"Progressive" Christians

This past election cycle we heard a lot from so-called "progressive Christians," people who perceive themselves as more responsive to the needs of the poor, the afflicted, the uninsured than are other Christians. Is the appellation they have chosen for themselves an oxymoron, or is it possible to be both progressive and a Christian?

Those who found their political philosophy on using government to meet the needs of the less fortunate invoke a very natural and right response to human need: compassion. Compassion is what some moral philosophers call a form of "paraconscience." It is more than mere emotion. To be sure, it is a sub-rational motivation, in the sense that it does not entail reasoned consideration of the common good and individual duty. However, it motivates one to consider her duty to others and the common good and to respond accordingly. So, compassion works in conjunction with conscience to facilitate moral reasoning. We ought to feel compassion toward those in need (as a matter of inclination), and we ought to respond by treating those persons as we would want to be treated (as a function of moral reasoning).

One problem with progressivism is that it misuses compassion in order to obscure self-evident principles of practical reasonableness. It does so in two ways. (1) It misdirects compassion from its natural and right channel to an end it was never designed to serve. (2) It blows compassion out of proportion to other equally-important human motivations, and similarly elevates the corresponding virtue, charity, at the expense of other equally-important goods and principles.

First, compassion rightly and naturally serves the human good of grace, one important form of which is the virtue of charity. Charity is a right response to human need. Christianity has always affirmed this response in individuals. The Bible admonishes us to visit the sick and the imprisoned, to care for widows, to be our brothers' keeper. However, progressivism re-directs this right response toward statism. Whether I assist the poor or not, I ought to pay more taxes, and local institutions ought to cede authority to centralized institutions, so that the government will assist the poor. That is the progressive argument.

Many progressive Christians direct compassion to both its proper and its improper ends. Many take low-paying jobs with non-profits, donate time to charitable causes, even while simultaneously advocating for redistributivist and collectivist public policies. However, this is the place to mention that conservative Christians are at least equally as charitable. Studies have shown that conservative Christians are as likely to donate their time to charitable causes as liberal Christians, and that conservatives donate a lot more money than progressives do. These findings are consistent with the generalized belief that conservatives are, on balance, more likely to take jobs with wealth-creating enterprises, which make charity possible. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, the conservatives I know are at least as charitable as the liberals I know, they just talk about their charitable acts a lot less. (One progressive acquaintance of mine, who is actually paid to do charitable work, boasts to me about his good deeds at least once a month.)

The progressive defends the misdirection of compassion into statist and collectivist channels on the ground that the government is powerful enough to meet human needs and should be employed as one tool to do so. This defense is confused about the nature of charity. It presupposes that the end of charity is to accomplish some external purpose, such as the eradication of poverty or homelessness, or universal health insurance coverage. But charity is not an instrumental good. Grace (in all its forms, including charity) is a basic good. That means that it is something to be pursued for its own sake. Homelessness is not something to be eradicated. Instead, the homeless person presents us with an opportunity to share grace, to clothe, feed, and shelter a real, live, human person. And that person's good is something far more profound and vast than merely having something to eat and a place to sleep.

For this reason, a gracious act that accomplishes no practical purpose is still good. We rightly laud the heroes of the New York police and fire departments who sacrificed their lives trying to rescue those in the Twin Towers, even though they were unable to save everyone, and even lost their own lives in the effort. Conversely, a bad act that causes a good result is still a bad act. We would (and should) recoil in horror from curing cancer by performing lethal experiments on live human babies, even if the experiments were almost certain to be successful.

This observation is related to the second way that progressivism obscures practical reasonableness. Progressives focus on charity to near-total exclusion of other equally-important goods and principles. Progressives are, in fact, obsessed with human conditions. They think that human conditions -- wealth or poverty, sickness or health, suffering or pleasure -- are the really important things in life. But both practical reasonableness in general and the Christian tradition in particular reject this notion. Christianity teaches that the common good is far more expansive and multi-faceted than absence from want and realization of preferences (or even basic needs). What does it profit a man if he gains a sandwich and a cup of coffee but loses his soul?

So progressives are wrong to focus on human conditions and to use compassion as a trump card over equally important and countervailing moral considerations. In the progressive equation, compassion for the unwed, pregnant teen trumps the moral mandate to provide the most vigorous legal protection for the most vulnerable among us, including the unborn. Compassion for those suffering from Parkinson's Disease trumps the intrinsic value of unborn human life. Compassion for the homosexual trumps society's important interest in promoting and regulating procreative relationships. In each of these cases, progressives take a right response, compassion, and fashion it into a weapon with which to destroy the common good.

In the final analysis, the progressive project is to immanentize the Eschaton. They intend to eradicate poverty, homelessness, needless suffering, and puppy-killing. As we have observed before, this project is completely inconsistent with Christianity. "Progressive Christianity" is an oxymoron, and its attractions make it all the more deceptive.

On a lighter note...

I will comment soon on the Connecticut decision, but first a more amusing judicial action. A state court trial judge in Nebraska has dismissed a lawsuit against God for lack of service of process. The atheist-plaintiff, bless him, gave it a pretty good go. His very creative argument ran thus: God is invoked during court hearings and before legislative assemblies. These are facts of which the court can take judicial notice, and which demonstrate that God is omnipresent. Because God is omnipresent, service of papers on him anywhere is effective.

It's a pretty good argument, actually. If only the theist had studied a little theology, he would know that God is spirit, and therefore has no hands (as we conceive of them) with which to receive process papers. Perhaps the atheist will next argue for an exception based on special circumstances resulting from God's disability.

Connecticut creates same-sex marriage

Of course I will comment on the Kerrigan decision, handed down in Connecticut today, when time permits. I am swamped at the moment, grading mid-terms and trying to meet a publication deadline for a scholarly article. In the meantime, enjoy the much-deserved ridicule that the scholars at Bench Memos are heaping on the decision.

Just another Wallisian Christian celeb?

First, Jim Wallis tried to make it okay for Christians to vote for a pro-abortion candidate. Then Brian McLaren followed suit. These two paved the way for the inevitable: an evangelical celebrity who would go the whole nine yards and endorse Barack Obama.

Meet Donald Miller. Apparently Miller's claim to fame is a book that he authored, entitled Blue Like Jazz. I've heard rave reviews of the book but have not read it; there's too much great literature out there and so little time to spend on fads. Miller is using his fame to campaign for Barack Obama. Like other Christians who have recently announced their support for Obama, he wants to treat abortion like a traffic management issue and marriage like a civil rights issue. And he has some absurd notions about law and the Supreme Court. All this proves is that he has never given a moment's reflection or study to moral, legal, or political philosophy. But young Christians are listening attentively and taking his assertions very, very seriously.

I am sure that Miller's heart is in the right place. And he is right to support male mentorship and assistance to the poor and suffering. (It is interesting to note, however, that conservative Christians have been championing and furthering these causes for decades without fanfare or self-aggrandizement.) Good on him for motivating young Christians to good deeds. But before opining on policy, law, and morality, he would do well to read a book or two on the subjects.

Another Catholic falls for it

What is it about Obama that induces once-reasonable Christian intellectuals to check their reason at the door? Nicholas Cafardi joins Doug Kmiec in endorsing Barack Obama for President.
Cafardi's justification falls far short of reasoning. It is full of fudges, contradictions, plays on words, and outright prevarications. He’s wrong to suggest that the abortion battle is lost. And he's irrational to adopt a consequentialist justification for his position. The issue is not one of reducing the total number of abortions, as if abortion policy were somehow comparable to traffic management. Even assuming what is manifestly not true, namely that Obama's proposed policies would reduce the number of abortions in America, encouraging others to vote for Obama is immoral. The issue with abortion in this country is that a tyrannical judiciary compels the participation of the American people in a grave moral wrong. Cafardi is enabling that evil.

Cafardi vastly overstates his case on torture; McCain publicly and emphatically opposes torture, and no reasonable person believes that all enhanced interrogation techniques amount to torture. Reasonable people can disagree about the justness of the Iraq War, and it is telling that the Pope has not spoken out against American activity in Iraq since becoming Pope. And to call “ignoring the poor” an intrinsic evil is not to make an argument but rather to slander one’s intellectual opponents.

