The Aching Need for Scapegoats

Went out to a nice lunch yesterday with my kid and a cousin, at a Cuban sandwich shop in Durham, NC. Here's their front door. Mighty fine.

This week several good political blog authors have noted a series of pieces by Ross Douthat and David French (ex-Presidential aspirant) which suggest that youngsters who are asserting their trans situation are really just presenting some sort of "fad," medical or social, victims somehow of liberal parents or a liberal social culture. Here in North Carolina this itch was decisively scratched back in the spring with HB-2. Slap 'em down! Our state government seems willing to pay any price. The NBA All-Star Game is gone. They've now hired some big cheeze lawyer to defend their law, a guy who charges $500 an hour. Roy Cooper, our Democratic Attorney General, who's running for governor against our Republican bigot, Pat McCrory, won't defend the law. Of course the Republicans just say it's all politics. Even the local NPR affiliate pretty much reports it that way. Funding is involved. Some say, others say. They're rioting in Africa, they're starving in Spain.

Perhaps Tony Perkins lost his house to flood this past week because of his persecution of the weak and disenfranchised. That didn't stop Jerry Falwell, Jr. from endorsing Mr. Trump, so we have a test case in the making. Hurricane season is here: keep your eyes on Lynchburg, VA for the next couple of months. But I'm more convinced by the late Christopher Hitchens' argument. Some varieties of religion remove responsibility from people, and that's likely one reason for the expanding popularity of these varieties. And it's still cheap thrills. Just this past week we were looking at a nearby rest home for Libby's dad which stated, as part of it's religious credo, that humans are without religion "depraved." Here's the whole credo, just so you know I'm not kidding:

We believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible; the Deity and sinless perfection of the Lord Jesus Christ; the existence of the Holy Trinity; the total depravity of man and the necessity of the new birth; redemption through the blood of Christ; salvation by grace through faith; the personal premillenial return of Christ for all believers; and the physical resurrection of the dead, either to eternal bliss or eternal damnation.

Oh yeah? Well the old man ain't goin' there. He already spent a good year of his life in France and Germany, 1944-'45.

Meanwhile, I might go back over to Durham next week just for another Cuban sandwich.