La Estrella del Mar, or, Mother of Exiles

Trucks rumble—the hustle and the hum

Of gears gas engine exhaust choke POTHOLE and there’s a cut on the forehead,

Red over the white frightened eyes in the dark.

She bends down over POTHOLE her baby

And she knows what’s coming next but it hasn’t happened yet,

So she cradles and coos and tries not to think

About the kennel they’ll put her son in

With the chainlink door and the concrete floor and the ugly foil blanket made for an alien.

And the dry road south is all sand sand sand POTHOLE sand,

Back down to Sinaloa, the land of the rattlesnake,

Sand in the hair the mouth the eyes, like an itching thirsting disease.

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Saftey,

It’s Herod and he means it this time.

The trucks aren’t full of people.

They’re full of MS13 monsters like her,

They’re full of sluts who wouldn’t get an abortion like her,

They’re full of cost-benefit ratios like her,

They’re full of huddled masses like her,

They’re full of not our problems like her.

But her eyes are two thousand years old

And the message of the angel still shines out of them

The mystery the plea the glory the warning

That this is an ikon of the all-consuming Fire.

What will you do when that Fire falls on you?

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Safety,

It’s Herod and he means it this time.

So pick up your ploughshares and your pruning hooks,

This is no time for passivity, it’s time for pacifisticuffs:

If what you want is peace then go be peace’s power,

Lift up your voice, your open hands toward that White Tower

And cover it with brown sand.

Hate burns white-hot—don’t be fooled by its easy appeal:

Love is brown like earth and wood and dried blood and Jewish skin

And the eyes of the baby that immigrant woman is holding for the last time.

Call on the mountains to fall on us, the hills to hide us,

For their earth is full of love

And perhaps thus we shall learn to love our brother.

Turn your bodies against the drums, boys:

It’s the I.C.E., it’s the Committee of Public Safety,

It’s Herod and he too will die.

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EDIT: Notes on the Text
Title. La Estrella del Mar. This is the Spanish form of the Latin title Stella Maris, 'Star of the Sea.' This title (derived from a fanciful etymology of the name Miriam or Mary) has been used for the Blessed Virgin Mary since at least the early Middle Ages, and has particular reference to the guiding stars used by sailors.
Mother of Exiles. This is an alternate name for the Statue of Liberty, believed to have been coined by Emma Lazarus in her famous sonnet, The New Colossus.
l.10. Sinaloa. The state of Sinaloa lies on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and is the principal center of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel, considered the single most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world by US intelligence. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines are among their chief wares.
land of the rattlesnake. The Mexican flag and seal feature a rattlesnake being throttled by an eagle, in reference to an ancient Aztec legend. Though its bite is seldom fatal if treated promptly, the rattlesnake is the leading cause of snakebite injuries in the US, and ranges throughout the Americas.
l. 13. the Committee of Public Safety. This Orwellian title belonged to one of the institutions of the French Revolution, and oversaw the Reign of Terror in 1793-94.
l. 14. Herod. Cf. Matthew 2.1-18.
l. 16. MS13. Also known as Mara Salvatrucha, this extensive gang operates mostly in North and Central America, partly under the auspices of the Sinaloa Cartel. It is known for a multitude of crimes, including murder, human trafficking, and child prostitution. Most MS13 members are Salvadoran; the gang was originally founded to protect emigrants from El Salvador who had come to the US after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.
l. 19. huddled masses. Cf. The New Colossus ll. 10ff.
ll. 21-22. But her eyes ... out of them. Cf. Luke 1.26-35.
l. 24. all-consuming Fire. Cf. Hebrews 12.28-29.
l. 25. What will you ... falls on you? Cf. Matthew 21.42-44; Acts 2.1-4, 15-21, 38.
l. 29. your ploughshares and your pruning hooks. Cf. Isaiah 2.1-5.
l. 32. White Tower. A mashing together of White House and Trump Tower.
l. 35. wood and dried blood and Jewish skin. In reference to the Crucifixion.
l. 37. Call on the ... to hide us. Cf. Revelation 6.12-17.
l. 42. he too will die. Cf. Matthew 2.19-20.