The problem is that many people are going to reason: If Kmiec and Cafardi support Obama, it must be reasonable for a Christian to do so. This is the stuff that really gets my goat. I have no problem with hearing and reading these arguments from my secular friends. To get it from a Christian brother is just galling.

UPDATE: A very thoughtful colleague challenges my reasoning here. Given that McCain is not opposed to embryonic-destruction research and is arguably opposed to abortion not in principle but rather as a matter of political expedience, isn't a vote for McCain immoral in the same way as a vote for Obama? I respond in two parts.

First, I am not really voting for McCain, I am voting against Obama. That is a distinction with moral significance. My moral obligation is to avoid being complicit in the perpetuation of a grave moral evil. A vote for Obama certainly entails that complicity. A vote for McCain (as compared with, say, a vote for a write-in candidate) makes it less likely that Obama will be elected.

Second, there is a relevant distinction between voting for a candidate and endorsing that candidate. Voting for Obama is bad enough. Encouraging others to vote for Obama is morally unjustifiable.

More divisive than ever?

Several conservatives I know have gotten themselves into hot water these past few weeks because of their supposed incivility toward liberals. Meanwhile, liberals seems to be stepping up their ad hominem attacks on conservatives, and particularly Sarah Palin. My sister-in-law summed up neatly something I have been sensing for a few weeks: this election is different than presidential elections past. "It is feeling really intense, divisive, and almost antagonistic to me – even among my friends," she observed.

I think, to some extent, the identification of incivility is overstated. An increasing number of people seems to take offense at civil, direct factual claims. So, for example, when I claimed recently that Obama is morally self-deceived on the issue of abortion, an acquaintance excoriated me for slandering and "wanting to win," whatever that means. But I didn't slander Obama (see New York Times v. Sullivan). Nor do I particularly want McCain to win (though I really don't want Obama to win). And I did not engage in an ad hominem attack. Obama's stance on abortion is morally indefensible. And that fact is relevant both to the substance of his position on abortion and to the question of his judgment. Both of those questions are relevant to his campaign for the presidency.

On the other hand, I suspect most Americans who know someone of the opposite ideology have experienced some genuine incivility these past few weeks. I have. Is it worse this year, or does it just seem that way? I have the impression that it is worse. And I think there are three causes.

First, I wonder whether Facebook and blogs have exacerbated the problem. I suspect a lot of conclusory/slightly-ad-hominem comments that people made to their ideological soulmates over the kitchen table in elections past are now appearing in the status bar on Facebook, which of course is open for all to see.

Second, I think Obama and Palin are pitch-perfect representatives of the cultural divide in a way that no national candidate has ever been before. To have them both in the same election is just too much for civility to bear. Obama represents everything I detest about the liberal elite. And Palin seems to really raise the ire of that same liberal elite.

Finally, I think the two cultures in American society have drifted further apart since 2004, thanks to the same-sex marriage decisions and Bush's mistakes in Iraq. Just when a consensus was starting to develop about the immorality of abortion and the need for better health care policy, along came the Massachusetts and California courts and a badly-botched counter-insurgency in Iraq.

These are not excuses, but I think they are reasons why this election has been so gut-wrenching. It's likely to get worse in the next few weeks.

The case against McCain, not strong enough

George Will makes the conservative -- that is to say, reasoned, principled -- case against a John McCain presidency. It is a strong case. It resonates with me. I am troubled by many aspects of a potential McCain presidency. But there remain two conclusive reasons why voting for McCain is the right choice.

First, there's Sarah Palin. By choosing Palin, McCain has helped to commit the future of the Republican party to conservative quarters.

Second, there's Barack Obama. Obama is not merely liberal. He is for abortion on demand, he refuses to oppose infanticide, he promises to put liberal activists on the federal courts, he promises dramatically to expand costly federal entitlements, including health insurance, and has already demonstrated his fecklessness in foreign relations and policy.

I am not enthusiastic about a McCain presidency. But the Candidate of the Past must be stopped.

The culture of death advances...

... and we in the West need a base from which to resist it. Baroness Warnock, an influential moral philosopher in the United Kingdom, has rightly provoked outrage over her suggestion that people suffering from dementia have a moral obligation to commit suicide. "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service." Of course, this claim entails the further conclusion that those demented patients who refuse to do their duty should be euthanised.

To this appalling and predictable moral claim, one would expect a devastating response from those in the UK who value human life. Instead, we get this:

Neil Hunt, the chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "I am shocked and amazed that Baroness Warnock could disregard the value of the lives of people with dementia so callously. With the right care, a person can have good quality of life very late in to dementia. To suggest that people with dementia shouldn't be entitled to that quality of life or that they should feel that they have some sort of duty to kill themselves is nothing short of barbaric."

Hunt's response is equally as troubling as Warnock's claim. According to Warnock we should protect the right of demented patients to live because they might enjoy a "good quality of life." On that reasoning, those patients who do not or cannot enjoy a good quality of life -- one imagines that this is a majority -- are perfectly legitimate targets for termination. So Hunt has not refuted Warnock's claim, he has merely reduced by a small fraction the pool of candidates for Warnock's proposed euthanasia program.

This is the bind in which hyper-secular Europe finds itself. Having rejected the natural law and adopted consequentialist moral reasoning, it has no ground on which to resist the culture of death. Mr. Hunt and others who care about the mentally infirm could learn a lot from reading this blog.

UPDATE: The American Thinker makes an interesting point. Is this where we're headed if we adopt socialized medicine?

"I hate her."

Jay Nordlinger has some useful observations on the Left's pathological hatred -- yes, hatred -- of, and attempts to destroy, Sarah Palin. I share Nordlinger's physical revulsion at the recent behavior of the mainstream media and cultural elite. However, I think his anecdotal sample is slightly skewed by living in New York. Most Americans are not nearly so vile as the liberal elite.

American values shifting left

I do not believe in fear-mongering. But these numbers do not bode well for our great nation.

The case for human life -- civic evangelicalism, part 6

This is part 6 of an ongoing series. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. In my last post in this series I made the case for basic goods. I argued that many of the things that people today pursue and choose (such as pleasure or happiness) are not things to be pursued at all but rather are mere by-products of other choices. They are, in other words, not human goods. Other things that people choose, such as money or power, are not intrinsically valuable goods, but are merely instrumentally valuable, and are therefore valuable if chosen for more fundamental ends, such as health, charity, or the common good.

There exists a third category of objects of human choice, basic human goods. Basic goods are reasons for choice, pursuit, or action that are valuable in and of themselves. They include beauty, knowledge, religion, and marriage (more on which in a later post).

One of the basic human goods is human life. Human persons are valuable, and therefore are proper objects of choice and action, simply because they are human. For this reason, human beings ought never be instrumentalized -- that is, turned into mere means rather than chosen as ends in themselves -- as they are when they are aborted, destroyed in embryonic research, or made objects of sexual gratification.

Humans are inherently different from all other beings. G.K. Chesterton famously observed in his great book, The Everlasting Man,

Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hinds legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were standing on his head.

Why is murder considered gravely wrong, while animal meat consumption has been accepted by the vast majorities of every civilization from the dawn of time? Why do humans create art, music, and poetry? Why do we clothe ourselves? Why do we travel long distances merely to view a beach, a sunset, or a mountain range? Why do we experience longings for which no satisfaction can be found on Earth?

The common answer to all of these questions, of course, is that humans are not merely different from the animals in degree, we are different in kind. We are wholly other. We are more than mere collections of matter, more than mere arrangements of chemicals, more even than sentient beings.

The implications of this fact are many and far-reaching in our contemporary culture. To instrumentalize a human person is to deny that person's dignity, his or her inherent moral worth. Slavery (and later, racial segregation) remains the most obvious example of instrumentalizing the human person. Slavery has long been abolished here in the United States (though it continues in many other places in the World, where Christian and natural law teachings are disregarded). Yet humans are routinely instrumentalized today in the United States. A few examples are obvious.

Abortion, embryo-destructive research, and infanticide all violate the inherent dignity of human persons. They turn nascent human persons, who if allowed to develop would become walking-around persons like you and I, into means rather than ends. Young humans become either obstacles to the mother's ostensible self-actualization or raw materials for research that some hope (in spite of all the contrary evidence) will rid adults of certain diseases.

