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Words of Christ

August 23, 2020

“The road to heaven cannot be widened by men because they desire it to be widened so that their sins may accompany them and none must be shed.  There is nothing gained without sacrifice, least of all heaven.  For if heaven is indeed that to which man most aspires, then would not the sacrifice required for admittance be the greatest sacrifice?  Man though was unable, being sinful, to offer the greatest sacrifice, and therefore I offered it for him.  But then shall they count this sacrifice as naught by attempting to bring with them on the journey the very things from which I have freed them?  Although I have made this sacrifice, and although it is complete and perfect, have men not heard the call to abandon sin and to pick up the cross?  For, if arriving at the gates, men carry no cross, how then indeed will they be able to enter into the resurrection?  For a resurrection requires a crucifixion, and how can one be crucified without a cross?

-S

The Essential Scalia To Be Released Soon

By ED WHELAN

August 24, 2020 2:33 PM

If you want to encounter Justice Antonin Scalia’s great legal mind in action, from broad questions about legal interpretation to specific disputes over constitutional provisions, I have just the book for you: The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law, co-edited by Sixth Circuit judge Jeffrey S. Sutton and me.

Here’s the opening of Justice Elena Kagan’s beautiful foreword to the volume:

In the six years Nino and I served together on the Supreme Court, I held to an unwavering rule. When Nino circulated a new opin­ion, I would put aside whatever else I was doing to read it. Whether I expected to agree or to disagree, I wanted to know immediately—not in a day or in an hour but right now—what Nino had to say. I wanted to dive into his inimitable writing style. To marvel at the power of his mind. And most important, to take the measure of his ideas.

I envy the reader who has picked up this book, as I once picked up those opinions, not knowing what he or she will find.

The Essential Scalia will be released on September 15—just three weeks from tomorrow—and is available for pre-order now. I’ve just received today an early copy from our publisher and am pleased that the book’s outstanding contents are so handsomely packaged.

As regular Bench Memos readers might have in mind, The Essential Scalia is the third volume of Justice Scalia’s work that I’ve had the privilege of helping to produce. The first two, which I co-edited with Christopher J. Scalia, are Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived—a New York Times bestseller—and On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (which I wrote about here). All three volumes are published by Crown Forum, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Is Kamala Harris Suppressing Her Tambram Origins? 

Mukul KesavanOpinionUpdated: August 23, 2020 6:54 am IST

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee excited Indian Americans. The fact that her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian Tamil enthused Indians and Tamils in India and the diaspora. It’s very likely that some Tamil Brahmins were pleased that a Tamil Brahmin’s daughter had made it so far in American politics. A few desis groused that Harris had emphasized her African-American identity at the expense of her Indian heritage. 

An Indian American journalist, Sadanand Dhume,  alleged in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal that Kamala Harris “…airbrushes her mother’s community from her story. The words Tamil and Brahmin don’t appear at all.” Since Dhume’s piece is headlined, ‘What Kamala Harris Isn’t Saying About Her Mother’s Background’, the implication that Harris has tried to keep her Tamil Brahmin ancestry quiet is hard to avoid. 

It’s an intriguing suggestion and it’s worth taking the column seriously if only to reflect on our relationship with inherited identity. Dhume supplies two possible reasons for Harris’s failure to acknowledge her Tamil Brahmin forbears.  He first concedes that as an American politician, Harris ‘…has no obligation to know about her mother’s ancestral community, much less to recount its story.” This is true. The trouble with this concession is that Harris can’t be reasonably accused of hushing up her Tambram past if she knows nothing about her mother’s origins.

This leaves the reader with the column’s second explanation for the omission: namely, the reluctance of the American Left to recognize the success of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora in the United States because to do so would be to acknowledge that the US is not an oppressive Leviathan, but a land of opportunity where immigrants flourish. 

The reference to the Left might confuse Indian readers who have read Harris described as a centrist who is often critiqued by left-wing Democrats for her political history as an aggressive prosecutor. But in the Journal’s op-ed universe where Dhume can declare that India “…adopted socialism in 1947…”, Harris probably does figure as a furious leftist airbrushing her Brahmin past to badmouth America. In the world that the rest of us live in, though, there are simpler speculative explanations for the absence of Tamil Brahmins from Harris’s book. 

Kamala Harris might, for instance, have known that most Tamil Brahmins would have had a stroke if a daughter of theirs brought a Black husband home. In her visits to India to meet her maternal grandparents, she might have encountered Tamil Brahmins who let their discomfort with ‘miscegenation’ show. The unreconstructed racism of most middle class Indians towards people of African origin is a fact that every honest desi acknowledges. Shyamala Gopalan was clearly an honourable exception to this rule, as were her parents. Perhaps Kamala Harris saw her Indian grandparents as individual relatives whom she loved and admired, instead of owning them as members of a caste community. 