Men and Monsters, Part II

Anybody can enact that murder shall not be punishable by death; nobody can enact that the swallowing of a tumblerful of prussic acid shall not be punishable by death. In the former case, the connection between the two events is legal—that is, arbitrary; in the latter, it is a true causal relationship … When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence, and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God. …  

At the back of the Christian moral code we find a number of pronouncements about the moral law, which are not regulations at all, but which purport to be statements of fact about man and the universe, and upon which the whole moral code depends for its authority and its validity in practice. … If they are true, man runs counter to them at his own peril. He may, of course, defy them, as he may defy the law of gravitation by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but he cannot abolish them by edict. Nor yet can God abolish them, except by breaking up the structure of the universe, so that in this sense they are not arbitrary laws. We may of course argue that the making of this kind of universe, or indeed of any kind of universe, is an arbitrary act; but, given the universe as it stands, the rules that govern it are not freaks of momentary caprice. 

—Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

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At first I’d been thinking of beginning with the sociological side of my first post; however, my language of divine judgment provoked more reaction than I’d expected, and anyway, on reflection it makes far more sense to begin with the spiritual. That spiritual side of things is the suggestion I made, or the suspicion I harbor, that the United States is a nation under judgment, due very largely to the war crimes of which we are historically guilty—but that notion needs a lot of unpacking.

To begin with, let’s consider what is meant by judgment. Usually, the image this summons to the imagination is one of God-as-cranky-old-man hitting people with bolts of smite because they’ve annoyed him in some way. This image actually does have a good use, to which we shall return later, but for the most part it’s stupid and terrible, and most of what it says to our minds and emotions should be discarded without hesitation.

A proper understanding of judgment is, rather, grounded in God’s character as the Creator, and the corresponding integrity of creation. In making the universe, God made an ordered reality, a universe in which cause and effect relate to one another in regular harmony. Why he did this is a question I can’t answer with certainty, and I have a hunch that it’s secretly nonsensical, like asking what the shape of yellow is, or whether eleven is solid, liquid, or gas; if God the Son is the Logos, then order is grounded not just in the choices, but in the being of God. At any rate he did make an ordered universe, and creatures like ourselves that not only rely on order to exist, but can’t even really imagine a world without it. The closest we can get is by mixing known elements of our world at random, but even this depends on our understanding of the order and defined things that we know.

This orderly creation in which we live is, also, the prerequisite for free will, which is itself a sine qua non of love. A world of pure chaos would be incomprehensible by definition, and no self-awareness or meaningful choice (which are the things we mean theologically by free will) would be possible. Accordingly, love, which is the most divine choice, would not be possible either.

But if the universe is ordered and governed by cause and effect, and if there are free agents in it, then suffering and evil become real possibilities. Through ignorance or inattention, any free being could run up against the order of the universe in a painful or damaging way; and through deliberate malice, any free being could attempt to violate, break, or circumvent that order. But freelance modifications of creation would require the same power (in the double sense of authority and ability) that the God who made it possesses; and we don’t have that. Accordingly, the effect of such attempts will naturally be as painful and damaging as mistakes made through ignorance, if not more so. And the more a creature perseveres in its error, the worse the consequences will be, until that creature is either destroyed or corrected.

Thus, judgment is not an arbitrary act of God, intruded into creation as a punishment for behavior he doesn’t like. Rather, it is a name for what happens when a creature defies the inner logic of creation, and is met by the self-consistency of that logic, experienced as hostile because of the creature’s own hostility. Judgment may, in that case, sound like a strange choice of name; which leads into the one great advantage of the ‘cranky old man’ depiction of God. By representing the Creator as a Person, this image can remind us that forgiveness, patience, restraint, and mercy are possible, too. C. S. Lewis, in his epistolary on prayer, Letters to Malcolm, wrote:

You suggest that what is traditionally regarded as our experience of God’s anger would be more helpfully regarded as what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power. As you say, ‘The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.’ My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? … The angry can forgive, and electricity can’t. 

And you give as your reason that ‘even by analogy the sort of pardon that arises because a fit of temper is spent cannot worthily be attributed to God nor gratefully accepted by man.’ But the belittling words ‘fit of temper’ are your own choice. Think of the fullest reconciliation between mortals. … Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. … Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy—the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships.

Fine, fine. But what has all this got to do with describing America as a nation under judgment?

