FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

My favorite AC/DC tune is "Back in Business," but there's no good video of it.

This'll do, though. What's your favorite? It's all streaming now!

•     Republican pundits (or should we say RINO elitists?) are panicking over Donald Trump's strong showing in GOP polls. Jim Geraghty attempts, unqualified as he is, to talk sense to his fellow wingnuts in a post called "Do Trump and His Fans Even Want to Persuade Others?" (something I ask about conservatives generally all the time):

I realize that if you’re a Trump fan right now, energized by his in-your-face combativeness with the media and anyone who disagrees with him... 

But let’s take Stephen Covey’s advice to “begin with the end in mind” — presumably that is conservative governance — and recognize that to achieve that, we need a Republican president. And as much as Trump may be rising in the polls of the GOP primary... let’s take a look at his numbers head-to-head against Hillary Clinton: 

CNN: Clinton 59 percent, Trump 35.

Fox News: Clinton 51 percent, Trump 34. 

Quinnipiac: Clinton 50 percent, Trump 32.

Some of you will see the problem right off. Wait for it...

(One caveat: That CNN poll had Hillary ahead of Rubio by 16, Walker by 17, and Bush by 13, so perhaps we can argue that it was a Democrat-heavy sample...

A Democrat-heavy sample! Or "perhaps we can argue" that Clinton is a revered name in American politics and the Republicans are running approximately 239 feebs, flakes, and nincompoops led by a racist blowhard clown. Wait, though, Geraghty's not finished:

...Most polls have these candidates trailing by single digits or tied with Hillary.)

Geraghty provides zero links to support this assertion, so I looked up keywords in Google News and got some results such as this from the Washington Examiner:

Ted Cruz is winning at Twitter, tied with Hillary Clinton on Facebook

If only elections were totes social media LOL!  Also, that was from December of last year.  Much more recent (June 26) was this:

Poll: Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Statistically Tied With Hillary Clinton In New Hampshire

Well, now it makes sense!

•     Jesus-con Alan Jacobs has a long more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger thing at The American Conservative about how all us gay marriageists and non-fans of the Confederacy are not merely expressing opinions he does not share, but actively trying to shut down debate with our Twitter feeds and our mean looks -- which schtick, I'm sure you've noticed, is a popular favorite among the brethren these days. "Survey and critique others, lest you make yourself subject to surveillance and critique," Jacobs characterizes his opponents. "And use the proper Hashtags of Solidarity, or you might end up like that guy who was the first to stop applauding Stalin’s speech." He himself, of course, is just trying to keep free discourse alive -- his post's called "The Value of Disagreement," see?  The first tell that this is bullshit is an opening quote from a particularly passive-aggressive post by P-A Queen Mollie Hemingway. But it's even more instructive to get in the Wayback Machine and read Jacobs' 2003 article called "The War in Quotes: Journalists who don't like the war -- and like thinking even less -- have a little trick they use to tell us how they really feel." There, Jacobs calls rightblogger whipping-boy Robert Fisk "the Krusty the Clown of journalism," and notes that when referring to the invasion of Iraq Fisk put quotes around "liberators" and "liberation," which seems to me like basic hygeine for handling government propaganda, but which Jacobs calls "punctuational Tourette's Syndrome." Jacobs also complains that the New York Times and other peace creeps are doing the same thing:

...the Times apparently can't bear under any circumstances to use that term, in the context of the Iraq war at least, without scare quotes. Thus my description of this practice as a tic or as disease: After a while it kicks in automatically, and one wonders what habitual users could do to keep it from taking over their minds.

Twelve years later, Iraq is wreckage and everyone knows the idea that we "liberated" it was always a joke -- and Jacobs, then so diligent about what he considered journalists' inappropriate use of quote marks, is now telling us that liberals are the real language cops.

SILENT UPON PEAK WINGNUT IN DERP-IEN.

Kevin D. Williamson says you lieberals are Ikea-racist:

The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint.

("At gunpoint" is apparently Williamson's term for something lawful he doesn't approve of -- e.g. "people who object to abortion will be forced at gunpoint to pay for them" -- you know, kind of like when you were mad at your Mom and called her Hitler.)

Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy. 

In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness. American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.

Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.” 

The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.” 

Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”...