As the daughter of parents who met because of a shared enthusiasm for civil rights activism, Kamala Harris was raised by her mother as a Black girl in a country where African Americans were routinely discriminated against and often formally disadvantaged. We should consider the possibility that Kamala Harris chose to affirm the remarkable inclusiveness of her maternal relatives as her Indian side, instead of embracing the fastidious superiority of their caste community. 

Kamala Harris might, for instance, have known that most Tamil Brahmins would have had a stroke if a daughter of theirs brought a Black husband home.

Perhaps she had the intellectual self-awareness to spot the contradiction between identifying as a Black girl in a largely white country and simultaneously affirming her membership of a caste that fetishized light skin and went to extraordinary lengths to argue that it was racially distinct from the non-Brahmin Tamil population in which it was historically embedded. Maybe it was this self-awareness that explains the omission of Tambrams from her book, not some need to ignore the success of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora to demonize America. Remember, Harris chose to attend Howard, a storied, historically Black college, because she wanted the experience of being Black  in an immersive way. 

Throughout the column, Tamil Brahmins are described as hereditary priests, as “occupants of the pinnacle of society”, as a group, as a community but never as the caste system’s gatekeepers, or as the principal beneficiaries of a system of birth-ordered inequality that could, at its worst, make apartheid look like the Enlightenment. Tamil Brahmins are described as a caste just once, and that too in passing, while referring to anti-Brahmin movements led by other castes in the twentieth century.

The lay reader of the column could be forgiven for thinking that Tamil Brahmins were a striving community of the hyper-literate best–like the Parsis or the Jews– marginalised and tragically forced to flower in exile by the resentful rest. The closest the column gets to naming the near-monopoly that Tamil Brahmins enjoyed in the professions, in education and in government employment or acknowledging the prejudices that defined their status and propped up their everyday lives, is this prim sentence: “It’s undeniable that Tambrams had advantages, and many of their ancestors held views about social hierarchy that rightly grate on our modern sensibilities.”

My paternal great-grandfather’s considered Tambram views about social hierarchy saw him return for a purifying bath every time a Dalit or ‘pariah’ passed within a dozen feet of him. Whenever Sir Mirza Ismail, legendary administrator and Dewan of Mysore, visited my grandfather at home (who was, by several ranks, his subordinate) he was served coffee in a silver tumbler, not a china cup, because he was a Muslim (or Turka) and anything he drank from had to be cleansed with embers. 

Perhaps Kamala Harris saw her Indian grandparents as individual relatives whom she loved and admired, instead of owning them as members of a caste community. 

My father, who was raised by his grandfather in an agraharam (a Brahmin neighbourhood built around a temple), rejected the old man’s prejudices but remained grateful to him for forcing him as a child into learning Sanskrit, a language he grew to love that sustained him to the end of his days. He tried, as best as he could, to disentangle the literary and religious pleasure that Sanskrit gave him from the thicket of prejudice and learning that constituted brahmanical cultivation. 

Dhume faults Harris for noting that her mother won a prize for singing in India without acknowledging that the prize “…was for Carnatic music, a classical art form closely associated with Tamil Brahmins.” It’s almost as if this ‘omission’ is a piece of political furtiveness. In a fine article titled ‘Can Carnatic music be de-Brahminised’, the Carnatic singer, T.M. Krishna, a Brahmin, reflects on his complicated relationship with the classical form that he has made his own. He describes his struggle to see if the core of Carnatic music—raga, tala and text—can sustain itself outside its traditionally Brahmin habitat.

It seems reasonable that an artist should want his art to transcend the ownership of a caste or a community, that Krishna should want to liberate the Carnatic tradition from what he sees as a limiting Brahmanism, despite being a Brahmin himself. This isn’t some strange species of self-hatred, just the basic self-awareness you would expect of a thinking person. What is strange, though, is the spectacle of one American reproaching another for not affirming an inherited claim to caste. 

Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi. His most recent book is ‘Homeless on Google Earth’ (Permanent Black, 2013).

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Democratic Convention Wrap-up

Watching the Democratic Convention this week brought to mind the Gospel of Mark Ch. 5, where Jesus performs the exorcism of the demoniac of Gerasens.  The demons (yes, there were many who possessed the man) pleaded with the Lord to allow them to go into a nearby herd of swine rather than return to Hell (they know all too well what happens there, but that is a subject for another time!)   

Jesus quickly obliges, and the demons appear relieved for a moment perhaps incredulous that they seem to have prevailed against the Son of God… just before they rush down the hill and into the sea to drown – – and THEN return to Hell.

How long could this have taken? Maybe a minute or so? Tells you a lot about Hell! They really wanted to stay out of there, even for an extra minute!  An undesired consequence, one way or another. But I digress. Sin and evil tend to narrow one’s field of vision, leading to myopia and the inability to see things as they are (Truth). 

Certainly, I am not judging anyone’s salvation. My only point is that the nomination of Joe Biden, and his VP choice Kamala Harris could not have been worse for democrats.  They didn’t mean to, but they just couldn’t help it.  Call it Divine Providence, wherein God always ensures that our Free Will choices (always remaining perfectly free) ultimately and always subordinate to the Divine Will of Almighty God.  If they only understood this!

