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Notes -
Does anyone know any higher ups in the Catholic Church? Maybe, specifically in Louisiana?
Still-current ‘American Conservative’ (the publication) blogger and former trad-cath Rod Dreher, who has spent a career moralizing to others, has divorced his wife and converted to Orthodoxy. I think it’s only fair and right the Catholic Church excommunicate him for his divorce and heresy.
Just wanted to see if anyone can put in a call, get the ball rolling.
Obviously it doesn't necessarily require the conclusion that Dreher is a hypocrite because he can't hold his marriage together, just like it doesn't make Jordan Peterson a hypocrite to get addicted to benzos, and Joe Biden might still know how to raise kids even though Hunter. Some people roll snake-eyes when they're picking a spouse or having a kid or born with the wrong addiction gene combination. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. "Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves, therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up, he shatters, but his hands heal."
But when people become famous for having a lot of thoughts on how everyone else ought to live, and point to all the bad things happening in your life as a result of your lack of discipline/religiosity/virtue, one might tend to look at how their lives are going and say: gee it seems like discipline/religiosity/virtue isn't getting you all that far is it?
I've been a Dreher reader for over a decade, I've found he has a lot of insight on many things and I think The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies were important intellectual contributions to the discourse. But, part of traditional marriage and family life is keeping your wife happy and happily obedient, a man must have the patriarchal leadership and charisma (I mean that positively) to actually lead. If Dreher couldn't deliver on it, is that really a model that is scaleable to society? Or is it a non-workable model?
In the same way I don't think drug addiction makes you a bad person, but it's a strike against you, and it's certainly a big red asterisk on your advice about how to live your life. Having an addict kid that fucks his sister-in-law doesn't make you a bad person, but it makes me think maybe you should have some grace and not try to insert the government under your leadership into my family life.
It's possible that one or more of their philosophies is a model that is only scaleable to society. Perhaps if you instead only implement it on a small scale, without nearly-omnipresent support for your preferred culture along with a high-trust and long-time-horizon view toward it, it becomes impossible to rely on the benefits of that culture, because external forces will eventually break whatever you've tried to build on it, which creates a vicious cycle when even your allies stop seeing benefits to that culture and trust and long-term outlook. But, if you could somehow manage to create a whole world where the vast majority of your fellows are on your side, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about you or your family falling to temptations that all your peers are also trying to help you avoid.
On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this explanation sounds like exactly the same bullshit that incorrigible Communists use to explain why their predecessors only trashed their half of the world (because we cruelly didn't give them the whole world to play with!). So even if it's true in some case(s) it probably still means the philosophy is unachievable, as well as unstable even if it could be temporarily achieved.
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