Our nation has, from its inception, been soaked in blood. With the exception of Rhode Island and parts of Pennsylvania, every square mile of US territory was either taken from its indigenous inhabitants by compulsion, or purchased from European powers that had done the same thing—England, Spain, France, Russia. The insultingly named ‘Indian reservations’ (as though they were parks maintained for endangered animals!), whose rights we regularly violate despite their technical status as independent nations, are an embarrassing continuation of colonialism. Our history in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was imperfect even in relating to other Western powers; but we’ve really taken to war crimes since World War II. Interfering with other countries’ internal affairs, [1] killing foreign soldiers with no declaration of war, killing foreign civilian men, women, and children en masse, torturing prisoners of war … And all this is only about how the US deals with other countries, let alone immigrants and internal injustices like slavery, capitalist oppression, racism, and abortion.

John Gast, Spirit of the Frontier, 1872

I believe that, by this history of atrocities and by our general acquiescence to them (if not in many cases outright, vocal approval), we have invoked judgment upon ourselves. This violence indicates contempt for human life as such, and the nature of judgment is to work backwards, so that contempt of human life falls upon us. It certainly has: in the schools where we’ve taught children that destroying First Nation civilizations and killing or deporting them by the thousands was a historical footnote; at the military bases from which we’ve sent our brave boys to bomb Japanese or Vietnamese or Iraqi civilians with nuclear and chemical weapons, whose long-term effects we could never hope to control; in the office towers where the goods of clientele and employees alike are ruthlessly subordinated to profit.

Does this mean the individuals upon whom these judgments have fallen were the most guilty? No. It doesn’t mean they were guilty at all. Societies are vast webs of coïnherence, and as many people suffer for others’ sins as thrive on others’ virtues. This should be no new idea for the Christian: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The Last Judgment, the final settling of individual accounts, is yet to come, and while it tarries we still have an opportunity to invoke mercy, both for ourselves and for our society.

What does this invocation of mercy involve? First of all, individual repentance, because nothing can be done until and unless individual people—that is, you and I—own our thoughts, words, and behavior. To the extent that we’ve involved ourselves in social sins, whether by active approval or passive indulgence, we must repent: i.e., say that we’ve done wrong and that we’re sorry, ask for forgiveness from anyone we’ve wronged (God or neighbor), and resolve to do better.

Source

And then, as far as possible, we must participate in societal repentance. Now, maybe our own influence on society is a very small thing. Maybe all we can do is swallow our pride by letting someone win a Facebook argument and switch to fair-trade coffee. But, in truth, those things aren’t nothing. Small decisions to foster peace are where the power to make biggers decisions for peace comes from; it’s like lifting: you don’t start with benching 350 pounds. Then again, maybe our influence on society is a bigger thing than we think. Maybe we can sponsor the education of a child in a war-torn country, or write music that celebrates kindness and honesty, or help organize an anti-war campaign, or all sorts of things. But it’s always those little things coming from us individual people that multiply and grow and finally start moving whole cultures. Bartolomé de las Casas, William Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, Cardinal Manning, Eugene Debs, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr made things happen because they did not wait for others to act. They went and did something. It was that which inspired others to do something too.

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[1] I’m not saying that this is never justifiable. I am saying that we are way too ready to dictate to other states what they may and may not do.

Catholic Anarchy, Part III: Sedition

In this same time … our good Lord shewed a ghostlie sight of his homelie loving: I saw that he is to us all thing that is good and comfortable to our help. … And in this he shewed a litle thing, the quantitie of a hasel-nutt, lying in the palme of my hand, as me seemed; and it was as round as a ball. I looked theron with the eie of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ and it was answered generallie thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last: for me thought it might sodenlie have fallen to naught for litleness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasteth, and ever shall: for God loveth it. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.’

—Lady Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 5

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How, then, is a state to be overthrown? There are two ways of doing so, direct action and indirect action; indirect action (in an ostensibly democratic culture such as ours) tries to elect people who will work to dismantle the structures of power, while direct action simply tries to get on with the dismantling and never mind electing anybody. Of these, only direct action is likely to be any good, because not one man in a thousand is going to dismantle the system that put him in power; he is far likelier to work, as far as in him lies, to render that system hostile to his rivals for power.1

Direct action can again be divided into two kinds: the coercive and the persuasive. Coercive direct action includes all techniques that rest on either violence or the threat of violence, from armed revolt to sabotaging property to holding Cold Stone Creamery executives at gunpoint with demands for socialized ice cream distribution. By contrast, persuasive direct action encompasses the range of tactics that appeal to the opponent’s conscience and intellect, from pamphleteering to strikes to non-coöperation with the law.

