Twilight of the old party system?

Belmont Club » That’s the Way You Do It

The situation in which Britain finds itself is so dire that the Governor of the Bank of England told an American economist that whichever party won the current general election it would be “out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be.” David Cameron may find, immediately after taking control of the ship of state that he has been promoted to the captaincy of the Titanic.

That makes me feel a bit better about watching the UK election results tomorrow.

In the meantime, you might be interested in Adam K's analysis of how, in an America where the political center has all but been abandoned, politics is becoming a fight in which each of the two major parties seeks to destroy its rival in order to institute some new kind of political center and debate on new terms. However, the more a party is expressly aware of and publicly vocal about its desire to destroy the other party, the less successful it can be. Adam thus looks for the political issues that, if fought seriously, may nonetheless have the pragmatic effect of destroying the "criminal cult" that is today's Democratic Party.

Sharia's status in the UK

There has been a lot of talk lately in the blogs that Sharia courts are now recognized by higher courts in the UK. What this discussion has not made clear is whether the higher courts will enforce the decisions of Sharia "arbitration" courts if the latters' decisions are themselves contrary to British law.

This article by John O'Sullivan argues that British courts cannot recognize illegal (under British law) rulings and thus helps clarify the issue at stake, which is that ultimately Sharia, with its image of Islamic society (and its outsiders) as a ritually-bound hierarchy of distinct roles that determine each person's place and "rights" is logically and ethically incompatible with a legal system that would treat all members of a nation as free and equal individuals (and would similarly treat all nations as having equal rights and responsibilities internationally).

Thus any compromises made towards Sharia courts in what professes to be a society based on individual liberty is simply a cynical or cowardly deferral of hard choices, and an appeasement of those who refuse to adapt to modernity and its ethical absolutes rooted in the sacredness of the free individual and the kind of society that makes free individuals possible.

The fact that large numbers of the British political and policing classes are just so appeasing at present is not proof of Sharia's present legality in the UK. What we mean, in theory or practise, by "the rule of law" - as something distinct from the rule of arbitrary tyranny, or of multiculti legal pot luck (where you can't be sure which law will be determinative in any given time or place) - cannot be reduced to the political cowardice or bullying of an imperial officialdom. No, "the rule of law," as something freely recognized and widely respected must be ultimately recognizable in terms of a widely-understood revelation about the meaning of history, or its key events. The rule of law cannot be separated from a coherent and freely accepted vision of nationhood (and similarly of a truly inter-national order).

Ultimately, no enduring society, whether Islamic or Western, can be long ruled by bureaucratic fudging by post-national elites invested in an ethic of moral or legal, multiculti, relativism. Inevitably, there comes a place and a time when the meaning of a society and its law has to be clearly represented and renewed by some kind of iconic authority, an authority rooted in revelatory and widely respected events.

This re-presentation should not be dictatorial but rather must renew and hopefully expand the degrees of freedom, e.g. of rational debate, without which the long-evolving social order cannot be sustained. Our revelations thus must be open-ended, never entirely settled, or else they are in need of renewal. But we must not confuse true open-endedness with a kind of multiculti bureaucratic fudging that only limits the growth of a free society by re-ritualizing a system of differential rights.

King John is not yet resurrected as the Sheikh or Fatwa council of every demographically-appopriate British hamlet, if I may mix metaphors without too much bureaucratic incoherence. What is happening today in the UK is just a cowardly and dangerous postponement of some future day of reckoning. Does none of Britain's politicos and police officers have the balls to make clear whether or not all British women have a right to be protected from domestic abuse and third-class status in family law? If not, then the future belongs to others' superior generative capacities. It cannot belong to endless fudge, however distracting the promise of another little chocolate mint is at present.

The Archbishop of Sharia controversy

Adrian Morgan provides a useful overview of the present storm over the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments, and provides some background to recent developments in Britain.

Of course, despite Archbishop Rowan Williams' general political foolishness, and his unwittingly anti-Christian moral and cultural relativism, the Archbishop is at least correct that Sharia law already exists in some form in Britain as, for example,the reports of Muslim police and government officials helping families track down wives and daughters who have tried to escape to women's shelters testifies. When the state is helping to sustain a culture that still performs honour killings, the outrage over Archbishop Rowan William's testing of the Sharia waters is understandable. According to police, there are up to 17,000 women who are victims of honour crimes each year in Britain.

