The first principal, Father Tracey, was a stickler for ladylike decorum, especially at social events. Although Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and James Dean were the sex symbols du jour, and “Bandstand” might be an “occasion of sin,” we were expected to remain chaste.

Our sex education consisted mostly of “cross your legs, wear mid-calf skirts and keep a phone book on the car seat between you and your date!” Even with all that, some girls dropped out quietly to await what was quaintly dubbed a “blessed event.”

Discipline was relentless. There was a rule against opening textbooks in the cafeteria, for example. Once, feeling unprepared for a post-lunch Latin test with Sister Mary Agnes, I sneaked a peek at my book.

I was caught by one of the disciplinarians and immediately handed a detention slip. Imagine! Others were disciplined for such far-out infractions as striking the “forbidden” backspace key on the typewriter or daring to apply lipstick in the lavatory at dismissal.

Talking back could get you suspended or expelled to the (shudder) public schools.

We can laugh now, but we were in awe of those religious women. (Mrs. Kane, our gym teacher, was the only lay person.) Other schools had college fairs—we had a “convent fair” in the cafeteria with booths competing for applicants to the many communities of nuns that staffed the school.

I’ll stand my ground with my insistence that many on the left hate Sarah Palin in a very real way.

As an additional data point, I offer this essay from Salon. The author begins by repeating the smear that Trig Palin is not the governor’s son, and saying that the rumor makes sense, before declaring glibly that he doesn’t believe it. But that’s not the worst part. The author, a medical doctor, claims that Palin’s decision not to kill Trig in utero is “a sign of her hypocrisy.”

If this isn’t a symptom of deranged hatred, I don’t know what is.

And not only the fringiest parts of the political fringe: A writer at the Washington Post attacked Palin for the fact that her seventeen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby. A writer for The Atlantic openly questioned whether or not Palin’s four-month-old baby, who has Down’s Syndrome, was actually hers. The utterly unfounded suggestion was that the baby was Palin’s daughter’s and that the governor had faked her pregnancy. Proof of the baby’s birth was demanded.

Again, we are not talking about an anonymous blogger at Daily Kos—this is the commentary from the Washington Post and The Atlantic Monthly. And there was more—much more—where that came from.

So why? What is it about Sarah Palin that convinced so much of the left to objectify and assault her so quickly, and with such manifest maliciousness? There are many reasons, but four of them stick out in particular, each having to do not with Palin’s politics, but with her family.

1) Trig Palin’s Down’s Syndrome is a challenge to their ideas about what represents worthwhile life. The fact that this Down’s baby was carried to term and not aborted is statement that his life has the same value as all life. This is an idea with which the left vehemently disagrees. Here is the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus discussing her own opinion of Down’s babies in an online chat earlier this week:

I had my children at ages 37 and 39, old enough that the risk of Down syndrome was elevated, as it was for Palin, and my doctor recommended amniocentesis. Had the results indicated any abnormality, I have little doubt that I would have made a different decision than did Palin.

As such, the left sees Baby Trig as a provocation. Note today the commentators complaining that Trig has become a “prop” for Palin’s candidacy simply because the family took turns holding the four-month-old in public last night. (Perhaps these observers simply have no understanding of how infants are handled and cared for.) Instead of being viewed as just another baby, Trig is seen by the left as a little Terri Schiavo—an assertion of the value of all life and an affront to their belief that there are differences in what constitutes meaningful life.

2) Which leads, of course, to abortion. Palin’s family is a double-rebuke to the culture of abortion. First, there’s Palin’s decision not to kill Trig because he has Trisomy 21. Then there is seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin’s decision to not to kill her baby.

Contrast this with Barack Obama’s statement that he would keep abortion legal so that if one of his daughters were to “make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This statement is freighted with meaning: Obama views out-of-wedlock pregnancy as a mistake (which is sensible); he views such a resulting baby as punishment (which is less so); and he has strong feelings that should such a situation occur, he would not want his daughter to carry the baby to term. It is, objectively speaking, a pro-abortion statement.

3) Then there are Palin’s religious views. She is a lifelong Christian who belongs to an evangelical church. No further explanations should be needed about the provocations which emanate there from.

4) Finally, there’s the fertility. The Palin family’s five children would have been unexceptional forty years ago, but today constitute something of a fertility freak show. They’re the type of people for whom the epithet “breeder” was invented. The U.S. fertility rate sits just below the replacement level and is only that high because of the greater fertility of Hispanic immigrants. According to the most recent census data, only 1.1 percent of non-Hispanic white women bear five or six children over the course of their lifetime. By contrast, 22.5 percent of these women never reproduce. The percentage of childlessness among women rises in a straight line with educational attainment.

Why the worry about this? First, there’s the fact that few of Palin’s tormenters can understand the fact of her large, traditional family. That is certainly not the way in which they have structured their lives.

Second, there is the left’s long-standing concern about overpopulation, which has become a staple of modern environmentalism, beginning with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich preached a Malthusian near-future in which hundreds of millions would perish by famine as the world’s unchecked population growth spiraled to infinity. As it happens, Ehrlich’s predictions were entirely incorrect: Not only has increased food production reduced famine to a weapon of political conflict, but the world’s population growth has slowed to a crawl. Fertility rates around the globe are falling and world population will peak around nine billion by 2050. From there, we will experience population contraction.

