WEIRD TALES.

Today Rod Dreher took a break from his customary racist and homophobic material to rage about sex, this time quoting extensively from a Mary Eberstadt Weekly Standard essay that seems -- though it's hard to be sure, for all the froth -- to descry "the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception" as the cause not only of widespread abortion but also child poverty, sexual assault, lonely old age ("Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell”), and other horrors. Even the good news she can't ignore is contaminated by contraception: "Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise." It would seem the only end to this nightmare, if you follow Eberstadt's logic, would be the banning of birth control. (Hey, maybe the new Trumpified court can do it!) But maybe an end to it isn't what she seeks: Maybe all she wants is for us to feel dread and shock and bad about ourselves for daring to get laid without fully committing to childbirth.

Dreher gets right in the spririt: "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags," he cries. "The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."

But shortly before that, Dreher got on an even weirder subject: Was Anthony Bourdain suicided by witchcraft?

Somebody in my Twitter feed last night observed that “the Internet” was making a pretty good case for Anthony Bourdain’s suicide being tied to the occult. Say wha’? Lo, it turns out that his girlfriend Asia Argento is a witch, and not just a casual one either. There’s lots of extreme darkness there, right in the open. She flaunts it. Bourdain, the poor fool, was doomed the day he met her...

This is exactly where we are as a post-Christian culture: we have usurped the powers of binding and loosing from God. The Satanists admit what the rest of us cloak as advanced liberty and self-determination. Here is the line that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be most remembered for. It’s from the 1992 Casey ruling reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion...

This is so loony Dreher eventually took it down (the prior link is actually to its Google cache). But I think it was an instructive post: For all his theological palaver, a lot of Dreher's ravings are rooted in the sort of doomy, scary stories that used to bulk up pulp magazines, lurid 60s tabloids, and comics like House of Mystery; their place has been filled by websites like the crackpot collection where Dreher got this one. Come to think of it, posts like Eberstadt's owe a debt to this genre as well: The world as a nightmarish place to gawk at, with perhaps a little moral uplift at the end to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Well, at least in that sense these guys are observing the verities.