As a professed pacifist, I naturally look to persuasive rather than coercive action. But, given that I view my pacifism as a matter of personal calling, not universal obligation, the question remains of whether I prefer persuasion as a matter of liking, or think that it’s simply better strategy than coercion; and I think the latter.

The chief argument in favor of coercive direct action is that it accomplishes radical change in a short period, which persuasion can’t, because some people just won’t be persuaded. The trouble about this argument is that it’s wrong from start to finish.

First of all, let’s talk about radical change. It shouldn’t be confused with merely drastic change. The word radical comes from the Latin radix,2 which means ‘root’; it is change at a root level, a change of heart, that is at stake here. And coercive means can’t effect that. Thinking it could was the error of the Middle Ages at their worst, attempting by force of arms to protect and expand the dominion of the Prince of Peace. Trying to force profound change on a population breeds only hypocrisy; it’s a law of human nature. Radical change has to come from within, and be permitted to flower through patient tending—pulling a plant will not make it grow taller, and the harder you pull, the likelier you are to tear it up.

Persuasion is not the best way of effecting a change of heart: it’s the only way. For many people it may not do its work alone: it may require experiment or experience for them to change their minds. And, yes, there will always be people who can’t be reached. ‘That we should wish to cast [Sauron] down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.’3 That’s life, and there’s no getting round it.

But the fact is, coercive direct action does accomplish something. It can right certain material injustices, even if it can’t effect radical change as such. Surely that’s better than nothing?

Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on what the coercion brings with it. But we can say this about all coercion, before we know anything else about it: it is, whether implicitly or practically, violent. And if violence is the problem, adding in more violence is doomed to failure. Not all anarchists are pacifists, either personally or philosophically, but the state’s power to compel is something we all object to, and compelling them to cut it out is pure hypocrisy.

The only way it could be justified is to classify the agents of the state as the enemy, an other, not a human neighbor. Both Christianity and democracy forbid such a thing. And anyway, if the problem with the state is the separateness of the state and the people, siding with the people just makes it worse. It doesn’t solve anything. Dehumanizing one’s opponents is always wrong; which is why I describe myself, in the words of Dorothy Day, as a pacifist in the class war.

So what does persuasive direct action actually consist in? It has three primary forms: advocacy; striking; and civil disobedience. Advocacy includes every kind of argument for anarchy, spoken and written, from pamphlets to full-length books. It also encompasses techniques chiefly meant to draw public attention to the cause of anarchism, like protests or artistic displays. The aim here is persuasion in its purest form: gaining a hearing from people, explaining what we mean by anarchy, and trying to convince them to adopt it.

Striking is normally a refusal of work in some way or other.4 A walkout at a company (especially in fields of work with ‘hard’ products, like farming or construction, as opposed to ‘soft’ products like entertainment or research) is the commonest form, and its aim is to bring about negotiation, or to bolster the cause of the strikers in an ongoing dispute; the same is true of rent strikes, culture strikes, and student strikes. I know only little about this, as I’ve never been in a position to participate in one (partly because I’ve been fairly well treated by my employers to date). Abstaining from voting can be considered a form of striking as well; though, given there's no quorum for electing public officials—i.e., no matter how low voter turnout is, the person who gets the most votes out of that turnout will win the election—it’s largely symbolic, and blends a little into the third category.

Lastly, there is civil disobedience: this is peaceful but direct defiance of the law. This may be a symbolic action, like Gandhi’s Salt March, or it may be simply a result of conscience clashing with legislation. There are times when anybody should do this, anarchist or not, as when the resistance movements in Europe in the 1940s concealed Jews. That isn’t so much anarchism as basic human decency. When it comes to specifically anarchist civil disobedience, though, the technique has a more determinate character. Civil disobedience doesn’t require attention-grabbing defiance of every individual law; after all, many laws do codify right behavior no matter who did the codifying, and many more are just less trouble (and no affront to your dignity as a person) to obey than to make a fuss over.

