This particular controversy, which is ironically transpiring in the former capital of the Confederacy, may well symbolize the present state of Western Civilization as much as anything fostered by the forces of PC to date. A writer of absurdist fiction who wished to illustrate the madhouse that modern society has become would have a hard time thinking up something this good. The piously politically correct folks at the Federal Reserve may have destroyed the economy, but at least they are inclusive. Un-effing-believable.

The Richmond Federal Reserve Bank's attempt to show inclusiveness in the workplace by flying the rainbow flag outside its building has reignited a divisive gay-rights debate.

Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, is calling on the bank to remove the flag, terming its presence "a serious deficiency of judgment by your organization, one not limited to social issues."

In a letter to Richmond Fed President Jeffrey M. Lacker, Marshall says the homosexual behavior "celebrated" by the bank "undermines the American economy."

"What does flying the homosexual flag, or any other similar display, have to do with your central banking mission under the Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress?" writes Marshall, one of the General Assembly's most conservative members.

The Fed, which deems itself an independent entity within the federal government, placed the flag at the request of PRISM, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender bank employees, to coincide with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

Jim Strader, a bank spokesman, said the flag was raised to fly for the month of June, and that there are no plans to change the timetable. It hangs under the American flag on a pole in front of the building.

"We are flying the pride flag as an example of our commitment to the values of acceptance and inclusion," Sally Green, the bank's first vice president and chief operating officer, said earlier this week.

Opponents in the battle over gay-rights expansion in the state staked out familiar positions, with the conservative Family Foundation saying it's "disappointing" to see the bank participate in the "celebration."

"At The Family Foundation, we will simply choose to use this flag, like the view of Mr. Jefferson's Capitol, as motivation for the work that lies ahead," said Victoria Cobb, president of organization.

Equality Virginia, a Richmond-based gay-rights group, threw its support behind the Fed's decision on Friday, criticizing Marshall and the Family Foundation as "Virginia's self-styled morality police."

"The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond should receive accolades for its decision to recognize and celebrate its GLBT employees, customers and vendors during Pride month," said EV's Executive Director James Parrish.

Parrish took issue with the Family Foundation's claim that state residents spoke on gay rights when they voted 57 to 43 percent in 2006 in favor of the state's marriage amendment. He argues that people's attitudes on gay-rights issues have evolved and pointed to more recent polling.

The Fed is "a private business and should be able to make its own personnel and corporate policy decisions without Bob Marshall's guidance or the Family Foundation's approval," he said.

Marshall wrote in the letter to Lacker that homosexual behavior is a Class 6 felony in Virginia, referring to the state's sodomy law. That statute remains on the books despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional a Texas law that prohibited private, sexual acts between consenting same-sex adults.

Brian Gottstein, spokesman for the Virginia Attorney General's Office, said its attorneys "have not heard of a scenario in recent decades, even before the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, where a consenting couple acting in private was prosecuted."

That's consistent with the experience of Richmond Commonwealth's Attorney Michael N. Herring, who said "To my knowledge no one enforces consensual sodomy as a result of [Lawrence v. Texas]."

[The tenth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

I've said that inclusiveness has a religious quality. To say it is a kind of religion is not to say it works well as one. Religion defines the place of man in the world, but inclusiveness reflects the modern outlook, which has difficulty dealing with such issues. It likes unitary theories that lead to clear conclusions, so it tries to dissolve the world into man or man into the world. Neither makes sense, so moderns--including liberals--oscillate between the two and settle on neither.

Cartesian egos

At bottom, liberalism views the individual person as the Cartesian ego--a disembodied subject with no qualities other than the ability to have experiences and make choices. If we accept that understanding, and view the external world from the radically subjective standpoint that results, it becomes something we construct from our sensations for the sake of our goals.

Such an understanding affects our attitude toward the world. It makes every particular tie to things outside ourselves seem an intrusion that has somehow gotten hold of us and is dragging us down. The result is a compulsion to destroy attachments that make claims on us. Hence the need for sexual liberation, abolition of social roles, mass third-world immigration, multiculturalism, and so on. Society must be destroyed as a network of particular persons and relationships in a particular setting and turned into an abstract neutral schema for the satisfaction of desire.

The role of the other

The matter cannot rest there, because the Cartesian ego is so odd philosophically. It is not part of the world of experience, and it is unclear how something with no positive qualities could be embodied. The result is difficulty understanding our place in the world. Am I the only reality, because the subjective outlook is so privileged, or am I not real at all, because I have no enduring tangible qualities or connections? With respect to ourselves, such difficulties lead to insecurity, narcissism, and identity crises. With respect to other people, they lead to an obsession with the non-Western other.

Non-Westerners are defined as such by the fact they do not have the free-floating Cartesian ego as their self-understanding. Since they do not view themselves in that way, they can be seen as embodied and part of the world of experience. That gives them a very special though ambiguous significance. From one perspective the Cartesian outlook turns whites into abstractions who hardly exist at all, while nonwhites remain vibrant concrete realities. From another, it makes nonwhites a colorful background--part of the Stuff White People Like--that accessorizes the narcissism of white liberal Cartesians. There is no way within the liberal outlook to choose between the two, so particular liberals flop back and forth depending on mood and circumstances.