A friendly warning to Trump-haters: Be careful what you wish for!

PS – Time to start planning what you will do with all the free time on your hands that will be made possible by the upcoming cancellation of the debates…and don’t forget to wear a mask.

Jeremiah Bernard

Virginia Plans Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccinations For All Residents

by Tyler Durden

Fri, 08/21/2020 – 21:40

As Friday’s hospitalization numbers across the Sun Belt appear to confirm CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield’s assertion that the American COVID-19 outbreak has peaked and is starting to fade, the State of Virginia is setting a new precedent by seriously discussing forcing Virginians to be vaccinated with whatever rushed-to-marked candidate the FDA approves first.

During an interview that aired on Friday, the state’s health commissioner said he planned to invoke state law to make vaccinations mandatory – once a western product is available, presumably.

Here’s more from ABC News 8:

State Health Commissioner Dr. Norman Oliver told 8News on Friday that he plans to mandate coronavirus vaccinations for Virginians once one is made available to the public.

Virginia state law gives the Commissioner of Health the authority to mandate immediate immunizations during a public health crisis if a vaccine is available. Health officials say an immunization could be released as early as 2021.

Dr. Oliver says that, as long as he is still the Health Commissioner, he intends to mandate the coronavirus vaccine.

“It is killing people now, we don’t have a treatment for it and if we develop a vaccine that can prevent it from spreading in the community we will save hundreds and hundreds of lives,” Oliver said.

Pro-medical-choice activists in the state argue that the issue is a matter of medical choice, and that the hasty “expedited” approval process being implemented by the FDA is grounds for concern. State health authorities insist, meanwhile, that they would never mandate a vaccine that hadn’t already proven to be safe.

Virginia Freedom Keepers Director of Communications Kathleen Medaries, a mother of three from Chesterfield, says this is a matter of medical choice.This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s not a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine issue,” Medaries said. “For me, it’s an issue of being able to assess each vaccine for myself and my family one at a time.”

[…]

“He shouldn’t be the one person to make a decision for all of Virginians,””Medaries responded.

The state’s top medical official is opposed to a bill that has been put forth in the state assembly that would create more exemptions to the mandatory vaccination power, allowing exemptions on religious and other grounds.

Oliver believes that COVID-19 is a public health emergency that should take precedent over everything else, and that vaccine-assisted herd immunity is the state’s best and only real defense.

The decision comes after Massachusetts said it would make the flu vaccine mandatory this year as part of a campaign to protect the state’s medical system. We suspect Virginia and Massachusetts won’t be the only states to discuss mandatory COVID and/or flu vaccination in the coming weeks, as the school year begins.

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Obama Vacation

OBAMA VACATION SCAM IS OVER

No wonder the Obamas hate President Trump.

Good news is always sweet, especially when even Snopes will verify the same. Snopes says President Trump did indeed send Obama a bill for all the vacations he has gone on since leaving office….It’s no wonder ex-President Obama’s last speech went after President Trump. Obama’s recent speeches are not to support his Democrat party, they are to slam President Trump for taking away the Obamas taxpayer-paid next vacations for the next 20 years! President Trump cancels their vacations, and refunds the money to the American taxpayers. Again…This was verified on Snopes as being true.

PRESIDENT TRUMP JUST ENDED THE OBAMA’S VACATION SCAM!Ex-President Obama was going to stick us for $2.1 billion or so. Before Obama left office, he arranged with the State Department for a series of “official visits”to foreign countries spanning the next 20 years. Using funds from the Office of Presidential Visits and Vacations, Obama was planning to use what would have been $2.1 billion in free vacations for him and up to 24 members of his family plus staff and even a dog sitter until the year 2036. He would have, that is, until President Trump put a stop to it. Trump, who is always looking for ways to save money, was presented with a ledger that contained all of the Obama’s travel plans and expenses. The ledger was found by one of the workers President Trump hired from outside the typical White House staff. President Trump immediately canceled the plans and recalled all Secret Service agents scheduled to protect the Obamas anywhere outside of the United States.

The Obama’s are also facing another new challenge at the hands of President Trump. They’re going to have to repay the government $214 million for all of those vacations that weren’t official state business.The bill, after some small allowances for days that were possibly work related, is for $214 million. Of the 692 days the Obama’s spent on vacation, almost none included any work at all. They ate, slept, and golfed And, Michelle was given shopping allowances from the Office of Discretionary Gifting Funds, which is supposed to be used to buy presents for visiting dignitaries.Feel free to share this with everyone in your email list. Many Americans will appreciate to know this hidden facts.Yea, President Trump! We love what you do and for what you stand for!P.S. Michelle’s mother, who took care of the granddaughters for all 8 years was GETTING PAID! And NOW she is getting a pension of $13,000 a month for the rest of her life. (chew on that; how much is your social security?)

BonnieLou