But some laws aren’t like that. Some laws are simply wrong, and should not be obeyed, or should even be specifically disobeyed: for example, not only should you not turn Jews over to the Nazis (not obeying), you should help them get away, however much you can (disobeying). Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to coöperate with the segregationism of the Montgomery bus system, though not a defiance of a law exactly, is of a kind with civil disobedience. A more exact and contemporary example would be Edward Snowden’s disclosure of surveillance information; that the spying was going on in the first place was wrong, and it was also wrong that it was being kept secret; his publication was, therefore, an act of conscience, a symbolic protest, and a kind of advocacy all in one.

Okay, the pic may be a little melodramatic, but the article's good and hefty.

Other laws, while they may not be violations of justice per se, may still be unwarranted, offensive intrusions into the general human right of liberty. Quiet refusal to fall in line with laws that have no right to be instituted are not usually effective as protests, but, from an anarchist point of view, they’re perfectly legitimate choices ethically (for example, in places where selling alcohol is banned on Sundays, an anarchist would see nothing immoral about selling and buying it anyway).

But what does any of this matter? There are never many Parkses, Snowdens, or Gandhis in any generation. What effect can something as small as one person have on an entire political system? What can one woman or man do?

First, break the spell of size. The state may be huge, but it is made of human beings; there’s nothing else in it. If there are many of them, there are many of everybody else, too. And second, it is our submission to coercion that gives it its power. Sedition doesn’t have to mean conspiracy and rebellion, when it is conducted not against the powerful but against their power; sedition can be as simple and clear as the word No. Realize for a moment that every state would crumble to dust in a day if everyone in its simultaneously refused to coöperate with its directives. Only one thing is needed to bring down principalities and powers: namely, the will to do it. From the moment we choose it, we have liberty. All the rest is the flower; the will is the seed.

How can this sort of sedition have victory? That’s what persuasive direct action is for: annoying your friends into agreeing with you. Because with every person you convince, the number of free people expands. Maybe, one day, the state will crumble; in the meantime, anarchy has already begun.

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1There have been exceptions: Cincinnatus, the first dictator of republican Rome, was famous for being a dictator that actually followed Roman law and retired when the emergency was over; similarly, King Juan Carlos of Spain, who quietly blended in with the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco, emerged after the tyrant’s death as a democratic reformer, transforming his own office into a constitutional monarchy. But these men are precisely exceptional. Rulers like Julius Cæsar, William of Orange, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, and Augusto Pinochet are the rule. Being trapped in the spider’s web of power politics is a far commoner fate even among would-be reformers, men being what we are.

2From which we also get the word radish, which is why radishes have long been a symbol of political unrest [citation needed].

3Said by Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Book III.

4Hunger strikes are the only exception to this that I’m aware of, but, like the other forms of strike, they are often used as a negotiating tactic, or sometimes for publicity.

The Facts About Islam

There's a lot of misinformation about Islam available, and a lot of it has gotten mixed into the controversy over Syrian refugees in the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris earlier this month. These attacks themselves, and the debate surrounding them, are part of the larger uncertainty and disputation over Islam and its relations with the West since September 11th, and arguably longer still, reaching back to the First Gulf War or even the Iranian hostage crisis.

It is, as always, much easier to find partisan arrangements of facts, factoids, and unfacts than it is to get at the truth -- whether we're talking about the truth about Islam generally, or about specific things that hit the news. I'd like to share some of what I've picked up in my studies (partly academic, mostly idle and incidental) of history, religion, and food.

1. Is Islam is a Religion of Peace or a Religion of Violence?

No; or, if you prefer, yes.

The first difficulty -- which Christians, especially Catholics, ought to appreciate (but often don't) -- is in establishing what we mean by Islam: are we talking about the creed or about its followers? For once the question is raised at all, it's obvious that these need not be the same at all.

There is no denying that Islam was spread by the sword from its earliest days. This is awful. That said, it must also be pointed out that these were wars of conquest, not extermination, and did not involve eliminating Jews and Christians -- which is more than can be said of the wars of Christendom, which regularly strove to eliminate not only Moslems, but also Jews and whatever Christians were believed (however correctly) to be the wrong kind. The Reconquista and unification of Spain, followed by the Inquisition and the forcible conversion or expulsion of the Jewish and Moorish populace, are an extreme example, but they are an extreme example of a phenomenon that was commonplace enough.

