By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 09, 2025
The state of Washington, a pissant authority if ever
there was one, is going
to war with the Bill of Rights, the American liberal tradition, and, almost
incidentally, the 20-century-old institution upon which Western civilization
was founded. Becket, the public-interest law firm that sues to secure the free
exercise of religion and is
doing so in this case, could not be more perfectly
named: The ghost of Henry II, who had Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas
Becket murdered in order to facilitate the domination of the church by the
state, is never far from us.
Washington has passed
a law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that
might be communicated to them in the confessional. Catholic clergy already
operate under a similar reporting requirement (one imposed by the church, not
by the state) that covers every other context, but the sacrament of
reconciliation, as confession is more precisely known, is exempted from this, because
it is a sacrament. Priests who fail to comply with this demand—which is to say,
those who fail to violate their vows and break the sacramental seal—are
threatened with imprisonment. Having been an occasional guest of some of the
finest quarters offered by our carceral authorities, I can attest that this
would represent for the clergy a relatively mild and bearable form of religious
persecution, and I hope that, if it comes to it, they will do their time
joyously—but I expect that Becket will win in this matter, because the state of
Washington is so obviously wrong, and so stupidly, that even the Supreme Court
could probably find a way to get it right.
I trust that my Protestant friends will forgive this
Puritan-friendly Catholic what might sound at first like a sectarian point,
but: While most Protestants today not only accept but also cherish the
principle of religious liberty, the entire point of the English Reformation—not
merely an unintended consequence—was ending the separation of church and
state. English religious history does more than rhyme: They had two kings
called Henry (II and VIII) with chancellors called Thomas (Becket and More) who
became martyrs (in 1170 and 1535, respectively) because they insisted that
there were limits to what a king could do to the church, that altar could not
be entirely subordinated to throne. There is a reason so many of the churches
of the Reformation became state churches: The Catholic Church was the premier
European multinational organization, and it was not only in England that the
Reformation was a nationalist project that produced national and nationalist
churches. If you ever heard Nigel Farage talking about the European Union in
the days before Brexit, you heard a very old and very English voice—and I do
not mean only his accent.
Americans speak with a different accent (most Americans,
anyway: My friend Charles Cooke is three times the American patriot I am, at
least, in spite of his persistent Oxford pronunciation) but that English voice
is still very much with us. American political culture is a product of
Anglo-Protestant liberalism and still (in spite of the best efforts of many
generations of vandals) bears the hallmarks of its creators. That is in most
things an excellent outcome, but the Henrician line of thinking—that the church
and its officers must ultimately bend the knee to the king rather than to the
King of Kings—has never quite gone away. When you hear the evangelical atheists
and grumpy little secularists of our time rage and snuffle about certain tax
exemptions enjoyed by religious bodies, you are hearing an echo of William the Conqueror’s
great-grandson, and he wasn’t the first to lodge that complaint. The remote
reaches of history are never as remote as we think they are, particularly when
it comes to the history of ideas, and extra-super-particularly when it
comes to the history of bad ideas.
What Henry II and Henry VIII could not live with was the
idea that there were centers of power independent of the state—that the power
of the king was limited. Americans supposedly cherish the notion of limited
government and insist that we would abide no king, but we are in most things
perfectly happy to let presidents behave as though they were Louis XIV—as long
as they are doing what we want them to do, or at least as long as they are
irritating and discomfiting those we regard as our rivals and enemies. (Hatred
is worse than a sin—it is a cause of unnecessary stupidity.) And, of course,
those who would aggrandize the power of the state are rarely so clumsy as to do
so in the service of something that is obviously wicked but instead do so in
the pursuit of something desirable: in this case, punishing people who commit
some of the worst crimes there are.
Again, there is nothing new in this: Henry II was very
much concerned about the cases of “criminous clerks,” meaning clergymen accused
of serious crimes of a nonreligious nature, and there was a particular focus on
cases of sexual wrongdoing. (In the excellent cinematic version of these
events, Becket, the matter immediately at hand is a priest “accused of
debauching a young girl.” I assume that this film is no more faithful to
historical events of the 12th century than Oliver Stone’s Nixon
is to the events of the 1970s or Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is to
events of the first half of the 20th century. But that isn’t exactly
the point of this kind of film.) Nobody wants to see child molesters go
unpunished. And no red-blooded Englishman of the 12th century
doubted that mustering forces to kick the stuffing out of the French was a
positive moral good and a patriotic necessity, and English patriots of the 16th
century were not wrong to complain of Roman corruption or to resent
self-interested papal intervention in English political affairs. “Shall I be
tempted of the devil thus?” Queen Elizabeth asks in Shakespeare’s Richard
III. “Ay,” the villain answers, “if the devil tempt you to do good.” That
play probably was written about 1592—again we have a very old story, and it
keeps ending the same way: You cannot defend liberty with the sword of tyranny.
And Washington’s intrusion into the confessional is
tyranny. Even if it doesn’t feel like tyranny.
