The crazymaking left and more

• From Mark Steyn: Big fat Greeks, and weddings. The quotable Kathy Shaidle: The same people who told us 30 years ago that “marriage is just a stupid piece of paper” now insist that it’s a “human right.” The same people who told us that “a flag is just a meaningless piece of material” now want certain flags banned and others raised — or else. The same people who say you can’t change who you want to f*ck tell us you CAN change the bits you f*ck them with. The same people who said “Hey, if you don’t like it, change the channel” now run #StopRush and try to ban Ann Coulter et al. from campuses. The same people who used to tell us to “lighten up” and “learn to take a joke” now fire people who make them. LITERALLY the same people. If we’re “crazy,” they made us that way. Here's when, how, and why the left seemed to change. As I say, I woke up in a different country in 1973, when the Sixties captured Middle America. (Roe v. Wade, and real wages stopped rising; the start of a decline.) At first they assaulted the culture by shocking us: talking about homosexuality, for example, if only to make fun of it. Ditto Hef and the wannabe swingers (before the Sixties, just naughtiness, but pseudo-intellectual Hef pushed the Sixties, naturally): down with bourgeois morality. (Meanwhile, the Soviets had figured out virtue is good for society and actually promoted it at home. Vice was to weaken the enemy.) Then once we'd been desensitized, malleable, the left seemed to 180 to a moralistic phase (after all, it's a Christian heresy), accusations of "microaggressions," shaming, and all.
• Huw Richardson on the whole American marriage mess. I like Huw because he doesn't confuse his likes including any sins with Christianity anymore. "I'm Orthodox. I'm gay. But don't call me a gay Orthodox. Maybe I'm wrong." Anyway, his take in a nutshell, if I understand him rightly: "Traditional marriage IS marriage; the church is right but you right-wingers are idiots, and I'll explain how." The kind of thing I'd cook up if I were trying to sound cool.
• New Zealander Black Poison Soul repeats the smart line: a tiny minority didn't cause this; we paved the way by buying into Marriage 2.0, turning away from the church's teaching on matrimony.
• One of the remaining taboos. Which in the left's earlier stages almost wasn't a taboo. Back in Roman Polanski's partying days, the newly victorious Sixties left was ALMOST OK with sex with kids. When good conservative Catholics reported Fr. Weirdo to Bishop Happening, they were told to mind their own business.
• Do we preach Orthodoxy or Christ? Classic, repeated by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, not necessarily about Orthodoxy (of course if all it did was preach Orthodoxy, I wouldn't post it); something Catholics can relate to. Protestants often accuse us of worshipping the church instead of Christ, since unlike them we believe he founded a visible church to speak through until he returns. As a good friend says, false religion is always about self first, and as a kindly priest taught me 30 years ago, every act is aimed at an apparent good, so even the church's trappings, including your ancestral culture, all good things, can become idols. As I like to say, if I'm as Christ-centered as a good Missouri Synod Lutheran (they left the church but think they ARE the church, much like our estranged Eastern brethren), I'm doing it right. But the place set up to do it is the church.
• Bob Wallace: The Bible is for adults.
• The domestic church. Yes, hooray for folk Roman Catholicism. But, Diane, lay Orthodoxy, the real, ethnic kind, is very much folk religion too (you know my line: Byzantium's mostly estranged Catholics), from services for the dead to lighting candles at your favorite icons to saint's-day festivals to asking St. Panteleimon for healing. Not at all what some call monkabees.
• More from Kathy Shaidle: The orations of Monica Lewinsky. She is still unmarried and childless, and now, at 41, her chances of altering her status drop daily. By all accounts, such things matter to her, as does the abortion she had just before her fling with the Commander in Chief. Such wrong thoughts are, of course, anathema to the older feminists whose orders — have a career, screw like a man — Monica dutifully followed in her early 20s. And when obeying those orders ruined her life, who turned on her and, yes, “slut-shamed” her? Those very same feminists on the left, of course. ...the real enemy still isn’t obvious to Monica at all. In this and similar speeches, she utters all the usual progressive blather about “LGBT” and “raising awareness” and “compassion.” I’m sure she’ll die (although not by her own hand, God forbid) a registered Democrat.
• New horizons on the dissection of deviance. A theory behind male homosexuality, and: ever wonder why and how girls are slightly more amenable to homosexual experimentation? And why most such snap out of it by their 30s? And why some straight men like girl-on-girl fantasies and some straight women like "slash" literary porn?