So am I saying that Christian sins legitimize Moslem sins? Not in the least. I'm not even saying that Christian sins revoke our right to rebuke Moslems for sinning, whether we speak as Christians ourselves or as the Western heirs of Christendom -- though there's plenty to be said for that. My only point here is that, if Christianity can make any valid claim to be a religion of peace in the face of our own history, then it is at least possible that Islam can make the same claim.

No one could claim that peace is central to Islam as many claim that peace is central to Christianity. I would point out, though, that telling other people what their religion does and doesn't consist in is a little rude, a little pompous, and a little ridiculous. If anybody is going to tell us what sort of religion Islam is, it ought to be Moslems, for much the same reasons that our source for what Catholicism is ought to be Ronald Knox or Peter Kreeft as opposed to, say, Lorraine Boettner or Norman Geisler.

2. Was Muhammad a Saintly Hero or a Cruel Lunatic?

Well, was Martin Luther King Jr. a pioneer of minority rights and pacifism, or a serial adulterer?

Muhammad is a difficult figure to evaluate, and not just because the sources about him are confusing and sometimes incompatible. He's a difficult figure to evaluate because he was complicated. This is natural; religious founders, who do such exceptional things, tend likewise to be very exceptional people, whatever our opinion of the religious traditions they found. Joseph Smith, Confucius, Martin Luther, Aleister Crowley, Pythagoras, St Paul -- it's tricky to get to the bottom of any one of them.

Muhammad was certainly not perfect, even by the standards of his own time, to say nothing of the criticisms of his behavior we would launch today (with regards to his marital rape of Aisha, for instance).* Neither, of course, was St Peter, as St Paul so tactlessly pointed out. But on Christian premises this point, when you get right down to it, really only matters to Muhammad at this point -- and, on materialist premises, can't really matter to anybody, since he is both wrong and dead. Meanwhile, if we accept the view that we are judged by God after death, he's passed that gate, and what we have to decide about his legacy is not whether he was a sinner -- he was -- but whether he was also right, and how far. Bringing in "But he was a total jerk!" isn't relevant to that inquiry even if it's true.

And, for what it's worth, it isn't true, or it isn't the whole truth. He could be cruel, utilitarian, and lascivious at times; probably no more so than the European leaders of Christendom in the Renaissance and the Reformation (on both sides), men and women whom we readily and rightly admire. Admission of flaws does not cheapen greatness; but we can cheat ourselves out of admiring and imitating the great by admitting only their flaws. As for Muhammad's greatness, he elevated the status of women and slaves from where it had been; he was generous and kind to the poor; he opposed racism; and -- this is something that Christians often fail to appreciate -- he converted an entire people from one of the cruder varieties of paganism to complete monotheism. That alone is a massive religious advance, and the Catechism goes out of its way to affirm that it is the true God whom he worshiped and proclaimed, with whatever imperfections of understanding.

3. Are Most Moslems Supportive of Terrorism or Opposed to It?

Here, there is for once a simple answer: most Moslems are opposed to terrorism, whether as a means of spreading Islam or for any other reason. This is in part because most Moslems are not crazy people. It is, also, because most victims of Moslem terrorism are fellow Moslems.

One of the chief inspirations of terrorists in general is a puritan or fundamentalist approach to religion, and one of the characteristic targets of all fundamentalists is, not those outside, but those whom they regard as fifth columnists -- traitors in the house. It's noteworthy that the Inquisition was primarily concerned with heretics, not with Jews, witches, or Orthodox Christians in Catholic territories. Likewise, the main victims of al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and the rest have been Moslems whom they consider lax or heretical, not Christians, Jews, or Westerners.** Indeed, this is one of the many reasons that so many people are fleeing the Levant -- being Moslem doesn't protect them.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of radicalization happens, not in the Middle East or other places where Islam is a dominant cultural presence, but right here in the West. The terrorists in Paris, for instance, were French and Belgian nationals, and it's been suggested -- not implausibly -- that the attacks were aimed at terrifying the West, not into submitting to Islam, but into turning refugees away and forcing them to stay under the hand of ISIS. Or Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who came to this country as the children of asylum seekers and were radicalized under the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American native who graduated from Colorado State. Which makes them rather like Scott Roeder, who shot abortionist Dr. George Tiller through the eye while the latter was serving as an usher at his church; or Timothy McVeigh, who, scarred by his experiences in the Gulf War, murdered 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing in an effort to make a point about American hypocrisy about Dresden, Hiroshima, Baghdad, and countless other devastated cities and populations. America is a great place to breed terrorists, apparently -- though I wonder whether bringing in a few thousand refugees who are specifically trying to get away from terrorism might not dilute that quality.