If you cleave to a political philosophy holding that
there is nothing outside of the state, then you are a partisan, however
well-meaning, of absolutism and totalitarianism. Not every totalitarian
temptation indulged leads directly to 1984. (The philosophy of the
American left “is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an
Orwellian one,” Jonah
Goldberg once put it. “It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying, but
it is definitely totalitarian, or holistic, if you prefer, in that liberalism
today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from
what you eat to what you smoke to what you say.”) There are many stops, many
way stations, and (one prays) many off-ramps along the road to serfdom. But
allowing the state to shove its stupid snout into the confessional is a big
step in the wrong direction. It is one that should be resisted not only by
litigation but also through civil disobedience, if necessary.
You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal
Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago, envisioning life under such
totalitarian assumptions:
I expect to die in bed. My
successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public
square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly
help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.
The cardinal’s words had more impact than he intended: “I
was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said,” he later said
about his famous statement, “but the words were captured on somebody’s
smartphone and have now gone viral.” But his views were no less dramatic when
expressed in less dramatic language: “The greatest threat to world peace and
international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power,
deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence,” he later wrote.
And his actions bore out his convictions: When the state of Illinois insisted
that funding for adoption and foster care providers would be restricted to
those that agreed to provide services to same-sex couples, the cardinal, with
regret, instructed Catholic Charities to refuse to comply, and the archdiocese
eventually discontinued
those services. That is the totalitarian tendency at work: The question
wasn’t whether there would be 500 adoption agencies that serve same-sex couples
but whether the 12.7 million people of Illinois could tolerate one that
did not.
There are many legal questions at play here, which I
trust will be handled by The Dispatch’s growing constellation of legal
stars with customary excellence. But this is not, finally, a legal question—it
is, rather, a question of that which is prior to the law, that which is
above it and beyond it and which, by its nature, sets limits on how far
lawmakers may venture into the territory of the sacred. The church is a kind of
embassy, sovereign within the four walls of its sanctuary irrespective of whether
any statute recognizes the fact. Sovereignty that is violated does not cease to
be sovereignty—it becomes sovereignty that needs defending, whether it is from
one big bully in Moscow or from 147 little ones in Olympia.
Economics for English Majors
Young people ask me for career advice more often than
you’d think. (I mean: more often than you’d think if you are a sensible
person.) Some time ago, I had a conversation with a young person who was
convinced that his boss, who had hired him, wanted him to fail and was
sabotaging him to ensure that he did.
I very much doubted that this was the case, and said so.
Yes, the world is full of fallen people and deformed institutions, but, in
general, a manager who hires an employee wants to see that employee succeed.
For one thing, recruiting new employees is a disruptive and at times expensive
process, one that usually comes with significant transaction costs; unnecessary
turnover in an organization is a sign of deficient management. An employee’s
performance colors (sometimes unfairly!) institutional perception of the hiring
manager’s decision-making—a new employee’s failure is of concern most
immediately and urgently to that employee (failure is his problem, even
when it is not entirely his fault) but it also is a concern for the one
who hired him. I can think off the top of my head of three or four cases in
which a bad hire had serious consequences for the manager who did the hiring,
with uncomfortable meetings on the subject of: What the hell were you
thinking?
But there are contexts where this isn’t the case. I was
thinking of the weird situation of labor markets in professional sports
leagues, where certain unusual arrangements such as payroll caps mean that
employee turnover can create very desirable business opportunities in a way
that you wouldn’t normally expect to see in a more conventional labor market.
Here is an extract from an older but still interesting paper published by the National
Bureau of Economic Research:
Unlike most other unions, players’
associations in North America and Europe do not negotiate salaries for their
individual members. That is handled by the player himself, generally through an
agent. The associations do bargain collectively over working conditions,
pension benefits and insurance, grievance procedures and, in North America but
not in Europe, league-wide arrangements such as a minimum salary, any direct
restrictions on total payrolls or individual salary caps, or owners’ incentives
to compensate players (“luxury taxes” in baseball). Players’ associations have
generally opposed plans by owners to cap payrolls, and owners have, especially
after the dissolution of reserve systems, proposed various schemes to restrict
open bidding for players: the NBA instituted a payroll cap for the 1983–84
season (and beyond); football (the NFL) followed suit in 1993; Major League
Baseball’s unsuccessful attempt to force a cap in 1994 ultimately led to the
players’ strike of 1994–95, and it ended with the owners nevertheless getting a
second-best outcome, a (“luxury”) tax on payrolls that exceeded specified
levels. Associations have also generally opposed widespread revenue sharing
among owners. Reducing the incentive to win decreases the value of players and
thus would, as demand for their services declines, lead to lower average
salaries.
That final point is very, very interesting. I suppose I
should not be surprised that it is in professional sports that the labor unions
have best understood the value of competition.
