One of the foremost insights of conservatism is that an old not-so-good is almost always preferable to a brand-new unknown. It is not that conservatism fears change, for some changes can be and are good; it is that change, especially untested, massive change, invariably invokes the Law of Unintended Consequences. We respect the wisdom of our forbears -- not any one, or any one group, but the totality reaching back in time -- because they tried, and experimented with, and suffered from, all of the essential conditions of humanity, and found ways to cope. Put more bluntly: We don't need to re-eat arsenic every day to find out that it kills us, because many stupid people in the past did this, and in their deaths, taught us not to eat the dully shiny metal.

And that is why I oppose gay marriage, and why every conservative should do so.

Never before has a civilization tried this little feat: Ordering marriage as anything other than a male-female combination. Oh, we've tried all sorts of variants on male-female, most of which are classic polygamy; but those failed, time and again.

We're looking to break new ground here, kids. And that's rarely a good thing where the human condition is concerned. Just because the arsenic is baked in attractive loaves of soft dough, doesn't mean it won't finish you off just the same.

So let's take a look at some of the fallout of this new wave of "progressive" thinking.

Honorable men like Ben Domenech and William Sulik are rightly upset that their Church is running face-first off a cliff. And I think we can safely say that John Derbyshire is not in his happy place:

This is a dreadful event, a triumph for the forces of death over the forces of life. Robinson cheerfully acknowledges that he is an active homosexual. The Bible is perfectly clear that homosexual acts are sinful. Our Lord gave sinners strict and clear instructions: stop sinning, and repent your past sins. Robinson is in brazen violation of fundamental Christian doctrine. Nobody has to be a Christian; but if you are going to call yourself one, you should follow the rules. Further, Robinson abandoned two little girls in order to indulge his sexual urges. [...]

That he could become a bishop in my church sickens and disgusts me. We can show tolerance and Christian obligation towards deviant minorities without handing them the keys to the house, can't we? Apparently not, not today, not in America. For shame! For shame!

And why should he be? "Progressives" in his Church have tossed 2,000 years of Christianity out the window, calling it bigotry.

Beware anyone who says that the received wisdom of 2,000 years is evil.

The Biblical injunctions on this are clear; what's at least as clear is that never in the history of orthodox Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam) has boys-playing-with-boys been licit. Never. Never has marriage been defined as anything other than a male-female relationship. And yet a nominally Christian Church has tossed all of that out the window.

Next up: "Blessings" for same-sex unions. (Update since I started writing this: Apparently, this is half a fait accompli.)

Wanna talk the law of unintended consequences? It is a common Christian prayer that the various Churches should some day reunite, for it is wrong that the Bride of Christ be as injured as she is. Admittedly, when most folks (and I am no exception) say this prayer, it is with the assumption that of course their Church is the template upon which reunion will happen. Reunion is only desirable if everything vital is not lost in the process. The Episcopal Church just cut itself off from, not only the rest of the Anglican Communion, but also the catholic (small and large C) Church. In other words, if you thought Papal infallibility was the big hangup to eventual reunion, think again.

(Yes, I know, the Anglicans exist because of a schism. Fine. But that's neither a good reason to cheer a large chunk of them heading off into an even graver error, nor an excuse for lack of mercy and pity as we pray for a wounded part of the Christian Church.)

And that's just one of the immediate, please-God-not-iterative effects. It makes my point, though: The reason conservatism is a superior outlook is that we don't proceed in a ready, FIRE!, aim sequence. Move slowly, and you're not too likely to trip over your own feet.

I don't care about the Supreme Court's sweet-mystery-of-life garbage. I don't care that an elite class, of which I'm a member, has informed the plebes that, really, they should simply submit to the superior wisdom of their unelected masters. (On a related note: While I recognize the value of having a counter-democratic institution in our Government, I have to object to much of its work: They are apparently using a copy of the Constitution etched with blackbody ink on radioactive elastic.) I do care that two tiny segments of the population (lawyers and gays) are pushing us to experiment in a way that we've never dared before. One insignificantly small portion, the Federal judiciary, whose whole job is to stop radical change, is leading the way. Any "conservative" who cheers this (or, despicably, compares any of this to slavery or Jim Crow) is not worthy of the name -- not for the effect (which might be laudatory and might be disastrous) -- but for the means of achieving it.

(This is, incidentally, for all of his invocations of "true conservatives," and Michael Oakeshott, why Andrew Sullivan is not now and never has been a conservative. If you are willing to cast aside thousands of years of wisdom and thought, for your own gratification, you are many things, including limitedly rational; you are not a conservative.

This, incidentally, is why he's not Catholic: Cheering a pro-choicebaby murder candidate, specifically for being in favor of slaughtering infants, is no more Catholic than Holocaust denial.