What is becoming more and more clear is that there is growing a very serious divide between the elites or the bureaucratic-academic-journalistic classes and the bulk of (increasingly internet-informed) public opinion in countries like Britain on the questions of "multiculturalism" and Islam and their place in (British) society. This is a highly dangerous situation that could lead to great violence because it testifies to a collapse of a shared conception of what the national covenant of Britain is. If the elites, full of their vague and fundamentally incoherent half-ideas about cultural and moral relativism, "multiculturalism", "European Union", (anti-)nationalism and democracy, are unable to represent the nation and political citizenship in ways that can be used, exchanged, modified, by the large majority of people, under a national political constitution that provides a people the non-violent means to constitute and renew their political identities, it is only a matter of time before there will be serious disorder.

According to a recent report for one of the world's leading elite-liberal-post-nationalist organizations, Europeans think Islam is dangerous:

An “overwhelming majority” of Europeans believe immigration from Islamic countries is a threat to their traditional way of life, a survey revealed last night.

The poll, carried out across 21 countries, found “widespread anti-immigration sentiment”, but warned Europe’s Muslim population will treble in the next 17 years.

It reported “a severe deficit of trust is found between the Western and Muslim communities”, with most people wanting less interaction with the Muslim world.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

This divide between "leaders" and "citizens" is indeed frightening. The basis of all human order, the means by which we defer violent conflict, is through the exchange of signs or representations. These signs must emerge and be exchanged on shared scenes, a requirement that has led us in the West to develop shared national cultures, on the realization that multicultural empires have proven less capable of insuring the democratic exchange of signs. But this is a lesson we are always forgetting, due to the unhappy but inevitable history of conflict within and between nations, and due to the appeal of more simplistic Utopian ideas about imperial control and unified deferral to centralized signs of "multicultural", i.e. extra-cultural, rule. To speak of "extra-cultural" rule is to suggest that the "culture" ruling multicultural empires is parasitic on the subject cultures and does not provide a means for much cultural renewal in the long run. If "multicultural" "unity" comes at the cost of a loss to ordinary people's capacity to engage seriously in the renewal of the culture by which they are led, if unity means that politics becomes a game of horse-trading among demagoguing elites who stir up the mobs they presume to represent, focusing their resentment on the other demagogues and the other mobs-cultures of the multicultural empire, instead of engaging one's constituency in a serious exchange of signs, then it is not a unity that will last long the erosion that human resentment effects on any and every form of political order.

Multiculturalism, as a principle of rule, must be parasitic on all the cultures that constitute the political entity, for it cannot fully provide any one culture the freedom continually to renew the terms by which leaders and led will relate to each other. It robs any one culture of the degrees of freedom necessary to that essential human task. Whatever multicultural flourishing we (Canadians) should allow ourselves in the domestic, strictly (privately) religious, consumer, and economic spheres of life, when it comes to public politics, our ideal should be a universally shared national covenant. If multiculturalism means eating Chinese food, or becoming a Hindu, fine. But if it means that our political leaders speak primarily not to individual Canadians as free individuals, but to Chinese, Hindu, etc. "community leaders", then we are going down a road to a political culture that will rob ourselves of the necessary means for renewing our politics non-violently. Only a political order that has a constitution that allows the people the individual- (not group-)based freedoms to be variously involved in renewing their culture(s) can hope to survive long in history, especially at a time when our means of communications and resentment are so great.

Order is never primarily a question of brute force or power, but of shared opinion about the political and social lines that must be respected and defended. It is once that shared exchange of political representations is lost between putative leaders and led that the attraction of brute force to those seeking power and order becomes fantastically appealing.

But those who want to forestall the coming danger will not simply jump on the popular bandwagon of denouncing both Islam as a violent and supremacist cult, and the elites who insist it is a religion of peace. What Islam is or can be is not half as important as what Western nations understand themselves to be. Will Westerners, currently immersed in the religion of White Guilt, give up on renewing and championing their national cultures, both as the basis for a more transparent and effective inter-national mediation of conflict, and for maximizing our individual potential to live free and meaningful lives within the march of history?