A bit more:
The economic issues revolve around
the fact that consumer demand depends on inter-team competition and rivalry. A
self-interested team would never acquire so much talent as to make its games
predictable and dull: this is just an example of the fact that the marginal
value of one team’s quality depends on the quality of other teams. In a sense
there is nothing unusual here. After all, the marginal product of labor in a
neoclassical production function depends on the amount of capital, and
conversely. Market prices and competition for labor and capital ensure that
social and private margins are equated and that decentralized decisions are
efficient. In sports it is useful to think of the contest as output and teams
as inputs that produce the output. Efficient decentralization dictates that the
teams themselves compensate each other for the joint value they collectively
add to the game. Externalities arise when the prices faced by teams for
services rendered are set improperly; creating inefficient incentives for
individual teams to gain a competitive edge in the talent market. Efficient
transfer prices among teams would eliminate the inefficiency.
Words About Words
Above, I wrote about Cardinal Francis George. But
if I were indulging my paleolinguistic tendency, I would have written: Francis
Cardinal George or even Francis, Cardinal George. A cardinal is a
princely figure and, traditionally, cardinal was treated as a princely title.
Royal and noble titles standing by themselves may be capitalized where we would
not capitalize republican or clerical titles such as president or pope
because those royal titles function as names and, hence, as proper nouns: For
example, in the abovementioned Richard III, we meet a character called
“Buckingham,” but his name was “Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of
Buckingham.” For official purposes, his name was “the Duke of Buckingham” or,
simply, “Buckingham,” in the same way that one might write “the Prince of
Wales” as substitute for the man known in his school days as “William Wales,”
one of those awkward constructions necessitated by trying to shove people with
royal names into the more familiar first-name/last-name convention. Prince
William has used different surnames, in fact: first Wales, then Cambridge, and
then Wales again. Similarly, the Rev. Justin Welby might (before he resigned)
have been referred to, properly and conveniently and simply, as the “Archbishop
of Canterbury.” But you would write: The senior figure in the English church
has been the archbishop of Canterbury for more than 1,000 years.
John, Cardinal Smith became John Cardinal Smith
the same way Alfred, Lord Tennyson, became Alfred Lord Tennyson—commas
are short-lived things in the wild.
William
Safire observed in 1987:
When Jewish leaders met at the
Vatican with church leaders to prepare a joint communique to be issued at the
close of a meeting with Pope John Paul II, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum of the
American Jewish Committee noted a surprisingly informal construction in the
Catholic draft. The document referred to the president of the Commission for
Religious Relations With the Jews as “Cardinal John Willebrands.”
“Shouldn’t this read ‘His Eminence,
John Cardinal Willebrands’?” asked the rabbi, referring to the ancient, formal
style stemming from the time the nobility put the Christian name before the
title, as in “William, Duke of Norfolk.”
“We don’t do that anymore,” said
Cardinal Willebrands cheerfully, and into the historic communique went a couple
of references to cardinals using the title before the first name.
The statement read: “On Tuesday
morning, the Jewish delegation met with Cardinal Agostino Casaroli.” That was
how the text appeared in The New York Times, but the accompanying news
story clung grimly to the old ways: “This morning the Jews met with Agostino
Cardinal Casaroli.”
In some matters, The Times thinks
in terms of centuries.
In Other Wordiness …
“All individuals must control their baggage at all
times,” says the airport announcement. The individuals have been put on
notice—but what about the utter conformists? What of their baggage? I mean
their literal baggage, not the emotional stuff.
Also: Doesn’t it seem like there are more airport
announcements saying, “Hey, dummy, leave your gun in the car” than there were a
few years ago? Maybe it’s just my airport.
Also: The Washington Post offered a wonderful
howler (quietly
amended) about the new pope:
“Hallelujah,” he intoned
reverently, in Latin.
They say that there’s a secret chord that David played,
and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for copy editors, do ya?
Somebody hasn’t been reading their psalms and such, where “hallelujah” is
intoned reverently in Hebrew.
And every Indiana Jones fan knows there’s no “J” in
Latin! Gah.
Also also: The New York Times, in a story about
divorce coaches, wrote:
Alexa Wolkoff, a licensed clinical
social worker and a divorce coach based in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., has been
coaching for five years. Her interest in the industry peaked in 2017, when
custody issues with her ex-husband led her to seek support with her divorce
agreement. She joined One Mom’s Battle,
an organization that supports women navigating separation. When the opportunity
arose to train under one of the organization’s leaders, Ms. Wolkoff decided to
pursue certification as a divorce coach.
Given that she went to work in the field, I do not think
that Alexa Wolkoff’s interest in it peaked in 2017—more likely, her
interest was piqued, or aroused, by that custody dispute. Pique
is from the French piquer, meaning to prick, related to the words pike
and probably, if you go back far enough, poke. (Ne piquez pas l’ours!)
The fabric known as pique gets that name from the term for backstitched, from
the same pokey-pricky root.
Not germane, but I cannot help but observe that the Times
story focuses on a divorce coach who works in Miami and Los Angeles and is
accompanied by a photo that looks like someone told an AI prompt: “Give me an
image of a guy who looks exactly like a Miami-based divorce coach.”
In Closing
So, DOGE and Elon Musk—everybody out there in Trumpworld
is feeling real smart, huh?
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