Civil Commotion

Senator Tommy Tuberville’s maiden speech exemplifies the reason I think a biography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair might be a worthwhile effort.

Two groups that promote religious secularism are taking aim at Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville’s inaugural Senate floor speech in which the former college football coach advocated bringing “God and prayer back into schools.”

Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State issued statements Tuesday condemning the freshman senator for wrongly suggesting that prayer had been removed from U.S. public schools.

One wonders, of course, Is Tuberville a bona fide ignoramus who simply doesn’t know that prayer has never, in fact, been banned from school, or is he a cheap demagogue playing to the ignoramuses amongst his constituents?

I’m going to assume he’s an ignoramus bellowing in good faith, rather than a manipulative cynic exploiting ignoramuses.

Prayer has never been banned in school — never — and just a moment or two of thought reveals the truth of that; how could voluntary prayer by students be banned in school? How would Satanic administrators go about preventing a student from thinking, or whispering-to-self, a prayer? It’s ridiculous on its face.

What the Supreme Court proscribed is teacher-led prayer, which is an establishment of religion and therefore unlawful. If Tuberville, and evangelicals in general, had a lick of sense they’d be grateful for the Supreme Court decision, because it’s a safe bet that their children would encounter teachers with a wide range of religions, and nearly all parents would find at least a few of them noxious.

The humdrum truth is probably that the Pious resent the loss of cultural supremacy that the decision signifies.

The tweet itself is fairly ordinary, a commonplace sentiment; but do read the article she points to.

I was taught to be good, to obey, to submit and to be a role model for others. I was trained to love Jesus, serve others and put myself last. My internal voice — the one that whispers to you in the stillness — was something to be avoided, not trusted. Instead, I was to trust my family, my pastor, my church and those in leadership over me — but never myself. Listening to my self was dangerous and worldly. It was not an act of surrender. So I ignored it, I pushed it down, and I hoped it would go away.

[ … ]

Then came “The Trauma,” and with it, the inability to trust anyone or anything. I only trusted myself — but I was told that my self was bad, that there was something wrong with me, that I needed to be fixed, cured, healed, exorcised. I didn’t understand why, but I did all the things people told me I needed to do: I prayed, I fasted, I confessed to those in authority over me, I read my Bible, I trusted God and had faith.

I suppose that what reaches me in this piece is the emphasis upon … self, the insistence by Christianity that you are innately depraved, defective, foul. That is Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim, and it goes directly to who you are, rests upon nothing but the bald fact that you are a living human being. To be a live human is to be depraved, defective, foul — and there is nothing you can do about it except join the right club and keep your fingers crossed.

So Phooey! on all that empty talk about love-love-love. Christianity is degrading at the root, and has nothing on offer but degradation.

Apparently, “wokeness” is infiltrating college-level mathematics instruction.

There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math

In my position as a professor of mathematics at Princeton, I have witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.

I was wrong. Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.

Since I would have insisted that the Pythagorean Theorem, and the thousands of pages of calculations I made while working as an engineer, had nothing to do with race, I suppose I also thought STEM was immune to woke lunacy. After all, the race of the client, or facility users, never enters the calculation of the settlement of a spread foundation or the load-carrying capacity of a pile.

Whoops! It turns out that the mere use of mathematics is a symptom of … something, and it’s pretty awful.

The woke ideology, on the other hand, treats both science and mathematics as social constructs and condemns the way they are practiced, in research and teaching, as manifestations of white supremacy, euro-centrism, and post-colonialism.

Uh-huh. Woke theorists should be obliged to live downstream of an earth-fill dam designed without the use of math — post-colonial, or euro-centric, or otherwise — I’m thinking.

The Pious are up in arms today on news that Bethany Christian Services, a major adoption agency headquartered in Michigan, will begin serving LGBTQ couples seeking to adopt.

Albert Mohler is typical:

The “Pivot” Away from Biblical Christianity
Bethany Christian Services Announces It Will Not Hold to Biblical Definition of Marriage

[ … ]

They have been established explicitly by Christians on Christian grounds and Christian commitment driven by Christian law. But now we’re seeing a situation in which Christians are being told, “You have to forfeit your Christian doctrine, your Christian biblical commitment, even your Christian understanding of the gospel if you’re going to continue in this childcare enterprise.”

Mohler is being at least disingenuous here, if not outright dishonest. Look at their IRS-990 forms, here.

The majority of Bethany’s money comes from the public sector, from tax revenue contributed by, among others — What do you know? — gay and transgender people. In other words, gay and transgender people were obliged to subsidize discrimination against themselves.

Almost certainly, somebody noticed, complained, threatened a lawsuit — and Bethany had to either begin treating LGBTQs equitably or lose funding. Good. Mohler presents this as “moral revolution,” but what we’re really talking about here is the deserved, long-overdue death of a superstition.

As for the complaint that he is now subsidizing a public policy he doesn’t like, perhaps he and the like-minded can find solace in the fact that, unlike gays, he won’t be injured by that policy.