Bring back the horses?

There are more important things to blog about. The Boston Archdiocese has taken exception to the "Black Sabbath Mass" performance at Harvard. Quickly: no, Father Landry, Harvard doesn't actually maintain a handy Index Librorum Prohibitorium, to which the folks who rent out the rooms can refer before letting a student group sign up for space; anyway, wouldn't it have been smarter to react the way the LDS church did to the Book of Mormon? My advice to everyone: if it offends you, don't go and you won't have to be offended, and if you can convince enough others to stay away, the show will fold. Right now you have the marketplace of ideas working against you; if the Church thinks it's that bad, it really must be worth seeing!

Then there is the resurgence, with Joe Biden's full throated support, of the campus sexual assault issue, which Ross Douthat ties rather too simplistically to a general breakdown in morals at college. Hint on my views on the key action item: I think accusations of grave crimes require a high standard of proof, since the consequences of false positives are so severe. I always thought that was the American way.

But I don't have enough time to do a proper job on those sensitive issues and am likely to be unhelpfully annoying if I do them quickly. (Probably was already, in fact.)

So instead I will just give two cheers for new Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for planning to bring back the mounted police to the City of Boston.

The only occasion where I encountered police on horseback was after the Harvard-Yale game when it was held at Harvard. Some years ago, after a Harvard student was severely injured when the crowd in New Haven pulled down the goal posts, Harvard decided to do what it could to be sure the same thing did not happen at the Stadium. The Stadium is in Boston! So with 10 minutes left in the game, half a dozen officers on mounts approached each goal post. It was something to see. And in spite of the propensity for drunken students to do incredibly stupid things, they never were stupid enough to mess with those horses.That ended when the MPs were disbanded. We've been lucky the past few years, but it might be a good idea to restore the practice if we have the chance.