A Disappointing Day

Today I've learned that my hopes to someday be appointed to the Supreme Court are never going to pan out. Apparently drinking in college, getting in bar fights, and similar things can be held against you in that regard. Fortunately, thanks to former President Obama, we know that cocaine and marijuana use cannot be held against you in your quest to become President; but unfortunately for me, I've never used cocaine or marijuana. I might have had some beer, though; and I can't promise under oath that there have never been any bar fights. Friendly ones, more or less. Just good fun. All the same, there might have been some.

Apparently this sort of thing is disqualifying. The latest story I've heard is that someone is alleging that K's frat may have hired a stripper to perform a "public sex act" at the frathouse, albeit after he had graduated and gone on to law school. I'd heretofore understood the Democratic Party's position on 'sex workers' to be that they should be treated with respect, which surely should mean that giving them some employment shouldn't be beyond the pale. I certainly don't wish to suggest that people who engage in such work are necessarily immoral or wicked, nor those who employ them; all the same, I've never been interested. However, I did once attend a birthday party where a stripper performed. I was 15 or 16, and so embarrassed that I fled immediately. But the folks who employed her were Volunteer firefighters, friends of my father's and pillars of the community insofar as they'd report anywhere in the middle of the night to deal with fire or accident. They just liked to see a pretty girl once in a while. They had no intention of assaulting her, and she was performing there of her own free will.

Catholic theologians can explain just why this is nevertheless sinful, although at the moment the Church might better avail itself of expunging the beam in its own eye than in explication in the mote in others'. In fact one might argue that the Church might have better employed strippers occasionally, as by all accounts it used to do, than to have handed itself over to those who didn't care to see a pretty girl once in a while. Lusting after the pretty girl who voluntarily performs for you can be handled in Confession; the assault on the children is unlikely to be as readily satisfied, even according to the most careful theology of the Church.

The Democratic Party is not covering itself in democracy here. Opposing sex and beer and rowdy fire may be moral according to some visions, but not according to the democratic vision.

All the same, I've learned this week that I'll never be a judge. Too bad for you: I'm a pretty lenient one. You'll be sad to be judged by those who never had a fault themselves, if such people can in fact be found. As Chesterton warned: "Oh drunkards in my cellar, boys in my apple tree: the world grows stiff and strange and new, and wise men shall rule over you; and you shall weep for me."