You'll notice I haven't been inserting comments on this as I usually do. That's because I don't know what to say. I've just been sitting here slack-jawed, marveling at the insanity of the thing. To suggest that liberals champion social-welfare ideas from Scandinavia because they don't want to be associated with unpopular South and Central American dictatorships is just a more advanced version of their usual slurs -- but to add that this makes liberals white supremacists is so crazy that I'm convinced I was right about these guys and they've lost their collective minds.

And I haven't even got to the really hot parts:

When Barack Obama wants some solar-energy subsidies to pay off his crony-capitalist backers, he doesn’t rebuke the Canadians, but those damned dirty brown people in the Middle East. (Middle Eastern people seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity: It used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.)

Who is this written for? Whom is it meant to convince? It's impossible to imagine anyone who isn't already infected reading it and saying, "He's right -- universal health care is racist!"

UPDATE. Comments are a joy. I appreciate the contributors who sought to characterize Williamson's very-fabric-of-space-and-time-rupturing stupid ("the HyperDerp" -- derelict; "a fragmentation grenade of stupid" -- Al Swearingen), but I must give a special No-Prize to LookWhosInTheFreezer for this:

Shorter Williamson: You liberals all wanna turn America into Denmark, we conservatives want to turn it into Somalia. Now who's the real racist?!!

GET ME REWRITE!

I haven't been paying proper attention to Acculturated, that most enjoyable culture-war make-work project, so thanks to alicublog commenter mortimer2000 for alerting me to a new column there by Mark Judge (known as Mark Gauvreau Judge in an earlier incarnation). It's called "'Manhattan': Remembering a Near-Great, Near-Conservative Film." Get a load:

Manhattan was famously shot in glorious black and white by Gordon Willis, who passed away in March. Manhattan is also, at least at times, a conservative film. This sounds absurd about a Woody Allen film, but it’s useful to remember that Allen has always had a lot of criticism for the cultural revolution of the 1960s. His films often poke fun at drugs, radicals, rock and roll, and the movie industry. Allen’s obsession with sex and younger—much younger—women has often obscured this fact. But without it, Allen could write for National Review.

Well, he could still serve as president of Hillsdale College.

Anyway: the fact that Woody Allen's character Isaac has the hots for the Diane Keaton character Wilkie, even though she believes in God and talks smack about Norman Mailer, proves to Judge that "he’s a New York liberal with a conscience that tells him that Wilkie may have a point," because there's no bigger turn-on than philosophical differences, look at James Carville and Mary Matalin, preferably not before lunch. Also, Isaac is mad at his lesbian ex-wife -- which has to be a moral imperative, because it can't possibly be the kind of psychological reaction you'd expect Woody Allen to have to a woman who left him for a woman -- and also has character-building tips for his underage girlfriend:

Isaac criticizes his young girlfriend Tracy for being raised in the Sixties.

I hope you've learned your lesson, young lady! Next time pick a responsible decade to be born in.

“You were brought up on drugs and television and the pill.” He then adds that he believes “people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.” Then, disgusted with the drug-taking hippies who produce his show, Isaac quits. This is not a member of the Weather Underground.

No, this is typical Woody Allen, a crabby guy who likes to lecture his friends about God and death -- and in the end gets his comeuppance from, surprise, the teenage girlfriend, which shows at least a little self-awareness on his part. In Judge's view, though, "Manhattan sets up a great premise and then fails to deliver" and guess what, it doesn't have to do with anything as puny as art:

Keaton’s Mary Wilkie arrives as an intellectual equal to challenge Allen’s assumptions. Then, just as suddenly, she and Isaac fall in love and she loses all of her edge. She vacillates when she gets involved with a married man, Isaac’s best friend Yale. Where she was once fearlessly direct, she becomes dithering and morally uncertain. It’s fine to have characters who have self-doubt, in fact it makes for a more compelling film—and a fresh alternative to so-called Christian and conservative films, which give us square-jawed protagonists who get all their answers from God.

Allen will be relieved to hear he avoided this pitfall.

But you don’t establish a powerhouse female character who dismisses liberal journalists as “schmucks... mired in Thirties radicalism,” and two scenes later have her almost begging Woody Allen for a date.

I have asked this many times but: Has Judge ever met a real person? Or at least seen a Whit Stillman picture? Eventually Judge tells us how he would have made Manhattan:

How different and better Manhattan might have been had Allen just gone with the initial premise of the script: a middle-aged TV writer who is uncomfortable with the Cultural Revolution meets a sharp journalist who validates his doubts. They don’t become born-again Christians, but they do navigate their way to a better moral place. He stops dating teenagers, and she stops fooling around with a married man.