Homosexual conduct, adultery, and other types of non-marital sex acts violate the inherent dignity of human persons. They turn humans into means rather than ends. Other people become means for satisfying sexual desires, and their intrinsic worth is thus denied.

Evangelicals ought to affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every human person. And on this we must not compromise. We should learn from the abolitionist and civil rights movements that compromise with the evil forces that denigrate human persons is the same as capitulation to them. Human life deserves a radical and robust defense. This much is clear. The only question is whether we have the will to make that defense.

Oh, for a George Marshall

What is it about serving at the State Department that turns gifted, once-sensible individuals into shills for failed, liberal dogmatics?

A depressing record for liberals

It must be depressing to be a liberal these days. Democrats are losing the presidential election after liberals succeeded in placing the two most liberal members of the Senate on the ticket. Liberals are (finally) losing the culture wars, with public opinion turning slowly but decisively in favor of protecting the lives of the unborn, embracing theistic convictions and the natural law, and defending conjugal marriage. And the United State is winning the War in Iraq, which liberals have tried so hard to forfeit.

Liberals have been trying to encourage each other as the political and cultural landscape has suddenly and unexpectedly grown dark for them. A liberal colleague of mine called my attention to this Bob Herbert op-ed in the (where else?) New York Times. In it, Herbert, trying his best to buck up his leftist cohorts, argues, "Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today."

It's an interesting argument. The problem is that it's manifestly untrue. We certainly have liberals to thank for the civil rights movement. To their shame, conservatives sat that one out. But the rest of the supposed achievements of the Left, which Herbert trumpets, simply aren't that impressive. The verdict is very much still out on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, all of which could be bankrupt within a generation. Unfettered welfare was a disaster, and was reformed (and saved) by a conservative Congress and a moderate President. And it is absurd to credit libs with improving the lot of women in America. The feminist movement since ca. 1945 has had the opposite effect with its emphasis on sexual liberation, which frees men from the obligations of marriage. Furthermore, libs gave us abortion, the great moral evil of our time, and capitulated to Communism and Islamic fascism. Overall, not a very good record.

Indeed, liberals can rightly claim credit for only two major achievements in American history: the Bill of Rights and the civil rights movement. At every other pivotal moment in American history -- Dred Scott; the Civil War; the credit crises of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries; World War II; the Cold War; the culture wars of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries; the fight against Islamic facism -- liberals have been on the wrong side of history.

The Bill of Rights and the civil rights movement are certainly not insignificant achievements. Both were significant and just causes. However, liberals have managed even to botch these attainments. They have placed activist judges and justices on the courts of our land who have read into the Bill of Rights a tyranny of relativism. The Bill of Rights now contains within its penumbral emanations inviolable rights to obtain abortion on demand, engage in homosexual sodomy, and consume sexual obscenity, among other rights.

And liberals have in the last thirty years manages to despoil even the civil rights movement, arguably the high point of American liberalism. They have rejected the natural law principles on which the movement was founded and replaced them with identity politics, grievance-mongering, affirmative action, a commitment to sexual licentiousness, and a program of affirmative action, all of which harm those whom the civil rights movement was designed to assist.

Herbert protests too much. It must truly be depressing to be a liberal these days.

True American femininity

Sarah Palin has inspired and awakened an enormous and politically influential, if often quiet, demographic: mothers. To observe that the liberals don't understand this group is to miss the significance of liberals' self-deception. As one Palin supporter put it, with considerable understatement, feminist groups such as NOW do "not represent me." And in Sarah Palin these women (including my own wife) have found more than a representative, they have found someone with whom they identify.

A colleague recently remarked to me that his wife detests politics. She never engages her acquaintances in political debate, never even shares her political views. When she recently expressed her antipathy to politics on her personal blog, several of her friends, all mothers, freely confessed their own disaffection with politics. And yet, my colleague informed me, all of these women go to the polls every four years and vote Republican. And this year, they are excited about doing so, because the Republican ticket contains one of their own.

If liberals are still wondering what's the matter with Kansas, they might ask the average American woman, who, as the Palin supporter stated, "are raising our families, who work if we have to, but love our country and our families first."

Obama and slavery

The inimitable Gerry Bradley puts Obama's moral self-deception into its proper historical framework. Obama's accommodation on abortion bears a striking resemblance to the apologies made 150 years ago for slavery. That is surely an uncomfortable fact for Obama, who identifies himself with the grievance politics of Black America, but it is undeniably a fact, nonetheless.

Perfect timing; Divine Providence

After watching Palin's speech last night, I remarked to a friend this morning that she is no Lady Thatcher, but that Obama and Biden must have been peeing their pants. My friend retorted, "She's no Thatcher yet."

That is Sarah Palin's "x" appeal among conservatives: she has extraordinary potential. Her potential is unrealized, but she has potential nonetheless. As Rudy Guliani put it, she is the future of the Republican party, and the future looks pretty good. In this respect, she resembles the Democrats' nominee for President, Barack Obama. Of course, the resemblance ends there.

Palin might turn out to be a big flop. She might never realize her potential. But right now, in the infancy of her career on the national political stage, potential is all that is expected of her. Contrast that expectation with the one now sitting upon Obama's shoulders. When he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention his potential was enough to satisfy. That was four years ago. Obama has not been running for president forever, it just seems like it.

Which begs the question: did Barack Obama peak too early? Or, put differently, did the Democrats tap him too late, after it had become painfully obvious that his potential was all puff and dander, completely devoid of substance? What might have happened had John Kerry tapped the Obama well in '04? Might Kerry be running for a second term as President today?

Thankfully, we'll never know. Which makes me believe that God still cares about America after all, and has great plans for her. Only Divine Providence could have arranged this chance for a conservative resurgence in spite of strong anti-Republican sentiment and the apparent inevitability of Barack Obama's coronation.

The choice is hers

One of the many lies that pro-abortionists shamelessly perpetuate is that pro-life politicians are trying to take choice away from women. Mark Hemingway today catches Matt Yglesias peddling this prevarication.

Putting aside the obvious fallacies in Yglesias' reasoning -- women choose whether or not to have sex (unless raped), they can choose to put a child up for adoption -- there inheres in this claim a more subtle and foundational deceit. Abortion prohibitions would not eradicate choice about abortion any more than other homicide prohibitions take away choice about other forms of homicide. That homicide is a crime does not prevent many people from choosing to kill other human beings.

Of course, a criminal prohibition against abortion would place the compulsion of the state on the side of innocent human life. And that compulsion would, no doubt, directly inform the choice of would-be aborters. But what's wrong with that? Yglesias and other libs are simply wrong about their claim that conservatives devalue human agency. Indeed, one of the most important reasons to restrict abortion is to encourage women to maintain their character and to avoid an action that would harm their integrity.

Furthermore, many abortion restrictions fall far short of compulsion by threat of criminal punishment. Informed consent requirements, cooling off periods, paternal consent demands, and similar regulations would go a long way toward encouraging women to save the lives of their unborn children.

Liberals, who claim to care about the autonomy of pregnant women, would do well to consider their moral and physical well-being. Pro-life conservatives demonstrate true concern for the health and integrity of women's choices.

POTUS campaign trivia

How about this for curious: On the two tickets are represented the first state, and the 48th, 49th, and 50th. Not a good year for states added in the 19th century, apparently.

Palin for Veep

The Corner is abuzz about the Palin pick. With good reason. Almost no one saw it coming.

The best aspect of this pick might just be Palin's perfect positioning to make inroads into the culture of abortion. Consider this analysis:

For now, let's just give McCain credit for going for the Democratic Party's solar plexus. He picked a woman when his competitor couldn't. He picked a pro-life mother of a Down Syndrome baby to run with him against a man who, as Jonah points out, couldn't bring himself to protect babies who survive abortion.

All of that matters. A lot. We could be witnessing the high-water mark of the pro-abortion movement. Imagine the damage that a pro-life, female Vice President can do to the abortion rights crowd. Imagine the immensity of her bully pulpit. Add the fact that she kept a child with Down Sydrome and her moral authority on this issue seems insuperable.

UPDATE: I just watched her speech. Just when you think her moral authority cannot possibly be any stronger, she discloses that she has a son serving in Iraq.

