You’re a blogwatcher, I’m a blogwatcher too…

Camassia: Acute as always.

This seems to be an issue with some folks at my church also, since the pastor sometimes invokes “our mother in God” and song lyrics are edited to excise male pronouns for God (though oddly enough, they leave in masculine titles like Father and King). However, I’ve long wondered if this is an expression less of some deficiency in the traditional understanding of God than in a deficiency of modern fatherhood. Fox’s theses seem to assume that father = someone distant and punitive. Fathers have always been disciplinarians, but in premodern cultures other attributes of fatherhood loomed larger: your father would probably have been your primary educator, your protector in a rough world, and (if you’re male) a model for when you come into fatherhood and the family profession. All those functions appear prominently in the God of the Bible (and in the New Testament, the inheritance definitely includes women). Discipline, then, occurred within the context of the close relationship, not in “wait till your father gets home” sort of threats. Fatherhood can and does turn nasty and abusive of course, but so does motherhood, so I’m not sure how changing God into Mother helps that much.

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The Godspy newsreel (along the left-hand side of the page) is an indispensable source–sort of an Arts & Letters Daily for Catholics. When I have an Internet connection that I don’t have to kick in the shins every two minutes, I will add both to the blogroll.

The Volokh Conspiracy: If man is the political animal, are journalists subhuman?

And Raich v. Ashcroft (medical marijuana) case links: SCOTUSblog has a ton of people commenting, including my father and my cousin; Ninomania (“If there’s anything I like less than Justice Scalia being wrong, it’s Justice O’Connor being right“); and David Bernstein on the policy question:

There are essentially two strategies for those who are concerned with civil liberties for limiting the government’s ability to abuse the rights of the public. One is the standard ACLU strategy of being a liberal supporter of broad government power, and then insisting that the government respect individual rights, especially constitutional rights, when using that power. The other strategy, followed by libertarians, is to try to limit the government’s general power to begin with because the government cannot abuse power it does not have. The drug war provides a least one example of the superiority of the libertarian strategy. The drug war has run roughshod over the civil libertarian accomplishments of the Warren Court, leading to a weakening to various degrees of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments, not to mention a huge increase in the prison population, and the denial of the basic right to use relatively innocuous recreational drugs, even for medicinal or health purposes. Far better to have denied the federal government the power to regulate intrastate use of and sale of drugs to begin with, as, I recall, Justice Van Devanter advocated on Commerce Clause grounds way back in the “dark ages” of the 1920’s.

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Wow, my Internet connection is slower than a tortoise riding on the back of a somnolent ROCK. I have much more to say, but I am talking too fast for this computer’s Little Pea Brain, so it will have to wait until tomorrow. Try to restrain your wailing.