I'm on the edge of my seat! You won't be able to sell tickets fast enough! Maybe for the foreign markets, though, in the third act we should have them go on vacation to the Grand Canyon, and have one of those humorous encounters with wildlife Allen's so good at.

Next week at Acculturated: "Citizen Kane -- So much better without the class politics."

UPDATE. Comments are already fun! Gromet:

Chapter one: He adored Tulsa. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that He romanticized it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of Toby Keith...

I'M ONLY ONE MAN.

Was it really just 10 days ago that National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, attempting to show his range by playing the role of conciliator, claimed that the wiser conservatives understood that the Obergefell "decision is now the law and that it is not going to change" and that sweet reason would prevail? Today at The Federalist, a team effort by Ben Domenech and Robert Tracinski:

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage -- the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists -- some were...

Ah, some were! Be advised Domenech and Tracinski supply no links to support the following assertions, which should give you some idea of how substantial they are:

....already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs. We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides...

Let's pause here a moment to note that, on that last bit, Domenech and Tracinski are apparently talking about the Harrisburg Patriot-News' decision to treat letters to the editor and op-eds critical of gay marriage the way it would treat "those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic," an arguable position to which the Patriot-News, being a private enterprise, has a perfect right, but which the brethren, whose thousands of web outlets claim and exercise similar rights every day, nonetheless insist is censorship (e.g., "Post-Obergefell, Dissent Is Now The Highest Form Of Bigotry," "FREE SPEECH TOSSED OUT THE WINDOW AS BIG NEWSPAPER BANS OP-EDS AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE"); they may also be talking about BuzzFeed's forthright support for gay marriage, which (since conservatives think every popular media venue, online or off, owes them a platform as a form of wingnut affirmative action) has similarly shivered their timbers (e.g., "EIC BEN SMITH: BUZZFEED IS PRO-GAY MARRIAGE — NEUTRAL ON SHARIAH").

...and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe...

I could ask what they mean by "must" -- has a law been passed? Or do they merely assert a right, undetectable in the Constitution, not to be mocked for their racism?  Indeed,  I could go on through every particular of the whole wretched screed -- for instance, "every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs," to which a reasonable person might respond, first, this kind of thing is certainly not the exclusive province of liberals (e.g., "PIERS MORGAN GOT PWNED ON TWITTER OVER GUN CONTROL"), and second, grow the fuck up.

But you know what? For the first time since I took up this loathsome duty, I feel a bit overmatched.* Because since the Obergefell decision, I perceive that not some but most conservatives, from their elected officials and top pundits down to the bottom feeders, have gone barking mad. I do this alicublog thing in my spare time, you know, and most days I get material for posts desultorily, just by idly rifling through conservative sites. It's been kind of fun peeking into their rooms, detecting which of them has gone a little off his feed, and reporting back. But since gay marriage came in it's like every rightwing door I open reveals a shit-smeared, babbling Bedlam, with nearly every inhabitant shrieking his fool head off about the homosexual apocalypse. I could quit my job and report the atrocities day and night, and still not get the scope of the thing.

And it's not as if all of it's about gay marriage. Take this post by -- oh, look, it's Cooke again, and the title is "Repainting the General Lee Won’t Erase What It Symbolizes from History." No, really, Cooke, a British transplant whose pat-riotism apparently includes a fetish for the cheesiest Americana, is outraged that the impeccably Southern Bubba Watson, owner of the car from The Dukes of Hazzard, is replacing the rebel flag on the roof with the Stars and Stripes. Cooke reacts as if Watson planned to draw tits on Whistler's Mother:

There is a clear and necessary answer to Watson’s rather naïve inquiry, “Why not the American flag?” That answer: Because the General Lee is a piece of America’s cultural history, and civilized people do not vandalize their antiques.

The Dukes of Hazzard. He's talking about The Dukes of Hazzard. I was a teenager when that came out and even I knew it sucked. One searches in vain for signs that Cooke is kidding, or at least ironically inflating his own obsession like a nerd ostentatiously sighing over the set of the original Star Trek, but no, Cooke actually thinks this is important:

It is fashionable in our age to seek unity in all things, but the “General Lee” is not a statehouse, responsive to and reflective of the popular will. It is a historical artifact and cultural totem that sums up a particular moment in time. By amending it to suit contemporary fashions Watson is seeking, in effect, to erase that moment from history. This in my view is extraordinarily dangerous...