I hope the McCain campaign did its due diligence. This is almost too good to be true. As long as she doesn't have any dark skeletons in her closet, she's going to make Slow Joe Biden look like a used car salesman.

More on Democrats' antipathy to free speech

Powerline has the latest in a "series of near-daily 'Democrats vs. Free Speech' stories." Stanley Kurtz has now crossed the Dems' hawse with his inquiries into Obama's connections to the terrorist Bill Ayers. According to Politico, the Obama campaign responded with an effort to disrupt Kurtz's appearance on a Chicago radio program.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups."

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

Clearly, this issue touches a nerve in the Obama campain.

UPDATE: Guy Benson has a first-hand account.

More on health care

A liberal colleague of mine, who identifies himself as an evangelical but stands squarely outside 2000 years of Christian tradition on matters of legal and political philosophy, is fond of the Wallisian argument that Christian moral teaching demands single-payer health care. Christians have a moral obligation, he thinks, to employ the state to ensure that disparities in health care are eradicated.

The flaws in this argument are too many to count. But it is important to respond to this sort of nonsense because many liberal Christians, eager for an excuse to vote for Barack Obama, are buying it.

First, this consequentialist account of political engagement simply does not hang together. It is entirely inconsistent with 2000 years of orthodox Christian teaching on jurisprudence and poltical philosophy. The Church has always taught a moral philosophy that is deontological and emphasizes the importance of the Eschaton values -- virtue, the Good -- relative to things of lesser and merely temporal importance, such as human conditions. In short, these Christian consequentialitsts stand squarely outside of orthodox Christianity. Perhaps that is not troubling to so-called "progressive Christians," but it should at least cause them to pause.

That aside, the assumption on which the argument is predicated -- that the justness or morality of a policy is determined by its consequences (the "moral goal," to borrow your oxymoron) -- is anything but self-evident, and liberal Christians have not bothered to demonstrate it. I would love to know they plan to get around the incommensurability problem, which in the last 50 years has caused consequentialist philosophers the world over to abandon consequentialism as untenable. So far, they aren't saying.

As a prudential and factual matter, their claims are simply wrong. "Progressive" -- statist and collectivist -- proposals have never, anywhere, at any time reduced disparity in healthcare (is it disparity to which they object or inadequacy?), reduced waste, or made anyone more healthy. Health care rationing in Canada is now so extreme that doctors are actually dropping patients from their practice lists. I suppose in that sense, Canada's statist system has reduced disparity: everyone is equally unable to obtain adequate health care.

An old joke about the Soviet economy went like this. After ordering his car at a local dealership, a customer inquired when it might be available to pick up. The dealer told him, "You can come by to get it on February 3, two years from now." The customer replied, "I can't. The plumber's coming that day."There's a reason why that joke is funny. It was true.

Indeed, most (though certainly not all) of the failures of the current health insurance system are due to too much state intervention and not enough freedom of market. If insurers were freed from disparate and restrictive state regulatory schemes, a national market would naturally emerge, increasing access and reducing costs.

The tradeoff would be that less affluent people would end up with "Wal-Mart" plans and more affluent people would end up with "Brooks Brothers" plans. In the minds of conservatives, that would be a good thing. Better a Wal-Mart plan than no plan at all. But liberals care more about disparity than about access, so they prefer a single-payer system that rations a smaller quantum of health care on more equal terms.

McCain's plan is, in the minds of conservatives, superior to the statist solution Obama offers for all of these reasons.

So much for free speech

Barack Obama is trying to silence a group that is raising legitimate, unanswered questions about Obama's ties to the terrorist William Ayers. He is threatening to employ the Justice Department to pressure television stations that carry advertisements linking him to Ayers. And he is impliedly threatening to have the stations' broadcast licenses revoked, asserting that running the ads violates the stations' obligations to operate "in the public interest." That phrase is a term of art, the standard for determining which television stations get to broadcast and which ones do not.

I have not seen the ads. Perhaps they imply stronger inferences than the evidence will bear. However, Obama is a public figure, so the ads are almost certainly not defamatory. Cheaps shots? Perhaps. But in this country we happen to believe that tough questions in a political campaign are protected under the First Amendment. And we trust American citizens to distinguish between political ads that are legitimate and those that are over the line.

The bigger issue is this. If Candidate Obama is willing to go to such extremes to silence critics during a political campaign, imagine what a President Obama might do once he has actually obtained the reigns of power. The man obviously has little regard for the First Amendment. Add this to the list of things -- human life, marriage, free markets -- for which he has little regard, and one discerns a troubling pattern.

UPDATE: Police in Denver have arrested an ABC news producer for "trespass" on a public sidewalk, a physical impossibility. At the time of his arrest, the producer was attempting to photograph Democratic senators and DNC donors. How little do Obama's folks value free speech?

I am informed that Rush Limbaugh is covering this story on his radio show.

Having a bad day?

Feeling down? A bit sorry for yourself? Read this. Your day won't seem so bad anymore.

Facts that don't fit the narrative

For the mainstream media, frenzied in its peurile, pubescent passion for the Big O, facts have little value. The Washington Times, not infected with Obamamania, has uncovered a fact that the New York Times, the networks, and CNN -- in short, Obama's communications agents -- refuse to report because it doesn't fit their Obamanarrative: Obama's half brother lives in a hut in Africa, subsisting on three cents per day. It seems that the multi-millionaire and Democratic-nominee Candidate of the Past wants to spend your hard-earned money and mine on programs for the poor but cannot bring himself to share a meager fraction of his own coin with his own flesh and blood.

This fact is consistent with recent revelations that the Obamas make millions each year and, as the Washington Times points out, live in "a mansion that a mobster helped pay for." Also consistent is the fact (again, tip to the Washington, not New York, Times) that the Obamas give less than the national average to charities. And the fact (yup, Washington Times) that Michelle Obama's employer, a hospital in Chicago, steers poor blacks to other hospitals. The list goes on, but you won't read any of these facts in the news section of your mainstream paper or any news service that relies primarily on the AP and/or Reuters.

The moral of the story is simply this: if you want a liberal narrative devoid of any connection to reality within the four dimensions of time and space, get your "news" from traditional sources. If you want facts, conservative media is the place to go.

Liberal theonomy comes in Catholic variety, too

We have on numerous occasions condemned theonomous reasoning on matters of civic importance (for examples, see here, here, here, and here). Both liberal Christians and conservative Christians can be found arguing that the Bible says x, therefore Christians ought to endorse y policy. Almost invariably one finds that the speaker is a protestant, usually a self-described evangelical.

Today the Bishop of Providence, Rhode Island demonstrates that Catholics are not immune to the temptation to indulge in theonomous lines of argument. According to the AP, "Rhode Island's Roman Catholic bishop is calling on U.S. authorities to halt mass immigration raids and says agents who refuse to participate in such raids on moral grounds deserve to be treated as conscientious objectors." America's immigration laws ought not be enforced, according to Tobin, because they are unjust and immoral.

One of the many problems with the rhetorical tie between theology and public policy is that it is a cop-out. It excuses the one making the assertion from engaging in the rigorous process of reasoning publicly, invoking publicly-accessible propositions and demonstrating proofs. Bishop Tobin doesn't bother to explain his assertion that the democratically-enacted immigration laws of this country are unjust. And the assertion is just that: an assertion. It is anything but a self-evident truth.

The AP author provides a clue, stating, "The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called U.S. immigration policies 'morally unacceptable,' saying they keep families divided and encourage the exploitation of migrants." If that sums up Tobin's concern with current immigration laws, then he has no ground for claiming that the laws are unjust and immoral. The laws may be imprudent. They may result in undesirable (and presumably unintended) outcomes, such as the division of families. They may for these reasons be bad public policy. But that in no way makes the laws unjust or immoral. Unwise perhaps, but not unjust.

And Tobin should know this. As a Catholic bishop, he is aware of the distinction between matters of principle and matters of prudence. The legalization of abortion is unjust in principle. Our current health care laws are unwise as a matter of prudence. Similarly, our immigration policies are prudentially suspect in some respects. But to encourage law enforcement officers to refuse to enforce the law, simply because one has prudential disagreements with the lawmaker, is to thumb one's nose at the rule of law.

