Joel Mathis

A couple of interesting pieces in the last day or so, one from David French and Liz Bruenig. They're both writers I admire - though, perhaps, I don't always fully agree with them - because they're more interested in staying true to their principles than in relentlessly defending their respective tribes. Which means that it often seems that they don't really have tribes - at least not on Politics Twitter. Anyway, let's start with French. He's talking about a recent First Things essay that criticizes evangelist Tim Keller's "winsome" approach to public discourse as outdated and suggests a more, uh, muscular approach is needed because secular culture has become so hostile to Christianity. Here's French : Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the

Interesting tidbit from Dave Weigel: Adam Serwer recently noted Trump is struggling to make a culture war case against Joe Biden: For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.”  But Republicans can be relied on to use scare tactics when it comes to Democratic women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez follows Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as bogeywomen of the right. They'll keep doing it as long as they think it's successful.

Some angry talk these days from my conservative friends about ESPN's firing of famed pitcher Curt Schilling after Schilling posted some anti-transgender comments to social media the other day. "Progressive America is sending a message," National Review's David French wrote . "In the institutions it controls, there is no distinction between the personal and professional. Keep dissent to yourself. All your words belong to your boss." I don' think that's quite the lesson to draw here. This is what Curt Schilling posted: It's a distasteful, near-pornographic image — one that, even if it said something like AMERICA IS THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD or VOTE FOR BERNIE SANDERS might've caused most people a bit of faint-heartedness. Now, understand too: Schilling had already been suspended last fall for THIS post: Too me, the sentiment is objectionable without being pornographic. This is the incident I might've criticized ESPN a