Must the owners of Monticello take Wite-Out to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, lest the more egregious passages offend our modern sensibilities?; Must the custodians of vintage Aunt Jemima boxes throw them into the Mississippi to atone for their ugly anachronisms?...

And finally:

Just as to burn an unwanted book is not to kill its author, to paint over the roof of an attitude-laden car is in no way to go back in time and to eradicate that attitude from the record.

If you're wondering why that sentence is even clumsier than we can normally expect from Cooke, my guess is that he really wanted to compare painting over the General Lee with burning books, but something in his soul rebelled and convoluted his sentence structure. Which means there may be hope for him yet.

*UPDATE. Not that I didn't read the whole thing, but I don't recommend it -- it proceeds to a bizarre theory that the Culture War is not just a fucking annoyance for all concerned, but the wellspring of human progress:

The culture wars of the past produced great achievements in art, architecture, literature, and science as the opposing parties strove to demonstrate that they had more to offer and deserved the people’s admiration and loyalty. Those culture wars gave us Michelangelo’s David, Galileo’s science, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment, and the movement for the abolition of slavery.

I look forward to Ben Shapiro's blueprints for Breitbart Tower. It also contains this amazing sentiment:

The Sad Puppies are just the Salon des Refusés with different players...

It's the rightbloggers' world, we just don't live in it. Meanwhile in comments, which are choice, Another Kiwi points out that The General Lee of legend was actually a series of Dodge Chargers, so if Cooke is seriously about preserving Suthun heh'tage, he's in for a long search of collectible car dealerships and junkyards.

HOPE FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE.

Hope y'all had an excellent Fourth. As I write, the local hooligans are still setting off their bottle rockets and M-80s, so the dog isn't happy. But I am, because I've spotted what may be the meme of the year, and a great development for the Republic: The conservative movement disowning not the Confederate Battle Flag -- to be fair, they probably aren't disowning that anytime soon -- but the Confederacy itself.

By which I mean, they aren't saying they were wrong to grab and hoist the Old Standard of the Lost Cause when the Democrats dropped it in the Civil Rights Era -- they're saying the South was never behind the Confederacy in the first place.

Attend Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

JACK NEELY: Was The South Ever Confederate Anyway?

The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular challenge for anyone to survive the 1860s in Knoxville and either idealize one side or demonize the other. It took a later generation, one that didn’t remember the war, to glorify it. 

I do want to point out something provable. Whether the Confederate flag is an irredeemably racist and oppressive symbol or not, the Confederacy is not “the South.” It is not “the South now,” certainly. It was not even “the South” in 1861. The conflation of the Confederacy with “the South” began, I suspect, as some tired editor’s attempt to make a headline fit. 

People of European and African ancestry have been living in the South for 400 years. The Confederacy lasted for four years, about 1 percent of that time. And even during that 1 percent, a large proportion of the people who lived in the South—perhaps even a majority—were skeptical of the Confederacy. . . . 

The Confederacy was not universally popular, even in the South. It would be difficult to prove that as much as half the people who lived in the South in 1861 were fond of the Confederacy. Sam Houston, who grew up in East Tennessee and spent his entire life in the South—except when he was in D.C., representing Southern states in Congress—despised the Confederacy and denounced it publicly. David Glasgow Farragut and Gen. William Sanders—whose last names survive in multiple institutions in Knox County—both grew up in the South and fought against the Confederacy. Sanders, who’d spent most of his life in Kentucky and Mississippi, was killed by Confederate bullets. Several of Knoxville’s fiercest Unionists, Parson W.G. Brownlow, William Rule, and Thomas Humes, were lifelong Southerners. 

It might take years to do a thorough study on the subject, but judging by what we know of those who favored secessionism or the Union, here in East Tennessee at least, Confederate sympathies didn’t necessarily suggest Southern roots. Many of Knoxville’s notable Confederates were immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, or Ireland. John Mitchel, probably Knoxville’s most nationally famous secessionist—editor of The Southern Citizen, which advocated slavery—was an Irish revolutionary Unitarian who’d spent several years in prison in Tasmania and never laid eyes on the South until 1853. J.G.M. Ramsey, the secessionist most influential locally, was from a Pennsylvania family. Father Abram Ryan, Knoxville’s “Poet-Priest of the Confederacy,” grew up in Maryland and Missouri, son of Irish immigrants. Thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom had never seen the South, were Confederate sympathizers. 