More dishonesty from the homosexuality lobby

This ad is currently running in California. The ad shows an attractive young woman trying to get to the alter, where her handsome, chivalrous husband-to-be waits to marry her. Various obstacles have been placed in her way, and after squeezing between cars in the parking lot, losing a heel and her veil, and being tripped up by a clumsy, elderly guest, she gives up and sits in the aisle just a few feet short of her destination. The minister then restrains her fiance from coming to her aid. The following words then apear on the screen: "What if you couldn't marry the person you love."

The ad is disingenuous on so many levels. To name just a few:

(1) The couple trying to get married consists of one man and one woman. No same-sex couples, polygamous couples, or any other groups of people trying to marry the people they love appear anywhere in the ad. The imagery is intentional, of course, and extremely dishonest. A single image of a same-sex couple approaching the alter would belie the myth underlying the ad.

(2) The message is predicated upon a lie. Nothing prevents any person -- heterosexual or homosexual -- from getting married. Everyone has equal access to marriage under traditional laws. But homosexuality lobbyists don't want equal access. They want the law's special and particlar endorsement of homosexual intimacy.

(3) An unmistakable, if veiled, implication of the ad is that various people have thrown up (legal) obstacles to prevent homosexuals from reaching the alter. Of course this also is untrue. But the implication betrays a more subtle presupposition: anti-gay traditionalists are obsessed with keeping harmless homosexuals from attaining marital bliss.

The traditionalists-are-obsessed-with-same-sex-marriage slander, commonly recited by sexual liberationists, is particularly galling because it is a classic example of psychological projection. Before the homosexuality lobby shoved this issue into the national consciousness by litigating it before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and every other judicial forum they thought might be receptive, I and most people like me though about same-same marriage as often as we thought of platinum ice cream (that is to say, not at all) and for exactly the same reasons.

Victory in Iraq

One problem with fighting a war against terrorists is that no single event marks final victory. However, the signs that we are winning in Iraq are now accumulating so quickly that victory in that theatre seems almost inevitable. This is particularly striking and encouraging when one considers that defeat seemed inevitable just several months ago.

The latest landmark on the road to victory comes with the announcement, expected on Friday, that Moqtada al Sadr intends to disband his infamous Mahdi Army. The Journal explains why this is so important. "Coupled with the near-total defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq, this means the U.S. no longer faces any significant organized military foe in the country. It also marks a major setback for Iran, which had used the Mahdi Army as one of its primary vehicles for extending its influence in Iraq."

Despite the best efforts of liberals and Democrats, we are winning in Iraq. We have defeated both Sunni terrorists and Shiite thugs. While mainstream media institutions emboldened and enabled our enemies, the men and women of our military quietly went about their business beating an impassioned, determined, and dishonest enemy.

God bless the men and women who serve us in uniform. God bless the fast-maturing Iraqi government. And God bless America, preserver and defender of freedom and hope.

Superficial dandies

I was trying to make sense of a student evaluation yesterday. One of my students complained at last semester's end (though the semester ended in May, I only got around to reading my evaluations yesterday) that I was too hard on him or her and that I needed to understand that not everyone is as privileged as I.

That struck me as odd. Privileged? Really? As I have mentioned here before, I grew up in poverty and busted my hump for decades to get out. And because I tell my students a very abbreviated version of my life story at the end of the year (I intend it as inspiration, not cannon fodder) my students are aware of this fact. So the claim that I am privileged struck a particularly discordant tone.

Reading Thomas Sowell's column today cleared things up for me. Sowell observes of our contemporary culture:

People who have achieved success are often referred to as "privileged," especially by the intelligentsia. Achievements used to be a source of inspiration for others but have been turned into a source of grievance for those without comparable achievements.

I see this phenomenon frequently in some (but not most) of my students. Another student complained that I was playing favorites. The basis for the charge? I praise students who answer questions correctly and do not give similar praise to those who get the answer wrong.

This entitlement mentality goes hand in hand with the "incessant self-dramatization" to which Sowell rightly objects. Increasingly, young people nurture the notion that they deserve success regardless of merit. They seem to believe that achievements, fame, and honors are like lottery winnings. How have we failed them so badly?

The power of liberal academic dogma

Anyone who thinks that universities in America are places of free and open inquiry either: (1) has not recently stepped foot on an American campus or (2) is liberal and deluded. The latest demonstration of narrow-mindedness in the left-leaning academy comes from North Dakota, where the NoDak Law Review had the audacity to publish articles by pro-marriage scholars. For this bit of heresy, the Law School is being flogged in the local press and legal community.

Protests from North Dakota lawyers have been so passionate and widespread that North Dakota Law School Dean Paul LeBel posted a disclaimer on the school’s Web site assuring the legal community that “the university and the School of Law are welcoming and inclusive educational communities.”

Just last week I shared dinner with a fellow member of the legal academy who unwittingly slandered me to my face. She complained of "anti-gay bigots" who "oppose gay marriage." Of course, it never occurred to her that I, a rational person, might support conjugal marriage, much less that the word "bigot" might be an insulting calumny. Mercifully, another colleague arrived at that very moment to save me from having to respond. But the point was (once again) driven home: scholarship in the American academy is for the exchange of ideas and the pursuit of truth, unless those ideas are conservative and the truth is inconvenient for the liberal worldview.

Debunking the callous-America myth

Over at Mirror of Justice, Greg Sisk takes down the liberal canard that the United States of America has failed to commit financial resources to development of its poor. Unlike his intellectual opponents, he uses facts. Lots of them.

For example, government spending in 2007 consumed $4.9 trillion, 35.9% of our gross domestic product. Sisk states, "Of that government spending, social spending constituted some 55.8 percent of total spending, totaling more than $2.88 trillion."

Think about that number for a moment. That's "trillion" with a "t". Furthermore, Sisk points out that "the percentage of the federal budget devoted to defense has plummeted while social spending has skyrocketed."

Finally, the average American begins working on January 2 each year and doesn't start taking money home until May 1. Everything she earns before May 1 goes to the government. And while she is not taking money home, she is not able to give to charitable organizations, which are able to help the poor much more effectively than government bureaucrats. This graph effectively illustrates the problem:



It is worth noting that Barack Obama proposes to make this problem worse by increasing expenditures on federal entitlements for the poor. In short, the claim that America is not serious about assisting the poor and needs to take a more liberal, compassionate (profligate) posture toward state spending is hogwash.

Remaking the world, secular European style

In case you've not yet picked up on the messianic ambitions of the Junior Senator from Illinois, we have this passage from his speech today in Berlin. "With an eye towards the future, with resolve in our heart, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again." The highly-secular Germans ate it up, averaging more than one applause interruption each minute throughout the speech.

Barack Obama and western Europe: religiously immanentizing the Eschaton.

Add hypocrisy to the list

Barack Obama is currently on his world tour running for... it's not clear what. One would be forgiven for concluding that he is hoping to be elected Emperor of the Secular Western World. In any event, Obama made a campaign stop at the Western Wall in Jerusalem yesterday morning, complete with campaign posters written in Hebrew. Predictably, some in attendance heckled, others chanted their support.

Rather than accept responsibility for turning a holy site into the host of a political convention, Obama had this to say: "It was rowdier than the last time I was there, you know? I mean, people were sort of, like, holerin'. You know I was expecting more reverence."

Obama has demonstrated an increasing number of unattractive vices in the last several months. Add hypocrisy.

The case for basic goods -- civic evangelicalism part 5

This is part 5 of an ongoing series. See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

In a post last week I examined the unfortunate and immature, "progressive Christian" obsession with human conditions such as wealth and poverty, pleasure and pain. This obsession is borne largely out of an inability (or a refusal) to distinguish between basic goods, instrumental goods, and non-goods in the created universe.

By basic goods I mean things that are worth choosing for their own sake. These include knowledge, beauty, and human life.

By instrumental goods I mean things that are valuable only because they enable us to obtain more basic goods. Money, for example, is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Rather, it is to be pursued because it enables the pursuer to feed his family, stay healthy, and give charitably to those who are less fortunate.

By non-goods I mean things that are not to be pursued at all, but are mere by-products of choice. Pleasure is a good example. Neither pleasure nor pain is something to be chosen, though we often experience pleasure and pain as a consequence of our choices. We will experience pleasure as a result of our right choice to have a child, but that child will also bring us pain and suffering. We can also experience both pleasure (short-term) and suffering (long-term) as a result of the wrong choice to engage in sex acts outside of marriage.