4. Are Moslems Refugees Dangerous?

No. The hypothesis that they're dangerous doesn't make sense, and the statistics about them don't back up the idea, either.

Now, to begin with, plenty of refugees from predominantly Moslem countries, such as the Syrians fleeing ISIS, aren't Moslems in the first place. Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Yezidis, and atheists have as much reason to get out of the Middle East as Moslems do. But equally, many Moslems have as much reason to get out as these other believers and non-believers do, for the reasons cited above. Most of them aren't crazy, and the ones that are would presumably prefer to stay in a place where crazy is the order of the day.

Turning to the statistics proper, the U.S. has admitted well over 750,00 refugees since September 11th. Of those, a whopping three have been connected to terrorist campaigns and conspiracies, which I think can be safely classified as an insignificant percentage if we're grading on a curve. For contrast, over sixty times that many American nationals have left this country to join ISIS. Or hey, just compare it to something as exotic and suspicious as cars; something like 1.3 million people are killed in car accidents every year, whether chauffered by terrorists or otherwise.

Hail, Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star,

Guide of the wanderer here below,

Thrown on life's surge, we claim thy care,

Save us from peril and from woe.

Mother of Christ, Star of the sea,

Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.

In fine, there are few simple answers to be had, few facts about Islam that can be categorically asserted. That's life. That doesn't mean there's no truth to be had, or no way of making decisions; what it does mean is that in this situation, like all the other ones, we have to be guided by patient thought and gathering as many facts we can, not by violent political rhetoric that panders to our fear and pride.

*I'm well aware that Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, and indeed the consummation of that marriage, would not have been considered wrong or even odd at the time. I think this lessens his responsibility -- recognizing right and wrong in the particular ways one's own culture has obscured them really is hard. I don't think that it changes the nature of the act; and I also don't think that Muhammad's virtue or lack thereof says anything, one way or the other, about the legitimacy of his prophecies.

**Fun fact: al Qaeda and the Taliban have both denounced ISIS for being too crazy. (Think of your send-'em-back-to-Africa uncle ranting about how awful Hitler was.) This has also apparently prompted some in our own government to propose using al Qaeda to fight ISIS, because Americans never learn anything, ever, whether from history or from the past five minutes.

Contempt of Conscience

You've probably heard of the Kim Davis case by now. And, if you haven't, congratulations on being the first person to reach Mars.

Who's a geek now, Steve?

Anyway, in case you do happen to be reading from the red planet, Kim Davis is a county clerk from Kentucky who has been jailed for contempt of court, after refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Since the Obergefell vs Hodges ruling in June, a number of counties have entirely stopped issuing marriage licenses in order to avoid issuing them to same-sex couples; Rowan County, where Davis worked, among them. Last month a federal court ordered that marriage licenses must be issued; when Davis continued to refuse, she was imprisoned. (The plaintiffs -- two gay couples, two straight couples, and the ACLU -- had asked only that she be fined, but the judge in question dismissed this as ineffectual, on the grounds that the fine would be paid for her by supporters.)

Most of the people that I've seen talk about the case on social media have been on the side of the courts: admittedly, when she originally took the job, she had no way of knowing that it would later come to require of her that she transgress her conscience; but that's what the law does require now, and if she refuses to do that then she ought to resign. It's easy to see the strength of such an argument. Nor is it without precedent; St Thomas More chose to resign in silent protest when Henry VIII defied the Church by repudiating Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn.

And Davis' own defense -- that she has divine and biblical sanction for her actions -- is a dubious one. That is, there is no reason to suppose that her beliefs are insincere in any way, but one can hardly maintain that those religious beliefs are relevant to civil law; the separation of church and state is enshrined in the First Amendment (not phrased in those words precisely, but it really doesn't matter; what's at stake is the substance of it), and to obtrude a solely religious basis for a political act is, in consequence, dodgy, especially as a state official.