Then again, I suspect that all of his affection for the pageantry and emotionalism of Catholicism (as opposed to, you know, the faith and the tradition) won't hold him there any longer.)

Look, here's the deal. Where gay marriage is concerned, it's entirely possible that we'll all join hands and skip happily into a bright, shining Eschaton. It's possible that there will be no social consequences of any sort.

It's just that I'm not betting on it.

Hey -- does anyone know anything about Word-of-Mouth.Org? Someone is apparently doing a search for information on me, and two someones apparently know something about me (and they'll let me investigate this invasion of privacy for only $20!). I think WOM might be engaging in actionable behavior, but I'd like to know more about them before I look more closely at that.

Oh, and: Anyone who wants to know about me can just email me. I'm a pretty charming fellow.

At some point, you become a self parody.

Richardson should be ashamed of himself. Didn't he take an oath to honor the law?

I've been privy to some damned good speeches lately, but I think this might be one of the best I've seen in a while. I love the opening: "Good afternoon, or, as John Kerry might say: 'Bonjour!'"

My favorite bit? (Hard call.)

When criticized for these kinds of comments, the Democrats said we were questioning their patriotism.

Not so!

The Democrats' problem is not a lack of patriotism. It's a lack of seriousness.

They don't hate their country, they just refuse to lead it.

I will never call the Democrat Party unpatriotic, but I will call their current leadership unfit to face the serious challenges of the 21st century. [...]

Bob Graham – a respected former governor and chairman of the intelligence committee – is calling for the president's impeachment.

John Edwards – a so-called moderate – compares the president to a dangerous socialist.

And Dennis Kucinich – a long-time member of Congress – now calls for legislation – I love this – to ban “mind control” weapons in outer space.

These ideas aren't unpatriotic… they're just weird.

It makes you wonder if at their next presidential debate, the Democrats are all going to show up wearing aluminum-foil helmets to protect their brain waves from the mother ship!

People who believe such things cannot be trusted with national leadership, period.

The ending is nothing short of incredible.

To everyone who has shown up recently: Thank you, and stop running through your bookmarks.

I've been down and out for a little while, and I will be for a little while longer. I did want to share a few observations:

(1) The probability, on any given 80s Radio station, at any given time, that White Wedding will play, approaches 1 as time approaches the Twelve O'Clock Rock Block or Noon Lunch Hour or its equivalent.

(2) I begin to see, from the other side, why so many people have so much aversion to plaintiffs' lawyers. Apparently, not everyone is as ethically rigorous as I or my old firm.

(3) The lack of directions on a can of shaving cream for "What to Do When This Gets in Your Eye," is either an indication that the stuff is safe if inserted thus, or no one at Gilette thinks that anyone could be stupid and clumsy enough to get it in their eyes.

(4) They're wrong.

(5) 867-5309.

(6) Stress is a constant. Reduce it in one area, and, obeying Le Chatelier's Principle, it will appear somewhere else.

Just add to the bad news. Please.

Hello to my readers:

You'll note a dearth of posts lately. I can't even explain what's up with Blogger, but I can neither check (nor frequently edit) my page, nor, for example, Paul Cella's. Inserting html tags into this statement will cause my input page to crash. Sorry.

Come back after the weekend; I should be able to do something then.

Best:

T.

In what can only be called an interesting turn of events, my template is now all ASCII text.

Sh**.

I know I said I wouldn't post today, and this is the only one, but:

(1) He's right, but I already grilled up a steak for that;

(2) He's right, too, that I shouldn't rejoice in others' toasty time in Asmodeus's House of Barbed Sodomy and Dismemberment, and I'd like to say I don't, and that I was only explicitly talking about death, not about the consequence thereof, but I don't want to compund my sin with lying on top of it;

(2a) I should note that the linked information in that post is correct insofar as a Lexis-Nexis search shows. Ms. Child, for example, only does live cooking at Smith College and Planned Murder events. However, I could be mistaken; if I am, I invite corrections.

and

(3) 62.13018% - Extreme Geek. I know what THAC0 is. And I can calculate it -- in my head, with an AC of -14, a fighter of 15th level wearing a girdle of Storm Giant Strength, and a long sword +1, +6 against the creature with the AC -14. Nuff said.

Happy Fourth, all.

Proof #489,254,121 that I'm going to Hell:

Aw.

I will not be posting tomorrow; therefore, Happy Fourth of July, folks.

God Bless America.

Dammit: Dammit, dammit, dammit, DAMMIT: That SOB Rick Reilly wrote something worth reading.

Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?

Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?

Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."

So why? Why did the 24-year-old Kansas City Chief try to save three boys he didn't know with a skill he didn't have?

He'd been sitting in the cool shade of a tree on a tar-bubbling afternoon at Chennault Park, a public recreation area in Monroe, La., when he heard voices calling, "Help! Help!" He popped up like a Bobo doll and sprinted toward the pit.