The real leaders of society will take it upon themselves to sit down with their friends, neighbours, internet acquaintances - all fellow citizens of good faith - and start asking how we can start representing our nations in ways that can preserve and renew our traditions of individual freedom and self-ruling democracy. When I hear of covenant zones, or something like them, popping up in the UK, I will worry less that out-of-control street violence, or totalitarian government, is in the future of the land that gave Canada the basis of our constitutional freedoms.

Nigerian Archbishop Ben Kwashi responds to Rowan Williams:

Technorati Tags: Archbishop of Canterbury, Sharia, Rowan Williams, multiculturalism, United Kingdom, covenants, constitutionalism

Not-So-Great Britain, Say UK Teachers

A group of British educators refuse to forgive their predecessors for their bad choices. In order to punish their ancestors, they are going to take out their hatred on the next generation of young brits:

"Don't teach children patriotism"

Patriotism should be avoided in school lessons because British history is “morally ambiguous”, a leading educational body recommends.
...
Teachers should not instill pride in what they consider great moments of British history, as more shameful episodes could be downplayed or excluded.
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Three quarters of teachers felt obliged to tell students about the danger of patriotism. The survey suggested neither pupils nor teachers wanted patriotism endorsed by schools.
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The institute - part of the University of London – asked nearly 300 pupils aged 13 to 14, and 47 teachers, in 20 London schools, how patriotism should be handled. About 94 per cent of teachers and 77 per cent of teenagers said that schools should give a balanced presentation of opposing views. Fewer than 10 per cent felt patriotism should be actively promoted.

Why such a dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the good as well as the bad? Why such stark dismissal of the repentance, of the atonement, of the change for the better that underscores so much of British history? Why don't they want to see the good along with the bad..?

Why the blind determination to leave the sins of the past unforgiven?

“Forgiveness” doesn’t mean we ignore a bad choice, or pretend that the bad choice doesn’t matter; to forgive is to act like something matters more. To never forgive is to live in the past, to freeze our life into a wax figure tableau representing a single moment, perpetuating the time we were sinned against. To forgive doesn’t mean living within an illusion, or being blind to the past… it means living for the future. What will get us beyond the moment of pain, of failure, of resentment? Forgiveness is fully seeing the sin, and reconciling to it.

If I am unwilling or unable to forgive others, is that merely an excuse to avoid facing judgment myself, being held to account for my own choices and decisions?

If a person doesn't believe that their country can become a better place, what might that say about their own beliefs about themselves? Is a person capable of improvement, or not? Are we really no different, at twenty, at thirty, at forty, than we were at the age of thirteen..? If an individual can learn from experience, why not a nation of individuals as well?

The teachers and I agree on one point: children should be taught that love requires clarity, honesty, and humility. Love is not about lying, Love is not blind, Love is the opposite: true, faithfully persistent commitment to seeing things as they really are. The hard part is that this involves seeing the unseen, seeing into the future, penetrating a cloud of doubts in order to affirm that we can learn from experience, that we can progress... we are not animals, we are Human.

The gurgling little baby in our arms can someday learn to give shape to his dreams, that he is capable of growing to see his own mistakes, in order to learn from them, maybe even some day appreciating the gift of free will that allows him to choose good as readily as evil..

...so that choosing good can be seen as the treasured blessing that it really is.

Falling on your own sword

I remember with interest a book I once read detailing a common theme in myths from around the world. These would be myths characteristic of an agrarian society with a dawning consciousness of how its myths work. These myths tell us about a society that, in times of trouble, hears the words of a wise man, or, alternatively, someone who is not usually heard from, telling the people to look for a special sign of something or someone - say, someone whose pants have a horizontal, not vertical, seam - someone who, it is implied, is somehow connected to the cause of the crisis. The person who speaks intuitively grasps that the community needs a victim, someone to point to and cast out, not that they know exactly what it is to scapegoat; what the person does not realize, until too late, is that in speaking out he or she becomes marked as a potential victim him or herself.

Such a myth is mark of a world still somewhat primitive, not yet fully in the light of the Judeo-Christian unveiling of myth's role of transfiguring sacrificial violence by making victims into myth's tragic heroes or gods, a world not yet troubled by myth's inability to explain itself, its own history and relationship to human violence and to the rituals that represent and obscure originary violent events.