Meanwhile, many of Knoxville’s Unionists grew up in multi-generational Tennessee families. Did Southern heritage even play a role in affiliation with the Confederacy? Here in Knoxville, a demographic study might even prove the opposite. Maybe it was the people with the deepest roots here who were most skeptical of the noisy rebel bandwagon. 

In any case, in 1861 more than 30 percent of Tennessee’s Southerners voted against secession, against joining the Confederacy. Well over 30,000 Tennesseans took up arms against the Confederacy.

Yes, but the important point is letting low-information white Democrats feel superior.

 It would appear Neely's trying to tell us that first, Tennessee wasn't entirely united for secession -- which is certainly true -- and second, that neither was the rest of the Confederacy, therefore the South wasn't really for secession, at least not until they were bamboozled by "immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, or Ireland," which is ridiculous -- rather like the protestations of those large numbers of Germans who after WWII declared they had during the recent unpleasantness been in the underground, or Switzerland, but in any case certainly didn't like what the Hitler fellow was doing without their notice. The Southerners' elected representatives voted secession, and hundreds of thousands of Southerners marched for Treason In Defense of Slavery. If they aren't accountable, no polity is.

The Perfesser adds the perhaps unneeded gloss: that the idea that the Confederacy was a Southern thing is just another way we Northerners oppress Southern whites. I noted this on Twitter --

-- which led to the usual festival of shirt-retuckers demanding that I "research" the Free State of Jones and referring me to contrarian essays like 2006's "The Myth of 'the Southern Strategy,'" which asserts that Southern whites only switched to the GOP in the Nixon era because it made economic sense to do so, not because of race (but declined to speculate as to why Southern blacks didn't follow their lead).

They're annoying, but with their annoyance comes this silver lining: These guys seem ashamed of the Confederate legacy, and whether they're sincere about it or (more likely) totally cynical doesn't really matter. With so many wingnuts crying tyranny-'n'-oppression just because private businesses are failing to fly their Battle Flag for them, that conservatives are even tendentiously abandoning the Lost Cause is a healthy development. We should encourage them in this, just as we should encourage them when, some years in the future, they claim they were never against Obamacare. Let us clasp hands o'er the bloody chasm!

THE SET-UP.

Remember when King v. Burwell came down, and conservatives cried blackmail? Actually it's gotten to the point where every time Roberts rules against them, conservatives assume it's blackmail.

Well, today I saw this from the Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

JESSE WALKER: Whatever Happened To Jim Webb? The populist Democrat and his barely-visible campaign. At a guess, Hillary’s got some dirt on him.

I know the Clintons are rich, but I'd advise Hillary to start a little higher up the Enemies List if she's going start blackmailing people. Why waste perfectly good Clinton Crime Family blood money on Jim Webb?

I think I'm pretty cynical, but if I started seeing the world this way I'd have myself committed.

COMEBACK KIDS.

How goes the rear-guard, dead-ender attack on gay marriage? Hilariously! Have a look at this symposium at Opus Dei strokebook First Things featuring the Douthats of Tomorrow. Say what you will about snake-handlers and desert mystics, there's no crazier Christian than than Christian intellectual; they dress  like Chesterton and talk like the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. All the symposiasts  want to see overturned (or, in Scaliaese, o'erturned) not only Obergefell but also America's sexual freedoms in general. Some have interesting ideas as to how to achieve this. Hadley Arkes, who like many of his compatriots compares Obergefell to the Dred Scott decision (because having to live in a world with married gays is the same as slavery), suggests this:

...it must start with the voice that rings out the depth of the wrong and summons the resistance—that “this shall not stand.” We will learn here right away, from the reactions springing from our political class, just who among our political figures may be up the task and adequate to the moment. But it may not be a man in office, or someone running for anything. Rick Santelli, emitting a cri de coeur on CNBC, triggered the coming of the Tea Party movement. A Robert George, with the attention properly focused, might accomplish the same thing.

