resign after his colleagues learned that he had backed the referendum. ­Brendan Eich was forced to step down as the CEO of Mozilla in 2014, when his past support of Proposition 8 was publicized.

Those who denounce cancel culture often speak as though it was hatched by radical activists and intolerant students, and see the contest as pitting liberal tolerance against illiberal denunciation. But as the history of gay marriage shows, the reality is more complicated. Cancel culture was pioneered in part by veteran political activists such as the lifelong Republican Fred Karger, who organized demonstrations outside commercial properties owned by backers of Proposition 8. And it arose in alliance with corporate power, as seen when corporations declared “capital strikes” by threatening to pull out of states that guaranteed religious freedom to those who rejected gay marriage.

In recent years, figures such as ­Andrew Sullivan have emerged as brave and eloquent critics of wokeness. They have opposed its particular injustices while exploring its deep origins. They have tied wokeness to the flowering of “illiberalism” on the left and the right. But they have failed to examine how these forms of illiberalism were encouraged by the campaign for a policy they support.

Gay marriage changed the character of important institutions in ways that its moderate supporters have not yet recognized. Through the operation of cancel culture, high-profile opponents of same-sex marriage were silenced, fired, or forced out of important institutions. In 2011, Paul Clement, the distinguished appellate lawyer and former solicitor general, was compelled to leave his law firm in order to continue his legal work on behalf of the Defense of Marriage Act, a case that his firm had been pressured to drop by the Human Rights Campaign. In 2015, Kelvin Cochran, the chief of the Atlanta fire department, was fired after writing a book that expressed opposition to homosexuality. In 2023, Jacob Kersey, a police officer in Georgia, was placed on leave after writing on Facebook: “God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church. That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.”

Eliminating religious and conservative voices from important institutions changed the character of those institutions. People who had previously been liberals or centrists suddenly found themselves the rightmost members of institutions in which progressive causes enjoyed uncontested prestige. One victim of this process is Sullivan himself, who in 2020 was compelled to leave New York magazine because its junior staff had declared him a bigot for his rejection of progressive ­pieties on race and gender identity. Across his career, Sullivan has been admirably willing to break with conventional views. He has also spoken movingly of the necessity of treating those with whom we disagree with liberality. But legal recognition of same-sex marriage has in important ways worked against his better instincts by limiting the range of acceptable views.

A popular cartoon shows a liberal man remaining in place as his fellow liberals move left—so far left that they come to view him as on the right. That shift in perspective is part of the story of the transformation of American institutions in recent years. The other, and essential, part is the deliberate elimination of outspoken right-wing figures, often with the support of moderates, centrists, and liberals. These establishment figures frequently share the principles of their progressive counterparts, while lacking their consistency. Once the vocal right-wingers are gone, liberals must either preserve their self-conception as centrists by moving to the left, or they must become de facto right-wingers in a context where being right-wing has personal and professional costs. Most choose to move with the times.

LGBT organizations played an important role in the construction of this new reality. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Committee for the Free World, a neoconservative think tank, closed its doors. Its director, Midge Decter, concluded that it had served its purpose and so should dissolve. Gay-rights organizations chose a different path after Obergefell. Rather than declare victory and go home, they moved on to the “next frontier”: transgender rights. Religious conservatives had already been largely eliminated from important American institutions, and so posed no internal obstacle to the pursuit of this goal. Feminists, who remained, mostly went along with the idea that men could become women. Those who chose to speak were labeled “TERFs” and targeted with the same arsenal of social, professional, and financial threats that had once been deployed against opponents of same-sex marriage.

When rainbow colors were ­projected onto the White House, the symbolism was broader than the celebration of any one Supreme Court decision. It was a sign that something fundamental had changed about the country, that an older order, symbolized by the stars and stripes, had given way to a new one that marched under the rainbow banner. This regime rejects neutrality as it seeks to inscribe its political priorities in American law. Religious freedom, due process, and equal treatment before the law must all yield before the imperative of inclusion. If the expression of certain views makes members of protected groups uncomfortable, those views must be silenced. If legal norms cause an insufficient number of cases of sexual harrassment or rape to result in conviction, the norms must be abandoned. Christianity famously introduced a distinction between the sacred and secular realm, differentiating the things that belong to God from those that belong to Caesar. The new American regime has collapsed this distinction, creating a system in which full citizenship is closely tied to right belief.

This new regime is not narrowly tied to the cause of gay rights. Its quest for inclusion is all-encompassing, and its priorities—including the gender transitioning of effeminate boys and tomboyish girls—at times contradict the preferences of gay activists. It seeks to make queerness normal, to move what has been marginal to the center of society. This is why it has not been content to rest with gay marriage, but has proceeded to insist on drag queen story hours in public libraries and sex education for third-graders. Beginning at the earliest ages, the weird must be made familiar.

These developments indicate the triumph of the more radical—and consistent—side of a long-running debate. Gay marriage has always had critics on the left, who regarded it as an attempt to entrap queer desire within a dead institution. Sullivan’s insight was that America would be quicker to normalize gayness if gayness aspired to ­normality—if “acceptance” meant allowing gays to participate in an utterly conventional institution. But this was an ambivalent aspiration. Sullivan himself warned against the “stifling model of heterosexual normality,” and argued that heterosexual relationships could stand to take on “something of the gay relationship’s necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality.” The queer would be normalized by the queering of the normal.

Obergefell was supposed to tame homosexuality, but it has precip­itated a regime of more radical queerness. From “Marriage is a human right” to “Marriage is deeply flawed and fundamentally violent”: The sexual left’s long-running dispute about the nature of marriage and its relation to gayness seems to be getting resolved in the direction of the marriage skeptics.

Progressive capture of institutions explains the emergence of a more populist and radical right. When conservative and religious people find themselves excluded from important institutions, they will naturally tend to acquire anti-institutional attitudes. When they see that ostensibly liberal institutions are arrayed against them, defining their beliefs as bigotry, they may turn against liberalism wholesale. Gay marriage has played an important role in this process. Legal protection of gay rights has entailed the penalization of traditional views of marriage: Any employer or employee who expresses opposition to homosexuality in stark or unsubtle terms can be regarded as creating a hostile work environment or engaging in hate speech. Institutional embrace of the rainbow banner—blazoned on police cars and flown at U.S. embassies—puts the lie to the claim that our regime upholds procedural neutrality or is equally open to every creed.

On the right, the success of gay marriage caused many to ask what the conservative movement was capable of conserving. The conservative movement had been characterized by its simultaneous commitments to moral traditionalism, laissez-faire economics, and liberal principles of argument. But after Obergefell, the business interests it had defended turned against the convictions of religious Americans. Likewise, the conservative belief in the importance of free speech and of transacting public business in the currency of reason and argument came to seem naive beside the cancellation tactics employed by the left. Perhaps an unstinting defense of corporate power is not finally conservative in its effects. Perhaps America, whatever it claims to be, is hardly a liberal democracy. These dark reflections led some in unexpected directions. A radicalization of the left prompted a radicalization of the right.

When the Supreme Court announced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the sky didn’t fall—as supporters of the decision wryly observed. But their claim that the legal recognition of same-sex marriage would change little about American life has become harder to sustain. Same-sex marriage may remain fixed in our law, but its placement there has caused much else to shift.

By Matthew Schmitz and published in First Things in April 2023 and can be found here.