Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

America in C Major

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

October 20, 2014

I do understand there has been some debate over whether America was once a Christian nation. But whether it was or no — and I believe it was — there should be no debate among Christians over whether it was a normal one. Defenders and revolutionaries alike insist that those norms be defended, or smashed, as it suits them, but everybody agrees that the norms were actually there. Twenty years ago, same sex mirage was unthinkable. Now you are an enemy of all mankind if you call the mirage for what it is — a shimmer in the air over the desert sands — instead of what everyone is demanding you call it, which is something that rhymes with carriage. But it also rhymes with disparage, which brings me to my theme.

Rejected New Yorker Cover

. . . . But whatever the mix was in helping to establish what used to be normal, I want to insist cannot be reattained apart from a reformation and revival, the kind which impels us to call on the name of Jesus Christ. Not only do I believe this must happen, or we are all lost, but I also believe that we will not be lost. This will happen. It is happening now.


In the meantime we have to deal with the secularist overreach. The fact that they must overreach is to be expected because their entire worldview is based on an inability to say no to their lusts — and this libido dominandi is no different on this score than the other kind of lust.

So, for the present, now that we are no longer in the grip of H8, water is commanded to flow uphill, by order of the Supreme Court, and triangles must have four corners, by order of Congress. On top of that, the president has recently signed an executive order determining that ham and cheese sandwiches may no longer contain ham, or cheese for that matter, and that anyone who, from the date of the issuance of this executive order, makes a ham and cheese sandwich with any ham or cheese in it will be fined five thousand dollars, and remanded to sensitivity training, where trained bureaucrats will pull out his toenails as a way to teach him not to be so hurtful.

In other words, ordinary norms of the sort that would get you yawned at in the Eisenhower years are now officially transgressive. This is why I am thought to be such a bad boy. I continue to maintain that the sky is an azure blue, and that grass is emerald green in the springtime, and so it has happened that reading this blog is something of a guilty pleasure among establishment conservatives. They are not in a real position to say that the sky is blue — bad career move — but they do enjoy watching someone else be naughty.

The most outrageous thing someone can do in our Bosch exhibit version of Night at the Museum is part his hair on the left side, comb it carefully, and smile for the camera — with a cute little blonde wife by his side, and four well-scrubbed and well-loved children, also with their hair combed properly. If those children have also had their noses wiped, this is a clear indication that we need to work even harder to teach our people that hate is not a family value, and that the patriarchy could clearly use a little more smashing.

It is now avant garde jazz played with the fists, but America used to play its songs in C Major. And for those of you who think this is some sort of racist dog whistle for referring to the good old days when it was “all white keys,” we might as well get to that issue now.

A wedding chapel in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, The Hitching Post, run by a man and wife team, each of them an ordained minister, has been informed that they could face jail time or fines if they refuse — as they intend to refuse — to perform same sex mirages. Now let’s leave out of this the fact that they are standing for biblical values when she is ordained to the ministry contrary to biblical teaching. That kind of inconsistency was simply placed in this story by an all-loving God to help us keep laughing as we keep our eye on the central point.

Now the argument is that they will be forced by the state to perform same sex mirages in their role as businessmen, and not in their role as ministers. Because this is an “open to the public” thing, like a restaurant, they must serve whoever walks through the door. Simple pimple, right? Well, not exactly. In the first place, I see no reason why they should be forced to perform same sex mirages any more than our local La Casa Lopez should be forced to serve up Chinese, however much an urgent patron wants him some almond chicken. Their defense would run along the lines of “we’re a Mexican restaurant. We don’t serve Chinese food. We don’t know how to make Chinese food.”

So this is where appeal will be made to the great advances accomplished by the Civil Rights movement back in the sixties. Back in the day, whites could refuse to serve blacks in their restaurants, and it wasn’t that long ago. It was that way in the town where I grew up, and who wants to return to those days? The claim is made that “you opponents of same sex mirage want to return us to those days.” This particular point is the central slippery trick in this whole mess.