A Tea Party, only anti-gay! Presumably instead of tricorners and knee-breeches, they'll all dress in Eldridge Cleaver codpiece pants and other affectations of extreme butchness. And with Robert George as their inspirator! This would be the same Robert George who's been wowing the West for years with his rap about how "masturbatory, sodomitical, and other sexual acts which are not reproductive in type, cannot unite persons organically" and other such keep-it-in-your-pants perorations. Put him out on the town square with a bullhorn and watch the next Great Aweakening unfold. (Arkes also calls for a Constitutional Convention, which should go about as well as that schtick always does.)

Some are enraged by the brands who waved their rainbow flags for the decision, and want a holy boycott. Mark Bauerlein:

It’s time for conservatives to apply principles to their purses. Coca-Cola, ESPN, and Walmart are prominent cases of corporate culture warfare, and every time a conservative buys a Coke, watches SportsCenter, or enters the megastore, he helps them do their damage.

I can see the faces of Bauerlein's readers falling, then their wheels turning: Maybe they can drink Coke on the down-low.

No conservative likes to turn his consumption into a political act...

Ha ha -- no conservative, he says! Someone buy that cowboy some Chik-fil-A! Peter J. Leithart wants the brethren to cease with the happy-clappy love-one-another bogus Christianity and cut to the chaste:

And we might as well say it plainly: We oppose gay marriage because we believe homosexual acts are sinful, and we believe that for biblical and theological reasons. Unbelievers already know it. Let’s admit it.

Noted! Rabbi David Novak suggests they "stop co-officiating (i.e., along with the marriage license clerk) at civil weddings, and thus remove their names from the civil marriage registry" -- which is actually sensible, and so will probably not catch on, as his comrades seem to think that when a single God-botherer doesn't like a party it's the party that should leave, not him.

Some of them reach back to root causes, none further than Ephraim Radner, who has half decided that democracy itself is inconsistent with his religion:

Second, the vitality and moral usefulness of the liberal state is increasingly in question: has this form of rule by procedural decision-making served its purpose and collapsed under the weight of its own outsized reach? We are perhaps about to enter times of political revolution and re-inventing government analogous to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Maybe he can mob up with ISIS; really, what's for them to wrangle over except the name of God? Melinda Selmys, meanwhile, blames it all on the disastrous abandonment of arranged marriages. Once upon a time, there was forced marriage for the godly stuff, and "concubinage" for funsies:

The difficulty that presents traditional marriage in the modern world is that over several centuries we’ve undergone a major social shift. The keeping of mistresses or concubines stopped being socially acceptable at about the same time that the idea of “marrying for love” first started to gain traction in the public imagination. The institution of marriage began to change: the focus slowly shifted from the creation of family alliances and provision for the continuation of the line, to the happiness of the couple and the love that they have for one another. In the process, a lot of other concepts (consent, for example) also shifted. The relationship in which people joined their lives on a permanent basis in order to have children became, at the same time, the relationship in which people enjoyed intense erotic attraction and emotionally satisfying interactions.

Now, in a lot of ways this was a good development...

Marrying for love isn't all bad! See, she's meeting you halfway. But:

...Simply put, mutual responsibility towards offspring naturally demands a long-term commitment (at least eighteen years) while mutual attraction and erotic desire does not... The battle over the institution of marriage is basically a battle over which of these two purposes of marriage ought to have primacy.

So if you're not as sexually voracious as you were when you were 20, Selmys doesn't see why you stay in your otherwise meaningless modern marriage. Well, she might win a convert or two among unhappily-marrieds looking for a loophole.

But above all, whining -- always whining. "We have entered Canaan and been swallowed up before Moloch in the same way that Israel was enveloped by a surrounding religion of idolatrous violence," cries Radner. "On the bright side, we’ve entered an era that will make for some of the bravest Christians we’ve ever seen," consoles Mark Regnerus; we will see them huddled in the food courts, enduring the sight of men holding hands. Patrick Deneen compares himself and his buds to Solzhenitsyn, and wails:

What has been most striking all along is not the division, the passion, at times the vitriol. What has been most remarkable is the insistence by same-sex marriage proponents that all dissent be silenced—whether through threats of economic destruction, legal bludgeoning, and now, increasingly by appeal to the raw power of the State.

Did they have a straight Holocaust and I missed it?

The firing of Brendan Eich was a bellwether for what has now become a commonplace: the fanatical insistence that all opposition be squelched, and more—that even belief in an alternative view of marriage be eradicated.