I'm really not sure if I am being facetious in suggesting that such a mythic consciousness would be roughly the equivalent in religious consciousness of today's Archbishop of Canterbury:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.

Dr Williams, who has seen his own Anglican Communion riven by fierce invective over homosexuality, said the current blasphemy law was “unworkable” and he had no objection to its repeal.

But whatever replaces it should “send a signal” about what was acceptable.

This should be done by “stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours” that have the effect of silencing argument.

The Archbishop, delivering the James Callaghan Memorial Lecture in London this afternoon, said it should not just be a few forms of extreme behaviour that were deemed unacceptable, leaving everything else as fair game.

“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said.
[...]
In 2006, Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which creates an offence of inciting or “stirring up” hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. But the act was so watered down during its passage through Parliament that its critics fear it will be almost useless.

Dr Williams said: “It is clear that the old blasphemy law is unworkable and that its assumptions are not those of contemporary lawmakers and citizens overall. But as we think about the adequacy of what is coming to replace it, we should not, I believe, miss the opportunity of asking the larger questions about what is just and good for individuals and groups in our society who hold religious beliefs.”

Dr Williams was criticised by the National Secular Society who accused him of promoting “self-serving and dangerous" ideas.

Terry Sanderson, president, said that the Archbishop’s speech was a “blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws that the Government are planning to scrap.”

Thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting? Self-serving indeed. I mean what could be more thoughtlessly sacrificial than pointing the finger at someone and labelling them with highly emotional and subjective labels like "thoughtless" and "unintentionally cruel", and then casting them out of society as the bad guy? Sure the lawyers would develop all kinds of standards and protocols for such charges; still, at the end of the day, what kind of law can judge "unintentional thoughts" without making the traditional English ideal of a univerally-applied law into a plaything of arbitrary judicial interpretation? How could a society with such a law not corrupt its judiciary and their aspirations to disinterestedness, given that a judge would have to rely on political correctness to know when someone was being criminally thoughtless and unintentionally cruel?

A society that became so irrational as to cast out all that Christianity has taught us about the irrationality of scapegoating and depending on victimization for creating social order - a society whose present erosion is in part tied to its religious and political refusal to name and contest the primitive religious sensiblity that is growing in its midst (as anything other than "anti-Islamic" and "cruel") - is a society that could easily turn on the Archbishop and say that he is the one being thoughtless and unintentionally cruel, and cast him out.

Where do they find these people, these half-witted readers of Rene Girard (I have read that Dr. Rowan Williams is among their number) who never seem to appreciate what Girard is really telling us about our cruel addiction to casting out the bad guy, "Mr. cruelty"? The British Isles that gave us the greatest lessons in the rule of law and free speech, are now home to many high officials and sacrificers who need to go back to school and relearn those lessons.

As usual, the work of Eric Gans is to the point:

The claim that what Robert Sheaffer--an interesting "amateur" theoretician of resentment to whom I shall return in a future column--calls "envy control" is the founding principle of human society strikes me as more valid by every reasonable intellectual criterion than, for example, Richard Rorty's popular idea, borrowed from Judith Shklar, that the good society is one that avoids cruelty. The idea of avoiding cruelty is so sanctimoniously self-serving, in a word, so sacrificial--Cruelty as the black-hatted Bad Guy--that it makes me nostalgic for the Aztecs who supplied themselves with protein by slaughtering their neighbors; no mealy-mouthed hypocrites there! But this Nietzschean reaction, however natural, only plays into the hands of the "institutional middle class," with its "empathic" notions of compassion and cruelty-avoidance. As proof, Nietzsche himself has become a hero of this class, which is to say, of the Left, which he execrated. His revaluation of all values is now, with fitting irony, put to just the opposite use to that for which it was intended: the conscration of the victimary. This should be a warning to all thinkers who dare speak of resentment.