The Catholic Church takes a slightly different angle in its objections to gay marriage. Its contention is not that gay marriage contravenes the Bible's definition of marriage, but that the natural character of marriage, apart from any question of divine revelation, is directed toward bringing children into the world. And this is certainly how most societies in most places and times have viewed marriage, which is partly why polygamy, divorce on grounds of barrenness, and the keeping of concubines have so often been culturally acceptable. (We may, of course, regard this general witness of humanity as inadequate to change our own minds, but whatever that witness is worth, this is its testimony.) Hence, a gay union, because it can't produce children, is regarded as not being a marriage ipso facto. It certainly doesn't follow from this that no legal recognition could or should be given to gay unions; only that the specific kind of recognition accorded to marriage should be unique.

If this, rather than marriage as found in Scripture, were Davis' position, she'd be in a much stronger position -- for in that case, she would be not refusing to obey a law because it conflicted with her religious faith, but refusing to obey a law because she thought it was unjust. As things are, she does seem (in my view) to be blurring the categories of civil and religious obligations, and resignation would probably have been a neater and more conscientious solution. It's partly for this reason that, though I am a fervent defender of religious liberty, I don't see this as essentially a question of religious liberty, because I don't think the nature of marriage is a specially religious question in the first place.

But, though I disagree strongly with the grounds on which she made her decision, I'm not writing this to criticize Kim Davis' actions. I'm writing to praise her.

By obeying her conscience and peaceably accepting imprisonment, Davis has entered the high tradition of civil disobedience. Indeed, refusal to comply with a law and accepting the penalty for your refusal is civil disobedience in a nutshell. Gandhi, one of the great sages of that tradition, taught with great care and emphasis that the thing that makes passive or civil resistance righteous is precisely this decision to accept the consequences, to suffer in oneself rather than inflicting suffering on others by violence -- and, incidentally, pointed out also that if a person is mistaken in their views, civil disobedience has the advantage of causing only themselves to suffer for the mistake. Martin Luther King followed the same teaching, influenced by students of Gandhi and Christian pacifists.

I would, also, pose a question to those who criticize her for failing to do her job. Without wishing to cast any doubt on the sincerity of your beliefs, have you ever gone as far as she has in standing up for what you believe? Could you go to prison in defense of gay marriage? What, in fact, did you do for gay marriage, aside from some Facebook likes and a drunken rant to a friend after your poli-sci midterm?

Kim Davis (probably)

And the members of this tradition are frequently found guilty of contempt of court, because they consider themselves answerable to something else: their consciences.* I have nothing but respect and support for that. I for one would far rather be found in contempt of court, than know within myself that I am guilty of contempt of conscience. To carry that knowledge with you, sleeping and waking -- no. And while an individual may be mistaken about right and wrong, that's true of courts too. Unjust laws, and for that matter unjust judges, have existed at least as long as history -- that was kind of the point of the gay rights movement, wasn't it? Law itself is worthless unless it embodies justice; justice is superior to all law; and justice is known, not by legal fact or precedent, but by the inner witness of the soul as tutored by the intellect. A person can be persuaded that their beliefs are incorrect, and therefore change them. But as long as they do hold those beliefs, obedience to them is what makes for a clear or a guilty conscience.

People will say that Kim Davis is no MLK. Certainly not. And, yes, her own track record on marriage is by no means a perfect one.** But we do not earn the right to obey our consciences by being saints already, or even mere heroes. Obeying your conscience is what raises you to heroism. I think that Davis' decision to follow the path of civil disobedience in this case, even though I disagree with her grounds for doing so, ennobles her.

*All of the civil resisters that I know of have also been religious; their obedience to their consciences has been inviolable to them because they believe that conscience is, in Newman's phrase, the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. While this trend is certainly present, I don't know that it's necessary to civil disobedience. I see no reason why an atheist or an agnostic couldn't make a good civil resister. Furthermore, insofar as these acts are a testimony to conscience and an urge to others to heed their own consciences, I don't believe that civil disobedience involves us in the mixed-up premises that Kim Davis has espoused.

**She has been married four times (twice to the same man). A good deal of chaff has been blown up over this fact. I'd point out a few things in response: first, that her experience of religious conversion only took place in 2011, so that her zeal on matters marital may well be a recent and comparatively unsoiled thing; second, that we are not privy to the nature and circumstances of her marriages (or not that I'm aware), which could possibly be innocent or at least very pardonable, and that presuming the worst of others is an ugly way to behave; and third, that having a poor moral history oneself is not a good reason to transgress one's principles further merely because it would be consistent.