Among the basic goods that Christians recognize are two of contemporary importance: human life and conjugal marriage (the union of one man and one woman in lifetime commitment). Many progressives deny that these are basic goods by first denying that basic goods exist in the first place. So, before we get to the cases for the intrinsic value of human life and of marriage (in later posts) we must first defend the notion of intrinsic value. Here we will respond with inductive reasoning, starting with particular cases and working our way out to general principles.

In my native New England, stone walls line the landscape. Historically, stone walls served two valuable purposes. The soil in New England is very rocky, and before it can be tilled and cultivated it must yield its rocks. The stone wall served as a place for farmers to store the rocks once they were removed from the soil. Once constructed, the wall also helped to mark boundary lines between farms or between fields in a single farm.

Today, farms in New England simply cannot compete with the agri-businesses in the West, and most New England farms have stopped operating commercially. In fact, many farmers have sold their land to vacationers who wish to escape the city and establish a second home in a quiet setting. These vacationers often restore stone walls that have decayed over the years. Often they find that the stones on their properties are insufficient to serve the particular aesthetic (the "look") they seek. So they buy stones and have them delivered onto their properties.

Now, the old farmer scratches his head in bewilderment at the sight of trucks bringing rocks onto the land. The farmer always had altogether too many rocks, so the notion that one would bring more rocks in seems like madness. In this respect, the vacationer's treatment of the stone wall is the opposite of the farmer's. But is the vacationer acting immorally?

Of course not. Why not? As the farmer reasonably chose to build a stone wall for the extrinsic benefits of tillable soil and boundary demarcation, the vacationer reasonably chose to re-build the stone wall for the extrinsic value of beauty. Both the farmer and the vacationer instrumentalize the wall, choose it because it is instrumentally valuable for the attainment of extrinsic ends. But there's nothing wrong with that because the wall has no intrinsic value, no value in itself, only instrumental value.

Now imagine a guy who wants to bed a girl who loves poetry. So before taking her to dinner, he memorizes some Keats. After his successful sexual conquest, he dumps her. The guy has acted immorally in at least two respects because he has instrumentalized beauty, knowledge, and another member of the human race. He has used poetry to get the girl and has used the girl to satisfy his desires. The first makes us uncomfortable, the second awakens our sense of injustice. Why?

Unless beauty, knowledge, and human persons have instrinsic value, using beauty, knowledge, and human persons instrumentally to achieve extrinsic ends would not strike us as troublesome. We conclude from this observation that some objects of choice, such as poetry and women, are valuable in and of themselves and are reasonably chosen for their own intrinsic value. Those objects of choice we call basic goods, goods that are chosen not for any more fundamental reason but as reasons themselves.

Single-payer health insurance as a moral obligation

Two of my "progressive Christian" acquaintances have recently made the claim that Americans have a moral obligation to ensure that all persons have health insurance. To them I have posed the following questions, but they have either declined or proven unable to answer.

(1) Whence this moral obligation? How does one come to such a conclusion?

(2) How extensive is the obligation? Must everyone have full coverage for all medical, dental, and pharmaceutical needs, or will lesser levels of coverage satisfy our putative moral obligation? If the latter, are not free market solutions the most efficacious? I wholeheartedly agree with you that this is a complex problem requiring a complex solution. History teaches that markets produce better solutions to complex problems than governments.

(3) What principled limitation exists on our putative moral obligation? Moral obligations are universal. For example, my moral obligation not to take innocent human life extends both to Americans and to non-Americans. On your reasoning, why are we not also morally obligated to provide health care to the billions of uninsured and impoverished in nations other than our own?

(4) How are we to discharge our moral obligation without infringing upon personal autonomy? Some people simply don't want to spend the money for health insurance, and others (particularly the young and healthy) don't need to.

I am trying to avoid the conclusion that these questions have no intelligible answers and that my acquaintances are trying to foreclose debate by calling names. The conclusion becomes more difficult to resist the longer they fail to answer these simple questions.

Dangerous because so very naive

Barack Obama pledges to rid the world of nuclear weapons during his tenure as President. As if the goal were not sufficiently naive, his means are laughably so. "Obama said adhering to nonproliferation treaties would put pressure on nations such as North Korea and Iran."

The notion that Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be so shamed by our voluntary disarmament that they will give up their nuclear ambitions can only be maintained in a very small, very weak, or very immature mind. The Candidate of the Past must be defeated. We cannot afford to capitulate to thugs and terrorists.

Wealth and poverty, two sides, same coin

The most recent edition of Harvard Magazine (Mrs. Discipulus is an alumna) contains a silly screed inveighing against income disparity. That's predictable enough. Contemporary liberals adhere to the ridiculous notion that your financial success is a net loss to someone who is less successful, even if that person is better off as a result. So the corporate shareholders who succeed in business and create jobs for working-class families are, in the twisted lib worldview, harming those very same working-class families for whom they are creating jobs and, therefore, wealth.

The HM author introduces a new term to summarize this concept: "relative deprivation." I quote directly: "The idea is that, even when we have enough money to cover basic needs, it may harm us psychologically to see that other people have more."

To articulate such nonsense is to refute it. However, liberal fascination with inequality (and attendant, maleable concepts such as "poverty") flows out of a much deeper metaphysical misunderstanding about the world in which we live. For whatever reason, contemporary liberals have it stuck in their heads that human conditions like poverty and wealth, sickness and health, pleasure and pain, are the really important things in life. This is a narrow, dogmatic view of life.

Mature, reasoning people recognize that the really important things in life are basic human goods, such as knowledge and beauty, and the great virtues, such as love and charity. The human conditions are merely the occasions -- opportunities, if you will -- to practice the great virtues and to enjoy the basic goods.

For this reason, mature, reasoning persons have the capacity to be truly joyful in wealth or poverty, sickness or health, pain or ecstatic pleasure. Liberals lack this capacity. Instead, they look around at the greatest, most just nation in the history of the world and complain that biology has left the genders unequal. They live in the most prosperous time in history, in the most prosperous nation on earth, but they are obsessed with the psychological harm that a middle-class college professor ostensibly suffers by watching his CEO neighbor drive to work every day in his Benz.

These are useful observations to bear in mind as we listen to "progressive Christians" in the coming months drone on and on about inequality in America. Having grown up the oldest of six children in a ten-foot wide trailer and having worked my way into the upper middle class, I look at inequality in the most prosperous nation in history as an amazing opportunity. So who is narrow-minded? The Harvard Magazine-Sojourners crowd, or me?

The Next Bailout

Bloomberg has an article today speculating that Fannie and Freddie, the mortgage giants with tacit government backing, need more capital. The question becomes where will they get the capital? It is likely that the U.S. government will foot the bill. Unfortunately, I have to say that a bailout by the USG is probably necessary given the liquidity these two institutions provide for our mortgage markets. Also, if Fannie and Freddie lost tacit backing, the cost of funds for mortgages would likely sky rocket. The worst part is that Fannie, Freddie, and Congress all had a hand in creating the broken system and now because of their mistakes, we'll be footing the bill. Thanks guys.

Apologies

On behalf of the entire Cloakroom gang, I apologize for the scant content these last few weeks. For several of us, summer is a time to focus on things other than politics, legal developments, and current events. (That's not a good reason for our delinquence, just an excuse.) Posting will continue to be light throughout the remainder of the summer, but when Congress and the federal courts get back up to speed in a few weeks, we will no doubt find ourselves compelled to provide analysis. In the interim you will hear from us from time to time.

Thanks for checking in.

Live by the judicial decision, die by the judicial decision

Largely unable to persuade in the court of public opinion, progressives have spent the last five decades imposing their eschaton-immanentizing worldview on the rest of us through activist courts of the third-branch, impervious-to-democratic-impulse type. The problem with that strategy of legal subjugation is that the courts do not always cooperate.

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided (rightly, in my view) that the Second Amendment secures to individual, private citizens the right to bear arms. (See Ed Whelan's helpful summary, here.) And a million liberal lawyers groaned audibly.