Horizontal transcendence

The problem often takes a religious form. The absorption of traditional religion by inclusiveness reflects in part an effort to maintain religious values in a scientistic world. In such a world God is unthinkable, so people fall back on themselves. Their concerns and desires are what they know--indeed, they are That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived--so why not treat them as divine?

The problem is that radical self-centeredness is not a satisfactory religion. We need a moral and spiritual order beyond ourselves that enables us to place ourselves and make sense of our situation. One possible solution is horizontal transcendence: standing in awe before other people as ineffably and unclassifiably other, disclosing to us a reality that cannot be reduced to our own purposes and categories, and imposing peremptory moral obligations on us through their needs and desires.

On such a view, those most radically other than ourselves become natural exemplars of the holy. However, the solution is unstable because in fact the non-Western other is evidently no more holy than we are. One can respect someone's good qualities and human dignity, but it is silly to overlook whatever flaws and limitations he has, or take him more seriously than ourselves or those to whom we have a more immediate connection.

Once again, the outcome is a messy compromise, this one between self-involvement and sentimentality about third-world peasants. Something of the sort is a very common solution among spiritually-inclined liberals, especially those among them who find it natural to express their souls in peasant-themed home decor, fashion accessories, and cooking styles.

The Managerial State, not content with the chaos it's created by upending sexual norms and creating the vast problems associated with multiculturalism, has developed a sinister new "problem" in immediate need of their tender ministrations: the nebulous and very human activity of "bullying."

Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated New York Times article that focused on “mean girl” bullying in kindergarten. The federal government has identified bullying as a national problem. In August, it organized the first-ever “Bullying Prevention Summit,” and it is now rolling out an anti-bullying campaign aimed at 5- to 8-year old children. This past month the Department of Education released a guidance letter to schools, colleges and universities to take bullying seriously, or face potential legal consequences.

What happened to Tyler Clementi was not bullying. It was sociopathy. What Ravi and Wei did to Clementi is already illegal, immoral and probably as immune to therapeutic social programs or new laws as the actions of most sociopaths are. There is no ethical code, law or social program which will prevent sociopaths from acting this way, nor are there any ethical codes in America by which the actions of Ravi and Wei are even marginally acceptable.

What "mean girls in kindergarten do" is simply nature. No matter what kind of mind-bending pharmaceuticals and Maoist reeducation camps you put five-year-old girls through, they're still going to pick on their social inferiors. It's not even human nature: this tendency exists in the nature of all social animals, from the wolf pack, to pot bellied pigs. All social animals form hierarchies. The only way to prevent this hierarchy forming is to completely atomize the social structure, by raising children in opaque test tubes.

The one really ironic thing about the whole Thilo Sarrazin comedy, which nobody in the English speaking world seems to have noticed: he has an Arabic last name. I'm assuming his family emigrated to France some time around the Crusades, as they have recognized him as a Hugenot at least, but that's about as German a last name as "Abdullah" is.

Click here if you don't know what I am talking about. Of course, considering his statements controversial is also pretty comical, but this is the EU we're talking about.

Edit add: I suppose he could also be a Basque.

I’ve come to the conclusion that discourse among American conservatives has degenerated into little more than “values” button-pushing. Mention the Culture of Life, and you can argue for just about anything -- including open-borders immigration.

Take this from Cesar Conda, Dick Cheney’s former assistant for domestic policy, who is pro-immigration for lofty, moral reasons that have nothing to do with his ethnicity:

As a pro-immigration conservative (yes, I know, we could fit in a phone booth), I am opposed to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R., S.C.) proposal to end birthright citizenship for babies who, through no fault of their own, are born in this country to illegal immigrants. Innocent children shouldn’t be held responsible for the sins of their parents.

In terms of why not amend the Constitution: The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the idea that someone could be a person but less than a person legally, as well as the idea that citizenship can be made dependent on race. It is of enormous symbolic importance. There is no data supporting the claim that significant numbers of women deliberately cross the border to give birth in the United States in order to take advantage of this provision.

Further, the Republican party would be committing political suicide if it were to endorse ending birthright citizenship, as it would cost the party Latino votes, which are crucial in Florida and in several Western states. It could also hurt the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming mid-term election by diverting attention from the Democrats’ record of over-spending, over-taxing, and exploding the national debt. Given inexorable demographic trends, the GOP could be rendered politically irrelevant, certainly at the presidential level, for generations.

But wearing my other hat as the co-chair of the Susan B. Anthony List’s executive committee (though speaking strictly for myself), my biggest fear is that Graham’s proposal, if enacted by constitutional amendment or by statute, will lead to more abortions: Undocumented immigrants with unplanned pregnancies might choose to have abortions instead of risking apprehension by the police or government immigration agents (not to mention possible deportation down the line) at the hospital maternity ward. Some women terminate their pregnancies for less serious and sometimes superficial reasons. It also might encourage women to have unsafe births outside of a hospital setting.

Senator Graham’s plan to end birthright citizenship is not only substantively and politically flawed, but it undermines a bedrock principle of modern conservatism — preserving the sanctity of life. Republicans and conservatives ought to think long and hard before embracing such a controversial proposal.

Perhaps Cesar will next inform us that Americans who desire immigration restriction “don’t support the troops” because closing our borders would keep out Iraqi migrants and refugees, and thus imply that they are not ready for democracy, which would demoralize our fighting men and women currently expanding the blessed form of government in the Middle East. This seems no more ridiculous than the argument above.