A while ago a friend recommended Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan to me, and I figured that, as a young person who had intellectual conversations with groups of friends in New York, I would find it especially resonant with my life in the city. The young people I’ve met in New York are not dyed-in-the-wool preppies (with few exceptions), so I did not find the direct parallels I thought I would. But the movie happened to be the most intelligent and subtly funny film I have seen in recent memory.

Its brilliance lies in its subtle wit and spot-on analysis of American preppie culture. The idea that preppies are “doomed to fail” looms large. Most will make enough money to sustain their lives, but not enjoy their jobs or attain true satisfaction in other areas of life. And given the indolence that wealth is wont to produce and the social mobility that democratic captialism provides, many will be finding themselves descending the social ladder.

Today the guy who first told me about Metropolitan mentioned an article in First Things by Austin W. Bramwell highlighting the Christian morality of Metropolitan and Stillman’s other films, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. So the next time you’re looking for a good movie, pick up a copy of Metropolitan. You’ll discover (or rediscover) a serious look at the American bourgeousie as seen by a master social analyst.

In a review in Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey trashes Ben Stein’s anti-Darwinist documentary, Expelled—and, by all accounts, with some justification. I haven’t seen the film, but it doesn’t sound persuasive. Still, this passage from Bailey caught my eye:

In the film, the mathematician David Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don’t apply.

But people through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for murdering each other, including plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion.

Hmmm. It’s like Bailey is testing us with a game of Name That Fallacy.

Nathaniel, the Mark Steyn case is getting the bulk of the conservative media attention (since he writes for National Review), but don’t overlook this other Canadian Human Rights Case. Tony Perkins, in his FRC e-mail update, writes:

David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, once said, “The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.” Nowhere have politicians more miserably failed that test than in Alberta, Canada, where the gatekeepers of political correctness–the Human Rights Commission (HRC)–have sentenced a pastor to a lifetime of silence. The case was initiated in 2002, when Rev. Stephen Boissoin published letters to the editor opposing same-sex “marriage” in the Red Deer Advocate. At the time, Canada was embroiled in a debate over whether to legalize counterfeit marriage across the country. When Professor Darren Lund of Calgary read Boissoin’s editorials, he filed a complaint with the Alberta HRC, alleging that the content of the articles was “hateful.” The Commission appointed a tribunal to investigate Boissoin, led by an unelected bureaucrat Lori Andreachuk. Last November, Andreachuk found Boissoin guilty of discrimination and, without the benefit of his testimony, forbade him from uttering “anything disparaging about homosexuals.” Notice that Andreachuk does not ban him from speaking about anything “illegal” but bars him from any negativity toward gays and lesbians. The official punishment, issued without so much as a public hearing, includes everything from personal emails to congregational sermons. As if the lifetime speech ban were not tyrannical enough, Andreachuk also ordered Boissoin to compensate Professor Lund, who was not a victim of the so-called “hate crime,” $5,000. Under the terms of his sentencing, the Reverend must “cease publishing…remarks about homosexuals” and submit a written apology to Lund for publication in the Red Deer Advocate. Ezra Levant, who is under similar scrutiny for printing cartoons about Mohammed, notes in a new column, “[Boissoin] has to publicly humiliate himself, by publicly declaring his contrition–a contrition he does not feel–and his abandonment of his deeply-held religious beliefs… Does that happen anywhere outside of Communist China?” Conservatives across Canada are in an uproar over the ruling and many are demanding that Premier Ed Stelmach follow through with his promise to review the unbridled “censorship powers” of the HRC. If he refuses, Alberta’s thought police can indict any pastor or average citizen who holds political or moral views contrary to the powers-that-be.

We’ve mentioned the Mark Steyn case in the past, but today Rich Lowry posted an update on Real Clear Politics on its progress. For those who haven’t heard, our neighbors to the north have a system of Human Rights Commissions in which you can lodge a complaint against people who say things that you don’t like. You accuse them of hate speech and the government revokes their right to speak. It sounds like a good deal for some. It also sounds Orwellian. And it is. Lowry gives the background to the Steyn case as follows:

Last week, a Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia considered a complaint brought against journalist Mark Steyn for a piece in the Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s. The excerpt from Steyn’s best-selling book America Alone argued that high Muslim birthrates mean Europeans will feel pressure to reach “an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots.”

The piece was obviously within respectable journalistic bounds. In fact, combining hilarity and profound social analysis, the article could be considered a sparkling model of the polemical art — not surprisingly, given that Steyn is one of North America’s journalistic gems.

The Canadian Islamic Congress took offense, and brought him before the Human Rights Commission. Lowry continues the story:

The national commission has never found anyone innocent in 31 years. It is set up for classic Alice-in-Wonderland “verdict first, trial later” justice. Canada’s Human Rights Act defines hate speech as speech “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” The language is so capacious and vague that to be accused is tantamount to being found guilty.

