gracchusdixit

In the year 1483, a Dominican friar named Tomás de Torquemada was appointed the “Grand Inquisitor” of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain.  For the next 15 years, Torquemada oversaw a reign of terror, in which Muslims, Jews, and non-conforming Christians were bullied, expelled, tortured, and not infrequently condemned to the fires of an auto-da-fé—a ritual of public humiliation and penance, culminating in execution and incineration.  Torquemada was a converso, the descendant of Jews who had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution or to prosper economically.  Like so many converts, his zeal outstripped that of those whose families had always been Christian.  Indeed, Torquemada’s obsessive determination to rid Spain of “heresy” became so extreme and led to such horrific consequences that even Pope Alexander VI, who was himself a Spaniard, felt compelled to rein him in.  Centuries later, in an act of supreme and ironic cosmic justice, Torquemada’s tomb was ransacked by brigands, whereupon his bones were burned to a cinder in their own auto-da-fé.

Today, five hundred years after Torquemada launched the horrors of the Inquisition, it would seem that we have another Tomás de Torquemada living in our midst.  His name is William Barr, and he is the Attorney General of the United States.

For months, the pundits who populate our national newspapers and television networks have been asking the question:  How could a respectable legal traditionalist like Barr allow himself to become the cat’s paw of a low-rent thug like Donald Trump?  What the punditocracy fails to realize is that the premise behind the question is false.   William Barr has never been a “respectable legal traditionalist”.  His laconic demeanor, his precious parsing of words, all his hemming and hawing when he appears in public, all of this is a masquerade designed to hide his true nature, a ruse that has thus far been quite successful.   

Which is why the chattering classes were so taken aback when, earlier this week, Barr pulled back the curtain and revealed his true self.  During a speech at the University of Notre Dame, he lashed out at what he proclaimed to be the evils of “militant secularism,” blaming non-believing “progressives” for virtually every ailment that afflicts modern society:

I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack.  On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.  On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.

By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim.  Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground.  In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.  Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.  As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualties in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age.  Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.  And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

Just about the only sin Barr’s breathtaking diatribe didn’t lay at the feet of liberal secularism was climate change, presumably because he doesn’t believe in it.  Either that, or because he believes that the Book of Genesis gives human beings the right to pillage the earth to their heart’s content, as long as they abide by the dictates of his medieval theology.

That all this surprised the bien pensants who populate journalism, the upper echelons of government, and the legal profession merely indicates how shallow their knowledge of William Barr actually is.  It also illustrates how shrewdly Barr has managed to cordon off his personal agenda from his public persona.  

When William Barr stands in front of a public audience under the watchful eyes of the press, he adopts the manner of a conventional member of the legal establishment, with a  plenitude of solemn, sotto voce mumbling about the rule of law and respect for the constitution.  When he finds himself among his own, namely, other hard-right Catholic revanchists, he unfurls his true colors.  

That is what happened at Notre Dame.  What William Barr felt safe to say in the cloistered confines of a Catholic university, he would never have said in the open forum of a “secular” institution like Harvard or Berkeley or, for that matter, the United States House of Representatives.

Barr’s remarks at Notre Dame were so illogical, so contrary to fact, and so historically absurd, that it’s hard to know where to begin.  The most ludicrous of his polemical falsehoods was the opening salvo: “I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years religion has been under increasing attack.”  Far from being “under increasing attack,” religion in the United States is privileged and protected.  Despite the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state, religious practice is given extravagant deference in our public life.  Sessions of Congress are opened with prayers by “chaplains”.  Presidents dutifully attend “national prayer breakfasts” and would be assailed if they did not.  Deceased presidents are commemorated at “the national cathedral,” as if the American head of state were also the head of an established church.  

Even worse, religious institutions are tax-exempt, for reasons that have never made an ounce of sense and are never questioned, let alone investigated.  Bible-thumping evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed are paid millions of dollars, but the institutions that enrich them are never taxed.  Thanks to the radical views of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, bigoted business owners are now permitted to discriminate against their fellow citizens on the grounds of “religious freedom”.

In short, religion in America, far from being “under attack,” is “on the attack,” and bigots like William Barr are leading the charge.  

Even more absurd is Barr’s assertion of a cause-and-effect relationship between the “militant secularism” he so despises and the “social pathologies” he decries.  There are many reasons for the so-called “wreckage of the family,” for rising levels of depression, suicide, and opioid addiction.  None of these doleful phenomena, however, has anything to do with a secularist attack on religion.  Barr makes his assertion without citing one jot of evidence, because no such evidence exists.

William Barr did not stumble unwittingly into the corrupt quagmire of the Trump presidency.  He is not an innocent and honorable naïf, who finds himself entangled in a moral morass he did not foresee.  William Barr actively schemed to become Attorney General, knowing full well what kind of man Donald Trump is.  He did this to acquire power—and to use that power to impose his religious bigotry on the nation.

Like Tomás de Torquemada, Barr is a converso—his father converted from Judaism to Catholicism—and also like Torquemada, his zeal and bigotry go far beyond what most life-long Christians would consider either reasonable or decent.   His aim is to replace “moral relativism with a “moral absolutism” that demands the condemnation and punishment of all who do not subscribe to William Barr’s medieval moral code.  If he is left unchecked, he will become our Torquemada, and the Justice Department he controls will become our Inquisition.