Somali gays under attack in the UK

I admit to having some doubts about whether one should encourage homosexuality as a "normal" thing, a good choice for young people, as the Government of British Columbia has recently declared our public schools will teach. Quite aside from one's take on the controversy over whether homosexuality is rooted in biology or learned desire, or both, it seems clear to me that Western culture and most families have had reason for taking heterosexual love in youth and marriage as a standard: it promotes social order and reproduction. It also seems evident to me that male homosexuality can become widespread, especially in a hierarchical culture, in the form of pederasty, and that such a widespread practice doesn't come without limiting or shaping a society in certain ways. It is a choice, with consequences. So I'm not surprised to see the hysterical fears of homosexuality among Islamic opinion leaders (like the President of Iran who recently informed Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in his country!), given that by all reports male homosexuality, while kept hidden and denounced, is nonetheless widespread in the Islamic world. Whether Islam, with its codes of dominance and submission, can ever overcome its often nasty take on the homoerotic, and its women-bashing tendencies, is something I often doubt, though I sincerely hope.

Holding this view doesn't mean I think we shouldn't have a society free enough for people to do what they will in private, or to talk about it in public. If the conventional Western nuclear family and heterosexual romantic ideal is an integral part of a free society, as I believe they are, we should defend both this family structure and any homosexual freedom to the extent it does not begin to subvert the family and societal reproduction. Such a balancing act will only be possible in a society where free speech is positively encouraged, and people are not scorned for what are today politically-incorrect defenses of the "normal", or criticisms of the sado-masochistic, or promiscuous, in matters sexual.

This understanding of freedom, however, which I had thought was pretty firmly established in the West, no longer goes unchallenged in the United Kingdom where free speech is no longer a priority (as producers of a recent television program investigating the radical Jihadi speeches being given in British mosques discovered when the police responded to the program not by investigating the mosques, but rather the program’s producers – for incitement to "racial hatred").

As usual the great challenger today to the established Western order is Islam. At present, our attention is on a story found buried in cyberspace about a UK website set up for Somali homosexuals to communicate and come in contact with each other. For their troubles, the site's male owners, who offer a reading of the Islamic holy texts to defend homosexuality, and who believe Islam is a religion of reason, have received various death threats, even from enraged Muslim women:

afrol News , 29 November - After the website Somali Gay Community was launched earlier this month, the staff behind the site has received death threats. The news about the website, which major Somali media picked up from afrol News, caused a storm of debate that included threatening hate messages. But it also gave the new gay site very many hits and members, documenting needs in Somali society.

Muraad Kareem, one of the Somalis behind www.somaligaycommunity.org, was astonished by the row of events that followed the publishing of an article about the website by afrol News. "Major Somali news websites have picked it up the article that you .. published. People were outraged to see such article on 'Hiiraanonline' which is a major news website. People could not believe that a major Somali news website would publish such article. They have asked it to be removed and their messages were horrific and hateful," Muraad tells afrol News.

"One of the messages was saying that they will hunt us down beyond enemy lines," he continues. "I was ignoring these messages but when I started to worry when my name, address, telephone number and that of Andrew Prince was posted on Somaliland.com."

Andrew Prince, a UK-based gay activist and web developer, stood behind the technical aspects of the Somali website. Also he was surprised by the amount of "hate writers" attacking him and Muraad on Somali blogs. He recalls: "One individual calls for us to be 'hunted down in the street and stoned like dogs' while another said, 'Allah will punish them', another, 'It's a western illness', and yet another, 'motherfocker if I ever see you on the street, am gonna chop you to pieces then feed ur crap to dogs' – this last one from a Muslim woman."

The two reveal that several individuals were going a step further than just threatening. Some investigated the whereabouts of the two and published this information on a Somali website. According to Mr Prince, "the site was threatened with being hacked so I had to take extra security steps to protect the site so that it stays online to serve the community that it was intended for." Muraad adds there were indeed attempts to hack the website.

Now we could chalk this up as just another story about the rise of intolerant Islamic supremacism in the West. But in the midst of all these stories another question is emerging: what is it going to take for Western people to stand up and make it perfectly clear that this type of hysterical and threatening behaviour is deranged, a sign of mental illness that must be faced and disciplined by healthy society?

Well, for starters, that would take a widespread recognition of what is a healthy and free society. But it also requires people knowing and loving the truth so much that they will risk their own security to defend it. Because, like it or not, it is possible that you are taking a risk with your life, or economic security, when you stand up to hysterical and threatening Muslims and their aiders and abettors among the appeasing elites of Western society.