But Ehrlich’s prognostications never fell far out of favor, particularly with environmentalists who take it as an article of faith that the planet is already overcrowded. To them, the prodigious Palin family is surely seen as taking more than its fair share.

And finally, there is the concern that the amped up fertility of people such as the Palins will lead to a less progressive future. In an influential 2006 essay in Foreign Policy, demographer Philip Longman warned of the “Return of Patriarchy” as religiously orthodox and fundamentalist populations were reproducing at much higher rates than post-modern and secular populations. The result, Longman worried, will eventually be a return to a less politically and culturally progressive era.

As you can see, each of these facts about Sarah Palin touches upon deep sources of antagonism. Her opponents quickly intuited that the particulars of Palin’s story, on their own, stand as challenges to some of the most integral parts of their worldview, whether or not she ever makes them explicitly.

It isn’t any of Palin’s specific policies or ideological beliefs which have so antagonized the liberals (although they surely dislike her for policy reasons, too). They simply hate her for who she is.

So it was particularly surprising when, only a few moments later, Andrade displayed a nice bit of theological sophistication. Asked by NBC’s Jim Gray to describe his inner sense of disappointment, Andrade said (I paraphrase), that he didn’t really have any way to express it, but that he thanked God for taking care of him and getting him this far.

This is a small point, to be sure, but when’s the last time you saw an athlete thank God for his grace in defeat?

Many athletes have the annoying habit of thanking God for their victories and accomplishments, often in such a manner as to suggest that God was favoring them against their opponent. (Tennis’s Michael Chang was one of the worst offenders throughout the early 1990s.)

To be sure, very little human accomplishment is begotten without the help of our Lord. But his ways are opaque to human eyes and it is wrong-headed to think that in, say, a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles, God has chosen a side.

(Actually, that’s a bad example, since the Lord has obviously been punishing Philadelphia’s teams for the city’s sins during the last twenty-five years. But you get the idea.)

The proper way to understand the role of the Almighty in athletics is to recognize his grace in your performance, not in the outcome, and to trust that whatever result occurs is part of the Lord’s plan for you. Very few professional athletes seem to understand this. Demetrius Andrade is a pleasant exception.

It’s an open question as to whether the new version of Brideshead excises the Church from the story (as I’ve heard) or worse. A friend sends me this astonishing essay by screenwriter Jeremy Brock, who penned the new adaptation. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a taste:

The moment you read Evelyn Waugh’s novel, you discover how fresh and contemporary its themes feel. Though set in the rarefied world of the aristocracy between the wars, it still speaks directly to many of the issues that count as “current”: religious fundamentalism, class, sexual tolerance, the pursuit of individualism. . . .

Contrary to some reports, God is not the villain of our adaptation. The villain is man-made theology; the emotional and moral contortions forced on to individuals by their adherence to a particular set of codes and practices. Inevitably, as in Waugh’s novel, the film debates the merits and demerits of such belief systems in people’s lives.

As for the sex, I’ve always believed there’s a visceral relationship between a yearning for spiritual bliss and sexual ecstasy. Look no further than Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St Teresa. Like laughing and crying, sex and religion are twins. The film will not shy away from that.

But in the end, my reason for taking on this adaptation was simple. Waugh’s novel is a gloriously subtle and original love story that deserves the big-screen treatment.

Spend your $10.50 at your own risk.

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.

A publication called IEE Spectrum, which playfully calls The Singularity “the Rapture for geeks,” suspects that Wired‘s piece on Ray Kurzweil’s bid for immortality is bosh:

Why should a mere journalist question Kurzweil’s conclusion that some of us alive today will live indefinitely? Because we all know it’s wrong. We can sense it in the gaping, take-my-word-for-it extrapolations and the specious reasoning of those who subscribe to this form of the singularity argument. Then, too, there’s the flawed grasp of neuroscience, human physiology, and philosophy. Most of all, we note the willingness of these people to predict fabulous technological advances in a period so conveniently short it offers themselves hope of life everlasting.

This has all gone on too long. The emperor isn’t wearing anything, for heaven’s sake.

More demystifying follows. This is the techno version of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, only funny, entertaining, and incisive. Enjoy.

Nor is his message, which seems to be that white people are all the beneficiaries of slavery and that we must abandon our 401K funds, throw away our trust funds, and leave the jobs which we were handed by the old boys’ network in order to atone for “what our ancestors did.” He rails against “white entitlement” and “supremacy.”

It may come as little surprise that Fr. Pfleger is a supporter of, and friend of, Barack Obama. Or that Fr. Pfleger invited Rev. Wright to deliver a blessing from his church, Saint Sabina, in March, during the height of the controversy over Wright’s bizarre and hateful racism. He uses “damn” as an expletive in the course of charging Hillary Clinton with being a racist.

If only the Catholic Church really was the conservative, absolutist organization that its liberal critics charge it with being . . .

“Presumably the nuns would vote Republican, so the ID requirement may help Democrats after all.”

Something tells me the commenter hasn’t met all that many nuns.