Unlike in defamation law, truth is no defense, and there’s no obligation to prove harm. One of the principal investigators of the Canadian Human Rights Commission was asked in a hearing what value he puts on freedom of speech in his work, and replied, “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” Clearly.

In British Columbia, the Steyn hearing proceeded with all the marsupial ungainliness of a kangaroo court. No one knew what the rules of evidence were. Hilariously, one of the chief complaints against Steyn was that he quoted a Muslim imam in Norway bragging that in Europe “the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes.” If that insect simile is out-of-bounds, the commission should swoop down on Norway and execute an extraordinary rendition of the imam.

The hearing has appropriately exposed the commissions to ridicule — and maybe some hatred and contempt (if that’s allowed). There are calls to strip them of their power to regulate the media. This would limit the damage, even as free speech is endangered elsewhere.

We in America can be thankful for our peculiar ideas about the freedom of speech, but we also need to remember that such freedoms require vigilant protection.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post carried a piece about Washington’s National Cathedral. It seems that a few years ago the cathedral was given a $7 million bequest. The dean used the funds to expand all sorts of services, but now the money has run out, and new funding never materialized to support the expanded projects. So the cathedral is cutting back on programs and laying off staff.

Nothing particularly noteworthy here, except, perhaps, for the types of projects the dean used the bequest to launch. From the Post piece:

[Dean Samuel] Lloyd has used bequest funds to help launch an array of new programs with international, national and local reach that have given the cathedral a more activist bent.

“We came to believe that because we are the nation’s church . . . certainly at critical moments in our life, we’re then granted an opportunity to be a big public voice — a public megaphone — for a thoughtful, generous, respectful Christian faith that has important things to say in the public conversations of the day,” said Lloyd, who came from Boston’s Trinity Church to the cathedral as its 10th dean.

As part of its new international outreach, the cathedral has opened the Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation, which describes itself as focusing on poverty, social justice and peacemaking initiatives around the globe.

The cathedral has held interfaith conferences on global warming and started an effort to reach out to clerics in Iran. It raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring in participants for an interfaith conference on women and global poverty in April that featured former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell and former Irish president Mary Robinson. Lloyd has also launched a Sunday forum that has brought in high-profile guests such as Rick Warren, a megachurch pastor and best-selling author, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Cathedral leaders say the series attracts an average of 400 to 500 people each session.

The piece goes on to list some of the programs which are being shuttered–they include building the church’s congregation, the church’s famous greenhouse, and a “Family Saturday” initiative, which brought familes with young children to the cathedral. One can’t say for sure from the piece, but the impression is given that the more “activist” programs will not be cut.

While I liked Rick’s comments on the Mirror of Justice site, I was a little confused by Rob Vischer’s recent post. He comments on a Boston Globe article on recent pushes by academics to have the law recognize friendships:

The article does not focus on the SSM debate, but this issue does underscore, in my view, the cost of excluding an entire segment of the population from the institution of marriage. Gays and lesbians understandably will seek state support through non-marital relationships, which takes us closer to a world where individuals simply choose the category of relationship through which to receive state support, and the state is neutral as to the form of, and committments embodied in, those relationships. It is difficult to imagine marriage maintaining its privileged status (as I believe it should) twenty years from now if a significant portion of the population is ineligible.

There is no doubt some truth to this. But it seems to me that the logic runs in the exact opposite direction. By embracing same sex relationships as marriage, you undercut any rational basis for limiting marriage to two people or viewing marriage as an inherently sexual relationship. If we reject the idea that marriage is founded on a two-in-one-flesh union between sexually complementary spouses–which is what we would do if we encourage the state to legally recognize same sex “marriage”–then why shouldn’t the state recognize other “marriages” that venture slightly further away from this norm–”marriages” with more than two people, “marriages” that don’t entail sex, “marriages” that amount to little more than being roommates. If this is the preference of the autonomous adults–free and equal before the law–on how to arrange their living arrangements, what reason will the state be able to offer as to why their friendship-living-arrangement isn’t as worthy of recognition as Adam and Steve’s “marriage.” I argued something along these lines in a First Things daily article a little over a year ago. Referring to UK civil union laws and the plight of the Burden sisters, I wrote:

Moreover, the government’s policy on civil partnerships is equally misguided. The state has long recognized the exclusive, permanent, and sexual union of a man and woman in marriage, and thus has treated married individuals as a single entity—a couple—and the fruit of their sexual union as part of that single entity—a family. But, in the wake of modernity’s sexual revolution, elected officials believed they had to recognize formally same-sex sexual arrangements. The solution they devised was civil partnerships: recognized domestic relationships between adults of the same sex.

