[jobim]

For those of you non-Catholics, Rod Dreher has made a name for himself as an orthodox, conservative Catholic, assuming that pigeonhole to be serviceable for the sake of discussion. He especially has been outspoken against the liberal, usually homosexually-driven underbelly of American Catholic clergy that has caused the Titanic transference of funds out of the church and into the hands of legalman, and of course into the hands of victims of those Catholic imposters.

But this crunchy con appendage has never sat proper for me, as much as I have admired Dreher's essays. It smacks of self-righteousness born of late-sixties privilege. The moral lense required through which one can only view this crunchy con Weltenschaung seems to me artificial.

As one whose college days commenced a week after Woodstock, I sense a link between those days of free-wheeling autocracy, when one's individualism was carefully analyzed by the tie-dyed politburo, with the present values-laden approach to the marketplace of the crunchy con mindset.

I don't see that virtue coheres in any specific way to choices one makes of a strictly material nature, such as how we choose to design our homes or our cities.

[DManA]

In all these stories about crunchy cons, the subject quickly changes to urban planning. Is "Smart Growth" the abiding preoccupation of crunchy cons?

"In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. . . . [T]he developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification...."