Kennedy's disregard for the meaning of words

Justice Kennedy is at it again. Writing for a 5-4 majority Kennedy today announced that the death penalty may not be imposed upon those who rape children. The natural repugnance decent people feel for child rapists is borne not out of any defect of reason but rather out of an intuitive understanding that child rape is a horrible, awful, indefensible, inexplicably depraved act. Justice Kennedy regards that intuition with contempt.

Kennedy is equally contemptuous of the rule of law and the meaning of words. According to the AP report (I have not yet read the decision), Kennedy reasoned, "The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child." However, the U.S. Constitution contains no requirement that punishment be proportional. Instead, it prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. If execution is not cruel and unusual for a murderer, nothing in logic suggests that it would be cruel or unusual for a child rapist. But in Justice Kennedy's world, in which we are all voiceless subjects, words have no meaning.

Import Tariff on Oil?

Today, during my usual morning intake of Morning Joe, I watched as Pat Buchanan and Tom Friedman agreed that our addiction to oil can only be broken with an import tariff. This discussion was based on Friedman's new book and articles he has written in the past. So, why does this matter?

I believe it marks a unique point in our current events since protectionist conservatives (yes, they exist and Buchanan has always been one. See the Nixon Administration for evidence of this.) and liberal Greenies see the same solution to different problems. In Buchanan's case, protection of "Made in USA" label and in Friedman's case, the reduction of greenhouse gases. The trouble is that if this coalition gains traction we will start down the slippery slope of protectionism and add substantial recessionary pressure to the US economy.

The argument for import tariffs is that the tariff will further increase the price of gasoline, shrinking demand. Additionally, the tariff would generate revenue for the US treasury which could be used for the various and sundry purposes the Federal Government finds to spend our money. The argument goes that instead of feeding foreign government coffers we will feed our government coffers.

Well let's look at some of the inherent problems with a tariff:
-First, the world price for oil will not change. The only place where the price will change is where the tariff is in place (the US).
-If you could up with an argument that the price for oil would drop then the US would be subsidizing world economic growth at our expense. The reason is that while the world would be paying a new low price, the US would still pay a high price. This price differential would give world industry a competitive advantage over US industry.
-There would be a fine balance between government receipts created from the tariff and economic activity lost for the same reason. Could government get it right? Likely not. It would probably require a good bit of tinkering.
-Tangentially, RECESSION and INFLATION. Adding a fixed tariff would drive up prices for energy intensive goods (everything is energy intensive) this would likely drive up prices and would likely stifle growth and cause recession. I defy policymakers to come up with a way that this could be avoided. The only scenario under which it can be is to have an alternative source. Currently, this alternative does not exist. Oh, and please don't say corn based ethanol.
-Finally, increasing the price of oil would disproportionally effect those without discretionary income i.e. the suburban, rural poor, who rely exclusively on automobile transportation.

Hopefully policymakers will see the myriad issues related to tariff increases. Even more importantly, let's hope Pat Buchanan and Tom Friedman drop the subject.

Typical...

It is so predictable. The minute a Republican actually becomes vocal and decides to fight for Republican principles a legion of status quo me-first GOP'ers begin to criticize the action. And again in predictable fashion, the criticism never comes on the record because they are too cowardly to associate their name in public with their bitter sour grapes. Rather, they use the oldest trick in the Washington playbook, the anonymous quote.

Some Republicans say the Republican Study Committee’s ongoing push to define the House GOP’s election-year message is a thinly veiled attempt by the group’s chairman, Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, and other members to put their political ambitions ahead of party needs.

“We should be really focused on the majority party,” said one senior GOP aide. “This is all about giving [Hensarling] the stature, given [presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen.] John McCain’s anti-earmark position, to get him nominated to a senior position in that administration. It is so obvious and he is doing it at the worst time for the Conference. None of this is helpful for anyone other than him.”

Hensarling is not known to be particularly close to McCain, but he was mentored by former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, a McCain ally who chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Hensarling was executive director.

The messaging push has led to speculation about Hensarling’s ambitions should McCain win the presidency or if party losses in the House open positions in the GOP leadership. The ambitions of other top members of the RSC, including Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and House Chief Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, have also been the subject of discussion.

This is what status quo power-hungry leadership types have been saying about reformers for years. When Mike Pence was chairman of the conservative Republican Study Group, the nasty leadership aide quotes were everywhere then too. Hensarling should look at these pathetic snipes as a badge of honor. If leadership aides weren't fabricating stories about the chairman of the RSC it would be clear that said chairman was not doing his job. Hensarling is being effective and relevant, and that pisses some people off.

They should get over it. For the good fo the Party and more importantly a nation that desperately needs some real leadership.

The September 10 Candidate

We have here called Barack Obama the Candidate of the Past because of his extraordinary resemblence to Jimmy Carter. Obama is mired in the failed policy proposals of the 1970's.

As Andrew McCarthy today points out, Obama is also mired in the failed national security mindset of another moment of the past, September 10, 2001. McCarthy drives the point home:

When an elitist lawyer like Obama claims the criminal-justice system works against terrorists, he means it satisfies his top concern: due process. And on that score, he’s quite right: We’ve shown we can conduct trials that are fair to the terrorists. After all, we give them lawyers paid for by the taxpayers whom they are trying to kill, mounds of our intelligence in discovery, and years upon years of pretrial proceedings, trials, appeals, and habeas corpus.

As a national-security strategy, however, and as a means of carrying our government’s first responsibility to protect the American people, heavy reliance on criminal justice is an abysmal failure.

A successful counterterrorism strategy makes criminal prosecution a subordinate part of a much broader governmental response. Most of what is needed never happens in a courtroom. It happens in military operations against terrorist strongholds; intelligence operations in which jihadists get assassinated — without trial; intelligence collections in which we cozy up to despicable informants since only they can tell us what we need to know; and aggressive treasury actions to trace terror funds.

Barack Obama lacks the will to oversee these necessary operations, and he is far too enthralled with his own moral and intellectual superiority to deal honestly with the problem of terrorism. For the preservation of all that is good about Western civilization and this great nation, the Candidate of the Past must be defeated.

Supreme Court Roundup

Having been on vacation for two weeks, I missed entirely an annual June tradition. Each year about this time the justices of the United States Supreme Court hand down from on high tablets of stone containing enlightened pronouncements on the state of American law. Some of these pronouncements are sensible, coherent, and foundational to ordered liberty. These tend to be written by Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Scalia, Thomas, or Alito.

Other pronouncements are written by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, or Souter. These tend to be destructive of the rule of law, inconsistent, breathtakingly dismissive of common sense and the meaning of words, and coherent only to mainstream media commentators and liberal law professors.

Into the latter categorty falls last week's Boumediene decision. NRO has an excellent summary of that disastrous judicial event.

I have not yet read today's Dada decision. And Matthew Franck's handy Kennedy Rule, useful for determining whether a SCOTUS case was wrongly decided, does not pertain because the court did not in Dada declare anything unconstitutional. However, it is worth noting that Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Dada on behalf of Ginsburg, Stevens, Breyer, and Souter. Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito dissent.

I repeat that I have not yet read the decision. It is possible that the majority correctly decided Dada. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Another twisted New York Times columnist

I missed this column last week while on vacation, but Rick Garnett directed attention to it at Mirror of Justice. According to NYT columnist Judith Warner, dads who encourage their daughters to wait for sex until marriage are distinguishable only by slight degree from dads who imprison their daughters in dungeons and rape them repeatedly. Warner expresses "horror" at the commitment of evangelical fathers to protect their daughters' purity, a protection she labels "emotional violence." And, in Warner's twisted worldview, fathers who affirm the beauty of their daughters commit emotional incest.

And liberals wonder why we call it a culture war.

The case for curiosity -- civic evangelicalism part 4

This is part 4 of an ongoing series. See part 1, part 2, and part 3.

A common criticism of evangelicals is that we are, on the whole, rather dogmatic, even anti-intellectual. We are slow to ask questions, quick to provide answers, no matter how unreasonable. We are slow to reflect, quick to opine. We are slow to question Christian dogma, quick to reject secular dogmas. And we are slow to consider criticisms of us, quick to criticize things we do not understand, or care to understand.