Before proceeding further, I do want to say that we should be far better masters of the distinction between sins and crimes before we go about trying to outlaw sins. Because we tried to eliminate the sin of racial prejudice in public spaces without grasping that essential distinction, we have ended up by mandating the commission of sin in public spaces. Essaying to stamp out one sin we have made another sin, one that is far worse, mandatory. Let me go over that again. We have outlawed one sin, and the cost of doing it is that we have made another sin compulsory. People who do that shouldn’t be in charge of things.

Run this out. Suppose The Hitching Post was owned by a couple that had sincere religious convictions against miscegenation. This would mean that they would want the right to refuse to perform a ceremony between a black man and a white woman. Now I take it as a given that such a refusal on their part would be sinful. But should it be illegal?

And even if it should be illegal, how does it follow that if the state can make someone quit being sinful that this somehow authorizes the state to make people start being sinful?

So this is the point where our pretended moral arbiters try to retreat into moral relativism — they say that we use terms like “sin” and we quote Bible verses and all, but not everyone has the same understanding of morality. Who is to say what sins are? Who is to tell us the difference between right and wrong? This is a pluralistic society, and we should know that we cannot impose our own moral codes on others who do not share them. Don’t you know anything, rube? Well, okay, but if we can’t impose a particular morality on people who don’t share that morality, then why did you impose your morality on the bigoted restaurant owner? This is not a difficult question to understand, and I am willing to wait for an answer. By what standard are you making your moral decisions, and why should they be obligatory for others who do not share your devotion to those standards?

The anti-miscegenists had a really tenuous case from the Bible. They wanted to maintain set racial boundaries because, said they, God had appointed the boundaries of our habitation (Acts 17:26). That is some thin soup cultural application, right there. And to the extent that the Scriptures speaks of interracial marriage directly, it was on the occasion of Moses having married an Ethiopian woman (Num. 12:1). The only person in that story who was really white was Miriam, who, when she objected to the marriage, was struck with leprosy. The Lord checked her privilege. In short, the opponents of miscegenation had a cluster of petty bigotries covered over with the thin veneer of one Bible verse that did not say what they claimed it did.

Sodomy, on the other hand, is spoken of throughout the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and always in a way that condemns the practice as vile, the necessary end result of a refusal to honor God as God. God destroyed cities with fire from Heaven over this evil (Gen. 19:24), He says using a man as though he were a woman is an abomination (Lev. 18:22), He excludes unrepentant practitioners from salvation over it (1 Cor. 6:9), and He says that those who live like this receive in their own bodies the due penalty of their sin (Rom. 1:27).

If the Scriptures had prohibited interracial marriage with the same kind of clarity, that particular battle would still be going on. The opponents of interracial marriage only climbed down because they were defending a sinful position and they knew it. They had no real scriptural case, and they knew it.

But it is completely different now. Back then the anti-miscegenists had a bad conscience; the bad conscience now is with the soft-on-sodomy crowd. Those Christians who are climbing down today, in the midst of this current battle, are the ones whose eyes are shifting back and forth, right along with their exegetical core values. The anti-miscegenist Christians were shamed into abandoning a stupid scriptural argument. The evolving Christians, who are not afraid of what the Holy Spirit in our generation calls “lots of cool, new stuff,” are the ones who are being shamed into a stupid scriptural argument. And call me old-fashioned, but I still maintain there is a critical difference between climbing out of stupid and climbing into it.

So let us distinguish our current crop Vichy Christians from the fight-on-the-beaches, fight-in-the-fields-and-streets, fight-on-the-landing-ground Christians. The worst thing about pragmatic accommodations is that they don’t work, and the best thing about principled lost-cause stands is that they do.

The Bible speaks on this subject with such clarity that the only way this current homo-overreach can conclude is by trying to take our Bibles away. As long as we have our Bibles, their contentions will be unable to get the clown face paint off. But we live in an era that has difficulty in understanding when an argument is ad absurdum, and so I apologize for bringing it up. No need to take our Bibles. Really.