Every day from this day forward, I pray to God that I can be such a man. Most of us like to think we'd be like Delaney, or the men who raced into those burning towers without a second thought; if we're honest, few of us are.

RIP, Mr. Delaney.

Via Orrin Judd.

And, on a related note, Ramesh Ponnuru rocks:

If you share Scalia's view of such decisions as Casey, Romer, Dickerson, Stenberg, Lawrence, et al, then it is altogether rational to deploy a rhetoric that exposes the essential fraudulence of the Court's claim to be interpreting the Constitution. (One assumes that the justices themselves are part of the audience to which he means to expose it.) What Justice Scalia is trying to do, in other words, is to demystify the Court; to suggest that it is engaged in exercises of raw judicial power. (Part of that power consists of our ignorance of the fact.)

Justice Scalia is not alone in seeing things this way. From time to time, the liberal justices accuse conservative majorities of raw politics as well, with heated rhetoric. (Pick a federalism case and read the dissents.) And Scalia's aspersions against the legitimacy of the Court's "constitutional law" reflect a half-century of conservative rhetoric on the judiciary. That rhetoric still underlies the Republican party's position. Every Republican senator who says he wants a judge who will "apply" rather than "make" the law is implicitly accusing some judges of exceeding their legitimate powers.

To reject the Broder-Sullivan critique of Justice Scalia, in short, is to begin to see something important about modern judicial politics — something to which the good justice is trying to awaken us.

Someday, if I eat all my veggies and pray very hard, I might be that good a writer. Probably not, but I can dream, can't I?

Y'know, Andrew Sullivan was off and racing the other day on Constitutional law, a subject about which he knows little, and Bill Pryor and Nino Scalia, subjects about which he apparently knows less. I thought about saying something; then Feddie said it better here and here and, indeed, in other spots too.

Helluva blog, that one.

Blogging promises to be light the next week or two; those who know why, will know why, and the rest of humanity will do what it usually does and disregard this blog.

Anyway, before I sorta go, a brief note to my wife on why it would be bad for me to seek electoral office, especially as I am now:

Katherine Hepburn is dead, and I owe myself a pizza.

You see, it is my habit to order a pizza in celebration whenever an ardent fan of slaughtering infants in utero kicks the bucket. Thurgood Marshall did some serious good in his time, but his me-tooism to Brennan with Roe and the descendent decisions, to my mind, voided all the good he did (hint: you advocate murderering one group of people, it overwhelms helping free another). So -- especially after all of his unseemly Reagan-bashing, I felt Domino's was in order.

And when Blackmun died, let's just say I was stuffed for a day, and the local Pizza Hut delivery guy was significantly richer. Teddy Kennedy's death in a drunken orgy in a van at the bottom of a cold New England river will bring the same result.

So, in tribute to an old bitch who felt life was just too good a thing to share with millions of babies, I'm thinking Godfather's some time this week.

Oh, and one thing: Don't hand me that "she just supported Planned Parenthood for the birth control" crap. Putting every other argument to the side, if that's what she really wanted, she could've lobbied for Merck.

Talk about this.

Ben Domenech marvels that John McCain didn't mention Bush in his paean to John Kerry. I marvel that he didn't mention himself more.

Damn, but this is funny.

Oh, and because the whole sodomy case-thing reminded me about this:

Salus populi suprema lex, contrary to Glenn Reynolds and Dave Kopel is:

(1) Never rendered as salus populi est suprema lex, because, for those of us who made it past the first six weeks of Latin I in high school, it is apparent that in a declarative statement such as this, the third person form of esse finishes the sentence, and, more importantly, the Latin saying does not include a verb, sort of like Senatus populusque Romanum (which is nonetheless a perfectly acceptable statement). It's called "idiom."

(2) Not simply concerned with the people's bodily or spiritual or psychic health. It's an overall measure; it's frequently cited in commentaries as a justification for the State's right to go to war. Try reading an elementary primer on Roman Law. (The best translation is The welfare of the people is the highest Law. Reading salus as health as in heart disease is a very elementary error.)

(3) A vital component of Roman, then Canon-derived, then Medieval European, then Common- and Civil-law rules of law. To pretend that the states of our system never legislated on public health until the late nineteenth century -- as Kopel and Reynolds do -- is sophistic, at best.

(4) A very good encapsulation of what a government is for. Libertoids have forgotten this, but the reason we give up any of our liberties to our government is three-fold: (a) We need collective security. (b) We have a hell of a collective action problem, especially in times of stress. (c) Governments of necessity seek to preserve the physical integrities of their subjects, in war and in social interaction.

I stopped reading, and started crying, when I read this.

I want to be rich.