Like many generalizations, these sweep with fairly broad strokes. Not all evangelicals are dogmatic, unthinking, know-nothings, but many are. Instances of evangelical theonomism are well-known and receive much press. The Bible says x, therefore Americans ought to endorse y policy, buy n product, or support z institution. This sort of reasoning is as counter-productive as it is juvenile. Non-Christians do not accept the authority of Scripture. And they reasonably chafe at the thought of living in an evangelical, theonomous nation.

Historically, Christian arguments have persuaded when Christians have avoided the Bible-thumping and done two things instead: (1) employed publicly-accessible reasoning, and (2) asked lots of questions. For a biblical model of the first method, think of Paul in the Areopagus, co-opting the Athenians' alter to an Unknown God (Acts 17). For the second, consider Jesus' questioning of his disciples, which led to Peter's confession of faith (Matthew 16:13-17). For an example of a didactic, unquestioning lecture failing entirely to persuade an audience, consider Stephen, who so enraged the Sanhedrin with his righteous pontification that they stoned him to death (Acts 7).

In our own day, the Christians who have the most intellectual influence dispense with dogmatic and scriptural assertions altogether, and instead reason in publicly-accessible language and venues. Consider the difference between two different arguments against abortion. The Know Nothing asserts that God knits the baby in the mother's womb and that human life has special "sanctity." There's nothing mistaken with those claims. But concepts like creation and sanctity have no meaning to non-Christians. So this argument does not persuade. Instead, it comes across as supercilious and simplistic.

Furthermore, these assertions gloss over some real weaknesses in the pro-life argument. Many pro-lifers have no answers to difficult questions. Shouldn't women have the right to control their own bodies? Doesn't the Constitution guarantee a right to autonomy? Why should the interests of a zygote trump the rights of an adult woman? Slogans about the sanctity of human life do not answer these questions.

By contrast, the thoughtful evangelical points out: that humans choose things that are good; that human life is good, both because it enables the liver to enjoy other goods, such as affection, play, knowledge, etc, and because life is good in an of itself; that unborn humans are indistinguishable in nature and character from born humans, and are therefore members of the human family. From these observations the thoughtful evangelical persuasively demonstrates that unborn children ought to be chosen as goods in and of themselves, and that the intentional destruction of unborn humans is evil and unjust.

Christians ought to be curious not merely better to persuade, but also because we care about Truth and desire to pursue it. We ought to countenance the possibility that we are wrong. If we are wrong we ought to repent, and questioning our own assumptions is the only way to discover our errors. If we are right, questioning our assumptions gives us greater confidence in our convictions and helps us better explain our reasoning.

All of these benefits of intellectual curiosity follow only if we are both humble and confident. We need to practice intellectual humility and admit that we don't know everything perfectly, or even well. At the same time, we need to be confident that our God is a God of Truth -- in fact, He is the Author of Truth because He created the universe -- and that we have nothing to fear from intellectual exploration.

Justice Hillary

This is absolutely terrifying:

If Barack Obama is elected president, mutual friends say the best course for Hillary Clinton might be nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court rather than staying in the Senate.

Clinton is also talked about as suitable for secretary of state in an Obama administration. The consensus among her friends is that she would not be content forging a lifetime career in the Senate, as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy did after he lost the 1980 presidential nomination.

A footnote: The last confirmed Supreme Court nominee without prior judicial experience was Lewis Powell, a prestigious attorney from Richmond, Va., named by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. No high court selection has had so modest a legal background as Clinton since President John F. Kennedy named football star Byron (Whizzer) White in 1962.

Of course, it is terrifying because Hillary is an outright liberal politician. The Supreme Court is supposed to be devoid of politics. To date, the left has at least had the decency to pretend to nominate non-political judges. I suppose there would be one commendable thing about a Hillary nomination: the left would finally be admitting that they see the Supreme Court as an extension of the legislature where they need dutiful liberals to legislative their agenda from the bench.

On saying one thing, and doing another...

Investor's Business Daily:

Fiscal Policy: The Senate's new $3 trillion budget for 2009 is big, but it fails to do something vital to the U.S. economy: extend President Bush's tax cuts. If this isn't fixed, we'll soon face the largest tax hike in our history.

The Senate's action on Wednesday to approve the spending plan came on a 48-45 vote over Republican objections. The House is also expected to pass the measure this week.

Democrats sounded almost giddy. The budget "will strengthen the economy and create jobs," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat. "It will provide tax cuts for the middle class, and it will restore fiscal responsibility by balancing the books by 2012 and maintaining balance in 2013."

Fine-sounding sentiments all. But parse those words for a moment. Virtually everything Conrad says is false, and in no small way.

Read it all.

Incidentally, budgeting like this is exactly what we will get, and worse under an Obama Administration.

Cap and spend

Forget for a moment the very real argument over whether or not a so-called cap and trade bill would help the environment. Focus instead on exactly what dirty politicians in Congress are doing with this massive transfer of wealth. They are enriching themselves, while screwing the economy. The Wall Street Journal nails it:

Sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner, the bill would put a cap on carbon emissions that gets lowered every year. But to ease the pain and allow for economic adjustment, the bill would dole out "allowances" under the cap that would stand for the right to emit greenhouse gases. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a package of manager's amendments that mandates total carbon reductions of 66% by 2050, while earmarking the allowances.

When cap and trade has been used in the past, such as to reduce acid rain, the allowances were usually distributed for free. A major difference this time is that the allowances will be auctioned off to covered businesses, which means imposing an upfront tax before the trade half of cap and trade even begins. It also means a gigantic revenue windfall for Congress.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that's trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won't be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on "crustaceans" and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot.

Of course most of the money will go to human constituencies, especially those with the most political clout. In the Boxer plan, revenues are allocated down to the last dime over the next half-century. Thus $802 billion would go for "relief" for low-income taxpayers, to offset the higher cost of lighting homes or driving cars. Ms. Boxer will judge if you earn too much to qualify.

Read it all.

Gerson can't help himself

After blindsiding Senate conservatives in a recent screed for their unwillingness to blindly approve $50 billion in deficit spending for AIDS relief in Africa, Michael Gerson is now using the Bible to attack Tom Coburn. In this piece, Gerson picks out one sentence of a Coburn column and proceeds to completely misrepresent Coburn's argument. Coburn was not arguing that Jesus was a libertarian, rather, he was making a point about how so-called "compassionate" conservatives love to spend other people's money.

Read it for yourself:

Now comes another charge -- that compassionate conservatism is actually opposed by the Bible. "Common sense and the Scriptures," argues Sen. Tom Coburn, "show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor's possessions. Spending other people's money is not compassionate."

It is not my purpose to pick on the senator from Oklahoma (once again); he is a man of principle. And he is merely restating a fairly common view: that compassion is a private virtue, not a public one, and that religious conscience concerns the former and not the latter.

But this is a theological assertion, not a political one. And as theology, it is flawed.

Be sure to keep reading and note where Gerson concludes that Coburn would not like to associate himself with the great, and yes compassionate, works of William Wilberforce, John Wesley and Lord Shaftesbury. This is of course a laughable charge. Not only has Tom Coburn demonstrated compassion throughout his life (this is a guy after all who inists on continuing to deliver babies while he is a senator, and charges nothing for it), but he works for it in the Senate. MEMO TO GERSON: It is possible to pass compassionate legislation that does not fleece the taxpayer.

This is another example of raising prudential disagreements about social ills to the level of moral disputes. Gerson and company do this everytime, and it gets tiresome.

Bullies for same-sex marriage

I never cease to be amazed by the willingness of homosexuality advocates to bully social conservatives into accepting their premises. Our arguments are so bad, we must be motivated by anti-gay animus. The analogy between same-sex marriage and polygamy is disingenuous and therefore no reasonable person takes it seriously. Et cetera.

Trouble is, it's not just cowardly libs who use these tactics. Libertarians willingly use the same ploy. Today on Volokh, both Eugene Volokh and Ilya Somin, in consecutive posts, play the any-reasonable-person-must-accept-my-presuppositions-about-same-sex-marriage game.

Why do most (all?) opponents of conjugal marriage refuse to engage supporters of conjugal marriage on the merits of our arguments? Is it intellectual cowardice, disrespect?

And why do those who consider themselves liberal and broad-minded so often resort to illiberal debate tactics? Is it delusion, malevolence?

For once, let's have a debate on the merits of a conservative idea without all the hocus-pocus. Is that too much to ask?