Ah, Brendan Eich -- the rich CEO dismissed by his rich Board of Directors, and therefore a martyr (in fact Rod Dreher -- yeah, they couldn't have this party without him -- declares "We are all Brendan Eich now." I wish! I could probably live on his pool fees).  You know, if one of these Jesus freaks got as upset when, say, a minimum-wage worker got fired for talking to the Washington Post about her shitty job, maybe people would take them a little more seriously.

I'm tempted to say it wouldn't be half bad if an actual Gay Gulag appeared for them to be sent off to, but you can't even joke like that around these guys -- in an hour it'll be added to their list of oppressions. I'll say this for them -- their persecution mania is so intense it almost overpowers the smell of their gay-hate. Say, maybe that's the idea!

UPDATE. Had to gender-correct a pronoun for Hadley Arkes because the gay oppressors forced her to have a sex change. (No, actually he was always a man from what I know.) Also comments are so fun you should just dive in. For example, John Wesley Hardin reveals the revolutionary agenda: "'Taste the Rainbow' is now a diktat from our fabulous cultural commissars!" And there's this cautionary tale from Jay B.: "First they came for flowers and I said 'Since when did fags like flowers?' Then they came for the cake and I said 'Pastries are sacred.' Then there was no one to have cake and flowers with me." I think he speaks for us all.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

At the seething cauldron of post-gay-marriage panic that is Power Line, Paul Mirengoff has a theory, important enough to be expounded in not one but two posts. How could a court with all these Reagan-Bush appointees so disappoint Mirengoff as this one did? For one thing,

It’s commonly acknowledged that the trajectory for young men is to move to the right as they begin to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, including paying mortgages and helping to support and raise children.

But Supreme Court Justices are almost always past age 50 when they are appointed. By then, the children are, or soon will be, raised; the mortgage has, or soon will be, paid off; and the Justices are looking forward to grandchildren.

These developments shouldn’t drive anyone to the left, but I believe the aging process itself often does. Why? Because conservatism, especially conservative judging, is predicated on the absence of a certain kind of sentimentality (I say “certain kind” because there is a sense in which the main strand of conservatism is quite sentimental). It is predicated on not letting “feelings” dominate the decision-making process...

Let me see if I'm getting this: Men get more rightwing as they age, except for some of them, who grow childish-foolish and want to be nice like the Bird Lady in Mary Poppins. But why would lawyers, of all people, be the ones to go "sentimental"? Anyway:

The same-sex marriage opinions illustrate the point. Justice Kennedy’s opinion overflows with sentiment. It is sappy. (Kennedy’s sentiments, by the way, are in line with those of Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, the classic example of a conservative who moved leftward in his advanced years).

Yeah, Goldwater's gay rights stand wasn't a natural outgrowth of his libertarianism, it was just senile dementia... Hey, wait a minute, Goldwater was never a lawyer. Why didn't he get more conservative?

...The Obamacare cases also were arguably influenced by age. Forget about what Justice Scalia calls the the Chief Justice’s “sommersaults of statutory interpretation.” In my view, Roberts’ opinions are really about caution. In the first case (on the individual mandate), he was at pains not to overrule the legislature. In the second (on subsidies), he was desperate not to upset the health insurance market.

Caution is an attribute associated with advanced age.

So judges and Barry Goldwater, but not other people, get liberal as they get older, but some also get cautious... This isn't really hanging together, so for his follow-up post Mirengoff hauls in some guy  to spell it out: These judges who don't vote his way are just "soft," Some Guy says, partly because they "have essentially made it in life," but mainly because the evil spirit of liberalism steals upon them and drains their essence:

For virtually all my lifetime, liberalism has ruled the culture (including and importantly academia), and being a conservative just takes a lot of energy. For example, it is not only anti-male and anti-white bias that accounts for the fact that so many leftist airheads get jobs as professors; it’s that when you’re on board with the received liberal wisdom, you swim with the tide rather than against it. 

Swimming against it produces harder thinking (which is one important reason conservatives like debates and more often than not win them), but it also requires a lot of energy. Sooner of later, for most people, it starts to run out.

So liberalism challenges conservatives, thereby making them mentally stronger, but also physically weaker, which is how the Court's conservatives lost the secret Feats of Strength that actually decide their cases. (Ginsburg's thin but she's wiry!)

I guess Mirengoff's beginning to despair that he'll ever get on the High Court and has decided to grace his readers with his Scalia-grade bullshit. Or has the conservative breakdown reached the stage where they're just trying to confuse people?