Now it seems that the gay principals of the UK website are willing to stand and fight. They have put in enough time and love to recognize their stake in the system and to defend it for now.

Yet a question that is often asked in the blogs of conservatives - and those liberals transformed by 9/11 into taking what are today labeled “conservative” stances, i.e. the defense of classical, liberal values - is why aren't the "feminists" doing more to stand up for the women atrociously abused by Islam, like the many rape victims beaten and imprisoned for the "crime" of letting themselves be raped. Where are the widespread denunciations of orthodox Islam in the supposed equality-defending universities? We also hear the question, why aren't the leaders of the Western gay institutions standing up more for those homosexuals who, from time to time, are violently punished - sometimes executed - as the scapegoats for an Islamic culture that can't come openly to terms with its own culture of pederasty? Are gays in the UK going to get out in public and defend their local Somali gay website? Or are they going to make excuses for Islam, all the while dreaming of a vacation in, say, Egypt where you can service all kinds of desires as long as you know how to be discrete?

Islam, it seems to me, is acting as a great unveiler of what we in the West really believe. It's always easy to talk, and to think holy thoughts, but what you really believe is revealed by what you are willing to do and to defend when under direct personal pressure.



People cannot act if at heart they are nihilists, which is to say, according to my friend Adam Katz, if they don’t really know which among several contradicting imperatives to stand for and fight, and if they can’t link their discovery of a personal imperative to a true vision of a free and expanding culture where one is in a compact with other free persons to guarantee each other's freedom to speak and think and fight for what each believes is right, even when you disagree with each other on fundamental questions. If people's model of standing for something is simply to demand recognition for a historical victim status – e.g. for recognition and compensation for the fact that Western society, until recently, privileged the status of heterosexual males in public positions of all kinds – then people seem to be unable to deny other peoples' similar claims on such victim status, i.e. the claims of Muslims demanding respect and entitlements in the “post-colonial” West, even as the Muslim leaders do little to criticize let alone fight their many co-religionists saying or doing violently objectionable things. The problem that gays and feminists may face in overcoming their apparent paralysis on the Muslim question is that in criticizing the straight male, they have often come to assume it is ok to deny straight men the right to publicly criticize homosexuality or certain feminist doctrines. And this entails, in other words, that people no longer have a firm sense of the covenant we all must share to guarantee each other’s freedom to speak without being shunned, or worse.

If gays and feminists want to be protected in a free society they are probably going to have to take a lead in defending it, precisely because at present they may have more moral authority in the left-liberal circles of elite public opinion makers than do cranky straight males like me who might wish to criticize something about “the other”.

Gays are going to have to learn why it is imperative to defend homosexuality as a necessary freedom in face of those who would go on fits of gay bashing. But wait a minute, surely this is not any great intellectual dilemma, is it? Well, as Charles has reported, the best the Mayor of Amsterdam can come up with in response to a number of Muslim gay bashings is to “study the problem”. And what he means is that he is going to commission some report to show to the Muslims and say “look! this is what all good liberal people think”.

The problem with that is that what good left-liberal people think is that no one should any longer do or think anything that isn’t in line with what all good left-liberal people think. It’s paralyzing, waiting for the great consensus to turn your way. In other words, the left-liberals have spent so much effort in circumscribing all manner of non-“liberal” thought and social authority that they themselves no longer really know how to act on their own initiative, uncertain as to what might result from it, what new imbalance or crime of victimization they may inadvertently commit, especially against immigrant minorities doing objectionable things. They are too full of the idea that good liberal people simply embrace multiculturalism – the left defines itself as a coalition of “minority” groups - and not criticize other cultures, choosing instead to promote integration through mutual self-esteem. And they don’t have a plan B if that fails. And they will only learn again how to act on questions of life or death when they truly learn to love their freedom as something other than an entitlement, or a sign of what all good left-liberal people think, when they learn again what is an almost God-given imperative for oneself to defend, as if it were most sacred. The faith that will propel positive action cannot come from vague ideas of what all good liberal people believe. I think European gays will have to renew a commitment to both a more imperative and indefinite, open-ended, faith, in exchange with other lovers of freedom.