The problem with this, however, was that it dictated that these relationships be sexual in nature. Thus, a middle-aged woman taking care of her elderly mother, or, as in this case, two elderly sisters living domestically—but not sexually—with each other do not qualify. This is lunacy. And all because the real push for civil partnerships was to create gay “marriage” without having to call it marriage. The legislature made a profound and dangerous error when it assumed that marriage is something the state created and thus something the state can refashion at will. If, on the contrary, marriage objectively exists as a given, and if marriage exists precisely because of its nature as a sexual and potentially procreative relationship, then the creation of any other recognized sexual relationship is certain to spell disaster. Witness the plight of the elderly sisters in England. They are denied rights that they would otherwise have solely because they are not in a sexual relationship with each other.

If the government deems it necessary to recognize other adult relationships besides marriage, then it cannot discriminate against competing relationships on the basis of sexual activity. For in venturing beyond marriage—with its contours based precisely on complementary sexual union—the state has no available reasons for citing sexual activity as the defining attribute of other adult relationships. In other words, civil domestic partnerships must be open to all adult domestic partners whether or not they are (or are willing to say they are) sexual partners.

The discussions seem endless these days, but Rick Garnett’s comments on Doug Kmiec’s latest article are worth reading.

A taste:

That said, Doug’s column goes off course in a few places, I think. He writes:

Given that abortion is an intrinsic evil without justification, thinking the overturning of Roe “solves” the abortion problem, when it does not, can mislead Catholics into the erroneous conclusion that any candidate unwilling to pledge reversal of Roe is categorically unworthy of support.

Yes and no. True, overruling Roe does not, by a long shot, “solve” the abortion problem. It would, however, do two very important things: (a) It would solve another, serious, problem — namely, it would undo the major error that was Roe, thereby improving the state of our constitutional law (about which Doug cares quite a bit); and (b) it would make it possible for We the People, acting through our legislatures, to take measures that might, bit by bit, “solve” the abortion problem. The fact that overturning Roe does not, by itself, end abortion does not change the fact that the persistence of Roe effectively removes abortion from the arena of legislative (even if only incremental) action and compromise. Doug writes:

Senator Obama’s position accepts the existing legal regime which leaves the abortion decision with the mother as a “constitutional right.” Senator McCain’s position would leave the decision with the individual states. Neither position is fully pro-life, both are pro-choice, with the former focused on the individual and the latter focused on the right of the states. Senator McCain’s position is sometimes described as pro-life, but in truth, it is merely pro-federalism (states being free under the McCain position to decide to permit or disallow abortion as they see fit).

But this is not quite right. Sen. McCain’s position is not (merely) pro-”the right of the states” or pro-”federalism”; it is pro-”the right of the People” to try to promote the common good through law. Sen. McCain, unlike Sen. Obama, also supports a wide range of federal policies that regulate abortion and protect the consciences of pro-life citizens. Doug continues:

Independent of my Catholic faith, as a constitutional law teacher, I respectfully disagree with both Senator Obama and Senator McCain since the Constitution was intended as a means to enforce and guarantee the unalienable right to life recited in the Declaration of Independence, where of course it is explicitly traced to our Creator. Since neither candidate presents a position fully compatible with Catholic teaching recognizing abortion for the intrinsic evil that it is, Catholic teaching asks us to work for the reduction of the incidence of abortion through the most prudent way possible.

I am also a constitutional-teacher and, independent of my Catholic faith, I think that the Constitution probably does not, in fact, require governments to outlaw or regulate abortion. In any event, it *is* compatible, it seems to me, with Catholic teaching to have the view (as McCain does) that the Constitution permits (but does not require) We the People to legislate in accord with Catholic teaching, by regulating abortion (and banning capital punishment, and welcoming immigrants, etc., etc.). And, even if one thought that McCain’s view was not “fully compatible” with Catholic teaching, it is not clear why one should regard him as, in effect, in a “tie” with his rival, whose views on *this* question seem quite *in*-compatible with Catholic teaching.

Our friend, the law professor Stephen Bainbridge, posts a note about having an article accepted—and then rejected—by a law-review journal. He ends with an observation that it sure looks like he had a contract with the journal—and, lawyers being lawyers, the legal commentators on the Volokh Conspiracy all jump in with claims and counter-claims of what constitutes the technical elements of contractual notice, acceptance, enforceability, etc.

Ah, well. Each of us does the discipline we know best. Having worked at magazines a long time, I think the Razor applies here: Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence. There might have been a little ideology involved—somebody noticing, a little late in the day, that Professor Bainbridge is not a reliable leftist. But the easier explanation is just that it got screwed up.

Maybe too much material was accepted by the journal, and something had to be rejected. Or maybe somebody without authority accepted it, and then got ordered to reject it. Anyway, the result isn’t a contractual violation. Just bad manners.