The death of Joe Sobran on September 30, after several years of failing health, could not have come as a total surprise to any of his friends. News about his deteriorating condition and the need for divine intervention was steadily provided by Fran Griffin, his alter ego of many years, his longtime publisher, and, not least of all, his tireless fundraiser. From Fran’s reports throughout September, it was clear that Joe would not survive much longer. The news that he expired painlessly may have been the least disturbing communication from her during this period.

Joe’s death deprives those of us on the independent right and in Anglophone society of a brilliant literary presence. Although widely known as a political controversialist, Joe was also, not incidentally, one of the most impressive English stylists of his and my generation. Most of his columns, like his works on Shakespeare’s real identity and on complicated constitutional questions, were literary gems. And though he would not have presumed to compare his talent to that of his hero G.K. Chesterton, Joe was probably Chesterton’s equal as a master of expository prose. The reason this graduate of Eastern Michigan (and scion of a working-class Ukrainian family) rose rapidly at National Review to become a senior editor within three years, after being hired in 1972, is that William F. Buckley recognized his considerable talent.

And arguably Joe was kept at the magazine even after Norman Podhoretz and his soul-mates condemned him as an anti-Semite in 1993, because Buckley wished to hold on to his best writer. Perhaps trying to bring around his newly acquired neoconservative dinner companions, Buckley defended Joe (and Pat Buchanan) for a time as “contextual” rather than genuine anti-Semites. According to Buckley, it was because of general sensitivity to the historic problem of anti-Semitism and the special place of Israel among American Christians as well as American Jews that the frontal attack on AIPAC and Jewish media power engaged in by Joe aroused such resoundingly negative feelings.

A column by Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August 30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all, freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one extent or another.”

One might ask Goldberg, the “tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or “Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”

Apparently the anti-discrimination mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?